"What the hell did you say to him?" Magen asked me.
It'd been three days since I'd talked to Dalostaed. He was night shift and I was day shift, so it wasn't as though avoiding each other was difficult, but now that we were settling the caravan again - this time at the much friendlier empire city of Putluru - people were changing shifts in earnest.
I shrugged at Magen. "Just a dumb argument." I said. "The heat's been a bit much."
Magen nodded. "It happens, but you'd best reconcile quick, or at least learn to work side by side. Utijan is our next and last stop, and we'll be needing everyone left to help unpack."
I looked around at the numerous wagons that were already unpacking. Merchants, mostly, and a whole lot more than had been allowed at Chankota. "What about here?"
"You're free to help out, so long as the heat won't be a problem." Magen's tone indicated he didn't quite believe my story, but his surface thoughts had already moved on. He wasn't going to ask questions.
"We're out of the desert now." I said. "The grass is almost green. Should be cool enough to keep my temper."
"Good." He said, and moved down the line.
I made my way up the caravan to the group of wagons that I'd guarded on their rather quick departure from Chankota. Their guard recognized me and nodded. "Hey, Bishop," she said. "Magen need anything?"
"No," I replied, "I was just checking to see if anything needed to be unpacked up here." Left unsaid was the fact that this was about as far from the wizard's wagon as I could get.
She shrugged. "We're not staying. Magen sent us on ahead like he did because we're not actually part of his caravan." She tapped the side of the wagon closest to her, and I noticed a different flag painted on it.
"Oh? Where are you headed?"
"Dynasty, eventually. So we don't dare get too close to Utijan, because you know how they feel about supplying the enemy."
I managed a chuckle. The Dynasty and the Empire had technically been at war with each other for the past hundred years, though it had been nearly that long since a battle had actually been fought. "I can imagine. So why go this far west at all, can't you just head north from Opal?"
She laughed. "I keep forgetting this is your first trip."
I hadn't actually told her at any point, but gossip traveled pretty freely around the caravan. "That obvious, huh?"
"Sorry," she said finally. "Looking at a map it looks like an easy trip, Ruby's up there along the way. You know much about the other Jewels?"
Opal wasn't the only Jewel of the Desert. Pretty much any city that survived in the desert got that title, so long as they'd named themselves accordingly. Even that wasn't a strict requirement; Sapphire's actual name was Crossing Dunes, but nobody called it that and you'd be hard-pressed to find a modern map that used the latter name. "I mostly just know about Opal," I said finally.
"Ruby's an outlaw haven. Founded by people who believed that true anarchy could really work. Idealists, of all things. Most of them met the wrong side of a crossbow about a month after that founding, but the city's still there so I guess they were at least a little bit right. Anyway, they're big believers in 'personal freedom', up to and including the part where they feel free to take your stuff if you're a small group of traders with only one or two guards. If Magen were leading this whole caravan to the Dynasty, then sure, it'd be safe just because there'd be too many of us to kill. But he's not, so we take the long way around."
"Makes sense." I said. "I-"
A cough from behind me interrupted what I was going to say. I turned around and peered into the completely shadowed visage of the wizard.
"I'll let you get on with that," the other guard said, unhelpfully.
"Um, hi." I said to the wizard. "Do you need help unpacking?" I wasn't sure why I was talking; he couldn't understand anything I said and even if he did answer me, I couldn't understand him.
He motioned for me to follow him, then turned around and started walking away without checking to see if I'd actually done so. I glanced back to see if my fellow guard could help me, but she'd wisely gotten out of sight. I guessed I didn't have much of a choice.
I caught up with the wizard, who was moving relatively slowly. His robes dragged the ground with a hissing sound that he didn't seem to notice. He didn't say a word to me as we walked back to his wagon. As I'd suspected, Dalostaed was unloading it.
"Xiex," the dwarf / man said to the wizard. The latter barely acknowledged him, climbing back on top of the remaining portions.
"We're setting up?" I asked as calmly as I could.
If Dalostaed harbored any ill will over our conversation, it wasn't reflected in his manner. It was possible I'd been avoiding him for nothing. He gestured to the wagon. "Not all of it, thank the Ten. Just enough to unload a few tinctures we probably wouldn't be able to sell in the Far Lands."
I helped unload until he told me to stop, then I helped put the booth together. I found myself wondering if I was also going to be expected to sell the wares. I not only had no idea what they did, I also wouldn't be able to understand if anyone tried to ask me questions about them in Hidna. Still, I could build a booth.
As we were working, I asked: "The Ten?"
"You religious?" He asked me, looking in my direction skeptically before returning his attention to the work.
Growing up like I did, you either cultivated a deep personal faith to keep you steady in terrible times - which was nearly all of them - or you gave up on the idea of higher powers entirely. I'd known friends who had personal shrines to the Lord of Winds or the Lady of Subtlety. Me, I'd gone in the other direction.
"Not really." I summarized. "It's just that we're taught in Opal that it's the Nine."
Dalostaed grunted. "I'm not surprised. You know what we know about the Tenth? Nil, that's what. The texts I knew mention that there were ten, talk about how the world was created, and then each of the nine gets their own chapter. Somewhere along the line, number ten just got left out."
"Strange." I commented. I wasn't really sure where he was going with this, but it wouldn't be the first rambling conversation we'd had.
"You know the story about the creation of the world?"
I made an uncertain gesture. "Not word-for-word, no. But the gist of it."
"Let's kill some time, then. Tell me the story." Dalostaed was not killing time. There was a point to this. But given how our last conversation had gone, I was in a conciliatory mood.
"All right," I said. "In the beginning, there was Void."
"So you know that part word for word."
"Everyone knows that part word for word," I said. "It gets a little fuzzier from there. The five gods-"
"Or five aspects of one God," Dalostaed interrupted. "That's what the commonwealth out east teaches, though not all the kingdoms there agree on it. It's one of the things they fight with each other about."
"Okay," I said. "Anyway, however many gods there were decide to hop into the void and carve out their own slice of it, but they do a terrible job alone. Fire can't survive on its own, Air is literally just howling in the void, Water evaporates immediately, and Earth can't stay in one piece. Mind of course can't even exist without people. So they have to team up to make our world. Not sure how that makes any sense with what the easterners teach, though."
"It makes perfect sense for them," Dalostaed said, "the fact that the elements do nothing on their own means that they have to actually be reflections of one thing in order to exist in the first place."
I wasn't sure that was a valid interpretation, but I'd barely read the actual scriptures so I really couldn't say. I continued the story. "Four of the elements make the world: Earth is obviously the earth, Water its waters, Air is the air, and Fire is at its core. And then as though to show them all up, Mind creates life."
"Great, that's our world. But what happened next?" Dalostaed said, as though he didn't know. He was definitely going somewhere with this.
I was suspicious, but continued. "Well, the rest of the gods, or aspects or whatever, they decide to get in on this life thing. Each of them splits into two, which I guess just makes the commonwealth scripture scholars supper happy, and they pool their powers to form bodies for themselves. These are the first human beings."
"Who are they?" Dalostaed asked.
That I remembered. "The Lady of Subtlety, the Lord of Oceans, the Lady of Rains, the Lord of Winds, the Lady of Breath, the Lord of Quakes, the Lady of Soil, the Lord of Blazes, and the Lady of the Hearth." I'd managed it all in one breath and without singing it in the annoying tune used to teach it to children.
"So, they make bodies for themselves, and then the other chapters start."
"From what I remember," I said, "that's the part I'm fuzzy on. The scriptures from that point on are a history lesson from nine different viewpoints, and none of them agree with each other. Other than some of the exciting stuff from Quakes or Blazes, it didn't really stick."
"But you're not a religious man." Dalostaed said, finally bringing the conversation around to its beginning.
I shook my head. "Not really." I wasn't sure I wanted to explain; gutter life in Opal wasn't exactly a cheery topic.
"So, who were they really?" Dalostaed asked.
"Who were who really?" I asked. "You mean the gods?"
Dalostaed nodded. I hoped he was actually getting to the point, because we were nearly done setting up the booth.
I just shrugged. "Seems pretty obvious, they were the first Pure. I know it's heresy to suggest it, but some people say that there was life before magic, not the other way around."
"And they'd sure seem like gods," Dalostaed pointed out. "Maybe he wasn't divine but every historian I've ever met agrees that the Lord of Blazes was a real person. The firestorm that destroyed Gizyut really happened, and it was at his hand."
I tried, really hard, not to ask him what the point to all this was, and I succeeded. Unfortunately, my surface thoughts were not quite so hidden as I'd hoped, because he answered me anyway: "I'm worried about you, boy."
He really was; the rage I'd inspired in him earlier seemed gone completely, replaced with this strange sorrow for someone he didn't even know.
"I'm sorry." I managed.
"We're still going to have a conversation," Dalostaed replied, "when the time is right. I don't know what you got up to in Chankota or how in this world you managed to even hear the words 'Zìshan Mon Zhouk', let alone see them on a sign, but it's nothing good."
"It's a suicide curse, you said." I was feeling pretty exposed at the moment; if it had turned out that the curse was something that only a Pure Mind could do then I'd have leaked some pretty damn important information about my own mission. Then again, things that only the Pure could do tended to not have names that weren't also the names of natural disasters. Plus my predecessor wouldn't have risked having one if its mere existence would have confirmed his employer. I hoped.
Dalostaed nodded. "When you know something that you literally want to take to the grave with you, you find a wizard." He gestured to his employer, who was apparently asleep. "The wizard implants in your mind a sort of ward. If anyone should try to access the information you've protected, either via coercion or because your interrogator is a wizard himself, it kills you."
I'd kept looking at the wizard atop his wagon. "And he's done that?"
"To himself, yes." Dalostaed said. "Standard procedure for ambassadors or envoys like him. The wizard knows much about the Dynasty, not to mention a great deal about magic. The Far Lands could learn much from him, so he can't be captured."
I shivered. "I see," I said finally.
"It's important, because the Pure are still among us." He said.
I didn't comment. I shut down my surface thoughts, hard, and though he must have noticed it, he was polite enough not to bring it up.
"The real reason I asked if you were religious was because if you were then you might have read Subtlety."
I shook my head. It was the last of the chapters and was preceded by the boring-even-for-scripture chapters of Soil and Hearth. I'd barely even bothered with Winds.
Dalostaed grunted again. "If you had read it, then you'd be familiar with the idea that there are still Pure in the world. Subtlety prophecies that, from time to time, the Gods would return to the earth in mortal form. In other words, the Pure are still being born. I can't speak for the other cities, but I know that it happens in the Dynasty. They're very quietly brought into one or more of the ruling houses to shore up the diversity. I don't know if it's common knowledge, but the Dynasty rulers have a bit of an inbreeding problem."
That was an understatement, though I'd thought the notion of the inbred dynast to be a stereotype rather than the actual state of things.
"I know." I said, finally. I allowed the discovery of Mrs. Windhelm, the Pure Water I'd found in Opal, come to the surface of my mind without context. "I know the Pure are real. I made it a... hobby to try to find one. I didn't think I'd actually succeed." It was close enough to the truth to pass, for now.
"A Pure Water," Dalostaed said, having picked up what I was thinking, "could wreak unimaginable destruction, even in a desert. Rains is an ironically dry chapter, but at one point the Lady of Rains does call down a flood from a clear sky. Any Pure could do that kind of damage."
"But there's not that many of them." I said with more confidence than I actually had.
"No." Dalostaed said. "There are not. You found one in a city of, what, twenty thousand people? The ratio is similar in the Dynasty. And I understand that natural-born Pure Minds are nearly unheard of. But if you wanted to protect information against one of them, the curse would do the trick. I worry that, wherever you heard this phrase, someone was tangled up with one of them. There's strange news come from the Empire over the past decade or so. Credible reports of a Witchdoctor. One Pure is unlikely, but possible. Two, though? One of which being the most rare sort that there is? And they just happened to find each other and produce an offspring? There's more behind the scenes of this than meets the eye."
"You don't think it's bluster?" I asked. "That the Empire doesn't just want its enemies to think it has these resources?"
Dalostaed shook his head. "When I say 'credible reports', I mean ones that the wizard and I have personally delivered. Our posting to the Far Lands isn't our first diplomatic mission. I've spent a lot of time in the Empire, more than I'd like in fact. The Witchdoctor is real. I don't know what you've gotten yourself into, but if you're stirring up the hornet's nest I'm glad I'm going to be on another continent."
The booth had been finished quite some time ago, but only now did the wizard rouse himself to come down and inspect it. He didn't say anything, but it was apparently to his liking, because he sat himself down at the chair behind his wares.
Dalostaed motioned me to follow him away from the booth. "Thanks for letting me say my piece," he said once we were out of hearing range. "I know whatever you're doing is important - it'd have to be - but I hope I've impressed upon you just how dangerous it is." I could tell he was thinking about Windhelm as he added, "Even though you've at least a little bit of an idea."
"Thank you, Dalostaed." I managed. "I'll be careful."
Dalostaed just nodded, and walked back to the booth. I watched him go, hoping that I'd actually be able to keep my promise.