Chapter 197 – Still Searching

Mirian hurled the book across the room and hit it with a fire beam spell. “Drivel!” she snapped at it as it turned to ash.

Gabriel, who was sitting at another table in the Mahatan Palace Archive, raised an eyebrow at her. “I thought you were the type to like books.” He was eating a red vegetable curry and had gotten the sauce on every book he’d touched so far.

“It’ll be back next cycle,” she said. “If that author didn’t want his book incinerated, he shouldn’t have copied unnamed sources from the 3rd millennium and then pretended he’d done the archeology. Maybe I will have them incinerated in whatever the last loop is. An absolute waste of the time of anyone reading it.”

Gabriel licked the curry off his fingers, one by one, then turned another page in his book, then another, skimming it like he did. “This is why you need to spend more time relaxing.”

This was their third time visiting Mahatan together. The 200th loop had passed without much comment, though Gabriel had insisted that they drink a type of foul rice alcohol imported from Zhighua. Mirian preferred wine if she had to drink, but what she really preferred was not to drink at all. For two and a half months now, they’d been scouring the archives for any sign of the gate. They’d found references to a Gate of Fire in a place that sounded like the city, but the archeology revealed little she didn’t already know about Mahatan. It had been abandoned for some thousand years at least, then the ruins were reoccupied. No one had anything to say about a colossal Elder mechanism or any deep secrets buried beneath it.

The most prolific writers had been the scholars of the Persaman Triarchy. The libraries here had thousands of volumes, ranging from important treatises to the most mundane things imaginable. At first, Mirian had thought of it as a researcher’s paradise. Then, she’d begun to think of it as a researcher’s hell. There was, she was learning, such a thing as too much information. Petty scholars seeking to further their careers had either copied or rewritten the same texts hundreds of times. Instead of revealing truth, they had obfuscated it.

Mirian leaned back in her chair. “So what soul magic do you know?” she asked.

“Mirian, my dear, you really need to learn how to make normal conversation.”

“I don’t feel that would serve me well. We are deviations from the normal, so far from an ordinary life that we will never be understood. I found the writings of an old Prophet, you know. A letter, hidden in the pages of a book, long forgotten. They too cried out to be understood. But what task did they have? And did they fail, or succeed?”

“Exactly what I’m talking about,” Gabriel said, because he seemed to like being abrasive. Then, more diplomatically, he said, “You’re right, to some degree. But wrong to worry. What’s done is done. Whether or not the past Prophets failed or succeeded is irrelevant, in the same way that we don’t have to care if past kings or generals failed at whatever the hells they were trying to do. The only path forward to us is our actions in this moment. There’s no sense endlessly mourning what could have been.”

Mirian took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “But what could have been… the more I read these histories, the more I learn, the more I think human existence is a long series of tragedies. So much death and suffering. And after we’ve experienced so much of it, will we ever want to return to it? Or will the Ominian’s great Mausoleum attract us, where we can rest in a place of silence, away from it all.”

“Listen, I know some great people you can fuck. You’ll forget all about this stuff, at least for a few minutes. It’s great for stress relief.”

“I know some too. That’s not the issue. The issue is that nothing I have with them will ever be shared. That’s not how people were meant to live. To be alone is to live an existence antithetical to being human.” And if you want a person to fall in love with you, it will never be, no matter how much time you spend with them, she thought. Because they forget.

“There’s no right way to be human. You’re alive each day. You live. That’s how you stay human. That’s all.”

There was wisdom in that, she thought, but it wasn’t what she felt. Perhaps the possibility of understanding that Liuan and Gabriel offered was a worse torment than all the non-Prophets. She expected nothing from the normal people. They were blameless; practically automatons in that they were helpless to change their own fate. But the other Prophets—they should be able to understand her. She should be able to trust them.

But she couldn’t bring herself to open up. She was scared. A curse like the one on Jherica could still incapacitate her. And there was too much at stake.

“You were RID, weren’t you?” she blurted out.

Gabriel looked at her, then closed the book he’d been paging through. He sighed. “Yes. Former. But some parts of it never leave you.”

“So there really is no breaking the mind-curses that the RID and Deeps put on people?”

He grunted in acknowledgment.

“Are you on good terms with Westerun?”

“No,” he said. “You tried talking to him? He revels in having secrets. He uses them to have power over people, and then he strings them along forever. Don’t waste your time.”

So he has been to Akana. “I didn’t. Not much, at least. So what is Akana Praediar trying to do here?”

“The same thing every other great power has tried to do since time immemorial. Dominate as much as they can. You want my sad little tale? I grew up in Akana as a kid. Then my mother was deployed here. I liked Urubandar, but I hated how backward it was. When I grew up, I thought Akana would bring all their ideals about government and progress here. I thought we could topple all the corrupt bandits that wear the amulets of station here, consign them to ash, and then build a new Persama. The Akanan bluebloods that came here never could see me as like them. See, my mother was Akanan, but my father was Persaman. They would never treat me as an equal. I could stomach that, though. Takes a lot to bother me. Then, I watched as Akana lifted up a degenerate bloodless cur of a man named Lord Saiyal. I watched as all the obedient dogs that follow him around licked at his feet, and watched as everything I worked for turned out to be for the same Persama I knew, the one that was full of warlords and merchant princes lording over a land of misery. So I quit. Only, Empires don’t like it when you say no to them. But the joke was on them, because the Ominian chose me.”

“You helped hunt down Dawn’s Peace, then?” Mirian inferred.

Gabriel gave another grunt of acknowledgment. “Now we’re done with the topic. Though if you’d like to share your spells and soul magic prowess, we can trade. But you needn’t make excuses as to why you won’t. I can see you don’t trust me still. Doesn’t bother me. I wouldn’t trust me either. Now if we’re going to work, let’s get back to work.”

Mirian nodded. They got back to work.

***

On the 203rd loop, they started investigating the dunes around Mahatan. On the 204th, Mirian began to worry. She’d paid close attention to when Ibrahim had changed his tactics back when she was preparing for Apophagorga, and she began to worry that perhaps he was noticing that she’d changed her tactics.

“Relax,” Gabriel told her when she brought it up. “He’s not single-minded, but he’s also too busy.”

Gradually, their circle of divination had expanded outward, spiraling away from Mahatan. Again, there were plenty of tombs and caves, but there was no sign of the Gate at all.

On the 205th loop, their distance from Mahatan eventually brought them into contact with bandits.

“They must have contacts in the city. Perhaps part of a smuggling operation,” Gabriel said as the bandits approached on foot. A large dune shielded them from view of the city, while a shallow cave system had hidden the bandits until they were practically on top of them.

“Maybe there’s a clue in that cave they just came out of,” Mirian said.

Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “We’re not going to flee?”

“No. We can try talking to them first, though. You’re the better manipulator, right? You go first.”

The other Prophet shrugged. “Sure. The signal word for if it’s time to attack, though, will be ‘marauder.’”

Mirian nodded.

There were twelve bandits. Nine of them had rifles, two wands, and the last a spellbook. The man with the spellbook was wearing two gold bracers, the kind that held wealth well but didn’t stop blades. Mirian guessed he was the leader. The bandits didn’t have their rifles raised, but they were loaded, glyphs glittering.

She could kill them all easily, but it seemed that Gabriel couldn’t. This was a good opportunity to see what he was capable of.

Or maybe he wanted to hide his own capabilities too.

Gabriel strode forward. “Gentleman! I was just here trying to deliver this silver I found to its rightful owner,” he said, waving his purse around. He tossed it towards one of the bandits, who opened it up to count.

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The leader could easily see Gabriel’s wand and Mirian’s spellbook. It was disguised so it looked like the sort of ordinary spellbook a working mage might have, but it was still obviously a spellbook. Unfortunately, those were highly valuable.

The man who’d counted the coins said something to the bandit mage, who announced loudly, “You were right to return the money, my friend, but unfortunately, there’s a new fee in place for passing this area. I’m afraid one good deed isn’t enough to waive it.”