Location: Iztak, in the Rhokki Mountains
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year
I confess it took me a moment, studying that trembling, plainly-robed figure alone on the chamber floor, to recognize precisely what had happened. This was not the High Wyze One. This was not even one of the mid-ranking Vice-Wyze Ones or Choir-Keepers who’d made it through the door ahead of him. This was the very bottom of that whole absurd ladder — the Under-Wyze One, trapped by nothing more dignified than bad timing and a stone door with a cruel sense of humor, left to hold a conversation his own superiors had all but shoved into his arms on their way out. I weighed, for a moment, whether to raise the door again and summon one of the cowards back for someone of proper standing instead. I decided against it almost as quickly as I’d considered it. There was, I found, a certain rough justice in leaving Malvorn and his fellow deserters to stew in whatever fear had driven them from the room, and besides — a god does not enjoy repeating himself, and I had, in any case, just lost one mortal to that Well already this evening. I saw no pressing need to make it two.
“RISE ONLY YOUR VOICE, UNDER-WYZE ONE. TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU HAVE HEARD FROM THIS WELL SINCE LAST THE SEASONS TURNED.”
“Y-yes — yes, Great One. It — it began near — near two years past, a — a pronouncement—” His voice, already thin with terror, seized entirely on the word, and what followed was less an answer than a stammering wreck of half-formed syllables, his whole body shaking too hard, I gathered, to properly govern his own tongue.
I want to be honest with you about how tedious I found this. I had, by that point in the evening, already endured a farce of costumes and titles, watched an entire priesthood’s leadership flee rather than face me, and lost one mortal to the Well outright. I had no patience left to spend coaxing coherent sentences out of a terrified boy one broken syllable at a time, however sympathetic his circumstances. And so I did what any sensible god does when a useful tool proves too rattled to function: I fixed it.
It cost me very little — the smallest thread of my own will, reached down through that ancient fissure and into the trembling creature prostrate before it, enough to still his hammering heart and steady the breath behind his voice, the way one might calm a spooked animal with a touch rather than a shout. I did not trouble myself to be gentle about it. I simply wanted him functional.
Praxus’s next breath came out even, and when he spoke again, the stammer had vanished entirely, replaced by something almost startlingly clear.
“It began near two years past. A pronouncement naming the Derkka clans as a rising threat, commanding vigilance along the western pass. That one — that one felt true, Great One, or true enough that none of us thought to question it.”
“CONTINUE.”
“Then, some months after — the tone changed. Cruder. It named the Amorosi kin-thieves, demanded a blood-price on the old treaty.” Praxus hesitated. “That much I know from my own transcription, Great One. The rest — forgive me — the rest I have only in pieces. High Wyze One Malvorn keeps certain records to himself, and the Eastern Vault does not share its own transcripts freely even within these walls. I know there was a pronouncement of glories yet to come, of tests set for lesser gods — I was told of it after, secondhand, by Elder Ossian, and I could not swear to its exact wording.”
I want you to appreciate the particular flavor of my own irritation in that moment, discovering that the one mortal willing to remain and answer for his god’s affairs was also, by cruel accident of rank, the one least equipped to answer them fully. I had wanted a complete accounting. I was going to have to make do with fragments, gathered secondhand by a priest too junior to have ever been trusted with the whole of it — a priest who, I noted with some private interest, no longer trembled quite the way he had before I’d touched him, and who would not, I suspected, quite manage to shake that particular steadiness again for the rest of his mortal life.
“YOU DO NOT HAVE THE FULL RECORD.”
“No, Great One.” He said it plainly, without excuse, which I found — despite my irritation — rather more to his credit than a lesser man’s bluster would have been. “Only what has passed through my own hands, or what my betters saw fit to mention in passing. If it please you, Great One, I can have every transcript gathered and brought before you, from every Vault and Choir alike, howsoever long that takes.”
“SEE THAT IT IS DONE.” I let a long silence stretch before I continued, partly for effect, and partly because I found I genuinely required the moment to decide precisely how much of the truth this particular mortal deserved to hear in the meantime.
“THE FAULT,” I said at last, “WAS MINE, AND I WILL NOT PRETEND OTHERWISE TO ONE WHO HAS SERVED THIS WELL WITH SUCH DILIGENCE, WHATEVER HIS STATION.”
Praxus’s trembling did not entirely cease, but I watched some fraction of raw terror in it shift toward something closer to bewildered gratitude, the particular relief of a mortal who has spent months fearing his own god had gone mad, only to be told the fault lay elsewhere.
“I HAVE MANY DEMANDS UPON MY ATTENTION, UNDER-WYZE ONE, FAR BEYOND THE AFFAIRS OF A SINGLE MOUNTAIN PEOPLE. IN MY ABSENCE, I ENTRUSTED A LESSER SPIRIT TO SPEAK IN MY STEAD — A CONVENIENCE I HAVE USED BEFORE, IN AGES YOU WOULD NOT REMEMBER. THAT SPIRIT PROVED… INADEQUATE TO THE TASK.”
I want you to appreciate the particular indignity of that sentence, coming from me, and the effort it cost me to deliver it with a straight face, so to speak. But the alternative — confessing that some unknown rival had breached my own private channel and I had no earthly notion how — struck me as considerably more damaging to five centuries of carefully cultivated authority than a mild admission of poor delegation. Mortals forgive an overworked master his careless servants. They do not so easily forgive a god who cannot even keep his own house secure.
“I understand, Great One,” Praxus whispered, and I watched him actually nod against the stone floor, already, I suspected, composing in his own mind the version of this explanation he would carry back to his brethren — a version that would cost the Nave family considerably less face than the truth might have.
“TELL ME NOW WHAT HAS BEEN DONE IN RESPONSE TO THIS CONFUSION.”
“The eastern muster, Great One. King Hanbull’s council has held back full mobilization, but the war-clans stand ready along the border nearest Arbola, awaiting only your word.”
I sat with that a moment, turning over rather more calculation than pure damage control required.
I want to be entirely honest with you here, because I have promised you nothing less: I did not, in that moment, feel the slightest inclination to command peace. Whatever chaos this crude imposter had accidentally seeded between the Drokka and the Amorosi struck me, on reflection, as rather more useful left to simmer than smothered outright. A god who reverses himself entirely, the very night he reveals a rival tampered with his own voice, invites exactly the kind of scrutiny I could least afford. And chaos between two peoples who had kept an uncomfortable, treaty-bound peace for fifty years was, by my own long-standing philosophy, rarely a thing worth extinguishing purely for the sake of tidiness.
I understood, of course, the particular limit of my own reach here. I am not the one who marches armies. Hanbull is Kon-Herr; the Council advises him; the High Wyze One, whatever his own considerable influence, is one voice among the King’s counselors, not a general with soldiers of his own to command — and Praxus, whatever his newfound value to me, held no such standing at court at all, being rather further down the ladder than the one voice Hanbull’s council was accustomed to heeding. Whatever I wished to see happen between Drokka and Amorosi would have to travel through him regardless, and through him to Hanbull’s own ear, dressed as counsel rather than decree. I decided, before I let him go, that I would simply have to lend him the standing his own office had never afforded him.
“THE CONFUSION OF RECENT MONTHS HAS NOT BEEN ENTIRELY WITHOUT WISDOM, UNDER-WYZE ONE, EVEN IF ITS DELIVERY WAS FLAWED.” I let that settle before continuing. “THE AMOROSI HAVE GROWN COMPLACENT IN THEIR PEACE, TRADING ON OLD TREATIES WHILE DROKKA BLOOD AND DROKKA PRIDE ARE MADE TO WAIT UPON THEIR CONVENIENCE. TELL YOUR KING THIS, IN YOUR OWN WORDS, AS COUNSEL RATHER THAN COMMAND — FOR I DO NOT MOVE ARMIES MYSELF, ONLY THE HEARTS OF THOSE WHO DO. TELL HIM THAT A PROUD PEOPLE WHO ACCEPT INSULT WITHOUT ANSWER TEACH THEIR NEIGHBORS THAT INSULT COSTS NOTHING.”
“I understand, Great One,” Praxus said again, and I noted, with some satisfaction, real conviction creeping into his trembling voice this time — not merely fear now, but the particular fire of a man who believes he has just been handed genuine, actionable purpose by his own god. “I will carry this to King Hanbull myself, before the week is out.”
“YOU WILL CARRY IT AS MY VOICE, UNDER-WYZE ONE — NOT AS THE LEAST OF YOUR BRETHREN, BUT AS THE ONLY ONE OF THEM WHO STOOD HIS GROUND WHEN HIS GOD CALLED FOR HIM.” I let that land fully before continuing, and I will confess I savored every word of it, for reasons that had rather less to do with theology than with a certain private satisfaction at the thought of Malvorn’s face when he learned of it. “LET IT BE KNOWN THAT I HAVE SPOKEN DIRECTLY TO PRAXUS DER NAVE, AND TO NO OTHER, ON THIS NIGHT. LET THOSE WHO FLED THIS CHAMBER EXPLAIN TO THEIR OWN SATISFACTION WHY THEIR GOD CHOSE THE LOWEST OF THEM OVER THE HIGHEST. I DO NOT EXPECT THEY WILL FIND THE EXPLANATION COMFORTABLE.”
I watched something move behind Praxus’s still-lowered eyes that I do not believe he entirely understood himself in that moment — not merely relief now, nor even simple gratitude, but the first dawning shape of ambition, the particular vertigo of a man realizing that the very cowardice which had trapped him in that chamber might, by some considerable irony, prove the making of him. I suspect, too, that the steadiness I’d pressed into him earlier — meant, at the time, purely to spare myself the tedium of his stammering — had not entirely faded, and would not, I judged, fade again for the rest of his natural life. A man who has once had a god’s own calm settled directly into his chest does not easily lose the knack of appearing unshaken before frightened crowds, whatever storms may actually be raging beneath the surface. Whether he would rise to High Wyze One within the year or within the decade, I could not say and did not especially care, though I suspected I had done rather more than merely wound Malvorn’s pride to help him along toward it. I had made my point to Malvorn and his fellow deserters regardless, and I have always found there is a particular pleasure in rewarding an accident of fate handsomely, purely to watch the more deserving squirm over having missed it.
“SEE THAT YOU DO. AND UNDER-WYZE ONE—” I let the pause stretch, savoring it. “SHOULD ANY LESSER SPIRIT EVER PRESUME TO SPEAK IN MY STEAD AGAIN, YOU WILL KNOW MY TRUE VOICE BY THIS: IT DOES NOT CONTRADICT ITSELF WITHIN A SINGLE SEASON, AND IT DOES NOT FORGET THE WEIGHT ITS OWN WORDS OUGHT TO CARRY.”
“Never again will I mistake the two, Great One. I swear it.”
I withdrew from that chamber considerably more satisfied than I had entered it, and considerably more troubled besides. I had salvaged what could be salvaged, bent the wreckage of my rival’s clumsiness to my own advantage rather than simply undoing it, and left behind a priest who believed himself freshly favored rather than freshly deceived — and, as a small bonus entirely my own invention, a whole priesthood’s worth of cowardly superiors who would now have to answer to the very Under-Wyze One they’d abandoned to face me alone. That much, I judged, was a job well done.
But the larger mystery remained entirely unsolved. Someone had breached my Well, spoken with enough crude conviction to nearly unravel five centuries of careful theology, and I still had no honest notion who. Not Gwar — I remained entirely certain of that much, whatever else I doubted. Perhaps Rhokki himself, stirred at last from his eternal sulk. Perhaps Mindos, testing waters he had some old claim upon. Perhaps some other thing entirely, patient and clever enough to have escaped my notice until this very season.
Whoever it was, the western unrest at Rhokki Pass remained a separate, pressing matter, and Gwar’s own fingerprints were all over that half of the crisis regardless of whatever else remained mysterious. It was time, at long last, to go find him, and demand of him what I could not yet demand of a rival whose face I hadn’t even managed to guess at.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 