He paused to consider his words. “Wars cost money just as much as they cost lives. It takes a fortune to raise an army. We know that Lunar silver finds its way into the hands of heretics here. We know that Lunar weapons and armour find their way into Belaria and Umbrea. These things can be tracked. Sorcerers trained in the east come west and they fight in our wars, always to our detriment.”
“It has not been unknown for things to happen the other way too.” Kormak agreed with a good deal of what Jonas said, had seen evidence of such things with his own eyes. But he had also seen that no one side had a monopoly on virtue. “It takes two sides to make a conflict.”
Jonas laughed. “Indeed but it only takes one strong army to conquer a country. Someone needs to keep watch. Someone needs to stand guard. Your order does that against individual Old Ones. King Aemon and my order seek to do that on a much larger level, among the nations and princedoms. Surely you can see the necessity.”
Kormak felt like saying he had seen that claim used to justify all manner of power grabs. People who set themselves up as guardians against a hidden enemy were always tempted by wielding secret power. Who knew that better than his own order? It hardly seemed diplomatic to say so he nodded.
Jonas took this for acquiescence. “Lady Marketa is centuries old. She is a sorceress. She is an agent of the Courts of the Moon. She is one of the favoured creatures of the rulers of that ancient empire. Be aware of this if you plan on having any further dealings with her. She is not our friend. She is the agent of a powerful rival and she will do anything she can to undermine the King-Emperor and his realm. At the moment, we are the last bulwark against the ambitions of her masters.”
“You are hinting that she might be behind the Vorkhul problem.”
“I doubt she would admit it but it is a possibility worth considering, is it not? Our realm is thrown into chaos, the power of her gods is displayed, even here in the shadow of the Angel. She is, as you have pointed out, an expert on the Old Ones.”
“The sarcophagus did not come from her. It came from your own governor in your own colonies.”
“Lady Marketa has friends even there. They might not love her, but they love the king even less. They could aid her in getting the sarcophagus sent here, even if her own agents in the colonies could not.”
Kormak wondered about this. A lot of secret enemies were suddenly appearing, and this would be a useful pretext to clamp down. He saw the hand of Prince Taran in this and the fine mind of Frater Jonas. This crisis could be used to advance their agenda.
Kormak turned the possibilities over in his mind then dismissed them. His task was simple, to find Vorkhul and end his rampage. He did not have to care about the schemes of kings and dukes and nobles.
“I am a simple man, Frater,” Kormak said. “My goals are simple goals. Protect the innocent. Oppose the Shadow. Uphold the Law. That is what I intend to do. I shall leave you to worry about the political ramifications.”
“I do not think you are so simple, nor is it so easy to do the things you claim to want to. Often it’s hard to tell the innocent from the guilty, the followers of the Shadow from deluded fools, those who seek to uphold the law from the criminal.”
“That is not the Law I was talking about.”
“I know. I was talking to myself more than to you. Sometimes in order to protect the greater good, you must break the law and even do things against your own conscience. I have.”
Kormak had too, but he did not want to give any ground. “We need to try to make those distinctions though,” he said.
“Aye, we do.” Jonas hesitated for a moment, rose from the chair, walked over to the fire and studied the flames. “There are times when I wish I saw the world as you do,” he said. “I fear my vision is clouded sometimes.”
Kormak felt guilty, pretending to a clarity of purpose he lacked.
“I would see this moongate that Lady Marketa is so interested in,” he said.
“That is easily enough arranged,” said Jonas. “Come with me.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THEY WALKED TOWARDS the large building on the far side of the courtyard. It loomed several stories high. Its stained glass windows contained mosaics of elder signs. Statues depicting kings and saints stood sentry in alcoves in its walls.
Jonas strode along. His hands were behind his back, left hand clasping right wrist. His eyes looked down as if he were concentrating hard and did not want to be distracted.
He paused at the foot of the stairs leading up to the Museum’s heavy oaken doors. The ironwork reinforcing the wood was moulded into protective runes. It looked as if the doors could resist a battering ram. Jonas gave a sign to one of the guards in the sentry box. The doors to the Museum swung open.
The priest strode up the steps and Kormak followed. They stepped from sunlight to shadow. It was cooler within.
They walked through a high vaulted hall containing the stuffed remains of several huge animals. A woolly mammoth stood in the beams of light from one of the stained glass windows. Across from it was a bridge-backed wyrm, a reptile so huge it made the mammoth look small. The skeleton of a dragon hung from the ceiling. It ran the length of the large room.
“I’m glad you wanted to come here. The King would like your opinion on the moongate.”
“He is thinking of making the trade?”
Jonas glanced around and then shrugged. “It is difficult to understand how His Majesty thinks sometimes. I am just a humble servant.”
“You certainly seem to have become one since you entered the palace.”
Jonas gave a short barking laugh. “I enjoyed our sea voyage you know. I felt a sense of freedom on that ship. But this palace is where my duty lies and where their burden is heaviest.”
They entered a smaller chamber. Elder signs from half a dozen places lined the walls. There were tracings of symbols to be found in the deserts near Tanyth worked on copper. There was a stone pillar that must have come from somewhere in the Northlands. In one corner brooded a black monolith in which a truesilver star within a circle had been set. It hovered just above a plinth of similar black stone. Doors led out to much larger halls on the left and right, but Jonas kept walking straight ahead through an archway. “This is quite a collection.”
“It was started by the Archmage Pelageus,” Jonas said. “His descendants have added to it. King Aemon most of all. He finds such artefacts fascinating.”
“So I gathered.”
“The possibility that worries me most is that someone who knows about the King’s obsession may have chosen it as a way to strike at him.”
“By sending the sarcophagus?”
Jonas nodded.
“It seems a far-fetched way of doing so.”
“I’ve seen stranger plots,” said Jonas.
“So have I.”
The sarcophagus would have looked at home in the room they walked through. Metal coffins stood upright against the walls. The lids had been moulded into the shapes of sleeping humans. Their features were fine. Their eyes were huge. Over each sarcophagus hung a silver mask, each also an excellent representation of a human face.
“Some of these belonged to the Priest Kings who served the Old Ones when they ruled Siderea. Some come from Umbrea. They were interred in mausoleums.”
“I would have thought they would have been destroyed by the Inquisition.”
“Interring them under the shadow of the Angel is symbolic of Solar ascendance,” said Jonas. “It proves the servants of the Holy Sun have triumphed over the worshippers of the false gods and have no fear of them.”
More guards stood by the entrance of the next chamber. Each of them carried a shield warded with an elder sign. Their helmets were similarly protected. They had the hard, fit look of elite warriors. This room was lit by sunbeams falling through stained glass windows in the roof. Dust floated in the pillars of light. At the far end of the chamber stood the moongate. It was an arch three times the height of a man, made of white marble ins
cribed with runes. Liquid truesilver filled the arch, remaining upright in defiance of gravity. Kormak walked closer and studied it.
Dull moonstones showed in the stonework. They had none of the sparkle they would have possessed when active.
“What do you think,” Jonas asked.
“It is indeed a moongate,” Kormak said. “And it is probably functional.”
“You’ve seen the like before?”
“Yes.” Kormak said, not liking the memories the sight of this thing brought back.
“You think it could be made to work?”
“By a sufficiently powerful sorcerer.”
“They say the Old Ones and their favoured servants used these to travel from place to place as quick as the light of the moon.”
“I know,” Kormak said.
“The elder signs around the Palace hold it inert.”
“They ought to.”
“They say thousands of these once linked every city and palace of the Eldrim. Now there are only a few score left. This would be priceless if it worked.”
“Most likely,” said Kormak. He wondered if the Sidereans really were considering trading this to Marketa and her masters. They could ask a great deal for it. He said so.
Jonas steepled his fingers then glanced around as if to make sure they were not overheard. He said, “The King-Emperor will never trade it.”
“Why? It is worth a fortune”
“She is our enemy.” Jonas said. “And the King-Emperor is already the richest man in the world.”
Jonas walked away from the moongate. He went over to stand before a massive suit of armour forged from orichalcum and spiderglass and some black metal alloy. It was made for someone both taller and thinner than he. The face was a demon mask. Black crystal filled the eye-holes in the visor. More moonstones had been set there. It radiated a cold power.
“What is it?” Jonas asked. “What disturbs you?”
“This armour,” Kormak said.
“It belonged to Darkoth Sharktooth, Prince of the Whispering Caves. He killed a dozen mighty knights and three Guardians of the Dawn before Pelageus overcame him. His axe hangs on the wall there.”
Kormak strode over to the huge weapon mounted on wall brackets. The blades were razor-edged and spread an arm-span apart. In the centre was set a rune-worked moonstone. Another was at the tip of the handle. It looked too heavy for a mortal man to lift. An Old One could wield it though.
“Your kingdom’s enemies were mighty,” Kormak said.
“They still are,” said Jonas.
***
Wearing the old man’s shape, Vorkhul limped through the dungeons. Blood-soaked rags covered imitations of festering sores. He kept his eyes human. His other senses were limited in this form. It was possible to make his hearing keener and keep his sense of smell stronger but not to the extent it had been in his more bestial shapes. His leg still hurt where that accursed weapon had bit into it. The wound followed him no matter what shape he wore. There was no escaping it.
Following some impulse from the old man’s consciousness, he wandered upwards, towards light, towards freedom. The price of the knowledge he absorbed was that something of his victim remained with him and enjoyed a short-lived spell of influence.
He did not mind. He felt that he had done this many times before and come to take pleasure in it. A dark undercurrent of memory warned him that doing so might have been the cause of his troubles. No matter how hard he tried to trace that thought to its source, he could not.
Wearing the human’s form allowed him easier access to the old man’s memories. They hovered on the surface of his mind like scum on a stagnant pond.
He savoured the recollection of standing by a small pool on a summer day and watching the tadpoles swim within it. They were tiny teardrops of life, twisting and lashing their way through the water. Some had vestigial limbs. All had tiny black dots for eyes. It was a memory of a day over fifty years ago, a lifetime for a human, an eyeblink for him.
Mortals! So frail and short-lived and so filled with superstition. They worshipped shadows their minds projected on the walls of the world. They were like tadpoles. They changed so quickly, from tiny children to brief maturity to final decrepitude. No wonder they were so afraid.
As he wrestled with the old man’s memories, he felt a mounting sense of loss and horror. Where were the images of his own people? Where were the Eldrim who should have ruled these pitiful short-lived things?
There were no recollections of their glorious magical palaces. Or their sky chariots. Or the sorceries that should have made them feared and adored. There was just the idea of distant lands where the remnants of the Old Ones lorded it over creatures they were little better than.
This was wrongness on a cosmic scale.
The Eldrim could not have fallen so completely. The world could not have changed so much during his imprisonment. The Old Ones were born to rule all lesser beings in the name of the Lady. They were the wisest, the most powerful. They were created to dominate. Nothing was allowed to challenge that. For millennia, nothing had. They had ruled supreme among the Elder Races. Invincible. Immortal.
Those who could not be defeated by force could be infiltrated, subverted, turned against each other and finally absorbed. Politics and religion were just as much weapons as sorcery and arcanotech and fleshsculpting. All were arts in which the Eldrim excelled.
The plundered memories showed him a world that had changed immensely from the one he had known. The Eldrim were a degenerate shadow of what they had once been. The other Elder Races, the mighty Quan, the Serpent Folk, the Kassandri, were remembered only as fearful legends. The Ghul, the Khazduri, the humans, scores of other subservient species, had all rebelled. Everything he had known had been swept away, leaving this barbarous shrunken world.
He dug through the old man’s memories and found only faint hints of war among the Eldrim. There were stories of the taint of Shadow. There were tales of humans who had overcome the Eldrim and driven them from their lands in the name of the Holy Sun.
The words triggered another flood of his own memories. The Shadow. Something about that made him salivate. Enormous holes in his recollections surrounded the concept, as if any knowledge of it had somehow been erased.
Who would do that? Why? How? He had no idea. He knew only that he felt a great sense of emptiness when he thought of the Shadow.
The Holy Sun. The great fiery enemy in the sky whose light burned the Eldrim, confused their senses, confounded their magics.
The Holy Sun, the arch-rival of the Lady of the Moon.
The Holy Sun. The deity worshipped by the accursed Auratheans.
He saw them now. Beings who rode from star to star in vehicles of sungold and solar flame, who existed as disembodied intelligences of light.
Suddenly a vivid image exploded into his mind, something he felt certain had happened to him. He remembered great golden ships dropping from the sky, metal giants emerging, living war-machines armed with weapons that burned like the sun.
The sick realisation struck him that he had vastly under-estimated the strength of his foes. They burned their way into his palace and captured him and . . .
Infuriatingly the image faded. He could excavate nothing more.
From the old man’s memories he picked out another image; of a huge Aurathean battleform standing in one of the buildings above him. It was one of the vessels in which they manifested. The metal giant occupying the Cathedral had done nothing in living memory. It was regarded as a mere empty suit of armour that had once been occupied by an angel.
That was wrong. The Auratheans had been a power, almost as great as the Eldrim, a threat to his people’s domination of the world.
He searched through his stolen memories and found not a single reference to Aurathean host forms. The humans knew nothing about what the Auratheans were, what they had once been. They worshipped only their empty vessels.
He needed time. He needed to sort through all the
things he had learned and begin to piece together a picture of what had happened. He needed more knowledge too.
Another image flickered through his mind. And he felt a sudden shocking sense of recognition. This mortal had once worked in the palace, in a place where ancient artefacts were stored.
The human remembered relics of the Eldrim. There was armour that would allow him to endure the light of the sun. There were devices that would enable him to shape the aether with a thought. There was a huge mirror, a teardrop of liquid truesilver held within a stone arch, that could only be a moongate.
A moongate! A way out of this hideous place! He could go to where his people had once congregated, to Khazduroth or Winterpeak or the sub-oceanic domes of Talazar.
If it still functioned. It was worth investigating. If he could tap the gate’s power he could wreak such destruction that the mortals would relearn their fear of his people.
Vorkhul knew he would have to do this soon. The human who hunted him would return with others of his kind. He would not give up until one of them was dead.
He had his own reasons for going upwards now. He wanted to find the moongate. He wanted to be free of this place, to seek his own kind. He wanted to find out the truth of what had happened, not some half-remembered fable torn from the mind of a dying human. Most of all he wanted to get his hands on the weapons that would make him master of this pitiful degenerate world.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RHIANA LOOKED UP when Kormak entered her chamber. She sat on the balcony, staring out to sea. “Where have you been?” Rhiana asked.
“Talking to people.”
“Did you learn anything?”
Kormak took the other chair on the balcony. His whole upper body still hurt and he felt tired. “Nothing that I did not already know.”