The Archons of Khrigo City could only grant so much in the very moment of asking, but they could offer heir hospitality, and that was was considerable. We were given lodgings equal to the prince’s dignity: a beautiful massive suite in the private home of the archon Ingmatmar, the priestess of the Flame. The suite consisted of private rooms, plus a bath, and a balcony overlooking the archon’s private garden and the temple palace beyond. The floor and walls were all clad in white marble. The furniture was carved of dark wood, highly polished with fine gilded details. The ceilings were high and the windows wide, making the suite colder than us miniscule mortals found ideal, but it was all built solidly enough that I was able to discretely enchant the suite to a more comfortable temperature.
I was presented with a full formal arraignment of the robes of my order, and a handful of plainer tunics and saris for informal occasions. Khanaarre and Elana were presented with fine silks, as well, in colors clearly inspired by their existing wardrobes, which reappeared some days later, cleaned and mended as much as could physically be done.
Rennin, we were assured, was already in the hands of capable healers. It had been a near thing, last night, but he would recover. He would be brought to our suite on the morrow, and we could visit him this afternoon, if we wished. We did, of course, but he was asleep when we went to see him.
We were taken to see Orland, as well, where he lay in state. The priestesses of the White Lady – in the Holy Empire, Torh had not appeared as a grim, black-shrouded skeleton, but as a compassionate Jor widow draped in white – had laid him out beneath an immaculate shroud, which would keep him uncorrupted until we were ready to see him to the pyre. The white-clad priestesses admitted us without comment or question, merely standing aside so that we might view the body and say our farewells.
We all wept. Elana most of all, of course. She threw herself over his cold breast with great, wracking sobs. Khanaarre and I grieved with her, and for our own sakes: Orland had touched all of us with his humor and compassion.
“Ask them,” Elana said to me when she could speak again, “if we can have his arms and armor. For his family.”
I nodded, almost a bow, and told the priestesses what she required. I should have thought of it already: it was Vencari custom. Had Elana not told the story of her grandfather and how he had earned the elaborately detailed breastplate she had worn since we had left Liddarn?
“It shall be so,” the priestess said, bowing in return.
Dinner was presented to us almost as soon as we returned to our quarters in the archon’s home. With it came an elegantly written invitation to join the lady for a casual breakfast. I translated it for Elana, who nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
I translated for the Jor servants, who thanked me then left us to our meal.
All day, I walked the razor’s edge between Derrek Rowan and Yma Rinlo, trying to be both and failing to be either.
I had not been Yma Rinlo in a very long time. That restless priestess, heart half-broken by the end of her first love affair, desperate to find belonging in the company of her own species. I had not so much as spoken her language – the mortal tongue shared by the rhu xian and the giants – aloud in nearly forty years. I was no longer accustomed to the cold.
Shaved bald and dressed in Yma Rino’s clothes, though, I couldn’t seem to find the wizard Derrek Rowan inside myself, either. The common togue of the Compact sounded strange and alien in the halls of the rhu xian. The confidence and ambition that had seen him to the heights of worldly and magical power, and then into comfortable obscurity, now felt dangerously reckless. All his plans, after all, had come to naught.
So, I retreated to rigid, aloof formality as I helped my companions navigate their first day in the Holy Empire of the rhu xian. I let Elana lead as much as was feasible, translating for her and for Khanaarre but offering my opinion as little as possible. I tried to clear and sharpen my mind, to see beyond the immediate next steps, but saw only howling white snow.
At long last, though, we were alone in our suite. A handful of muttered enchantments in the celestial tongue of the rhu xian warded us against prying minds and ears. It was time for me to work a little harder at being Derrek Rowan.
We took a few minutes to watch the sun set outside the massive windows before we sat down to eat. Tonight’s offering was a buffet of curries and flatbreads, grilled and seasoned fish and fowl, with a deep and glistening bowl of round pastries floating in honey syrup for dessert. Khanaarre and Elana sat close together, opposite the seat I had claimed for myself. I sighed, running my hand over my smooth, bald head.
“You have many questions,” I said, trying to remember Derrek Rowan’s voice. “I think that I can guess most of them, but I do not know in what order you would like to hear them answered.”
My companions did not even look to one another, let alone at me. They stared at their empty plates, silent for an uncomfortably long time. Several times, Khanaarre almost spoke, but shook her head. Finally, it was Elana who asked the most obvious and, arguably, least pertinent question.
“Who are you?”
I sighed. I stood. I served them the dinners that they seemed reluctant to eat, and poured them each a cup of tea.
“What I am about to tell you first,” I said, “I have told only two people in the world, one of them seated at this very table. I have no recollection of these events, but learned them later, as an adult, through divination. I was born in Handar, the second of three children, where green eyes are seen as proof of elven blood and of magical talent. My father believed his wife had been unfaithful, and treated me always as a bastard. Named a changeling, I was always under suspicion of sorcery and mischief. One day, someone convinced my brother that I was the source of all of our father’s misfortune, and handed him a knife coated with witchbane. He took me into the woods under some false pretense. I don’t know exactly what he tried or intended, if he knew the knife was poisoned or only meant to scare me, but he cut my face. I fled into the woods, hallucinating wildly.”
Even now, decades upon decades later, I could not tell the tale and eat or drink. I had no conscious memory of those events. But from the moment I woke, after them, I had been filled with a deep pain and loneliness. Those feelings faded, most of the time, but awakened whenever I was sad for some other reason, and whenever I turned my thoughts to my youth.
“The rest of what I am about to tell you,” I said, refilling their tea, “I have told no one, ever, no matter how much I loved or trusted them.”
For appearance’s sake, I decided to pour myself a cup, as well.
“Somehow,” I went on, holding my tea in my hands without drinking, “I made it deep into the mountains …”
===
My first memory was of being carried like a babe in massive, powerful arms. I had been swaddled in stinking, uncured furs, that had been bound tight around me to keep me warm. Though I had been a malnourished bastard, I had been as large for my age, then, as I am, now. Still, the woman who held me was large enough that I was an infant in comparison. She gave me melted snow to drink and fed me scraps from her cookfire.
I do not know how long, exactly, I travelled like that. I remember little of those days, either, but I believe that is the more common sort of childhood forgetting. In time, I was brought to the temple where I was raised.
My rescuer was a cyclops scout by the name of Jirudan. She had lost her husband and children in a hunting accident, and intended to raise me as her own. It is the tradition in the Holy Empire that all children be brought before an oracle and that a prophesy be issued, and so when it was certain that I would live, I was brought before the oracle. To Jirudan’s dismay and the shock of everyone else, I was pronounced a priestess, and made a ward of the Temple of the Stars. The priestesses of the temple, thankfully, were sympathetic to Jirudan, and though they took over much of my rearing, she was permitted to stay with them, and with me. I could not recall the name my first mother had given me, and Jirudan named me Yma Rinlo
The details of my youth are of no interest or import to anyone. I was raised by the rhu xian priestesses and my adoptive cyclops mother. I had a few friends among the cyclops and the Jor freemen – the earth-giants you have seen in armor and livery – but many saw me as more an exile than a priestess and were wary of me. It was a solitary, studious life. It suited me for many years, but eventually I grew restless.
I wished to know my own people. I wished to see where I had come from. And so the oracle showed me, perhaps thinking to dissuade me from leaving. It was horrible, and I have never forgiven the men of Handar for what they did to my mother and I, but my yearning to live among the djuunan who had made me was not diminished.
I found and mastered the language spell that I would later teach to the uurnigath. So armed, and provided with raw gold and silver to barter for currency, I made my way across the mountains back to Handar. I grew out my hair. I burned my vestments and stole native clothes that would fit me. I listened from shadows until, with the aid of the ancient diplomat’s magic, I could speak intelligibly. And then I began to travel.
I only spent a few months in Handar. They are guarded, suspicious people, and my accent would not be native for years. But I learned enough of the Compact from them that, when I crossed into Namora, my eccentricities were dismissed as Handari. I took the name Derrek Rowan: Derrek because I liked the sound of it, and Rowan because I learned it was a name given to bastards.
I spent a few years in Namora, an itinerant wanderer. I perfected my understanding of the language of the Compact. I learned the rudiments of sword fighting. I carried the King’s Writ. Everywhere I saw the remnants of the Vencari Empire. Everywhere I heard tales of Vencari blood wizardry.
It was curiosity that led me to Vencar, only to discover that they had as little tolerance for vagrants as Handar. By now, though, I was ready to settle. I met a blacksmith in the City who was in need of an apprentice. I spent my days in the smithy, mastering the trade. I spent my nights begging access to libraries, trying to learn what I could of human history – Illustria, a’Rasyr, their fall and what came after – and human wizardry. I tried to avoid attention, but my curiosity did not go unnoticed.
I attracted the attention of the Obsidian Cabal. Though I truly enjoyed working in iron and steel, the opportunity to study wizardry was too good to refuse. Combined with what I had picked up of Old Namoran, studying with bards, I managed to pass off my fluency with Heavenscript as childhood in a mystery cult coupled with unadulterated genius. The nameless mystery cult in the mountains of Handar – a razor’s cut from the truth – explained all my eccentricities well enough that few bothered to ask more questions.
I settled into a long apprenticeship. The only noteworthy thing about me, besides my faculty for language, was my utter insignificance. Even my obsession with Illustrian shadow magic was as common as dirt. I would have been forced into a journeyman’s quest, eventually, been awarded my Mastery, and lived in obscurity until I died in Vencar or returned to the Holy Empire. I had no greater ambition.
But Aemillian Solirius heard of my work. He saw merit in it. He shared my obsession. He gave me access that no wizard had had in centuries, save him. And with the secrets I had brought from the Holy Empire, I was able to … not reproduce, but emulate the secret at the core of Illustrian shadow-sorcery. And so he and I became the Great Wizards, and put the world on the path we walk today.
===
“So,” Khanaarre said at last, a little bitingly. “You are not a genius.”
“I mean,” I said with a shrug, “I think that I am. I do have a prodigious memory, and an improbable faculty for the immortal tongues, and an incalculable native talent for wizardry. But none of that ever got me half as far as access to secret knowledge, or having more time than humans are supposed to have, or just blind, stupid luck.”
“How old are you, exactly?” Elana asked.
“If I have reconciled the calendars correctly,” I said, snatching a honey-soaked pastry from its bowl, “I was born in the spring of 913 VC.”
To my delight, I performed the maneuver perfectly, dripping on nothing, despite being nearly forty years out of practice. Then I immediately regretted it, fearing the native gesture made me look more alien to my compainions.
I was fifty-seven years old. Unless more time had passed in the mortal world while we were gone than we realized, in which case I was fifty-eight.
Khanaarre did a spit-take. Elana’s jaw dropped open.
“You lived a whole life,” Elana said, “before you ever came to the Empire. Well, to my Empire.”
“I did.”
To my surprise, Khanaarre seemed to be taking that fact harder than Elana. Was I older than she? I had never been able to guess her age.
“How could you befriend me?” Khanaarre asked, at last. “How could you fuck me? When the people who raised you see my people as animals, as property?”
Oh. Or perhaps it was everything all at once. I noted, but did my best to ignore, the very interesting look on Elana Traiana’s face.
I thought back on our time together, imagining how the needling questions and tests I had put to her at the beginning of our journey might look to her now that she knew the greater truth of me. Those tests had been meant to assess her as a threat to my secrets and to keep her at arm’s length for my own protection, when the time for the end came. The rage and shame in her face – red and flushed, her long ears swept down and back – the forward tilt of her head as she was unable to meet my eyes, the defeated slope of her shoulders, all gave me some indication how they looked to her in retrospect.
“Khanaarre,” I said softly, choosing my words carefully. “You are my friend. You are my peer. I am honored to have been your lover. I am so, so sorry that I have ever made you feel unequal.”
I wished that I looked more like myself in that moment. That I had changed out of the rhu xian priestess’ robes and into something less formal – ideally my Georgi garb, if it had not been taken to be cleaned and repaired – or that I were not shaved bald like the cyclops who tried to emulate the rhu xian.
“The uprising of the llamenan and the rrotran nearly destroyed the Holy Empire,” I went on, as patiently and gently as I could. “Your people fled. You did not see the earth-giants’ uprising that you inspired. They are the Jor freemen, now, and though they still live and work among the rhu xian … it’s nothing like it was before. They order their own lives. They have their own city-states, where they raise their own archons. The cyclops still serve, but they are the sien xian, the hand of god beside the rhu xian, the children of god, and ever under the watchful protection of the Jor. It has been three thousand years. There are no more slaves in the Holy Empire. Nor will there ever be again.”
I sipped my tea. I wished that I could make Elana vanish for just a moment, so that I could have this conversation with Khanaarre in private. Perhaps it was for the best, though. With Elana, here, I was not tempted to give Khanaarre the last of my secrets.
< Previous Chapter | Home | The World | Next Chapter >
Thank you so much for reading!
New chapters drop every Sunday morning barring unexpected circumstances. New maps and art drop when I finish them, any time except Sunday morning. For the inside scoop, other stories set in Dathl’lyr, access to new chapters six weeks before they go public, and/or a look into all the other things I do, please consider joining my Patreon campaign! Don’t like Patreon or just want to support my work? Drop a tip in my jar over at Ko-Fi!