Chapter 24: 15. The Flame’s Witness

~Desmer~

Carhavel belonged to him.

Against the backdrop of a dark sky, the last unstifled fires blazed in the ruins of fallen walls. Beyond them was the glimmering sheen of the stars. It was right that they'd come to witness this. Right that they saw what their gift had bought.

Desmer had always been taught to fear the men of the Grasp. Gadsen liked to tell him stories of kings so mighty even the shadow of their crowns could bring their enemies to kneel. Of knights so ruthless they had driven the woodsfolk to extinction. Of Magi so uncaring that they had wiped out entire kingdoms, turning the very land inhospitable, without batting an eyelid. He'd always known the stories for false, of course. Even if Gadsen did not lie himself, it was clear that the words he spread were lies he'd heard from elsewhere, embellishments made to lionise Graspman kings or to excuse the cowardice of Southern warmongers too afraid to take back what was rightfully theirs.

But he'd expected some resistance. The fortress wall of Orrde Bank had been delivered to him by a saboteur within the garrison. Morsearn had been an inspired touch. The Graspmen couldn't be faulted for failing to these tricks; anybody would be taken in, even Desmer had he not been the one to think up the strategies. Tarhanen should not have fallen in hours, though, and neither should Carhavel. This last had been fun at first. The city's defenders had conjured shield walls, a demonstration of some will to fight. It had been as a child's game to break the shields, of course, but Desmer had thought them the first step in a beautiful battlefield dance. He'd been wrong. The shields fell, and Carhavel descended to chaos.

Southerner losses amounted to seven men. Two of them hadn't been slain by Carhavel's soldiers at all, but had drowned in the rush of the Rhaddan river. Desmer still found wonder in these rivers of the Grasp. The water was so clear, so bountiful. It was almost a shame to taint it with the bitter iron tang of blood. But needs must. In war, you could never be precious.

Asceline, slick with sweat from the battle, stood a short way from him, beneath the shattered archway of what had once been a gate. Now it was a breach, and men still spilled through it. She stared at the Rhaddan. Its rage had never been dulled by the passage of time. It rushed on and on, an ancient ghost, unaware that a battle had just been fought on its shores. And it stared back at Asceline.

"No doubt you saw the shields," Desmer said to her, and she jumped at the sound of his voice.

"I did, my king. A valiant effort."

"There is magic in this city." He smiled. "Let us hope those who wield it are not as stubborn as you were."

"The magic was never mine to touch," said Asceline, eyes cast at the ground. "You were right to take it from me."

He nodded. "I was. Shall we see what our day has won?"

"After you, my king."

Desmer stepped into Carhavel to a backdrop of cries. Soldiers who had defended the wall, in their armour of pale blue--stained red with blood--were now herded against the charred remnants of that selfsame wall. Four by four they were bound at the wrists with rope, pressed up tight to the wall, then--on a command from Tauver--killed. A sword in the back. They died screaming, and their screams of pain only begat screams of fear from the ones still waiting their turn. It was impressive how many men the city had mustered to its defence, and how quickly they had given up on their cause. They were broken. No sense wasting their lives.

He raised a hand. "Stop with this, Tauver."

"My king?" Tauver had a frown on his face.

"The city is won. Butchery is pointless. These men fight for me now."

Tauver nodded. "As you say."

Desmer turned away before he said something he'd regret. Tauver, for all his strengths, could be impudent. It was the bloodlust in him--so easy to trigger and so difficult to sate. When the wars were done and the Grasp was his, Tauver would become a problem. It would be necessary to have peace then. Tauver would crave only war. When the time came, friend or not, Desmer had to deal with Tauver. But the time was not yet. For now, much of the Grasp remained unconquered. Tauver had a part to play yet.

A man in grey woollen robes descended the steps from the wall. Hamonet. The man who had been with Desmer the longest, since Ambricie. Age had given him a permanent stoop, and scored deep age lines into his face, but his mind was still as sharp as a sword. A smile hooked onto his face as he walked towards Desmer, adjusting the iron bracelets on his wrists. "My king, the Magi here are arrogant enough to identify themselves with little pendants around their necks, as though they do not fear a soul. In trawling the ruins I have found five of them. Most are dead."

Desmer laughed. There had been only one Magus in Tarhanen, and she had willingly thrown herself into his service, begged and wept for her life. That was a disappointment. In the homelands people spoke with awe of the Magi of the Grasp, and he'd looked forward to meeting their challenge. In Carhavel, at least, they'd stood in defiance of him. Though calling it 'defiance' was a kindness. "Perhaps they should have feared," he said. The worst thing a person could do was go without fear. Fear was the emotion that spurred greatness. If Desmer had not feared what Gadsen would have done to him, he wouldn't have speared Gadsen on his blade and ascended to greatness. Even now he had fear. Only one individual needed to find him with a projectile to render him insensible and end his reign too soon. That was why he was always cautious. "Hamonet, you said most are dead."

Hamonet nodded. "Yes, my king. Four bodies, all of them stiffened by death. They died early in the siege."

"And the fifth?"

Hamonet flicked his chin upwards. Following the movement, Desmer saw two of his homeland soldiers descending the stairs behind Hamonet, dragging between them a ragged figure. A woman. She was a mess; her hair was matted with thick blood. One hand was shattered and the other gone altogether, and her left leg was bent in an entirely unnatural way. She was lucky to have lived as long as she had. It would be a gift from the stars if she were to survive until morning, and even should she recover she would never walk again. Except...

"Hold still, child," he said, as she was laid before him. As though not understanding, her eyes met his and she began to wriggle. She moaned in a brittle voice. Then she saw her missing hand and she wailed. Did she know how much she was trying his patience? He knelt and pushed her chest, holding her in place. "I said hold still. When a king gives you a command, you obey it."

The Magus met his eyes again. She seemed dazed. "King..." she whispered. "No..."

Keeping his hand on her chest, Desmer reached for the power in his veins. He caught a hold of it and opened himself fully to it, letting it run like molten lava through him. And he let a bare trickle of it pass from his hands into the Magus. It seemed to glow as it travelled through her, honing in on the wounded extremities, knitting them together and making them right. In time, he could restore every part of her that was broken, remake all that was lost. It would barely even bring him to sweat.

But he never did for nothing.

He lifted his hand away, severing the connection with the Magus. At once the power receded. The light that was tracing her nerves crumpled away. Desmer needed her alive. He needed to quell her bleeding, break the fever in her head, purge her body of infection. It even served his purposes that she had two working hands. In her stupor she still looked on in amazement at the suddenly-restored appendage on her left wrist; she bent and prodded her fingers as though disbelieving that the hand was truly there and not just an illusion.

Desmer did not need her to walk, though. Her leg would not kill her. That was enough.

She looked at him again, and her mouth fell open. "Why?"

"You have the power of the stars in your blood," he said. "Just a touch, and you think yourself a master of that power. I have gazed into the heart of the stars, and seen the writhing of their fury. I have let their flames sear my flesh, and put myself at their mercy. On the barren plains of Dacsaul I stood. I saw it fall to me, from the sky: a messenger from the stars. I saw it as it came down to kill me. I embraced death there, and so the star gave me life. Its power is mine." He felt the fire burning in his red eye. The eye had once been blue, like the other; he remembered the way he screamed as his face burned, and his eye melted in its socket. Oh, it had been agony. And when it was done, he had sight again. He had the power, as sure as blood in his veins. That had been the greatest of the star's miracles. "It is nothing to me to make right what is broken. Just as it is nothing to unmake it, should I so choose."

The woman's dark eyes widened. That made Desmer happy. He would never tire of the way these arrogant men and women of the Grasp recoiled in the face of true power.

"It is just as the stories say," she squeaked. "Chimeras are insane."

"Others said the same of me," Desmer told her. "The kings of the South thought to quiet me. They sent me to the driest depths of the most arid desert, so I would die of thirst and my body would cook. But I did not die. I grew instead. There are no kings of the South, now. There is only me. Gillabin was once a prince, but his father thought to defy me. Now Gillabin serves me, and his father feeds the flies. Would you defy me, Magus?"

"Please..."

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"You mustn't be afraid of me. If I wanted to kill you, you would have died when I broke your feeble attempt at a shield." He smiled. People liked it when you smiled at them. "My dear friend Asceline once thought as you did. When I cut down every other man and woman of the South lands who'd ever been kissed by the stars, she spat in my face. She named me insane, just as you did, and vowed to see me dead. In return, I gave her the gift of a life everlasting. In time she came to understand why I must do what I do." Someone had to unite the realms, before the end came. Why shouldn't it be Desmer? "What's your name?"

The defiant glare the woman gave him withered in a second. "Kana," she said, meekly.

"Hold still then, Kana," he told her. "This will not hurt a bit." He nodded to Hamonet, who held the girl in place, then lifted his arm out. Ripples of blue light ran across it, leaving the flesh translucent. It was a trick indeed to do this next part. The stars didn't like it when he did, hadn't meant to give him access to this particular power--he could feel their anger every time, feel their reproach. It came as a pulsing pain in his red eye, pressing on the inside of his skull. They thought they could take back what was no longer theirs. Laughable. For all their magic, the stars were no smarter than men. They were blind still to the truth. He was stronger than the stars were, now. He could ignore them. Pushing the pain to the back of his mind, he reached for Kana's chest. When his hand touched her skin, it passed through, as though it was not skin at all but merely water. When he was wrist-deep, Kana glanced down, and she screamed. Her eyes were a picture of horror.

It was the same with all of them. To begin with.

His hands found their mark, and closed around Kana's heart--the only part of her solid to his touch. The heart came away at the lightest tug. The veins and arteries bled for a second, but he soothed them, and they stitched together, as though there'd never been a heart there. Gently, then, he withdrew it from her chest, and held it aloft. The screaming was louder then that it had been before. She drummed the floor with her feet.

As he'd done so many times before, Hamonet came to take the heart from Desmer. He was the Heartkeeper. The hearts Desmer had taken lived in jars, which Hamonet alone knew the location of. Each held the power of its original owner; when Desmer took them, he took the powers too, more powers than one man was meant to have access to. That was why the stars threw up challenges for him. Why he had to conquer the Grasp before the stars came to wage their war on him. "The screaming's unnecessary, Kana," he said, as Hamonet bore her heart away. "I am the Flame's Witness, and my heart will beat for you. You don't need one of your own. You will live forever, Kana, and forever you will have a place of honour at my side."

The screaming stopped. She looked at him with hollow, ashen eyes, moist with tears. Those eyes were brimming with hatred.

"You mustn't hate me," he told her. "And soon you will learn to love me instead."

There was often resistance to the taking of a heart. Kana bore no shame for it; it was a weakness of humanity, not confined to the coddled peoples of the Grasp but endemic to the entire race--an inability to relinquish one's ego to a stronger master. The heart was love, the common folk were told. The heart was power, so the starkissed believed. None of them understood that the heart was a curse placed upon mankind by their sidereal progenitors. Desmer had once believed as the others did. He'd not seen, then. He remembered the day the man in the azure mask had come to the desert of Ambricie. For shame, Desmer had wept, begged for mercy. Yelled out Gadsen's name. The old man still slept, though; for all Desmer's screaming, he never came.

When the man in the azure mask had taken his heart, Desmer had bawled. Kana had taken the loss with far greater grace. It was only once it was all done that Desmer realised that it was not butchery that had driven the man to do what he had. There was no savagery involved. No loss. It had been a gift. No longer reliant on that weak organ to keep him alive, Desmer's eyes had been opened to the flame. Beneath a blanket of stars, in the dry plains surrounding the Hangman's Butte, the man in the azure mask had cast Desmer's heart to the fire. In the blaze, he'd seen everything; a flurry of colours, a myriad of possibility. The stars liked their gift. On that night, when they were as bright as they were all year, they gave a gift of their own. It was then that his power had been awakened.

Gadsen had died to ensure the gift remained his. There'd been no sorrow as he killed the old man. Gadsen's right to be wept over had been forfeited when he did not answer Desmer's cries.

Every heart Desmer took was a growth in his power. Hamonet did something to them when he put them in those jars, tying them to Desmer and exacerbating his strength. Hamonet's arrival in Ambricie had coincided with the departure of the man in the azure mask. It had been a good trade; Hamonet did not presume to command Desmer, or drive him hard, the way the man in the azure mask often did. He was content to serve. From his aid, an empire had blossomed at Desmer's back. His most loyal followers had once stood in opposition to him. Tauver had come to his side when he killed the King of the Raigerlands. Asceline swore her shield to him, when she had finally put away her foolish longings for the power she'd once touched and realised that it was far more satisfying to live forever in the court of a man who was her better.

He sent Kana off with Asceline, to be properly dressed and to learn the ways of her new king.

Alone at last, Desmer wandered. It was good to know the city you had conquered. And more than that, the man in the azure mask had taught him the value of time alone. It was the greatest lesson the man had ever imparted. You could win many glories on the battlefield. With a Heartkeeper at your side, there was no end to the power that you could claim. But it wasn't until you took some time to reflect in your victory that you could truly know that power.

Today he had taken a woman for his own, let her essence diffuse throughout his blood. He could feel Kana's heart beating inside him. Every beat sent his newfound ability through him, until it was soaked into his every inch, more a part of him than it had ever been a part of Kana. Oh, and it felt good. Far away from everybody else, now, Desmer closed his eyes.

When he delved inside himself, he could see his accumulated powers, like cuttings of the stars running through his blood. One light was new. The strength of Kana, given in exchange for eternity. Men were borne from the ashes of once-mighty stars, lifeblood created in the depths of their stellar cauldrons and spilled as they fell to the very soil. Every thought was the stammering of a star-spark. Kana had been able to read them, as though she were reading a book; such a talent had been promised by those in the Octal Tower who were sworn to Desmer, but the true power was far greater than what he'd been promised. Greater than Kana ever knew. The thoughts of any man Desmer chose were now his to command. Finer control would come with practice, and presumably work best on those he had already broken to their base state--but he did not need fine control. He needed only the ability to touch.

That had been granted him by Kana's gift.

He focused his mind on the new starlight, and begged it to consume him. The brilliant ecstasy of the fire flooding his veins came, and then he entered the Dream.

Desmer had never fully conquered the Dream. Nobody had, who now lived, and few seemed even to have heard of it. The man in the azure mask dismissed it as a folly. Sombreth, who had dared to stand in defiance of Desmer at the Bone-Ford even when her kin were all dead, had talked of it, had screamed a promise to show Desmer all its secrets when he'd finally broken her resolve. He'd even taken her heart, as a reward. Sombreth knew little: how to touch the Dream, how to realise when the Dream had touched you. Those skills she'd learned from an elder when she was a little girl herself, and had failed to improve upon in eighty years of life. For the false promise, she was suspended by thick ropes above a deep canyon. Hamonet had been commanded to keep her heart, so that she would not die. She remained there still. She would remain there until wind and time wore the ropes down to fibres. Those who made false promises to the Son of Prophecy did not get to die quick.

Now, like never before, Desmer walked the Dream as a man in control. How had Kana lived with this ability for so long, and never used it to its full? Did she not know what she had? Desmer saw the stars splayed out before him, billions upon billions, infinity. So close he could touch them. Except they weren't really stars, and he didn't need to touch them. He spoke. He spoke, and the infinities heard.

 

~Eada~

Eada slept alone in her bed. The mattress was hard, the pillow so thin it might as well not have been there, and the room was unbearably hot. She'd been given a bower in the middle of King Desmer's castle, directly above the kitchens; the heat rose and gathered here in the day, and there were no windows to air it out. It was no accident that she'd been placed here. It was a punishment from the King, for her outburst earlier in the day. For daring to care for Telsa as more than just a piece of warm flesh with curves where the King liked there to be curves.

Telsa was going to join her at some point in the night. When opportunity allowed. King Descard was a jealous man, she said. He wanted Telsa for his own, and would likely take her by force if he thought another would get her first. The fool. Did he not realise that Telsa Cannaldan's heart already belonged to another? She and Eada had promised themselves to one another when they were only girls.

Eada tossed and turned in the bed, trying to find somewhere that was comfortable. It was no good. There wasn't an inch of this bed that was suitable for sleeping on; she'd be awake until the morning, awake until she passed out from sheer exhaustion. Come the morning she'd be gone. She hoped she wouldn't be alone. Telsa would not come; she had a job of her own to do, and would not abandon it until it was done. But Percy Oddell might. Whatever he said, Eada was sure there was a chance he'd come with her. It was writ large on his essence, clear for her to read. The man was more a contradiction than he let on. He'd fled from Carhavel, telling himself in the moment that what he did was righteous. He might do the same again. But Pardasath was far from danger still. Jac Rendas insisted that no trace of Outlander armies had been seen at Anternien. And when it came to it, there was nowhere to go from here but out of Tuiar altogether. Percy Oddell was loyal to his homeland. Leaving Pardasath was like a betrayal, he said. Eada thought him a pompous fool for that--why stay in a homeland that has nothing left to offer? But she could see he meant what he said. She would not be cruel enough to ridicule his heartfelt faith.

The trouble was that part of him--the part that thought of Eada as a daughter, and loved her as such--didn't want to leave her alone. She didn't know whether Percy would be waiting for her at the gate of Pardasath with the coming dawn. She wouldn't find out until she was ahorse.

She yawned, suddenly exhausted, and sleep came to her.

The darkness resolved into a nightmare in the span of seconds. Broken stones scattered across grass, like bodies beneath a sky of blood. In the distance, a tower stood amidst a backdrop of broiling flame. Its form was unmistakeable. The Octal Tower. Even as Eada started towards it, the Tower was split in two by an almighty fury of blue and red light crashing against one another. As she gaped in horror, the Octal Tower fell to the ground.

Where it had been, a face appeared. The man might have been handsome, in another light; gentle curls of blonde hair framed a firm, unscarred face. But those eyes... one was brilliantly blue, but the other was a fire opal. A chimera.

Eada turned to look away... but no matter which way she faced, the man was there, locked hard in the centre of her vision. And then he spoke.

"Tarhanen has fallen," he said, his voice echoing terribly around the red firmament. "Orrde Bank and the Threepoint Fort fell before it. Carhavel, too, is mine. People of the Grasp, your day of great salvation is at hand. I am here. The Son of Prophecy, he who was foretold to forge new Chains. I am not your enemy. I am the man who will unite all of mankind under a single banner. No city which submits itself to me will be harmed, but let my words be a warning: the great city of Carhavel, which has never before been conquered, is gone. Every stone has been torn down. Such will be the fate of all cities who stand in opposition to me, and who think to meet my army in battle."

Not true, Eada knew. The whitestone which made the core of Carhavel could not be destroyed. No means known to man could so much as scratch it. But most of the city is not built from whitestone, she thought. Can it be gone?

The man continued. "For many centuries your petty kingdoms have stood. All that time, they have been in thrall to servants of the very evil that will destroy the world. The Magi of the Octal Tower, granted safe harbour in every inn, afforded places of high honour in the halls of kings, conspire to undermine the stability of the Grasp. It was Magi who murdered Fariel the Fair. It was Magi who brought blight to the peaceful kingdom of Otenlan. Their magic is an affront to the stars that granted it to them, and they live with impunity. I am the man who sentences them, and the man who carries it out. I speak now to all the kings and queens of the Grasp: surrender to me your Magi, that I may deal them the justice they deserve. Do this, and bow to me, and I will permit you to rule your lands as you always have, as duchies in my united realm. Defy me, and your fate will be the fate of the House of Egéna, whose blasphemous scions I rewarded with the mercy of death."

The man was gone then, just as suddenly as he'd appeared. The Tower was gone, too, and the dream. Eada was in her bed.

Sobbing.

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