Revelation (Seeds of Humanity: The Cobalt Heresy) (8 page)

“You demand that we submit ourselves to your authority,” she hissed, “and relinquish our most precious commodity in return for your ‘protection’ from these attacks.” She stood abruptly with the scroll tube still in her hand. “How do I know that you are not the ones responsible for all of this?!”

I took a deep breath, but I was just about past the point of no return. I stood slowly and fixed my eyes on the scroll tube she was brandishing like a sword. “Lady,” I said as coldly as I could, “let me assure you that if the Empire wanted your little castle and whatever happened to be in the surrounding, oh, hundred miles, they would take it.” When she pointed the tube at me as a prelude to further arguing, I raised my hand and continued, “My class of six years ago at the Wizard’s College numbered thirty two, and wizards live a very, very long time. If the Empire wanted to bring you to your knees, I doubt it would take more wizards than you can count on one hand, and I would be shocked beyond belief if any of you lasted even a week!”

That seemed to give her pause, so I pressed the advantage the best I could. “Now that my master is AWOL, I am literally the only thing standing between you and immediate Imperial subjugation.” I paused to let that sink in before finishing, “I don’t think I need to explain just how unpleasant that could be.”

We glared at each other over the desk for what seemed like a long time, and I couldn’t stop myself from gasping for breath. The stress of the sudden shift in the conversation on top of the actual physical exertion I had just undergone was pushing my frail body to the limit.

Eventually, she sat down in her chair and I followed suit, glad for the reprieve. God, I hated being so physically weak!

“Still,” she began in level tone she was obviously working hard to keep control over, “you demand that we submit ourselves to the Empire and become Imperial subjects all but in name.”

I shook my head. “Our petition is for Coldetz to become a Protectorate of the Empire,” I corrected her. “You would retain your own local government and sovereignty. Since you have such rich natural resources, Coldetz won’t even have to pay any taxes; in fact, the Empire will pay you far more for the mythicite than you could get anywhere else and they will be heavily invested in protecting your stores, ensuring a measure of stability you couldn’t hope to achieve on your own.”

She bared her teeth. “All at the price of our freedom,” she spat.

“I agree, it’s a terrible choice,” I said bluntly, which seemed to take her by surprise. Seizing on the opening, I leaned forward. “I’m not a politician, and I’ve never been good at public speaking, so I’ll just put it as bluntly as I can,” I said with a hard edge in my voice, “I despise the Empire for the same reasons you do. They come in with their iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove when you’re at your lowest and ever-so-politely suggest that you to sign your life away. But I can’t think of a better way,” I said with more than a little despair creeping into my voice. “The part that kills me is that somehow I’ve become their errand boy, when all I want is to get away from them!”

She clapped her hands in mock applause. “A touching performance,” she sneered, “and just what I would expect of an envoy from your Empire—or any other empire for that matter.”

I shrugged my shoulders emphatically. “I don’t really care what you expect. We have an agreement in principle and on paper,” I said, stabbing my index finger down on the desk, “which is why I’ve put myself squarely between three impossible adversaries: an Empire fueled by the most impressive magic I’ve ever even read about; a supernatural force which probably isn’t alive, and therefore can’t be killed; and a kingdom of people who appear content to let themselves be annihilated rather than make a tough choice!”

“I have already told you,” she retorted with considerably less vigor than she had previously displayed, “Coldetz has no king, we have never had a king, and we never wish to have a king,” she said before hastily adding, “or even a queen! Therefore, we are not a kingdom.”

I raised my hands in a ‘slow down’ gesture. “I know that, but I still don’t know how to refer to Coldetz and the surrounding area. I meant nothing by it; it was a slip of the tongue,” I did my best to assure her.

She locked eyes with me, and I was quite certain she was trying to read me like a poker player tries to read an opponent while sniffing out a bluff. “We are a Free State,” she said finally, “governed by our own populace, in accordance with traditions handed down for hundreds of years.”

I nodded knowingly. “Where I come from, our government was similar and we called it a ‘Democracy.’”

She cocked her eyebrow immediately, and I once again damned myself for the slip. I really had to be more careful. “Where you are from is an Empire, is it not?” she demanded coldly.

I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes at my slip. “Yes, well in school we study all kinds of governments,” I sad half-truthfully, “and I was taught that a self-governed society like the one I had been raised in is a Democracy or a Republic. It depends on a few factors which really don’t matter right now.”

After a few agonizing moments of silence, she stood again and walked around the desk, presenting the scroll tube to me. “Our sages found this and they think it might be of some assistance,” she said stiffly.

I accepted the ivory tube and examined its markings. The inlays looked like mother of pearl, and they didn’t form any letters or other characters with which I was familiar. The ends were capped in silver, and I was now all-too familiar with opening and closing different types of scroll tubes.

“It looks old,” I mused, “really old. The markings appear to have been made with mother of pearl, which places its origins as likely somewhere near the coast, and the patina of the silver makes it several hundred years old at least depending on how well it’s been stored.” I never studied archeology of any kind, unless you count watching television shows about high-end pawn shops or museum scouts, but I guess some of it had stuck in my brain.

 “Just over five hundred years old,” she confirmed. “It was already in the archives of the castle when we declared our independence as a Free State three hundred fifty years ago.”

I carefully unscrewed the cap and sniffed the air inside the tube. It was musty, which indicated that it had been at least decades since the thing had been opened. “What is it?” I asked as I reverently removed the rolls of vellum from the tube.

The High Sheriff chewed her lip before replying. “It is a record of discovery,” she said eventually. “It is very detailed, having been made by a local wizard of some repute. That is all I know from its description in the archive’s catalogue, as I believe no living person has ever seen the contents.”

I moved to lay the scroll out on the desktop, and noticed with a smirk that she had already cleared a proper-sized area before we had even begun arguing. She clearly had already made her decision to trust me before I had even sat down.

“And why do you think it can help us?” I asked as I looked over the first sheet, which was a square roughly two feet on a side covered in barely legible writing.
Wizards and Doctors apparently have more in common than just long internships
, I thought wryly as I flipped to the second sheet.

She pointed at a detailed diagram on the second sheet which I hadn’t yet noticed, but when I focused on it I understood exactly why she thought it might help.

A thorough sketching which would have made Leonardo DaVinci proud clearly showed what could have only been one of the ‘flyers’ we had battled the night before, complete with bat-like wings and scorpion-like tail.

Chapter V: Departure

“Who drew this?” asked Pi’Vari with obvious appreciation for the quality of the work. I had brought the tube and its contents back down to our common quarters in the gatehouse.

“A wizard from five centuries ago,” I replied pointedly.

Pi’Vari looked up immediately. “Five centuries?” he repeated.

I nodded. “The markings and patina of the tube, as well as the accounts and records of the castle’s custodians support the age, as do the assertions of the High Sheriff,” I said, rubbing my eyes. The trip down the stairs had been easier than the trip up, but after the magical exertion the night before and all that climbing, my frail body desperately needed rest, and I was having real difficulty keeping my eyes open.

Pi’Vari nodded slowly. “And the inlay work points to having originated from the coast,” he mused before turning serious. “Could this truly be his work?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I really don’t know, Pi’Vari,” I replied wearily, “but what I do know is that our course is clear.”

Aemir raised his hand like a child at lecture. “Pardon my interruption,” he began in his thick accent, which reminded me quite a bit of an Indian man I had once known, except Aemir’s voice was much smoother and deeper, “but of whom do you speak?”

Pi’Vari looked at me as if asking permission, which I gave with a nod. “A wizard who traveled the world in the centuries before the city of Veldyrian was founded over four hundred years ago,” Pi’Vari explained. “He is well-known to these lands as something of a legendary figure—a sort of peasant hero, if you will.”

“What fate befell him?” asked Aemir, who had spent many nights regaling us with legends from his own lands.

Pi’Vari shook his head. “No one knows for certain, as he simply vanished almost exactly five hundred years ago,” he said mysteriously. “His home was a coastal city which was destroyed hundreds of years ago by the Empire when they refused to become Imperial subjects, and it is believed that he spent his final days traveling the lands in search of important phenomena to catalogue.”

Aemir cocked an eyebrow. “What sort of phenomena did he consider important?” he asked, obviously intrigued.

Pi’Vari looked back down at the sketching pointedly before answering. “The kind we still do not yet fully understand, like this,” he answered with a wave of his hand at the sketches. He locked eyes with me before continuing, “The Empire would pay quite handsomely for these works, even if they do not belong to Sbeegl and are instead simply high quality pieces of the period. Pre-Imperial era collections of knowledge, literature and art are extremely valuable, and the subject matter is…unique.”

I kept my eyes locked with his as I replied, “These do not belong to the Empire; they belong to the people of Coldetz.” I suppressed the urge to cough as my voice turned hoarse, and my eyes began to water. “We keep them here unless we absolutely require them to find what we are looking for.”

Pi’Vari broke eye contact with me and sighed. “Such a waste, to have articles such as these locked away in some provincial castle,” he said wistfully. “But you are of course correct, Jezran. I do not believe we will require the presence of these original documents if you can confirm there is nothing magically hidden within them. If they are simply mundane documents, I can copy the entire collection in perhaps two days.”

I nodded. “Good call, Pi’Vari,” I said as I stood and moved to the table where he had laid the poster-sized scrolls. Aemir stood back slightly, and Dancer was already asleep on the other side of the room. Pi’Vari didn’t move an inch, as I had come to expect.

I closed my eyes and calmed myself. Augury and other forms of divination were notoriously sensitive, and even the smallest noise could interfere with a proper reading. When I felt like I had reached an appropriate state of mind, I willed the symbols I knew were needed for the spell I was to cast into my mind’s eye.

Casting a spell is an odd thing, at least in my experience. It’s kind of like mentally selecting a series of equations, but the relationship between them is usually counter-intuitive, unlike mathematics which is pretty straightforward when you understand the basic principles. The first step of casting a spell is to recall which symbols or equations are needed, but even more important than which symbols or characters are necessary, is the sequence and timing of their combination necessary to form a complex, functional structure.

I can’t explain why I was able to do any of it in the first place, but it came naturally enough and even felt ‘intuitive,’ if that’s the proper word. It was almost as though the right selections came to the forefront of my mind unbidden, and it was just a matter of ‘remembering’ how and when they went together, kind of like a familiar puzzle.

This particular spell was a complicated one, but it didn’t require much energy to cast. So I brought the right symbols together in my mind, and they formed a kind of triangle which glowed bright white in my mental landscape. Then I imagined that symbol, writhing and churning constantly but somehow maintaining its exact shape, to manifest itself on my forehead.

Satisfied that I had cast the spell correctly when I felt heat on my forehead, I opened my eyes. I can’t explain how it is to see with three eyes, especially when the third one doesn’t see like the other two, but that was what had happened.

I knew that it wasn’t really a third eye on my forehead, and was just the same white triangular shape I had envisioned in my mind’s eye glowing in the space above my eyes, but it still made me self-conscious.

I looked over the papers one by one, as I knew I could maintain the spell as long as was necessary considering how little power it required, but after only a few minutes I had read all of the papers except the last.

When I came to that paper, I froze. It was covered with the same scribbling as the other ones, as well as a few unfamiliar diagrams, but it was what I saw beneath the ink that caught my eye.

There were colors cascading back and forth, like laser-lights at a dance club. I tried to focus on them individually, but just when I thought I had tracked one down long enough to get a good look at it, it broke into two very different bits of swirling light. Those lights in turn danced hypnotically across the page, tearing my attention in two different directions.

For a moment I couldn’t resist the urge to try to maintain focus on them, even when they each split into two more, quite different bits of flashing color whose speed appeared to have increased. In frustration, I narrowed my focus and followed them all the way through to the third division. I was then following eight separate bits of light, and my mind felt ready to burst at the strain.