Prologue |
The hypnotizing ripples foamed serenely along the surface of the clear, almost transparent mountain river. It divided the blossoming plateau into two halves. To both the west and east rose the snow-capped peaks of the ancient mountains.
It was said that before the arrival of the New Monarchy, with its guns and “analyzers,” the people of the valley remembered the names of these mountain peaks. They’d brought small offerings to roadside shrines and temples, honoring those who’d lived on the plateau, just as those on the plateau had honored the mountain gods.
But then the cannon salvos had echoed through the air, and black powder was turned into fertilizer for new crops in the fields… And somewhere to the north, more miles of railroad tracks were always being laid down, with steam locomotives rattling their steel wheels.
Magical beasts, whose cores were once the coveted resource of wizards, were either exterminated or driven so deep into the mountains that hunting them became impossible.
The scientists of the New Monarchy drew maps and translated the local dialect into the common tongue, but they didn’t bother with the myriad names and traditions. Then, 196 years ago, after the end of the Dark Lord’s rebellion, which had gathered many races of the Firstborn under its banner, the scribes named this mountain range the Alcade, and the natives were called Alcadians.
That had been the decision of the scholars in their scholarly mantles and their campuses in the Metropolis. They never asked the mountain people for their opinion, much less their gods. Scholars generally didn’t believe in gods and didn’t care if the feeling was mutual...
Time passed, and soon, due to maps, books, railroads, roads made from strange stone, schools, saloons, horseshoes, steel plows, and many other heaps of metal and objects of “civilization,” the valley dwellers themselves forgot what they were once called.
Shrines were abandoned and surrendered to moss and the mountain forests. The names of the gods were forgotten. Ancient rituals and customs were dressed up in the costumes of children’s holidays. Wise men in capes were replaced by village teachers who came to work in the schools of stone and wood. Their inconspicuous suits smelled of chalk and cheap spirits.
Even the ancient altars, where only the most secret paths led, fell under the onslaught of clanking metal and the rustling, scholarly robes of civilization. Now, in their place, stood the wooden churches of the Face of Light, and a pastor in black attire with a book of holy scripture in his hand preached there.
And so, the valley that had once worshipped the mountain gods and their descendants had become just another “Subject of the New Monarchy, under the control of the Three Chambers of the Tenth Convocation Parliament and the Twentieth Congress Government,” called the “Foothill Province.”
That’s what the children were taught in those very same schools in their Social Structure classes, anyway.
It took a little less than two centuries for civilization to turn the valley’s inhabitants into true Alcadians. The kind whose women wore dresses, worked as seamstresses in stuffy factory workshops, served drinks in saloons and taverns, raised children, brought them to school, faithfully attended church on the sixth day, and loved their husbands and fathers.
The same husbands and fathers who toiled in the mines, extracting that precious resource with which the Alcade mountains were so rich, or who strained their shoulders in the sawmills. Husbands and fathers also sweated in the furnaces of the adjacent factories, where their beloved wives and daughters sewed them thick work clothes.
Both bent their backs in the fields, toiling on farms and looking to a surely brighter future, hoping that their children, after a good education, might even become accountants or, with the Face of Light ’s blessing, lawyers or doctors, and move to the city.
The city...
They say that cities are like villages, only hundreds of times larger. They say that there are houses made from artificial stone, metal and glass there; they say there are streets where carriages ride without horses, and iron poles burn on the sidewalk, providing light without oil or wood. They say that hundreds of thousands of people live there and...
They say a lot.
Especially those Alcadians who have been lucky enough to visit. In all the surrounding settlements and villages put together, there wouldn’t be more than a hundred such people. It was a long way to the nearest big city of the New Monarchy. And to get to the first railroad station, one had to cross wild prairies. This meant spending a week in a stagecoach in the middle of an endless sea of grass and hills. A sea full of land pirates and predatory beasts.
And then there were a few more days on the train. And if someone believed that it might be safer to be stuck in a metal box, steaming along steel rails, then... they would be wrong. “Pirates” — robbers and monsters — didn’t simply disappear the moment a traveler stepped onto the platform. Quite the opposite, actually...
So, it wasn’t surprising that the Alcadians, all of them so civilized, cooped up as they were in their villages and settlements, sometimes gazed up at the mountains. When school was out, when the church bells stopped ringing, when the shifts changed in the mines, on the farms and in the sawmills, when the sun no longer shone over the hills and fields, they would secretly, quietly, at dusk, tell their children about the mountain people.
About men and women with skin kissed by flame and hair like the wings of the night. Mighty and ancient, part of the Firstborn races, they’d been those conceived by the mountain gods and then given to the beasts to raise. That was why their eyes were not human, with vertical slit pupils and irises that almost completely covered the whites.
It was said that the mountain people once lived here in great numbers. Those abandoned old shrines and altars that could sometimes be found along the roads and in the clearings of the sawmills belonged to them. There, the mountain dwellers had prayed to their mountain gods, who’d been cruel, but just.
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And the Alcadians still remembered various stories about these people.
They remembered that they’d possessed secrets that the civilized people of the New Monarchy had called magic. Or that the mountain people had had terrifying strength — their women could carry glacial boulders, and the men could cut down trees with their bare hands. They also remembered how the mountain people had learned from beasts at an early age, so that their children could wean themselves from their parents and take care of themselves in the harsh conditions of life among the mountain peaks.
They said that there were once those who learned from snow leopards, becoming warriors as formidable and fearless as a wild storm. And those who’d walked the paths of the lynx, gaining the skills of the best trackers. Then there were the apprentices of the bear, who were able to overcome any obstacle in the river and defeat any opponent.
There were also those who, with the guidance of mountain goats, learned how to find food even in the most inhospitable conditions, or those who ran after eagles — such mountaineers could cross all of Alcade faster than the trains that now ran on the railroads.
But most of all, children loved the stories about those who learned from... a little squirrel. They gained the ability to hear the whispers of trees, the laughter of mountain streams, the grim tales of stones and boulders; they became keepers of stories and legends.
And there were also... students of the wolves. Those who journeyed to unknown lands, where they would find that mysterious and melodious word — “magic.”
But adults rarely mentioned them, more often focusing on the fact that the mountain people were among the first of the Firstborn to join the Dark Lord in seceding from the New Monarchy. They were almost completely eradicated by the New Monarchy’s troops as a result. No matter how strong, fast, powerful, cunning, or sharp-eyed a Highlander was, what could they do against the volleys of cannons, the organized cavalry and the learned mages of the Metropolis.
Especially since, as the story went, on the day that the humans invaded the mountain, the Great Mage of the Highlanders, who’d once stood side by side with the Dark Lord, did not come to their aid.
But, as was almost always the case, a grim story was being cloaked in a light shroud of instructive myths and beautiful legends. Children were often told about the Dark Lord’s wondrous artifacts: the Sword of Darkness, which could cut light itself, and the Staff of Stars, which gave the Lord’s spells such power that even fifty Imperial Mages couldn’t overcome them.
And, of course, there was the frightening prophecy that claimed that after three signs appeared to the people, the Lord would return to destroy his enemies and fulfill his oath. The first sign — during the height of summer and drought, snow would suddenly fall and the air would crackle with fierce frost. The second sign — at midday, the world would be enveloped in impenetrable night. And as for the third sign — it remained unknown, supposedly lost somewhere in history.
But let’s leave these stories to the grandparents and their grandchildren and return to the Highlanders.
Of course, some of them survived. They retreated deep into their mountains, but in the aftermath, no one brought offerings to the shrines, no one prayed to the old gods. Soon, the few remaining Highlanders were forced to descend into the valley. Their men married Alcadian girls, worked in the fields and factories, even quarried stone beneath their native mountains. Their children did not learn from the beasts, did not sing songs to the mountain gods. Their skin, once the color of red copper, paled; their hair no longer resembled the night, and their pupils rounded out.
And so, the proud inhabitants of the snowy peaks dissolved into the valley.
“And what were they called?” A particularly perceptive child might ask. Having just received their “state analyzer,” they would point the rune-engraved plate attached to their wrist at a flower, then at a table, then at a small crystal at the base of the kitchen stove.
And the runes on the plate would form inscriptions:
<Household flower. Danger: none. Power Level: None. Lei Concentration: None.
<Kitchen table. Danger: None. Power Level: None. Lei Concentration: none.
<Household accumulator, produced by the company “Bri-I-Men.” Danger: Minimal. Power Level: Minimal. Lei Concentration: 1 Ray of the 1st Star.>
Without even understanding what the runes on the tablet were spelling out, the child would feel that there was a certain mystery hidden behind what was happening. Something that seemed ordinary to everyone else, but was still magical and mystical to them, a child who had just started school.
Children could feel this world much more deeply and more subtly and would know the power of names.
The adults, glancing back to make sure no neighbor who might report them to the authorities was listening in, would whisper in response:
“Matabar.”
“Matabar...” The children would repeat with a sigh until their mouths were covered by a hand.
It was forbidden to speak the name of this Firstborn race aloud. If not outright imprisonment, a fine from the Sheriff was certain to come in response to such an audacious act of defiance. And when one worked six days out of seven, sixteen hours out of twenty-four, and barely earned eight imperial exes a month, a fine of four exes and fifty kso was not a sum one could afford to pay just to convey knowledge from the distant past.
“Do they still live there?” The child would then ask, looking out of the window to where the reflection of the oil lamp danced so enticingly.
As if somewhere among the mountain peaks, fires had already been lit and the Matabar now danced and sang songs, communicating with their terrible gods.
“There are rumors,” the mother would say as she washed the dishes, “that the family of rangers who guard the mountain forest against smugglers have traces of ancient blood. But those are just rumors, dear.”
“Can I be a Mat...” The child would inevitably start to say, and then, upon seeing the stern looks of their mother and father, immediately fall silent.
They would sense that there was a certain mystery there, a secret in all of this. And they would want to be a part of it — to be like their parents. To hold their tongue just as tight.
Looking out of the window, they would fantasize about the students of the beasts, the mighty Matabar people. But not for long. Soon, they too would be caught up in the millstones of civilization. School, work, and the same nighttime conversations with their own children. They would have no interest in the ranger family, who rarely showed up in town, usually just to sell furs and buy flour and spices.
And so, they would never know that somewhere among the mountain peaks, where the hypnotizing ripples foamed serenely along the surface of the clear, almost transparent river, on the bend, occupying a wide hill, stood an old three-story house. One big enough to house four generations of a family under its roof.
But its dilapidated, moss-covered roofs had long since sagged, and there was no laughter or song on its many verandas — only broken crates, smashed furniture, and other junk scattered about. One of the two chimneys had collapsed, and the other only occasionally puffed smoke.
All the windows above the second floor had long since been boarded up and covered with mats, peeking through the gaps in the shabby wood.
The pier by the river was hopelessly broken — most of it had been carried into the mountains by the current, and what remained was only used as a washboard.
A family of four had no use for the huge watchtower built here by the civilized people of the New Monarchy. At least not all of it.
But they still loved this old, huge and strange house.
That night, as someone down in the valley told their child stories about the Matabar, the last of them looked at the lights blossoming like night flowers at the foot of the mountains without knowing anything about what was coming.
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