Toriman's desk was set directly in front of the fireplace; it was almost as impressive as the room itself. It was at least seventeen feet long, made of a single slab of rosewood; it was supported by four thin, almost delicate legs which, along with the border that hung down about five inches from the rosewood sheet, were richly carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Complicated but not profuse gilt moldings ran around the desk.
Turned toward the fire was a rather large, high-backed chair; it too was done in rosewood with gilt embellishments. It was upholstered in black and gold brocade. General Toriman sat there, leafing through an ancient folio with the General's crest on the covers.
Toriman was old now, almost sixty-eight, and his face showed the reflected horror and misery of a lifetime spent on the battlefield. His hair, iron gray, was combed back severely and was remarkably thick for a man of his age. His face, with its interlacing network of lines and old scars, was a marvel of shadows; his deeply set eyes sat in two dark caves, betraying their presence only by an occasional glint as they caught the firelight. His sharp nose, solid jaw and almost lipless mouth completed the cold portrait.
As he rose to greet Limpkin, one could see that his marvelous physique of latter days had deteriorated only slightly; the General still carried his bulk with the brutal grace of an Imperial Hussar. Limpkin felt as if he had moved under a thunder cloud.
The two men were not the best of friends. Toriman had no real friends, but for the past ten years they had known each other fairly well. Toriman was the first to speak, apologizing for his dragging Limpkin out on such a beastly night, but he thought that he had come upon something which he and his Office should know about as soon as possible. He motioned toward another high-backed chair, this one not quite so large, which Limpkin pulled close by the fire. A servant brought in some wine, and the General produced a small walnut thermidor from amid the clutter of maps and documents on the desk.
When both men had settled down with their goblets and cigars, Toriman spoke. "Limpkin, I hope that you will forgive the faulty memory of an old man, but am I correct in saying that your job involves something to do with the development of the nation? I think you told me at a party once, but as I said . . . " Toriman touched a finger to his forehead; firelight glinted off a gold ring.
"Yes. 'Getting the country back on its feet' is the usual phrase. Although I am, at times, really quite confounded as to how I am to recreate a world that I know nothing about and one which might"—Limpkin's voice dropped slightly—"exist only in legend." He brightened a bit. "But, it's an easy job; most hopeless ones are. I can sit in my fine office on George Street and fire off no end of orders and plans. And the results? My dear Toriman, you can see as well as I that the Caroline Republic and the rest of the World is nothing more than a sometimes-freezing, sometimes-burning hell hole. It appears that it has, for all intents and purposes, always been so and will continue to be so, or worse, until some benevolent deity chooses to bring it to an end."
"You paint a discouragingly black picture."
"The model is black"—Limpkin paused—"a fact which the exploits of the 42nd Imperial Hussars and other elements of other armies have not helped."
Instead of being insulted Toriman only seemed to relax a little. "Correct, more or less; I offer no apologies and no excuses. Those days are dead now." Toriman drew thoughtfully on his cigar and stared into the fire. "But we can hardly allow the unalterable past to sully the plotting of a brighter future, can we?"
"Hardly. Please continue," breathed Limpkin, more relieved than anything else.
"Do you remember, once, several years ago, I had had lunch with you and several other officials? And do you remember that you had taken me aside and remarked that the trouble with the World lay not in its barren fields, but within the spirits of the men who inhabit them?"
"Yes, of course. As a matter of fact, I had been thinking of that very instance on the walk here."
"Good, fine. I have a report"—Toriman lifted a fat folder from the desk—"whose contents I will not bore you with." He dropped it with a slight smile. "In substance, though, it says almost exactly what you had suspected: something has been lost. Call it the ego, the will to power, or whatever you mean; we both know what I am talking about."
"Then I was right?" Limpkin asked a little incredulously.
"Oh, quite right. Now, don't go complimenting yourself," Toriman said, smiling, the firelight glittering off his shadow-cloaked eyes. "Many men have suspected it before. The trouble is that few could prove it and fewer still would admit it to themselves. I must confess that even I had some trouble in getting used to the idea that most of the people alive today are virtually emotional eunuchs.
"But that is true, as I said, of only most. I hope that I am not being overly vain in considering myself in the minority. And I hope that my estimation of you, Limpkin, is equally correct. But back to the report. . . ." Toriman picked up the folder once again and began leafing through it.
"This essence, which neither of us can precisely name, was probably lost long before any modern records were penned. But the legends, as far as I can tell, contain a great deal of truth. I have traveled much in the service of my country"—Limpkin thought he could detect a trace of disgust, but he chose to disregard it—"into many strange—the rabble would call them enchanted—lands and I have seen many of the relics that our fathers left behind. They are older than you or I can ever possibly imagine; their character strikes the people dumb with awe—which, of course, defines our whole problem right there. The Grayfields with its fleets of spectral aircraft, overgrown with fireweeds and vines, but as real as my hand. The Fortress at the mouth of the Tyne River—beside it even my ancient and mighty Caltroon appears to be a wooden lash-up built only yesterday."
Limpkin was amazed and somewhat frightened to find the myths of his provincial childhood suddenly acquiring awesome substance; but he also found an odd comfort in it. "Please go on."
Toriman looked into his eyes for an instant and nodded. "Go on? How far shall I go on? For every legend there are ten actual wonders. The hulks of great ships, aircraft, and machines litter the edges of the World, and not even the legends attempt to understand them."
"Just by way of curiosity, why have we not heard more of these things?"
Toriman shrugged. "Who can say? The World is an incredibly vast place, far outpacing the estimates of even the wisest geographers. It is easy for even works of the Tyne Fortress' magnitude to become lost in it.
"Our World, Limpkin, the civilized one, is but a small island. The ravages of a hundred thousand pogroms, wars, inquisitions, and 'rectifications of history' have further helped to erase any sure knowledge of the past. The might and power and skills have almost all been purged from the earth."
Limpkin nodded and then simply asked, "How did it happen?"
"What happen?"
"The end of the First Days."
"Oh? Not even the Black Libraries can tell us that, but I can make a guess as to how long ago it happened: three thousand years."
"Small wonder that traces of the old World are so hard to find. It must have been an incredible cataclysm."
"Perhaps. Some volumes in the Black Library at Calnarith hypothesize an Apocalypse of some sort, but these accounts are always submerged in so much religious rot—Second Comings and the like—as to be almost useless. But whether our loss in man occurred just before any Armageddon or, more likely, as the result of one, is irrelevant. The thing was lost and then all the horrible decline followed. Perhaps men just went to bed one night, and when they awoke they found that the night had stolen something from them.
"In some places the fall was rapid and absolute, as it is in the far west and south. In other places, here for instance, the fall was slow and agonizing. Hell, Limpkin, if I see aright, we are still sliding and won't stop until our lands are as sterile as the Black Barrens, our cities occupied by dry rot and worms, and our descendants the pets of lizards."
"And now it is you, my dear General, who is painting the black picture. Obviously, you have brought me here to present a scheme for relieving the blackness. What do you suggest?"
Toriman blew a smoke ring and lightly said, "Rebuild."
Limpkin had expected something a trifle more original. He let out a little laugh. "General, I realize that that is the way out but certain rather formidable obstacles stand in one's way."
"Overcome them." The General seemed to have sunk into a pocket of conceit arising from his very evident ignorance of the real state of the nation; Limpkin wondered, for the smallest of moments, if the man was going senile. Limpkin patiently pointed out, "My Office has been working on that problem for the past century and we have come no closer . . . "
"That is because you were not working with the right tools nor with the right technique," Toriman said amiably.
Limpkin was beginning to get upset. "Perhaps being always on the business of war, dashing across the country from one campaign to another, you have not been able to examine the land and the common people as closely as I have.
"I admit that, by comparison, the Caroline is in pretty fair shape; but what we are comparing it to . . . dammit, Toriman, stop grinning at me!"
"Sorry, Limpkin." But he kept his grin.
"The land is destitute; the collections of hovels that we call towns and cities are virtually ruled by juvenile gangs and vice lords; industry, such as it is, has maintained a steady 2.8–2.6% annual decline." He shot a frigid glance at Toriman. "And foreign wars ravage our fields, destroy our finest men, and bleed the state treasury white."
"Why?"
"What?"
"I asked, why haven't these faults, which I have already outlined (so you see I am not a total dunce), been corrected by your Office."
Limpkin was getting progressively more irritated. "We have tried. Didn't I tell you that? The cellars of the Office are glutted with copies of orders and directives to the Government, our own regional offices, to the people themselves; some of these orders are more than eighty years old! We've sent out every kind of order, used every kind of appeal, threat, or tactic that we could think of, but the letters go out and that is the last we ever hear of them. Send a man out and he comes back empty-handed or beaten to a pulp, depending upon the temperament of the people.
"Ah, the people! The bloody-damn, sacred people! Tell them that their very lives depend upon a dam or upon the repair of a city's walls and it's like talking down an empty well. It's almost as if the men were less than men, as if"—Limpkin lifted an eyebrow—"they had lost something." Toriman smiled briefly, his face a harlequin mask of shifting light. "All right then, once again we have come upon this fact. Now what?"
"First of all, my agitated friend, perhaps we should qualify ourselves by saying that this essence has not really been lost, but rather has been, ah, anesthetized by three millennia of simple hell. Acceptable?"
"It seems to be your conversation."
"All right, we don't have to go traipsing off into the Barrens or some other objectionable place looking for enchanted vials with this thing in them. All we have to do is awaken it in the citizenry."
"Ah, there you are. Just what my Office and its counterparts have been trying for years to find. With all due respect, General, you have told me nothing that I did not already suspect, and if you can offer nothing more original and concrete than these philosophical or psychological meanderings, then we can both count the night a failure."
Toriman took a puff on his cigar and then suddenly crushed it in an ebony ash tray on the desk. "Yes, quite right. We have had enough of cigar and brandy talk. Enjoyable, but time consuming." The General's voice shifted emphasis subtly. He heaved himself out of the chair and vanished into the shadows past the fireplace. He was back in a second, towing a wheeled frame with a map strung between its uprights. He pushed the chart in front of the fire so that the translucent vellum took on a three-dimensional aspect when view from the front.
Limpkin studied the map. To his right in the east was the Sea and the coastline of the World. He could recognize the Maritime Republics, New Svald, and the Dresau Islands off the Talbight Estuary. Above and below this, the seacoast was pockmarked by minor nations with progressively unfamiliar names (some of which, such as Truden and Dorn, he had previously thought of as existing only in children's tales).
He caught a reference point, the free city of Enador to the south of the Talbight Estuary, and followed the Donnigol Trace westward until it reached the southern extremity of the Caroline. Around his homeland were her neighbors and their sister nations; very comforting, but the eye could not help but notice that they comprised only a very small portion of the map.
Ignoring the smile of satisfaction that Toriman was wearing, Limpkin got up and unabashedly gawked at the illuminated chart. The fire behind it made it look as if the World were floating on a sea of molten glass. The cartography was flawless; mountains appeared to be in relief and the rivers seemed to flow with turquoise water. Many of the countries had their national standards painted under their names: the golden eagle of the House of Raud, the winged horse and mailed fist of Toriman's own Mourne, the four stars of Svald and the seven of New Svald, and the indecipherable rune-standard of the tribes which laid claim to the heraldry from Heaven and Earth and less savory realms and deposited them on this fantastic map.
Toriman eased back into his chair and began talking. Limpkin at once saw that his was to be a virtual lecture and the guise of dialogue would be discarded. Toriman began. "Limpkin, before you lies the concentrated knowledge of too many years spent in places that I and the other people who helped to make this map had no business being in. Rather like a partial outline of . . . "
"Hell," Limpkin meekly offered. Torman accepted it without notice and moved on.