Chapter ten: Intermission
Chapter ten
Mansuur was in pain. He was surprised as to how much. It had been a long time - years, decades - since anyone or anything had last been able to hurt him. Much like Dara, he was used to his powers isolating him from the hardships of life, giving him a supreme, even god-like, power over the material world around him. He was used to being the master of the world. He had forgotten that the world could strike back.
Still, he was Mansuur. He was the First Among The Chosen. He had waited for this time, this final chapter in history, ever since he was a child and his father had sat him on his knee and told him that their family was special - that they were blessed by damnation, a part of the omnipotent force that ruled most of the world, that had reduced the domain of humanity to a few scattered islands spread throughout the Wastelands. He had spent his whole life preparing for it, and he would not falter now.
The gargoyles had to be handled first. They were going berserk, driven by his anguish to destroy each other and everything else in their path. He strained himself to speak, and managed to gasp out a few words of power. Little by little, the sounds of the stone’s rampage faded, until all that remained was the sound of the rain, the moaning of the wounded Chosen, and the pounding heartbeat in Mansuur’s own head.
He opened his eyes, blinking away a film of something red and sticky. For a moment he thought it was his own blood. Then he realised that it was not so - he was bleeding, yes, and he needed to get to a healer soon or he would probably die from his injuries - but the reason he was soaked with blood was that it was falling from the sky.
He laughed feebly. So the first sign had come! He had toiled for years to bring it about - performed a hundred strange, grisly rituals, culminating with the ritual sacrifice of three iconic victims. He had had to search deep for the lore to do it, find the arcane knowledge that had been unknowingly encoded in the Demesne’s songs and stories, but in the end he had managed to piece it together.
"Don’t just stand there, fools!" he growled, though he didn’t know if anyone was standing anywhere. "Collect what we need!"
That seemed to have no effect. Mansuur groaned. If you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself.
Gasping and choking, he spoke more words of command. Three gargoyles crumbled at his voice, and the stones that had made up them rattled along the ground, finding each other, merging together. Slowly, a Witch Stone construction took shape, a great stone cauldron, large enough that a full-grown man might be boiled in it. Mansuur spoke again, and gargoyles took positions around the cauldron, grasping it by quickly forming handles and lifting it from the ground.
Good, Mansuur thought. And now, since I seem to be the only Chosen worthy of the honour...
He sacrificed another two gargoyles to form a stone stretcher for himself. On his command, strong gargoyle arms lifted him from the ground and placed him on it - only through supreme self-control did Mansuur keep himself from screaming in pain - and then lifted the stretcher itself. Thus elevated, Mansuur looked around. All the Chosen he had brought were on the ground, either wounded or too scared to move.
He could have spat. The Chosen! There had been sixty-six unhallowed bloodlines, once upon a time, but four hundred years had extinguished many entirely and left others so diluted as to make no difference. Still, they formed the elite of Shadowed Citadel Demesne. Most of them were Nobles - Mansuur, part of the caste of Mystics, formed one of the few exceptions. It was inevitable, of course. The destiny of the Demesne turned upon the Chosen, whether individual Chosen knew it or not - fate itself conspired to place them in positions of power.
Right now, however, Mansuur strongly questioned whether any of them were worthy of the destiny they had been born into. Four hundred years of hidden history, and this was what it came to - a bunch of incompetent lickspittles who were cowering in the mud, too terrified to notice that the enemy had fled the field.
Dara was a problem. Mansuur didn’t believe there was anything she could possibly do, but the portents were infuriatingly vague on the subject - some were adamant that the Philistine was fated to try and fail, but others seemed to regard her as a genuine threat, and Mansuur couldn’t help but notice that even the ones that were the most vitriolic in their insistence of the Philistine’s impotence had a worried undertone to them. The prophesies weren’t sure. Maybe that meant that fate itself wasn’t quite sure, which was an infuriating possibility to a man who had built his life on the inevitability of his own ascension. Yes, Mansuur would have felt a lot better if Dara had died here, in the ruins of her wasted Philistine life.
But that still wasn’t the main problem. Killing Dara would have been nice, but he had had a greater purpose in coming here. He had wanted to secure Jalon, once and for all. The fact that the man was now in the wind - and aware of some twisted version of what was actually happening, after all that Mansuur had done to try to ensure that that underachiever he was sleeping with didn’t manage to tell him anything - was worrying.
Mansuur tried to console himself. Perhaps some of this was the fault of his own lack of faith. A lot of sources seemed to imply that Jalon did not join the Chosen until after the second sign - perhaps it had been foolish to try to force it to happen. He had not meant to do much more than play with Jalon at his feast, give the Artist a taste of the world that was his birth-right and at the same time make sure he understood who ruled that world, but Jalon had gotten dragged off by Dara. That had in itself seemed like a fine joke - Dara was after him for the ritual sacrifices, seeing herself as the heroic detective hunting a murderer, when in fact she had entered a world far larger and more terrifying than her petty one of crime and investigation - but soon after, his demonic allies had informed him that the woman was the Philistine. Mansuur had gotten upset.
Being upset had gotten him here - forced to be carried on a stretcher, with Witch Stone rocks still quivering within his savaged flesh. He tried to focus his will on them and pull them out, but the pain was so intense that he immediately stopped. He could have pushed through it if he had had to, but he was worried that he might actually kill himself if he tried. Let the stones lie where they were for the time being - he could get them out with the help of a healer as soon as he had gotten to one.
Speaking of which...
"It is time to leave," he proclaimed. "Anyone who can walk had better be on his feet immediately."
A few of the Chosen actually managed to get up, standing shakily in their ruined, soaked clothes. Mansuur sent gargoyles to pick up the rest and carry them along. Dead or alive, or alive but wounded enough that the rough treatment would kill them - Mansuur didn’t care, he could sort them out once he was back at Ravenscar Hold.
The diminished army of gargoyles set out through the grisly rain. The cauldron Mansuur had shaped was carried along with them. Little by little, it was becoming filled with blood.
***
"Clear the way!" Aseena shouted. Dara was lying folded over her shoulder like a bag of laundry, feeling just healthy enough to feel ridiculous. She could walk just fine, thank you, as long as she could walk slowly and preferably have someone to lean on! But Aseena had insisted that the worse her injuries appeared, the better.
They were in what was ordinarily a rather pleasant pub, the Hearty Holter. There was an open fire, all sorts of interesting bottles and barrels behind the counter, and a trace of the pleasant scent of good, simple food that probably dominated the establishment in the normal course of things. Right now, though, the dominating scent was the copper stench of blood. Dara supposed that the whole city would smell like that for weeks.
All sorts of people had taken refuge in the pub when the red rain started and the alarm bells started sounding. Even now, the proprietor - a portly Servant man with a huge walrus moustache - was barring the door behind the two women. Aseena stormed by him, further into the main room, filled with tables and chairs and drenched people clustered around them.
"Injured woman!" Aseena shouted. "We need a healer!"
"I’m healer!" a Priest said. He was wearing a flowing white robe with many golden embroideries - it had probably been quite stately five minutes ago, but now it was a red ruin - and had a round, serious, middle-aged face with only a few wisps of grey hair left around the ears. "Everyone step away from the table, please! There - put her down here, Servant, if you would be so kind."
Aseena unceremoniously dumped Dara on the table like a sack of potatoes. Dara swore feebly, but remembered that she was supposed to be near death and didn’t try to strangle Aseena for it. Not that she was sure she could have strangled Aseena if she had tried - she might not be dying, she hoped, but she certainly wasn’t doing too well.
"What happened to her?" the Priest said while he moved his hands over Dara, a few inches from touching her.
"Her horse got spooked by the rain," Aseena said. "It threw her, and she was at the top of the Frillus Stair at the time - she rolled and slid half the way down, I think hit her head any number of times..."
Dara actually felt impressed. Aseena didn’t answer immediately and without hesitation, like a mediocre liar might have done, thinking that hesitation was the only thing that was suspicious. Instead, she hesitated for just an instant, just long enough to give the impression that she had to put a memory into words. Nor did she deliver the lie clearly and firmly. No, she delivered it with just enough unevenness in tone that she sounded like she was upset at a friend’s sudden injury and had a little trouble concentrating. In fact, Dara was pretty sure that Aseena had done what any good liar did, and half-convinced herself, just for this moment, that her story was true. Her delivery was good, because she was actually feeling some semblance of what the situation she presented should have made her feel.
Certainly the Priest seemed convinced.
"She’s going to be fine," he promised, kindly and just the tiniest bit condescending - a fatherly Priest reassuring a simple Servant woman. "She had a lot of nasty bruises, and a bit of a concussion, but all in all, she’s very lucky. I know she seems dazed and confused, and that that might seem frightening to you, but I think that’s the shock more than anything - her injuries aren’t actually bad enough to cause this reaction."
"But you’ll heal her, right?" Aseena said, her voice tight with worry.
"Of course." The Priest smiled. "The UniGod preserves, and He has gifted me with the ability to care for His people. If you would just give me a moment..."
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. After a moment, a pure, white light began emanating from the hands he was holding over her.
Dara watched with half-closed eyes. She had always had a suspicious fascination for gifts other than her own. Part of it, she supposed, was jealousy - everyone loved conjurers, and healers and scriers were the UniGod’s holy servants, but a witch was only ever a superstitious riot from being hanged from a streetlight. Most of it, though, was a constantly frustrated desire to know, to understand. No one even knew what a gift was, why one person got one and another person got another, and why most people never got any at all.
If I had been born a healer instead of a witch, she thought, not for the first time, what would have been different? Would I have been a believer? A councillor, a nurturer? Or would I have just been me, and stuck with a gift that didn’t suit me at all? Or are gifts connected to personalities, and you can only ever have a gift that is an extension of yourself?
A sense of warmth and well-being swept through her. The fugue and pain in her head eased, cleared, disappeared like smoke blowing away on the wind. The deep ache in her strained muscles and battered bones melted and flowed away. She gave off an involuntary gasp of surprise and relief - being healed always gave you such a shock, as your body seemed to remember that it wasn’t supposed to be in pain.
"How do you feel?" the Priest said. His face was a bloody nightmare mask hovering above hers, but his smile was kindly.
"Better," Dara mumbled. "Thanks."
She flung her legs off the table and stood up. She felt almost euphorically strong and fit, ready to run a race. Her mind was still a mess of betrayal and self-doubt, but at least her body was back to its usual state of pampered health.
"We have to go," she said.
"You can’t go!" the Priest protested. "The bells are still ringing - listen! The city is under attack. We all have to stay inside while the Soldiers deal with the incursion."
Dara nodded morosely. Somewhere, Rinabaar was swinging his sabre against a swarm of malformed enemies, shouting at his troops to stand firm, to hold back the infernal enemies who were threatening the lives and souls of the civilians he was sworn to protect. She hoped he would be all right. This time, it didn’t look like she would be able to turn up and help him.
"No, you don’t understand," Aseena said desperately. "My little brother is out there! I lost track of him when I had to run and pick her up - I don’t know if he made it inside or not! I have to search for him!"
The Priest shook his head unhappily.
"You can’t," he said. "Everyone stays inside while the bells are ringing, it’s the law. But I’m sure that someone made sure your brother got to safety..."
His voice trailed off. Aseena’s expression was saying, very clearly, oh, you’re sure, are you? Would you be as sure that there was nothing to worry about if it had been someone you loved who might be out there?
"He’s just a little boy!" Aseena pleaded. "Look, she and I can take care of ourselves. But if he’s wandering around somewhere, scared, lost... We have to do everything we can! If something happens to him while I sit in here, safe and warm..."
The Priest sighed.
"All right," he said quietly. "The UniGod go with you." He walked ahead of them to the front door. "Open the door, Servant!" he commanded the proprietor. "Quickly, and stand ready to close it as soon as these two are outside!"
The door closed behind them, and Dara and Aseena set off into the blood-red downpour.
"Little brother?" Dara said.
"Well, I do have one of those, as it happens," Aseena said shamelessly. "It’s always best to improvise off of something you know well, I’ve found."
Dara gruffly admitted to herself that Aseena was a handy person to have around when you were hunted by the law and the criminals all at once. Lying was one knack that she had never mastered - a side effect, she supposed, of being all about pursuing the truth.
"So where are we going?" she said.
"To where it all started," Aseena said. "For me, at least. We’re going to pay a visit to the National Archive. It’s about time that you got to see just how far back this all goes."
Mansuur was in pain. He was surprised as to how much. It had been a long time - years, decades - since anyone or anything had last been able to hurt him. Much like Dara, he was used to his powers isolating him from the hardships of life, giving him a supreme, even god-like, power over the material world around him. He was used to being the master of the world. He had forgotten that the world could strike back.
Still, he was Mansuur. He was the First Among The Chosen. He had waited for this time, this final chapter in history, ever since he was a child and his father had sat him on his knee and told him that their family was special - that they were blessed by damnation, a part of the omnipotent force that ruled most of the world, that had reduced the domain of humanity to a few scattered islands spread throughout the Wastelands. He had spent his whole life preparing for it, and he would not falter now.
The gargoyles had to be handled first. They were going berserk, driven by his anguish to destroy each other and everything else in their path. He strained himself to speak, and managed to gasp out a few words of power. Little by little, the sounds of the stone’s rampage faded, until all that remained was the sound of the rain, the moaning of the wounded Chosen, and the pounding heartbeat in Mansuur’s own head.
He opened his eyes, blinking away a film of something red and sticky. For a moment he thought it was his own blood. Then he realised that it was not so - he was bleeding, yes, and he needed to get to a healer soon or he would probably die from his injuries - but the reason he was soaked with blood was that it was falling from the sky.
He laughed feebly. So the first sign had come! He had toiled for years to bring it about - performed a hundred strange, grisly rituals, culminating with the ritual sacrifice of three iconic victims. He had had to search deep for the lore to do it, find the arcane knowledge that had been unknowingly encoded in the Demesne’s songs and stories, but in the end he had managed to piece it together.
"Don’t just stand there, fools!" he growled, though he didn’t know if anyone was standing anywhere. "Collect what we need!"
That seemed to have no effect. Mansuur groaned. If you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself.
Gasping and choking, he spoke more words of command. Three gargoyles crumbled at his voice, and the stones that had made up them rattled along the ground, finding each other, merging together. Slowly, a Witch Stone construction took shape, a great stone cauldron, large enough that a full-grown man might be boiled in it. Mansuur spoke again, and gargoyles took positions around the cauldron, grasping it by quickly forming handles and lifting it from the ground.
Good, Mansuur thought. And now, since I seem to be the only Chosen worthy of the honour...
He sacrificed another two gargoyles to form a stone stretcher for himself. On his command, strong gargoyle arms lifted him from the ground and placed him on it - only through supreme self-control did Mansuur keep himself from screaming in pain - and then lifted the stretcher itself. Thus elevated, Mansuur looked around. All the Chosen he had brought were on the ground, either wounded or too scared to move.
He could have spat. The Chosen! There had been sixty-six unhallowed bloodlines, once upon a time, but four hundred years had extinguished many entirely and left others so diluted as to make no difference. Still, they formed the elite of Shadowed Citadel Demesne. Most of them were Nobles - Mansuur, part of the caste of Mystics, formed one of the few exceptions. It was inevitable, of course. The destiny of the Demesne turned upon the Chosen, whether individual Chosen knew it or not - fate itself conspired to place them in positions of power.
Right now, however, Mansuur strongly questioned whether any of them were worthy of the destiny they had been born into. Four hundred years of hidden history, and this was what it came to - a bunch of incompetent lickspittles who were cowering in the mud, too terrified to notice that the enemy had fled the field.
Dara was a problem. Mansuur didn’t believe there was anything she could possibly do, but the portents were infuriatingly vague on the subject - some were adamant that the Philistine was fated to try and fail, but others seemed to regard her as a genuine threat, and Mansuur couldn’t help but notice that even the ones that were the most vitriolic in their insistence of the Philistine’s impotence had a worried undertone to them. The prophesies weren’t sure. Maybe that meant that fate itself wasn’t quite sure, which was an infuriating possibility to a man who had built his life on the inevitability of his own ascension. Yes, Mansuur would have felt a lot better if Dara had died here, in the ruins of her wasted Philistine life.
But that still wasn’t the main problem. Killing Dara would have been nice, but he had had a greater purpose in coming here. He had wanted to secure Jalon, once and for all. The fact that the man was now in the wind - and aware of some twisted version of what was actually happening, after all that Mansuur had done to try to ensure that that underachiever he was sleeping with didn’t manage to tell him anything - was worrying.
Mansuur tried to console himself. Perhaps some of this was the fault of his own lack of faith. A lot of sources seemed to imply that Jalon did not join the Chosen until after the second sign - perhaps it had been foolish to try to force it to happen. He had not meant to do much more than play with Jalon at his feast, give the Artist a taste of the world that was his birth-right and at the same time make sure he understood who ruled that world, but Jalon had gotten dragged off by Dara. That had in itself seemed like a fine joke - Dara was after him for the ritual sacrifices, seeing herself as the heroic detective hunting a murderer, when in fact she had entered a world far larger and more terrifying than her petty one of crime and investigation - but soon after, his demonic allies had informed him that the woman was the Philistine. Mansuur had gotten upset.
Being upset had gotten him here - forced to be carried on a stretcher, with Witch Stone rocks still quivering within his savaged flesh. He tried to focus his will on them and pull them out, but the pain was so intense that he immediately stopped. He could have pushed through it if he had had to, but he was worried that he might actually kill himself if he tried. Let the stones lie where they were for the time being - he could get them out with the help of a healer as soon as he had gotten to one.
Speaking of which...
"It is time to leave," he proclaimed. "Anyone who can walk had better be on his feet immediately."
A few of the Chosen actually managed to get up, standing shakily in their ruined, soaked clothes. Mansuur sent gargoyles to pick up the rest and carry them along. Dead or alive, or alive but wounded enough that the rough treatment would kill them - Mansuur didn’t care, he could sort them out once he was back at Ravenscar Hold.
The diminished army of gargoyles set out through the grisly rain. The cauldron Mansuur had shaped was carried along with them. Little by little, it was becoming filled with blood.
***
"Clear the way!" Aseena shouted. Dara was lying folded over her shoulder like a bag of laundry, feeling just healthy enough to feel ridiculous. She could walk just fine, thank you, as long as she could walk slowly and preferably have someone to lean on! But Aseena had insisted that the worse her injuries appeared, the better.
They were in what was ordinarily a rather pleasant pub, the Hearty Holter. There was an open fire, all sorts of interesting bottles and barrels behind the counter, and a trace of the pleasant scent of good, simple food that probably dominated the establishment in the normal course of things. Right now, though, the dominating scent was the copper stench of blood. Dara supposed that the whole city would smell like that for weeks.
All sorts of people had taken refuge in the pub when the red rain started and the alarm bells started sounding. Even now, the proprietor - a portly Servant man with a huge walrus moustache - was barring the door behind the two women. Aseena stormed by him, further into the main room, filled with tables and chairs and drenched people clustered around them.
"Injured woman!" Aseena shouted. "We need a healer!"
"I’m healer!" a Priest said. He was wearing a flowing white robe with many golden embroideries - it had probably been quite stately five minutes ago, but now it was a red ruin - and had a round, serious, middle-aged face with only a few wisps of grey hair left around the ears. "Everyone step away from the table, please! There - put her down here, Servant, if you would be so kind."
Aseena unceremoniously dumped Dara on the table like a sack of potatoes. Dara swore feebly, but remembered that she was supposed to be near death and didn’t try to strangle Aseena for it. Not that she was sure she could have strangled Aseena if she had tried - she might not be dying, she hoped, but she certainly wasn’t doing too well.
"What happened to her?" the Priest said while he moved his hands over Dara, a few inches from touching her.
"Her horse got spooked by the rain," Aseena said. "It threw her, and she was at the top of the Frillus Stair at the time - she rolled and slid half the way down, I think hit her head any number of times..."
Dara actually felt impressed. Aseena didn’t answer immediately and without hesitation, like a mediocre liar might have done, thinking that hesitation was the only thing that was suspicious. Instead, she hesitated for just an instant, just long enough to give the impression that she had to put a memory into words. Nor did she deliver the lie clearly and firmly. No, she delivered it with just enough unevenness in tone that she sounded like she was upset at a friend’s sudden injury and had a little trouble concentrating. In fact, Dara was pretty sure that Aseena had done what any good liar did, and half-convinced herself, just for this moment, that her story was true. Her delivery was good, because she was actually feeling some semblance of what the situation she presented should have made her feel.
Certainly the Priest seemed convinced.
"She’s going to be fine," he promised, kindly and just the tiniest bit condescending - a fatherly Priest reassuring a simple Servant woman. "She had a lot of nasty bruises, and a bit of a concussion, but all in all, she’s very lucky. I know she seems dazed and confused, and that that might seem frightening to you, but I think that’s the shock more than anything - her injuries aren’t actually bad enough to cause this reaction."
"But you’ll heal her, right?" Aseena said, her voice tight with worry.
"Of course." The Priest smiled. "The UniGod preserves, and He has gifted me with the ability to care for His people. If you would just give me a moment..."
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. After a moment, a pure, white light began emanating from the hands he was holding over her.
Dara watched with half-closed eyes. She had always had a suspicious fascination for gifts other than her own. Part of it, she supposed, was jealousy - everyone loved conjurers, and healers and scriers were the UniGod’s holy servants, but a witch was only ever a superstitious riot from being hanged from a streetlight. Most of it, though, was a constantly frustrated desire to know, to understand. No one even knew what a gift was, why one person got one and another person got another, and why most people never got any at all.
If I had been born a healer instead of a witch, she thought, not for the first time, what would have been different? Would I have been a believer? A councillor, a nurturer? Or would I have just been me, and stuck with a gift that didn’t suit me at all? Or are gifts connected to personalities, and you can only ever have a gift that is an extension of yourself?
A sense of warmth and well-being swept through her. The fugue and pain in her head eased, cleared, disappeared like smoke blowing away on the wind. The deep ache in her strained muscles and battered bones melted and flowed away. She gave off an involuntary gasp of surprise and relief - being healed always gave you such a shock, as your body seemed to remember that it wasn’t supposed to be in pain.
"How do you feel?" the Priest said. His face was a bloody nightmare mask hovering above hers, but his smile was kindly.
"Better," Dara mumbled. "Thanks."
She flung her legs off the table and stood up. She felt almost euphorically strong and fit, ready to run a race. Her mind was still a mess of betrayal and self-doubt, but at least her body was back to its usual state of pampered health.
"We have to go," she said.
"You can’t go!" the Priest protested. "The bells are still ringing - listen! The city is under attack. We all have to stay inside while the Soldiers deal with the incursion."
Dara nodded morosely. Somewhere, Rinabaar was swinging his sabre against a swarm of malformed enemies, shouting at his troops to stand firm, to hold back the infernal enemies who were threatening the lives and souls of the civilians he was sworn to protect. She hoped he would be all right. This time, it didn’t look like she would be able to turn up and help him.
"No, you don’t understand," Aseena said desperately. "My little brother is out there! I lost track of him when I had to run and pick her up - I don’t know if he made it inside or not! I have to search for him!"
The Priest shook his head unhappily.
"You can’t," he said. "Everyone stays inside while the bells are ringing, it’s the law. But I’m sure that someone made sure your brother got to safety..."
His voice trailed off. Aseena’s expression was saying, very clearly, oh, you’re sure, are you? Would you be as sure that there was nothing to worry about if it had been someone you loved who might be out there?
"He’s just a little boy!" Aseena pleaded. "Look, she and I can take care of ourselves. But if he’s wandering around somewhere, scared, lost... We have to do everything we can! If something happens to him while I sit in here, safe and warm..."
The Priest sighed.
"All right," he said quietly. "The UniGod go with you." He walked ahead of them to the front door. "Open the door, Servant!" he commanded the proprietor. "Quickly, and stand ready to close it as soon as these two are outside!"
The door closed behind them, and Dara and Aseena set off into the blood-red downpour.
"Little brother?" Dara said.
"Well, I do have one of those, as it happens," Aseena said shamelessly. "It’s always best to improvise off of something you know well, I’ve found."
Dara gruffly admitted to herself that Aseena was a handy person to have around when you were hunted by the law and the criminals all at once. Lying was one knack that she had never mastered - a side effect, she supposed, of being all about pursuing the truth.
"So where are we going?" she said.
"To where it all started," Aseena said. "For me, at least. We’re going to pay a visit to the National Archive. It’s about time that you got to see just how far back this all goes."