The Clans
The Brotherhood of Galen became the foundation of the Council of Six . . . six houses or, as they were then called, clans. While pursuing the seedling mystical arts, each spent most of their time and energies on survival alone. Hounded and despised by both the lay members and priests of the Five Domains, jeered as the Soulless wherever they went, universally blamed for the great war between the Dragonkings that had raged for decades, the mystics were outcasts of society, shunned and persecuted. They were made up of farmers who could only long for land, craftsmen dreaming of a trade, and women who yearned for a home for their children. They became nomads by fiat, thieves by necessity, and were hated all the more for it. They were the only hope of a world winding down to its end—and the world would give them no rest.
BRONZE CANTICLES, TOME III, FOLIO 2, LEAF 24
Caelith slipped quietly through the trees less out of design than out of habit. There was no shortage of predators that hunted the mystics of Clan Arvad wherever they stopped. Some were beasts who hunted the Reshalthei and Mathedran Forests for their own survival: wild torusks that lay in wait before charging their prey, or small, lightning-fast Kampocs—dragonhawks, as they were occasionally called—that could dart and weave through the thickets with incredible speed. Some were more cunning and deadlier still: human hunters who roamed the places beyond the walls of civilization hoping to claim the bounty offered on each mystic head by the Pir. Worse was the war itself that dragged the Elect to their deaths openly or killed them indiscriminately along with everyone else in its warrior path.
Caelith frowned as he stepped carefully from stone to stone over a small stream winding its way northward through the trees. All these were small matters compared to the worst threat of all. What they feared most endangered them no matter how light their tread nor how silent their breath.
Above all, the mystics feared one another.
According to the Pir, the clans of the Elect were composed of the insane—and they were not far wrong. The power of the Deep Magic, as they had come to call it, drove many of those who were susceptible quite mad. Indeed, those who were not outright insane were often ruined either by their inability to cope mentally or through bodily injury they may have suffered at the hands of the uncontrolled magic itself.
Supporting such a proportionally large community of mental or physical cripples was nearly impossible because little basic social structure existed beyond the broad ties of the clan. They were a society of broken dreams and shattered families—sons separated from fathers; daughters who no longer remembered their mothers; and parents whose children were lost to them.
Worse yet, those who had managed to somehow hold on to the dragon’s tail of Deep Magic and retain some modicum of sanity and mastery at the same time were all too easily swayed by the power itself. Simple ambitions became dangerous obsessions when fueled by the explosive and dangerous power of the Deep Magic.
And the magic itself was unpredictable. The metaphors in the dream were cryptic; a language whose meaning was largely still unknown. It remained unclear to the mystics whether they controlled the magic—or the magic controlled them.
Thus, there was no greater danger to the mystics than their own kind.
Caelith stopped, alert and unmoving. An unnatural quiet had descended on the woods. He had learned to listen to the voice of the forest, and silence, he knew, meant danger. In his stillness, Caelith reached in his mind toward the place of dreams, drawing up its power within him. He only had a vague notion of what form the power would take but he would rather prepare than not. It was a fundamental fact of a mystic’s life: be wary or be dead.
He sensed the movement behind him. He could not see his enemy but knew that one was there. One part of his trained mind fell into the dream, searching for a connection—for some image or idea that would empower him. Some few icons in the dream were known to him and he could count on them. The power surged toward him in the dream, taking shape in his mind as he drew it from the other world.
Caelith spun around, raising both his hands as they twisted and whirled through the air, forming the patterns from his mind. He only vaguely saw the shadowy figure rushing toward him as the long vines laying across the forest floor leaped upward in his defense. They wove themselves into a mesh as they flew, arresting the figure in its charge, throwing him backward against a tree with a resounding thunk that reverberated up the trunk and shook the leaves of the branches.
“Oh, no!” Caelith muttered. “Not now!”
The power continued to surge through him unbidden and turning wild. He had hoped only to bind this unknown stalker but soon even branches from the tree joined the vines in curling around the unknown person.
At last, Caelith was able to lower his hands. The vines were so effective that the figure was bound to the tree from the heel of his boot to the top of his head. Only the vaguest outline of the attacker could be seen through the foliage.
“Who are you?” Caelith demanded, still shaking from the magic. “What do you want?”
“Mmmffph murmuphth,” was all the reply the encased figure could manage.
“Don’t move,” Caelith said harshly, raising his left hand and gesturing carefully.
Nothing happened.
Caelith sighed. So much for control, he thought as he pulled his sword from its sheath and started sawing at the vines. He quickly cut away some of the vines around the intruder’s face.
“Well, if you can’t take a little joke,” snipped a familiar voice, “I don’t know why I even bother to visit!”
Caelith stopped in surprise, his face brightening as a rare, genuine smile broke on his face. “Lucian?”
“And who else would be bound to a tree in the forest?”
Caelith chuckled as he shook his head. “Lucian! I can’t believe that you’re here!”
“I might not be for long,” Lucian grunted, “if you don’t get these frightful vines off me.”
Caelith gleefully sawed the edge of his blade across several more vines. “Diplomats and courtiers always think they can sneak up on the warriors; that’s why we always hold our best magic just for you.”
“No death too good for us, eh?”
“Hey, just relax and enjoy the embrace.” Caelith grinned, stepping back and considering the predicament into which he had placed his friend. The lower vines were still tightening. He would need to work quickly before the upper vines got the same idea.
“Still having a little problem with control, are we?”
“Aren’t we all,” Caelith observed as he worked. “Nothing ever happens quite the same way twice. Whatever are you doing here?”
“Came with mother,” Lucian answered in tones that seemed almost bored. “The Circle of Six is convening under most mysterious circumstances, you know; completely out of season and entirely irregular. Mother was quite put out.”
“I see you managed to make the trip,” Caelith replied flatly as he worked to free his friend’s waist.
“Careful with that! Well, I thought I was making remarkable progress until I was bound to this tree,” Lucian sniffed. “I had hopes that such an event might occur, mind you, but it always involved a comely young sorceress from Clan Arvad who wished to enslave me with her winning—or should I say ‘vining’—ways.”
Caelith groaned as he pulled the last of the vines away from Lucian’s feet. “Then I’m sure you’ll want to meet Magretha.”
“Oh, indeed?” Lucian purred, the upward slant of both his brows rising precipitously. “And why is that?”
“Last month she presented her theories about the use of physical sensuality as a means of power and communication in the mystic arts,” Caelith said pleasantly. “I understand it was an unusual presentation.”
“That sounds like a course of study I should like to pursue most vigorously! Did it work?”
“No—but it was certainly worth watching,” Caelith said smoothly as he pulled the last of the vines clear of his old companion’s feet. “So why sneak up on me? You should know better than that by now.”
“I wasn’t sneaking,” Lucian objected in hurtful tones. “I was looking for you, if you must know. Sneaking just made the whole thing more interesting. The truth is, I was sent to have a look at this glade of yours before the meeting.”
“So you are in charge of your mother’s safety this trip?” Caelith nodded. “Fair enough, but you’ve nothing to worry about. I’m on my way to check the glade myself.”
“Of course.” Lucian smiled like a cat. “Which is why my mother sent me to check on you. Lead the way!”
Caelith waved his friend on. “Go on, then—just upstream.”
“Ah, well, if we must.” Lucian sighed. “But upstream is definitely not my style.”
Caelith followed his old friend as they walked against the slow and meandering course of the stream. Lucian was taller than Caelith by nearly half a head and somewhat broader. He had a pinched face like a triangle that came down to a jutting chin, and his small mouth held a perpetual smirk while his eyes always looked either sleepy or bored. He kept his hair cropped short, a bristle of blond as careless as his manner.
“It’s good to see you again,” Caelith said as they hiked.
“Yes, it is good to see me again,” Lucian agreed at once, picking his way along the stream. “I cannot imagine how you have borne being separated from me. I know that I should be very upset at being separated from myself. How long has it been, Cae? Three years?”
“Two years,” Caelith replied.
“Really?”
“It was the council on secession, remember?”
“Yes, I remember now,” Lucian said and smiled in that peculiar way that Caelith recognized, with his right lip curling upward. “Uruh Nikau wanted to go to war against the Pir with or without the consent of the Circle. Your father talked her out of it.”
“Actually, it was my mother,” Caelith confided.
“No!” Lucian stopped in his tracks.
“Yes,” Caelith nodded. “No one knows what mother said to Nikau or what she might have offered in exchange, but it worked.”
Lucian raised his brows again as he looked at his friend. “I may have to be impressed with the Arvad family after all!”
Caelith smiled as he passed his old friend. “Well, I suppose everything has a first time.”
“Still,” Lucian sniffed, “it might have been just as well if we had gone to war.”
They both stepped from the tree line where the stream opened onto a meadow full of activity. The white smoke of multiple campfires joined above them into a single light haze. A hodgepodge of shelters lined both sides of the stream in its course through the tall grasses. There were a number of large lean-tos mixed with tents in various states of disrepair. Children ran among the dwellings, their course determined largely by whim and a search for whatever grasses of the meadow remained untrammeled. Their mothers watched closely and scolded them quickly, if unenthusiastically, when they started to stray too far. The distant sound of a forge hammer rang over the encampment and already the hunters were returning from the forests.
“How many workers in your clan?” Lucian asked idly.
“Not nearly enough,” Caelith replied, “Less than half our total number. We care for the drones* as best we can.”
“What about the dangerous ones?”
“The mad?” Caelith shook his head sadly, then looked up. “Well, we’re all a little mad, aren’t we? Maybe it’s just a matter of degree—or time.”
“We’ve heard rumors,” Lucian said casually, “that Uruh’s been allowing the drones of her clan to be left behind.”
Caelith looked away as he spoke. “Uruh’s clan had a hard winter—but I haven’t heard anything about her abandoning her own drones.”
“I’d believe anything since the Edicts,” Lucian said, squinting slightly.
“The Edicts?” Caelith asked
“Caelith!” An extremely large woman called from a lean-to whose interior roof she was attempting to repair. Her greasy black hair hung flat against her head down to her shoulders. Her neck was as wide as her head and carried at least two additional chins.
“Magretha,” Caelith responded as he and Lucian walked past. “I hope you’re keeping dry!”
“I am, Caelith, thank you . . . have you had a chance to ask your father about another audience?” Magretha shouted, wiping her broad, dirty hands against her even filthier dress.
“I have,” Caelith answered, never slowing his stride. “He’s just a little busy now . . . he promises you another audience before the clan masters as soon as he has the time.”
Magretha called after him. “I’ve got some new insights into belly dancing and the dreamworld that I’m sure he will want to hear about!”
“I’m sure he will!” Caelith smiled as he responded, not looking back.
“That is Magretha?” Lucian whispered to Caelith.
“Yes, that is Magretha.”
“The one who demonstrated the sensual—”
“Yes.” Caelith nodded through an almost innocent grin, before he stopped, gesturing behind them. “Would you like to meet her now? Maybe I could arrange a special demonstration for you?”
“No,” Lucian shook his head.
“Really, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. We could do it right now if you—”
“No, thank you.” Lucian pressed earnestly as he grabbed his friend by the shoulder and pulled him forward once more. “Normally I wouldn’t mind, but right now you were about to show me the Council Glade.”
The old friends fell into step next to each other as they walked through the camp. It was an unusual feeling for the warrior; as a rule he had comrades in arms but no real friends. It seemed to Caelith as if no time at all had passed and it was not until then that he realized just how much he had missed companionship.
Caelith broke the silence hanging between them. “You were telling me something about some decree or law or . . .”
“The Edicts?” Lucian offered.
“Yes . . . what is that about?”
“Ah, yes.” Lucian sighed. “The Grand Duke of Pantaris has decreed in the name of Panas—our most revered Dragonking, may he rot in his own bile—that the power of the mystics is actually some sort of plague. The Edict states that all who are in contact with them must die to ‘purge the pure blood of Enlund’ and that it is better to burn the grain and the weeds together in this season that the grain may grow healthy in the next.”
“Strange thought, that,” Caelith said, a chill running down his spine.
“Stranger truth,” Lucian agreed, turning to his friend. “Entire villages have been razed, so we have heard. But come, you are entirely too serious around here.”
“What do you mean?”
“The masks.” Lucian tilted his chin toward the dwellings on either side of their path.
Each of the temporary shelters had one thing in common: on a front pole of each dwelling, no matter how humble or small, hung a mask. Most were of tooled leather intricately painted or stained with bright colors while others were carefully carved out of the most beautiful of woods. They were half-masks all, covering only the eyes and forehead, many of them crafted with long, waving points as if from a crown at their tops. Some had broken glass while others had what few gems were left to their owners embedded in their surfaces. Many were just plain or painted simply in an unsteady hand. Yet no matter what their circumstance, each of these temporary shelters was guarded at its entrance by a mask.
“It’s their sign of agreement to the Law of Veils and, therefore, their support for the Circle of Six,” Caelith explained. “No one walks the world of dreams without a mask.”
“It’s such a foolish rule.” Lucian yawned. “I mean, it’s because of this law that we have to travel practically the length of Hrunard just to be here. In the old days the Six would have just met in the dream no matter where they were and be done with it.”
“Only in the most desperate circumstance; it’s too dangerous otherwise,” Caelith said, shaking his head. “Not everyone who connects with the dream supports the Council.”
“And so we wear masks.” Lucian rolled his eyes. “First we hide from the world and then we hide from each other. Really, Cae, how is anyone going to learn anything?”
“Father believes that until we can find a way to know who we can trust in the dream, it’s better just to not trust anyone,” Caelith said as he turned to wave at some children running around their parents’ sagging tent. They continued making their way across the meadow as he spoke. “He says we should prefer to be anonymous rather than be betrayed. It has greatly inhibited progress in understanding the dream but the Council agrees with Father.”
“Well, I think it’s nonsense,” Lucian rejoined. “Bad enough to have to conjure up some ridiculous pretense when you enter the dream, but to have to hang one on your tent? I wouldn’t be surprised if the Council were actually making these masks at night and selling them on the side. It’s all just a fad.”
Caelith smiled broadly at the comical thought of the august heads of each clan slipping away in the night to tool leather goods. “I don’t think so. The other night I was in the dream and found myself carried to a distant place I’d not seen before. There was what seemed to be a great amphitheater—an open stage like the ones you described having in Enlund.”
“‘Had’—old fellow; ‘had.’”
“Oh, of course.”
“They were wonderful,” Lucian said. “Some of the plays presented there were—”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Sorry, do go on—and on, and on—”
Caelith gave a sharp, frustrated grunt. It was hard to hold Lucian’s attention, especially where serious matters were involved. “I was in this amphitheater in the dream, surrounded by a great crowd watching the players on the stage. I stood before the stage—in my mask, of course—and all the players stood before me in masks as well. One was a beautiful woman with wings like a butterfly—”
“Oh, I’ve heard of her before,” Lucian interrupted. “Isn’t she the one your father first met in the dream? You know, I even met a—”
“Will you just listen?” Caelith rumbled. He was beginning to remember things about his friend that he had conveniently forgotten. “The winged woman was wearing a mask, as were two brothers, both standing in shadows, as well as a short, dark man—a dwarf with a white scar running down his back. All were gesturing in their performance as though in a dance, but while I realize their movements had meaning, I could not understand any of it.”
“So you watched a play you couldn’t understand,” Lucian said. “That’s not uncommon, old boy; nobody who goes to plays really understands them. For a patron to attend a play and actually understand it would be highly insulting to the playwright.”
Caelith gritted his teeth for a moment before he went on. “You’re the one not understanding, Luc. I was watching these players moving on the stage when suddenly the winged woman fell dead at the feet of the shadowed brothers. The dwarf danced about her body while the audience laughed, cheering and applauding insanely. The blood of the winged woman ran down off the stage and crept toward me. I tried to move back through the crowd but the blood kept following me. I looked up at the brothers, their masks still in deep shadows, and knew that one of them had killed the woman, though I could not tell which one.”
“When you have a vision,” Lucian responded, “you certainly have a strange one.”
“Yes, but I knew that if I had not been behind my own mask, I would have been on that stage and the blade would have been meant for me. It isn’t just the other mystics of the clans that threaten us there, you know. There are others in whom the power is still awakening. Some of them, we believe, are being used by the Pir to spy on us. Father himself once knew an Inquisitas who had the gift.”
“High Priest Tragget,” Lucian finished for him.
“How did you know that?” Caelith asked, surprised.
“Oh, it’s not much of a secret, Caelith . . . you can’t keep a good juicy story down, can you?” Lucian replied with a shrug. “I heard they were once close.”
“Father thought so.” Caelith frowned, uncomfortable with the subject. “I don’t know . . . look, do you want to see the glade or not?”
“Hey, sorry!” Lucian put his hands up. “Lead on into this most dangerous glade and we shall take on all foes!”
Caelith pushed past his friend and moved quickly down a winding path into a narrow hollow. The pond that had once graced this place had long since evolved into a grassy glade cupped in the hollow of the surrounding hills. Hardwood trees rimmed the glade, their new leaves casting dappled light on the soft grass.
“It is beautiful,” Lucian concurred, “though not so much as I would travel a month just to see it.”
“The most beautiful thing about it is that it is deserted,” Caelith said as he stepped back toward the path. “Or at least will be once we leave.”
“I thought you came to check on something?”
“I did—to make sure the glade was empty. It is—now let’s go.”
“Soon,” Lucian said, holding back. “First, tell me what all this is about.”
Caelith turned slowly, his jaw set. “Lucian, you know better.”
“All the Circle of Six rushed here so quickly,” Lucian stated casually, stepping to one side. “No explanation; just summoned by the great Galen Arvad? And they come—oh, yes, we all have come—but might we be permitted to think for ourselves?”
“Even if I knew, Lucian, I couldn’t tell you.” Caelith’s voice was low and menacing. “Now let’s just go before—”
“Wait!” Lucian’s chin rose slightly. “Someone’s coming!”
“By the gods!” Caelith swore. “Quick! Over there!”
“By what gods?”
“Just move!”
The two leaped as silently as the brush would allow into the undergrowth surrounding the glade. They held perfectly still for several long, careful breaths before a figure appeared coming down the same trail they had taken to reach the glade.
It was Galen. His features were more troubled than usual and his gait was slow and heavy. His fists clenched and unclenched as he walked and he looked altogether like a man facing his own death. Galen moved slowly into the glade, then just seemed to wait.
Caelith drew in a long, relaxing breath and moved to stand up but Lucian’s arm restrained him.
The last sliver of the sun dipped down below the horizon. In that instant, a slim figure emerged from the dark shadows at the tree line. The robes were unmistakable in their design, black with a great hood trimmed in purple.
They were the robes of the Pir Inquisitas.
Panic seized Caelith. The Pir had hunted the mystics for two decades, relentless in their slaughter and persecution of any who demonstrated the power of the Deep Magic. Their vow was the extermination of the Mad Emperors on behalf of their dragon-gods. Now, one of their number walked slowly into the glade before Caelith’s father, who stood alone to confront his enemy. Caelith wanted to run to his father’s side, elements of the Deep Magic tumbling in his mind, but the shock of this unexpected visage held him still next to his old friend.
It was then that the Pir Inquisitas reached up and pulled back the great hood of her robe.
Caelith then heard his father utter a single name in a voice broken and somehow infinitely old.
“Berkita.”