The Legend of Broken

perceptibly, and her chest rises and falls with her heavy panting. Most of all, she continues the throaty purr that she long ago determined to be of such entrancing comfort to the old man, never more so than when he is in distress and astride her, where he can put one ear to the back of her neck and listen to the steady vibration.

And in this manner is the great sorcerer Caliphestros once again brought back from the brink of despair and death by the legendary white panther of Davon Wood. They are the two most infamous beings of their generation, to the people of Broken, the stuff of more than mere parents’ warnings to unruly children, or of those children’s nightmares; for their existence, especially together, strikes fear into the very royal and sacred clique of the Kafran kingdom. Yet one would be hard-put to find greater tenderness and compassion among any two creatures in the kingdom of the golden god, or, indeed, anywhere on this Earth, than exists between the seemingly very different — yet, in their hearts, not at all dissimilar — enemies of the realm of the Tall …

The panther had been relentlessly hunted by men of Broken even before she rescued the old man from the inexplicable evil to which she had watched his own kind subject him. The panther hunt more generally had, for generations, been the definitive rite of passage into manhood for eldest sons from such Broken families as possessed the wealth and position (to say nothing of the additional male offspring) to allow them the leisure, the horses, and the servants to engage in so vicious, dangerous, and foolhardy a blood sport. And, because exceptional purity and uniformity in the coloration of panthers was believed by Broken hunters as well as by the Bane to imply great mystical powers (despite the teachings of Kafran priests that such was a mischievous remnant of pagan beliefs), a high value was from the first placed on this uniquely hued female. But when it became clear that no human would likely ever prove brave or clever enough to track and kill her, an only slightly diminished value had been placed upon the heads and hides of the four golden cubs she soon mothered.

The family had never been tracked: the unspoken truth among those who survived the encounter that terrible day was that a Broken hunting party, led by the son of the kingdom’s then-Merchant Lord himself, had stumbled upon the young cats at play, under their mother’s watchful eye, in an open dale too close to the Cat’s Paw. The hunters quickly found themselves faced with a far more desperate struggle than they would have expected from one female and four juvenile panthers: the white mother had been able to kill several of the humans, before being wounded herself by a spear that pierced her thigh and glanced off the bone beneath. Thus slowed, she had been forced to watch and lunge desperately, as three of her brave children had been killed, one after another. The body of her eldest male had been taken off toward the city atop the mountain, along with her surviving daughter, who was painfully herded, terrified, into an iron cage; and then all the intruders and their captives disappeared, off toward that mountain, the walls and lights atop which the white panther now often studies, of a night, in a seeming attempt to try to comprehend what those distant, glittering movements may signify …

Since that fateful battle, sightings of the white panther by hunters of Broken have been few; and she has made certain that fewer still of those brash pursuers have returned to the mountain of lights, and that none have tracked her to her high cave-den. In this way, she has kept secret the location of the sanctuary to which she brought the damaged old man, and in which she has helped him to recover, just as he has warmed her winters, preserved her kills, and healed the wounds of her hunts. And so the old man’s name for her — Stasi, Anastasiya, “She of the Resurrection”—is apt in its description of her, and of their life together.

If this tale of dual tragedy and redemption should stir disbelief† in any who read it, they may comfort themselves that they are not alone: for, on the very day in question, when the white panther he calls Stasi carries the suffering Caliphestros once again to the cold stream near their cave to soothe him, two observing eyes — hard, tough eyes that have watched from the safety of a tall ash — also widen with incredulity. They are the eyes of a man who, if the white panther had the time, she would gladly dispatch: for she detected his stink, despite the aromas of the old man’s herb garden (newly revived by spring), as well as the “hidden” observer’s attempts to disguise his own scent, well before she reached the clearing outside the cave. Although the intruder is clearly of the small tribe in Davon Wood (who have always respected her), the panther liked and yet likes nothing about the blended stenches of fear and filth, as well as the stolen scents of other creatures, that mark him. Yes, she would steal upon and finish him, had she not another mission of mercy to perform for long-suffering Caliphestros …

High in that ash tree, meanwhile, the man who creates that scent of fear knows full well that the panther would indeed kill him, had she the chance; and he waits a long while, after the beast and her strange rider have disappeared, before he even thinks of returning to the forest floor. He continues to wait, in truth, until long after they vanish, letting the unnatural pair put as much of the Wood between themselves and his solitary form (which has never felt so small) as possible, before he silently makes his way down the ash trunk, and lightly drops to the ground.

Heldo-Bah stands gazing toward the trees and undergrowth through which the panther and the sorcerer Caliphestros have disappeared: for “sorcerer” he must be, thinks the forager, if he not only survived the Halap-stahla, but lives with the most dangerous animal in the Wood! Only after several moments have passed without Heldo-Bah’s wide, amazed eyes catching any further movement does he dare even murmur, in his sourest tone:

“Perfection …” But Heldo-Bah’s sarcasm lacks its usual conviction. “Most supreme perfection!” he tries again; and then (although he knows he could offer that beast nothing approaching a fight) he clutches his gutting blade at the ready as he dashes back east, toward the camp that he made with Keera and her brother a few hours earlier.

“Let that fool Veloc explain this to me!” Heldo-Bah says aloud, when he deems such volume safe. “The sorcerer lives — but with the most feared panther in Davon Wood, a creature that most think a phantasm! Oh, this has been well worth three days’ run — we can’t even approach him, with that monster in his thrall!”

More astounded and merely senseless expressions of bewilderment at the ongoing perversity of his life echo about Heldo-Bah, as he runs — and yet his last statement was nothing if not true:

Although he does not yet know it, the strange vision he has witnessed has been more than worth his own and his friends’ desperate dash through Davon Wood over the last several days and nights …

Part Two: The Riddle of Water, Fire, and Stone

It is my hope that you, among all my friends and colleagues, will understand why I contemplate not only publishing this tale, but associating my name with it. It is not simply that, even as I write, grievous abuses of Opportunity (indeed, such Opportunity as History rarely offers to any man or state twice) are being committed by a collection of destructive dreamers, self-serving knaves, and — worst of the lot! — viciously yet brilliantly manipulative men, all of whom now pose as the legitimate legislature† of one of our mightiest and most ancient European realms [France]; no, equally tragic are the streams of exiles of every description that are flowing out of that state in all directions. Many have come here, to Lausanne: and I can assure you that they are learning the same lesson with which the ruling and mercantile classes of Broken were confronted, and upon which you have expatiated so sagely in your Reflections: that wise men, when forced to take up arms against evils that masquerade as “popular” passions, must be careful also to redress such complaints as prove to represent true grievances. Failure to do so will most assuredly lend plausibility to the most absurd and violent rants of the basest scoundrels; indeed, it is by way of this last consideration that we arrive at perhaps the most perplexing philosophical question put by this tale:

How could a human society reach the relative superiority and sophistication evidenced in the great kingdom of Broken, and then, because of a stubbornly and ultimately cataclysmic unwillingness to adapt its religious and political customs to changing realities, disappear so utterly that a millennium would pass before the sole surviving account of its existence would again find eyes and ears capable of understanding it? We are, at this very moment, witnessing the reassertion of this timeless quandary; and while, ten centuries ago, there may have been little or no way of foretelling the horrors to which the unyielding yet flawed rites, dictums, and standards of those who held ultimate power in Broken might lead, we, by virtue of