Most died in the effort.

FROM MEMORIES BY JEVAN LOR’VAKAYNE, SON OF SAVRA.

14

Bedor's spring light sliced the hallway leading to the secret scriptorium. The winter had been briefer than expected, and Gishna welcomed his light. That Zauhune wildling knight had already won at court. A new phase of her plan could begin. She'd no time to waste, and grasped Julissa, her heiress, by the arm.

“My girl,” she rasped. “It is time I show you something of grave importance.”

Julissa patted her arm. Her daughter humored her because she thought her matron mother was a helpless old woman. How wrong she was!

Gishna tightened her grip. “Girl, you are not yet a matron. Heed me!”

“Yes, matron mother,” Julissa said. “Of course. Tell me.” A plaintive sigh followed. Julissa had little to trouble her beyond lighter administrative tasks. Those were trivial matters compared to what Gishna must tell her today.

Gishna started down the hall, pulling on Julissa to follow. Her eyes may have failed three hundred years ago, but there were other ways of seeing and knowing the world. She had a natural affinity for the Dark and the other illicit powers she'd learned discreetly. She scoffed. She’d poison half the crater for her house's survival.

As they walked the long hall, she fed off tiny living things that made their homes in the cracks, in the unseen worlds in the air. She siphoned life from them in trickles, a beggar. It was forbidden to use this sorcery, but who bothered to enforce such things these days? It was no way to live, but she must for the good of her house. The hallway twisted and turned before her, a swirl of shadow shapes in her mind.

Julissa freed herself from Gishna's grip and hooked her arm in her mother's, patting it along the way, no doubt disturbed by her mother's strange behavior. It was time the girl found out. She was hardly a girl, anyway, nearing her fourth century. Had it been so long? Gishna felt redeemed for just a moment. Finally, they were doing things the right way. She needed to prepare her heiress for the matroncy and the current state of her house. In three months, Julissa would ask Rodin Lor'Nilhune to be her consort, and if the green-eyed seer was correct, she would struggle to have children with him. The taint was in both of them. Gishna couldn't allow Julissa to indulge in the same mistakes she'd made. Starting too early with children was the worst of all her offenses. Gishna had also waited too long to engage in the work her own mother had revealed to her before dying.

They would face the facts together. Today was Julissa's day of reckoning.

Gishna hoped her daughter would be wise and choose someone other than Rodin.

A taint pervaded Ilor'Hosmyr and its branches. It was easy to blame her grandmother, who'd consorted for love. As if they could blame one woman for something which had lain dormant in them since they first entered Vailassa. It didn't ease Gishna's conscience. She'd produced Julissa through sheer luck, and only after enduring four stillbirths. With each failure, Gishna had aged rapidly. The solution had mortified her first consort, Kaulor, but Gishna had admitted the seer into her domain because the matroncy compelled her. She must save her house.

“Through here,” she said, pulling Julissa along.

She felt the softness of Julissa's shawl, wrapped around her shoulders and hanging across her arms. The girl had a slight chill, even here in Halkamas, within the kith crater.

“Such weakness,” she said to herself.

Julissa just patted her arm.

They stopped at a door that Julissa had never thought to enter.

“What I show you now,” Gishna said. “What you hear within, you will never repeat to anyone. Even your consort. Not until you know he is fully bound.”

She waited for a reply.

“Of course, matron mother,” Julissa sighed.

“No! Say it true!”

“I swear it, mother.” Julissa let her go and the outline of her shivered as she grasped herself. She gave her mother an annoyed look.

Good! Let her endure me, Gishna thought. It won't be for much longer. She pulled a cord to the side of the door and a muffled bell sounded inside. The door opened a moment later and an advocate diviner greeted them with a bow. Above his forehead, the skin puckered into a small glyph which flickered with goddess-light. A second glyph was taking shape on the left side of his clean-shaven head. He wore a simple, dark blue tunic fringed with a pale gray border to designate his grade within the diviner's ranks.

They entered a long, tall chamber. Two rows of desks ran down the middle. True adepts, not painted skulls, sat at each desk as servants scurried about, bringing them their utensils or tea or water, whatever they needed to perform this great work. They did not look up as the matron passed. Julissa looked to her, eager to correct this insolence, but Gishna just grunted and shambled toward the back, her gown's wide silk sleeves flailing.

Large canvases with what looked like veins, or the roots of a tree, covered the walls. They started at a point and then branched off, sometimes to a dead end, or to another canvas, joined by a bright blue thread. Dozens of large canvases sat rolled up along the walls.

An adept with a head crammed with blistering glyphs rose from his desk, walked to a tree, and compared it to what he was writing.

“What are they doing, mother?” Julissa asked.

“Wait,” Gishna said and dragged her to the back.

Sinnin, the scriptorium prior, and second only to Thensil, Hosmyr's Chief Diviner, sat against the back wall. They stopped at his desk. Glyphs gleaming with goddess-light covered his bald head. He wore a midnight blue tunic lined with a silvery blue border. He'd been working on this project since her great grandmother's time yet kept a youthful appearance. Gishna never asked how. She allowed them their secrets as long as they didn't work against hers. He served with dedication and discretion, but like all diviners, had no consort. Only this chamber and its work commanded him. His loyalty was unclear, but she was stuck with him and these others.

“Is he available?” Gishna asked.

Sinnin nodded and rose, removing a keyring from his belt. He unlocked a narrow door behind his desk, and they entered. He locked the door behind them as they crammed into a passageway made for a servant.

“This way, high matron,” he said. Tiny blue sconces lining the ceiling lit up as he passed.

Julissa gripped her mother's arm and Gishna shook her head. The lights appeared as tiny dots in her mind, the most trivial of power, yet to her daughter, a daughter of this fruitless age, it was an awesome sight.

Soon the truth would shatter that awe. Gishna hoped her daughter was strong enough to bear it all. What else could she do? What choice did she have? Gishna would not, could not, live forever. That fact irked her. The best of them died, leaving their empires to the weak.

They reached another door. The keys—lengths of metal, each attuned to a different door—jangled as Sinnin flipped through them. Gishna snorted. All she needed today was more delay. Julissa's gaze fixed on her, widening with every second. Could the girl sense something in her? Was her inner fortress failing? Her daughter had never manifested a sign of a priestess's more elusive gifts like the reading of emotions or, greater still, of minds. If she had it, Julissa wisely kept it hidden.

A matron's first lesson: keep your secrets.

The door unlocked with a dull clack. Sinnin did not enter, but pressed himself against the wall so Gishna and Julissa could pass. They entered a small chamber with a ceiling so high it disappeared in such dim light. Sinnin closed the door. Julissa squeezed her arm when the lock clacked again.

“I would have words with you, magister,” Gishna said to a forest of stacked folios, paper, and books.

“Is it time for her education?” a man asked.

“It is,” Gishna replied.

The man stepped out from behind a stack of leather-bound books—foreign books he'd requested, and she'd complied. He was six foot tall with alabaster skin and unruly flaxen hair streaked with pale gold. Julissa had never seen someone like him before. She stepped back and Gishna snorted. It wasn't the hair which alarmed, but the eyes. Gishna could no longer see them well, but she remembered those pale green orbs and how they’d read deep into her bones the first time she met him.

“This is Kandah,” Gishna said. “You will ask him nothing about his people or line. That is the agreement.”

From within her shadowed vision, a halo like no other in all Vaidolin shimmered around Kandah. His was a power of a vastly different kind.

“May I sit?” Gishna asked.

Kandah removed a stack of folios from a stool next to his worktable.

“Your throne, matron,” he said with a flourish.

Julissa huffed at the forwardness of the man and her mother's humility.

Gishna dropped onto the stool and grimaced as an ache radiated from her left hip.