Chapter 44: Vivianne – Duties
Vivianne wanted Marcus to stay home.
‘Why do you insist on patrolling the Wave? Farheim and Inlang can’t raid us any longer.’
‘Thanks to you, I know,’ said Marcus. ‘You can stop showing off now.’
Vivianne would never let her brother forget she was the one who found out how to defend Deran from northern invasions.
‘Why build those watch towers on the Wave if you insist on riding everywhere all the time?’ she asked. ‘Do you fear the North may still invade us?’
‘I am yet to see a vulture giving up on carrion.’
Vivianne twisted her nose. ‘Deran isn’t dead meat.’
‘Franária is,’ said Marcus. ‘If I was in Farheim or Inlang and someone put an obstacle in my way, I’d find a means to overcome that obstacle, and I would do it in a way to make sure no one got in my way ever again. Stop arguing, Vivianne. I know you had planned to visit Clément and explore those hidden architectures of the Rock, but our wishes come after our duties. I will go on patrol, and you will look after Lune until I am back.’
More than anything, Vivianne wanted to explore the Rock again, especially now that she had the original maps of the castle, but Marcus was right: she was a Master of Lune and her duty to her castle and her people came before any architecture.
A few days after Marcus left, Vivianne got news that King Clément was being absurd again. With only fifteen soldiers, the king had camped in the south of Deran, practically on the border with Baynard and close enough to Lune to make his safety Vivianne’s concern. So, she wasn’t betraying Marcus or her duty by leaving Lune now. On the contrary, it was her duty to take Clément back to the Rock.
Vivianne rode over the undulating Deranian fields with two hundred soldiers. A few hours after she left Lune, her butt hurt so much that she had to walk, which made the journey a lot longer. It must have been great to travel on Satironese trains during the Empire. The trains were faster than horses, more comfortable than chariots.
‘I don’t understand how ignorant the Franish people are,’ she had once said to the Wraith. ‘Where has sorcery gone to, and why did normal trains stop working? How could this knowledge simply disappear?’
‘Wisdom and war, tyranny and knowledge,’ the Wraith had said. ‘Where one thrives the other withers.’
Vivianne then stood up from her desk, walked away from her maps, and looked out the window, where she could see the remains of an old shoe factory. During the empire, Lune produced shoes. When the Land of the Banished emerged and Sátiron disappeared, sorcery began to decline. Without the magic energy that fed the machines, the factories began to close, one by one. The buildings were dismantled, their stones used to build something else.
‘How could we forget?’ Vivianne insisted. ‘Franária was part of the empire, which means that we had access to Satironese science. All we had to do was pass it on. There was no need to invent new locomotives, as long as we didn’t forget how to make them. Sorcery was there, all we had to do was not lose it. Why did Patire, Deran, and Baynard allow a stupid war to break that knowledge?’
‘You speak of war as it is now,’ said the Wraith. ‘Lazy and predictable, like a big yawn after a heavy, bloody meal that has lasted four hundred years. But the beginning wasn’t like this. A war that is born is hungry for horror, it leaves no space for teaching. The common man becomes an animal, survival is his only purpose, and the only knowledge that matters is how to kill. Sorcerers were hunted down for fear of their powers. Magic objects, without a sorcerer to keep them running, die as well. Magic reactors are frail, they break too easily.’
‘Can’t you create new reactors?’ asked Vivianne. ‘They were built by a mage in Sátiron, weren’t they?’
‘I know nothing of sorcery. It was Fregósbor who invented it. He created the reactors, and he was working on a way to make the other countries magically self-sufficient.’
The Wraith was then quiet. The shadows inside the hood became more solid, like clouds preparing to rain. He seldom spoke about Sátiron, about the people he had known there; people who got buried in the darkness of the Land of the Banished.
Vivianne would have liked to ask more about Sátiron, sorcery, mysteries, Nakamura, the two empresses, but she didn’t want to make the Wraith sad. She went back to a more routine topic.
‘If war was so terrible at the beginning,’ she said, ‘it should have decimated the Franish population.’
‘It did,’ said the Wraith. ‘Don’t you see the emptiness?’
‘Emptiness?’
‘The cities look abandoned and there are too many ruins. Think of the great Franish fortresses: the Rock here in Deran, Chambert in Baynard, and the Halls of Snow in Patire. Castles of that proportion were built to house at least fifteen thousand soldiers each. Plus civilians. Nowadays in Deran, if we sum up Lune, the Rock, and Sananssau, we might get four thousand soldiers. In Patire, if we count the soldiers from Beloú and the Halls of Snow, we might have five thousand. Baynard, with Debur, Fabec, and Tuen barely have another four thousand, especially after that revolution in Debur. This is less than fifteen thousand soldiers in the whole of Franária.’ The Wraith shook his head. ‘There were diseases, fires, and hunger as well as ferocious battles in the beginning of the War. You can tell by the size of the cities and castles that the population of Franária was very close to being wiped out.’
‘That was also the reason,’ he said, ‘why the three sub-kingdoms agreed to restricting the battles to one battlefield. At some point in this War’s history, the killing had to be restrained.’
‘The Mouth of War,’ said Vivianne.