CHAPTER FORTY
Ancrushav stopped before the wide door that had taken them three concealed passages to reach. “Cover your eyes.”
Druadaen was about to do so, noticed that Aleasha was still distracted. He nudged her gently. She flinched, looked up, saw what was required, shielded her face behind her palm.
Ancrushav opened the door and light flooded out, not intense so much as pervasive. He stepped through the yellow-gold rectangle quickly, explaining, “I must pass first.”
“There is a trap to be disarmed?” Druadaen wondered, as Aleasha shuffled forward.
“There is a condition to satisfy,” Ancrushav amended as he waved them into the room. “If I am not the first to cross the threshold, and if I am not carrying a particular object I do not routinely keep upon my person, the results would be… most unfortunate.”
Druadaen hardly heard the serratus’s understatement of the consequences of trespassing; he was too busy staring around the unexpectedly vast chamber. Paneled in dark wood, closely spaced sconces held a slightly different variety of the glowing algae; the light was not only brighter and warmer, but it seemed to pulse faintly. Bookcases and scroll racks almost reached the fifteen-foot ceiling, all about two-thirds full. Worktables were clustered in the center, tools of the archivist’s trade set in easy reach.
Aleasha looked at him as she lowered her hand. “You must feel right at home, here.”
“In fact,” Druadaen answered happily, “I do. It has been a… a very long time since I have stood in such a place.”
“Feeling homesick?”
He thought, then shook his head. “For Arrdanc, yes. But for the Archive? No, I don’t think so.”
Ancrushav was returning from one of the bookcases with two large tomes. Aleasha looked at them suspiciously. “Are those what you said we must see?”
He nodded, opening and spreading their pages carefully as he gestured them to join him. “You will note the date.”
Druadaen shrugged. He read no more than a hundred words of any of the languages of Hystzos and knew nothing of its dating other than the names of the days and months. But Aleasha peered at it in disbelief. “This was written over twenty-five centuries ago?” She frowned. “This must be a copy.”
“It is,” Ancrushav said with what sounded like suppressed pride.
She looked up at him. “You? Copied this?”
He nodded. “The original is still in one of the libraries of Pagudon.”
Druadaen reassessed the size of the collection. “I take those collections are larger than this one?”
He shrugged. “This would barely contain the reading room for the smallest of them.” He leaned closer to Aleasha to point out elements of the odd pattern spanning both open pages. “Note the many circles. And the lines joining them, like overlapping spiderwebs.”
Druadaen realized what he was looking at. “The Vortex of Worlds,” he murmured.
“So you have heard of it. That is good. Then I have relatively little to explain.”
“To him, perhaps!” Aleasha exclaimed.
Ancrushav’s inclined head was almost a short bow. “My apologies. Where shall I begin?”
“Perhaps by letting me figure out as much as I can on my own!” she retorted.
To which Ancrushav had a singular reaction; he worked—hard—to conceal a small smile. “Of course. Do as you wish.”
“Thank you, I will.” Her frown changed to one of intense concentration. “Well, I presume these are all different worlds. Or at least different places.” She glanced at him.
He nodded but said nothing.
He’d probably lose his fight against that smile, if he spoke, thought Druadaen.
Aleasha pointed. “And I presume the large words underneath each sphere are their names?”
“Yes, but not all are recognizable. Many have probably been forgotten, and not all of the scripts are known, today.”
She scanned the arcane array of circles of different sizes. “Well, what’s this one say?” It was obvious why she had chosen it; it not only had several names, but had ten times as many lines emanating from it than any other.
“That first word is ‘Spindle.’ The second is ‘Gyre.’ I suspect these were the most common names; you will note that others are beneath them in smaller characters. And two are written in a script that I cannot decipher.”
“And what of this one?” she asked, pointing to the one that had attracted Druadaen’s attention. “It has more names than any other.”
He nodded. “That is the strangest part of this map. Or diagram, or whatever it might be. Firstly, several of the labels are just the same word in different languages. The most common is Grinder. Others call it Distaff, but in the explicit and restricted meaning of the shaft upon which a spindle turns. Then there are all these other labels, almost half of which are in forgotten languages. But the ones that I can translate are either Cyclone or Maelstrom.”
Druadaen leaned over to study it more closely. “Odd: it has the most names of any object on the two diagrams, yet has the fewest lines connecting it to other circles. But this is what I find particularly interesting.” He let his index finger hover above the object before moving it slowly toward the edge of the diagram. “It sends out this line, the only one that does not lead to another circle. Instead, it attaches to this strange symbol, here at the margin of the page.”
Ancrushav’s eyes were steady upon him. “You are a quick study.”
Of ancient texts? I ought to be! But Druadaen simply asked, “What does the symbol stand for? Is it… mathematical?” It had that look, somehow.
Ancrushav’s gaze became a fixed stare. “It is mathematical, but it is not a value. It signifies that whatever value or variable it is affixed to or derived from contains a function which does not end.”
“Such as the set of all numbers? Or an irrational number?”
“Yes.”
“But here, on the diagram, it stands alone.”
“That,” Ancrushav said slowly, “signifies both the value and the principle of infinity.” He nodded at Druadaen. “You have touched upon the great mystery of this map. If map it is.”
“What else would it be?” Aleasha sounded impatient. “And where is Hystzos?”
“If it is on this sheet—and it may not be—I cannot read the label which signifies it. And before you ask, I have found nothing which suggests which one—or if—any of these symbols stands for the world of the Annihilators.” He crossed his arms. “But even more frustrating are the small sigils which lay along the different connecting lines like notations. They are not from any language or numerical system known on Hystzos. And in all my reading, I have only found them in books like this one.”
Aleasha blew a strand of chestnut hair out of her eyes. “And this book is called?”
“The Recursivity of Portals.”
A cool, almost cold finger seemed to run slowly down Druadaen’s spine; he managed not to shiver. “So these spheres: do they represent different worlds or different portals?”
“That,” Ancrushav said with a nod, “is what I have been trying to determine for five years.”
Aleasha frowned. “They could be both. And maybe these mysterious chicken scratches next to the lines explain that.”
But Druadaen hardly heard her hypotheses. Instead, he seemed to see the Lady’s face alongside Ancrushav’s, her ghost-voice describing the conclusion of the Hidden Archivist’s rescue: the one that had been effected by rerouting portals with what she called her Tower’s “Refractorium.” That word closely echoed, in both form and concept, the term “Recursivity.”
Druadaen did not realize he was speaking aloud until the memory-echo of the Lady’s words were chased away by the sound of his own voice. “These notations… could they be codes?”
“Codes?” Ancrushav repeated, frowning.
Druadaen found a better comparison. “I mean instructions. Such as the ones used to keep a ship on a course, or change it, by observing the location of known stars at expected times.”
Ancrushav’s eyebrows rose sharply and his eyes widened; they seemed to grow more red. “Or maybe the formula of a mantic construct?”
Druadaen stared at Ancrushav. “No one on this world has ever used the word ‘mantic.’”
The serratus shook his head at his slip. “To be more precise, you have never heard anyone use that word.”
“The ‘Old Arts,’” Druadaen said, nodding as understanding rushed outward from Ancrushav’s implied exception. “Pagudon’s sorcerous disciplines are not merely similar to those of Arrdanc; they are one and the same.” That conclusion spawned another. “And that is why Pagudon is uncertain how to respond to the priestess’s actions. And it’s why one vizier speculated that the ‘sorcerers’ might see her as ‘a threat, an ally, or a tutor.’ Because she is not struggling to piece together some fragmentary ‘Old Art’; she is a master practitioner of the complete discipline.”
Ancrushav nodded and leaned back from the book. “It doesn’t really matter whether this is a map of how to move between worlds, or within them. Either way, it is about portals. Dig deep enough, and you find them at the root of almost every twist and turn of Hystzos’ history.” He began strolling among the worktables. “Wars. Politics. The Annihilators. Mancery. And now you and the priestess.” He gestured to carefully laid out fragments of ancient scrolls, maps, treatises, codices. “Portals are the key to power. They always have been. They probably always will be.”
Druadaen followed a step behind, Aleasha lagging further. “So that’s why you started talking about ‘us’ following the priestess. Because that’s what the Prow was built to defend: an osmotium.”
Ancrushav nodded at the word. “‘Osmotium’: you do indeed know the cant of the Old Art. And yes, that is what it was built to protect. And it is probably the most important one in this world.”
Aleasha had caught up. “Why?”
He glanced at her. “You are familiar with the term ‘Annihilation Gate’?”
“Of course. Many legends say that the Annihilators used those portals to reach Hystzos.”
Ancrushav shook his head. “That is not legend. That is fact.”
“But why is the one near the Prow so important?”
“Because this is not an Annihilation Gate; it is the Annihilation Gate. The first one they came through.”
“First?” Druadaen asked.
“There were others. It remains unclear whether the Annihilators built any themselves, or simply reopened ones that were already here, dormant and forgotten. What little was known and recorded during those times was mostly destroyed later on. Along with everything else.”
Aleasha’s light brown face might have grown pale. “So… this priestess means to travel to the world of the Annihilators? Is she mad?”
“No, because it is unlikely she means to travel to their world,” Druadaen mumbled as pieces of a hypothesis began falling together.
“And how would you know?” Aleasha exclaimed.
But Ancrushav was nodding. “If the notes appended to each of the maps’—or diagrams’—connecting lines are codes or mantic referents, then it may be her intent to change the connection of the Annihilation Gate.”
Aleasha looked from one to the other. “Is that even possible?”
“I suspect,” Druadaen said, “that was part of what she researched in Sarmasid and why she had to break into one of its oldest and most restricted archives.”
“You think she learned the… the incantations to change the gate’s destination?”
Ancrushav shook his head. “Possibly, and the Sarmese would not realize if she did. If they knew they had such information in their archives, they would certainly have made use of it long before now. I doubt they even know that the Prow guards a portal, let alone the Annihilation Gate.” He was quiet for a long moment. “But Pagudon does.”
Aleasha nodded. “So: that’s why you were sent here. To be close enough to watch what might occur there.”
“Officially, yes.”
Druadaen let one eyebrow rise. “And unofficially?”
“To watch the watchers we already had at the Prow, the command of which had been entrusted to the Pagudon’s greatest rival.”
Druadaen found a chair and sat. “I fear I am becoming confused.”
Aleasha nodded. “Me, too.” She sat beside him, but leaned toward Ancrushav. “So you have known about this Annihilation Gate all along?”
“Not as such. For centuries, we only knew it as the Maelstrom; that’s what it was called in the epoch of Great Hystzos. But several generations ago, after hundreds of years of poring through the shattered libraries that Pagudon has slowly reclaimed, we learned that the Maelstrom and the Annihilation Gate were one and the same. That transformed Pagudon’s plans and ambitions.”
“Why?”
“Because it proved that the Annihilators did not build the gate whereby they first arrived. That, in turn, proved that the means of creating and controlling portals was known on Hystzos long before, and that Pagudon might hope to rediscover it.”
Druadaen crossed his arms and leaned back. “As a rule, I do not press others for information, but it seems imperative that we have a better understanding of what Pagudon is and what it wants. And to do that, it sounds as if we must understand the Annihilators, first.”
Ancrushav shrugged. “Few facts remain, but Pagudon’s research has confirmed or uncovered at least this much. The Annihilators arrived without warning, possessing strange powers as well as artifacts that were reputedly gifts from their gods. They took the Mael—the island complex in which the portal is located—and the Prow within a few hours.
“They swept forth, secured the surrounding lands, and then sent highly disciplined troops marching to various cities of the empire. It is now known, thanks to a few recently discovered diaries, that they sent small detachments to a number of obscure towns and even ruins in remote areas.”
Druadaen nodded. “Lending further credence to the theory that they were restoring old portals in those places, rather than creating new ones.”
Ancrushav returned his nod. “There is no complete reckoning of the campaign in which the Annihilators toppled the empire. The remaining accounts are fragmentary and mostly refer to persons and places that are no longer known, or at least not by those names. In the course of several decades, the empire was reduced to a number of isolated provinces. In one or two centuries, nothing remained of it, and the Annihilators departed with the same suddenness they had appeared, using the same portals. However, in most cases, they also found a way to destroy those sites shortly after leaving them.”
Aleasha frowned. “And how did they do that? Suicidal minions?”
Ancrushav shrugged. “Maybe, but there is another possibility. For centuries, many have searched the Annihilators’ old places in hope of uncovering some of their wondrous artifacts.” He nodded toward Druadaen. “At first, they often encountered devices such as you fought in the pit. They are part mechanism, part mancery, and yet no practitioners of either art have ever understood, let alone replicated, them.”
Aleasha nodded. “So you presume they were the means whereby the Annihilators sealed the gates behind themselves.”
“As well as the collaborators you suggested. Possibly zealots among their own deeply religious ranks who volunteered to remain behind for that purpose. But whatever methods they employed, they either could not—or did not—destroy the Annihilation Gate, at least not completely. However, they did leave it and the surrounding region ‘hazardous in the extreme,’ as one account puts it. But details of those hazards did not survive the destruction they wrought in their resolve to lay waste to all of Hystzos.”
Aleasha leaned forward. “But why lay waste to a world that did not even know theirs?”
Ancrushav shook his head. “If that question was asked, no answer was given. Nor could any clues be derived from their actions except that they meant to hunt the Changed to extinction. The only actual communication from them was received just before they departed, when they contacted the King of Sarma with a final ultimatum.”
“Which was?” Druadaen asked.
“That if he wished to keep his rather peripheral province from suffering the same oblivion as his armies, he had to reveal whatever he knew of the many sorcerers who had fled Great Hystzos to hide in his lands. In exchange, the Annihilators swore to leave his cities unrazed, thereby ensuring that Sarma would be the greatest remaining power in the known world.”
“What a horrible nation to choose,” Aleasha observed.
“That was almost certainly their intent,” Ancrushav replied. “Witness what the Princes of Sarma have done with that preeminence: squandered it in their endless grasping to have a few coins more than their brothers. And so, Hystzos remains in a state of disarray.”
Aleasha steepled her fingers. “So, when Pagudon realized that the Annihilation Gate and the Maelstrom were the same, they went to the Prow and attempted to learn from it, to become masters of the art of creating and controlling portals.”
“That was their intent,” Ancrushav agreed, “but they have yet to succeed. The Prow was easily secured, but the Mael has proven impossible to control for long. It is infested by Changelings of the most unusual and dangerous sort and there are no maps of its strange tunnels. After many expeditions, Pagudon has only managed to narrow down the number of passages which might lead to the Annihilation Gate.”
Aleasha stared over her hands. “And is that yet another reason they sent you? Because your resemblance to Changelings meant that you were more likely to gain their trust?”
“I doubt it. Pagudon knew full well that although the eyes of a distant Changeling might mistake me for kin, their noses will soon tell them a different story. But my mentor did have other reasons, I am sure.”
“Did he wish to protect you?” Aleasha’s gaze grew shrewd. “Or rather, to cache you in a distant place: an ally kept in reserve beyond the reach of his rivals?”
“I suspect the latter, but also because he, too, had come to fear me. In addition to being harder to kill and accustomed to physical combat, I had skill in their arts.”
“So, you were not just an ally; you were a potential threat.”
“If so, then he ignored the precautions I took to assure I could not become his rival.”
Druadaen leaned forward. “What precautions were those?”
“I avoided training in the Old Art. Had my skill neared that of any of the Senior Order, I would have been too dangerous. They would not have suffered me to live among them, if at all.” He stared at his scarred hands. “Besides, even at an early age, I sensed that my gift for the art would entrail a danger to me as well. I had ready access to more power than they did, but I also knew I would pay a greater cost.”
“In exhausting yourself?” Druadaen asked, doubting that answer even as he posed the question.
“In losing myself.” Seeing their looks, Ancrushav shrugged. “Humans, others, must learn to control the source of their effects: what you call manas.” He shook his head. “I never had to reach out for it. It was in me, waiting, as if it was ready, eager to obey. But by becoming the medium of its release, I sensed that I could also become subject to it.”
“You mean, it had—has—a will of its own?”
“I am unsure. But I feared that if I experimented with it to find the answer, I could become ensnared in the process. Or susceptible to direct control through the Pagudon’s more nuanced knowledge of the art.”
Aleasha’s hands were no longer steepled, but extended in an exaggerated gesture of imploring. “We keep hearing that word: Pagudon. But we don’t even know who or what it really is. Sometimes it sounds like a place: ‘Pagudon.’ Other times it sounds like an individual: ‘the Pagudon.’ And sometimes it seems to refer to the whole Order. Which is it?”
Ancrushav almost smiled. “It can be any of those, but the root of it is the title of the head of the Order: the Pagudon. He is no longer known by his own name. He is held to have transcended that. It is also a constant reminder to him that he is responsible for the entirety of the group.”
“You keep saying ‘he’ when referring to the Pagudon. Is leadership of the order restricted to males?” Aleasha’s voice made her distaste quite plain.
“It goes beyond that; membership is restricted to males. At least, that has been the case since the Order went underground and took its current name.”
“Which comes from what?” Druadaen asked.
“The library that was the last, hidden refuge of the sorcerers: the only one that was not found when the King of Sarma betrayed them to the Annihilators.”
“Because it was so well hidden?”
“That, and because its existence was never shared with anyone outside the Order for that very reason: to protect it from the assured eventuality of betrayal. Since then, the Pagudons have been varied in origins and nature, but all possess one skill in common—and it is the only one that matters to the Order: maintaining power and mastery over others. By any and all means. Experience, social position, family: these are immaterial. In such a collective, there are no complex rules or even debates over how to select or replace or determine the legality or limit of the leader. So long as they can maintain their primacy, by whatever measures, they prove that they are the best: the Pagudon.”
Druadaen rubbed his chin. “I could foresee a Pagudon spending all his time simply protecting his position.”
Ancrushav nodded. “That is one of the tendencies that has kept the Order so small and insular for so long. Protection is inward looking. But the Order has an axiom: every Pagudon remains such until he is no longer the best one. The logic—specious or not—is that a Pagudon devoted to protecting himself also protects the Order from strife, excesses, and ambitions that it cannot afford. But if new opportunities arose and he failed to capitalize upon them, that shows that he is no longer the best leader and so, he is replaced.”
“And is that the kind of leader in charge now? One that has responded to the ‘new opportunities’ in the Broken and Last Lands?”
“More than that: he has been instrumental in creating those opportunities.”
Aleasha’s smirk was vicious. “So he is the one behind insinuating agents into the Nightfall cult that has been growing in Tharn, passing off powers of the art as priestly miracles.”
Ancrushav nodded. “Yes, that sham is his creation. On the surface, it is crafty enough, but I believe it conceals a deeper ploy.”
Aleasha looked from him to Druadaen and back again. “With you two, I suspect there will always be a ‘deeper ploy.’” She grinned as she said it.
But Ancrushav shook his horned head. “Jests aside, he has used religious crusades—and now, wars among and within nations—to obscure his even more pronounced activities in a direction that had been of no interest to Pagudon for several centuries.”
Druadaen nodded. “You mean here in the northern Godbarrows?”
Ancrushav’s horns dipped and rose. “Having walked the dark tunnels of the libraries beneath their hidden citadel, I may tell you one thing with certainty; fifteen years ago, there was not one among them who saw any advantage to be gained in the Godbarrows. The communities here do not produce coin or highly desirable goods. Nor do they produce learned youths who might make promising apprentices and eventually journeymen. And whatever old artifacts might once have been here—whether those of the Annihilators or Great Hystzos—they presume to have already been recovered by fortune-seekers.
“But recent documents found during the excavation of newly discovered library sections revealed far more about the creation and control of Changelings.”
“In which you were trained,” speculated Aleasha.
Ancrushav shrugged. “And which I also helped decipher before being sent here. Not a coincidence, I suspect.”
Druadaen smiled. “What was the nature of these new records?”
“Reports from high-ranking imperial commanders about the Changelings. But they were not field officers, and as I read further, I realized that their reports were not so much dedicated to the outcomes of battles as they were on the performance of new breeds of the Touched.”
Aleasha sat very straight. “Are you saying that Great Hystzos was using—creating—Changelings as part of their armies?”
“I cannot be sure, but the reports could certainly be read in that context. Or they could simply have been recounting what occurred when random hordes of Changelings found themselves in combat with the Annihilators. However, the Pagudon doubled the pace of excavation and decreed that further information on the process of Changing was of cardinal importance.”
Druadaen heard a hesitation in his conclusion. “And is that another reason you were sent up here: not just because you were more likely to move and survive among the Changelings, but to conduct tests upon them?”
Ancrushav’s glance at Aleasha was at once guilty and defiant. “The Pagudon’s goal was to learn how to gather existing and new ‘abominations’ into a controllable horde. My goal was simply to be sent to a place from which I could readily escape the Order. But then I arrived here and found all this.” He waved expansively at the shelves of books and beyond, toward his followers. “If Pagudon was to learn what I have about the portals, about the Changelings, and now, about the priestess’s skill”—he shook his head—“I do not know what force might be able to stop the Order, once it is armed with all that knowledge.”
Aleasha stood. “Then it is upon us to prevent that from happening.” Her chin came up. “I am very tired. I am also very hungry.”
Ancrushav stood as well. “Then you shall have a good meal and a clean bed.”
“Make it a pallet,” she corrected. “Then, in the morning, I shall contemplate how best to save this wretched world of ours.”