Mage's Blood (2 page)

It was long minutes before the face of her spirit-guardian formed in the smoke, blank as an unpainted Lantric carnival mask. The eyes were empty, the mouth a blackness. ‘Sabele,’ it breathed. ‘I felt the child die … I knew you would call.’

She and Jahanasthami communed, images from the spirit’s consciousness streaming into hers: places and faces, memories, questions and answers. When the spirit was confounded by one of her enquiries it consulted others, then passed on the responses. They were a web of souls, connected by uncountable strands, containing so much knowledge that a mind might burst before it could take it all in. But Sabele tried, straining through the endless trivia and minutiae of millions of lives, seeking the nuggets of information that would shape the future. The jadugara shook with the effort.

Hours passed – to her, they were aeons, in which galaxies of information were born, flowered, collapsed and perished. She floated in seas of imagery and sound, immersed in the vast panoply of life, seeing kings and their servants conferring, priests haggling and merchants praying. She saw births and deaths, acts of love and murder. Finally she glimpsed the face she was seeking through the ghost-eyes of a dead Lakh girl haunting a village well – just a tiny instant, when the ghost saw a face revealed by the twitch of a curtain, before a flare of wards buffeted her away. That mere flash was enough, and Sabele moved closer, from spirit to spirit, hunting. She could feel her quarry, the way a spider sensed a distant trembling at the edge
of its web, and at last she was certain: Antonin Meiros had finally made his move. He had come south from his haven in Hebusalim, seeking a way to avert war – or at least survive it. How ancient he looked; she remembered him in his youth: a face burning with energy and purpose. She’d barely escaped him then, when he and his order had slaughtered her kindred – her lovers, her bloodline, almost extinguished.
Better you still think me dead, magus
.

She banished Jahanasthami with an irritable gesture.
So, the great Antonin Meiros has decided to act at last
. She had been poking around in the constantly shifting potentials of the future long enough to know what he sought; it only surprised her that he had waited so long to act. Only one year remained until the Moontide and the carnage it would bring. It was late in the game, but Meiros’ other options had been torn away.

He and Sabele were Diviners; both had seen the likely futures before them. They had crossed mental blades for centuries, worrying away at the strands of the future. She could hear his questions and felt the answers he got – she had sent him some of those answers herself, lies tangled around suppositions, hooks on gossamer threads.

Yes, Antonin, come south – take the gift I have prepared for you! Taste of life again. Taste of death
.

She tried to laugh and found herself weeping instead, in anguish at all that was lost, or some other emotion she had forgotten she could feel. She didn’t analyse it, merely tasted it and savoured the novelty.

The sun rose high enough to pierce the cavern and found her still there: an old spider tangled in ancient webs. Beside her the tiny corpse of the child lay cold.

Pallas, North Rondelmar, on the continent of Yuros
2 Julsept 927
1 Year until the Moontide

Gurvon Gyle pulled up the hood of his robe like a penitent monk: just another anonymous initiate of the Kore. He turned to his companion, an elegant silver-maned man who was stroking his beard thoughtfully, staring out the grilled window. Shifting light caught on his face, making him look ageless. ‘You’ve still got the governor’s ring on, Bel,’ Gyle remarked.

The man started out of his reverie and pocketed the easily identifiable ring. ‘Listen to the crowds, Gurvon.’ His voice wasn’t exactly awed, but certainly impressed, which seldom happened. ‘There must be more than a hundred thousand citizens in the square alone.’

‘I’m told more than three hundred thousand will witness the ceremony,’ Gyle said, ‘but not all of them will be watching the parade. Pull up your hood.’

Belonius Vult, Governor of Noros, smiled wryly and cowled himself with a soft sigh. Gurvon Gyle had built a career on anonymity, but Vult hated it. Today was not an occasion for display, though.

Heralded by a soft knock at the door, another man slid into the tiny room. He was slender, with the olive skin and curling black hair of a Lantrian, clad in sumptuous red velvets and bearing an ornate crozier. His soft, oval face had full, womanish lips and narrow eyes. Being near him made Gyle’s skin crawl at the tingling sensation of gnosis-wardings. Paranoia ruled the Church magi more than most. The bishop flicked back his tangle of black curls and proffered a ring-encrusted hand. ‘My lords of Noros, are you ready to witness the Blessed Event?’

Vult kissed the bishop’s hand. ‘Eagerly ready, my Lord Crozier.’ All bishops of the Kore forsook their family and took the surname Crozier, but this man was kin to the Earl of Beaulieu and was accounted one of the rising stars of the Church.

‘Call me Adamus, gentlemen.’ The bishop leant his crozier against the wall and smiled like a child playing dress-up as he pulled up the hood of his identical grey cloak. ‘Shall we go?’

The bishop led them into a darkened passage and up a crumbling stair. With every step the noise grew: the hum and buzz of the people, the blare of trumpets, the rumble of drums, the chanting of the priests and shouting of the soldiers, the tramp of the thousands of boots. They could feel it through the stonework; the air itself seemed to vibrate against their skin. Then they topped the stairs and found themselves on a tiny recessed balcony overlooking the Place d’Accord. The roar became a wall of sound that buffeted their senses.

‘Great Kore!’ Gyle shouted at Vult, who was smiling in wonder. Neither man was unworldly, but this was something more than either had seen. This was the Place d’Accord, the heart of the city of Pallas, as Pallas was the heart of Rondelmar, which was the heart of Yuros: the Heart of the Empire. This mighty square was the theatre upon
which the endless play of politics and power was staged, before a mob whose size was frightening. Giant marble and gold statuary dwarfed the people clustered beneath and on them, like giants come to witness the pageant. Column after column of soldiers marched past, the tramp of the legionaries a drumbeat, a pulse of power. Windships circled above, giant warbirds floating in defiance of gravity, casting massive shadows beneath the noonday sun. Scarlet flags billowed in the soft northerly winds, bearing the Lion of Pallas and the sceptre and star of the Royal House of Sacrecour.

Gyle let his eyes drift to the royal box, some two hundred yards to his left, to where the legionaries directed their straight-armed salutes as they passed. Tiny figures in scarlet and glittering gold presided from above: His Royal Majesty the Emperor Constant Sacrecour and his sickly children. Assorted Dukes and Lords of this and that, Prelates and magi too, all come to witness this never-before-seen event.

Today, a living saint would be inaugurated. Gyle whistled softly, still amazed that someone had the nerve for such blasphemy, but to most here, judging by the joyous and triumphal mood of the crowd, it was deemed right and good.

A cavalry detachment high-stepped past, followed by a dozen elephants, captured on the last Crusade. Then came the Carnian riders, guiding their huge fighting-lizards between the walls of onlookers, ignoring the collective gasps of the crowds. The gaudy reptiles snapped and hissed whilst their riders maintained iron discipline, staring straight ahead except when they too swivelled to salute the emperor.

Gyle remembered what it was like to face such a force in battle and shuddered slightly. The Noros Revolt: a débâcle, a very personal nightmare. It had been the making of him, even as it stripped away both innocence and morality, and for what? Noros was once more part of the Imperial Family of Nations, for all the good it did them. For the empire it had been a blip, a momentary stalling of their conquests, but for Noros, the wounds still festered.

Gyle banished these thoughts. No one outside of Noros cared any
more, and certainly no one here. He followed the bishop’s pointing finger and dutifully marvelled as the Winged Corps swooped over the Place d’Accord, dozens of flying reptiles in serried ranks coming over the roof of the Sacred Heart Cathedral, battle-magi saddled behind the riders, and dipping before the royal box while the crowds screamed in awe and no little fear. Jaws longer than a man snapped, foot-long teeth gnashed and many of the winged constructs belched fire as they roared: impossible creatures made real by the magi.

How did we ever think we could defeat them?

After that came trumpets and a sudden silence as white flags rose about the royal box – the cue for the populace to still their tongues, for the emperor was to speak. Obedient to a man, the people fell silent as the small, slender shape on the throne rose to his feet and stepped to the front of the royal podium.

‘My People,’ Emperor Constant began, his high-pitched voice gnostically amplified throughout the square, ‘my People, today I am filled with pride and awe. Pride, at the assembled grandeur of we, the Rondian people! Rightly are we acclaimed the greatest nation upon this Urte! Rightly are we known as Kore’s Children! Rightly do we sit in judgement on the rest of mankind! Rightly are you, the least of my children, of greater worth to God than all other peoples! And awe, that we have achieved so much in the face of all adversity. Awe, that we have been chosen by Kore himself for his mission!’

Constant went on exalting his people – and by implication himself – cataloguing their glories from the overthrow of the Rimoni Empire and the conquest of Yuros to the Crusades across the Moontide Bridge and the crushing of the infidels of Antiopia.

Gyle felt his attention drift away from the emperor’s slant on history. He counted himself fortunate, one of the few who had been educated in something closer to the truth. The Arcanum he’d attended had been more secular and less partisan. The tale he knew was that as recently as five hundred years ago Yuros had been fragmented, its greatest power, the Rimoni Empire, controlling barely a quarter of the landmass, though that encompassed Rimoni, Silacia, Verelon and all of Noros, Argundy and Rondelmar. Wars were constant; dynasties
plotted and warred in Rym, the capital. Various faiths, now labelled pagan, struggled for supremacy. Plagues came, famines went. The seas roared, impassable. No one even dreamed that there was another continent beyond the eastern seas.

Then five hundred years ago, everything changed: Corineus came like a blazing comet and set the world alight. Corineus the Saviour, though he was born Johan Corin, son of a noble family of the border province of Rondelmar. He abandoned the savage gentility of the courts for a simpler, rustic life on the road. Johan Corin travelled, preaching of free love and other such idyllic notions, attracting a band of followers that over time burgeoned into nearly a thousand young people. The lost and impressionable swarmed to him and his promises of salvation in the next life and endless debauchery in this one. His people swarmed over the countryside, marked out as troublemakers, until the day when they descended upon one particular township, who panicked and called upon a nearby legion camp for help. The army agreed that the time had come to end the blasphemies of Johan Corin and his followers. That night Corin’s camp was surrounded by a full legion, and at midnight, the soldiers closed in to make the arrests.

What happened next passed into legend and became scripture: there were lights and voices, and the legion died, to a man, in a thousand different ways. So did many of Corin’s followers, including Corin himself, murdered by his sister-lover Selene. But there were survivors, and they were transfigured: each one had the power of a demi-god, wielding fire and storm, throwing boulders and channelling lightning. They became the Blessed Three Hundred, the first magi.

Abandoning Corin’s principles of love and peace to take revenge on the town (now conveniently remembered as a ‘wicked place’) in an orgy of destruction. Then, realising what they now were, they allied themselves with a Rimoni Senator and formed a new movement that became an army capable of annihilating whole legions without losing a man. They destroyed the Rimoni, razed Rym and made the world anew. They created the Rondian Empire.

The Three Hundred attributed their powers to Johan Corin, claiming he was an Intercessor with God, who had bargained away his own life to gain magical powers for his disciples. They set about claiming the mortal world as their own. Being young and almighty, they slept with whomever they desired, in any land they came to. At first they did not care that the powers diminished in their children the less they bred true, but as their offspring spread throughout Yuros, claiming fiefdoms, and their understanding of their powers grew, they started colleges to teach each other, and they founded a church, and preached of their own divinity to the population.

Now, five centuries later, thousands bore the sacred blood of the Blessed Three Hundred: the magi. Their rule was embodied in the Imperial Dynasty, all descendants of Sertain, who took Corin’s place as leader after the transfiguration, and currently vested in Emperor Constant Sacrecour. Gyle himself could trace his ancestry directly to one of those Three Hundred.
I am of this
, he thought.
I am magi, though I am also of Noros
. He glanced at Belonius Vult and then at Adamus Crozier, magi also: rulers of Urte.