He looked in the direction of the skeletons, and a host of new questions formed in his mind.
“Why did you want to come to us?” he asked, not angrily now, but in a curious tranquillity of spirit. “Why did you choose to serve us as you did? Why did you allow us to destroy you, since surely it was in your power to prevent it?”
Powerful questions. The Warder had no answers to them. But yet who knew what miracles might grow from the asking of them. Yes. Yes. Miracles! True faiths can arise from the ruined fragments of false ones, was that not so?
He was so very tired. It had been such a long night.
Gradually he slipped downward until he was lying completely prone, face pillowed in his arms. It seemed to him that the gentle light of morning was entering the chamber, that the long vigil was over at last. How could that be, light reaching him underground? He chose not to pursue the question. He lay quietly, waiting. And then he heard footsteps. Mericalis was returning. The night was over indeed.
“Diriente? Diriente, are you all right?”
“Help me up,” the Warder says. “I’m not accustomed to spending my nights lying on stone floors.”
The custodian flashes his torch around the room as if he expects it to have changed in some fashion since he last saw it.
“Well?” he says, finally.
“Let’s get out of here, shall we?”
“You’re all right?”
“Yes, yes, I’m all right!”
“I was very worried. I know you said you wanted to be alone, but I couldn’t help thinking—”
“Thinking can be very dangerous,” says the Warder coolly. “I don’t recommend it.”
“I want to tell you, Diriente, that I’ve decided that what I suggested last night is the best idea. The evidence in this room could blow the Church to pieces. We ought to seal the place up and forget we ever were in here.”
“No,” says the Warder.
“We aren’t required to reveal what we’ve found to anybody. My job is simply to keep the temple building from falling down. Yours is to perform the rituals of the faith.”
“And if the faith is a false one, Mericalis?”
“We don’t know that it is.”
“We have our suspicions, don’t we?”
“To say that the Three never returned safely to the stars is heresy, isn’t it, Diriente? Do you want to be responsible for spreading heresy?”
“My responsibility is to promote the truth,” says the Warder. “It always has been.”
“Poor Diriente. What have I done to you?”
“Don’t waste your pity on me, Mericalis. I don’t need it. Just help me find my way out of here, all right? All right?”
“Yes,” the custodian says. “Whatever you say.”
The passageway is much shorter and less intricate on the way out than it seemed to be when they entered. Neither of them speaks a word as they traverse it. Mericalis trudges quickly forward, never once looking back. The Warder, following briskly along behind, moves with a vigor he hasn’t felt in years. His mind is hard at work: he occupies himself with what he will say later in the day, first to the temple staff, then to the worshipers who come that day, and then, perhaps, to the emperor and all his court, down in the great city below the mountain. His words will fall upon their ears like the crack of thunder at the mountaintop; and then let whatever happen that may. Brothers and Sisters, I announce unto you a great joy, is how he intends to begin. The Second Advent is upon us. For behold, I can show you the Three themselves. They are with us now, nor have they ever left us—
The Dragon of Tollin
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
The emissary flew for many days until he at last came to a spot cool enough for his feet to touch the surface without harm. The High Queen should have sent an ifrit instead of one of the Sky-Fey, the emissary thought. Ifrits flew by magic and thus could be wherever they desired in the twinkling of an eye, whereas the Sky-Feys’ wings took them no further in each mote of time than those of a bird of comparable size. Of course, speed was the only advantage ifrits possessed as emissaries. Their chancy dispositions made them otherwise useless for that purpose. But on this mission, speed would have sufficed, for nowhere in all of these blasted lands had the emissary found a living spirit with whom to converse.
The first hint the emissary had seen of the ruination was that a pall of black and gray boiling smoke hung over the shoreline of the southernmost reaches of Northworld. Here and there the sky would crack open to reveal streaks of angry orange or the clouds would suddenly bloom with fiery color within. An appalling stink assailed the emissary’s nose, and all during the subsequent flight he had had to cover his nostrils with a piece of his robe to filter the air.
Where the bustling port cities had been, black ooze trickled into the sea, scoring with deep gullies of blistering and popping magma the mountainous rim that had protected these prosperous lands from invasion for so many years. Where sentinel castles had guarded the coast smoldered piles of fused rubble. No ship or even the wreck of a ship wallowed in the fouled harbors. No man, woman or creature of any race walked the earth. No sea being within miles of the shore lifted its body from the waves to greet him. The sea creatures were the ones who had brought word of the disaster. The trading ships that normally plied the seas between this side of the world and the emissary’s side of the world had not been seen for some months. Finally, a selkie left word with a fisherman that she was concerned for relatives who had not made their yearly migration from the Northworld seas to those in the south and the fisherman took word to his lord, who sent word to the King, whose responsibility it was to report such matters to the Queen. A caravan took the weekly report to the highest mountain pass in Southworld where the High Queen presided from her castle of ice (which was believed to impart to her cool judgment) over the disputes and concerns of the lands and peoples below her.
She dispatched the emissary. The emissary had traveled to Northworld once, as a youngling, with his father on matters of state. The coastline of this landmass beneath his wings now and its location told the emissary that it was indeed the continent known as Northworld, but as to other clues, they were all erased.
Where he remembered great seas of billowing green forest there were now jagged charred stumps sticking up like the ruined teeth from the skull of some long-dead crone. The emissary thought he might find some answers in Tollinlund, that greatest city of all Northworld, whose boundaries annexed what was once an entire independent country.
The emissary had thought to stop on the way to rest his wings, to have a bite to eat, to sleep perhaps, for it was necessary to cross the borders of six other countries and the Great Inland Sea, the Hungry Desert and the vast Ogrebones mountain range before reaching Bellgarten, the land of which Tollin was the capital city.
The inland seas heaved like a dying man with black sludge from shore to shore, and the mountains were mightily scored on the southernmost side, though less so on the northern side. The emissary began to have some hope as he saw that the Hungry Desert, aside from sporting a new collection of still partially-clad bleached bones, looked much as it ever had, although the once-sparse vegetation was now nonexistent. Beyond the desert, however, where the northern loop of the Ogrebones guarded the fertile fields and populous towns of Bellgarten, the changes, though more subtle, were nonetheless evident. Bellgarten, as was well known, was the guardian country of Northworld, as the High Queen guarded Southworld. Bellgarten had this distinction and its enviable prosperity because it possessed a dragon, whose favor made it mighty and powerful, as well as wealthy.