Chapter 7

Yalet

The Empire of Nejim

The Noble District of Tijar

Anoth stepped out of his conveyance pattern and into the familiar surroundings of his personal suite, high up in the towers of the palace of Tijar.  He took a deep breath, taking the time to brush bits of ash from his sleeves.  He had traveled to Mount Thayl by slow, mortal means, but his return trip was made nearly instantly using the fiery portal.  Such conveyance patterns were difficult to create, and going through one would be fatal to any mortal, but the effort and resulting exhaustion were worth it.  Now that he was home, his only concern was for his master.

Anoth strode swiftly to the other side of his bedroom.  He held the Orb above the basin stand, examining it.  His master’s vessel was filthy—caked in earth so thick and hard that he could only see glints of the blue-gray labradorite hidden beneath.  He filled the washbasin with water from a nearby ewer and dipped the Orb beneath its surface.  He dug his nails into the softening grime, breaking off bits here and there and turning the water into a slurry of filth.

One by one, glyphs began to appear on the stone, revealing a surface that was polished and smooth to the touch.  Only when every grain of grit was removed did Anoth finally smile, satisfied.

He dried the Orb with a towel and brought it to the center of the room, where he knelt reverently on the floor.  It had been nine hundred years since he had lost the Orb, and his master, Verahi, within it.  Before that, Verahi had been his only confidant and friend for several centuries.  They were both exiles from their original home, considered oath-breakers and criminals of the worst kind.  But they knew better, and Anoth had long wished for the day when he and Verahi would be reunited.

“Master, can you hear me?”  Anoth raised the Orb a little, allowing the sunlight shining through the windows to bathe its surface.  The Orb, however, remained lifeless.

Anoth shook his head.  The Orb had gone too long without refined matter to energize it.  He turned the shining ball around in his hands.  Unlike mortal bodies, his body was composed of refined matter, and it emanated from him perpetually.  Because the Orb served as a prison, Verahi had relied on close contact with Anoth to maintain consciousness, but now, nothing stirred.

Anoth grimaced.  Usually it only took a touch to energize the Orb.  Had it been dormant for so long that Verahi couldn’t be revived?  Anoth brought the Orb up to his face, shifting into the third degree of focus and squinting until he could finally make out a dull but impossibly dense cluster of thought matter at the center of the Orb.  Perhaps it needed a catalyst to wake.

Anoth lowered the Orb and shifted to the first degree of focus.  He began gathering shadow primal matter in his free hand and forced loose particles of light matter into close proximity until the mixture crackled audibly.  He pressed the tight pattern into the Orb, which caused it to glow intensely and emit waves of heat that swept back his hair and charred his sleeves.  When the glow stopped increasing in intensity, he ceased his injection and held his breath.

The Orb flickered for a moment, but then its brightness faded slowly until it went completely dark and lifeless.

Anoth exhaled and hung his head.  He had found the Orb, but had time eroded the delicate mechanisms that made it work?  Had Naltena sabotaged it as her final act?

Just as Anoth was ready to give up and place the Orb onto his mantle, it suddenly brightened of its own accord, causing him to fall back on his heels.

Verahi’s voice reverberated softly from the Orb.  “Anoth?”

Anoth laughed joyously.  “Master!”  He lifted the Orb up once again, but faltered as his arms suddenly weakened, numbness beginning to creep through his entire body.  Verahi was leeching energy from him through his hands.  He resisted the urge to drop the Orb; he would allow Verahi to take whatever he wished.

Verahi spoke again from the Orb, a little louder this time.  “The last thing I recall is Naltena’s voice.  But I cannot sense her here.”  The light within the Orb swirled and buzzed, shifting the stone’s color from gray to green.

“Naltena hid you from me.  She claimed to be protecting me from you.  She said your influence would lead to—”

“Lies!”  The Orb became hot in response.  “You were wise not to have listened to her.  Our enemies rely on such fabrications to separate us from our goals, and from each other.  They know that they cannot defeat us when we are united in purpose.”

“Yes,” Anoth agreed.

“You say I was hidden from you.  How long was I hidden?”

“Nine hundred years,” Anoth answered hesitantly.

The Orb darkened a little, its temperature rapidly decreasing.  “How is it that I was lost for nine hundred years?  Where was I hidden that you could not find me?”

“Naltena wrested you away from me and conveyed you directly into Mount Thayl, burying you deep in the mountain,” Anoth responded.  “By the time I reached the mountain, I was no longer able to sense your psyche, nor could I see it or the orb itself in any degree of focus.  I couldn’t use ormé to level the mountain, risking damage to the Orb that would leave you trapped forever.  So I used Yalet’s native beshtats and Naltite slaves we stole from Zaidna to excavate the mountain inch by inch in order to find you.  That is why it took so long.”

Verahi was quiet for a moment, the light shining through the labradorite fading to a flicker.  “Your diligence is appreciated,” Verahi finally acknowledged.  The stone grew slightly warm again, and Anoth felt the blood rush back into his forearms.  “What was done to punish Naltena?  Surely, she is not unscathed.”

“She was punished, enough to satisfy even you, Master.  I beat and stabbed her until she finally confessed to where she conveyed you, and then I left her body to be torn apart by the hadirs until her psyche was left naked and helpless.  They could not consume her psyche, of course, but I allowed them to taste it.”  Anoth smiled sadistically at the memory.

“Well,” Verahi murmured with some satisfaction.  “Then you’ve as good as killed her.”

Anoth smirked.  “Yes.  If a shred of her psyche somehow remains after all this time, it is blind and utterly lost.”

The Orb vibrated uncertainly.  “This is a dangerous victory.  Are the others aware of Naltena’s fate?  This act would certainly justify intervention.”

Anoth frowned.  Nine hundred years was not a particularly long time to his people, but the retaliation he expected had never come, except that the old forest on the other side of the parting was all of a sudden completely refined.  It could have been done as an acknowledgment of his victory, but more than likely it was a warning or threat.  “I don’t know how much they know of it.  I have generally kept the oaths of this world since we arrived.”

Verahi hissed.  “You delude yourself.  Of course they know every detail.  They don’t want to admit to such a loss, so they do nothing.  They are simply waiting for you to further overstep your bounds before taking greater action of their own.  We will be fine if we remain careful.” Verahi paused, the Orb thrumming softly.  “Tell me, now that the whole of Zaidna is under your control, do you have a single emperor ruling over it or do you reign from here in Yalet?”

Any pride Anoth felt for his victory over Naltena was snuffed out in an instant.  For the first six hundred years after Verahi’s loss, Anoth had single-mindedly searched for the Orb at the expense of all other responsibilities.  The beshtats he had enslaved proved to be inefficient and accident-prone while excavating for the Orb, and the hadirs had refused to stoop to manual labor.  It was only when the hadirs’ numbers grew to the point that they became restless and difficult to feed that Anoth decided to send them beyond the parting to pillage Zaidna for fresh psyches to consume and suitable slaves to help chisel at the mountain.  He had hoped that they would have found the Orb quickly after that, and that he and Verahi could conquer Zaidna together.  But nine hundred years had passed, and he had little to show for it.

“You hesitate,” Verahi observed as the Orb flashed white.  “Surely, without Naltena’s protection, all of Zaidna has fallen into your hands.”

Anoth averted his gaze, even though he knew Verahi could not see him.  “No, Master, not exactly.  Even with Naltena dead, there is always opposition, as you know.”

Verahi was silent for a moment.  “Then surely at least one of the Naltite empires is under your control.  Judath, where the parting lies, perhaps?  This would have greatly increased our numbers.”

Anoth shut his eyes, ashamed.  “Judath is still under the control of a Naltite emperor, as are the others.”

“Even with a host of hadirs and beshtat thralls at your command?”

“. . . We have also not yet gained control over all of the beshtat lands.  As always, they are—protected.”

“You don’t even have Yalet fully under control?  But how can this be?  You have hadirs, you have slaves, and yet the Naltites and beshtats remain free?  What have you been doing these nine hundred years?”

Anoth thinned his lips, choosing silence over self-incrimination.

“You’re hiding something from me.”  Verahi’s tone was rigidly stern.  “Show me.”

Anoth knew all too well what “showing” would involve.  “Please, Master, that isn’t necessary!  Let me explain.  The hadirs—they go beyond the parting and—”

The Orb, however, was uninterested in any explanation, becoming red hot in Anoth’s palm.  “Show me.  Now!”

Anoth swallowed and slowly held the Orb up to his face.  He shifted into the third degree of focus.  Where there had been an inert mass at its center just minutes before, there was now an overflowing ball of thought matter, with long tendrils spilling from his master’s psyche.  He reluctantly willed his own thoughts forward, weaving the threads into Verahi’s, intentionally knotting and tangling them together into a rough silver rope.

“Good,” Verahi muttered, and Anoth’s vision was immediately obliterated into chaos.  Verahi began digging into Anoth’s memories, uprooting and discarding them with abandon.  Flashes of Anoth’s past came into view, not as living, moving scenes, but rather as fragments of images, where there was only an instant to process each of them.

Anoth tried feebly to direct Verahi away from more sensitive memories.  An old image of Naltena flared up, in which she was weaving the pattern that ultimately tore the Orb from his hands, before she conveyed it into the depths of Mount Thayl.  He then saw his own hands strike Naltena down as the hadirs rallied all around him.

Verahi discarded this memory for another, and Anoth found himself on Mount Thayl for the first time out of thousands as he hunted for the Orb.  He watched as he used ormé to pull giant mounds of earth from the surface of the mountain, then frantically searching through the rubble, terrified that he might have damaged the Orb in his zeal.  He had quickly realized that he would not be able to locate it on his own and would need to enlist his followers to excavate using more primitive methods.

Silent moments passed, but Anoth knew they represented years.  Newly transformed hadirs dotted the face of Mount Thayl, with Anoth barking orders.  But the hadirs were lazy and disobedient, surreptitiously using ormé as a shortcut to lay waste to the mountainside whenever Anoth wasn’t looking.

“I see you’ve made even more of your abominations,” Verahi hissed with disapproval.

“They bring unique challenges,” Anoth acknowledged, “but they are loyal and eternally indebted to me.  They may have failed as excavators, but they managed to subjugate many beshtat slaves as replacements.”  He gently drew out memories of his hadirs as they gathered and crossed over the borders of Nejim to conquer the beshtats’ capital city.

Verahi grunted, pushing past those memories and into images of scores of beshtat slaves wilting and dying on Mount Thayl as they toiled in the hot sun.  Their slave master hadirs circled in the periphery, waiting for their chance to feast on the psyches of the near-dead, then burning beshtat bodies by the heapful at the base of the mountain.  “What was the point of collecting these vermin?  Would their deaths at the hands of the hadirs not bring frequent interference?”

Anoth swallowed nervously, shifting to memories of the remaining beshtats largely being put to work serving the Anotites in the capital, and the hadirs being gathered once again, this time to pass through the parting into Zaidna.  Anoth had traveled with the hadirs during the early decades of these raids, watching as they blitzed unsuspecting coastal towns, feasting on the weak and bringing back worthy Naltite slaves.  The hadirs took great pleasure in carving ormé-blocking glyphs directly into the slaves’ flesh, after which all the males were taken directly to Mount Thayl.

The Orb hummed in contemplation.  “Using Naltite slaves to excavate the mountain may have been the correct plan in the end,” Verahi conceded.  “Very little risk to our people, proper use of glyphs to suppress the Naltites’ ormé, and no oath-breaking in Yalet that would warrant retaliation.”

Anoth nodded eagerly, hoping that Verahi wouldn’t look any further into the more sordid details of how the Orb was found.

“What is to be done with the hadirs now that their task is complete?” Verahi asked, sifting through more memories of the hadirs.  “I see that their numbers lessened with every raid.  None of the Naltite villagers would be able to cause any harm to a hadir in combat, so it is curious that they would simply disappear.  And yet their numbers are still too high here to have them idle for long.  I assume you have no plans to create more?”

“I admit I may have been less selective when choosing subjects at first.  But I intend on converting only the most faithful and qualified in the future.”

“I question your judgment,” Verahi admonished, drawing up a mosaic of related images.  “Look at the fruits of your work.  These hadirs served you well as protectors, but you have allowed them to influence your courts.  They disregard my laws and cause our people to follow their bad examples with impunity.”

“But Master, I allow them to participate in the government so that they can enforce your laws.  There certainly have been some hadirs who have taken advantage of those privileges, but I have dealt with them in—”

“I am not a fool,” Verahi interrupted, pulling up a torrent of memories as if from a cascading scroll.  “How do your enforcers justify the nightly indulgence of orgies in their bathhouses?  And beyond these whoredoms, they flout my teachings by despoiling the purity of the mortals, especially that of the innocent.”

Anoth remained silent, his mind frozen in fear.