Michael Stackpole - The New World

“I don’t want to burn the rest of my city. We’re not using fire. We will, however, need sand to put out fires. We will need work crews-they can use the sand piles to block streets. We want to channel the kwajiin into killing areas. Count Derael has worked out how best we can trap them. Get his charts and coordinate placement of ballistae, spring engines, and barricades.”

Two clerks, one working logistics and the other on fire precautions, bowed and withdrew. As they passed through the doorway, a replacement for the first clerk appeared and dropped into place at a desk. As she did, heat poured through Cyron.

His vision faded, yet he continued to see. Each of the clerks became a bright spot, a star in the night sky of his vision. Little white lines connected them with others, creating three-dimensional constellations, with himself in the middle. Energy pulsed from him to them, and from them out to the others. Stars shifted. People rearranged themselves, resources were re-ordered, and what had begun as a tangled skein of lines and points resolved itself into a flexible and resilient matrix binding North Moriande together.

Cyron heard no sounds, but he knew he was speaking because energy pulsed out of him. Clerks rose and departed, sharing that energy with others. New clerks appeared and locked into place in the matrix. More orders were communicated and more people moved.

Because the pattern appeared so clearly, Cyron changed his orders. He reemphasized some things, or set up redundant systems. He found bottlenecks and alleviated them. He ordered water to be brought in smaller casks to combat stations. He demanded carts be requisitioned so meals could be brought to soldiers at their posts.

He reached out and the city seemed to fit him like a formal robe. There was so much there, but it all had to be perfect. He smoothed a wrinkle here, tightened a lace there, folded, and tucked. In the rush of things it took him a moment to realize he had his left arm back and was using it with the skill of a musician teasing notes from a necyl.

I am whole again.

He laughed and his joy poured through the matrix. A prince born of princes, it was assumed his talent had been for governance. He had done well in his post, but the thing he did best was organizing. His father had begun the program of exploration, but Cyron had formalized it, set goals, and encouraged it even before he’d reached the throne.

I was a minister without a ministry, working at my talent without ever realizing it.

He began to work faster. Clerks came, but before they had spoken or handed him a report, he knew their questions, had found solutions and communicated them. Some clerks looked at papers and found marginal notes they’d not seen before, then acted on them. Others suddenly remembered a fact he’d mentioned. Upon checking, they found a solution.

The matrix pulsed with life-his life-and energized him in return. The sheer joy of seeing things work, of watching them unfold and simplify, provided him with the same deep satisfaction as hearing a bird sing, or watching a sunset.

“Highness.”

Eiran’s voice reached him. Cyron blinked, and the world returned. The room had emptied of clerks and the day had passed into twilight. “Where is everyone?”

“They are off on the missions you gave them.” The Helosundian prince shook his head. “I was here for it all, but I never noticed time passing. I heard every word…”

“You heard it? I was speaking?”

Eiran hesitated. “I remember hearing, but that is the only way I can understand what has happened. You did not stop and there was no problem for which you could not find a solution. Some so elegant that we would never have thought of them ourselves. Organizing militia by neighborhoods and using those neighborhoods as rallying points was brilliant.”

Cyron nodded. “That’s where they will run to when the line breaks. It was right.”

“The whole thing was right, Highness.” Eiran jerked his head to the south. “With your plan in place, and you in command, Nelesquin’s invasion is finished before it begins.”

Pravak Helos hated premonitions. He’d never been inclined to trust them back before the Turasynd expedition. Whenever he felt good about something, it always went wrong. And when he felt bad about it, it just went worse.

The only things worthy of trust were his skill with swords and his strength. He’d come to the study of xingna through his mastery of the sword, though he’d never devoted himself to it fully like some of the others. He’d learned minor magics-things to keep his blades sharp or to heal small cuts. But he’d refused to be seduced by magic, as others had, keeping himself grounded with his continued study of the sword.

The problem with premonitions was that they were irresistible. He’d come to awareness in midevening when something jolted him. It actually made him feel energized, which he took as a good sign. Then he decided it was a premonition. From there he had to follow his sense of things.

Well, his sense, and the stones.

There had been a dozen of them so far. Black pebbles-unremarkable save for their uniform smoothness. They reminded him of Nelesquin’s scrying stones, which Pravak had grown to hate more and more. They generated premonitions, and Nelesquin relied on them too heavily.

Pravak slid his swords into the harness on his back and set out. He found the first stone in the corridor outside his chamber in Quunkun, and the next in the road. He followed them as he would a trail, knowing that someone leaving so obvious a set of clues intended him to follow. That raised the spectre of an ambush, but this did not concern the vanyesh. A side from Nelesquin, Qiro, and perhaps Qiro’s grandson, he feared nothing in Moriande.

He sighed-or, rather, his shoulders slumped as if he were sighing. His lack of lungs had done nothing to strip away the habit. He had imagined Ciras Dejote would give him more of a fight, but the young man had not. If he truly was the reincarnation of Jogot Yirxan, the rebirth had been flawed. Now the swordsman was flawed-another useless enemy.

Pravak was aware that Virisken Soshir lurked beyond the river, but wasn’t concerned about him. The man was, after all, mortal. Though they had never seriously come to blows in the past, Pravak had seen him fight. While Soshir was good, he was hardly invincible.

The stones led Pravak across South Moriande and to Kojaikun. Here the vanyesh ’s dread deepened, because he recognized what had awakened him. Many of the vanyesh harvested the magic from the city. The thaumston fibers he wore as a long queue dragged magic from the circles. Pravak’s new vitality meant he was drawing more power because no one else was harvesting it.

The others are dead.

That shook him. The vanyesh had hardly been immortal. Down through the eons, survivors had changed-abandoning their physical forms for constructs they’d created in Tolwreen. Many of his comrades had ridiculed him for having his skeleton wrapped in a silver/ thaumston alloy upon which magic formulae could be inscribed, but he’d outlived those who doubted him.

Even as he bent and picked up the final stone, he realized he was the last of those who had preserved Nelesquin’s legacy.

The Grand Hall in Kojaikun had been transformed into barracks for the vanyesh. Not only was it spacious enough, and pleasingly decorated, but the Keru had used it as a place to train. Magic lingered there, making it a welcome sanctuary.

Now a mausoleum.

A Viruk waited in the center of the hall, armed with a Keru spear. Around him, the rest of the vanyesh lay scattered as if a child had destroyed them in a tantrum. The vanyesh sparkled in the wan lamplight, each one beyond repair.

The Viruk grinned with a mouthful of ivory needles. “I would have killed you at Quunkun, but I thought you should see this.”