The Childless Ones, page 47
“I have to go now,” Jack said to Sarah. “It was very nice seeing you again.” He hugged her as if worried he might break her and kissed her on the forehead.
Jack drifted in and out of sleep much of the ride up to Providence. He had been worried about how seeing Sarah would make him feel, but now he realized his fears had been unwarranted.
He was in a brief stretch of being awake (though he didn’t open his eyes), when he heard Moira on her com.
“Hi, Robert…Oh good. I’m glad you and Cori are having a good time…What’s that? No. Actually…I wanted…I wanted to talk to you…I’m glad. Okay. Yeah, I know you’re busy and everything. That sounds great. We’ll talk next week when Cori gets back and everything…Yeah…Great…I’m looking forward to it too.”
From Padgett’s Rise and Fall of the Alderian Empire, published 613 Years After The Fall
“On the End of the Lunaris Dynasty”
In the 601st Year, Emperor Kaleb finally succumbed to the illnesses brought on by his advanced age, thus ending his fifty-three-year reign, which was characterized by great military success and Imperial expansion but also by costly wars. Though Kaleb sired four children, two of whom survived into adulthood, neither were able to succeed their father. The former Crown Prince Patrin (who would have been Emperor Patrin VII) died only months before his father, never having sired any offspring, despite being married twice. Kaleb’s second son, Marcellus, while surviving his father, had several years earlier been diagnosed with madness and sent to live in a sanitarium. As a result, when Kaleb died, the throne passed, as the Alderian Council had dictated, to Kaleb’s second cousin, Kilborne, making him the first of a new Galsworth dynasty. While many suspected that Imperial policy would remain relatively unchanged after the dynastic succession, this prediction was not borne out. Within the first six months on the throne, Emperor Kilborne I—who as a soldier during the Second Haroumi War and general during the Great Uprising, was no stranger to the darker side of Imperial expansion—laid out what he called the Six Pillars of Reform, which amongst other things, put an end to aggressive Alderian expansion, assigned grand council seats to each of the provinces, and created a path for independence, albeit a difficult one, for those provinces who wished for it. Of course, many Imperial officials predicted that few of the provinces would actually opt for secession. While annexation into the Empire may have been a violation of those former nation’s sovereign rule, once in the Empire, many of the annexed territories enjoyed a number of economic and political advantages that they were not likely to want to give up.
FOURTEEN
THE SAPLING
611-612 Years After The Fall
All that morning Padgett dreamed of fire and death tearing through the Westwood.
The bodies of Mandrakhar—pierced by arrow, ripped asunder by sword and axe, or trampled beneath the thunder of horse hoof—littered the forest floor. The ancient trees burned in a great conflagration whose smoke blacked out the sky. At the center of the blaze, where the fire had started and where it now burned hottest, was where the oldest of the trees had been.
Padgett could see the ephemeral embodiments of the memories held within, floating off into the sky, gone forever, as the Tree shriveled, blackened and died.
But then he was somewhere else: a courtyard surrounded by a decrepit building of many faded colors. And he saw the jewel inside the scepter glow, its hue cycling through every imaginable color before settling on a pure, brilliant white that blazed brighter than the sun. Root-like structures began growing from the bottom of the scepter, which, when they reached the soil, plunged into the earth.
He opened his one good eye.
He was back in his chamber in the Sanctum of Ilyeth, staring upward at the detailed, vaulted ceilings. He sat up and exhaled a long, slow breath. The outward look of serenity on his face hid his combination of excitement and horror.
He went to his wardrobe, a fine piece of late-Phaidonian make he’d inherited when Master Szilvia finally passed, and located the items he sought, placing them on his desk: the white scepter and the small, egg-shaped red jewel that belonged inside it. So much of his life had been dedicated, in a roundabout way, to these two things. The former had been found some years ago in the tunnels beneath the old Phaidonian ruins in the Westwood. The latter had been in his possession slightly longer but had come at greater cost. Even after he possessed both of them, he’d searched for so long—five years—to understand their purpose.
Now he had it. But at what cost?
He should have guessed it would have to do with the Mandrakhar. These two items were allegedly of the Forefathers; according to legend, the Mandrakhar were the Forefather’s chosen people.
He removed a volume from his bookshelf and flipped through the old journal that had belonged to his one-time friend and mentor. He’d read these pages so many times he almost knew all the words by heart.
Setting the book down, Padgett got dressed, packed some belongings, and readied himself to leave the island. The first ship left just after dawn and he would be on it. It would be a long journey back to the Westwood. To think, when he found the scepter, he had been right near where he’d needed to go. He just hadn’t known it.
He hurried down the corkscrew staircases of the Sanctum. Few were awake yet and everywhere around the air was still and silent such that each of his footsteps felt like a kind of trespass. He was already an old man by normal standards, but this journey, he thought, would mark an end to something that began in his own adolescence, long ago. And afterwards, he would enter a new, perhaps final, stage of life.
Vorlan, seed keeper, woke to shouting, the trample of horses, and the smells of things burning that were not meant to burn. A red glow showed through the single window of his cottage. Not far away came the terrible music of steel on steel. He recalled something from long ago—war, death, so much blood—more feeling than memory, the yulthanispel, memories of the ancestors.
He regained himself and stepped out onto the landing, high up amongst the branches. It was nearly winter, but a hot wind greeted him. The sky was still dark, but the fire—fire everywhere—provided ample light. Two hundred paces away many of the huts at ground level, many of the trees, burned brightly. Below, against the backdrop of the flames, a woman ran towards the gates. She pulled along a child in each hand. He couldn’t make out her face in the smoky red light. The horse sounds grew near. Time seemed to pass very slowly. Two riders, humans not Mandrakhar, gained on the running woman, the children, from behind. The distance between them closed. She called out, a single scream. Then the falling of the first rider’s axe, the second rider’s sword, and the screams stopped. The children never made a sound.
He stepped back into his cottage, closed the door, and sat on the floor, out of view from the window. He slid over to his dresser and found his hatchet. Up until now it had only been used to cut fallen tree branches.
He heard someone, slow methodical steps, walking up the stairs. He tried to grip the hatchet, but it just sat in his semi-closed hand. He was no fighter. The door opened and Vorlan prepared to meet his end.
It was only Flynn.
“What takes place in the current world near to us?” Vorlan said.
“Someone attacks us currently,” Flynn said. His voice was quiet, strained. He was one of the oldest in the settlement—nearly twenty now. He had begun to show the first signs of the wasting sickness. For months, his hair had been the white of a swan’s feather, his skin a translucent cream that had begun to reveal his bluish and reddish veins beneath.
“By which people and for what reasons?”
“I . . . I know not,” Flynn said. “But the unknowns transformed it to fire . . . the Tree.”
Vorlan knew which tree.
“You must…become nothing from this place,” Flynn said. “You own the role ‘seed keeper.’ Keep the seeds safe.” He hunched over. He looked tired. But so it was with the sickness.
Vorlan shook his head. Being seed keeper was only a ceremonial role. Everyone knew this. No Trees had been planted in fifty generations. Without the methods of the ancients, methods that were beyond them, the seeds could not sprout. They would just sit inactive in the soil. Their fate would be the same as all the other Mandrakhar throughout the Continent: adrift in the world, untethered from their pasts. “Does not such an action lack purpose? If the Tree no longer lives, we have lost ourselves.”
“Perhaps. But the title you own mandates certain duties.” He gestured to the small, gold-inlaid wooden chest on the table.
Vorlan unlatched the box to behold the smooth black acorn-shaped things inside. He closed the box again.
“My horse. Take it,” Flynn said. He pointed down through the floor.
“Will not you need it?”
“My body maintains a state of tiredness prohibiting travel,” he said. “I will . . . sit . . . and rest.” Flynn sat down on the straw mattress.
“Where should I go?”
“Eventually to Ilyeth, home of sorcerers. Some generations past a sorcerer lived amongst us. People called him Kam Rhys. Perhaps he can help. But for now, that is too distant a journey. For now, go east…The capital of the empire of men.”
“The capital?”
“Many Mandrakhar live there. You can blend in and find safety until you can get passage south. The empire of men does not love our kind, but neither do they allow murder within their walls. Also, there lives a woman there who you can trust. A human. She will help you.”
“A human?”
“Yes. People call her Corinne.”
Leaving his home. Going to the capital. Trusting a human. It was all too much for him. “How will I find her? The stories tell that it requires a day’s march simply to go from one end of the capital to the other.”
Flynn removed a small piece of parchment from underneath his shirt. “A letter. I think she said where she worked. A house of knowledge. The letter has an age of three years, but maybe she works there still.”
“And what does she appear as?”
“How many years have you, Vorlan?”
“I approach my eighth,” he said.
Flynn looked at his fingers as if counting. “Yes, then I believe you shall recognize her when you see her.”
Corinne sat at her desk in the cramped Imperial Library office overlooking Bethsemene Square. Through the tall, narrow window she watched people walk beneath the domed crowns of the stone pines that lined the walkways. In one secluded section of the square, a man with black hair and a woman in a gray dress stood beside a hedge kissing. Perhaps they were in love. There would have been a time some years ago, when she had just come to the capital, that she might have wished to switch places with such a woman, to be again in the embrace of a lover. No longer. Corinne’s days for romance were past. She accepted that. Her life was no longer one of the heart but one of the mind, and for this, this second act, she was grateful.
For the last week, she’d been working on making a copy of Jerome’s History of the Continent that had been ordered by the library in Vicus Remorum. Despite the monotony, one of the things Corinne loved about her vocation was how much it permitted her to read—indeed, required it. The histories weren’t her favorite; they often digressed into endless lists of places and dates and battles, but they were better than nothing. Her favorites were the epic poems of the Old Masters who told stories of love and heartbreak and courage and sacrifice and redemption. Sometimes she felt like it was only in stories that life could transcend into something greater than its usual, disappointing reality, and so in this way, the storyteller, the poet, were professions of the highest order.
When her pages dried and it was time to end the day, Corinne closed the two large tomes and descended the stairs to the office.
“How goes the book?” said Schumm, one of the head librarians and her supervisor. “Will it be ready by next week?”
“I think so.” She pulled her cloak, a tattered thing she had brought with her when she came from the West those five years ago, tight around her.
“How are you, dear?” he said now. Schumm was a kindly man; although, since his wife had died two years ago, Corinne could see him regularly considering her in his eyes. What kind of wife would she make? Corinne wasn’t interested. One marriage was enough for this life.
“I’m well,” she said and tried to smile.
It was still another month before the spring equinox and the air was chill. Corinne rushed home along the cobblestone streets. The most direct route to the rooming house she lived in took about a quarter hour by foot; however, the route Corinne took was a circuitous one avoiding the Mandrakhi Quarter.
When she’d first arrived in the capital, she spent much of her free time in that part of the city. So long as she brought coin, she was reluctantly welcomed into their meal houses and their shops. The Mandrakhar here in the capital were different than the ones in the Westwood. Here, they lived their short lives without a Tree, without the inheritance of their ancestors’ memories. Still, they had felt familiar, comfortable. Sometimes though, comfort was the last thing we needed. Now she avoided the place.
When she returned to the small one-room apartment she rented above a clothier’s shop, she undressed and washed herself in the basin of water she had left over from the day before. She made a meal of boiled turnips and some of the dried meat she had stored away in her cupboard. For the rest of the evening, until she fell asleep, she read, by candlelight, a book borrowed from the library.
It was the next day she first learned of the violence in the Westwood. It was a wonder she heard of it at all. The capital hardly concerned itself with such backwaters. Schumm brought it up casually during lunch in the mess hall on the first floor of the library.
“A pity,” he said. “A slaughter, they say. Nearly all of them killed and the entire settlement burned to the ground. I was no great fan of the Lunari, but there were fewer of these fanatic outlaws running around when they were in charge.”
“And who did you say this group was, again?” Corinne said. She tried not to envision the attack. “The Order of—”
“Of Men? Of Man? I’m not sure. A bunch of illiterate crazies, no doubt. And a stupid name, to boot. They pretty much hate and mistrust everyone; they think the Mandrakhar are the offspring of the Demon, think the Kallanbori are conspiring to take over the Empire. I understand much of the Westland is no longer Alderian territory, but if you let that kind of cancer grow outside your borders, sooner or later it will be at your door.” Schumm picked up his bowl of stew and slurped down the remainder of the liquid. “Now you lived in the West, Corinne. Did you ever have any dealings with these elves?”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, is this stew too spicy for you? Here, let me give you my handkerchief.”
The stew wasn’t too spicy. She took the handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “Thank you. Now what were you saying?”
“Oh . . . I was asking about the elves. Did you ever have any dealings with them in the West?”
“They don’t like being called ‘elves,’” Corinne said but then tried to give him a reassuring smile to show she wasn’t personally offended.
“Oh, is that right? See, I’ve seldom ever spoken to one, so how should I know? So does that mean you did have dealings with them?”
“Yes,” she said. “From time to time.”
It was long enough ago that most of the Mandrakhar she’d known would have most likely succumbed to the wasting sickness by now anyway. She felt a disabling sadness move through her nonetheless. If the Tree had been destroyed then Erlan truly was gone.
Sera and Nob had just got done with a tough job, over the course of which they’d each taken their share of physical abuse and racked up quite the bill with the local healer. The case was a complicated affair involving corrupt nobles, murder, infidelity, incest, and stolen jewels that Sera still wasn’t sure she’d gotten straight in her head. The point was, they were in bad shape—and the fact that both she and Nob were getting a little older (fine, a lot older) certainly didn’t help. In no particular order, Nob had been:
• stabbed in the arm by a butcher’s knife
• sliced with a spear on both hands
• burned by a cattle brand
• smacked in the face by said cattle brand
• punched by a dwarf (not Sera, a he-dwarf)
• kicked by a half-horse in the chest and
• thrown off his own horse into a thicket of thorny rose bushes
Sera’s list of injuries, while less extensive, still included being:
• clubbed by Redcloaks on two separate occasions
• choked and then kicked between her legs (thank the gods she was a woman) by the aforementioned dwarf
• locked in a barrel, and
• almost drowned by accident
Sera was considering retirement. At the very least, they were both in dire need of a little time off.
Alas, it was not meant to be.
Not three days after bringing this latest job to a close, Sera and Nob were returning home after an aggressive night of imbibing spirits and generally making merry (drunkenness dulled the pain of their recent injuries, Sera reasoned), when Sera opened the door to the office, and there, sitting in the dark room, was a man whose face was hidden in the shadows. Sera and Nob were both given quite the surprise, their shock undoubtedly heightened by their inebriated states.
Neither of the pair were usually the type to resort immediately to violence—Sera because she wasn’t much good at violence, Nob simply because he was predisposed to politeness—but on this particular night, Nob was, as Sera would have labeled it, “out-of-his-mind drunk.” Without a word, he unsheathed his claymore and charged the shadowy trespasser, who remained unmoving in his chair.
“Slow down, Nob,” Sera said, but he didn’t. It was only as Sera drew closer, as Nob’s blade came downward in a deadly arc, that she recognized the figure.
