"Very prescient of you, Nasser. Our friend Tharvello recorded what you said and went to see Greven il-Vec with it. When Greven wouldn't act on what he heard and appoint Tharvello chief of the Corps of Sergeants-over your "retired" corpse, Nasser-Tharvello swore he would take his percher to Ertai and the emissary. As it turns out, I have a certain amount of influence with Greven, and he revealed the whole sordid story to me."
Tharvello's eyes rolled back. His flesh had taken on the color of new parchment. From his stool, Dorian lifted his slippered feet and tried not to let the blood touch him.
"You'll find me tolerant of many things," Crovax said, wiping the dirk on the terrified chamberlain's gown. "Drunkenness, dueling, gambling-these are normal recreations of fighting men. As long as they don't compromise your duties, I don't care what you do on your own. I can even tolerate failure. We all fail, now and then." He laughed, though no one else in the narrow room joined him.
"What I won't tolerate is treachery. This is the fate of traitors." He kicked Tharvello's still-warm corpse. "Do you know why I gave him the knife first?" The sergeants nodded or grunted ignorance. "To give him a chance to kill me. If he'd tried to strike me down with a quick thrust, I would've spared him. Assassins I can use. Traitors are just carrion.
"You know your places for tomorrow's operation. You're the best men on Rath, the best fighters and true leaders. When I am evincar, you will all share in the bounty of my victory."
Nasser raised a fist in salute. "Crovax! Victory!" The sergeants took up the cry. "Crovax! Victory!"
Dorian swallowed the bile in his throat and croaked, "Crovax, victory."
"Oh, yes, the chamberlain. I almost forgot you."
He grabbed Dorian by his thick throat and hoisted him into the air. The portly chamberlain weighed easily as much as two normal-sized men, but Crovax lifted him with one hand. Dorian's eyes bulged, and froth formed on his red lips.
"I can't trust you any longer," Crovax gritted. "You've always been a fool, but at one time you had enough sense to keep your mouth shut. Losing your wits has cost you your life."
He threw Dorian against the flowstone door and it held him fast. The door panels flowed outward, gripping Dorian's head, arms, waist, and legs.
Crovax twirled the dirk between his fingers. "Observe," he said. "I'll show you the stroke I used on Tharvello was no fluke."
CHAPTER 14
The pile of discarded scrolls spilled off the table and covered the floor. A good third of the bookshelves were empty. Ertai slumped over the latest treatise, head propped on one hand. He couldn't read anymore. For sixteen hours straight he'd labored in this obscure annex where some past chamberlain had stored all the books he found too old or too esoteric for the palace's main collection. The technical information he gleaned from the scrolls was straightforward enough. The tiny machines were highly resistant to normal magical influence because it was artificial. Flow-stone existed on the molecular level. In order to survive programming and recombination, flowstone molecules were extremely well balanced harmonically and therefore resistant to any sort of energy input. In a natural substance-wood, for example-matter was balanced statically. At rest, under normal conditions, wood was wood. Add heat to it, and its balance broke down-burning resulted. No fire in the world could burn flowstone because adding heat to the harmonically stable substance had no effect. Trying to ignite flowstone was like trying to boil an ocean by adding a teakettle full of hot water.
The secret of flowstone manipulation lay in focusing magic or mental energy on individual molecules of the stuff. Ertai imagined it this way: start with a tall brick tower, solid and level. A man could not topple the tower simply by shoving against it or even by battering it with a sledge hammer. But with a chisel and mallet, he could loosen bricks around the base of the tower. When the foundation became unstable, the tower could be toppled with a single finger. The real skill was in trying to make the resulting rubble into something useful.
Evincars were given this psionic ability by the Phyrexians during their physical metamorphosis. Unaltered minds could influence flowstone only through absolute concentration or conversely by a massive outpouring of directed magic. Ertai's effects came from the latter method. His magical skills got him started, and the infusion therapy he'd been taking boosted the available power for him to tap. Now, however, his method was at a dead end. All the natural magical power present on Rath wasn't enough to enable him to raise up a table or turn the floor to putty as Crovax did.
Ertai's candidacy was, in a word, doomed. The trick was to make certain he himself wasn't doomed along with it.
He considered going to Crovax and abdicating his chance to become evincar. Surely the relieved Crovax would spare him, maybe even allow him to depart Rath via the old Phyrexian portal in Portal Canyon?
Of course. Crovax was such a kindly, forgiving fellow.
Ertai shoved the remaining scrolls off the table. The small flowstone lamp overturned, and for a moment he feared it would start a fire among all the loose manuscripts. The yellowish wick kept glowing inside the glass shield. There was no fuel as such in the lamp. Commanded to glow, it glowed. In time the nano-machines in the lamp would break down, disintegrate, and the light would go out. It would take several hundred years at least.
Ertai put his head on the table and stared at the light. It reminded him of Belbe. Bright, purposeful, untiring, and single-minded. What did she think of their solitary encounter? He tried to understand what it meant to him. Since he was a small boy, Ertai's life had been centered on the practice of magic. For nineteen years it was the first thing he thought of in the morning, and the thing he dreamt of at night. At Barrin's Academy he'd been too busy for romance-if something didn't advance his knowledge of magic, what use was it? He could laugh now at his own arrogance, except he didn't feel like laughing.
With thumb and forefinger, he tried to pluck the glowing wick from the lamp. It winked out, throwing the cluttered room into darkness. He took his fingers away, and the element resumed glowing. No flame, no heat. More than ever it reminded him of Belbe.
She had her own portal, she said. If so, she must go and take him with her. As Ertai saw it, they had common cause to leave Rath together. Once Crovax was in power, no one on Rath was safe. Everyone would be fodder for his appetite, his own private herd of two-legged cattle. As a defeated rival, Ertai's life was obviously in danger, and he could see Belbe's would be, too.
Yes, Belbe would be number two on Crovax's "to do" list.
Where to go? Dominaria? It was home, but very soon it would be the scene of a horrible war. Gerrard and the others had told him this, and Belbe confirmed it. In their private moments, Belbe explained how Rath and Dominaria would intermingle, the landscape of one becoming part of the landscape of the other. Once the Rathi overlay was in place, the legions of Phyrexia would pour forth in all their awful, technological efficiency, and life on Dominaria would be either enslaved or extinguished.
Ertai considered himself a realist. Gerrard, Hanna, and company couldn't prevail against the hosts of the Hidden One. He'd thought it possible once but no longer. They would be faced with an army of a hundred thousand Crovaxes, utterly ruthless and totally without mercy. His homeworld was doomed.
Belbe's portal could take them anywhere. There must be a million worlds or more out there populating the void. Even the Phyrexians couldn't reach them all. Perhaps he could find some peaceful world of magic to inhabit, where machines were made of wood and didn't think, where floors existed only to be walked on, and a man and woman of talent could live a good life together until time mingled their souls into the great firmament forever.