“It’s embroidered on your uniform!”
He looked down at himself and then looked up again, confusion writ large on his face. Arienne felt a pang of pity for him as she realized that he did not know he was dead yet. She wondered if she should tell him, but she knew if she did, they might never move on to the more urgent matters at hand.
“Where are we?” Noam said.
“Listen carefully… Well, sit down on that bed first.”
Noam obediently sat down on the edge of the bed. Arienne began to tell him of how an Imperial Powered weapon, the Star of Mersia, had brought about the destruction of the whole country; that no one knew what exactly had happened; and that she had come to Danras to find out.
While she told him, distrust, horror, rage, and disappointment passed over Noam’s face.
“All right, now ask me whatever questions you have,” Arienne finished, preparing herself.
Noam said in a sad voice, “So I died then?”
“Probably… I’m sorry.” She knew it wasn’t her fault he had died, and that he had been dead for over a hundred years, but she still felt sorry all the same.
Swallowing hard, Noam asked, very carefully and in a reverent tone, “Then are you… our god… ma’am?”
She burst out laughing, more out of relief than at the absurdity of what he was asking.
“Not at all! My room is not your afterlife. It’s a space I made in my mind using sorcery. You came into it when I didn’t have my guard up, and siphoned off my Power to reclaim your old form, at least in my mind.”
“I don’t remember trying to get in here.”
“You were a ghost for a hundred years, so your desire to find your form again was probably instinctual,” Arienne guessed, shrugging.
Noam looked a little skeptical, but Arienne had questions of her own.
“What kind of an Imperial engineer believes in a god? Where are you from?”
“… Ebria.”
A country mentioned in her studies at the Imperial Academy. It was a small province in the northeast of the great continent. A professor had derisively noted they prayed to a god they had never even seen.
“Where they used to worship the, er, ‘Nameless God’?”
Noam nodded. “Some of us still worship… Oh, I suppose if a hundred years have passed, things could be different.” His face turned somber, even for a ghost.
The Empire rounded up sorcerers at a young age and maintained control over them until death, whereupon their corpses were converted to Power generators. The sorcerer-engineers, like Noam, were the ones who built and maintained these generators. Noam had likely been taken from Ebria by the Empire and trained to become an engineer, then assigned to look after the Power generator of Mersia before he met his doom here. This could’ve easily been her own fate. She shuddered at the thought of spending her life alongside preserved cadavers, then remembered that she was conversing with a ghost, in an underground cemetery.
“Well, Noam of Ebria, I have some more pressing questions.You’re here by the good grace of my Power, so you can help me a little, can’t you?”
Noam nodded.
“The world believes that Mersia rose up against the Empire and the Empire extinguished the country through a weapon called the Star of Mersia. Was there really a rebellion?” When the Grim King Eldred had lived in Arienne’s mind, he’d told her that Mersia had always been a faithful vassal of the Empire. She needed to know the truth.
Noam frowned as he considered the question. “There were always a few people who wanted the Empire gone, but Mersia generally had good relations with the Empire. The prefect was almost always appointed from the local population and there weren’t any significant incidents during the seventy years of Imperial rule. And I didn’t have any problems working here.”
So, that part of Eldred’s story at least seemed true.
“That lullaby you sang to Tychon. Do you remember singing it?” she asked, changing the subject.
Noam was startled, and he shook his head.
“Just a moment ago,” Arienne persisted, “you said something about Tychon’s margin of error being something or other. Were you in charge of Power generator Tychon?”
“Yes. Because Grand Inquisitor Lysandros can only move with Tychon. When he was stationed here, it was one of my tasks to make sure every day that the generator functioned properly.”
