Hubris - 48. We've Had this Conversation Before

On another night Crowe might have been impressed by the opulence of Benedict’s home. How clean everything was. The framed portraits of aristocrats gazing down at him in disapproval forever preserved in oils. The rich blue carpet beneath his feet. The paneled walls and air that smelled of the salt from the Gaulhill Sea. Instead of appreciating the decorations, the luxuries that a life in a house like this must present, he found himself reaching out with his mind, searching for what the regular eye could not reveal. No shouts of alarm sounded in his mind, but the enemy had proven itself to be tricky. Barghast seemed calm enough. If there was danger afoot he would most likely sense it before the practitioner.

At the end of a long corridor two servants dressed in black uniforms with white aprons tied around their waists waited on either sides of the door. They greeted the Governor with studious bows. Crowe and Barghast ignored their lingering glances. Four other stewards stood in the corners of the room like soldiers awaiting orders from the commanders. The moment the dinner party entered the room they sprang into life, pulling back chairs from a long rectangular wood table that took up most of the room. Matthiesen positioned himself at the head of the table. A fire roared in the hearth of his back. Lucijan took the chair to his left, Roan the chair to his right. Crowe took the chair at the opposite end of the table. Barghast lowered himself cautiously into the chair next to the practitioner. The chair groaned precariously but held his weight.

A heavy silence filled the room as goblets were filled with chilled wine. The pitcher was placed in the center of the table; beads of condensation marked the side of the pitcher. The second their goblets were filled, Matthiesen and his men raised their glasses to their lips and drained the contents. Lucijan reached for the pitcher without ceremony. Wine sloshed over the sides of the glass. The smell of fermented grapes blossomed in the air. Barghast raised his snout and sniffed with an appreciative grumbling sound. Crowe almost laughed in relief. If the wine had been poisoned, Benedict and his companions would not have emptied their goblets so readily; in this much he could take comfort in.

Catching Barghast’s eye, Crowe drained his goblet. He smacked his lips appreciatively to show that no harm would be done to him. The lycan’s eyes flashed excitedly. He tipped his head back. At the other end of the table, Lucijan watched with a mix of wide-eyed fascination and terror as the Okanavian opened his muzzle and simply dumped the goblet’s contents down his goblet. Benedict slid the pitcher down the table to the herald. Within less than a minute of it being set down, the pitcher had been emptied; now it was being whisked away for replenishment. Servants continued to filter in and out of the room, setting silver-topped platters down on fancy silk cloths unlike anything Crowe had seen before. The tops of the platters removed to reveal roasted duck, a stack of meat pies with golden brown crust, roasted vegetables, bread, a serving platter of freshly churned butter…the more he saw, the more his mouth watered.

“Alright, enough beating around the fucking bush,” Lucijan growled, glaring at Matthiesen. Crowe was happy to see his suspicious scrutiny fixed on someone else for a change. “You have been acting very strange today. At first I thought it was exhaustion - the weight of your burdens finally starting to get to you - but I know something else is afoot and it stinks of Inferno.”

Crowe felt his heart jerk inside his chest at the mention of Inferno.

“Up until recently you've always kept Roan and I apprised of any notable developments so that we might prepare contingencies for future crises. You know I don't scare easily so you also know I don't say this lightly when I tell you the way you have been behaving has scared the living shite out of me.”

This was followed by another pregnant moment of silence that seemed to have no end.

The proof that Matthiesen cared how his advisor felt could nor be more evident than when he leaned back in his chair, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a deep breath. Crowe almost felt sorry for the man; he leaned forward in his chair, eager to hear what Lucijan had to say. In spite of his barbaric appearance, the practitioner knew better than to underestimate the shrewd Lucijan.

Matthiesen did not respond for a long time.

He looked at Lucijan as if he were only seeing the man for the first time. No, it was deeper than that; it was not just a look of bewilderment, it was a look of pain. It was the look of a man stuck between a rock and a hard place. It was a look Crowe knew well because he had worn it many times. Not for the first time Crowe felt as if he were a voyeur witnessing something he wasn’t supposed to see. He focused on serving Barghast and himself, letting the three men bicker amongst themselves while he filled the lycan’s plate with generous portions of roasted duck and meat pies.

Crowe wasn’t sure how much time had passed in this fashion before he realized there were more than just the five of them in the room. He turned his head to find two children standing shyly in front of the double doors with a woman herding them along at their back. Despite the sudden fuzziness of his head (he’d drank more wine than he’d intended), it didn’t take long for the herald to surmise these were the Governor’s children.

The boy, the older of the two siblings, resembled his father the most. Crowe could see that the youth softening his face would one day fall away, slimming down into the narrow, deep set features of Benedict. He stood with his shoulders and back ramrod straight in a posture that was meant to imitate the man he most aspired to be. The girl had Matthiesen’s slender height but must take more after her mother. Her hair was a tarnished gold color that hung down to the middle of her back in willful springs. Where the boy looked dour, the girl’s smile brightened up the grim mood in the room. The willowy older woman who had followed them into the room wore a blue turban around her head.

“Ah, Tilde.” Benedict smiled at the woman with a smile of genuine warmth. “Thank you for bringing my children to see me before tucking them into bed for the night.”

“They would badger me all night if I didn’t,” the woman chortled. Her eyes shot to Crowe and Barghast where they lingered on the lycan. She gulped audibly before looking away with a jerk of her head. Thankfully, the lycan was too busy scarfing down the food the practitioner had put on his plate to have noticed. Unfortunately the practitioner noticed. Even here Barghast will not be fully accepted. There will be people who will take one look at him and immediately be afraid because of his appearance. The thought saddened him.

The children did not notice. Their focus was on their father. He spoke to them in lowered voices, cuffing the boy and ruffling his hair and kissing the girl on the cheek and giving them fierce hugs. Crowe watched this display, unaware of the look of longing on his face or the hunger for fatherly affection. With a few more whispered words to the children, and a peck on the cheek to the old woman, they were dismissed out of the room. After a long silent moment in which the Governor seemed trapped in his own sense of longing for familial connection, Matthiesen returned to his seat. When he spoke, the words were rushed as if he could not get them out fast enough. His eyes bore into Crowe.

“I’ve held back long enough. I know you have a lot of questions so I’m just going to dive in. This is not the first time you’ve sat before me, herald. You, your lycan companion, Lucijan, and Roan. We’ve all sat here at this table. We’ve had this conversation before.”

“What do you mean you’ve had this conversation before?” Lucijan was deep and booming but Crowe caught the undercurrent of fear all the same. In spite of the world we live in this is a man of practicality. Even as the events happening around him defy the laws of gravity, he will continue to deny his own insignificance to cling onto his sense of control.

“I mean…” Benedict closed his eyes. A vein pulsed in his forehead: the first crack appearing in his mask of serene calm. It’s best if you just shut your mouth and listen, Crowe urged Lucijan silently. This conversation isn’t for you anyway. “This day has already happened. I’ve already experienced it once before.”

“In a dream or for real?” the practitioner asked.

Benedict narrowed his eyes in thought. “For real…though I have my doubts. It didn’t completely feel like a dream. In it you and your lycan companion sat before me the way you are now.”

The words sounded ludicrous even to Crowe. And yet he could feel the Cycle pulling at him again, turning like an unceasing wheel. “Is that how you knew about Bennett?”

The Governor nodded shakily. His skin had become pasty with sweat.

“I have no recollection of having had this conversation with you. Any of it. Do you think it’s possible Monad sent you the dream as a warning?”

“You have no recollection of the dream. Why would he send me a warning and not you? I am not the herald. You are.” A thought…a question that disturbed him.

The older man shook his head in befuddlement. “That is a good question. If you can’t answer it then I don’t think anyone can.”

“What else happened in the dream?”

The man rose slowly from his chair. “You and your lycan friend should come with me. I’ll show you why you are here, some of which you already know. Still, I think it’s worth seeing again.”

Crowe tried not to stand too eagerly. He’d been patient, knowing the answers to this latest mystery would present themselves when the time came. Now that a few seemed close at hand he could hardly contain his impatience. He took a long pull of wine to calm his fraught nerves. Barghast lowered his plate to the table, licking his chops with satisfied smacking sounds. The chair he’d been sitting in groaned in relief when he vacated it.

The heavy silence that had followed the group into the manor stalked them out of the dining room. Crowe ignored it deliberately. The feeling of being pulled that had assailed him at the table continued to grow in the pit of his stomach. He watched the Governor closely, making sure to match him stride for stride. They were almost the exact same height with Matthiesen having an inch or so on him, so it wasn’t too great of a challenge. He could sense Benedict’s concerted effort to avoid his suspicious glare. I cannot feel Hamon’s influence around him. If he’s being used as someone’s puppet, who would it be?

At the top of a long spiral staircase they reached the large room where Matthiesen, Lucijan, and Roan had gathered before. There in the center of the table was the map with the red ring in the center. The dried ink pulsed at the practitioner like a watchful eye.

The spot where Loras, her troops, and the refugees had gone missing. Something cold and unpleasant wormed its way into his belly. He felt a strange urge to trace the circle with the pad of his finger in spite of his disgust towards it. The way they know they shouldn’t touch something unhealthy but simply can’t help themselves. He could see himself reaching out, laying a finger on the map and knew the second he did, the ring would show him things. Terrible things. Things he didn’t want to see.

He reached for the lycan’s paw until he felt large digits engulf his. And still even then he could not take his eyes away from it. “You sent out scouts, right? Months ago, when you first discovered it?”

“Yes.” This came from Roan whose expression reflected the same uneasiness Crowe felt. “Since then we’ve sent half a dozen scouts to follow suit. None of them returned. When we realized the pattern would only continue, we stopped sending parties.”

“How long has it been since you sent out the last scouting party?”

“Eight, nine weeks ago.”

Barghast took position over by the window, looking out the window. Somehow Crowe had managed to take his eyes off the ring without realizing it. He latched onto the sight of the lycan’s muscular back. The perfect distraction. He bit back a smile.

Lucijan hooked his thumbs through the belt loops in his breeches. “We're calling it ‘the black hole’. Because it's not just our scouts who are getting swallowed up by the damned thing, but Drajen’s as well.”

“Fortunately, we don't think Drajen is aware of it just yet,” Roan continued. “Part of this is due to the location of the black hole; it's still technically in our territory. We have man-made forts set up all through the Southern lands and the reports state that all of the forts are deserted.”

“Deserted?” Crowe parroted. “Were they taken? Was there a skirmish?”

“One would almost prefer it. It would be easier to track and confirm,” Matthiesen replied grimly. “But from all appearances they were not taken, they simply left their things and went of their own accord. Almost as if they were called.”

“The only clue we have are a few scrawlings on the walls of the fort,” Lucijan drawled. ‘The Mother of Caldreath’ calls to us. Not written in blood or anything like that, thank Monad, but in ink or paint or oil…things like that.”

“ ‘The Mother of Caldreath?” Crowe’s eyes narrowed at the memory of the name. “Wasn't Caldreath burnt to the ground by the Theocracy? There was a massacre. Story goes they burnt every villager at the stake on Drajen’s predecessor’s orders.”

“Many stories are told with dramatic flair for shock value,” Lucijan growled with a roll of his eyes. “I'd there were no survivors there would be no tales. There were survivors and Commander Gyrell was one of them. It was the boot heel of vengeance that propelled her up the ranks to the role as commander. No one could blame her for wanting to strike down every Theocracy soldier for making her watch her whole village burn…including her husband and daughter.”

“For almost a hundred years - starting at the tail end of my grandfather's third and final term as Governor - Gyrell waged her own private war against the Theocracy,” Matthiesen continued. “What give me pause is the location of the black hole. It's on the exact same spot where Caldreath used to be. It used to be the farmers and simple folk stayed away from it out of superstitious dread, but now refugees are being drawn to it like a moth to a flame.”

Roan cleared his throat. “Before they disappeared Gyrell reported her party had stopped at Fort Teague which is a hundred miles West of where the black hole is.”

“And you think this all has to do with Gyrell?”

“I'm certain it does,” Matthiesen said with the same undeniable pang of certainty Crowe felt banging around inside his chest. “There are too many oddities for it to be coincidence…far too deliberate. Eventually Drajen will take notice that his soldiers are coming up missing. Word has it the pope is going mad…his mind caving under the pressure of old age. I can only shudder the conclusions he could jump to and the avalanche that would cause.” The Governor watched the practitioner so intently, the sorcerer had no doubt he was speaking solely to him; at that moment they could have been the only two men in the room.

“You sent me and I never came back,” Crowe said with grim wonder. He could feel the ring of red ink trying to pull his eyes back to the map.

“You were gone for weeks. You and your lycan. We sent scouts after you but as before they never returned. The day we got the news was declaring open and indiscriminate war against Monad’s people and the resistance alike, I went to bed and awoke to find myself reliving the past few days. While there are subtle differences, the instances are similar enough I fear it could happen again if you go. Will you go?”

“I don't think I have a choice,” Crowe said. “The path is set for me. But maybe not entirely. You said this conversation happened and that I left to investigate the black hole but never returned. After several weeks Drajen declared open war and then you woke up to find yourself reexperiencing this dream. Maybe by telling me I don't make it back will keep it from repeating a second time because I will know to be on the lookout.”

Crowe watched all the blood drain from the Governor's face. “I do not know what you will find in the black hole, herald, but I do know it will only lead you into damnation.”

                                                                                …

The sun was sinking, filling the sky with red light; to Crowe it made the heavens look as if the heavens were bleeding. The failing light cast elongated shadows on the flat earth still cooling from the day’s blistering heat. Fort Teague was the largest shadow of all, a bulky silhouette in which nothing around it but weeds stirred. Not a squirrel, not a bird. No one moved along the walls. No one shouted and fired off warning shots as the practitioner willed Mammoth into a cautious trot with a pull of the reins.

Mammoth forged on, albeit cautiously. Crowe could feel the mount’s fear when he touched a hand to the mount’s broad neck. The massive shire horse was not the only one who was afraid. Barghast’s chest and belly was a constant rumble that quivered against the herald’s sweaty back. The lycan had his rifle loaded and in hand.

Abandoned wagons pocked the land around the fort like gravestones. Sun-faded drapes flapped miserably in the wind. Tracks in the dirt marked the passage of man and beast. Crowe hypothesized that if they were to follow the same path, it would take them a hundred miles West to the black spot. Whoever or whatever is doing this isn’t trying to hide or be sneaky, the sorcerer thought. It wants to be found, leading practitioners and torchcoats to it alike. But to what end?

He parked Mammoth by the bulk of a large cabin. While Barghast continued to scan the walls and sniff the air, Crowe worked on soothing their horse. While Barghast searched the inside of the fort, Crowe fed and watered Mammoth. He took a moment to appreciate the three bulky packs Matthiesen had supplied them with before leaving Caemyth. We’re loaded for bear. The practitioner had the feeling they would need every bit of it.

Barghast returned, his tail flicking back and forth with annoyance.

“Problems?” Crowe asked.

“No.” The lycan’s voice was half growl, half whine.

“Is that a problem?”

“It bothers me. It is as you said: The fort is completely deserted. I do not smell the influence of the Black One. I just smell people…your people, my beloved…I smell a few torchcoats as well. A small band of scouts stopped here a few days ago. They didn’t stop for long. Just long enough to scour the place.” He bared his teeth in the lycan equivalent of a grin; there was no humor in it. “What they saw spooked them. I could smell their fear…but then there was a change in their scent.”

“The torchcoats?”

“They got on their horses and started back in the direction they came and then stopped before turning around to follow the same path as your people.”

The wheels in Crowe’s mind turned. “As if they changed their mind.” Or called. He filed this information in the large leatherbound book he stored in his mind; it was a book that grew larger everyday. “I don’t like this place anymore than you do; and like you, I don’t intend to stay any longer than we have to, but I want to take a look myself. Maybe I can pick up something you weren’t able to. Anything that can give us an idea of what awaits us ahead of time. At this point I think it’s safe to say you can never be too prepared.”

Inching forward, muscles bulging beneath fur that rippled in the turgid Southern winds, Barghast towered over him until the broad plateau of his shoulders blotted out the remaining light. Kneeling down on one knee, he leaned forward until their foreheads touch: a familiar gesture of comfort that always soothed the restless spirit. “As always, you are wise beyond your years. I will follow you anywhere. Even into the depths of Inferno. You know this, twin o’rre.”

With this final gathering of courage they turned to face the fort.

By the time they reached Fort Teague’s gates, night’s full moon had taken its rightful place over the earth, casting everything in a ghostly glow. “I know this makes me sound like a foolish pup, but I would prefer it if the place were crawling with torchcoats and evil spirits,” the barbarian rumbled.

“Because it makes more sense?”

“Indeed.”

Stepping out onto the square was like stepping into the center of a graveyard. Blue flags with the white diamond of the resistance flapped in the cooling wind, sounding like the rustle of bat wings. The tops of row upon row of tents seemed to stick up out of the ground like the pointed teeth of a leviathanian beast. Crowe and Barghast tip-toed cautiously past them though they were certain they were completely alone. The entrances of the tents yawned open, encouraging them to explore their mysterious depths. Bit by bit the details of his conversation with Matthiesen and his advisors filtered through the practitioner’s mind.

In spite of the baffling number of empty tents, they had not discovered anything to be alarmed about. The orderly set up of the rows suggested the soldiers inside the fort had attempted to establish order and routine amongst the refugees to distract them from the chaos happening outside. Spaced evenly apart there was not a scrap of litter or bullets or corpses scattered in between the canvas huts. And to think there are over a dozen forts just like this one, the sorcerer thought. He was unable to suppress a cold shiver.

They were eventually drawn to a message scrawled on the side of a tent in red paint. A worm of uneasiness wriggled into Crowe’s gut: the paint was the exact same shade of red as the inky circle on Matthiesen’s map of the South. The ring that had called to him with images of insanity.

WE GO TO THE MOTHER OF CALDREATH! read the declaration. WE ANSWER HER CALL OF RAGE AND GRIEF WITH VENGEANCE! MAY WE SPILL THE BLOOD OF THE WHORE OF CREATION’S CHILDREN!

The paint called to Crowe the way the ink had: a susurrus buzzing sound that made him think of a nest of angry wasps. Back in Caldreath the ink’s call had been an echo he’d been able to resist with effort,. Here within the silent walls of Fort Teague the call of the paint - the call of the Mother - the call was like a punch to the gut that threatened to bow him over. It pulled at him like steel to a magnet, drawing him forward on stilted legs made of wood. He tried to utter Barghast’s name, but his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth.

Barghast, who had made it his mission to protect the practitioner for better or worse, reached for him, claws snagging against the back of his hood, but the herald was already stepping out of reach. He raised his hands, his expression remote and devoid of emotion. He walked with the languid shuffle of a man whose eyes are open but he is not awake. The paint glowed with an infernal red light that bathed his face in a sulfuric warmth. He was vaguely aware of the fear he heard in the lycan’s voice, but the sound barely breached the surface of the mind. As he walked forward he was being pulled back - forced - into a whirlwind that was impossible to break away from.

He called to Monad, trying to summon the flame that had abandoned him in his time of need. No, no, no! he growled helplessly in his mind; if he could have, his teeth would have been gritted in terror. He has long since discovered that Monad could be just as opaque and as negligent as any deity. Don't abandon me now! Don't you dare cast your eyes elsewhere - help me, damn you!

If Monad was infuriated by Crowe’s claim that his priorities were more important than anyone else's, the flame did not offer a response to this. In a lot of ways you truly are no different than Petra's, Crowe thought.

The moment he touches the paint that burned with an inner light, fire raced up his arms. He felt Barghast pull him back but the sound of the lycan’s voice was drowned out by his own screams. Tendrils of flame pushed into his mind like hungry vines seeking his brain. He had just enough time to fear what might happen to him before the ground was swept beneath his feet.

Fort Teague was gone and so Barghast. He was in the middle of a burning village. Caldreath, he thought. I am in Caldreath. A shrill voice in his mind - the voice of a jibbering frightened child - told him this could not be possible. Caldreath had burned down a century ago. But he knew better than to draw a line between what was possible and what was not. Wooden huts were engulfed by raging fires, propelling stacks of smoke into a sky that rained ash on the snow-covered ground below. Voices screamed all around him. Vague human shapes darted through the thickening wall of smoke, pursued by torchcoats on horseback. They were indiscriminate in their butchery of the people of Caldreath, stabbing and chopping. No woman or child was spared.

He tried to move towards the commotion - to intervene in any way he could; to prevent history from repeating itself - but his arms were bound to something solid and unyielding. He remembered the last time he's been bound in such a way. They hung me from a noose and I almost died…but Monad was with me.

Monad was not with him now. Monad had abandoned his people.

Crowe searched the gloom frantically with a growing sense of terror. There were others bound to stakes just like him, their heads lowered in defeat or raised towards the sky in prayer. Their bowls and undulating cries of agony reached pitches that were beyond human.

The sorcerer was alerted to movement at the center of the maelstrom. A slim figure emerged from the flickering light. Even as years drained from the corners of his raw and puffy eyes, Crowe could see that the newcomer was a woman from the feline swing of her hips. Atop her head she wore a headpiece carved from bleached bone. Silver fox eyes peered at him intently through the hollow sockets of the skull.

Crowe was vaguely aware that a crowd of torchcoats had gathered before his stake. He could hear the high self-righteous voice of the cleric who read his final rights from a scroll.

He turned his attention away from the cleric, from the growing audience of religious zealots who had come to watch him burn. He’d heard the rites before and he did not wish to hear them a second time. He was aware of being splashed with something wet and foul-smelling.

Through the unbearable dread and the cries of the condemned, Crowe could not take his eyes off the woman. He knew her. Or rather he would come to know someone very much like her. It was the grief in her eyes that pulled him to her. He couldn't turn away from her even if he'd wanted to. To turn away from her would be to dismiss her.

“Look at how they slaughter Monad's children.” Her voice crackled with a rage that was older than the land around them. Despite the growing heat of the flames, Crowe shivered with fear - fear of what would happen should the woman decide to turn her fury on him. “Look at what they do to any child who is not their own, who do not share in their beliefs.” She lifted a lean, but muscular arm to indicate the massacre still playing out before them; bone bracelets jangled at her wrists.

A pocket of air cleared the smoke, creating an opening of visibility. Through this opening Crowe could see three more unfortunate souls were being added to the mass of victims. A woman, a man, and a young girl. Though he had yet to lay eyes on her, the practitioner knew this second woman was Loras Gyrell. Tangles of black hair whipped around the woman’s face, blown into a frenzy by the backdraft. She twisted her head around to track the progress of her husband and daughter. Jalif and Kara. They, too, will burn and there's nothing I can do to stop it. To know a thing and not be able to stop it is a special kind of damnation, the herald thought.

“Please,” he begged the tribal woman. He began to weep. Even as a voice screamed in the back of his mind that this was not real…could surely not be real in the name of Monad…he was so hot and so thirsty. If he could have, he would have bowed before the woman and seized her skirt in desperation the way Barghast had once done with him. “I don't want to see this…don't make me watch.”

“Everyone must watch,” the woman hissed. Tears cut pales paths down her cheeks, washing some of the soot away. “Everyone must know and witness the becoming of the Mother of Caldreath.”

Ashen fingers seized the back of Crowe's head, pinning his skull to the board so he had no choice but to look ahead. Before him, Loras sunk to the ground, her body bowing under the threat of exhaustion. Her knees dug furrows in the ash and snow. Behind her the girl wriggled out from the grip of the torchcoat steering her towards her death. She reached for her mother, her pudgy hands snapping open and closed like claws.

At the same time the guard pursuing Kara caught up with her, the pack surrounding Loras closed around her like hungry wolves. Jalif was equally helpless. The guards kicked him towards his death. Strings of blood and mucus hung down from his broken nose. Both eyes were sealed shut, his face a contorted mask of black bruises and swollen flesh. Loras was also beaten mercilessly. Her body rocked with the force of each blow delivered with militant precision.

At last, death came to save him. Two torchcoats approached, wielding torches.

“Yes!” Crowe laughed. Loras and her family were gone now, swallowed up by a billowing mushroom cloud that would stain this land a century afterwards. Hearing their screams and knowing what would happen to them was bad enough.

When he began to burn, his howls of hysteria turned into undulating screams of agony. Had he ever felt such pain before? He could feel the fire already scouring his flesh from bones. He felt his eyes shrivel and then turn to jelly inside his own. Even through the agony was the knowledge that Loras would suffer a fate even worse than this. She would live beyond this moment and it would haunt her for the rest of her days.

These were Crowe's last thoughts.