Chapter 14
ARIENNE
The sight of the Imperial sorcerer ghost bouncing Tychon made Arienne pause.
The lines of his features and body were less sharp compared to the other ghosts that had entered her mind, but what really struck her was the fact that he knew the baby’s name.
He must have had some kind of relationship to Tychon while he was alive.
“And that’s why he could remain when everyone else was banished,” she murmured, forgetting that there was finally someone around to hear her. The donkey had been staring at the ghost and now turned to her, his ears perked up.
The first person she thought of as having something to do with Tychon was his father—Lysandros. He hadn’t died in Mersia, but he was the author of The Sorcerer of Mersia and had ties to this country. For all she knew about ghosts, this was as good a reason as any why Lysandros might be here now.
She took a closer look at the ghost while he comforted the crying child. Lysandros, when Arienne met him, had been more machine than man, and she hadn’t ever imagined what he would’ve looked like before he did away with most of his flesh. She took a step toward the ghost.
“Do you remember me?”
The ghost looked up from Tychon and stared at her. His eyes were like dark shadows and his face hard to read, but his stare told her that he was trying to remember.
“Well, do you?” Arienne asked again.
Arienne gasped as his features started to become even more blurred and vague. He did not answer. Hoping that he would not dissipate into thin air, she pressed.
“I’m Arienne, the one who ran away with Eldred? I killed you.”
“Eldred … the Grim King…?”
The fog-like boundaries of the ghost suddenly started to come into focus. Only then could Arienne see the embroidered name on his uniform: ENGINEER JUNIOR GRADE NOAM.
“Your name is Noam? Not Lysandros?”
She was disappointed, but also curious. And after having crossed the Rook Mountains and traversed a wasteland without sharing a single word with anyone, she was almost overjoyed to actually be speaking to someone, albeit a ghost. She thought of the days when Eldred had lived in the room in her mind.
“Lysandros. The Grand Inquisitor…” His eyes found their focus, and he looked less out of it.
He began to sing softly, a lullaby. Tychon’s cries subsided, and Arienne felt like she was falling under a spell.
This was an unfamiliar language. The ghost carefully laid Tychon down on the bed before he started talking.
“Yes, sir! Engineer Noam, reporting … No problems with Tychon, Grand Inquisitor Lysandros. Output margin of error within five decachrons…”
The ghost’s form was slowly coming more and more into focus.
His round face was flush, and his large, shining eyes were the first feature to fully re-form.
His clean face had no trace of a beard, and his ears were too big and his nose too small.
He looked around twenty-five, maybe younger?
As she wondered what he would say next, the ghost suddenly leaped up and shouted, “Fractica! What is Fractica doing?”
He suddenly grabbed Arienne’s shoulders, his face twisted in fear.
“Oh no, oh no … Ayula!”
Arienne’s eyes were wide as she stared into Noam’s face.
“Melting. Melting … my hands…”
The twisted, melted buildings and bones of Danras—as Arienne was remembering them, Noam grabbed her face and Arienne pushed him away.
“Stop that!”
Noam stumbled backward, tripped over Aron, and landed on his behind. His hands were not melting, nor were they warping. They looked perfectly normal. Noam stared at them and then looked up at Arienne. He gasped. Quickly, he got to his feet and took another step back, staring at her with suspicion.
“Who are you? What am I doing here?”
“It’s me who should be asking you those questions! Clearly, you’re a sorcerer in charge of managing a Power generator. Engineer Junior Grade Noam.”
“How do you know my name?”
“It’s embroidered on your uniform!”
He looked down at himself and then looked up again, confusion writ large on his face. Arienne felt a pang of pity for him as she realized that he did not know he was dead yet. She wondered if she should tell him, but she knew if she did, they might never move on to the more urgent matters at hand.
“Where are we?” Noam said.
“Listen carefully … Well, sit down on that bed first.”
Noam obediently sat down on the edge of the bed. Arienne began to tell him of how an Imperial Powered weapon, the Star of Mersia, had brought about the destruction of the whole country; that no one knew what exactly had happened; and that she had come to Danras to find out.
While she told him, distrust, horror, rage, and disappointment passed over Noam’s face.
“All right, now ask me whatever questions you have,” Arienne finished, preparing herself.
Noam said in a sad voice, “So I died then?”
“Probably … I’m sorry.” She knew it wasn’t her fault he had died, and that he had been dead for over a hundred years, but she still felt sorry all the same.
Swallowing hard, Noam asked, very carefully and in a reverent tone, “Then are you … our god … ma’am?”
She burst out laughing, more out of relief than at the absurdity of what he was asking.
“Not at all! My room is not your afterlife. It’s a space I made in my mind using sorcery. You came into it when I didn’t have my guard up, and siphoned off my Power to reclaim your old form, at least in my mind.”
“I don’t remember trying to get in here.”
“You were a ghost for a hundred years, so your desire to find your form again was probably instinctual,” Arienne guessed, shrugging.
Noam looked a little skeptical, but Arienne had questions of her own.
“What kind of an Imperial engineer believes in a god? Where are you from?”
“… Ebria.”
A country mentioned in her studies at the Imperial Academy. It was a small province in the northeast of the great continent. A professor had derisively noted they prayed to a god they had never even seen.
“Where they used to worship the, er, ‘Nameless God’?”
Noam nodded. “Some of us still worship … Oh, I suppose if a hundred years have passed, things could be different.” His face turned somber, even for a ghost.
The Empire rounded up sorcerers at a young age and maintained control over them until death, whereupon their corpses were converted to Power generators.
The sorcerer-engineers, like Noam, were the ones who built and maintained these generators.
Noam had likely been taken from Ebria by the Empire and trained to become an engineer, then assigned to look after the Power generator of Mersia before he met his doom here.
This could’ve easily been her own fate. She shuddered at the thought of spending her life alongside preserved cadavers, then remembered that she was conversing with a ghost, in an underground cemetery.
“Well, Noam of Ebria, I have some more pressing questions. You’re here by the good grace of my Power, so you can help me a little, can’t you?”
Noam nodded.
“The world believes that Mersia rose up against the Empire and the Empire extinguished the country through a weapon called the Star of Mersia. Was there really a rebellion?” When the Grim King Eldred had lived in Arienne’s mind, he’d told her that Mersia had always been a faithful vassal of the Empire. She needed to know the truth.
Noam frowned as he considered the question.
“There were always a few people who wanted the Empire gone, but Mersia generally had good relations with the Empire. The prefect was almost always appointed from the local population and there weren’t any significant incidents during the seventy years of Imperial rule.
And I didn’t have any problems working here. ”
So, that part of Eldred’s story at least seemed true.
“That lullaby you sang to Tychon. Do you remember singing it?” she asked, changing the subject.
Noam was startled, and he shook his head.
“Just a moment ago,” Arienne persisted, “you said something about Tychon’s margin of error being something or other. Were you in charge of Power generator Tychon?”
“Yes. Because Grand Inquisitor Lysandros can only move with Tychon. When he was stationed here, it was one of my tasks to make sure every day that the generator functioned properly.”
“And did you … sing to all the lead sarcophagi you came across?”
Noam’s face turned red. “There’s no rule against singing in front of a Power generator!”
Arienne thought of teasing him about it, then decided against it. She didn’t want to stress him more than she needed to. She didn’t like the way he became blurry before, when she pressed him to remember. “Why was Lysandros even here?”
“Please don’t say his name like that. It’s disrespectful.”
Arienne suppressed a laugh, imagining what Noam’s face would look like if he figured out that she had killed Lysandros.
“Fine. Why was the Grand Inquisitor here?”
“I don’t know, really. He just arrived one day, unannounced. The prefect was nervous because he didn’t know how to express his gratitude for Mersia’s liberation.”
“Gratitude for Mersia’s liberation?”
“It was thanks to the Grand Inquisitor that Mersia was liberated from the Grim King’s grasp and joined the Empire.
That was why he was promoted to Grand Inquisitor of the Office of Truth …
But he didn’t even attend the reception the prefect had hosted for him, he only visited the Power generator chamber. ”
A Power generator chamber? Of course—even minor cities like the capital of Arland had Power generators, so it only made sense that a large city like Danras would as well.
“There’s a Power generator chamber here? That means Tychon wasn’t the only generator, right? And you were in charge of that generator as well?”