Varsis walked from the gangplank of the Legacy. He breathed in a breath of the fresh, northern air. He was in Xiater, the city which was the seat of Makini power. And he was home.

The Legacy had journeyed across down a river to get here, then across a sea, then up another river. Xiater was so far away from the Imperial City, the distances were scarcely imaginable. But he had made it.

Varsis stepped onto the city’s dock, crowded with merchant ships coming and going. Xiater had been founded on a rich mineral vein, and its resources supplied lands a great distance away.

Behind Varsis, three others walked off the ship. Taros, his sole remaining bodyguard, Ana, his lover, and Roin.

Roin truly was a quandary. Varsis had set Taros to the task of interviewing Roin. He remembered when his bodyguard had reported the results. Roin said he had only signed on board the Legacy a month and a half ago, a fact was verified by Salko and other crew.

Background checks were a must when joining the crew, and Roin, apparently, had been raised the simple son of a fisherman, who, one day, for no discernable reason, had signed himself up onboard Varsis’ ship.

After it was determined that Roin was not only a quick study, but bookish in his spare moments, and knew a great many things, he’d been promoted to Varsis’ aide.

Taros had said that Roin was harmless, but Varsis wasn’t so sure. Someone who had the ability to rise so quickly, to be the aide of a noble, just had to be dangerous.

At the docks, Varsis and his three followers were greeted by a pair of helmed Makini guards, who by the looks of them served the Council.

“Welcome back, Lord-General,” said one of the guards. He clapped his hand on his breastplate, and his partner followed suit. “Your ship was spotted by those in the watch towers. Your mother wishes to see you.”

“Immediately?” asked Varsis.

“Immediately,” said the implacable soldier.

Varsis and Taros followed the guards, leaving Roin and Ana to their own devices. The pair would make it to Varsis’ home easily enough by themselves. Varsis hadn’t wanted to visit his mother the moment he got back, but she had called, and now it was unavoidable.

As one of the guards opened the door to a Makini carriage, Varsis and Taros got in. The carriage started to move, and Varsis mentally prepared himself for what was to come.

Varsis’ mother was not any mother. She sat on the Council of the Makini, and was arguably the most powerful person in the Makini House. Other mothers wanted their children to grow up and lead happy and productive lives. All Hisa as Hakshi de Makini wanted was for her children to serve her.

And if one failed to do that, she could turn dangerous. Varsis uttered a prayer as he remembered his poor older brother, who tried to oppose Hisa’s appointment to the council. Now Varsis was the oldest.

Through the carriage, Varsis could hear the beats of drums. The carriage stopped, and Varsis stepped out, followed a moment latter by Taros.

Varsis stepped through a gate, and onto a black carpeted path, bisecting the courtyard. As he walked, he saw that Makini soldiers lined the path, double rowed, and on both sides. They were all helmed except for the drummers placed at intervals, and they gave off a feeling of power. Not one note was off beat, and not one soldier stood at anything less than full attention.

Behind Varsis, the carriage rode off, and the gate closed down. He walked slowly down the created aisle, feeling the glory. He knew his display of grandeur was not truly his. Few but Hisa could have spurred so many soldiers to participate in a ceremony of arrival on such short notice, and Varsis knew his mother was behind it.

He knew that every one of the hundreds of soldiers who stood in this courtyard, erstwhile for him, were actually a testament to the power of his mother. Varsis knew that more than wanting to greet her son; she wanted to show him that she still reigned in the Fortress.

However, Varsis knew that all loved flattery, and he was no exception. Despite all his knowledge, the hundreds of soldiers standing at attention for him, and him alone, brought with them a sense of pride.

Even though Varsis knew who was pulling the strings.

As the drumbeats grew ever more rapid, the Fortress became clear before him. The Fortress was the heart of Xiater. The Fortress was what the city had began as, and if the worst came, what the city would end as. The Fortress was originally built a thousand years ago, to protect the mining camps in the mountains. Xiater had grown around it. For if any one building could spawn a city, the Fortress was it. The Fortress might even have the size to hold a city.

For it was built of mountain. Any but the industrious Makini would have built a freestanding castle in the area, if protection was needed. The ground was flat enough, in some places. But the Makini of the old days had thought different. And now, a massive castle like structure covered almost an entire mountainside.

Varsis was no historian, so he knew not which of the parts that lay before him were of the original construction. The Makini worked keenly to make new renovations look the same as the old had. Even though the Fortress’ main areas were confined to the mountain face, dozens, if not hundreds of tunnels had been carved into the rock, always being added too. There was a saying, that the day the Fortress stopped growing, it would be the day that the Makini did the same.

With the Fortress ahead, Varsis gazed at it in awe. He had not been home in a year, and though he had lived in the Fortress for most of his childhood, a year was time enough to restore much of its awe. Six giant towers had once been built in a semicircle around the fortress, each at least twenty stories high. And at each of those towers’ very apexes, it looked as if another tower had been placed on its side, long enough to connect the towers to the main body of the Fortress. Those thick, glorified passageways were the barracks of hundreds of troops.

Varsis passed them by. Now he was before the gate. Normally, it was open all the time, for with the amount of traffic that entered and exited the Fortress, nothing else was feasible. For Varsis’ welcoming ceremony, however, it had been temporarily closed.

The gate was a hundred feet high, and just as wide. A colossal set of steel doors showed their face at him, with metal spikes proudly displayed along their exterior. Varsis had long wondered about the practicality of spikes dozens of feet in the air, but perhaps they were worth their construction for their image alone. There was something about hundreds of spikes inlaid into a door, each on the size of a man, that gave one pause.

Varsis finally became conscious of the drumbeats, and their steady rhythm. As he stopped in front of the gate, with the steel doors preventing him from going further, he heard the pattern, five medium sized beats followed by a louder one, repeated over and over again. But even as he listened, the rhythm changed. Instead of a marching beat, the drums began to provide music, the thick heavy music that the Makini were known for. And then it all stopped.

The doors began to open.

Steel creaked inwards. Varsis believed that the gates actually had the ability to move both ways, though he had never seen them go out, but in this situation, the choice was obvious. To go out, the doors would have crushed Varsis, Taros, and a few dozen soldiers, all of whom stood directly before it.

As soon as the doors opened wide enough to accommodate a person’s width, Varsis proceeded. Waiting would only waste time.

Past the doors, and the area that was clear so that they could function smoothly, which was huge enough, there was a grand chamber, lit by hundreds of lanterns. Though usually crowded with hundreds of functionaries, today the room was all but empty. Varsis and Taros proceeded across the floor, which had drawn upon it the largest map of the Empire that Varsis had ever seen. It actually took time to walk down some of the roads that had been etched into the floor.

This was yet another display of the Fortress. Once, the building had a real name, but now that was unnecessary. Commoners on the far side of the Empire knew what the Fortress was.

Across the massive chamber, standing, of course, right where Xiater was on the floor’s map, was a single soldier, attired much as those in the courtyard had been, but unhelmed.

Varsis strode over to him, along the North-East Trade Path, conscious of the many silent moments the process took. When he had reached Xiater for the second time, he saw who had been set to greet him. Marke is Rothi, the current Lord of the Fortress. Marke was always proper, so his hands were folded behind his back, just so.

“I assume you will be taking me to my mother?” said Varsis.

“Lord-General,” Marke acknowledged his better with a nod. “I will be taking you to the Council of Makini.”

Which meant the exact same thing, even if Marke was too proper to say it.

The three began to walk, heading deep inside the mountain. The Chamber of the Council was one of the furthest buildings in, for the added protection of the five who composed it. There was a standard joke that the further inside the Fortress they were, the more the Council had to worry about a collapse of the building, but that joke was limited to those who knew little. There were a thousand safeguards in place to keep that from happening.

As Varsis, Marke, and Taros proceeded down the massive halls, the smallest with ceilings of twenty feet, some higher, Varsis began to see others. Apparently, only the courtyard and the entrance chamber had been cleared for him, and now that he was through with both areas, the Fortress was returning to life as usual.

But as they went further in, through grates, guards, and locked doors, the hubbub of the Fortress receded. When Varsis was ushered into a grand room, darkened, and filled with paintings, he knew he was almost there.

In the room of the paintings, Marke and Taros stopped following Varsis. The next room was where the Council sat, and they were not interested in seeing any but the ones they wished to. The Council could keep any they wished out, even including personal bodyguards, and the Lord of the Fortress.

Varsis walked up to a simple wooden door, guarded by the only others in the room, a half dozen massive and stony-faced soldiers. One of those men opened the door for him, and Varsis walked through.

He was in the Chamber of the Council.

Leaders of the other Houses liked the light, and liked multitudes of courtiers with them, just to be told how great and magnificent they were, but the Council was different. Their audience chamber, instead of being lit and filled with people, was dark, and, in its vastness, all but empty.

The room, rumor had it, had been constructed hundreds of years ago, when the capital had been moved to Xiater, and had been built from the basis of a cave. If that was true, it explained how the room maintained its ability to forebode, with all its awful precision.

Varsis, having just entered the room, stood on a sizable carpeted circle of floor, surrounded by a railing.

The room was constructed as if he, as the one to gain the audience, was in an arena, and the Council was watching him. A sloping rock face, or what looked like one well enough, surrounded Varsis’ circle. The Council sat in two rows, three on the top row, and two on the bottom, in comfortable leather-bound chairs, that seemed to be built right into the ancient rock. Here again, the Council was different than other ruling bodies. Most lords preferred to sit in uncomfortable chairs of sold gold, or something of the like. The Council saw no point in that. If they ruled House Makini, why not be comfortable?

Below the chairs, on the rock face, about half a dozen servants crawled, serving to their masters’ needs, and pressing to the ground so they would be as invisible as possible. Almost all the light in the room, from its mysterious source and unknown source, was focused on Varsis, the one who had been granted the audience, so he could not see the Council members and the others very well. However, he thought he saw a slave girl licking the feet of the Councilman who sat in the top right chair, and others carrying around platters of food, holding them above their heads, but no higher than any in the council’s knees, so at their pleasure, the any in the Council could take something to eat.

As for those of the Council themselves, they were cloaked in shadow, and wore dark robes. The features on their faces could only be made out with effort. In the top row, however, on the center chair, Varsis knew sat his mother, Hisa as Hakshi. Even though, in theory, the Council was a group of equals, the one who sat in that center chair was first among them. Hisa had sat in that chair for five years now. Things lurked in the shadows, ready to serve them.

The first of the Council to speak was the only other woman, the one who sat in the lower right chair, to Varsis’ view. Her name was Via as Nemed, and she was no more than a girl in her twenties, no older than Varsis. She had been on the Council for less than a year, so Varsis had not seen her in that seat before. To get a seat at the Council at her age was unprecedented, but there was a negation to that: she was Hisa’s pawn. All knew as much, when Via, incredibly inexperienced, had gotten a seat on the council after the oldest among them had died of old age.

“Are you a servant of the Makini, Varsis Hakshi dol Makin?” asked Via, starting the ritual.

“With all my heart and all my soul, illustrious member of the Council,” responded Varsis. Though I have more power than you do. In fact, rarely did any but the most junior member of the Council voice the ritual. Varsis performed a deep bow.

“Good,” said Hisa, the moment the ritual was over, in the cold, echoing voice of hers. “You have returned to us, my son.”

“I have indeed, mother.” Varsis inclined his head. Here, only bowing at the beginning and then end of the audience was necessary, but with Hisa, it was always better to err on the side of caution.

“What can you tell us?” asked Hisa. “What news can you bring us from the capital?”

Varsis understood her intent. “Not much you do not already know, I am sure, Lady of the Council,” he said. “Except for one thing.” He elaborated as much as he could on his decision about Maiako as Arathou, and what had happened as a result. Hisa listened, and then replied.

“You did well, my first son,” she said. “You made the correct choices. It was not your fault that things turned out as they did.”

You mean, I made the choice you would have made, Mother.

“Tell me again about the cloaked man who rescued the Princess,” said Hisa. Varsis obliged, going into as much detail as he could, and then Hisa continued.

“There is a chance that the man is nothing more than a would-be hero, who actually managed to succeed. That chance is so great, I myself believe it. Graven was new at his job, and not as good as Taros. Certainly not as good as you, my son.” She paused.

“There is something we think you should know,” said the Councilman who sat at was Varsis saw to be Hisa’s left, a moment later. Varsis remembered his name to be Grako dol Belas. “Our spies discovered a disturbance in the town of Gansu. It seems the Minsu soldiers there encountered a girl who they thought was the Princess, and tried to kill her to remove the extra thread. Her protector saved her.”

Hisa picked up where Grako left off. “The information you bring clarifies the knowledge of our spies,” she said.

Varsis cut in. “If you so desire, I will hunt the pair down for you. My failure brings disgrace upon our family.”

“Nonsense,” said Hisa. “You did not fail, and you will not leave the capital to go on a fool’s errand. There are much more important things for you to do, my son. Much more important things.”

The Councilman who sat to the right of Hisa picked up where she had left off, seemingly unphased by the slave girl working at his feet and legs. “You see, we of the Council have made a decision. We are a House older than the Arathou Dynasty ever was, older than any other House that exists to this day. For a thousand years, we have licked Tachen boots clean, sending our natural resources to all parts of the Empire, so that rival Houses could prosper from our hard work.

“But no longer.

“The Makini are done serving. We are the strongest of the Houses, the richest. We will not accept the False One, Ehajdon as our master.”

“What are you talking about, Great One?” said Varsis, against a sudden wind that, defying all logic, rustled through the chamber. “There are the Prophecies to consider, and the Mandate of Elysium!”

“Do you think we of the Council will bow our heads to a prophesized hero that will be anointed to unite us all?” asked Hisa, angrily. “Use your head, little boy. The priests are wrong. The Arathou Dynasty has had corrupt ruler after corrupt ruler. Someone assassinated the late Emperor Mentis, to be sure, but it had nothing to do with the God-Kings. The age of the mythic is over, and has been since the first pathetic Tachen put a crown upon his own head.”

“We will not wait for something that will not come,” said Grako, as the winds finally resided. “ Xiater will be the capital of something far greater than the Empire ever was. Even the westerners will fall before us.”

“Before this month is done,” said Hisa, “the armies of the Makini will march to end Ehajdon. For five years, you have led the armies of House Tachen, as their Lord-General, as a display of coexistence between the Houses. Fight with us now.”

Varsis got to one knee. “I do gratefully accept the Council’s charge.”

From the dark things, which lurked in the shadows all around, Varsis thought he heard an answering roar.