webcrawl/APGTE/Book-4/out/Ch-042.md.tex

\hypertarget{chapter-28-archaic}{%
\chapter{Archaic}\label{chapter-28-archaic}}



\epigraph{``An offer to `kneel or die' would be insincere, Matrons. Deny me
and your corpses will be made to kneel anyway, as I have a chorus of
your children scream a cheerful tune.''}{Dread Emperor Nihilis I, the Tanner, negotiating the end of the
Fourth Goblin Rebellion}



I had a mildly amusing comment about Warlock's unexpected longevity and
lack of tan on the tip of my tongue, but I smothered it without missing
a beat. Masego, looking at what most likely his second father -- the
incubus known to me as Tikoloshe -- had cast to his face I'd never seen
before. He looked \emph{betrayed}. I squeezed his shoulder comfortingly,
even though I didn't know the reason for his grief, and did not bother
to ask whether or not he was certain of the incubus' identity.
Hierophant was not in the habit of make assertions unless he was certain
of them.

``Why?'' Masego murmured. ``He knows I've been trying to piece it all
together for years. Gods, what practitioner from the Wasteland hasn't?
He was there. He saw it with his own eyes.''

He hadn't raised his voice, and in a way that worried me more. Anger I
knew well, and how to soothe it. Whatever\ldots{} this was, I was poorly
equipped to handle it.

``He might have been trying to protect you,'' I ventured.

His hand whipped out and a streak of flame tore through half a dozen
soldiers, burning bright blue.

``I am not a child, Catherine,'' he hissed, ``I do not need to be
coddled. Refusal I could forgive, but to force \emph{ignorance} upon me?
As if I was some meddling hedge mage about to blow his fingers off. As
if I was incapable of grasping my own limits.''

I heard Hakram stepping lightly behind us, having finally caught up, but
without turning I raised my hand and signalled for him to withdraw. More
people would only be adding oil to an already volatile brew.

``We don't know for sure he saw whatever ritual wrecked Keter,'' I said.
``He could have been dispersed before that.''

``Don't try to appease me,'' he said, turning to me with a burning glare
whose radiance singed the eye cloth over it. ``Papa has never been
dispersed. His consciousness has been uninterrupted for millennia
without a single return to the original shapelessness. His contract
ended or he succeeded at slipping the leash.''

``Either of which could have happened before the ritual,'' I pointed
out.

``He wouldn't have just left, even then,'' Masego yelled, to my honest
surprise. ``He's a deterministic being, Catherine. It would have gone
against his nature to flee for a position of influence. Devils
\emph{like} being in Creation. It is the only place they can truly
learn.''

My knowledge of theology had never been all that deep and what I did
remember was a little rusty, but I was fairly sure determinism was more
or less another word for predestination. Which wasn't all that popular a
teaching, in Callow, though it had some adherents in the southern parts
of it. Mostly priests.

``You mean he wouldn't have been able to choose otherwise,'' I slowly
said.

Normally even half an admission of ignorance would have been enough to
bait him into a lecture. It was telling that he didn't even attempt one,
only frowning in irritation instead.

``You don't understand,'' he said.

I kept my face and voice calm.

``If he didn't have a choice then,'' I said carefully, ``he might not
have had a choice in not telling you either.''

``You don't understand, you fool,'' Masego sharply repeated. ``I have
desired to know the answers here for years. It is in Papa's nature to
satisfy desires, and his binding should allow him to do so for our
entire family within limits. That contract is one of the single most
complex pieces of sorcery in existence, Catherine, Father spent
\emph{decades} crafting the closest to the ability to make choices a
devil can possibly have. Which means either Father forbade him to speak
to me, or\ldots{}''

``He doesn't see you as family,'' I quietly said.

``I'm not sure which would be worse,'' the blind man weakly said. ``That
Father would bend his will against everything he taught me just to keep
me in the dark, or that Papa never once though of me as-``

His voice broke. I winced, sliding an arm around his shoulders and
tugging him close. It was awkward hugging him, since he was noticeable
taller than me and just stood there like a dead fish.

``Come on,'' I murmured. ``There's a lot we still don't know, Masego.
Don't come to conclusions too early.''

Slowly, he came to rest his forehead on my shoulder. Gods, the angle
must have been Hells on his neck.

``He might have been faking this entire time,'' he muttered into my
tunic. ``Since the moment I was adopted. My first memories. Just playing
the role, for Father's pleasure.''

I'd always thought that Warlock and Tikoloshe had done a decent job of
raising Masego, for Praesi anyway. He'd had a golden childhood that
taught him to love learning, no real difficulties to face and if he
hadn't come out of it with the sharpest moral compass in the world, well
-- there was only so much you could expect from Wastelanders. It was
hard for me to understand something like having your entire childhood
put to the question. The orphanage had not encouraged sentimentality.
But I could understand, just a little bit, having your trust put on the
chopping block. He wasn't the only one with a complicated relationship
with a Calamity. Masego withdrew eventually, tiring of my hands rubbing
his back soothingly. His face was dry, of course. The day that saw him
gain Summer eyes had cauterized his tear ducts as well.

``It doesn't matter,'' he said through gritted teeth, smoothing his
robes. ``They can hide secrets from me, but they cannot prevent me from
learning on my own.''

``You want to continue looking at his,'' I guessed, eyes turning to the
battle still unfolding around us.

Now that the ruby-crowned king was dead, it had turned into a rout for
the obsidian soldiers I assumed were ancient Keterans.

``Yes,'' Masego said with forced calm. ``Tell Indrani the duel here is
between two Named. That should hold her interest enough she does not
chomp at the bit.''

I grimaced. Fair enough. I didn't really want to spend any longer here
than we had to, but if it got his head in order I'd compromise. There
was a part of me, that whispering voice that never really went away,
that noted this was perhaps the best occasion I would ever get to turn
Hierophant against Warlock. To get him firmly on my side before the day
of reckoning I knew deep in my bones was over the horizon came upon us.
All I had to do was ruthlessly exploit the grief of one of my closest
friends in the world. It would be for his own good, too. When the dust
settled at the end of the Tenth Crusade, there was a real chance that
close ties to Praes and the Calamities might get Masego killed. After
Akua's Folly there would be wariness about powerful sorcerer Named, but
if he had a war record of fighting against the Empire\ldots{} I clenched
my fingers and snapped that voice's neck before burying it in a shallow
grave. I was not above manipulating Masego. I would own up to that. But
if I did, it would only ever be to help him. Not to rip away all his
ties but those that kept him at my side.

``I'll speak to the others,'' I said quietly. ``Don't do anything
dangerous. I'll be back as soon as possible.''

He did not answer, light already blooming around his fingers as his face
hardened and he began tracing runes. I took that for the dismissal it
was.

---

``He's been at it for at least twelve hours straight,'' Hakram said.

The worry in his tone was subtle enough a stranger wouldn't have caught
it. It was plain as day to me. The two of us stood at the edge of our
makeshift camp -- raised far enough from the main engagement that at the
peak of the battle the war cries wouldn't wake us -- and watched
Masego's lone silhouette. He'd not eaten since he began. Indrani had
tried to bring him bread and water, but she'd run into a transparent
pane of power she'd not been able to break through. Her screaming had
gone unnoticed as well. He'd killed the sound from outside the boundary,
was my guess.

``He hasn't even sat down once,'' I grimaced. ``And he's been using
sorcery the entire time. Named or not, he should be about to collapse.''

``We'll pick him up when he does,'' the orc sighed. ``Put him in Zombie
and get away from here while he's unconscious. This is unhealthy.''

``He's always been prone to obsession,'' I admitted. ``We all are, but
he's further down that slope than any of us.''

``This is different, Cat,'' Hakram said. ``If he begins a trance when
studying spellcraft, we can ease him out of it after a few hours. Even
Thief knows how, and she's known him the shortest. But putting up wards
to keep us out? He's never gone that deep before.''

``Family fucks you up,'' I said. ``So I've heard, anyway.''

``We're what he has,'' the orc told me. ``His fathers let him loose
after he joined us, and you've heard the same stories I have. They were
always highly permissive, even when he was a child. If we don't keep him
at an even keel, there's no one else.''

I passed a hand through my hair tiredly.

``You know comfort's not my strong point,'' I admitted.

``He doesn't need a friend,'' Hakram replied. ``He needs someone to tell
him it's enough. A figure of authority.''

I glanced at the tall orc uncomfortably.

``That's not really how I've run the Woe,'' I said.

``And you were right to do so,'' Adjutant said. ``A heavier hand would
have alienated Archer and Thief before they joined us. But Hierophant is
Praesi. He was raised by the Calamities, Catherine. He understands,
instinctively, that in a band of Named there is someone who gives
orders. That is you.''

``It's one thing to give orders on a battlefield, Hakram,'' I said
sharply. ``It's another to pull strings off of it, in private matters. I
won't pretend we're equals in all things, but I try not to tell any of
you how to live your lives unless I can't avoid it.''

The orc's dark eyes flicked at Masego's lonely silhouette.

``And does he look to you,'' he said calmly, ``like he benefits from
this restraint?''

I grit my teeth.

``You're not \emph{tools}, Hakram,'' I said. ``I won't shape all of you
into something more useful to me. That's not a road I'll wander down,
ever.''

``There is a difference between intervening for our sakes and
self-serving manipulation,'' he gravelled. ``You pretend not to know
this, because asserting the authority you were given of us makes you
uncomfortable. That is one of the most selfish, disparaging things I've
ever seen you do. Do you think we swore oaths and made pacts because we
were swindled? That you tricked us into putting faith in you? Are you
the only one of us that can extend trust?''

``That's not what I said,'' I replied.

``Words are nothing,'' the orc said. ``Actions speak louder, and the
decision not to act is an act of itself.''

My fingers clenched and I glared at Adjutant.

``And my judgement's always worked out so well, has it?'' I hissed. ``I
carry an entire \emph{funeral procession} of blunders behind me, Hakram.
One of the most recent got a hundred thousand people kill, and we're
heading towards a place where I might just top that.''

``We all sat there, in the room,'' the orc said. ``We heard the same
arguments. We know the same truths, and the plan they spawned. Yet here
we all are, travelling with you. Did you somehow enslave us without my
noticing? All of us chose to be one of the Woe, Catherine, knowing full
well what that meant. Our hands have not been forced.''

I always hated arguing with Hakram. He was so infuriatingly calm and
reasonable.

``Fine,'' I said. ``I'll tell him to cut it out.''

Adjutant raised his hand to stop me.

``Do not bury this,'' he said. ``Pretend it was the argument of a single
instance and move forward as before. I care nothing for your crown,
Warlord. Or whose apprentice you were. I put my trust in \emph{you}, as
did the others. You do all disservice by acting as if it was a mistake
to do so.''

My lips thinned and I met his eyes. He'd only ever called me by the old
orc title when it was a matter of utter seriousness we spoke of. Which
meant he'd been sitting on this for a while, waiting for the right
moment to bring it up. Reluctantly, I nodded. His hand went down, and I
strode for Masego's one-mage lightshow. I felt the wards even though I
couldn't see them. My fingers trailed across their surface, transparent
sorcery forming wherever my hand touched. I rapped my knuckles once, but
it was like hitting a solid wall. I heard Indrani turn towards me in the
distance, but did not look. Breaking the wards might hurt Masego, so I'd
have to show a little moderation. I seized Winter, wove its power into a
maul of ice tall as I was and grasped the handle. I squared my footing
more out of habit than true need: the construct was light as a feather
to me. I smashed it into the ward once, twice, thrice before Hierophant
finally stopped tracing runes long enough to look at me. Dropping the
maul, I gestured for him to end the ward. He shook his head.

``Now,'' I said flatly.

He flinched. He tapped a sequence among the runes hovering around him
and a door opened before me, made visible by the transparent power that
formed the cadre of it. I walked in, dismissing the maul with a flick of
the wrist.

``Catherine,'' he said. ``I'm not hungry. There's no need to-``

``You've been at this for twelve hours, Masego,'' I said. ``It's done.
You rest, you eat, and then we discuss our next move.''

``Not now,'' Hierophant said, ``Not when I'm \emph{so close}.''

``To what?'' I replied, eyebrow rising.

``Walking the true span of the echo,'' he told me. ``Not true
interaction, no, but the full witnessing of it. As if I were truly
there.''

I glanced sceptically at the ghostly battle.

``And?'' I said. ``What does this gain you?''

``This isn't an illusion, Catherine,'' he said. ``It's a reflection of
the state of Creation at specific points in time. The echo of an
individual includes all that individual knew then. If I can carve out
that knowledge and translate it into a form I can understand-''

``You'll learn a lot,'' I interrupted. ``That's fine. You want to work
on that project? I've got no objection. But you do it right. You sleep,
you eat, you talk with the people who love you. And you do it at a rate
that doesn't make a wreck out of you. There'll be more interesting
shards deeper in anyway.''

``It would only be a few more hours,'' he said.

``Then it won't matter where those are spent, will it?'' I patiently
said. ``Or is there something specific to this shard that makes it
easier to work with?''

He looked away. So there wasn't. I took him by the arm and dragged him
until he began walking on his own.

``Come on,'' I said. ``And while you're at it, you're apologizing to
Indrani.''

He frowned at me.

``What for?'' he asked.

``That, for one,'' I grimly said.

\emph{Godsdamnit Hakram.} It'd be easier to be angry at him if he wasn't
right so often.

---

We moved forward, to everyone but Masego's relief. The five of us had
taken to talking as we passed through the landscapes, trying to piece
together the story unfolding. It was made more difficult by our
inability to tell the sequence the shards took place in, which even
Hierophant admitted he was unable to discern. That spawned the game of
`tell me how Keter fell', which allowed us to whittle away the hours as
we walked. We tried, one at a time, to piece together what we'd seen
into a coherent sequence.

``All right, bear with me on this one,'' Indrani announced.

I sighed at the sight of the silver flask in her hand. It was barely
noon -- probably -- but I was less appalled by the drinking than by the
fact that she seemed to have an endless supply of booze. Where the Hells
was she keeping it all? If Thief had been holding the liquor, she
wouldn't offer it up nearly that often.

``Do we have a choice?'' Vivienne drily asked.

``Don't you drag theology into this, Dartwick,'' Archer drawled.
``Anyway, this is how Keter fell. So there was a witch queen with a nice
big mace, but she was a woman with \emph{needs}. So she hit up the King
of Keter and she made the bedroom eyes, but he was weird about it. You
know, have her the brush off. So then-``

``No,'' I said.

``No,'' Hakram agreed.

``Gods no,'' Vivienne muttered.

``Seems unlikely,'' Masego conceded.

``You're all joyless,'' Indrani complained. ``Mine had everything. A
lovers' spat, sex and violence and revenge. It was going to be worthy of
song.''

``For mouthing off after your turn was ended, you get skipped next go
around,'' Vivienne noted.

Archer muttered something sounding pretty insulting under her breath,
though I didn't recognize the language.

``Hakram?'' I said.

``This is how Keter fell,'' Adjutant gravelled. ``There was a plague in
the borderlands of the kingdom that took a great toll. The queen of the
iron men saw weakness and struck with raids, only to find the soldiers
of Keter weak. She assembled more men and invaded the kingdom, forcing
battle and slaying the king on the field.''

We'd seen more and more plague shards over the last two days, so he
might actually be right. Only towns and villages so far, though, we'd
found no city being afflicted. The battles were becoming more frequent
as well, though few were as large as the one where Masego had found his
father. After a few days passed Hierophant was forced to admit that a
mere few hours before his breakthrough had been an optimistic
assessment. He still spent most of his downtime working on his
`witnessing', but we'd all gotten used to hearing he was going to finish
it any moment now. We saw our first Keteran victories, most of them won
through sorcery. The sorcerers gathered in small cabals and struck with
rituals, the brutality of them increasing the farther we went in.
Lightning and fire were traded for spells that boiled blood or broke
minds, and once or twice we even saw the Keterans fielding devils of
their own.

Small numbers, and not particularly impressive specimens. Closer to imps
than the Wasteland's favoured meat shields the \emph{akalibsa} and
\emph{walin-falme}. Hierophant dismissed those we saw as being from some
of the easiest Hells to reach, and noted that diabolism as a branch of
sorcery was one of the magical disciplines that benefitted the most from
the passing of years. It had taken centuries for the Praesi to
accumulate names to call on and to learn the secrets of the most useful
Hells, the line of every High Lord building on the knowledge earned by
the previous generation. His assessment was that diabolism had not been
a favoured sorcery of the Keterans, but that in their desperation they
were turning to cheap solutions to turn the tide -- like barely sentient
devils that could be bound through simple shedding of blood.

``His successor, Trismegistus, found his kingdom on the verge of
breaking as the iron men pushed further in,'' Hakram continued. ``Rather
than face defeat, he unleashed devils and turned the remainder of his
people into undead to bring revenge unto the invaders.''

He got a vote of agreement from everyone save a pouting Indrani, which
was just enough to bar him from getting a swig of the bottle of aragh
Thief had pulled out. Archer was a sore loser. Adjutant's story was the
most believable so far, though the rest of us moved around the mosaic
tiles again and again in order to see if something else fit better. We
realized the underlying mistake the day after, when we encountered the
most striking shard yet. We'd assumed we had all the necessary tiles to
tell the story, you see. We were disabused of that notion when we found
the first landscape out of Keter itself. It was the funeral of the king
we'd watch die, his body tastefully covered by a shroud so the pulped
head could not be seen by those attending. Among those present in the
great crypt where the entombment took place was the young man I was
fairly sure became the Dead King. Not because of anything he did, but
because of who was talking to him. The face I didn't recognize, I'd
admit. But the shoddy lute and the flask? Those I'd recognize anywhere.

They belonged to the Wandering Bard.