(USFB): Twenty-One: The Empire and The Remains

Even from the heights of the split monolith, ancient to a point in which even the most learned of scholars could not tabulate its age, the view of the ceremony was clear enough. The winds rounded about the leopard on the high ledge, his pale gray eyes unblinking against the torrent. Nothing had forced Pulzaricati to flinch away in the days following the attempt on his life. It was not for his own mortality his resolve had grown but for that one far below in the valley amid the plumes of smoke and mourners partaking of their form.

The Quetal twisted fluidly and put the final vestiges of his kin behind him as physically as much as emotionally. He stretched and, with a quick updraft, tossed himself to the ledge that overlooked his current perch. It was no easy task to find purchase where he had stood, but the final lip above him was an incline no matter where one stood. It wasn’t until a climber slid the length of about three tigers stacked tow to head that it became stable, and that was because it was where the step began again. As Pulzar settled onto the uppermost stair, he met the fiery gaze of that last confidant.

Even after her efforts in circumventing the attack, Pulzar had trouble putting his confidence in Neusthera. It wasn’t simply that Thera was an outlander; it wasn’t that she was a tiger and a one-time arm for the Great Syre back east, but the ferocity that was ever on display in his face. Though it was an overly helpful indicator of the woman’s temperament, the leopard had trouble deciding if that aid wasn’t as much a hindrance. Thera had been too prone to anger, throwing it without much regard as much as blistering away those few who had fancied her. Pulzar wasn’t sure that the two were not one and the same.

Her massive paw met his shoulder, and where fury often dwelt was some semblance of sympathy, “Quetal, I know things are not so well, and you wanted your time, but I am afraid we have something more important.”

“More important?” Khosi’s death was far from unimportant, but the indignation only touched the man’s heart and not his mind.

Neusthera nodded, a dizzying expression as the waving lines of soot in her flame-baked coat always seemed to dither here and there, “I don’t mean to say… It is something we can’t sleep on. Better?”

Deference was not a look that suited the woman’s features; Pulzar couldn’t deny that much. Somehow, taut and ready to explode with rage, Neusthera looked natural, while so many looked twisted to the end of their abilities. He saw in her hand the cylinder, a coduse, locked and undoubtedly carrying a message within. His fingers graced the capsule before he met those brilliant eyes that, if caught in the right light, were an intense lapis lazuli or, by some stroke of an unseen painter, the most visceral red-orange. Grasping the tube, his expression asked what words were not necessary for which she returned with a nod.

Twisting the coduse permitted the trapped breath of a distant voice to be heard once more and only once more. Pulzar was sure he should not have been so anxious and waited to open it within a closed space, but the message was not lost on the winds or in the open air. Great Syre of the Realm, Orion Kammherit, the Iron Mane, the Red Spear, and last but not least, Warlord of White Sands, was no more. A shade, a shadowed assassin, veiled in endless night, had stole away with his life in the early hours several mornings ago. The succession would name Yulthar, his eldest, the new Great Syre, but he too had fallen. And as this was recounted by another coduse, Pulzar saw the reason for alarm, the overlap that threatened more than he cared to know.

If his informants through the empire could be trusted, their word accurate to the day, the assassinations of both Syre and son had been carried out on the same morning. Worse still, they were nearly synchronized with the attempt on his own life, which had come days earlier in the afternoon. What built the troubles even higher, to the point that would put his perch above the village beneath the waves themselves, was that these acts were carried out by a similar malefactor each time, a shadowed thing that emanated the dark it used to conceal itself.

The coincidence could not be overlooked, despite what Pulzar would tell himself of assassins and other such paid killers. They would be fools to leave themselves exposed and uncloaked as they carried out their deeds, but the consistency of the descriptors pointed more so to one culprit than any other. As he and Neusthera made their way down the split monolith, at the base of which stood the chamber of elders who would need to be called from their far-reaching holdings, Pulzar contemplated the situation further.

It was very possible his ally in the eastern lands had come through and, by one means or another, likely by way of his shades, spied other aspects of the house Kammherit to bring down. Yet, that did not displace the fact he had also attempted to take his life in addition to the others. Furthermore, Pulzar couldn’t confirm if the single act the man had been bidden to perform had been done so and to what effect. If that far and foreign ruler had mind enough to wipe clean the slate of all the Kammherit line, it would be of little surprise, but to Pulzar, it would equally be expected for the man to forge a deal with that most vicious of the lions.

As they stood in the silent halls of elders and brilliant, upstart scholars, Pulzaricati asked his ally, “Do you think the younger Orin still lives?”

“He went away a long time ago, and I don’t think anyone, but you might hear so far away. So you tell me. Do you think he still draws breath?”

“The best I can assert,” the young Quetal remarked with a shake of the head, “His forces were still engaged earlier this cycle. I have my agents among them, but I don’t think even this news will shake them to action.

The tigress rest a paw on her colleague’s shoulder, her heavily draped robes pulling up to reveal the rippling stripes upon her arms, “Perhaps if we could send word, a show of faith, that we are united in our venture.”

“It would be a challenge to prove to yours as well as mine,” he watched the splotches of lighter and darker gray press away from the touch of the warm pads, “I believe it is time we do away with avatars far of field and take actions of our own.”

“Your winds carry farther than my flame. If you said the capitol and the rest of Kammherit’s sycophants, that would be one proposition.”

Pulzar shook his head all the more before turning away from the interior of the semi-open chamber. He rest himself against the portal out of the space and watched through the web-like limbs of so many spinneret trees. Khosi would be little more than bone and ash and what the rest of the village would carry away inside now. Like anything, he wished he could have taken just one morsel to keep safe inside himself. And though within the flesh, the face, the eyes of so many friends and followers in the village, he would see the face of his dear sister, she would never again be any closer than the pitch dark corridors that led deep into the minds of so many others. But he had partook of nearly enough of the ceremonies which had done the same to others. Through him, not only did the great winds buffet the waves across the coasts, carrying word from afar and breathing the sweet scents of the seasons onto the world, but there stood a portal into the next world.

Though the effect was lost on him, and Pulzar presumed anyone else who looked too deep into a mirror searching for that hint of otherness, his countrymen could see those lost loves and lovers through his eyes. Like the honored dead on Ly’ono Cronusen, he was a gallery of the deceased for all but those he shared blood with. To think that only Khosi would be admitted into the arcades of other minds to present herself to him whenever a glance was held too long seemed unjust. But to know in his own gaze others found that comfort was quite another thing. Pulzar had to wonder if the Kammherit’s should deserve such treatment.

Their rule had vanquished almost every landholder and ruler until they had met the new dynasty in their attempt to quash anything that stirred in the jungle. Even as recent as the cycle prior, Pulzar had contended with them to keep the honored nobles and scholars from meeting the blade. To devour them and have their light shine in the radiance of another seemed inappropriate. They had already done so well to leave an indelible mark on the world that to keep their remains alive in another was to never undo the damages left in the wake of such a voracious appetite for war. But could such a sigil marked into the minds of every last person of the time not serve as the cautionary tale against the avarice that was the Kammherits?

Bringing the three fingers of his left paw to rest over his eyes and bridge of his nose, Pulzar took in a heavy breath. He was quickly becoming overstimulated by all the happenings of recent and all the more so for the burdensome guilt laying too heavy on his heart. Even though Neusthera had done her best, he wished she had made the call differently. Though it would have been far from wise to protect Khosi in the tumult that ravaged the marketplace days before, Pulzar felt it would have been easier. Whatever happened in his stead meant one simple thing: no one could fault his lack of action against such dreadful situations.

He twisted back to face the tigress who had watched him deliberate with such self-recrimination for a span of minutes. No, as much as death would be a sweet and comforting release, it was not his place to say when he should pass, and hardly the time for it. Pulzar knew he had been exactly right to rage inwardly for his inactions, but he would not allow the lack on his part to continue. As though completing a conversation, he spoke to empty air, “That’s what I’ll do. Thera, I need you to round up everyone. I’ll strike the bell, but I won’t be back for a while. I might not be in any shape when I return, so they will have to decide without me. But I want a verdict. What will we do now that the Kammherits are gone? We’ll air on the side of fortune that Orin II has been removed from this world as well. Do not let the nobles dictate what will be done. If we need, we will bring in those remaining from the deserts to help decide. When I return, we will plan the next steps of the new dynasty.”

A gush of air rushed from the far, dusty reaches of the chamber and blew out like lungs deflating with a death rattle. No sooner than Neusthera had gazed behind her, she saw that the Quetal was gone. She had gone no more than three paces when the ivory bell in the unfading tower a quarter mile away in the jungle sounded once but with such a raucous cry that not a single soul, deaf or otherwise, could mistake its tone. Though Neusthera had seen so many acts by the leopard enough times that she insisted nothing could surprise her, she was nonetheless in awe as he sailed away into the sky like so many of the fire-tongued lizards of the jungle. Were she able, she couldn’t say she would permit herself to use her gifts among the flames in such a manner. Indeed, she had walked through fire, touched the stuff without the slightest repercussion, and her breath had oozed with a liquid flame more than once, but to be taken so far from where a mortal should dwell was insanity. Rest assured, she considered, it is often better to have the mad aligned with you than against.