The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (29 page)

Geraad meant to just nod or say 'yes sir' or something of the sort, but as he steadied he couldn't help but ask, “Is everything all right?”

Enkhaelen didn't look at him.  “Don't concern yourself, Geraad.”

It took until he had stumbled from the rings and past the wards before he realized the necromancer had finally used his given name.

He glanced back, but Enkhaelen was already engrossed in his work, the energy ramping up around him to spit sparks across the ceiling again.  Too exhausted to start the trek back to his own cell, Geraad looked around for somewhere to sit.

And saw the door to Enkhaelen's office standing ajar at the far end of the chamber.

Was it like that before?
he wondered, but even his mentalist's memory was unclear; his view from the casting circle had been obscured by the angle.  He looked back again to find Enkhaelen facing away, concentrating his spellcraft on a blade at the far side.

Am I being set up?

That was paranoia speaking, surely, but at this point it seemed like the sanest voice in his head.  Still, the hawk's mirror sat close to the office, so with only mild trepidation Geraad started that way.

Rian joined him near the mirror and pointed poutingly to the arrowhead he had left by it.  “Am good,” he said, then beamed when Geraad smiled appreciatively.  Letting the goblin clamber onto him again, Geraad spent a moment squinting into the mirror—it seemed to be daylight wherever the hawk was, but the tree-cover was too heavy to see more than a slice of empty trail.  Then he let his gaze stray to the office again.

He had seen the books in there.  In his memory's eye he could even read their titles.  It was like looking through the Great Library's loss logs all over again: Citadel construction journals, necromantic and artificing tomes, ancient and modern histories, treatises on pre-Mirrimane wardcraft, a whole shelf of lost spiritist and summoner texts, and bound volumes of incident reports galore.  While they couldn't be everything that Enkhaelen had removed from the library, they were apparently the ones he deemed important.  The ones he kept close at hand.

Another glance down the room showed Enkhaelen with his back still turned.  His skin crawled; this felt like a trap, so much so that he envisioned himself crossing the threshold only to be caught by some horrific spell—held immobile as Enkhaelen came to punish him.

But the need to know was too great, and when he touched the door, it swung open for him.  When he stepped inside, only a faint tingle crossed his skin.

And when he pulled the first book out and began to flip through, mentally imprinting the pages, he knew he had found something too important to ignore.

*****

Several candlemarks later, Geraad lay staring at the ceiling in his small chamber, poring over what he had seen.  The pages floated before him as if spread on a table, each perfectly preserved in his mind's eye.  The problem was fitting them all together.

He had skimmed the construction journals but found them less than helpful now that he was down in the depths that they described.  The only mages who knew how Enkhaelen had formed the Citadel were the Master Summoners, who described a monumental and almost unfathomable working of elementals, constructs and protective wards coordinated like clockwork by the oppressively omnipresent Artificer Archmagus Morshoc Rivent—one of Enkhaelen's alter egos.  That Rivent had been obsessed with overseeing every aspect of the Citadel's raising was blatant, and there were many accounts of his temper, his scathing criticism of even the Masters, and his insistence on using only unbound elementals.  When the Master Summoners had threatened to quit the project en masse over that requirement, Rivent had met each and every one of them in private.  None dared detail that meeting in their journal.

That Enkhaelen was a spiritist did not surprise Geraad.  It was hardly the strangest thing about the man, and explained the wealth of summoning tomes he had stolen.  Most detailed the older style of summoning, where elementals were snared and bound and then severely disciplined to break their will.  According to the texts, this resulted in tractable slaves that would not dare retaliate against the summoner even if freed.

The current way was less abusive, but still strict.  Geraad knew of a few Valent student groups who demanded that not even bonds be used—that elementals be recruited as volunteers and not servants—but the administration mandated that all elementals within the Citadel be shackled in the interest of safety.

As for the other books, the incident reports did not tell him much.  None of Enkhaelen's known aliases showed up as a perpetrator, but he appeared regularly as the faculty advisor—equally distributed between the offenders and the victims—and was mentioned a few times for disrupting unsanctioned duels.  Apparently he had a penchant for walking into the crossfire and just standing there, absorbing the spells, until the combatants realized who he was.

The pre-Mirrimane wardcraft tomes were enlightening, but not for what they said about Enkhaelen.  Geraad had opted for the Warder path after six years of mentalist training, and had since spent twenty-two years in study and practice, but he had only ever been exposed to the Modern Consolidated style with its rigid terminology, formalized gestures and theory of interchangeable sectionality.  In Modern Consolidated, all but the skintight wards were built in panels of energy, whether square or wedge or hemispheric.  This made them easy to piece together around large groups or large objects, or use in a multi-mage gestalt, or replace damaged portions on the fly.  However, they were weak at the joints and had limited energy-fluidity; power dedicated to one panel could not be shifted to another without seriously compromising the first.

Pre-Mirrimane wardcraft was messy, cluttered and pieced together from at least four different sources, but it contained all of Modern Consolidated plus so much more.  Layered skins, flowing wards, bioselective permeability, ambient regeneration, and entire new disciplines like reformative envirogenesis and subdimensional architecture.  It was like Mirrimane had chopped off the entire top tier of true wardcraft and sent the Warders back to remedial classes, where they practiced the techniques most useful to the Imperial war-machine and forgot about theory or innovation.

Suddenly everything that any military Warder had ever complained about made sense.  In their drive toward efficiency and ease of training, the Silent Circle had lost half a millennium of progress that the rest of the world still remembered.  No wonder they could not hold the borders.

It took Geraad a great effort to put those books aside.  He wanted to marinate in their knowledge thoroughly, but it had to wait, because he had more important things to read.

The histories.

Since his entry into the Citadel at the age of ten, he had been trained and educated to the highest Imperial standard.  No common citizen had such resources to draw on, such books and teachers and lectures and experiments.  No one in the Empire knew more about the world than a Silent Circle mage.

And yet, according to these histories, he knew nothing.  Not only did the ancient histories astound him with details of the Ogre Dominion, the Northern Uprising, the Gods' Wars, the Five Great Empires, and the devastating Great Wars which had culminated in the Sealing, but the modern histories were full of things he had never been told.

Like the Heartlands wars of unification.

With his memory, it was easy to recall what he had learned in lectures and compare it to the text.  The disparity frightened him.  The oldest Heartlands tomes were critical of the growth of the Risen Phoenix Empire, comparing it to its fallen precursor-empires and referencing a Firebird cult from the Khaeleokiel mountains.  They detailed the political and cultural upheavals going on in the Heartlands kingdoms: kings being deposed, shamans blamed for outbreaks of plague, the mass assassinations of influential mages and anti-Imperial activists.

The later volumes changed their tunes dramatically.  They waxed ecstatic about the Emperor and his expanding influence, about the glory of the Imperial Light, about the rightness of reunifying the Heartlands—and perhaps every land—under a single banner.  It was those that the Valent curriculum followed.

Geraad knew a mindwash when he saw one.  He'd just never had the context before.

And he still didn't.  For all the maps and footnotes, these tomes were like artifacts from a distant world, difficult to root in his reality.  Too many place-names had changed, and too many borders: Daiki to Daecia City, Anan Kingdom to the protectorate of Amandon, Tevin Kingdom to Trivestes and part of Riddian.  It was difficult to keep the details straight even with his mentalist talent.  And the people referenced, and the notes from old folklore and dead faiths...

He needed to talk to Enkhaelen.

It was a bad idea, obviously.  He had gone behind the necromancer's back to get this knowledge, and who knew what would happen if he admitted that?  But a part of him sensed that this was no accident, no stroke of luck.  Perhaps Enkhaelen didn't want to be what he was.  Perhaps he would be willing to talk—or to change.

I'm quite the optimist
, he thought sourly, but forced himself up from the bed anyway.  He couldn't just ruminate.  He had to take the chance while he saw it.

Rian was elsewhere, exploring, so he did not need to dissuade the goblin from keeping him company.  He passed a few black-robes in the rune-lit halls and exchanged polite nods, or sometimes a greeting; no one tried to bar his way, or questioned where he was going.  Even as he headed down the hall to the laboratory, the black-robes he encountered were either pleasant or disinterested, and the doors opened at his touch.

The traffic in the hall told him that Enkhaelen was still in residence and finished with his grand spell, so he wasn't surprised to see the laboratory door still open, or the collection of black-robes beyond its arch.  He peeked inside, cautious, and saw Enkhaelen closing down a portal-frame while several black-robes used the empty slabs as desks on which to fill out forms.

“Leave them on the far counter when you're done,” Enkhaelen said blandly, obviously repeating it.  “Then if you're not seriously injured, you're dismissed.”

A black-robe placed her finished parchment on the indicated pile, set her quill and ink-bottle among the collection, then headed for the door.  Geraad slipped in to let her pass, and she shot him a weary smile; one side of her face was scorched and peeling, with black veins running up from under her collar as if to reach it, and she trailed the distinct scent of burnt hair.

“Iskaen?” said the necromancer.

Geraad twitched, then steeled himself and approached.  Enkhaelen's brows were up, his glacier gaze mild, and as Geraad halted just beyond arm's reach and fumbled for the right words, he smiled.  “Office time, hm?  Very well. 
All of you!  Quills down, you're dismissed!
”

There were some murmurs of question, but no one disobeyed, and in short order all the parchments were stacked and the black-robes gone, the laboratory door spiraling shut behind them.  Geraad stayed in place throughout, though he couldn't help but clasp his hands behind his back, wringing fingers together.

“Come,” said Enkhaelen, heading off among the slabs.  “You have something to ask?”

“I—  Yes, master.  I have lots of things, actually, but I—“ 
Don't want to die.
  “—Don't wish to offend with any of them...”

“I am not easily offended.  Just don't ask about this.”  Enkhaelen's gesture seemed to encompass the lab, the corpses, the casting circle and all the complex beyond.  “Or that,” he said, pointing upward at the Citadel.

Though disappointed, Geraad nodded; the Citadel seemed the least of his concerns.  “It's more about...the Palace.  And the Empire.”

“Ah.”

“I learned our history in my introductory courses, but I wonder if—“

“It's fabricated.”  Enkhaelen spoke flatly, motioning for Geraad to stay at one side of a covered slab as he moved to the other.  There, he folded back the overlapping edges of the two sheets to expose a corpse's torso, the chest-cavity emptied of organs.  A partial spiderweb of silver thread ran between the exposed ribs.  Geraad recoiled.

“Not completely,” the necromancer continued.  “And not far beyond the norm, either.  Most governments manipulate the facts of their creation.  Bloody coups become revolutions, oppression becomes peace-keeping, genocide becomes righteous conquest.”

Frowning, Geraad said, “I worked for Count Varen for decades, so I've seen my share of politics.  But the Emperor...I though he was a man.  The Scion of the Light, not...”

Enkhaelen reached into the chest cavity to withdraw the loose end of the silver thread.  As he spoke, he began winding it between bones and piercing it through muscle, and Geraad looked away, stomach roiling.  “He pretended, initially.  Back when the Empire was new-born.  You wish to know what I know?”

“Yes.”

“Keep in mind that much of it is hearsay.  I've been around a while, as I'm sure you can guess, but I'm not omnipresent, and there are...gaps.  But I know that this started long before the Empire's official founding.  You've heard of the Seals?”

Geraad nodded, then said, “Actually, I had a question about that too.  I remember them from class, but we learned that they were made to keep out Night Herself—that the God of Law and the God of Light forged them to protect us.  That the Sealing Disasters were Night's last strike against us.  But I've...recently read more and found talk of a Portal and an Outsider and...well, really it's all different.”