Book 9: Chapter 1
I WAS SITTING in the lotus position, meditating on a wide escarpment of rock at the top of a low-lying cliff. Or trying to meditate, at least. I just couldn’t concentrate. My thoughts were like pieces in a big mosaic, which I was trying to piece together while somebody was deliberately mixing them together in a big pile on the floor.
I was meditating without the lunari that day. She and the fayret were back on the frontier. Selina was escorting a large unit under the command of Georg von Linz. The Barrier had moved back into the depths of Shadow Pass, so I had sent a unit out to transport all the treasures from the temple back into the fort.
Thanks to my connection to the place of power, I knew with certainty that the Barrier wouldn’t move from its current position for at least a week. All the same, I felt a lot better knowing that my forces had a lunari with them. She would be able to sense the onset of a new flow. Leo and Elsa were there as well. The two strykers had studied all our newfound treasures quite well during our time underground. And now they were hard at work training the rest of our experts. It seemed to me that after a few more trips, it would be safe for some of our strykers to head back to Fort de Gris and leave the rest of the force on the frontier. I was hoping that several of them would advance to new levels during the interim.
Ignia was still at the frontier fort, which we had decided to expand and reinforce. Basically, we wanted to turn it into a fully-functional fortress. The fayret was helping an expanded garrison keep an eye on the place and its environs. After our memorable battle with that pack of scroggs, the structure (which, of course, had originally been built by the Scarlets) had earned the nickname “Fort Ratsbane.”
By the way — Ursula Hoog, who had finally made it to my Margraviate, had already expressed a desire to set up her laboratory at Ratsbane. She argued that this would put her in close proximity to all the resources that we were extracting from the Shadow and the frontier. At the moment, she was hard at work on a plan to outfit the future fortress with magical defenses; thankfully, we had plenty of material for her to work with. Most importantly, she also got to work restarting the Scarlets’ mining operations in order to reactivate the flow of brown ore into the Margraviate.
I couldn’t help but chuckle as I recalled our conversation. She had never forgotten my visit to her armory in Abbeville, and she smirked as she asked whether I had finally come to understand the difference between normal plate armor and stryker armor, whose appearance I had compared to a carnival costume.
She liked my suit of snakeskin armor. After a quick examination, Ursula identified it as the handiwork of Albrecht Lothar, the artificer/weaponsmith from Vintervald. She advised me to put out feelers and see if he would come join us.
She had basically read my mind. Sigurd and I had already discussed the idea. More than that, Ursula promised to think for a little while and put together a list of shadow mages who, in her opinion, might be willing to come join me in my new Margraviate. She also liked my idea of setting up my own mages’ guild.
I showed Ursula some samples of Shadow materials from our treasury, and her eyes practically lit up with excitement. According to her, these were the kind of resources that could finally bring some of her long-cherished projects to fruition. She had only shown me a few of the blueprints and diagrams for these projects, but I was already giving myself another mental pat on the back for having brought her out to join me. The armorer’s interest was particularly piqued by the blue-steel armor and the two swords I had found in the secret wing of the temple. She spent a long time studying them; from time to time, she would burst into an excited flurry of commentary about the magical nexi and nodes inside them.
Just like me, not so long before, she hadn’t immediately realized that this armor would only “come to life” when golden mana began to course through it. The other suits of armor I had found in that underground complex were fit for use by strykers, but this particular suit of armor had obviously been created for an auring.
After finishing her examination, Ursula shook her head sadly and noted how unfortunate it was that she would never be able to see this set of swords and armor in action. After all, the creatures who had wielded golden mana were a thing of the distant past...
An involuntary smile spread across my lips as I sat there meditating. I recalled the wide-eyed expression of amazement on Ursula’s face as she watched me send a clot of golden mana coursing down the sword’s energy channels.
Kurt von Hartha had helped Ursula Hoog get set up during my absence. They were longtime acquaintances, who had both served Conrad V, father of Princess Verena.
I had suspected that the change of management in her homeland might have been the reason that the armorer herself had left Astland and resettled in Abbeville, and now that suspicion seemed to have proven correct. Ursula hated Otto II, and frequently referred to him as an accursed murderer and usurper.
As for the fact that their former King’s daughter was alive and well, and living in the Fox Den... Well, I hadn’t told any of the “Savages” about that yet.
And by the way — by that point, “Savages” was technically a misnomer. The “Savage Hearts” mercenary guild had ceased to exist. Its Captain, along with almost all his men, had sworn fealty to me. They had become my vassals. As had Sigurd, whose contract had long ago expired.
He planned to send his resignation to the Blades of Dusk during our next trip to Herouxville. Considering that nobody besides me had been willing to hire the heretic anyway, it didn’t seem likely that this would cause a problem for anybody...
I should point out, however, that there were some former “Savages” who decided not to hitch their carts to my wagon. Some of them went off to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Erika Bern, for example, who had done such an excellent job on her assignments in Tulonne and Sardent, and also brought Ursula and her laboratory safely back to my Margraviate, was one of them: after receiving her due reward, she took all her servants and several other warriors with her and headed off to Northland.
The former sergeant of the “Savages” simply couldn’t accept the idea of serving alongside her longtime enemies, the werewolves. Even the fact that I was an auring didn’t change her mind. Also, as Kurt explained to me, Erika had only really stuck with the “Savages” for so long because of Uwe.
After his death, there was nothing keeping her tied to the unit anymore. So, after a solemn funeral for all our fallen comrades, she took Uwe’s personal effects, gathered the people who had decided to come with her, and made her way out of my lands... It was a real shame. I knew I would need warriors of her caliber.
Besides Erika Bern, there was one other group that left my Margraviate at that time. This one, however, was part of a larger plan. Twenty of the Mertonians set out on the long, hard journey back to their island, where they planned to gather their families (and anyone else who wanted to emigrate) and move en masse to my Margraviate.
The Glenns had already started making homes for themselves on the lands of the fugitive Baron. That was also where, under the watchful eye of Hilaire Reese and the Count de Poitiers, the Viscount d’Angland and his comrades were temporarily being housed. To keep the young people from getting bored, the old Marshal decided to take up the task of training and educating them.
Besides Ursula Hoog’s laboratory, we also had a large shipment come in from Tulonne. It consisted of several chests and sacks full of Shadow artifacts. Slowly but surely, my Toulonnais friends were streamlining their resource-acquisition process. Sure, it was mainly pieces of Shadow beasts and plants for the time being, but I was mainly just glad to have another supply channel open and functioning.
Along with this delivery, I also received several letters from Baron von Holtz, the current Lieutenant of Westerly Fort Théodore Vincent (who was in charge of my mansion and farms in Toulon during my absence), and a detailed report from Tomcat about the state of affairs in Sardent. Mostly, these letters contained accounts and news from Vestonia, although admittedly some of it was obsolete by the time it actually made it to us...
Thinking about the letters made me frown. The problem of the postal system needed to be sorted out ASAP. For the time being, Vaira was basically the only mail carrier in the Margraviate. She would fly from one place to another, carrying news and orders this way and that at a furious pace. And while the efirel genuinely loved this work (sitting in one spot without moving would have been abject torture for someone like her), she certainly couldn’t handle the entire postal system single-handedly, much less do so indefinitely...
I would have tried to delegate this problem to Lorin, but he was already swamped with work as it was. Besides, his grumpy mutterings had led me to believe that this wasn’t really his wheelhouse anyway. Something about how he was nobody’s Nester or Rafterbird, and how taking care of a bunch of stupid birds wasn’t his job. Long story short, I still had to find someone to take care of the birds for the postal system.
Deep breath in through the nose... Breath out through half-closed lips... Repeat... Focus on your breathing. Here and now...
I scooped an average-sized clot of magic from my reservoir and sent it gliding through my energy channels and energy nodes. I had to chuckle as I did so. Just a few months before, I would have had to suppress the will of a vicious parasite in order to use my own energy system. And now me and that parasite had transformed into a single entity. I was in total control of the entire process.
I sent the next golden clot toward my reservoir, intending to use the magic to thicken its walls. Its volume had doubled over the course of the preceding few months. With my current stores of mana, and the reinforced nodes and channels in my energy system, I could create up to twelve medium-sized webs at any given time.
Conversely, if I ever found myself in a situation where I needed to cover myself with a large defensive dome, I could now do so in such a way that punching through it with a spear (as Khaldrekar had once done) would be very difficult. That, at least, is what I wanted to believe... Every once in a while, I was still experiencing flashbacks of the pain I had felt that day.
Besides all that, the power of each individual attack web had also increased. I now had three different webs from the arsenal I had once possessed as a werefox. Chaos Fang and Chaos Scythe had been joined by a spell simply called Spiderweb. It was the same one I had used in my very first vision — the spell with which, as a young werefox, I had turned the head of a zombie into a pile of shapeless flesh.
Also, my Lesser Healing Web had become more effective and quicker-acting. In my mind, I knew it was probably time to dispense with the “lesser” part of its name. Also, I had finally achieved complete mastery of my energy-augmenting web, which accelerated all the processes in my energy system.
The effect was similar to that of emerald mana, except that it was many times more intense. My next goal was to learn to use this web on other people, as well as myself. I hadn’t achieved any success so far, but I wasn’t going to give up: as they say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Our months in the Shadow had given me the opportunity to work on my werefox magic. Thankfully, I’d had a practically-bottomless supply of energy to work with at the time.
Standing next to the place of power, where my golden mana could interact with the latent brown mana in the ground to create a sort of two-color hybrid, I felt genuinely powerful.
But I didn’t let myself get carried away. The slightest deviation from the appropriate dose of energy — the slightest excess in the amount of energy I was allowing to pass through my body — and even my strengthened energy system might easily have burned out. As such, I made sure to work with relatively small currents of mana. I used these to strengthen the walls of my reservoir and toughen my energy nodes.
Basically, I eventually reached the ceiling of development for the level I was at. The next step would be increasing the reservoir’s size. It was growing gradually, but not as quickly as I would have liked. I needed pearls. Lots of pearls. The bigger, the better.
Sure, being next to a controlled place of power helped my abilities develop pretty well. But any situation that required me to rely exclusively on my own reservoir in a tough battle — fighting three Avants at Sigurd’s level, for example — might still have ended very badly for me indeed. If the Avants were fast, and operating as a team, neither my gift as a Seer, nor my speed, nor my werefox magic would be able to save me.
And it was unpleasant even to think about an opponent like Khaldrekar. I had only managed to defeat him because I was close to a place of power, and then only because the demon hadn’t recovered his full strength. I was afraid to imagine what sort of demon they might eventually have summoned into our world if I hadn’t stopped them... Every time I picked up one of the black bruts, I could feel an icy coldness in my soul, as though something ancient and evil were staring at me from within the Abyss.
This wasn’t some fairy tale or legend, as I had once thought. It was a real threat. I was completely certain of that. I didn’t know what exactly the Hrimthurs had thought up, but whatever it was, I intended to make sure they wouldn’t succeed.
From time to time, I would feel a wave of... Well, I guess it was a feeling of intense anxiety, coupled with an exhaustion that weighed heavily on my mind. At times like that, it really felt like the burden I had thrown onto my shoulders was simply too heavy for me to bear. Like my actions were contrary to my fox nature. Every new decision, every new step taken, every new threat... It felt like they were pulling me down. But eventually I would remember the people who had put their trust and faith in me, and the fact that these people were my family. As the head of that family, I had to be ready to fight for every one of its members, and keep them protected whenever they were in need.
And in order to avert whatever catastrophe was coming, I knew that I would need to get back to the capital before too long. I would have to find someone who could translate the ancient scrolls I had found in the temple. I was hoping that would give me answers to at least a few of my questions.
I knew of at least one person who could help me; namely, the people (or maybe I should say “beings”) to whom the scrolls had once belonged. No matter how I had tried over the preceding months, though, I had never managed to repeat my journey into the Reverse. It was starting to seem like my visits to that world had occurred not through some accidental blip in the energy structure, but purely by the will of some all-powerful creature.
And I could only think of one being who fit the bill: my secret benefactor. Try as I might, however, he was steadfastly ignoring any attempt I made to get in touch with him. Not that this was particularly surprising, of course.
I had some ideas of my own, of course. On my first trip to the Reverse, the spirits had sensed my connection to the lunari and recognized it immediately for what it was. My connection with her hadn’t surprised them at all, which meant that these “lunar spirits” (as the spirits of the Reverse had called them) were probably part of the process of helping mages access the world of the Reverse. Selina didn’t know anything about it herself, but I figured that one of the elders from her Clan might know something. Yet another reason to get back to Herouxville as soon as possible...
After taking out one more clot of mana, I felt a slight vibration on one of the straps that ran across my chest. The golden bruts had woken up a little bit. They had sensed an energy similar to their own. Unlike the rest of the crystals, these ones seemed to behave as though they were living creatures in their own right. I hadn’t quite figured out what exactly they were. Unlike other crystals, they seemed reluctant to share their mana. I suspected that every one of these bruts had its own little parasite inside it, similar to the one inside me.
When I had first found them, I started making a list — I wanted to determine which of my strykers to outfit with a golden reservoir of their own. That, after all, was the main feature of all the legends about golden bruts. Supposedly, these crystals could turn an ungifted creature into a mage.
First on my list was Sigurd, but alas — he and I were in for a mutual disappointment. All my attempts to get the golden bruts to work on my bodyguard ultimately failed. The same thing happened with Georg, Leo, and Elsa. The golden mana in the crystals refused to submit to them. The parasites in those crystals just kept ignoring the strykers.
At first, I thought it might have something to do with needing a more complex ritual, but after a few days of trying, I found that the crystals seemed to wake up during my meditation sessions — they seemed to sense the manipulations I was doing with my mana.
Soon, this started happening every time, and before long it had been going on for several months. That said, the crystals only seemed to react to me. My strykers tried doing the same thing, but the bruts were every bit as inert as they had been before. This led me to the conclusion that even if it was somehow theoretically possible to implant a golden reservoir into someone else, the parasite inside the brut would have to choose its host for itself before anything else would happen.
Which is why I started carrying a supply of the golden crystals around with me in the pockets on one of the straps on my clothing. I never took them out; I was waiting for them to identify a suitable candidate on their own. Alas — they hadn’t reacted to anybody at all so far...
The story was much the same with the figurines I had found in the temple. I could feel golden mana emanating from each of them, but that was all. I showed them to Ursula, hoping that as an artificer, she would be able to figure out how they worked. But unfortunately, she had no luck with them at all. Again — yet another reason to head back to the capital...
There was clearly some kind of connection between the records I had found in the Fox Den and the ones I had found in the underground temple’s archives. I felt certain that the ancestor of the Duke de Clairmont who had built the castle had almost certainly visited the temple as well.
And if that was true, then that progenitor of the de Clairmont house had been more than just a simple spellsword. At the very least, he had probably possessed the ability to interact with places of power.
In other words, people generally considered de Clairmont’s ancestor to have been a collector of antiquities, but in reality he was nothing of the sort. He had been looking for something. And he hadn’t been the only one: the Side of Darkness had been looking for the same thing.
Lord Khaldrekar had mentioned a certain Eye of the Abyss, which had allegedly been hidden by the “motley rabble on the Side of Light.” I figured that the latter probably referred to the aurings. All that remained was to find out what the Eye actually was, and why an Elder Hrimthur would have been so keen to find it (if, of course, he had actually succeeded in turning me into a vessel for the purpose).
I sighed... My mind was in a state of total chaos with all the thoughts rushing through it. Today, it seemed, wasn’t going to be a good day for meditation. In my mind, I was already back in Herouxville.
I knew that the capital was seething like a boiling kettle. I had been told as much by the representatives of the Amber Guild who had hitched a ride with Baron Reese.
Five mages. Not counting servants and soldiers from their escort. One Healer, two Alchemists, and two Strykers. All mediuses. I had talked to one of the strykers (who happened to be the head of the escort unit) shortly after my return from the Shadow.
I seem to remember him trying to look unfazed by everything that was happening. But the flashes of lilac energy in his system gave him away pretty clearly: he was a ball of tightly-wound nerves. Which wasn’t surprising, assuming that Samira Clemand had passed on what I’d said. I had made it very clear to her at our last meeting that representatives from the Amber Guild would not be welcome on the territory of my Margraviate.
And yet here they were, in spite of all my warnings. Moreover, the Guild’s master had pulled off a pretty cunning little trick to make it happen. They managed to find a long-lost relative of the late Baron de Vilar, who had died at the hands of the Scarlets, and drag him with them to my Margraviate. He claimed his inheritance, then pissed off back to the capital, leaving the Amber Guild ensconced in his castle. Right next door to me, you might say.
All the time I had been in the Shadow, the Amber Guild had been settling into its new base. They didn’t try to stick their noses into my affairs at all, though, which actually inflamed my suspicions. They were keeping the lowest possible profile.
I mean, sure, they made regular visits to Fort de Gris and other settlements, but only in the company of an escort unit that Kurt von Hartha had set aside especially for the purpose. Basically, the Amber Guild was making a point of staying on its very best behavior.
Kurt and Hans told me all about this. And I’ll be honest: I found it all a bit surprising at first. After all, I had been completely confident that the representatives of Vestonia’s biggest Guild would start trying to throw their weight around, and indignantly thrusting their charters in front of the ailing King.
Everything fell into place, however, after my conversation with the head of the Amber Guild’s escort unit. It turned out that he and his colleagues were part of a faction within the Guild Council that opposed Gilbert de Ambrelle, the current grandmaster.
There was something of a power-sharing arrangement within Vestonia’s largest Guild. The current Grandmaster had decided to suborn the Council to his will, which (naturally enough) incurred the displeasure of many other respected and influential masters.
It was this faction, acting independently, which had sent these representatives to meet with me, in the hope that we could find some way to circumvent Gilbert de Ambrelle. That was why they were behaving with such remarkable decorum — while also making it clear that they had the legal right to set themselves up in my Margraviate if they so chose.
They handed me a written invitation to a meeting in Herouxville; the paper bore the signatures of no fewer than six of the thirteen masters who sat on the Council of the Amber Guild. As a step toward the friendship they hoped one day to establish with me, they also sent me a list of the goods that were in particularly high demand within their Guild at the time.
The prices they were offering for these goods were significantly higher than the going rate for Shadow artifacts at Westerly Fort. In fact, they were even higher than the going rates in the shops of the Guild’s capital-city suppliers.
I showed this list to my inner circle, and we decided that as a reward for the scrupulous loyalty the Amber Guild had been displaying, we could afford to budge on the prices a little bit. Especially since we already had many of the items on the list stacked to the rafters in our warehouses. We had been planning to sell them anyway.
For the time being, it was hard to tell whether this offer of collaboration on the part of the Amber Guild was genuine, or just another piece of manipulation. But we were prepared for them either way.
The rustle of grass behind me suddenly tore me out of my contemplations. It was Sigurd. And it could only have been something urgent that required my personal attention...
“What is it?” I asked, without opening my eyes.
“Hans sent a rider,” said Sigurd. “Your Lordship’s presence is required.”
I sighed again as I opened my eyes. My seneschal had given an excellent account of himself in my absence. Especially given that, before I left for Bone Grotto, we had discussed the possibility that that absence might last for quite a while. Hans was just trying to wring as much benefit out of my presence in the Margraviate while he still could. Most likely, he had set up some sort of meeting with local headmen or traveling merchants...
I could see the silhouette of Fort de Gris in the distance (much enlarged over the preceding few months), as well as our military camp, which had started to take on the features of the city it would one day become. The boundary between the two would soon disappear, and when it did my capital city would double in size.
A warm spring breeze ruffled my hair, and brought with it the smell of flowering trees and fresh earth. The air contained notes of pine, a barely-perceptible hint of thyme, and the sweetish tinge of nature reawakening after a long winter.
The world around me was coming back to life: birds were chirping happily in the crowns of the trees, sunbeams were shining implacably down through the young foliage, and in general it seemed like the entire world had drunk deeply from the cup of life. The moment was full of a special sort of magic, and I felt like I wanted to dissolve into it, leaving everything else in the world behind.
Alas... Such a luxury was beyond my means. In just a few days, I’d be headed back up the long road to Herouxville...