The Crown Achievement

Synopsis

The morning belonged to Gwen, who talked about her family for the first time. Her mother Althia sang, and died of the same wasting disease Gwen carries, which is not supposed to pass from parent to child. She was the eldest of three; she believes her brother Elias and her sister Leora did not survive. She left Amulta six or seven years ago, after the estate and her father’s laboratory burned with all his newest notes in it, and named one Amultan noblewoman who might still hold his research, while making plain how little she wants to write to Amulta’s nobility, on whose sanction her father’s work had depended.

The point of the day was to walk her into the hidden Mól hall beneath the Crack, the fallen-pillar chamber with the water basin, and see whether the place was what had been draining her. It did nothing to her. It did a great deal to Aldo. A soft lump rose between his shoulder blades, and when it was bared it carried the vague indents of an eye, a nose and an open mouth pressing up through his skin. Gwen, who sees magic whether she wants to or not, said the crown on his head had changed the instant he entered the room; Mikhail looked and found its aura had gone from enhancement to summoning, the new thing all but swallowing the old.

So they cut it out. Aldo was dosed insensible on a numbing root, Koa held him, and Mikhail worked the mass free: a large blue ooze in an egg-like membrane, anchored into muscle. Handling it afterwards, Aldo suddenly remembered meeting it: it had come at him from under a bed in the sludge-keep beneath Haudh-Gwenn and forced itself down his throat, and that is when he began to see the Elder. Gwen, meanwhile, was sick in the middle of the room, and there was a faint glow in it: she had been carrying traces of the soul-ooze all along, in her father’s own tea remedy.

Elliot arrived, lectured everyone on oozes, and took more interest in the crown than the creature; Ashanti took the ooze away to study. Mikhail and Elliot sat up all night over a green volume of the Mól Encyclopædia and broke its cipher. The Empire was run by great clans, the emperor’s Clan Saytar and eight more: Säv, Zarkhûn, Twbykh, Muharib, Khazûn, Barzûl, Darakûn, and the lesser Nabrûl. Seven curse-keeps; seven clans that are neither the emperor’s nor the least; a relic apiece. The crown Aldo has been wearing is the Crown of Echoing Steel, and it is Muharib. The hooked sword in Beltran’s hands is the Wraith Blade, and it is Zarkhûn’s. And the motto on the Ring of Säv is the Muharib’s own: by thy service and by thy loyalty, all paths open to thy sovereignty.

By morning Ashanti had an answer: not the curse’s soul-goo at all, but an inert simulacrum, a doppelganger, settled into a vague unformed shape. Three courses were argued for hours: destroy it, crown it and grow it large enough to question, or push the crystallized soul-goo Gwen had brought up into it. Koa hated every version of the conversation. Yara was fetched to smell for evil and found none in it. So they crowned it, and it grew to the size of a child; Aldo pressed the crystal through its membrane, and the body reshaped into a woman folded into a child’s frame; and they crowned it again, and it stood to full height and woke.

She was translucent and sea-blue and terrified. She spoke an old tongue, asked after her masters, and read Mikhail’s mind while he was still deciding what to say. Her last memory was of running for the fields during the rebellion, and of Vëné and the one whose power rots the ground holding the Mól off so that people could get away, and she gave that second fighter a name. Nancáro, Vëné’s brother. Aldo knew the description at once: it is the Elder, who has walked them through every keep.

She had been freed, she said, because I served, which the party heard, and let pass. Her name is Rheem, and it means merciful rain; she was born in a drought year to parents praying for some. Then Aldo reached down to help her off the floor, and she flowed into a perfect copy of him (every hair of the mustache, every thread of the coat), and the two of them stared at one another.