First Lord's Fury

CHAPTER 11

“You have no idea of the potential for destruction in the forces you are tampering with,” Alera said calmly. “None whatsoever.”

Tavi stood in his command tent, looking down at a large map of the Realm spread out across an entire tabletop, its corners weighted with small white stones. The air hummed with the tension of a windcrafting that would prevent their voices from carrying outside. His dress-uniform tunic was folded neatly on the cot in the corner, ready for his dinner with Kitai. “Then perhaps you should educate me,” he murmured.

Alera looked as she always did—serene, remote, lovely, garbed in grey, her eyes shimmering through one metallic or gemstone hue after the next. “It would be difficult to truly explain, even to you. Not in the time that remains.”

Tavi arched an eyebrow at that remark and studied Alera more closely. The human-appearing fury folded her hands before her, the posture of a proper Aleran matron. Had they been trembling? Did the nails look… uneven? Ragged, as if she’d been chewing upon them?

Something, Tavi decided, was definitely off about the fury tonight.

“If it isn’t too much trouble, perhaps you could explain what sorts of problems I might be letting myself in for if I go through with the plan.”

“I don’t see why,” Alera responded. “You’re going to do it in any case.”

“Perhaps.”

She shook her head. “What you are asking is going to set certain cycles into motion. The ultimate result of those cycles could be the slow freezing of the world. Glaciers that grow and grow each year, slowly devouring all the land before them.”

Tavi had just picked up a glass of watered wine and taken a drink. He half choked on it. “Bloody crows,” he croaked. “When?”

“Not in your lifetime,” Alera said. “Or in the lifetimes of your children, or their children. Perhaps not in the lifetime of your entire people. Almost certainly, beyond the length of time your written memory will survive you. A thousand years, or two thousands, or three or twenty. But it will come.”

“If I do not act,” Tavi said, “the vord will destroy my people before the snow flies this year.” He shook his head. “The Alerans of thousands of years in the future will never have the chance to exist—and you’ll never get to tell anyone that you told them so. The theoretical Alerans of tomorrow will have to look out for themselves.”

He half expected her to smile at his commentary. It was the sort of quiet, cerebral humor that the fury seemed to appreciate. She did not respond.

“You’ll help us?” he asked.

She inclined her head slowly. “Of course.”

Tavi stepped closer to her abruptly, reached down to her folded hands, and lifted them. His heart went up into his throat as he did. The fury before him was a being of almost unthinkable power. If she took exception to his actions…

But she only stood there regarding him with a calm expression. He moved his eyes from hers to her fingertips.

They looked ragged, the material of them frayed, somehow, chewed. Tavi had once seen the bodies of soldiers who had fallen into a river during a battle. The men had drowned, and their remains had not been recovered for more than a day. The fish and other creatures of the river had been at them, biting and snipping off tiny bits of flesh. The wounds had not bled. They had remained cold, inert, grey, as if the bodies had somehow become sculptures of soft clay.

Alera’s fingers looked like that—like a wax sculpture an industrious mouse had been nibbling upon.

“What is this?” he asked her quietly.

“Inevitability,” the fury replied. “Dissolution.”

He frowned for a moment, both at her hands and at her reply. The meaning sunk in a few seconds later. He looked up at her, and whispered, “You’re dying.”

Alera gave him a very calm, very warm smile. “A simplistic way to view what is happening,” she replied. “But I suppose that from your perspective it does share certain superficial similarities.”

“I don’t understand,” Tavi said.

Alera considered her hands in his for a moment. Then she gestured down the length of her body, and said, “Know you how this form came to be? Why it is that I speak to your family’s bloodline?”

Tavi shook his head. “No.”

She gave him a chiding glance. “But you have conjectured.”

Tavi inclined his head to her. “I hypothesized that it had something to do with the mural in the First Lord’s meditation chamber.”

“Excellent,” Alera said, nodding. “The mosaic in the chamber floor is made from pieces of stone brought there from all over the Realm. Through those pieces, the original Gaius Primus was able to communicate with and command furies all across the land to bring him information, allow him glimpses of places far away, and to do his will.” She pursed her lips. “That was when I first began to become aware of myself, as a discrete entity. Over Primus’s lifetime, I continued to… congeal, I suppose, would be the best word for it. He sensed my presence and, in time, I understood how to speak with him and how to manifest a material form.” She smiled, her eyes distant. “The first words I remember actually hearing with my own ears were Primus’s: Bother, I’ve gone mad.”

Tavi let out a short, choking laugh.

She smiled at him. “The mosaic was the focus upon which this form was predicated. It was what drew thousands upon thousands of furies with no individual identity into something more.” She put a hand flat to her own chest. “Into Alera.”

“And when my grandfather destroyed Alera Imperia, the mosaic was destroyed with it,” Tavi said.

“Unavoidable, from Sextus’s perspective. Had it remained intact, the vord Queen would have possessed it. She would almost certainly have understood what it meant and attempted to control me through it. She might even have succeeded.”

“And that’s why the First Lords never spoke of you to anyone,” Tavi said quietly. “Why there’s not a word of you in any of the histories.”

“No foes of the House of Gaius could attempt to usurp control of me if they did not know of me.”

“But they could kill you,” Tavi said quietly.

“Indeed.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “In a very real sense, I have been killed by the vord invasion—but it took a certain length of time for me to form. It will likewise take time for me to return to my original state.”

“I hadn’t… I didn’t realize,” Tavi said. “I’m so sorry.”

She arched an eyebrow. “But why? I do not fear what is to come, young Gaius. I will feel neither loss nor pain. My time in this form is almost done. All things must come to an end. It is the way of the universe.”

“After so long helping my family and the Realm, you deserve better.”

“In what way is that relevant? What one deserves and what one experiences are seldom congruent.”

“When they are, it is called ‘justice,’ ” Tavi said. “It’s one of the things I’m supposed to help provide, as I understand the office.”

Alera’s smile took on a bitter undertone. “Bear in mind that I have not always helped your family or your people. I am unwilling to place any creature before any other. And every action I take mandates a reaction, a balance. When Sextus wished me to moderate prevailing weather in the Vale, it would cause half a dozen furystorms elsewhere in the Realm. When he would ask me to lend strength to the great currents of wind, it would spin off cyclones hundreds of miles away. Until the vord came, I and my kin had killed more Alerans than any foe your folk had ever faced.” Her eyes glinted with something savage and cold. “The argument could be made, young Gaius, that what is happening to me is justice.”

Tavi took that in for a moment, mulling it over in his mind. “When you are gone… Things will change.”

Her eyes went unreadable. “Yes.”

“What things?”

“Everything,” she said calmly. “For a time. The forces so long bound up in this form must settle out to a balance once more. The countryside of all the Realm will become more active with wild furies, more turbulent, and more dangerous. Weather patterns will shift and change. Animals will behave oddly. Plants will grow at unnatural rates, or wither for no apparent reason. Furycrafting itself will be unstable, unpredictable.”

Tavi shuddered, imagining the chaos that would grow from such an environment. “Is there no way to prevent it?”

Alera looked at him with something almost like compassion. “None, young Gaius.”

Tavi sank down onto a camp stool and put his elbows on his knees, his head bowed. “Nothing. You’re sure.”

“All things end, young Gaius. One day, you will, too.”

Tavi’s back hurt. Some motion during the fight with the Canim assassins had pulled a muscle. It would be simple to ease the pain in a tub, a mild watercrafting. Even if he didn’t have a tub, the discomfort was minor enough to alleviate with a few moments of intense focus. But at the moment, he wasn’t sure he was capable of that. His back hurt.

“You’re telling me,” he said, “that even if we somehow overcome the vord, it won’t be over. Someday soon, the land itself is going to turn against us. We might overcome this nightmare only to drown in chaos.”

“Yes.”

“That’s… a lot to have in front of me.”

“Life is unfair, uncaring, and painful, young Gaius,” Alera said. “Only a madman struggles against the tide.”

She didn’t make a whisper of sound, but Tavi lifted his eyes to find Alera kneeling, facing him, her face level with his. She reached out and touched his cheek with her frayed fingertips. “I have always found the particular madness of the House of Gaius singularly intriguing. It has fought the tides for more than a thousand years. It has often failed to attain victory. But it has never conceded the struggle.”

“Has it ever faced something like this?” he asked quietly.

“When the first Alerans came here, perhaps,” Alera said, her eyes distant. “My memories of it are very distant. It would be centuries before I knew your people. But they were few. So very few. Eleven thousand lives, perhaps.”

“About the same size as a Legion and its followers,” Tavi said.

She smiled. “And so it was. A Legion from another place, lost, and come here to my lands.” She gestured toward the entrance to the tent. “The Canim, the Marat, the Icemen. All lost travelers.” She shook her head sadly. “The others, too. Those that your people exterminated, over the centuries. So much lost to fear and necessity.”

“When they came here, they had no furycrafting?” Tavi asked.

“Not for years.”

“Then how did they do it?” he asked. “How did they survive?”

“With savagery. Skill. Discipline. They came from a place where they were unrivaled masters of war and death. Their enemies here had never seen anything like them. Your forebears could not return whence they had come. They were trapped here, and only victory gave them survival. So they became victors—no matter the cost.”

She met his eyes calmly. “They did things you would scarcely believe. They committed the most monstrous and heroic deeds. The generations of your people in that time became a single, savage mind, death incarnate—and when they ran short of foes, they practiced their skills upon one another.”

Tavi frowned. “Are you saying that I and my people must do the same if we are to survive?”

“I am not the one making a choice. I have no opinion. I only share facts.”

Tavi nodded slowly and gestured with one hand. “Please continue.”

Alera frowned pensively. “It was not until the original Primus threw down all who opposed him, carrying out brutal war in the name of establishing peace, that they began to come to their senses. To build something greater. To lay the foundations of the Realm as you know it today.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Laws. Justice. Art. The pursuit of knowledge. It all came from a single source.”

“The ability to kill,” Tavi whispered.

“Strength is the first virtue,” Alera said. “That is not a pleasant fact. Its dis tastefulness does not alter the truth that without strength to protect them, all other virtues are ephemeral, ultimately meaningless.”

She leaned forward slightly. “The vord have no illusions. They are willing to destroy every living thing on this world if that is what it takes to ensure the survival of their kind. They are death incarnate. And they are strong. Are you prepared to do what may be necessary for your people to survive?”

Tavi lowered his eyes and stared at the ground.

There was more he could do to help the war effort. Much more. There were steps he could take that he would have believed utterly unthinkable a year before. His mind had always been a steady fountain of ideas, and now was no exception. He hated himself for giving birth to such monstrous concepts, but the Realm was fighting for its life. In the dead of night, when he could not sleep, when he was most afraid of the future, the steps would come to him.

Those steps could only be taken upon the broken bodies of the dead.

Principles were shining, noble things, he thought. Those who worked hard enough to keep them polished them lovingly—but the simple fact was that if he wanted any Alerans at all to survive, he might have to sacrifice others. He might have to choose who lived and who died. And if he was to truly be the First Lord of the Realm, the leader of its people, he would be the one to make that choice.

It would, in fact, be his duty.

A flood of emotions he rarely permitted himself to feel flowed over him. Grief for those already lost. Rage for those who might still die. Hatred for the enemy who had forced the Realm to its knees. And pain. He had never asked for this, never wanted it. He did not want to be the First Lord—but neither could he walk away.

Necessity. Duty. The words sounded vile in the lonely vaults of his mind.

He closed his eyes, and said, “I will do what is necessary.” Then he looked up at the great fury, and his words sounded hard and cold to his own ears. “But there is more than one kind of strength.”

Alera stared at him for a long moment, then slowly inclined her head. “And so there is, young Gaius,” she murmured. “And so there is.” With that, she was gone.

Tavi sat on his camp stool, feeling exhausted, limp and tired as a wrung-out dishrag. He struggled to see the path before them all, to imagine its twists, turns, and forks. There were times when an odd kind of certainty suddenly blossomed in his thoughts, a sense of crystalline understanding of the future. His grandfather, like the First Lords before him, was rumored to have the gift of foreknowledge. Tavi didn’t know if it was true.

The vord had to be stopped. If Alera could not throw them down, their path would end, abruptly and in total silence. No one would know that they had ever been.

But even if they somehow won through, the havoc inflicted by the war, the horrible price in pain and grief and loss paid by the people of Alera would leave them in no condition to do battle with the chaos of the great fury’s dissolution. A people already steeped in violence and war would still be drunk on rage and blood, blind to any other path.

When they ran short of foes, they practiced their skills upon one another. Of course they had. It was all they knew.

How to stop it? Provide his people with another enemy, to focus their wrath outside of themselves? Tavi glanced toward the Canim camp and shivered. He thought of Doroga and Hashat—and Kitai. His stomach turned in slow, revolting knots.

It couldn’t be allowed to happen. Such a struggle would not be quick. The blood-thirst of a generation of Alerans at war would be only temporarily slaked, and in the end it would change nothing. They would turn upon themselves.

Gaius Octavian, the young First Lord of Alera, sat alone and followed the possible paths in his mind. He clenched his fists, hoping in vain for an answer to come, for certainty to suddenly flow through him.

But it didn’t.

With a word and a savage slash of his hand, he darkened the tent’s furylamps.

No one should see the First Lord weep.