No, then it’ll be my head, Vash thought gloomily. He stared at a weeping boy and wished he could reach through the bars and hit the child to make it stop crying. And even if I am lucky and manage to keep them alive for whatever madness he plans, what next? What next, Pinimmon?
The autarch’s parade of strange whims continued. They had started off from Hierosol in a single ship, but many more ships from the Xixian navy had caught up and joined them during the voyage, all loaded with soldiers. Now, after the fleet had skirted Brenland and passed through the Connord Straits, they landed in a shallow bay in the wild lands along the eastern border of Helmingsea. This was as much of a surprise to Pinimmon Vash as the order to capture one hundred children. He was increasingly convinced that his master was deliberately leaving him in the dark about the most important parts of this weird venture.
Stranger still, a troop of the autarch’s fierce White Hound soldiers and their horses now went ashore in boats. They rode off west into the forest and had not returned when the autarch told the captain to weigh anchor. The fleet was still many leagues from Southmarch, their apparent destination, so Vash could not even guess at what mission the White Hounds had been left behind to fulfill.
“Let us be honest with each other, Olin,” Sulepis said, “as men of learning and brother monarchs, if nothing else.” Now that they were at sea again, sweeping along the coast toward their destination, the autarch was in an expansive mood. He was standing so near the railing—and the condemned northern king—that Vash could almost feel the anxiety of his Leopard bodyguards, who were watching the situation with the fixed, predatory stares of their namesakes. “Most of what we are told of the gods by priests, by the sacred books, is nonsense,” he continued. “These are tales for children.”
“Perhaps that is true for the tales of your god,” Olin said stiffly, “but that does not mean I so lightly throw away the wisdom of our church ...”
“So you believe everything your Book of the Trigon tells you? About women turned to lizards for spurning the gods’ advances? About Volos Longbeard drinking the ocean?”
“The intentions of gods are not for us to judge, nor what they can accomplish if they choose.”
“Ah, yes. On this we are agreed, King Olin.” The autarch smiled. “You do not find the subject interesting? Then let me speak of more specific things. Your family has a certain invisible… deformity. A stain, as it were. I think you know what I mean.”
Olin was clearly furious but he kept his voice even. “Stain? There is no stain on the Eddons. Just because you have the power to kill me, sir, does not mean you have the right to insult my family and my blood. We were kings in Connord before we came to the March Kingdoms, and we were chieftains before we were kings.”
The autarch looked amused. “No stain, is it? Not of character or of body? Very well, then, let me tell you a little of what I have learned. If you still say I am wrong when I’ve finished—why, on my oath, I might even apologize. That would be entertaining, wouldn’t it, Vash?”
The paramount minister had no idea what Sulepis wanted him to say, but his master was clearly waiting for an answer. “Very entertaining, Golden One. But astonishingly unlikely.”
“But let me tell you a little of my own journey first, Olin. Perhaps that will give you some idea of what I mean. You will be interested too, Lord Vash. No one else in all Xis has heard this tale, except for Panhyssir.”
His rival’s name was like a hot coal dropped down his collar, but Vash did his best to smile and look gratified. At least the high priest was elsewhere; otherwise, the humiliation would have been even more excruciating. “I listen eagerly for whatever wisdom my lord wishes to share.”
“Of course you do.” Sulepis seemed to be enjoying himself: his long-boned face kept creasing in wide, crocodilian smiles and his unusual eyes seemed even more lively than usual. “Of course you do.
“I have know that I was not as other children since I was very young. Not simply that I was the son of an autarch, because I was raised with dozens of others who could claim the same thing. But ever since I was a small boy I have heard and seen things that others could not see. After a while I came to realize that I, of all my brothers, could actually sense the presence of the gods themselves. Truly, every autarch claims to hear the speech of the gods, but I could tell that even for my father Parnad these were empty words.
“Not so for me.
“But here was a strange thing! All of the other royal sons and I were the children of the god-on-earth—yet only I could sense the presence of the gods! Stranger still, I had no greater power than this one small gift. The gods had given me no greater strength than other mortals, no longer life, nothing! And clearly the same was true of my father as well, and all his other heirs. The autarch of Xis was nothing but an ordinary man! His blood was ordinary blood. All that we had been taught was a lie, but only I had the courage to acknowledge it.”
Vash had never heard so much blasphemy spoken—and it was being spoken by the autarch himself! What did that mean? How was he supposed to react? Indifferent as he largely was to religion, except insofar as it was the steady heartbeat of Xixian court etiquette, still Vash could not help cringing, wondering if any moment the great god himself might not strike them all down with his fiery rays. Clearly, every worry he had entertained about the autarch’s sanity had been justified!
“So I took it upon myself to learn more about it,” Sulepis continued, “both about the blood of the gods and the history of my own family.
“At first I spent my days exhausting the great libraries of the Orchard Palace. I learned that before my ancestors swept out of the desert to take the throne of Xis the city had been ruled by other families who claimed kinship with other gods. The farther back I went, the more these ancestors were described as being close to godlike themselves. Was this because they were closer to their godly ancestors than we moderns are, so that the holy blood ran thicker in their veins? Or had the stories around them simply grown over the years? What if these ancient monarchs, self-proclaimed descendants of Argal or Xergal, had been no less mortal than the dull creatures being raised around me in the palace—no less mortal than my father? Parnad might be fierce and cunning, but I had long since learned that he had no wit for and no interest in matters of religion and philosophy.
“Some of the priests recognized in me what they thought of as a kindred spirit. They were wrong, of course—I have never been interested in esoteric knowledge simply for its own sake. A single mortal lifetime is too short for such untrammeled, undisciplined study. I had only one thought in mind. Without the truth I had no tool, and without a tool I could not reshape the world into something I liked better.
“In any case, the library priests began to tell me of books they had heard of but never read—for the first time I came to understand that there were writings that the libraries of the Orchard Palace did not possess, writings in languages other than our own, some of which had not even been translated into Xixian! Do you wonder why my Hierosoline is so good, King Olin? Now you know. I learned it so that I could read what the ancient scholars of the north had to say about the gods and their doings. Phayallos, Kofas of Mindan, Rhantys—especially Rhantys—I read them all, and searched for the forbidden books of the southern continent as well. I finally located a copy of Annals of the War in Heaven in a temple near Yist, where my several-times-great-grandfather had destroyed the last of the fairy cities in our land.”