Alium, page 35
“At least you romanticize the notion of loyalty. What, pray, is the point of this mythmaking?”
“Of course you will only believe me when I say that this presence hidden in the heart of Zenidow is a greater power than Altum has ever known.”
“Ah! So you have found me a weapon! Well this is fantastic news.” Chalem’s eyes darted to the image of his father solemnly envisioned among the hard shoulders of past Kings, painted in vivid reds and creamy whites, those famously tremendous shoulders bunched up in a cataract of blue and gold cloth sweeping as in a mighty gale off and behind the Kings before him. “I have your temper, Father,” he said bitterly to the fresco, “but see what comes of trust.”
“Ever fixated on might are the Sons of Chalor,” Nubes grumbled. “And none more than you, though it must sound a compliment in your hall.” He followed the King’s eyes to the stoic image of Chaldred. “Your father’s temper indeed! You were ready to exile me when I crossed your threshold.”
“That fate still is not unkind to my ears, Nubes. You gave not the slightest premonition of your actions, and I’ve heard nothing of you for a quarter of my life. So appease me! Where is this weapon?”
“Well, I really don’t know what it is, but yes if one were somehow to actualize and control it, they might accomplish much more than winning a silly war.” Nubes gave a harrumph. “There is but one name for it which arises from the Fabric and which was spoken to me as by the voices of the Somnambiunt themselves together in my dream: so it is called Alium, even I suspect by the Xol if Fozlest suffered a similar vision. Though, of course, it must have some true name among its creators.”
The King sighed. “You don’t have it.”
“No. But it is quite safe for now. The real issue is what I’ve learned in living so close to its influence. There is great tumult among the eyes and ears of the heavenly bodies, Chalem.”
Nubes raised his staff. The very skin of the air seemed to ripple before the throne, distorting the distant tableau of Kings. The folds of bent light compressed, flowed, split and parted, revealing wider and more clearly a bottomless, black deep dusted with twinkling white stars. At the fading edges of the vision, wisps of darkling energy trailed into the slanting multicoloured rays beaming in through the tall windows, so that Chalem could not tell precisely where the immaterial gave way to the physical.
If he were surprised, it was only for the fifteen years absent of Nubes’ brand of magic which so humiliated the trifles of Lucetal’s greatest wizards. Already he was comforted by the familiar luminance of his family’s oldest ally, to look through this sudden window unto the Cosmos.
The living plane of vision flexed and warped, stars streaming into fluid continuums, but when all had settled, and once again those points of light shone in space as individuals, there too was a new hue in the darkness. Supersaturated vermilion seeped up and billowed through the viscous black, and in the swollen carmine bellies of this bloody nebula shot inexorably forth, as great bladed blights against the stars, deadly black shapes with enormous serrated beaks, trailing long cords of writhing shadow.
Chalem leaned forward. “Caelare among us,” he said, touching the ring of bone about his left thumb. “These are… they are of course very different but, they are eerily akin to…”
“That they are,” Nubes muttered, watching the strange vessels slip through space. The wash of red played in his ice-coloured irids. “This fleet has consumed many worlds more mighty than Altum even at the height of Elechlear civilization. Domination is tantamount to its commander. Even, I suspect, It craves the rebellion of the conquered, so that It may defy the orders of Its master and absorb all life in the universe. It is called Duxmortul, one of the awful Wrudak, the bastard progeny of the Old King, the Shadow of Primexcitum’s folly. The Wrudak’s natural powers over the mind and spirit liken even Fozlest to a blithering fool, for they are wrought of god-flesh and armoured in technologies the likes of which stupefy the most advanced in the Cosmos.”
Chalem stared into the vision stubbornly, his eyes glazing with mannish denial. “I can see that their crafts are fearsome and wholly alien. But they cannot reach Altum so easily.” He cleared his throat. “If the Reach is so vast as you’ve often said.”
“Vaster than you can imagine,” Nubes said ominously. “And ours is a planet entirely across the galaxy from the Wrudak fleet. They passed into the outermost whorl of Semoteus two winters ago, but that utmost distance between us only speaks to the magnitude of the threat. I have observed these ships for many years, Chalem, and calculating the speed of their progress was a minor thing compared with what intelligence I bear now. Duxmortul’s ships will enter Altum’s atmosphere in seven years. The vessels at his command are much faster and greater than those of the fallen Elechlear which you hoard.”
The vision collapsed inward like a great ethereal scroll rolled up at once, and Nubes brought his staff loudly to the golden surface of the dais. His countenance was grim to behold. “We must equip ourselves, King Chalem. Raise Fort Soarlin to the sky! Call for peace at once and join forces with the Xol! We shall share the ancient starships with all who can pilot them, and prepare to protect our world lest it collapse into the sucking hand of darkness!”
Nubes’ quirky old voice had quite vanished, as if it were only an act; now boomed the deep, remorseless command of an elder wizard, echoing timeless through the high ceiling as it had many Kings before, mingling its bass with the roar of the sea. Chalem gazed into the glittering windows as the call washed over him. His tired shoulders sloped forward, sceptre screwed at the dais like an elegant cane. For five hundred years the crimson mage had advised the Sons of Chalor, but no matter the status of the speaker, not one would have even acknowledged this request. It was to go against the constitution of Lucetal itself.
Though he considered this foundation of his city’s history in a thought, already his eyes were lifted to heights, he imagined, so awesome as to leave behind their worldly integrity. High above the flagstones, up the glossy wall, he looked over the painted, stately brows of his mindlessly subservient predecessors to a vacant space of high stone wall where he imagined one day his own proud face would look down on the proceedings of the great hall. In those days, Lucetal would be more powerful than ever before.
“Often I have thought to break the seal of my fathers,” he said evenly. “Imagine the impotence of Xol sorcery before the full might of an Elechlear army.”
“What? That is not at all our need. You speak of intolerable waste,” Nubes said with fury blistering behind the composure of his unflinching gaze. “The Xol will be our strongest allies when the Shadow falls upon Altum.”
Chalem’s frown pushed the creased corners of his mouth into the pouches of his jowls. “Of course,” he groaned, still gazing up at the fresco. “Perhaps the threat to our world is enough to quell the devilspawn until the doom has passed.” He blinked as though for a while his eyes had grown dry from openness, and turned to Nubes. “The end of the world… it is at least of import enough to weather the wrath of Lucetalians deceived.”
“A faction of revolt will surely form, but that is the price.”
“Surely; surely. To be at war no less, desperate for peace, at bloody, bloody, endless war. Just the sight of an Elechlear ship, how it would appease them knowing that the fighting might end in a day.” Chalem snapped his sceptre to the dais. “Ah, but to discover that one has swung a primitive metal tool in the stead of divine fury incarnate. What will my knights say when they learn that they have lost so many brethren who might have been spared by the atomizing hand that is luxint energy? What will they say, wise one, when they learn that they are not to avenge the dead with these new weapons, when they learn that arm in arm they must walk into hell with the Xol demons they hate as a right of birth?”
The growing fog of the King’s eyes thickened as he croaked out these last few words, and his meaty knuckles grew white around his sceptre, driven like a stake into the golden floor. He twisted the pike as if sealing a kill, though he spoke clearly and calmly. “Yet, your council is fair. You are wisest in the Kingdom, and older than us all. Yes. Let us be done with this war!” Chalem rose at first gingerly for his sudden passion, but then steadily, his bones crunching like pestles and mortars of stone and gravel. Though he lurched and swayed, he rooted himself at last straight-backed and poised, and upon his blazing brow was a great dignity.
Nubes saw little to be trusted in that sudden glory. Already he had little patience for Novare, and like many wizards was quick to anger, though he hid this fault deftly. He had served under seven of Chalem’s predecessors, and even the most brutal and uncompromising had not such lust for conquest. Yet this youngest descendent of Chalor was truly the most trusting of mages that Lucetal had ever known, a characteristic quite honourable in a man whose sworn enemy was a race of entities born in the light of the Fabric.
To this King, Nubes was no conjurer of tricks, no demonic deceiver or blasphemous summoner conscripted purely for intellect and worldly understanding, handed down over the years like some glorified advisor. Instead he was a powerful mage, and the source of true knowledge about the world and the Cosmos, a place—the greater universe—that only he, in the whole Kingdom, knew for what it was in truth. Yet for all the matrices of history and lore and demonstrations of astronomical mathematics and lessons upon the nature of the Fabric and physical law that Chalem endured, Nubes suspected his chief value to the King was in his prescient eye on the mind of Fozlest, for he knew that nothing was more important to the King than power.
“So you will call off the army,” said Nubes heavily.
Chalem wrung his sceptre. “That I shall.”
“Then I shall go to Fozlest and reveal to her what I know of Duxmortul and the Wrudak fleet. And,” he looked askance through one piercing blue eye, “I will inform her of the Secret of Lucetal. Surely she will comply to join forces if you have already retreated from the black forest, and even more worthy of trust will you be when she learns that you offer up a new power for the protection of the world we share.” With these words Nubes turned and descended the dais swiftly, striding out over the thin strip of blue carpet.
“Stay awhile, old friend,” Chalem called suddenly, when the wizard was halfway to the door. “If I’m to reveal the troves of Lucetal at last, certainly you wish to see them. Won’t the Demon Queen benefit from a more detailed account of my new technologies?”
Nubes stood with his back to the King for a moment, like a red shade. “Indeed,” he shouted back at last.
“And I may as well display the fruit of the Elechlear first to the army’s finest, as they’ll soon educate the troops in preparation.” Chalem rang a silver bell taken deftly from his robes. A young page appeared, listened on one knee to the King’s wishes, and shot off again into the high halls which wound back and around up through the terraces of the palace.
*
Chalem ambled carefully down the steps of his stage, pivoting from each broad platform with his stabbing sceptre, and moved slowly across the spacious room. The changing colours of the iridescent window-scenes turned and sparked as he passed through their slanting rays. His long blue cloak, emblazoned with biting white panther and golden, serpentine prey, slid along the stone floor with a hiss like rain until he came to stand beside one of the ceiling-scraping parabolas of filtered sun. The rose and magenta chips of light cast from the tableau of twilit galleons cresting the sea illuminated his waist-length yellow hair as he leaned against the wall beside the tall window, listening to the sea.
Nubes remained in the centre of the hall, studying that ever-evolving fresco above the door, glancing over each of Chalem’s fellow Kings of the Third Age. His eyes fixed upon the terrifying visage of Chaludren, the first King of Lucetal whom he had served. In those days, when the wizard was young and dared not unsheath his wit, the Lord of the Capital wore a tall, golden crown atop his bald pate, and was envisioned here as well in a radiant suit of gilded plate armour. The beardless, hawk-eyed face allowed no compromise; the utterly thin lips betrayed no emotion. Chaludren had executed all who spoke critically of his reign, always quick to demonstrate the power of his sovereignty to the people lest they feel comfortable in his shadow. Each slightest crime was a direct offence not only to himself, but the integrity and sacrality of his government.
It had always seemed to Nubes that Chaludren would inevitably unleash the great secret, but those ancient rooms beneath the city had remained untouched. Granted, there was no war to be had during those times. That King’s thirst for power had been chiefly over his own people. The Xol of Chaludren’s day were left alone, and even then, though Chalem would insist his peoples’ hatred was marrow deep in the bones of time, the purple folk were respected rather as a compelling myth, guardians of the distant forests across the sea. Even had Chaludren sent his armies over the desert, or landed his fleets along the sylvan coast of Efvla, no commander could have had the spirit for conquest that thrived now in all but those of the Red Tower, Occulimontis, where Nubes’ students masked their studies ever more carefully, thinking that—were the war to end and their intellects undermined—all workers of magic may be hunted down and slaughtered like the Xol.
The first to answer Chalem’s summons was tall Donlan, Captain of Cavalry, high commander of mounted forces and chief in all matters of beast-taming. A storied hunter and taxonomer of many novel species in his youth, he was now a lean, coal-coloured old man whose soft brown eyes melted the hard, chiselled shadows of his fatless face. His short, poorly cut hair was studded with cowlicks and he had a nose which could stab a man. From his wiry shoulders fell a cape of blue, diaphanous cloth, so light and soft compared with the rough leather jerkin he wore beneath it, and the thick black sleeves of his shirt. Around his waist was a silvery, corded belt hung with three rapiers, gemmed at each hilt in red, burgundy, violet. Against his sandy trousers were the distinct pale marks their scabbards left over years of wear. Like the King he wore sandals.
Donlan was of equivalent age to Chalem, and knew Nubes well. Always he had loved the wizard, as many stoic Novare secretly, and few proudly do. After bowing before the King, he strode to the wizard eagerly, warmly clasping his dark hands over the other’s and smiling. “Nubes, you daft fool. My spirit breathes again seeing you wandering our halls once more. I heard you made quite a scene at the docks!” The two embraced, and the old wizard seemed frail in the arms of the dark champion.
“And you, not a day older, horseboy,” Nubes snorted with a vigour that contested his appearance. “I thought you’d at least have greyed a little by now! But you and the King both! If Chalem is the endless day, still your hair is the shade of night.”
“You’re one to talk. Ever the day I met you your vitality hasn’t changed the least bit. A wizard’s tricks eh? Or are they illusions?” Donlan lowered his sable eyebrows as if scornfully, but such was always his way of playing games.
The wizard’s eyes flashed in return, unable to abstain the compliment. “At a certain age one can only appear so old.” He laughed heartily. “Besides, I am no illusionist. I promised long ago never to deceive a friend.”
Next into the room stomped the hard boots of stout-hearted Ramcrone, Captain of Knights, sculptor of any who fought armoured upon the ground with shield and blade. Many of his knights rode horses in battle with the hosts of Donlan’s commanders, but once their legs struck down it was his law they followed, for it was he with which they chiefly trained. His hair was short and deep red, his eyes a flaming blue. Like Donlan his face was cleanly shaven, but his chin was stout and broad as any well-bearded warlord would envy. He was younger even than many of his knights, but a legend already in the capital and in the songs and stories of his foes. His talent with a blade was hallowed, and none thought to challenge him.
He appeared girt in a dull grey cuirass, silver greaves, and gauntlets reaching behind the elbows, a weighty broadsword across his back lest battle find him unawares. Upon him else were no adornments of cloth or fealty, and he wore beneath his armour only black leather, for he cared little about striking a noble figure. One would scarcely guess that his mother was the greatest blacksmith in Lucetal, for he attended little to the condition of his equipment. The metal pieces protecting his trunk, shoulders, limbs, though masterfully wrought, were storied with dents and scrapes, in some places awfully warped by the corrosive blood of the Xol’s foul war-beasts, and appeared as old as any set of armour in the Kingdom. He carried too his beaten, scarred, silver helmet beneath one arm, and from it though no plumage shot, one could tell easily that it was the headgear of a great leader, for it had upon its cheek the rune which means in Lucetal “commander of commanders.” Ever the soldier, upon bowing he came and stood silently, awaiting orders.
Last and most silently to arrive was Vespia, Captain of Rangers, head instructor of all engineers, archers, and assassins. She swept into the hall as a dark wind. Her jagged hair was jet black as her uncompromising eyes. Slim and blade-like she was, and nimble, yet there was terrible strength in her movement. She wore loose-fitting fabrics belted with a leather strap just as black, and there was sure to be a diverse assortment of knives strapped beneath her flowing tunic, or fitted in her spotless boots. At her shoulders were regal midnight pauldrons trimmed with gold, and upon the rightmost was the emblem of her rank, for she was proudest and most loyal to the Kingdom in all the army’s finest. Her face was scrunched into so grave an impression of ceremony that even the stone-browed leader of the knights seemed next to her quite relaxed.
