Endworlds - Nicholas Read [59]
Twin unblinking pricks of retinal light were the only hint of a face deep inside the dark hood that was the habit of her Order, and when she spoke the chamber filled with a crackling voice, resonant as it was deep. The crone had been ancient before the Fall, the subsequent immortality of this deathlife making her eternally so.
All bowed their heads as she invoked a blessing upon the proceedings, calling to the Builders above and to the Earth below for wisdom and balance to underwrite their words and actions, in each wafer of time, to each dawning day. All present intoned their commitment: “As Above, so Below.”
The rites now observed, Brace Hurcan Aragenti bowed to the old woman as she was led back to her seat, then cast a knowing glance at Queen Fae’Elayen as he took to the stand. With tensions so high between the Houses, this meeting could easily get out of control. He traced his fingers across his thummin disc and flicked the images through the air where they displayed a checklist and agenda to be followed across the concave ceiling.
Clever fox, thought the queen. As above, so below indeed. And it keeps them from looking at each other, all the better to avoid their rivalries.
Matters of community were reported by each House, various challenges and advances in the arts and sciences discussed and applauded. Then the meatier subjects that all had really come to debate were opened, and the volume in the chamber rose in proportion to how little was known on each topic. It was a simple truth that people were always loudest when talking on that which they did not fully understand, that which would identify them as the personification of a populist view, and that which they did not want to be challenged on.
Ah, politics, what would we do without it?, the Queen pondered wryly. She would like to have found out. Would that she held the Scepter of Rule and not one of Balance. But that lance of greatest significance had long been lost, along with its fallen wielder.
Yet surely old Anu had held the right idea: rule by might alone, not by consensus. The people had loved him for it. God-king. First king. Master of the Builders’ own Words. His rule represented six thousand years of unimpeded progress; an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove.
The people of the First Age had almost made it, almost passed the Builders’ test. Until the end. And look how that final dissent had ended for the usurpers: wicked Tiamet now lay shattered, its only reminder the three thousand asteroids snared on one of the Lagrangian Points that were their Coreworld’s wings. That remnant of Tiamet was known by another name to the Fae’er. They called it Anu’s Bracelet, a reminder that one is irrevocably tied to the consequences of action; that reaction follows action as effect follows cause.
She absently fingered the tiny notches of gold filaments that joined her monarch’s wrist to her scepter, the bracelet rich in metaphor and pathos.
But hers was a benevolent monarchy where democracy granted all House Families the right of self-rule and determination. The same right they granted the other dimensions. Even the role of monarch was passed between the Houses every few centuries, a passage presided over by the runes and prophecies of the Nabiyã Siancay who alone determined which of the Chakanni-khi were fated to ascend the throne as best suited to face the challenges ahead. As she herself had done seven hundred years ago.
Yet in the gleaming eyes of those old seerwitches, eyes that held the secrets of the ages better than any vault, even she sometimes spied a growing desperation. The final Line of Judgment was approaching, and their offspring on Earth Prime were so far from healing as a people.
Were the Builders to examine the Prime world today they would find a race at war with itself and at odds with the very harmony of nature. Sides were drawn and battles fought daily over their pots of gold, their acres of land, their moments of glory, their so-called philosophies, or the color of their