As soon as the decision was made, I began gathering my strength. I knew that I would be able to part the Eastern Veil and bring us into the Holy Lands – this had all, after all, been inevitable, and I had divined much of the road ahead more than a decade ago – but I knew also that it would take everything that I had and perhaps a bit more. The political necessity of making myself available to the prince and her court, however, made that cultivation more difficult than it had to be.
I was of sufficient rank that my breakfast was delivered to me by servants, rather than in the common all, and I was generally permitted to enjoy that breakfast in solitude, but by lunch my presence became absolutely necessary. Some days I was called to the same meeting hall where I had first told the prince what she must do. Other days I was called to the chambers that the Jade Order had claimed as their guildhall and library: cold and dark mineshafts transformed by artifice and enchantment into warm and grand sunlit halls. Still other days, I was brought to the alchemical laboratories shared by all the wizards and orders of the court in exile, full of chalkboards covered in arcane formulae and slate tables buried under iron cauldrons and copper boilers and glass beakers and vials.
Over and over again, I explained the mechanics of the aegis to the prince and her court and their wizards, how Aemillian and I had designed it so that he need never take it off, not even in sleep or intimacy. I explained how we had written the true name of the Blade of Xadaer into the shield, and how that explicit weakness made the aegis’ seeming invulnerability possible.
I explained to the prince and her generals, at times with help from their priests and the wizards, that the Holy Lands were not distant in the way that Naal was, but rather the way that the Shadow Realm was, and that the Veil was a place where one could pass from this realm to that one and back, even as the wraiths and shadowmen who plagued Georg moved between that realm and this. I explained that I knew of the Veil from the travelogues of the famous Dragon Bard, Dano`ar. I did not say, though certainly the more learned among her advisors guessed, that I had also read of it in the journals of the great diviner Arcmedus der Allan, whose work so many sun-cults called blasphemy.
There were things that I would not tell them, of course. I had my secrets. And some that I could not tell them, even if I wanted to. The secret that vexed them most, of course, was the source of Aemillian’s power … and my own.
“You must tell us how you did it!”
The surprising thing, really, was that it took them three whole days to ask.
“How,” demanded Secundus Agnatius of the Jade Order, “how did you and he reproduce Shiithaia’s Gift?”
I smiled, that first time: a long-practiced expression that used the stiffness of my scarred face to mingle innocence and threat.
“Do you think you have time,” I asked, “to pursue such experiments, now? Or that our prince would permit them? Do you think Elana Traiana would smile upon the emergence of another Great Wizard?”
That held them off for that day, and the next. But the question – asked or not – haunted me at every table for the rest of my time in Liddarn.
The question of our power had haunted Aemillian and I from the beginning: following us through the halls and libraries of the Obsidian Cabal, through the balls and fetes of Imperial life. We could only escape it, even for a moment, in our most private chambers. Only when Aemillian had claimed Grand Mastery of the whole Order had his political power been sufficient to still those questions, at least within our own walls.
Less irritating, but at times even more exhausting, were those who came with their own theories as to how we had achieved what we had. At least some of those treated me as a peer with whom they could converse, not as a daimon who could be bullied or begged into revealing the secret or its price. And some of those understood that true mastery would come only from figuring the secret out for themselves.
“Did you go to the Shadow Realm?” Iulia Oanthe of the Black Quartz Sphinx came closest to the truth. “I have thought of going there, myself, if I can find and part a veil. It is said that Georg is riddled with them, and that they part on their own when the moon is full.”
“I did not,” I said. “Mostly because I could not, then, figure out how. And I would not, now, having heard the tales Georgi tell, and seen the truth of some of them for myself.”
“You have seen…?”
“I have fought shadowmen on the streets of Renner,” I admitted. “And seen glimpses of worse things in the woods on nights when the moon is full or new.”
Adaros Ilmakon, of the Jade Order, was further from the mark, but even more likely to discover something new and interesting when he followed his theories to their conclusion.
Adaros and I met often, to my great pleasure.
“I wonder if Shiithaia’s Gift really failed,” he said one night, at the end of a long and meandering conversation and a great deal of wine, “or if it had merely run its course. If Arcmedus der Allan was correct, and this realm, the Holy Lands, and the Shadowrealm were all once one and separated slowly as the course of natural processes. Did the use and so-called failure of shadow-sorcery affect that division? Slow it? Speed it? Guide it somehow? And, if so, what does it mean that you and the Usurper have resurrected it?”
I had no idea if he was correct or not. My interest in cosmological theory had always been as a means to an end. But I found myself hoping that Adaros was among those who survived the coming war. I wanted to read his monolgraphs.
Of the prince and her fighters, I saw little. Elana and Rennin and Orland I saw some, for while they were occupied always with the politics of the court in exile, managing me and the rest of the wizards were high on that list of responsibilities. In those court functions, I saw Khanaarre and Veralar perhaps a handful of times each, always at an insurmountable distance. That was for the best. The journey was perilous, and for all that I had given them their only chances to succeed, the wise gambler would bet against our survival. It was not in my best interest that we become friends.
Despite those demands and distractions, I was able to rest and to gather the power that I thought that I would need. I was able to picture our objective clearly in my mind and in my crystal ball. North and west through the Wolfwood to meet my friends there, then east through the Wolfwood to the great forest beyond. To the Eastern Veil, where the membrane between this mortal world and the shining Holy Lands was thin and had been passed by other adventurers before us. To the Holy Lands, where once even the greatest of gods had walked and lived and loved and warred, and where their relics still remained – among them the blade we sought, wielded in life by the divine hero Xadaer, son of Horaath, son of Althaeruh, which would carry us all into legend.
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