18.7
Jewel looked down on the corpse of a man, he had not visibly aged further, but the feeling of his flesh in the world was scarcely better then Mathias had been on his death bed.
His lungs no longer breathed on their own, his heart could no longer beat, his body merely trembled and strained ever so slightly before the miracles pulled them into action. His bones were held up by divine command rather than any kind of integrity. His muscles were wasted away, barely flexing before his limbs moved, his skin over thin and soft, shielded and coddled, even his eyes were not quite seeing or turning so much as being puppeted by the subtle touch of a god and the light bent and carried into them.
If Jewel dismissed the miracles holding the corpse of a man up she was pretty sure he would be dead before he finished falling.
Yet he stood, Peter Bulchava stood before her, the miracles smiling for him with a kind of delighted wonder. Without the report from Adelyne about the rising tensions between the highest members of the Pantheon she would have refused the man’s request for an audience, no matter all of his offers.
But he and his enterprise were not going to be welcomed in Old Cantor after this year, and whatever he might say it was Jewel who was holding the power in their negotiations.
“Shining Countess of Viznove, Jewel of Rochford, Lady of Valasect, how far we both have come.”
He turned to consider Anna, and Jewel felt the still unsettling eruption of gooseflesh rising on her softest’ spawns arms and up and down her back. It was so strange to have a version of herself almost completely bereft of scales. The speckling of ripe wheat colored dots on the five year old’s skin was more of an additional distraction than any comfort or protection.
“I must again apologize for my youthful foolishness, but is it not a very curious thing indeed that what was once given as an insult has manifested in truth?”
Jewel snorted in open derision while she kept Anna’s attention on the man, even as the aged thing Peter Bulchava had become turned to gaze adoringly up to her wyrm self.
“What you said about my mother is not even half an imposition to her propriety as what every tavern in Viznove sings about me and my family each night, the debt of your insult was more than paid, I was far less understanding of the nature of men in my youth.”
The man nodded, or rather his flesh struggled and failed to move and was then carried by the divine touch cutting through him in a blinding profusion. It accomplished the task and to Anna’s eyes he seemed strong and sure in the motion.
But now that she had the eye to watch for it she could only wonder if this was the truth of the Pantheon’s declaration of divine intervention as a sin. Peter Bulchava was rotting away even as he stood and moved.
Was it the support of the miracles themselves that ruined him?
How many of those miracles were hiding how wasted and decayed he was from himself just as Jewel had done as Gem the first?
Finally the man’s divinely strengthened voice broke the silence that had settled.
“Just so, but to business then! I did not request an audience and march the core of my enterprise through under and over paths to apologize and make right for youthful foolishness. I came to tell you what my Enterprise can offer you!”
Jewel nodded, his party had been astoundingly large, her Manor had grown from the modest accommodations it had started as, year after year stone had been carved into shape, statues made, all mortared and sealed together and foundations dug into the hillside. It had guest rooms and chambers now to accommodate multiple houses’ staff as well as the households of her Vassals and Allies as guests.
The Bulchavan Enterprise Caravan had filled all the rooms Jewel could spare, spilled out into the Valasect village and what room they offered and then had to arrange a suitable place for a truly festive market encampment besides.
Hundreds of men and women, four times more in beasts of burden, the enterprise had arrived full with spices, gold, silver, intricate crafts and they had gladly taken Wyrmspun wool and whatever trade Valasect’s villagers wished to sell in exchange. Often at what Jewel was certain had to be terrible losses.
But then again all of that was trinkets and refuse to what the enterprise and its heavily armed and armored guards truly protected, had requested she secure in her manor.
Twenty-Two True Wyrm Eggs.
Ostensibly rightfully owned by Peter Bulchava but they were absolutely going to be missed when the Pantheon thought to check their own hoard of the things.
His voice was made by miracles squeezing and flexing in the man’s feeble throat.
“I must first admit that despite all the depths of knowledge, wisdom and treasure available to my enterprise and my clients among the Pantheon, that you found an impossibility beyond even me with your first request.”
Jewel did not sigh, she had made her demand of the man while still in the height of her pain over her Father. Leo had reported much the same as Adelyne said Bulchava would tell her, Tsulogothulan and their contact with Urul the Written had agreed with the sentiment based on their own memories and records respectively.
Still the man repeated what she knew he would say.
“I have found nothing to the matter of where your Father and former Captain’s souls now reside”
Almost no records or lore available to Jewel and her allies even hinted at evidence of the ‘lie’ of the heavens regarding kept souls. Much less any insight into the truth of where they actually went.
Still she felt Anna’s face trying to frown and probably pouting at the confirmation. It was so much harder to properly express when your face was squashed in like this, how did all the humans in Jewel’s life manage it?
No matter, she did not need to speak to his ‘apology’, like any peddler, Peter Bulchava loved the sound of his own voice, even if it was barely his anymore, so much divinity wrapped around and through his neck.
“It is a great shame that I have failed at the one thing you would ask, after you and your family were the very fulcrum of my fortunes, for the request to end in my failure.”
Jewel rumbled, her voice deep, soft, feminine but powerful, she shifted it based on how Anna’s bones and flesh felt it, keeping it from being outright painful but still ever so slightly disquieting.
“You did not come here merely to apologize for that either Bulchava.”
Adelyne’s guild members were scattered quite far indeed now, Jewel was not even sure how precisely the Guild Mistress gathered so many secrets from around the world. But in moments like this it was invaluable.
Peter Bulchava smiled up at her wyrm-self, he grinned and even those motions were barely his own, without the divine helping along his face he’d not even manage a quiver of his lips.
“I know what Cantor Reborn has been trying to build, I know what you have accomplished here with the Archpriestess and the Court Wizard. It is troubling the Pantheon, their council is liable to split between those that want to see the entire effort ‘censored’ and those that want to claim it for themselves to give out an afterlife to only those they deem worthy.”
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Jewel again felt Anna’s hairs on her arms rise up in gooseflesh, she felt the ache in the back of her neck trying to take on the posture her wyrm-self was only just avoiding. Holding herself from rearing back with wings flared.
“Is it threats then you wish to bring to me Peddler Bulchava? To the whole of Cantor Reborn?”
She spoke very softly, at least to the ears of Anna it sounded like such, but the rumble in her throat was deep and low, low enough to be beneath hearing, rising like a tremble in her spawn’s spine. Her diminutive tail twisted to the left and right under her dress.
The man shook his head at her words, he ignored the inaudible hum that was even making Anna want to squirm in dread.
“Quite the opposite, Oh, Shining Wyrm, Fortune of my life, My dealings with the Pantheon have been enriching, but our labors with them and the work of their contracts is completed, the Bulchavan Enterprise is not the instrument of the god botherers and their inner strife. It is mine and my partners’ alone.”
Again Adelyne’s reports would disagree, it was only by some very creative definitions that his enterprise’s dealings with the Pantheon were complete. The miracle puppeted peddler had absconded with more than three quarters of all the craftsmen that knew how to make use of his so-called ‘yoke of creation’. Leaving Old Cantor’s diviners with the least skilled of apprentices to ‘finish up’ the labors he’d agreed to provide.
Jewel held her judgemental glare on the man-corpse until he continued.
“Your project to give a safe life after death, the missives your realm’s temples still deign to share with the Pantheon, my own men in the trade and what word we receive from around the world all say the same thing. It costs a mighty bounty to procure the materials for it.”
Jewel nodded slowly, it was still precisely as she had been warned.
“And you would offer to use your hoard of eggs, my own kind’s eggs, to solve that problem for me?”
His smile didn't leave his face, another tremor of raised hairs passed over Anna.
“Only that? Hardly! They are far too precious for mere material, but I see the Countess is well informed! No, I offer more, for is it not another problem that the stones your afterlife depends on are required to witness a body to recover the soul? As well as being present to enact the blessing to secure them in the first place?”
Jewel huffed and raised a brow. Adelyne had already reported that some details of the Leuhtąun were turning up in the Pantheon. Although efforts were made to contain it by their leadership with some truly severe methods, the rifts just kept getting deeper as the priests argued and took up sides for the growing schism in Old Cantor, and secrets leaked through those cracks.
“And I presume you have a solution for that as well for sale?”
Peter Bulchava attempted to move, to nod, to smile and his web of miracles obeyed the aborted twitches to move him through these actions, they pointed his hand up at her ceiling, his wrinkled skin pulled taut by the pressure the heavens placed upon the overly thin skin of his lips and cheeks with how wide a grin he bared to her.
“It turns out oh Blessed Fortune of my life, that the gods are not above selling a place within their heavens. For the cost of cracking even a single True Wyrm Egg they would take up one of your stones and place it within the sky, setting it where all in the world under any vault could see and be seen by it. For my debt to you, I will gladly pay for this service from my own stores!”
Jewel felt her flame still, she had to remind Anna to take a breath before the burning in her lungs made her spawn light headed. That was something that Adelyne had not reported about Peter’s dealings in Old Cantor.
But if what the corpse of a peddler offered was possible? If they could put a sufficiently large Leuhtąun to save everyone’s souls in a place among the stars themselves? To be seen even not just by those within the Realm of Cantor Reborn, but anywhere, under any vault?!
Jewel pulled her face into a frown, the man before her was a pit of greed she was sure of it, all the parchment spent between her and Adelyne seemed to confirm it, yet he stared up at her in worship, more fervently in tone and expression than she had ever seen before. He stank of his devotion, not even the most obsessive and disturbing inhabitants of Kaeketeh looked at her like Peter Bulchava did now.
She briefly considered denying him, refusing the offer, but the consequences of doing that? The state of the Leuhtąun could not continue as it was. With a tone of voice far too even, covering how desperate she was for an excuse. Jewel asked the one question that might let her deny this offer.
“What do you want for this peddler? What is your price?”
His smile did not dim, though the miracles blinded her wyrmish sight, she could feel his flesh held tightly in place, smell his breath, both the herbal perfume in it and the underlying rot, Anna’s eyes could see he didn't even twitch.
“A place in your afterlife for me and those in my enterprise. Same as anyone else in the Realm once you’ve finished. A place of peace safe from the Gods and the Pantheon.”
Jewel let the frown deepen, her head lowering with the weight of what she was about to do. But for a cost of practically nothing, and another wyrm’s eggs? Could she deny it on those grounds?
When there were so many others that could be saved if she accepted?
Her Father and Muriel both would have been saved if they had simply known to begin the Leuhtą project before the war. No one had, but they could have begun it any time! All the lives lost in the War with Magarska could have been saved too!
So many lives, so many thousands of losses as deep as her own.
All those souls could have been kept safe?
Without this what would become of the project? The Leuhtąun only a comfort available to Jewel and her family? Maybe the Stein family? the Pantheon’s high priests, perhaps even the likes of Murad or even this peddler Peter Bulchava? It would eventually find its way to these rich and spiteful men, they could find the means to acquire what Erhard and Ursula had made. Even if Jewel did not perform the wyrmish sorcery they could go to Evren, or whoever the next tyrant wyrm that hatched was to satisfy that requirement.
Others would have a place kept safe after death.
But only at an exorbitant cost.
Maybe the Pantheon would offer the ritual that was needed for this themselves, but they would demand a payment from Cantor Reborn, Jewel had seen them scheme, had heard them try to grasp for power. They would put conditions on the dream after death and who could benefit.
Or for nothing but Jewel’s word she could agree to what this corpse of a man barely held alive by miracles offered her.
Could Jewel deny all the sons and daughters that had lost fathers just like her over her disdain for him?
Hardly! Such a thing would be monstrous!
No, She had only one answer she could give, Peter, whether genuinely devoted to his words or merely so fearful for his own mortality as to not make a difference was giving her a good deal, more so despite everything about him he’d even tried to do what she asked of him before this. Despite it so far being an impossibility.
“Very well, for that price I accept, the Bulchavan Enterprise will assist Erhard and the Archpriestess of Asherah in this project.”
Jewel could hear a hint of skin and meat tearing in his cheeks as the man ordered his miracles to smile wider than his feeble flesh could sustain.
“But you and yours shall do so in the Capital, in Burning Depths Ford, away from me and my demesne.”
Anna’s careful observations finally saw the smile fall from his face, it sank, slowly crumbling, until the lines in that face resembled tree bark, or the dribbling of melted candle wax. Without the prompting of the miracles the face looked like a dead thing despite the flush of living blood forced through it by a chained heart.
Again the man who was a puppet to himself on divine strings nodded. Again he spoke with a voice that was nothing like the feeble, faltering failure that barely moved in his throat before the gods took over from his prompting.
“As the Shining Countess and the heart of my Fortune commands.”
And with that he bowed, far too smoothly for how many times the muscles and tendons in his back tried to spasm during the process. Then the living corpse turned and walked out, with a strength that did not show the way agony had to be smothered at every motion by a god’s contract.
In the silence and emptiness left behind Jewel risked trying to speak again with Anna’s throat, feeling out the struggle of this new voice.
“If I never see that man again it will be too soon.”