2 Mercy
“When the land burns, history will ask why. It’ll wonder how we missed the signs that flare rune-bright in hindsight. It’ll sigh that we fell like the malleable, ambivalent creatures the Elsar know us to be, without any cognizance that war’s bitter tide rose from a spring of our making.
Beneath Ur Dinyé’s placid surface after the monarchy’s fall, roil a thousand currents that any enterprising student of history can steer into war.
The powerful, secretive Elsarian Order seeking to impose religious governance. The Guilds’ long-held monopoly of northern resources against the economic reform posited by Tetrarchy. The elite wealthy against us all. Stormfall crowning our skies.
A historian’s task then rises above an arbiter of fact to an observer of pain. To examine these conflicts for betterment, detriment, or stagnation. Learn how they’ve been woven into each other. Find their weavers and those threads that, if strengthened in one fight, can ruin another.
Watch for symptoms of war. If the public is vigilant, then the public cannot be fooled.”
—excerpt from a lecture by Magus Telmar
Winter mornings drained Edessa of color, painting the citadel that housed the Academiae with charcoal and silver and draping the Tower Gates in gossamer shadows. For once, the city seemed as it was: an insular spiderweb of secrets that dictated life in Ur Dinyé. Home, and yet a battlefield.
Frost limned Sarai’s cloak and trailed the length of her braid.
The first rays of sun broke over the Academiae’s presently bauble-laced tree boughs, its artfully trimmed gardens hidden by a crisp carpet of snow.
Just off the cobblestone path, a group of tall, blond, water magi from the distant land of Usten sat in bewilderingly thin leather tunics and trousers, murmuring in melodic accents as they shaped ice into a frozen flight of birds.
The Academiae spared no expense for its winter graduation, and despite Kadra’s opinions to the contrary, Cassandane insisted that everything proceed as it always had.
“We’ve much to prove.” The Head Tetrarch had looked haggard at their last meeting before the Hearing, crimson robes echoing the strained blood vessels in her eyes.
“We can’t give the public any reason to believe that we’ll upend their lives more than we already have.
People don’t care that you did it to protect them, Sarai.
They only remember that it made them feel scared. ”
The irony. Kadra’s deviation from established law had ruined Edessa’s tyrants.
Now came the bitter task of holding on to power via the same system that had been proven not to work, all because folk liked the idea of change more than they liked its implementation.
The people she sought to protect had become those she had to outmaneuver.
Ahead, an ornate metal steeple pierced the bruised dawn sky like a sword thrust through flame. The Academaie’s marble student chapel rang with a lusty chorus of song and prayer for glorious careers, coin a plenty, and a blessed beginning to a new era in the graduates’ lives.
The cavern of dead dreams she barely visited these days let out a sad thrum.
If the Fall hadn’t happened five years ago, she would have been among those gleeful graduates last winter, linking arms with friends, reminiscing of sneaking back into their dormitories after a night in the city.
She would be… young. The thought was as foreign to her as the Elsarian chapel was to Usten’s water magi, who were casting flabbergasted glances at the uproarious singing.
She silently added her voice to the mix. After all, the gods were real, even if she found them in other places. Her soft exhale drew a shroud over a past that had not been, and she walked on toward what was.
She nearly ran into an agromagus after two steps.
“Petitor Sarai, I wrote to you last week and have heard nothing.” The violet-robed man’s chest swelled at this ignominy. “Bad enough that the north is rioting, but now, word abounds of this beetle plague they’ve got. Should we be concerned?”
Not this again. She sighed. “I know as much as you do. The coalition of northern Praetors have not shared the type of beetle causing the damage or the extent of the injury to their cities, so my lack of response was no insult. I cannot share what I don’t have.”
The agromagus puffed his chest out further, bringing his crest pin of a desert ironwood—Ur Dinyé’s national tree—to prominence.
“Northerners visit Edessa daily,” he spat as though the poorer half of the land were beetles themselves.
“Having them inspected prior to entry is fine and well, but what if the vigiles miss something? The south holds most of Ur Dinyé’s viable farmland!
We risk famine. As a northerner, you may not understand—”
“I do,” she said with more ice than the eavesdropping magi from Usten were sculpting with.
“As I have repeatedly told your colleagues, the coalition of northern Praetors has informed us that these beetles swarm cities. Unlike the north, the south lacks mountainous terrain to veil a swarm’s arrival.
The magi patrolling our city walls will raze them long before they’re a threat. ”
The agromagus looked mollified. “They’ll burn to a crisp?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Yes.”
“Nevertheless, ask the Magus Supreme to consider a ban on northerners. I await your reply.”
He was off before she could snap that this northerner had no intention of writing back.
“I,” she muttered to no one, “am not Kadra’s errand girl.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” A heavy hand came down on her shoulders.
Harion snorted when she flinched and darted away.
“How does our Magus Supreme handle this jumping?” His brows rose.
“Does he restrain you during a fuck? That’d be excellent material for a new volume of The Alternate Histories of the Sidran Tower Girl. ”
Usten’s magi had given up all pretense at work and were blatantly staring now. An intricate sculpture of a desert ironwood bled water behind them.
Had she been in better spirits, she would have given voice to the epithets burgeoning on her tongue, perhaps ribbed him for the bruise-like colors he had chosen upon becoming Tetrarch—sapphire blue and emerald green—or perhaps she wouldn’t have reacted at all to the jibes of a man who, for as long as she’d known him, sought self-aggrandization at everyone else’s expense.
But now, scarcely a day after the Hearing, she just felt raw.
Looked at and judged so much that parts of her had been scraped off.
“What the fuck do you want?” A hiss like a dagger through air.
Harion’s brows rose, sly levity winking out in his eyes. “Touchy. Inform Kadra to calm down with his inspections of Guild wagons leaving Edessa. The new Grains Guildmaster is highly displeased with this interference into how he runs his business.”
Anger bristled up her spine. “This would be the same Grains Guild that insists that their crop yielded poorly this year and that they can’t meet their obligations under the Distribution Act? The one that’s directly led to the northern riots?”
Harion adjusted the button at the notch of his throat with a shrug. “The truth is vastly overrated, mountain girl. Quell the riots the old-fashioned way and spill some northern blood. You and Kadra are slim on allies, and going after the Guilds won’t do you any favors.”
It wouldn’t. But blame for the riots could be laid at the feet of all fifty-eight Guilds.
Once hailed as bastions for the working class where they could earn some shred of power during Ur Dinyé’s monarchical era, the south’s Guilds had evolved from independent mercantile coalitions to powerful institutions, largely unbeholden to the law in the name of good business.
The only leash that kept them from bleeding every Urd dry was the Distribution Act—a centuries-old contract between north and south stipulating that resources mined, harvested, or collected in both regions must be shared with the other as per the Act’s percentages.
Percentages dictated by the Guilds, of course.
Despite their wealth of ore, limestone, and clay, the north had little viable farmland.
And the snobbish south had refused to barter food for metal without the Guilds as intermediaries.
Thus had come a trade bargain worthy of Ruin herself.
The coalition of northern Praetors hadn’t stood a chance during the “negotiation” of the Distribution Act.
Only the Guilds had the coin for investing in mining operations and the numbers to ensure nationwide supply of gathered resources.
Or to destroy any northern business that attempted to compete with them.
The choice had been to bleed or bow, and the north had folded forward.
Centuries later, the results remained catastrophic.
Northern locales had no claim to their resources, and their peoples were little more than the Guilds’ indentured labor.
“The Tetrarchy legislates crime and social governance. It has no oar in the free market,” Ioratius, the newly appointed Grains Guildmaster, had reminded Sarai when she’d raised the subject weeks ago.
Iron-gray beard trimmed neatly, he wore a genial smile like a sword and had emptied a pouch of aurei on the table between them like a shield.
“Your visit is an unjustifiable incursion into Guild business.”
“Not if Magus Supreme Kadra is receiving petitions on the matter.” She ignored the bribe. “Every northern locale is entitled to an allotment of grain under the Distribution Act. You can’t halt wagons on the basis that your yield was poor.”
He tossed a gold coin in the air and caught it. “We must care for our own first.”
“Last I examined, the north is still part of Ur Dinyé and barely has the farmland to grow a few ears of wheat.” Her nails had dented the seat of his plush armchair. “It’s half ice and half desert.”