Even before the Prince’s death, it had been a season of curious omens and bewildering portents.
Unexpected manifestations appeared throughout the city and across the island kingdom: ghosts and phantom music and stranger things besides. The three acolytes who had gone into seclusion many weeks before were seen in public for the first time, their transformation complete. They emerged white-haired, tallow-faced, garbed in priestly scarlet. It had been twenty years since the Empress last had twelve Furiádhin to do her bidding, and the fact that they were restored to their original numbers was one even the most devout found somehow disconcerting.
But on the tenth day, Ouriána began to recover, her very natural bereavement giving way to a vast irritation at what she was beginning to regard as a monstrous inconvenience.
“Two sons dead. Guindeluc and Cuillioc gone, and only that fool Meriasec remaining,” she said to Noz, her Lord Chancellor. The grotesque little hunchback had known and served her in the days of her relatively obscure youth—when she was not even a king’s daughter, but only a royal niece waiting to be displaced in the succession by male cousins as yet unborn—and she occasionally confided to him things she would never have spoken in public. It was no part of her policy to acknowledge that sons of hers might have proved unsatisfactory—though acknowledged or not, everyone always knew.
As for Meriasec, if Cuillioc had been but a pale copy of his brilliant, dazzling older brother, her youngest son was even less than that. A bully with a streak of cowardice, he was spineless and compliant in the presence of his mother. Meriasec’s servility, meant to please her, had just the opposite effect, and Cuillioc’s questioning mind, his struggles to reconcile his somewhat misguided principles with his obedience to her, had been, she realized belatedly, much more to her taste. His loyalty, so painfully genuine, meant something, and now that Cuillioc was gone, she discovered in him something irreplaceable.
In her rage and confusion she began to pace through the palace. Such was the force of her personality that when she was angry, her presence filled a room until all those present felt crushed by it. Waiting women blanched at the sight of her; the young squires and pages, suddenly discovering they were needed elsewhere, went scurrying off to unnamed duties on the other side of the palace; and Prince Meriasec, with rare discretion, absented himself altogether.
But on the eleventh day she put her three sons, living and dead, from her mind and turned her green-eyed basilisk’s gaze elsewhere.
“How can it be, with five hundred of the city guard and half that many spies scouring the city for a single drunken juggler, the man nevertheless continues to elude them?” She turned her baleful regard on the six red-robed priests she had summoned to one of her private chambers.
“It is possible that he is no longer in the city,” said six-fingered Vitré tentatively. He and his companions smelled strongly of smoke, and there was a subtler odor about them of religious fervor and superstition.
Stains of a darker crimson marred the hems of their robes and their hanging sleeves, for though Ouriána had put aside her grief, the official period of mourning was to last a fortnight and the sacrifices continued.
“Possible that he left before the search for him even began.”
“If that is so,” she replied ominously, “the sorcerers and seers you have no doubt employed to look for him should have learned at least that much by now.”
Vitré and his companions shifted uneasily. “There has been an—unforeseen difficulty,” he said. “It appears that Maelor, as he was known in the city, was not the name he was given at birth. Even he does not seem to have known his true one, and you will appreciate the difficulty of casting a seeking spell where the name is unknown.”
Ouriána ground her teeth. “The task is beneath me, but I am beginning to think if I want the man found I will have to look for him myself. His possessions, if he had any, whatever hovel he lived in—these things were searched thoroughly for any clue to his whereabouts?”
“Searched and scryed by your own seers. And there is this.” Vitré took a hesitant step forward, knelt at the Empress’s feet, and offered her a worn and dirty rag of fabric. “A scrap of the blanket he slept in, in case you might wish…”
Ouriána wrapped her long, smooth fingers around the threadbare bit of cloth. Her nostrils flared, as though taking some scent. “He was not much of a magician, if he knew no better than to leave something so personal behind.”
Scioleann cleared his throat. “They say the old man had a habit of misplacing more than his name, and especially whatever knowledge of magic he once possessed. No one seems to know whether or not he was ever a true adept, although the spells he performed that day in the marketplace—” A slicing movement of her hand chopped the sentence short.
“His spells that day would argue there is more to the man than anyone suspected, yes.” As her glance moved from one face to the next, each of the priests in turn had the uncomfortable sensation that there was not nearly enough air in the room. “And the disruption he caused has not yet dissipated. Quite the opposite. Noz tells me that his spies hear far too many whispers of former days and the Old Religion.
These things will not be allowed to continue.”
The Furiádhin prostrated themselves at her feet, signifying their obedience.
In the palace at Apharos there was a chamber at the top of the highest and most isolated of the nine towers, where even Ouriána’s priests were never permitted to go. To enter, it was necessary to pass seven stout doors, locked and sealed and bespelled, which required seven different keys, and seven different names, and seven different charms to open.
In that many-sided room full of strange devices, she kept the greatest treasure of her house and lineage—which in former days, before her apotheosis, had also been the source of their temporal power—the Talir en Nydra, the pearl-grey Dragonstones. They rested, each one in an intricately worked silver stand, directly in front of the twelve windows. On the tiled floor was a map of the known world with a great lurid stain at the center, the mark of Ouriána’s most ambitious spell-casting, when she broke the Thäerian fleet twenty years ago and crippled her own power for many seasons in doing so.
The place reeked of magic; the scent was so strong that even she, who was accustomed to the atmosphere, detected it immediately on entering. Though the room was open to the air, no breeze ever freshened it; the miasma was always there. Sometimes, stray tendrils would drift down to the nearest houses, or to the ships anchored in the bay, causing the inhabitants to dream strange dreams or experience vague, irrational fears.
As soon as she closed the last door behind her, locking it with a curiously constructed key like a tiny fingerbone, Ouriána moved purposefully toward the largest of the stones. They were not quite spherical, and when not in use, the Talir en Nydra appeared dull and opaque. But as soon as she placed her hands on one of them the stone would begin to glow with uncanny lights and became translucent, while a well of darkness appeared at the center. There was peril in gazing too deep, but a strong mind and a resolute will could conjure images in the heart of the well. Then, if that was her desire, she could see the inner fires of the earth, or the upper reaches of the air where the stars shone even in daytime; she could see kingdoms so far distant that their names, even the bare rumor of their existence, had never reached Phaôrax.