“I’ve work to attend to in the forge,” said the Smith, and left me standing
beside the open box. A thrill of grephe trickled down my spine. Did I dare touch the scroll within?
* * * *
Son of my Hearth,
I have foreseen you will one day read this letter. Let us assume therefore that the race is run, the pursuers have found me, and I am
probably dead. I wish there might have been another way. Believe me. But the secrets I hold, which today are cradled within you, are of such grave import that I mark these measures as obligatory.
First:
to you, Arlak. I wish you could have been my son. I could never father a child. But it is Mata’s grace you were given into my care for these too-brief anna. I see in you such great potential. I have dreamed the Dreams of Anon. I have chosen you as the receptacle of a great and terrible fate, without your knowledge or consent. Forgive me.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered your heritage! You, Arlak, are the son of Orik, Master of Telmak Lodge, and the Eldrik Warlock A
lannah, daughter of Senbo and Syialla. Syialla was the secret daughter of Sherilla by Lucan, perhaps the greatest, and the most infamous, of all Eldrik Sorcerers. Magic runs thick in your blood. Lucan it was who created the Banishment, with my help. I believe it is your destiny to undo the Banishment.
What is the Banishment? A crime beyond pale or belief.
Long ago, the doctrine that came to be known as Lucanism, was conceived in Eldoran. The Eldrik believed that only by purification of the gyael-irfa would they be led into knowledge of the great mysteries. For purification, they had to remove the tainted, the unnecessary, the unwelcome, and the discordant notes in that great community of Eldrik minds. Rather than embracing diversity, they dreamed of a perfect unity. What they achieved was perfect uniformity, and the stagnation of an entire race.
What they wrought was an annihilation of their
own kind. The excoriation of their very souls.
I designed the Banishment to be impervious, unbreakable, and unchangeable, except by a certain key.
People believe Lucan created it so. Mark this well, Arlak: it was Talan, son of Lucan, who at the crucial moment cast an interruptive spell, which cancelled exactly that part of the great orchestration, and only that part–the working of the key. Talan’s magic it was that changed the Banishment; he made it immutable. When he realised what had been done, Lucan gave up his spirit. His suicide was for shame. In the gyael-irfa, nought is hidden. His shame would have been paraded before all, known to all, for all time.
Talan Dissembled. He
aimed the finger of suspicion at Lucan–unfairly. Meantime, he tried to have me assassinated.
‘Why?’ you ask. That brings me to my second point. I am not
of the Eldrik. I am Armittalese. The people of Armittal are most downtrodden and underestimated of the races, Arlak. But what makes me special is that I was the result of one of many experiments by Lucan’s cronies and predecessors–experiments that sought to catalogue the effects of different forms of magic upon human foetal development. Of course no Eldrik woman was chosen, only the women of slaves. The vast majority of foetuses died before term. Of those which survived, most were freaks, mad, or highly dangerous, and terminated by the Sorcerers when they began to show their true abilities. But I survived.
I survived by being a Dissembler from birth. My abilities came to light late on, during my fortieth anna–
for we Armittalese live long, Arlak, longer even than the Eldrik–and our spirits are not as strongly bound to flesh as the Umarite or Eldrik races. By then I had learned the secret of the guardtower will. I have an eidetic memory and a perfect recall of texts, events, conversations … everything. Nor do I merely own perfect recall, but I am a Synthesizer also. I can take what I learn and turn it by introspection and reflection and speculation into new, testable knowledge. The design of the Banishment, broken into 327 discrete and individually complex parts for the different Sorcerers and Warlocks who participated in its initiation, I conceived and held in its entirety in my mind.
I was there when Lucan cast the fateful spell. I was there when Talan spoke his piece. And I know the result
–perfect disaster. That is why I was, and am, being hunted. Talan and his faction fear me.
That is why, before I am found, I will secrete all this inside of you. I will
conceal my knowledge where Talan and his cronies will never find it. Inside your brain, Arlak, I will archive all of my knowledge and learning and experience and memory. I can do this because I am unique. I am as Mata made me: the unwanted by-product of a massacre of innocents.
Again, I must beg your forgiveness. Not only did I do this without your consent, but further, I cut you off from the gyael-irfa, assuming that should your presence become known to the Eldrik, they would quickly hunt you down as they did all the others who fled Eldoran during the First and Second Purges. To my everlasting sorrow, that is what happened to your mother Alannah. She loved you, Arlak. She loved you more than her own life.
I will write little more upon this history, for what I know is in you. I am in you.
Talan is utterly ruthless in his ambition, and is surrounded by many like-minded Sorcerers. But his own daughter Aulynni opposes him, as does the young Sorcerer Eliyan, who I believe shows great promise. I heard not long ago a strange and wondrous thing, a tale of a Sorceress returned from Birial, from the Dark Isle of the Banishment. I would have believed it impossible. Perhaps your next task should be to seek out Eliyan and Aulynni in Eldoran. If this Sorceress escaped from within, then perhaps the Banishment can be broken from within
, in the same way.
I wonder if you ask, ‘Why, Janos? Why did you participate in the creation of this Banishment?’ Because, with my cool, rational intellect, I convinced myself that such a course could be a tool for good, that it could uplift a people, that its use would be honourable and just, for example,
in putting aside criminals. By selecting the best we would leave behind the dross that drags down a race. We would reach toward a higher, greater, more beautiful humanity. In short, I was an idiot. An almighty fool. I deceived myself. I thought no further than the cleverness of my own creation. The perfect jail. The perfect vehicle for cleansing. And when I saw what it became … the inevitable consequences … words fail me. I gave inhumanity rule and reign over the Eldrik. Mata will judge my part in creating that cesspit of evil.
Nobody,
mark my words, hates the Banishment more than I.
It remains then,
solûm tï mik, to give you the key to the guardtower inside of your mind. Open it, delve within, and achieve the destiny I have Dreamed for you. Be not afraid to seek help in Eldoran. Eliyan is good. Aulynni is brilliant, but as fragile as a delicate crystal. Treat warily with her. And yes, in my Dreams of Anon I remember I saw two more who will come to your aid: Aulynni’s daughter Amal, who resembled you most uncannily as a child, and a blind Armittalese slave-girl whose name I never learned.
You have but to speak the word aloud and it will be unlocked for you. The word is ‘Benethar
’–my name amongst the Eldrik. We Armittalese all have a secret name. Mine you will know once you speak this word aloud.
Such a change of fate, such things of which I have spoken: My son, these things would terrify any sane man. But I would urge and encourage you. Before you lies
the opportunity to right a great wrong. Take your courage into your hands, Arlak Sorlakson. Test your mettle. Nothing would please me more. Nought else would grant my soul its final rest. And most important of all, you would be doing your people, the Eldrik, what I believe is the greatest service in their history–restoring to them their humanity.
Begging
your forgiveness, and undeserving of your love, he who was given the privilege of being your surrogate father,
Janos (Benethar) of Armittal
* * * *
I have never been a weepy sort of man. But after reading Janos’ letter, I wept up such a wealth of tears that any mountain squall
worth the name would have been hard-pressed to keep up.
I wept for
Janos, the wonderful, unique product of horrific experimentation by the Sorcerer-elites of Eldoran. Janos, who had learned, seen, and hidden so much. Creative Janos. Brilliant Janos. Janos, who had been father to me when I had none. Janos, who I betrayed as though he meant nought to me.
Janos had foreseen a great many things–that my fate should take me to enlightenment in Eldoran, albeit via the fell torture
s of the Inquisitors, that his guardtower will should defeat their every artifice, and even that I should meet Amal, and P’dáronï, the Armittalese slave who had defended Janos so ably. She whose depths I clearly understood only in a small part. But his timing was wrong. He clearly intended that I should have read his letter many anna ago, before my sojourn in Eldoran. Perhaps his visions were wrong, too?
Now, more than ever, I was convinced
that Aulynni and Jyla were one and the same person. But how could it be that one who was so set against her father Talan, the true shaper of the Banishment, should become a vile murderess? For what reason had she tortured and killed Janos–did they not both desire the same end? This I could not fathom. No dint of puzzling at this problem would turn it toward any kind of sense.
“Dinner!”
Helya called from the kitchen door. I looked up. She held her daughter by the hand. Sherillya was learning to walk for the first time.
Beautiful.
I turned to face the mountains, my gaze misted by surging emotions. I whispered, “
Benethar.
”
But nothing happened. No bolt of lightning, no mental epiphany, no walls tumbled down; all I heard was the wind sighing around the cabin’s eaves, and the faraway hoot of a hunting mouse-owl.
“I believe you’re with me, Benethar. I know you are.” My laughter made an unholy gargle in my throat. “And if anyone needs forgiveness, it is I.”
Being an account of loss and restoration, and the
emergence of the Great Wurm on a fateful day; the world-shaping, mighty Wurm; the restless, unsleeping power shaking the very foundations of the earth.
Rise, El Shashi, and
seize your destiny!
When an old man’s grephe comes strongly upon him,
He knows his time is nigh.
Listen then to his wisdom, my son,
Fill your cups while his well
is high.
Oldik Laymarson,
Verses Beyond the Rumik, Scrolleaf the First
I entered his receiving-chamber afeared, truly told, of approaching a man who in my lifetime I had barely known a few makh. It was a room set for business. I saw the walls were panelled in bragazzar wood, the floor space was dominated by a dark desk, and the musty odour of old scrolls and ink tickled my nostrils; for a moment, an echo of my chamber in the Mystic Library of Herliki. But my gaze was drawn irresistibly to the man behind the desk.
Upon
my entry, my father rose and said, “I’ve been waiting for you, son.”
“How–”
“A report came to my ears. A great disturbance upon the northern road. A mighty Wurm, goes the tale, did make merry with the ferry at the Ry-Breen Crossing.” Orik chuckled wheezily at his own joke. “The man saved the jatha at the cost of his own skin. That, I knew, had to be my son. Now hear me. I have packed my bags. A man needs little for his last journey.”
“But, father
, I–”
Orik wagged his cane beneath my nose. “I will
entertain no argument, you striploose youngling. Being over a hundred anna has its advantages. Be you eighty anna or none, you’re still my boy.”
I stared at the ancient, wrinkled creature before me, still standing as upright as
a sapling straining for the welkin above, with the inclusion of a small concession–his cane–and saw his eyes twinkle, as before. “You will be taking an old man to meet his family. I’ve seen it in my grephe. I have readied a cart, ordered jatha bought, briefed my staff, and put my affairs in order. I stand ready. This very makh.”
I could but shake my head. Perhaps it was from him that I inherited my will to survive!
“You are a hundred and ten anna if a day, father!”
“And? What of it? It is you who made me hale and hearty, my son. Is the journey far?”
“Nine or ten days,” I admitted. “But it is deep Rains.”
“All the better to spend Alldark Week with my long-
lost daughter,” said he, “and to meet my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
“
You’re a strip of stubborn old jatha-hide!”
Orik stiffened his jaw, but tempered his curt words with a smile.
“I’ve thought this through, Arlak. I ordered a covered cart complete with a built-in stove beneath the canopy, where an old man may rest and warm his limbs. You will warm my quoph with tales of your days, and I will regale you as an ulule with stories of the sea and of Eldoran, and your mother.”
Ay, truly told, I knew my cause was lost. “I will tell
you
of the Eldrik, father,” I returned, with a sullen curl of my lip.
“You
will tell me why there lives in Eldoran a woman called Amal who appears to be my very twin.”
To my surprise, Orik gave reign to the kind of wicked chuckle
that better belonged in the corridors of a brothel. “Oh, is there? Now there’s a tale for the telling, my son!”
Frankly, I stared at him.
“A tale for the road,” said he. Taking up a small gavel that sat upon his desk, Orik tapped a lever set into a small panel of levers behind him. I heard a bell jingle elsewhere in the house. Shortly, a manservant entered the room. “It is time, Frathik. Ready my cart. Bring us … Hakooi spiced chai?” He waggled an eyebrow at me.
“
I’m agreeable.”
“Chai as a libation to Mata,” said Orik.
“This is a most auspicious day. So, Arlak, did you find what you were hunting for in the mountains?”
I raised my cup three times to Mata, and sipped thrice too. “Father, in your misspent youth, were you even more indiscreet than I?”
He threw back his head and laughed.
That was when I knew
, deep in my quoph, it was going to be a good journey.
* * * *
Is it not said that where a son spits, a father spits twice as far?
I cannot attest to the truth of that old proverb, but the more I learned of Orik Sorlakson during our journey together, the more I saw of myse
lf in his eyes and in his days.
The servants and staff of Telmak Lodge gave the old Master a rousing, tear-strewn send-off. They had covered the entire courtyard in green stalks of moxi grain, symbolising health, wealth
, and happiness, and it was upon this stage that they stamped and danced and clapped, making of a simple walk from House to cart a makh’s celebration. Riotous fun! What I saw in their faces moved me. I had always known the Master Telmak held respect due to his position, but their response went far beyond a master-servant relationship, at least as I imagined it. Many had been born into his service. It was as though in leaving, he took a part of their quoph with him.
We travelled at a jatha’s walking-pace, which is gentle. We
tarried to pass an eventide with a wandering ulule who had taken upon herself the entertainment of a group of road-workers, those hardy men charged with keeping the undergrowth from invading the road–no mean task. Much did they suffer from the flesh-shrivelling bite of the leaf-adder, and the sting of threshing-nettles, apart from general exposure to cold and suns. Unobtrusively, I plied my trade among them. My father looked on with alert interest.
Like me, in his youth, Orik Sorlakson had been an ardent purs
uer of the daughters of Yuthe. “A lady in every port, my boy!” he boasted. “A Sea-Captain is expected to conform to certain standards of behaviour!” I snidely wondered how many other half-brothers and half-sisters I might have scattered around the coastline of the Fiefdoms. “Are you still sore at my not intervening when you made the Matabond with Rubiny?” he asked gently.
I nearly gagged, I felt so awful
at raising this note of guilt within him. “Nay. That is but a small note of regret amongst anna of happy memories with her,” I replied.
The second morning, he sat alongside me on the carter’s bench and took up the master-prod as though intent upon examining the tool for deficiencies.
“You asked about Aulynni,” he said, as though his words were being dragged forth by the red-hot tongs of a torturer. “In those days, Eldoran was in at peace, though in great fear. Talan, the son of Lucan, was First Councillor of the Sorcerers. He gathered in the reins of his power, consolidating his hold upon the factions, dealing and diving and rolling ukals and favours across every palm open to him. Always secretly afraid, that man. Insecure.” He spat over the edge of the cart. “Little did we know the scope of his ambitions.”
“I think the anna must have been 132
5. Perhaps an anna or two earlier, I don’t rightly remember. I was a very young man for a Sea-Captain, Arlak. I looked older, I acted older, and I came into my position by the money and favour of my father. Ay, I was talented, and brave in that way of young men who think that Belion and Suthauk will rise and fall at their bidding. I was worse than a strutting lyom.”
“I met Aulynni one event
ide in the marketplace of Eldoran. We were trading a special extract of sathic seed–oil of Rumali, it is called. The Eldrik were buying it up by the shipload, for what, we never learned, but if a Captain knew the ways of the Gulf of Erbon and the Straits of Nxthu, he could make his fortune and more. You would not believe it. Men used to scheme and kill each other to crew my ships. More oft than not, we’d leave port amidst a boiling fistfight upon the pier. Those were heady days, boy. Days you could smell the terls and ukals upon the sea breezes.”
Orik
’s laughter had a knowing edge. “Bet you could start such a fight if townspeople knew El Shashi had come to heal their afflictions.”
“
Ay.” So I should swallow this joke? To him, my mantle must seem burdensome. “Carry on, father.”
He must have sensed my discomfort, for his voice
grew gentler. “I hate to say it, Arlak, but Aulynni was a brief dalliance that meant little to me. That day in the marketplace she had a vulnerability about her that was as perfume to my quoph. I had no idea I had fathered a child by her. The Eldrik are supposed to have ways of ensuring such things do not happen. If I were ever to meet this Amal … ah, Mata! My sin against her is grievous, Arlak. Aulynni I saw–I don’t rightly remember. Perhaps a handful of times. I went home to find myself betrothed in a loveless match. I returned to Eldoran for my final voyage and met your mother there. I fell in love with Alannah and forgot all about Aulynni.”
He shifted upon the bench, holding that master-prod as though his life depended upon it. “I tried to be a good father, Arlak! To Rubiny
… and to you. I gave you a place, parents to call your own! How was I supposed to know? Mata’s fate! Is this how She cares for us? It is too hard. How can I bear it?”
I put my arm around his frail shoulders. I
clutched my father to my chest as though I were the strong one.
After a long time during which there was no sound in the forest save the huffing of our jatha, he murmured, “I’d want her to know
that I loved her–I mean, I would have loved her, as surely as Doublesun follows Springtide. Do you know what I mean?”
I murmured that I did.
After that, my father slumbered several makh.
More northerly in the forest, we
came upon places where the Wurm had passed through. Orik surveyed the devastation with a grim mien. “How big is the Wurm now, say you, Arlak? Jump down and pace out the width of its trail here.”
“Fifty-seven paces, father.”
The weather closed in upon us. Orik took to sheltering within the cart, but his voice regaled me for makh upon makh with the skill of an ulule in full flow.
When we came to the Ry-Breen Crossing, I saw to my pleasure that the ferryman’s house and livelihood had been spared. The great rope
spanning the river was intact, the ferryman was bringing a customer in our direction, and there were but two signs of the Wurm’s passing: a huge trail of flattened trees north of the ford, and a hole to the south that had swallowed the road and much besides. I directed our cart with care, thinking: how could any creature have bitten such a hole in the earth? I should know better than any man. Yet still, a stubborn spirit of disbelief inhabited my quoph.
While we waited for the ferryman, we talked of the anna that had passed since my time in Eldoran. How would Eliyan be faring? What had become of Jyla and her plotting since she attempted to break the Banishment? And what was her motivation? Orik, even more than I, mistrusted the worthiness of her motives.
“A means to usurp power,” he said. “Perhaps by removing the Banishment, she could accomplish the overthrow of Talan and his faction? Or harness the might of these Karak? Or turn the magical might of the Banishment spell to her advantage?”
We could but speculate, in our lack of knowledge.
The ferryman did not appear to recognise me. But I frowned inwardly as Orik chatted to him about where we were bound. He was so excited! Rightly so. But I had been too many anna steeped in keeping my ways secret, I thought. Obviously, Jyla was no longer concerned about chasing me about the Fiefdoms. If she could command the Wurm’s storehouse of magic from afar, what need to travel the lands? What need even to know my location?
So we crossed the Ry-Breen without wetting so much as the sole of a boot or a jatha’s hoof
, and turned those huge, spreading horns of the jatha to the western horizon.
Hunched deep in a thick burnoose gifted me by Telmak Lodge, proof against the gathering cold, I did ponder long and deep upon the changes in my life that stretch of road we had just covered, had wrought. Once, for the Faloxx to murder my parents. Twice, for the trader’s grephe and my folly at Elaki Fountain. Thrice, for my journey back home. And
, by undertaking this last journey, to grant my father his dying wish.
What was Mata trying to teach me
in all this?
* * * *
“Father Yatak!” I burshingled most deeply in the doorway of his simple chamber. “I heard you were unwell?”
How strange to stand once more within
Solburn Monastery.
The good Father coughed so violently I imagined his lungs were trying to turn themselves inside-out. I knew it at once for the river-fever, or the drowning-fever, named for the excessive
congestion upon the lungs that every Darkenseason steals many lives, old and young alike. Last I knew, the Brothers had been testing various herbal infusions and extracts for their potency against this fever.
“Do not stand upon ceremony, Brother Benok,” he whispered.
“You have suffered enough, Father,” said I, stepping hastily across the chamber to his pallet–the simple pallet offered all Brothers in their cells, in place of the usual Umarite cot.
“I suffer little.”
“With respect, Father …”
“I suppose I couldn’t stop you making of every day a miracle,” he grumbled, rising from his bed. “How you do that
… thank you. Listen, don’t fuss over me. There are some thirty penitents awaiting the Holyhand. All have needs greater than I.” The Father smoothed his cassock and peered past me. “By the aspect of this man, I gather I have the privilege of addressing your father?”