The Heretic Kings (26 page)

“What did you do?” he asked Aruan. The imp was blinking and rubbing its eyes.

“A simulacrum, nothing more. But it renders communication a little easier. You need not fear; your essence, or the bulk of it, is with your sleeping body down in the city.”

Bardolin’s shining image felt itself with trembling hands. “This is magic indeed.”

“It is not so difficult, and it makes things more… civilized.”

Bardolin folded his imaginary arms. “Why am I here?”

“Can’t you answer that yourself? You are a creature of free will, as are all God’s creations.”

“You know what I mean. What is it you want of me?”

The man named Aruan turned away, paced to the edge of the platform and stared out over the city of Undi. He was tall, and dressed in voluminous, archaic robes that a noble might have worn in the days of the Fimbrian Hegemony. He was bald but for a fringe of raven hair about the base of his skull, for all the world like a monk’s tonsure. He had a beaked nose and deep-set eyes under bristling, fantastic brows, high, jutting cheekbones strangely at odds with the rest of his rather aristocratic face, as if someone had melded the features of a Kolchuk tribesman and a Perigrainian Landgrave. Hauteur and savagery, Bardolin noted them both.

“This is how I once looked,” Aruan said. “Were you to see my true form now you might be repelled. I am old, Bardolin. I remember the days of empire, the Religious Wars. I have known men whose fathers spoke with the Blessed Saint. I have seen centuries of the world come and go.”

“No man is immortal,” Bardolin said, fascinated and apprehensive at the same time. “Not even the most powerful mage.”

Aruan turned away from the dark city, smiling. “True, too true. But there are ways and means of staving off death’s debt collectors. You ask what it is I want of you, and I am wandering around the answer. Let me explain something.

“In all the years I have been here, we have seen many ships arrive from the Old World—more than you could ever have imagined. Most of them carried cargoes of gold-hungry vultures who simply wanted to claim this, the Zantu-Country, and rape it. They were adventurers, would-be conquerors, sometimes zealots filled with missionary zeal. They died. But sometimes they were refugees, come fleeing the pyres of Normannia and the purges of the Inceptines. These people, for the most part, we welcomed. But we have never encountered an Old-worlder with your… potential.”

“I don’t understand,” Bardolin said. “I am a common enough brand of mage.”

“Technically, perhaps you are. But you possess a duality which no other mage who has come here from across the ocean has possessed, a duality which is the very key to our own thaumaturgical hierarchy here in the west.”

Bardolin shook his head. “Your answers only provide the spur to further questions.”

“Never mind. It will become plain enough in the time to come.”

“I want you to tell me about this place—how you got here, how this began. What is happening.”

Aruan laughed, a guffaw which made him sound like a hearty ruffian. “You want our history then, the centuries of it, laid before you like a woven tapestry for your eyes to drink in?”

“I want explanations.”

“Oh—so little you think you are asking, eh?
Explanations
. Well, the night is fine. Give me your hand again, Brother Mage.”

“A phantom hand.”

“It will suffice. See? I can grasp it as though it were flesh and blood. In the other I will take your imp; it would not do to leave him alone here.”

Something happened which Bardolin, for all his expertise in the field of Dweomer, could not quite catalogue. The platform disappeared, and they were thousands of feet up in the air and still rising. The air was cooler here, and a breeze ruffled Aruan’s hair.

I can feel the breeze; I, a simulacrum
, Bardolin thought with a start of fear. And then he realized that it was the imp’s sensations he was feeling. Had to be. A simulacrum could not be given physical sensation.

Or could it? He could feel Aruan’s hand in his own, warm and strong. Was that the sensation of the imp or himself?

They stopped rising. Bardolin could look down like a god. The moon had risen and was a bitten apple of silver which lit up the Western Ocean. The vault above Bardolin’s head, strangely, did not feel any closer. The stars were clearer, but as far away as ever.

The incredible vastness of the world, night-dark and moon-silver, was staggering. The sky was a bright vault which spun endlessly above the sleeping earth, the Western Ocean a tissue of wrinkled silver strewn with the gossamer moonlight. And the Western Continent was a huge, bulking darkness in which only a few scattered lights burned. Bardolin could see the watchfires of Fort Abeleius on the coast, the tiny pricks of light that were the stern and masthead lanterns on the
Osprey
offshore, and inland red glows like scattered gleeds from an old fire.

“Restless forces of the world, at play amid the earth’s foundations,” Aruan said, sounding as though he were quoting something. “Volcanoes, Bardolin. This country is old and torn and troubled. It stirs uneasily in its sleep.”

“The craters,” Bardolin said.

“Yes. There was a great civilization here once, fully as sophisticated as that which exists upon Normannia. But the forces which create and destroy our world awoke here. They annihilated the works of the ancients, and created Undabane, the Holy Mountain, and a score of lesser cones. The
Undwa-Zantu
died in a welter of flame and ash, and the survivors of the cataclysm reverted to barbarism.”

“The dark, tall people who inhabit your city.”

“Yes. When first I came upon them, in the year of the Saint one hundred and nine, they were savages and only legends and ruins remained of the noble culture they had once possessed. They called themselves
Zantu
, which in their tongue signifies the Remnant, and their ancestors they called
Undwa-Zantu
, the Elder Remnant. Their mages—for they had been a mighty folk of magic—had degenerated into tribal shamans, but they preserved much that was worth knowing. They were a unique people, that elder race, possessed of singular gifts.”

But Bardolin was gaping. “You’ve been here… how long? Four and a half centuries?”

Aruan grinned. “In the Old World I was a mage at the court of King Fontinac the Third of Astarac. I sailed into the west in a leaky little caravel called the
Godspeed
, whose captain was named Pinarro Albayero, may God rest his unhappy soul.”

“But how—?”

“I told you: the shamans of the Zantu preserved some of the lore of their ancestors, theurgy of a potency to make what we called Dweomer in the Old World look like the pranks of a child. There is power in this country, Bardolin; you will have noticed it yourself. The mountains of fire spewed out raw theurgy as well as molten rock in their eruptions. And Undabane is the fountainhead, the source. The place is virtually alive. And the power can be tapped. It is why I am still here, when my poor frame should be dust and dry bone long since.”

Bardolin could not speak. His mind was busy taking in the enormity of what Aruan was saying.

“I came here fleeing the purges of the High Pontiff Willardius—may he rot in a Ramusian hell for ever. With some of my comrades, I took ship with a desperate man, Albayero of Abrusio. He was nothing more or less than a common pirate, and he needed to quit the shore of Normannia as badly as we did.” Aruan paused for a moment, and his eyes became vacant, as if looking back on that awful expanse of centuries, all gone to ash now.

“Every century or so,” he went on, “there is a convulsion in the Faith of the Ramusians, and they must renew their beliefs. They do so with a festival of slaughter. And always their victims are the same.

“We fled one such bloodbath, my colleagues and I. Most of the Thaumaturgists’ Guilds of Garmidalan and Cartigella became fugitives, for as I am sure you know, brother, the more prominent you are in our order, the less chance you have of being overlooked when the Ravens are wetting their beaks.

“So we took ship, some score of us with our families, those who had them, in the cranky little vessel of Pinarro Albayero.

“Albayero had intended to make landfall in the Brenn Isles, but a northerly hit us, taking us down to North Cape in the Hebrionese. We rounded the point with the help of the weather-workers amongst us, but not even they could help us make up our lost northing. The storms we rode would brook no interference, even from the master-mages amongst us. So we rode them out in our little ship, the weather-workers having to labour merely to keep us afloat. We were driven into the limitless wilderness of the Western Ocean, and there we despaired, thinking that we would topple off the edge of the world and plummet through the gaps between the stars.

“But we did not. We had hoped to find an uninhabited island among the archipelago of the Brenn Isles—for there were still such things, back in the second century—but now we had no idea where we might be cast ashore. The winds were too strong. It seemed almost as though God Himself had set His face against us, and was bent on driving us off the face of His creation.

“I know better now. God was at hand, watching over us, guiding our ship on the one true road to our salvation. We made landfall seventy-eight days after rounding North Cape, ninety-four after our departure from Cartigella.

“We landed on a continent which was utterly alien to anything we had experienced before. A place which was to become our home.”

Aruan paused, chin sunk on breast. Bardolin could imagine the amazement, the joy and the fear which those first exiles must have felt upon walking up the blazing beach to see the impenetrable dark of the jungle beyond. For them there had never been any question of turning back.

“Half of us were dead within six months,” Aruan went on, his voice flat, mechanical. “Albayero abandoned us, weighed anchor one night and was across the horizon before we had realized he was gone. He sold his knowledge to the nobility of Astarac, I afterwards found, enabling others to attempt the voyage in times of desperation. A good thing, as it turned out, for it meant that once or twice in the long, long years and decades and centuries following we had injections of new blood.

“We tamed the Zantu with feats of sorcery, and they came to serve and worship us. We lifted them out of savagery, made them into the more refined people you see today. But it was a long time before we truly appreciated their wisdom and learned to leave behind the prejudices of our Ramusian upbringing. We cleared Undi, which was an overgrown ruin lost in the belly of Undabane, and made it our capital. We made a life, a kingdom of sorts if you like, here in the wilderness. And we were not persecuted. You will never smell a pyre’s stink in this country, Bardolin.”

“But you did something, didn’t you? I have seen man-beasts here, monstrosities of Dweomer and warped flesh.”

“Experiments,” Aruan retorted quickly. “The new power we discovered had to be explored and contained. A new set of rules had to be written. Before they were, there were some regrettable… accidents. Some of us went too far, it is true.”

“And this no longer goes on?”

“Not if I do not wish it,” Aruan said without looking at him.

Bardolin frowned. “A society glued together by the Dweomer. Part of me rejoices, but part of me recoils also. There is such scope for abuse, for—”

“For evil. Yes, I know. We have had our internal struggles over the years, our petty civil wars, if I can dignify them with that title. Why else do you think that out of all the founders of our country I alone remain?”

“Because you are the strongest,” Bardolin said.

Aruan laughed his full, boisterous laugh again. “True enough! Yes, I was strongest. But I was also wisest, I think. I had a vision which the others lacked.”

“And what do you see with this vision of yours? What is it you want out of the world?”

Aruan turned and looked Bardolin in the eye, the moonlight crannying his features, kindling the liquid sheen of his eyes. Something strange there, something at once odd and familiar.

“I want to see your people and mine take their rightful place in the world, Bardolin. I want the Dweomer-folk to rise up and cast away their fears, their habits of servitude. I want them to claim their birthright.”

“Not all the Dweomer-folk are men of education and power,” Bardolin said warily. “Would you have the herbalists and hedge-witches, the cantrimers and crazed soothsayers have their say in some kind of sorcerous hegemony? Is that your aim, Aruan?”

“Listen to me for a moment, Bardolin. Listen to me without that dogged conservatism which marks you. Is the social order which permeates Normannia so fine and noble that it is worth saving? Is it just? Of course not!”

“Would the social order which you would erect in its place be any more just or fair?” Bardolin asked. “You would substitute one tyranny for another.”

“I would liberate an abused people, and remove the cancer of the religious orders from our lives.”

“For someone who has spent the centuries here in the wilderness you seem tolerably well informed,” Bardolin told him.

“I have my sources, as every mage must. I keep a watch on the Old World, Bardolin; I always have. It is the home of my birth and childhood and young manhood. I have not given up on it yet.”

“Are all your agents in Normannia shifters, then?”

“Ah, I wondered when we would get to that. Yes, Ortelius was one of mine, a valuable man.”

“What was his mission?”

“To make you turn back, nothing more.”

“Our ship carried the Dweomer-folk whom you would like to redeem; they were fleeing persecution, and yet you would have sent them back to the waiting pyres.”

“Your ship also carried an official representative of the Hebrian crown, and a contingent of soldiers,” Aruan said dryly. “They I could do without.”

“And the other vessel, which ran aground and was wrecked on these very shores? Did you have a hand in that?”

“No, upon mine honour, Bardolin. They were simply unlucky. It was not part of my plan to massacre whole ship’s companies. I thought that if I made the carrack, the ship with the leaders aboard, turn back the lesser vessel would follow.”