Headless Over Heels ch. 2.39 - Momentousness (Patreon)

“Sister Niama al Pars wore this head once.” Alice cleared a pile of binders from one of Magra’s shopworn easy chairs and sat across from Seth. “She was a saintspeaker’s akathist at St. Qamor’s, on the Tuthimi border. A scholiastry—that means they were as concerned with study as with prayer.”

“I’d picked up on that much, at least,” Seth said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got quite the, uh, protuberant vocabulary right now.”

“Protuberant.” She giggled. “You’re funny, Seth.” He had given that adjective an honest go, actually, but he laughed along on the assumption that he had face to save.

Magra ahem’d. “If we’re spilling secrets all over my laboratory I would really prefer we be prompt.”

“Of course. Yes. What was I saying?” Alice removed her glasses and fiddled with their nose piece. “Niama was affected by visions. Or what she thought were visions. They manifested unpredictably. She called them in momentousnesses. Oh, thank you.” This to Magra, who had taken the glasses from her and now worked at them with a tiny screwdriver. “At first, she thought they were Saint Makine’s words coming to her. But she came to understand that what was happening was the involuntary triggering of a Darkness.”

“A Darkness?” Seth’s brow furrowed. “Was she unlit?”

Alice shook her head. “She never discovered how it happened to her while she was still ensouled. Her working theory was that her soul had a somehow tenuous grasp on its seat. Chronic illness had affected her all her life. Though one wonders now how much of it was the Darkness fatigue.”

“What was it, her Darkness?” Seth had to sound out the word step-by-step: “These momentousnesses?”

“They showed her the Darkness in others,” Alice said. “Oh, goodness. That’s unintentionally rather poetic, isn’t it?”

“Poetic but factual.” Magra said. “She could look at you and see—if she was in the right state of mind—what your Darkness would be, should your soul depart and give it expression. Try now.” She handed the glasses back.

Alice perched them on her nose. “Much better, Magra. Thank you. I imagine you can appreciate how paradigmatically a power like this would change the Legion, Mr. il Gutierre.”

Seth tried to. Momentousness suddenly felt like too humble a word. Maybe a few more syllables required. His tongue was pressed against the roof of his mouth. He reclaimed it with difficulty. “But we don’t have access to that Darkness, do we? It’s attached to her soul.”

“We don’t,” Alice said. “But fortunately for us, Niama was a woman of inexhaustible curiosity, with access to a tolerant saintspeaker monastery that encouraged her explorations. The disease took her before she could bring it from theory into practice, but she’d written extensively on her momentousnesses. Near the end of her life she was working on a treatise on how one might replicate her findings. As we now have infuser goggles to etch and examine enchantments, we could read a hexological imprint, and so discover the power latent in the lit.”

She half-turned, back to the mirror, and stared searchingly into her own magnified eyes, as if the sister’s ghost might be swimming within their black pools.

“She wanted me to have this knowledge,” she said. ”But she knew she was fading; she didn’t have the time to wait for me. So she tributed her head to me and ciphered her notes, hoping that I would either remember enough to reconstruct the research or at the very least to understand the code into which she’d copied them. When I arrived at St. Qamor’s gate the saintspeakers gave me the head. The notes they’d sent ahead, secreted into their Iron Artery tributes.”

”Where are they now?”

“I’m not, um… not sure.” Alice’s round lower lip was fuller than its upper bow-shaped partner, bestowing her girlish face with a puzzled pout at rest. It tilted now into the genuine article as she looked to her partner in skulduggery. “Magra, did they reach you?”

“They’re here,” Magra said. “At the college, in the archives. I’ve kept them hidden in the binding for some dreck about dragonflies while I’ve waited for you.”

“Why didn’t they just send the head, too?” Seth asked. ”Who kept trying to steal it?” Alice glanced unsure at Magra, and he pressed further: “Whatever this subterfuge is, I’m on your side. I swear to you both I am. But I can’t sit in the dark. You gotta deal me in.”

”There are… people against this, Seth,” Alice said. “People who want this buried. There are factions. They do not want the Legion to have this power.”

”Why not?”

“They fear it would be the end of the Territories,” Alice said. “And the beginning of a terrible autocracy. They fear a Legion that would march through the continent, scanning every citizen for the power it might bring them. Hauling innocents North to gouge their souls out for the Darkness that waits beneath it and press-gang them into a war greater than any since the Emergence. A Legion out of the worst imaginings of the rebels and the boogeyman stories.“

“And would it be?”

“Not if I can help it,” Alice said. “But I can’t blame them. Because there are other factions who wish to take this discovery and do exactly that. They believe this power is the key that unlocks the next and final phase of the war with the Seraphs. And that once we bring together all the murderous potential that lurks in the kindred’s great collective Darkness it will be time for the last Winter War. For the end. Of them or of us.”

“The press-gangers and the abdicators, as I’ve come to know them,” Magra said. “Fools and cowards, respectively.”

It felt as if the floor had been yanked from beneath Seth’s feet and he was hoverig now over some dizzying drop or blackened sea. These were the machinations you’d hear about in crackpot conspiracies and paperback dreadfuls, and they were real. “And what…” With the Forked Tongue on its dormant period, his voice creaked treacherously. “What do you want?”

“I… I want to help Charles,” Alice said. “The way he helped me. And all of us. I owe him so much, Seth.”

”Why?”

“I’m… sorry. I can’t. I’m telling you so much right now. Some things hurt too badly to recall with any head, and in ways that have nothing to do with the larger picture. What is important, I’m telling you. Please understand.”

Maybe if it was a different head pleading with him he’d react differently, but Alice looked so thoroughly vulnerable, he nodded his acquiescence. “Okay. So you owe him. I guess we all do. How will we help him?”

“You haven’t met him yet,” Magra said. “But you were supposed to. He’s supposed to be at the Verdugo receptions. He used to be. A decade ago—even a couple of years ago—he might have been. The deathspell’s name is deceptive. It’s enhanced by our hexcraft, of course, and we’ve developed procedures to help the Sorcerer General along with it. But the spell itself is not a spell. Not one we know, anyway.”

“It’s a Darkness,” Seth realized.

Magra nodded solemnly. “A rare and terrible Darkness. One that the Sorcerer General must use a half a dozen times a day, every day. He does not strategize, he does not govern. This he leaves to the Verdugo General and the Legionnaire General. The entirety of his duty, the reason he was chosen, is to keep the Deathspell fueled. You’ve invoked yours. You know how it feels to use it once.”

“But if that’s… if that is true, then how does it work when he…”

“Dies?” Magra finishes for him. “It works by luck. Sheer bloody luck. Two Sorcerer Generals in a row, a successor has gone unlit with a similar-enough Darkness first, in time to step him in when the time comes. We have gotten phenomenally lucky twice. Charles il Nekropoli has been the Sorcerer General for fifty years, now, and we’ve come leaps and bounds on hexis efficiency and prolonging his functional life, but he has perhaps a decade left. And we are waiting and waiting, and have not gotten lucky again.”

“So this time you want to go hunting,” Seth said. “That’s why you need Niama’s Darkness. To find his replacement.”

“I don’t want to just replace him, Seth,” Alice said. “If I can find just one person, that will buy him decades more time and a more comfortable life, and secure the next Sorcerer General. But we can’t stop there. Magra theorizes that every additional person we discover whose Darkness can fuel the Deathspell dramatically improves its efficiency. Imagine we find a dozen such people. Imagine we find a hundred. Imagine a world with a great and invincible Deathspell, whose need for hexis has shrunken from a flood to a trickle. A world where the Legion no longer swells and thins with the Winter War, but has the manpower to stand in defense of places like Shaheill. Where the Verdugo carriages no longer roll out into the countryside every spring. That’s the world Niama imagined. And it’s the world I’m imagining for her, now that she’s gone.

“And it’s a world under green skies, yes. Where the seraphs remain, outside, hungry. But what the press-gangers want—we’re never getting the old world back, Seth. We broke it. After the first Emergence, the Saints bid us farewell with their gift of Hexis magic, and told us to unite and prepare for the seraphs’ return, and what did we do?”

Seth knew this: “Nothing.”

“Exactly,” she said. “We fell right back into our old disunity and our old habits and resentments. That was the time we could have saved the old world. That was our best chance, and we let it slip away, and there is no regaining it. The seraphs have only grown more brutal and monstrous since then. They are adapting. Everyone knows it, but nobody wants to admit it. Every kill twists them further and further into killing machines.”

Seth recalled what Annalise told him after his first seraph encounter in the caves of Laramme. The changes Sik-Ersetim had undergone from one death to the next.

“This life.” Alice’s shoulders were tight, her posture bent with Niama’s bookish bashfulness. “This sad, hollow, green-tinted halflife that remains to us. From far out, i imagine it looks frozen and feeble. And when one sums all we’ve lost since the second emergence, one might go mad with grief. I know that. But from the ground, I… I’m happy. Even under this dome, there’s lifetimes of art and comfort and… and love. There’s so much left. I think it’s still worth living. Worth protecting. I don’t want to give up and let the Legion pass without a successor and watch the continent drown in feathery death, and I don’t want to melt it into a war machine and be crushed in the gears of some great and glorious apocalyptic war. I only want this world, but a little gentler. That’s all we can do, and that’s all I want. I want to live in this burrow we’ve made in the corpse of the planet. These small creature comforts. They’re enough for me. All I want…”

She was as tall and broad as she ever was. But Seth had never seen her look so small and unsure.

“All I want is to get old with you,” she said. “I’m a greedy coward, fighting for all the other cowards. Sandwiched between the ones who want us to wither and the ones who want us to explode.”

The still air pricked Seth’s ears in Alice’s silence. What was he waiting for? Approaching boots? The Fox’s whisper? Someone to tell him what to do? The Verdugo and the Sorceress were staring at him—Magra with stony solemnity and Alice with a pleading need that was a few breaths away from panic.

His wrist tingled where Lisa’s magical tattoo had sat and then faded. He needed no hexentat or order. He’d made his decision months ago.

“If that’s what you’re fighting for,” he said, “then I’m fighting for it, too.”