Chapter Text
The completion of his protective maz sucked the air from Cala's lungs and drove him to his knees, but he had not survived five attempts on the life of his Emperor without learning to have an offensive spell ready to follow. Crackling blue energy gathered about his fingertips even as he forced himself up and tried to get a good look at his surroundings.
He was in a long dark room lit only by a few gaslights turned low at either end. People were screaming shrilly, flailing, clambering over low, humped obstructions that he could scarcely see with his light-dazzled eyes.
Beshelar was not here, nor Edrehasivar who a moment ago had been within arm's reach. He couldn't sense them anywhere nearby. Had Cala failed his oath?
He called up a lightball over his left hand, still keeping the deadly revethmaz at the ready on his right. The low shapes lining the walls of the room were beds, and the people struggling out of their blankets were children. The novices' dormitory was well known to Cala, for he had lived here for years, in the base of the Mazan'theileian.
He gaped around at the eyes of the terrified children now hiding in the corners, his right hand drooping. One older boy was rising to his feet from a crouch, trying to speak, but his words were lost in the continued fearful sobs of the younger ones.
Then the door behind the older boy burst open to reveal Tidris Athmaza, one of the teachers of the Athmaz'are who had died years ago, and behind him Sehalis Athmaza who should be peacefully retired and living in the country by now. He was too shocked to notice and too slow to resist as the older men's maz wrapped around him, stifling his own, and he fell into sparkling darkness.
The blast knocked Deret from sunlight into blackness, his shout of warning echoing into sudden quiet. He rolled over and found straw prickling his hands, with cool packed dirt below instead of the worn cobbles he expected. When he clambered to his feet he overbalanced almost at once, feeling unaccountably light. He was not wearing his armour. He was not wearing his sword, and frantic pats found no weapon attached to the simple rope belt about his waist.
A horse snorted close to his left ear and he lurched away in surprise, falling against a rough wooden partition. Further away, a hoof thudded against a door. The rich, warm odour registered upon his nose. A stable? How could he be in a stable, at night, with no one about? Only an instant earlier he had been standing upon a stone bridge, reaching out to try - hopelessly - to protect His Serenity from the boiling wall of death rolling toward them.
"Cala? Serenity? Are you here?" His voice sounded high and weak, and no-one answered him.
He groped toward the only light he could see, a faint glimmer that proved to be an open half-door. The closed bottom portion seemed uncommonly high for a stable door, and it took him many thumping heartbeats to find a heavy latch almost at his own eye-level. He staggered out into moonlight, but what he found did nothing to calm his heart or steady his spinning head. He was standing in the barnyard of his parents' farm, which he had not laid eyes upon since he had left to join the First Army of the Ethuveraz. And he was so small he could barely peer over the lower half of a barn door, nor could he - when he realized his mistake a moment later - successfully restrain the nanny goat who slipped out of the open door behind him.
A hot fist punched Csevet between the shoulder blades, and he fell forward - but the searing blanket of ash he expected to smother him did not follow. Instead he landed upon ridges of chill, wet stone. His clothes were sodden, and rain splatted down all around him. There was only the barest glimmer of reddish light low upon the horizon to his right; all else was dark to his eyes.
He flexed his fingers upon the granite and felt the sharp-edged steps under his shins, recognized the strap of a courier bag tugging at his shoulder, smelled the peculiar tang of budding elesth trees in the rain-laden air, and he did not need light to know where he was.
He did not know how. But somehow, he was on the switchback path that climbed up to Eshoravee, and he had a message to deliver.
Maia watched the poisonous cloud of smoke and ash boiling down the mountainside faster than the swiftest horse could gallop, channeled by the river gorge directly at the bridge they stood upon. Trees cracked and groaned beneath the roiling heat of its passage. After the first moment of hesitation and disbelief, he could see there was not enough time to run to either side of the bridge, though Csevet, who had been walking ahead of Maia and the nohecharei, might have made it to the meager protection of the hillside had he sprinted. Instead, Csevet was running back toward them.
Maia's mind raced with each beat of his heart:
Beat.
We are going to die.
Beshelar and Cala will be with us.
So will Csevet - ah, not Csevet, why didn't you run away?
Beat.
At least Idra did not accompany us on this excursion.
Csethiro is safe at home, with the children.
Ah, but now there will be a regency government, my poor son!
Beat.
Will Kiru and Edolis be safe in the village? The river curves below it, perhaps this deadly flow will pass them by?
But it does not matter; they will find our corpse and slit their veins at its feet.
Our seared and twisted body will lie in the Untheileneise'meire just as our father and brothers did.
Beat-
In the next instant, Beshelar's hand closed upon Maia's shoulder and began to jerk him back, the broad chest curving around as if to shield him. But already the terrible roiling mass was descending upon Csevet, too few paces away -
Maia cried out despite himself, falling backward into a soft mattress and cool linens. He lay panting, blinking into gloom. "Beshelar?" he breathed. Surely that could not have been a dream; it had been far too real. Yet it must have been a dream, or how had he come to be in this bed? As his eyes adjusted to the soft light, he realised that this was not his bedchamber in the Alcethmeret, nor yet the guest house in Bakhoree that had been hastily appointed in Imperial splendour for his visit.
A figure rustled toward him, carrying a candle yet silhouetted against the light coming through an open door. He turned to see which of his nohecharei would soothe his alarm and center him in reality and tell him where he was, but instead a strange woman bent over him. She was impossibly large - no, he was far too small.
"Maia, Your Grace, you must get up now." She lit the oil lantern beside his bed, and as the light came up he saw that she was vaguely familiar. She had been a maidservant, long ago, in the house at Isvaroë. "You are needed in your mother's bedchamber."
"Mama?" Maia heard his own voice, soft and piping, and noticed his childish hands pushing against the linens of his bed. But none of that mattered. This could not be real, but reality didn't matter against the chance of seeing his mother. He felt so light he might float away, and wavered as he tried to climb out of the bed, watched the maid push slippers onto his feet, wobbled down a half-remembered hallway to a room with the fire built up and the curtains drawn back from the bed.
His mother was there - his mother! - but so gaunt and frail, the colour of ash, her mouth open and her eyes not amber but dun, blinking at him.
"Mama!" he gasped, and without thinking he was clambering onto the bed by her side. Her cool, papery hand twitched weakly as he grasped at it. He turned back to the maid, remembering all he had learned a decade too late about the medicines that should have been made available to the dying Empress. "She needs a doctor - a cleric of Csaivo - summon help -" the words spilled out in a rush, jumbling together on his tongue so they were almost incomprehensible.
There was an older woman in the room - perhaps the cook? No, he recalled, it was the household steward - who said, "It is too late for that, little Maia. You are here to say goodbye to your mother, now."
It was not true. He knew it was not true - she could be helped! Or could have been helped, if given the right medicines early in her illness. But as he turned back to his mother now, he found her eyes closed and her hand slack, her chest rising and falling too slowly.
"Mama!" he begged, tears starting to his eyes. "Mama..."
"Tell her that you love her," the steward was saying, but in Maia's head he heard Thara Celehar's rasping voice, Tell her that you love her and you will be all right, so that she may pass in peace to the care of Ulis.
Maia gaped in astonishment at the steward, who was nothing at all like Mer Celehar. But recalling the solemn Witness helped him calm his frantic energy. He straightened the bedclothes rumpled beneath his legs, smoothed down his mother's fingers and stroked her cheek with his small hands. His skin was scarcely paler than hers, his knuckles dimpled instead of knobby.
He whispered to her in his imperfect Barizhin, so that the servants could not understand even if he had to put in the occasional Ethuverazhin for a word he didn't know. "I will be well, Mama, I promise. I will grow up to be... to be... thou'lt be proud of me. I'm going to be Emperor, Mama. And I will be a better kind of Emperor, not Varedeise, not in the pockets of the rich merchants. I will make sure the servants are cared for, just as thou hast taught me, Mama. And the factory workers, and the orphans, and the silk weavers and cart-drivers and the boat men and the airship crews, and all the people who are forgotten, I will remember them. And I will remember the meditations thou'st taught me, and ask Cstheio for guidance, and I will make sure it isn't unfashionable to honour the gods. And I will make peace between our lands, thy father's land and mine - and, and I'll come to know thy sisters, thy half-sisters, Mama, dost remember them? They will teach me Barizhin and help me make peace and learn to be a good Emperor -"
His mother made a noise, half-gasp and half-choke, and Maia froze, fearing she was already gone. But her tongue swept her lips, and her slitted eyes turned to him. "My boy," she whispered faintly, in her father's tongue. "Love... always..."
"Yes, Mama, I love thee so much, always and forever, I will never forget thee. And, and I'll be well, I promise. Canst... canst... go on, and I'll be..." He began to weep then, his throat so tight he could speak no more. He pressed his forehead against the blankets over her chest, and amid his own sobbing he missed the moment when her breath ceased to move within her.