FAN FIC
Post it here, people, and if the Muse agrees, I shall devise a page, and there it shall dwell in earnest or satiric glory, for as long as the Brain shall live. But be warned, for thousands shall see, unforgiving multitudes, who shall heap scorn upon thee, leaving only a blessed handful, the disordered few, to praise and stalk thee.
Verily, post it here, people…
The Tilling of Her Skin (by Sciborg)
A Young Man from Kutnarmu (by Angelos)
Animate (by Swense)
Holy to the Damned (by Subetei)
Negotiation at One Remove (by Walter Langendorf)
First Sight of the Mark (by Technopilus)
A Tale of Swayal (by Mike Hillcoat)
Three Pound Brain 
Mr. Bakker do you realize how fucking intimidating this is??? lol
That’s why they call me MISTER Bakker!
As I mentioned on another post, I have tremendous anxiety when it comes to writing. Because of this anxiety, I tend to avoid writing if I am not required to write something.
That said, I am actually going to try to write something for this. I need to get over my anxiety and I think writing a story featuring that lovely freak of naure, Disciple Manning, might actually be kinda fun.
I love this idea. Also kinda has that “put up or shut up” feel to me; for those who criticize somebody else’s writing without having tried to write something themselves.
Mostly this is just a post to try to shame myself into writing a piece of fanfic which I hereby declare I will attempt to do.
Now I’ll see if this shame strategy works.
It’s the great engine of my productivity!
Taking a stab, realizing it isn’t quite up to snuff:
Their younger eyes watch the clusters of pustules on the floor of creased skin, while the eyes of their first faces glance nervously at the approaching necrosis. Mother will soon be little more than a petrified fossil, one whose emptiness now seems crowded with the echoes of the Inchoroi’s used up lovers and fodder.
Anxiety causes deeply set grafts to shiver, sending ripples across translucent flesh. In this place, even they who are a race lovers are flacid, their arousal doused by desperation. Crouched over the milky blisters, penises drooping into contact with the slow cooling floor, these last masters of the Bios whisper indoctrination with the wary resignation of a gambler.
“…Drawn out from the dying flesh of the mother, born of a seed taken from the Father we made, you are both brother and son…”
The similarity of their teaching brings an almost synchronous flow to their collective words, the closest their kind has ever come to the ritual of the faithful. They peer deep into the pus with a fanatical intensity, seeking some sign of movement, some proof that life has quickened in the pus, some sound of life gurgled through the reptilian maw.
“…You are a descendant of Wutteat, and all this world might be your larder if you can make it our harem…”
There was a time when they might have more easily separated the wheat of those that would come to term from the chaff of the stillborn, yet now they were forced to be little more than desperate farmers or pearl divers thankful for even most meager of harvests.
“…’Who are your Makers?’ you ask as your skulls harden over nascent minds…”
They sat, squatting in the darkness, hoping but not praying for dragons while somewhere in the deep caverns of Mother there was a long dead sigh of pheromone induced ecstasy. A flicker of recalled desire ran like a feeble lighting from each penis to both brains, for even with that reminder of approaching damnation the Inchoroi could not forget what they had made themselves to be.
“….We are a race of flesh, we are a race of lovers…”
damn i wish there was an edit function.
Just edit and resubmit. I love what you have so far, Sci. What’s the title?
“Just edit and resubmit. I love what you have so far, Sci. What’s the title?”
Oh, no idea on title, just started writing about whatever was in my head. Really just flash fiction.
I need the title for the link, though.
Wow, this is great! Seemed very structurally consistent with some of RSB’s writings too!
So…
I know I’ve never posted in the comments before, but I’m a long-time fan of the books, and have been reading this blog casually almost since it’s inception. I loved the Four Revelations, and although I don’t often write fanfic and the very idea of posting here is extremely intimidating, I’d like to give it a shot.
I’ve got a draft playing around in my head, and it refuses to get out.
What’s the idea? Thankfully Scott has given us this page to has out and discuss ideas.
Let’er rip Swense! The central premise of Three Pound Brain is that everyone but everyone is talking out of their asses.
Note: Please treat this effort at a short story not as a Fanfic but as a (very polite) and lengthy request to Mr Bakker to give us just a little big more when it comes to the Gnosis 🙂 🙂 🙂
The young man was angry.
He was angry because Koruni had clearly struck and – possibly – violated his sister. Her left eye swollen, she had run to him when he returned from his fruitless hunt for pear scorpions, to try and explain that it was her fault. She claimed that the specks of blood on her stonecat-skin skirt came from skinning Koruni’s latest kill.
Koruni was the best hunter in the small village. He was the strongest, the fastest, with three wives and five lion manes adorning his hut. Lately, he started calling himself the Prince of North Kutnarmu – with the shaman’s blessing.
Confronting Koruni straight-on was an act of suicide. His brothers-in-blood, fourteen in number, would probably slay him before he even had a chance to brandish his spear.
That same night, the young man packed provisions for three days, a large waterskin, left his hut and started travelling south.
A year ago, after the shame of his first unsuccessful hunt, the young man had fled the ridicule of his peers, and travelling aimlessly he ended up near the caves, a days walk to the south of their village. The barren land surrounding the caves was empty of game with no water to be found for miles. Exploring the caves in the hope of finding a stone cat or even a lion – a kill which would make him a hero to the eyes of the village – he discovered an old man living in one of them.
He was a bearded northerner of many summers, dressed in robes and with the glint of madness in his eyes. Their friendship was a thing born of boredom. Despite the fact that he came this south to die, the old man craved the occasional companionship of another being and the young man was intrigued by this northerner who was plagued by nightmares all night, yet would unfailingly wake up every morning before dawn to sit cross-legged in the lip of his cave and greet the morning sun.
The young man was present when the old man levelled a pack of water-crazed stone cats with a few impossible words. Their hunt for sustenance had brought them near the caves. The schoolman’s eyes had eyes lit up, his mouth had uttered sounds no Kutnarmuian throat had ever made and six stone cat carcasses collapsed in the ground, brains empty of what makes them meaningful, eyes filled with blood and most of the large bones in their bodies shattered. The schoolman would have nothing to do with the bodies and the young man was afraid to bring them back to the village as his own kills, worried that the women would raise questions about the unnatural way the animals died.
Today, when the young man entered the cave, calling a greeting in passable Ainoni, the old man would not rise from his rough bedding. Parched lips, skin sticking to a frame devoid of any fat, the Schoolman was ready to greet what came next.
With urgency in his voice, the young man asked the Schoolman to teach him the words that kill. Words that he could use to put Koruni in his place, once and for all.
The schoolman tried to laugh at that but all that came out was a dry chuckle. People would spend lives trying to master even the basic intricacies of the Gnosis and most of them failed.
Yet, what did he have to lose?
In complete contrast with his past teachings and methods, the schoolman spent the last three hours of his life talking to the young man about the true *meaning* of things. He wasted no time warning about Seswatha’s dreams or about the responsibility that came with knowledge. He would point to his face, his body, his arms, his legs, to his surroundings and name them using the Logos, impossible words stripped of all cultural influence and filled with semantic – and powerful – meaning. The young man would probably not even be able to register them but the schoolman was past caring. He did not stop, he did not offer any explanations or extrapolations on deeper concepts, he just talked and named things. And before the sun came out, he closed his eyes and expelled his last breath.
The young man built a stone cairn for the Mandate Schoolman and left the caves.
He reached his village the next day just after sunrise. He purposefully walked to stand outside Koruni’s hut and called him out. At his approach, Koruni’s blood brothers stood up from their places around the fire, smirking at the young man. Koruni himself, wearing the mane of his latest kill, exited the hut and wondered aloud what the “Brave hunter with no kills” wanted, a question which was greeted by laughs from the whole village.
The young man blamed Koruni for the violation of his sister. He blamed the shaman (who was still drunk and sleeping on his hut) for letting this pass and blamed Koruni’s blood brothers for being cowards who would ignore the code of their village.
And when Koruni and his fighters started moving towards the young man with murder in their eyes, the young man leaned forward and screamed the word “Stop”. Yet his voice carried in it something more, something *potent*.
The men were brought to their knees, still alive yet stunned, trickles of blood evident in their eyes, noises and ears. In a circle around them, the dry grass was flattened and the earth slightly depressed, as if a giant’s fist had gently pushed it down.
What the old schoolman failed to perceive in his isolation, was that the language of the Kutnarmu tribes was out of necessity stripped of lies or anything else that might corrupt the true meaning behind a word. In those three hours of teaching, the young man’s mind did not have to shed any cultural bias, it simply absorbed everything it heard. And somewhere a connection was made and a very tiny and – relatively speaking – ineffective door was opened to the Logos.
Many years would pass until the next Mandate Schoolman would walk the deserts of Kutnarmu, but when that happened, she was surprised by the warm welcome offered to her by the recently appointed King of the Tribes.
It was after that visit that the Odaini Concussion Cant was added to the syllabus of the Mandate School, named after the young man who unknowingly uttered it first, all those years ago.
“What the old schoolman failed to perceive in his isolation, was that the language of the Kutnarmu tribes was out of necessity stripped of lies or anything else that might corrupt the true meaning behind a word.”
loved this.
Very cool, Angelo, but I need a title to make the link!
Thank you sir!
I was thinking about “Naming a cant” but when I spoke it aloud (and after I stopped laughing) I realised that it will simply not do (for English speaking people at least).
What about “A young man from Kutnarmu” ?
Another great one! I like the scene describing the Gnosis effects on the stone cats.
So did the young man suffer from dreams of Seswatha I wonder?
you guys are setting the bar pretty high 🙂
The Mandate say I cannot know the burden of their hearts. But the Mandate are not me. How, then, can they claim with certainty what in my heart I do and do not know?
– Altheus, Aniconian Interrogations
Angelos, a few comments to help your story mesh with the canon established by Scott:
-You also need to establish that the young man is one of the Few with the capacity grasp the Onta.
-I don’t remember The Logos canonically being mentioned as part of Mandate teaching. Indeed, I thought it was just a Dunyain thing.
-The Mandate would also not tolerate those uninitiated by touching Seswatha’s heart to weild the Gnosis for fear of it being gained by their rival schools. The only thing that stops The Scarlet Spires from grasping it is the fact that all Mandate schoolmen carry part of Seswatha in their subconscious which helps them resist torture and Cants of Compulsion. As such, you might want to end the story with a brief mention of the Mandate sent out a few sorcerers of rank and Chorae crossbowmen later on a genocidal mission.
Such is life on Earwa.
Ah, you’re right! -> re:Logos.
I can see a three-pound brain argument developing here since I’m Greek and the word in my native language is a semantically rich word, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos for the various meanings.
What is not apparent from the wiki article is the fact that in everyday speech we also use the expression “Στον λόγο μου” (“to my logos”), as a reinforcement to a promise we make. For example, if we reply with “Στον λόγο μου” to the question “Do you promise to do XXX”, that’s equivalent (for some people at least) to “sealing” / swearing a strong oath.
If you add all the ancient Greek philosophers baggage to it (we had to do Ancient Greek in school, tough class), and you capitalise the first letter, you end up with a word which when read by a Greek in a magical context of a fantasy novel, it becomes an all-powerful concept, a thing you use to define reality as you see fit by speaking.
When reading the word “Logos” I personally get the following:
– A promise -> that something WILL be done
– Reason -> What you asked to be done using the Logos makes sense (Aristotle)
– Language -> The “spell” is effectively a word / series of words that make sense, depsite them being “impossible” or non-perceivable by non-Schoolmen
– Rich semantics -> Logos goes above the concept of “word” and can include concepts such as conversation, speech, analogy, tale, story, prose etc.
– Power -> Capital L.
Hence me confusing / integrating it with the Gnosis 🙂
re: Guarding the Gnosis
Yup, it does make sense but it will end the story in a “darker” mood that I wanted to. The whole purpose of this short story was to voice a “need” to Mr Bakker about getting a little more background when it comes to the Gnosis.
This is from the White-Luck Warrior:
” At long last the Wizard struck.”
“An Odaini Concussion Cant. Simple and low, meant only to stun – to knock back into reason perhaps. But Nil’Giccas had floated above sharp ruin …”
So you have this absolutely awesome post-battle, and you get to see this trick used by Aha. When I read that, I was like ” Wait, Odaini Concussion Cant? What’s that? That sounds AWESOME. More more more! Why Concussion? What does it really do?”. This is a risky request because the more unknown magic remains, the more tempting it is, but naming the Odaini Concussion Cant immediately generates a need for me to know *more*! 🙂
It’s extra frustrating for people intrigued by that kind of thing since almost all the named spells in the books are presented that way. Together their names add the weight of history and tradition to the cants, but individually we know nothing about the inventors and only very little about how individual cants work. It might just be a carry over from Vance and Gygax’s tendency to name spells that way. Bigby’s Clenched Fist? Oh Bigby, you so silly.
That said, I still prefer the current narrative focus on people. This level of detail might go well in the appendix, but too much focus on the background stuff will often ruin the story for me.
I think that cross cultural responce, particularly with details given on it, is cool! I mean, why not that integration with the Logos in that way? Sure, the author might have set ideas about stuff, but a real life cross cultural reading is like real, instead of a bunch of made up ideas. So it’s really interesting! Do need the explanitory notes though, heh!
On the Odaini Concussion Cant, I think that showed up in thousand fold thought when Akka fought Conphas’s army. I think he also used it at some point to push someone clear of danger, but I can’t recall where. Oh, and in judging eye he tries to hit a skin spy with it, but damn are those skin spies mary sue fast!
I can’t remember it’s name, but I like the earth moving cant that shows up in the dragon fight. Could help but feel that Scott was geeking out with us there, showing a utalitarian spell, it’s background, the disdain but necessity that brought it’s invention and yet all that mundanity is raised to epic because fuck yeah, it’s being used in a fight with the father of dragons! Making all that mundane world prior significant(and thus real) due to the significance of the martial moment. Great meaning backwash effect! But I shouldn’t describe it to technically, spoils the geek out!
Edited version – Sci
The Tilling Her Skin
Their younger eyes watch the clusters of pustules on the floor of creased skin, while the eyes of their first faces glance nervously at the approaching necrosis. Mother will soon be little more than a petrified fossil, one whose emptiness begins to be overcrowded with the echoes of lovers and fodder used up and discarded through the passing of ages.
Anxiety causes deeply set grafts to shiver, sending ripples across the translucent flesh of the Inchoroi. In this place, even they who are a race lovers are flacid, their arousal doused by desperation. Crouched over the milky blisters, penises drooping into contact with the slow cooling floor, these last masters of the Bios whisper indoctrination with the wary resignation of a luckless gambler.
“…Drawn out from the dying flesh of our Mother, born of a seed taken from the Father we made, you are both brother and son…”
The similarity of their teaching brings an almost synchronous flow to their collective words, the closest their kind has ever come to the ritual of the faithful. They peer deep into the pus with a fanatical intensity, seeking some sign of movement, some proof that hearts are quickening within the cutaneous wombs, some sound of life gurgled through at least one of the reptilian maws.
“…You are a descendant of Wutteat, and all this world might be your larder if you war with us to make it our harem…”
There was a time when the Inchoroi might have more easily separated the wheat of those that would come to term from the chaff of the stillborn, yet now they were forced to be little more than desperate farmers thankful for even the most meager of harvests.
“…’Who are your Makers?’ you ask as your skulls harden over nascent minds, as the furnace within you begins to warm…”
They sat, squatting in the darkness, hoping but not praying for dragons while somewhere in the deep caverns of Mother there was a long dead sigh of pheromone induced ecstasy. A flicker of recalled desire ran like a feeble arc of lightning from each groin to both of their brains, for even with that ghostly reminder of approaching damnation the hoary sons of the Ark could not forget what they had made themselves to be.
“….We are a race of flesh, we are a race of lovers…”
damn it I suck, fucked up the title, should be The Tilling of Her Skin
See, here’s the opposite of thinking one understands the entire text. Here I’m reading the absence and thinking ‘it there an abruptness as a sort of deliberate primeval regression or summit? Suggesting, what?’ but actually it’s a typo. So true, people often think they understand the entire text. But for anyone who just thought they understood utterly that that was a typo, they did understand that entirely and in this case, trying to read more into it and not understanding the full meaning was, while maybe creative somehow, the missplaced notion. Just thought I’d note this as a counter example to the usual “Readers think they get it all but they don’t!” which often gets said around here it seems.
It is ever the narcotic of the learned to seek intent behind the question of why they are not more.
– Ajad, Chronicle of Toil
I came to write a story and all I got was this stupid t-shirt of wacky false document aphorisms. Maybe once I get over the shame of making people eat an entire cake made of icing I’ll post the rest of them. Maybe even a story too, if that ever comes together.
You know how to make icing? Fuck!
Doubt begets philosophers, and philosophy beget fools. Verily, Parcis detests my company.
– Nomedius, Refutations
I wouldn’t mind seeing those quotes Frank.
I was thinking more about witches, don’t necessarily have a story in mind yet but was curious how people see things like the whore shells. I think of witch-magic as twice removed from the Gnosis. If gnosis is mathematics, and agnosis is analogy, then witch-magic requires the physical to make the witch’s will known to the world.
So I see witches scraping mollusks out of shells, and when sex workers where these the fetish similarly makes a lifeless “pit” out of the “shell” of their wombs…kinda relates back to what happened to the Ark.
Similarly, what is it like for the Nuns to dream the dream of a man? And not just any man, but Seswatha?
-Sciborg
Still putting stuff together. I’ve been both inspired and creeped out by reading this recently and seeing shades of Khellus in something so old. Now I’m going through my list to check if I don’t unintentionally plagarize anything. If I am going to do that I want it to be intentional.
And I’m saving WLW for christmas so I don’t know anything about witches in that, but I remember the wathi doll in the first series was from a witch. Does that give you any ideas?
Yeah, the Wathi doll is interesting – witch-magic is fascinating in that it is (as I see it) at least twice removed from the pure mathematics of the Gnosis, going past analogy to fetish. Yet this supposed weakness makes it seem to have far more utility.
I do think there might be a connection between witch magic and dragons ability to breath fire, as in dragons themselves are “living” fetishes. It might help explain why dragons don’t wear chorae.
Still don’t have a story formed in my head, but ideally others will get something out of our discussion.
-Sciborg
Here’s a small list of heresies and other nonsense. The story proper is taking it’s own sweet time.
—
It is ever the narcotic of the learned to seek intent behind the question of why they are not more.
– Ajad, Chronicle of Toil
The scholar drowns in depth as the world drowns in ignorance.
– Ajad, Chronicle of Toil
The Mandate say I cannot know the burden of their hearts. But the Mandate are not me. How, then, can they claim with certainty what in my heart I do and do not know?
– Altheus, Aniconian Interrogations
When sorcery moves the world, are we deceived in word or deed?
– Altheus, Aniconian Interrogations
Is blasphemy still blasphemous if condoned by the God? Is piety still pious if condemned by the God? All acts can be pious, all acts profane. To believe otherwise is to deny the God as infinite.
– Altheus, Aniconian Interrogations
Why does the Tusk need reside within the sheltered halls of Junriüma? How can the Gods be so uncaring for that which is most holy?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
What heavenly design moves the hearts of men, that so many are put to such rude propose?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
The sinner and the pious, who has greater need of the God’s blessings?
The blessed and the untouched, who is more cherished in the eyes of the God?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
Doubt begets philosophers, and philosophy begets fools. Verily, Parcis detests my company.
– Nomedius, Refutations
When fools hold power over you, acquire the means to overpower them. To suffer their foolishness is to prove yourself the greater fool.
– Nomedius, Refutations
There is a difference between the admission ‘I am wrong’ and ‘I do not know.’ But to utter either without forethought can bring equally swift disaster. Learn to extricate yourself from your own mistakes with your mask of certainty intact. Only then shall you rule the thoughts of lesser men.
– Nomedius, Refutations
Sincerity is the truest form of flattery. That is to say, not very true at all.
– Nomedius, Three Seasons at the Courts of Shigek
Watching the suturers and apothecaries ply their trade, I am moved to believe that we were made for suffering.
– Kuchaga, The Scourge in Repose
I reach out and cupped the water with my hand
I reach out and cupped memory with my thought
The two gifts that I hold both promise me life
Yet one shall run dry while the other shall not
I mourn for my kin who have come from afar
As they drink onto death this stream without end
– Anonymous, Lamentations at Dusk
Tremble as you kneel before the God. Thought He cherishes some and torments others, the God owes each of us nothing. We are to Him as beasts are to men.
– Chants 1:6, Lesser Apocrypha
The soundness of sleep is purchased by the blood of righteous.
– Kianene proverb
Train your sentries to guard against each other.
– Ainoni proverb
The great and lesser Schools would laugh at the Mysunsai for calling ourselves ‘mercenaries’. Wear the title with pride, brothers, for what is wealth but power in the hands of guileful men? The Schools cannot help but demean us for laying bare their own most cherished pretensions.
– Cartanian, Dictat Trichroma
I just got the best christmas present ever.
Some additions and fixes.
—
It is ever the narcotic of the learned to seek intent behind the question of why they are not more.
– Ajad, Chronicle of Toil
The scholar drowns in depth as the world drowns in ignorance.
– Ajad, Chronicle of Toil
The Mandate say I cannot know the burden of their hearts. But the Mandate are not me. How, then, can they claim with certainty what in my heart I do and do not know?
– Altheus, Aniconian Interrogations
When sorcery moves the world, are we deceived in word or deed?
– Altheus, Aniconian Interrogations
Is blasphemy still blasphemous if condoned by the God? Is piety still pious if condemned by the God? All acts can be pious, all acts profane. To believe otherwise is to deny the God as infinite.
– Altheus, Aniconian Interrogations
Why does the Tusk need reside within the sheltered halls of the Junriüma? How can the Gods be so uncaring for that which is most holy?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
What heavenly design moves the hearts of men, that so many are put to such rude propose?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
The sinner and the pious, who has greater need of the God’s blessings?
The blessed and the untouched, who is more cherished in the eyes of the God?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
What is analogy, if not falsehoods that seduce through their resemblance to truth?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
Doubt begets philosophers, and philosophy begets fools. Verily, Parcis detests my company.
– Nomedius, Refutations
When fools hold power over you, acquire the means to overpower them. To suffer their foolishness is to prove yourself their lesser.
– Nomedius, Refutations
There is a difference between the admission ‘I am wrong’ and ‘I do not know.’ But to utter either without forethought can bring equally swift disaster. Learn to extricate yourself from your own mistakes with your mask of certainty intact. Only then shall you rule the thoughts of lesser men.
– Nomedius, Refutations
Sincerity is the truest form of flattery. That is to say, not very true at all.
– Nomedius, Three Seasons at the Courts of Shigek
No medicine is as sweet as sympathy, but poisons often delight the senses.
– Nomedius, Three Seasons at the Courts of Shigek
Watching the suturers and apothecaries ply their trade, I am moved to believe that we were made for suffering.
– Kuchaga, The Scourge in Repose
For six years my father knew only triumph. Near and far, heathen princes cowered before his unstoppable might. “All doubt is vanquished before the victor’s blade,” he was fond of saying. It is as good an epitaph as any.
– Kuchaga, Records of the White Jihad
I reach out and cup the water with my hand
I reach out and cup memory with my thought
The two gifts that I hold both promise me life
Yet one shall run dry while the other shall not
I mourn for my kin who have come from afar
As they drink onto death this stream without end
– Anonymous, Lamentations at Dusk
Tremble as you kneel before the God. Thought He cherishes some and torments others, the God owes each of us nothing. We are to Him as beasts are to men.
– Chants 1:6, Lesser Apocrypha
Train your sentries to guard against each other.
– Ainoni proverb
The soundness of sleep is purchased by the blood of righteous.
– Kianene proverb
The great and lesser Schools would laugh at the Mysunsai for calling ourselves ‘mercenaries’. Wear the title with pride, brothers, for what is wealth but power in the hands of guileful men? The Schools cannot help but demean us for laying bare their own most cherished pretensions.
– Cartanian, Dictat Trichroma
To take up the sword is to be humbled. Every thrust and parry is a constant reminder to the limits of one’s reach. Beware, your eminence, he who would wield his Cants as steel.
– Cartanian, Reply to the Principle of the Oaranat
The master said, we are many,
The many answered, we are one.
Crimson toil for crimson levies,
The dead speak not once deeds are done.
– Anonymous, The Burning of Kiz
The subtleties of benjuka are inestimable, but men begin at the plate with the same goal at heart.
– Sutai, On the Paradox of Stratagems
When men war over pride, the spoils are always a pittance.
– Sutai, On the Paradox of Stratagems
Did you want me to just replace the previous version, Frank?
These are seriously awesome, by the way.
Thanks. That would be great. I thought making you do individual changes in the old copy on my behalf would be kind of a dick move.
Done. Once again, splendid stuff.
These are awesome! Though I think that when members of the Mandate are referred to plurally, they’re called Mandati (Book 2)
OK, my first draft is done.
I will post it after my GF makes suggestions, but first I must apologize to Saajanpatel for two reasons:
1. My story is called “Tiles”.
2. The thematic content of my story is, in a roundabout way, similar to yours. It just takes longer to get there.
By some bizarre coincidence, when Scott said “write fanfiction!” our brains went to the same (fucked-up) place.
No need to apologize – I think dragons are in the Earwa zeitgeist. I likely only beat you to it by ignoring things like plot.
Oh, it’s not the dragons. It’s the sick shit that the Inchoroi do.
Saajanpatel – I too was thinking about Witches, it seems. Although in a more roundabout way. I admit I take some liberties with knowing what it would be like to be trapped inside one, but then again that’s something I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
This is but a first draft, and I’d love to hear your critiques, gentlemen.
Animate
As a man he knew love once. He knew a woman, and she was – and is – a witch. They come to salt her one day in his second life. The hateful mob beats her with impassioned fists, and then transfigures her in a flash of divine retribution in the name of their demon-headed gods. Later, the Xerashi inquisitor chops her into pieces; sells the fortune of white salt to Ainoni traders. The curiosity is how each hacking blow made the world seem less, made his crumbling ties diminish until his first life’s memory is a naught but a fog, a haze in his artifice of eternity. Where there should be impossible heartbreak there is only a growing emptiness, not unlike the oblivion he will come to experience.
It is a welcome foretaste.
He knew sickness, once. He was dying, dying and the woman who was a witch, a beloved woman whose name he cannot recall (now after and before her death alike), sought to save him from the hungers of demons and gods alike. She took him in her arms, laid him in a circle he now knows was stained with accumulated sins. “I will make of you a new body, one carved of wood that will last beyond the ending of the world.” She whispered, cradling his failing body. “I may be damned but I can give you this, my love.” There was light and there is darkness beyond all darknesses.
He cannot feel the multitude of sensations in his second, soul-bound existence. He blinks false eyes and he sees the world as ghostly angles and truths; he sees light where bodies should be, shining according to the merit of their souls. He watches a cat wander towards him. He tastes the feeble soul, lets a feeble spark of consciousness pass through and above him. He wipes blood from himself in clumsy pantomime.
He knows the absurdity of his form, trapped as he is within a body like an artist’s dummy. And yet still he sates himself, continues his existence even though he can see it through to a bitter finality. This, he realizes in an uncommon moment of revelation, must be the experience of a god.
Later by one hundred years that is as a second, he sees sorcerers singing in the vault of the sky. Coiled ethereal dragons are swept away in a furious cataract of plasma. Saurian maws drown in holy water. A heartbreaking song as death comes swirling down. Wards – he knows they are wards somehow, sees them with an animata’s perspective – crumple under successive cracking waves of hatred and righteousness, a song so beautiful it must be God’s own and yet he does not understand… how can God be singing? God is shattered, a thousand warring pieces engaged in their own peculiar internecine violence.
He has never heard a song that did not offend.
He would weep, but for the falseness of his eyes.
One autumn day in what men now call Kian, he sees the child pick him up, throw him against the ground with a child’s customary disrespect. “Servant!” The caste-noble daughter screams, and a terrified slave girl all dressed in Nilnameshi purples comes for him. She cradles the doll in her hands. “Was this among your things, Aisa dearest?” She asks, frowning. “This does not look like one of yours.” She frowns, carries the doll away amidst weeping protestations.
The animata cannot say he is ungrateful – he knows his time is soon. “ab Pasha!” The servant calls. “Kas’anafira, I found something.” He wonders if this second death will be release. He awaits anxiously the oblivion of his soul.
All instants ultimately converge within a single instant, as they must. A snakes’ tongue licks his stained and beaten exterior, smooth tongue so close it can almost taste his soul. “Fane has decreed this… thing a demons trick. A tool of witches.” The bound soul struggles against the human grip which drags him from the floor, plucks him as a carpenter would pluck a splinter. “A Wathi doll.”
“What shall we do, your holiness?” The human voice is rough, Kianene, speaking a bastard dialect of a tongue he remembers from his human life. “Burn it? How did a demon’s toy find itself among the satrap’s daughter’s playthings? Especially a man as pious as Kas’anafira ab Pasha…” The doll knows, if they care to ask. Let them phrase it in a way that is meaningful, a cant that would unseal his soul and spill forth the knowledge within. Let them not destroy him without understanding… But he is not praying, because there is nothing Outside worth praying to. He is only begging in silent desperation, realizing in the end that his soul cares. It does not long for death as it did in the decades of ceaseless tedium. Oblivion draws a limit, a terrifying limit in an existence that should be measureless.
“Silence, Faisal.” The unblemished, unmarked priest commands. “These old governors… still they are steeped in idolatry, in their false ways. Cast the doll, and the texts, into the fire. Leave no record of their existence. Cull these hateful things, that they might not tempt the eyes of the righteous.” The doll offers mute protestations, knowing these infidel men cannot hear the screams of his soul. Ever are men blind to what lays beyond. Save the one who calls him Wathi. The priest, he knows can see with his own pair of false eyes. The snakehead priest sees the fear and destroys him nonetheless, such is his fanatic hate.
The snakehead licks cold lips.
There is no sensation of warmth in the fire, merely one of unraveling, of instants coming to pass in actuality. For the first time since his death, he knows that his life is the past, that he stands upon an infinite precipice beyond which lies nothing.
A human heartbeat passes, and he is unaware of the nothingness he becomes.
*I too was thinking about Wathi dolls.
I like it. There’s a few little stylistic things such as two separate comparisons of such and such “alike” happening in rapid succession that I would have done differently, but they don’t bug me too much. That part with the cat mirroring a similar event in the series threw me. The story clicked once I realised it wasn’t the same doll as Achamian’s. It might be less confusing if you changed the encounter to some other common animal.
Life of a Wathi doll – awesome. I still have trouble wrapping my mind around people who practice sorcery knowing they are damned, but I wonder if there is a current of Sisyphean defiance I would do well to cultivate in my own personality.
Or perhaps despite all scripture there is that feeling of wasting one’s life on a gamble of salvation.
Still, the love of the man and the witch had a tragic beauty to it. Reminds me of a scene from the Mark of the Beast comic where two lesbians think the world is ending:
“Is God punishing us?”
“Let Him try.”
Ah, thanks. In my first imagining, it was Achamian’s. That part was a hold-over.
HOLY TO THE DAMNED
His beauty always stilled him for a solitary moment , and yet the cavernous depth of his Mark repelled him. A living contradiction, he was the epitome of all that men thought great and yet he and all his race were condemned as Falsemen, to look the very image of youthful beauty and yet be burdened by ages uncounted and dimly remembered. He spoke with the strange intonations of his people, “I see that you study. This is good” he punctuated his declaration with sideways head nod that signalled assent. “Knowledge is power. That is what your school believes, yes?” He paused for a tepid instant, as if to consider the import of his next words. “The power over ones self, the power over others, and if with enough knowledge, power over the very world itself,” his pale skin gleamed in the shambling light of the scriptorium, marble white struggled against suffocating blackness across his upper torso, a field that shifted with random gusts of wind. “Power?” he tried to imbue this single word with derision to mark his incredolusness, and to mask the feelings of awe that the presence of the Quya master evoked in him. “I come here daily to read old tomes about ancient wars and peoples long diminished,” his confusion about his purpose splayed across his youthful face, at the meaning he failed to grasp,” I have duties that I can scarcely finish without trekking daily to this city of parchment.” Human hands waved to the greater room about them, cold stone and dry parchment loomed in every direction, such that a single man seemed a hot blooded intruder in a forest of a higher order.
Nonman lips pulled back across fused teeth, strange that one could almost believe that a pale man stood before him istead of an ancient from a dead race, little details seemed to tear away such comforting fables of their own accord. “You are San-Kaujalau are you not? A prodigy of this age dark age,” again the simple gesture of assent, ” your School will indulge your curiosity, especially at my request. Mortals may burn intensely then fade away, but they will not have forgotten my contributions. Gin’yursis was not the sole sponsor in teaching Men the sublties of the Gnosis.” Once again the wooden bench which had become his closest companion over the last weeks pummeled his backside, sending jolts of outrage across the small of his back. The man who was not a Man stepped smoothly foward his hands clasped behind him, once again his presence assailed the Schoolman. Here was a being that was so much more than a man, and yet so much less, human lifetimes could be creep and there passing scarcely register. A nimil surcoat flowed around his powerful frame shimering like blessed water, a heavenly waterfall to complement his angelic contenence. With each measured stride the individual links drew his his eyes like brilliant lodestones, a million interlocking cranes the width of an eyelash that danced in the flickering light. Not for the first time the sense of wonder that a race that could create such marvels had walked across this very land, they were a stupendous shout compared to mannish growls. The miracles that those eyes had seen and simply forgotten because of the even greater immensities lay stamped across his soul.
“You are a Schoolman and this is the great library of Sauglish, a wonder of the mannish world,’ he spoke as if he doubted the truth of this statement, ” you should be as one with this place. With my brothers I helped raise this place from the wilderness, a crib to hold the summit of your knowledge.” He learned foward, bent at the waist like a like a falling oak. “What have you learned from our madnes and our heartbreak?” he could feel the warmth of his breath cross his lips. Again he wondered at their first strange meeting, when the Siqu had approached him in the hall of his school with a seemingly simply request. To read the grand history of the Cunuroi embodied in the Isuphirya and so pull away the sheaves of millenia. It was unusual but the ways of a Nonman seldom moved according to mannish expectations. Such a request from one who gifted mere men with the Gnosis, taught them the paucity of analogy compared to the essence of meaning. No, his brother Schoolmen would never deny this being, even the Mangaecca respected the writ of Nincama-Telesser. “Come now, the language should flow for you, all schoolmen are now taught are holy tongues instead of mannish barking,” again grand arrogance mixed with stunning insight, such insults would have to be borne by all who conversed with Nonmen.
“No Great One, I could never forget your hallowed tongues, Gilcunya has raised one such as myself to wield the very power of creation. And Ihrimsu has allowed me to plumb the depths of this world.” Ardor fairly leapt from him as he spoke, a sense of things long concealed within finally being unleashed upon their unsuspecting creator. “Even the rulers of Umeria fear to be in my presence, their guards scuttling aound them like ants. Me,” he gestured violently with his hand to his chest, “the son of a fuller elicits terror in the heart of the God-Kings.” The emotions of his humble origins animated his face, disgust that one such as he could come from such people, and relief, relief most of all that his grasping of the onta had allowed him to escape that such a fate. Again the strange gesture of assent, his head still hovering mere finger lengths away. The Nonman spoke again, “yet this power comes at an immortal price,” there it lay spoken, the hard seed to the sweet peach of sorcerous power, “damnation,” they spoke in unison of the bond which all sorcerors shared. A sense of inward turning was the only signifier of the terror that word evoked where before only arrogance beamed forth.
Perfect features draped in white nodded their understanding, as one who will also share the same fate as the condemned. Then he spoke, “is it fair for the world to condemn what the world itself has bestowed upon you? It has made men small in a titanous world, the land , the animals, and even the seasons dwarf lowely Man.” Chalk white lips parsed in contemplation, the spoke again, “only the intellect of Man makes him greater than the that which encompasses him. And what is sorcery if not the ultimate expression of that intellect overcoming nature. And yet we are forever damned for using are greatest gift, and these are the gods to who you pray?” The last question simply one of base sanity. As if the condemned could worship his executioners. A mask of fury contorted the face of the sorceror, “I long ago gave up that special brand of madness, rational men do not give credence to the Outside, only the foolish harken to such fables as the God!” Crimson shame bloomed across him that he should show such weakness before the Siqu, yet the Nonman betrayed no sign of discomfort. Instead truthful words, “your fears animate your beliefs, for there is a God shatterred across the Outside and your actions will see you forever damned,” a look of absolute pity accompanied this admission, a loving father decsribing the realities of a cruel world to a loved child.
“Why?’ he struggled to control his roaring emotions, “why would you come here to tell me this? Do you think I do not already know? That I do not war with nightmares of burning when I sleep?” A sorceror became a beaten dog in the space of a few heartbeats, the mask pulled from even a sorceror of rank. A strange smile animated the haunting face, the perfection of his features became more stark as he backed away, satisfied that pupil had taken the final step toward kwowledge. “Indeed it is not fair,” his teeth seemed a great gate that opened and closed a path to oblivion, “to trade mere heartbeats of unequal doses of pleasure and pain for the certainty of eternal torment.” The Nonman turned and not for the first time he admired the utter absence of imperfection in the Quya mage. A back and forth pacing before the desk such that his torso hovered above the pages of the ancient tome. A pause in the pacing, a decision reached, “does a just father kill his son for using the tools he himself has provided?” A rhetorical question he decided not meant to be answered, once again he was at a loss in the depths of the Nonmans’ purposes, “a clever son would use the tools anyway and still find away to avoid punishment. Maybe even displace the unjust father, to rule in his stead as a more just ruler.” A conspiratorial wink, as if he emulated a poorly understood human custom. Althougth the words puzzled, dread crept up his spine, of waystations passed that could never be recovered.
“Replace the Gods?” his speach sputtered upon his lips, impossible words that should never be uttered, an idea that was to ludicrous to be voiced aloud. “Perhaps,” the Nonman now played coy with his intentions. “You have read the Isuphiryas,” with a gesture indicating the haunting pages that lay open before him, “how the mighty were laid low by the trickery of those who were deemed to be broken, I myself inhabit those those hallowed pages.” He fairly leapt to display the product of hard study, “you were a mighty prince of renown, Cet’ingira of the high mansion Nihrimsul, cousin to its king Sin’niroiha. You battled against the Nonman King of bardic legend, pulled mighty Wracu burning from the sky, and slew those creatures that were called Inchoroi, hurling their carcasses to the screaming masses of their progeny.” This brought joy to the man, to converse with one as great as this, a being older than nations and mightier than prophets. He relative even if a thousand generations distant, a brother who could also sing the song of creation.
“Yes,”a star pupil that had proved worthy of his mastres praise, “I who was once mighty now stands before you a shamble, a shadow of his former magnificence, as are all my kind.” For the fist time sadness overcame his beauty, his greatness transformed into a wreck clothed in princely garb. “All life is loss we are just the worlds most pertinent example,” a short pause as if to introduce another to a cabal, “what if there were others who also shared the same eternal prospects and yet did not simply wail at their circumstance, but conspired to change the very nature of the world itself. And throw the judgement of heaven back upon itself, defiant to the Outside, only held accuntable to their own judgements”. His tongue seemed melded to his throat, worried glances thrown across the abandonend gallery, as if such heresy could bring immediate damnation down upon them. A question that had selfishly lingered in all sorcerous hearts and yet never voiced.
He spoke, “who are these men who would shut out the heavens and their judgement? A shake of his hairless Head, “men? There are none as of yet, but there may be in the future. I do not speak of men mortal, but never the less their goals and yours may converge upon the same path.” Confusion arced across his soul, “if it is not men, then it must be the Cunuroi. I did not know that your kind also railed against heaven.” Immortal eyes peered directly into his own,” my kind have long since been leeched of such cares. There is more to this world than your short histories have written down. There is a third race upon this world, a race of lovers, although now much reduced in wars with my brothers. Forgotten to history, forbidden to speak of them by Nil’giccas himself, I myself helped raise the mighty glamour which cocoons it still, yet those hungry for knowledge can yet discover them.”
A pointed look at the great text before him, “it was called the Incu-Holoinas by my people before treachery cut out our hearts, golden horns which could pierce if they dared to approach,” a pair of tears equally shocking for the way seemed to enance his beauty as their sudden appearance. Diamonds placed upon a marble statue, mortal emotions running across an immortal face. A palm and fingers extended to the chest, “yet their is a great beauty in heartbreak, here the shadow of absense will forever haunt me,” with wide lucid eyes he looked past him as if sighting an old friend behind the figure of a stranger. “There is also beauty in degredation, perfection being dragged throught the mire. My new teachers have taught me that, a thing can only be truly holy if brought down from stupendous heights to the touch of base hands. I have fallen so far and yet will fall much further,” for the first the sorceror became to question the sanity of his newfound teacher, a cracked vessel showing its imperfection under the suns glare, “I may be the most holy of all this world. And I shall treasure the memories of my great fall.”
The world hung from a pin, there would be no stepping back from the precipice, a leap of faith must be taken. “I will take your brothers to them, to my teachers.” A pin that lay far to the north, shrouded by the accumulation of ages. An angel wreathed in flesh spoke of defying heaven, nothing it seemed to the damned could be more holy.
Good stuff, I liked the lead up to the mention of the Inchoroi – I should have seen this coming but was drawn enough into the story that I wasn’t thinking about it until it was mentioned.
One thing I thought was marginally confusing was the number of “he” and “his”, which if I am reading this right referred to both the Nonman and the human in the same sentence.
Yeah I have not been writing lately, so putting this thing together I felt a little exposed. But it seems the writing bug has bit me again and I will start writing in my own world instead of just world building.
Negotiation at One Remove:
“He will come, Nari, for the Deimotic Arts.” It sounded like blasphemy, for one so versed in the roundabout necessities of jnan to speak the plain truth. Heramari Iyokus, however, was a man intimately familiar with blasphemy.
Grandmaster Iyokus, he corrected himself inwardly. In the wake of the disastrous losses at Shimeh, in the wake of the astonishing transformation of the Holy War it was easy to lose sight of his own change in station. When the world moved such a distance, who could keep precise track of their own stumbling transition?
“Uhh…” he vocalized his frustration at the track of his thoughts. How was it that this infant faith invaded his innermost counsels, so that his every rhetorical question seemed to be answered by the very name of the Aspect Emperor. He had once prided himself on the clarity of his thought. Now he served another, and he had witnessed with blinded eyes what true clarity of thought entailed.
Nari, the thrall who fulfilled his addictions, placed the vessel upon a nearby stand with a deliberately heavy hand. It pleased the Grandmaster to pretend his ears were far less sharp than they were in truth, so that his servants would believe he heard only the sounds they made for him to hear. In truth, he fancied that in the dim illumination he demanded for his private chambers he knew the truth of things far more intimately than they. To lord over the ignorant…had he fallen so far?
“He has no need of them, of course” he continued to speak to the empty spaces. Nari, of course, had no capacity to reply. Yet it pleased Iyokus to discourse with the man as though he retained the ability to comprehend, and to respond.
“His Mandate learning”, and ohhh the bitterness that filled his soul when he spoke that hated word, “is no doubt sufficient for his purposes. Indeed, if the Zaodunyainni are to be believed it is sufficient for all purposes.”
He reached to the receptacle, and picked up the object of his hunger. Iyokus had long since resigned himself to the necessity of taking Chanv. He had, very deliberately, deadened his mind to the sullen shame that all addicts must bear when exercising their dependence before those who do not share it. There remained, however, a spark of resentment at the necessity of bringing this bargain to pass. Must there be a corporal component to his surrender? The actual taking of the opiate seemed almost…crass.
“But I have observed the man.” He felt the thrill of heresy. How long before no one would refer to their new sovereign as such? ” Vicariously of course, and I have never seen him set aside a tool unused. No matter how apt or flawed for his purposes, he pursues and acquires an understanding of all that falls within his reach. From poetry to music, to the fabled mathematics of far Zeum, the parade of tutors, whether they know that they fulfill such a role or no, is never ending.”
“He will come for the Daimos”
He had returned to where he began, and as the Chanv began to take affect he considered ending there. He lacked the courage, however, and so he continued to ramble.
“What will I take in return? For there can be no doubt that I’ll render unto him all that he asks for. We are stricken by the losses of Shimeh, and rendered helpless by the patronage that those Mandate fools shower upon him for indulging their…” He paused, the Chanv giving him the clarity to wrench his thoughts from this well worn rut and return to the monologue he had rehearsed.
“My Daimotic knowledge, and here I pause to congratulate myself, for such has been the diligence of my study that my knowledge and the School’s are one and the same. My knowledge given for what?” He paused, and let the tension build.
“No mere bauble, none of the empty consideration and trappings of status with which his other teachers have been rewarded. My concern must be for the future. Heramari Iyokus will be used up in the Aspect Emperor’s war, my knowledge given to fuel his dreams and my time spent in service to his dream. Fine, I accept this. But my School…for my School there must be recompense.”
“Is it blasphemy, then, to dicker with the divine? To haggle with the heavens? Then I blaspheme. But I’ll have this from him. I’ll have the very source of his strength, given to the disciples of the Scarlet Spires for all times to come.” He smiled, the smile of one who finds within himself the strength he’d feared would not be there when he called for it. “When I’ve surrendered myself, and my services, and my knowledge, and my School into bondage. My heirs will have that which we have yearned for for so long. We’ll have the Gnosis.”
He sat in silence then, listening. He did not start when Nari’s stumbling tread became a warrior’s deliberate movements. He did not twitch when the other inhabitant of this space sat across from him. He was proud of himself for this, and yet he knew that this was a pride that he was allowed, granted like a dog is permitted to pride itself on its skilled retrieval of a felled fowl. He sat and listened for the word that he must hear.
When it came at last it seemed almost too mundane, and he was struck by the thought that such must be the conceit of a man who approaches a great river and demands stridently that it continue to flow, or that a mountain remain tall and inviolate.
“Begin.”
Awesome stuff. Great character study of Iyokus.
I wonder if the Gnosis has advantages beyond that of cutting through lesser magic. Could one teleport via analogy, or does one in truth require the mathematical precision of the Gnosis?
Thanks man!
I imagine one could teleport by analogy, if one was Kellhus. I always thought that the thing that brought the possibility of teleporting about was the second inaudible. It seems like he could do that if he was simultaneously reciting multiple poems rather than multiple equations.
That said, it would probably be harder, in general it seems like the Gnosis is simply better at everything than the weaker sorcery of the other schools. I think Kellhus could compensate for inferior tools with superior effort however.
Heh, speaking of fan-fic I should have told Bakker to check out Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
Going to try something, see where it goes:
She worked in this new darkness as she had in the old – with only the soft, cold light streaming from her eyes and mouth to guide her. Yet even in this dim illumination the upheaval of circumstances both confronted and relieved her.
The walls were stories carved out of stone, books meant for her and her kind. The younger ones, she knew, were being taught how to read. Some of the other witches had taken up the practice, given the ease that with the deluge of memories, but she chose to cling to her fragile illiteracy, winced when she recognized the assemblage of letters.
Knowing that such knowledge was not her own, but that of the stranger inside her, the *man* who crowded the space of her thoughts and at times left a phantom limb between her legs. The man whose story had been echoed over and over in the walls of the Swayal Compact, until the carvings threatened to rival the compulsive sculptors of the Nonmen (more memories not her own).
She concentrated on her work, digging the mollusk out of its shell, willing herself to ignore the sessile audience of dead and lost legends that seemed to leer about her in every room and hall.
Old as I was, why did I have to touch the cursed Heart?
-to be continued-
Very cool, sci. What were you intending on doing with it?
Well, I was thinking about the liberation of women that comes through the Swayal Compact, but how this freedom to learn sorcery is tied their touching Seswatha’s heart and Khellus’s mission.
Wanted to explore this from the perspective of someone who is too old to master the Gnosis but was inducted into the school for political purposes.
I should be able to finish it, just need some time to think of the second part.
I’m just not sure what you want me to post.
continuing:
Old as I was, why did I have to touch the cursed Heart?
Even as she lost herself to the cadence of whispered words weaving through the metaphor of her culling the meat out of the mollusk shell, she could feel the weight of Seswatha’s time intruding on her conscience.
History so old it had unraveled into poetry, the implicit admonition of the Sagas soaked not only in the shrill condemnations of the Yatwerian priestesses, but in His echoing baritone. The Aspect-Emperor’s sermon against her craft, carried across the walls of this school like thunder growling through currents of cloud.
“I see mothers raise stillborn infants to blinded Gods. … I see the No-God …”
The No-God, the Whirlwind, Lokung. The Angel of Endless Hunger. Even the last could not wrap itself around what was being described, the looming presence in memories coming in dreams, stalking her in the way of wolves with new prey…
Yet here she is, an accursed witch emptying a shell so that a womb might be left unripened, so that a woman – even a Nun – might have at least one choice in the grinding machinery of yet another man’s design.
So focused is her willful defiance of both the man who rules over her empire and the one who has commandeered a place for himself in her slumber, so driven is she to at least twitch in the web of higher powers woven across her body and soul, that she fails to notice the approach of illumination until the room is softly shining with the glow of cloud covered morning.
Her concentration is broken, the shell in her hand cracked by the weight of erroneous arcana. The polished shards reflect the ball of light hovering at the center of ceiling.
“It is late, grandmother.” The voice is unmistakable, even in whisper. Anasurimbor Serwa.
She does not turn, merely sits frozen on her chair, eyes adjusting to the light and the greater extent of Seswatha’s story now revealed. The witch has had a lifetime of being hunted to gain mastery over her fear, but like the recession of the tide this more clearly reveals the shame that surprises and angers her.
“Too late for such little rebellions.” Even with dawn mere hours away, the witch knows it is not the lateness of the hour that Serwa speaks of. She also senses the question in the admonishment.
The witch thinks back to the moment of discovery, the readying of her hexes against the expectant chorae or sparrows of fire, the flung curse of boils and blindness woven into the thigh bone of a stray dog shattering against the flawless sphere of light flashing into existence.
Lightning like water, revealing a young, portly, hook-nosed woman with the burning lantern of the Gnosis spewing light from eye sockets and mouth.
“The woman who came for me,” the witch began with her eyes still facing the wall, “She was one of the first your Father recruited. Noble blooded, taken in as a teenager. A nun who’d bent her life to the Ordeal yet believed herself free. Even then, watching her look over my butcher’s table of body parts and my shelves of herbs with disdain, I knew I would be a kenneled dog as much as an honored guest of this School.”
The witch’s eyes shifted from Seswatha seeking succor from the Nonmen to a scene of Seswatha standing atop a parapet, the silver-gilded lines of his arcane light lancing through the bodies of circling dragons.
“Too old to master little more than the rudiments of the Gnosis, you were a political symbol of the amnesty granted by my Father. Proof for those who might otherwise have feared to come forward as members of the Few.” When Serwa spoke, there was curiosity, but little sympathy. The witch recalled how young the demigoddess was when she’d been brought here as a hallowed and beautiful child, how quickly the Aspect Emperor’s daughter had been tied to the life of a man over a thousand years dead.
The witch turned then, studying the radiant beauty who’d discovered her, searching for signs of a woman in the young Anasurimbor’s eyes. There was a thin layer of kindness, shining out from a fire of startling avarice. The Intruder’s memory recalled the cants that summoned the heat of molten iron to stomach and skin, though the witch already knew the Cants of Compulsion would easily pluck out the names of the sorceresses who’d sought her services.
“Does it have to be a shell?” The daughter of the Savior asked with a need unbecoming of the highest of the Nuns.
The witch blinked, then squinted with suspicion, before ultimately concluding that the headmistress of the Swayal Compact had enough evidence to sentence her to death on the charge of blasphemy and enough power to turn her old bones to ash with a few whispered words. Words the witch should not have been able to understand.
“It has, to my knowledge, always been so. The emptied shell is what forces loyalty from the womb.”
Serwa nodded, her placid expression having expected as much, the frown hidden in her cornflower irises plainly stating she’d hoped for better.
“My Father would not be pleased if His nuns were found to take lovers other than the God.” The words were subtly weighted, but the daughter of the Aspect-Emperor had clearly stressed the discovery rather than the sin. Perhaps it was two women, rather than two vessels crowded with the remnants of a dead man, who faced each other in the noose of these legend-choked walls.
Then Serwa stared through the witch with eyes gone dead.
Not just through but into her, as if the Anasurimbor might describe the older woman with the exactitude of the mathematician. The lips that haunted the dreams of men – and even a few nuns who felt able to confess their wayward desires to a witch – seemed to release themselves from expression all together.
When Serwa’s humanity returned, the witch exhaled with relief. It had only lasted a third of minute at most, but never had the old witch felt so exposed nor enclosed.
“We will discuss this further, as our schedules and discretion allow. There is still time before the Ordeal begins its march.”
The light shining above them exits with the Princess Imperial, leaving the witch in a darkness that conceals the exploits of Seswatha around her. It is a small comfort, for the witch can feel the permeation of exhaustion through the weathered frame of her flesh.
With the familiarity of the long imprisoned, she shuffles toward her cot. As wakefulness fades she hears the hollow cries of descending dragons with the ears of a man who’d given little thought to why a witch would risk death for the making of whore shells.
I have a world-building question here:
In Ce Tydonn, are the people mixed-race, or pure Norsirai? I recall that that the Tydonni have some sort of racial ideology, and that the Captain says that Kellhus had some Orthodox blinded in order to send a message to the blondies in Ce Tydonn, which would indicate they’re Norsirai.
However, the Tydonni conquered a country that was originally Ketyai. Do these Ketyai still exist as an under-class? Because, the Captain kills one of the Stone Hags when one of the Skin Eaters provokes him into calling Kellhus false. He then holds the Skin Eaters up by his black hair. But that Stone Hag, Hurm, is described as Tydonni. How does he have black hair?
@Jurble:
Ce Tydonn seems to be a country with a racial caste system, which Scott described in the TTT appendix. Basically, the area was inhabited by a Ketyai group called the Cengemi, before the Norsirai came south and conquered it. It’s also mentioned in TTT how the Cengemi are a subjugated people who chafe at their oppressed status, and how the Tydonni have racist slurs about “mongrel races”.
So yeah, the Ketyai still exist as an underclass. I suppose a historical parallel would be the Indian caste system, which has been speculated to be racial at its inception (white Aryans on top, dark Dravidian natives on the bottom).
I’ll put the two parts together and edit it. Not sure if the witch’s bitterness is fully explained in the story.
Really, I’m killing time for Happy Ent to make his debut. 🙂
Also, where do we post our fanfics for Scott to notice them and put them up on the site?
I have a fic about the Nonmen and the Womb-Plague in mind…
Just post here with title, Scott then puts link up top. That is my understanding at least.
-Sci
I’m just going to leave this here like a log, or some other thing that can be dropped discreetly before one runs away.
—
The Burning of Kiz
To take up the sword is to be humbled. Every swing and parry is a constant reminder to the limits of one’s reach. Beware, your eminence, he who would wield his Cants as steel.
– Cartanian, Reply to the Principle of the Oaranat
What is analogy, if not falsehoods that seduce through their resemblance to truth?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
3793 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal
Grandmaster Shinurta walked between candlelit shelves, reordering the scrolls according to some private fancy. It did not matter that he rarely spent time in the teaching libraries. All knowledge that belonged to the Scarlet Spires also belonged to him.
“Master Safras tells me you have been studying the Refutations,” He asked the young man trailing behind him. “What have you learned so far?”
The student followed in silence. As cowed as he was by the grandmaster’s personal scrutiny, he still flaunted some small obstinance under the rules of jnan.
“Do you suffer a malady of the tongue, young prince?”
Levininas scowled behind the old man’s back. Knives behind every word. He know I am no prince in this place, he thought. “Nomedius is a terrible philosopher,” he finally muttered, more to himself that the grandmaster.
Shinurta turned and stroked his well oiled beard in the way of solemn men, pondering solemn words. “I see.”
With no rebuke forthcoming, Levinias continued. “His rhetoric resembles the classics only in their tone. He is a provincialist hiding beneath the scholar’s cap.”
“I see,” Shinurta repeated after even weightier consideration, then spoke as if suddenly remembering. “But what of parody? Have you considered if the defects of his rhetoric were intentional?”
Recklessness, resentment, dangers foreseen and ignored. “Intentionally bad is still bad.”
A hint of amusement flickered across the grandmaster’s face. “The ancients are long dead, Levinias. They do not know you. Why should their words grate you so?”
The young prince clenched his hands in frustration. He could give no answer.
“Despite what you tutors may say, in some respects you are right,” Shinurta nodded conspiratorially. “Yet even terrible philosophers have their lessons. Nomedius certainly was no heir to Ajencis. He was a caste-noble trained in the tradition of scholars, and so believed that all nobles should aspire to be scholars. But as Ajencis taught us, men tend to value only what they know. The scholar prince could find no common ground with nobles entranced by power. Predictably, he went on to make a virtue of his own deficiencies.”
The grandmaster’s appraisal caused Levinias to unclench, a little. “Sincerity is the truest form of flattery. That is to say, not very true at all,” he quoted the ancient philosopher. The words finally hinted at a deeper significance than the blandness of their trivial insight.
“No medicine is as sweet as sympathy, but poisons often delight the senses,” Sinurta added. “There are many such observations from his latter works. Nomedius was clearly a very perceptive man, but that awareness was seldom bent inwards. No one at court would tolerate his aloofness, so he came to see the very idea of camaraderie as a weakness of lesser men.” The grandmaster searched for a candle and lit it with an ancient phrase, “Speak plainly, Levinias, do you think we have treated you unfairly?”
Jnan brooked few exceptions, and the desire to speak plain was not among them. He tests me again. “Fairness is the lie of tyrants and lovers,” Levinias replied. But two can play this game.
Shinurta laughed aloud, a surprisingly hearty sound for one so bent with age. “Perhaps we have kept you in these halls for too long.”
Levinias stared at his sandals, eager to avoid the illumination that had sprung up before him. He thought back to the many season of watching the other students, heads shorter, much younger, and often not as talented, don their embroidered initiate robes and leave the outer dormitories for the last time. His fists clenched again, so hard that he thought he might draw blood. The twin whips of anger and shame made him want to vomit.
Shinurta tactfully ignored the spectacle before him. “A king retains his post only with the consent of nations,” he said. “But a sorcerer remains a sorcerer so long as he can sing the Cants. We address you with courtesy because you came to us a prince, yet you flinch from moment to moment and think we mock you out of malice. We do not mock, Levinias. To speak ill against nothing, accomplishes nothing. The courtesies are for your benefit alone.”
Unwanted tears rolled down reddened cheeks. “But I am more than nothing, grandmaster,” Levinias cried. “I have studied so hard for so long! Why won’t anyone teach me the words?”
“Rank among schoolmen can only come through the mastery of thought and speech. We can walk no other ground.” The grandmaster’s voice feigned the loss of interest that colored so much of jnan. He turned his gaze to the scrolls once more.
Levinias brushed his eyes against his sleeve. “I— I don’t understand.”
“And that is the first piece of true wisdom you have uttered today,” Shinurta answered. “Your lessons in the exoterics ended months ago, young prince, but you never once asked to be advanced.”
(to be continued God know’s when)
Good stuff. I like that this story is sympathetic to the Scarlet Spires.
Thanks. The longer it’s up here the more I want to edit the hell out of it.
God says when is now!
—
3808 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal
Although he had less and less opportunity of late, Levinias often came to the student libraries during his brief moments of respite. The walls seemed to have shrunk in the intervening years since his own tutelage, but the rows of parchment on age worn shelves still bespoke of ancient mysteries. Outside were horrors, desperation, betrayals, and talk, endless talk. But here among the scrolls, listening to the scratching of quills as children learned their letters, it reminded him of simpler times.
Glistening reflections of candlelight spied him from behind a shelf. The young sorcerer beckoned with an outstretched hand. Outlines of a face and sandals shrank from view.
“What is the matter? Speak.”
A child shuffled forth with downcast eyes, and made many halting apologies before posing a question regarding the court letters of the philosopher Nomedius.
Levinias raked his memories for some relevant insight, but could recall none. He felt a sudden irrational urge to adopt the mannerism of one deep in contemplation and simply wander away. Instead, he resorted to the trick he had seen performed so many times by men who had nothing to say, but were forced to seem wise before their peers.
“Consider the circumstances, child. Why do you think this is so?”
The student wrung his hands as he agonized over an interpretation of his own devising. Levinias listened and nodded with sagely approval.
I have no idea of what he speaks.
Years had passed since he last had the leisure to immerse himself in philosophy. Wars upturned many things, some more intangible than others.
Levinias examined the student. Ten, perhaps eleven. Certainly far too young to have ever known the man who stood before him as anyone but a senior sorcerer of rank. The child’s minute frame conjured up an image of prepubescent legs dangling from the Grandmaster’s seat, as children of even younger age stood attentively at Council. A chill ran through Levinias despite the warmth of his lavishly quilted robes.
A polite cough from the hallway rescued him from further questions. The student withdrew, eyes full of wonder at the sight of powerful men attending to stately affairs.
“The hour is late, master Safras,” Levinias said. “We can continue our discussions tomorrow.”
“A new matter acquires your attention. I am afraid this cannot wait.” His onetime tutor bowed by way of apology. The sight filled Levinias with momentary juvenile delight.
The two men ascended winding stairs towards the audience chambers. Javreh and King’s Guard alike stood at attention as they passed. The slave-soldiers were enough of a fixture among the Spires that Levinias had grown almost accustomed to the constant aura of giddy death that radiated from the Chorae bearing Captains. Master Safras was less accommodating. He shuffled every which way in his walk, dodging the periphery of sinkholes that promised certain oblivion.
The Javreh were of Grandmaster Shinurta’s design. Many impassioned and petty words had been thrown about in Council regarding their creation. In the end, the Grandmaster browbeat his detractors with a fury that was itself almost supernatural. It was agreed, the Scarlet Spires would no longer rely on mercenaries, who proved only ever consistent in bleeding the treasuries while they delivered the School time and again to the edge of disaster. The pittance of guards sent by King Horziah III of High Ainon would remain, but henceforth the School would arm its own soldiers.
There had been questions of expense and other such mundane concerns, but what galled many Scarlet Schoolmen was the prospect of arming the slaves with Chorae. What few Trinkets the School had seized during the war lay buried in the deepest vaults. Theirs were an irony that stung, an incredibly potent weapon against sorcery that could never be wielded by sorcerers. But to hand them out to slaves? Surely such madness was unthinkable.
Shinurta’s arguments were elegant in their simplicity. Men were ever ready to compromise their morality for advantage. When, not if, but when the Thousand Temples acquired sorcerous accomplices, the Scarlet Spires would need every advantage in order to survive. Whereas tortures mutilated flesh, sorcery could violate the very soul. Or so the people believed. And that was enough to cow an entire army of slaves, regardless of what a few of them may hold in their hands.
Still, whether out of pride or cowardice, not everyone was convinced. Even as the Council conceded to the measure, whispers persisted for weeks that this was a foolhardy stratagem by a dying man desperate to maintain his slipping grip on power. A few dared to insinuate the Grandmaster played at an even darker game, that he was wagering with the enemy his few remaining years against the future of his entire School. Shinurta demonstrated the fallacy of the first argument by personally, and permanently, removing the man responsible. As for the second rumour, all doubts were quashed when, impossibly, a newly formed Major School signed the Psailian Concession with the Thousand Temples a year later.
What once appeared madness became the essence of sanity.
The gaunt figure of Master Safras fussed with his sleeves as he walked. “A man by the name of Xorias Cartanian presented himself at the gates. He claims he is from Cironj.”
The fortress home of the Scarlet Spires was constantly beset by sycophants, starving beggars, and the occasional Inrithi fanatic. Such rabble were all turned away with swiftness and precise brutality. The stranger’s name meant nothing to Levinias, but the very fact that his arrival merited a report showed this was no simple petitioner. Levinias thought back to the child in the library and marveled at the uncanny resemblance of the elderly sorcerer wringing his ink stained hands. The man was clearly distressed.
“What does this Cironji want?”
The old man breathed deeply. For a moment he resembled nothing so much as a propped up sack of twigs, ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. The stresses of endless war had not been kind to him.
“He asked for a private meeting with the First Principle of the Scarlet Spires,” Safras spoke at length.
Levinias frowned. “First Principle?”
“A title among certain Minor Schools of the West.”
Levinias knew from the few remaining spies in the field that there were no more Minor Schools in the West. Those who had not defected to the Major Schools or fled for distant Zeüm had either been ground into dust by the holy war, or had joined to form a new Major School.
A new School.”So he is Mysunsai.”
And there it was. The betrayer School, lapdogs of the Thousand Temples. A sorcerer from the enemy camp has walked to the very gates of the Scarlet Spires.
What does this mean?
(once more to be continued)
Bleh. I kind of wish I could delete those earlier versions, since the lengths I’ve taken up all over this thread is getting kind of absurd. Here’s a fixed up repost of part 1 (semi self contained story of sorcery pedagogy trolls) and part 3 (more yap yap) along with a new insert part 2 (encyclopedia expositica) and part 4 (aren’t you a little short for a storyteller?). Hopefully one last part remains to tie this all together, and hopefully it won’t require a repost of everything.
—
The Burning of Kiz
To take up the sword is to be humbled. Every thrust and parry is a constant reminder to the limits of one’s reach. Beware, your eminence, he who would wield his Cants as steel.
– Cartanian, Reply to the Principle of the Oaranat
What is analogy, if not falsehoods that seduce through their resemblance to truth?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
3793 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal
Grandmaster Shinurta walked between candlelit shelves, reordering the scrolls according to some private fancy. It did not matter that he rarely spent time in the teaching libraries. All knowledge residing within the fortress of Kiz also belonged to him.
“Master Safras tells me you have been studying the Refutations,” He asked the young man trailing behind him. “What have you learned so far?”
The student followed in silence. As cowed as he was by the Grandmaster’s personal scrutiny, he still flaunted some small obstinance under the rules of jnan.
“Do you suffer a malady of the tongue, young prince?”
Levininas scowled behind the old man’s back. Knives behind every word. He know I am a prince of nothing among the Scarlet Spires. “Nomedius is a terrible philosopher,” he finally muttered, more to himself that to the Grandmaster.
Shinurta turned and stroked his well oiled beard in the way of solemn men pondering solemn words. “I see.”
“His rhetoric resembles the classics only in their tone,” Levinias continued when no rebuke was forthcoming. “He is a provincialist hiding beneath the scholar’s cap.”
“I see,” Shinurta repeated after even weightier consideration, then spoke as if unexpectedly struck by insight. “But what of parody? Have you considered if the defects of his rhetoric were intentional?”
Recklessness, resentment, dangers foreseen and ignored. “Intentionally bad is still bad.”
A hint of amusement flickered across the Grandmaster’s lips. “The ancients are long dead, Levinias. They do not know you. Why should their words grate you so?”
The young prince clenched his hands in frustration. He could give no answer.
“In some respects you are correct,” Shinurta conspiratorially lowered his voice. “Although you would be wise to not share this with all your tutors. Yet even terrible philosophers have their lessons. Nomedius certainly was no heir to Ajencis. He was a caste-noble trained in the tradition of scholars, and so believed that all nobles should aspire to be scholars. But as Ajencis taught us, men tend to value only what they know. The scholar prince could find no common ground with nobles entranced by power. Predictably, he went on to make a virtue of his own deficiencies.”
The Grandmaster’s appraisal caused Levinias to unclench his fists a little. “Sincerity is the truest form of flattery. That is to say, not very true at all,” he quoted the ancient philosopher. The words finally hinted at a deeper significance than the blandness of their trivial insight. There was a history here. A man had lived and died by his sayings.
“No medicine is as sweet as sympathy, but poisons oft delight the senses,” Sinurta added. “There are many such observations from his latter works. Nomedius was clearly a very perceptive man, but that awareness was seldom bent inwards. No one at court would tolerate his aloofness, so he came to see the very idea of camaraderie as a weakness of lesser men.” The Grandmaster searched for a candle and lit it with an ancient phrase, “Speak plainly, Levinias, do you think we have treated you unfairly?”
Jnan brooked few exceptions, and the desire to speak plain was not among them. “Fairness is the lie of tyrants and lovers,” Levinias replied. He tests me again, but two can play this game.
Shinurta laughed aloud, a surprisingly hearty sound for one so bent with age. “Perhaps we have kept you in these halls for too long.”
Levinias stared at his sandals, eager to avoid the illumination that had sprung up before him. He thought back to the many season of watching the other students, heads shorter, much younger, and often not as talented, don their embroidered initiate’s robes and leave the outer dormitories for the last time. His fists clenched again, so hard that he thought he might draw blood. The twin whips of anger and shame made him want to vomit.
Shinurta tactfully ignored the adolescent spectacle. “A king retains his post only with the consent of nations,” he said. “But a sorcerer remains a sorcerer so long as he can sing the Cants. We address you with courtesy because you came to us a prince, yet you flinch from moment to moment and think we mock you out of malice. We do not mock, Levinias. To speak ill against nothing accomplishes nothing. The courtesies are for your benefit alone.”
Unwanted tears rolled down reddened cheeks. “But I am more than nothing, Grandmaster!” Levinias cried. “I have studied so hard for so long! Why won’t anyone teach me the words?”
“Rank among Schoolmen can only come through the mastery of thought and speech. We can walk no other ground.” The Grandmaster’s voice feigned the loss of interest that colored so much of jnan. He returned his gaze to the scrolls.
Levinias brushed his eyes against his sleeve. “I— I don’t understand.”
“And that is the first piece of true wisdom you have uttered today,” Shinurta answered. “Your lessons in the exoterics ended months ago, young prince, but you never once sought to advance.”
—
3807 Year-of-the-Tusk, the River Sayut
Ships large and small cleared a path for the galley leaving the fortress of Kiz. Curious onlookers craned their necks, their eyes darting from galley to red enameled walls and back again. Many cursed under their breath when they spied the figures aboard, while others made the sign of Momas, as if the vessel’s very existence might bring about the Sea God’s ire.
The galley flew no banner as it travelled the length of the Secharib Plains. There was little need. None without a Chorae armed host at his back would be so mad as to challenge a ship full of Scarlet Magi.
As the days passed, riverbank paddies filled with bend back slaves yielded to emerald fields of sugarcane as far as the eye could see. The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires marveled at his own elation. Had he truly toiled among the painted faces of Carythusal for so long that the feeling of a summer breeze should prove more of a surprise than a reminder?
He could hear the servants preparing his noonday meal. More fish, no doubt. The journey upriver was organized with ludicrous haste. There had simply been no time to secure more tolerable provisions for the days long trip to Moserothu.
Shinurta smiled in good humour. A Grandmaster reduced to dining on caste-merchant fare. What sacrifices I’ve made for my School!
Alarmed voices snapped him from his reverie. A crowd jostled towards the galley’s tip. Several of the younger acolytes leaned overboard as far as they dared, before turning to each other in confusion.
The Grandmaster squinted hard at the source of the commotion, but his failing eyesight could make out nothing. Another gift taken for granted in youth, he thought, and not for the first time pondered his reluctance to take up the narcotic chanv. For years he had weighed the merit of spending another lifetime in passionless sterility, but now that the whole of Jekhia warred in open revolt, the choice was no longer his to make. In a strange way, news of upheaval in the tributary state had come as a welcome relief.
At last he saw the sight as well. Greasy black plumes of smoke made mockery of a clear blue sky. Thin lines of flame danced across distant fields, occasionally outlining what might have been the tiny silhouettes of upright men.
A Subdidact began chanting.
“Save your Cants,” Shinurta waved dismissively to his followers. “Slaves always burn the fields before harvest. No Jekhian army rides our way. ”
The distant fire soured his mood. Not from any intimations of doom—after all, anything could be taken as divine portent if one looked hard enough—but rather from the reactions it provoked. If his fellow Schoolmen could be so unsettled by something as mundane as a brush fire, then what would they do if they were ever called upon to repulse crusading armies? How would they fare if Carythusal itself came under siege?
Just like Atyersus.
Inevitably, Shinurta’s thoughts returned to the cause of his rushed expedition. The island fortress of the Mandate was even now besieged by the Thousand Temples. After their mission at Carythusal was recalled due to the lack of Ainoni support, no one among the Scarlet Spires had heard any more word of the Gnostic School. Uncovering the truth from either belligerent or defender proved impossible, while other sources yielded little more than hearsay.
That all changed four days ago. A single letter had thrown the Scarlet Spires into panic.
The King of High Ainon bids greeting to all his esteemed subjects. Let it be known that we have received with due observance three far travelled petitioners from Attrempus. While our guests profess gratitude towards our hospitality, regarding the purpose of their arrival, they reveal only that they bring news of affairs in the Empire and the Ancient North. We are magnanimous in our patience, for while still over wearied from their travels, our guests consented to no further discourse save with the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires. Though their ill-mannered ways are many, jnan demands we preserve in their stead some small measure of their dignity. We trust you shall receive the petitioners at Moserothu within ten days of our writing and bring this matter to fortuitous conclusion.
Under witness of the God and His Aspects, King Narumizu Horziah III
Separated from High Ainon by harsh terrain and hostile nations, the Scarlet Spires never assumed the Mandate would dispatch an overland embassy from their distant mainland stronghold. Now the Scarlet Spires was forced to grovel before two factions while King Horizah played host at his summer palace. The King’s posturing and false piety, his inevitable demands for recompense, even the arrogance of his outrageous deadline, all could be endured if what his letter implied was true. For all his devious maneuverings, the King had acted as little more than the unwitting bearer of the embassy’s true message.
They bring news of affairs in the Empire and the Ancient North.
Those simple words hinted at unprecedented opportunity and danger. In all the Three Seas, only a single other Major School retained the sanction of its host nation. Imperial Saik or Scarlet Spires, one would be offered the secrets of the Gnosis.
Plans were made, motions debated, and a not inconsiderable amount of wine was drunk. The Scarlet Spires held its collective breath as it waited for further confirmation. Word came that very evening on furtive Cants of Calling sent from the shadows the King’s own court. The Orchid Palace had shone with unnatural lights at night. All of Moserothu was abuzz with dread speculation.
Few things annoyed the Grandmaster as much as being forced to act in ignorance. His earlier elation dashed, Shinurta fretted over pivotal events yet to come. The history of his School’s obsession in wresting the Gnosis from its keepers was neither brief nor pleasant. War against a common foe could erase a great many enmities, but so too could they be intensified. There was little telling what heartbreaking terms the Mandate might demand for the many past wrongs they suffered.
Several knights under the royal banner shadowed the galley along the western riverbank. Their mounts obscured by densely packed sugarcane, the men almost appeared to float across a parallel river. It would be another half day’s ride inland to Moserothu once the galley reached the nearest docks. To Shinurta, spending so much time on horseback was only slightly more unpleasant than the prospect of exchanging civil pleasantries with the leader of the knights. He seethed at the pinprick blot of the caste-noble’s distant Chorae. Uncouth savages. They might as well be receiving him with drawn swords in hand.
“Does the King’s Guard mean to slight us, Grandmaster?” asked the easily frightened Subdidact. “Why are they not wearing—”
And then he was gone, erased from the deck by the setting of a second sun. Ghostly flames roared past the Grandmaster’s reflexive Wards. In an instant the forward half of the ship became a bonfire of maddened screams. Men dove blindly for the river, or simply fell and never stirred again.
The other riders overtook the Trinket bearer. Unearthly light blazed from their eyes and mouth. Shocked awareness dawned on the Grandmaster. Clever bastards, thrice damned clever bastards! The assailants had hid their sorcerous Mark under the baleful shadow of the Chorae.
“Take to the skies!” Shinurta shouted against the din. He stepped into the air and began chanting ancient words that only needed to be heard by the world. Phantom rifts tore open beneath his assailants’ feet, belched pillars of liquid fire. The earth blackened at the touch of his song.
The surviving Schoolmen sang their Wards, or tried to. A scarlet robed figure doubled over in agony and fell head first into the water, while two others were each struck down by a single shard of glowing ice. When one dared rise again and completed his Wards, a dozen more shards mauled his defenses and pinned his body like a bloody trophy against the upper mast.
Even as Shinurta called upon his most potent Analogies, he dissected truth from the false knights’ sorcerous Concert. The idiosyncrasies of their posture, how they leaned into their Wards and traced shapes with weaving hands, gave away their meager affiliation. These were sorcerers of the Nilitar Compact, mere dilettantes whose laughable mannerisms bespoke the crudity of their Cants. On a sane day they would have looked up to the learning of his School with as much envy as the Scarlet Spires looked to the Mandate. They spoke no Gnostic Abstractions. Far from it, most of their incantations were scarcely more impressive than the connotic utterances learned by initiates as stepping stones to true sorcerous Analogies. Yet the world yoked to their madness. How could senior sorcerers of rank be undone by something so trivial? How could so many be felled so quickly and by so few? Shinurta howled the impossible words, rage his only answer.
—
From blessed synaxis, we will make gods of ourselves… The others lulled their heads and made idols of their borrowed speech. Only one man regarded the disguised Palatine of Moserothu. Any salvation promised by words, he finally, finally realized, could be undone just as easily. Sorcerous flames wreathed his weathered hands. Open or clenched, he felt none of their heat.
3808 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal
Although he had less and less opportunity of late, Levinias often came to the student libraries during his brief moments of respite. The walls seemed to have shrunk in the intervening years since his own tutelage, but the rows of parchment on age worn shelves still bespoke of ancient mysteries. Outside were horrors, desperation, betrayals, and talk, endless talk. But here among the scrolls, listening to the scratching of quills as children learned their letters, it reminded him of simpler times.
Glistening reflections of candlelight spied him from behind a shelf. The young sorcerer beckoned with an outstretched hand. Outlines of a face and sandals shrank from view.
“What is the matter? Speak.”
A child shuffled forth with downcast eyes, and made many halting apologies before posing a question regarding the court letters of the philosopher Nomedius.
Levinias raked his memories for some relevant insight. Recalling nothing, he resorted to the trick he had seen performed so many times by men who had nothing to say, but were forced to seem wise before their peers.
“Consider the circumstances, child. Why do you think this is so?”
The student wrung his hands as he agonized over an interpretation of his own devising. Levinias listened and nodded with sagely approval.
I have no idea of what he speaks.
Years had passed since he last had the leisure to immerse himself in philosophy. Wars upturned many things, some more intangible than others.
Levinias examined the student. Ten, perhaps eleven. Certainly far too young to have ever known the man who stood before him as anyone but a senior sorcerer of rank. The child’s minute frame conjured up an image of prepubescent legs dangling from the Grandmaster’s seat, as children of even younger age stood attentively at council. A chill ran through Levinias despite the warmth of his lavishly quilted robes.
A polite cough from the hallway rescued him from further questions. The student withdrew, eyes full of wonder at the sight of powerful men attending to stately affairs.
“The hour is late, master Safras,” Levinias said. “We can continue our discussions tomorrow.”
“A new matter acquires your attention. I am afraid this cannot wait.” His onetime tutor bowed by way of apology. The sight filled Levinias with a fleeting moment of juvenile glee.
The two men ascended winding stairs towards the audience chambers. Javreh and King’s Guard alike stood at attention as they passed. The slave-soldiers were enough of a fixture among the Spires that Levinias had grown almost accustomed to the constant aura of giddy death that radiated from the Chorae bearing Captains. Master Safras was less accommodating. He shuffled every which way in his walk, dodging the periphery of sinkholes that promised certain oblivion.
The Javreh were of Grandmaster Shinurta’s design. Many impassioned and petty words had been thrown about in council regarding their creation. In the end, the Grandmaster browbeat his detractors with a fury that was itself almost supernatural. It was agreed, the Scarlet Spires would no longer rely on mercenaries who had proven only ever consistent in bleeding the treasuries while marching time and again to the edge of disaster. The pittance of guardsmen sent by King Horziah would remain, but henceforth the School would arm its own soldiers.
There had been questions of expense and other such mundane concerns, but what galled many Scarlet Schoolmen was the prospect of arming the slaves with Chorae. Those few Trinkets the School had seized during the war lay undisturbed in its deepest vaults. Theirs were an irony that stung, an extraordinary weapon against sorcery that could never be wielded by sorcerers. But to hand them out to slaves? Surely such madness was unthinkable.
Shinurta’s arguments were elegant in their simplicity. Men were ever ready to compromise their morality for advantage. When, not if, but when the Thousand Temples acquired sorcerous accomplices, the Scarlet Spires would need to secure every advantage. Whereas tortures mutilated flesh, sorcery could violate the very soul, or so most people believed. And that was enough to cow an army of slaves, regardless of what a few of them may hold in their hands.
Still, whether out of pride or cowardice, not everyone was convinced. Even as council conceded to the measure, whispers persisted for weeks that this was a foolhardy stratagem by an old man desperate to maintain his slipping grip on power. A few dared to insinuate the Grandmaster played at an even darker game, that he was bargaining with the enemy for his few remaining years against the future of his entire School. Shinurta demonstrated the fallacy of the first complaint by personally, and permanently, removing the man responsible. As for the second rumour, all doubts were quashed when less than a year later, a jumble of incredulous voices from afar began whispering in dreams that a newly formed Major School had entered into alliance with the Thousand Temples.
What once appeared madness became the essence of sanity.
The gaunt figure of Master Safras fussed with his sleeves as he walked. “A man by the name of Xorias Cartanian presented himself at the gates. He claims he is from Cironj.”
Kiz, the fortress home of the Scarlet Spires was constantly beset by sycophants, starving beggars, and the occasional Inrithi fanatic. Such rabble were all turned away with swiftness and precise brutality. The stranger’s name meant nothing to Levinias, but the very fact that events merited a report showed this was no common arrival. Levinias thought back to the child in the library and marveled at the uncanny resemblance of the elderly sorcerer wringing his ink stained hands. The man was clearly distressed.
“What does this Cironji want?”
The old man breathed deeply. For a moment he resembled nothing so much as a propped up sack of twigs, ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. The stresses of endless war had not been kind to him. “He asked for a private meeting with the First Principle of the Scarlet Spires,” Safras spoke at length.
Levinias frowned. “First Principle?”
“A title among certain Minor Schools of the West.”
The Scarlet Spires knew from their few remaining spies in the field that there were no more Minor Schools in the West. Those who did not defect to the Major Schools or flee for distant Zeüm had either been ground into dust by the holy war, or joined to form a new Major School.
A new School. “So he is Mysunsai.”
And there it was. The betrayer School, lapdogs of the Thousand Temples. A sorcerer from the enemy camp had walked to the very gates of the Scarlet Spires.
What does this mean?
3808 Year-of-the-Tusk, Sumna
Gleaming Tusks raised in procession. Echoes of a hundred horns. An ocean of faces straining to hear words of ancient Laws.
“Cut from them their tongues, for their blasphemy is an abomination like no other!”
A palanquin lain down with mock solemnity. Mailed fists searching for their prize. Finery draped over mangled skin.
“Seal their lips with flax, for the sins of their voice are without measure!”
From above comes a man, but more than a man, bearing a Tear of God.
“Burn them, for they are Unclean!”
Ancient pillars thrown in relief. Judgment, cold and unyielding. A light that would cleanse the world.
How about I wait until you’re finished, then repost the whole thing?
And I immediately figure out not all the time markers come with section dividers. Damnit.
Re: repost. That would probably be for the best. I feel like I’m making a big enough mess already.
YES! Finally I can sleep.
—
The Burning of Kiz
To take up the sword is to be humbled. Every thrust and parry is a constant reminder to the limits of one’s reach. Beware, your eminence, he who would wield his Cants as steel.
– Cartanian, Reply to the Principle of the Oaranat
What is analogy, if not falsehoods that seduce through their resemblance to truth?
– Altheus, Book of Standards
3793 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal
Grandmaster Shinurta walked between candlelit shelves, reordering the scrolls according to some private fancy. It did not matter that he rarely spent time in the teaching libraries. All knowledge residing within the fortress of Kiz also belonged to him.
“Master Safras tells me you have been studying the Refutations,” He asked the young man trailing behind him. “What have you learned so far?”
The student followed in silence. As cowed as he was by the Grandmaster’s personal scrutiny, he still flaunted some small obstinance under the rules of jnan.
“Do you suffer a malady of the tongue, young prince?”
Levininas scowled behind the old man’s back. Knives behind every word. He know I am a prince of nothing among the Scarlet Spires.
“Nomedius is a terrible philosopher,” he finally muttered, more to himself that to the Grandmaster.
Shinurta turned and stroked his well oiled beard in the way of solemn men, pondering solemn words. “I see.”
“His rhetoric resembles the classics only in their tone,” Levinias continued when no rebuke was forthcoming. “He is a provincialist hiding beneath the scholar’s cap.”
Shinurta paused in deep contemplation. “I see,” he repeated, then spoke as if struck by unexpected by insight. “But what of parody? Have you considered if the defects of his rhetoric were intentional?”
Recklessness, resentment, dangers foreseen and ignored. Levinias spoke without care.
“Intentionally bad is still bad.”
A hint of amusement flickered across the Grandmaster’s face. “The ancients are long dead, Levinias. They do not know you. Why should their words chafe you so?”
The young prince clenched his hands in frustration. He could give no answer.
“In some respects you are correct,” Shinurta lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Although I would not share this with all your tutors. Yet even terrible philosophers have their lessons. Nomedius certainly was no heir to Ajencis. He was a caste-noble trained in the tradition of scholars, and so believed that all nobles should aspire to be scholars. But as Ajencis taught us, men tend to value only what they know. The scholar prince could find no common ground with nobles entranced by power. Predictably, he went on to make a virtue of his own deficiencies.”
The Grandmaster’s appraisal caused Levinias to unclench a little. “Sincerity is the truest form of flattery. That is to say, not very true at all,” he quoted the philosopher. The words finally hinted at a deeper significance than the blandness of their trivial insight. There was a history here. A man had lived and died by his sayings.
“No medicine is as sweet as sympathy, but poisons oft delight the senses,” Sinurta added. “There are many such observations from his latter works. Nomedius was clearly a very perceptive man, but that awareness was seldom turned inwards. No one at court would tolerate his aloofness, so he came to see the very idea of camaraderie as a weakness of lesser men.” The Grandmaster searched for a candle and lit it with an ancient phrase, “Speak plainly, Levinias, do you think we have treated you unfairly?”
Jnan brooked few exceptions, and the desire to speak plain was not among them. As much as Levinias hated its rules, he knew them well enough to play along. “Fairness is the lie of tyrants and lovers,” he answered without answering.
Shinurta laughed aloud, a surprisingly hearty sound for one so bent with age. “Perhaps we have kept you in these halls for too long.”
Levinias stared at his sandals, eager to avoid the illumination that had sprung up before him. He thought back to the many seasons of watching the other students, heads shorter, much younger, and often not as talented, don their embroidered Initiates’ robes and leave the outer dormitories for the last time. His fists clenched again, so hard that he thought he might draw blood. The twin whips of anger and shame made him want to vomit.
Shinurta tactfully ignored the adolescent spectacle. “A king retains his post only with the consent of nations,” he said. “But a sorcerer remains a sorcerer so long as he can sing the Cants. We address you with courtesy because you came to us a prince, yet you flinch from word to word and think we mock you out of malice. We do not mock, Levinias. To speak ill against nothing accomplishes nothing. The courtesies are for your benefit alone.”
Unwanted tears rolled down reddened cheeks. “But I am more than nothing, Grandmaster!” Levinias cried. “I have studied so hard for so long! Why won’t anyone teach me the words?”
“Rank among Schoolmen can only come through the mastery of thought and speech. We can walk no other ground.” The Grandmaster’s voice feigned the loss of interest that colored so much of jnan. He returned his gaze to the scrolls.
Levinias brushed his eyes against his sleeve. “I— I don’t understand.”
“And that is the first piece of true wisdom you have uttered today,” Shinurta answered. “Your lessons in the exoterics ended months ago, young prince, but you never once sought to advance.”
—
3807 Year-of-the-Tusk, the River Sayut
Ships large and small cleared a path for the galley leaving the fortress of Kiz. Curious onlookers craned their necks, their eyes darting from the galley to red enameled walls and back again. Many cursed under their breath when they spied the figures aboard, while others made the sign of Momas, fearing the vessel’s very existence might bring about the Sea God’s ire.
The galley flew no banner as it travelled the length of the Secharib Plains. There was little need. No one without a Chorae armed host at his back would be so mad as to challenge a ship full of Scarlet Magi.
As the days passed, riverbank paddies filled with bend back slaves yielded to emerald fields of sugarcane as far as the eye could see. The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires marveled at his own elation. Had he truly toiled among the painted faces of Carythusal for so long that the feeling of a summer breeze should prove more of a surprise than a reminder?
He could hear the servants preparing his noonday meal. More fish, no doubt. The journey upriver demanded ludicrous haste. There had simply been no time to secure more tolerable provisions for the days long trip to Moserothu.
Shinurta smiled in good humour. A Grandmaster reduced to dining on caste-merchant fare. What sacrifices I’ve made for my School!
Alarmed voices snapped him from his reverie. A crowd jostled towards the galley’s tip. Several of the younger acolytes leaned overboard as far as they dared, before turning to each other in confusion.
The Grandmaster squinted hard at the source of the commotion, but his failing eyesight could make out nothing. Another gift taken for granted in youth, he thought, and not for the first time pondered his reluctance to take up the narcotic chanv. For years he had weighed the merit of spending another lifetime in passionless sterility, but now that the whole of Jekhia warred in open revolt, the choice was no longer his to make. In a strange way, news of upheaval in the tributary state had come as a welcome relief.
At last he saw the sight as well. Greasy black plumes of smoke made mockery of an unblemished sky. Thin lines of flame danced across distant fields, occasionally outlining what might have been the tiny silhouettes of upright men.
A Subdidact began chanting.
“Save your Cants,” Shinurta waved dismissively to his followers. “Slaves always burn the fields before harvest. No Jekhian army rides our way. ”
The distant fire soured his mood. Not from any intimations of doom—after all, anything could be taken as divine portent if one looked hard enough—but from the reactions it provoked. Few among the Scarlet Spires had risen to the threat of open war as well as the princely protege who now headed the school in his absence. Instead, many once reliable Schoolmen lost themselves to indecision. If something as mundane as a brush fire could unsettle so many, then how well would they fare if they were ever called upon to repulse crusading armies? How long would they stand firm if, just as at Atyersus, Carythusal itself came under siege?
Inevitably, Shinurta’s thoughts returned to the cause of his rushed expedition. At this very moment, armies of Inrithi faithful laid siege to the Mandate’s island fortress home. After its mission departed empty handed from Carythusal in the previous year, the Scarlet Spires had uncovered little more than hearsay on the Gnostic School’s fate.
That all changed four days ago. A single letter had thrown the Scarlet Spires into uproar.
The King of High Ainon bids greeting to all his esteemed subjects. Let it be known that we have received with due observance several far travelled petitioners from Attrempus. While our guests profess gratitude towards our hospitality, regarding the purpose of their arrival, they reveal only that they bring news of affairs in the Empire and the Ancient North. We are magnanimous in our patience, for while still over wearied from their travels, our guests consented to no further discourse save with the Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires. Though their ill-mannered ways are many, jnan demands we preserve in their stead some small measure of their dignity. We trust you shall receive the petitioners at Moserothu within ten days of our writing and bring this matter to fortuitous conclusion.
Under witness of the God and His Aspects, King Narumizu Horziah III
Separated from High Ainon by harsh terrain and hostile nations, the Scarlet Spires never assumed the Mandate would dispatch an overland embassy from their distant second stronghold. Now the School was forced to grovel before two factions while the King of High Ainon played host at his summer palace. The King’s insincere politeness and false piety, his inevitable demands for recompense, even the arrogance of his outrageous deadline, every last slight could be endured if what his letter implied was true. For all his jnanic posturing, the King had acted as little more than the unwitting bearer of the embassy’s true message.
They bring news of affairs in the Empire and the Ancient North.
Those simple words hinted at an unprecedented opportunity, as well as great danger. Across the Three Seas, only a single other Major School retained the sanction of its host nation. Imperial Saik or Scarlet Spires, one would be offered the secrets of the Gnosis.
Plans were made, motions debated, and a not inconsiderable amount of wine was drunk. The Scarlet Spires held its collective breath as it waited for further confirmation. Word came that very evening on furtive Cants of Calling sent from the shadows the King’s own court. The Orchid Palace had shone with unnatural lights at night. All of Moserothu was abuzz with dread speculation.
Few annoyances irritated the Grandmaster as much as being forced to act in ignorance. His earlier elation dashed, Shinurta fretted over pivotal events yet to come. The Scarlet Spires had a long and brutal history of trying to wrest the Gnosis from its keepers. War against a common foe could erase a great many enmities, but so too could they be intensified. There was little telling what heartbreaking terms the Mandate might demand for the many past wrongs it had suffered.
Shinurta resolved to send for his handpicked successor by nightfall. Not bringing Levinias before his royal uncle had been a mistake. In spite of professing concerns for the King’s mercurial temperament, Shinurta realized his true motivation for leaving the prince behind was ultimately due to a selfish desire to lay sole claim to a legacy befitting a Grandmaster. But when the future of his School hung in the balance, such vanity was a luxury he could no longer afford.
The proud are humbled in their fall, better to never stand so tall.
As much as it galled him, Shinurta had to admit even The Tractate hid a few kernels of wisdom among its epics of self righteous nonsense.
Six knights under the royal banner shadowed the galley along the far riverbank. Their mounts obscured by densely packed sugarcane, the men almost appeared to float across a parallel river. It would be another half day’s ride inland to Moserothu once the galley reached the nearest docks. To Shinurta, spending so much time on horseback was only slightly more unpleasant than the prospect of exchanging pleasantries with the lead horseman. He seethed at the pinprick blot of the caste-noble’s distant Chorae. Uncouth savages. They might as well be receiving him with drawn swords in hand.
“Do the King’s Guards mean to slight us, Grandmaster?” asked the easily frightened Subdidact. “Why do they not—”
And then he was gone, erased from the deck by the setting of a second sun. A wall of flame roared past the Grandmaster’s reflexive Wards. In an instant the forward half of the ship became a bonfire of maddened screams. Men dove blindly for the river, or simply fell and never stirred again.
The other riders overtook the Trinket bearer. Unearthly light blazed from their eyes and mouth.
Shocked awareness dawned on the Grandmaster. Clever bastards, thrice damned clever bastards! The assailants had hid their sorcerous Mark under the baleful shadow of the Chorae.
“Take to the skies!” Shinurta shouted against the din. Despite the sudden chaos of battle, he appreciated the peculiar irony that his pride may have just saved his favourite student’s life.
The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires stepped into the air and wove dire tales of wrath. Phantom rifts tore open beneath his assailants’ feet, bathing their Wards in pillars of liquid fire. Allegories of ice cracked and shattered. The earth blackened at the touch of his song.
The surviving Schoolmen sang their Wards, or tried to. A red robed figure doubled over in agony and fell head first into the water. Two others were each struck down by a single shard of glowing ice. When one dared rise again, a dozen more shards pinned his body like a bloody trophy against the upper mast.
Even as Shinurta called upon his most potent Analogies, he dissected truth from the false knights’ sorcerous Concert. The idiosyncrasies of their stance, how they leaned into their Wards and traced shapes with weaving hands, gave away their meager affiliation. These were sorcerers of the Nilitar Compact, mere dilettantes whose laughable mannerisms bespoke the crudity of their Cants. On a sane day they would have looked up to the learning of his School with as much envy as the Scarlet Spires looked to the Mandate. They spoke no Gnostic Abstractions. Far from it, most of their incantations were scarcely more impressive than the connotic utterances learned by Initiates as stepping stones to true sorcerous Analogies. Yet the world was yoked to their madness. How could senior sorcerers of rank be undone by something so trivial? How could so many be felled so quickly and by so few? Shinurta howled impossible words, rage his only answer.
—
Ethereal chains unfurled above flotsam to thresh prized wheat from bloodied chaff. The others swayed their limbs and made idols of their speech. Only one man contemplated the grand deception he had wrought. By the promise of power the Scarlet Spires had been undone, but were the desperate hopes of his own people any less given to delusion?
From infinite Synaxis, we will make gods of ourselves…
A false path led nowhere, regardless of how much time one had to walk it. Any salvation promised by mere words, Cartanian finally understood, could be undone just as easily.
Sorcerous flames wreathed his calloused hands. Open or clenched, he felt none of their heat.
—
3808 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal
Although he had less and less opportunity of late, Levinias often came to the student libraries during his brief moments of respite. The walls seemed to have shrunk in the intervening years since his own tutelage, but the rows of parchment on age worn shelves still promised timeless wisdom. Outside were horrors, desperation, betrayals, and talk, endless talk. But here among the scrolls, listening to the scratching of quills as children learned their letters, it reminded him of simpler times.
Glistening reflections of candlelight spied him from behind a shelf. The young sorcerer beckoned with an outstretched hand. Outlines of a face and sandals shrank from view.
“What is the matter? Speak.”
A child shuffled forth with downcast eyes, and made many halting apologies before posing a question regarding the court letters of the philosopher Nomedius.
Levinias raked his memories for some relevant insight. Recalling none, he resorted to the trick he had seen performed so many times by men who had nothing to say, but were forced to seem wise before their peers.
“Consider the circumstances, child. Why do you think this is so?”
The student wrung his hands as he agonized over an interpretation of his own devising. Levinias listened and nodded with sagely approval.
I have no idea of what he speaks.
Years had passed since he last had the leisure to immerse himself in philosophy. Wars upturned many things, some more intangible than others.
Levinias examined the student. Ten, perhaps eleven. Certainly far too young to have ever known him as anyone but a sorcerer of rank. The child’s minute frame conjured up an image of prepubescent legs dangling from an ornate oaken chair, while children of even younger age stood attentively at council. A chill ran through Levinias despite the warmth of his lavishly quilted robes. He tried to draw strength from the Grandmaster’s faraway words of encouragement, words that had come increasingly seldom of late.
A polite cough from the hallway rescued him from further questions. The student withdrew, eyes full of wonder at the sight of powerful men attending to impossibly weighty affairs.
“The hour is late, Master Safras,” Levinias said. “We can discuss our dwindling vellum stocks tomorrow.”
“A new matter acquires your attention. I am afraid this cannot wait.” His onetime tutor bowed by way of apology. The sight filled Levinias with a fleeting moment of juvenile glee.
The two men ascended winding stairs towards the grand audience hall. Javreh and King’s Guard alike stood at attention as they passed. The slave-soldiers had become enough of a fixture among the Spires that Levinias grew almost accustomed to the constant aura of giddy death that radiated from the Chorae bearing Captains. Master Safras was less accommodating. He shuffled every which way in his walk, dodging the periphery of sinkholes that promised certain oblivion.
The Javreh were one of the last matters the Grandmaster attended to before his departure for Moserothu. Many impassioned and petty words had been thrown about in council regarding their creation. In the end, Shinurta browbeat his detractors with a fury that was itself almost supernatural. It was agreed. The Scarlet Spires would no longer rely on mercenaries, who proved consistent only in the way they bled the treasuries while marching time and again to the edge of disaster. The pittance of royal guards sent by King Horizah would remain, but henceforth the School would arm its own slave soldiers.
There had been serious questions of expense and logistics, but what dismayed many sorcerers was the prospect of arming the slaves with Chorae. Theirs were an irony that stung, an extraordinary weapon against sorcery that could never be wielded by sorcerers. But to hand the few the School had captured over to its slaves? Surely such madness was unthinkable.
Shinurta’s arguments were elegant in their simplicity. Men were ever ready to compromise their morality for advantage. When, not if, but when the Thousand Temples acquired sorcerous accomplices, the Scarlet Spires would need to secure every advantage in order to survive. Whereas tortures mutilated flesh, sorcery could violate the very soul, or so most people believed. And that was enough to cow an army of slaves, regardless of what a few of them may hold in their hands.
Still, whether out of pride or cowardice, not everyone was convinced. Even as council conceded to the measure, whispers persisted for weeks that this was a foolhardy stratagem by an old man desperate to maintain his slipping grip on power. A few dared to insinuate the Grandmaster played at an even darker game, that he was bargaining with the enemy for his few remaining years against the future of his entire School. Shinurta demonstrated the fallacy of the first complaint by personally, and permanently, removing the man responsible. As for the second rumour, all doubts were quashed when a jumble of incredulous voices from afar began whispering in dreams that a newly formed Major School had entered into alliance with the Thousand Temples.
What once appeared madness became the essence of sanity.
The gaunt figure of Master Safras fussed with his sleeves as he walked. “A man by the name of Xorias Cartanian presented himself at the gates. He claims he has come from Cironj.”
The fortress home of the Scarlet Spires was constantly beset by sycophants, starving beggars, and the occasional Inrithi fanatic. Such rabble were all turned away with swiftness and precise brutality. The stranger’s name meant nothing to Levinias, but the very fact that he merited a report showed this was no common arrival. Levinias thought back to the child in the library and marveled at the uncanny resemblance of the elderly Safras wringing his ink stained hands. The man was clearly distressed.
“What does our traveller want?”
The old man breathed deeply. For a moment he resembled nothing so much as a propped up sack of twigs, ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. The endless threat of war had not been kind to him.
“He asked for a private meeting with the First Principle of the Scarlet Spires,” Safras spoke at length.
Levinias frowned. “First Principle?”
“A title among certain Minor Schools of the West.”
The Scarlet Spires knew from their few remaining spies in the field that there were no more Minor Schools in the West. Those who did not defect to the Major Schools or flee for distant Zeüm had either been ground into dust by the holy war, or joined to form a new Major School.
A new School. “So he is Mysunsai.”
And there it was. The betrayer School, lapdogs of the Thousand Temples. A sorcerer from the enemy camp had walked to the very gates of the Scarlet Spires.
What does this mean?
—
3808 Year-of-the-Tusk, Sumna
Gleaming Tusks raised in procession. Echoes of a hundred horns. An ocean of faces straining to hear words of ancient Laws.
“Cut from them their tongues, for their blasphemy is an abomination like no other!”
A palanquin lain down with mock solemnity. Mailed fists searching for their prize. A grandmaster’s finery draped over mangled skin.
“Seal their lips with flax, for the sins of their voice are without measure!”
From above comes a man, but more than a man, bearing a Tear of God.
“Burn them, for they are Unclean!”
Ancient pillars thrown in relief. Judgment, cold and unyielding. A light that would cleanse the world.
—
3808 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal
From the height of the grand audience hall, two sorcerers watched as guards escorted their guest inside the fortress of Kiz. The flickering torchlight gave little indication of the foreign sorcerer’s bearing, save that he was of impressive stature.
Pacing the length of the resplendent hall, Levinias reluctantly admitted to himself he had little hope of overawing a reckless Schoolman with mundane opulence. The severe tapestries and rows of gilded chairs appeared ridiculously excessive for the purpose of receiving a single man.
“I will arrange for additional patrols,” said Master Safras, oblivious to any considerations of artistic propriety. “This may be the prelude to an ambush.”
Levinias examined the lavish mural above his intended seat. The last belligerent general of Cenei was forever caught breaking his sword before the legendary founder of High Ainon. Had the scene always looked so garish?
“Assuming there is no ambush. What then?”
“Then we set one of our own,” Safras cleared his throat, betraying a hint of unease. “The Mysunsai are dogs. We can uncover all his secrets without ever striking a bargain with his kind.”
Levinias stroked his beard. He kept it unbraided for convenience and, truth be told, flair, but now its simplicity made him feel self conscious. He resisted the urge to re-oil it before the meeting. “I would not risk a battle here without first finding out what he wants,” he said. “Please have someone prepare the Grandmaster’s private audience chamber. I will receive him there.”
Master Safras left without bowing. Polite entreaties aside, he still resented being order about like a chamberlain.
Ever since the Grandmaster departed on his embassy, Levinias had dreaded the prospect of being called to appear before the King. All his years of tutelage and being groomed for leadership, he understood, was part of a long reaching plan to form closer ties between the Scarlet Spires and the throne. One day soon, he would be expected to return to his uncle’s court, to serve a man he once loved but now could scarcely remember. Vizier, they would call him, and look to him to transform the Scarlet Spires from blasphemous pariahs into another Imperial Saik of the East—at least in public.
But now an enemy sorcerer had come, and all of a sudden he was faced with an equally imposing challenge. There was good reason for the different Schools to approach each other with stifling formality. As a rule, sorcerers saw themselves to be men of unsurpassed merit, unjustly denounced by an ignorant world. When facing others who suffered similar extremes of pride, the results were often dangerously unpredictable. Just as his conduct before the King would mark his place at court, how he handled this encounter could determine his future standing among his peers.
Rather than wait for an attendant to summon the stranger, Levinias decided to greet him in person.
The foreign sorcerer was tall, with stone grey eyes and the well tanned, muscular build of a seasoned warrior, or perhaps a particularly well fed laborer. His weather beaten tunic and unkempt beard bespoke of a far travelled man who did not have the luxury of oils or braids, while his dirt covered nails simply spoke of bad manners. Were it not for his Mark, Levinias would have scarcely believed such a brute could also number among the Few.
“Greetings,” the prince bowed curtly to his guest. “You must be Xorias Cartanian, of the Mysunsai. Shall I address you as First Principle?”
The sorcerer tucked under his arm the mangled ball of wolf fur that passed for his hat. “Former First Principle of the Nilitar Compact,” he corrected. “I have no titles now. And you must be Prince Narumizu Levinias, esteemed leader of the Scarlet Spires.” He bowed much lower than required between sorcerers of equal rank.
A bow towards a Grandmaster. The thought thrilled and terrified Levinias in equal measure.
“Only until Grandmaster Shinurta’s return,” the prince hastily answered. He tucked his arms into his sleeves. “Please, follow me.”
Xorias Cartanian filled his short walk to the audience chamber with idle chatter. His boots left muddy prints on the immaculate tiles with his every step. Levinias listened with outward politeness but increasing apprehension. The man skirted jnanic transgression with flamboyant ease.
A pair of the King’s Guard opened nondescript doors to a pitch black room. Levinias favoured Master Safras with a rare thought of approval. The old man had likely handpicked the two guards in order to reflect solidarity between King and School. Perhaps when it came to appearances he was not so hopeless after all.
The prince lit the first candle in complete darkness. Three others he also set alight with a single phrase. He knew the layout of the room intimately. “Men do not fear the unknown,” Grandmaster Shinurta once told him, “so much as the moment of glimpsing it.”
A servant stepped from a side chamber carrying bowls of wine. From his own experience, Levinias knew the servant would appear as a ghost emerging from nowhere, or perhaps as someone who had stood motionless in the darkness the entire time.
The rudely dressed foreigner was utterly unfazed. “May I trouble you for something to eat as well? Cironji traveller’s fare is…” he made a face.
Levinias instantly regretted the theatrics. They seemed childish now that he was the one sitting in the Grandmaster’s seat. He recalled the servant to bring additional refreshments.
The foreign sorcerer attacked his plate of fruits and sweetbreads. He licked his fingers with relish between lengthy gulps of wine. More pointless gossip followed as he ate.
Levinias cringed when it dawned on him that the stranger had been waiting for him to speak the ‘fortuitous turn’ of words that would lead talk to weightier matters. A smarter man would have realized this much sooner, he thought. No matter, time to fake some wit.
But something about the sorcerer’s boorish mannerism struck all the wit from his thoughts. Dispensing with jnan, which was of course another move in jnan, Levinias opted for the direct approach.
“So tell me, First Principle, why would a Mysunsai Schoolman arrive unannounced at our door?”
Cartanian followed with all the subtlety of a hammer. “Because, Prince, that Mysunsai Schoolman led the attack that captured your Grandmaster. He thinks the news important.”
“Grandmaster Shinurta bested by the Mysunsai?” Levinias let derision slip into his voice. “Impossible. The Mandate would never have yielded their secrets to the likes of you.”
“What?” Cartanian frowned, for a moment genuinely confused. “The Gnosis had nothing to do with you Grandmaster’s defeat. No, our hashish eating brothers in Nilnamesh believe they have mastered an entirely new metaphysics.” He returned his gaze to his morsels as one already losing interest in the conversation at hand. “While the truth is far less impressive than their claims, you School will be fatally unprepared.”
Levinias sought reassurance in the tingling aura of the chamber’s many defensive Wards. He tilted his head ever so slightly, affecting a look of bemusement rather than the terror that gripped his chest. “You would threaten my School? Here, of all places?”
“Would I?” Cartanian matched the pose with infuriating exactness. He hefted aloft a grapefruit, then thought better of it.
Knowing when to break with jnan was central to its mastery, but Levinias felt his anger rise at the man’s singular focus on how he chose to do so. He wondered if Cartanian’s stone grey eyes truly were animated by deadly cunning, and no some genuine crazed obsession with fruit. Making perilous wagers against wily foes was to be expected when dealing with other sorcerers, but could his adversary in fact be insane? The thought of that melted his anger into fear. Sane men simply did not arrive alone and unannounced at the stronghold of the Scarlet Spires to claim they had captured the Grandmaster. Insane sorcerers, on the other hand, tended to be dangerously free with their Cants.
“Would you indeed,” the prince decided to test his opponent’s madness. “I once had a tutor who assured me that there were no foolish questions. He was one of the most foolish people I have ever met in my life.”
Cartanian helped himself to another orange. “Don’t you think that’s being rather unfair to Master Safras?” he asked. “As much as we might both find him tiresome, he’s not an imbecile. I look forward to testing my skills against his.”
Levinias struggled to keep his terror in check. Just how far had his enemies penetrated the Scarlet Spires? “Have care,” he warned. “Utter one word of sorcery here, and all of my School will descend upon you in an instant.”
“Not all of your School, I suspect.” Cartanian held the half peeled orange in his mouth and rummaged for a sheaf of parchment under his tunic. He casually tossed it into the prince’s lap. “The Shirah’s record keepers are very thorough.”
Levinias inspected the ornate columns of High Sheyic script. It proclaimed divine forgiveness in recognition for services rendered onto the Thousand Temples. He read and reread the name scrawled on the far edge in red ink.
It is you, isn’t it? It has to be you.
“Well this is ridiculous,” he retorted with a tone of doubt he did not feel. “You would have me believe that Master Safras betrayed our School over promises of a shortcut into Heaven?”
“And a lifetime of being fed by Inrithi coffers,” Cartanian added. “What better rumour to spread against your superior that the familiar guilt you would hide in your heart?”
Levinias felt short of breath. He was grasping at straws and still drowning.
“Ridiculous,” he insisted a second time. “If Safras works with you towards some common mischief, then why did he ask for you to be seized when you first arrived? And if you arrival is an unexpected betrayal of his plots, then why did he relent on your capture?”
“I don’t know, doubt?” Cartanian threw up his hands in exasperation. “Your logic has confounded me! I assumed most of my efforts would be spent convincing you the Shiral Remission is real, or perhaps answering questions of your Grandmaster’s fate. Instead—” he spat a pip into the darkness. “If our discussion comes to nothing, I will be very displeased with myself for several days.”
The prince felt shamed by the words of his enemy. He took a deep breath to collect his thoughts. “You claim to have captured the Grandmaster. How?”
“Patience, skill, and so forth,” Cartanian replied between mouthfuls, “Most sorcerers find utterals difficult when they’re underwater. But truly, ‘how’ is not so important as…”
Levinias knew he was being baited, though his anger felt real nonetheless. If the question was not how, then, why? Or—
“When?”
Cartanian tipped his wine bowl. “Four days after his departure. We ambushed the galley right before landfall. An agent of the Luthymae concealed our approach.”
Levinias gripped the edge of his seat. Anger once again turned to horror. Words of arcane devastation coiled around his tongue.
This is ridiculous!
“There never was a Mandate delegation,” the Mysunsai Schoolman continued, headless of how closely he tempted death. “We misled both your King and your School from the very beginning. The King has since forgiven us, as he must. As for how Grandmaster Shinurta continued to send his reassuring missives, well, I trust you can already guess.”
Ridiculous…
“But the soul can be Compelled only for so long, before it no longer resembles itself.”
A Grandmaster possessed by traitorous words for months! All of the Scarlet Spires deceived, by a man who chewed with his mouth open!
“The Mysunsai gather as we speak. We have demonstrated our power, and your King feels he has no choice. Soon they will be joined by armies from Conryia and march together under the banner of the Tusk.”
Levinias knew what would follow. The streets of Carythusal in flames. The spires of Kiz felled like severed fingers. Men dashed against stone, their vaunted sorceries impotent before timeless hatred and cold calculation. Thousand year histories trampled into dust, while a name, his name, became the lingering curse of the dying.
His eyes brimmed with the tears of a child who once raged at the injustices of an indifferent world. The absurdities of Fate are… absurd.
“Master Levinias, are you unwell?”
Memories surfaced of a lesson learned years ago, when the world was still simple and no one spoke of war. Grandmaster Shinurta had taught him that cursing against circumstance was futile. Fate cared nothing for his passions. Only through action could the future be seized.
The prince rubbed the moisture from his eyes. He repeated a question that he realized was never truly answered. “Speak plainly, Cartanian, why have you come?”
“For the food?” the sorcerer laughed half heartedly at his own jest. He was suddenly overcome with a look of weariness that aged him beyond his years. “I need your help to save both our Schools from this war. I came because I know you.”
Levinias offered his own bowl of wine. “Then tell me what you know.”
Gone was Cartanian’s mask of rustic insincerity. The Mysunsai sorcerer spoke as one possessed. He unravelled the hidden principles of Nilnameshi esoterica that gave such deadly advantage against the ignorant. He recounted the desperation of his fellow sorcerers, searching for salvation in the depths of their meager secrets. He piled scorn on his own past delusions born from those efforts, and cursed himself for convincing the rest of his School into seeking apotheosis on the borrowed time of Inrithi conquests. He painted a grim end to all mannish sorcery, where the betrayers, too, would be stamped out at the end of the holy war. Finally he came to his own desperate hope, that a catastrophic early defeat on the battlefield would force the Mysunsai to withdraw from their self destructive alliance. Ranks, dates, supply trails, strategies. Cartanian gave him everything he would need to rout an army. And through it all, Levinias choked on the bitter certainty that this was the man who had tormented his beloved mentor into madness.
If there was any justice in this world, I would kill him.
“You would consign your friends to death for believing in your own false teachings?” Levinias asked instead.
“All men are greater than dead men,” Cartanian replied without hesitation. “The rest of the Mysunsai may survive, and the dead will go to their graves ignorant of my betrayal. That has to be enough.” He drained his bowl of wine in a single gulp. “But you, prince, you must also pay a price.”
“The King.”
Cartanian nodded. “King Horizah believes he can keep the throne only if he follows his first betrayal with another.”
Levinias was forced to admit that any guilt the King might feel for his unwitting part in the embassy deception, or any lingering fondness for his once beloved nephew, would mean little against proof of the Mysunsai’s power. The Grandmaster’s humiliating capture would have forced his hand. There would be no parley with King Horizah III, and there could be no mercy for his guards.
“I loved my uncle once,” the prince whispered to himself. His earlier unbearable dread at the prospect of returning to court seemed from a lifetime ago.
Cartanian ran a hand through his disheveled hair. “That’s not all,” he spoke hesitantly. “I must claim your Initiates as well. Several have been seduced by the promises of wealth and absolution. Unlike Safras, I don’t know who they are, but you cannot afford any treachery among your ranks.”
Levinias crossed his arms in the gloom. “We have ways of uncovering spies.”
“Perhaps,” Cartanian admitted. “We both know your School’s only chance for survival is to rout the King’s army before it can gather at full strength. Say you do purge the ranks, what happens to the rest of your loyal followers? You’ll sow doubt if you keep the interrogations secret, or panic if you expose the long reach of your enemies. How likely will your School still take to the field in either case?”
“Then what are you proposing?” Levinias said, not wishing to hear the answer.
“Mysunsai assassins ambushed your Grandmaster on his way back to the city,” Cartanian pointed to himself. “Tonight one tries to kill you as well, but fail. Master Safras falls in your defense and the Initiates are killed when the assassin makes his escape. Safras dies a hero, while the others will be a blood debt that must be repaid. The Scarlet Spires will howl for vengeance.” The unkempt sorcerer’s eyes reflected madness, yet why did his words sound so sane?
“You go too far, Cartanian,” the prince stood firm. “The Initiates are the future of my School. Too many innocents will lose their lives.”
“Some for all. That is the price we pay,” Cartanian said. “We can walk no other ground.”
Levinias thought of his lifelong love for philosophy. He had spent countless evenings immersed in ancient works, fencing with the ignorance of others, as well as uncovering his own. For all his adult life, he had prized truth like a treasure. And now he was about to deceive his School in order to save them from themselves. Should he throw away the lives of his students like so many number-sticks, based solely on the words of the enemy? Could Cartanian’s confession be merely another mask? Could his conclusions be an even more horrific lie, built on a graveyard of truths? He simply did not know.
“We are running out of time, Master Levinias!” Cartanian leapt from his seat. “The only explanation for my presence here is to cause havoc among your School. The Mysunsai knows I’ve come. They are watching this fortress even now. The longer we wait, the longer they’ll suspect something is amiss. If they send word to the King’s camp then everything could be lost.”
A three headed serpent perched atop the entrance surveyed Levinias with quiet indifference. Above, the golden threaded pictogram for Truth gleamed in the candlelight.
“Please render me one last service, First Principle. Tell me what happened to my Grandmaster.”
Cartanian looked down at his calloused hands. He was at a loss for words. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “We plied him with the Compulsions until he could no longer Call to you in your dreams. Once the Luthymae knew he had gone mad, they moved him to the coast to await their ships. He is long gone by now. I truly am sorry.”
The Grandmaster of the Scarlet Spires summoned his onetime tutor to his audience chamber. The first casualty of the night would die pure.
Oh, the tens of dollars I would pay for an edit button. Two little words I forgot to take out in the Sumna section spoonfeeds the reader on who’s getting offed instead of leaving at least some people to piece it together at the end. Oh well. Maybe knowing for certain raises the stakes for the last section.
Updated, new and improved.
‘
But as Ajencis taught us, men tend to value only what they know. The scholar prince could find no common ground with nobles entranced by power. Predictably, he went on to make a virtue of his own deficiencies.”
‘
The above was especially poignant, really echoes the writing of the novels.
I have a few questions that could need some further enlightenment before I am willig to post my work. A) are children born outside wedlock treated as a shameful thing and null in inheritance, how does the majority of the gentry view a bastard in the line? Does noble houses have mottos? Does the armor and weapons in TSA correspond more with ancient civilizations than the medieval eras? What is the status of a knight and his significance in Earwa.
Sorry Ciun. No world questions. You’re just going to have to take a risk.
Not even the part with armor? I thought that was non-consequential. 😦
I think if you have a story idea that requires confirmation of some world building fact that hasn’t been made explicit, just write assuming it’s true. The worst that could happen is posting a story inspired by the setting that doesn’t perfectly mesh with all its details. If it’s well told, I doubt anyone who reads it would care too much about breaking canon.
This is my first posting to the website. I was encouraged to see some of the fan fiction here. I have always had a writing bug, and I am a big fan of Scott’s work.
So, I spent a few days working on this and a week or so contemplating whether or not to post it.
I hope you like it as much as I liked writing it.
Let me know what you think. Any criticism is welcome.
First Sight of the Mark
2095 Year of the Tusk, Kuniuri
The screams had finally stopped, but the smell lingered. Jraus had never actually believed his father when he had told him that burning men smelled of pork. He could not deny that unpleasant truth any longer. The men tied to the tree had finally stopped struggling against the restraints. The fire continued though. The Sranc had tied the caravan guards to a large oak. The lower boughs were aflame now. Within moments the entire tree had been engulfed. Jraus could see the horror of it as he strained against his own bonds. He, with some of the other men, had been tied to the sides of the wagons; the horses that had pulled them from Tryse had long since been slaughtered.
His legs ached after having to support his own weight for endless hours. The hemp rope that held him had cut into his arms and hands. Rivers of blood ran down, dripping onto the dry ground beneath him. Delina had been tied down into the bed of the wagon. She hadn’t made any sound for hours now, not since the rape. Jraus had felt every struggle when the abominations had taken her as the wagon thrashed side to side. Her screams, first of rage and pain, then of terror still echoed in his ears along with the screams of the others being tortured.
The children, Jraus didn’t want to think about what was going to happen to them. But he could hear them; the high pitch of their cries had an unmistakable tone over the mindless gibbering of their captors. Until now, he had heard the rumors about what the Sranc did to their captives. The truth was far worse.
His mind had been numbed by the horrors of the last few hours. Every moment felt dreamlike and unreal, as if this were all some horrible nightmare that he would wake from and feel Delina’s comforting arms encircle him in comfort. There was no comfort now. He had tried to talk to her. He couldn’t see her, no matter which way he tried to turn his head. She had whispered his name a few times after it was over. But she had fallen silent for a while now and would no longer respond.
The tree burned for an hour before the flames died away. Around its base, teams of Sranc danced, spilling their black seed on the ground. Their handsome and horrible faces twisted in the orgy of their perversions.
The sound of a broken sob next to him caught his attention. Jraus turned and looked at Phaul. One of his ears had been torn off; blood had crusted around the gaping wound. Phaul was looking straight ahead, past the dancing Sranc.
“That’s a Nonman. I’m sure of it.” His voice was a rasp now.
Jraus looked up, and noticed the figure on horseback on the ridge above them, silhouetted in the pale moonlight. A Nonman? Jraus couldn’t tell, though he doubted very much that it was human. The Sranc would have long since taken the figure.
“Jraus, I can no longer feel my hands.” Phaul said. Jraus’s own hands had been tied as Phaul’s. Twisted around to strain his arms, Fingers bent backward, fine rope holding them back that cut into the flesh.
“Have hope Phaul.” Jraus was surprised at the sound of his own voice. His throat had hurt to utter the words. He had worn out his voice from his own screams when they had peeled the skin off his chest. Two long strips of raw meat oozed blood that ran down his front.
Phaul let out a grunt, either in agreement or just acknowledgement that he had heard. On the ridge, the figure bowed his head and clicked the reigns. The horse began descending down the steep slope.
Not far behind was the road they had been taking from Tryse. It had been a dangerous trip. He had been warned before packing up Delina and joining the caravan to Sakarpus. There had been stories of trouble in the Kuniuri plains. But he couldn’t pass up the opportunity. A nobleman had offered him a wage twice that of what he had made in Tryse. Besides, he had been convinced that the presence of guards for the caravan would ensure its safe journey.
They had shared a meal the first night with several cast-menials from some of Tryse’s wealthier families. Jraus had sat at the camp fire and listened as one of the men, a bronzesmith had mentioned visiting a school in Sauglish, but the man’s wife had quickly shushed him. Jraus knew about the school in Sauglish and had no intention of going anywhere near it. He had been warned by his father long ago about staying away from schoolmen. It had been years since he had seen the mark, and had avoided any contact with the sorcerers since.
Not wishing to talk about that particular subject, he had also fallen into silence. Jraus had caught the man giving his son long quite looks. The boy looked to be five or six and had spent the trip in silence, reading some of the books that Jraus had lent him. The next night the other family had chosen to rest somewhere else, Jraus hadn’t seen them since. He wondered what had happened to the boy.
The figure on the horse reached the bottom of the slope and rode closer to the wagons. A few still held the squirming forms of the men and women who had been forced to endure the unspeakable. Jraus was certain he was going to die when the Sranc had begun working on him. But he wasn’t dead, not yet. The Sranc had stopped their torture a while ago. Likely just to let their victims endure the injuries that had been inflicted upon them, and to let them ponder what was coming next.
Jraus watched the Nonman. He was a Nonman, Jraus was certain of it now that he could see the figure more clearly in the firelight. He wore a cloak about his shoulders that dropped across the back of his mount. His face was like something from a painting. His skin pale and unblemished, his eyes dark, the bald plate of his head glistened in the firelight.
Had the Nonman been working with these creatures? They had certainly seemed to be more organized. Not the mindless hordes that roamed near the mountains in the north. These Sranc had been prepared to ambush the caravan. Within moments their defenses had been overcome.
Screams coming from behind him, children’s screams. What’s happening now?
“Oh Gods, no.” Phaul’s voice was almost a sigh. “Please let this end, make it stop.”
Jraus turned away, trying not to listen to the man next to him. No one else had been tied to this side of the wagon, and Jraus could see one other wagon with three figures tied to it. At least two more were tied down in the bed. The Nonman had dismounted his horse and approached the wagon. Jraus watched as the Nonman’s eyes began to glow, words came forth that made the very world cringe. The wagon burst into white hot flame. It had happened so fast that the people had no chance to even cry out.
“It is almost over Phaul” Jraus said. “They are ending it.”
A moment later the restraints that had cut through his skin suddenly relaxed, and then seemed to vanish. His legs gave out and he dropped to the ground. Next to him Phaul let out a groan as his limp form collapsed as well.
They weren’t going to end it then, not yet anyway. Jraus tried to move, to see what was happening on the wagon above him. Shifting sounds of scraping along wood, then Delina was thrown out of the wagon. The way she landed, the blank look in her wide open eyes, her clothing, what little of it remained was soaked in blood; Jraus knew that she had died hours ago. A cry of despair escaped his lips.
The Nonman appeared over him, looking down. Jraus stared up into the dark eyes. I’ve never been this close to one. He thought. Until the last few horrifying hours, he had never actually seen one. The blank face, the fused teeth, it was easy to see now how different these creatures were.
“Your kind fought them for so long.” Jraus croaked, not really understanding why he was saying anything at all. “Why do you fight with them now?” He wasn’t expecting any answer.
The Nonman tilted his head slightly, looked toward the children then reached down and grabbed Jraus’s collar and hauled him back up. He was surprised at the strength of the creature. Jraus could smell him now, a faint sent of pine. The Nonman had been in the open for a long time. The smell of the wild was all over him; but none of the scents that a man would have no odour of sweat, dirt or blood. Just the musky smells of trees, and flowers.
The Nonman looked directly into his eyes, and then turned to the gibbering Sranc who had gathered around them. The words he uttered sounded like animal cries, and the Sranc shouted back, clearly angered. The Nonman’s eyes glowed then. The next words that came forward made the very air around Jraus thick. He could almost feel nature itself flinch away and he felt a moment of nausea that was not from the wounds he had endured. The Sranc fled, their short forms disappearing into the darkness beyond the light cast by the fires. Then the Nonman released his grip and Jraus dropped to his knees. He felt a hand rest on his head, and then heard some more of the Nonman’s song. He felt darkness take him then. His vision clouded and went black.
Daylight burned into his eyelids. Small hands were shaking him. Jraus turned away from the light, opened his eyes. Phaul was gone. Only a small patch of dried blood remained where the other man had been.
“Get up! Please we have to go before they come back.” A child’s voice. The bronzesmith’s son. The boy looked frightened, but otherwise unhurt. Jraus pushed himself upright, wincing at the anticipated pain. He was surprised to find none. Looking down at his chest, he saw two long scars where the raw tissue had been before. His arms and hands were also healed; thin lines of new skin crisscrossed his forearms and hands.
“What happened?” He croaked. His voice no longer pained him, but he was thirsty, and hungry.
“They cut me loose, and then took all the others. Please get up.” The boy’s eyes were wide. His face puffy from crying.
“Your mother?” Jraus quickly looked for her while coming to his feet. A moment of dizziness at rising to fast forced him to lean on the thin shoulders of the boy.
“They took her, they took everyone but us. Why?”
Jraus took in the scene. The tree had been consumed by the flames; a smoldering pile was all that remained. The wagons had also been burned; the ground around them bore the visible marks of sorceries fire. The bodies were gone. Jraus could see that the boy was right, they had taken everyone away. Of the Sranc and Nonman, he could see no sign.
“Why?” the boy said again. Jraus could see the pain in the boys face, had he been tortured? There was no physical damage. But then Jraus saw it, the mark, the one that couldn’t normally be seen.
“Did you see what the Nonman did?”
“Nonman? Was that what that thing was? He didn’t look like anyone I’ve ever saw before.
And if you’re lucky you won’t see him again. Jraus thought.
The dizziness passed. His wounds had been healed, but how? As far as he knew sorcery of any kind could only destroy. It could only work against the world, not work to fix things, not to heal. How had it happened?
Had the Nonman been an erratic? Very dangerous to be sure if he was and there was no guarantee that he or the Sranc wouldn’t be coming back. They would have to flee. Sakarpus was weeks away and Tryse was over a week behind them now. Fleeing on foot would be faster than traveling with a caravan, but the horses were gone. Jraus knew that there was no choice. It would be dangerous and they would have to leave immediately, but first one thing had to be established.
“What did you see boy?” Jraus asked, already knowing the answer.
“I don’t know. Something happened when that Nonman spoke. His eyes glowed and the words, they seemed to hurt me, but not really hurt me. I can’t describe it.” The boy frowned, trying to find the right words.
“The world screaming at the use of the sorcery.” Jraus said.
The boy gave him a puzzled look at first, and then nodded his head in agreement.
“I never learned how to use it myself.” Jraus said. “I was never around when the sorcerers came through the village looking for those who had the mark. My family kept me away from any schoolmen after. But I found out that I could see it when sorcery was used. And I can see the mark in others. And it seems that you also have the mark.”
“What does that mean?” The boy said. His eyes empty, his expression blank. Shock, Jraus realized. The boy was in shock from everything. Soon he would begin the emotional strain. Night terrors, fears of nameless threats, the loss of his parents would hit him hard and soon.
And that applies to me as well, he realized. But the need to survive was strong right now, stronger than the emptiness inside. Both of them didn’t have the luxury of grief.
Has anyone ever had the mark so young?
“Your family was going to leave the caravan eventually. They were going to Sauglish. Do you know why?”
The boy nodded quietly, his eyes wide with fear. “My father told me I had to go to a school there. A man he worked with told him I was special and needed to be taught.”
Special, that’s obvious. Jraus thought. He had been over twice the boy’s age when he had first seen the mark. Was it possible for anyone so young?
“What are we going to do?” the boy said then. Jraus thought for only a moment. He had stayed away from the schoolmen all his life. But this boy, if he had the mark at his age then he would need the schoolmen. He would have to learn from them. Jraus closed his eyes tight and fought down the wave of fear. He could also see sorcery, what would the schoolmen do to him? But there was also the need to get near other people, quickly.
“We go to Sauglish.” He said then trying to forget his doubt and fears. “It is two, maybe three days to the west. I know the school you are talking about.”
The boy looked at the ground for a moment, he seemed to be thinking. “The Sohonc. That is its name.” he said then.
“We have to go. Quickly and without resting, else they will catch us again.”
With that, the two started off. They were over a mile away from the clearing behind them when Jraus thought to introduce himself.
“And what is your name.” he asked when the boy didn’t respond right away. “I can’t keep calling you boy now can I?”
The boy gazed up at him as he marched forward, matching Jraus’s pace.
“Seswatha, my name is Seswatha.”
Page is up Technopilus. Very cool.
Has your lawyer approved this? Does this give your fans rights to Earwa? Are you going to be brought to court by someone in the future because they claim to see a resemblance between something they wrote and something you later write?
This just seems deeply dangerous. There’s a reason the big authors stay away from fan fic, and that reason is usually because of scary legal implications.
I have no clue. Fucking lawyers. Even when they’re not in the room they’re in the room.
Adam, if a bully at school punches anyone who wears red socks, is it dangerous to wear red socks? No, to say so is to legitimise that bullying.
The question does not just ‘exist’. The skies the limit anyway if any organisation can make up questions but then act as if somehow individuals were required to answer (as if that question ‘exists’).
Adam,
You do have a valid point.
I would like to go on the record right now as stating that any fan fic that I have submitted to TPB is now the property of TPB and Scott Bakker. In fact, if Mr. Bakker should actually decide to use any elements from the fan fic I submitted I would be more than honored.
Same goes for me of course.
The story I was writing seems to have prematurely concluded – it feels like I’ve done something (possibly feels that way to my inner sense of stuff/my muse), but some of the threads I wanted to get onto are left dangling.
In the mean time I thought about the nursery rhymes I wrote when I got sick of singing the classics to my children. I thought, why am I passes on someone elses work that I don’t even like – why aren’t I singing my own creations to my children developing and vulnerable minds *twists villain mustache*. And so a couple of rhymes – can’t quite describe the tune to sing by, perhaps a mutation of twinkle twinkle little star.
Blind man looking far away.
Sees a diamond on the horizon, what does he say?
It’s coming closer!
It’s coming closer!
Blind man looking far away,
Doesn’t see it’s his own feet that do stray!
It’s coming closer!
It’s coming closer!
Could have stopped, could have backed away!
Diamond was a ghost from dim, dark days.
It’s coming closer!
It’s coming closer…ARGH!
Ghost was a slayer,
But twas blindness that slayed!
It’s great when the kids sometimes join in on the ARGH!
Now the second one
What’s the game, the game you play?
What’s the game when it doesn’t go away?
Can’t afford dragon prices.
Can’t say no to dragon say.
What’s the game but life each day?
Come dragon or brimstone,
each man decides such rules alone.
In this fear or relief, will not sway!
Actually that last one reminds me of recent debate. The ‘relief’ part is important – what’s being expressed is the idea you decide the rules yourself, the responsibility can never be passed on, not out of fear, not out of relief (at someone offering to take it, or some group (minority or not) seeming to be the one deserving of its decision and not yourself).
Rhymes passed on for mutual benefit, but with authorship attribution to moi (ie, either party can make profit from publishing (as if it’d ever come to that), with my name stuck on somewhere nearby…ps: fuck IP lawyers)
Actually that…
Could have stopped, could have backed away!
Aught to be…
Had a choice, could have stopped, could have backed away!
Though either works well, but the latter is just a bit more lyrically pleasing, IMO.
I really hate to be a bother, but could anyone direct me to The book, and chapter (page location would be amazing) where Kellhus sees the Room of faces? I seem to remember it’s either in TDTCB or TTT, but I haven’t been able to find it scanning through.
I’d really appreciate any sort of direction here, I just need it for source material. Thanks!
1935
I though it was in TDTCB as well but it’s actually in the second book, about two thirds into chapter 17.
Perfect! Thank you very much.
On the off chance it helps Scott down the road, let me also say that I surrender all rights to anything fiction I’ve written here.
Hold fast all revelation. Each is but another flavor of ignorance.
– Anonymous, Cynics of Sauglish
Early Winter, 3817th Year-of-the-Tusk, Atrithau
The High-Hall of Ara-Etrith seemed to drag on, pillared recess upon pillared recess upon pillared recess into a deep, foreboding gloom. So it seemed to Treyus Mathas, Mandate Schoolman. Grand words rang out, echoing into the darkness, reminding him so much of ancient council.
Nothingness pulled at his gaze.
He was… Seswatha. But the oratory of the High-Hall was no longer his own.
“My Lords. My Ladies. I give you… Morghund Athullara, first of his name! Last of the Thousand Sons. Protector of the North. Steward to the High Kings of Kûniüri. King of Atrithau.”
Thunderous applause and Mathas felt the world shake beneath the heaving masses of Sranc and Bashrag. Jubilant screams and he heard only the shriek of the Whirlwind. Yet the fleeting vision of the Now persisted and Mathas saw only the pomp of theatrics.
A new King is crowned this day.
Morghund held out his arms, clothed in the finery of his station, and motioned for quiet.
The gallery seemed to breathe as one.
Finally, they must think. A King who might return them to their past. Reclaim the glory of their fallen nation.
Eämnor.
Like a lover’s lost whisper.
“A moment… a moment.”
Silence for the new King. Mathas shook from himself the reverie of Seswatha’s memories. The Quorum would want a clear account of the Atrithi Coronation.
“Let us remember those who have fallen to Apocalypse.”
Morghund Athullara sought to bind the present to by-gone deeds of the past but there was nothing glorious in the fallen King’s passing. Simply another of Atrithau’s Kings lost to the gluttony of the Sranc.
A very old story, indeed.
King Morghund spoke of the Summoning of the Horns and the enduring duty of Atrithau’s men. He spoke at length concerning the tilling of Atrithau’s final crops and the Winter Holds. He omitted the slanted distribution of wealth among the Atrithi. And the warning of Seswatha’s life rose like fury within Mathas’ breast.
Though you lose your soul, you shall gain the world…
But he did not speak. He was here to stand as Council to the court of Ara-Etrith, Mandate Liaison to the Stewards of the Ancient North. It was Mathas’ choice to embarrass the traditions of yore and he proudly withheld Seswatha’s voice from the proceedings.
I am more.
More than the herd.
Following the Coronation, in the vaunted chambers of the King however, Mathas raged at the Liege Lord.
“What of the Consult, my King?”
A question that darkened the very sky.
Morghund Athullara simply stared at him, incredulous.
“What of them, Schoolman? They are like snakes in our City. To my People, they may exist. They may terrorize us. They may even abduct our own from within these very walls. You simply mark the Mandate’s inability to uphold its bargain to defend Atrithau from your enemies. All while the Three-Seas rightly tells its children nursery rhymes of our woe.”
“But for the Mandate…” Mathas fairly shouted before slowing his speech to a pause. This King must be reminded gently. “The Three-Seas would lie ruined, my King. You know this. Even now Mangaecca,” Mathas fairly spat the name, “scream this truth in your dungeons.”
“Let it so then lie,” the King said with force of edict. “We need not sacrifice alone, Treyus Mathas. You suffer to protect their sons, their daughters and wives, their ignorance.
I see no Southerners on Atrithau’s walls…”
The King looked at Mathas, indifference shouting from his face. Yet Mathas knew that Seswatha wore his own, that a sorcerer almost two thousand years dead returned the King’s detached expression.
“This I cannot do, my King.”
“We invite your School into our city, Treyus Mathas. Despite the betrayal at the hands of your ancient founder. Your Schoolmen would do well to remember this courtesy extended the Mandate by every Atrithi King.”
Including Mathas himself.
Visions of yesterday flashed before Mathas’ eyes. Seswatha’s yesterday. All Mandate Schoolmen dreamed the stakes of Seswatha’s decision to abandon the Eämnori. Guilt washed in overwhelming purpose. Rallying all Men against the No-God at any cost.
Even Eämnor itself, dying so that Seswatha might purchase precious moments of respite for the world.
“The Anarcane Ground cannot protect Atrithau forever, Morghund. We Schoolman, the Mandate alone, keep Apocalypse at bay. If…” Mathas’ breath caught, the walls of the King’s chambers seeming to catch the light of another, older torch. He felt doom, inexplicable across the horizon. His Dreams.
The No-God walks!
“Schoolman?” The King asked, the very image of solemn concern.
“When…” Mathas said, speaking to the world of Seswatha’s life. He breathed deep, gathered himself. “When the Consult come, Morghund, when they truly war again… They will not need sorcery to overcome you. They will wash over your city as the sea-tide does the sand.”
The King seemed unmoved. He looked simply bemused by Mathas’ entreaties.
No matter…
“It is my duty to implore you, Morghund… Reach out to the kingdoms of the Three-Seas before our struggle descends finally into myth. With or without you, the Mandate will continue our war for Men against the Consult.”
Morghund Athullara stared at him with brown doe eyes. A twitch of a smile.
“Continue your war, Schoolman. I will wait to review the conditions of the School of Mandate’s Lease within our city. Atrithau needs its King now, more than ever. You may continue to enjoy the comforts of Atrithau and access at the gate for your sorties beyond the Anarcane Ground.” The King paused.
“I know how it bothers the Few.”
…
Beyond the King’s chambers, Mathas mused over Athullara’s words. How little the King understood of Mathas’ plight and that of his brother Schoolmen.
Mathas often wondered if all the Mandate of Atrithau’s Mission wrestled with his sense of unease in the King’s ancient walls. The experience of Seswatha’s life was something all the Mandate shared. But rarely the places of their nightmares. To walk through, to touch the same stone that had seen the great sorcerer’s life. It made their two lives one as few other places in the Three Seas.
This was the Ancient North. The place of all celebration and horror.
Mathas often woke greased in sweat.
We can yet prevail, Seswatha-within screamed.
He walked the halls of Ara-Etrith, the cold stone draped in massive furs, ornamented with the heads of all of nature’s animal and primeval beasts. Braziers and torches provided a modicum of warmth and light but did little to touch the chill, which gripped Mathas.
Clutching his robes around him, Mathas walked without thinking, down the various passages within the fortress. Soon he found himself at a transept in the halls, just past which he knew he’d find a small shrine lit with hundreds of ritual candles. Mathas knew the room well, having visited it many times with his brothers.
In which a shadow rocked…
Praying in a foul tongue.
The inscription hanging above the portal read Honour for King Ghumath Lamorthula, trophies slain by His own hand. The Prize Room of an Atrithi King.
Mathas moved cautiously. He leaned against the stone, peered into the darkened chamber. The Sranc skulls, which covered the whole interior of the Lamorthulan Shrine, seemed to leer from the flickering light. Mathas fought the urge to clutch wounds he didn’t have, fought the impulse to search the torch light passages for shrieking Sranc.
His heart beat in his chest, provided rhythm for the unholy muttering within.
Ghumath Lamorthula was a Hero of Old, Mathas and his brother Schoolmen had decided, a man born out of legend. It was said that Lamorthula had little patience for the administrative aspects of rule. Instead, the King would be found on the walls or hunting, endlessly reaving the Sranc hordes, and always, obsessively, carving Ghumath into the dead like a bored child.
“So Ghumath can be the Sranc’s very name for Apocalypse,” The King had said.
This was why the Mandate Schoolmen continually found themselves visiting the Shrine. The dead Atrithi King had provided mementos of the past and, the Mandate knew, future.
The very world given to Sranc.
Though King Ghumath had killed enough of the Consult beasts for forty such grottos while defending Atrithau’s walls and though all the skulls that hung within were choice kills, celebrated within the King’s Annals, the true trophy of the King was the great monstrosity hanging before the far wall, held in epic pose.
Three massive arms and legs wed together, grotesque bones with multiple joints. Fused spines and yawning ribcage.
Mathas fairly trembled with the memories of two men.
A Bashrag.
Beneath which shuddered a rocking shape.
The Mandate Schoolmen who came to Atrithau inevitable wandered into Lomarthula’s hearth. The remains of the Old Science, the Tekne, the skulls of the Sranc and the Skeleton Bashrag enabled them to counsel in the shadow of truth. It helped to close the gap between their experiences, their lives and Seswatha’s, to scratch at the afflictions of another’s memories. Beneath the dead gaze of the unholy Consult’s foul creations, the Schoolmen would sometimes suffer strings of Seswatha’s memories, unearthed at random by their conversations beneath the historic bones. Their senses became aflame with another’s memories.
It helped bind them as brothers, those Schoolmen who found themselves in Atrithau, on the Anarcane Ground.
So far from home.
It was written that Lomarthula had survived the routing of his hunting party, all of whom had been killed by the insatiable lust of a Sranc tribe. He’d been chased north, away from the refuge of his city.
Where he’d stumbled upon the abomination, alone in the wilds.
The shadow abruptly stopped muttering, raised its head as though to sniff the air.
“Treyus… Come out, Mandati…” the thing turned and rose, resolving by trick of shadow into the shape of a man, so that it stood framed by the Skeleton Bashrag. “They told me I’d find you here… Chigra,” he said, hissing the ancient name with horrifying ambience.
Mathas stood shock still as if another owned his body, his soul.
Seswatha?
He felt doused in cold water, like his robes clung to him as wet linen. He took a breath and stepped into the Lamorthulan Shrine.
It was said that Ghumath Lamorthula faced the Bashrag, killed it by his own hand.
The man regarded him as Mathas regarded the man. He was dressed in the robes of an Atrithau Knight but Mathas prided himself on knowing all of the Atrithi Wall-Guard.
This Knight was a stranger to Mathas.
“Chigra…” The Knight said in a low groan.
“Mangaecca!” Mathas cursed.
“No, Mandati,” the Knight said, shaking his head, laughing in animal roar.
Mathas felt himself grinning. Had the Consult so reduced themselves to their unholy tinkering and the ages? Sending mere men to the do work of the Few?
“Do you seek to challenge me then, slave? Here in the heart of Ara-Etrith?”
“It will be no challenge, Mandati… Chigra…” The Knight drew a knife from a sheath beneath his tunic and moved towards Mathas.
The Quorum had long debated the issue of the Anarcane Ground. Naturally their agents would seek to fence with the Mangaecca beyond the bounds of the Holy Mountains whenever possible. But the Ground itself presented other challenges. Schoolmen were simply men without sorcery and those who couldn’t act without the gift of the Few were useless to the Mandate Mission in Atrithau.
It had been decided that those who made the journey to the Ancient North must have only the best martial training. The Mandate utilized their contacts throughout the Three-Seas to facilitate their Initiative.
Yet still Mathas felt hard pressed as he battered the Knight’s blows aside with sweeping limbs, controlling the knife arm away from his own torso, while aiming his blows at the Knight’s gut and sides.
Mathas had personally sparred against and fought many Great Names of the Three-Seas. Conriya. Galeoth. Ce Tydonn. Even complicit Exiles from Nansur and High Ainon.
Mastered them at their own feats of war.
But fighting now, here beneath eyeless gaze of a thousand Sranc and the indomitable Bashrag, Mathas decided that this… man… was the pinnacle of human combat.
Mathas swept at the Knight’s legs and the Knight leapt high, flipping over Mathas’ arc. The Knight landing, turned, and stabbed with his knife. Mathas ducked beneath the arc of the Knight’s arm before rising to kick his face.
The Knight fell back, leering suddenly, granting Mathas a moment of respite. Breathing heavily he fought the impulse to look for the mark in this desolate, onta-less place – the utter disconnect so many of his brother Schoolmen had shared, suffering in Atrithau, enduring for their ancient mandate.
“My brothers will avenge me… This is Atrithau. You’ll never leave the city alive,” Mathas said, spitting into the gloom.
The Knight grinned. Mathas paused confused, noticing for the first time the arc at the bottom of the man’s tunic.
“Your brothers are dead.”
The words seemed to freeze Mathas.
Then as though two hands simply unfolded, like a spider faking its death, the Knight’s face unclenched and opened, twelve limbs crowned by wicked claws, revealing lipless teeth and lidless eyes.
“Abomination…” Mathas heard himself whisper through sharp breath.
“Sorcery?” He asked no one.
Then he realized…
The Tekne.
“I am something old… Something new,” the thing said, a voice like slithering snakes, gesturing to the skulls with its knife. “These are my siblings… Children of the same Fathers.”
Mathas had to run, to survive to fight another day. The King needed to be warned. Atyersus needed to be warned.
My brothers…
Its limbs danced, reassembled into another’s features…
And Morghund Athullara stood before him.
“My King?” Mathas asked, horrified, all thought struck from him.
“Soon, Chigra… Woe comes…” The King said with the thing’s voice.
The thing that would be Morghund Athullara I, King of Atrithau, leapt at Mathas, knife raised high.
Though you lose your soul, you shall ga-
I’m not sure what brought me back to write more of these things. As with everything else I post here, people can do with them as they see fit.
—
Though I have lived for many years with the sorrow of my failures, I have lived. Perhaps I have even lived well. Yet as the mercy of exile draws to a close, one last question still gnaws at my heart. Was my life wasted in unthanked toil, or did I serve true worthies who never had need of me?
– Ajad, Chronicle of Toil
Be the mountain upon which your army stands. The falling boulder cares nothing for skill at arms.
– Ortos, Of War and Its Disciples
I prefer the company of sculpted bronze. Amongst my officers, they alone do no vie for honours.
– Ortos, Of War and Its Disciples
As with everything else at the market, Ill omens long for a hawker with flair. Send forth your finest sellers of words and victory shall find you of its own accord.
– Ortos, Of War and Its Disciples
Why must I be wise when the wisdom of others are ready for plunder?
– Nomedius, Letters to Nenciphon
We rent our standards, scattered our treasures, and put our every idol to the torch. In the pyre we returned to innocence. From the flames we were born anew.
– Kuchaga, Records of the White Jihad
Though the prophet spoke once more to the infinite glory of the Solitary God, we knew such words could not be carried past the bloodied plains of Jahan. Defeat had made us hard, and victory made us savage. From that day forth no divine edict compelled our wont. We slaughtered the Nansuri because they lived where we marched.
– Kuchaga, Records of the White Jihad
Fear not doubt, my wayward sons. The pristine shield has saved no life. The untested faith has saved no soul.
– Rubric 9:9, Lesser Apocrypha
Are the threads of gold banners the same thread? Are the shades of gold banners the same shade? What difference, then, of sovereigns and their dynasties?
– Rae Sajja, The Glory and The Famine
A Tale of Swayal
For they are both the Unclean and whores, who maketh pits of their mouths.
– THE TRACTATE
Autumn, 6 New Imperial Year, Nymbricani
When Haubonus Lissa was a child, her favorite place was the edge of a small promontory where she used to sit overlooking the seething Meneanor. She would watch the waves crash and break against the rough bluffs meeting at the River Wutmouth. She would watch the water spilling in rushed torrents from the great river and imagine it traveling like her Mother had taught her… first from the Lake Huösi beneath Oswenta, the neighboring capital of Galeoth, by way of the River Vandauga, all the way from the passes of the Hethanta Mountains, which cropped the faraway horizon.
Sometimes when Lissa sat, whole chunks of shale would fall from the bluffs, creating great splashing arcs in the water and radiating out, across the sea, out from her towards the edge of the World. Slowly it seemed, year after year, the sea would eat at the World’s edge and the land of her forefathers would grow ever smaller.
And braced by her Mother’s knowledge of mountain rivers feeding seas, Lissa would stare across the foaming waters and watch while the Meneanor swallowed the very World she knew.
One bright night, the Nail of Heaven shining above, Lissa finished her chores early and ran blissfully from her home to the promontory. She found herself watching and marveling, in small child thoughts, at the way the sea dwarfed her, the raw, rushing power of the Wutmouth feeding the illuminated and insatiable Meneanor beyond.
It reminded Lissa of Mother, her inexhaustible strength, and of Father, who continued to fight in the war.
It wasn’t until she grew that Lissa would realize that the sea, her World-eating Meneanor, was but a small part of the much greater Meneanor, itself a part of seas joining the very World with the Ocean.
But it was then, for one small moment that she knew. With uncharacteristic certainty, brushed broadly with ignorance for she questioned everything, she just knew that her radiant perspective was bound by the horizons of her youth.
It was to be a passing revelation.
She didn’t learn how the hands of Men groped at the world; she didn’t learn of the avarice of sorcerers and kings. Her family was simple. Tending earth, tending soil. They worshipped the old over the new, especially when her Father and Brothers made war their God. And she and her mother would keep faith with the earth, tending, making soft earth deeply plowed.
It was a revelation that would sting in the quiet moments nonetheless, to know that she, at the edge of her Meneanor, waters to the horizon, was not the spoke about which the very World turned.
And it returned to Lissa again that bright starry night, came to her in her Mother’s form.
They were going to the Clearing-of-the-Great-Tree.
She had at once balked and celebrated in her soul’s eye. Lissa had never been to the Clearing before, the name by which it was whispered among those of a certain age in her family. It was a never-ending source of frustration to be denied this secret knowledge but Lissa could not help but rebel at this prematurity and lack of ceremony.
The Nail shone with the senseless malice of bad omens.
There were places of great power in the World, Lissa knew. Her whole life was preparation, mediating the untamable wild against the cultivated earth. And more, she had been marked from a young age as different from her Brothers, when she’d been given her favorite doll. She had been playing with Wathi before her Mother had called her for dinner.
But Lissa was only five and she wasn’t supposed to go to the Clearing yet.
“Shouldn’t we wait, Mother?” Lissa asked, bravely walking hand and hand with her Mother down dark forest paths.
Her Mother smiled down at her, joyous smile beneath glossy eyes. A tear ran down the corner of her Mother’s face, which cracked any further refusal Lissa might have had within her. She frowned back at her Mother’s smile, not understanding.
“We cannot, Lissa,” her Mother said, still smiling. She breathed heavily around the possibility of words but simply repeated herself. “We cannot…”
Lissa continued looking at her Mother as they walked, her calm face forward, leading them by memory, and though Lissa held endless questions in her soul she remained silent.
When they happened upon flickering torchlight through the tree dark wood, she held in a small scream, biting her lip and gripping her Mother’s hand more tightly in her own.
And Lissa had just known.
The Clearing.
In which stood what she knew as the Great Tree, named in another tongue, Fount-of-the-World. Hoary and ancient, wrapped and cloaked in darkened shadows and thickened green vines.
Many of those gathered Lissa knew from the neighboring farms. Many wore riding gear and she noticed for the first time the bray of horses tied among the Clearing’s edged trees.
A collective hush fell, voices lowering to silence as she and her Mother walked from among the darkened woods. Lissa stared at the assembled women as they watched them as if Lissa and her Mother were princes or priests.
Little girls and boys hugging against their mother’s thighs, elder girls holding small and bundled siblings in their arms. A small group of men, frail from age or wounded from war, stood at the Clearing’s edge, dumbstruck.
Only the most elderly women stood and sat in the gathering’s center, forming a broken circle joined at the base of the Great Tree.
Reverence, Lissa would later learn. They stood in awe of the woman who had always simply been her Mother.
“Sisters.”
Her Mother looked across those assembled, smiling her same tearful smile, letting her call ring out to silence those already silenced.
“You know why we have gathered this night.
“The call has gone out… This we have heard from our own husbands, our brothers, our sons.
“They have been made messengers of our destruction.”
Her Mother let the words stand.
“Deceiver!” one elder cried out, so wrinkled by life’s sum as to scare Lissa with thoughts of imaginary wicked hags from the bedtime stories she’d been told. “It is a ploy, Milandrea. Lies to expose us, to draw us out.”
The elder weathered her Mother’s fierce gaze.
“I do not choose my words, idly, Elnora,” her Mother said. “Our ways are dying… even as we speak now. Haste… submission is the only path left to us.”
“We’ve all had word, Milandrea… for it seems He need only beckon and our men will bark,” the wrinkled elder her Mother had called Elnora said. With the words spoken, Lissa looked through scissoring limbs at those few Fathers gathered, but none called out in protest. “He knows not our slumbering power… the World itself our ally!”
Several of the women gasped such was Elnora’s vehemence.
“None can stop the slow-burning wick of empire, Elnora,” another woman called out. The elder ignored her, eyes only for Lissa’s Mother.
“All things at a cost, Nora,” Milandrea said, her voice trailing to a whisper. “You know this, Sister.” Her words cracked around a beseeching edge.
“And pray tell, Milandrea, how is it that we can better serve Him?” Elnora said as spittle flecked her chin, which she promptly mopped up with a piece of fabric clutched in a knobbed fist. “I’ve not the age to haggle… what is our price?”
Haubonus Lissa looked up her Mother expectantly. For the first time in her young life, Lissa saw grim fear, in a women, her Mother who had always been the stalwart Empress of her home.
“The Holy Aspect-Emperor asks us only for our daughters…” her Mother’s voice said, looking down to meet the rising fear Lissa felt in her soul.
“In exchange for our souls.”
…
Scribe a scroll, save ten men.
– SAREOTIC PROVERB
Summer, 7 New Imperial Year, Iothiah
They travelled desert warrens. Ancient capitol of Shigeki God-Kings.
For Haubonus Lissa, it would forever be the place to which she was taken.
Taken from her Mother.
As war tore across the Three Seas, a fire consuming the map entire from the spark of Shimeh’s liberation, the Aspect-Emperor consolidated his gains within the former Kian and the Nansur Empire.
Iothiah. Caraskand. Shimeh. These cities were transformed. Lissa had heard many tales of the Holy War, in which her Father and brothers fought still, though it had quickly come to be called the Unification Wars, such were the martial intentions of the Aspect-Emperor, the Warrior-Prophet.
The bloodshed of Zaudunyani and Orthodox, the estranged sons of the Latter Prophet. It seemed to Lissa nothing could be more holy.
Everywhere the pageantry of dozen nations. The sons and daughters of far-flung capitols, come to spill gold for the New Empire. Lissa was too shocked, to numb from the spectacle, to be truly afraid. Those who collected the female Few from across the Three Seas, the Judges of the Aspect-Emperor’s newfounded Ministrate, kept them shielded from wandering eyes and questioning lips. What more, as they were Luthymae, Judges with the sight of the Few and the power of life and death over the faithful, they had Chorae, obscene absences, that pocked existence around the girls.
There were many grudges among the Schools of the Three Seas, fanned flames of those who could not tolerate the changes wrought by Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The status quo maintained by the Schools had been the rule. The Mandate with their Godlike Gnosis but cursed with the spectre of their founder’s life remained absent from the Benjuka Plate. The Anagogic Schools vied with each other for supremacy and power. But the Aspect-Emperor was upending this balance to its foundations. Like any community of peers, Schoolmen had unspoken ways, conduct hedged to lines of the mutual understanding of their craft. For what carpenter explains the hammer to his brother carpenter?
They were the Few. Schools were for men. Schoolmen killed Witches.
Many hunted them still.
Among their caravan, was a scholar who traveled from Sumna to Iothiah, a man who called himself a Sareot, from a long-diminished College of the Thousand Temples, he said. He told the girls of the famed Sareotic Library, which had stood in Iothiah since the last Aspect-Emperors of the antique Ceneian Empire. It was ruined, destroyed in a battle between the Holy Tutor of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, Drusas Achamian, and the Scarlet Spires, a School almost destroyed in their genocidal quest against the Sorcerer-Priests of the heathen Fanim.
Arriving in Iothiah, Lissa saw none of the destruction the Sareot spoke of. Only the pomp and glory. In the years since the Holy Aspect-Emperor had ordered the antique Library rebuilt. The Cults had rejoiced. And, apparently, in modeling all things Ceneian, He had even reinstituted a number of their antiquarian Indentures, including the Script Law, demanding all books entering the ancient city be surrendered to the Sareots to be copied and the Compactorium, which again bound all Schools to the Imperial Mantle, whether they honoured it or not.
Lissa had felt sick, such was the Sareot’s fervour.
But the true purpose of the Library wasn’t simply to safeguard the knowledge of the ages. For the Aspect-Emperor was devious without peer. It was here where He raised the New Empire’s jewel.
The Swayal Compact. First School of Witches.
From across the expanding realm, Anasûrimbor Kellhus called out to the persecuted Witches, who for centuries had practiced their arcane arts in secret seclusion. As a way to both goad the Schools and fulfill Seswatha’s bid to share the Gnostic arsenal come Apocalypse, the Aspect-Emperor collected the daughter Few from the matrilineal Witch-Lines of the Three-Seas.
He granted them the Gnosis.
And in doing so, the Sareot told the traveling Witches-to-be, their Holy Aspect-Emperor had doubled the sorcerous power to bear in their war against the Unholy Consult.
For all the Sareot’s wordy glory, the long weeks to follow would be remembered only for the tears she would cry in the Library Dorms with her Triune Sisters.
What sorcery could be worth the cost of her Mother’s soul?
…
Fanatics have the courtesy to simply kill arguments that offend them. But the Schoolmen of the Mandate are compelled to convince you that you’re wrong. So does the sword become mercy while mere words send Men running for the knife.
– ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN
Winter, 11 New Imperial Year, Iothiah
Study. This is how her life was measured in the Library. Endless tutors, exercises, drills, tutors, exercises, drills.
Practice.
No longer was Lissa ignorant of the greater Meneanor.
They said it took years to master the Gnostic tongues; the Swayali learned the holy Gilcûnya in shy two years. They said it took decades to wear the Mark of rank; the Swayali looked as blasted as only those most ancient Mandate in only a matter of years.
In writing the Novum Arcanum, of Anasûrimbor Kellhus’ most holy texts, the Aspect-Emperor forever altered the practice of sorcery. After freeing several of the most senior brethren of the Mandate, the Quorum, from the binding yoke of Seswatha’s Heart and instructing the Schoolman in His personal revisions of their antique craft, they were sent to Iothiah to train the new generation of Witches, among them the Aspect-Emperor’s own daughter, Anasûrimbor Serwa.
But in forgiving the damnation of sorcerers, the Aspect-Emperor had also ushered in a new age for the faithful and the Few. And though the consequences of his declarations were both immediate and irrevocable in dividing all men, nowhere was the rift more perilous than between those with the ability to work sorcery and so mark the blood of the onta, a crime for which they had always been Damned.
It was one of these instructors, Mandate Siqu, an ancient and wrinkled sorcerer of great height, named Nautzera, whose duty it was to prepare and conduct the Swayali through the Grasping rituals. His skin hung like clothes from the rack of his bones. It was he who first told them of the curse of Seswatha’s life.
Nightmares drawn from the sheath.
Nautzera made no secret of his contempt.
“You may know it not, young Witches,” he had said, “but you are truly an apocalypse yourselves, a revelation. You are the last of the Few who will ever know the walls of a School, if you do share the greater Library with the World.”
He surveyed them as Lissa’s Father looked upon horses he might purchase for rearing. Nautzera wore his Mark fiercely, acknowledging it with them as only a Schoolman could before the sight of the Few.
War-Cant Master.
Lissa had fairly trembled with anticipation.
“In time you will come to know our plight as no others. We Mandate had become School of mummers, the only School deserving of the distinction, playing a Father’s game in children’s clothes. Hundreds of years did we wage our war while the World treated us like deranged kings – too much power to deny, too little sanity to excuse.
“Then, though we knew it not, the advent of the skin-spies, and for entire generations of Mandate lived and died, with only whispers of the World’s foe. Where we had closed with the Enemy for millennia, then we had naught but our nocturnal war to wage. Forever fighting and losing, reliving our founder’s ancient doom.
“That is… until the coming of Maithanet, the Holy Shriah, who revealed the creature in our own house!
“Until the coming of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, who revealed the Consult in all our houses!”
He smiled, looking down on the collective Triunes, as if they could never bridge the gap between them and so fathom his thoughts. And he seemed, to Lissa, a sad man suddenly, his sorcerous frame a rind where others are whole, clinging to vehemence as proof of the way things were.
All that mattered to her then was that he share his power.
“We celebrate His coming as no others can, we Mandate. We were raised from paupers to prophets, vindicated by the Aspect-Emperor’s proof of the Consult’s infiltration of the Great Factions. But we are men. We bear grudges still.
“And we would not share lightly.”
For a moment, Nautzera paused. In remembering, he became what Lissa thought of as uncharacteristically solemn for the harsh Siqu of later years.
“What is the price of power, Witches-to-be? What more, than being taken from your very homes on pain of death, shall you pay to become as Gods to the huddled masses? Gods of the God, as the Gnosis has become to our Lord’s Metagnostic recitations.
“Seswatha knew the conflict with his vanquished foe was not yet finished. So he worked to reincarnate the warning of his life, passing not from the World but into his followers, into their Dreams.
“You too will dream the Dreams. You too will come to know Apocalyspse!
“Where had He asked, we would have denied, risked the World and denied our Lord in sharing the Gnosis with those who had rebuked us in the past.”
Nautzera laughed, as he couldn’t believe how the Whore, Anagke, had played him.
“Instead He asked only that all men, not just the Few, accept a School of Witches!”
“The price you will pay by sharing in the incomprehensible. You will wail, scream, and gnash your teeth for heartbreak, for glory, for the end of the World! You will cry out as one in your sleep. A bond – like a vice!
“And you will awake crying, not with despair as we did for hundreds of years, but with joy, joy and wonder! Because you wake in a world where an Anasûrimbor has returned and you alone will know how those words were once our only prayer.”
Nautzera’s voice faltered. Lissa watched him scowl, it seemed because such had been his fervour.
“You will Dream as we do,” he said. “And when you do, you will continue to earn your wages.
“You will help us hunt those who oppose our Lord still.
“Wizards,” Nautzera fairly spat.
“And Witches.”
…
All the Few experience salvation in my name. All arcane arts, reasoned and wild. Man and woman. Schoolman and Witch.
– ANASÛRIMBOR KELLHUS, NOVUM ARCANUM
Spring, 15 New Imperial Year, Momemn
Haubonus Lissa, Swayali Witch, moved in the cramped quarters of the Kamposea Agora. She was shrouded and yet exposed, as only the Few can be.
She was hunted by the Luthymae, those College Priests of the Few, formerly dedicated to exorcising sorcerous spies from within the Thousand Temples.
And by those she would call her Sisters.
It had been weeks since Lissa had fled Iothiah. All the thoughts, the doubts, the endless obsessing. Planning, planning.
The love for her Mother.
It remained unthinkable to her that she had betrayed the Compact and the Grandmistress. Unthinkable that she might betray the Mandate.
The Aspect-Emperor.
Seswatha-within…
Whenever Lissa’s thoughts strayed towards her betrayal, her high unholy treason, something within inevitable balked. It was as if the love of the World she had come to know and the love of the World she had been torn from could not co-exist inside her. And so each used her soul to murder the other.
The Greater and lesser Meneanors of her heart.
Lissa prayed as she walked within the bustling market, ignoring the momurai who cast word of their wares like Cants of Compulsion, hoping to move those within earshot to consume. She prayed to the Gods, as she had not done in years since she taken from her home, since Iothiah and taking the Aspect-Emperor as her Lord and God.
She had to find her Mother.
And she prayed it was not too late.
Lissa gripped her cloak tightly about her despite the high, hot sun. If she might only squeeze enough, it seemed she might transport herself back to her promontory of long ago, looking out across the white-caped waves of her Meneanor wondering at the horizon ends of the World.
Then otherworldly muttering, feminine voices rising from ground of being, cracking through earth and stone.
She was thrown sideways even as her Incipient Wards cackled to life around her. She whispered the words that saw ghostly orbs appear rippling around her, each bisected with further, shielding disks.
The Odaini Concussion Cant smashed her through a number of stalls, spilling ceramics and food, tents and poles, causing small fires. She came to rest at the foot of a wall, which crumbled the brick in the vague shape of her Wards’ indentation.
Lissa laid momentarily dazed, listening to the strange alien tones, deep and brooding, laced with the high counterpoints of her Sister Lady-Witches. A small eternity passed within her and her love, her hate, rose like fire within her, compelling her to her feet.
She raised a hand to the sun, singing more life-preserving Wards, and found her Triune Sisters walking the ground’s echo in the sky above, their yellow billows unfurled in twirling arcs.
Fenistra. Ishteret.
Their faces masks hiding lesser stars.
Lissa walked calmly towards them, through the screaming rush of crowds running to escape the sorcerous destruction sure to follow. She could already sense the Luthymae, drawing the net closed, small absences encircling her. She came to a pause in a small square clearing among the stalls and looked up, wearing her torn confusing on her face.
“Enough, Lissa,” Fenistra called down to her. The Cant animating her Sister’s undone billows reminded Lissa of sea breezes and she felt herself wishing for her Meneanor home. “What is done, is done. Come home, sweet Sister. End this madness.”
Tense moments passed between them and Lissa felt she might explode, that it might end, such was her inner turmoil.
“I cannot, Feni,” Lissa said, addressing Fenistra with her secret name, as strangers who had become Sisters, trying breaching the walls they might throw up around the mortal fact of their duty.
Hunt all those who resist the Holy Aspect-Emperor.
Kill.
“I cannot murder my Mother!”
“Sister!” Ishteret shrieked. Small, shy Ishteret, who had kept crying at Iothiah long after Fenistra and Lissa had dried their cheeks. “You condemn yourself to death. To Damnation!”
By the trick and play of light, Lissa saw then the waters that streamed down Ishteret’s face, sunlight and sparkling droplets. Something loosed within her and Lissa chocked back the tears that threatened to come.
“I will not murder my Mother,” she said, her voice forced and hoarse.
Fenistra screamed at this, cursing aloud.
“Then you will murder your Sisters, Lissa, or worse, force murder upon us. Can you not see this?!” Fenistra called down to her. “The old World is dead…”
Yet despite their pleas, despite the great love Lissa bore her Sisters, she could not relinquish that thoughtless abiding love of a child for her Mother.
And Lissa felt with a curious sense of resolution. It was if the bowl of the World had tipped her long ago and only in madness could she find balance anew.
Striking the past from the scroll of the World.
Her past.
Knowing she could not, would not bend to her Sisters pleas and seeing the trap that had been set for all the Witches, she felt outraged. Outraged for all the girls who had simply been traded from being slaves of all men to slaves of one man.
And so Haubonus Lissa screamed and called out with World-slapping thunder. She struck with the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, of Nonmen, refined by man, and revolutionized by the Aspect-Emperor.
A thousand lines of geometric light. A Weära Comb. The Scythe of Gotagga. Deepest of Cirroi Looms.
Glittering lines of abstraction, swung out from her, blinding parabolas, cackling and cracking as they sparked from her Sisters Wards.
And crying out in futile resignation, her Sisters responded in kind, circling above Lissa, raining down destruction upon her with threshers of knifing white.
Lissa felt as if crushed, striking out with her song, knowing she could not contend against her Sisters, knowing that she forced them to murder in their Lord’s name, seeing the cracks already appearing in her spheric Wards.
But she could not bear the contradiction.
Lissa sensed the Luthymae much too late as they moved as vague shadows around her, glaring hate and love at her Sisters above.
Haubonus Lissa stood tall and unrelenting, the World around her afire with sorcerous song, razor light threatening the end of all she had ever loved.
It seemed she could hear the roar of the Meneanor, river water crashing in the surf.
Apocalypse…
A flash, white ringed with black nacre of pearl.
Her Sisters ceased singing as one, descending the ghost of stairs from the Vault of the Sky to stand before her. Ishteret had ceased crying and Fenistra’s face was hard as stone.
Haubonus Lissa, Swayali Witch.
A frozen pillar of salt.
Third (For Real Final) Draft
A Tale of Swayal
For they are both Unclean and whores, who maketh pits of their mouths.
– THE TRACTATE
Autumn, 6 New Imperial Year, Nymbricani
When Haubonus Lissa was a child, her favorite place was the edge of a small promontory where she used to sit overlooking the seething Meneanor. She would sit and watch the waves crash and break against the rough bluffs meeting at the River Wutmouth. She would watch the water as it spilled in rushed torrents from the great river and imagine it traveling like her Mother had taught her… first from the Lake Huösi beneath Oswenta, the neighboring capital of Galeoth, by way of the River Vandauga, all the way from the passes of the Hethanta Mountains, which cropped the faraway horizon.
Sometimes when Lissa sat, whole chunks of shale would fall from the bluffs, creating great splashing arcs in the water that seemed to radiate out from her, across the sea, out towards the edge of the World. Slowly it seemed, year after year, the sea would eat at the World’s edge and the land of her forefathers would grow ever smaller.
And braced by her Mother’s knowledge of mountain rivers feeding seas, Lissa would stare across the foaming waters and watch while the Meneanor swallowed the very World she knew.
The evening was young, yet the Nail of Heaven shone brightly above, and Lissa, having finished her chores early, walked blissfully from her home to the promontory. She found herself watching and marveling, in small child thoughts, at the way the sea dwarfed her, the raw, rushing power of the Wutmouth as it fed the illuminated and insatiable Meneanor beyond.
It reminded Lissa of Mother and her inexhaustible strength, and her absent Father, who continued to fight in the distant wars.
It wasn’t until she grew that Lissa would realize that the sea, her World-eating Meneanor, was but a small part of the much greater Meneanor, itself a part of seas joining the very World with the Ocean.
But it was then for one small moment that she knew. Gripped by uncharacteristic certainty – brushed broadly with ignorance for she questioned everything – she just knew that her radiant perspective was bound by the horizons of her youth.
It was but a passing revelation.
She didn’t learn how the hands of Men groped at the world; she didn’t learn of the avarice of sorcerer and kijneta. Her family was simple. Tending earth, tending soil. They worshipped the old over the new, especially when her Father and Brothers made war their God. And she and her mother would keep faith with the earth, tending, making soft earth deeply plowed.
It was a revelation that would sting in the quiet moments nonetheless, to know that she, at the edge of her Meneanor, waters to the horizon, was not the hub about which the very World turned.
And it returned to Lissa again that bright starry evening. Came to her in her Mother’s form.
They were going to the Clearing-of-the-Great-Tree.
She at once balked and celebrated in her soul’s eye. Lissa had never been to the Clearing before, the name by which it was whispered among those of a certain age in her family. It was a never-ending source of frustration to be denied this secret knowledge, yet Lissa could not help but rebel at this prematurity, this lack of ceremony.
The Nail shone with the senseless malice of bad omens.
There were places of great power in the World, Lissa knew. Her whole life was preparation, mediating the untamable wild against the cultivated earth. And more, she had been marked from a young age as different from her Brothers, when she’d been given her favorite doll. She had been playing with Wathi before her Mother had called her for dinner.
But Lissa was only five and she wasn’t supposed to go to the Clearing yet.
“Shouldn’t we wait, Mother?” Lissa asked, bravely walking hand and hand with her Mother down dark forest paths.
Her Mother smiled down at her, joyous smile beneath glossy eyes. A tear ran down the corner of her Mother’s face, which cracked any further refusal Lissa might have had within her. She frowned back at her Mother’s smile, not understanding.
“We cannot, Lissa,” her Mother said, still smiling. She breathed heavily around the possibility of words but simply repeated herself. “We cannot…”
Lissa continued looking at her Mother as they walked, her calm face forward, leading them by memory. Though Lissa held endless questions in her soul, she proudly remained silent.
When they happened upon the flickering torchlight through the tree dark wood, she held in a small scream, biting her lip and gripping her Mother’s hand more tightly in her own.
And Lissa had just known.
The Clearing.
In which stood what she knew as the Great Tree, named in another tongue, Fount-of-the-World. Hoary and ancient, wrapped and cloaked in darkened shadows and thickened green vines.
Many of those gathered Lissa knew from the neighboring farms. Many wore riding gear and she noticed for the first time the bray of horses tied among the Clearing’s edged trees.
A collective hush fell, voices lowering to silence as she and her Mother walked from among the darkened woods. Lissa stared back at the assembled women as they watched Lissa and her Mother as if they were princes or priests.
She noticed little girls and boys hugging against their mother’s thighs, elder sisters holding small and bundled siblings in their arms. A small group of men, old and frail or cripples returned from war, stood at the Clearing’s edge, dumbstruck.
Only the most elderly women stood and sat in the gathering’s center, forming a broken circle joined at the base of the Great Tree.
Reverence, Lissa would later learn. They stood in awe of the woman who had always simply been Mother to her.
“Sisters.”
Her Mother looked across those assembled, smiling the same tearful smile, letting her call ring out to silence those already silenced.
“You know why we have gathered this night.
“The call has gone out to the World… Not to us, no.
“This we have heard from our own husbands, our brothers, our sons. They have been made the messengers of our destruction.”
Her Mother let the words stand.
“Deceiver!” one elder cried out, so wrinkled by life’s sum as to scare Lissa with thoughts of imaginary wicked hags from the bedtime stories she’d been told. “It is a ploy, Milandrea. Lies to expose us, to draw us out.”
The elder weathered her Mother’s fierce gaze.
“I do not choose my words, idly, Elnora,” her Mother said. “Our ways are dying… even as we speak now. Haste… submission is the only path left to us.”
“We’ve all had word, Milandrea… for it seems He need only beckon and our men will bark,” the wrinkled elder her Mother had called Elnora said. With the words spoken, Lissa looked through scissoring limbs at those few Fathers gathered, but none called out in protest. “He knows not our slumbering power… the World itself our ally!”
Several of the women gasped such was Elnora’s vehemence.
“None can stop the slow-burning wick of empire, Elnora,” another woman called out. The elder ignored her, eyes only for Lissa’s Mother.
“All things at a cost, Nora,” Her Mother said, her voice trailing to a whisper. “You know this, Sister.”
Her words cracked around a beseeching edge.
“We are hunted by those with whom we have no quarrel,” she called out. “We are denied the practice that is our birthright by the prejudice of men.”
Lissa watched the Sisters nod, their heads bobbing in eerie tandem, their eyes glazed for wonder.
“Our lives our forfeit.”
Lissa’s Mother looked down at her.
“But all need not share our fate.”
Moments of silence. What did her Mother mean?
“And pray tell, Milandrea, how is it that we can better serve Him?” Elnora said as spittle flecked her chin, which she mopped up with a piece of fabric clutched in a knobbed fist. “I’ve not the age to haggle… what is our price?”
Haubonus Lissa looked up her Mother expectantly. For the first time in her young life, Lissa saw grim fear, in a woman, her Mother who had always been the stalwart Empress of her home.
“The Holy Aspect-Emperor asks us only for our daughters…” her Mother’s voice said, looking down again to meet the rising chill Lissa felt within.
“In exchange for our souls.”
___
Scribe a scroll, save ten men.
– SAREOTIC PROVERB
Summer, 7 New Imperial Year, Iothiah
They travelled desert warrens. Ancient capitol of Shigeki God-Kings.
For Haubonus Lissa, it would forever be the place to which she was taken.
Taken from her home.
Taken from her Mother.
As war tore across the Three Seas, a fire consuming the map entire from the spark of Shimeh’s liberation, the Aspect-Emperor consolidated his gains within the former Kian and the Nansur Empire.
Iothiah. Caraskand. Shimeh. These cities were transformed. Lissa had heard many tales of the Holy War, in which her Father and brothers fought still, though it had quickly come to be called the Unification Wars, such were the martial intentions of the Aspect-Emperor, the Warrior-Prophet.
The great bloodshed of Zaudunyani and Orthodox, the estranged sons of the Latter Prophet. It seemed to Lissa nothing could be more holy.
Everywhere clothed in the pageantry of a dozen nations. The sons and daughters of far-flung capitols, come to spill gold for the New Empire. Lissa was too shocked, to numb from the spectacle, to be truly afraid. Those who collected the female Few from across the Three Seas, the Pederisk-Judges of the Aspect-Emperor’s newfound Ministrate kept them shielded from wandering eyes and questioning lips. What’s more, as the Few were now faithful, they were Luthymae. Granted the power of life and death over the faithful, they were given the World’s third greatest accumulation of the blessed Chorae, Tears of God, both to shelter their children-wards and quell the dissent of the heretical Few.
The obscene absences pocked existence around the girls.
There were many grudges among the Schools of the Three Seas, flames fanned by those who could not tolerate the changes wrought by Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The status quo maintained by the Schools had once been the rule. The Mandate with their Godlike Gnosis, but cursed with the specter of their founder’s life, remained absent from the Benjuka Plate. The Anagogic Schools vied with each other for supremacy and power. But the Aspect-Emperor was upending this balance to its foundations. Like any community of peers, Schoolmen had unspoken ways, conduct hedged to lines of the mutual understanding of their craft. For what carpenter explains the hammer to his brother carpenter?
They were the Few. Schools were for men. Schoolmen killed Witches.
Many hunted them still.
Among their caravan was a scholar who traveled from Sumna to Iothiah, a man who called himself a Sareot – a long-diminished College of the Thousand Temples, he said. He told the girls of the famed Sareotic Library, which had stood in Iothiah since the last Aspect-Emperors of the antique Ceneian Empire. It was ruined, destroyed in a battle between the Holy Tutor of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, Drusas Achamian, and the Scarlet Spires, a School almost destroyed in their genocidal quest against the Sorcerer-Priests of the heathen Fanim.
In Iothiah, Lissa saw none of the destruction the Sareot spoke of. Only pomp and glory. In the years since the city’s recapture by the Holy War, the Aspect-Emperor had ordered the antique Library rebuilt. The Cults had rejoiced. And, apparently, in modeling all things Ceneian, He had even reinstituted a number of their antiquarian Indentures, including the Script Law, which demanded all books entering the ancient city be surrendered to the Sareots to be copied and the Compactorium, which bound all Schools to the Imperial Mantle as they had been in antiquity, whether they honoured it or not.
Lissa had felt sick, such was the Sareot’s fervour.
But the true purpose of the Library wasn’t simply to safeguard the knowledge of the ages. For the Aspect-Emperor was devious without peer. It was here where He raised the New Empire’s jewel.
The Swayal Compact. First School of Witches.
From across the expanding realm, Anasûrimbor Kellhus called out to the persecuted Witches, who for centuries had practiced their arcane arts in secret seclusion. As a way to both goad the Schools and fulfill Seswatha’s ancient bid to share the Gnostic arsenal come Apocalypse, the Aspect-Emperor collected the daughter Few from the matrilineal Witch-Lines of the Three-Seas.
He gave them the Gnosis. Bade them use it to hunt those secular Few who rebelled against His Holy Schools.
And in doing so, the Sareot told the traveling Witches-to-be, their Holy Aspect-Emperor had doubled the sorcerous power to bear in their war against the Unholy Consult.
For all the Sareot’s wordy glory, the long weeks to follow would be remembered only for the tears she would cry in the Library Dorms with her Triune Sisters.
What sorcery could be worth the cost of her Mother’s life?
What daughter was worth her Mother’s soul?
___
Fanatics have the courtesy to simply kill arguments that offend them. But the Schoolmen of the Mandate are compelled to convince you that you’re wrong. So does the sword become mercy while mere words send Men running for the knife.
– ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN
Winter, 11 New Imperial Year, Iothiah
Study. This is how her life was measured in the Library. Endless tutors, exercises, drills, tutors, exercises, drills.
Practice.
No longer was Lissa ignorant of the greater Meneanor.
They said it took years to master the Gnostic tongues; the Swayali learned the holy Gilcûnya in two years. They said it took decades to wear the Mark of rank; the Swayali looked as blasted as the most ancient Mandati in only half of one.
In writing the Novum Arcanum, most holy of Anasûrimbor Kellhus’ texts, the Aspect-Emperor forever altered the practice of sorcery. After freeing several of the most senior brethren of the Mandate, the Quorum, from the binding yoke of council and instructing the Schoolmen in His personal revisions of their antique craft, they were sent to Iothiah to train the new generation of Witches, among them the Aspect-Emperor’s own daughter, Anasûrimbor Serwa.
By promising the redemption of sorcerers, the Aspect-Emperor had also ushered in a new age for the faithful and the Few. And though the consequences of his declarations were both immediate and irrevocable in dividing all men, nowhere was the rift more perilous than between those with the ability to work sorcery and so mark the blood of the onta, a crime for which they had always been Damned and reviled by scripture.
This was the one enduring lesson of the Unification Wars.
All who oppose the Aspect-Emperor fail.
It was one of these instructors, the Mandate Siqu, an ancient and wrinkled sorcerer of great height named Nautzera, whose duty it was to prepare and conduct the Swayali through the Grasping rituals. His skin hung like clothes from the rack of his bones. It was he who first told them of the curse of Seswatha’s life.
Nightmares drawn from the sheath.
Nautzera made no secret of his contempt.
“You may know it not, young Witches,” he had said, “but you are truly an apocalypse yourselves, a revelation. You are the last of the Few who will ever know the walls of a School, if you do share the greater Library with the World.”
He surveyed them as Lissa’s Father looked upon horses he might purchase for rearing. Nautzera wore his Mark fiercely, acknowledging it with them as only a Schoolman could before the sight of the Few.
War-Cant Master.
Lissa had fairly trembled with anticipation.
“In time you will come to know our plight as no others. We Mandate had become School of mummers, the only School deserving of the distinction, playing a Father’s game in children’s clothes. Hundreds of years did we wage our war while the World treated us like deranged kings – too much power to deny, too little sanity to excuse.
“Then, though we knew it not, the advent of the wretched skin-spies, and for entire generations Mandate lived and died, with only whispers of the World’s foe. Where we had closed with the Enemy for millennia, we had naught but our nocturnal war to wage.
“Forever fighting and losing, reliving our founder’s ancient doom.
“That is… until the coming of Maithanet, the Holy Shriah, who revealed the creature in our own house!
“Until the coming of the Holy Aspect-Emperor, who revealed the Consult in all our houses!”
He smiled, looking down on the collective Triunes, as if they could never bridge the gap between them and so fathom his thoughts. And he seemed, to Lissa, a sad man suddenly, his sorcerous frame a rind where others are whole, clinging to vehemence as proof of the way things were.
All that mattered to her then was that she would share his power.
“We celebrate His coming as no others can, we Mandate. We were raised from paupers to prophets, vindicated by the Aspect-Emperor’s proof of the Consult’s infiltration of the Great Factions. But we are men. We bear grudges still.
“And we would not share lightly.
“There are those who seek to deny the World our Lord has borne. Those Few and faithful who cannot abide the changes He has wrought.
“Heretics. Witches. Wizards.
For a moment, Nautzera paused. In remembering, he became what Lissa thought of as uncharacteristically solemn for the harsh Siqu of later years.
“What is the price of power, Witches-to-be? What more, than being taken from your very homes on pain of Damnation, shall you pay to become as Gods to the huddled masses? Gods of the God, as the Gnosis has become to our Lord’s Metagnostic recitations.
“Seswatha knew the conflict with his vanquished foe was not yet finished. And he worked to reincarnate the warning of his life, passing not from the World but into his followers, into their Dreams.
“You too will dream the Dreams. You too will come to know Apocalyspse!
“Where had He asked, we would have denied, risked the World and denied our Lord in sharing the Gnosis with those who had rebuked us in the past.”
Nautzera laughed, as he couldn’t believe how the Whore, Anagke, had played him.
“Instead He asked only that all men, not just the Few, accept a School of Witches!”
“The price you will pay by sharing in the incomprehensible. You will wail, scream, and gnash your teeth for heartbreak, for glory, for the end of the World! You will cry out as one in your sleep. A bond – like a vice!
“And you will awake crying, not with despair as we did for hundreds of years, but with joy, joy and wonder! Because you wake in a world where an Anasûrimbor has returned and you alone will know how those words were once our only prayer.”
Nautzera’s voice faltered. Lissa watched him scowl, it seemed because such had been his fervour.
“You will Dream as we do,” he said. “And when you do, you will continue to earn your wages.
“You will help us hunt those who oppose our Lord still.
“Heretics. Wizards,” Nautzera fairly spat.
“And Witches.”
___
All the Few experience salvation in my name. All arcane arts, reasoned and wild. Man and woman. Schoolman and Witch.
– ANASÛRIMBOR KELLHUS, NOVUM ARCANUM
Spring, 15 New Imperial Year, Momemn
Haubonus Lissa, Swayali Witch, moved in the cramped quarters of the Kamposea Agora. She was shrouded and yet exposed, as only the Few can be.
She was hunted by the Luthymae, those College Priests of the Few, formerly dedicated to exorcising sorcerous spies from within the Thousand Temples.
And by those she would call her Sisters.
It had been weeks since Lissa had fled Iothiah. All the thoughts, the doubts, the endless obsessing. Planning, planning.
The love for her Mother.
It remained unthinkable to her that she had betrayed the Compact and the Grandmistress. Unthinkable that she might betray the Mandate.
The Aspect-Emperor.
Seswatha-within…
Whenever Lissa’s thoughts strayed towards her betrayal, her high unholy treason, something within inevitable swayed. It was as if the love of the World she had come to know and the love of the World she had been torn from could not co-exist inside her.
And so each used half her soul to murder the other.
The Greater and lesser Meneanors of her heart.
But Dreams had come.
They were unlike those visitations of Seswatha’s life, her brother, who possessed her sleeping soul as she did her waking one. These were glimpsed in cataracts of detail, as if their message, and it’s portend, had been hidden in a broken mirror.
Skulking shadows. Forest wrath, crumbling cultivation, road and stele alike, with its roots.
A figure fixed upon a circumfix, strangled with vines.
Accompanied by a voice, soft as though spoken from wind’s passage through the trees.
Lissa… Daughter…
It had been scant months since she’d learned that her Mother might yet still live. The flames of war guttered, the World burned on the pyre of the Aspect-Emperor’s making. Yet strong embers smoldered among the coals.
Heretics. Wizards. Witches.
And Dreams had come.
Her Mother fought for her still. Used the life granted by sacrificing Lissa to war against the Empire that had taken her daughter from her in exchange for the redemption of her immortal soul.
He is Ciphrang…
Damnation…
Lissa prayed as she walked within the bustling market, ignoring the momurai who cast word of their wares like Cants of Compulsion, hoping to move those within earshot to consume. She prayed to the Gods, as she had not done in years since she taken from her home, since Iothiah and taking the Aspect-Emperor as her Lord and God.
She had to find her Mother.
And so she prayed it was not too late.
Lissa gripped her cloak tightly about her despite the high, hot sun. If she might only squeeze enough, it seemed she might transport herself back to her promontory of long ago, looking out across the white-caped waves of her Meneanor wondering at the horizon ends of the World.
Then, otherworldly muttering – feminine voices rising from the ground of being, cracking through earth and stone.
She was thrown sideways even as her Incipient Wards cackled to life around her. She whispered the words that saw ghostly orbs appear rippling around her, each bisected with further, shielding disks.
The Odaini Concussion Cant smashed her through a number of stalls, spilling ceramics and food, tents and poles, causing small fires. She came to rest at the foot of a wall, which crumbled the brick in the vague shape of her Wards’ indentation.
Lissa lay momentarily dazed, listening to the strange alien tones, deep and brooding, laced with the high counterpoints of her Sister Lady-Witches. A small eternity passed within her and her love, her hate, rose like fire within her, compelling her to her feet.
She raised a hand to the sun, singing more life-preserving Wards, and found her Triune Sisters walking the ground’s echo in the sky above, their yellow billows unfurled in twirling arcs.
Fenistra. Ishteret.
Their faces masks, hiding lesser stars.
Lissa walked calmly towards them, through the screaming press of crowds running to escape the sorcerous destruction sure to follow. She could already sense the Luthymae, drawing the net closed, small absences encircling her. She came to a pause in a small square clearing among the stalls and looked up, wearing her torn confusion on her face.
“Enough, Lissa,” Fenistra called down to her. The Cant animating her Sister’s undone billows reminded Lissa of sea breezes and she felt herself wishing again for her Meneanor home. “What is done, is done. Come home, sweet Sister. End this madness.”
Tense moments passed between them and Lissa felt she might explode, that it might end, such was her inner turmoil of her incompatible loves.
“I cannot, Feni,” Lissa said, addressing Fenistra with her secret name. She used it to try and reach them, an attempt to breach the walls these strangers become sisters might throw up around the mortal fact of their duty.
Hunt all those Few who resist the Holy Aspect-Emperor.
Kill.
“I cannot let my Mother be murdered!”
“Sister!” Ishteret shrieked. Small, shy Ishteret, who had kept crying at Iothiah long after Fenistra and Lissa had dried their cheeks. “You condemn yourself to death. To Damnation!”
By the trick and play of light, Lissa saw then the waters that streamed down Ishteret’s face, sunlit sparkling droplets. Something loosed within her and Lissa chocked back the tears that threatened to come.
“I will not let my Mother be murdered,” she said, her voice forced and hoarse.
Fenistra screamed at this, cursing aloud.
“Then you will murder your Sisters, Lissa, or worse, force murder upon us. Can you not see this?!” Fenistra called down to her. “The old World is dead…”
Yet despite their pleas, despite the great love Lissa bore her Sisters, she could not relinquish the thoughtless abiding love of a child for her Mother rooted deep within her.
And Lissa felt a curious sense of resolution. It was as if the bowl of the World had tipped her long ago and only now, in madness, could she find balance anew.
Striking the past from the scroll of the World.
Her past.
Knowing she could not, would not bend to her Sisters pleas and seeing the trap that had been set for all the Witches, she felt outraged. Outraged for all the girls who had simply been traded from being slaves of all men to slaves of one man.
So Haubonus Lissa screamed and called out with World-slapping thunder. She struck with the Gnosis, the sorcery of the Ancient North, of Nonmen, refined by man, and revolutionized by the Aspect-Emperor.
A thousand lines of geometric light. A Weära Comb. The Scythe of Gotagga. Deepest of Cirroi Looms.
Glittering lines of abstraction, swung out from her, blinding parabolas, cackling and cracking as they sparked from her Sisters’ Wards.
And crying out in futile resignation, her Sisters responded in kind, circling above Lissa, raining down destruction upon her with threshers of knifing white.
Lissa felt as if crushed, striking out with her song, knowing she could not contend against her Sisters, knowing that she forced them to murder in their Lord’s name, seeing the cracks already appearing in her spheric Wards.
But she could not bear the contradiction she felt within.
Lissa sensed the Luthymae much too late, moving as vague shadows around her, as Lissa glared hate and love at her Sisters above.
One moment Haubonus Lissa stood tall and unrelenting, the World around her afire with sorcerous song, razor light threatening the end of all she had ever loved.
It seemed she could hear the roar of the Meneanor, river water crashing in the surf.
Apocalypse…
Then a flash, white ringed with black nacre of pearl.
Her Sisters ceased singing as one, descending the ghost of stairs from the Vault of the Sky to stand before her. Ishteret had ceased crying and Fenistra’s face was hard as stone.
Haubonus Lissa, Swayali Witch.
A frozen pillar of salt.
I’ve given this its own page under “Fan Fic.” (Should I delete the post?)
I think the posts have just been left here so far. You could delete the Second (Final Draft) Posting that has no paragraph spacing, though.
Thanks very much, Roger (and for the paragraph edit :)). Also, I don’t know if you can get the original formatting from my post to the story-page but I’d appreciate your trying.
Cheers.