Rythe Falls (12 page)

             
And then Caeus bowed his head and did something that neither Quintal nor Drun had thought they would ever see.

             
The Red Wizard's face, when he looked back, was dripping with bloody tears.

             
'He is gone...and Carious was right, of course. In my madness I allowed pride to rule me. Hubris was ever my enemy. I...I am...sorry?'

             
The word sounded alien, even on Caeus' alien tongue.

             
'I went to my God to find the Crown of Kings. Carious sees all...but not that. I went to my God with my power a shield and a pennant, like an army victorious...but I am not. I should have gone as a supplicant, but my Lord God Carious burned me and chastised me like an errant child...and it was right to do so. For all my power, I am no more than a simple fool.'

             
'Welcome, Caeus,' said Drun, and with a gentle and careful hand, touched the Red Wizard's shoulder. 'Welcome to humanity.'

             
Perhaps another creature would have found such a compliment demeaning. But Caeus' blighted eyes once again turned back to mottled grey, if only for the merest instant.

             
He nodded, finally. His tears simply disappeared, sucked back into his face like rain into dry earth.

             
'Drun, Quintal...I am mad. I am dangerous. But I will help where I can. But you should know this...for all my strength in the arts of power, in the ways of the mage...there is something of this world that eludes me. There is a splinter in my sight, in my foresight...a shard of blackness that I cannot find nor penetrate.

             
'And it worries me.'

             
'Then,' said Drun, 'we will watch for treachery, for danger, from unexpected quarters.'

             
Caeus nodded. 'I am...tired. Tired at last. Excuse me.'

             
Drun and Quintal watched the creature go, this time taking the stairs to his rooms like a mortal might. Drun thought he had never seen anything or anyone look so...worn.

*

Chapter Twenty-One

In the heart of the continent of Lianthre, far across the sea from Sturman shores, there is a spot of land that looks, and feels, like some horrific and deep black cancer.

             
Upon the map, it is no more than a mark, a note, and a name.

             
That name is Arram.

             
Arram is the cancer, and its tendrils spread wide across the land.

*

Chapter Twenty-Two

A solitary Protocrat sat at an ancient wax and ink stained desk deep within the bowels of the sprawling complex named Arram. Few of the protectorate, even those within the council of twenty-one who led the vast, and now impatient, armies of the protectorate, knew what the lone creature did.

             
His name was Fernip Unger. He was good, perhaps, at two things: reading, and writing. He had been a student of letters throughout his entire life, and the saddest thing he found was that so few of his kin even knew what he did.

             
Maybe only one other, but he was dead now. Klan Mard had seen the entirety of the Protectorate's archives. Had, in fact, etched it into his very being. Created in himself a Bone Archive.

             
Fernip knew these things, but yes, he knew more.

             
But did anyone ever ask of him, but for Anamnessor Mard? Did anyone ever come down to the dark of the libraries and the archives beneath Arram and tap Fernip upon his bony shoulder?

             
'Fernip? I wonder if you could tell me what the Island Archivists knew of all this...' they might say. Perhaps one day, someone might have come with such a need. And perhaps Fernip would have told them. Would have told Jek Yrie, or Mermi Fros, the truth.

             
The truth beneath the lie.

             
Above, something shifted within the complex, and the dust from the endless rows of books, parchments, tablets, was agitated, drifting angrily into the air. Fernip did not feel the need to cough, but the dust alighted on the text before him. The text which he wrote.

             
Perhaps it would dry the ink better than sand
, he thought. But then, did it matter if it smudged, or if his hand wavered as he wrote? He thought not.

             
A sense, above, of some vast mass moving, again.

             
Nearly done, now, he thought, but this was tinged with a kind of sadness that few Protocrats would understand. What did the majority of them care for emotions but those born of fear? The dark emotions that fuelled their terrible powers...

             
Fernip felt such deep sadness because he alone understood that there would never be a reader for the work before him. He wrote it for his own...amusement? Did he feel humour?

             
He didn't. No. But he could understand it. On an intellectual level. As though the sense of the ridiculous was nothing more than an academic exercise.

             
To whom could he tell this joke? This immense joke? A joke as big as the galaxy, as big as the Protectorate themselves?

             
None would listen. Not because they would not care. No.

             
Not one of them would listen because they were all utterly mad and there was nothing left, no magic, no secret, no unveiling, that could save his kind. The blight had destroyed their minds, just as it was always supposed to.

             
It is,
he thought,
quite the funny yarn.

             
He tried to laugh, but all that escaped was a dry, rasping hack from lungs full of dust.

*

His whole world might as well have been full of dust.

             
The only one of their kind who might have had some kind of power, some sway, was gone and dead. For that, Fernip was happy indeed, because Klan Mard was a dark-hearted, evil bastard, even for a Protocrat.

             
He would have spat on the memory of the name, but his mouth was dusty, too. Parched.

             
Fernip Unger shrugged and dipped his quill tip into a small, dwindling, bottle of ink.

             
Perhaps he would run out of ink before he finished telling his grand joke.

             
Now,
he thought,
that really would be funny.

             
Scratching on the rough dry paper in the meagre light of a single candle, Fernip wrote once more.

...Rythe hangs in the balance, and like two weights on opposing sides of a scale, the continent of Lianthre faces the country of Sturma from across the long and wide ocean.

             
Sturma is naught but a small nation. A nation (to the minds of the Lianthrians that even know it exists) of barbarians. Once, that nation was strong and proud. Ruled by Thanes, and ultimately a line of kings, for a time it knew stability, civilisation, and the trappings thereof - art, commerce, architecture, religion...these things flourished. For a time.

             
Under the kings, and during the time of kings, yes...they flourished. Remnants remain, still.

             
Some of those kings were great men, some mediocre, some bad, ineffectual, even evil.

             
Kings are mortal men, after all.

For a moment, Fernip paused. He didn't tire, true, but sometimes he wished for a diversion.

             
For many hours now the cacophony in the halls, and on the land above, had slowed.

             
He realised he had no sense of noise, movement, other than his own.

             
Were they, at last, all gone?

             
He shrugged. It mattered not. But in a way...it was a kind of solace to know that Arram, the entire place, was his. His alone. Maybe this beautiful loneliness would only last for a short while...but he suspected...not.

...
Long, long before men dotted the earth with their short-lived deeds, before man even learned to write or speak, before they thought or had the ability to record their trials and victories, a different kind held sway upon that planet.

             
The Elethyn...

Fernip dipped the quill once more, nearly at the end of the bottle.

             
Once, the Elethyn ruled with hate.
And their bastard children rule it with the same tools now,
he thought.
But not for long.

...They were defeated by treachery, by one of their own kind. A creature known only as 'Caeus'.              

             
When they left is not know, but their mark did remain in a weaker, diluted race. Those known as the Hierarchy, and, hidden too long in their towers and minarets, the Hierarchy dwindled to nothing more than myth.

             
They left the land to my kind. I, Fernip Unger, am one.

             
We, together, are the Protectorate.

             
And we are nothing more than an entire race of fools.

Fernip, tireless, wrote long after the silence had enveloped even the most distant reaches of Arram.

...The places of power are merely...beacons. Arram, Sybremreyen, the Kuh'taenium.

             
The humans, the rahken, we Protocrat, even the Hierarchs, are all, ultimately, nothing more than...animals. Here to be farmed, or culled, or butchered, when the Elethyn come home.

             
We build our halls and towers high. We build our society large and far and wide.

             
And in the end it crumbles to nothing but dust.

             
My domain is dust.

             
As is Rythe.

He knew the outcome was in no doubt - the blight had taken hold. Now there would be nothing but madness and despair.

...We brought on the blight with our hate. We let it grow. We embraced it. But it is not strength. It is not a disease, or a sign that we have become better than ourselves.

             
Why does the blight affect only our kin?

             
If we'd spent more time reading, as I have, than killing...we would have known. We might have saved ourselves.

             
But we did not and no one knows but me and I will not tell because...

Fernip tried, desperately, to summon a tear for the world of Rythe, but he was dry.

...Because of my towering hate for myself and my kind...and because it is too late.

             
The blight is no disease. It is a pathway for those souls that travel, even now, as nothing more than a blood-red light. It is the path for the Elethyn to follow home.

'I'd kill myself, if I could,' said Fernip to the dust and the dark and only remaining candle. But of course he could not kill himself. He was already a long time dead.

             
Klan Mard had seen to that.

*

Chapter
Twenty-Three

When an army of men marches to war, there is disarray. No matter the discipline, the harshness of the commanders, there must be disarray, because the world is not created for petty displays of might. Roads curve, meander, head up and down inclines. Rivers cut swathes across the landscape between battles, mountains spread armies and supply lines thin.               Geography is untidy and men cannot make it into something that it is not. Armies may be pieces in a larger game, but the world is not so simple as a board upon which those pieces move.

             
But upon a plain, like that which surrounds the immense, sprawling complex known only as Arram?

             
There, an army can shine.

*

The Speculate, the leaders of the Protectorate, looked out of place. Rain made the ground soft, but it was largely sand and thirsty ground. But they were accustomed to shade and shelter, not the road, nor the weather.

             
'This is what we have to contend with?' said Jek Yrie, the most powerful of them.

             
Paenth Dorn D’tha, one of the most talented, and the leader of the Prognostication Division, looked like a rat. Her hair, straight like all Protocrats, fell to her waist and down most of her forehead. Rain dripped from each of them.

             
Haran Irulius actually shook himself, just like a dog might. Jek shook his head.

             
He knew it was madness. But he, too, was not immune.

             
To empty the whole of their home, Arram?

             
Madness.

             
To stand in the rain, like common soldiers? For this? For
this
?

             
The blight was in nearly every one of their kind. Blood-red eyes and more. The eyes were a sign of ascension. They all, even the lowliest warrior of the Tenthers, were more powerful than ever. But judgement, control...Jek could feel it slipping from himself. It, too, was gone from many of his kind already.

             
But still some core remained within Jek that let him understand that, yes, the power was burgeoning, and that the return was nearing (how long now? Weeks? Months? No longer than that, surely...) but that they were losing something of themselves, too. Jek could feel it slipping away. Centuries of planning, countless hours of manoeuvring councillors, persuading in the darkness with words or steel. For nothing? For
this
?

             
The might of Arram, the entirety of the Protectorate, had been drawn back to this barren, sand-blasted plain, for this...two men, in simple steel armour, on horseback. 

             
Jek felt himself blood-eyed and drowning in the fury of the blight.

             
Behind him, an army, arrayed as it should be. Upon the plains of Lianthre, in the centre of the greatest continent of Rythe. The largest, best trained, most powerful army the world had ever seen. Miles of steel worn by fast, terrible soldiers who spent their lives training with the sword. Bayers, awful hounds, held on leashes, ready, eager to go to war. Mages with the power of destruction a few simple words or even a thought away. Fire and talent, fury and rage...

             
And yes, insanity, but what army was not full of it?

             
The rain fell on the mightiest army in history, glistening on robes and cloaks, on warhound's dark flanks, running to drip from scabbards and sheaths and gauntlets and helms. Plumes still bristled upon the Pernant's helms at the head of their Tenther units. Not a single protocrat moved, nor grumbled, despite the insanity of the blight that boiled throughout the entire ranks.

             
Not one soldier, not one mage, no one. Nothing but the rain and Jek's words made a sound.

             
And the two men? Armoured and armed, yes...but two men?

             
Suddenly, Jek had not the slightest idea why he had order his people, his army, into this wet, miserable, sandy expanse.

             
To make war on these men...one of them old, at that? The Speculate could make out the man's grey, whiskery face even at this distance, even with his bloody eyes.

             
The blight was making a fool of him.

             
No. All of us. The blight is making fools of all of us.

             
Are we undone already? Is this what the blight leads to? Idiocy?

             
'Idiots!' he bellowed, turning from the men. Where they even there? Did he now have to doubt his own eyes?

             
'Get back in! It is not time...this was...'

             
Oril Poulgian blinked, as though waking from a daydream.

             
'A drill...'

             
Jek was thankful, but said nothing to Poulgian. They would have words, and soon.
Presume to treat me, the Speculate, like a mewling babe on a mother's tit?

             
More than words.

             
'A drill!' his voice, his words, gained strength with the power of his magic and his blight-fuelled rage.

             
Why had they come? Why?
Yes, they could go back, back to Arram...but what had spurred them to come and stand like pretty statues in the rain?

             
He turned and looked and there, still, those two taunting bastards. Mere mortals. Not even gifted. Nothing special about them at all.

             
Am I truly, truly insane?

             
He did not wonder for long. The men spurred their horses, and came toward the Protectorate's entire army.

*