Revelation (Seeds of Humanity: The Cobalt Heresy) (7 page)

“What ‘Sundering’?” Dancer asked impatiently.

Pi’Vari leaned down toward Dancer, who stood his ground defiantly. “Sundering,” my herald smoothly began, “is when they annih-“

“It’s unpleasant, and it’s final in a way death probably never could be,” I cut him off. “Sundering doesn’t just kill you; it…repurposes you.”

Seeing that he still didn’t understand, and not wanting to continue in this vein any longer than absolutely necessary, I tried to put it in words with which he was familiar.

“Dancer makes the Dance of Life and Death, right?” I prompted.

“It first and last of Seven Dances,” he agreed.

I nodded slowly. “Sundering takes away the Last Dance and removes you from the circle,” I tried to explain.

Dancer shook his head adamantly. “Impossible,” he argued, “Last Dance for all: people, trees, even mountains make steps of Last Dance.”

I nodded patiently, “What about Gaeld?”

He cocked his eyebrow, prompting me to continue.

“Gaeld, Baeld and all of their kind,” I said slowly, “were once people who became Sundered.”

Dancer’s eyes widened. “Sun-dered make Gaeld?” he asked in awe, forcing the syllables of the first word.

Pi’Vari shook his head. “Only the lucky ones end up like Gaeld, Dancer,” he explained in a serious tone which he rarely used.

“Pi’Vari’s right,” I agreed, “Gaeld and Baeld were once people like us. But they were punished with the Sundering, making them eternally subservient to whoever holds their contract.”

Aemir raised a finger. “You say Sundering is a punishment of the Empire,” he said as though he had found a great flaw, “but you also say that you are the first Imperial to set foot in Coldetz. If that is so, how did Baeld find his way here?”

Pi’Vari replied before I could find the words. “The Empire did not invent the process, Aemir,” he said dismissively, “we took it from the God Sworn, like everything else they had of value. It is possible that Baeld is old enough to have been created by the God Sworn centuries before their destruction.”

I glared at Pi’Vari pointedly before continuing. “Baeld is another piece of the puzzle leading me to believe that the remnants of the Young Gods are behind these attacks,” I said darkly. “Which is why it is imperative that we secure Coldetz immediately for annexation, or we might find ourselves caught in a crossfire between those remnants and the unbridled fury of the Empire. And frankly, Sundering might be a preferable fate to whatever that particular scenario could bring down on us.”

Chapter IV: Politics

“You are summoned to the High Sheriff’s office at once,” reported the silver and yellow clad soldier after unceremoniously opening the door to our common chambers in the gate house.

I nodded and felt my stomach tighten. “Of course,” I replied as graciously as I could manage, simultaneously signaling to my cadre that they should stay where they were.

He showed me through the series of corridors and chambers which led to the central tower of Castle Coldetz. Even in this state of what amounted to constant, if protracted siege, the walls were adorned with the bright yellow standards of Coldetz. Every sconce held a brightly burning torch, illuminating the decorations of the Castle’s interior, and there were worked cleaning in nearly every room I passed through.

We came to the great, winding staircase and for a moment my imagination wandered, thinking of the wizards I had seen in movies or read of in fantasy books living solitary lives in similar structures. That portrayal was a far cry from my own experience so far, but it in no way diminished the majesty of this particular structure.

I was amazed at the architecture of the building, which was apparently composed entirely of dry, fitted stones of that same glossy black color as the walls. Inside the corridors and with proper lighting, various veins of marbling could be seen in the stones; gold, green, red and even blue were represented among the massive blocks. I wasn’t an engineer or even particularly well versed in how difficult such construction was, but I had seen television specials about Machu Picchu and was under the impression that hand-fitting each stone perfectly to its neighbors was laborious in the extreme.

I followed the guard at a leisurely pace, having made this trip before and knowing that I would be lucky to make it to the top before stopping to rest at least once.

A few years earlier, before I had been brought to this strangle world and thrust into my current body, I could have jogged up and down the tower’s stairs for at least thirty minutes before tiring. We ran grinders in high school wrestling on much steeper steps in the football bleachers for ‘Red Flag Days.’

Red Flag Days were combinations of the hardest exercises available to us, for the maximum duration possible, and each one would make at least half a dozen members of the team collapse and/or puke from exhaustion. At the time, it had seemed like the coaches wouldn’t let us shower off until they had reached their predetermined quota of quitters for the day, and obviously nobody wanted to be the weak link who sent us to the showers.

I never considered myself at the top of the heap in wrestling, either in conditioning specifically or athletics generally. My brother had always been the more gifted of us when it came to sports, actually earning a late round selection in the baseball draft as a senior in high school which he declined, before actually getting picked in the fifth round in his junior year of college. But I was never the one to stop a Red Flag Day, and while I know it’s a fairly simple thing to be proud of, it was a point of pride I carried with me afterwards.

“Stop for a rest, sir?” asked the soldier acting as my guide.

I nodded my assent. I really didn’t want to have to stop after only ten stories, especially when I was over halfway done, but I knew that this body wouldn’t allow me to go much further before forcing the issue.

“There was a time,” I muttered under my breath as I sat down in one of the large wooden chairs located on our current landing, “when I could have run up these stairs and not even needed to catch my breath afterwards.”

The soldier cocked an eyebrow as he poured a glass of water from a nearby jug. “I was under the impression that wizards didn’t care much for physical conditioning,” he said before visibly catching himself. “I’m sorry, sir,” he stammered, “I didn’t mean any disrespect.”

I shook my head and accepted the water when he offered it. “I used to think the same thing,” I replied, trying hard to keep my breaths measured. “But the truth, as usual, is a little different from preconceptions.”

The soldier looked confused. “Would you mind elaborating on that, sir?” he asked after a moment’s pause. “Our wizards were all physically frail before they fell two months ago…and they were also quite a bit older than yourself.”

I nodded as I swallowed the water, and while it wasn’t cold, it was wet and that’s all my body needed. “In Veldyrian,” I began, “wizards come in every shape and size. I kid you not, I saw one that was only a half head shorter than Baeld, and from the look of him he could lift both of us with one hand,” I said, holding my hand above my head for emphasis. The soldier looked confused, and I caught myself. “It’s a phrase we use where I’m from,” I hastily explained, silently cursing myself for the ‘I kid you not’ colloquialism, “it means ‘I’m very serious,’ or the like.”

He nodded. “If you don’t mind my asking,” he pressed timidly, “what makes you wizards so different from ours? I’ve never seen anything like what your Master did last night.”

That was a very, very good question. In fact, it was one to which even I had not yet received a satisfactory answer. I spread my hands wide and shrugged my shoulders, “I can’t tell you,” I said as truthfully as I could.

The soldier stiffened visibly. “I understand,” he quickly replied, “wizards and their secrets, say no more. Ready to continue, sir?”

He obviously could not understand but since neither did I, I stood and tested my lungs. They still burned, but I was pretty sure I could make the next six flights before needing another rest. “I believe so. Thank you for the water,” I said with a nod.

We continued our climb and just as my breathing started to shift to gasping and those annoying little stars began flitting around the periphery of my vision, we found ourselves standing at the highest room in the tower: the High Sheriff’s Office, whose door was emblazoned with the familiar eagle holding a pickaxe and shield symbol, but this one was a finely worked, presumably solid gold figure the size of the white wooden door itself.

The soldier knocked and we waited until it was opened by the guard stationed on the other side, who ushered me in without speaking. My guide remained outside, and the door was closed quickly after I entered the room.

The room itself was spacious, but not huge, probably measuring thirty feet in diameter. The circular shape of the tower made a three hundred sixty degree view of the surrounding lands possible through the many windows of this particular floor. It really was breathtaking being this high up in a building which hadn’t used cranes, steel, or concrete to construct. The windows, which looked to have been paned in stained glass, were actually extremely thin panels of translucent stone which had been fitted into a leaded frame.

The tower tapered gradually from the base, which was at least twice as wide as the top, and I could make out the inward angle of the walls easily enough. The appointments of the office were simple, but functional. There was a large desk built of the same white wood as the door positioned near a fireplace, and behind that desk sat the High Sheriff of Coldetz.

I had been assured on multiple occasions that she was only ‘Acting’ High Sheriff, as the position had been given to her under circumstances which were quite unusual. Her father had been elected to the post for his third five year term, and his Second was to take over in the event of his death.

During the first battle seven months ago, both her father the High Sheriff and his Second were slain. Her father died on the wall, while his Second fell to more questionable circumstances, but I had been unable to discover the exact details of the latter.

“Wizard, thank you for coming,” she said formally, looking up over a pile of papers and clay tablets she was reviewing. Paper wasn’t durable enough for bringing reports from the more rural areas, so the majority of their outlying villages used clay tablets instead of parchment or vellum for carrying reports.

I nodded, thankful that the stars had disappeared from my vision. “I came as soon as I could,” I assured her as I walked toward the desk, which had one chair placed opposite her position.

She returned the stack of papers and tablets to the table and pushed them aside before leaning forward in her chair with her elbows resting on the desk. “Have you learned anything from our Court Mage’s records which might help you?” she asked brusquely. The dark semicircles under her eyes told a story of long-worn stress, and the pile of correspondence on her desk was likely the least of the problems on her mind. Even though we hadn’t ever seen eye-to-eye, I admired anyone who stood in the center of chaos like this and refused to quit.

I sat down in the chair opposite her slowly, carefully bending my knees so that I didn’t collapse from exhaustion. After I found myself safely seated, I found her hard gaze and nodded. “We haven’t learned much, but I think we are getting a sense of who, or rather, ‘what’ might be at the heart of these attacks.”

She just stared at me with her impressive, yet still entirely feminine jaw clenched tightly before leaning back in her chair and reaching into a drawer. What she produced piqued my interest; it was an apparently very old, silver-bound, ivory scroll tube nearly two feet long.

“I did not know at first if I could trust you,” she began, and fixed her eyes on me again, “and I still do not know if I can, but you and your Master did more for us last night than our entire defense force managed during any of these attacks.”

I had never been good at receiving compliments, so I shook my head, “Sheriff, I told you before that I believe in what you’re doing here. Everything I’ve done has been to protect Coldetz and the people who rely on it.” I had learned as a child that sometimes going with the truth, even when it’s likely to get thrown back in your face, is the only thing to do.

She snorted and her eyes flared with renewed life. “You mean to protect the Gods’ Blood beneath our walls,” she snapped, “please do not take me for a fool. I know I have no choice in the matter, but do not mistake me for someone who does not understand why you are really here!”

I couldn’t blame her for mistrusting me. If the situation was reversed, I probably would have tried to kill the Imperial Envoy (meaning myself) as soon as he arrived, and taken my chances with the ravening horde of supernatural monsters who appeared every full moon to lay siege to everything I held dear.

“Sheriff,” I began slowly as I leaned forward, placing my forearm on the desk, “if the Empire knew of this place before my arrival, there is no chance in hell that a single wizard barely out of his apprenticeship, with nothing but his personal guard and herald, would have made first contact with you.”

 “Still you cling to the lie that you are a lowly apprentice,” she scoffed. “I saw what you did on the Middle Wall, and what your men did at your side. Your own powers far outstrip even our greatest Court Mages, and your master brought the entire invading army down with what appeared to be nothing more than a swipe of his staff!”

I hesitated before replying. “I assure you, there was quite a bit more to it than that,” I bit out through gritted teeth, “but he didn’t act alone. I don’t understand the magic he worked last night, and I have no idea where he is right now!” I stopped myself before pouring even more gas on the fire.

She was fuming, but we both knew that we had to work together, if for different reasons. She needed me to stop these attacks from destroying Coldetz, and I needed her to cooperate so we could avoid having the Empire come in and tear out the local government root and branch. The mythicite was just a bonus as far as I was concerned—at least, it had been at first.