Chapter 40
EMERE
Emere grabbed the broken stick of a Zero Legion standard, then broke off a bit more at the end to fashion a quarterstaff.
He used it as a crutch to chase after Ludvik.
Ludvik himself also seemed injured from Loran’s explosive landing in the middle of the fort—Emere could easily track Ludvik by his bloody footsteps.
Emere turned around the corner of the fort, and spotted a small door swinging on its hinges in the battlements. He slipped inside.
The door led into a dark corridor, and the deeper he got, the more muffled the sounds of battle became.
He listened for the sound of footsteps, squelching with blood, ahead.
His own steps were turning wet, the many wounds from his recent torture still bleeding.
A realization dawned on him that he would go down this corridor, but never come back through it in life.
What a long and winding path he had taken to his imminent death.
Was it good that it would end this way? If he died here and now, he would have truly accomplished nothing.
His sister would not know of his death, nor would the people of Kamori.
At best, he would be a footnote in some dusty volume of Imperial history.
He wondered if Loran might weep for him. Rakel definitely would. This was reassuring.
A light, at the end of the tunnel.
“Ludvik!” he shouted.
Ludvik, lantern in his left hand, turned.
Blood soaked his face, his mustache drenched in red.
He made no answer but grabbed the hilt of the sword on his side.
Emere held up his staff, grabbing one end of it with his left hand and two palms’ length down with his right.
Suddenly, Ludvik charged, drawing his sword and pointing it at Emere.
Emere flicked his quarterstaff in a circle to deflect Ludvik’s sword tip.
The sword, slippery from Ludvik’s own blood, fell out of his hands.
Emere then slammed the staff against Ludvik’s head, but he was too weakened, which gave Ludvik his chance to grab the end of the staff.
Ludvik roared like a tiger, charging along the length of the staff.
The two became entangled and rolled over each other as they fell to the floor of the dark corridor, the lantern smashing against the stone before it went out.
Emere came to. The floor was wet with someone’s blood.
Emere didn’t see Ludvik—just the tracks of a body that had dragged itself away.
He didn’t know how much time had passed.
Emere followed the tracks with his eyes.
They led to an open iron door that was at once familiar—beyond it was a red wasteland with a violet sky.
Emere felt for his staff on the floor, slowly got up, and limped through the door. The invisible weight of the wasteland grew heavy on him again, but now he knew. This weight, he had carried it for his whole life.
Ludvik, perhaps dead, lay still in the middle of the empty wasteland. Then his body jerked once, and from beneath him a pool of blood expanded. Emere collapsed on the ground, exhausted. He coughed. The taste of fresh blood filled his mouth, and he wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“You have done well, Prince Emere.”
A voice now familiar to him. When he looked up, he wasn’t in the wasteland anymore, but in a wide street lined on both sides with wooden buildings, each with awnings of stiff leather.
The sky above the road was blue, where white clouds floated—and the Power generators that made up the Circuit of Destiny, cocooned in their bandages, looked down at Emere.
On his left was a beautiful tower, strikingly tall for a wooden structure, its eaves adorned with many colorful wind chimes. There were no people. He turned his eyes back to the street, and found Loran—the Circuit of Destiny—standing there.
“How are you in the Zero Legion fortress? Or am I dreaming again?” Perhaps this was his death vision, Emere thought.
“We are everywhere. We are here through the Power generators Kzara and Vorik, who give Power to this legion’s machines. We are the Circuit, but all the other generators are kin to us. They sing for us, and do what we ask.”
The last time they met, Emere recalled, the Circuit had told him that Power generators whispered to it. Did the Circuit of Destiny have control over all the generators? Emere shuddered, then drew a long breath.
“And what exactly have I done well?”
“You have met your destiny. Now it is the time to choose.”
“But wasn’t all of this engendered by you?”
“No.” Loran shook her head. “The Empire wished to create a machine that could predict the future, and so we are made of the bodies of sorcerers from around the world.”
Emere, leaning on his staff, got up from the ground.
“But they did not know that in here”—she placed her hand on her heart—“something would accumulate every time a new body was added to the Circuit, every time we looked into the past or present to predict the future. A sorrow, an obsession, growing bigger and bigger without someone to name those feelings, those…”
Emere cursed himself for expecting a straight answer from the Circuit. “Speak plainly!”
“A sense of suffering had always been within the machine, but there was no us to feel it. Then, when the Grim King, a necromancer who straddled the line between life and death, finally woke up after seventy years of his fitful sleep in the Circuit, we came to be. Finally, there was an us that could feel, and we screamed as he screamed. This space…” Loran gestured around them.
“Our dreamscape, if you will, was created then.”
“So this place, the wasteland, the fields of Arland…” Emere began to understand. It was the same sorcery that Arienne had described to him after the battle in Arland.
“The Grim King knew how to make space and time in his mind, therefore we did as well. Then we were finally complete. Do you understand, Prince Emere?”
Emere felt like his eyes were opening for the first time. “This is a place created from the resentment and sorrow built up inside you,” he replied.
Ludvik had said to him that the influence of the Empire was weakening, that rebellious provinces needed to be shown an example of Imperial might—words that could only be spoken by a man with a true belief in the Empire.
One without such belief might instead say that the sin of the Empire was crushing the world underneath its weight and that the world was now pushing back.
It was the Empire’s sins, heavy and cold and thick, that pervaded the air here.
Loran nodded. “One hundred years ago, when what was inside us was unleashed onto Mersia, there was no here. It was just black smoke, a vague kind of poison, that fed not only from the sorrow of the sorcerers that were, but that of the world as well.”
Emere had to ask. “But why Mersia? Why them and not the Empire? Isn’t the Empire the source of all your agonies?”
Loran looked sad. “With the Grim King Eldred’s awakening came his rage and hatred as well.
His resentment toward the inquisitor who had destroyed him opened a pathway to Lysandros’s Power generator, Fractica, through which our screams, our poison, erupted into the world.
Had Fractica been at the Capital, the Imperial heartland would have become a wasteland instead. ”
Emere closed his eyes and sighed. “So it was an accident, like Ludvik said.”
Loran sighed, too. “We were emptied of all our sorrows that day. But another hundred years have passed since, and we cannot bear the new pain any longer. What happened to Mersia was an accident, a by-product of the confused happenstance that was our becoming. This time our pain may be a weapon that serves a purpose.”
“What purpose can such destruction ever serve?” Emere asked, only to remember what Ludvik had said about how the Office of Truth used the Star of Mersia to buy a hundred years of peace.
Loran smiled. “We are unable to choose our own purpose. That is why we have sought you out. You know this already. You are our king.”
Emere scoffed, “You just want to kill a whole country again.”
“Prince Emere, if you do not choose, even we do not know where our screams will go. Each time the sorcerer-engineers feed us news of rebellions and their oppression, disobedience and suppression, exploitation and poverty, corruption and despair, each time our brethren whisper to us the stories untold in the official reports, and each time we foresee futures from what we have been given and send them out in visions and stacks of papers, the pain-poison becomes distilled, purer and more deliberate. For that is what the world is, inside and outside of us: pain. The last time, it followed the Grim King’s first impulse upon his awakening.
Who knows what it will follow the next time it erupts without control?
If what you call the Star of Mersia should happen a second time, again without purpose…
” Loran shook her head. “Not even we know what form it will take or where it will happen.”
The whole thing was nothing less than nauseating. Swallowing the bile, Emere managed to speak.
“So I have been chosen to pick which country to erase from existence. That is the decision you want me to make. That is the purpose you want me to give you. That is why you sought me out.”
Was this really the destiny he had chased all his life?
“You have a king’s destiny. Your choice is not what we can predict. However, we speculate that you may want to see the Imperial heartland suffer, for what you feel that it has done to you.”
Those words had truth in them. But Emere’s immediate thoughts of millions upon millions dying and the world plunging into untold chaos did as well. He cursed under his breath and said, as clearly as he could enunciate, a single syllable:
“No.”