Chapter Two – Part 5 – The Ioun Stone
Edvard Thryche sighed, some visceral measure falling from his shoulders as he did so.
“The need for my counsel is dwindling because talent is rising, Mireya. Your very existence is proof that soon, the judges – that was the old name for us, we who assess talent and give knowledge where it is necessary – are a dead tool.”
Thryche tapped the glistening yellow-and-indigo stone in Mireya’s hands with a thin, crooked finger.
“For exactly the reason that trinket is useless now, I will soon become the same. The trick of the Ioun Stone was discovered twenty-seven centuries ago. It was originally a fruit, borne by the Ioun tree, deep in what were once the forests of Dorna.”
“Dorna, the desert? The home of the tribes we warred with for the last century?”
“The same,” the Curia nodded, folding his hands in his lap. “The Ioun stones are amplifiers. They act the same way as the lens atop the Ducal palace in Penance did, keeping the city lit an extra hour when the sun falls below the horizon. The stones, when a Dweomercrafter forces his power through them, cause that weaving to be so much more than it could have been alone. Now, however, since the Ascension, that has changed.”
“The Ascension,” Mireya interrupted, not quite following the Curia’s path. “You mean the war, thirty years ago?”
“I do, yes. I mean the events which led to the war becoming known as the War of Ascension. The same which caused your kind to be born, so that my kind might become trivial.”
“My kind,” the girl spat, shoulders hunched against the sudden chill of his tone. “You can’t possibly blame my birth for a change in how weavers are trained!”
When he sat silent for a time, Mireya began to regret her outburst. She drew her eyes up from the precious indigo-and-gold stone in her hands to look at master Thryche.
He was simply smiling. As if she had made a joke she wasn’t aware of.
“Ah, my dear, that is just what I am trying to say. Your talent, though I am not equipped to judge its nature, I can tell is one of a few dozen rare abilities not oft seen in the last centuries. And you are not alone. Rhayd and Kintere I can assess, and their talents are just as rare, if for different reasons than your own. If the Ascension had not happened, you could not have been born as you are now. And, thus, I could not be as happy to retire upon my delivery of you as I am.”
Mireya blinked, having to force herself to close her lips. The words almost sounded like relief! How could someone so powerful be so relieved to not be needed any longer?
So she asked.
“But Curia Thryche,” she began, speaking slowly, to keep her words as true to her thoughts as she could manage. “You silenced the entire Court. You have power I can barely imagine. How could a simple battle, even a war, change so the state of things in the eyes of the Gods that children may become your superior in any way?”
Edvard Thryche did not laugh, but there was laughter in his eyes as he reached out to pluck the Ioun stone from Mireya’s trembling hands.
“Lady Maran, I am but a simple soldier. I was at the battle of Merdol, thirty years ago. It is where I found this stone, my old friend. You see, the Ascension was not an accident. Many have been told that the island of Merdol cracked because of the battle on its southern coast, because of what the Grey Man, Grevault Anginock, did to the Dornan armies there. That he turned the beach to glass, and birthed the race of Xul we have come to know as the Glass Men.”
“But that isn’t so, is it?”
“No. Anginock did break a law of the divinorum, yes, but it was not he who heaved the isle into the sky. No. The duke of Merdol, Ansolen Lemiticron did that. The war began over his disappearance, it’s true, but long before he vanished, Lemiticron had more than three thousand Ioun Trees brought from various places across the face of our world, and transplanted their seeds into a vast garden about his keep at the centre of Merdol’s chief city, Skan Merdol. The night of the Ascension, every one of those three thousand and more trees bore its fruit, died, and began to rose toward the sky, taking the keep and half of Merdol island with them. Do you know what the generals of the opposing armies found when Merdol keep floated away, Mireya?”
She was nearly too incensed to ask. It was too much, to be hearing that all of the knowledge she had about the history of the war that she had scraped together had been false. Auss had lost his arm at the battle of Merdol, she had been told. Thryche was telling her that everything her grandfather had said was a lie.
“Chains, Mireya. Vast, unimaginable chains. Someone, or something, had burrowed under Merdol keep in preparation for the bearing of the Ioun trees’ fruit, and had built a support structure for the keep underneath made of thousands of stone and crystal chains to hold the keep in place. It still hangs there now, I’m told, angry and black with Xul crawling all over it, tethered to what is now the sea’s floor by hundreds upon hundreds of great, shining stone chains.”
“This was an unkind story, Curia,” Mireya found the breath to say after a moment.
“Yes, my dear, it was,” Thryche said with a sigh. “I think perhaps you should go for the evening. I must sleep, in preparation for the landing tomorrow. I will tell you more, as time becomes available, if you wish.”
Mireya nodded and stood, numb from the neck up it felt like. She looked at Kintere, sleeping fevered on his bed, the welts on his back already showing signs of improvement.
“I think I should like that,” she decided out loud, much to her own surprise. “Nothing, clearly, is as any of us have been told.”
Mireya left. She spent the remainder of her night in her bunk. But she did not sleep.