Soul of the Fire

Ann knew liars were the Creator's children, the same as she, and that she was duty bound to view them with patience and forgiveness, but she couldn't. She simply couldn't abide liars and that was that. She was resigned to the fact that in the afterlife she would have to take her lumps for it.

Begging was proving to be time-consuming, so in order to cover as much ground as possible, Ann tried to do as little of it as possible. Every night the camp was jumbled all over again, making it impossible to rely on the merit of previous searches, so she determined to make as much of each foray as possible. Fortunately, because the army was so vast, they did tend to stay in roughly the same ordermuch like a string of cargo wagons stopping along a road for the night.

In the mornings it was well over an hour after the leading edge started out before the tail began to move. At night the lead was cooking dinner long before the rear guard halted. They didn't cover a great deal of ground each day, but their progress was inexorable.

Beyond their purpose, Ann was disturbed by their direction of travel. The Order had been gathering for quite some, time down around Grafan Harbor in the Old World. When they finally began to move, they had streamed up from those shores into the New World, but they turned with the coast, following it west, to where Ann had unexpectedly encountered them.

Ann was no military tactician, but it struck her immediately as an odd thing for them to do. She had assumed they would attack north into the New World. That they were heading in such a seemingly fruitless direction told her there must be a good reason; Jagang did nothing without reason. While he was ruthless, confident, and bold, he was not rash.

Jagang was skilled in the fine art of patience.

The people of the Old World had always been anything but a homogeneous society. Ann had, after all, been observing them for over nine centuries. She considered it charitable to merely say they were diverse, fractious, and intractable. There had been no two areas of the Old World that could agree on up from down.

In the nearly twenty years she had been watching him, Jagang had methodically consolidated the seemingly ungovernable into a cohesive society. That it was brutal, corrupt, and inequitable was another matter; he had made them one and in so doing forged a force of unprecedented might.

What the parents might have been-independent and loyal only to their small place in the world-the children were not. A large percentage of the Imperial Order troops and command had been babes or young children when the Order seized power. They had grown up under the rule of Jagang, and as children always did, believed as they were taught by those who led them, adopting the same values and morals.

The Sisters of the Light, however, served a higher purpose than the affairs of governance. Ann had seen elected governments, kings, and other rulers come and go. The Palace of the Prophets and the Sisters, existing under the ancient spell that dramatically slowed their aging, always remained. While she and her Sisters did work to help bring out mankind's better nature, their calling was in areas of the gift, not rule.

But she did keep an eye to rulers, lest they interfere with the Creator's gift. Jagang, in recently committing himself to the elimination of magic, had overstepped matters of rule. His reign had become material to her. Now, he was moving into the New World, in his efforts to extinguish magic.

Ann had observed over time that whenever Jagang swallowed a new land or kingdom, he would settle in as he began to infiltrate the next, and the next after that. He would find willing ears and, with tempting promises of juicy slices of the graft to come, woo them into weakening their own defenses in the mask of virtue: peace.

Some lands' discipline and defenses were so eviscerated from within that they threw out a welcoming carpet for Jagang rather than dare defy him. The foundations of some formerly strong lands became so riddled with the termites of diminished purpose, so decayed with the decadence of smug moderation, and so emaciated with the vacillating aims of appeasers, that even when they saw the enemy coming and did resist, they were easily toppled when the Imperial Order finally pushed.

With the unexpected direction the Order was taking to the west, Ann was beginning to worry that Jagang had been doing the unimaginable: sending envoys on covert missions sailing around the great barrier-years before Richard destroyed the Towers of Perdition. Such missions would have been incredibly risky. Ann would know; she had done so herself.

It was possible Jagang had books of prophecy, or wizards with the talent, who gave him reason to believe the barrier would come down. After all, Nathan had told Ann that very thing.