Chapter 20

The sense of events unfolding in the world beyond her care had never bothered her before. It was odd that a nagging feeling should bother her, some detail left unfinished, a task she needed to do.

She went about her life, tending her small garden, literally, both the tiny plot she grew her foodstuffs on, and her own affairs, such as they were. She often ignored the stars spread across the heavens at night, but even a casual glance upward while retrieving carrots from her garden showed the agitation in the heavens. She stopped and studied the scattering of sparks spread across the velvet dark. Adding to her growing unease, Kira still had the sense strange things were happening across the world, and that McAllister needed her. Sable did also, though she was somewhere closer. Kira worried at the knowledge that they were separated, worried at it for a hidden meaning.

Her friend ... here, she smiled, her friend was still batty.

"Go to them," her friend told her in her strange voice. "I'll be well."

Kira, the great sea-dragon knew it wouldn't be so easy. Her unhatched egg was developing. She was positive it held her son, and she'd been thinking of names much of late. Nothing in her art would let her see within the mottled shell. Kira did not know how long a dragon should take to incubate her egg, having never seen another sea-dragon.

Kira would not leave her egg, and she worried for her longtime familiar Yivani. With a sigh, Kira did that thing which was so discouraged by the rest of the Hellborn, that thing that might indelibly mark her as their enemy forever. Kira, proud and independent, one who had lived alone for so many millennia, admitted she didn't know enough to plan any course of action and prayed to a goddess for guidance.

"Why hasn't your uncle arrived, Azer?" Sable was still short with the young demon. Within the last three days, she had taken over the direction of the daily activity for the small group. For an hour in the morning, they worked on learning the sword, and again for an hour before dusk. One hour was devoted to Shan Hu's practice of destructive magery, there in the courtyard. Four hours were for Shan Hu to read, and two for practical application of his magic and laboratory experiments. One hour for the evening meal, and that left two hours for Shan Hu and Sable to talk privately.

That Sable and Shan Hu could plan privately was a recent development. The morning after Sable asked why she should not kill him, Azer had tried to exert dominance over her with his superior swordsmanship. Sable recalled just enough of her equine mass to beat his blade aside with incredible strength, and sent the Fire racing down her blade to burn a welt in his side as she landed her blow. Only one blow, delivered with implacable eyes of green fire, muscles of steel, and a mass Azer had no hope of answering, and the message was clear.

There was no Healing of the burn Sable landed, not by magery. Only the natural healing brought by time could help, and Azer was ... painfully aware of the fact. He was likewise aware Sable had withheld what obviously could have been a killing blow, and the knowledge changed the nature of the relationship between the three prisoners trapped within the house.

Azer had not tried to silence Sable by magic again.

"I think he must be stymied at the border between the planes. I cannot believe he hasn't found my letter," he answered politely.

Sable sighed. "I cannot believe he hasn't, either. That leaves some alternative answers. One, he doesn't care. Two, he trusts in you to succeed or fail on your own. Three, as you suggest, someone or something barred his entrance to this plane."

Azer said nothing.

"Shan Hu," Sable said, then, "what keeps you from using magics of a higher order?"

Azer started to answer for him, but Shan Hu made a small gesture with his hand to forestall it. Sable noted the movement, and with suppressed humor, watched Azer subside.

"A sense of mastery, Lady," he gave his response at a measured pace. "There are more ... axes, directions of movement, I should characterize them as, with each level. To handle all of the new ones, and there are more new ones with each level, I need more familiarity and control. It's is a thing of the facility of the mind, how much I can encompass."

"Not so different than complicated sorcery," she mused, and Azer nodded. "Both of you, then, spend an hour now and research spells of time. I don't want to sit in this prison much longer, or at least not longer in the outside world," and she gave Azer a direct stare as she said it.

The young demon withstood the weight of her stare with chin held high, though he nodded his acceptance of her orders.

The chamber beyond the door was large, constructed with more of the gray granite blocks. Largely unadorned, the only source of illumination was the globe of light McAllister had created.

In the center of the room four great arches, their curvature barely obvious to the eye, met in a central pillar, the arches just separating from one another in the last few feet from the roof, each arch square in cross-section, and easily five feet thick. The arches came together to form the center pillar, six feet on a side, under the domed roof more than forty feet overhead.

McAllister noted the three other sets of double doors spaced evenly around the circumference of the chamber, and the curvature of the walls. He had no doubt that water could be caused to rush in those doors. Though the water may be a short while in the coming, it would not lack for force and depth when it arrived.

Looking up, he shuddered to think about how far underground he was, and how many tons of cut stone block could come tumbling down to fill the chamber if the central pillar failed.

"They did what I asked and more," Carus said in awe. "I never saw this level after it was roofed over. The great arches were still massively propped up with lumber. The project was to take four hundred years. I ... died ... in the fiftieth year of its construction, an old man."

With an easy smile, he turned to the two guardsmen, Beneficiaries, Carus called them, 'soldiers for the good of all', meaning 'military police', a duty McAllister's Royal Marines were often pressed into in fleet duty. "Emile," Carus addressed one, and the taller of the two guardsmen ducked his head. "I'd a report the two of you were absent from your post, early on in the construction, perhaps the tenth or twelfth year. I am signally happy to discover you hadn't deserted your post."

"It weren't nothing, sir," the guard, Emile, responded. "We'd just stared down one of the snooty Hindi royals and one of his flunkies, and set down to dice, and here we are." The other guard's stomach rumbled then. Emile grinned. "I hope there's a meal soon, sir, I haven't eaten in twelve hundred years."

"We need to survive this next bit first," McAllister murmured, with his eyes locked on the pillar. Unlike the decoy room the tour on his first visit into the palace, this room had a sense of something ... At his breast, McAllister felt the stick talisman awaken, the level of awareness the carved stick projected sharpened almost painfully.

Behind McAllister the light brightened, as he circled the pillar, studying its face. "It thrums, as it calls to you, does it not?" The voice was Aditya's, though McAllister frowned at the words in the language he thought of as 'Bhandi', his attention still on the pillar. Idly, he removed the lashing holding the stick talisman to his breast.

"Can you subdue it?" McAllister asked the stick in the silent way.

A short burst of confident scorn came back to him, then, and McAllister felt the will of the stick encompass the strength of the Rod embedded within the pillar.

"Before you strive, you should understand deeper," came Aditya's voice from behind, warm and close, and McAllister nodded, his attention almost fully upon the pillar. The Rod was a thing of constancy, of adamant will, he knew from his reading. 'When the cryptic lettering flashed golden, all must obey or die', he had read in the library in the city of Crest.

He perceived lines of strength radiating from the cube at the end of the rod, permeating the pillar, and spreading through the Palace. To a lesser extent lines ran through the rock and air of the upper city of Bhangda. Other localized pockets of the strange force were scattered about the world, he saw, some greater than others, the greatest of which must be the Basilica at Saint-Raphael.

With dull shock, McAllister realized the will of the Rod still bound thousands on thousands of men, dead and in their graves, their bones still under the geas of the Rod. Perhaps worse were the men whose bones were scattered, not collected together in a grave. McAllister understood then the magic on the horn he carried, and understood more of the Rod.

The strength in the pillar withstood the weight of the entire Palace, millions of tons which should have crushed the pillar before him into dust, exploding the massive blocks with great force before the Palace crashed into the bowl scraped into the bedrock of the mountain, the bowl McAllister stood at the bottom of. "Bide a moment," McAllister told the stick, while he drew on the inner fire, and quickly wove the spell of binding he used on the door to Huídào's study, in the wing of Natural Philosophy in Sea's-Home, a lifetime ago. Tightly, neatly, McAllister wove, sending the strands of the stuff to climb up the pillars and through the arches, binding the stone. With each strand he drew it tightly, until it lay closely within the substance of the stone blocks.

"Enough, do you think?" McAllister asked the stick.

McAllister sensed approval from the talisman for what he did, but it seemed uncertain if the extent were enough.

"Well, then, go slowly," McAllister told it, silently.

Time slowed for McAllister, as his stick began working a contest of wills. His perception returned to normal, though the room dimmed, and the familiar sense of cold permeating everything without McAllister returned. The golden nimbus around the ivory rod McAllister held encompassed him, and then it seemed to him the stone blocks of the pillar became like glass. Embedded within the stone, the Rod ignored McAllister and the stick talisman, seemingly unaware of the alteration in the flow of time.

The ivory carving in McAllister's hand acted, and somehow pinched one of the vastly slowed flows of force leaving the Rod until the flow stopped. The ivory then turned that flow back into the Rod. Methodically, then, it set about repeating the action for every flow of force from the Rod, and McAllister understood, then.

"It's not aware," he told the ivory baton in his hand, and received confirmation in a warm pulse. "You will defeat it," he conveyed to the ivory carving, then, with utter confidence. Flow after flow, the ivory baton sundered and returned to the Rod, until there were only two left.

"You should save the battle for your goddess' Basilica for when you are physically there," a voice he should not have been able to hear in this moment outside of normal time suggested.

McAllister looked up to see a tall figure with legs crossed and a vaguely pear-shaped face hovering before him. The figure shone with a natural luminance, and small black eyes regarded him from under slender brows, over a tiny, bow-shaped mouth. All of this paled in McAllister's mind as he saw the one before him held a trident and a comb in a second set of hands behind the first set draped in his lap. "Am I free to depart for the Basilica in Saint-Raphael, then?" McAllister asked.

"That will depend," the other said, and held the object in his lap up before McAllister. An eye, floating above the hands, McAllister saw, and the eye saw him.

"Its glare can burn," the other said, "though I think, not you. Another shall negotiate, I have judged. Release the flow of time," the last directed at the ivory baton McAllister held in his hand.

Time flowed again, McAllister knew, as the light from the ball he created, surely a lifetime ago, again lit the room. Warm and fluid, the others in the room were speaking.

"Well, when do you begin?" Carus asked, curiously, while McAllister studied the ivory rod in his hand, all hints of its former wooden substance replaced.

"He has finished," Aditya spoke in Denarian, and his voice carried a sense of presence, of multiple voices speaking at once. "McAllister, we are pleased you have chosen a way that did not destroy the palace, nor destroy the instrument of binding. Will you leave it with us?"

McAllister read the consternation in Aditya's face and body as real fear. "Relax," he told the smaller man in Bhangdi. "It is only a visitation," and turned so the others in the room would not see his smile.

"Do I need to leave that sorcery I've woven above in place?" McAllister asked when he turned back.

"No," he was told. "The artifact binds it still. You have a right to the artifact, therefore we did not stop you. You were judged as pure of purpose, and now that we have seen your actions, we offer a service in exchange for your right of ownership of the device."

McAllister nodded. "I don't like the thought of millions on the mudflats below, living in squalor, with no hope of changing their station in the world."

"There is precedent, set by many, for changing one's station."

"There are no public works, no sea-wall, no provisions for defense," McAllister countered.

"There is not enough food produced to feed even a fraction more."

"There is no stewardship, no governance, in the city below. With direction, and authority, labor can be diverted toward foodstuffs. Other labor can be diverted to common defense and public works. There are no large palaces under construction here in the upper city," McAllister said. "Was that not a time of plenty?"

"What, then, do you propose?"

"Allow the worship of the Child, the Mother, and the Crone in the lower City. Stonemasonry may be taught in the construction of her churches, and the order her Church imposes can be taught as well. Her religion is not exclusive, and if you are seen supporting her here, her priestess can work, over a generation, for the improvement of all. There would be little in conflict with the ways of existing law. You obtain a healthier, and content populace. Defense from storms, skilled labor for shipping and cartage, and a city of stone, all fed by willing farmers."

"And if we decline?"

"It will happen anyway, but badly," McAllister sighed. "Sooner or later, shipping from Denaria or Han will find your harbor, and find things to sell to those with no means to buy. The shipmaster's demands will hold your government, the Royals, hostage or your people will overthrow the government."

"Why do you say this, McAllister?" The multiple voices speaking through Aditya fell silent, and only one, not Aditya's natural voice, asked.

"I've seen it, in the policies of my King's government," McAllister replied. "There is a country, on my world, called Bengal. Men from the United Kingdom, men who run a company of shipping, bring into Bengal a drug that causes its users to crave more and more of the good feeling it brings. The drug is meant for shipment into the massive country behind it, a country that is extremely poor, but has so many people the company can get rich nonetheless. That drug kills the people who use it, as they would rather have more of it than eat. The shipmasters use the money the drug trade brings to purchase silver for trade with the Chinamen, and they trade with China for tea to sell back at home. To keep the tea coming, the Parliament allows ever greater atrocities in the name of producing more opium to further the cycle. There is nothing the Emperor of China can do to stop this."