Age of War

Chapter 11

“Let me make sure I’m understanding all this right,” Calad said slowly, “because, you know, on first blush, it does kind of sound like you might have gone away to Talos and come back a crazy person.”

Jonis rolled her eyes. She, Calad and Calam were all crowded into the tiny cell she shared with her brother who was, for now, mercifully absent. Calad was leaning against the wall opposite the door, sprawling in such a way that he dominated the space, while she and Calam were squashed up on her narrow bed, legs folded underneath them. “Is it so hard to believe?”

“When a theory starts with a bunch of savages praying to imaginary people in the sky, yes, it is hard to believe.”

“You don’t have to take it at face value, Calad,” his sister said, “obviously the Talosi’s beliefs aren’t literally true. The point is that there are some coincidences.”

“Yes, and that’s all they are. I guarantee it. Look, you could go to every Province in Atlantis and find some backwater village where they believe just about anything. You’d find all sorts of strange parallels between some silly fairy story and real history. It doesn’t mean there’s some…I don’t know…some conspiracy…”

“You really think nothing’s going on here?” Jonis asked him.

He looked conflicted. “I’m just struggling to see the significance. Go through it again.”

Jonis sighed. How many more times would she have to repeat herself? The Matriarch had been just as sceptical. So sceptical, she’d ended up mucking out the pits like a novice. “All right,” she counted off on her fingers, “first there’s their religion. They worship a deity called the One-Eyed God, a vicious bully by all accounts from whom they had to wrest control of their homeland.”

“Sounds like every other god I’ve heard of…”

“Right, but the symbol they use on their temples? It’s branded into the thigh of your Cyclops.”

“You’re sure it’s the same symbol?”

Jonis traced her finger across her sheets, leaving a slight indent. “This one?”

“She only saw it for a second when he turned around, Calad,” Calam said.

“It’s a simple enough design…”

“Okay, well then second of all, you have their myths and the prophecy that goes with it. A woman, with one of our tattoos, bargains with them a thousand years ago. They call her a sorceress.”

“But we’re not sorceresses…or even sorcerers…”

“No,” Calam agreed, “but to uneducated savages, our ability to control Cyclopes would seem like magic.”

“Maybe.”

“Then there’s the other things. The way their runes look like our tattoos. The fact that the castle in their capital is built on Atlantian foundations that look just like this.” She gestured around herself. “I swear, that was a Cyclops pit.”

“Well then,” Calad folded his arms. “Maybe there were Cyclopes there a thousand years ago. What of it?”

“No history of Atlantis mentions anything like that happening. The Talosi arriving is a footnote in the tale of a generation-long war of succession. Cyclopes aren’t deployed idly. If the Empress was fighting a war against her rivals, why did she send her greatest weapons to a frozen peninsula to hurl a few mainlands barbarians back into the sea? And the Talosi aren’t stupid – they know their own history. And a Cyclops attack tends to stick in the mind, right? But all they seem to remember is a sorceress with my tattoos…”