Chapter 6
Eighteen years ago
“If you’d not been here to guide us, we would’ve frozen to death before we found this entrance. The directions we were given were flawed for this last part. It would have led us to the wrong part of the summit.”
“Correct, Ashok,” Ratul said as he knocked the ice from the hidden doors. They were cut from the stone and camouflaged so well that they could have camped on them and never known. “The Heart is the most vital possession of the Order. Only those who pass the test may know the true location. It is possible that an acolyte may fail the test and flee the Order. They have already demonstrated their lack of character. They could talk. What then?”
The solution was obvious. “Execute them.”
“Easier said than done in some cases, so it is better to deceive all the acolytes. Those who pass learn the truth. Should you ever speak of what you see beyond this point, your life is forfeit. If you are ever tortured for this information, it is better that you will yourself to die rather than give it up. If you ever tell of this place, you will be hunted down by the entire Order and destroyed, for the Heart is the source of our power.”
Ratul did something with his hands, it seemed as if he were tracing invisible pictures on the stone, but whatever it was was hidden from view by his fur coat. The door should have been frozen solid, but it slid open with the grinding of stone against stone. Steep stairs led down into the mountain. Ratul started down and they followed. It was good to get out of the wind, but Ashok didn’t like how there was no visible mechanism for opening the heavy door inside. Regulated magic was legal, but he had an instinctive personal distrust of the craft. Magic was made using the leftovers of broken ancestor blades and the remaining life spark of long-dead bearers.
“From this point forward, nothing you see can ever be spoken about with anyone who is not a Protector of senior rank or higher. You have already given me your oath. Whether it be a chief judge, the highest arbiter in the Capitol, the Thakoor of your house, or if the Forgotten himself descends from the heavens in a rain of fire and asks about this place, I don’t give a damn, you will not speak with them about the Heart. Understood?”
“The Forgotten is imaginary, Lord Protector,” Ashok pointed out.
“Damn, boy, you are a literal sort. Come on.” Ratul started down the stairs.
The acolytes followed. Ashok was still having a hard time walking. His joint made a clicking noise in his pelvis with each step, and the pain was grating. The cuts on his chest burned, but the blood had dried to his undershirt enough to form a sort of giant cloth scab, so he was in no danger of bleeding to death. Devedas’ was keeping pressure on the laceration in his side, but the wound on his head was still slowly leaking through his hood. He was looking deathly pale and had vomited a few minutes before, but Ratul had denied their requests to stop long enough to tend their wounds.
Devedas slipped, stumbled down several steps, but caught himself on the wall before falling completely. Ashok grabbed him by the arm and helped him stand. Since one foot was numb, that almost caused both of them to go tumbling down the stairs. Some mighty Protectors they were.
He’d never been good at offering encouragement. “Keep going. It’s not far now,” Ashok said anyway.
“You don’t know that,” Devedas whispered.
“I can still hear you,” Ratul said from below. “Your bodies are frail. Bones break, blood spills, and the Law is deprived of yet another valuable enforcer. That’s what the Heart is for. When your own proves insufficient, it will beat on your behalf…But the boy is right, Devedas, it isn’t much farther.”
The magic door ground closed behind them, plunging them into complete darkness. Footsteps told him that Ratul was still descending. Devedas muttered something incomprehensible, and then the two of them limped along after their instructor.
The blindness was unnerving. The stairs continued. There seemed to be hundreds of them. Normally Ashok was so focused he would have counted, but now he was too tired to think. Something was making his nose itch. The mountain had been almost sterile. In comparison this placed smelled old. It was quiet except for the scrape of their boots against the stairs, their gloves along the walls, and Devedas’ labored breathing. Ashok was taking a lot of Devedas’ weight now as the older acolyte was having a hard time staying conscious. “Stay with me, brother,” Ashok pleaded as Devedas’ head wobbled around on his neck. If he went limp, they would fall. “I’m not strong enough to carry you.”
Below them, Ratul began to whistle a tune. Then his footfalls changed. He’d left the stairs and reached a level surface. That gave Ashok hope. There was some rattling of metal on metal, and then the scrape of a firestarter. Thankfully, an orange light appeared. The glow spread as Ratul took the torch and touched it to a big fire pit. Whatever was in it was dry and immediately ignited. By the time he got Devedas to the bottom the chamber was filling with light and heat. His skin prickled. They’d been cold for so long that the warm air felt like being stabbed with thousands of needles.
“Bring him this way.” Ratul ordered as he walked further inside and lit another fire pit. Ashok was having a hard time keeping up. “I was told there used to be lanterns here that never went out, but all magic breaks down eventually. The lights died generations ago, yet we make do. I sense a parable about society there.”
Ashok stepped on an uneven part of the floor, and for whatever reason, that was enough. The strength went out from his injured leg. It crumpled beneath, and the two acolytes fell down. He hit the ground with a grunt. “Oh, what now?” Ratul muttered as he came back. He roughly rolled Devedas over and lowered an ear to his chest. “Hmmm…This one is worse off than I thought. He’s bleeding to death and doesn’t have enough sense to complain about it.”
“He did complain, Lord Protector. However, you didn’t listen.”
“We’re going to have to work on that unflinching honesty of yours, Ashok.” Ratul effortlessly hoisted Devedas up and put him over one shoulder. “Wait here. I must get him to the Heart immediately.”
The master carried off the other acolyte, leaving Ashok alone.
He lay there on the hard floor for a time, flat on his back, letting his exhaustion seep from his body into the mountain. Ashok was incapable of fearing for himself, but it was interesting to discover that he could be worried about someone else’s fate. He didn’t want Devedas to die. Ashok had never had a friend before. Well, at least if you didn’t count Angruvadal, but he wasn’t sure if an ancient magical killing machine could actually be considered a friend.
The fire pits cast just enough light to see the high ceiling of the chamber. This place may have started out as a cave, but it had been worked and polished until the walls were smooth. However, there was large, rectangular, section on the wall above him that was intricately carved and casting odd shadows. It took his eyes time to adjust enough to figure out what he was looking at.
It was a map.
Ashok had seen many maps. Mindarin used them during his lessons and had several posted in the training room. He’d seen maps of house borders, of the trade routes between them, even maps of all of Lok, where great rivers were lines and cities were nothing but specks. Only this wasn’t like any map he’d seen before. He couldn’t figure out what house’s lands it was showing. Something was wrong with this one, he couldn’t place his finger on it, but the map seemed totally unfamiliar. Legal borders changed over time, but coasts and mountain ranges didn’t.
Then he picked out a few familiar shapes that would not have changed over time, like the Gujaran peninsula, and the western blob that was Uttara, the northern and westernmost parts of their nation respectively. “Impossible…” Ashok muttered as he forced himself to stand up. His leg burned and threatened to betray him again, but he needed to get closer. Ashok found another torch on the wall and lit it from the fire pit. He placed himself directly beneath the gigantic map and held up the flame.
This was a map of the entire world.
Their nation, the entire world of man, took up but one small corner. There were several other lands across the seas, some far larger than theirs, and hundreds of islands in between. As he moved the flickering torch back and forth, he realized there were thousands of carved dots casting tiny shadows. A quick check of the one continent he was familiar with revealed that the holes seemed to represent cities, with the bigger the shadow, the larger the place. Most seemed to correspond to the seats of the houses today, though there was no Capitol in the center, and there were a few dots where there was nothing today, but most matched…They had to be cities. When he went back to examining the rest of the map, he realized there were thousands of dots, spread across every landmass except for the ones at the very top and bottom. “Impossible,” he said again.
Ashok couldn’t say how long he stared at that map, memorizing every line, staring upward until the muscles in his neck began to ache and he got dizzy. It was easy to lose track of time when you found something so incomprehensible.
“It is rather impressive, isn’t it?”
He hadn’t heard the Lord Protector return. “Is Devedas—”
“That boy is too stubborn to die. As determined as he is to make up for his father’s failures, it wouldn’t surprise me if someday he was given my office.”
Ashok turned back to the carving. “I don’t understand this.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. This map comes from the time before the demons fell to the world.”
It was forbidden to speak of the time before the Law in anything but the vaguest of terms. The acolytes only learned of it in passing, because it had been a dark and wicked time, so corrupt that it still influenced lawbreakers today. “The Age of Kings?”
“Before that, even. The houses were tribes back then. Fighting the demons is what forced us to name a king. It wasn’t until long after we drove the demons into the sea that we discovered kings could be nearly as bad.”
“We haven’t been taught much about those days.”
Surprisingly, Ratul didn’t yell at him for concentrating on frivolous, useless things, and to the Lord Protector anything that wasn’t fighting or preparing to fight seemed frivolous. Instead Ratul joined him beneath the map. “In ancient times, man had settled across the whole of the world. We were one of nine continents. There wasn’t one nation like there is now, but hundreds of them, a multitude with different ways, different languages, traditions, different color skins, they even had different laws. They fought wars against each other, traded goods and thoughts, even animals. It was routine for man to travel across the sea in mighty ships.”
“That’s illegal, not to mention stupid,” Ashok stated dismissively, even though he was talking to a superior.
“Not in those days. The oceans were just large bodies of water, nothing more, until there was a war that consumed the heavens, and the demons were defeated by the gods and cast down.”
“Gods?” Ashok asked. Advocating the existence of such things was highly illegal.
“I speak metaphorically of course. Regardless of where they came from, there was a time before demons and a time after. They fell from the sky and began to destroy everything. Across the entire world, cities burned, and men fled before them. They nearly exterminated us. It wasn’t until we used the black steel to drive them into the water that the oceans became hell. The demons have owned the sea ever since.”
“Do you know where black steel comes from?” Despite spending years with three pounds of it riding on his hip, nobody had ever been able to explain it to him.
“There are only fantastical tales by those deluded enough to worship false gods,” Ratul answered a little too quickly.
It was hard to imagine this ancient world of travelling foreigners and no supreme law to rule them all, until it had begun raining demons. Angruvadal had been forged in those days and it still remembered them. Ashok would have liked to see what that world had been like, but the memories locked in his sword were limited to battle after battle, and nothing beyond. Ashok could relive every fight of every bearer, but he’d never understand what any of them had been fighting for. “What do the fanatics say about the origins?”
Ratul gave Ashok that heavy lidded glare, letting Ashok know there would be no good answer to that question. “The demons destroyed most of civilization, and what histories survived were questionable at best. They’re locked away in the Capitol library now, under the careful eye of the Archivists’ Order. The Age of Kings was based on lies, so the records that passed through their priests’ corrupt hands were tainted until everything was twisted to serve their greed. Regardless of where black steel comes from, ever since our victory, man has controlled the land and demons have held the sea. We don’t try to cross the water and they are not allowed to walk upon our land. This arrangement has held for fifty generations.”
Scanning the dots on the other lands, Ashok tried to take it all in. Some of them cast much larger shadows than Vadal City and the census said nearly a million people lived there…It was hard to imagine a city even bigger. “What happened to the people in all those other continents?”
“Who knows? Dead more than likely. The demons nearly ended us here. Perhaps other nations weren’t so lucky. Did they discover magic like we did? Maybe in those other places the demons won and now those slimy things are the ones living on land.”
“That would be trespassing. They should be punished.”
Ratul actually appeared amused by that. “I admire your commitment, but sadly that’s a bit beyond our jurisdiction to enforce, Ashok.”
For now, Ashok thought to himself. He couldn’t abide the idea of anything, demon or human, flaunting the Law.
“Regardless, if any foreigners survived like we did, we’ll never know. Crossing the sea is impossible, so for all practical matters, we’re all that remain…You know this. Mindarin must have covered it in your lessons.”
“Briefly.” They didn’t waste too much of the acolytes’ precious training time on ancient history. Protectors were focused on enforcing the rules now, not dwelling in the past. How one got to the destination was not nearly as important as maintaining order once there.
“Myself, I’m a student of these things. I’ve read everything available about the ancients and sought out the best scholars in the Capitol to discuss our history.” That was a surprise. Normally, Ratul only seemed interested in teaching them how to kill people more efficiently. It was hard to picture him actually enjoying something. “I’ve been fascinated by the subject my entire life. If I’d not been obligated to the Order, I might have made a fine Archivist, but enough of this. There is one final test for you.” Ratul walked away.
Ashok hesitated. From the top of the mountain he’d been able to see into the lands of several great houses. At the time he’d not realized how truly small they really were. Taking one last longing look at the map, Ashok hurried and limped after his instructor.
More torches had been lit along a corridor. It led further into the mountain. “I’m curious, Ashok. Why did you attempt the test so early?”
He was required to give only honest answers to his superiors. “I don’t think I can last another year without my sword.”
Ratul grunted. “Thought so.”
That didn’t answer whether he’d get Angruvadal back yet or not, but it wasn’t Ashok’s place to question. He would prove himself or die trying.
They entered another, smaller chamber. The room was plain, but the shape of it gave the impression it had once been used for more. There were strangely shaped alcoves all around the interior, empty now, their original purpose a mystery. Ratul gestured toward an altar in the center of the room. “Behold, the Heart of the Mountain.”
It was so black that it seemed to burn a hole in his vision. The hungry darkness seemed to absorb their torchlight. He had to turn his head a bit so that he could actually see it from the corner of his eye. The heart appeared to be a jagged, twisted mass of metal the size of a child. It was the biggest piece of black steel Ashok had ever seen, big enough to forge a dozen swords or thousands of valuable fragments. Some people had a sense for magic, and though Ashok had never been naturally gifted in that way, even he could feel the energy radiating from the Heart.
The metal device twitched. As he watched, it twitched again. It really was beating.
“This is the Order’s greatest weapon, old as your precious Angruvadal, from the time when magic was common. We’ve kept it for over a thousand years. This is what makes Protectors more than men. When you touch it, you will take part of its power with you for the rest of your days. It will sting you and infect your blood. The influence of the Heart will be yours to call upon for the rest of your life. It can make you stronger, hardier, and hone your reactions. With sufficient concentration you can direct it to empower your senses, but it can only do so much at a time. You will heal faster and even survive wounds that would be fatal to a normal man, but it will not make you immortal. An injury sufficiently devastating will still kill you. It may stay death for a time, but nothing can postpone death forever. Well, nothing legal at least.”
“I have already been touched by magic.”
“Indeed. For one such as you, the defensive power of the Heart combined with the offensive skill bestowed by your ancestor blade, I can only imagine what the Order could accomplish with such a weapon at its disposal.”
There was no better cause than justice, so Ashok didn’t mind the idea of being a weapon in its behalf. “What if I’m unworthy?”
Ratul had a laugh like a dog’s bark. “The Order decides who is worthy, and if you weren’t, I’d have had the guardians toss you off that cliff. Magic can make you tougher, but it can’t give you character. That’s why our program is so harsh. Flawed acolytes must be weeded out. The Heart does not care about birth or honor. I imagine a casteless could take from it if one was clever enough to find his way in here. Only a bearer would think of such a question. Don’t worry. It is not like Angruvadal. The Heart has no opinions of its own.”
It was not his place to disagree, but in Ashok’s experience, all black steel had ghosts inside of it. Some of them were just louder than others. He peered closer into the burning darkness. There was something wrong with the Heart. There was a weakness to it. “Lord Protector, you can see magic inside of things, can’t you?”
“I have that gift, yes.”
“How much magic is left within the Heart?”
Ratul didn’t respond. Ashok looked over to see that the master was scowling. “Less than when I first saw it for myself, but enough.”
When magic was worn too thin its container would fail. “What happens when the Heart shatters?”
“The Order will die,” Ratul said simply.
Ashok moved away from the Heart. “Then I will not use up any for myself. Save the magic for someone better.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but that isn’t how it works. No, Ashok, this is your final test. To become full-fledged Protector the Order requires this. I’m one of the few who can see magic, which means that when you touch the Heart, I will see you for what you truly are. This is necessary, for the good of the Order and for the sanctity of the Law.”
“This is a command?”
“Yes.”
Ashok nodded, stepped toward the Heart of black steel and placed his hands on it.
The world turned to blood.
* * *
The promotion ceremony was over. Only two acolytes had attained senior status this season, not nearly enough to make up for attrition and their dwindling numbers, but one showed great promise and far more importantly the other possessed a sword that could supposedly defeat armies. Mindarin was excited at the prospects. However, Lord Protector Ratul seemed to be in a worse mood than usual.
The Hall of the Protectors was a vast stone fortress cut from the mountainside, far too large for their dwindling numbers. Mindarin joined his commander on the balcony overlooking the empty training ground. “I’ve been told that in times past, our numbers were so great that our formations took up this whole space when they presented themselves for inspection.” Ratul snorted. “We used to be so respected that we received so many obligations that we had to turn some away. I can’t even imagine. Now we can barely fill one corner with children. So this is what it feels like to preside over a dying order…But then I wonder if it truly has to be that way.”
The acolytes were gone, allowed a few hours to celebrate some of their number successfully advancing or to mourn the one who hadn’t made it back. It was their choice. Ratul went back to staring off into space, sucking on his teeth, mulling over something.
“What troubles you?” Mindarin asked.
“The truth…”
“That’s an unusually cryptic pronouncement. You saw something strange at the Heart, didn’t you?”
“Any other acolyte and I would have cut him down on the spot, but the Order needs that sword.” Ratul sighed. “Dark times are coming, my friend.”
Mindarin felt his hopes dashed. “Ashok then. Did you receive a prophecy?” Such a thing was rare, but not unheard of when dealing with the Heart. “Did it show you his future?”
Ratul spit over the edge and watched it fall. “Bah…I’m weary from the journey. That mountain seems taller the older I get. I don’t want to talk about it now. It’ll be dealt with in time. Good night, Mindarin.” He left the rail and began to walk away.
“Did the Heart show you the future?” Mindarin called after him.
“No.” Ratul didn’t look back. “It showed me the past.”