A Path to Coldness of Heart

Chapter Two:

1016-1017 AFE:

Mountains Far

Fangdred bestrode one of the highest peaks in the Dragon’s Teeth. Who built the castle was a mystery, as was how the engineering had been achieved. Fangdred had been there for countless centuries. Its current population was miniscule and included several mummies.

Many of the living would not, strictly appraised, easily pass for sane. The sorcerer had worn many names, including Empire Destroyer, but, commonly, was called Varthlokkur. He employed his arts to spy on the wider world while he wrestled the demands of love, honor, and pride. He observed carefully, painfully aware that mortals were subject to manipulation by puppet masters unseen and driven by imperatives that might not make sense even to them.

He spent hours every day looking for puppeteers, with little success. He was able to track factions in Kavelin, where everyone acted on best guesses while guessing wrong. His successes elsewhere were less clear. The lords of the Dread Empire were wary. Getting anywhere near the Empress was problematic. What he did see might be staged for his eyes.

He did manage one triumph beyond the Pillars of Ivory. He stumbled across a man he had thought long dead, a fugitive who had escaped from Lioantung during its destruction by the Deliverer. That man was headed home, now.

The wizard did what he dared as the man’s guardian angel. Varthlokkur’s mad pride had done irreparable harm during the business of the Deliverer. He had yet to understand what had driven him to such stubborn excess. His excuse had been his fear of losing his wife, but common sense saw that battle won well beforehand.

On the other hand, that fool Ragnarson had been just as stubborn… “Damn it!” His blood was rising for no sane reason.

He could not back down. He could not admit that he had been wrong. Yet he had cost Kavelin dearly. Protecting Haroun during his long journey west was slight recompense but it might pay off in time to come.

Haroun carried his own guilt burden.

Varthlokkur’s wife let herself into his Wind Tower work chamber, unannounced and uninvited. She found him focused on his monstrous creation, Radeachar the Unborn, that he used to ferret out secrets and to terrify villains.

Nepanthe was pale of skin and dark of hair, brooding and shy. Sorcery kept her looking young, as it did her husband. Varthlokkur appeared to be in his early thirties but was centuries older. He considered Nepanthe the most perfect woman ever to live. She was his great weakness and absolute blind spot. His love was fierce. That psychosis had so tormented him that he had let it shape today’s shattered world.

Nepanthe said nothing. She watched Varthlokkur spy here, send Radeachar there, then enter the blazing construct of the Winterstorm. His manipulation of brilliant floating symbols shaped changes far away. Snow might melt early and raise waters enough so an army patrol would not discover the fugitive from Lioantung. An icy gust might assail the camp of some of the Itaskians trying to take over in Kavelin, starting fires. An agent of Queen Inger might be about to stumble onto the loot from Kavelin’s treasury when something stirring in a sudden darkness so terrified him that he would never go near that pond again. An avalanche might block the route of an ill-advised winter raid by Colonel Abaca’s Marena Dimura partisans. A bridge collapse beyond the northern frontier might abort an equally ill-advised winter incursion from Volstokin.

He watched Hammad al Nakir less determinedly. There the daughter of the Disciple, Yasmid, pursued a sporadic, fratricidal civil war against her son Megelin while her father sank ever deeper into a permanent opium dream. There was a special need to watch the son. Megelin’s key ally was the dark sorcerer Magden Norath, who might be as powerful as the Empire Destroyer himself. No one knew what moved Norath. He created monsters that were almost impossible to destroy, for no more obvious reason than a lust for destruction.

Norath was weak now, though. He had become the principal target of El Murid’s suicide killer cult, the Harish. He thwarted every attack but only after it got close enough to hurt him. Damage was accumulating.

Varthlokkur turned to something of no interest. Nepanthe moved on to the shrunken stasis globe where once the Princes Thaumaturge of the Dread Empire had been trapped, then had murdered one another. Why had Varthlokkur kept that in this diminished form? Why had he not ground the princes to dust, then burnt the dust? Would that be impossible? Could be. It had taken the Star Rider’s power to capture them.

She had been there, but that was all she could remember clearly- other than that it had been a terrible night. She feared that she had done something she dared not remember.

She shied away. Those days were gone. Horrible times, they had been followed by more horrible times. It had taken many ugly seasons to bring her here, to a remote place and a life with a man she respected deeply but did not love, nursing her insane son by her first husband and raising an eerie daughter by the second.

Nepanthe drifted round the Winterstorm, as ever wonderstruck. Once Varthlokkur had filled her hair with those glowing symbols… Another memory she did not want to relive.

She turned to her husband. They had been at odds for months because he had been so determined to shield her from the pain of learning that her son Ethrian had become a monster. He had been that insecure.

Enough! She teetered at the brink of a slide into a hell that existed only in the bleak realms of What If? and Might Have Been. This was now. Now was here. They two had to act as one. Innumerable divinations were iron about that.

Varthlokkur left the Winterstorm. He was exhausted. He took a seat. Nepanthe moved in close, to support him with the warmth of her presence.

In a whisper, he said, “Every day I drive myself to the verge of collapse, trying to hold back the night. But I don’t do any good.”

“Let it go. Turn away. Focus on us and the children. The fire will burn itself out without you.”

“Am I resisting the tide of destiny? Are my efforts pointless?”

“It may take everything you have just to raise Ethrian and Smyrena to be marginally sane adults.”

Varthlokkur nodded. The children were in his thoughts always. All four, not just Nepanthe’s babes. “I wish. But bad things happened. Some were my fault. I can’t help trying to make that right.”

Nepanthe did not argue. There was no changing his mind, be his choices good, evil, or just stubbornly unreasonable. And it was true that he had unleashed some of the darkness stalking the world today.

She asked, “What’s the situation now?”

“They’ve moved Bragi to Throyes. He’ll never break out, now, and even I couldn’t get him away from this place.”

“And Haroun?”

“One day at a time. Still headed home. Still sheltered by the fact that nobody knows he’s alive.”

“And you’re helping.”

“Not so he’ll notice. He’s hard. He’s convinced that he can go anywhere any time because he’s a master shaghun now.”

Today’s Haroun resembled Varthlokkur at a similar age. Prolonged observation left the wizard feeling an eerie deja vu.

Haroun had no boundaries. He could kill or be cruel without thought, remorse, or regret. He did terrible things to people who got in his way and lost not a minute of sleep. He would do the same on behalf of his friends. Or to his friends if they became silhouetted against his destination.

Varthlokkur did not sleep much anymore, not because of demands on his time. There were long stretches when his body felt no need. But there were other times, for a week or two, when he would sleep twelve hours a day. At present he needed only the occasional nap.

Of late, in his manic stretches, he had begun using Radeachar to probe the mysteries surrounding its creation. The key points were known. In a mad, complex scheme involving the Captal of Savernake, Yo Hsi, the Demon Prince of the Dread Empire, had impregnated the barely old enough Queen Fiana with seed specially prepared in Shinsan. Though the truth had surfaced only recently, Old Meddler had had a hand in it, too. The scheme had collapsed. Fiana bore a daughter instead of the devil the conspirators wanted. So they switched that daughter for their own child, at the time unaware of the girl’s sex.

Years later, following the death of her husband, the King, Fiana enjoyed a liaison with Bragi Ragnarson. She became pregnant. That had to be concealed for political reasons.

Fiana died in childbed, birthing the thing the conspirators had planted in her womb years before. Some twist in time had transposed her pregnancies. Varthlokkur suspected the Star Rider.

The horror within Fiana was too large for her birth canal. Her belly had been opened. The monster passed into Varthlokkur’s control and became his terrible familiar, Radeachar.

All that was known to a few survivors of all the war and wickedness since, including, possibly, the dark wight creeping westward through the Dread Empire, sometimes in stages of only yards a day.

Recently, while trying to winkle out anything more about how the Unborn had come to be, Varthlokkur had stumbled across an ugly truth. There had been a day when the King Without a Throne thought it necessary to dispose of a prince named Gaia-Lange, and then a little princess, convinced as he had been that they were instruments of the Dread Empire.

How Old Meddler must have laughed.

Haroun had made two cruel choices and both had been bad. To this day no one suspected. Especially not Bragi Ragnarson.

Since then the King Without a Throne had done the unexpected several times by hurling his Royalists at the enemies of Kavelin’s King Bragi. No one could fathom why. Some thought that was because several young Mercenary Guildsmen-Ragnarson, his brother, and friends- had saved Haroun repeatedly when he was a boy.

Haroun could not confess the greatest misjudgment of his life. He could not confess a sin that never stirred a feather of suspicion.

Varthlokkur had stumbled onto the truth and had been appalled. He, who could justify his own foulest deeds, could not understand what had moved Haroun to murder those children.

The guilt that shaped what Haroun had done since was no mystery. Varthlokkur knew guilt well. Guilt was a lifelong, intimate companion.

…

The fugitive’s life was narrow and small. He was unique in his ability to focus on himself and his surroundings. He always saw the needful thing where survival was concerned. He had long-term goals, medium-term goals, and goals that did not go beyond the moment. Every moment negotiated led to another, then another. Enough conquered moments became a successfully completed short-term goal.

While no match for the Tervola of Shinsan, Haroun was a trained shaghun, a military sorcerer, the best of recent times. That was not saying much, though. The Disciple had forbidden the practice amongst his followers. His enemies disdained shaghunry as unmanly.

Haroun employed his skills sparingly. Feral sorcery, if noticed, was suppressed quickly and lethally inside the Dread Empire.

Haroun’s strengths were will and patience. He had endured trials that would have crushed most men. And the miracle was not that he had come through but that he had come through every time. Even the heroes of the epics managed only once or twice.

He knew nothing else. Settling down with his wife to raise a crop of grandchildren was beyond his capacity to imagine.

He was obsessed. He was driven. He was the King Without a Throne. This was the life that his God had ordained.

There were few viable passes through the Pillars of Heaven and Pillars of Ivory, from Shinsan to the broad plains between that double range and the Mountains of M’Hand, the latter forming the shield wall of the west. He dared not be seen in those high, tight, narrowly watched passages. He crossed the hard way, sometimes even avoiding the game trails favored by smugglers.

There came a day, though, when he relaxed in the shade of a giant cedar and congratulated himself on having crossed all of the Dread Empire without getting caught.

But… This was still territory Shinsan ruled. The epic must continue, with the going a little easier. Hazards would be fewer and less determined.

While resting he indulged in thoughts of his wife, his son, and possible futures.

He shut all that down and resumed moving. He could not relax till he reached Hammad al Nakir, and then never till he found Yasmid.

The instant he relaxed his vigilance would be his final moment of freedom.

He was certain that of all the lonely people in his world he was the loneliest. And the most significant. He was a linchpin of history. He would, if he survived, definitely shape tomorrow.

He did not just have a powerful will. He was not just driven. He had an obsessive sense of destiny.

He did, perhaps, overvalue himself. There were lonely operators out there who made his mortal moment look like a lone spark of a lightning bug in springtime. Of those Old Meddler was the foremost and oldest.

Haroun gave the Star Rider a lot of thought when he did not have survival on his mind.

…

“Is that Haroun?” Nepanthe asked.

“Yes. He’s finally through the Pillars of Heaven.”

“I thought he was dead.”

Varthlokkur frowned. Was she having memory problems again? “He was a prisoner in Lioantung. Caught trying to rescue Mocker.” Her first husband, his son, now dead, slain in a failed attempt to murder Bragi Ragnarson.

Would this failure be permanent? Or would the memories return one more time? “He escaped in the confusion when the Deliverer came to Lioantung. He would’ve been home long since if we’d known that they had him.”

“He went to rescue Mocker? All the way to Lioantung? Why?” “He did. Because he was deceived by the Pracchia.”

“That’s so hard to believe.” Nepanthe had loathed Haroun forever.

His ambitions had had a brutal impact on her life. Haroun had pulled her first husband into one cruel saga after another. Again, “He went there to rescue Mocker?”

“Yes. Haroun bin Yousif is unique, darling. He abandoned his own dreams to save Bragi, too, because of a debt of honor.” Nepanthe knew nothing about the horrors Varthlokkur had discovered. She would not learn. He would keep that to himself forever.

He did fear that Old Meddler might know and would not hesitate to spread the news if that would stir the pot of action and hatred.

The Empire Destroyer spent a lot of time pondering how best to misdirect or tame that ancient wickedness.

“But…”

“Dear heart, this shouldn’t surprise you. These men have all done mad things on behalf of those they value. Michael Trebilcock and Aral Dantice twice trekked all the way to Argon to effect your rescue. Ragnarson risked an army to get you back. That nobility of purpose is who they are.” But they could be mislead.

“All right. But… Varth, I don’t remember things so good anymore.”

True. Her twitchy memory left him impatient when she asked the same question over again. More frustrating was the fact that the problem was intermittent and unpredictable.

“You’re helping him get back, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Haroun may be the last hope of the west.”

“What?”

“The Dread Empire is approaching the end of its terrible trials. The threat from the east has been eliminated. The talismanic focus of defiance in the west, Bragi Ragnarson, has been swept from the game board. The war with Matayanga is winding down. Matayanga has exhausted its resources and will. And, as always, Shinsan remains willing to fight for as long as it takes. Stability exists at the Imperial level. Mist has eliminated everyone willing to challenge her.”

Nepanthe wondered about her sister-in-law’s personal life. What did Mist intend for the children Valther had fathered?

Varthlokkur said, “If bin Yousif gets home in time, and reclaims his place, there’ll be a strongman who can resist the next onslaught.”

“Will you be involved if that happens?” Nepanthe’s gaze was hard. She was unhappy with Varthlokkur these days, though she did not always remember why.

He had made choices, on her behalf, without consulting her. Neither those choices nor their results pleased her, when she did remember.

“I will play a part.”

That offered a chance to carp. She let it go.

She wanted desperately to stop fighting about things that could not be changed. She wanted to make him do the right thing from now on.

…

The Lady Yasmid stood atop the wall of a fortress her father had built as a boy, on deciding to establish himself here at the place called Path of the Cross. War had not troubled Sebil el Selib after El Murid moved on to Al Rhemish. But time had seen him disestablished there. War was back.

War’s aftermath was back.

The survivors of the conflict with Throyes and Shinsan had assembled below. The fighting had been unkind to them but they considered themselves the victors. The invaders had gone away.

Yasmid knew the truth. The enemy had gone because of a shift of political wind inside the Dread Empire. Bragi of Kavelin had penetrated the Roe Basin, forcing the enemy to realign his assets. Shinsan’s Lord Hsung had been replaced by Tervola interested in concluding the wars Shinsan already had elsewhere.

But let the warriors believe. Let them be proud. Another enemy was coming. Her son, Megelin, was coming. That stupid boy, with Magden Norath skulking through the shadows, behind monsters sent to spread terror and destruction. Magden Norath, who was the maddest and possibly most powerful sorcerer in the west.

Megelin. Her son. The King of Hammad al Nakir.

What insane whim had driven Haroun to pass power to the boy? He had known that Megelin was unfit.

Three men shared Yasmid’s vantage. The nearest, physically and emotionally, was old Habibullah, who had been her bodyguard when she was a child and was her closest conspirator as an adult. He had helped purge the Faithful of the worst lapses of her father and his fellow founders. Habibullah’s clarity of vision had become the foundation of her rule. Without Habibullah, she feared, she would be lost.

A second man was an enigma.

Elwas bin Farout al-Souki was a self-made champion. His mother had been a prostitute in the foreign quarter of Souk el Arba, beyond the Jebal, on the coast of the Sea of Kotsum. Elwas had risen from recruit to commander of ten thousand by acclamation of the men with whom he rode. He won battles and brought his followers home. That overrode all else with the war fighters.

Yasmid knew little about Elwas. His rise had occurred while she was elsewhere. He was a solid Believer. His coloring and shape said that his father was a black man. Other characteristics suggested that his mother had been a refugee from over the Sea of Kotsum. Those things mattered little in the forest of swords. They did matter at court, where men of old families felt slighted if an outsider received honors.

Yasmid refused to be distracted by pettiness, nor did she tolerate it.

The third man, able to stand only with assistance, unable to communicate rationally, was El Murid, the Disciple, Yasmid’s father, the salt trader’s son whose calling had set the west awash in blood. Whose inspiration, invoked, could send thousands to the slaughter even now.

El Murid was old before his time. He was crippled. He was partly blind. Incessant pain had led him to opiate addiction. He was so enslaved by the drug he could no longer be drawn into the real world long enough to generate a useful thought. He had no say anymore but remained a powerful symbol. He could be shown and men would gallop to their deaths screaming his name.

That the Disciple was in bad health was no secret. But his appearances were staged to leave fanatic rank and file convinced that their prophet could not be overcome by mundane evils.

The warriors looking on today had not yet recuperated from the Throyen campaign. They had not had enough time with their families. They were tired of war but war was not tired of them. They were pulling themselves together for one more campaign. If they did not, war would devour them and theirs.

The King, Megelin, son of Haroun, son of Yousif, would show his mother and grandfather no mercy. He would attack till he ended the long contest between Royalist and Believer.

Yasmid prayed that her son’s followers were more war-weary than her own.

In an introspective moment she wondered how much responsibility for the state of the world lay with her family. Of late, every people, every nation, every kingdom seemed to be at war all the time, indulging in civil strife when no other war was available.

Warfare had been much less common before El Murid began to preach.