Mirror Sight (19 page)

T
he professor gestured for Karigan to take a seat on one of the overstuffed leather chairs while he remained standing, his hands clasped behind his back as if he was about to deliver a lecture before his students.

“You are aware of the dissidents that called themselves Second Empire?” he asked.

“Very,” she replied.

“They built up their army by conventional and . . . magical means, enough to actually challenge King Zachary’s forces.”

“The king has been working to counteract them.”

“He failed.”

The words fell as a blow that would have knocked her to her knees had she been standing. Rationally she’d known King Zachary must have failed for his realm to have come to this end, but hearing it spoken so baldly? She closed her eyes wishing it was not so but knew wishing would change nothing.

“By whatever means,” the professor continued, “the forces of Second Empire grew to be a serious threat. Battles were won and lost, but the fiercest and bloodiest happened right here.” He flung his arms wide to encompass the area around them. “Mill City not only stands on parts of the Old City, but also on a battlefield. The last battle took place before the Old City’s gates. It is said the conflict raged for months with Second Empire seeking to breach the city walls.” He paused, as if deep in thought, then added, “They don’t make walls like that anymore, do they. Clan D’Yer’s work, if I’m not mistaken?”

“You’re not,” Karigan replied. Clan D’Yer, renowned masons, had also built the vast wall that separated Sacoridia from Blackveil Forest; a wall that had withstood the forces of nature and magic for a thousand years. There had been no better stoneworkers than Clan D’Yer, and yet, as she had seen today, Sacor City’s walls, and the castle itself, had been more than breached—they’d been pulverized. “How did . . . how did they overcome the walls?”

“I’ve the diary of one named Seften, a guard at the gate who witnessed the final battle. His words are better than mine.” He raised a finger, indicating that she should hold her questions, and dashed over to his shelves, scanning his collection of damaged books. He hummed tunelessly as he ran his fingers across creased and tortured spines, finally pulling out a small volume with a cry of triumph. It was, Karigan saw, half-charred, the remaining pages stained and stiff from water damage . . . and something darker.

“The diary of Seften,” the professor said. “Sadly, little of it survived.” He thumbed through brittle pages, then paused for some time, his eyes darting across the lines. “Here’s what I want. Seften writes: . . .
after so many months of striving for victory, the king led a final charge onto the field, splendidly arrayed as always in his armor and the regalia of Sacoridia. We cheered as he led his elite Weapons and the reserve forces behind him. The enemy quailed and . . . and . . .”
The professor muttered and squinted. “Much of this is muddled, I fear. Oh, I see. He says,
and the troops on the field rallied, forcing the enemy’s host back, verging on retreat.
” The professor flipped through some torn pages as Karigan dug her nails into her chair’s leather armrests.

“I lose it until this,” the professor said.
“Then the enemy unleashed its great weapons, and it was like all five hells bared as one and all its mightiest demons came unleashed. We hadn’t a chance . . . So terrible they could not be of this Earth.”
He paused, scanning the page for more legible parts, then cleared his throat.
“When the clouds and rage and fire settled, I espied the king as he fell to the bloodied field, his Weapons slain in a black circle around him, his standards limp on the ground.”

Karigan squeezed her eyes shut. “No . . . ,” she murmured. But what had she expected? She’d seen the ruin of Sacor City, saw how an empire had risen up. And the king, she knew, would have laid his life down for his realm. He would not let the enemy overcome it while he still lived. He would not have hidden in the castle.
I should have been there.
Her presence wouldn’t have changed the tide of battle, but she ought to have been there with her people, even if it meant dying with them.

When she opened her eyes, she found the professor kneeling before her, the diary in one hand and a handkerchief extended in the other. “I seem to be causing you quite a bit of distress today.”

Only then did Karigan feel the hot stream of tears on her cheeks. She accepted the handkerchief.

“It’s clear you believe King Zachary was a good leader,” the professor said.

“He
is
a good leader,” Karigan said.
And more than that. Much more.

The professor lifted his chin as if she’d only confirmed his own thoughts on the matter. He patted her knee, his expression compassionate. “I have found nothing in my research to dispute it,” he said. “And it is grand to hear one of his own servants corroborate it. Now, there is just a little left in Seften’s diary that is legible. Can you bear it?”

She nodded.

The professor solemnly returned her nod and remained on his knees. It appeared to Karigan that he skipped paragraphs. Perhaps he was trying to spare her from some further unpleasantness. It did not take much imagination to guess what an enemy would do to a fallen monarch’s corpse, especially with no bodyguards left to defend it.

“Here it is,” the professor said. “Seften writes:
The king’s death stole the courage of our soldiers. We were lost after that. The demon beasts descended on us, crushing the city walls and all within as if they were nothing, destroying, destroying . . . No one was safe. There was nowhere to go. We were lost, Sacoridia was lost.”

After a long pause, Karigan asked, “That’s all?”

“I’m afraid so.” Professor Josston rose, closing the diary. “The rest is illegible or destroyed. Elsewhere, we find tantalizing mentions of the weapon or weapons that destroyed the city, often referred to as demons or hell beasts. In some accounts it is said that Second Empire raised the beasts from its one hell. In others, it is said that the Sacoridians drew the beasts out of their five, but the beasts turned on them.”

Beasts, weapons . . . Karigan shook her head. “What of Rhovanny? The Eletians?” she demanded, thinking of Sacoridia’s allies of old. “Did no one come to our aid?”

“Rhovanny sent help, but they were also under attack. Of Eletia?” He shrugged. “It appears the Eletians did not come. It did not prevent the empire from seeking out Eletia, however, and capturing it along with every other country on this continent. But Eletia, it seems to me, suffered the most.”

“How so?” she asked, thinking everything she had done, everything the king and her fellow Riders had tried to do, was worthless. If this was the outcome despite everything they tried, what had been the point of their effort? She clenched her hands as despair darkened her thoughts.

“Any Eletians that were taken captive were hauled off to the Capital,” the professor replied. “You see, my dear, long ago, in their own land, the Arcosians learned to draw etherea out of the air, the earth, the water, and . . . out of those with inherent magic, all for the pleasure and use of the emperor of Arcosia and those he favored. It is why the Arcosians first came here—they depleted their own sources of etherea. By all accounts, Eletia and its inhabitants have been sucked dry.”

That would explain why her special ability and her moonstone had not worked.

“Our emperor is always seeking new sources, for one day even the Preserve will run dry.”

“The Preserve?”

“You know it as the Blackveil Forest.”

“But it’s tainted.”

“Those who harvest it, the emperor’s artificers, claim they purify it through a filtration system. They process it somehow. Turn it into forms they can use it in—liquids, solids. As we use rivers and canals to power the machines of Mill City, so the emperor uses etherea to mold the Capital into whatever form he desires. It is said he uses it to make himself and his most special servants immortal.”

“Like Eletians.”

“Yes, like Eletians.”

One of Karigan’s ancestors, Hadriax el Fex, had been Mornhavon the Black’s closest companion, and she’d read his journal, which had survived the centuries hidden in the archives of Selium. She gathered from his writings that Mornhavon had been obsessed with the Eletians. He was both in awe of them and resented them. Hadriax had written of grotesque experiments Mornhavon performed on them to learn the source of their immortality and magical nature. It sounded as if he had achieved that goal.

“The world is much poorer for its lack of etherea,” the professor said. “Ever since your arrival, I have wondered how things might have been different.”

“Even in my time,” Karigan replied, “magic was scarce, or at least the magic users were. Very few survived the Long War and the Scourge that followed.” She believed that Green Riders survived simply because their abilities were so minor and only worked if amplified by devices like their Rider brooches. During the Scourge, the brooches were supposed to be destroyed, but the Riders of the distant past hid them by placing a spell of invisibility on them. She touched the empty place where her brooch should have been pinned, feeling only the warmth of her own flesh through her nightgown. The Riders continued to keep the secret, and it was so ingrained in Karigan to do so that she did not speak of Rider abilities to the professor. He obviously knew something of the brooches, because he had recognized what hers was, if nothing more than a symbol of the messenger service.

“Still,” the professor said, “you lived in a time and place where there were still Eletians and some magic. Magic that was not used to subjugate the populace. Wonders still existed—it wasn’t all machines. There were forests and clear lakes, fresh air to breathe.”

It was not perfect in her own world, and she thought some of Mill City’s machines a vast improvement compared to what she had in her time—the accoutrements of the privy and bathing room coming immediately to mind—but she agreed that this bleak future lacked all the richness and beauty of her time. It was drab, hard. Depressing.

“Believe me when I say,” the professor continued, “that Mill City is a paradise compared to other parts of the empire. The city magistrate does not tender abuse upon his populace to the degree it is done in other places, and the lands about us are not torn asunder and stripped for coal or silver or other minerals. Of course, the true paradise is the Capital, as artificially contrived as it is.”

“Where
is
the Capital?” She kept hearing about it, but if it wasn’t Sacor City, where was it?

“Let me show you.” The professor returned to his library shelves, gently sliding the diary of Seften into its slot and humming again as he gazed along the bottom shelves. Eventually he tugged out a large volume with red leather covers. In contrast to the others, it did not show damage. He laid it on his desk with a thump and beckoned Karigan to his side. They leaned over the volume shoulder to shoulder, he smelling faintly, though not unpleasantly, of earth.

“This is an atlas of the empire,” he said. “I have one in the library at the house, too, for reference.” He opened it near the beginning, and there, displayed in vibrant color, lay the Serpentine Empire occupying the continent that had once been home to several countries. She saw that those countries had become subject territories, or protectorates, of the empire. Borders were, in some cases, altered. Hura-desh, for instance, had been combined with the Under Kingdoms to form the Under Territories. Eletia was gone completely from the map, and the empire claimed even the Northern Wastes and the harsh, dry lands to the southwest of Durnesia that Karigan had known as the Unclaimed Territories, inhabited only by non-aligned tribes, and visited only by the hardiest of travelers. They were now simply labeled, “Imperial lands.”

As for Sacoridia, it was renamed “Imperial Seat.” Sacoridia’s neighbor to the west was no longer Rhovanny, but the Rhove Protectorate.

Though Karigan saw it all laid out there before her, she still couldn’t quite believe it. It was like a map drawn from some tale of fantasy, not real life.

The professor seemed to pick up on her disbelief. “It is said,” he told her, “the empire’s forces were an irresistible tide that swept the continent, all enemies falling before it. Durnesia and Bince capitulated before they could be crushed. Tallitre has never been fully subjugated and most slaves now come from those periodic uprisings as the bounty of war.”

He turned pages that showed detailed maps of each of the protectorates and opened up to the Imperial Seat. Sacoridia’s borders remained very much the same, but gone were the twelve provinces and their names, their boundaries redrawn in straight lines, and the areas numbered. Karigan’s home province of L’Petrie, or what was roughly L’Petrie, was now squared off and labeled “Section 1, the Capital,” and painted in gold leaf. She glanced at the Blackveil Peninsula, colored a bright blue, and simply labeled, “Imperial Preserve.” A city had grown about where the breach was, called, “Etherium Plantation.”

“Etherium Plantation?” she asked, glancing at the professor.

“A huge industrial complex where they acquire and process etherea from the Preserve. Er, Blackveil.”