Deleted scene

(This was originally written as part of a much longer version of Scars, one of the stories in my anthology In Midnight’s Shadow, but it also works as a deleted scene from The Many Shades of Midnight, and provides a glimpse of Brivar’s research into Alyas’s blades)

Brivar in the library

The company was back in the city for less than a day before they were gone again, called to Cadria by an outbreak of the contagion. And Brivar, left behind at the temple, had gone down to the vaults and watched Ilyon kill himself.

Ilyon, who guarded the temple’s Isyr treasures.

Ilyon, who had been alone in the vaults with them for years and had plunged a blade into his own neck because the Isyr whispered to him and drove him mad.

As it had driven Alyas’s father mad.

Old mysteries faded into insignificance when set against the very present quandary of how to persuade Alyas to put aside his father’s Isyr blades before they did the same to him.

You must convince him it is necessary, Alondo had said, so Brivar set about doing just that. He went to the library.

Even as a boy, he had been fascinated by the temple library. One of his earliest memories of his apprenticeship was of standing amid the vast aisles, surrounded by their towering shelves, longing to explore the hoarded knowledge.

It had been several years before he was granted that privilege. The library of Yholis in Avarel was one of the greatest in Ellasia, and it had not gained that reputation, as the librarian had told him on more than one occasion, by letting little boys loose on its priceless books.

That library had never yet failed him in his quest for knowledge. If the answers he was seeking were to be found anywhere, they would be here. If only he could work out what he was looking for.

The librarian peered at him over a stack of books. “Well, well. If it isn’t the Duke of Agrathon’s personal surgeon.”

Brivar flushed. He had been unprepared for the teasing he’d encountered on his return to the temple, though it was mostly good natured. “I’m still an apprentice.”

The librarian chuckled. “As I’m sure Elenia reminds you at every opportunity. What can I do for you? Battlefield wounds? Common soldierly complaints?”

Brivar’s flush deepened. He had treated the city garrison many times during his apprenticeship. He knew the types of ailments soldiers tended to suffer from when they weren’t at war. “Metalworking. Isyr.”

“Indeed.” The librarian gave him a long look. “Then it’s our Qido section you want. The Qidans were the masters of Isyr. Their craftsmen were unequalled. Of course, they raped Ado to get their Isyrium, but that’s a different kind of history.” He led Brivar to the far end of the library, stopping halfway down an aisle and pulling a book from a shelf. “Most of the world’s finest pieces of northern steel were made in Qido, but you know that already, don’t you?”

Brivar nodded. It was the Qidan emperor who had given the blades to Gerrin-Raine Sera. By accident or design, a deadly gift.

The librarian ran his fingers along the row of spines, pausing at a volume bound in worn blue leather. “Our library in Lessing has the largest collection of Qidan art history outside the empire. What we have here is but a poor selection by comparison, but the Ado blades are more famous than perhaps you realise.” He handed Brivar the second book. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

***

Brivar found more than he was looking for. Amid the dusty treatises on metalworking and the manipulation of Isyr, he caught tantalising flashes of his quarry.

The Ado blades.

He had not known their name. He had not known they had a name. And they didn’t just have a name, they had a reputation. It was not a happy one.

Ever since they were forged two centuries ago by the great craftsman Stevan Baard, the Ado blades had carved a trail of blood through the pages of history. Priceless, alluring, coveted, these most precious of Isyr treasures had killed many men who had sought to possess them, the pride and bane of the Kranz mining family for whom they had been made.

Then, a hundred years ago, when the Isyrium crisis hit, when the mines and storehouses ran dry, the Kranz family had simply… ceased to be. The blades had disappeared, dropping out of the histories for a short time only to re-emerge at the end of the Isyrium Wars in the hands of the emperor Krado II.

The Mad Emperor.

Only he wasn’t mad, not then. Not for years.

Brivar didn’t need the history books to tell him about Krado II. The man who had brought the continent-engulfing wars to a close when he’d sponsored the Lankaran mining enterprise that had developed the process of refining impure Isyrium ore and returned peace and stability to the countries of Ellasia.

For three decades, Krado II had been, by Qidan standards, a relatively benevolent ruler. He had steered Qido back to prosperity after the wars, halting the empire’s relentless military expansion with a series of treaties with its neighbours, ushering in a new era of openness with the rest of the continent. Then everything had unravelled. Not all once, not overnight, but over the course of the next twenty years, as his behaviour became increasingly erratic, Krado II all but disappeared from the public eye, until eventually he was replaced, first by a regent, and then by his son, the present emperor.

Copies of his treatment notes were kept by every temple in Ellasia. Brivar read them. Krado had been deemed by his surgeons to be a danger to himself, and their notes recorded their growing frustration over their inability to remove from his possession certain items that could be used to do him harm. That did do him harm. Because when he died, escaping from his enforced isolation to burst in on an audience of the imperial court, Krado II had killed himself. With the Ado blades.

A few months ago, Brivar would have had little sympathy for the surgeons who hadn’t simply acted to remove the threat, but he hadn’t met Alyas then. And when he tried to imagine himself taking the blades from Alyas… it was an uncomfortable thought. Even worse was the thought of the consequences if he could not be persuaded to give them up willingly.

The parallels between Krado’s death and Gerrin-Raine Sera’s were uncanny. Horrifying. There could be no doubt that the blades had driven both men to suicide, but Brivar was no closer to understanding why.

Why them? Why this Isyr?

And why were the Lathai unaffected?

He went back to the librarian and came away with an armful of books on Qidan history, on Ado, on Isyrium mining, on diseases of the mind. He read again the temple’s notes of Krado’s illness and treatment and had the librarian hunt down records of similar cases, of which there were a surprising number. And he tried to put it all together, but it still didn’t make sense.

He went back to the librarian. “What did you mean,” he asked, “about Ado?”

***

The Qidan rape of Ado made difficult reading. Rich in mineral wealth but nothing else, the empire hadn’t even bothered to conquer its small, downtrodden neighbour. It had simply stripped Ado of everything of value over the space of half a century, then left it little more than a hollowed-out carcass.

Ado, where Isyrium had first been discovered and mined. Ado, for which Alyas’s blade were named, because so much of the world’s old Isyr originated in its remote, untamed wilderness.

If the early mining syndicates had needed somewhere to dump the waste from their new operations, what better place than Ado? And when Ado could take no more, they must have found ways to dispose of it in other places, in other countries, until those too were full to overflowing with the deadly pollution.

But there was one place in Ellasia the syndicates could not go. One place they could not dump their toxic waste, because Alyas had planted his feet there and said no. The Lathai mountains.

Brivar was on his feet with no recollection of how he’d got there. “It’s not the Isyr,” he said. “It’s where the Isyr comes from. That’s what matters.”

The librarian regarded his excitement with a jaundiced eye. It was late, they had been at it for days, and Brivar was not making sense. “Isyr does not come from anywhere. It is made.”

It was true. Isyr had been forged from the purest Isyrium, by craftsmen who trained a lifetime in the art. The elation faded.

Then the librarian said, “Of course, the Isyrium from which it is made must have come from somewhere. But why that should make a difference, I do not know.”

Brivar, who’s heart lifted at of course, felt it sink again. Because he couldn’t answer the question that really mattered. Why? He could not explain why Isyr made a hundred years before the land it came from was despoiled should be affected by the death of that land. But just because he couldn’t explain it did not mean he should not act on it. That Alyas should not act on it. Surely now he would give up the blades before they killed him?

But when he confronted Alyas with the death of Ilyon, with the madness and suicide of the Qidan emperor, and Alyas slammed the door on his way out, refusing to listen, Brivar knew that all the knowledge the library contained would not be enough. Because there was nothing rational about this.

Alyas knew the danger. He had always known, and he would not save himself. Somehow, Brivar would have to do that for him.