Shadowblood

Chapter Nine

The great wyrm waddled along the Eastern road, a huge reptilian ship carried along by the current of troops. Halim was a week’s march behind them, lost behind ranges of hills. In the howdah, Asea sat under a parasol reading. Rik envied her the ability to do that. His mind raced even as he tried to keep still. He was reminded of their barge trip to Harven. That had not ended well either.

Without looking up Asea said: “You are restless.”

“I am.”

“You could try reviewing the meditation exercises I taught you.”

“I have. This bloody potion makes it difficult to concentrate.”

“All the more reason to practise. It is not always possible to work sorcery under ideal circumstances.”

“I take your point.” He said the words slowly and with emphasis. She sighed and closed the book.

“But you are not willing to act upon it.”

“There are times when it’s difficult to concentrate and this is one of them.”

“You are normally a very focussed young man, Rik. It’s what makes you such an apt pupil. Tell me, what is disturbing you?”

“Everything. Nothing. Nothing I can put my finger on anyway. It’s just that my life — all our lives — seem to be spinning out of control. We are marching to war in the East just as if I were still in the army.”

“You still are, Rik. We are both part of it. There is no escape from duty. Not in times like these. Not ever, really.”

“Look at all these men marching. In a few weeks they may all be dead. In a few weeks they may be walking corpses.”

“That’s the risk a soldier takes, Rik. If war does not get them, plague might. If plague does not get them, hunger might. If hunger does not get them, accident might. If accident does not, old age most certainly will. Everything dies, Rik.”

“Terrarchs don’t.”

“Terrarchs do. We simply live longer than humans, Rik.” He looked at her long and hard, trying to measure her youthful beauty against what he knew of her age.

“Are you really two thousand years old?”

“I am two thousand, one hundred and fifty nine years old, give or take a few years.”

“Why do that?”

“The lengths of months and years on Al’Terra were somewhat different from those of Gaeia. I am converting my age into your years for the purposes of satisfying your somewhat impertinent curiosity.”

He considered this. She had told him that the climate was different on the Terrarch homeworld. He had not imagined such basic things as the length of a year might be different. It opened up whole new vistas of strangeness.

“I talked to a sorcerer in Harven who claimed he would give up years of his life for the opportunity to talk to you.”

“You are doing so. I hope it’s worth it.”

“What is it like?”

“What?”

“Being so old?”

Asea laughed. She seemed genuinely amused but there was a hint of anger in her voice. “You have a lot to learn about tact, Rik.”

“This I know. Are you annoyed?”

“Never apologise for being curious, Rik. At least not to me. The only way to get answers is to ask questions.”

“Are you going to answer mine?”

“Let me think about it. I am not sure there is any easy answer I can give you.”

“Any answer will do. It does not have to be easy.”

“Why this sudden interest in matters of life and death?”

“Kathea is dead. I killed Malkior. There are times, looking at the things in my mind when I know what it’s like to die. The Quan killed many people.”

Asea flashed him warning look. Karim was the wyrm’s mahout. He was her servant, and loyal, but there were some things better not discussed in the presence of anyone save themselves. She raised her hand, and he felt the flow of power as she invoked a ward. He could almost picture the lines of energy weaving around them. His sensitivity to such things had increased recently. External sounds vanished, as the bubble of privacy swirled into being around them.

“This is probably not the best place to discuss this, Rik,” she said. He knew this but the words had forced themselves out anyway. Some compulsion lay on him, some force within his mind.

“I have killed a lot of people,” he said. “I have a lot of strange dreams.”

She cocked her head to one side, concerned. “Go on.”

He tried to approach what was troubling him obliquely, like a hunter moving downwind of a deer. He was not really sure what it was, but he felt its presence as he could sense the presence of an animal in a bush, by the rustling of that which it displaced.

“When I was a soldier it was either me or them. The people I killed I mean. Most of the fights since then have been the same way. I thought about these things, but I never really thought about them, if you know what I mean?”

“No,” she said. He sighed and looked for another approach.

“When I was a kid, the Temple priests told me about heaven and hell. I sort of believed them. As I got older I stopped believing. One priest tells you that you go to hell if you murder someone, but another says it’s all right if you do it in the service of Queen and country. Some men can hold both those thoughts in their mind and believe both. I couldn’t — so one of them had to go.”

“I think I follow you now.”

“In the past few months, it all has become much more complicated. You don’t seem to take the Faith very seriously.”

“It’s hard to do so when you’ve watched it being constructed with your own eyes, Rik.”

“See, you say things like that. If I said them, I could be put to death for it. You say it like it’s just the simple truth.”

“The truth is rarely simple.”

“And then you say things like that. And you have talked to Angels.”

“And your point is?”

“My point is that I don’t know what’s happening anymore, either inside my head or outside it. I still hear voices sometimes, telling me to feed. I can remember what it was like to have the power in me, to be able to work magic so easily that it was like breathing. God help me, there are times when I want that again, more than anything in the world. And there are times I think I will be damned for it. That I am already damned for it.”

“I understand what you mean about wanting to work magic, Rik. I really do. On Al’Terra, it was like that for me, always, even from my earliest youth. I was the most gifted sorcerer at the Mazarian Academy. In my time I created things- towers, airships, spells- that are unthinkable in this world. I was constantly surrounded by magical energy that I could draw on in thousands of different ways. Being here is like being a fish on dry land. I can remember what it was like to have power, Rik, the power to destroy armies, to shatter kingdoms, to quiet earthquakes with words, to build cities by force of will.”

As she spoke her face was transformed, as if the clouds had parted and a ray of sunlight focused on her face. She raised a hand to her cheek and brushed away a strand of her long hair. “I can’t do that anymore, and I never will be able to, and it is like the loss of a limb. Worse, it is like the loss of all my limbs and going blind and deaf at the same time and remembering what it was like to be otherwise.”

“Would you go back? To Al’Terra. If you could?”

“There are times when I think that I would, Rik, even though it would mean my death or worse at the hands of the Princes of Shadow.”

“You knew them, didn’t you? You met them.”

“You are in a morbid mood today.”

“Apparently.”

“And you think this is an appropriate conversation to be having with an Inquisitor within hailing distance?” She sounded more amused than concerned, but there was something shifty and a little trapped about her eyes that worried him.

“Appropriate or not, it’s the one we are having.”

“Yes, I knew them. I went to school with some of them, studied sorcery alongside them.”

He felt like he was standing on the edge of some vast abyss. He had to restrain the urge to reach out and touch her, to satisfy himself that she was real. Today, for the first time in a long time, he saw her as someone who had stepped out of a legend. She had known saints and angels and devils. She had talked to them. And they were just like her. He had never been more aware of the distance that separated them, in time and space and understanding. He was sorry that he had started this conversation, and repelled and fascinated all at once.

“What were they like?”

“They were like you or me, at least to begin with.” He considered that. Scripture said they were incarnate devils, the very personification of evil. Asea’s manner said something quite different.

“What changed them?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. We walked along the same road for a very long way, and then they chose a different fork in the path.”

“Did they really make a pact with the Shadow, and sell their souls to it for power?”

“There are times when I am not even sure there is a Shadow, Rik. Not in the sense that you have been taught.”

“The priests always used to tell us that was one of the snares the Shadow used to trap our souls.”

“And maybe they are right. Who can tell? I am not one of the Prophets. God does not talk to me. She never did.” He could see that her gaze was turning inward, as it often did, as she retreated from the prospect of answering his questions. He wanted answers desperately, and he pushed on.

“So you don’t think they made a pact with the Shadow?”

“Al’Terra was not the way the priests taught you it was, Rik. This I know. I was there. For reasons of politics, the Temple tells humans things that make them easier to control. But whatever else they were, the Princes of Shadow were real, and they were wicked, and I do not think it really matters whether they made a pact with the Shadow of God or not. The end result was the same.”

“And yet you say you were once like them, or they were once like you — what changed them?”

She looked at him long and hard. He said, “You told me never to apologise for asking questions. I am merely taking you at your word.”

“There are questions and there are questions, Rik, and there are ways of putting those questions that make them easier or harder to answer. There are ways of making questions weapons as well.”

“I did not mean them so.”

“I know that, but the effect may be the same whether you mean them or not. There are times when I ask myself what the difference was between myself and the Princes of Shadow, and there are times when I do not like the answer.”

“You are not like them. You are not some Lord of Darkness.”

“And you think that is what they are?”

“That is what I have always been told. If you know differently, I will listen.”

“Rik, you will get me burned for heresy yet. I could almost believe Inquisitor Joran put you up to this.” She said it as a joke but for a moment he could see her taking the idea seriously. She waited as if she expected him to say something. There was nothing he could say that would make any difference so he remained silent.

“The Princes of Shadow were like your father, Rik. They were eaters of souls. They devoured their fellow Terrarchs because they needed the power to work magic, and the energy that made magic possible was going away.”

She had alluded to this before but had never seemed to willing to go into details. “So the magic was fading before ever you came to Gaeia.”

She nodded. “In truth I hoped when we came through the Eye of the Sun that we might find the magic once again, a new world with all its magical potential untapped, but it was not so. There was less magic here than on Al’Terra.”

“Why did the magic go away?”

“No one really knows, Rik. My theory is that we simply used it up. Imagine a great forest. Woodcutters come and cut down the trees, to build their houses, to make their fires. It takes trees decades to grow, but more and more people come and build more and more houses. Eventually the forest is gone. Perhaps it was that way, or perhaps it was like a well that runs dry. In any case the magic went away. The Princes of Shadow found another way of acquiring power. They mastered techniques for draining it from living things.”

“Malkior said he wanted to use human beings as cattle. Is that what he meant?”

“Humans possess less magical energy than Terrarchs so you would need far more of them, but it is a similar plan. Unsurprising really since Malkior was a follower of Shadow.”

“The Princes of Shadow killed a lot of your people then.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t someone stop them?”

“Because at first no one knew, and then they were too powerful. They could still work the great magics when most of us could not. And there were those who hungered for power and followed them because of it.”

“You think it could happen here?”

“I think it has happened here, and that it is still happening here. What alarms me is the thought that the Terrarchs might come to look on humans as cattle.”

“A lot of them already do.”

“There is a difference between looking on something as property and something as food or wood or some other source of power.”

“You think that really might happen?” Rik was prepared to believe many bad things about the Terrarchs but he found it hard to imagine them keeping people in herds.

Asea seemed to follow his thoughts. “It does not take too many people to think that way to have the Princes of Shadow come again, Rik. The ones who do will acquire power that in this world could only be described as god-like.”

The words burned in Rik’s mind, and he hoped their effect was not visible. The Quan had made him privy to such techniques. If he could find a way to tap into them the way Asea claimed then he too could possess such powers. He was not sure he wanted power acquired that way but the temptation was there.

“Were you ever tempted to walk that road?”

“The problem with walking that road is that it drives you mad eventually. You can’t absorb another sentient being’s memories without being affected by them. Your own experiences must have shown you that.”

She was right. He thought of the voices and tried to imagine thousands of them, all crying away in his mind at once. That was not a pleasant prospect.

“Surely there must be techniques for controlling the side-effects.”

“None that I have ever heard of.”

“Why did the Princes of Shadow continue then, if they knew the results?”

“I am guessing that they thought as you did, and did not realise what was happening until it was too late. And Rik, it is worth remembering that the Princes of Shadow were Terrarchs, with hundreds of years of experience, and among the best trained sorcerers of their world.”

The warning in her voice was unmistakable. She obviously could see the way his thoughts were running. “Were you ever tempted?”

“Not once I saw what would happen.”

“Did you look for other ways of casting magic?”

“Of course, but then war was upon us and the Princes of Shadow conquered the world.”

“How did they do that? If someone wanted to devour my soul I would fight against them. I cannot imagine that the majority of Terrarchs were any different.”

“As I am sure you must have realised, things rarely appear that clear cut. The Princes lied about the source of their power, they confused the issue with political arguments. They bound servants with spells. As they gained power, their secret police terrified most folk. If only one in a hundred people vanishes then you can convince yourself that it won’t be you, and that maybe they deserved it anyway. You can build systems where people will co-operate with those who oppress them, Rik. You have seen it here on Gaeia.”

Rik could see the sense in what she was saying. He thought about the world in which he lived. He had been a soldier of the Queen. He had helped put down the Clockmaker’s rebellion. This was a world where humans fought against humans at the behest of Terrarchs. When Talorea clashed with the Dark Empire most of the dying would be done by human beings.

“And yet you want us to fight against the Sardeans?”

Her smile was sour. “I want a better world. But of course that is what a Prince of Shadow would say as well.”

“Why would people follow those who called themselves the Princes of Shadow?” He saw the stupidity of the question even as he said it, and answered it for himself. “They did not call themselves that, did they?”

“They called themselves many things; the Illuminated, the Enlightened Ones, The Brotherhood of Peace. It was their enemies who called them the Princes of Shadow. It’s what they called us.”

“The same way we call Sardea the Dark Empire.”

“Indeed. In all of history I cannot think of any nation that ever called itself the Dark Empire.”

“The Sardeans probably call us that.”

“They call us the Scarlet Empire, the Bloody Handed Empire and a lot worse.”

“Whichever side wins will get to name the other.”

“It was ever so, Rik. I have no doubt that now on Al’Terra, they refer to Gaeia as the world of Shadows.”

He thought about what the Terrarchs had done since they came here, and of what Malkior and perhaps others like him still planned to do. “Maybe they are right.”