I put the seed in my mouth and clicked it against my own teeth. Tap, tap, tap. “More or less,” I said.
Solitude smiled. At first, I thought it was in reaction to my imitation of her; then, she began to laugh.
“I could kiss you, Drothe,” she said. “This is perfect!”
“Um?” I said.
“If Nicco, Kells, and Shadow think I’m after all of Ildrecca, they’ll try to stop me outside of the cordon. None of them truly wants Ten Ways, so they’ll pull back and try to keep me contained. That means the cordon will fall even easier.” A dark gleam entered her eyes. “And if the war doesn’t go past the cordon’s walls, then the empire will pull out, too. Once they’re done wrecking the place, of course.” She laughed again, clapping her hands together. “Oh, this is beautiful. I should be paying you to tell tales like this!”
I sat up in my seat, suddenly feeling far less clever than I had a moment ago.
“You mean this is all about Ten Ways?” I said. “The setups, the rumors, getting Nicco and Kells at each other’s throats-even drawing in the empire-is all so you can take Ten Ways? You don’t want to be the Dark King?”
“Hell no!” said Solitude. “I have enough headaches without anyone becoming the next Dark King, let alone myself. No, I just want the cordon.”
I asked the obvious question-the one she was waiting for. “Why?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
No. “Yes.”
“I thought you might.” Solitude smiled and leaned forward. “Because it didn’t always used to be called Ten Ways,” she said. “Because a long time ago, it was called Ten Wise Men.”
I noticed that somewhere along the way I had chewed and swallowed my seed without noticing. I put another one in my mouth. “How long ago?” I said, starting to have a bad feeling.
“Right around the time Stephen Dorminikos became emperor,” she said, “and before the beginning of the Endless Cycle.”
“And why was the cordon called Ten Wise Men?”
“I think you’re starting to suspect why,” said Solitude. I kept silent, and she shrugged. “It was called Ten Wise Men after the people Stephen Dorminikos granted it to. He gave it to his Paragons-ten of them to be exact-so they could conduct research for him, uninterrupted.”
“And one of those Paragons was named Ioclaudia Neph,” I said.
Solitude nodded. “Including Ioclaudia. Who wrote a journal as insurance against her life, for all the good it did her.”
“Insurance?” I said. “Why would she need insurance if she was working for the emperor?”
“Why does anyone need insurance when they work for someone of great power?”
“To protect them against that power.”
“Precisely. The emperor didn’t put them in Ten Wise Men to work on Imperial magic; he put them in there to work on soul magic. He put them in there to make him immortal.” Solitude leaned forward and stared me in the eye. “The Angels didn’t choose Stephen Dorminikos to serve as the Undying Emperor-he did. He charged his Paragons with finding a way to make him immortal, but it didn’t work. For some reason, reincarnation was the best they could manage. So they broke his soul into three pieces and somehow arranged for those pieces to follow one another in a constant cycle. That’s how Stephen Dorminikos Progenitor became Markino, Theodoi, and Lucien. The Angels had nothing to do with it.”
My heart gave a flop, but I hardly noticed it. “And the Paragons?” I said, already knowing.
“Dusted. Them and everyone else in Ten Wise Men-servants, apprentices, bakers, everyone. All on the same night. The emperor surrounded the cordon, sent in his troops, and when they were done, he had the place burned to the ground. It’s been rebuilt countless times since, and each time the name has changed slightly. But underneath it all, Ten Ways is still Ten Wise Men. And there are secrets buried there.”
“Like Ioclaudia’s journal,” I said.
“Like Ioclaudia’s journal,” agreed Solitude. “Hers is supposed to be the most complete, but there are notes, fragments of journals, ancient runes, and circles of power still down there. And I want to dig them all up, which means I need Ten Ways.”
I stared at Solitude, trying to wrap my mind around what she had just told me. If what she said was true, then the Angels had had nothing to do with Stephen Dorminikos’s reincarnations. And if that was the case, then his whole foundation for sitting on the Undying Throne-being the chosen of the Angels, being an intermediary between Them and humanity, being guided in his rule by aspects of the divine-was all a construct, a hoax, a fucking con.
I felt my world starting to shift, and I didn’t much care for it.
“How?” I said, scrambling for purchase. “How could anyone possibly set something like this up? The religion, the cults, the sheer belief. It’s not possible!”
“Of course it is,” said Solitude, her green eyes flashing. “How do you start a rumor on the street? You tell a few key people the tale you want spread, give them an incentive to talk, and step away. If done right, it’ll take on a life of its own. Look at what I did with Nicco and Kells in Ten Ways-that was small-time.
“Now, think about what an emperor can do, especially if he has years to prepare. He could lay the foundations for a cult, create a corps of fanatics, indoctrinate the bureaucracy so it would be waiting for him when he came back. Stephen’s Paragons didn’t come up with the Endless Cycle overnight, and he didn’t die the instant they worked the magic. There was time to plot, to lay groundwork, to make sure he would be reborn into an empire that was counting on his return as an article of faith. And when he did return?” Solitude spread her hands. “Everything was confirmed. The hardest part for Stephen was throwing down the First Regency when they decided they didn’t want to surrender power to him. After that, it was just a matter of meeting the expectations he had already set.”
I rubbed at my temples. The pain was back, but I knew it wasn’t solely from my strained vision. “But why?” I said. “Why go through all of this just to keep the throne?”
“Why did Stephen kill his uncle and become emperor in the first place?” said Solitude.
“To save the empire,” I said. Or, at least, that was the popular story. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“Exactly,” said Solitude. “He saved the empire, but he also knew that, no matter how good a foundation he laid, it would collapse someday. You know history-sooner or later, someone comes to the throne who undoes all the work of his predecessors. Have enough of them close enough together, and the empire falls.” Solitude held up a finger. “Unless.”
“Unless he stays on the throne forever,” I said.
“That’s the theory, anyhow. And so far, it’s been working.”
“But what about the Angels?” I said. “Stephen’s been claiming to be their Chosen One since he came back. If They didn’t set him up to come back, why haven’t They cast him down?”
Solitude shrugged. “How should I know? I’m no theologian. Whatever They think of this, it’s between Them and Stephen. For all we know, his creeping insanity is the punishment for blaspheming against Them, but I hope not. It’s too damn tame for me.”
I rubbed at my temples some more and reached for my herb wallet. It wasn’t there. Of course. It had gone the way of my clothing seemingly so long ago. I pulled at one of the altered seams of Nestor’s doublet and felt it give a little. I wasn’t much longer for this outfit, either.
“Pardon my asking,” I said, “but you have to understand when I say, where the hell are you getting all of this?”
“You mean, assuming I’m not making it up, or crazy, or both?”
“The thought occurs,” I said. “Even you have to admit this isn’t the kind of thing you find in any old history book.”
“I have fragments of another journal,” said Solitude. “Mainly bits and pieces, but enough to get a basic picture of what happened. The rest I’ve pieced together from ancient histories I guarantee you’ve never heard of, heretical theologies, and other sources. As you can imagine, information on this… aspect… of imperial history isn’t thick on the ground. But it’s there, if you know where to look.”