I awoke on a small but comfortable cot. Somewhat to my surprise, I was neither naked nor in shackles. As a point of fact, I was more than a little surprised to have woken up at all. I had more than half expected to be executed for seizing the Throne, however briefly, to say nothing of everything else.
Someone had dressed me in a plain but fine linen tunic that fell past my knees. Sitting up, I found soft slippers on the floor beside me. Strangely, though the pattern welded cuffs that marked me as a master smith were missing, someone had replaced them with a pair of iron rings on my middle fingers; I could not get the rings off to examine them.
Looking around, I saw that I was in a circular room with a domed ceiling, all cut directly from the living bedrock, lit by a skylight over a moon pool. The room was dim, thick with the smell of incense, but not so thick that I could not smell the unique magical sweetness of the Great Crystal Lake. My surprisingly comfortable cot was pressed to the wall directly opposite the door, half-hidden by the potted ferns that surrounded the moon-pool.
“Ah,” said an unfamiliar voice from beyond the ferns. “You’re finally awake.”
The voice’s owner stood, revealing a slender androgynous figure in the black and white robes of the Order of the Truth-Seekers.
Ah. Shit. So that’s where I was.
The Emperor Dorian’s Labyrinth. Maris Pello’s masterpiece. I wondered, had they called for the Truth-Seekers to throw me in here, or had they made Khanaarre operate her master’s devices for them?
“I am,” I said, after probably too-long a pause.
The wizard nodded and turned his back to me, knocking a code-sequence on the door, and vanishing into the hall.
And so I was awake. And alone. I could have spent my time inventorying the room, testing the door, investigating the depth of the moon pool. I could have tried to pull upon the power of the siphon, to test my strength and ingenuity against one of the greatest devices ever crafted by human wizardry. In the moment, though, it all felt vain and pointless. It was very unlikely I’d leave this place of my own will. It was distinctly possible that I would never leave here, at all.
Perhaps an hour went by before the door opened and closed again, this time without a knock. In came the newly minted Emperor Elana Traiana IV, processing carefully around the moon pool. with her small entourage. To her right stood Sir Rennin Ösh; to her left, Khanaarre of the Black Mask. All were dressed richly and formally. All wore expressions of carefully restrained consternation.
I inclined my head politely.
“You have been unconscious for ten days,” Elana began. “And before we discuss anything else, I just … I have to know. When we confronted the Usurper that afternoon, did even you know whose side you were on?”
I sighed and closed my eyes, glad that we had the room to ourselves. I was almost certainly going to cry, and that didn’t need any larger audience than this.
“Is there any answer to that question that could possibly bring you peace or comfort?” I asked, half rhetorically.
“No,” she admitted. “And yet I must know.”
I nodded. I passed my gaze from one to the other to the next, meeting each of their eyes. I don’t know why. I could not spin the tale for each of them with all three of them here in the room. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, trying to keep the tears from coming.
“No,” I said, now blinking back the tears. “When we walked into that room and saw him there on the throne, I had no idea what I was going to do. I woke up that morning certain only that I and Khanaarre would leave that room alive, with half a mind to kill both you and him, and turn things over to the house of Shii or some shit. I have spent every day since we fought the dragon Lynqxaemass for access to the Holy Lands trying to figure out what doom I was destining Vencar for, and whether you or Aemillian was the lesser of two evils over the course of the next seven generations.”
“How.” Elana swallowed hard. “How did the decision come down in my favor?”
The tears were flowing freely now. I gave that battle up for lost and focused on keeping my voice as steady as possible. I could tell from the start that it would be a losing battle, too.
“In Ghol Vidar, I went to see an oracle to help me decide. She showed me twin visions of Vencar, one under his reign and one under yours. In both visions, there is a world-shattering threat, which I will go over in detail later. Both Aemillian and your grandchildren abused that threat as a political opportunity, and I couldn’t see the world after, but on the road there … I think, in the vision that began with you, the people of Vencar were happier before things went wrong.”
I kept my eyes carefully closed. I no longer wanted to see any of their faces. If they were going to kill me, I didn’t want to see it coming.
“And,” Elana choked. “The Blade of Xadaer. All our diviners agreed that the Blade of Xadaer was the only way. And yet … How did you do it?”
“As I child, I was obsessed with the champion Xadaer and his goddess-forged magic sword. When I forged my own first master-quality knife, I named it the Blade of Xadaer as a private joke, and have carried it with me every day for the last however many years. When Aemil … When he and I made his aegis, we made my knife the key because we couldn’t then foresee a future in which I would oppose him.”
“So the quest for the sword, that was just … a joke? A ruse? You led us beyond the edge of the world for nothing. Veralar and Orland died for nothing.”
This was the worst of it, I thought. Unless, in my grief, I was forgetting something.
“The quest was a ruse, yes,” I said. “A plot to get you used to trusting me, to doing what I said. A sunk-cost fallacy meant to trap you all up to your eyeballs in preparation for a rush to confront the tyrant on his throne. The Blade of Xadaer, the real one, was to be my consolation prize for everything I was going to have to do to get you here, and for dragging me back into Vencari politics.”
The silence that followed that statement was deathly. I kept my eyes shut tight. When no one killed me, I continued.
“But Orland didn’t die for nothing. He died to protect you, and to keep you on the quest that would – that has – ultimately lead you to victory. The plan – his plan, my plan – only worked if you had a real enough chance to fool your diviners, which was only possible if it had a real chance in the first place. We always imagined – or, rather, I always imagined – that chance lay in you outsmarting me, finding me out or discovering that you had the wrong Blade of Xadaer, possibly the real blade being able to do what I suggested, either because of the similarity in names or just because it is, in fact, god-forged in the Eye of the Sun. But that … was not how things went, was it?”
My voice broke on that last sentence. I swallowed hard. I wished I’d thought to see if there were something in here to drink before the emperor had arrived. I wished that I’d the strength left to stand and find that drink, now.
“Veralar isn’t dead,” I went on. “She is cursed. Sooner rather than later, she will break free of the curse. And when she does, she will be my doom.”
There was so much more that I wanted to say, but my mouth was dry and my eyes were wet, and I couldn’t begin to decide where to start. That I, too, mourned the death of Lord Sir Orland Borgon? That for the rest of my life, I would regret cursing the Shan Khul Master Veralar Tann? That I had begun to suspect that I was on the wrong side as early as the Wolfwood, even before the appearance of the Prophet of Enhyl?
“Starry sky and burning hells,” Elana cursed. “Derrek Rowan, you are a piece of fucking work.”
I laughed at that, and opened my eyes just in time to see Elana gesture to Khanaarre, who spoke a word and sent me down into a deep and blessedly dreamless sleep.
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