The False Martyr (132 page)

“
The Eroth Amache shall
decide,” Arin agreed. He turned and walked from the
tent.

Ipid moved to follow, but
the king reached across the table and caught his arm. “Chancellor
Ronigan,” he said low, pulling Ipid across the table to speak in
his ear. “I hope you can see the need for our nations to again be
allies. I am deeply sorry for the attacks we made on your men as
they came up the Alta. We were seeking only to defend ourselves.
Now, I see that the Order never meant us to be enemies.”

“
I understand,” Ipid
managed though he had a hard time still thinking of himself as the
man who should receive such apologies. “I knew about the Empire but
am still coming to terms with what you said about the Fells. I
cannot begin to understand what has happened to allow
that.”

“
I have received only the
report of my son’s murder and their decision to side with the
Empire. I can only imagine what betrayals allowed that, but I will
whip it from those bearded bastards soon enough.” The King’s teeth
ground as his mind went to the betrayal. “In the meantime, my
generals have made a separate agreement with your man, Marshal
Landon. Can I assume you will honor it now that you are
here?”

“
What . . . what kind of
deal?” Ipid asked, still slightly overawed that he was speaking
intimately with the King of Liandria, a man that he had previously
only managed to glimpse despite all his wealth and
influence.

“
The details are best left
to the generals, don’t you think? I am told it will to keep the
dying to a minimum on both sides.”

Ipid sighed. He was
certainly in favor of that. “I will discuss it with Marshal Landon,
but if it is as you say, I can see no objection.”

“
Very well,” the king
said, looking around the tent. The Darthur had departed, riding
back to their camp, leaving Ipid alone with the king and his
entourage. He held out a hand. Ipid took it and tried to meet the
strength of the old man’s grip. “We are allies then. And this time,
we will work together to put the Morgs in their place and bring
down that abomination to our savior that the Empire has become. Let
your invaders have their gold and conquest. When they have returned
to their lands, we will have our world back, and it will be unified
as Valatarian intended it be.”

The king shook Ipid’s hand
and smiled, but Ipid could not help but think about what he had
just said, and he suddenly wondered who was using whom.

Chapter 76

The
59
^th
Day of Summer

The number of
possibilities within the tapestry that is the Order are beyond any
man’s ability to comprehend. They are as numerous as the drops of
water in the ocean, the grains of sand in the desert, the beats of
every heart, the thoughts of every man and woman. To trace them
more than a few connections is to meet the full power of the
infinite, to be lost, to drown. However, if one can remove himself
from the individual strands, he can look out at the pattern that
those strands form. Just as a man cannot understand the desert by
looking at its individual grains of sand, he cannot understand the
Order by looking at the individual strands of possibility that form
it. He must look instead at the dunes, the wastes, the salt flats,
the oases and see them as a whole, how they work together, how they
support one another, the conflict and cooperation between them, how
one grows and the other shrinks, how one gives life while another
takes it. The same is true of the Order. It is a tapestry, and a
tapestry cannot be understood by its individual threads but rather
by the patterns that form it.

Lius considered those
words again. Xionious Valatarian had written them at the end of his
time in the desert. Driven there by his enemies, the desert nearly
claimed him before he had his great epiphany. Having wandered for
weeks, dying of thirst and hunger, he’d had the vision that allowed
him to see the strands of possibility that formed the Order. He
then spent three years studying the Order in its purest, simplest
form and eventually came to see it as a tapestry made up of
billions of possibilities, each a thread that could be pulled to
change the outcomes around it. At first, that power was enough to
help him survive his harsh environment, to find water and food and
shelter, but eventually, he started to understand the full extent
of his knowledge, to see the larger patterns, and how even small
actions impacted those patterns, how his decision to kill a fly
might lead to a thousand men dying a thousand miles away a thousand
days in the future. Or, far more likely, to nothing.

Eventually, he began to
see the Order as a great tapestry, strands of possibility woven
into sweeping patterns that showed everything that could happen.
Following that, it was just a matter of learning how to read and
manipulate those patterns, to create specific outcomes tomorrow
through his actions today. Finally, when he had mastered the
Tapestry, he prepared the world for his return. Months upon months
of meticulous planning followed. Often their savior spent days in
deep meditation, nearly dying of thirst as his mind stretched to
create the patterns required to allow him to triumph over those who
had driven him to the desert, the Lawbreakers. When everything was
ready, he emerged, gathered his followers, and used them to magnify
his control of the Order. With the growth of his power, the number
of his followers and their dedication increased until even the most
powerful of the Lawbreakers, not even his hated brother, could
stand against him. Eventually, finally, he was able to align every
power and possibility against the Lawbreakers, to harness the
Order’s infinite power to exile them.

Yet, he saw still the
possibility that the Lawbreakers could return, could reestablish
their power over the world, so he put protections in place to keep
them away. He wrote his great book so that future generations could
understand the Order and how to manipulate it. He tasked a quintet
of his most accomplished apprentices – the Five, the Hand, the
Pentagram – with maintaining the patterns he had created and placed
his most dedicated commander at the head of the great Empire he had
created, giving him ultimate authority to ensure the dictates of
the five were followed.

Over and over, Lius had
read Valatarian’s great book. A majority of it followed the
versions he had studied his entire life. Many of the phrases, the
laws, the warnings, the overall history – the arc of the savior’s
achievements, the battle against the Lawbreakers, the Exile – were
the same. These sections were clearly written for the commoners,
for those who needed only to obey, to align their lives to the
Order, and maintain the patterns set by their savior. Those people
needed a guide as well, a moral underpinning for their leaders’
insistence that they subvert the freewill that their creators had
given them. So these sections had been removed from the original
text, simplified, massaged, and repackaged into what Lius had
always thought of as
The Book of
Valatarian
.

But that book in all its
forms, dating back to original texts to the newer version
propagated since the Reinterpretation, lacked the truth of what
their savior had done to defeat the Lawbreakers. They withheld the
fact that the Order was a thing that could be seen and understood,
was a thing that could be manipulated and controlled, that it was
not an all-powerful force created by Hileil, but rather a machine
that had been built and maintained by a small set of men, that it
was them rather than a distant god to which they were aligning
themselves. But far more frightening than even that revelation were
the things that their savior had done to create the Tapestry that
they followed, the sacrifices he made, the blood he and his
followers spilled to ensure that their patterns held.

Just as you did that night
two weeks ago,
Lius reminded
himself.

No victory was ever
achieved without sacrifice,
Valatarian
said.
For months I fought this. How could
I sentence thousands to their deaths? How could I make the
decisions that would send them to their graves? There must be
another way, I told myself. But I eat the lizards and scorpions. I
manipulate the Tapestry to bring them to me. I kill them to
maintain myself. Their sacrifice allows me to live, just as the
sacrifices of cows and chickens and pigs allow all those people to
live. The Order is sacrifice. Every creature is sacrificed to the
survival of every other. Death is as much a part of the Order as
birth. Only by embracing death, by acknowledging and accepting it,
could I create the patterns that would save humanity as a
whole.

The passage strengthened
Lius resolve. He had found and memorized it only after that night,
but he came back to it often now, used it to remind himself what
was at stake. He had read enough of the Tapestry now to know that
he was not engaged in a battle for the heart of the Empire but
rather for the continued existence of the Order. When he had
received Valatarian’s book, Xi Valati Maciam had told him that he
was the last of the Weavers, that it was up to him to lay a
foundation and wait for the one that would restore their power.
Lius now knew that the foundation was one of study, of patterns, of
outcomes planned, protected, and executed to ensure that the powers
that had invaded their world would be defeated. And if he failed to
do his part the Order would fall. No matter how terrible, any
sacrifice was justified.

Again, Lius tried to read
those patterns. He sat with legs tucked beneath him, hands on his
knees, back straight, eyes closed, body relaxed, breathes slow and
steady. Yet as calm as his body was, his mind stretched and
strained, struggled to find the patterns, to understand what they
meant, and what was needed to maintain them. He had been doing this
with almost his every waking moment for the past two weeks, but he
only felt that he understood the Tapestry slightly better than he
had before all this began. What he could understand was that great
effort had been put into creating the patterns he saw. He could see
where the possibilities had been manipulated, where the strings had
been twisted to create new patterns that were often as counter to
the Order as the chaotic forces they sought to defeat. These
patterns had been created over centuries, maintained, manipulated,
redirected through great effort. And they had a purpose, they
pointed toward something, someone, to a great culmination that Lius
could not hope to understand if he studied it for a
lifetime.

What he could see was that
he, this camp, Jaret, were all small parts of those patterns. They
had their own purpose, but that intersected with others,
influencing their outcomes, supporting them as they built toward
this great finale. And it was with those patterns that Lius
concerned himself. He knew his limitation, knew the range of his
vision. It was enough that he understand the strands around him,
how they fed into and supported the larger patterns that he had no
hope of comprehending.

He traced another strand
now, confirmed that it was time for it to play its part. But that
part was not in the pattern that Jaret was building. It was to link
them to the larger, more significant pattern, to find the lynchpin
to all of this and bring their patterns together. What happened
then, Lius could not tell, but he knew that he had to put the
pieces into motion. And now was the time.

Opening his eyes, Lius
came back to his body and took a deep breath. He allowed himself a
moment to adjust to the light that filled his eyes, the sweat that
covered his body, the ache in his knees, and tingling in his feet.
Then slowly, he rose and tried to walk. He had to find Quinn,
needed to send the young man on his way.

THE END of BOOK
TWO

Author’s Note:
Thank you for reading
The False Martyr
. I hope that you
enjoyed it (if not, how did you possibly make it this far?). I am
not writing for money or glory but would greatly appreciate it if
you would share your thoughts about this book with a review on
whatever site you downloaded it from (and please, keep in mind that
I’m doing this for free: no editors were paid, no publishers were
consulted, no outside consultations took place). Please, also
spread the word. Tell your friends, family, colleagues, and anyone
else who will listen about these books. The more people that read
them, the more enthusiastic I am to keep it going.

About the Author:
The False Martyr 
is
Nathan's second novel.  It is the sequel to
From Across the Clouded Range
and is the second book in the epic fantasy series, The
Pattern’s Purpose. A former management consultant and now full-time
homemaker, he has been writing fantasy novels and stories for
twenty years.  Beyond his lifelong love of fantasy literature,
Nathan is a runner, backpacker, outdoor enthusiast, and former
triathlete.  A graduate of Carleton College, he lives with his
family in Greenwood Village, Colorado.

For more information about
H. Nathan Wilcox and The Pattern’s Purpose Books, please
visit
http://www.hnathanwilcox.com/
.