Talquist’s brows drew together in displeasure. “I am not trying to raise the dead, Lasarys,” he said sharply, watching the acolytes remove the beams from beneath the statue, now lying on the weighing plate. “I am merely trying to tap life that is unused—to transfer it, so to speak.” He nodded benevolently to the acolytes who were wiping their brows and who had signaled that their task was complete. “Well done, gentlemen. Thank you.” He turned to the captain of his guards and spoke loudly enough for the acolytes to hear him.
“Take these holy men into the palace, where a repast has been prepared for them. After they’ve supped, lead them to the wagons, return them to their beds at the monastery, and withdraw, that they might rest themselves after such a difficult task—all but two.” The weary acolytes bowed and followed the captain of the guard into the palace.
Talquist gestured to the soldiers as the two priests, Dominicus and Lester, came to Lasarys’s side and stood, exchanging questioning glances but otherwise still.
“Bring out the creature’s tank,” the regent ordered.
Slowly a dray cart was wheeled out from the royal stables, wrapped in canvas. The priests continued to watch as the tank was unwrapped, then shattered. From the detritus a creature was lifted, pale and sickly in shape, its flesh hanging limply from bones that appeared to be little more than cartilage.
“Sweet All-God, what is that?” Dominicus whispered to Lasarys, but the sexton silenced him by raising a hand.
The creature in the soldiers’ grasp hissed and flailed weakly, but was no match for the men in armor. They bore their struggling burden up the steps to the Scales and deposited it into the empty western weighing plate, then stretched its curved arms out and weighed them down with bags of sand. Finally, when it stopped struggling, the soldiers withdrew as well, leaving Lasarys, the two acolytes, and Talquist alone in the square, their footsteps echoing away into the emptiness. A moment later they could hear the distant clattering of cartwheels, as the wagon bearing the acolytes made its way from the cobbled streets of the city to the hillside monastery next to the sexton’s manse where they lived.
Silence returned to the streets of Jierna’sid.
The regent of Sorbold slowly mounted the steps to the ancient instrumentality, the Place of Weight, where the golden pans had weighed decisions of life and death, war and peace, the survival of nations, and the overthrow of despots for millennia, in this land and the one before it, now sleeping beneath the sea on the other side of the world.
“Lasarys,” he said softly, “unwrap the statue.”
The sexton remained frozen for a moment, then reluctantly nodded to the two acolytes. Together the three holy men gently removed the wet linen wrappings while Talquist continued to gaze at the Scales as if in a trance.
Beneath its linen coverings the statue was still warm from the heartbeat of the Earth in the Living Stone, its smooth clay flesh pulsing with a static hum. The extreme edges of it, where the shoes were carved, the rough-hewn sword in its right hand, and the tips of the mail gauntlet on its empty left hand had begun to harden into lifeless clay, but otherwise it was still damp, still multicolored clay formed into a tall man with irisless eyes, staring blindly up into the night sky, its heavy features expressionless.
Once the statue was laid bare, Talquist moved silently in front of the priests to gaze down at the enormous piece of Living Stone. He ran his hand over the massive shoulders gently, almost lovingly, his face transfixed in an excitement that bordered on holy ecstasy.
“Imagine, Lasarys,” he whispered, “imagine all that can be done here. I have been planning this since before my ascension—the first time I saw those soldiers, I knew they held the power of an entire army in each one of them! I am the keeper of the scale of the New Beginning—don’t you understand, Lasarys, these things are meant to work together! This is the key to all of the plans I have been crafting since I discovered the power of the violet scale. If the Scales can take the life essence of a useless freak, a barely alive piece of flesh, and put it into this stone soldier? If it can stand watch, alive, over my palace, unmoving but animate, it would be a wonderful guard, a fearsome deterrent to any who might try to enter in malice. And if it can move—if only it can move! It might be the perfect weapon, a stone neolith functioning completely under my command, perhaps able to understand the same primitive commands as the being whose life was sacrificed to animate it? Imagine then an army of them—every statue of Terreanfor harvested and brought to life? Not just the twenty or so in the cathedral, but the hundreds, perhaps thousands down in the City of the Dead in the crypt below? Just imagine—”
“This is heresy, m’lord,” Lasarys whispered in return. “I pray you, you do not know what you are doing. The properties of Living Stone are all but unknown to us. It is a gift of the Creator, a primordial element, a rare treasure—”
“Get out of the way, Lasarys,” Talquist said impatiently, shoving the sexton aside and crossing to the other plate where the pale, limp form of the freak he had purchased that evening was outstretched.
“Good evening, Faron,” he said pleasantly, watching the recognition come into the creature’s eyes. “Can you understand me?”
The fish-boy’s heavily veined eyelids closed over its milky eyeballs, as if it were squinting, but it did not otherwise respond.
As I thought, Talquist noted. Only animal-level intelligence. Like a dog, it can respond to its name, perhaps simple commands. Good.
He examined the heavy layers of skin that made wrinkled folds around the creature’s stomach. Tucked within them were three tips of hard, multicolored material, dried with blood from the creature.
“This must be painful,” he said soothingly to the freak on the plate in front of him, gently running a finger over the top of the skinfold. “Allow me to hold on to them for you.”
He carefully lifted the flap of skin and slid out the first tip; as he expected, it was a scale much like his own, the same gray hue but with a flash of yellow as it slid forth from the creature’s belly. Faron moaned in agony, but Talquist was not deterred; he continued to remove both of the other scales, all part of the same original set, ignoring the trembling of the creature from which they had come. He held them up to the light of the torches in the square.
The tattered ovals were of the same multihued gray that his prized scale was, scored with tiny, geometric patterns like the hide of a reptile. When they caught the firelight they gleamed prismatically, as if all the colors of the spectrum were contained within them, yet each had a dominant hue; one yellow, one red, and one a dark blue the color of indigo blossoms. Each bore a crude etching on it, runes in a language, like his own scale, that he could not read.
Years before he had translated the writing on the violet scale by finding a key to the language, the tongue of the Ancient Seren race, in the dusty museum of Haguefort, the ancestral home of Stephen Navarne, the Cymrian historian. He had also found a sketch of his own scale. It was in an old relic, the fragment of a tome entitled The Book of All Human Knowledge that had been rescued from the sea. Most of the book had been destroyed by the salt water, but in the few pages that remained intact, he had read of a deck of cards owned by a Seren seer named Sharra, and had come to believe that his scale was part of the deck. It was said that, in the hands of someone possessed of Firstborn blood, blood of a race that had descended from one of the primordial elements, the scales had power, power to see things the eye could not see, to heal wounds that could not otherwise be healed, to bring about change that otherwise would never happen.
Power unimaginable.