Sacred Fire

Chapter 14

The bells of the Temple sounded a carillon the moment the sun’s lip rose above the waters of Lake Istar. It was a delicate melody, and beautiful, and for a moment it made Cathan’s heart lurch with fear; he froze in mid-step, glancing back over his shoulder, toward the crystal dome that rose above the Lordcity’s rooftops. Even now, Beldinas would be in the basilica, leading the morning prayers. The clergy were there, too, and the masters of the city. In other times, more innocent days, he would have gone to the ceremony as well, but now he couldn’t stomach the thought. The bells were a clangor to his ears, and the loveliness of the Temple was to his mind as forbidding as a tomb.

He thought of the dream he’d had in the Garden last night, of the burning hammer falling toward the city. He understood it, now. It was the god’s wrath; about that, the Kingpriest had been right. But he’d been mistaken about its purpose. They all were mistaken. And now they were almost out of time.

He turned around, looked back down the street. He was in the city’s north quarter, the Hill of Lords. Here the boulevards ran spear-straight, lined with flowering trees, past the sprawling manors of Istar’s wealthy. The homes were walled, their gates watched by armed guards, their courtyards wide and lushly appointed. Each was larger and grander than the last: here was another wing, a bigger atrium, taller columns on the front portico. None could touch the imperial manse for sheer grandeur, of course, but in other realms some of these houses could have been the palaces of kings.

Wentha wasn’t the richest woman in Istar, but she was close. Her manor stood near the hill’s crest, on a rocky outcrop that gave an impressive view of city, Temple, and lake: On a clear day one could see the far shore, and the great foundries of Bronze Kautilya. Today mist clung to the water, obscuring it not far beyond the harbor’s breakwater. The guards-bare-chested Seldjuki warriors, each of whom could have picked Cathan up with one hand, and who carried fantastically curved sabers the size of barge-poles-saw him coming, and nodded their shaven heads, parting without a word. The silver gates opened, and he stepped into the cool of the Weeping Lady’s grounds.

There were many fountains in Wentha’s garden; she’d acquired a taste for them, and had spent a small fortune in amassing them here. Everywhere Cathan looked, there was a spray, a jet, a glittering shower. The centerpieces were warriors and maidens, dolphins and sea dragons, capering satyrs and beautiful nymphs. And there-here, of all places-was even one with the Lightbringer himself standing in its midst, tall and beautiful as he once had been. There was no trace of madness, no sign of fear in his face. It made Cathan sad to see it.

The manor had seven steps, a broad flight leading to doors of rich-grained vallenwood inlaid with gold and onyx. Those doors alone had cost more than his and Wentha’s whole village had been worth, back in Taol. Another time, he would have felt a surge of pride at his sister’s prosperity. Now, though, he barely paused on the top step to lave his hands in a golden bowl before going in.

His hands were on the doors when they opened of their own accord, and there was his sister, standing in the shadowy cool of the atrium, another fountain bubbling behind her. She was dressed for the day in a gown of crimson samite, with a necklace of blood-red jasper around her throat-her own protection against the thought-readers. She smiled when she saw him, but even her beauty couldn’t break the pall that had settled on his heart.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her brows knitted. “Has something-oh,” She bowed her head. “You saw it, didn’t you? Fan-ka-tso.”

Cathan nodded. “He showed me. Why didn’t you just tell me yourself that he’s turned on the gods of light?”

“Would you have believed me if I had?”

He thought about that, and shook his head. “Will you help us, then?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied, and glanced over his shoulder. There was no one around; even the manor’s guards were hidden by the trees of the garden. Even so, he felt strangely exposed, vulnerable. This was no place to plot sedition.

“Let me in, Blossom,” he said. “There is something else I must tell you first.”

Tancred was the last to arrive, and found the rest of his family in an open-air dining hall at the heart of Wentha’s manor. Jewel-colored dragonflies hummed over a pool in one corner, and blossoming lemon trees filled the air with their scent. Cathan sat at a table of polished blue-gray marble, with Wentha on one side and Rath on the other. They all looked at Tancred, their faces grim.

“Shut the door,” Wentha said.

He did. “I’m sorry I took so long to answer your summons,” Tancred said, smoothing his vestments. “The dawn-calling was longer this morning than usual. His Holiness was in a particularly sacred mood.”

Rath chuckled a little, but Wentha cut him off with a look.

“Sit,” Wentha bade. “Your uncle has something to say.”

He got himself a drink first, pouring water and wine in a jeweled goblet. He sat, took a sip, and looked at Cathan-or tried to look at Cathan, without actually meeting his searing eyes. “So, you’ve made up your mind. About time.”

“Hush;” Rath said.

Tancred’s eyebrows rose at his brother’s seriousness, “What’s happened?”

“Yes.” Wentha looked at Cathan. “Tell them what you told me.”

Cathan took a deep breath. “I spoke with Beldinas last night, at the Hall of Sacrilege, He told me everything. What he hopes to do, to rid the world of evil once and for all.”

The brothers exchanged worried looks. Cathan looked down at his hands, folded on the table. Wentha shut her eyes as if wracked by pain. Rath and Tancred leaned forward, their troubled expressions so identical it was almost funny.

“His Holiness,” Cathan said, “means to command the gods.”

“What?” Tancred asked. “Command them? Surely you mean-”

“I mean command. He has asked them to remove the darkness from the world. He has cajoled, pleaded, begged. None of it has worked. He still sees evil wherever he looks. Hence the thought-readers. Hence Fan-ka-tso. So now, he intends to demand it of them, to force the gods to do his will.”

Rath laughed aloud. “That’s folly! No man has ever commanded the gods. No man can.”

Cathan didn’t answer. Wentha put a hand to her forehead.

“Can he?” Rath asked.

“He’s done it once already,” Cathan said. “When he brought me back from death. Now he means to try again.”

“But how?” Tancred asked. “And why hasn’t he done it already, if it’s within his power?”

“It isn’t within his power. Or at least, he isn’t certain how he did it, the first time. But he thinks he’s found a way, something that will reveal the secret he seeks. The Peripas Mishakas.”

Rath spread his hands. “The Disks of Mishakal? But there are transcriptions of them everywhere. The monks in the sacred chancery are making new copies all the time. If that’s all he needs, then why-? ”

“You assume the transcriptions are complete,” Tancred said.

Everyone looked at him-Rath in startlement, Wentha with pride at his knowledge, Cathan with sorrow. “That is correct, Tancred,” Cathan said. “Beldinas thinks the lost chapters of the Disks hold the key. He believes the way to recapture what he did when he resurrected me lies within their pages. And so, he wants me to accompany him to the Vaults of the Kingpriests, to recover the true Disks, the originals scribed by the gods themselves.”

“But the Vaults are sealed,” Tancred said. “No man may enter them and live. So it is written.”

“Not quite,” Wentha murmured.

Cathan smiled, but without mirth. “The ban on the Vaults says that no living man may enter,” he said. “That’s where I come in.”

No one knew how the Disks of Mishakal had come into the world; their origins were lost to history. The sages knew they were very old, predating the Kingpriests and Istar by a long margin. They were already ancient in the time of Huma Dragonbane, a thousand years ago. There were mentions of them in the accounts of the first emperors of Ergoth. Legend had it that the gods themselves had written the Disks-or at least Mishakal the Hand had-and had given them to the first men to break free of slavery under the ogres, that they had been the tools humankind had used to learn the arts of reading and writing. But there was no proof, one way or the other; all that remained from those dark times were stories and legends, passed down over the millennia.

What the scholars did know was that the Disks-called Peripas in the church tongue-had been thought lost in the second Dragonwar; that they were captured in the Battle of Gods’ Tears, when the forces of evil had all but wiped out the defenders of light. Even after the defeat of the Queen of Darkness, the Disks were not recovered, and the churches of Ergoth and Solamnia had given up their search.

It was in that dark time when Dario, the third son of the king of what was then the city-state of Istar, had discovered an ancient cavern in the hills northeast of the city. Dario was, by all accounts, a villain and a knave, a man of few prospects and fewer scruples, who lived for wine and women and roguery. He had gone into that cavern alone, certain it was an ancient barrow, ripe for plunder. But instead of a tomb, he found an old goblin lair, empty since before the time when Istar was a simple village of skin huts on the lake-shore. According to his later accounts, Dario found a cave at the bottom of the lair, filled with the bones of half a hundred goblins, charred black by some terrible fire.

In their midst, Dario had found the Disks.

He hadn’t known what they were at first, thinking only of treasure. Of themselves, the Peripas Mishakas were as precious as any riches he could imagine: hundreds of beaten circles of pure platinum, each larger than a full-grown man’s hand. Beaten into each, in cuneiform letters so fine that even dwarf smiths shook their heads at the craftsmanship, were words in a tongue Dario did not recognize. And yet, when he chanced to read one of the Disks, the words became as clear as if they were written in Istaran. Fascinated, he’d sat down among the goblin bones and began to read

Dario stayed in that cave for a month. In that time, he took neither food nor water; nor did he sleep. He read each and every one of the Disks, while his father and brothers were scouring the hills for him in vain. Finally, after the king had given up the search, Dario emerged from the cave. He was gaunt and wild-eyed; his black hair and beard, grown long over the days, had turned stark white. In his hands, he bore the Peripas. He walked back to Istar on bare feet that bled profusely by the time he passed through the gates, and entered his father’s palace in the middle of his own funeral.

“Ni sarudo, partun ourfo,” he had declared to the stunned mourners, “e barbas pram doboro iudun donbulas pidio, usas sod op tis balfo.”

Sorrow not, for I live, and I bring word of the light beyond the stars, the true gods of this world.

Until that day, Istar had been a heathen kingdom, the people worshipping their own ancestors as divine. Dario’s discovery changed that, just as sure as the Disks changed his life. He left wickedness behind, and was reborn with help from the gods’ words; he declared himself the First Son of Paladine, and founded the holy church of Istar. The Peripas became the church’s first relic, and over the next hundred years the neighboring city-states bowed, one by one, to their power. Thus was the Empire of Istar born.

In the empire’s early years, there was only one copy of the Disks, and the First Sons cared for it in the imperial palace, reading from it to the laity, who knew they spoke for the gods of light. But times were not always peaceful in Istar; its enemies, the barbarians of plain and forest and mountain, sought to bring the realm low, and plunder its riches. Three times the barbarian hordes attacked the Lordcity itself, and on the third time they got through the walls, slew both the emperor and the First Son, and nearly sacked the palace itself. In the end the armies of Istar drove them back and wiped them out, but the shock of nearly losing the Disks was enough to change the church’s policy.

Amiad, the new First Son, declared that the word of the gods should not be for his ears alone, and should be spread among all the peoples of the world.

The result of this was the Abenfo Migel, the Great Translation. At the command of First Son Amiad, a dozen of the empire’s finest scribes and scholars set down to write out the text of the Peripas in the language of Istar’s church. It was painstaking work, lasting more than twenty years, and would have gone on for twenty more had Amiad not died in his sleep on the eve of his sixtieth year. His successor, an elder cleric named Regidan, did not approve of the Abenfo, and put an end to the translation. As a result, the final texts were incomplete: seven copies, each of which held no more than six hundred of the Disks’ thousand chapters.

Regidan was a venal man, perhaps the least virtuous to hold the title of First Son until the time of Kurnos the Deceiver. He feared the translations, and believed they could weaken his grip on the reins of power; so he ordered all the translations destroyed. Six of the seven copies were burned, but Amiad’s scribes managed to smuggle one copy out of the palace and the city before Regidan’s men could seize it-at the sacrifice of their own lives. Regidan ordered an empire — wide hunt for the lost translation, and declared that anyone caught harboring it would be cast out of the god’s sight, and then put to death.

Despite this, the translation survived, moved in secret from one monastery to the next. Wherever it was secreted, monks furiously worked to create copies of its pages before sending it on again. The First Son’s men put the torch to many places where the Disks had visited, but they could not destroy all that had been created. In time, Regidan’s hunt for the lost manuscript resulted in the one thing he feared most: its spread throughout Istar. By the time of his arrest and execution-for the emperor had grown tired of Regidan’s burning of recalcitrant abbeys-more than a hundred copies of the Peripas had spread throughout the empire. In the years to follow, clerics began to read from them to their flocks, and even some of the laity came to own them. Monk, translated them into Old Solamnic, and the tongues of Kharolis and Ergoth. The elves and dwarves-in those days, the bearded folk were still friends of Istar-acquired copies of their own.

As for the lost chapters, the four hundred that Amiad’s scribes had never set down in translation, the debate over whether they should be recorded nearly tore the church in two. The Completists argued that the Disks were not truly the gods’ word unless all of them were translated; the Reductionists countered that the gods themselves had willed Amiad’s untimely death as a sign that not all the Peripas should belong to common men, In the end, the Reductionists won, and so the books and scrolls held only part of the gods’ word.

The Completists were not quite defeated. They tried to steal the Disks, in the hopes of producing a full transcription. They nearly succeeded, and actually spirited them out of the Lord city before the Scatas tracked them down and put the culprits to the sword.

First Son Symeon, who had been the leader of the Reductionists, was livid, and proclaimed that the Peripas would not be safe as long as they remained in the hands of men. He made a pilgrimage into the hills, to the cave where Dario had found the sacred texts, and declared it a holy place. The Scatas cleared out the goblin bones, and the priesthood purified the site with prayers and holy water; an army of stonemasons and sculptors, whitesmiths and mosaicists set to building a mighty shrine above the spot. The shrine took five years to build, and when it was done Symeon brought the Disks to it and placed them within. Then he prayed to Paladine, shutting the shrine’s doors with a teal of gold.

“Tos cir cunanpur soidint, onmornlig fi site sifas bronint. Ni bomo at ifeso gomit e nisit. Sifat.”

Let these rest here evermore, untroubled by who in ever would do them harm. No living man or woman shall enter and survive. So be it.

So, as ordered by Symeon-who, soon after, would throw down the emperor, don the Crown of Power, and declare himself the first Kingpriest of Istar-the Peripas Mishakas left the hands of men once more. Dario’s cave, and the shrine above it, came to be known as the Forino Babasom, the Vault of the Kingpriests. Many men, Completists and robbers alike, sought to break in and steal the Disks, and were never seen again; not even their bones were ever found. It became a haunted place, in the eyes of the people, and folk stopped going there. The road to the Vault decayed, vanished. Only Symeon’s geas remained, a warning that kept any who might approach-even the future line of Kingpriests-away.

The Disks still lay within, the only copy of the gods’ full word to the mortals of Krynn.

Waiting.