forty-two
Even Sulim was impressed at how quickly things changed in two weeks.
All without bloodshed. How about that? Olma resumed her previous position as second in command to Mira di’Cerilyn, the newly reigning chief who immediately began imposing orders from her new office.
The first was to relinquish her birthright as scion of House Dunsman and to resign as Temple priestess.
That said, she made the bold move of taking control of Shield Town’s Temple…
and the other three Temples erected on Cerilyn.
This decree mandated that the Yahzenian Temple had no power in this place.
Something that Mira assured Sulim would not go over well in Garlahza.
Anyone who found this strange or otherwise had a problem with it was dealt with, either by convincing or being banished from the town.
Luckily, there were few willing to verbalize their disdain for this transference of power to a julah who claimed to have killed a chief using forbidden rituals.
And once word of that reached the outside world, it added to the pile of reasons the Yahzenian courts wanted to “talk” to Mira.
A guise, Mira told her soulmate, to get her back on Yahzen, the only place the YDF could arrest her.
As long as she stayed out of the Federation, nobody could legally touch her, let alone as the chief of a mercenary tribe.
The Treaty of Cerilyn was quite clear that any “crimes” committed while on mercenary business were overlooked by other authorities, something humans like Sulim and Sonall were all too familiar with.
“I know a few things about losing birthrights,” he told Mira one night while they convened in her chiefly apartment to go over the next day’s plans.
Olma had done little to change this apartment, and did even less when she moved out with her meager personal items and commandeered a private room near Sulim’s.
Now, when Sulim sat in the chief’s apartment, she saw basic wooden and stone furniture complemented with a few bits of technology she itched to go through to ensure they were secure. “Only mine wasn’t my decision.”
“Whatever happened to the ones who contracted the hit on your family?” Mira asked from across her formidable table. “One of them was Marco di’Flare, wasn’t it?”
Sonall was left speechless for a moment as he met Mira’s inquisitive look.
Even Sulim was impressed that she knew that.
When Olma became chief, she offered some favors to higher-ranking mercenaries.
Sulim had asked for permission to have otherwise forbidden technology, such as a high-speed computer and her own holographic clipboard that accessed the intergalactic internet, but Sonall asked for her to tell him who took out the hit on his family.
Priorities. As well as a stark difference in how two people ended up in this situation.
“Yeah.” Sonall cleared his throat and shifted in his seat.
When he glanced at Sulim, she shrugged, her way of urging him to continue.
“He teamed up with a rival lord to get control of the estate. After the… well, you know, they moved in and the lord took over my home. Marco was retained as a public partner and was still living there when I paid him a visit a couple of years ago. Sleeping in my goddamn parents’ old room.”
Sulim kept her mouth closed; Mira raised both eyebrows, imploring him to continue.
“So, anyway, I shoulda let him realize it was me before killing his fucking ass.”
The words were out of Sulim’s mouth before she knew what she was doing. “Pretend you didn’t hear that,” she said to Mira. “Technically, Olma didn’t know that’s what Sonall went off to do. Technically, it didn’t happen.”
“Oh, I paid the fee,” Sonall said. “Also, took a few things from the house that were still there. Mostly my sister and mother’s stuff.”
The way he so candidly talked about returning to his old home to enact revenge and salvage a few sentimental items was common for a hardened mercenary, yet Sulim was still impressed that Sonall had not completely crumbled when he returned to Cerilyn with two bags full of jewelry, dolls,
and photo albums.
His sister’s old dolls lined one of the shelves in his room.
He kept the jewelry in a Federation safety deposit box, and Sulim had helped him digitize the photos before they were stored in the back of his closet.
Only then did he fall into a three-day drunken stupor that ended with him passed out in his favorite brothel with three women fawning over him because they thought he was dead.
So, they called me. Sulim had dragged Mira over to the courtesan house to assess if he was too ill for transport to the infirmary.
Naturally, they all thought I grabbed the priestess to read his last rites. What a day that had been…
Since then, Sonall had gradually pulled back on his excessive drinking to where he spent whole days completely sober, but there were still nights when Sulim found him in their booth at the tavern, pounding back beers and spirits in the hopes of numbing the worst of his memories.
If we get through this, I hope we can both properly move on.
Part of the problem with not only being Sonall’s partner, but his ex, was bearing some of the weight of his traumas.
Sulim wasn’t just the occasional babysitter who had to fetch priestesses and administer antidotes she purchased with her own money because she knew how he could get.
She was part therapist, part accountant, part lawyer, and part sister at this point in their relationship.
“Good on you,” Mira eventually said. “One less thing for me to do around here.”
Sulim didn’t know what that meant, but she kept that sentiment to herself.
They were later joined by those who were staying in town, such as Ramaron, Kema, and Hannu—as well as Olma, who was invited alongside trusted inner circle members like Giselle and Barnabas,
two people both Sulim and Sonall vouched for when Mira expressed that they could use a few more hands on this project.
She also had a short list of people she trusted from the other two tribes, including the ones who had come as witnesses on behalf of Third Tribe.
“Everything we know about vashta is handed down to us from ancient texts related to the Old Ways,” Ramaron relayed as a marker wrote words on a board without his physical input.
Sulim tried not to stare at how it flourished up and down, left to right, in Ramaron’s handwriting.
What kind of concentration does that require, anyway?
Sulim better be careful before she got too distracted from the mission brief…
not that she had ever been in one this big, let alone in the chief’s apartment, before.
“At its simplest, it requires gathering the two Relics that represent a planet’s soul. On the hunks of rocks Nerilis has targeted for practice so far, it hasn’t been too difficult.
One of the many reasons I believe he’s targeting Cerilyn as his first genocidal sacrifice is because the population is small, and quite frankly, he doesn’t see any of your lives as worthy.”
“Well, we are barbarians,” Giselle wryly said. “Even my own grandmother has probably disowned me for being on Cerilyn this long.”
Ramaron let those words fade before he continued.
“In the case of a present population, the Relics will manifest as two objects representing the spiritual expression of a planet’s people. There will be a Relic that represents a population’s outlook, and one that is personal to a single entity. Often, they are located in a similar geographical area,
but they can change over time. Granted, all of this is highly theoretical. Nerilis will be the first julah in history to attempt it.”
“Out of curiosity,” Mira said, “what is Yahzen’s public Relic? Do we know?”
Ramaron hesitated because he probably wondered if he should ponder this in front of present company. “It’s believed that the runic shroud in the Sanctuary is the Relic that represents Yahzen’s heart. But it’s hard to say. It could also be the statue in the plaza. You know the one.”
Mira didn’t say it, but Sulim had a feeling it had to do with her mother.
“To destabilize a planet enough to destroy it via vashta,” Ramaron continued, while the keywords appeared on the board behind him, not that anyone took any notes, “you destroy the two Relics. This will send the planet into turmoil and begin to dismantle.”
“That’s wild,” Sonall said.
“Yes. Quite wild.”
“So, let me get this straight…” Olma aimed her hand in front of her face, fingers directed at the board. “This bastard is coming here to sniff out our two ‘Relics’, which he will then destroy and then… we wink out of existence? Like the other planets? I’ve seen the live footage.”
Ramaron needed a moment to restructure his thoughts before answering. “Something akin to that. Keep in mind that while the Relics will be somewhat close together, bringing them together side by side will begin the destabilization process. I have seen this for myself before.”
Mira sent a look of warning to the table. “Don’t ask.” Sulim wouldn’t. Not that question. Instead, she’d ask another. “How did this work on those lifeless planets?”
“Ah, well, ‘lifeless’ is a misnomer in this case. I know Basic doesn’t make the distinction, but in Julah, we have a word for planets that have sentient life, such as julah and huling, but all astral bodies have souls. Especially planets. And suns. Moons are a slightly different matter.”
“So, how do you get Relics if there is no sentient life to power them with spirituality?”
“There is something always treasured by the closest form of life,” Ramaron initially explained. Then, “In this case, it is what that planet treasures most. It is what the amoebas, the birds, the reptiles treasure most. There is spirit in everything. The entire universe is made of it.”
Even Sulim was slightly humbled by that assertion. Is this what it feels like to sit in on an Academy lecture? “But sentient life trumps all of that?” she asked.
“Sentient in Basic simply means that you have a soul. You are a child of the Void; a child of the unknown creator. Astral bodies and the law of nature existed before our first breaths, but the Temple hands down that they were created to host us and enjoy life’s many splendors.