The ceiling of the tunnel disappeared into a huge vault above them as they entered the temple proper. Lasarys extinguished his lantern; the only fire that was allowed within the outer hallways of Terreanfor had been kindled in a golden plate by the sun. Inside the basilica itself, no light was allowed save for the glowing phosphorescent stones that gleamed with a cold radiance of their own in the otherwise complete darkness.
They passed the first of the immense pillars shaped like trees that reached to the towering ceiling into the main apse, where a great menagerie of animal statues stood, life-sized sculptures of lions and gazelles, elephants and tirabouri that, carved as they were from living earth, seemed almost to breathe. Above, in the pillar trees, Living Stone birds were perched, their feathers the deep, rich colors of the earth in the cold light. Talquist thought he could almost hear them twitter.
Lasarys led him through the earthen garden to a pathway flanked by immense statues of soldiers, a score and ten of them, each standing ten feet in height atop a three-foot base. The stone warriors formed an arch with their primitive swords, their faces reflecting the features of the indigenous people who had lived in this place long before the Cymrians came, the people who had found and preserved Terreanfor, had carved the beautiful stone tributes within Terreanfor by planting within the living earth the seeds of the trees, the feathers of the birds, and an unknown essence of the animals that had grown, as if by magic, from it.
Finally, when they were standing in a dark alcove in which a bevy of earthen flowers grew, their petals shaped like tiny stars, Lasarys stopped, then slowly pointed at the ground.
“There,” he said sadly. “I have been through the entire cathedral, and though it pains me greatly, I suppose if you must have more of the Living Stone, we can harvest one or two of these flowers. There are more of this kind than any other.”
Talquist coughed, choking on a laugh, then cleared his throat and put his arm around the shoulder of the sexton.
“Lasarys, surely you jest.” He gave the man a friendly squeeze, then released him, his face growing more solemn in the almost-dark. “I’m afraid you misunderstand, my friend.”
He turned around and surveyed the stone garden, its trees and plants, flowers and lily pads all formed from Living Stone, pulsing in the light of the phosphorescent crystals. “When I asked you to harvest the stone that I used to tip the Scales in my favor, and end the Dynasty of the Dark Earth in favor of my ascension as Emperor, I needed only a small amount, because I had this.” He reached into his robe and drew forth a tattered oval, slightly concave, violet in color had it been visible in the light. “The New Beginning; that’s what this scale portends. Its power is older even than the Living Stone, or so the ancient books say. And between the stone you gave me, and the scale, that new beginning has come to pass.
“But it was only a beginning, Lasarys. What I plan requires much more than the tip of some ancient Scales, the rigging of a weighing. No, Lasarys, I have much bigger plans. When I am crowned emperor, I want my domain to be worthy of my vision. And I can see for miles, Lasarys.” His eyes glowed brightly in the dark. “Thousands of miles.”
The elderly priest began to tremble. “I don’t understand, m’lord.”
“That’s all right, Lasarys, you don’t need to. You served me well as a teacher many years ago, when I was your acolyte. I came to you long ago in the hopes that I would discover how to use this scale that I had found, buried in the sand of the Skeleton Coast. You were unable to shed any light on that for me, but it wasn’t waste, any more than my apprenticeships with scholars and foresters, ships’ captains and Filidic priests were, because in each place I looked for answers, I found other things that would one day complete the picture, like—well, like pieces of a puzzle.” He smiled, pleased with his analogy. He held up the violet scale. “And this, Lasarys: this is the centerpiece.”
“Yes, m’lord.” Lasarys settled into quiet compliance, as he always did when the emperor began to pontificate in this manner.
“Where is the benison?” Talquist inquired. Nielash Mousa, the Blesser of Sorbold, was the chief cleric of the patrician faith in the nation, and one of the five benisons of the Patriarch, his highest religious councilors. Lasarys maintained Terreanfor under his supervision.
“He’s—he’s in Sepulvarta, at the Patriarch’s meeting, with the other benisons. He won’t be back for another six weeks.”
“And he isn’t scheduled to be in Terreanfor until the high holy days, on the first day of summer next year, correct?”
“Yes, m’lord,” Lasarys whispered, a sickening feeling crawling through him.
“Excellent.” Talquist’s black eyes gleamed in the dark. He turned away from the garden and walked back to the arch of soldiers, their expressionless faces staring stalwartly above them. He pointed to the last in the line on his right.
“I think this will do nicely, Lasarys.”
The sexton’s eyes grew wide in the darkness. “The soldier, m’lord?” he asked in horror.
“Yes. I want you to harvest it.”
“Which—which part of the soldier?”
“The whole soldier, Lasarys. I need a great deal of Living Stone, and he will provide just what I need.”
The cleric choked audibly. “M’lord—” he whispered.
“Save your pleas, Lasarys—you are too deeply entrenched, and too deeply compromised, to protest now. I will return on the morrow, and when I do, I want you to have felled this statue and left it for me on the altar of Terreanfor. Use all of your acolytes to help you carry it so that it will not be damaged. Do be careful—I’m sure it is over two tons, possibly three. Slice it through the base to avoid damaging the feet; I will make use of whatever stone is left from the base as well.” Talquist patted Lasarys, who was weeping silently, on the shoulder. “Cheer up, Lasarys. There is always pain in birth. And when you behold what is about to be born, and the nation that will come from it, you will finally understand its worth is a thousand times the suffering.”
He turned and strode past the sexton and made his way through the dark cathedral back to the light and hot wind of the upworld.
JIERNA’SID, PALACE OF JIERNA TAL,
SORBOLD
Later that afternoon, as he pored over the reports of the shipping transactions from the western coast, Talquist’s eyes were drawn once more to the scale.
He paused in his work, putting down his quill long enough to reach out his hand and absently caress the brittle surface of it, to run his finger over the lines etched in it, the tiny tatters along its perimeter that looked like the edge of baleen from a whale.
How beautiful it is, he mused, recalling his first sight of it, as nothing more than a purple glimmer in the misty sand of the Skeleton Coast. He had known from the moment he first held it in the bleeding fingers of his hand, the flesh torn by digging it out of the volcanic sand, that it was an ancient thing, an artifact of great power. It had tasted his blood then, and had done so again recently.
He thought back to the night, in the height of the last summer, when he had placed it, his hands trembling slightly, on the Scales of Jierna Tal, the enormous instrumentality from the old world whose gigantic column and beam, balanced with large weighing plates of burnished gold, towered in the square outside the royal palace where the empress of Sorbold had reigned undisputed for three quarters of a century. Until that night, the dynasty of the Dark Earth had held the nation in a death grip of control.
He had changed that, had broken the death grip with a death blow of his own. And the violet scale had allowed him to do it.
The scale on one great golden plate; a totem of Living Earth, carved in the shape of the Sun Throne of Sorbold, had balanced the scale in the other plate.
Talquist glanced down at the back of his wrist, marred by a fading scar, a reminder of the last element of the equation—seven drops of his blood, freely given, counted meticulously as they fell, one by one, onto the scale in the plate.
A blood offerin
g to join the one of Living Stone; his life essence on one side, the Earth’s on the other.
The Scales had shifted; the bloody scale was lifted aloft, then the Scales balanced. The totem of Living Stone had burned to ash in a puff of crackling smoke.
And the power of the Dynasty of the Dark Earth had ripped in one metaphysical heartbeat from the hand of the empress to his own.
Later, amid great ceremony after the empress’s death, each of the contenders to the throne from the various factions of Sorbold made their way to the Scales of Jierna Tal to be weighed against the Ring of State, the symbol of power. Each that stepped into the plate before him had been found wanting, until finally he took his turn and was lifted high, for all the assembly to see, by the holy artifact that had been used to make the most important of state decisions for centuries. The Scales, and the benison, had proclaimed him emperor, but Talquist, aware of the political instability caused by the sudden turn of events, had modestly offered to only be confirmed as regent for one year’s time, after which, if the Scales confirmed him again, he would ascend as emperor.
And he was using that time well. The strictures the empress had put upon his trade were now gone; his domain over aspects of sea mercantile and indentured human labor was growing like wildfire. The arenas of blood-sport, once only tolerated by the Crown in a few places and strictly regulated, now were flourishing throughout the land; slave captures at sea and to the south, in the Lower Continent, were filling the mines and rocky hillside vineyards with much-needed workers. The coffers of the royal treasury were being filled handsomely.
In short, life was good.
And he owed all of it to his beautiful discovery, the ratty-edged scale of the New Beginning.
A knock at the study door shattered his musings.
“Come,” Talquist said, closing his books and tucking the scale back inside the folds of his garment.
The chamberlain entered, a man of the same swarthy skin and dark chestnut hair as the rest of Sorbold bore, as Talquist himself had.
“M’lord, a representative from the Raven’s Guild in Yarim has begged an audience with you under the auspices of the golden measure.”
Talquist sat back in his chair. The golden measure was a guarded code, known only to hierarchs of guilds, a tradesman’s countersign.
“Show him in.”
The chamberlain stepped aside to allow the visitor to enter. The man moved through the doorway like a shadow, stepping instinctively around the patches of hazy afternoon light that shone dustily through the windows, clinging instead to the dark spots, blending in with them as he moved. He was dressed in the simple garb of a traveler, plain brown broadcloth cloak and trousers, his dark eyes glinting from within his hood. As he approached the emperor presumptive’s desk, he took down his mantle to reveal a cadaverous face topped with thinning hair, with long tapers of sideburn joining the razor-sharp beard that darkened his cheeks like the shadows he traveled through.
“I bring you greetings on behalf of my cousin in the hills, m’lord,” he said. “I am Dranth, scion of the Raven’s Guild of Yarim.”
Talquist rose slowly and gestured the man forward, sizing him up as he walked nearer. The code he had uttered was an even more secret one than that of the golden measure, used only in the gravest of times.
“To what do I owe the honor of a visit from the guild scion himself?” Talquist asked, pointing to a chair before his desk. “My condolences, by the way, on the demise of your guildmistress.” He watched Dranth’s face carefully for a sign of surprise that he knew of her death, but the man merely nodded. “I had not met her, nor had we done business together, but her reputation was well known to me.”
“Doubtless,” Dranth said dryly. “M’lord.” He sat down slowly in the chair.
“Since you have approached me under the auspices of the golden measure, tradesman to tradesman, one guild hierarch to another, I am obliged to help you in whatever way I can, if the request be reasonable. What do you want?”
“Actually, I believe what I bring may be of aid to you, m’lord,” Dranth said respectfully. He drew forth a parcel wrapped in sheepskin from within the folds of his cloak and laid it on the table in front of the emperor-to-be. “Please examine this.”
Talquist nodded to the package. “Open it for me,” he said pleasantly.
Dranth smiled. “Gladly, though you have nothing to fear from me of traps or poisons, m’lord. Your long life and robust health are quite important to me; you will see why in a moment.”
He pulled from the sheepskin parcel a sheaf of documents, each in the spidery script of assassin’s code, next to carefully rendered schematics of tunnels, bunkers, and breastworks.
“The guildmistress was doing reconnaissance in the Firbolg kingdom of Ylorc at the time of her death,” Dranth said softly. Talquist noted that his voice was both sweet and poisonous, like the scent of almonds in arsenic. “She had gained the Bolg king’s trust, and thereby had unfettered access to his inner sanctum, his secrets, and his plans. She sent back a great deal of information, including troop numbers and schedules, hallway and infrastructure diagrams, munitions caches, and a host of other very important material.” He tossed the documents on the table in front of Talquist. “Among the other things she discovered was that he is planning to move against Sorbold.”
Talquist snorted. “If he is, I’ve seen no evidence of it. The Bolg have been busy redecorating Canrif more than building up for war. King Achmed doesn’t seem the land-grabbing type to me; he wants the demi-human monsters he reigns over to be seen as men, and to that end he is pursuing manufacturing and trade agreements, not war.”
Dranth nodded thoughtfully. “What is he manufacturing?”
Talquist shrugged. “The Bolg produce a strange but interesting array of goods,” he said. “They make a very light, very tensile rope, that is prized in the shipping trade. They also spin some finely delicate ladies’ unmentionables, which has always amused me. A unique type of wood from their inner forests past the mountains bears a faint blue tint beneath its dark natural hue, and that is highly sought after, especially overseas.”
“And they also make weapons,” Dranth noted. “Extremely effective and deadly weapons.”
“Yes.”
“But while they have trade agreements with you to buy and broker their rope, their wood, and their lacy folderol, they do not sell you their weapons.” Dranth smiled icily. “Do they?”
Talquist stared at the guild scion for a long time, then looked down at his desk and smiled.
“What score are you looking to settle with the Bolg?” he said finally, tracing the pattern of the wood grain in his desk.
“The death of our mistress,” Dranth answered.
“And none other?”
“No. She was seeking revenge for another matter, the theft of water, but that is no longer of consequence. The Raven’s Guild has sworn to avenge her death to the exclusion of all missions, or contracts, sparing no expense, no cost of any kind, human or otherwise, until the very end of Time, if necessary.”
Talquist chuckled. “My. That is certainly a very intense sentiment.” He looked up into the serious face of the guild scion, his smile dimming slightly. “If you wanted my help in achieving your revenge, you should merely have requested it under the auspices of the golden measure. It is not required that I agree with your vendetta; only that it is not against my interests.” His smile broadened. “And it is not.”
Dranth nodded, relief in his eyes that was not mirrored on the rest of his face.
“In fact, I believe that if we join forces, we can both exact your revenge and further my plans very nicely.” He pushed his chair back, rose, and walked slowly to the tall windows that overlooked the city’s central square where the Scales stood, their immense wooden arm casting a dark, rectangular shadow over the streets. “First, you do understand that our conversations are guarded by the sacred vow of the guildmason?”
“Of course.”
“And that
, as brothers in the guild, we are sworn to deal honestly with one another?”
Dranth’s brows narrowed. “The Raven’s Guild abides by the same ethics and vows as all other guilds, m’lord. Our area of business notwithstanding.”
“Do not misunderstand me, guild scion,” Talquist demurred, opening his hands in a benign gesture. “I fully respect your guild’s reputation and your expertise. I have dealt with many of your brother guilds in my time as guild hierarch in western Sorbold. I just need to know the truth—did the guildmistress truly uncover a plot by the Bolg to invade Sorbold, or—”
“No.”
“Ah. Good. Well, then, pray join me at supper to discuss how we might be able to mutually achieve our ends.” Dranth nodded, and Talquist rang for the chamberlain.
When the cordials were served, and the last of the trays taken away, Talquist leaned over the table.
“Now that I understand the capabilities of your organization, I believe I have a way to fulfill your request.”
Dranth interlaced his fingers. “I’m listening.”
“All of the intelligence you brought to me is genuine, except for your erstwhile claim that the Bolg intend to attack Sorbold, is that correct?”
“Yes,” said the guild scion, his eyes darkening. “Why?”
Talquist swirled the liqueur in his snifter gently and inhaled the bouquet.
“What do you know of the kingdom of Golgarn?”
Dranth shrugged. Golgarn was a distant realm, to the southeast of Ylorc and Sorbold. The forbidding mountain passes of the Teeth prevented overland trade and travel between Roland and Ylorc to Golgarn, so the only real method of communication was by avian messenger, the only manner of trade by sea. “There is a brother guild there. Esten was in infrequent contact with them, on rare occasions when a debtor of one kind or another attempted to make his way there, or here, to outrun a debt. She always found them very cooperative, and reciprocated quickly. They are on friendly terms with Sorbold, are they not?”