Zervakan: Stand-Alone

By Rob Steiner

Reason and science gave the Recindian Compact wonders like steam engines, telegraphs, and gunpowder. The world had order. It made sense.

Until one night two multi-colored bands of light split the sky, spanning the horizons like rings around the planet. Soon after, unnatural storms assaulted the Compact's cities. Whispers spread of ghoulish creatures haunting Compact forests. And then a message from a legendary race called the Mystics - "ally with us to fight the growing evil, or we all perish."

The Compact's desperate leaders turn to disgraced history professor Taran Abraeu. Taran spent years searching in vain for the ancient healing magic of the Mystics to save his dying daughter. His family and colleagues once mocked him. Now his research might save them.

When the Compact asks Taran to accompany a secret delegation to the Mystic homeland, he is swept up in an adventure that forces him to fight a horrifying enemy that only he among all his people can comprehend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quarkfolio Books
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781386307730

Rob Steiner

Rob Steiner lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, daughter, and a rascal cat. He is the author of the Journals of Natta Magus series, about a wizard from an alternate twenty-first century who is stranded in Augustan Rome. Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show featured two stories about Natta Magus: "The Oath-Breaker's Daemon" and "The Cloaca Maxima." He also wrote the alt-history/space opera Codex Antonius series (Muses of Roma, Muses of Terra, and Muses of the Republic) about a Roman Empire that spawns an interstellar civilization. Be among the first to hear about Rob's new releases by signing up for his "New Release Mailing List" on his web site below. He won't share your info with anyone, and he'll only email you when a new book or story comes out.

Book preview

Prologue

Keahra fled through the dark forest, ignoring the brambles that tugged at her cloak and flesh. She did not know where she was going, nor did she care, as long as it was farther and farther from the Guardian obelisk. She even feared stopping to listen for her pursuers. She was a prisoner to Fear, contrary to everything she had learned as a Tuathan Acolyte. But her order had never prepared her for this.

It took a blind fall into a small creek to stop her panicked flight. The cold water shocked her mind and body into forgetting its panic, and she reasserted her control. She paused and listened for the two murderers.

The sounds of cracking branches and rustling leaves drifted to her in the still night. They were coming.

Looking around, saw a small alcove where the roots of a nearby oak tree had made a natural cave in the embankment. She eased her cut and bruised body through the frigid, muddy water toward the root cave, maneuvering herself all the way into the dark shelter. She calmed her breathing, and then waited in the cold, chest-deep water.

Her pursuers grew closer until Keahra heard their voices and footfalls at the top of the bank.

Wait, a man said in a deep, angry voice. Keahra assumed it was the same man she had watched stab poor Jyla in the heart back at the Guardian. Listen.

A pause, then in a loud whisper, I don’t hear anything. It was a woman’s voice, sounding as cruel as the man’s. The woman had held Jyla down while the man took her life.

The woman said, We have to find her. They can’t know, not yet.

It’s all right, the man said. We’ll find her once Angra comes. We need to get back to the obelisk. It’s almost time.

Angra? Keahra had heard stories about harrowers infiltrating the Beldamark ever since she was a child, but she always thought they were tales to keep Tuathan children in line. Be good, or the harrowers will come for you, her father would say. They can’t have children like normal people, so they take bad children to raise as their own. Even as a child, Keahra knew the tales were nothing but tales.

But now...

Only minutes ago, Keahra had walked to the Guardian outside the town of Grayven to relieve Jyla’s vigil. When she rounded a corner along the two-wheel track through the woods, she saw a large red-haired woman holding a crying Jyla’s arms behind her back. Keahra arrived just in time to see the man plunge a dagger into Jyla’s chest. Jyla's eyes grew wide for a moment, then settled into an unseeing stare. The red-haired woman let Jyla fall to the ground. That was when she looked up and saw Keahra. Without thinking, Keahra fled through the woods.

So if these vile people were harrowers, what were they doing at the Guardian? The obelisk Guardians were among the last places left in the Beldamark that held the magical Aspects of Ahura. Whatever they wanted to do, it was not for Ahura’s glory.

With the heavy weight of priestly responsibility, Keahra knew she had to go back and see what the harrowers were doing at the obelisk. If she could return to Fedalan and report to the Master Circle everything she saw, they would have more information with which to formulate a plan of action. Whether or not these people were harrowers, they were murderers, and Keahra would not let them get away with the murder of a fellow priest and friend.

Keahra waited until she no longer heard the murderers before she crawled out of the muddy pool beneath the tree roots. Wet, cold, and dirty, she made her way quietly through the thick, brambly woods to the Guardian, pausing now and then to listen for movement. She took a roundabout way back, not wanting to risk returning along the same path she had used to flee. Animals scurried away from her in the dark, each one causing her heart to skip a beat and forcing her to stop and listen for the sounds of pursuit.

As she neared the Guardian, she took even more care not to make a sound. Every crushed pinecone or rustle of her cloak made her wince. When she reached the clearing of manicured grass encircling the obelisk, she looked on in shock at the Guardian’s golden tip. A gray light waxed and waned from the tip...something only legends said it was capable of doing. Not since the Barrier had gone up had the obelisk been activated like that. Not for a thousand years.

Keahra sensed the forest around her hush, as if every animal and tree had stopped to see what came next. Keahra had the same feeling of expectation, that any moment would bring—

The gray light pulses quickened, speeding up to the point where it seemed to solidify. It made no sound, nor did the forest.

A blast of energy exploded from the Guardian, sending a wave of cold air at Keahra that made her stagger backward. A gray beam of light shot into the night sky toward the stars. The beam arced slightly to the northeast, its head growing fainter, but still remaining bright. Keahra was astounded to see other beams arcing into the sky from what she assumed to be distant Guardians from around the Beldamark. Keahra counted twenty-five beams, from all twenty-five Guardians. The beams sped toward each other, heading toward a single point in the dark heavens.

After several seconds, the beams from all the Guardians met. A flash of light brighter than the midday sun exploded soundlessly, and Keahra had to shield her eyes lest she be blinded. She spent several seconds blinking away the starbursts filling her sight before she looked at the sky again.

Two parallel bands of light stretched across the sky from the northern horizon to the southern horizon. One filled with swirling colors, like a rainbow reflecting off a shimmering pond; the other blacker than any darkness Keahra had ever seen, making the night sky behind it bright as the moon in comparison. The rainbow-like band gave Keahra feelings of warmth, joy, and peace when she stared into its swirling colors. The black band, however, seemed to claw at Keahra’s soul.

She wanted to turn away from the black band, but her eye caught two black tendrils snaking down from the band, like trails of ink dropped in a glass of water. Her heart leaped into her throat for a moment, for the tendrils seemed to speed straight for her like two bolts of dark lightning. But at the last moment, they veered toward the Guardian, piercing the now unlit golden tip as if it were no more solid than a wall of mist. Keahra stared at the black tendrils as they undulated about the tip of the obelisk like angry snakes.

The wood door at the base of the obelisk shattered. Keahra turned away just as her back was pelted with the door’s needle-like splinters. She dove to the ground, ignoring the wood shards in her shoulders and back, and then peered through the undergrowth at the entrance.

One of the murderers, the woman, flew out the door and landed hard on the grassy clearing, tumbling over and over before stopping. She leaped to her feet, one of the black tendrils touching her left hand raised above her head. The man ran out the door, paused for a moment, his crazed eyes finding the woman, a snarl twisting his bearded face. His left hand was also raised above his head, and a black tendril touched it. He screamed in a language that was alien yet familiar to Keahra, and then charged toward the woman.

The woman stood her ground, waited for the man to come within ten paces before pointing her right hand at the man. A wave of black energy shot forth and enveloped the man. Terrible nausea seized Keahra, but her discomfort was nothing compared to what enveloped the man. He screamed a terrible, animal-like howl when the black energy hit him. She saw the man as if through heat waves shimmering off beach sand during high summer. The man’s features melted, merged, and then folded in on themselves. His screams changed, grew deeper and then shrill, impossible from a human throat.

The woman kept the black energy flowing over the man as he fell to his knees—or what became his knees in his new tortured form. He no longer made any sound, but the woman laughed maniacally, shouting in the same strange language the man had used. She did not stop until the man dissolved into the ground, leaving a blackened, wet patch of earth where his body had been.

Keahra wanted to vomit. She held back the urge, but in doing so, she involuntarily gagged.

The woman’s head whipped around, and she stared straight at Keahra with glistening, obsidian eyes.

Keahra’s body froze beneath that unnatural gaze. As the black energy engulfed her, she retained enough of her wits to realize she would be Ahura’s first martyr in over a thousand years.

1

Taran Abraeu knew he was dreaming, but the horror he felt was quite real.

He stood in the middle of a wide stone bridge above a black, fast-moving river. A gray mist covered the banks. Above him, the sky swirled with every color imaginable, making him dizzy just looking at it.

On the bridge in front of him were three stone boxes: one black, one red, and one white. Strange black engravings covered all three, words from a language Taran did not know, but was sure he once had.

The lid of the black box jumped, landing slightly ajar on top of the box. It jumped again, and this time it fell onto the bridge’s red-brick road.

Taran peered inside.

White mists swirled in the box, and black lightning flickered. The face of a beautiful woman with red hair materialized. Taran was unable to look away. The corners of her mouth lifted in a smile.

Jagged, yellow encrusted teeth leered at him. Her eyes turned as black as a shark’s.

She lunged—

Taran awoke to the chiming of the wiretype receiver on the nightstand beside his bed. The little bell rang twice, paused, rang twice again. Taran took a moment to calm his shaking body from the dream, then flipped the lever next to the chime. The wiretype keys in his office downstairs start tapping the message.

Taran lay his head back down on his sweat-soaked pillow. The street lamps outside illuminated the fine cracks in the ceiling’s plaster, and he wondered how long before the cracks leaked water. And then wondered how he’d pay for the repairs with his reduced university salary and Mara’s ever increasing doctor fees.

Accepting that sleep was futile, Taran rose from the bed, put on his round spectacles, and went to his office to see about the wiretype.

He passed Mara’s room, the door slightly open. He peeked inside, saw that his daughter’s eyes were closed and that she was sleeping in the same position in which he had placed her last night—on her back, with her head tilted slightly toward the window on the other side of the room. After Mara’s six years with the Blood, he did not know why this disturbed him every morning. Adhera would tell him that it was because he still expected Mara to bound out of bed one morning like she had before she caught the Blood. It would never happen again, she would say angrily.

Well, Adhera was wrong about that, and it was a disagreement that had driven them to separate rooms. Taran glanced at the door across from Mara’s, saw Adhera’s sleeping form in the street light seeping through her windows.

Taran closed Mara’s door and continued to his office, down the narrow stairs and past the small living room. The wiretype continued to tap at the paper tape emerging from the unstained wood case. He read the sender number at the beginning of the tape and frowned. It was from the Office of the Dean of Continental Antiquities. Taran wondered what was so important that old Arie Seazell would wiretype him at an hour when even Calaman University groundskeepers still slept. The message read:

Dr. Abraeu, be at my office in one hour for a conference with officials from the Speaker’s office. Look to the sky if you want the reason.

Speaker’s office? Taran wondered out loud. The Speaker? What could officials from the Speaker of the Recindian Compact possibly have to say to him?

Taran was an expert in a field that had long ago become the stuff of ridicule among universities across the Compact, and even most other nations on the continent. His classes on the ancient Mystics were popular among students looking for a diversion from their real studies of history, science, and Pathism. Taran had given up a lucrative and prestigious career in Recindian history six years ago, just after the Blood struck Mara, to pursue the Mystics. Legends of their healing powers were enough to drive Taran’s decision, though he had always had a passing interest in their mythology all his life. Mythology had become his last hope to save his daughter. For if he could find them, or at least find out how they had healed their sick, perhaps he could avoid the only prescription the Compact’s Pathist society had for his daughter’s condition...

So why would the Speaker’s office want to talk to him, a man whose Pathist orthodoxy was suspect at best, heretical at worst?

And what was the last line, look to the sky, about?

Taran walked to the window in the living room of his small townhouse. As always in a city of Calaman’s size, people were up and about at all hours, walking along the sidewalks or riding in horse-drawn carriages, hooves clomping on the cobblestone street. A steam trolley filled with a dozen people huffed and sputtered past his window, belching black coal smoke from the stack on its roof. Its blue uniformed driver rang the bell to warn off two men in black suits and tri-corner hats standing in the trolley’s path and staring at the sky. A lampman was extinguishing the gas lamps across the street with a long pole that had a small soot-caked hood at the end. The lampman looked up into the sky with a nervous frown, and then hurried on to the next gas lamp.

Taran looked up at the violet sky—

The wiretype fell from his hand.

2

I am Fatimah of Kulon Fields. I’ve been summoned by the Holy Seat.

Fatimah stood before the large, slanted wood desk of Olma Merhtash, Deacon to the Holy Seat. The Deacon did not look up from the parchment on which she was writing. Even with Fatimah’s height, it was difficult not to stand on her tiptoes to meet the Deacon’s eyes. Fatimah had heard that the Holy Seat’s assistant acted like she had all the power of the Holy Seat herself. With three decades of service, Fatimah supposed that Deacon Olma thought she was the Holy Seat. No doubt she did much of the Seat’s work.

Fatimah waited for the older woman to finish what she was doing, knowing that the Deacon would not interrupt her work for a newly ordained priest, no matter if the Seat had summoned her. Fatimah treated her wait as another lesson in Patience, lessons that were still fresh in her mind with her ordination only three weeks past. For Fatimah, it was the hardest lesson to master, and one that she constantly practiced.

Like now.

Questions raged in her mind, the least of which was why the Seat had summoned Fatimah for a personal audience. It was highly improper, for Master Eblin should accompany Fatimah on any audience with the Seat. Though Fatimah was now ordained, she was Apprenticed to Eblin of Luesing, Master of Languages, and member of the Tuathan Master Circle. For the next five years, Fatimah would study the Recindian languages and culture under Eblin’s guidance. As tradition dictated, Fatimah would learn nothing else, and was thus forbidden to perform tasks during her Apprenticeship that did not relate to her studies. Fatimah hoped that Eblin would not be angry with her for coming to the Seat’s quarters. But when three large, stern Heshmen knocked on her Heiron apartment door at dawn demanding she dress for an immediate audience with the Seat, she felt she did not have a choice in the matter.

Deacon Olma placed her pen in its quill, blew on the parchment to dry the ink, sprinkled fine sand over it, and then rolled it into a small scroll. She placed the scroll into a wood tube, capped it, and sealed it with a dollop of hot, red wax. She pulled the handle to a bell behind her desk. A young female Acolyte—for all Tuathan priests were female—with a white sash wrapped around her waist, appeared from a door to the right of the desk.

The Deacon handed the Acolyte the scroll.

Master Simmish, the Deacon ordered. The girl nodded, and then ran out the door Fatimah had entered and up the stairs toward the raven cages on the tenth floor of the Heiron, the great, ancient obelisk in the center of Fedalan that was home to the Tuathan priesthood and government.

Deacon Olma’s gray-green eyes then regarded Fatimah as if she were another Acolyte. It grated on Fatimah, for she had earned the right to a little respect from other priests once she was ordained.

But Fatimah kept these thoughts from showing and returned the Deacon’s appraising look with Patience.

The Holy Seat is meeting with the Master Circle at the moment, the Deacon said. Sit down. I do not know how long it will take.

Fatimah turned on her heel and sat down at one of the wood benches across from the Deacon’s desk. She had been fast asleep less than a quarter of an hour ago, almost dragged out of her apartment by the Seat’s bodyguards as if the Heiron was on fire, and now she had to wait only Ahura knew how long before the Seat explained why she needed a Recindian languages Apprentice before dawn.

She took a deep breath. Practice your Patience...

Fatimah glanced out the thick glass windows to her right, focusing on the sliver of a rising sun beyond the dark, forested hills to the east. Sunrises always calmed her, for they reminded her of her childhood on her family’s sheep farm. Fatimah and her papa would take the sheep out of their pens early—

A strange twinkling in the sky near the window’s edge drew her eye from the sun. She leaned forward. The light looked to be a rainbow, but she had never seen one in the pre-dawn sky. She stood and went to the window to get a better look.

The rainbow was a band of swirling colors that spanned the sky from north to south. But what made her heart freeze was the black band next to it, as if all light had been cast from it, and all that was left was an abyss in the sky.

She gasped. It was Ahura and Angra. The Barrier had fallen.

She stumbled backward, and then rushed to the Deacon’s desk, breathless. She pointed to the window, tried to find words to communicate the enormity of what she saw. Fatimah did not take her eyes from the sight, for fear that both bands would disappear and the Deacon would think her to be an overexcited Acolyte.

Almost bored, the Deacon said, I know, child, the Barrier is gone. That is why the Holy Seat is busy with the Circle at the moment.

Ignoring Olma’s reference to her as child, Fatimah stammered, But when? How?

Regarding the ‘when’, it was over six hours ago. The Deacon gave her a curious look, and asked, Did you not see the flash of light? It turned night into day all across the world.

Fatimah shook her head absently. I am a heavy sleeper.

Olma frowned, and then continued. Well, as for the ‘how,’ that is what the Holy Seat and the Circle will tell us when the time is right. Now please have a seat, child, before you fall down from excitement.

Fatimah stumbled back to her seat, her gaze locked on Ahura, the Avatar of Creation. She tried not to look at Angra, or what the priesthood called the Avatar of Chaos. Its emptiness made her feel too cold and queasy. She supposed it was her Tuathan blood, for it had evolved over millennia to feed off of Ahura’s grace...and to shun Angra’s blasphemy.

How could the Barrier have fallen? What did this mean for the world?

Does this mean I can—?

Fatimah gave the Deacon a wary glance, but she was busy writing another parchment. Remembering her lessons in Wielding history and methods, Fatimah practiced her Patience, allowing every muscle to relax and her mind to travel to a place and time where she was most at peace. She remembered a crisp spring day when she was a small girl, sitting on a hill with her father watching the sheep feed on the season’s new green grass. Her father was honing a shearing knife on a leather band in preparation for the wool harvest the next day. The weather had finally turned warm after a long cold winter, with a blue sky and a warm, humid wind that was more to Fatimah’s liking. She knew her mother would have hot tea ready for them when they returned to the farmhouse at dusk. She had felt so content, so peaceful....

Fatimah opened her eyes and concentrated on the candle that lit the Deacon’s desk. Calm and at peace, Fatimah raised her left hand, imagining herself touching the rainbow-like band in the sky.

And Ahura overwhelmed her. She had never felt such love and peace in her life, not even in the sweetest, most comforting moments with her father and mother. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she wanted to stay in this joy forever.

But she knew that staying too long would destroy her mind, or so the legends said.

With all her will, she drew Ahura into herself and called on Water. In her mind, she felt it in her hand, cool and clean, and then she focused it toward the candle on Olma’s desk.

There was a pop in her ears, and then the candle winked out with a hiss. The Deacon looked up at the candle, then at Fatimah. Realization dawned on her face, and she cried, What did you do?

Before Fatimah could answer, the room spun. The dark corners and tapestry-covered walls became one large blur, and she tumbled off the bench.

3

The rain began when Taran was a hundred paces from Shalliford Hall. Taran broke into a jog, cursing himself for not bringing an umbrella, though he never could have held the umbrella while carrying the musty old books, scrolls, and maps overflowing his arms. The materials were some of the most important manuscripts he had collected during his years of Mystic research. He had no idea whether any of them would answer the questions of the Speaker’s agents, but he at least wanted references on hand in the unlikely event they asked something he did not know.

Taran glanced at the cloudy, rain-swollen sky. The bands of light that the morning newspapers were calling rings of comet debris around the world were still visible, though somewhat obscured by the gray clouds. The ring with the swirling colors, combined with the moving clouds below it, gave Taran a somewhat dizzy feeling, as if he were moving the opposite direction in which he was walking. The black ring was a dark gash in the sky running parallel to the rainbow ring, diffuse around the edges but blacker than onyx toward the center. It made Taran as uneasy as he felt during Mara’s grim, weekly checkups by Dr. Hyt.

His right foot plunged into a cold puddle, bringing his attention back to the road. Plenty of time to stare at the rings later. Right now he had to get his suddenly valuable artifacts to the Dean’s office before they were a sodden heap of wood pulp and pigskin. The ivy-covered Shalliford Hall, housing the university’s College of Recindian Cultures, was less than fifty paces away. Taran ran the rest of the way just as the skies opened with a deluge of rain and peals of thunder.

Taran approached the door just as a young male student was leaving. The young man held the door for Taran, and Taran thanked him gratefully. Shalliford Hall was one of the oldest buildings on campus, and the smell of its musty interior tended to amplify during rainstorms. Taran set his load of books on a dark wood bench near the door, shook the rain out of his coat and hair, and wiped his spectacles with a semi-dry handkerchief. He gathered up his books and made his way quickly up the marble spiral stairs in front of the door.

On the second floor, he passed several rooms where professors were expounding on virtue for virtue’s sake, the core tenet of Jonah Luten’s history changing book, The Path. All tenured professors were Pathist, as were most government officials, merchant lords, guild masters, and anyone who wanted to move up in Compact society. About the only people who were not reliably Pathist were the Ahura cults in the Compact’s northeastern mining towns. But then their coal and iron ore were so important to the Compact’s economy that no one could afford to ostracize them. Taran wondered what they thought when they looked at the sky this morning.

But freedom to deviate from Pathist dogma was not a luxury someone in Taran’s position could enjoy without consequences. Before the Blood had struck Mara, Taran was a rising star in the College of Recindian Cultures, an expert in nations, creeds, and histories for people across the continent. He had just achieved his tenure, and was free to study and research any topic he wanted.

But after the Blood found Mara, when modern medicine could do nothing for his little girl, Taran single-mindedly pursued the legends of the Mystics. He had always had a passing interest in them all his life, and he was familiar with much of their mythology. But he knew their legendary healing powers were the only hope his daughter had of averting the Mercy that Pathism recommended for people with the Blood, the only cure for a disease that ensured its victims died screaming.

But a good Pathist’s pursuit of reason and logic did not mesh with belief in a legendary race of beings that could supernaturally heal with a touch. Taran’s research budget was cut in half, then quartered, and then halved again. He was banished to an office in the basement below the Steam Engineering department, doomed to listen to the clangs and whistles and bellows of students above him working on the latest steam and coal-driven technology. Taran knew the only reason the university did not fire him outright was because his father, General Tobias Abraeu, was one of the Compact’s greatest heroes in the First Mazumdahri War. Taran did not like having a position because of his father, but neither did he relish searching for another job with a sick child at home and a wife who could no longer find employment as a Pathist Teacher because of his beliefs.

Which reminded him that he forgot to wake Adhera and tell her where he was going. His first class was not until noon, so he was responsible for washing the blood-tinged night sweats off Mara in the morning. He sighed, then decided to wiretype his house after the meeting. He did not look forward to returning home later to Adhera’s accusing eyes.

The heavy oak door to Arie’s waiting room at the end of the long hall was cracked open, so Taran backed his way in while still balancing the load in his arms. There was no one in the small waiting room except for Arie’s assistant tapping the keys of a wiretype at her desk.

The young woman looked up from the machine, then turned back to it when she saw Taran.

They’re waiting for you inside, Doctor, she said absently, tilting her head toward Arie’s closed door. She did not bother to help him with the doorknob, so Taran shifted the books to one arm, used his fingers to turn the knob, and shouldered his way into the room.

Taran stifled a groan when the first person he saw was Metia Turcio’s frowning face. She stood to the right of Arie’s desk, her back against the wall, her arms folded beneath her expansive bosom.

It was a common joke around the College that she had been the department’s Zampolit for so long that she had approved the Pathist orthodoxy of each brick used to build the Hall a hundred years ago. It was a joke no one dared say to her face, however, since she had the power to make a professor’s life miserable. It was Metia who had Taran banished to his current office because his supernaturalist beliefs could not be allowed to infect the other professors. Taran heard that Metia wanted him fired outright, but was stopped by administrators who were friends with Taran’s father. On principle, Taran hated that fact, but what choice did he have?

Arie Seazell stood up from his desk and extended his arms to Taran. Let me help you with those, he said, taking the books and scrolls beginning to slip from Taran’s grip.

Arie had been a junior professor when Taran’s mother, Jajeh, became the department’s librarian. While Jajeh worked, eight-year-old Taran would roam the library, sometimes sitting in a corner for hours reading about Recindian history, philosophical theories, or scientific treatises on everything from astronomy to zoology. Taran had become somewhat of a protégé to almost every professor in the department, especially Arie who told Taran that if he kept receiving good marks in his schooling, he might get a job at the university one day.

Taran could not imagine a better job than to read books and research all day, so he decided that that would be his future. Tobias Abraeu had not been thrilled about his only son’s career choice, hoping instead that Taran would carry on the family tradition of a career in the Compact military. But when he saw the excitement in Taran’s eyes when he opened a new book or learned a new fact, Tobias accepted that his son’s destiny would take a different road. That and Taran believed his mother’s influence had helped ease Tobias’s disappointment.

Arie placed the books and scrolls on an already impressive pile of books and scrolls on the desk. He nodded to the man who stood up from the chair in front of Arie’s desk.

Taran, this is Kumar Ladak from the Ministry of Science.

Taran shook hands with Ladak. The man was dressed well in a pressed, spotless black suit common to government officials. He wore an uncomfortable smile. Taran had seen that smile many times. No doubt Ladak was cringing at the thought of speaking to someone who—as Metia no doubt already explained—had supernaturalist beliefs.

Arie motioned Taran to a third chair to the left of Ladak. A second chair on Taran’s right was empty, which he assumed was because Metia refused to sit next to him.

Doctor Abraeu, Ladak began, his full, gray mustache twitching, you have no doubt seen the...phenomenon in the sky this morning. The Recindian people are uneasy and want answers. The Speaker has ordered the Science Ministry to interview the brightest minds in Calaman’s three universities for any ideas regarding the phenomenon’s origins. My associates are now interviewing astronomers, chemists, physicists, Pathist Teachers, and even philosophers of...unconventional beliefs. My task is to—

Interview the Mystic cultist, Taran said, grinning. When Ladak began to protest, Taran said, It’s all right, sir, I’m used to it.

He glanced at Metia who continued frowning at him.

Arie smiled. Mr. Ladak, Doctor Abraeu is the Compact’s leading expert on Mystic legends. He has gathered the finest collection of ancient Mystic artifacts and documents on the entire Recindian continent. If the phenomenon has anything to do with the Mystics, Dr. Abreau will know it.

Taran smiled at his friend, always grateful for Arie’s