Chapter 26
ARIENNE
“This is Grand Inquisitor Lysandros?” came Noam’s incredulous voice in her mind.
“That’s what he said.”
In that tent erected in Fractica’s mind, Arienne looked over the skinny man who had introduced himself as Lysandros.
The Lysandros she had once met had looked nothing like this—his body had been entirely machine, and his eyes had glowed like Powered streetlamps.
But here was an ordinary young man, his body covered in a motion frame.
“But it can’t be. The Grand Inquisitor is not some … young man,” Noam muttered.
Making a soft whirring sound, the young man walked to the bedding and sat down.
Arienne was accustomed to the device he used to walk—the Empire often bestowed them on soldiers who had lost a limb during their service.
She had once read that the Powered armor legion elites were privileged to wear had evolved from this type of prosthetic frame.
Arienne noticed the thin arms and legs underneath the motion frame.
“So his machine body wasn’t just to prolong his life. He was always like this, from youth,” Arienne murmured to herself.
Because this really had to be Lysandros as a young man. Instead of a room, Fractica’s mind had a tent inside it, and the memory of Lysandros lived there. A ghost inside a ghost.
But then, Arienne’s mind also had a ghost …
“Noam, I’m going to open the door, and you’re going to step out.”
“… Is that even possible?” Noam asked nervously.
“As you can see, there’s already a ghost in here, so yes, probably.”
“Probably?” Noam whined.
Arienne laughed. “All right, definitely, then. I don’t know how Fractica has created it, but this is the same kind of mind-space as the room you’re in right now. I am sure of it. Maybe it—she—knew the same sorcery as Eldred, in life.”
This couldn’t be the Lysandros who had died on Finvera Pass, though. Instead, it was just a trace of him that remained, somehow, inside this machine. Perhaps it was simply Fractica’s memory of Lysandros.
Arienne chanted a spell and drew an ellipse in the air. Violet ripples instantly appeared inside it; as she expected, opening a door between mind-spaces was easier than between a mind-space and an actual space.
“It’ll be all right. Come out here and look at him with me,” Arienne encouraged.
Finally, Noam stepped out. He stared intently at Lysandros sitting on his bedding before saying, “He does look very much like him.”
“You didn’t bring Tychon with you?”
Maybe if she brought Tychon out, she could get this ghost of Lysandros to talk.
But Noam didn’t answer, continuing to stare at Lysandros.
“You hear all sorts of things working as a sorcerer-engineer. About rain compromising output levels, or the output being fine for chariots but lanterns always being dimmer than they should be, or sobbing noises when nobody is around … Some sorcerer-engineers end up treating Power generators like people.”
“Eldred was doing all sorts of things when he was a Power generator. He talked to me, even under seal.”
“I don’t know anything about abominations like him.” Noam winced. “But I did always think there must be something of the person they used to be left inside the generators. Fractica used to Power the Grand Inquisitor’s body before Tychon was commissioned. Maybe that’s why it dreams of him?”
Arienne suddenly realized that there was no Fractica here—to imagine a dream where the dreamer was absent seemed strange to Arienne.
Perhaps the sorcerer Fractica, whoever she was, didn’t exist anymore, not beyond the husk forever generating Power for the Empire, nothing remaining of her mind other than a space where memories without self could reside.
Then again, only the baby Tychon and the donkey Aron were inside Arienne’s own mind currently. A dream without its dreamer, in other words.
“What’s that?”
Noam was pointing to the side of the bedding. A pair of worn leather boots were seen. They were well-oiled and shining, with spurs.
“They’re shoes, obviously.”
“Yes, but I mean whose are they? They aren’t his size.” Noam pointed at the young Lysandros’s feet, which were encased in metal frame.
A faint outline of another person suddenly began to appear.
She was sitting on the edge of the bedding as well, her feet bare.
It was a woman with a long braid coming down her back.
Her shirt was slightly open at the front, her shoulders wide.
Her face was a blur, but she and Lysandros were gazing at each other on the bed.
“Who is she?” Arienne asked, turning her stare to Lysandros’s face for a clue.
Lysandros’s dazed look was changing, but his feelings were hard to read.
There was still that soft whirring sound, and his left hand on his knee turned into a fist. He slammed it on the bed.
The tent shook, as if a wind was blowing.
He struck again. The tent shook. Rain started to fall, then a torrent.
Noam grabbed the center pole of the tent and stared at Lysandros. The woman did not react.
“Noam, do you know who she is? Was Lysandros married?”
“I don’t know. When I met him, he wasn’t. But something’s about to happen. There’s something outside.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can smell it. The smell of the Grim King…”
And suddenly the pole he was grasping, and the whole tent along with it, flew away into the sky, leaving Noam stumbling onto the ground.
A waterfall of rain assaulted them. Arienne looked down at her hands and saw the rain was black.
A puddle formed before her, and a black form materialized upward out of it, like a blaze of fire.
Arienne knew immediately who it was. He was tall and not the dried-up corpse she knew him as.
Instead, he wore a robe that seemed woven of shadows and fire, and a crown of gold and bone sat on his head.
He had a dagger sheathed on one hip and a sword on the other.
Arienne’s lips went dry. This couldn’t be real.
This was only a shadow, a memory. She had no idea why he was here, but she knew Eldred was dead, by her own hands.
She had no reason to fear him. But the smell the Grim King had brought with him in this dark rain reminded her of that childhood memory, of the morning after her farewell party when the legionaries had discovered her hiding in her parents’ closet.
She recalled the stern expressions of the soldiers, and her parents standing behind them.
Perhaps the smell of the Grim King, known to Noam and all Mersians, was simply the smell of their own fear.
The Grim King stood silent. The bedding turned black in the rain.
Lysandros stared at him but otherwise did not react.
Arienne could see the half-formed woman flinching.
She was trying to stand up, but to no avail.
She seemed deteriorated, perhaps from being inside Fractica for so long, like an old memory.
Arienne realized that Fractica was beginning to forget this woman.
Sooner or later, Fractica would forget Lysandros as well.
But the Grim King was vivid. How did Fractica have a memory of him? She remembered a passage from The Sorcerer of Mersia:
In the rain, I rose on the palm of the gigatherion Apollyon, with Power generator Fractica, to the top of the castle, where the necromancer king Eldred stood.
He was gaunt and tall, his robes shadow and flames, his crown bone and gold, just as the Mersian locals had told me.
It was the first time in centuries that any outsider had laid eyes upon the Grim King.
Fractica had been with Lysandros when he fought Eldred.
“You keep fading, dog of the Empire.”
An all-too-familiar voice, inhuman. The Grim King did not even look at Arienne or Noam, the latter still sprawled on the ground, and spoke only to Lysandros.
“You are a mere trace, even if you have lasted over a hundred years in this small, nonexistent place. But it is time to surrender it to me. I shall use it for a better purpose.”
Arienne looked back and forth between Lysandros and Eldred. What was he asking him to surrender to him? But then, Lysandros’s empty expression caught something like the light of meaning. He stood up, declared his name, and spoke.
“I shall … restore Mersia … and return it to the embrace … of the Empire … and…” Lysandros turned his head to the woman on the bed.
“What you propose is impossible, as you are about to rot away forever. You do not realize what this machine is doing in Danras according to your wishes.”
So that was it. Eldred, or his shadow, wanted Fractica. The many fragments before her coalesced into one with this realization.
Fractica was “restoring” Mersia, starting with Danras, according to Lysandros’s orders.
Whether these orders came from the real Lysandros or the shadow of him, Arienne couldn’t be sure.
But she now understood that Fractica was worse than insane—it was stuck, trying to carry out its futile purpose.
It had been sentenced to roam the streets of Danras, trying to rebuild what couldn’t be rebuilt.
The Grim King slid toward Lysandros to stand right in front of him.
The robe of shadows and fire swirled around him.
His emaciated hands emerged from his sleeves and unsheathed his sword.
A blade, shining with opalescence. Before anyone could stop him, he plunged it into Lysandros’s chest. Lysandros fell and scattered into dust.
Eldred intoned, “You used your honeyed words to foment rebellion in my subjects and felled my country. The punishment you deserve is death.”
The woman on the bed was still trying to stand, but she couldn’t. She tried to speak, but no words came.
“It is regrettable the real Eldred cannot kill the real Lysandros but … we can begin with some small revenges.”
Arienne stopped waiting.
“I killed the real Lysandros,” she declared.
Eldred finally turned his head and looked at her quizzically.
“And what little girl dares speak such nonsense in the presence of a king taking back his kingdom?”
Arienne laughed. “And I killed the real Eldred as well. You’re just a shadow of a dead man.”
In the black rain, Eldred’s face twisted.
Arienne stared directly into it. In the corner of her eye, Noam sat by the portal into Arienne’s mind, looking in her direction with fearful eyes.
He must have wanted to flee, to escape into the room, but he also knew that if anything should happen to Arienne, that room would implode with him in it.
“More nonsense. My death was foretold. And there is no path to the prophecy coming to fulfillment.”
The prophecy. Noam had told her about it, that the Grim King’s apprentice would succeed him. Arienne knew there was no point in denying what she was.
“I am the apprentice of the Grim King.”
Noam gasped.
Arienne grinned. “And you are merely a memory of him. A memory who entered this place before the real Eldred met me.”
Eldred wailed with fury and charged at her with his sword.
This is only the shadow of an enemy I have beaten before, thought Arienne.
No matter how real he looks, I am what’s real and he is merely a memory.
His sword came down on Arienne’s shoulder but it simply shattered into a prismatic powder on impact.
Power flowed inside her. Arienne summoned the memory of herself slicing off Eldred’s arms—and at the same time, Lysandros’s arms—at Finvera Pass.
The wintry wind of the mountains. The snow crunching underneath her feet.
The bony hands of Eldred trying to strangle her in her mind, the metal hand of Lysandros doing the same in the real world.
Without hesitation, she chanted the cutting spell and her Power slashed out.
The black rain ceased in a blink. Eldred’s body stood for a moment without its head, then spasmed as if sneezing. Then, like Lysandros before him, he turned to dust. The sky was clear. Stars came out.
“Much ado for a mere memory.”
Arienne turned to Noam, who had stood up and was dusting himself off. Noam, without looking up at her, said, “You really are his apprentice!.”
“I just said it in the moment. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You also said you killed the Grand Inquisitor. Is it true?”
She realized she’d never told him that. Looking carefully at his face, she nodded.
“Why did you do that? He was a great man…”
It was a long story, and it would only upset Noam. She gazed at his sad and pathetic stance. Then, a ringing in her head—Arienne staggered. The door to her mind, which was still open with its swirling violet light, undulated. Noam jumped away from it.
The donkey Aron popped his head out. Then, he carefully stepped forward, one hoof at a time. On his back was Tychon.
“Noam, did you put Tychon on Aron’s back?” Arienne asked, puzzled.
Noam shook his head as Aron went straight up to the hazy woman on the bed. She stood up, reached out with her vague arms, and picked up Tychon. She cradled him against her, and Tychon opened his eyes wide and stretched his little hands to her face.
Her form began to fill in, just like Noam had when he had entered Arienne’s mind for the first time.
Color returned to the woman’s hair. Her skin had the rugged texture of a healthy outdoorswoman.
Her hands were strong. Her eyes were full of joy, the look of someone who had found what they had lost long ago.
The woman stroked Tychon’s forehead a few times and gently laid the baby down on the bedding.
She then turned toward Arienne.
“I am a memory of Yuma, the Chief Herder of Danras. But you must meet the real Yuma. Go to the castle of the Grim King. There, you will learn what you came here for.”
And just like Eldred and Lysandros before her, she turned to dust. Tychon began to cry.