Master (Book 5) (22 page)

“I think the dark elves do,” Cyrus amended.

“Not even all of them do,” J’anda said, and looked Cyrus directly in the eyes. “Saekaj Sovar is a keg of Dragon’s breath waiting to be lit. They are kept in line by the fear of the Sovereign.”

“Ah, the mysterious Sovereign,” Cyrus said and took an experimental bite of the pie. It still tasted fantastic, but he chewed slowly, his appetite suddenly suppressed. “The one whom no one will name.”

“No one
can
name him,” J’anda said with a quick shake of the head. “All who have known him fear him more than anything.”

Cyrus watched the enchanter intently. He placed his silverware upon the table with a light clatter and leaned forward. “Why? Why do you—so far outside his reach, one of the strongest enchanters in Arkaria—why do you fear him?”

“There is no place outside his reach,” J’anda said quietly, in a voice that reminded Cyrus of dry dust blowing in a desert wind. “No place he cannot reach you, no place he cannot harm you if he is of a mind to.”

“You had a death mark against you two years ago,” Cyrus said. “By his order. If he’s as powerful as you say, why didn’t he kill you then?”

“He could have, I am convinced,” J’anda said. He held up a wrinkled hand. “At any moment. As for why he did not …” J’anda sighed, eyes looking about at the tables nearest them. They were empty, chairs pulled out and abandoned, nothing remaining upon them but dirty plates and half-filled cups. “I do not think you know how old I am.”

“I don’t—”

“I am one hundred and thirty eight years of age,” J’anda said with an absolute calm. “I was a little over thirty when the last great war between my people and the elves came upon us. I fought in the Sovereign’s service during that time, with great distinction. I was a middle-class child, one of the few, and I came up from the mids of Sovar to become the single most acclaimed enchanter in the Sovereign’s army.”

Cyrus watched J’anda, unblinking. “I’ve always known you were good, but—”

“I am without peer,” J’anda said quietly. “Believe me. I have traveled the world—Reikonos, Pharesia. With the exception of some of the elves who have practiced their craft for thousands of years, I am the single greatest enchanter under the age of three thousand in Arkaria. In the entirety of the Elven Kingdom, there are perhaps ten enchanters who could best me in all the facets of our art. Such is my skill that I was offered a teaching position at the Gathering of Coercers in Reikonos—which as you may know is the only enchanter league still open outside of Saekaj. It is run by seven of the elves whom I would consider my betters.”

Cyrus waited for him to say anything that could be disagreed with. He heard nothing, so he merely nodded. “You’ll get no argument from me that you’re the best.”

“I do not wish to brag, but I wanted to establish something,” J’anda said, and a flash of discomfort made itself plain on his face. “I was a hero of Saekaj. My abilities won many battles in the last war. The Sovereign praised me personally, bestowing every possible medal of the dark elven army upon me. His eye settled upon me, and his ministers held me up as an example of the new wave of leadership and heroism coming up in the army. I was toasted, praised, put up as someone to aspire to. A great enchanter from a good family, with the right skills, whose belief in the Sovereign,” his expression turned pained, “was absolute.

“Within a year, I left and never returned until I was summoned back to account for my crimes during the time when we were accused of raiding convoys.” J’anda’s shoulders had settled as though there were a great weight upon them. “The Sovereign … he drove me out.”

Cyrus gave that a moment’s thought. “He exiled you?”

“It is … difficult to explain,” J’anda said with a sigh. “He did things to me, to someone who was dear to me …” the enchanter’s face fell, “… unspeakable things. Things that frightened and horrified me enough to leave without ever looking back. I went from the noble hero to unmentioned in an instant, a stinging blow to the Sovereign’s propaganda machinery, I am certain.”

Cyrus leaned forward just a little more. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I fear him,” J’anda said, looking up. “
Everyone
fears him.” There was a hardness in the enchanter’s eyes. “And I don’t want to fear him anymore. I want to stop him. I want to end his reign, to find the way to beat him again the way the elves did a hundred years ago. I am sick of people suffering on his account, on every side of this war. Some child is being drafted into his army and handed a spear right now, thrown to the front lines at Reikonos so that he can die for the Sovereign’s purposes.” J’anda straightened. “I must return to Saekaj Sovar.”

“What?” Cyrus blinked. “Why?”

“We need to know what he is up to,” J’anda said, calmly. “We need someone on the inside.”

“They’ll know you’re an enchanter,” Cyrus said, letting the urgency of his words carry them out of his mouth. “They have cessation spells, they’ll annul your illusions and expose you—”

“He will take me back into his army,” J’anda said, his Adam’s apple moving up and down in his throat. “He will accept my return without question.”

“You’ve fought in Sanctuary
against
his army,” Cyrus said. “You’re a traitor to him, and he will execute you.”

“No, he won’t,” J’anda said with a shake of his head. “All I need do to return is come into his presence, beg forgiveness, tell him I am cured of my …” a look of disgust crossed the enchanter’s face, “… deviance, and that I have come back to the fold, and he will allow me back in.”

“This is ridiculous,” Cyrus said. “It gets us nothing.”

“You are wrong,” J’anda said with a shake of the head. “I will be in the heart of the enemy. I can spy upon them—”

“You’ll be caught,” Cyrus said. “Their first instinct will be to assume you’re a traitor—”

“Some will believe that,” J’anda said. “Not the Sovereign, though. He is …” J’anda made a face of deepest disgust, “… attached to me. He will find some use for me outside of sensitive areas until I can prove myself to him once more.”

Cyrus paused, letting the noise of the Great Hall take up the silence between them. “What will you have to do to prove yourself to him?”

J’anda sighed. “Things I do not care to do.”

“Kill people?” Cyrus asked. “Kill humans?”

“Doubtless,” J’anda said. “Humans that would die anyway, but yes.”

“Worse than that?” Cyrus asked.

“There is nothing worse than killing,” J’anda said, “but I will have to prove myself reformed in other ways, yes.”

“Such as?”

“None you need worry about, my friend,” J’anda said with a reluctant smile. “The Sovereign is getting troops from somewhere. We need to know where from. He has an alliance with the trolls to some benefit—we need answers on that as well. I can get us this information—at some cost to myself, yes,” J’anda said, “but I see no other way to it but through this.”

“J’anda, we’d be sending you into the heart of the enemy capital with no assurance you’d come back alive,” Cyrus said, his pie entirely forgotten. “It’s not worth it.”

“I have great regrets from my youth,” J’anda said, using a hand to push the hair out of his eyes and looking up at Cyrus with a straightened form. “I helped crush a rebellion within the depths of Sovar that might have driven the Sovereign out of Saekaj once and for all. I aided the Sovereign’s war against the elves and the humans, helped kill countless people. I hid who I was behind an illusion designed to protect me from the scorn and reprisal of my own government. Because of my actions in Luukessia, I am now an old man.” He leaned toward Cyrus, and his voice became hushed. “I do not know how much time I have left, but I do not wish to die filled with all these regrets. Give me your blessing to go to Saekaj. Let me learn his secrets so that we can break him—together.”

Cyrus leaned back in his chair, let his fingers caress the stubble on his cheeks and upper lip. “Let’s say I believe you could do all these things—gain the Sovereign’s confidence, find out his secrets, avoid getting killed, and erase some of these regrets. You’re talking about mastering your fear of someone who’s held a chain around your thoughts since before you left his service.” He waited a moment as J’anda nodded. “How am I supposed to believe you can do all this—confront all this, play this role—when you can’t even say his name?”

J’anda smiled faintly. “You are clever indeed, my friend. You twist my own words around and point them back at me to get me to tell you what you have longed to know.” He leaned back, and his eyes drifted up contemplatively. “You are right, of course. Fear keeps his name hidden from the outside world; I have not dared to speak to any other the identity of the Sovereign, even a century removed from his rule.” He blinked and focused once more on Cyrus. “Very well, then. If I tell you the name of the Sovereign, will you give me your blessing to carry out this mission?”

Cyrus stared at J’anda, pondering it for just a second. “You have my word.”

J’anda nodded slowly, looking down. “Then you shall have your name.” He seemed to steel himself, like he was summoning it up from deep within. “And that name is …

“Yartraak. The God of Darkness is the Sovereign of Saekaj Sovar.”

“So you let him go?”

It was Vaste who had asked the question as they all sat arrayed around the Council Chambers, occupying their usual chairs. Cyrus sat with his hands folded over his mouth, surveying the remainder of them.
The chambers seem to grow in size, but in reality, it is we who shrink in number
. “It was not my place to hold him here against his will,” Cyrus answered.

A quiet hung in the Council, every one of them watching him, lost in their own thoughts after his revelations.

“I have to admit, I’m more than a little surprised that the Sovereign is Yartraak,” Ryin said after a pause. “How is that not a widely known fact?”

“Yartraak is an intimidating beast,” Curatio said quietly. “The fact that he directly runs Saekaj is what I would consider a closely-hidden open secret. It is known by many yet spoken by few outside the caves of Saekaj. Or within it,” he added.

“Why do they fear his reprisal?” Ryin asked. “Have they some cause to fear?”

“Fear the hand of the Sovereign?” Curatio said, looking over his hands at the druid. “Why, yes, in fact. Aloakna was the last affront to him, I believe.”

“Aloakna?” Nyad said, more than a little disturbed. “What do you mean?”

“He had his troops sack and burn the city recently, if you will recall,” Curatio said. “A largely neutral place, but one filled with a dark elven populace that had rejected his darkness and traded with everyone in equal measure. His troops destroyed it while we were in Luukessia, salting the earth, pulling down every edifice stone by stone, and annihilating the populace. It was a place where his name was spoken as a jest, as a curse and in defiance of his edicts.” The healer wore a grim look, still seated next to the high backed chair of the Guildmaster that remained empty. “So, yes, there is cause to fear the Sovereign. He is vengeful, and that is perhaps one of the lighter of his heavy-handed strikes over the last ten thousand years that he has ruled Saekaj.”

“He is frightful,” Erith said, and Cyrus watched her bow her head to hide her face as she spoke. “He was gone before I was born and did not return until after I had left, but the sense of what he’d done to the people of Saekaj Sovar was so pervasive, so dispiriting that even the children who had never known his rule feared to speak his name aloud in any context that connected him to command of the city.”

“But why?” Ryin asked, and he slumped back in his chair. “There are gods, and they walk among some of us. Why fear to speak of that? Why would not Saekaj embrace that and trumpet it from their rooftops, that they are guided by the fingers of their divine?”

“There has long been an understanding,” Curatio said, “since the days of the War of the Gods, that there is only so much interference in the affairs of mortals that they will brook from one another.”

“Now this is interesting,” Vaste said, suddenly sitting more upright in his seat. “Exactly how much is too much?”

Curatio sighed. “I am not prepared to speak on this at length because there is much about the events of that war that is simply … not wise to indulge in thinking about. However, for an example, every ruler of the major powers has some method of contact for each of their matron and patron gods, and can receive some assistance from them as needed.”

Something clicked in Cyrus’s head. “A few years ago, Isabelle told me that in the wake of the Big Three’s destruction of Retrion’s Honor, Pretnam Urides and the Council of Twelve threatened to remove them from the city. She seemed to genuinely fear whatever they had threatened her with.”

“It was gods,” Vara said quietly, meeting Cyrus’s gaze only briefly. “She mentioned to me last year that thanks to recent events, they were less beholden to the Council of Twelve’s edicts. She was likely speaking of the death of Mortus.”

“It would not surprise me if Urides pulled something of that sort,” Curatio said. “He was never reluctant to exercise his power over others when need be, and having a god or multiple gods confront the heads of the most powerful guilds in the land is precisely the sort of power play that would put an overweening guild in its place.”

“We’re back on gods again,” Longwell said with a deep sigh from across the table. “We just can’t seem to get away from them for whatever reason.”

“Their marks are stitched into this world,” Curatio said quietly, “their fingerprints indelibly upon all that they touch, including mortal lives and affairs. Their currents of magic eddy about us still, and all they have done is still intertwined with the powers of our days.”

“That’s great,” Vaste said, “but much like Longwell, I just wish they’d all bugger off and let us be.”

“I hate to bring this back to business since we’re having such a lovely anti-theistic conversation,” Cyrus said, “but we are being paid to look for one of these deities, and we’ve made little in the way of progress thus far. I hate to send Arydni a missive telling her we’re going to have to duck out on the job she’s paying us to do, but I don’t see any paths forward, only dead ends.”