Stardeep

CHAPTER SEVEN

Stardeep, Epoch Chamber

"Cynosure?" Telarian asked the empty air of the Epoch Chamber.

"Yes?" said the disembodied golem's cultured voice.

"I'm done for now. Connect me to my quarters."

"Very well. Hold still.."

Telarian waited for the idol to set up the transfer. Cynosure always required a span of moments to process each new point-to-point teleportation in the Outer Bastion. Of course, such tricks were not allowed at all in the Inner Bastion, which contained the Well. That is, they were not normally allowed, but Telarian had been working on contingencies. .

Just one more thing he'd failed to inform Delphe about. As with everything else, he justified keeping her in the dark on some of his activities because her role in Stardeep was so time consuming. Yet her dedication was futile. Her vigil at the edge of the Well was doomed to failure. He now understood, thanks to his visions, Xxiphu would one day rise whether or not the Traitor gained his freedom.

A blue flash and piercing odor, a moment of disorientation, and Telarian was back in his private room, a few levels above where he'd secreted the doorless Epoch Chamber. His room opened off a common hall in the Inner Bastion.

His unsteady hands found the neck of a wine bottle, then a glass. Not even the finest vintage could withstand neglect, and the wine in the bottle had turned vinegary and rancid. He should have finished it sooner after opening it a few tendays past, but he drank alone these days, and in moderation. Hard to finish a bottle before it turned sour. But his own cussed fastidiousness wouldn't permit him to throw it out and uncork a new one. Waste not, want not.

His thoughts remained on Delphe. For the thousandth time he wondered if perhaps he shouldn't bring her up to date on his preparations. Would she understand the risk they must undertake to avoid the disastrous certainty he had foreseen?

No, he didn't think she would. In fact, she would likely declare him mad with one breath, and disown him with the next.

Madness. In the lonely passage of time between shifts, he sometimes wondered. There might be a tinge of madness to his actions. Then again, madness is what those with limited imaginations called inspiration, imagination, and even revelation.

He knew first hand of places where doctrine had taken firm hold, where free thinkers and visionaries were abhorred. But without revelation, civilization's zenith would yet hunker in caves, drawing stick figures by firelight.

True, some prophets walked too close to the line separating inspiration from crazed imprecation. But the ones remembered as paradigm-changers and world-savers far after the fact were derided by their contemporaries. And though they sometimes faltered and fell, others in their wake benefited from the sacrifice.

Telarian's problem was he couldn't wait for the historians of later ages to acclaim his actions as heroic and necessary. What he had to do in the present, without the context the future would bring, was hard to explain to someone who doubted the effectiveness of divination magic to begin with.

Like Delphe. If he told her the truth, her apprehension concerning the predictive arts would lead to questions, accusations. Action. He couldn't afford strife. It was the same conclusion as ever before: he would proceed as he had been.

Thankfully, convincing Cynosure to side with him relied less on the art of persuasion and more on technical wizardry. Telarian had a knack for golem and construct enchantment, despite his primary focus in oracular insight. He had surreptitiously applied that skill to the linked nodes making up Cynosure's mind. After a year of gradual tinkering, the sentient idol was now partially under Telarian's control.

Cynosure was free-willed no longer, though its greater mind didn't realize a lesser portion of itself was almost completely commandeered. Despite this success, Telarian remained stymied; none of the tactics he'd devised had proven capable of overriding Cynosure's control over the Inner Bastion. It was too fundamental to the constructs creation. He eventually realized he would never succeed in gaining complete control of the sentient idol. It had become necessary to pursue other options. Of course, even if he had complete control of the construct, another tool was also required.

He trailed a finger up the length of his sword scabbard. What would Delphe do if she found out about Nis?

He shuddered. He removed the scabbard from his belt, careful not to touch the pommel of the dark blade.

His conscience skittered across the surface of his resolve. Too late. He'd done it; he couldn't undo what he'd forged.

He had learned the secret of the armory's existence, a place created by the previous Keepers, with Cynosure's help. In the armory, he found the vessel containing the split soul.

It was a half-soul, separated from its lighter half. Before being split, all the soul's goodness, all its righteousness, and all its morality were strained and infused into an animate blade of virtuous light: Angul. With that singular blade, the Traitor's most successful bid for escape in a millennia was foiled. The success of that event was known to all Keepers, though none realized what had gone into making the Blade Cerulean. None now recalled the sacrifice of the man who made the blade's existence possible.

A soul split along philosophical lines has two parts, as there is no light without darkness. Sin would not exist without morality. What is certainty without doubt to measure it against? The half-soul Telarian found was the detritus left over from Angul's forging.

Why the half-sentient thing had been preserved, when it should have been destroyed, was a real question. Perhaps the Keeper who forged it with Cynosure's aid was too sentimental? Or had fate stepped in on Telarian's side? Either way, that lapse was Telarian's opportunity.

His elaborate plan took form in the ashes of dream-tossed nights, as so many of his divinatory visions had since he'd come to Stardeep and looked into the Well. Something had opened in him then, and now his best insights came unbidden. In fact, it was during just such a divinatory dream that he first learned of the armory, and the stored half-soul. The future had seized his eyes and shown him the way.

Upon waking, Telarian asked Cynosure to transfer him to the armory, despite the idol's protestations that no such place existed in Stardeep. But Telarian trusted his vision, and overruled the idol. Cynosure teleported him into a space that didn't exist on any map-and found himself where Stardeep's history had been fashioned.

A dark, decommissioned vault, it contained a furnace, forge, magical fire, and masterwork tools capable of forging weaponry. And most importantly, in a darkened alcove resided a glass vessel where the fractured thing dwelled.

Soon thereafter, Telarian began his sword-forging project. He knew little of the craft, so his dreams began to instruct him.

He recalled how he carefully decanted the half-soul, inky and deceitful, into the cast already seething with molten steel. With Cynosure's halting aid, he mixed soul and metal into a singular bound thing.

He remembered beating the howling, screaming shaft of white-hot metal. It cried for release from torturous pain, as if alive. He could still smell the acrid salt and oil of the quenching.

When he removed the blade from the bath, its white-hot glow was gone. But it was only as Telarian tempered the blade over the ensuing tenday that all trace of hue slowly faded, until it was utterly colorless.

The naked blade was like a blind spot, a gap in perception. It took the name Nis, the Blade Umber. When Telarian grasped its hilt. .

When he grasped the hilt, he forgot fear. His disordered thoughts cleared. The solutions to problems and difficulties he'd noted in other parts of Stardeep rushed upon his brain as clarity washed over him, and cold logic grasped his heart and squeezed. As he caught his breath, it seemed to him that nothing was really beyond him-no problem couldn't be overcome, nor challenge met, if only he was able to devise the appropriately reasoned plan. Lucidity wracked his frame, and his mind ran and leaped, but could not win free. Some part of him did escape, and darted out upon a dim plain of disquietude. But it was fragile, easily eviscerated.

Telarian gasped, allowing his reverie to lapse. He took another large gulp of the nearly rancid wine. He'd learned not to touch the hilt. The time for drawing Nis would come soon enough.

Already, his agent in the outer world reported success in locating the bright twin of his newly forged dark sword. He disliked dealing with liars, backstabbers, and spies. But in this particular circumstance, the ends justified the means, he wholly believed. Telarian would stymie the Sovereignty's appearance, but only if he pushed through all interference, all weakness. All foibles and regrets of conscience.

His success would be assured once his agent completed the assignment and delivered him the sword Angul.

With Angul in one hand and Nis in the other, he would combine the blades, merging the split souls into the unified whole they once were. Then he would see about the Traitor's release.