Leaning against a tree just out of earshot of the others, he extracts the queen’s medallion from a pouch on his waist. The Seal carved onto its faces strobes at him unpleasantly, two colorful suns setting over a flat horizon.
Am I really doing this? But what choice do I have?
Now that he has awoken, his connection to his talisman feels stronger and more intuitive. Some of the inner workings that were once a mystery to him are now open secrets; for example, he now knows that he can use the talisman to aid and modify spell casting on the fly. He also knows how to entangle it with another talisman using a mystic Seal.
And that’s what he does. With a thought he rouses the red steel serpent on his left wrist and commands it to seek out the one who cast the Seal on the medallion. The serpent obeys, and lights flash from its crystal eyes as its core transcends distance and forms a link with another talisman far away—
Reality shifts around Salo, an endless plain of golden grass taking shape around him, spreading out for as far as the eye can see. Two prismatic suns can be seen sinking into the horizon, bathing the grasses in varicolored twilight, while across the plain, the moon is rising full and red in all her glory.
Salo knows instinctively that this plain isn’t real; it is merely the false mental construct AmaYerezi created for her talisman—her construct and not his because he hasn’t yet created one for himself. A part of him remains aware of his real surroundings: the woods not far from the Tuanu borderlands, an hour just after daybreak. But the detail woven into this false world is so true to life he doubts his senses.
In front of him the queen appears as the shapely outline of a woman made of golden-red light, a dazzling silhouette almost too bright to gaze upon. He executes a bow, and when he speaks, his words come out differently, though in a strangely familiar way. “Your Majesty.”
She watches him for the longest time, and the weight of her faceless gaze is almost too much to bear. “Hello, Musalodi. It is good to finally hear from you, though I’m surprised it has taken you so long to contact me.”
Salo struggles to find a worthy reply. “I wasn’t sure what I’d say, Your Majesty. The emissary’s commands were clear.”
“I take it you have something to say to me now.”
He swallows nervously as he thinks of how best to couch his current circumstances. “I have encountered trouble, Your Majesty. When I passed through a town along the World’s Artery, I . . . provoked the ire of a local mystic. He pursued me and the pair of warriors I’ve enlisted to accompany me, and while we managed to deal with him, I fear I’m still being pursued by other parties. I’ve had to take an alternate route; I’ll be traveling north to the World’s Vein and then east to the city.”
Salo suspects she already knows all of this. If she does, however, she gives nothing away, though the amusement in her voice is hard to miss. “I wonder: Does your predicament have anything to do with the wagonload of Faraswa refugees that entered our borders recently?”
“They arrived safely?”
“I hear your father has agreed to take them in, though it was quite presumptuous of you to send them here without consulting me first.”
Salo closes his eyes, overcome with emotion. He doesn’t think he’s ever loved his father more than he loves him now. “I apologize, Your Majesty. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“No more unnecessary risks. I need you alive and well in Yonte Saire. And be swift; the longer you dally, the fewer avenues we will have to take action against whatever threat is mounting there.”
Salo feels his heart begin to gallop. “Action, Your Majesty? What sort of action do you mean?”
“That’s what I’m sending you to find out. A great tempest is brewing on the horizon, with Yonte Saire at the epicenter. We need to find out what’s going on there and prepare ourselves, or it will be our undoing.”
This does nothing to help Salo’s nerves, so he broaches the subject he’s wanted to discuss from the beginning. “Your Majesty, I have to ask, did you send someone to watch me?”
The faceless silhouette smiles. Salo doesn’t see it, but he feels it in the air between them. “Your mother and I grew up together in the Queen’s Kraal. Did you know that?”
Are you trying to distract me from the fact that you have a spy tailing me? “I did, Your Majesty.” The two of them were once more than good friends, according to some whispers.
“We had much in common, Asanda and I. But what really drew us to each other as we grew into young women was our shared resentment for the Asazi old guard and their mystics. We found their ways suffocating. Too conservative. We looked to the mystics of our sister tribes and envied them their freedom to explore, to just . . . immerse themselves in the arcane without rules or restrictions. We saw the incredible things they did and wondered why we couldn’t do the same. But then I grew up, and she did not. And when the council of chiefs chose me as their queen, it was the end of our friendship. She couldn’t forgive me for it—I doubt she ever did.”
The queen gazes at the eternal sunset in the distance, lost in the past. “Asanda was too ambitious for her own good. I tried to rein in her forays into the darker side of magic, to reason with her, but the wedge between us only grew larger with time, and her thirst for power was insatiable.”
Why are you telling me this? Salo wonders, waiting for the queen to make her point.
“I don’t know where she found the framework for that Axiom of yours, but I know she consorted with a certain cult of apostates in Yonte Saire during her pilgrimage, and I know that upon her return she summoned an ancient spirit of immense darkness, by way of a blood sacrifice on the eve of a New Year. The spirit changed her, inflamed her desires, made her obsessed.” The queen turns her faceless gaze on Salo, and there is boiling acid in her next words. “Then she seduced a young warrior from a powerful line of chiefs and bore him a son. I knew she was up to something, but she was smart; she knew how to insulate herself from the consequences of her sacrilege.”
It is never easy for Salo to reconcile the power-hungry megalomaniac everyone else remembers and the woman he knew—save for those last few months before her death. Maybe he never knew her at all.
“Let your mother’s demise be an example to you of what can happen to the overly ambitious. Shortcuts to power will always take you through the mire, and sometimes, you never come out.”
Salo suspects there’s a second, deeper warning somewhere in these words, though he fails to parse its exact nature. He suddenly regrets this conversation altogether. “I understand, Your Majesty.”
“Travel well, Musalodi. I expect to hear from you once you reach Yonte Saire.” Then the queen disappears into the prismatic sunset, leaving Salo to emerge from the talisman feeling like he has a solid weight sitting somewhere deep inside his chest.
Strictly speaking, when he touched Ingacha and Wakii, blessing them with portions of his arcane power, he weakened himself by reducing the flow of essence he can draw into his shards. In practical terms, however, all the two animals needed to become as mighty as any moon-blessed quagga of the Ajaha cavalries were the tiniest slivers of his power, so tiny he can barely perceive their absence.
If he concentrates, though, he can sense two other tethers besides Mukuni’s pulling at his mind now, both in their own unique way. Ingacha is a proud, defiant presence, while Wakii is an excitable thrum. Both are weaker than Mukuni’s tether, but if he wants to, he can project his will across them, communicate with the minds on the other side, or even feed them more of his power.