If Thorn could have smiled, he would have. He rose, his immense legs creaking like trees in the wind, and put an armoured hand on the trunk of the ancient maple.
‘I will go into the far west, and learn a thing or two,’ he said aloud. His voice sounded harsh.
I have made myself a mockery of what I ought to be, he thought. But then the thought I shall retain this shape to remind myself of what I allowed to happen.
If he was having a conversation with the tree, it wasn’t answering. Thorn turned to walk west, and in that moment lightning struck.
The lightning struck all around him, a moment of awesome power. The great maple was destroyed, its heartwood reduced to steaming splinters, its great trunk split as if by a behemoth’s axe.
Thorn – whose body was bigger than a giant Ruk or a mighty troll – was struck to earth and pinned under the tree’s ancient branches. And still the air around him was like a thick porridge of sheer power.
If Thorn could have screamed, he would have.
Thorn felt he had been invaded. But not destroyed. There was something in his head that he couldn’t fathom – in his web of tree roots and spiderwebs, where he cast his workings and remembered the hundreds of options he had to his potentia, he now had a black space, like rot in the sapwood of a healthy tree.
Nothing could track him here.
And yet something so powerful that Thorn couldn’t describe it had appeared, pinned him to the ground, invaded him, and vanished.
Just to the left, through the mountain of destroyed foliage, he could see an object sitting on leaves and branches as if the ruined tree was a massive nest.
It was a black egg, the size of a man’s head. But not a true egg, as it was covered in scales, with curious caps on either end – like armour.
An armoured egg.
It radiated power in the aether.
It radiated heat in the real.
Thorn put up shield after shield – glowing hemispheres of forest green, layered like a lady’s petticoats. Then he tuned, or created, phantasmic instruments to magnify, to probe, to explore. And as he did he used his powers and his massive strength to raise the corpse of the great tree off his body.
The egg – it was too obviously an egg to call it anything else – resisted his investigation.
Thorn had no immediate plans. He was, he suspected, in some sort of shock. He sat in the shelter of the burl, and watched and prodded the egg, and the edges of the raw blackness within himself.
He felt violated.
What was that entity? And what does it want?
An hour passed and it did not return. The armoured egg sat, generating heat, and Thorn was gradually filled with power – filled with purpose. For the first time since his defeat on the fells of Lissen Carrak, he knew what he wanted.
North of the Wall – Giannis Turkos
Giannis Turkos sat watching his Huran wife make him moccasins. He wasn’t really looking at her; instead he was thinking of the council at which he would speak.
She raised her eyes. ‘It is nothing,’ she said. ‘They will listen to you.’
He shook his head. ‘It is more complicated than-’ He paused. Two years among the Outwallers had killed his deep-seated belief that they were children to receive lessons, but some deep-seated prejudices remained. One was that he hated sharing his plans. And the Outwallers were not men of the Empire, nor yet even Albans. They were fickle, even whimsical, in a way that no civilised man would ever allow.
But he loved his wife. And he loved her people. Even when they were bent on a war he believed was pointless and destructive.
‘There’s tea,’ she said, sounding oddly childlike with her mouth full of sinew.
Turkos shrugged. He was too worried to drink tea. He stood, went out of their cabin, and found that many of his political opponents in the village were sitting on the front step of the cabin across the small area of packed earth that Turkos thought of as the Plataea. Big Pine waved.
Big Pine was his inveterate enemy at council. Despite that, they had hunted together last fall, killing many deer together and gathering many beaver pelts. Life among Outwallers was a curious mixture of adversarial and cooperative.
So Turkos waved back, and smiled. But being outdoors didn’t offer him sanctuary from his wife’s sharp eyes and sharper tongue – or rather, it only offered sanctuary at the cost of the elusive interrogation of two hundred and fifty other Huran adults. He slipped back through the moose-hide curtain and took the copper teapot off the fire. He poured them both tea in fine, Morean-made cups, and handed one to his wife, who looked at him with a mixture of amusement and gratitude common to wives in every culture when men do exactly what women expect them to. She spat her sinew into her hand, laid it aside, and drank her tea. He put Wild honey in his.
She shook her head. ‘You are like a child,’ she said fondly.
He sat back on his chair, which he’d built with his own hands, as no Outwaller would use such a thing, with a small lamp full of olive oil at his side, and read through the scroll that had come a month ago. Again.
The Logothete of the Drum to his servants in the woodlands and wastes, greeting.
It has come to our ears, and sounded softly on our drum, that the Emperor’s enemies are attempting to use the Outwallers as a weapon against the Empire. The drum whispers of a heavy Outwaller incursion into Alba in the spring; reliable whispers state that the culprits were Sossag and Abonaki. Any conflict between the Huran and the Sossag could spill into Thrake. Such an incursion into Thrake would have the most deleterious of effects on the economy of the Empire, and with God’s will and the Emperor’s beneficence, we hope to avert such calamity. Let all the Logothete’s servants take note and act accordingly. Further, elements within the palace have become less enthusiastic about the Emperor’s policies about land and the Outwallers than before. The Logothete’s servants are required to test every assertion of this office commencing with this message for authenticity.
The message was written in a magicked ink on vellum; it was also coded using a letter-number code that was itself changed every six months, and that code translated into a form of High Archaic little used elsewhere in the world. The message had been carried by one of the Emperor’s messengers; a powerful bird bred for the purpose. Yet under all these layers of protection, the Logothete – the Emperor’s spymaster – had written a message that conveyed very little information and a strong hint of internal betrayal.
Turkos read it again. He’d deciphered it six times, each time looking for a new key or a chance phrase that might lead him to see a different meaning. He’d tried it with last year’s key. He’d tried it with a training key he’d been taught at the University.
It said what it said.
Which was very little.
‘Speak from your heart,’ his wife said. ‘Not from the skin of a dead animal.’
Kailin was small, her slim body hard with muscle and with a strong face, not exactly pretty by Morean standards, a little broad, perhaps, but full of character – happy with laughter, fierce with frowns. He loved her face. It had the slightly slanted eyes and sharp cheekbones that reminded him that some of the Outwallers were not, in fact, escaped peasants – many were a race apart from his own.
She leaned forward, and kissed him.
‘Sinew breath,’ he said, and they both laughed.
He rolled up his parchment and slipped it back into the light bone message tube in which it had come. Then he kissed her again, running a hand down her side, but she swatted him away. ‘Get dressed,’ she said. ‘I’ll have these done by the time you’ve got all your finery on.’