“Well, thank you for your candour. I believe we are finished for the day. Just keep trying, Master Reader. I do so appreciate your assistance in this matter. You must excuse me. I have other matters to attend.”
“Your will master.”
As Klan turned, he added, “And may I say how well you are looking?”
Fernip gave him a look only the dead can pull off, then watched Klan’s receding back. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he had touched a nerve.
Dead or not, some knowledge should be kept to himself. He would have to be more circumspect in the future.
Chapter Thirteen
Eventually, he thought it would be a kindness to the Kuh’taenium. Not long now and she would be weak enough to die. Perhaps she deserved it. She had served humankind for so long. Empathy was not one of Sventhan’s strong suites, but he could imagine just how tired he would be if he had been born to think, and to remember, and had done so for a thousand years or more.
He was tired enough now, and he had only been thinking for a day. But while he knew he might not be a great thinker, he did understand the meaning of duty as few others.
Sventhan followed the Omerteran. He followed it in his every action, his every word. But he knew also what it did not preclude, what it allowed, and how far he could traverse within its iron-bound code. The Omerteran was a way of life, handed down from generation to generation. Over the years it had been spread far and wide, the family growing, but still always able to trace their roots back to the beginning when they had been builders. The knowledge was part of the code — a way to make a building live. There was no magic. It was geometry, in the lines, and the stone. The stone was rare now. There were no more quarries. But far from becoming forgotten, the knowledge of how to build was entrenched in a widening family of builders. There was no call for it any more, but it was the rules. It was never written — and no body outside of the family knew what they knew. It had survived for a thousand years, survived the exile of some of their members across the western ocean, and but two examples of their works remained, the rest lay in ruins, and a few forgotten, or taken over by beasts, converted to a lair, granting those beasts a measure of intelligence. One of the remaining buildings was in Beheth, its name forgotten, because the people who used it were too busy reading books they forgot to use the writing on the walls. The other was the Kuh’taenium.
Sventhan and his family did not know, but there was an older example — Sybremreyen, the home of the Sard. But that predated the Kuh’taenium.
Sventhan took up his quill for the last time and dipped it in dark ink. A solitary drip hung from the tip while he paused for thought. The pause was, to an outside observer, overly long. But sometimes it takes a ponderous man to take the right action. Anyone can be rash, or intelligent. It takes a special kind of breed to be smart, whether they come to their conclusions swiftly, or with the patience and planning only a builder could bring to bear.
At last, the quill joined the paper. The Kuh’taenium was under attack…and it was time for the family to do their duty. The builders were going to war. Their name would be remembered again.
Sventhan wrote as he thought, with great care. It was this attention to care that ensured his family had survived through the ages — it pays to heed caution when creating tower structures from blocks of stone.
He could sense movement in the fabric of society. The Protectorate becoming overly bold, a sense of cowering among the people of the street, a darkening of the soul of the city. The buildings spoke to him, as they spoke to all his family — and they were afraid. The souls of people soaked into them, and the buildings felt their fear. He should have heeded the warnings long ago, but now there were no more excuses for inaction.
Gurt was family. While Reih did not know the builders, they knew her. She had asked Gurt for help, not knowing what she had set in motion, but now events were out of her hands. She must live. She was twinned with the building. There was no other way.
Duty was clear. Protect the Kuh’taenium, at whatever the cost.
The family might be simple builders who knew no other trade, but they could still wield the hammer, and the blade.
Chapter Fourteen
Jek Yrie sought allies in any place he could. He had travelled further than any of his peers (he thought he only had a few — those who were among the ascended, and even then only on the most tenuous of levels) seeing the distant lands that were to be of no consequence in the coming battle. There were thousands of small islands, archipelagos, peninsulas, mountain plains, cavernous lakes and natural tunnels underground, forests, deserts — anywhere people could live, there were humans. Some places he could not travel, no matter how powerful he had become since his eyes had turned to red; the blasted planes of the underground, where the Naum were rumoured to exist in their land of perpetual night, within mountain ranges where strange light skinned people lived under the stone, in the depths of the sea. If the Speculate could not see his destination, he could not travel there by magical means. But it did not matter. These hidden peoples, little more than barbaric tribes eking out a pathetic existence, were not players in the final game — the return.
He was not interested in them, but he was interested in an isolated city on the coast of a distant continent — the fourth continent. There lived a people not unlike his own, a diluted race of Hierarchs, touched by time and weakening blood, but the city he saw through his blooded eyes was remarkable in many ways. The Hierarchs there ruled with open cruelty, its humans little more than slaves.
The only problem was how to approach them. He would have to think on it. But he had time yet. If all of his resources could not stop the awakening of the wizard, then he would need all the allies with power he could muster. The future was far from certain. But foolish was the leader who did not plan for every eventuality. He was a proud being, but wise enough to know that even he did not have the foresight of the gods. He was, after all, still mortal.
Well, close enough.
Chapter Fifteen
Forces clashed across the world of Rythe, and pulled apart again, seeking weakness, openings, that elusive chink in an enemy’s armour.
On Lianthre, Roth’s race, the mighty rahkens, stood against the Protectorate. They did not seek to openly attack their might, but held their ground, holding the underground lairs of their kind, allowing magically gifted human dissidents sanctuary, actively seeking out those with vestiges of magical power and training them in the ways of the magi.
They would need allies in the final battle, and the humans were not yet aware of their own potential. The rahken nation let it be known that their homes were sanctuary for the hunted. The numbers of humans with fey eyes were growing.
They had promised Tirielle A’m Dralorn an army should she return. It was not an idle promise — the rahken nation saw far into the future, but more importantly, saw further into the past than even the scrolls of the Island Archive.
They could afford to be patient. They knew of the return, but they would fight for honour, and promises. Their time would come soon enough.
Other continents carried on their petty struggles, unaware of the scythe hanging over their heads. To them, each battle was life and death — the fate of the world bears little importance when you are fighting for your life. Rythe itself was born of strife. Wars were commonplace on each and every continent but Lianthre, and even now
