Heldo-Bah stands gazing toward the trees and undergrowth through which the panther and the sorcerer Caliphestros have disappeared: for “sorcerer” he must be, thinks the forager, if he not only survived the Halap-stahla, but lives with the most dangerous animal in the Wood! Only after several moments have passed without Heldo-Bah’s wide, amazed eyes catching any further movement does he dare even murmur, in his sourest tone:
“Perfection …” But Heldo-Bah’s sarcasm lacks its usual conviction. “Most supreme perfection!” he tries again; and then (although he knows he could offer that beast nothing approaching a fight) he clutches his gutting blade at the ready as he dashes back east, toward the camp that he made with Keera and her brother a few hours earlier.
“Let that fool Veloc explain this to me!” Heldo-Bah says aloud, when he deems such volume safe. “The sorcerer lives — but with the most feared panther in Davon Wood, a creature that most think a phantasm! Oh, this has been well worth three days’ run — we can’t even approach him, with that monster in his thrall!”
More astounded and merely senseless expressions of bewilderment at the ongoing perversity of his life echo about Heldo-Bah, as he runs — and yet his last statement was nothing if not true:
Although he does not yet know it, the strange vision he has witnessed has been more than worth his own and his friends’ desperate dash through Davon Wood over the last several days and nights …
Part Two:
The Riddle of Water, Fire, and Stone
It is my hope that you, among all my friends and colleagues, will understand why I contemplate not only publishing this tale, but associating my name with it. It is not simply that, even as I write, grievous abuses of Opportunity (indeed, such Opportunity as History rarely offers to any man or state twice) are being committed by a collection of destructive dreamers, self-serving knaves, and — worst of the lot! — viciously yet brilliantly manipulative men, all of whom now pose as the legitimate legislature† of one of our mightiest and most ancient European realms [France]; no, equally tragic are the streams of exiles of every description that are flowing out of that state in all directions. Many have come here, to Lausanne: and I can assure you that they are learning the same lesson with which the ruling and mercantile classes of Broken were confronted, and upon which you have expatiated so sagely in your Reflections: that wise men, when forced to take up arms against evils that masquerade as “popular” passions, must be careful also to redress such complaints as prove to represent true grievances. Failure to do so will most assuredly lend plausibility to the most absurd and violent rants of the basest scoundrels; indeed, it is by way of this last consideration that we arrive at perhaps the most perplexing philosophical question put by this tale:
How could a human society reach the relative superiority and sophistication evidenced in the great kingdom of Broken, and then, because of a stubbornly and ultimately cataclysmic unwillingness to adapt its religious and political customs to changing realities, disappear so utterly that a millennium would pass before the sole surviving account of its existence would again find eyes and ears capable of understanding it? We are, at this very moment, witnessing the reassertion of this timeless quandary; and while, ten centuries ago, there may have been little or no way of foretelling the horrors to which the unyielding yet flawed rites, dictums, and standards of those who held ultimate power in Broken might lead, we, by virtue of histories and legends such as this one, ought to know far better — and yet there is every sign that WE DO NOT!
— EDWARD GIBBON TO EDMUND BURKE,
November 3, 1790
I:
Water
{i:}
“And what are your feelings today, Sentek?” asks Visimar, as he brings his mare to a halt alongside Sixt Arnem, who is seated atop the great grey stallion known as the Ox, reviewing the fitness of the Talons, as they pass along the Daurawah Road, leading east from the base of Broken’s mountain toward the great port. Having had no time to accustom himself to command of his kingdom’s entire army before being ordered to destroy the Bane, Arnem is glad to be at his familiar post as commander of this elite legion. Only the endless questions with which Visimar has confronted him since they departed Broken have disturbed his thoughts; for they are of such a nature that the sentek finds it difficult — even, at times, impossible — to give forthright answers. He has tried every way he knows to distract Visimar: he has even told him the details of the attempted poisoning of the God-King. But all to no avail; for it seems that Visimar’s knowledge of that subject, too, somehow exceeds his own.
“Today?” the sentek finally concedes, looking at the bright blue sky that continues to be dominated by a peculiarly hot sun. It is a sky that would rouse little interest in high summer; but during the height of spring, it is unsettling. “Today is no different, old man. This strange heat bodes ill for our undertaking. I should think little of it, had the past winter been a mild one — but such harsh cold has not visited Broken since the winter of the Varisian war. Indeed, we had killing frosts well into early spring. Yet you know all this, Visimar. So, tell me — how can such heat come so early in the year?”
Although evasive, the sentek’s reply is relevant to the business at hand: for on this, the second morning of the expedition’s steady march toward the port of Daurawah, the sun’s continued hammering of the farming dales of central Broken is unobstructed by even the suggestion of a cloud. The sentek (setting, as always, an example) wears his lightest suit of leather armor beneath a wine-red cloak of cotton, not wool, and forgoes either steel cuirass† or shirt of chain mail, ordinarily the prudent uniform of the Talons in the field. But the spring morning is too warm for such precautions, and the Talons are still at least two days’ march from the Cat’s Paw and the Bane army — two days that were to have been used to find forage for their horses and supplies for the men in the towns at the rich heart of the kingdom. Arnem does not think his command in true danger of anything more than a skirmish with raiding Bane Outragers, as yet; but his mind is vexed, by the strange weather as well as by the odd gloom of the towns through which the Talons have thus far passed.
There the soldiers have been greeted, not with the gratitude a prosperous people owe their defenders, but with the sullen antagonism (or even open hostility) that a mistreated populace feels for troops who require more food and forage than the townspeople seem able to offer. Arnem, aided by Visimar, has begun to see that the cause of these unhappy confrontations is not ill will toward the soldiers themselves, but resentment of Arnem’s masters in Broken. The anxiety that has crept into the hearts of subjects who have always composed the most secure communities in the kingdom has also meant that these same subjects now angrily refuse to trade the valuable fruits of their various labors in the busy markets of Broken: finding prices for their goods in the great city impossibly low, of late, they are instead hoarding their supplies, not only of grain and other foods, but of fabrics and the handiwork of craftsmen other than weavers, solely for their own use — despite the considerable and even dangerous loss of profit that they will thereby suffer.
Yet there have been no widespread crop failures or shortages of other kinds such as would explain this bitterness among the kingdom’s prosperous weavers, millers, fishermen, and freehold and tenant farmers, the last of whom till Broken’s rich soil for the great landowning families of the mountain city’s fashionable First District. Nor has there been, according to the priests who maintain each town’s small temple, any faltering in observance of the basic Kafran tenet that devout living, combined with hard labor, will produce bounteous harvests, rich profits, and the robust health of physical beauty: all principle signs of the golden god’s favor. Instead, popular anger seems fixed, first, upon those foreign raiders from the North, now turned “men of commerce,” who bring plundered stores of goods in their longships to Daurawah, and second on those agents of uncertain employ who purchase and transport such wares up the mountain to Broken, that they may be sold again for far less than Broken’s own farmers, weavers, and artisans can afford to ask for their goods. It is because of this that the people of the provinces are withholding the fruits of their own labor, and surviving by bartering them locally; and the worry occasioned by this fact, in turn, causes Arnem to sigh at Visimar’s repeated desire to talk of what the sentek calls “irrelevant events from the past”: