Chương 121: Chapter 114

Caius Drenn, Saint of the Vanguard of the Priesthood of the Twelve Sanctum Primaris The feed had been running for six minutes when I turned it off. It was a projection of the Ascendant Ball at the Dominion of Vera estate of Mirefall, a substantial yearly political event for the Western Bloc and for Vera in particular. This year's gala mattered more than most, because it was rumored to finalize an alliance between Vera and Ava against the Dominion of Atillia.

The three Dominions were sliding toward war, and this was the chance to cement a bond between two heavy hitters of the Western Bloc. I knew all this. It was not exactly a secret. The intelligence arm of the Solaran Church, the Office of Sacred Observance, or OSO, had briefed us on all of it. We knew what was supposed to happen. It did not much concern the church, so we made no plans to intervene. Other people, it turned out, had other plans. What was supposed to happen did not happen.

Reading between the lines, if there had been no intervention, it could have gone very badly. On loop, I watched the Ghost of the Wastes single-handedly stop one of the most blatant geopolitical moves I had ever seen. It looked like quite the party. Still, in a corner of my mind I did not visit often, I did not like how Princess Talena's eyes followed the mercenary. I tapped several Technica mechanisms and watched the World Tree Lattice interface fold back into the crystal array above my desk.

The room returned to stone walls, high ceilings, the kind of quiet the basilica produced when the evening bells had finished and the city of Vorreth beyond our walls had not yet begun its night noise. Through the east-facing window, the last light was doing something with the rooftops. I watched it without seeing it. Then I went to the window properly and looked out. The basilica complex of Sanctum Primaris sat on the western hill, pristine.

Set in the heart of the City of Vorreth in the Dominion of Vascari, the church and the Vascari were so intertwined through history that it was hard to pull them apart, though that did not matter. Geopolitically they stood almost as far apart as the Eastern and Western Blocs themselves. The Emperor against the Luminary, one fighting for material possession, the other for spiritual dominance. It had been this way for more than five hundred years. None of that mattered to me.

Sanctum Primaris was built almost a thousand years ago to be the beaming light of understanding the Higher Ones had placed to lead the people of the Upper, Middle, and Lower Planes to absolution and salvation. We even kept ministries in the Secondary Planes and the Wastes. Supposedly there had been a time when the Dominion of Vascari and the church stood completely united, spiritually and politically both, a national and spiritual powerhouse.

As the story goes, in that unity the City of Vorreth and Sanctum Primaris existed with almost no border between them, the light and beauty of the basilica open to all while the city welcomed any and all comers, regardless of race, religion, or political affiliation. Then came the dark times and the schism, again as the story goes. Historical records from that period are hard to come by. Now everything was different, built on a history I was not entirely sure had happened as it was told. Conspiracy, perhaps.

The Emperor's advisors were forever hunting a way to fold the church back into their machine. Could this whole history be propaganda from the Emperor of the Vascari? Probably. The Luminari faith had grown up here in the Dominion of Vascari, and the Vascari people carried a strong national identity, but the Solaran Church, and the head of it, the Luminary, was a different beast, beholden to no single king or emperor.

In my humble opinion, the Vascari and their emperor and their Primum Oritaeum, which he used to govern his empire across Dominions in parts of the Western, Eastern, and Northern Blocs, made the whole thing up to appeal to the Luminary. He wanted the power the Luminary represented. He wanted the Vascari and the church recombined. That would never happen. I had met the Luminary many times, and he was far beyond that. I moved to get a full view of the evening's illumination settling in.

The Twelve held fine placement and finer views within the basilica, built like a starfish with a bulbous cathedral at its middle. Five wings shot out from the center. Four housed the Twelve, three Saints to a wing, each Saint with a household, their staff and concubines and wives and husbands and children. The fifth, pointing due north toward the Monterina Sea, belonged to the Luminary, his private guard, and the cardinals who attended him. Even young as I was, my rooms sat on the top floor of our wing.

From the Wing of the Vanguard I could see the full sweep of it, the great dome catching the last of the light and throwing it back gold, the colonnaded walkways running from the main structure toward the outer walls, the inner gardens the senior seats tended with the competitive attention people who have nothing to prove pour into things that do not matter.

I could see the neighboring wing too, three more of the Twelve housed there when they were not on missions, its lights and golden filigree a pocket of glow all its own. Below the complex walls, the city of Vorreth ran in every direction, dense and loud and old, built on the bones of something older. Markets still open, street traffic still moving.

In the distance the coliseum's upper tiers rose above the roofline many blocks east, the stone worn smooth by centuries of people who came to watch other people do brutal things to their enemies and to the criminals of the Dominion. On the eastern hill, the Emperor's palace caught the same twilight and did nothing interesting with it. The Primum Oritaeum and its Senate building sat just below the palace.

On the lip of the hill they had raised a long wrapping building joined to the Emperor's palace by a two-thousand-step stairway. Made of the finest marble from across any Dominion, that stair was a testament to ingenuity hundreds of years old, built with Aura and grit, a floating piece of architecture linking the two halls where the most powerful men of arguably any Dominion sat debating the empire's future. The Stairway to Heaven, the locals called it, and it was a tourist trap, which never made sense to me.

Who takes the Nexus to one of the biggest independent empires in all the Universal Connectiva Nexus just to walk on some stairs? Idiotic. Maybe I did not understand the joy of inter-plane travel. Beyond the tourists drawn to one of the longest-running empires, this architectural wonder of the three hills, and yes there was a third hill, though the tension ran mostly between the western and the eastern, had bred a long-running debate among artists, pilgrims, and citizens alike.

The structures made an aesthetic argument between two institutions stated in stone, Arcanum, Technica, and some advanced expressions I was still learning about. Arguments that would never be resolved. The basilica reached toward the sky. The palace spread across the ground. Neither had ever decided to stop being itself. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

I had grown up six blocks northeast of the coliseum, in the part of Vorreth the city's official maps called the artisan district and everyone who lived there called the Deaps, because the streets were narrow and the buildings tall and the light came through at angles that suggested the city had not planned for anyone to live there and had been surprised when they did. The dome had been visible from the window of the room I shared with my two brothers. I looked at it every morning for twelve years.

I was twenty-five years old, and I had been inside the complex for thirteen of them, since they found me with oddly pure mana for my age. Despite all that time, I was still not sure how I felt about the view from the other direction. I turned to an intelligence briefing, looping information I had pulled since last night. Our investigation team recovered it after the incident in the northern preserve of Valecis Isle in the Dominion of Vera.

King Cassian of Vera was not hostile to the church and the Twelve, but he was not on speaking terms with us either. If he knew we held this intelligence, swept in by our agents after the appearance of the Priest, it would go badly, politically and militarily both. I watched grainy footage from an alarm lattice laid down in a hurry once the mercenaries took the ground. Why they never managed better coverage was unclear, but it let us reconstruct the Priest's movements, and the Ghost of the Wastes's after him.

I picked up my crystal interface and looked over the report on the Ghost of the Wastes once more. I had read the intelligence files on him before. Every member of the Twelve held access to the OSO assessment, and had for the full century the Ghost had been in action. Standard protocol. The different Dominions, blocs, and planes all held individuals of immense personal power. The Twelve were counted among them, and so the natural destructive power such individuals could wield had to be watched closely.

It was too easy for one person to hurt many who had no way to fight back. The church kept files on arcane artists operating outside any institution, anyone whose demonstrated capability rose above the threshold that made them the church's business. The top 250 on the mercenary list was a given. Anyone with two or more cores at a purity above five had a dossier. Anyone with three cores or above, even at poor purity, sat somewhere in the top five percent.

There was massive variation even among the high-caliber individuals. The Ghost of the Wastes himself was an anomaly. The Ghost's file was thin. What even the OSO had gathered was pathetic set against the man's reputation, his perceived power, and the length of his activity. How does someone with as much personal power as the Ghost of the Wastes operate with so little known about him?

It helped that he spent most of his time in the Wastes, in the Lower Planes, and fighting on the Nexus transition points for reasons I had yet to account for. Still. The man was, for lack of a better word, a ghost inside his own legend. Yes, I understand the irony of that thought. The sparse information we did have was unhelpful. Largely inferential. Incidents attributed through second and thirdhand sources, firsthand accounts that contradicted each other, projections uploaded to the World Tree Lattice.

His capability was assessed from the aftermath of investigations, while more active players on the Dominion stage, the Bone Sovereign or Thessaly the Scion, had known, verifiable abilities. The Ghost of the Wastes did not. I knew all this. I had the file and had read it many times. The knowing had not prepared me for the broadcast, for what I witnessed at the gala, or for what came out of the northern preserve. I turned away from the window.

My chambers in the Vanguard's wing were opulent, one of the benefits of sitting among the Twelve, the spiritual leaders and the main military hand of the church both. I would have taken something plainer, but according to my seniors, maintaining the blessing of the Upper mattered in the eyes of the people, and we had followers across every bloc and every plane and Dominion.

It mattered that we showed strength and the favor granted us, the more so with the Orthodoxy forever working to undermine our spiritual and military authority. My personal floor at the top of the wing had grown into two halves. The opulence of a grand bedroom, a study, an entertainment hall, and a liaison room for my concubines. And the other half, which I had carved out myself, cutting away the worthless green room and the other spaces I had no use for.

A training area for Expression research and weapons work both. I had always been an Aura man. If I had not become one of the Twelve, I would likely have joined the Aura Swordsmen of the Vascari. I would never tell my fellow Saints that. Without meaning to, I glanced at the case that held a place for a ceremonial sword. The Veskari gladius was not on the rack. It was in the secondary case under the desk, where I kept the things that wanted more thought than the rack allowed.

Without really thinking, I went and retrieved it, the gladius firm in my hand, long and bright, forged by the Duthan on the outskirts of the Northern Bloc. The Duthan had long been tributary to the Vascari and their emperor, but their hearts sat with the church, and they showed it in the work. The gladius was still in my hand when the door opened. Vela came through it without hurrying, the same as she came through everything.

Rooms had rearranged themselves around her arrival for so long that she had stopped finding it worth noticing. Late twenties, dark hair worn loose tonight, the kind of features that made the Vascari artistic tradition's obsession with the southern face make complete sense. She wore the deep burgundy she knew worked, and the cut was what it always was, more suggestion than material. My eyes went where they went. I am twenty-five years old and I am not made of stone.

She crossed to the desk without looking for anything. She had been in this room enough times to know where it all sat, and which version of me she was walking into. She set a small tray of evening wine on the corner of the desk, the gesture domestic and worn smooth, then looked at the crystal interface still pulsing with its loop, and then at the gladius in my hand, and then at my face, and she made her one quiet attempt before she would let it go.

She reached out and touched the back of my hand, light, just her fingers against my knuckles, warm and unhurried.

"You have been at this since the evening bell," she said. Not a complaint. An observation. I looked at her hand on mine.

"Not tonight, Vela," I said. She read the rest of it the same as always, cleanly and without drama. Her gaze moved from the interface to the gladius to my face one more time, and whatever she weighed, she weighed it fast.

"Saint," she said, with the warm neutrality she kept for leaving without being asked twice, and lifted her hand from mine, turned, and left with the same ease she had brought in. The door closed without sound. I picked up the gladius and moved to the practice ring on the other side of my workspace. It took a moment to cross the many rooms. The floor was tatami, something I had brought from the Dominion of Nigon. The ring itself used a heavier material, but I liked the tatami under my feet.

I moved to the center, ran my mana through my Aura core, and began the dance of the twilight, my signature style. I pictured the Ghost. I pictured Thessaly the Scion. I pictured the Cipher. And last I pictured Princess Talena. I had met Princess Talena some time ago and found the woman intoxicating. I never thought I would have impure thoughts toward the princess, absolutely not, but she was incredible. Then I thought of how she had looked at the mercenary, Cipher, who was in fact the Ghost of the Wastes.

I could not help wondering if she had some sort of old-man fetish. That made me glower. It was then that Edric Casvane entered the room.

"We need to talk," he said.