Home > Scarlet Odyssey(80)

Scarlet Odyssey(80)
Author: C. T. Rwizi

“As for what the Enclave is,” Tuk goes on, “when the Ascendancy fell, many moon worshippers fled to this continent in fear of persecution, but they didn’t really fancy entangling themselves with the indigenous peoples—you folk, in other words. So they stayed in the unsettled regions north of the desert and established the Enclave.”

“That’s why we keep away from them, though, isn’t it?” Salo says. “They are of the moon, but they are not like us. They are not quite Red. They accept the foreign customs of the Empire and shun our ways, so we shun them too.”

“In their defense,” Tuk says, “they shun you mostly because they can’t afford to be seen associating with you. A survival strategy.”

“How so?” Ilapara says, and Tuk leans forward.

“The thing about the Ascendancy is that they revered this place. That’s why they never invaded. On top of that, their brand of magic was not too different from yours. Tamer and more technological, perhaps, but they used axiomatic ciphers just as you do.” Tuk spreads his hands. “Can you see why the Enclave had no choice but to distance themselves from you?”

Salo ponders the question for a moment. “I guess they didn’t want the world to think they were a new incarnation of the Ascendancy.”

“They had to become less Red, so to speak, or risk being exterminated in retribution,” Tuk says. “But they took things a little too far, if you ask me. They changed their magic so much it needed a new name; they call it Higher Red and yours Lower Red. And no one campaigns harder to keep this place quarantined. They don’t want you folk having contact with the outside world until you’re more civilized.”

Ilapara gives Tuk a sharp look. “You don’t think us civilized?”

“That’s not my opinion,” he says, palms raised and eyes flashing green with humor. “I’m simply telling you what the Enclave believes.”

“Then what is your opinion?” Ilapara says.

“I’ve seen people in glistening cities do the most savage of things, and people in the heart of the hinterlands do the noblest. I don’t think civilization is a place or a culture or a level of technological development. I think it’s simply the recognition that all life is valuable and must be treated as such. Everything else follows from there.”

Salo digests that in silence as he pokes the fire. “What do you mean by hinterlands?”

“These are the hinterlands,” Tuk says as he takes in his surroundings with his arms. “Or the Lost Lands of Sylia, or simply the Red Wilds. That’s what they call this place, why I crossed the Jalama Desert to come here. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. You’re all quite mysterious to the rest of the world, you know.”

“You must hate it, then,” Salo says. “How can you not after what you’ve seen?”

“Hate it? I’ve never felt more alive!” When Salo and Ilapara give him mistrustful looks, he grins. “The honest truth. The whole continent of Sylia has a deep connection to Ama Vaziishe—that’s why the Enclave was established here. But there’s no doubt that this connection is strongest in the Red Wilds, the land of Primeval Spirits and tronic beasts. Here it feels more . . . visceral. My blood feels thicker in my veins, and my heart beats louder. Here I am at home.”

Everything Tuk says stays with Salo late into the night, joining the cacophony of thoughts swirling restlessly inside his mind. He rests facing the milky spirals of the Devil’s Eye, that conspicuous constellation whose bright core marks the world’s celestial south pole, and he spends a long time staring at it in thought. His aago always said that the Eye was getting bigger and that the devil rules over a realm of ice beneath it that will one day engulf the rest of the world. He used to have nightmares about that story as a child, but now, after seeing the things he’s seen today, gruesome things that plague his vision whenever he closes his eyes, now he thinks that maybe the story being true wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Why, it would be exactly what the world deserves.

Just before sleep claims him, the night lights up briefly as a ball of fire streaks across the sky and then upward, accompanied by a deep rumbling, like thunder from a distant lightning flash.

 

 

27: The Maidservant

Southern Umadiland

At dawn she retreats above the tree line, on a mountain in the highvelds of the south, where nothing but the hardiest shrubs can thrive. There she draws essence into her cosmic shards, sinking it into the earth beneath her feet when they become saturated. The essence spreads down the mountain at the speed of an echo, like roots seeking nourishment from the soil, and she feels a rush as her ancestral talent begins to work, expanding her pool of power.

Slow as the rising of the suns, the same wave of euphoria she felt at her awakening overtakes her now, so intense she falls to her knees, gasping for breath. Ahead of her a vast woodland spreads southward from the base of the mountain and into the Great Tribe kingdom of Valau, its trees brimming with leaves in every shade of red, from rust to vermilion. In her euphoria the colors are unnaturally vivid, dancing and bleeding into each other, and for an instant she feels one with them.

And then the feeling abates, and when she looks at her forearms, she sees that a sixth set of rings has appeared on her shards. They now draw from a greater swath of her lord’s territory, including the mountain beneath her. Others drink from it, too, besides her master. Seafarer. Hunter.

There used to be another, conspicuous now only because of his absence.

A pang of sorrow stabs her chest, and she has to find relief in the burning pain of her cursed skin. She remains on her knees on the mountaintop for a long time, trying to scour her mind clean with pure-white agony.

Her focus is imperfect, though, and she can’t stop seeing a pair of trusting eyes watching her, forgiving her even as she dimmed the light of life they held.

Weariness envelops her like a hateful embrace, so heavy she feels it might pull her down into the ground and keep pulling until she reaches the furnaces at the center of the world. She wonders what it would feel like to burn there until she was nothing, until her atoms were separated and reassembled into something else, perhaps something better.

I want this to end.

I’m tired.

I want to remember the taste of peace.

But no. She has gone too far along this path, shed too much blood and caused too much sorrow. Something must justify what she has become.

Nothing can justify your existence, says the bitter voice in her mind. You seek to rationalize your crimes, but they will stain you till the end of time. You have already lost yourself to the underworld; all that is left is for it to take you.

She summons her tronic mind stone and returns to the business of breaking its protective charms with her Yerezi talisman. She sits in a posture of meditation, the talisman’s illusions floating in front of her, and for a time she loses herself to the indifferent world of cold logic and cipher prose.

Then a strange presence reaches out from hundreds of miles away to entangle itself with the talisman, taking her mind away from her work and into a false plane that knits itself together around her like a waking dream.

In this plane she takes shape on a marble platform floating somewhere in the middle of an ocean, though somehow she remains aware that she isn’t really here but is on a mountaintop in the Umadi highvelds. The skies above this false world are bright with stars, and calm waters stretch away from the platform in every direction, no land in sight.

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