Across the continent, or, perhaps, across the world (each time Havel had been told the story, it had changed) there had been founded an academy of mages greater than any other.
—
I won’t repeat the story, Havel said.
He aimed a look, then, at first the man and then the woman, sitting at the table’s other side, across from each other.
“That’s fine,” he said.
“Be done with it, start,” she said.
In due time, said Havel.
He sipped his drink from its clay mug, misshapen and leeching the coolness of the drink to the dry heat of the day.
The fabric stretched taut above the platform on the hill let in the wind and blocked the sun, but his voice would last until sundown.
Patience, he said.
The stillness had not yet struck home.
Aranka shifted in her armor (it was hardened leather over rough fabric, uncomfortable in the heat.) Her foot tapped, and the heavy sole forced a tremor through the table, through each of their drinks.
The detachment of the army she had brought with her, that had been permitted by common agreement to wait at the base of the hill, was a dozen men strong. A miniscule fraction of the number that waited at the next hill (as far as a horn blast would carry, and the pipers made that distance long.)
Her enemy, dressed in simpler robes, carried a sack of bird-bones by his side. He was still, in comparison. The brow under his shaggy hair, under his crown of grain, remained unfurrowed, and his expression unworried despite the tightness of the veins in his throat.
Petrit had brought his own followers, farmers and conscripts, nomads and inland sailors. Four sat at the opposite base of the hill, bristling in the way that he wasn’t.
Havel waited not only for the two before him, but for their entourages to quiet, to wait. The sun had not yet reached its peak, and there was time.
He sipped the drink, again, and then said that he would begin.
—
There had been many students at the academy, and many instructors, but no individual mentor or pupil could carry the institution to greatness and fame. Not in the wastes, beside a spring, where sat the building carved from rock.
It was beautiful, detailed. (As Havel had been told, the doors alone, in beautifully carved, polished, filigree, had been shaped by ten men in the sacrifice of a cattle herd.)
The inside was equally ornate, each surface perfect and fine, and the architecture was solid and firm, ready and waiting, receptive to lecture and practice alike.
But what had made the school great was the location, the inability to leave, and the supplies.
—
“Why couldn’t they leave?” Aranka asked.
“He will say,” Petrit said. “If you will listen, he will speak. He will tell us, I am sure.”
Havel said that he could speak for himself, and that he would.
—
They had discovered a technique for the introduction of magic unlike any other, there in the school in the wastes. Perhaps it had been found in the jungles of Archfeather, or in the frost of the Baergard, or in any other place inhospitable to man. But it was there, by the spring, where nothing grew, that someone had found it and then been found, for it was this very secret that kept the master from leaving.
—
“Partial life,” breathed Petrit.
“A story,” Aranka said.
True, Havel said. Nothing but a story, for historians have no record of the place, and surveyors are plagued by hazards in every land where it might have been. For all that he knew, it might still have existed over the mountains or at the other side of the world.
“Still,” Petrit said. “Such a discovery—”
“Incredible,” Aranka said. “It stands alone in the tales of fairies and spirits. A fabulous invention.”
Havel drank.
—
The initial bargain was as any other magical effect. An insect’s life for a wind’s shiver, or for the softening of a post’s ground. A mouse’s soul for a gust, to sever a boulder or to fill a spilled cup, fingers pressed to the wine.
Rumors tell, in wars or consecrations, in great projects or explorations, of men’s lives cast to steer the elements for tides, torrents or fertile ground.
Forbidden, in every respect, to press upon another, and only a master mage, of great power and skill, might lay down one’s own life upon a storm or fortress of a grave.
The man who drank from that spring, with dry ground to either side for days and days, was changed by his thirst, his starvation and potential exile. He was weakened, and believed that he could not exit the land without a signal, without a path or rescue.
Why he had traveled, we may only guess: an ancient war of which he wished no part, perhaps, or a famine, with greater stocks at the wastes’ other side. (Only scholars and caster-mages hold candles for definite information. No answers have come, and none will.)
(This, too, remains in shadow: what the internal method may have been, in its exactness.) But he hitched upon a way to sacrifice a part of one’s soul (one particular, peculiar part.)
A towering fountain jetted from the spring, and the earth shook, nearby. The clouds dared to flutter overhead at the wild, uncontrolled fracture of a person’s being.
A great sickness fell upon the master, and he was rescued at the very brink of death by another set of travelers (their own identities, unknown) which had altered its course by finger-widths at the sight. But upon their declaration of each other as allies, and even after he had been healed, the master was unable to travel at any speed.
—
“He became slow,” Aranka said.
Very close, Havel said, though not quite right.
“He became weary,” Petrit said, on the heels of his response. “The man grew weak, and forever more he could not walk.”
Also, in part, the truth.
—
He found himself unable to walk even a half-day’s march. He had recuperated, restored his body and his mind, but he had broken off a sliver of himself.
In his desperation, he strained to repeat what he had done, in the hopes of discovering what he had lost. He was unable.
Only when he next performed his magic, extinguishing a lizard to read the winds’ direction, did he sense the sacrifice he had made.
Ten thousand steps were left to him each day, and with every casting-act that followed, that number diminished, shrinking alongside the power of the deed. Incommensurate, but in proportion, for though he could only ever manage the breaking once, it had forever after strengthened his own ability.
—
“Specific,” Petrit said.
Havel said that he generalized. The number was inexact, but the range was narrow, fixed, and so it was told to him with an appropriate guess at its center.
“And with that,” Aranka asked, “was he then abandoned? Left for dead and then again rescued?”
—
A caster-mage of minor skill, a novice, grew to talking with him as they lagged behind the traveling party, day after day. Their friendship grew, and he agreed to teach her each and every secret if she aided him in his escape to the civilized world.
Her companions, too, he promised the few riches on his person, and favors besides, expenditures of his power, but he grew suspicious of their motives.
They were hampered by him, and themselves had no interest in delaying the journey’s end, nor in the greater part of what he offered. They were travelers, nothing more, and had no use for storms or mining shafts, channels or farms.
—
“They could have used a pack animal,” Petrit said. “His services would have provided them with wealth, and they knew this. Why did they not?”
“They were foolish,” Aranka said. “They marched under no banner, in this tale, and I am sure that is why they will be rewarded, will they not?”
One question, Havel said, for every answer. There are questions without answers, but every answer has a question. Both yours lead us on, and they will be acknowledged.
At this, Petrit leaned forward.
—
As they had ridden steeds, and shared his lot between them, the master’s burden grew. The sickness, it seemed to them, had grown within him, and any step taken in his name to carry him fell short against the limit he had split.
His ability to follow worsened when a terrible thunder struck, and the skies opened. It was as if the sea had fallen into the dry ground and consumed it, so began the parched, broken soil to drink the rain. The horses’ hooves were swallowed by the muck, and progress became impossible, yet no shelter could be found in the shallow valley beneath an open, hostile sky.
Within the hour, their state had become dire, and they settled upon what they perceived to be the only solution: to trudge back to the master and his newfound apprentice whom they had allowed to fall behind.
Through the beating rain, and in the devilish pits and gaps beneath the churning flow, they soldiered on to meet them.
By then, the mud was up to the waists of the two they sought to find, and though they reunited, the caster-mage found himself afraid. The plan was obvious, the only route to survival, yet though he placed his hands upon the horses and the few other animals which had lasted through the mad dash, his concentration was ragged, his mind divided and unclear.
As their lives were taken, he struggled to hold his palms upon the thrashing beasts, and yet it is said that he cast with the force of ten men.
Perhaps, it is said, he was somehow fueled by panic and desperation. Perhaps this was how it first had been. Others tell that he severed further parts of his soul that day, unnoticed. Still others would have you believe that the initial fracture had pushed him to a peak of magical power unrivaled for many years.
It is known, all these reasonings aside, that he held back the wind around them, and thus the rain; that he stilled and hardened the earth, reaching one hand to that swirling around him, and then down to the hardest part; and that he raised them upon a platform above the flood. Each shaking the elements to their roots, and each before a pinch of sand would have passed through the glass.
It is known, too, if the story is to be believed, that he suffered grievous wounds inflicted by the dying animals. They became infected, and in his already weakened state, unable to walk even an hour, he could not reach a capable doctor. The magic in which he had trained proved, if not his undoing, then no help at all in the final days.
He would soon die, immobile, in a place very near where he had first thought he might.
—
“It hasn’t been found,” Petrit said.
No, Havel said.
Petrit sat back, crossing his arms, and then reached up to adjust the placement of the shifted crown of grain.
“How?” he asked. “With such a monument?”
“Weatherbeaten,” Aranka said. “Destroyed. If it exists, the way he’s spoken, the site will have been reduced to ruins. So goes idle spirit in the face of practicality.”
Petrit glared at her, but said nothing.
Havel glanced at both, between them, and waited for the moment to pass.
—
Neither the travelers, it is thought, nor the school founded by that apprentice, held to any particular nation.
Both faded into obscurity, remembered in fable and in their effects. Some hold it to be the beginning of the empire, its first seeds planted in the standard practice of high magic.
Would that the story held more definition, I would share it, but the magnificence of the academy stood in sharp contrast to its surroundings. The oasis was razed, in part, by dissatisfied acolytes of the tradition, and fell into disrepair.
Fewer and fewer, swayed by promises of grandeur and power, were willing to throw themselves to the figurative pyre for improvements they might otherwise have made. Study and patience have carried many a great leader, soldier, or mage, and soon the prevailing thought forgot its room for exception.
The doors shut, abandoned, and one must imagine that the few remaining masters, confined to their fields, rooms, or beds, perished without the steady train of students and supplies.
—
“What does this have to do with the settlement?” asked Aranka.
She stood, her chair rocking behind her, and came around the table to the alcove at the side of the meeting-place, where sat the hour-glass, the sun shining through the trickle of sand.
“At the beginning of each day, turn the glass. We have met the middle already, or near to it, and made nothing of the time.”
Nothing concrete, Havel admitted.
“The mediator’s methods reveal a purpose,” Petrit said. “Allow him to proceed, and we may become enlightened.”
He nodded to Havel, as if he had chanced upon some great truth and chosen to share a sliver.
Nothing of the kind, Havel was forced to say.
It ran contradictory to his nature to state a clarification with such definition. Yet there was nothing else to be done but mislead, and to disrupt the summit would be unforgivable. Were it not for the lives in the balance, Havel might have attempted to heal the rift between the two peoples.
As it was, the armies waiting and the vast lands at stake, he could not conscience a perspective. He had only the ability to aid them in providing their own.
Another, he said, before the mid-day separation. It had begun as a tale for children, and it would give them more to discuss.
—
In a faraway place (and, by this: properly distant, a world away) there was a woman whose magic did not manipulate the wind and earth. The sacrifices to power it were of different sorts, too: time, and the burning of spices, from whose ashes and smoke were formed impish creatures the size of fists.
Each was fragile, immaterial, and mischievous in the extreme.
The smallest had no brain, and would batter themselves against the nearest walls, chittering and collapsing.
The next largest could plan and scheme, climbing and crawling, and were not so foolish as to immediately destroy themselves. They were obedient, if dull, their cleverness expressed through dexterity and a barely concealed guile. Any order given to them faced subversion or willful misinterpretation, but in the broadest, they obeyed, smiling from the base of one pointed ear to the other.
The largest of them all were heavy, dense, at most two handspans tall, and could not be so easily dispersed. They could speak with clarity, in sentences rather than in brief bursts of half-formed words, though they rarely chose to use any words at all. Creatures of action, these, compliant in each summons, and yet they were rarely used.
These most capable, most silent minions were rumored to cause injury, death, or disfigurement in the long term, corrupting the man or woman who created them in snatches and trifles. (The list runs on to ruin, exile, erasure, and other terrible fates, but these are more difficult to substantiate, and were considered even then to be the more dubious claims.)
—
“To the meal,” Aranka said. “I tire of these comparisons.”
Havel explained that he meant no such thing.
“Allegory, then,” Petrit said. “Transparent and untrue.”
She concurred, and for the eighth time in eight days, the two were united. For the sixth, against him, and the other two had been rants about the unaffiliated rebels to the east.
You broke for freedom, said Havel. In two separate instances and factions, but there is no contradiction in seizing the hour for yourselves.
Eat, drink, he said. Evaluate your position with the surrounding would-be nations, if I may guide your conversation, but adjourn, then, and be ready to resume.
When the level of sand in the glass had changed, it was decided, they would begin again.
Havel was left to sit alone. He remembered what he had said, as he ate from the stores of dried greens and loose bread. He rehearsed what he would say and reminded himself what he wouldn’t.
At his signal, one of several waves to an observer with a spy-glass, an amphora would be brought from one side or the other at random, tasted by either side, and made available to him to refill the drink he had emptied.
But the amphora in its wooden stand was half-full, and he refilled the cup with care before drinking, filling it again, and returning to where he sat, facing the glass as the time ticked through it.
Too long, Petrit conversed with his group, relaying the facets of magical power they might attempt, inspired. He was animated, effusive, invested after the previous day’s disappointment. Their restlessness was quelled at the cost of tedium, and it would only return in greater force.
Too short, Aranka parleyed with her lieutenants, reining them in once more, promising gains and defenses, inroads to renew their patience. She was bound to keep them in check, and to inform them on her dealings, but the obligations competed, and every deficit of definite headway was leaving them more eager than the last.
Havel was no reader of the wind, but he knew them both better than he had expected or wished.
Each alliance was thin in its own right, a basket woven from freshly picked, still-drying grain. When they sat opposite him at the table, it was obvious that the tension had grown in each camp, and that she knew it while he did not. If he mollified her by inducing concessions with lectures in history, battles and exploration, then the scales would tip towards him, and yet Havel would.
Then were the details of magical practice to which he had been privy, and the catalogue of crops he had known and their seasons of growth, and Petrit would grow disillusioned.
Havel had determined, in his appointed role, that it was parables, stories and myths (the provenance unclear) that would bring them together and set them thinking in the same ways.
It would lead them towards shared truths, if both parties could stomach compromise (and then, by the powers’ grace, an agreement or treaty.)
It was disquieting that Aranka sat first, shortly before the appointed hour, and in silence. More troubling was her stillness. She had heard all that she would hear of the staid, solid tales to be shared around campfires or before childrens’ beds, to thrill or to soothe to sleep.
It was worse that Petrit was eager, expectant, when he arrived a moment late, and asked Havel to begin as if he were a student, buoyed by the opportunity to dispense what he had just learned.
Further divergence.
“About the nations,” Aranka said. “I’ve thought to follow your request. The rebels lie on our border, above the Desolate Lands. They must be removed. Whether conquered, driven and scattered, or destroyed, they cannot remain. An organized force poses too great a threat to our security.”
“What would you have me do?” Petrit said. “You’ve named a problem without a solution. I won’t be manipulated like this.”
“You’ll be swindled by—”
Stop, Havel said. I’ll tolerate no accusation of deceit by my hand or by yours, just as I would not indulge its reality.
“There,” Aranka said, “you have it. But I am coming to a solution. A proposal. Oblige.”
Please, said Havel.
It was his addition, not a prompt for hers, but she added the word.
“By all means,” Petrit said.
“Lend me the army,” she said.
“Formally—”
“Formalities can wait.”
“All this is,” he said, “is formality. To postpone the very purpose—”
“You would consider us joined?”
“You’re requesting the use of my army.”
“Formally,” she said, “Radaved has no army. So I’ve been told.”
The distinction may be pertinent, Havel said, but I would consider whether it is in this particular request, and conversely, who is benefited by agitation and argument.
It was more forceful than he had been, but as opposed as they had begun, the conflict over words missed the first real substance of the day, and that substance had come early.
“How many?” Petrit asked. “How much?”
He expected no answer from Havel, who listened and drank.
“Numbers are secondary to commitment,” Aranka said. “Enough to repel them to their main camps along the sea, and be sure that I will ask for no others besides.”
“I would say the same, were it my demand, and I would receive a would-be traitor’s welcome for my supposed gesture of good faith. I am sure of that,” said Petrit, “and no other besides.”
“I meant to allow for latitude in your execution,” Aranka said.
“I will take that in the spirit it was intended,” said Petrit. “And I will take a favorable interpretation of that intent.”
“As would I,” she said.
“Continue,” he said, “if you would.”
Havel set about allowing him the time to think.
—
The woman had fallen deathly ill, and had endured the long path to relative health. The sickness from which she suffered had spread to her husband, a woodcutter, and he was yet to recover. Worse yet was the condition of her children, a son and a daughter, who were besieged by hunger and chill as the infection ran rampant, confined to their beds.
In desperation, she opened a tome she had not breached for many years, there beside the precious few storybooks and histories which held no value, or with which she could not part for the sake of the children.
She had spent the last of her family’s coin on food and, in a twist of cruel irony, firewood, the last of her spice-stock traded for healing herbs.
There was no time to spare, and nothing to burn but for the scarcest, most crucial elements of their home.
The weakest, cut-rate summons in the book, a bare imitation of even the hasty conjured vassals, took nothing she didn’t have.
But it was flimsy, collected and shaped from pollen in the breeze, dry leaves caught in eddys, and the dust of dry, early autumn in the logged tracts of land outside the city. At the first gust, instruction, or bird’s call, the creature blew apart as if it had never been there.
Another attempt, and as she strode towards the market at the town’s walls, a barker scattered her creation. A third was destroyed by the wail of a sickly infant, her neighbour’s child, and she fell to her knees there in the byway, nearly crushed under the wheels of a logging-cart.
But she could not fall victim to her fear and sadness forever, and it was anger that brought her to her feet.
—
“Food,” Petrit said. “And pack beasts to carry it. I cannot, won’t, expose the guard or their support in a journey to the east, and the casters I lead are too valuably positioned where they are. For goodwill, I can lend one of your battalions as a token effort, and nothing else.”
“Do you not trust me to return them?”
“I doubt whether they will return intact, and the promise of a favor in return must be kept. They have a habit of falling through the slats.”
Aranka stood. “Name your price, then, to provide a detachment. For the establishment of a garrison in the east, when the rebels have been driven back.”
She poured herself a drink with ease and recklessness, nearly cracking the amphora as she set it down.
“A delegation of your best soldiers to the west, and a trusted ranking officer to guide them. It is impossible to doubt our shared interest in the city, and despite your wont to scorn the term, I believe even you would find it petulant and vain.”
Havel tensed at the remark.
Aranka sat, finally, and pushed her chair closer to the table.
“You’re right,” she said. “Strength for strength, an eye for an eye.”
The possibility of assassination was discussed, poorly-veiled threats were issued, and bargains struck, consequences for reneging on the deal.
Petrit’s second was his brother, while Aranka’s was a childhood compatriot, a soldier who had risen through the ranks alongside her, breaking from the army when she had.
Each would accompany their leader’s end of the exchange.
“And then?” Petrit asked.
He leaned back, stretching his arms. He straightened, then, more hurriedly, and caught the crown that had nearly fallen from his head.
“We regroup,” Aranka said. “After my campaign and your diplomacy. Separately.”
“I was asking him,” Petrit said.
—
She exited the same way she had entered, the door left unlocked, but for the candles bundled in the looseness of her clothes. Enough for hours of light through the winter, but her purpose in stealing from the merchant’s son was not so petty.
Burned, in the depths of the forest at dusk, where the fire was invisible to woodsmen and to her family alike, the wax formed into a stronger, more stable creature under her command.
But the improvement was delicate, soft and pliable, or hard and brittle where the wax had hardened too long. It was the fastest material in the book that would go unnoticed until the pit of the year arrived, yet with those merits to the wax, its product was deformed.
Faceless, nearly immobile unless prompted, flexible in structure and in character, empty unless filled with order it was as likely to misunderstand as follow.
It defied her time and again, wandering and straying, but it scampered and scurried after her with aplomb once it understood, tearing bits from its body as it went. Candlewax was strewn along the branches and bushes of the path she walked in her return, and by the time she had noticed the holes and tears in her puppet, the pieces it must have left behind, it was too late to fix anything in the dark.
Her husband lay in more sweat than straw, his fever luring him to the cliff’s edge as he slept. The children had fed themselves half-portions each of their remaining gruel and bread, and they were restless in their dreams.
Awake until the sunrise, alternately perusing the pages she had long set aside and fretting herself towards madness, she conceived her plan as a whole for the first time.
It was only the next night, after a series of terrible barters, that she raised the Candlewax once more from the bowl where it had lain throughout that day.
The creature loped along behind her on its stubby legs, into the town. She was loath to lift it and further deform the hunched, irregular being, further increasing the connection between them, and had ordered it to the shadows.
The moons were raw that night, bright enough to cast them long and dark, and though the poor homunculus stomped its way between them, smashing its own feet, it remained unseen and unheard.
It was fortuitous, for she was not gifted with the same diminutive stature, and try as she might to avoid suspicion, she was noticed.
First, attention came from a drunk urinating on a building’s side; an odd-duck early-riser of a chicken-herder, then; the night watchman stirred in his post at the corner of a gate, but neither she nor the dropped, still-burning cigarette by his foot roused him from his slumber.
Brushes, each, eyes she could deflect with ducks of her head or short waves, but each person to see her was (unknown to them) a silent condemnation. A testimony against her, were she singled out and publicly tried, and a reminder that others were suffering in indulgence or isolation. (Or stricken, as she had been, by grief without reprieve, by poverty and plague.)
But she shunned the thought to reverse her course, for to sacrifice herself, were she caught, was just. And it was just to rip from the wealthy what they could not use, if it would feed those living on seam-strings and spare threads.
She sent the Candlewax over the wall of the alderman, and it left scrapes and shreds of wax along the stones around his house. Inside, it blundered until it retrieved a chalice of silver, and painstakingly delivered it over the same wall, smearing and succumbing to the weight.
The chalice dropped into her hands covered in wax, which had been made softened and heated by passings through the gathering-room, near the fireplace. She dropped it, holding herself from a scream, but the chalice clattered against the paving-stones.
This alerted the watchman, where the mere presence of the woman and the Candlewax had not, and upon awakening, he turned the corner. How could he not glimpse a woman with horrible burns of wax across her hands, a trail leading into the noble house, a chalice engraved with his initial and seal?
—
“She was stupid,” Aranka said. “Was the fool put in irons, mauled, or hanged?”
Havel confirmed that she had been hanged, and that the family had followed.
“Not to the gallows,” Petrit said.
In death, said Havel, but they had not been held responsible. How could they be?
“How could she be?” he wondered.
Aranka quaffed her drink and swallowed with difficulty, wiping her mouth.
“How unabashedly—”
Hold, Havel said. Then?
“You’re wrong,” Aranka said, “but it’s of another time.”
Havel held back a sigh, drinking back the dregs of his own mug, and took his own advice before he spoke.
Petrit rose.
“We’ve done enough today,” he said. “We’ll start early tomorrow.”
“The sun hasn’t set,” she said. “The hour runs late. We’ll settle now, and then.”
Havel looked between the two of them.
Her face was wrought with anger, while he was merely discontent, but the two of them were opposed in temperament and in territory. They could not stand each other. Yet it was unprecedented to abandon the day so early, no matter the progress that had been made.
Just as his mandate was to keep them all from violence, and to right them, whenever possible, from offense, he was charged with preventing them from stalls and dead-locks against each other.
He said that he was obligate to bid them sit and talk, to press out the knot into a connection or smooth break, to further both their adopted peoples.
“We’re not doing this for you,” Petrit said.
“I won’t,” Aranka said.
“First light.”
She tapped the scabbard at her hip in acknowledgement, wordless.
Each departed without another glance at him, and he sat, wondering he had failed. His mug was empty, and yet he had no urge to fill it anew.
—
Far afield (and in this tale, though not yet, Havel took heart and courage) the capital city of a great kingdom had fallen to siege, a final step in its long decline. Invaders lay beyond the gates (barbarians, opportunists, mercenaries, and a dozen other measures of men.)
The king, young and impetuous, shut himself in the cells of the lowest prison, condemning himself to moulder. He cast away the keys and the guards, for if the walls were breached, the citizens would die, and until then, it was higher will that he suffer the same fate as his people.
He starved, then, before the siege broke, and cries and whimpers were heard from the outer cells above the oubliette, so reported the prisoners there (themselves starving and vengeful.)
But the citizens, free, defied his instructions and those of his heir, a nephew. They opened the gates just as they were beaten down.
Those towards the front of the crowd were spared, and those at the rear were forced to turn their pikes and forks from the remnants of their own army to the invaders’ vanguard. They failed and were murdered where they stood.
When the onlookers, those who had admitted their enemies in hunger and fear, saw what they had wrought upon their great city and their fellow men, they revolted against those who had slaughtered so many.
Half butchered themselves in despair, and the other half were torn apart by the van they had welcomed moments before, thinking them saviors from the slow deaths visited within the walls.
—
“The border must be natural,” Petrit said. “For a division between our lands, if no geographical feature can be held in the estimation of my people, and yours, the arbitrary line will be pushed back and forth. War will always be threatened, and those on the border will always be at risk.”
“They risk death in any case, from skirmishes and conflicts. Perfect security— peace is a fantasy of an older time. A casualty of the past decade. Your forefathers may have told you to hide and to cover the weak when the horns blew. It no longer works.”
Havel let the reach pass. Less and less, they had welcomed his interference, though he thought it necessary, and her argument otherwise held a certain merit.
Petrit glanced at him, and then at her.
“It’s nonsensical,” he said. “The division breeds conflict. A system of grids has never worked, either; the land has peaks and valleys, ebbs and flows. A natural border is the only method for the people to accept—”
“Why must they?” Aranka asked.
“Beg your pardon?”
She drummed her fingers on the table.
“Why must they accept the split immediately? Whatever we tell them, they will grow into the division, and they will prosper or they will die.”
“Acceptance precludes want of force,” he said. “Force we must reserve against outside nations and pockets of rebellion, if it must be put to use.”
“Acceptance,” Aranka said, “breeds dissent. If they sense that their opinions are noteworthy—”
“They are,” said Petrit, strident.
“—then they are liable to rise up as we have. They will fail, but those failures will cost. If my kingdom cannot stand as a body, it will be overrun. I won’t have that.”
“For a king to be favored by his people provides him stability.”
“And it makes him weak. Frail. Vulnerable. I am seen as these things already by men who pledge me fealty that I maintain through fear and through respect. I cannot cede whatever boundary you proclaim over the most convenient streams and hills, joining them far from fairness. I will not.”
Petrit glanced at him again, and when Havel offered no comment, he was signaled.
—
The city, conquered and ravaged, pillaged and burned, had within it a secret, most defensible core within which lived the most distant scions and heirs to wealth and power, insulated from the dangers of the world. An enclave for them, that a handful might rise against an enemy that their prophecies foretold.
Too early, too sequestered, and ironically, shortsighted.
Its guards, subject to the whims of weather and war, were broken and beaten by the rampaging number who had breached the walls (and against only that advance, perhaps, they might have fought, but they were nothing to the avalanche that followed in their wake.)
Every building ruined and crushed, every horror perpetrated against those who had dared to have been born noble or elite, swaddled against the pains of the city and the terror of the lands beyond, left one stronghold (aside from the scant, already depleted armory which had been picked clean and promptly abandoned.)
A temple building, in which was practiced the religion and learning of the secluded few.
Those within were yanked from its doors, mutilated and slewn. There was no prisoners’ quarter for them (and those in the cells, who had relished their king’s conduct, were themselves left to die behind their bars.)
Yet within, they found the contents of the defensible retreat: ancient scrolls, incense, perfumes and wrappings, wax tablets, tables and furniture. Implements for writing, tending gardens, cooking, brewing, and enacting various obscure religious rites. Plates, cups, trays. A heap of material that might once have been a century-old forger’s anvil. A motley collection, in short, of tools of no use to the invaders.
In this last-by-chance bastion, they had expected stores of food or water, firewood, or weaponry.
To their frustration, there was nothing of the kind, and they demolished half the temple in their fury, tearing it apart in search of hidden precious metals or caches of rare tropical vegetables.
Nothing.
They burned the rest, then, and found themselves shocked and horrified at what the smoke revealed.
—
“What?” Aranka asked.
Petrit was still in thought, but at that moment his consternation eased, and he ushered on the story’s conclusion with a curt flicker of his fingers, like he was shooing Havel away.
—
The tools went up in flame, and the cheering, roaring entrants found themselves disappointed that not all burned with a satisfactory ease.
The sole exception (for each other material in this sanctuary had been treated with an excess of care) was the paper and wax, incense, and the perfumes that seemed to catch the flame from a contact to a grasp. The smells of those agents were pungent, almost painful to the nose, and (together with the possible value of the materials) it was determined to leave the bulk of the stocks.
But the indignity of the stench, of the assault on the nostrils from an unexpected corner, threw a contingent of the army into a frenzy. They had finally defeated their enemies, so they thought, and put an end to them, yet their senses had been struck from beyond the grave.
The only way to truly extinguish the kingdom, in living memory, besides the extermination of nearly every civilian, was to destroy its most crucial records. It could not wait, for their language might be learned, and others might take up those colors and names. (Such was their justification for their petty revenge.)
The first scroll burned unevenly as its corner caught the fire. Frustrated to every extreme, a captain tossed the scroll into the center of the pyre, and there the scroll was consumed in an instant and in its entirety.
Its letters, however, remained. The ink, and the scratches with which it had been dispensed, drawn, suspended in midair amidst the smoke, and it unfurled as it rose into the shape of a scroll unfurled, being read.
At this moment, seeing the destruction of the paper and no reason to stay his hand, a lieutenant tossed another scroll from the pile into the flames. Seeing that, the foot soldiers he commanded took up the mantle and made their own contributions, hurling scrolls and then tablets, with such fervor that the stacks they had been placed in fell under the removal of so many parts.
And during this, as the captain shouted for them to stop, his voice drowned by whoops and chants, masked by the crackling of the growing fire, the shadow of the ink grew larger.
The imprints and marks grew, suffused with the remnants of more and more ink, until they hung high in the air, near the clouds and just as large, like the skeletons of tremendous avian creatures, running black as night in the mid-day. Next to them was the wax of the melted tablets, stretched like taffy until their accompaniment seemed almost to form the wings of such bird-beasts. And each discrete element of the disquieting tableau formed a scene.
A drawing, or a tract of words, drew into a repetition of the events described therein, a stage-play with the stage and actors drawn in flaxen or sable lines. Swinging swords, poets’ pens, natural disaster and harvests, there against the grey and white of the sky, and a column of fumes supporting the snatches and parts of the kingdom’s history in its ragbag presentation.
They quenched the fire, but it was too late.
The appearance of these events, majesty and spectacle aside, could only be interpreted in one way: the kingdom’s history had been revealed, had transpired, and now was over; the long-foretold enemies had sacked the city and now sat in its ruins. A city that everyone knew stood in the center of a prime agricultural region, surrounded by fertile fields, and had been besieged for many days.
The army of conquerors was weakened, hungry, and after this display of magic, fearful. They had secured only the fortifications they had damaged in their recklessness and spite, and these were not enough, as they had not been for the citizens within.
They had plundered, but were unable to reinforce the gains they had made, and were swiftly overrun by opportunists. First from one civilization, and then, it can be surmised, by another and even another in turn, for eventually the city was plunged into irreparable chaos in its passing from hand to hand, and the names and titles of the kings and generals were forgotten. (Even those which were cast in the sky, their descriptions and acts plain for the world to view for many spans around.)
—
“Pretty,” Petrit said. “Encouraging, that isn’t.”
“It positively bursts the chambers of the heart,” Aranka said. “You had an answer.”
“I’ll place the line,” Petrit said. “My surveyors will, or the men of the number I send to the east, if I personally prove incapable of sparing the time, but I will sign my name to the border, straight and true from end to end.”
“Unacceptable,” Aranka said. “You’ll—”
Caution, Havel warned.
She stared at him, and soon slammed her drink to the table so hard it nearly broke.
He stared back, refusing to allow his eyes to widen at the speed or the sound.
Petrit cleared his throat. “I’ll— what will I do, in your mind?”
“You will have the opportunity, under your system, to place the border as befits you.”
She raised the mug as she raised her objection, to assess the damage at its base and the table’s surface. Neither was harmed irrevocably (a hairline crack and a slight dent.)
“And you will have the chance to check it’s been drawn properly,” Petrit said.
Aranka breathed deeply, and the tension in her brow eased, though even then her expression could not be called anything but a frown.
“This is true,” she said. “Find an angle, and we will place it as we come to other arrangements. Informed by other considerations, the amounts to be received will emerge.”
Petrit chuckled, and then straightened, serious, as if he were at the point of wiping his brow.
“Accepted,” he said. “I’ll enter it into what we’ve decided. Havel?”
“I’ll testify to that, if you wish to continue.”
“We’ll take it down ourselves,” Petrit said.
He looked to Aranka, and she nodded, her frown deepening as she did.
“That’s—”
“It’s not tradition. Perhaps it even flaunts in its face,” she said. “Keep your memory and make it true.”
“If there’s a disparity, we’ll call on you,” Petrit said, “but for now, for the moment, let us speak?”
He raised his voice in petition, not proclamation, but his certainty was plain: Havel was no longer wanted, however needed he knew himself to be.
His additions had been slipping from facilitation into near-opinions in themselves, perhaps, in an effort to perform his role. And yet Havel knew that the two remained at odds, that the confrontation would escalate, that first they, and then their guards, and then their armies and peoples would come to blows, if he did not periodically intervene.
The fables in his tool-belt, and the historical facts that informed them, the understanding of cultural attitudes and recent events would not die with him. But in that meeting, he was the only person who could provide what he knew. No other person in the gathering of soldiers, mage-casters, and secretaries could supply such a combination, nor deliver it with his unassuming presence.
He was impartial, and every other person for days’ travel had chosen their side, scheming to advance it and to sabotage the other. If not him, then who would rise to fill the gap? Who could possibly hope to maintain it, to keep each extreme from clashing through the space between?
“…forgive me,” Petrit said, “but that’s idiotic.”
Aranka scoffed.
“Men with spears take from men with grain. The reverse is a claim no serious negotiator would entertain.”
“Perhaps you will,” she said.
Civility, please, Havel said.
He felt himself reaching for a branch above a rushing river, and he felt it break in his hand, the current carrying him away, both their eyes upon him.
“It’s handled,” said Petrit.
He prodded the table with a finger, searching for a turn of phrase Havel could have supplied him if he had only asked.
“Service does not strip us of the ability to stand,” Aranka said. “Nor fight.”
“Near enough what I would have said.”
Havel shoved his chair back, stood, and circled around it to push the seat beneath the table.
“You’re leaving us?” Petrit asked.
There were ten thousand responses in his mind, a storm around the table where he had sat opposite them both. The most equivocal, diplomatic, that left him room to return if they required him.
It’s best that I leave you to make the next decisions at your own bargaining table, Havel said, without interference. I’ve ascertained it so, for the next days, and I will be near, as I must, if I am sought.
“My thanks,” Aranka said, relieved rather than angry.
Petrit seconded the sentiment, though the lines in his face deepened rather than relaxed, a different flavor of strain drawing him within its grasp.
Aranka was the one to raise a hand in farewell, chagrined as she had been, without the same from her prospective counterpart.
Havel set off down the hill, through the path between the flattened dirt to right and left (to the camps, entrenched and practically inextricable.) Without a message to those gathered there, he strode down into the relative valley, and partway through that journey, his stride became a walk, then a plodding trudge.
There were no others who could take his place, and often, in what others might call arrogance but what he deemed within the bounds of pragmatism, he was reassured by the extension of that certainty from the surrounding plains to practically the entirety of the world.
Instead, it was the very place itself that had vanished from around and beneath him. With the fall of empire had come wounds fresher and harsher than the scars he was meant to recall, open and bleeding. Unattended, they would poison the water and salt the earth. (And they were managed, however bright the individuals, by a generation who had felt the sundering as a call to violence, their passions inflamed despite their outward censures and condemnations.)
He balled his fists as he walked, but eased his fingers the moment he recognized the action, and drove himself forward with the motion of the arms as with the force of his feet. Fruitless, to wallow in frustration. Worse to show it to the men and women with spy-glasses, no doubt scrutinizing his every action as he approached the pass between the hills where they, too, were camped.
Havel had said that he would remain in the region, ready to respond to any call, and the purpose of his presence held true. But how could he improve the relations of two people that had grown to shun him over triviality and disposition? Peoples that had emerged from the whole he knew and loved into entities unto themselves, pieces that rasped against each other like unsanded wooden joins?
He saluted to one army and then to the other in quick succession. Cursory, courteous, never preferential.
In the pit of his stomach, beside the hunger, was the weight of the knowledge that there would be no horn-blast to recall him, no messenger sent riding out to track him down.
If there were horns, it would be for the armies. If there were messengers, it would be to the armies of the surrounding states (and that was if their polities still practiced declarations of war.)
And so there was nothing to keep him from journeying off into the hinterlands where neither could reach him, far afield from the concerns of their diplomacy and its certain failures.
It was that decision which allowed for the union of both kingdoms, sure to be great and prosperous, stronger than any state before or after. (So said Havel’s replacement as she presided over the signing of the treaty.)
Writings Of Orion 