With the mist’s aid his mind picked up the question. He knew what he had seen just an hour ago. They lived. They commanded some foul magic. They killed without remorse. They had redirected Corinn’s attacks to horrible effect. And they wanted something. The Song of Elenet. He repeated the name as he rose and, pipe in hand, shuffled to his library. His loose sole smacked the floor the entire way.
Setting his pipe on a reading table, Dagon flipped through volumes so rare that the Vadayan scholars, had they known of them, would have put down their parchment and quills and trained as assassins to get their hands on them. One by one, he tossed them on the floor behind him.
At first he was not even sure what he was looking for, but he remembered having read about the Santoth before. Just after they came out of exile and destroyed Hanish Mein’s army on the Teh plains, Dagon had searched for information about them. A short-lived course of study, it was. The sorcerers had gone back into exile, seemingly just as trapped there as they ever had been. Other matters had pulled his attention away.
“Sire?” The secretary’s voice was barely audible.
Dagon yanked around. How much time had passed? Measuring by the clutter on the floor it could have been hours. “Are they here? All gathered?”
“No,” the man said. He stood with one foot out of the room, seeming to slide farther out as he spoke. “They are all gone. Sire Grau and Sire Peneth. Sire Flann. All their attendants.”
“Gone?” Dagon let his arms droop. “Gone how?”
“They sail even as we speak, through the channel the Ishtat kept open. I’m sorry, Sire, but I could not reach them. The Ishtat withdrew. The channel closed.”
A folder slipped from Dagon’s hand. “All of them are gone?”
“All of them,” the secretary said. And then, stepping a little closer, “We’re alone. Trapped.”
Normally Dagon would have slapped the man for being overdramatic. Instead, he cast around, found his simmering pipe, and sucked on it like a pup on his mother’s tit.
T he dark hours of the middle of the night found Dagon still in the library, having picked himself up from the floor, and again rummaging through what volumes had not already been strewn across the stones. When he found the book it was obvious he could have done so all along, had his mind been calm enough to organize a more orderly search. It stood on a shelf among some of the oldest books. Jeflen the Red’s account of the Wars of Distribution. That was what he had been looking for, even if he had not been clearheaded enough to know it.
Dagon tipped it down. He placed it in the stand on a round table, the one best situated beneath the reading lamps, and he stared at the cover. Jeflen had been Tinhadin’s official chronicler. As such, his account of things was suspect, but it was the most complete single volume of the times that Dagon knew of. And it was also vivid. Dagon remembered that now. He felt it in the pit of his stomach and in his fingers, which trembled despite the mist’s sedative effects. He got up, flapped across to the other table, and worshipped at the pipe until he killed it.
Opening well into Jeflen’s account and flipping forward, Dagon skimmed the pages that documented the wars themselves. His eyes stuck on descriptions of battle, on numerical equations that measured the massive death tolls of the time. It described scenes of incredible carnage, in numbers that made the Santoth’s destruction of the Meins seem a minor skirmish in comparison. It was horrible, made more stunning because Dagon had images of his own to compare them to. That ribbon of red, torn flesh. It had taken him a long time to understand what he had seen. And when he had, he had vomited all down his front. This book, though, told of such things on a massive scale. Entire wars fought that way, between all-powerful sorcerers and armies that could do nothing but march forward to their ghastly deaths. The Santoth had never been defeated by any army of men. Never even close. So there was that.
Moving forward, he read of the growing friction between the king and his sorcerer knights. They each of them were ambitious, greedy men, ravenous for greater portions of the world. Were they not gods walking the earth? Did not the very words from their mouths destroy or create? According to Jeflen, Tinhadin came to believe the Santoth would soon turn against him. Against each other as well, but first against him, as he sat as king over them all. It was in reading his father’s journals for guidance on how to handle them that he discovered something his father had not intended him to discover. It was there in the journal, hinted at, suggested, promised. He came to believe that he and the Santoth had learned only a portion of the Giver’s tongue. The first text he acquired from the Dwellers was incomplete. It was only much later, after his father died and he began to piece together clues from his journal, that he realized there was an even more complete volume.
The Song of Elenet.
It was not, as Dagon had dimly remembered, an old epic poem. It was not a lament or a dirge or a eulogy. It was the first thief-sorcerer’s manual for speaking the language of a god. Dagon had known that, come to think of it. He just had not credited it. It had never mattered. He doubted it ever existed. Doubted such a language ever existed, or Elenet to overhear it. He had doubted, really, that there had ever been a Giver.
“You believe now, don’t you?” he asked himself.
Even when the Santoth proved themselves real on the Teh plains he had not truly had to face the ramifications of their existence. And when Corinn had begun to work sorcery, Dagon had thought it a nuisance peculiar to her alone. If she was removed, the nuisance would be as well. How foolish that seemed now.
He read on.
Tinhadin had gone in search of The Song of Elenet. Jelfen wrote at length about the epic journey Tinhadin had undergone to find it, but Dagon skipped that. What mattered was that Tinhadin had found it, studied it, and returned as a more powerful sorcerer than all the Santoth combined. The song lived in him. It coursed through him. He breathed it and sweated it. He dreamed in the language of creation and sometimes woke to find the world changed.
When Tinhadin returned to Acacia-for his search had taken him far away-his sorcerers came against him. He threw them back. He would have destroyed them, but a moment of compassion stayed him. They had been his companions from youth. Like brothers to him. Soldiers beside him for so many years. He hated their betrayal, but he did not want to sing them out of existence, as he could have. Instead, he banished them to the Far South.
The Santoth went, for they could not disobey their master. They could not stand against him, not when he was so much more a god than they. The sorcerers vented their rage on the land and up into the skies and upon any who got in their way as they moved south.
Only one nation massed to stand against them. A race of centaurs from the far south of Talay, the Anniben Dur Anniben. These horsemen had for eons roamed rich southern grasslands that teemed with life. They were among the Giver’s first creations, and they had always scorned humans, the spawn of the Betrayer, as they named Edifus. They had stayed outside the affairs of the Known World, and Tinhadin had not risked battle with them before. In his act of banishment, though, he sent his sorcerers against them.
Behind Burith-ben they ranked to face the raging sorcerers. They stood side by side in one great herd and said the Santoth could not pass into their lands. The Santoth destroyed them with fire, with worms that dropped from the sky and rolled across the plains, flattening the grasses and leaving them charred, with diseases that blistered their skin and split their hooves and ignited their hides and-
Dagon stopped reading. The words burned his eyes. It was all as horrible as he had feared. Before, if he had read descriptions like this, he would have thought them the fancies of imaginative, if twisted, minds. Now, he read them as truths that might as well have been written in the paving cement the queen had recently had spread across the streets of the lower town. The Santoth were loose in the world again, soon to have the book that would grant them even greater power. They would each of them be as strong as Tinhadin ever was, and much more twisted. How would they punish the world then? How long before they turned one against the other?
“They’ll destroy us all,” Dagon said. Only Corinn could possibly fight their sorcery, but she… Regardless of what had happened to her in the Carmelia, the clock of her life was winding down, and she didn’t know it. If she didn’t act quickly… “They’ll destroy us all,” he said again. Dagon heard Grau’s voice: What use is going to Rapture if it all comes crashing down in a few years? He tried to laugh, but he only managed to blow air through his nose. “It is the end of Rapture.”
He called for his secretary. The man stepped into the room before the sound of his voice had faded. He glanced around for a moment, looking as aghast at the state of the place, and then found Dagon with his eyes. “Sire?”
“I will visit the palace,” he said. “Send a messenger to alert them. Prepare an escort. Ishtat to go as far as the royal grounds. Do it just now. I must see… no, not the queen. I shouldn’t want to see her. Or tell her what I have to. Make it the… king. Aliver, I mean. I’ll tell him. Arrange it.”
