The Trials of Empire, page 34
And then Vonvalt said something that I did not expect.
“All of you out!” he snapped over his shoulder. When everyone hesitated, he added, “Now!”
The Guardsmen – those who had survived – bustled back into the corridor. Captain Rainer tried half-heartedly to interpose herself between me and the chamber, though I irritably shoved past her. There, I watched as Vonvalt retrieved three volumes from a satchel strapped about his waist. The first I recognised immediately as the grimoire necromantia; the second was The Art of Phantasmic Conjuration, which I had unearthed in the Law Library. The last was the Codex Elementa.
Taken together, Vonvalt had at his fingertips a powerful collection of sorceries – more than even Claver had access to. Even so, I knew not what he hoped to do with them. It was true that Vonvalt was already an accomplished practitioner of the arcana, but he would never wield them as weapons. The Magistratum had long forbidden such uses.
And yet… I thought of Jansen, and the ideogram I had seen carved into the bone of his forehead. I thought of Vonvalt’s reaction to seeing Sir Anzo’s creations in the Kyarai, or to seeing Westenholtz bound in agony in limbo – that of interest, curiosity, surprise, but never horror or revulsion. These things individually might be explained away, but when taken together, I realised, demonstrated the beginnings of a pattern. Like Claver, Vonvalt was becoming interested in the potency of these magicks. They were tools, under-exploited tools, which could be used to great and devastating effect.
He pinned the struggling prognosticator’s arms under his knees and the man’s forehead under his left hand. Then with his right hand he began flicking through the pages of the three tomes, opening up pre-marked sections.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Not only was it a violation of every fundamental principle of ethics, it was just wrong. Plainly wrong. I did not care how powerful these sorceries were. Even if they were used for good, the method itself was evil. And using an evil method to achieve a good outcome tainted the outcome permanently.
The old Vonvalt would have smiled, and called me a deon tologist.
But the old Vonvalt was gone.
“Don’t do it,” I called out to him. I was surprised at how calm I sounded. That was the thing about coming within a hair’s breadth of being possessed by a demon; it gave you a healthy sense of perspective.
Vonvalt, who had been about to start the incantation, looked sharply over to me. “I told you to leave. It is not safe to be here. Go, now. I will see you back in the palace.”
I shook my head. “You are better than this. We can defeat Claver using—”
“Using what!” Vonvalt thundered. “Using what, Helena? Swords? Arrows? Stout walls? Our honour?” He laughed, a cruel, brittle sound. I had never heard him speak in this way. Vonvalt was never sarcastic. He considered it to betray a weakness of the intellect. “This is what Claver understands. Naked, elemental force. It is time he had a taste of his own medicine. He and his cronies do not have a monopoly on the arcana. As they are about to find out,” he added, turning back to the weak, struggling form of the prognosticator. He pulled out a dagger, and consulting the ideograms, began to carve into the priest’s forehead with the precision and dispassion of a barber-surgeon.
I felt a strange calmness overcome me. A small part of me even agreed with Vonvalt. Why should we deny ourselves the most powerful weapons? Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps these magicks could be used to enforce an ultimate good.
Then I thought of what I had seen in the afterlife; the wretched artefact of Claver on the plains of Hell. Westenholtz and the Tree of Death. The rapacious hatred of Ramayah. And I realised that Vonvalt was not simply tapping into these energies; he was corrupting himself. There was evil here, malevolence. The Draedist magicks were not agnostic of morality. Where they were siphoned off from Prince Kasivar’s realm, they were tainted with malignance. It had turned Claver from an overzealous and deeply misguided priest into an instrument of horror and insanity. The Magistratum had kept these powers under lock and key for centuries for a very good reason.
“You cannot control it,” I said. “I saw. I saw Claver. His life. I saw it on the Broken Path. How it changed him, twisted him, corrupted him. You think you can control it, but—”
“Shut up! For Nema’s sake, just shut up!” Vonvalt roared. “Will you go away! Get away damn you!”
But I did not move. “You have not seen what I have seen. You have not—”
I was cut off by a deafening buzzing noise. The chamber filled with it. Vonvalt’s eyes had gone as white as balls of cut marble. He had been ignoring me. Muttering the incantations. I should have known that his unparalleled intellect could tolerate my interruptions and still complete the incantations.
I did now take a step back further into the corridor, colliding with Captain Rainer who had moved forward so that she was just behind me. Vonvalt continued to incant and carve ideograms into the prognosticator’s face. He finished one such rune and the prognosticator suddenly stopped struggling, killed. And then, as he lay there, an empty vessel, Vonvalt consulted the tomes next to him, and completed his curse.
The chamber was plunged into sudden, profound darkness.
The temptation to flee was almost overwhelming. The only thing that was keeping me there was the presence of Vonvalt himself. After all, he wouldn’t willingly put himself at risk. In spite of everything, in spite of his recklessness and haste and anger, I still trusted him implicitly. I trusted him to get the incantations right, to get the wards and runes right. There was no one else in the Empire I would have trusted with this evil. What a curious confession to make.
“Sir Konrad?” I asked. Memories, memories which felt old but which were terrifyingly recent, surfaced. Once again I felt my soul bulge as Ramayah tried to pull himself up from the immortal plane. “No,” I breathed, turning to run, my hands finding Rainer’s breastplate. She grabbed me.
“We have to get out of here,” she said. Her grip on me was iron. Her fear was a tangible thing.
“Please, no,” I said again and again.
“Suit yourself,” Rainer spat. “I shall not be a part of this.”
She had mistaken me. I had not been saying “no” to her; I had been pleading for Vonvalt to stop. It had been a refrain of dismay. But she left, along with the rest of the Guardsmen, and I turned back into the chamber. I reached out blindly, trying to find Sir Konrad, desperate not to be alone.
“Please, no,” I whispered, like a mantra. “Please, no.”
I saw then in the darkness a pair of eyes – like cat’s eyes. They flashed briefly in the light of the retreating lanterns.
And I fell very quiet.
“Sir Konrad?” I asked in the stillness.
And then I touched him.
For the longest time I heard a sound like screaming.
I had a sensation of immense movement, of wind on my face, and the smell of a city; damp bricks and cobbles, street effluent, human beings smelling of a day’s work and fear. I felt panic saturating the air in a great cloud of vapour.
I felt my hands scrape along the wet cobblestones. My world shifted, rotated, and now I was clawing my way along walls, my fingernails ripping out chunks of ephemeral matter from the background world which I inhabited. My tongue was out and hanging from my jaws, and I could taste the air. Always that rancid stink of fear. It thrilled me.
Where I went, I left in my wake death and fear. Weeds perished at my touch. Grass sagged and died. Insects, foxes, wild pigs, all froze, their hearts stopped in their chests.
I was through the city fast. Some part of my mind, an echo of an echo, a memory of a memory, knew that this was not Sova. But the word, the place, Sova, was important to these people. It had meaning. It was a target, a goal, something to be attained. They wanted it desperately.
All the while there was screaming. Constant, like desert wind.
I vaulted a wall and was in and amongst a large staging area. Now I could taste iron and steel, the putrescence of decay, of mud and soiled bandages, the reek of siege latrines overflowing with the shit of ten thousand men.
The thing I wanted most in the world pulsed with light. It was a beacon like those in Kormondolt Bay. An ideogram had been cut into the fabric of the aether, and through it, light from the holy dimensions flowed.
I felt fear. Felt it. Men all around me, encased in metal, felt suddenly sick with it as I passed. Some cried out. Some cried. They had no stomach for what was to come.
I reached a tent. I passed through its sturdy waxed fabric as though it were nothing except a curtain of air. Inside were men. I recognised two of them. The part of me that was still Helena knew they were my enemies.
The urge to destroy my target was sudden and incredible and overwhelming. I needed to do it. The desire was consuming. I could think of nothing else.
As I leapt to destroy Bartholomew Claver, something shifted in the air. He looked me dead in the eyes, startled and angry. A shield, invisible but as solid as a marble slab, blocked me. I crashed into it, senses ringing.
I felt my grip on this body slip. I realised that the constant screaming I could hear was coming from the prognosticator whom Vonvalt had vacated. He was locked away in some hellish interstitial space, forced to endure this puppetry of his life’s essence.
Enraged, confused, frightened, like a trapped animal, I reached out to the nearest unshielded soul.
“Margrave, run!” I heard Claver scream.
Vladimir von Geier looked at Claver with contempt.
“What in Kasivar’s name are you talking about?” he sneered.
My hands gripped his soul. His shadow in the background world. I pulled a spectral version of him free from his body and, with a guttural howl, I squashed his head between my hands until his skull buckled.
The mortal body of von Geier collapsed, outwardly unharmed, but undoubtedly dead.
The wrecked soul of the man transmuted into a cloud of black smoke.
And then something was coming for us, something boiling with fury, something a long way away but closing fast.
Vonvalt severed the connexion.
“You really meant it, didn’t you?”
Vonvalt looked at me. We were sitting in that same chamber, amongst the gore of dead priests and Guardsmen, the only light provided by a single, guttering candle. We sat on opposite sides of the chamber, each resting our backs against the wall. I could not speak for Vonvalt, but I felt… tired. Of everything. I was tired of being surprised and I was tired of being horrified. And I was tired of pretending Vonvalt was something he was not.
“Meant what?” Vonvalt asked quietly. The ritual had drained him. He did not seem outwardly pleased with the slaying of von Geier, though there was no doubt it marked a significant strategic victory. Von Geier was the tactician, the soldier, the general. He was evil and ruthless, and he was a commander without peer. Claver was many things, but he was not a natural captain of men.
Still, Claver had been the target. And something had stopped Vonvalt’s psychic assault dead in its tracks.
“Meant what?”
“That you would do anything. Use any tool.”
“To stop Claver?”
“Aye.”
Vonvalt nodded. “Yes. I meant it. Did you not believe me? I told you a long time ago that I was not the paragon you thought I was.”
“There is not being a paragon, and then there is this.”
Vonvalt gestured to the books at his feet. “You do not trust me to wield the power?”
“I do not trust the powers themselves. They are changing you in ways that you do not even appreciate. Claver has always been a zealous, unpleasant man, but it was not until he began to dabble in the arcana that he became completely untethered from reality. It changed him and it will change you.”
“I am nothing like Claver. I have been trained. I have a lifetime of practice under my belt. I can control the arcana’s more undesirable elements.”
“If you think that – if you truly believe that – then you are a fool.”
I had never spoken to Vonvalt with such insolence before, but I was long past caring. These were not trifles. This was like shooting a burning arrow at a stack of barrels where one in every ten was filled with blackpowder. Certainly it was possible to wield these incantations and curses and hexes in a selective and strategic way; but it seemed just as possible that one could accidentally precipitate the end of the world.
“You should not speak to me in that way, Helena,” Vonvalt said, though it lacked force.
“Why not? No one else will.”
“You would reduce your role to that of my court jester?”
“You have imprisoned the Emperor. Assumed the Regency. You are purging groups, razing ancient buildings of state, torturing dissidents – with serious fucking brutality I might add – and now you are using ancient pagan sorceries to assassinate your enemies.”
“Blood of gods, Helena, you make it sound as though I am the enemy!”
“You are an enemy to yourself!” I shouted. “What happened to our being the force of order? Champions of the rule of law?”
“Must we have this conversation again?” Vonvalt asked. He sounded exhausted.
“I will never not feel this way. No matter what I see. No matter what Claver and his cronies do. No matter what horrors I have witnessed in the holy dimensions – and believe me I have seen enough horrors to last me a thousand lifetimes. I do not want to become them. I do not want us to be those people. I want to be good. I want us to prevail because we are good.”
“And what if we can’t?” Vonvalt asked me softly.
“‘It is better to die in service of the law than serve a regime which does not uphold it’,” I quoted.
Vonvalt snorted quietly. For the briefest of moments I saw in him a flash of the man I had once known; the man who once would have been delighted to hear me remember such an obscure reference. It passed like a cloud passing across the sun. “Rudolph Blix,” he muttered.
We lapsed to silence, tired from fighting and tired of each other. But, as usual, I had information to relay.
“It is Ramayah,” I said after a long pause.
Vonvalt looked incredulous. “Ramayah? The Progenitor?” he said. “From the Book of Histories?”
“’Tis him who sought to possess me. He is Claver’s patron.”
Vonvalt shook his head. “No. That cannot be right.”
“Well it is,” I snapped.
“Well it cannot be!” he thundered. He stared at the floor. He was quiet for a long time. “Blood of gods,” he whispered. He looked as close to despair as I had seen him. “I cannot… I cannot do this.”
“We have to,” I said tonelessly.
He shook his head. “I have not the mettle for this, Helena. To say nothing of the knowledge. Ramayah – he is not just a greater demon, he is one of the chieftains of Kasivar himself.”
“I know. I saw him… infest Claver. Near the Broken Path.”
Vonvalt gave me a look of abject confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw Claver in the afterlife. Resi took me to the Broken Path and…” I shrugged. “He was there. Some spiritual echo. An artefact. I touched him and I saw his life. And at the end, Ramayah was there, on him. Like a parasite.”
Vonvalt shook his head. “Why did Resi take you there?”
“I am not sure she did.” I told him of everything I had seen – the Shrine Guardians, the golden runes, the Claver-echo, his life’s story… Vonvalt listened with astonishment. It was difficult to know what it was that he had kept from me over the years, as a way of preserving my sanity, and what aspects of the afterlife he genuinely had no working knowledge of. He had seemed deflated and angry about Claver hexing him with the Muphraab, but never surprised that such a thing had been possible. It was likely, then, that he was at least aware of these things and places as being real and tangible parts of the holy dimensions, even if he had not been there himself. But I do not think he had expected it to be so literal.
Once I had finished talking – and I took a very long time to tell the tale, for dredging my memory of these things was like taking a knife and cutting away the sutures of a freshly knitted traumatic wound – Vonvalt rubbed his face with his hands. He did not speak for a long time; but when he did, the first thing he said was, “I have met him.”
Now it was my turn to be confused. “What?”
“Ramayah. I have met him before. In Baniskhaven. Ten years ago – maybe more.”
“What are you talking about?”
Vonvalt sighed bitterly. “Just that. I was working on a case with another Justice – Lady Sokol. She wanted to commune with the body of a local baron. He had been… I can’t remember, eating people – murdering them and eating their brains, or something.” He paused, thinking. “I cautioned her against it. It is never wise to commune with an insane mind.”
“But she did it anyway?”
“She did it anyway. And he was there.”
“Ramayah?”
Vonvalt nodded. “He was drawn to the deranged soul, as though the afterlife had been chummed. He was… not pleased to be disturbed.”
“What was he doing?”
“Harvesting the baron’s soul. It is what he does.”
“That’s what Resi said. That Kasivar and others reap human souls. That is why Ramayah wants to break through. To possess me.”
“Blood of gods.” Vonvalt rubbed his face with his hands. “I have been deceiving myself for so long about the severity of matters that I almost truly believed it. An elemental, a minor demon, a sprite, an incubus, a drude – these things I can deal with. But not Ramayah. Not him.”
He paused. The candle was nearly out, and neither of us fancied being plunged into pitch blackness. He took a moment to light another. I said nothing; his despondency was infectious.
“What did he look like?” he asked me.
“Who?”
