In turning back to their old gods, were the pagans turning back to old technologies as well? Orholam, let it be so.
Upon reaching the shore, the bodyguards turned and cast blue luxin to make a bridge. The White King walked to shore without even dampening his boots, leaving only a hunchbacked charioteer behind.
They stood nearly a hundred paces from each other, a man in white and a woman in white, across the white sands, under Orholam’s white, hot eye. Karris drew her pistols and handed them off. She drew her bich’hwa and her ataghan and handed them off as well. Last, she took her green and red spectacles off their necklaces and gave them away.
The White King handed off a scepter that could serve as a mace, and a simple hunting knife. He started across the sand without hesitation.
Of course, either of them could be hiding another weapon. But they were drafters. They both were weapons, against which the only defense possible was vigilance. Karris walked toward him.
When she’d been captured by King Garadul, her brother had appeared in the vast carapace of luxin armor he’d created for himself. But this man didn’t so much as shine in the sun. There were no luxin angles reflecting light, no winking blues or flashing yellows.
He was smaller than she remembered, barely even taller than she was. But then she saw his face. Somehow she’d forgotten, the scouring of time a mercy.
The burn scars. Orholam. Her beloved brother’s face looked as if someone had given a wax poppet to a cruel child. His face had been melted. One eye was lower than the other. A thick knot of tissue had fused his cheek to his neck, and then been cut.
He looked far, far worse than when she’d met with him in Tyrea. It couldn’t all be the lighting, but neither did these look like fresh scars. He’d been burnt then, but not misshapen.
She composed herself against the pity and despair. She had to be sharp and cold for this. She was the White, and her office settled over her like a blanket of snow, covering the cracks in her armor.
“Koios,” she said, choosing to let some warmth seep through her tone. She was happy to see him. She was happy to have a chance to end this war, slight though it might be.
“You’ve come a long way since last we met,” he said, gesturing to her robes. Even his voice had changed from when he’d been young. Husky, damaged by the smoke, changed by that damned fire that had changed everything else.
“As have you,” she said.
“You mean this?” he asked, pointing to his face. “It was hexes, before, to minimize your horror, I hoped. I have since become… more comfortable in my own skin. Or what’s left of it, I should say.” He smiled as if it were some unfunny joke.
“I was referring to the lands you’ve conquered and the untold misery you’ve spread for scores of thousands,” Karris said.
“We’ve freed four of the nine kingdoms of old,” he said, barely hearing her. “But there is so much to be rebuilt. So much that was destroyed through ignorance and greed.”
It was as if they were speaking different languages. He saw himself as a builder?
“This is hopeless, then, isn’t it? There is no bridge across this chasm,” she said.
He smirked, and it was his old lips, unscarred; his old expression, and an old memory. “I had forgotten how intuitive you are, sister. You wrapped yourself in the blue virtues, but you understand with your heart first. Always did.”
“And does that make my judgments suspect?” she asked, coolly.
“On the contrary. I think you’ve grasped the crux of the matter. There can be no peace between us, only pauses to rearm.”
“Is that what you’re seeking? An armistice?” Karris asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Effective immediately. My armies have advanced as far as Azuria in Blood Forest. We’ll give the city back as a sign of goodwill. In the north, we’ve crossed the Great River. We’ll fall back to the west bank. The truce lasts until spring. It will give everyone a chance to harvest the fall and winter crops—lest everyone starve.”
“My generals tell me Azuria is indefensible. You’re giving me what I could take with little effort.”
“And yet you have not taken it,” Koios said. “Perhaps you are spread thinner than you would like to admit.”
He was right, although the real reason they’d not taken the city was that the question arose, what then? Her armies were needed elsewhere, and the Chromeria and Satrap Briun Willow Bough of Blood Forest were concentrating on keeping Green Haven free. Instead she said, “If we both rearm, it only guarantees that the next war will be even bloodier.”
“Life is lived in the pauses between wars. Any peace is better than any war, some say.”
“Do you take me for one of those?” she asked.
“I’m not asking anything of you. Any place your troops hold today, they shall keep. It shall be my side that falls back.”
“And I’ll guess that your spies will be repeating all this on the streets of Big Jasper within the week? Undermining support for the war?”
“Mm. That sounds like an excellent idea. It’s a weakness of your empire: people here never want to bleed for strangers over there. Whereas my word is holy writ. I command the gods themselves. I say when it is time to bleed and when it is time to build, and none question me. Not bad for the weakling once beaten by your sadly deceased husband, mm?”
“What you’ve suffered doesn’t excuse what you’ve done,” Karris said.
“I’m not looking for an excuse.”
And then she saw the terrible logic of it. Koios might be faced with a particular weakness right now that prompted him to a truce; perhaps he was waiting for someone to be bought off, or a critical shipment of black powder to come through. Certainly any pause would undermine support in the satrapies. But those things might not be the point at all.
Koios wanted both sides to rearm and come back to battle with more terrible weapons because Koios wanted slaughter. He wanted to demolish an entire generation. It wasn’t just that he wanted to kill everyone who stood in his way and war was the most efficient way of lining up your enemies and finding out which of your friends might be too formidable someday. He wanted to prove that the Chromeria’s way of doing everything was utterly broken. He wanted to kill their apologists, and anyone whose very memory would gainsay his new story.
It’s easier to build a new culture on the graves of the dead than around the homes of the living.
“This isn’t the kind of trap I was expecting,” she said.
“Trap my own sister?” he said, but his mouth twisted.
“If you kill me, I’ll be a martyr for attempting to find peace, and you’ll prove that you’re untrustworthy. Dammit, Koios, how’d you come to this?”
“Fire burns away illusions,” he said.
“So now you’ll plunge the satrapies into the fire, hoping it cripples everyone else as well?” she asked bitterly.
“I’m not a madman,” he said. “It’s beneath you to suggest I am. Too convenient by half. As lazy as I’d expect from some Chromeria witch or Magisterium sycophant. I thought better of you, though.”
She looked at him sadly. “Your plan isn’t mad, brother; it’s evil.”
“Evil is what we call what we don’t understand.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m going to leave here today and wonder why I didn’t try to kill you before you could do more harm, aren’t I?”
“It’s not in you to break a pledge, sister.”
Maybe it is, this once.
“How do you do it?” she asked. “How do you convince them all that you’re a polychrome?”
“Simple. I became one,” he said. “The same way Dazen Guile did it.”
He noted her confusion.
“You’ve either become a better liar than I’d have expected of you, sister, or you’ve stayed exactly, disappointingly the same, and you’re still the wide-eyed na?f who helped start the last war. You do know that the man you married is Dazen Guile?”
She tried not to react, but his face lit up.
“You did. So, not a complete na?f. But he kept some things from you. Heartbreaking.”