The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 45: Volume 2: Chapter 43 — The Far Seer’s Gambit

Read chapter 45 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 2: Chapter 43 — The Far Seer’s Gambit Cold settled in the stone as if it were a second liquid, and the scrying basin held it still... a shallow, metallic mirror, smooth from years of gazing. Severin stood with his hands behind his back, watching Aramore organize itself for war. Chaos did not stack wagons. Chaos did not lay out coil-ropes by length or mark casks with chalk sigils for powder, water, vinegar, or oil. What he saw below the basin’s trembling surface was design companies drilling in rhythm, Iron Defenders standing at attention in pairs, each construct’s eye-light burning with the same steady hue. Two large shapes moved through them, likely lieutenants, he thought at first. Then the shimmer along their hides changed his mind. Not lieutenants. Relics . Things she had made in her own image: deliberate, cruelly elegant, obedient by choice. “She found him,” Severin said. The mercury knew enough to pretend to listen. He widened the view with a small rotation of his wrist. The ritual chamber he had given his spy came into focus. Drains clean. Tables scrubbed. Journals are missing, indicating they have been found. He followed the invisible seam outward through alleyways where blood had cooled and been swept into gutters to feed the city cisterns. She had learned not only what he’d done but how . She would come. He touched the locket beneath his robes. The shard pulsed once as a restrained heartbeat against bone. Forty-three years of secrecy, hoarded like a miser’s coins, now endangered by a girl with a god-fragment and the arrogance to wield it. A mistake, letting her survive the collapse. Names on refugee ledgers don't usually build armies. She'd proven exceptional, which made her dangerous. “If she reaches my gates,” he murmured, “the Conclave will see the smoke. They’ll count the bodies and ask why my sealed relic answers my call.” The White City was one of three seats in the Conclave mage-lords who'd maintained the peace for three centuries through mutual threat and careful ignorance. Each held a sealed relic. Each swore they'd never use it. Each suspected the others lied. A gem broken into 3 shapes. White City had its piece: the city built upon the bones of an old monastery of the White Conclave; one stone held by the Regent mage of Eldania, and, finally, the Dwarves held the last shard. A gem broken so that its corruption could be contained. But use was different from containment. And containment was different from integration. What Severin had done what lived in his locket was neither contained nor merely used. It was a partnership, however reluctant. The Conclave would call it corruption. They'd be right. He looked down at the city that still believed him a scholar. “We end this elsewhere.” He turned from the basin and crossed to the map table. Pale ink marked the three-day road between the White City in the north and Aramore in the south. At its heart: an oval depression labeled Pale Stone Valley , a place of chalk and wind and nothing else. “Meet her where retreat and advance cost the same,” he said. “Day Two.” He did not convene a council. He issued orders. The White City courtyard smelled of lye and forge smoke when they brought the prisoners up from the cells. Two hundred. Their chains scraped like brushes dragged across stone. He offered no words to still them. Words implied choice. He placed his palm on the first sternum and let the shard reply. The light it gave was sickly yellow-green, the color of infection trapped beneath wax. The man convulsed as if a rope had been pulled straight through him. Bone thickened, muscle knotted, veins raised in cords. For a breath, he looked almost magnificent, what Yara might have made, had she wasted no mercy. Then cracks feathered across his jaw. His eyes clouded. Breath rasped once and steadied into something that wasn’t human rhythm at all. “Three days,” Severin said, counting the cadence. “Two, if you run him.” He turned to the next. Down the line he went. Some