Chapter 357: To the Empire (1)

Helia released a slow breath and closed her eyes for a moment to rest them. Outside the high windows, the moon had climbed to its throne and poured a pale road of light across the floor. The Saintess of the Sun God sat on her bed with a book open across her knees, reading the last page of a chapter she had promised herself she would finish before sleeping. Lately, there had been no such thing as a proper evening for her. Other than the hour that came directly before she collapsed into bed, she had no time that could honestly be called rest.

Even so, her heart was content in a way it had not been for an age. For a span beyond counting, the evil that coveted the Mortal Realm had pressed a hand against the world. That hand was gone. The demon legions had been driven out, and the Demon King who ruled them had fallen. She did not believe this meant the world would be peaceful forever; nations still clashed for advantage, and conflicts on the Mortal Realm would never fully end.

Yet such struggles belonged to mortals. They were struggles of law, gold, and land, not of demons clawing through the seams of the sky. The world would not be unmarred, but it would be spared the grip of an outer hand. That alone satisfied her more than she had words to say.

She judged the hour right and decided to sleep. She closed the book on a ribbon and lifted her hand toward the lamp to pinch out the flame.

In that instant, the air burst like a taut skin struck by a stone. Something tore across the outer sky toward her chamber with violent speed, and the dome of quiet that had wrapped the holy land changed timbre as if a bell had cracked.

“Wait, just a moment,” Helia said under her breath, and she rose in a fluid motion that carried the book onto the coverlet. Her eyes widened as she opened both hands and shaped a curtain of warding in front of her. The barrier formed cleanly, taking light from the lamp and the moon and turning it to a translucent wall.

However, it did not hold. A thunderclap rang in the room. The barrier shattered before the intruder even slowed. Helia’s pulse stumbled and then steadied as she shifted weight and fell back two steps, giving the breach space while she gathered holy power with both hands. Whoever had entered was strong, and not merely strong but stronger than she was by a comfortable margin. Someone of that level had forced his way into the Sun God’s holy land and reached the Saintess’s private chamber.

There was no time to catalogue and weigh possibilities. She drew on grace and called for a sacramental relic that had been sent down from the heights for dire moments only. The veil of light began to form in the air above her raised palm.

“It is me, Helia,” a voice said.

She stopped. The voice was familiar, not by the thin threads of rumor and report but in the way of someone she had met and measured. Moonlight fell through the broken glass and painted the chamber in silver; it caught the intruder’s jaw and brow and made his hair look like ink.

“Ketal,” Helia said.

The barbarian stood in front of her with the night at his shoulders.

“How are you even here?” she asked him.

“I heard you were in the holy land and ran straight here,” he said. His tone was even, and his breath did not labor. “The matter is urgent. I did not follow the formal path. I apologize.”

“There is a barrier around the holy land,” she said. “You should not have been able to step across the outer ring, much less the inner.”

“Something in the design felt as if it would interfere,” he replied. “I tore it and came through. I will pay for the damage later.”

He said it so simply that for a moment she could only stare. The holy land belonged to the most powerful order on the Mortal Realm, and their ward was the wall that other walls dreamed of becoming. A handful of ranked demons could not casually force their way through such a barrier, and those below them would be held like leaves against a glass. Yet, he described the act as if he had gone walking and brushed aside a nettle patch.

The absurdity of the sentence would have made her laugh on any other night, but it did not feel absurd when applied to him. Helia let the gathered holy power settle and diminish, then allowed the relic’s form to fade.

“I understand,” she said. “If you came this urgently, there must be a cause. However—”

Just then, the holy land’s alarm began to sing. The sound rose like a straight line and then spread across the complex in a widening ring. Priests and wardens shouted outside her door, and the movement of feet to stations thickened as the wards reported a breach and the bells made every sleeper into a watchman.

“I will reassure them,” Helia said. “They will only panic if I do not speak to them.”

“I am sorry,” Ketal said with a wry scratch of his cheek. “Please do.”

***

She calmed the stewards and captains with a few clipped sentences—no threat, an expected guest—and then returned to her chamber. Helia closed the door behind her and faced Ketal.

“What problem compelled you to seek me in the middle of the night?” she asked him.

“Before I ask the questions I came to ask,” Ketal said, “answer one for me. Do you know where the Tower Master is?”

“The Tower Master,” she repeated. She sorted the last week in her head and placed her memory. “I believe he departed for the Empire several days ago. I do not know where he is now.”

“As I thought,” Ketal said. His expression dimmed, and the brief lightness that had accompanied the apology vanished.

“What has happened?” she asked him. “The Demon King fell. Hell collapsed into dust and was driven off. I believed there was nothing left to trouble the Mortal Realm from outside.”

“I believed it as well,” he said. “But a new trouble clawed its way open.”

“A... trouble,” Helia said. Her throat felt tight.

Ketal told her what had happened in Magna Rain. As he spoke, Helia felt the lines of her face settle into stillness. When he finished, her mouth opened on a breath and did not close for several seconds.

“Magna Rain is gone,” she said. “And not by the hand of anything born on the Mortal Realm, but by something from the Demon Realm.”

“I saw it with my own eyes,” Ketal said. “The mage they called the master is almost certainly dead.”

“By the heavens,” Helia said, and her knees let go of some measure of strength. She sat without grace and pressed her fingers against the wood of the small table beside her bed until her nails found purchase. When she could trust her voice again, she spoke carefully. “The thing you faced—do you know what it was?”

“I do,” Ketal said. “The name I learned for it was Primarch.”

“Primarch,” Helia repeated.

“By the measure of the Outside,” Ketal said, “you could set one beside the Demon King and not call it wrong.”

By raw strength alone, the Demon King might stand a half-step higher. Once the Primarchs’ abnormal strength and their natural advantage of affinity were counted, however, the distance closed to something one could call even. Hearing that measure forced her breath thin.

They had paid dearly to bring down the Demon King. To hear that something of similar class had appeared without warning made the world tilt under her. She steadied herself and bit her lip once, briefly, so she would not speak what should not be said aloud.

“So you sought me for information,” she said, making the sentence whole and practical to pull her mind back to the ground.

“Yes,” Ketal said. “You are the Sun God’s Saintess. There are few people alive who see as much as you do.”

She nodded. Milayna’s ring of informants was impressive, but even the best of mortal networks had blind corners. The holy lands heard different currents.

“Ask,” Helia said. “Tell me what you want to know.”

“An apostle of the Primarch struck Magna Rain,” Ketal said. “He did not choose a capital or a holy city or a fortress above ground. He chose a city that had hidden itself beneath the world. It read like an attempt to keep his greater motion veiled, as if he wished to cut a throat in shadow before anyone understood there was a hand.”

The Twisted Primarch had already found a purchase in the Mortal Realm. Ketal believed the Primarch had devoured a faction in its favor. Helia inclined her head to show she followed.

“You want to know which group that Primarch devoured,” she said.

“The man I fought stood at the very top of the Transcendent tier,” Ketal said. “If you measured him as an individual, you would not place him on a low shelf and call him common. If you looked across the world, you would not easily find a half-dozen with that weight. The Mercenary Guild keeps one mercenary at that level as its highest blade—the Mercenary King.”

Helia made a soft sound that was not quite a groan. Someone like that could not exist long in the Mortal Realm without being noted and named.

“Did you recognize his face?” she asked him.

“No,” Ketal said. “I had never seen him, and by what he said and failed to say, he did not recognize me.”

“That is strange,” Helia said.

Ketal carried the world’s most famous name. Everyone who fought in the war had learned it, and most who peopled courts and war rooms could draw his face with some accuracy. A peak Transcendent who did not know him had not stood on any of the fields where Hell was opposed. Helia gathered the facts and asked the next question.

“Tell me his features,” she said.

Ketal described the middle-aged man point by point, the way a hunter would describe a stag that had slipped the arrow. Helia closed her eyes and ran the faces of the continent behind them.

“I have met or at least seen every peak Transcendent and every Hero on the continent,” she said at last. “But I do not know that man.”

Ketal did not know him. Helia did not know him. He had not been present at the war. There was only one place left where such a person could be born, trained, and hidden until he was needed.

“The Empire,” Helia said.

They had stayed out of the war. Their doors had remained closed and their banners furled. Even for her, the Empire was a place of curtains, built so that outer sight bent at the edges and the weave of information slipped off the surface.

***

“So it is the only candidate,” Ketal said.

He had suspected the Empire from the first breath, but he lacked confirmation. Hearing Helia follow him to the same ledge set both of their feet more firmly. She looked troubled and not merely because of the danger itself.

“I do not understand why it would be the Empire,” she said. “That is the strongest force in the Mortal Realm. Even something on the scale of the Demon King should not be able to swallow them quietly without leaving a trail of ash.”

In truth, the Empire had been designed for the Oldest Ones, a city that was more than a city and a capital that was also a device. However, Helia did not know this; even Saintesses had edges of ignorance when the subject was the Empire. From what she understood, the thought of a Primarch forcing its will on that citadel was difficult to accept.

“I have questions of my own,” Ketal said. “Which is why I need to look with my eyes.”

He weighed the sentence that followed like a coin and then asked it straight.

“Can I enter the Empire?”

“The Empire?” Helia repeated. “It is not impossible.”

Ordinary people could not pass its inner gate. Even those who wore the title Transcendent were often turned away unless they came by an avenue marked and permitted. If the Empire did not grant leave, the walk became a siege against a wall that could not be climbed. Ketal, however, was not ordinary. He had stood in front of the Demon King and had not yielded. No sensible royal council would bar such a man without hearing him.

“However,” she said, “it will take time.”

One did not wander up to the Empire and ask to be let in. She would need to send a full accounting of Ketal’s identity, the cause of the request, and a sponsored invitation to present him within the outer precinct.. Even under the best of conditions, a week would pass between her lamp and their seal.

Ketal’s eyes narrowed a shade.

“I do not intend to wait that long,” he said.

Neither of them knew how the Primarch meant to play its next card. They only knew it had shown its hand and that it had killed quickly. If the Twisted Primarch had already found a way to reach into the Mortal Realm, there was no reason to trust it to move slowly.

“Can we ask the gods to clear a path?” Ketal asked her.

Helia pressed her lips together before she answered.

“Yesterday,” she said, “the gods drove Hell out of the Mortal Realm.”

When Hell fell from its height, the broken planet that housed its throne hung like a wound above the world. Enough demons had survived the fall that the gods could not leave the ruin where it was.

As soon as their strength returned to the point where they could move the thing without risking a collapse, they put their hands on the mass and pushed it away. The effort left their attention elsewhere and their weight off the Mortal Realm. For a time, at least, they would not be able to answer summons as they had during the siege and the war.

“The timing could be better,” Ketal said, clicking his tongue.

“So if you wish to go to the Empire,” Helia said, “you will need to wait a little.”

She could not, in good sense, send a rumor ahead of him and hope it did not spook the wrong eyes. If the Empire had fallen, a letter would not convince it to behave. If it had not fallen, a careless message would pull a security thread and put a thousand captains on their feet. She could not move without choosing a risk.

However, Ketal had no intention of waiting.

“If the process is a nuisance,” he said, “then I will step around the process.”

“You are not thinking of walking straight to the capital, are you?” she said.

“I do not have the leisure to wait for forms to be stamped,” Ketal said. “It is regrettable, but unavoidable.”

“Give me a moment,” Helia said. She lifted both palms, an instinctive gesture that meant stop. Her eyes showed an urgency that sat close to fear.

Her reaction was not unreasonable. The Empire was the strongest house in the Mortal Realm. Even the Sun God’s order had to bow twice when they stood before the imperial dais. They had preserved most of their strength during the war with Hell by refusing to deploy it. If they stood the full of their hosts up and pointed them in one direction, there would be little left in their path when they were done.

Ketal’s case was not different. The man who had beaten the Demon King did not fit into ordinary scale. If he walked into the Empire without invitation, the Empire would not meekly take his hand. A reasonable world would require the Empire to treat the savior of the Mortal Realm with gratitude and deference. However, the Empire did not often behave as a reasonable world.

If he and the Empire struck one another, the Mortal Realm would suffer the echo. Helia had only just begun to believe she could sleep again without hearing horns in the distance. She did not want to watch the most dangerous man alive walk into the oldest city and ask it a hard question by force.

Ketal saw the trouble in her face and let a small, unbothered smile soften his mouth.

“It will be fine,” he said. “I will not make trouble. I intend to look and leave. If the Empire is itself, I will return quietly.”

Helia did not find it easy to trust that promise. She weighed the alternatives swiftly and chose the least bad one.

“There is one way,” she said, “to enter the Empire without the full procedure. It is a legitimate path.”

“Oh,” Ketal said. “Then it exists.”

“It does,” she said, and she hesitated. “It may feel demeaning to you. If you can accept that, I will attempt it.”

She hoped he would refuse, if only because the arrangement required her to bend rules in a way that would scrape every nerve she had. Ketal did not hesitate.

“I can accept it,” he said. “Do it now.”

Helia’s mouth tightened despite herself.

“I understand,” she said. “We will proceed.”

She pressed the twist in her stomach down until it lay quiet. A long time ago, Kain had worn the expression she wore now, the expression of someone who respected a person and disliked them at the same time.

***

Ketal stepped to the edge of the rise and looked down on the ring of walls and towers. The city below threw its architecture upward as if it meant to touch the moon.

“So this is the Empire’s capital,” he said. “It is high. It looks as if it means to press a palm against the sky.”

He stood at the approach to the first gate, and Helia stood at his right shoulder with her flag in its case and her seal at her belt. She spoke without turning her head.

“Stand one pace behind me,” she said. “You are, on paper, my attendant. An attendant does not move ahead of her mistress. It gives a bad example to the house.”

“I understand,” Ketal said. “I will stand where you put me. Shall I address you with honorifics as well? Lady Helia, perhaps.”

“That will not be necessary,” she said, and she kept her voice steady by will. “If you remain silent until someone asks you a direct question and answer simply when you are asked, that will be sufficient.”

She suppressed the shiver that tried to move through her and took one breath to calm her face. Ketal nodded lightly, almost cheerfully, and matched her step. Together they turned toward the gate of the Empire’s capital and walked to the entrance.