Chương 138: Prologue. Interesting Times (Book 3)

7th of Sapin, 853 AR. Six years since the Rebirth of Adom Sylla... The sea had been grey for eleven days and Lord Oberys stood at the prow of the Quiet Ambition, his hands folded behind as the wind pulled at the silk of his robes while the salt spray had long since begun to gather in the fine lines of his face, settling into the creases around his mouth and eyes.

He watched the horizon quietly while beneath him, the ship groaned and swayed, her blackened hull cutting through iron-colored swells with a steady rhythm. It was, by Oberys's count, his seventh crossing. He then drew the compass from inside his robe and held it flat upon his palm, more out of habit than genuine necessity, angling it so that the pale morning light caught the trembling needle beneath its crystal face.

The instrument was old and its housing had been cast in a metal that no living smith could identify, dark as tarnished bronze but lighter than bone, cool to the touch regardless of the warmth of the hand that held it.

The face was etched with coordinates that no cartographer in any of the great cities would have recognized: numbers reckoned against a prime meridian that had been struck from every official chart two centuries ago, longitudes and latitudes that pointed to a location the civilized world preferred to treat as myth.

He knew the numbers by heart now — seventeen degrees south of the Vorentine Meridian, forty-one east of the old reckoning — but he checked the compass each time regardless, because Oberys was a man who understood that familiarity was the mother of carelessness, and carelessness, in waters such as these, was the sort of indulgence one only ever got to enjoy once.

"Setharis," he called.

"We have arrived. If you would be so kind." A moment passed, and then the heavy thud of boots ascending the companionway stairs as Master Setharis emerged into the grey daylight and paused to draw breath.

"Same position as last time," Setharis observed, more to himself than to anyone else, already reaching into the leather satchel at his hip.

"To the league," Oberys confirmed, tucking the compass back into his robe.

"She keeps her borders well."

Setharis withdrew the crystal — roughly the size of a man's fist, its surface clouded and irregular, shot through with veins of deep violet light that pulsed with a rhythm uncomfortably similar to a heartbeat — and the air around it thickened and warped, bending and shimmering as several of the nearest crewmen, those who were making this crossing for the first time, took an instinctive step backward while the mage raised it before him with both hands and began to speak the words that would request passage through the veil.

"Clear the way for us," he said and the crystal's pulse quickened. The violet light within it deepened, bloomed, and then burst outward in a silent wave that rolled across the surface of the sea like the ripple from a stone cast into still water, except that where it passed, the world itself seemed to shudder and come apart.

The mist before them did not part so much as unravel and behind it, the grey featureless horizon began to crack and splinter, until an entirely different sky appeared through the wound in the one they had been sailing under. It was brilliant, blue and vast. And there, as it had been each time before, lay the archipelago. It sprawled across the horizon in a great sweeping crescent, dozens upon dozens of islands rising from a sea that shifted from grey to a luminous shade of turquoise in the space of a single breath.

"Ithrenaar," said a voice from behind them.

"The Veiled Throne of the Western Waters." Oberys's smiled and turned from the railing.

"Caelen," he said warmly.

"Come here, my boy." Caelen crossed the deck to his father's side.

"Son," Oberys said.

"We will be docking within the hour, and I expect we will be received shortly after. I would like you to remind me of what you know about the Princess. Everything I taught you, everything you read in the dossiers I provided. Tell me what you remember." Caelen turned from the railing and stared at his father with an expression that hovered somewhere between incredulity and long-suffering familiarity.

"Really, Father?" Oberys regarded his son with a look of the mildest, most benevolent expectation.

"The archipelago has been here for longer than either of us can fathom, and I suspect it will endure your attention being elsewhere for a few minutes more," he said pleasantly.

"The Princess, however, will form her opinion of you within the first ninety seconds of your arrival, and unlike these islands, Caelen, there is very little in this world that is more difficult to reshape than her estimation of a man once it has been set. You are no longer hearing about her from the safety of my study. You are about to stand before her. So, if you would be so kind." Caelen closed his eyes, and sighed deeply.

"We're going to see Princess Morgana Vi Savarnis," Caelen said.

"To deliver the goods we brought with us and continue strengthening our relationship with her court, such as it is."

"Who is she?" Caelen frowned in confusion.

"She's the daughter of Prince Soren. The Emperor's niece. The last surviving child to the—""That's her blood, Caelen. I asked who she is." Oberys adjusted the cuff of his sleeve, smoothing a wrinkle that probably wasn't there.

"You read the dossiers I gave you. All four of them, I hope?"

"Twice."

"Then tell me about the woman we're about to sit across from. Not her genealogy." Caelen took a breath and started over.

"She surfaced five years ago in Vethia. Port city and capital of the Marakian kingdom. Before that, there is nothing, no sightings, no records, nothing. Her uncle, the emperor of Sundar, had purged Prince Soren's entire household after the execution. Every ally, every servant, every member of the family. As far as the world knew, she was dead."

"And yet."

"She'd been traveling with Veyshari traders for almost a year before Vethia. Nomads that took her in, though the dossier doesn't say how she made first contact with them."

"What did she do when she reached Vethia?"

"Went looking for Sir Bedivere. Her father's old Knight Commander, the man who led the Star Knights under Prince Soren."

"I know who Bedivere is. What was he when she found him?"

"Erm, a gladiator?"

"Are you asking me, or are you telling me?"

"H-he was a gladiator. Enslaved in the fighting pits for eight years and owned by a crime lord named Thorne who ran most of the criminal enterprise in the southern quarter of Vethia."

"And how did she get him out?"

"Through an information broker called Rook, who gave her Bedivere's location, fight schedule, security details. She hired local help to create a disturbance and pulled him out during the chaos then escaped by ship."

"You're skimming." Caelen looked uncertain.

"The details of the extraction were—""Not the extraction. You said she hired local help and found a broker within days of arriving in a city she'd never set foot in. You skipped past that like it was nothing."

"I didn't think—""A twenty-one-year-old girl walks off a nomad ship into the capital of a foreign kingdom. No contacts, no reputation, no local language beyond what the Veyshari taught her. And within weeks she's running an operation involving an information house, hired muscle, a citywide distraction, and a smuggler's ship." He glanced at his son.

"That's not a part you skip."

"Understood."

"Where did they go after?"

"Karsova, in the Free Territories. She spent the better part of a year there while Bedivere recovered. Years of fighting and malnutrition had nearly destroyed him and his Fluid had almost gone out entirely." Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"What was she doing while he healed?"

"Working. Rook stayed in Vethia and fed her intelligence on the Empire, political shifts, troop movements, who among the Emperor's officers was discontented, who might be open to an approach. And apparently there was no shortage. The purge after Prince Soren's death made a lot of enemies who kept quiet at the time but never forgot."

"So she had information. What did she do with it?"

"Started reaching out. Former officers pushed out after the purge. Soldiers who'd served under her father. Minor lords in the border territories who'd been bled dry by Imperial taxes. And from everything I've read, she went herself."

"And once Bedivere was on his feet?"

"Things moved faster. He trained a personal guard from the first recruits. She moved south from Karsova, then east, picking up support in every port. She made promises and she kept them. Every single one, according to everything I've seen."

"Good, son. now, tell me, how many swords does she have now?"

"Hard to say with any certainty, and I think that's deliberate on her part. Bedivere's personal guard numbers around two hundred, all trained by him directly. Beyond that, she has pledges from at least a dozen minor lords across the border territories, each commanding their own levies. The merchant guilds she's partnered with have private security forces that could be repurposed if it came to it.

And Rook's network touches half the ports in the southern coast, which isn't swords exactly, but it's arguably more useful."

"Excellent, Caelen. Truly excellent." Caelen nodded, but said nothing. He turned back toward the water and stayed quiet for long enough that Oberys noticed.

"What is it?"

"... Can I speak freely?"

"You'd better." Caelen seemed to be chosing his words carefully.

"She's impressive. Everything in those dossiers tells me she's resourceful, disciplined, patient, all the things you'd want in someone you're backing. But we're talking about taking down Sundar. One of the largest empire in the world. And we're House Baelys. Sixty years old. If the Emperor's agents traced any of this back to us, we don't just lose our trading license, father. We lose everything. The house, the fleet, our lives." He paused.

"Ask your question, son."

"... Well, I suppose what I'm asking is whether you've weighed that fully, or whether there's something I'm not seeing." Oberys didn't answer immediately. He let the wind fill the silence and watched the white stone of the harbor walls sharpen in the distance.

"You're right to ask that," he said.

"And you should keep asking it, because the day you stop questioning a risk like this is the day you become bad as a merchant." He turned his ring slowly.

"So let me tell you what you're not seeing." He straightened from the railing.

"The Emperor's monopolies on the eastern sea lanes have been strangling southern trade for the better part of a decade. Every year, the tariffs go up. Every year, another independent house folds or gets absorbed by one of the old families who've already made their arrangements with the throne. In ten years, maybe fifteen, there won't be room for a house like ours anymore. The margins will be too thin and the competition too entrenched.

We survive by finding opportunities the old houses are too comfortable or too cautious to take. That's what we've always done."

"And Morgana is that opportunity?"

"Morgana is the opportunity of a lifetime, if you understand the shape of it. She doesn't need to topple the Empire next year, or even in five years. She needs to become costly enough that the Emperor has to negotiate, or divisive enough that his own court fractures around the question of what to do about her. Either way, the balance of power shifts, and when it does, every trade route in the south gets redrawn.

If we're already positioned on the right side of that—already known as the house that backed her when no one else would—we don't just profit from the new arrangements, we help write them."

"And if she fails?"

"Then we've lost cargo and coin, which is painful but survivable, because I've been very careful about how much of our actual exposure traces back to us. Rook didn't build that chain of intermediaries for decoration." He glanced at Caelen.

"The risk is real. I'm not dismissing it. But the risk of doing nothing is worse, it's just slower, and slower risks are the ones that kill merchant houses, because by the time you feel them it's already too late." Caelen took that in.

"You said that's what I'm not seeing. Is there more?" Oberys was quiet for a moment. The harbor was close enough now that he could make out individual ships at anchor, the faint figures of dockworkers moving along the pier.

"Her father was a good friend of mine," he said.

"I served under Prince Soren before any of this. Before the trading house, before Silvandros. I was a soldier in his command, and at Ashenmoor, he pulled me from a collapsed trench under arrow fire while his own guard was screaming at him to fall back." He said it evenly, the way he said most things.

"Never mentioned it afterward. Not once. That was the kind of man Soren was." He watched the light catch the water near the harbor mouth.

"When the Emperor had his brother killed, I was already here. Already rebuilding our house. I couldn't repay what was owed and I've carried that for a long time." He looked at his son.

"So yes. It's also personal. The strategy is sound and the gains are real, but I want you to know that about me, and about why we're on this ship." Caelen held his father's gaze for a long moment, then nodded.

"Good." Oberys reached over and straightened the boy's collar.

"We dock in twenty minutes. Try not to stare when you meet her." Caelen nodded and turned back to the railing, watching the archipelago resolve itself into finer and finer detail as the Quiet Ambition cut toward the harbor mouth. For a while neither of them spoke, content to let the wind and the groan of the hull fill the silence between them. Then Oberys said, almost as an afterthought, "By the way. Did you bring what I asked you?"

"The newspapers?"

"Yes, Caelen, the newspapers."

"Ah, the ones about that rising star in Arkhos, you mean?" Oberys turned to look at him with an expression that was pleasant in the way a sheathed blade is pleasant. His son, it seemed, needed to be taught more things.

"That rising star," he repeated.

"Is that how you refer to him?"

"I didn't mean—""The young man's name is Adom Sylla, and you will learn to say it with the respect it warrants. He is close to the Princess. Quite close, from what I understand, and she asks after him personally every time we visit. By name. If you walk into her court and refer to him as that rising star in Arkhos, I promise you the impression you leave will not be the one you want."

"Adom Sylla. Understood."

"Good. Now give them to me." Caelen raised his right hand and twisted the iron ring on his index finger. The air above his palm shimmered and folded inward, and from the brief distortion he drew a leather folio, neatly tied, which he handed to his father.

"All three editions you asked for, plus two from the Vethian press that were covering the same story."

"Well done." Oberys untied the folio and drew out the first broadsheet, unfolding it against the railing with both hands. The headline ran across the top in tall, heavy type: THE YOUNGEST ELECTED MAGUS IN HISTORY — ADOM SYLLA RECEIVES THE TITLE AT NINETEEN YEARS OF AGE Beneath it, the image moved. It was a peculiar thing, magical printing: the figures within the frame shifted and breathed with a fidelity that still unsettled those unaccustomed to it.

The image showed a grand hall, pillars of white stone rising into vaulted shadow, and at its center two figures facing one another. The first was immediately recognizable: the Sundarian Archmage, Gaius Emrys, tall and severe in ceremonial robes that pooled around his feet like dark water, his staff held across his body in the formal posture of investiture. And opposite him, receiving the title with a composure that bordered on stillness, stood a young man.

He was lean and tall, not yet grown fully into the breadth that age would bring him, but there was a stillness to the way he held himself that made him seem larger than his frame. Caramel-like skin, dark hair, save for the single streak of white that cut through the black, vivid as a scar. His expression in the image was calm, nearly unreadable, his eyes fixed on the Archmage with a sort of quiet attention that gave away nothing. The Archmage extended his hand. The young man took it. The image looped.

Oberys studied it for a long time. Nineteen years old and already a Magus. The youngest in the recorded history. The articles spoke of his academic record in terms that bordered on disbelief and referenced, almost in passing, a career in Krozball that had made him a household name before he'd ever set foot in the Magisterium, the 'Ghost', they called him. But talent alone did not explain this.

A Magus held the second highest seat in the Sundarian Magisterium, answerable only to the Archmage himself, and no amount of brilliance carried a boy of nineteen to that chair in five years without someone opening doors that should have taken decades to reach. Which meant Gaius Emrys had not merely permitted the appointment, he had engineered it. The Archmage had chosen this young man above every senior magus in the institution and spent half a decade clearing the path for him, and Oberys did not yet know why.

But he knew what it looked like when someone was being groomed for the thing after the thing, and if the pattern held, the broadsheets would eventually be printing a very different headline. Oberys had, of course, attempted to learn more than the broadsheets offered. But the young man had proven remarkably difficult to examine at any depth.

Somewhere in his ascent he had built — or someone had built for him — a thorough and sophisticated network of information filtering that intercepted, redirected, or simply buried inquiries before they reached anything useful. Oberys's agents in Arkhos and Kati had returned with frustratingly little beyond what was already public record, and the few threads they had managed to pull came back clean, almost too clean, trimmed at exactly the point where they might have led somewhere illuminating.

It was the kind of operational discretion that Oberys recognized immediately, because it was the kind he practiced himself, and that alone told him more about Adom Sylla than any dossier could have. As a magus, the boy now held a seat that placed him within arm's reach of some of the most powerful decision-makers in the known world, with the institutional weight to make alliances, broker agreements, and move resources in ways that a younger, titleless version of himself never could have.

The question that interested Oberys — the question that would have interested anyone with the sense to ask it — was what the boy intended to do with that position. Whether he would play the game that had now opened itself to him, and if so, on whose behalf, and toward what end. Because a Magus who was also young, brilliant, impossibly well-connected, and close to a princess in exile was not simply an academic success story. He was a piece on the board.

Perhaps the most dangerous kind of piece the kind as his final allegiance had not yet been declared, and his capabilities had not yet been fully measured. Oberys folded the broadsheet carefully and placed it back in the folio. The harbor was close. He could hear the calls of the dockworkers now, the heavy clank of mooring chains being readied. The Quiet Ambition slowed as her crew moved to their stations. Soren's daughter builds an army in secret.

And in Arkhos, a boy becomes the youngest Magus the world has ever seen. He tucked the folio inside his robe, beside the compass. Interesting times.