Chapter 4 #2
Kai hadn’t had reason to think about Highsun in decades.
He was another Immortal Blessed apostate like Tahren.
He had refused to accept the agreement between the Immortal Blessed Patriarchs and the Hierarchs and was imprisoned in ice rock.
It was the same punishment that Tahren had been threatened with for turning on the Patriarchs to save Dahin from being consecrated to the Hierarchs’ Well.
Highsun had been freed after the Patriarchs who supported the Hierarchs were deposed and disgraced, and he had supposedly left the Blessed Lands.
Dahin let go of the steering column long enough to wave a hand, as if illustrating the vagaries of scholars. “Apparently he came to Ancartre to help unravel ‘mysteries of the Hierarchs,’ or so Seeker Orai said.” He snorted in derision. “They could have asked me. I was available.”
A line formed between Tahren’s brows, and Ziede’s expression tensed. She asked, “Mysteries like what they did with the pieces of the lighthouse they stole from Teramythis or mysteries like how to use the artifacts they left behind?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea why Highsun does anything, obviously,” Dahin admitted. “But these Belith scholars have been in Sun-Ar, following the steps of the original Enalin expedition, trying to locate and speak with survivors of the Sun-Ar people, and—” Dahin stopped, jaw tightening.
They all fell quiet for a moment as the raft flew.
Sanja shifted around on the bench, frowning.
She said, “I don’t understand. I mean, Sun-Ar’s near where the Hierarchs came from, I got that part.
But if someone already went up there and didn’t find anything, why does somebody else have to go?
” Her expression cleared. “Oh wait, is there stuff left up there that somebody might steal? Special magic things?”
Kai wondered if Dahin would answer her. This was the key question, the one he had been reluctant to ask, in case Dahin decided it violated their pact. It had to be what Dahin had heard in the emergency meeting that had alarmed him to this point.
Dahin half turned to look at Sanja. Quietly, seriously, he said, “They found signs that the people the Hierarchs came from—the people they were before they started to conquer the world—might still be there.”
Sanja’s face turned incredulous. She looked at Kai, then Ziede, then Tenes, taking in their expressions to make sure this wasn’t a joke.
Dahin, to his credit, had shifted into his teaching mode.
He had always been a good teacher, particularly with young students.
He waited patiently for Sanja to ask, “But the Hierarchs, they’re dead.
So these people are just people? They’re not even Witches? Right?”
Dahin explained, “The Enalin who went to Sun-Ar never found these people, or the Hierarchs’ original Well of Power.
The Hierarchs had Wells down here that they created, like the dead city you saw in the Arkai, like the mortals trapped by the expositor on the stolen Immortal Blessed ship.
You understand those are Wells, created by concentrations of pain and death, yes? ”
Sanja nodded, biting her lower lip. “Yes. Ziede told me.”
“We know a few things about the original Hierarch Well in the Capstone of the World, even though we don’t know where it is.
During and after the war, scholars, like the people I need to see in Belith, found mentions in some letters and documents left behind by Hierarchs and their servants.
We know it was created when the Hierarchs’ people fed the pain and lives of most of the people of Sun-Ar into it.
And we know they used the power that it generated to make one of their leaders into the first Hierarch. ”
Sanja nodded again, in understanding and a tinge of fear. “So it’s still up there, that Well.”
Dahin leaned forward to check the position of the canal cutting through the plains below and corrected the raft’s course minutely.
“We have to believe it is. Such a powerful Well wouldn’t fade after only sixty or seventy years.
Especially if there were people up there who still fed it occasionally. ”
Tahren’s jaw tightened but she said nothing.
Kai felt cold creep up his back like the stinging tendrils of an intention.
Dahin’s words sparked a vision of the remnants of a people who were once so proud they thought they deserved to own the world and everyone and everything in it, tending their Well for years—perhaps with ritual sacrifices, with their own pain.
So many of the mortals who had formed the Hierarchs’ legions had been swept up unwilling because their own lands were conquered, because all their choices had been taken away, or because they had been raised from birth to believe in the superiority and sacredness of the Hierarchs’ mission.
But there must have been a core of true believers, of the people who had decided it was right and proper to destroy the neighboring Sun-Ar in order to create power.
To invest that power into one of their own who would wield it for all their glory and greed.
Some of those people might never have left their homeland.
Some would have fled back to it as the south fell and all their grand plans came to nothing around them.
With a troubled expression, Sanja sat back against the railing, and Tenes put an arm around her. Sanja said, “If they’re still up there, and the Well is still up there, they can make another Hierarch.”
“Exactly,” Dahin said. He let his breath out and just looked weary. “There’s no sign to say for certain that they’ve done it. I don’t even know if the scholars managed to find traces of the Well. But we have to be ready, we have to know.”
Ziede said, gravely, “Thank you for letting us help, Dahin.”
Kai added, “Thank you for trusting us.” At least now they all understood the urgency.
Even with the raft’s speed, it took days to reach the Belith city of Ancartre. Kai hadn’t taken the overland journey from Benais-arik to the south coast for a long time, and though he knew the years had changed the countryside, part of him had still expected to pass over a mostly empty landscape.
That made it a good surprise to see that over the last few decades, the renewed trade and travel along the old roads had given birth to scatters of villages and farms, many large enough to be called towns.
The Rising World Cohort Post on the river roughly halfway between Benais-arik and Stios had grown not only a caravanserai, but enough farmsteads, dwellings, and markets to sprawl out into a small city.
It warmed something deep in Kai’s chest, to fly into the night and to see the little clusters of lamplight appearing where only darkness had been before.
Dahin’s talk with Kai and Ziede, and maybe especially with Sanja, had calmed him down enough that he didn’t protest when they wanted to land in order to camp for the night, or for a chance to buy fresh food from a trading post, or just to relieve themselves in a thicket of brush rather than the lidded bucket kept in the raft’s shelter.
The wind from the south coast was cooler and their passage through the air stole body heat; both Sanja and Tenes needed breaks from it.
The rest of them could have endured a faster trip, but Kai was just relieved that they didn’t have to.
Flying like this still gave him a headache.
They could also have made better time if they crossed the Gulf of Stios but it was prone to storms at this season and no one wanted to drown.
Even Dahin was willing to admit it was too chancy.
Once they reached the coast it was safer to skirt it until they could cross the Belith Straits where the gap between the two continents was at its narrowest point.
Stios itself, once a major port for the Hierarchs, and a place where some isolated Immortal Blessed families still lived, they decided to make a wide circle around.
“As nice as it would be to stay in an actual guest house,” Ziede said, “we don’t want to make the mistake of running into a Blessed who is going to ask a lot of questions.”
“‘Where did you get the ascension raft?’” Kai said by example. “Oh, we stole it from the Immortal Blessed we killed, but he was a traitor to the Rising World so the council said it was fine.”
“I can live without seeing Stios again for a while,” Tahren agreed dryly.
Dahin didn’t join the discussion, but he glared at the gray clouds building to the west and made the course change without protest.
The coastal landscape below was mostly marsh, and the villages they passed over were the stilt-houses of fishers. Floating wooden docks extended out into the shallow water for their small boats, and walkways stretched back onto solid land for the trader wagons that came to buy their catches.
They stopped at one floating village to buy a midday meal.
Kai stood on the pier with Sanja and Tenes, watching the fishers cook crabs while Ziede and Tahren took a turn along the walkways.
The fishers didn’t seem too frazzled by the raft; they were familiar with Immortal Blessed traveling to and from Stios.
Though not Immortal Blessed in the company of Witches.
Kai wore his veiled hat to keep from causing any more consternation.
It had been a long time since demons had been forced to fight for the Hierarchs in Palm but it wasn’t worth the trouble to test the waters.
A few people came up and asked him and Ziede to touch protective charms made of sea glass and string, since contact with a Witch would make the charm more effective.
So close to their goal, Dahin was antsy at the stop and stayed with the raft, but Kai brought him a spiced crab pie and that seemed to mollify him.