Book 3, Chapter 33

After climbing back to his feet and dismissing the two guards who’d brought us in, the captain said, “If you truly aren’t Lightbearers, then perhaps you should be speaking with Jules instead of me.”

“That didn’t go so well for us earlier,” I said.

“Ah, yes. The blaspheming,” the captain said. “Let me ask you this. What are your intentions moving forward?”

I glanced over at Senica, who shrugged back. It was hard to argue against that. This was my expedition, after all. “I’m curious to meet these supposed divine beings,” I told the captain. “And while I personally doubt they’re any sort of actual messengers of the gods, my understanding is that they take offered food as tribute and spend their mana solving problems and protecting your town. If that’s the truth of it, then I have no objections so long as they aren’t hostile toward me.”

I could easily picture an encounter turning deadly. Presumably, the Lightbearers wouldn’t appreciate anyone exposing them as mere mortals with some mastery over mana. If they attacked me to protect their secrets, I’d be forced to put them down, but if they could remain reasonable, they could be a valuable source of information.

Even if they didn’t feel like cooperating, that didn’t mean I couldn’t learn from them. They’d hardly be the first people I’d extracted knowledge from without consent, though if I was right about their level of proficiency from the minds I’d skimmed while walking through town, they couldn’t be higher than master ranked. I’d need to keep Senica clear of the fight, but otherwise it’d be no problem.

“When will the Lightbearers arrive?” I asked.

“Probably in a week,” the captain said. “It depends. They always come around this time of year, but not always on the exact same day.”

More evidence that the angels were nothing of the sort. What kind of divine being couldn’t remain punctual?  That was a sure sign that they couldn’t predict and handle various problems cropping up quickly and efficiently. If I assumed it was because some villages needed more effort expended on them than the Lightbearers anticipated, that spoke highly of them being a benevolent party who would hopefully be open to a peaceful discussion.

I made my decision. “Let’s go talk to Jules and see if we can clear this up. Worst case, it’s an unpleasant conversation and we leave. As I understand it, these Lightbearers go all over the place. We can try to meet them in some other town. It’s not worth forcefully inserting ourself into this place if the locals don’t want us here.”

“Are you sure?” Senica asked. “I mean… is this really what we travelled so far for?”

“This, specifically? No, probably not. But it’s interesting and I’m curious to see where it leads.”

“I would imagine it leads back to the Sanctum of Light,” the captain said, scratching at the back of his head as he spoke. “That’s where the Enlightened live. It’s their city, kind of.”

“A whole city of Enlightened?” I asked. What had happened to Paradise, separate from the rest of the world? “That’s interesting. I would love to hear more about it. What do you mean by ‘kind of?’”

“I, er, well, I’m not the most studious guy,” the captain said. “The scriptures… they kind of describe it as less of a city and more of a holy land and a tower. Only the Lightbearers ever leave, and it’s impossible for anyone else to enter. Jules really could answer your questions better than I can.”

“A tower,” I murmured to myself. “That’s worth looking into.”

For some reason I’d never quite understood, civilizations had cropped up time and time again that were obsessed with the idea of building the biggest, tallest towers they could. I had to assume most, if not all, of them had collapsed with the breaking of the world core. Without an abundant source of mana to reinforce the construction, quite a few overly large edifices had probably succumbed to gravity and the elements almost immediately. Perhaps this particular tower had been built better, or it was just small enough that its owners had been able to keep it upright without magic.

Either way, it could be a remnant of the last age, what the history books called the Age of Wonders, which meant it could hold clues as to how exactly Ammun Nescect had broken the world core in his bid to destroy a moon. I didn’t blame him for wanting to break the moon, not considering a group of insurgent mages had harnessed it and were using its core to blow holes in the kingdom below, but Ammun had made a mess of things and caused collateral damage on a global scale.

“Let’s go talk to Jules,” I decided. “Depending what she has to say, we might just go straight to this Sanctum of Light instead of waiting around for a representative to show up.”

“Just like that?” the captain asked with a helpless laugh. “Just walk up to the gates of Heaven and demand to be let in? If you’re not an angel yourself, you sure are something.”

“I suppose I am,” I said. “Let’s be off, shall we?”

  *

Jules was not happy to see us, but she wasn’t surprised. It didn’t take much effort to figure out the two guards had warned her we’d likely be coming, and whatever else she might be, she didn’t have it in her to be an ungracious host.

We were sitting in a parlor in her house, one large enough to hold a dozen people and stuffed with thickly padded furniture. I had a rather fragile porcelain cup sitting on a table in front of me, some sort of tea steaming in it. I’d checked to confirm it wasn’t some misguided attempt to poison us just to be safe.

Senica was enjoying her drink, but mine was untouched. Instead, I was leaning forward in my seat, elbows resting on my legs and fingers steepled under my chin while I watched Jules. She squinted back at me, but remained silent.

“I can see that we’ve offended you,” I said. “Let me assure you, that wasn’t our intention. We are from far, far away and know nothing of your religion.”

“More blasphemy,” she practically snarled. “The Lightbearers carry their blessings to the farthest corners of the world.”

“Is this not a frontier town?” I asked. “I noticed the lumber operations at the edge of the forest. This place can’t be more than four or five years old.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“If this is as far as your civilization has expanded, you can hardly think it’s fair that we aren’t familiar with your society.”

Jules just kept up her glare, ignoring any and all attempts at reasoning with her. With a mental sigh, I switched my tactics and activated the mind reading spell I’d been holding. “What can you tell me about the Sanctum of Light?”

I immediately got an image of a tower that was too fat to be considered slender or delicate, despite its great height. It stretched miles into the sky and was probably a mile wide at its base. It was a mixture of brilliant gleaming steel and glass framed with bleached white granite, the whole edifice glowing in the morning sun light.

Jules certainly had an interesting idea of what she thought the Sanctum looked like, but I doubted it was accurate. The sheer amount of mana it would take to keep a tower like that upright beggared belief. Maybe it had looked like that a few thousand years ago, and maybe her books did describe it that way, but I doubted her fanciful imagining resembled reality.

“Home of the Chosen of God, the Enlightened, where the Lightbearers return to rest between their pilgrimages,” Jules said. It was clear she didn’t want to talk to me, but she wasn’t willing to just not answer the question. “Not a place for blasphemers and heretics to lay eyes on.”

“Do you know where it is?” I asked.

“The Sanctum of Light is not a place you can just walk to!”

“Well, it must exist somewhere if these Lightbearers go back there,” I said.

Trying to be reasonable was the wrong track to take with Jules, but I was quickly growing tired of this tedious conversation. If she didn’t want to cooperate, I’d read the information right out of her mind while I peppered her with leading questions.

“Which direction to the Lightbearers approach your town from?” I asked.

‘From the northwest road,’ her mind told me while her mouth remained firmly pinched into a thin line.

“How many are there?”

‘Always two, but not always the same two.’

“What kind of miracles do they perform?”

I recognized a dozen spells just from Jules’s passing thoughts, which only served to cement my theories. I still wanted to meet these angels, but only to pry the location of their Sanctum of Light out of them. If Jules was right about even a tenth of what she thought she knew, this city had enough mana in it to be straight out of the pages of history.

We’d only been there about ten minutes, but I stood up and said, “I think this conversation has run its course. We’ll be staying in town until the Lightbearers arrive.”

“They’ll smite you where you stand,” Jules told me. “Both of you.”

“I sincerely doubt that. If anything, they sound like kindred spirits to me. I have no doubt it’ll be a fascinating meeting.”

We left the house and walked down the street, Senica trailing slightly behind me. Jules watched us from a window, but didn’t start blustering and yelling again. Townsfolk stared at us, no doubt attracted by the rumors that were already spreading. That was good; it meant that when the Lightbearers did show up, they’d make an effort to seek me out. I could prepare a place for our meeting, just to make sure it didn’t get out of hand.

“Why are you so stuck on this angel thing?” Senica asked after we’d walked for a few minutes.

“Fake religions usually have to be backed by real power. People who have power often have other resources. Honestly, I’m less interested in whoever shows up here spending mana to ward rats away from pantries and more concerned with where they came from. Whoever these Enlightened folk are, they might very well be descendants of Ralvost.”

“They might not be,” Senica said.

“Also a possibility, but I’m not in any hurry. I still need another month to finish my new mana crystal—”

“Giant fucking boulder,” Senica muttered.

“—and then I have your own advancement to stage two to oversee before I start working on reaching stage five. After that, it’ll be a waiting game to try to develop the valley into the kind of land I need it to be to claim it as a genius loci and advance to stage six.”

“Okay, I guess. But what are we doing while we wait?”

“Training, of course. Did you think I’d let you off easy just because we won’t be flying anywhere in the next few days?”

“I’d kind of hoped, yeah,” she said.

“It’s like you don’t know me at all,” I told her.

We approached the edge of the town and started around the edge of a field to the forest. “We’ll find a nice little glade, or make one if necessary, and build our temporary lodging nearby,” I explained when my sister shot me a questioning glance.

“Couldn’t we just stay in town, in a bed?”

“Do you think anyone would have us?” I asked wryly. “I don’t think they’ll take the paper-cloth money we got from the Gateway. And it appears that using magic around these people upsets them in all sorts of ways.”

“That really seems more like their problem and not a reason to sleep out in the woods when we don’t have to.”

“If it’s comfort you’re after, I have just the spell,” I told her.

Senica’s sigh was so heavy, I had no doubt they heard her all the way back in town.