Matabar

Book II. Chapter 68 - Books and winds

Chapter 68

Ardan watched the autumn expanse of the Royal Forest race past the window of the Black House’s express train. Tree crowns painted in gold and copper were reveling in the last rays of the sun that was settling down to rest. They rustled their precious raiment of fading leaves, casting off the rich finery of seasons past from their drowsy branches.

The wind played amongst the falling leaves, making them whisper. Their words were mysterious, at times merry, sometimes grim, but more and more often, they were barely-audible tales of the places it had roamed.

From time to time, the train would burst out of the forest tunnels, emerging amid endless meadows and fields of grain, where the last and hardiest varieties of wheat still stood tall. Their luxuriant, sunlit blaze—a cloth shimmering like tin and brass—rustled under the caresses of that same wind. And the wind kept running. It seemed to be chasing the vanishing trail of white fluff streaming behind the puffing locomotive.

Sometimes, Ardi regretted the fact that they were making no stops along the way. Out there, among the grasslands, he sometimes spotted the distant silhouettes of herds, and between their endless rivers of horns and backs rose the occasional hillock. Wearing wide-brimmed hats and seated in their saddles, the cowboys were driving their charges across the boundless majesty of the Imperial plains.

Occasionally, Ardan found himself feeling nostalgic for the times when he, too, would wander the steppes until nightfall astride a trusty horse. Back then, as soon as the sky had wrapped itself in dark velvet, he would’ve dismounted, spread out a bedroll, covered his face with his hat, and slept, breathing in the scents of far-off lands and their stories brought to him on the wind.

“I really hate express trains,” Parela said with a grimace as her grimoire tumbled off the little table at the latest jolt. This wasn’t the travel-worn battle grimoire usually strapped to her belt, but her working one. “Major, what are the chances of our dear employer finally getting himself an airship?”

Mshisty, who was sprawled out on a sofa, was twirling his Grand Magister’s medallion between the fingers of his one remaining hand. Ardi had heard at the university that a new member had joined the Empire’s Grand Magister Lodge just a couple of weeks ago, but he hadn’t known the particulars. Nor had he understood why exactly Mshisty had been awarded the highest scholarly title in the country. However, after he’d recalled a conversation between Milar and the Colonel in which they’d mentioned the Puppeteers’ possible interest in that same lodge, the answer had become very obvious.

“Captain.”

“Yes, Major?”

“Tell me, what would you prefer—to get paid less for your rays and Stars, or for us to never roam the skies?”

Major Mshisty, who had a coarse, scarred face and refused to wear a prosthetic in place of his lost left arm, had a very peculiar manner of speaking. At times, he could make someone think that he was a gallant and dignified gentleman, his speech and mannerisms like that of a true aristocrat; and at other times… He was a mad dog fully deserving of all the unflattering epithets people awarded him behind his back.

And, most disconcertingly, Ardi couldn’t say with any degree of certainty which of those was his mask and which was his true face. Perhaps even the life-battered, gray-haired Grand Magister Mshisty didn’t know.

“A rhetorical question, Major.”

“As was yours, Captain,” Mshisty replied, tossing his medallion once more and catching it in midair. He wrapped himself tightly in his overcoat and turned away, facing the lacquered panels lining the carriage wall.

The Black House had several high-speed trains at its disposal that were not particularly comfortable. Nor were they especially fast in the grand scheme of things. The locomotive itself was none other than the same type of engine that hauled mail and tax shipments across the country—it was one and a half times more powerful than the standard model, with a more efficient but also more gluttonous boiler.

This meant that the train was pulling, besides the coal cars and water tanks, only three carriages. And, of course, they were far from being first-class ones, like those of the country’s largest transportation companies, including Ens Otarsky’s. They were converted day coaches whose cramped benches had been replaced with simple suspended sofas, small tables, and a pair of cabinets. Each carriage had only twenty-two sleeping berths, or forty-four in total for the whole train. Why not sixty-six? Because the last car of the Black House express was an armory.

Of course, if there was a need for it, the train could be lengthened by hitching additional cars to it, but then its speed would drop.

“You got something interesting there, Corporal?” Klementiy asked, walking up to the table with mugs of strong, steaming tea.

Both of them—Captain Parela and Lieutenant Klementiy—looked relatively fresh and seemingly none the worse for wear after the incident with the ancient vampire. Both of them still appeared to be far younger than their actual ages, which made sense since they were two Yellow Star Mages in service to the Crown.

Apart from them, there were eight other people in the carriage—not mages, of course, but operatives. That was practically the entirety of Mshisty’s department. It was responsible for… To be honest, Ardan still didn’t fully understand what one of the best military mages in the country was in charge of.

“You’ve been reading for two days straight without a break,” Klementiy added. He was wearing his usual, slightly rumpled suit, and he was a touch unshaven and unnaturally gaunt.

Ardan just shrugged in reply. He truly had been devouring the records the Colonel had passed along to him with great hunger, keeping his grimoire and a pencil at hand as he worked.

It stood to reason that the Black House Archive contained knowledge for which any Speaker would have sold their soul—or at least given up an arm without question. True, these scrolls—carefully cut apart and bound into book spines for easier storage—were of no particular value to the Aean’Hane, but to the Speakers…

“What’s it about?” Parela asked, propping herself up on one elbow. Her knotted fingers quivered slightly and her hawkish eyes narrowed.

Ardi involuntarily recalled his first conversation with Mart Borskov. Mages and their eternal thirst for new knowledge…

“It’s hard to explain,” Ardan answered honestly.

“We are educated people, Corporal,” Parela said with a faint note of indignation.

Ardan sighed and briefly closed his eyes. He reached out with his mind and will toward the whisper he could hear through the window that had been left open a crack. The wind burst into his consciousness like a merry, playful puppy that knew neither manners nor order. It slobbered all over Ardan’s face with damp stories from the shores of the icy Great Niewa—it was far more expansive than the mere chunk of it that the Metropolis stood on; it mussed his hair with rumors from Winged Lake and Shamtur; it tried to puff up his cheeks and ears with tales of the foamy waves of the Swallow Ocean; and it grumbled a bit peevishly at the calm hanging over the Western Shallow Seas.

Ardan grabbed hold of a shard of this Name and, after enlarging it with his will, he sealed off his own mind. Only then did he beckon the shard to follow him into that world which lay both adjacent to them and yet, at the same time, was so far away.

Ardan exhaled the shard, and it turned into a misty little bird woven from the steam rising in tendrils above their cups of tea. It flew over Parela’s head, undoing her tight bun, burrowed under Klementiy’s jacket—puffing it up like a balloon—and then, veering sharply, fluttered back out the window.

The young man, breathing heavily, let go of his connection to the shard of the Name of the Wandering South Wind and lifted his cup with a slightly trembling hand to take a sip of tea. It made him feel better.

“It describes winds and chills,” Ardan said, taking brief pauses to catch his breath. “How an echo rings in the mountains, how the breathing of your beloved is almost inaudible in half-forgotten memories, and how at dawn, when it’s barely light, dew sparkles in the sun’s rays. How a seagull’s cry lingers for the briefest of moments on the tips of its feathers before scattering across the seas, and how…”

“And how to turn a mage into a poet,” Parela interjected. She likely hadn’t intended to interrupt him, and had just misinterpreted his extended pause. “So why can’t you just tell us what it says?”

Ardan shifted his gaze from her to the sheets of parchment. In place of letters, he saw motionless images, heard muffled sounds, and felt the lightest of touches.

“It isn’t a language a human being can understand,” Ardi said, closing the “book” and setting it aside. “Or rather, you can understand it—but only if you first learn it.”

“And what’s the problem with learning the language?” Klementiy asked, straightening his jacket (his efforts didn’t make the already-rumpled fabric look more presentable). “I speak the Selkado language fluently, I can manage, more or less, when using the Confederation of Free Cities’ official tongue, and with a dictionary, I can get by in the Desert tongue.”

“And my Scaldavinian and Tazidahian are just as good as a native speaker’s,” Parela added.

Mshisty, judging by the sound of his breathing, was clearly not asleep and had been listening to their conversation, but he didn’t chime in.

“The issue is that… Okay, so, human languages evolved from logographic proto-languages,” Ardan said, cracking his stiff neck. It felt like he’d had a similar discussion with Tess earlier in the summer. “Those languages’ systems contracted, going from symbols depicting concepts to words, and then to individual syllables and letters, becoming semantic languages where phonetic sounds are recorded on paper with standardized characters. But not all races went that route.”

Parela and Klementiy exchanged looks and then sat down next to each other, watching Ardan with keen interest.

“Go on,” they requested in unison.

Mages and their thirst for knowledge… Still, Ardan could hardly judge them—he was the same.

“For example, there’s the Matabar language, or the dialect of the northern elves, for which they used the writing system of the wood elves who lived in the area that is now the Empire’s border with Fatia,” Ardan went on, now clearly on familiar ground. “These are imitation languages. They imitate properties of nature or the surrounding world. For the Matabar, such an approach led to cave paintings and tattoos on the body. For the northern elves, it led to borrowing an existing alphabet.”

“Wonderful. So, why can’t you tell us what the high elves wrote?” Parela pressed a touch impatiently.

“Because in their writing, they don’t imitate nature, but…” Ardan fell silent for a moment, searching for the right word but failing. “Life. Reality. The past, the future, the present. Thoughts. Imagination. Everything at once. And all of it is intermingled. A written text, for the most part, is structured thoughts from someone else’s mind, whereas here, it’s an entire consciousness laid bare. It’s like finding yourself someplace you aren’t, and then coming back again. You can’t describe that using an instrument designed for something else entirely.”

Now it was Parela and Klementiy’s turn to fall silent for a moment.

“And how long would it take to learn the High Elven language?” The captain asked warily.

Now here was a paradox—people like Captain Parela and Lieutenant Klementiy, both of whom were Yellow Star Mages, usually showed little interest in the art of the Aean’Hane. They normally just wanted to know how to fight against it.

Likewise, if Nicholas the Stranger was to be believed, the Aean’Hane didn’t bother themselves with studying Star Magic… Amusingly enough, their primary concern was likely how to fight against it as well.

But again, when you took into account the fact that Nicholas the Stranger had existed at all, and Ardan’s current conversation with Mshisty’s subordinates, it seemed as though these two opposites were relentlessly drawn to each other. Star Mages and Aean’Hane… Were they really opposites, or two halves of a whole?

Thoughts for tomorrow…

“You can’t really learn it the way we would approach such a process,” Ardan said, shaking his head. “Just like the Fae language, the High Elven language is inseparably linked to the ability to Hear and Speak. It’s a language of the art, and for those who don’t wield the art, there are dialects. And the majority of old High Elven and Fae texts were recorded precisely in such written dialects. They used them in everyday life, trade, construction… anywhere that the language of the art wasn’t required. For example, the runic dialect of the Fae language-”

“Is the basis for our Star Magic,” Parela chimed in. “A certain part of it, at least. Everyone knows that, Corporal.”

Ardan gestured at the book. “But here, it’s not a dialect. It’s the language itself. And therefore, it can neither be translated nor adapted.”

“Fine, let’s suppose that’s the case,” Klementiy said, raising his hands. “How did you learn it?”

Ardan opened his mouth, but then immediately closed it. Come to think of it, it wasn’t as if he had deliberately studied it, but somehow, after four years of talking with Atta’nha and Skusty—their lessons and guidance, the scrolls and books he’d read in the she-wolf’s icy home—Ardan had learned how to understand and speak both tongues: Fae and High Elven.

“He learned it because he’s a Speaker,” Mshisty growled from beneath his greatcoat. “Now keep quiet. We’ll be arriving soon.”

None of the eight operatives—all bundled up in greatcoats just like Grand Magister Mshisty himself—uttered a sound, but their approving silence spoke more eloquently than any words ever could.

Parela and Klementiy traded another look, and the gaunt wizard returned to his sofa. Before long, the carriage lapsed into silence broken only by the clacking of the wheels and the creaking of the bolts holding the tables affixed to the walls. Ardan tucked one of the books on the art of the Aean’Hane back into his travel satchel and gazed out the window.

He knew they were heading somewhere to the south-southwest, in the direction of the Dancing Peninsula, but slightly farther west. Maybe they were going to the shores of Warm Bay, which lay north of the island shaped like a human foot. Or perhaps to Deep Bay, which had wedged itself deep into the continent’s southern coastline.

Mshisty had yet to say where they were going or, more importantly, why. Ardi suspected that it might be connected to Odurdod Nudsky and Lashim Inakov, and likely to Driba and Sheriff Maryana Sestrova as well, but… He could theorize as much as he wanted, for as long as he wanted, and the truth might still turn out to be something else entirely.

And that was precisely why he hadn’t been able to answer Tess’ question.

A few days earlier

Ardi turned the key and, by the Sleeping Spirits, it didn’t feel as if he had plunged it into the lock, but into his own heart. Less than two months had passed since he’d returned from his assignment to the Dancing Peninsula, and now he was leaving again.

The scent of pastries and blackberries hit him in the face. Tess was making his favorite dish from his childhood. That alone was enough for Ardi—even before he saw the red-haired beauty—to figure out that she had gotten the role.

Their little apartment, which felt so cozy and warm, was awash in the light of a dozen candles. On the table, which was draped with a snow-white, festive tablecloth, a hot dinner was already laid out: a root salad for Ardan, a matching vegetable salad for Tess, and in the center, a stout pot of fragrant wild rabbit stew.

Humming happily, Tess was busy by the oven in the kitchen.

Ardan felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. The air rushed from his lungs all at once, and an unpleasant emptiness, dragging him toward darkness, settled in his head. Half of him wanted to drop everything, run back down the stairs, and hand Mshisty a resignation letter.

There’d been enough chimeras, demons, child-killers, mad scientists, tragic destinies, mangled lives, Puppeteers, conspiracies, and intrigues. Ardan already felt like he could manage without the Black House’s support—both in terms of making a living, and when it came to his research into Star Magic.

But…

But the other half of him whispered a simple, immutable truth in his ear:

He couldn’t give up.

Not like this.

He would no longer be able to come home to Tess every night after spending his days doing research, studying, working at Professor an Manish’s company, or at his pharmacy venture with Bazhen that hadn’t yet gotten off the ground. He could no longer do it all while knowing that, out there, beyond the threshold of their home, lurking in the shadows cast by the Empire’s brightest lights, a very real Darkness was prowling and drawing ever nearer. A force that was always hungry, forever cold, and utterly lightless.

Ardan had never liked adventures, not since he was a child. He’d always adored a warm little corner, peace, quiet, and the company of an interesting book—preferably on Star Magic or the art of the Aean’Hane. But just as much, he couldn’t stay on the sidelines when someone, somewhere, was asking for his help. And that call, with each passing year, each month, week, and even day, was only growing more insistent.

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Sleeping Spirits… Why did it all have to be like this?

“Oh, Ardi! You’re finally back!” Tess cried out. She’d clearly heard a floorboard creak under her fiancé’s feet. “I have the most unbelievable news! Can you imagine, I…”

With the grace of a cat—or like a little bird in flight—she darted out of the kitchen, wearing an apron and a kerchief over her hair, her hands smeared with blueberry jam and flour.

She never finished her sentence. She stopped short right in the middle of their living room—if one could call that miniature space a living room at all.

The joyful, impish smile on Tess’ face dimmed a little; the corners of her lips fell, and soon, she was gazing at him… while still smiling, but differently now. It was as if she were smiling with nostalgia and gentle sorrow not just at him, but at herself, too.

Ardan still didn’t say a thing.

Tess wiped her hands on her apron, padded barefoot into the hallway and, coming up to her fiancé, hugged him tightly, pressing herself against his chest.

“I kept wondering,” she whispered softly, as if afraid someone might overhear and ruin even this brief moment of closeness, “when it would be my turn to eat a celebratory dinner alone… Do you truly have no time at all?”

She didn’t need to clarify that she had seen similar scenes before, in her own childhood. She’d seen it when Tess’ father—Reish Orman, the Governor-General of Shamtur—would return home for a holiday, only to slip away into the night a few hours later. Or perhaps even minutes.

“Fifteen minutes,” Ardan whispered just as softly. He laid his cheek against her fiery hair and held her so tightly that it seemed like he wanted to take a piece of her with him. Or at least a trace of the scent of spring flowers blossoming by the brook.

“Where are you going?”

Ardan couldn’t answer her. He simply didn’t know.

“Do you need to pack a lot of things?”

“Enough for two weeks.”

Tess nodded.

They just continued to stand there. The second hand on the clock marched around the dial with the steady click of a soldiers’ heels, and still, they remained like that. They breathed each other in and tried not to think about the fact that beyond the foyer’s threshold, beyond the windowsills, beyond the walls of their small apartment, there was another world. A world which, for whatever reason, stubbornly refused to wait for them every time. Not even a little. Not even just a few minutes.

“Did you get the role?” Ardi asked when Tess drew back and headed into their bedroom to help him pack his travel bag.

“I’ll tell you when you return,” Tess answered with feigned playfulness, masking a hint of sorrow.

They packed in silence. Only the bare essentials. They occasionally paused to embrace briefly, then went back to rifling through the wardrobe’s shelves and the depths of their trunks.

Soon, Ardan was standing at the door. He was wearing a suit and an autumn overcoat, with a green mage’s cloak over his shoulders, his staff in one hand and his valise in the other.

They silently gazed into each other’s eyes, reading in them all the things they wished they could say, but for which there was no time.

“You’d better go, then…” Tess said, running her hand along his cheek, repeating the phrase that had by now become habitual for them. “And come back soon… I’ll be waiting.”

“I will,” Ardi said for the umpteenth time, inhaling the scent of her skin. “I’ll be back soon.”

Ardan walked out the door, descended the stairs and, practically flying through the crowded “Bruce’s,” stepped out into the street. He never turned back. He never looked up at the still-lit windows on the top floor of Number 23 on Markov Canal.

He knew that if he did, the slightly frail half of his soul would win out. He also felt like he finally knew why his father—every time he’d left on his patrols of the Alcade—had never looked back, either.

Present day

The train, shaking almost like a weary horse, came to a stop amid grassy hills surrounded by a forest, with dark waves of land rolling away toward two different bays at once. A heavy sky hung over the little town frozen amid the expanse of silent valleys—black marble that had fallen from somewhere in the depths of endless space, where lonely stars, separated by distances unimaginable to the mind, cast their rays of light out into the distance. They cast them anywhere at all. To anyone at all. All in the hope that someone might…

“Don’t just stand there like a post, mage,” came a growl from behind Ardan.

He started, shaking off the enchantment of the world’s underside whispering to him, and climbed down the portable wooden ladder onto the hard-packed, sandy road.

There was no platform in the tiny town that had sprung up around a lone railway station. In truth, apart from the station itself—a stone beacon towering amid the yellowing waves of the rolling valleys—there was nothing else here to speak of.

Beyond the main street stood a line of solitary wooden houses and a single stone building—a combination of inn, saloon, bar, and gun store. The stable stood opposite it, and next to it were the sheriff’s office and a church. It looked as if those had been built first, and then the settlers had added everything else as they’d made this place their home.

With the expanding urbanization of the Metropolis and the constant influx of new residents to the capital, the capital required ever more arable land, meat and water. And while the two branches of the Niewa were successfully taking care of the water issue, it was the food supply that was beginning to pose a problem.

Not in terms of territories suitable for farming, but the farmers themselves. There simply weren’t enough of them. That was why they tended to follow in the footsteps of the other settlers. They would end up being enticed by the low taxes, the subsidies for purchasing their own plot of land, and the absence of inspections for the first ten years after settling it.

And so, despite the construction of a railway network that was meant to unite a huge country that occupied one-sixth of the planet’s landmass, the central provinces of the Empire were emptying out. The people were spreading out along the southern coast, concentrating around the largest cities.

That was why, even here, right in the middle of this grassy sea of emptiness, towns had begun to appear like mushrooms after a rain.

“Major,” a man in an easily-recognizable uniform approached Mshisty, who had just stepped off the train.

He was dressed all in black, and his silvery belt buckle bore the Empire’s crest.

“Lieutenant,” Mshisty returned the salute with the head of his staff, once again donning the mask of a courteous, composed scholar… or perhaps taking off the mask of a madman? “Report.”

“As anticipated, Major, dead souls were dispatched to the Taian border in the form of forged documents,” one of the Second Chancery’s officers reported while standing in the middle of the night’s emptiness beside the train that was still hot from the journey.

Ardan, even after looking around, couldn’t fathom why a town of at most fifteen hundred people (counting the surrounding farms and itinerant cowboys) would warrant a Second Chancery office… It wasn’t as if they had to guard hundreds of thousands of head of cattle here… Yes, there was still a huge amount of resources here, and this was a critical food-producing region for the capital, but surely not to that extent.

And he also didn’t recall the Colonel or Milar suggesting anything about Inakov and Odurdod’s escape being a ruse to flee to Taia. Although, on second thought, that sounded perfectly logical. But even if the Puppeteers did have direct connections with the Tazidahian Brotherhood, what did the Principality of Taia have to do with it? After the Mercenary War, Taia had become little more than a satellite of Selkado—a country which, not that long ago, had abolished legalized privateering against Tazidahian ships in the Shallow Seas.

Ardan shook his head.

Thoughts for tomorrow…

“It seems like your posting is nearing its end, Lieutenant,” Mshisty said—evidently, he knew exactly what was going on.

“If only, Major,” sighed the man in black, releasing a barely visible cloud of breath. “I haven’t been to the capital in six months… Not even bonus pay cheers me up anymore.”

“Well, it appears like your prayers have been answered, Mr. Investigator.”

Investigator? So the man standing before them was not a field operative, but an investigator?

“Brief us on the situation, and let’s mount up.”

Mshisty didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the dozens of curious eyes gradually spilling out into the street. For the townsfolk, whose lives stewed gossip and news in equally-bottomless cauldrons of timelessness, the mere opportunity to gawk at something that broke up their usual routine was worth more than any money.

“Yes, Major,” the lieutenant said, spreading a map out on the rail of a hitching post. “Based on the observations I’ve made over the past six months, activity was noted here,” the lieutenant indicated the shore of Angel’s Tear, which was a relatively large lake that was half a day’s journey from the coast of Deep Bay. “And also here,” he moved his finger north, to one of the bay’s river inlets. “And here,” the final mark ended up just south of the island.

Some of Mshisty’s operatives were adding notes to their own maps and whispering amongst themselves. From what Ardi could hear, they were discussing possible alchemical and technical equipment that would need to be taken from the arsenal.

Could it be that Ardan had been assigned here in order to…

“Hey,” Klementiy said and, as if confirming the young man’s thoughts, he handed him a small box with more accumulators than Ardan had ever seen in his life.

Inside, on a double cushion, lay eight red crystals and eight green ones. On top of that, Klementiy also gave him another box, which held a palm-sized, murky green accumulator.

It wasn’t high enough in quality to be rated for military use, but it was definitely better than a standard civilian one. It was the kind of accumulator military mages slotted into the head of a staff.

Ardan murmured a quiet thank you and hurriedly fitted the miniature accumulators into his rings, placing the spares into the mounts on his belt. Each of them, as always, contained nine rays, because the saturation effect (this was when a mage, due to mental overload, could no longer use these small, quicker accumulators) was ultimately triggered by the number of rays restored within the Stars. The military accumulators needed to be uniform to prevent possible miscalculations and eventual saturation at the worst possible moment.

As for the large accumulator intended for his staff, which Ardan hastily fitted into the specially-made prongs at his staff’s tip, it held (as far as Ardan’s Speaker’s intuition could tell) no fewer than four dozen Green Star rays. However, due to the high proportion of impurities in the Ertalain, it would take Ardan about thirty seconds to absorb even one of them, which, of course, made it unsuitable for military magic.

This confirmed that Ardan had found himself smack dab in the middle of a Black House punitive raid. A magical one, at that.

“Our assumptions?” Mshisty asked, still perfectly calm and courteous as he continued to gather the key details of the operation.

“It’s possible that there’s a Black Star Mage on their side,” the lieutenant breathed out, which caused everyone else to stop dead and fall silent. A six-Star mage… Even if his triads were not very high, which was optimistic to hope for, well… That was still a mage of six Stars.

In Ardan’s case, it would be like asking a goblin to fistfight a giant.

It was a little comforting that Mshisty, Captain Parela and Lieutenant Klementiy were with them. Perhaps the three of them would be enough. But what troubled Ardan far more was this: if, despite anticipating the presence of a Black Star Mage, they had still dispatched Mshisty, it meant that with Lord Aversky’s death, the Black House had lost its only trusted six-Star mage.

“Around the perimeter, on the northeastern shore of the Tear,” the lieutenant-investigator said, pulling a detailed local map from his satchel and marking several points, “there are emitters. They’re camouflaged by illusions and, most likely, powered by Yellow Star generators.”

“I’m not sure about that, it’s more likely-” Klementiy began, but then fell silent when Mshisty’s heavy gaze settled on him.

“After the farmers’ children began disappearing,” the lieutenant went on, “and their livestock started dying off, I collected all the nearby myths and legends. And if the intel from the capital is correct,” the investigator paused and threw a quick glance Ardan’s way, “then that site could be the abandoned laboratory of a Dark Aean’Hane.”

A silence as heavy as lead descended upon the group of Cloaks. Ardan felt like his own spine bowed under its weight. So that’s what this missions was about…

“Corporal,” Mshisty raised his voice slightly, snapping Ardan out of his less-than-rosy thoughts. “Anything to say?”

Ardan quickly ran through the back alleys of his memory.

“There were no Dark Aean’Hane living on the southern coast,” he answered hesitantly. “They posed an equal threat to both Ectassus and Gales, so that most likely isn’t a renegade’s ancient base at all, but a… Excuse me. It’s possibly a shrine to the Dark Gods.”

“A third one in half a year?” the lieutenant-investigator recoiled.

“Lieutenant!” Mshisty nearly barked, momentarily dropping all his affected gallantry. “Mind the protocol!”

Ardan definitely didn’t miss that slip of the tongue. He’d said “third,” which meant that the lieutenant knew about the incident in the grotto with Lea Morimer, and the ancient vampire’s estate.

But, as the saying goes: “Such is the job.” Neither he nor Milar had been told about who else was working on the Puppeteers case, and it definitely seemed like the list of their colleagues that had been deployed across the country was much longer than one might imagine... which was logical enough. One-fifth of the world’s population and one-sixth of its landmass was not limited to the Metropolis alone, however vast and populous the capital might be.

Granted, the underwater grotto had had no relation to the Dark Gods, but that was too tangled a thicket of history and theology for someone in his line of work to need to delve into.

“Why do you think that, Corporal?” Mshisty asked.

Sleeping Spirits… Why couldn’t they have gone over all of this on the train? Most likely because, until they’d come here, not even the Grand Magister himself had known exactly what they would be dealing with.

“The Metropolis, in the sixth century before the Fall of Ectassus, back when it was still called Vetrograd,” Ardan began to explain, tracing dotted lines on the map, “was being blockaded from the north, northwest and west by the forces of the elven princes and the orc warlords. Only the southern route remained open, through which supplies were brought in. But even so, the blockade caused a great many deaths, especially among the children who didn’t get enough to eat, and in the end, this led to a surge of superstition and what people called witchcraft.”

“They called it witchcraft?” The lieutenant-investigator repeated. He looked only a little older than Milar, but was a lot more haggard and perhaps even gaunt by comparison.

“It was all superstition,” Ardi said. “People were blindly doing things they’d heard about from the Firstborn and their half-blood offspring. They used rites and rituals that imitated the art, but weren’t truly connected to it.”

“Then where did a shrine of the Dark Gods come from?” Parela asked.

Before Ardan could answer, Mshisty beat him to it.

“There will always be those who want to exploit the weakness and hope of the people, Captain,” the Grand Magister said in a tone Ardan had never heard from him before. It wasn’t gallant, nor insane, but something altogether different. “What could this mean, Corporal? What sort of threats await us?”

Ardi once again took a moment to think, recalling all he’d known before coming to the Metropolis and everything he’d managed to find out from the forbidden texts he’d devoured over the past year or so.

“Potentially anything,” Ardan concluded with little optimism. “But why would these… fugitives need some abandoned ruins?”

Hearing the operatives murmuring behind him, Ardan hurried to explain.

“The shrines themselves, nine times out of ten—whether they were dedicated to the Dark Gods, the Old Gods, the Sleeping Spirits, or any other belief—are nothing more than heaps of stones,” Ardan tried to sound as convincing as possible. “Most of the horror stories you may have heard in the past are connected to Aean’Hane spells or rituals that slipped out of control.”

“And if we’re unlucky, Corporal?” The Grand Magister pressed. “If this is that one case in ten? I sincerely doubt that our dear… opponents would spend their time and resources on some old ruins.”

Ardi didn’t fail to notice the particular tone that Mshisty had used when he’d said “opponents.” The Grand Magister knew about the Puppeteers. He knew what he was supposed to know to fulfill his duties. Ardan might’ve guessed as much back when the Mad Dog’s department had been sent to support Milar’s in the Night Folk quarter.

“Anything at all,” Ardan repeated in a similarly pessimistic tone. “There’s no strict classification for shrines. They’re just stones. Statues. Nothing more. Everything beyond that is the doing of those who…” The young man waved his hand vaguely through the air. “It’s impossible to predict what exactly we’ll run into.”

Inwardly, he mused that if Inakov and Odurdod had indeed run off to Angel’s Tear, then, if you took into account that both of them were entangled in the affair with the prototype engine based on Paarlax’s generator, and if you added the Homeless Fae whom Ardi had been unable to sense… On top of all that, the coast from which it was so convenient to reach the Larand Monastery of the Sisters of Light was three days to the southeast… He wasn’t liking this equation at all.

Something was taking shape. Something indistinct, unclear, blurred. Ardan was missing just a few pieces to complete the picture, but their absence was keeping him from seeing the truth.

An engineer. Chimerologist mages. A descendant of dwarfs. Missing children. A shrine to the Dark Gods off the old Imperial highway. Homeless Fae…

How did it all connect?

“Good,” Mshisty nodded. “That concludes this brief orientation. Mount up, gentlemen. We’ve still got a day and a half’s ride ahead of us. We’ll rest in half a day and work out a strategy. But don’t forget that we’re moving into the lair of a dangerous, cunning foe. If you don’t want to become a death notice for your next of kin, stay vigilant. Klementiy?”

The lieutenant, after giving him a salute with his staff, had already started pulling some complex, collapsible Ley-apparatuses out of a wheeled crate. Ardan wrestled with his curiosity for a few moments, but soon realized that he probably wouldn’t be able to grasp anything about the complex Star Engineering that Lieutenant Klementiy was an expert in.

***

Ardan lay in the greenery, chewing on a blade of grass. With his hands tucked under his head, he watched a meteor shower sketch bright patterns across the sky. The sparks of distant wanderers would flare to life amid the motionless lights only to disappear again at once.

Thanks to Elena, Ardi knew that, in a few years’ time, in the southern hemisphere, it would be possible to see the comet Aeniëneië, which only visited their solar system once every seven hundred years. It was a very small comet and almost imperceptible to the naked human eye. Even its name, in the language of the northern elves, translated to “the fire unseen by mortals.”

And perhaps that was precisely why its appearance had become yet another tragedy in the history of Ectassus and Gales. The elves of the northern forests had slaughtered the entire family of the human scholar who had invented the first telescope in history.

He’d simply loved the stars…

On his monument in the Metropolis Imperial Observatory, the inscription read: “To the stars, we are all equal.” According to the legend, those words had been the man’s last. He’d said them as he’d watched all his loved ones get killed before his very eyes, seconds before he himself was killed.

In response, the princes of Gales hadn’t stood idly by and, arming themselves with ballistae and crossbows, had sent several northern elf settlements to the Sleeping Spirits. Including some who’d had no part in the quasi-religious slaughter.

Ardan lay there and watched the meteor shower, which, for a brief moment, altered the map of the constellations. The young man relished being able to see the stars. It was a pleasant change from the eternal granite that wrapped the dark Metropolis sky in an impregnable shroud.

One had to wonder: if it had taken humanity only seven centuries to go from a telescope built out of a few magnifying lenses to observatories capable of peering into other solar systems, and to airships traversing the very heavens, then what was next?

For some reason, Ardan recalled the words of the Sidhe of the Burning Dawn. And for some other reason, his inner gaze still couldn’t pull away from the high elf scroll—the one that had been cut into pages—devoted to the art of the Aean’Hane.

Out there, on other planets, amid alien stars, in the darkness of endless space… what did those other Names sound like? And did they even exist at all? And most importantly, did Ardan want to know?

Ever since his childhood, when he’d listened to the swallows returning from somewhere beyond the distant ocean, he had sometimes imagined the wondrous lands of the east. But never had lands separated from him not by water, but by cold and lifeless void, fueled his imagination.

Tess had even told him that the bookshops were currently favoring fantasy stories about ships that didn’t sail the oceans and seas, but the starry reaches themselves. They told tales about inhabitants of other worlds that were unlike anything humans or the Firstborn had ever seen, machines that could think like living beings, and many other things. So many things that Ardi couldn’t even imagine them.

And someone had imagined them.

Amazing.

Could the little boy who’d loved to wander the Alcadian slopes ever have imagined that, one day, he would lie in the middle of a valley and ponder the stars?

Elena had told him that scientific journals had long since disproved the possibility of interstellar travel. With current technology, they would never be able to overcome the planet’s gravity. Also, the airships would simply be unable to withstand the frigid temperatures and thin air of the upper layers of the atmosphere.

And in space, there was no air. There was nothing there at all, except the deadly radiation of the stars, from which their planet was protected by the Paarlax field.

But none of that stopped people from dreaming, just as it hadn’t stopped that scholar of old who’d wished to witness a celestial phenomenon that only the Firstborn had previously seen. And he had seen it, but he’d paid the ultimate price for it.

Ardan grabbed his staff and grimoire, got to his feet, and walked to the edge of their camp. He stopped behind a thin steel rod—vibrating and faintly sparking— that was stuck in the ground. It was one of two dozen identical rods, all of them linked by Ley-cables and connected to a complex mechanical assembly of accumulators. Together, they formed an impregnable barrier.

There, within arm’s reach, the black watercolor of the sky had poured itself onto the earth. All the hopes and dreams of humankind whirled in the light of the stars falling like leaves. The night became her gown; the wind brought in mirages that served as her flesh; and the echo of distant chimes—resonant with ancient promises that had paused to rest in her majestic silence—rang out in her inhuman voice.

“Greetings, my betrothed,” said Allane’Eari, Sidhe of the Cold Summer Night, daughter of the Queen of Night and Wind, Winter and Darkness.

She waved her hand elegantly, and the stars spun into a bracelet around her slender wrist. She waved it again and stepped through the agitated waves of the hills, which danced beneath her feet as though they had risen up not from solid earth, but from sea foam and clouds.

Allane’Eari stepped past the barrier as effortlessly as air itself. She breathed out Words that Ardan could not hear, and a light dusk enfolded the camp in an enchantment of such deep sleep that it seemed like even wind and time had stopped to rest.

Ardan was left alone to face the Princess of Winter.