Lance of Earth and Sky

The Sky Knight arena was just beyond the south field, between Vidarian and his rooms. Now that they'd returned to the palace, a thousand tasks weighed on his conscience: he needed to find out more about the metal body Oneira had offered Ruby, he needed to find out more about and from Iridan, and his gut ached to know the status of the war with Qui. Admiral Allingworth and the emperor had both made it quite clear that they preferred Vidarian in the palace, but that hardly meant he had to remain uninformed.

Inside the arena, Rai barked, which meant that Brannon and his sister were likely there as well. Vidarian owed him thanks, and some kind of payment, for watching the pup while the Wind Maiden had journeyed. Part of him wished Rai had been there with him, but a more practical part was glad he had missed the journey.

A booming familiar voice, giving laughing commands, told Vidarian that the young apprentices were not alone. Caladan had returned from his dispatch. His voice was a relief—now the children would have the benefit of real Sky Knight training, instead of the gryphons' best analogies.

“Greetings, Sir Caladan. Excellent to see you again.” When they'd met, there had been some friction over Isri, which surely lingered; relief swept through him when the knight smiled heartily and extended his gloved hand. Vidarian clasped it, wondering what had provoked the change in humor. The man's eyes were on the young apprentices, who played with their steeds in a chasing game that Vidarian guessed was intended to train agility.

“Beautiful creatures,” Vidarian said. “Particularly the royals.”

“And she has you to thank, I understand,” Caladan said. So thus came the repair.

“We both have Rai to thank,” Vidarian said, gesturing to the capering wolf with his chin. Hearing his name, Rai dashed over, circled around both of them, then galloped back to his game.

“The Knighthood is in your debt,” Caladan said. The chase game had turned on Brannon, who now had to dash in an attempt to catch either of the two girls or their steeds.

“I had a rather different reception at the time,” Vidarian murmured, not wanting to cause difficulty, but feeling for where Caladan stood.

“It's not so bad as you might imagine,” he said, then lowered his voice. “Confidentially, Captain, there may as well be two Knighthoods now. Those of us who adapted—with joy—to the changes in our steeds…and those of us who did not.”

“And how many are the former?”

Caladan sighed. “Not enough.”

“Enough to protect the emperor?”

The knight's eyes turned sharply on him. “From whom?”

Vidarian looked to the apprentices, noting the speed of their steeds' growth, speculating things he did not wish to speculate. What kind of world was it, to think of bringing children into a war?

“Whomever we need to,” he said, finally. Caladan followed his gaze, his chin firm with an argument at first, before it dropped, and he nodded.


Vidarian hadn't the slightest idea how to go about finding someone who could build a mechanical body—but he knew someone who seemed to know more about the palace than many of the people who lived in it.

Since they'd returned to the palace, Ruby had been staying with Oneira and Iridan. Her reasoning was obvious, but stung nonetheless; it was difficult not to wonder how much of her remained whole inside the prism key. Such thoughts didn't help her, but despite the lashing of guilt that accompanied them he couldn't seem to keep them away.

Oneira had been locked in Company meetings from the moment the Wind Maiden touched down, and so Vidarian went to the Arboretum to find Iridan. Ruby had a “radius,” and as soon as Vidarian pushed open the Arboretum's massive stone door, he knew she was there.

“Good afternoon, Iridan.” The automaton was bent over a manuscript, but looked up when Vidarian greeted him.

“Welcome, Captain. I trust you've recovered from our long journey?”

“I have,” he said only. His instinct was to protest that he was hardly as taxed as he might have been, but that thought, too, was unproductive. “And yourself? I never got a chance to thank you personally for agreeing to come with us. Without you, we certainly would not have been permitted the ship.”

“Most of my interests are portable,” Iridan said, brushing the edges of the manuscript with copper fingertips. “I was not duly inconvenienced, and the travel itself was refreshing.”

“You're searching for your siblings? Modrian and Arian?”

The lights on Iridan's face brightened. “That is well remembered, Captain. Yes, I search for them still.”

“I wish I could be of more assistance to you,” he said, and meant it. “Your world is a foreign landscape to me.”

“Mm,” Iridan agreed, managing to lace more meaning into a single syllable than Vidarian had known diplomats to weave into an hour. “How may I help you today, then, Captain?”

“I—came to speak with Ruby, actually. Is she here?”

“She is here—but I'm afraid she's asleep.”

Vidarian drew back. “Asleep?”

Iridan made a musical sound, a brief rolling flute trill. “We do sleep. Prism intelligences, that is. But special tools are required. I'm afraid Ruby was quite sleep deprived.”

“She'll be better when she awakens, then?” He tried not to sound too relieved.

“Improved, yes.” There was a cloud of ambiguity around the words, something almost like worry. “I'll have a note sent when she wakes. In the meantime, perhaps I can help you?”

Vidarian worked not to frown as he considered how much to confide in Iridan. It was entirely likely that any words he provided would go straight to Oneira. “I'm looking for the history of crafting elemental devices—from comparatively simple ones, such as the relay spheres, even to such intricate and magnificent works as yourself.”

This time the musical sound was a kind of multinote pipe. “You needn't waste a silver tongue on me, Captain.” There was amusement, and also a hint of challenge. “But what you seek is the Animator's Guild. There should be a history of heirs in the Great Library. You could request the volume from their office in the palace. I admit I would be quite curious as to what you find.”

Vidarian blinked. “Do you mean to say you haven't spoken with them yourself?”

“The emperor, and my sponsors here, think it would not be wise for me to go abroad in the city.”

That was not difficult to believe, but somehow the thought was offensive. “You are captive here, then?”

Iridan's lights dimmed momentarily, then brightened again. “This is my home, Captain. I do not consider it captivity.”

He bowed slightly. “Of course. I apologize for the rash suggestion.”

“Think not on it. But I would like to hear what you discover.”

“I'll return tomorrow and tell you everything I can.”

“Thank you, Captain.”


Once he knew what he was looking for, the palace office of the Great Library was simple to find. The attendant, a bored noble's son, had a clear and manifest disinterest in whatever he would request, and so in short order he had a ticket providing claim to the most recent rolls of the Animator's Guild. The book took about an hour to retrieve from the library itself, and during the wait Vidarian thought of attempting to see Calphille, but worried that if he missed the delivery he would not be able to keep his promise to return to Iridan tomorrow. And he doubted that Calphille would have forgiven him, or the emperor, by now as it was.

The Animator's Guild roll proved surprisingly well organized. Assisting in its organization was the sad fact that only a handful of guildfolk remained committed to their craft. With over five centuries between the current practice and the last functioning elemental artifact, it was astonishing that any persisted at all. A striking concentration of them persisted in Rikan, and another tightly knit contingent in Qui—but there was one registered as alive and living in the Imperial City. And the roll provided an address.

Vidarian copied down the address onto two pieces of scrip and returned the book, then went to find Brannon, who would doubtless be with Thalnarra, and Rai. They were in the Sky Knights' training arena, and he left one of the address copies with them. Rai complained bitterly at not being brought along, but Vidarian had a difficult time imagining what he could bring to a delicately raised scholar that might disturb them more than a shapechanging wolf covered with electric thorns.

The Animator's name was Khalesh vel'Itai, and he lived in a modest but respectable district on the northeast side of the city. A light cab took him there—lit, as more than half the cabs in the city now were, by elemental lanterns. The effect as they bounced over the cobbles beneath a red sunset was striking and unsettling, a sea of bobbing pale blue lights that called to mind painterly visions of the spirit world.

Above the door at the address listed was a sign that said “Locksmith,” and Vidarian was quite sure the roll must have been out of date. He sighed heavily, and turned to call the cab back—but it was already gone.

The cab's quickness, however, turned out to be fortune; just as he turned back to the sign, looking to the east and west to see if perhaps the numbers had been changed, he caught sight of a small mark on the bottom corner.

It was a flame and gear-wheel insignia, the same as the one on Oneira's book.

He knocked on the door, and was rewarded almost immediately: first by a shout to go away, and second by an opening of the wrought-iron peephole cover.

“Who are you?”

“Khalesh vel'Itai?” Vidarian asked.

“No, that's who I am. Who are you?”

Vidarian gave a little half bow. “Captain Vidarian Rulorat, good sir, and I come seeking your copious wisdom regarding—”

“Not interested.”

He drew back. “But I—”

The iron peephole cover clanked shut, louder than should have been possible. “Not interested.”

“I'm willing to pay you,” Vidarian began, but only earned laughter. “I also come on request,” he said loudly, unable to keep an edge from creeping into his voice, “and on behalf of the automaton Iridan, created over a thousand years ago by the Grand Artificer Parvidian.”

The laughing stopped. There was a silence.

The door opened.

Khalesh vel'Itai stood there, his black-bearded head nearly brushing the doorjamb. He wore a battered leather apron covered with burns, thick wool arm-coverings even in the heat of the afternoon, and gloves that looked to be reinforced with metal and a pattern of tiny glowing gems. “You've met the automaton?” he said.

“I have,” Vidarian said. “He was quite interested to learn the fate of the Animator's Guild.”

Khalesh stuck his head out and looked up and down the street. Then he turned and beckoned with a glowing, gloved hand. “Come in.”


The Animator's house was a rabbit warren of narrow corridors, not by any architectural intent but by virtue of the number of objects he had crammed into the small space. Cabinets and drawers and armoires were everywhere, and coated with mechanical devices of all shapes and sizes.

Khalesh led Vidarian through the maze. They passed several small rooms, one of which had a large, multicolored bird on an iron stand that squawked a welcome with bone-scraping volume. Another was lined with tables laden with glass flasks of at least twenty types of meticulously labeled fluid in a rainbow of colors.

At last they came to a crowded drawing room. It was lined with bookcases on every wall except a narrow vertical band of stone that held a strange and wonderful fireplace. It was elemental fire, and it burned pure and clean—the finest Vidarian had ever seen other than the Living Flames of Sharli at the temple of the fire priestesses.

“Where in the world did you find that?” Vidarian couldn't help but ask.

Khalesh grunted, gesturing Vidarian to a tapestry-upholstered couch as he lifted an iron kettle onto a hook above the flames. “It's been here for generations. Turned itself on some weeks ago out of the blue. Rather startling, you see, as we'd been using that chamber to store books for the last half century or so. Lost a few to the flames, Lady bless.”

Yet another little thing for Vidarian to feel guilty about. The surge in elemental magic that had accompanied the gate had awakened the blue lanterns now carried by the cabs, and must have lit this fireplace as well. He decided not to mention it. “How long have you been here?”

The big man removed his gloves and set them on a lacquered side table—the gems dimmed as soon as he removed them—and spooned tea into an earthenware pot, touching his fingertips together to count as he did so. “Well, it's thirty-six generations, I think. Before that we were just a low merchant family in Khodu. My clan mothers instructed the family to become Animators—paid for my many-times great-grandmother's instruction—and we have been ever since.”

“Your ancestor was an Animator during the last time Iridan was awake, then,” Vidarian said. “The declining years of the Ascendancy.” He'd only heard it called that recently: more books, courtesy Oneira and the Company.

Khalesh nodded. The kettle rattled with its boil, and he slipped on a glove, picked it up, and poured steaming water into the teapot. Vidarian watched, struck by the speed and heat of the pure blue flame. “She met Iridan, once, family legend says.” He looked up, wordlessly challenging Vidarian's knowledge.

“I've just returned from a skyship journey with him.”

Eyes bright, Khalesh laughed. “A skyship as well. You must be quite the important fellow.”

“I was summoned by the emperor,” Vidarian said, to avoid being more direct, “and it's in his service—as well as on a private errand—that I sought you out. How did your family manage…” He realized what he was about to say was impolitic, and trailed off.

Khalesh laughed again, and poured black-green tea into a pair of silver-rimmed glass cups. “How did we manage to survive, practicing a trade that's been dead a thousand years?” He handed Vidarian a cup and gestured to the silver sugar dish. Vidarian took a piece of caramelized sugar, and Khalesh took one also, putting it directly into his mouth before picking up his glass and taking a sip. “The Guild has always known that Animation is a luxury art. Our creed as guildsmen and women is to protect the old knowledge at all costs, during times of waking and sleep for our charges, and in the meantime earn our bread through simpler mechanical devices.” He pointed around the room, which, though less cluttered than the others, still contained everything from laundry pulleys to padlocks to devices for which Vidarian had no names. “But you mustn't tease me, Captain. You enter my house with a promise of news of the automaton.”

Vidarian put the piece of sugar into his mouth as Khalesh had done. It was candy-sweet but pleasantly smoky, and the hot tea added just the right bitterness. “I will tell you all that I can, and find out for you whatever I can,” he said carefully. “But the Alorean Import Company keeps him quite closely guarded.”

Khalesh gave a violent wave of his hand, and his expression darkened so deeply and swiftly that for a moment Vidarian thought he would spit. “The Company. A scourge on the free traffic of information, and on the Animator's Guild, from the moment they began.” He took a long draught of his tea, and visibly mastered himself. “They were the ones who awakened Iridan, you say? It explains why we've been able to find out so little.”

Vidarian nodded. “A senior partner named Justinian Veritas, one of the only Company elders to survive the gate opening.” He blinked, remembering something. “And—as it occurs to me—the last time I saw him with Iridan, he seemed to be controlling him.”

Khalesh had been about to take another sip of tea, but halted mid-sip. “How do you mean?”

“He was giving a kind of musical performance. I was there when he first woke—” Khalesh's eyes widened with speculation at this, but Vidarian plowed ahead— “and he was asking about his brother and sister. He didn't ask again for some time, until that day. It was strange—he heard a word, and seemed to wake up from a dream.”

“What you're describing sounds like an inhibition geis,” Khalesh said, caterpillar-thick eyebrows drawn down with worry. “By the northern guild, they're forbidden altogether, and by the southern, strictly avoided except in the direst circumstances—such as an automaton going mad.”

“That can happen?” Vidarian gripped his glass, then deliberately relaxed his hands. He had not thought of the possibility of Iridan losing sanity, and now that he did, he imagined the terrible strength of that metal body bent against a human. A terrifying thought.

“Very rarely, thus the application of inhibition geasa was tightly controlled in my forefathers' day. I can only think of a handful of recorded uses.”

“I have to confess,” Vidarian said, “I came here for information of a rather different sort. I wanted to know if you, or anyone you know, would be capable of crafting a body like Iridan's.”

He expected thoughtfulness, but Khalesh homed immediately in on the oddness of his request. “A body.”

“I have a—a soul for it already.” Vidarian reached into his coat pocket and brought out a supple leather pouch. He untied the strips of leather holding it shut, and emptied its contents into his palm—a sun ruby, the empty companion to the one that now contained Ruby. Gently he passed it across the table to Khalesh, who accepted it and peered closely.

“This is a prism key.” He held it out to the light of the fire, and it brightened. “Finely made. A very complicated kind of opening device.”

“You recognize it? My friend's mind has been trapped inside one of these—”

“You bound a prism key to a human mind?” Khalesh had been turning the stone between his fingertips, but now he stopped, powerful jaw slack as he looked at Vidarian.

Vidarian couldn't bring himself to answer, and Khalesh carefully set down his glass and stood. He went to one of the tall bookcases and extracted a heavy, leather-bound volume. Still balancing the sun ruby in his left hand, he thumbed through it, then returned it and pulled another. He repeated this for four more volumes, then finally seemed to find what he was looking for—a particularly old book, its metal cover spotted with mineral residue—and returned to his chair.

Pushing aside the tea service with a massive forearm, Khalesh set the book down and began flipping through pages, calluses on his hands brushing through them so quickly that he seemed to move them with his thoughts alone. “It shouldn't be possible…” He murmured unhappily to himself as he pored, sometimes stopping to read individual pages, but more often flipping through entire sections. “Here…yes.” He traced a passage with his fingertip. “An elementalist who wields multiple polar elements could do this in theory. The binding occurs between the elements…” His eyes came up, his words slowed. “And then the subject must die.”

“That—is a fair description of what happened.” Vidarian closed his eyes, then rubbed them with his thumb and forefinger. The binding—foolishly, he'd agreed to bind the gem to Ruby the way that Endera had bound the sun emerald to him. Her words came back to him across what seemed an eternity: In order to bind that stone to your life, I had to bind some of your life—just a little part—to the stone.

And so he had bound Ruby's life to the prism key. A chill crept through him—did this also mean that, should he die, part of him would persist in the sun emerald? Was it also a prism key, or something else entirely? He'd given the stone to An'du…

“I'm sorry to say that what you've done is not advisable at all,” Khalesh was saying, clearly torn between sympathy and professional outrage. A slow dread had been congealing in Vidarian's stomach as Khalesh spoke, and now it was bubbling over.

“Could a body like Iridan's be made for her?” he asked softly.

“It could, but it would be—well, it could be disastrous.” Khalesh flipped the book shut, boring urgently into Vidarian's eyes with his own. “You have no idea how much of her made it into the stone. By its size, it's not possible that it was all of her. And you don't know what was already in the stone when she was put in there.”

At this Vidarian looked up, and Khalesh's jaw firmed.

“You've seen evidence already. Knowledge she shouldn't have, things she says outside of her own control and consciousness.” Miserably Vidarian nodded, and Khalesh leaned forward, his voice low with sympathy. “Whatever is in that stone, my friend, and however much it seems to be this woman you know—it isn't. Not all of it. It's a mirage, an echo—and possibly a dangerous one.”

“She's my friend,” was all that Vidarian could say, knowing that the words were a child's.

“If she was,” Khalesh said firmly, “what you owe her is to protect her—and those you care about—from what she has become.”