The Ardoon King Page 69

  Chapter 67: Out of Time

  Duke Romini had been uneasy when Hobuk had approached him and proposed a secret alliance. Romini was a supporter of Lilian’s reign while Hobuk was, of course, the leader of the “opposition.”

  Yet it was clear that Porazo’s peculiar ascendancy to prominence threatened both the Lilies and the Ordunas. He was playing them against one another, making promises to both in backroom meetings. He promised the Lilies that even if the king were dead, he would allow Lilian to live, the mark against her be damned. He promised the Ordunas that Fiela would be queen, if and when she returned. He promised the so-called “Sargons,” the hardcore supporters of Ben, that the king’s body would be recovered and given a monumental burial.

  He peppered these promises with hints that he knew the Great Sage, and that he might, just might, be representing the ancient scribe’s wishes. How else to explain his timely arrival, at this, Steepleguard’s moment of crisis? If not for Porazo, would not the Ordunas and Lilies already be at each other’s throats? Did the man’s arrival not seem very much like a script?

  Additional pepper came in the form of veiled threats. Porazo was the senior noble. If the king and both queens were dead, he might assume the throne. He was a beneficent man but would necessarily only deal with those who wished to deal with him. He would look kindly upon those nobles who worked with him now, as opposed to later, when they had no other option.

  Most of the lesser nobles had been swayed by the newcomer. Romini and Hobuk were not. Thus their unpleasant alliance to ensure the Porazo did not steal the throne.

  Only minutes before, one of Romini’s spies in the communications room had slipped him a note that said radio contact had been made with Lord Disparthian. The Peth of both the King’s Squadron and Queen Fiela’s had sustained heavy losses against unknown opponents, but both king and queen were alive, as was Hobuk’s daughter. They would return to Steepleguard within a day, and would bring with them a mysterious trophy.

  Romini smiled. Porazo was history. The usurper had ordered the communications room quarantined, undoubtedly to stop the important news from leaking. But surely he knew it would leak. Everyone at Steepleguard was a spy for one or more factions. If Porazo was smart, he’d already be in flight.

  Certainly no one could find him.

  Romini approached Persipia, his only intermediary with Lilian since her unofficial house arrest. The woman looked haggard, and with good reason. Lilian was a strict mistress even when in a good mood. She would be far more demanding now. He knew the consort would also be pondering her own future.

  Of course, she might be a spy, but if her dejected and weary appearance was an act, it was a fine one. Not willing to chance it, he had encrypted his short note for the queen using a cipher known only to the Sargons.

  Looking as morose as he could, he approached the woman. She was sitting in an armchair in the great room staring blankly at a ledger filled with numbers. She looked up when he approached and tried to smile.

  “Lord Romini,” she said, giving a modest bow.

  “Lady Persipia.” Romini sighed. “I have a message for you to give Annasa Lilitu.”

  He handed her the note.

  “What is it?”

  “A decision.”

  “About what?”

  “She will tell you if she wishes.”

  Persipia fixed on the note, her heart sinking. “As you say.”

  The Sillum, known in another form as Porazo, was out of time.

  He wondered how things could have gone so wrong. His mission was simple enough. Kill the king and two queens of Steepleguard. Other deaths were optional, but irrelevant if there were any survivors in the royal family. The king’s death was mandatory because he spoke the Empyrean Glossa, which was the great disruptor. Its power allowed him to reestablish civilization and thus preserve sentient humanity. Even the temple monsters would be unable to eradicate humanity if the king was alive because he understood the glyphs that made them possible. The man’s knowledge of the Empyrean also made him immune to its affects.

  Worse yet, the Sillum sensed that the king was somehow in communication with the fugitive teacher of abominations, Scriptus Ridley. The fugitive would undoubtedly instruct the younger man how to use the Empyrean to navigate the realities. That would make his enemy far more elusive and formidable.

  The infinite physical realities, being outside time, were indestructible. There always were and would always be. They were unchanging. In short, it was impossible to destroy the host of the minds known to him as sentients. Destroying an individual sentient was no less vexing a task. Sentients shot from one reality to another so rapidly that it was impossible to follow any one of them, which was why the old sage was such a thorn in the Sillum’s side. Even if a sentient could be tracked, chasing it into a “dead” physical body (“killing” him or her) was pointless. The spark would just move to another body in another reality. The move would be jarring, yes, but not terminal.

  Fortunately, sentients usually clustered together. It was unnecessary to track them individually, with the exception of those rare individuals, like the ancient sage, who had learned to consciously navigate the realities in lieu of following the pack. Properly manipulated, the cluster could be herded in a desirable direction. In this case, it had been herded into a reality that was effectively a dead end. It was like one of the primitive fish traps with a wide entry and no exit. The apocalyptic reality the sentients had been herded into had exits but they were few in number and extremely difficult to find. Left to their own devices, the sentients would find themselves stuck.

  This was important because the one thing that a sentient needed to exist was movement. Just as airplanes fell from the sky if they did not maintain forward momentum, sentients that found themselves unable to move from one reality to another would eventually fall, frozen, into the mindless abyss which the Sillum’s god ruled. There they metamorphosed into physical matter. They literally became rocks. In fact, all of the physical realities that sentients traveled through were composed of such “matter,” and matter was nothing but dead sentience.

  The recent apocalypse had generated a lot of rock. The sentients had been forced to play a game of musical chairs and, unfortunately for them, there were very few chairs available.

  The king whom the Sillum was tasked to kill could lead the sentient cluster out of the trap and back into the vast ocean of possibilities. Certainly, even had the Sillum killed the king, the man’s mind might have survived, but it would have likely entered some shell from which it could do no harm, having no memory of what came before. It could always be tracked down later, once the larger cluster had been taken care of.

  The Sillum’s quandary was that he was chasing his victims through an ever-changing series of realities, which meant it was increasingly difficult for him to know what would happen next. He had the first day at Steepleguard mapped, and the second, and the third, and so forth, but each map was less accurate than the one that preceded it. He did not know, for example, if the Ardoon king was dead, or if he was not, when he would return, or even if he would return. He no longer knew whether the king was a sentient being or a shell. He did not know whether the missing queen, Fiela, was sentient. Either or both might have shifted to new shells. If they did, the cluster would follow them. They might be, even now.

  The only thing the Sillum knew for certain was that the golden haired queen had a mind. Yet even that could change tomorrow. That could change anytime, in fact. The next second, for example.

  The Sillum couldn’t waste any more time.

  “One in the hand is worth two in the bush,” he mumbled to himself as he walked down the long corridor.

  He’d take care of this queen now and make his escape. He’d occupied this body, this Porazo, because it allowed him to get close to the royal family. Unfortunately, Porazo was fated to die, and soon. This body had serious health issues. The Sillum had to voluntarily evacuate the doomed shell and move to another t
hat followed another string of realities. If he did that, he would maintain continuity of mind and could plan his next move. If he waited for Porazo to die, he’d be ejected into…well, he wasn’t sure, but his memory would be wiped. And that was a problem.

  He needed to stay in the game.