Chapter 109 Tool to Use
ARYA
Mordecai’s cell was in the most heavily warded space in the temple complex and happened to be a chamber beneath the Moonwell itself, and that was where the magic was strongest, and so that was where he went. There was something fitting about it. Something that felt like the world making a small editorial comment.
I’d requested that the walk down be unaccompanied except for Luca and Bardon.
Sage had argued, of course. Caspian had argued more. I’d used the voice that didn’t require amplification and they’d both stood down. They were not happy about it but respected my right to be wrong.
The staircase wound down in a tight spiral, lit by magical light that was cooler here than in the upper temple. The Moonwell’s influence, maybe. Or just the depth.
“He’ll try to destabilize you,” Bardon said as we descended. “He’s been alone with his own mind for eight centuries. He’s had time to refine his techniques considerably.”
“I know.”
“He’ll use what he learned about you in the void. The things you fought, the doubts the darkness showed you. He has that information and he won’t hesitate—”
“Bardon.” I stopped walking. He stopped with me. “I know. I was there.”
He looked at me with the expression he’d been wearing more and more lately — something between pride and worry, two emotions that apparently coexisted comfortably in the face of an old man who’d spent his life adjacent to Moonborne power. “Of course. Forgive me.”
We continued down.
The cell door was iron reinforced with four distinct sets of magical warding, each keyed to a different practitioner’s signature so that no single caster could override them all. Through it I could feel a cold presence, like stepping near a window in winter without touching the glass.
“Ready?” Luca said.
“No. Let’s go.”
The warden was a calm, round-faced woman named Orin who radiated the competence of someone who’d seen everything and was surprised by none of it. She opened the outermost door and then stood back.
Inside was a room. We’d made it a room deliberately. Stone walls, a cot, a table, two chairs, adequate lighting. I’d argued for that against several council members who’d wanted something more punitive.
You don’t treat someone like an animal, I’d said, unless you want them to have nothing left to lose.
Mordecai sat at the table.
He looked like my grandfather might have looked, if I’d had one. Same dark hair as mine, same sharp architecture of the face, the same silver in the eyes that marked Moonborne blood. But everything else was wrong in ways that were hard to specifically identify. The stillness was too complete. The eyes tracked movement the way a predator does, constant and calculating, without the micro-expressions that normally accompany thought.
Many hundred years in the void had taken whatever he’d started with and refined it down to something essential and cold.
“Aeliana,” he said. He didn’t stand. He looked at Luca with the assessment you’d have when evaluating a threat. “And the king. I wondered if he’d insist on attending.”
“He insists on breathing my air. Coming to meetings is barely noteworthy.” I sat in the chair across from him. Luca stood to my right and slightly behind, which was a compromise we’d negotiated this morning: present but not crowding.
“You look better than you did in the void,” Mordecai said.
“You look worse.”
He almost smiled. “The cell wards are irritating. They press on me in ways that are difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t spent centuries as I have.”
“I spent time in the void. I have some frame of reference.”
“Weeks.” He said it without contempt, just measurement. “I was there for over eight hundred years.”
“I know. What I want to know is how.”
The slight shift in his expression told me this was the question he’d been waiting for. The reason he’d asked for this meeting. He’d known I’d need this information and he’d waited for me to need it badly enough to come to him.
That was fine. I’d known it too.
“The void isn’t what most practitioners believe it is,” he said. “They think of it as absence. Nothing. Emptiness. And in one sense, they’re correct. It’s the absence of physical reality. But absence isn’t the same as nothing.” He folded his hands on the table. “Absence is a state. A state has properties. Properties can be understood, manipulated, eventually controlled.”
“You learned to use the void itself as a power source.”
“I learned to become part of it. Partially.” He looked at his hands. “It takes from you. Everything that makes you specifically real, specifically individual is what it wants to dissolve. The only way to survive is to meet it partway. Give it some of what it wants and keep what you can’t afford to lose.”
“And what couldn’t you afford to lose?”
“My knowledge. My intent.” He met my eyes. “Everything else became negotiable.”
Luca made a quiet sound. Mordecai glanced at him without reaction.
“The Reclaimed,” I said.
Something moved in his eyes. Not surprise exactly. More like recalibration. “You’ve been receiving communications.”
I confirmed. “They want you released.”
“They want many things. My release is the stated objective. The actual objective is considerably more complex.” He leaned back slightly. “The Reclaimed aren’t a coalition in the traditional sense. They’re a network of practitioners, magical researchers, void theorists, power brokers, who’ve been working on a specific project for decades. Possibly longer.”
“What project?”
“Controlled access to the void.” He said it simply, like it was obvious. “Think of what it represents, if you could enter and exit reliably, if you could control the interaction between void and reality rather than being at its mercy. The power that resides in absence itself, accessible rather than destructive. It would be unprecedented.”
“It would be catastrophic,” Bardon said from behind me.
“That depends on who controls it.” Mordecai looked at me. “I spent eight hundred years in the void studying its properties. I am, functionally, the world’s only expert. The Reclaimed want that expertise. My release is a means to an end.”
“An end that involves destabilizing the Unity Council during an election period.”
“An end that involves chaos sufficient to create opportunity.” He paused. “I’m not their prisoner, Aeliana. I’m not their cause. I am their resource.”
“And you’re telling me this because—”
“Because I have no desire to be used as someone else’s resource.” That’s the first thing I’ve heard him say that sounded like a genuine feeling. “I have spent eight centuries planning my own return. My own agenda. Not as a tool for someone else’s ambition.” His eyes were cold but direct. “And at present, I find myself in the unusual position of having more in common with the Unity Council than with the people who claim to want my freedom.”
“That’s a very convenient position to arrive at while sitting in a cell.”
“Yes. Isn’t it.” He didn’t apologize for the convenience. “You can believe me or not. But I can give you names. Locations. Meeting points. Enough to find the Reclaimed’s operational center well within your allocated days.”