The Back Way In

The Silvergrey Sea

Part Three: Conspiracies and Secret Orders

The Back Way In

* * *

The Albedo’s ‘back door’ into Azhure’en was by way of another world.

There was a Portal in the Silvergrey, under its surface, in fact.

Abram hadn’t known that. He didn’t know what the mental key was as the Albedo hadn’t told him, either. The funnel of light was so like the normal swirl of silver and grey of the deep the Hermetist almost didn’t notice it.

A world it was that they entered. A planet it certainly was not.

They passed directly into a muddy ocean. Abram didn’t even know what the world was until the craft surfaced.

Then he saw the trees.

They, like the sky and the water, were shades of bronze. Thin they were, rarely more than a couple of feet across, and rose directly from the water to be lost in the haze of the air. Narrow branches occasionally extended from them, with a few vesica shaped leaves.

That was it. No variation was evident.

Well, except the obvious one.

“Haven’t been here but once,” the Albedo mused.

Abram had only ever been to Bazziom once himself. The memory still lingered. It wasn’t a bad one, just…haunting. “How extensively have we explored this world?”

The White Elect turned his polished ebon face toward his peer, pale eyes dulled by the light. “Last report I had put the number at over three hundred million square miles. We’ve got three teams out there—” his arm waved behind them—“now.”

“Is there any variation?”

He nodded. “Some. We’ve found open spots, some big enough to be called seas. There’s a kind of marine life in them.”

“So, the water is deeper there?”

“No deeper than here.”

Abram recalled that the water depth averaged thirty-five feet. “Seasons?”

A shake of his head.

“Hard to believe this is a natural environment.” The record of the Templars, who had built the Mother Lodge, indicated that it only touched naturally born worlds.

“I’ve wondered about that myself.”

They rode in silence for some time.

Save for their colour, the bark of the trees reminded Abram of the white birch of Oerth, a tree he had only seen imaged in the archives.

Cruising along, slowly wending their way among the trunks, the Mountain City of Azhure’en came into view after an hour. It was first seen as quite startling stripes of blue among the distant trees. So densely were the trees clustered and so hazy the air, the pair were quite close before the first hints of colour broke through. Abram had to crane his neck quite high to see the top.

Over the next ten minutes, the trees ahead became fewer until the whole edifice was revealed. On this world, the Mother Lodge rested in the middle of a substantial lake whose ‘shore’ was defined by a dearth of the topless trees. Those trees rose and thinned with distance until the essential haze of the air obscured them.

For the first time since arriving, they could see the sky, an oval patch that, even accounting for perspective, seemed smaller than the area of the open water beneath it. Bright yellowish balls of light flitted lazily along, generally moving to their right. Abram couldn’t fit them into any category of luminary, natural or otherwise. No way to tell how high above them they were, either. “Have we figured out what those are?”

“Not yet. We think they’re living things, but that’s all.”

“This place…”

“I know.”

Abram looked down to find a thoughtful expression on his fraternal brother’s face. “I’d like to come here on retreat. It’s…odd but being here seems to pull deeper thoughts to the surface.”

But the Albedo was already moving on to the Mother Lodge.

The Taphros, the moat of Living Water that protected Azhure’en, was here, even though there was no outer shore. A clearly visible line showed where the brownish water of this world ended, and the crystalline blue of the fosse began. The ship slowed and stopped, rebounding from the edge of the Taphros with an audible bump.

“Now what?” Abram really didn’t know. Entering Azhure’en shouldn’t be possible from anywhere other than through Mercurius. Without the Trial of the Seraph, there was no way to make the bridges manifest and going into the Living Water was death.

The Albedo turned to him and actually winked. Popping the hatch, he climbed out, beckoning his fellow Hermetist to follow. The latter emerged just as he was stepping down to the Taphros.

He didn’t sink.

The water continued its undulating flow under his boots. He took a broad stance; the movement of the river obviously challenged his balance. “Give me your hand, Brother.”

Abram stepped down the built-out steps on the side of the craft and took his hand. His first step was hesitant.

Together, the pair walked on Water.

Abram anticipated the tingling that would indicate they were passing through the barrier. Instead, he felt he was being wrapped in plastic. The sensation didn’t hinder movement and faded almost immediately.

Once on turf, the Albedo let go Abram’s hand and they climbed the ornamental fence. They were now in Azhure’en.

“What just happened? How…?”

“Getting into Azhure’en from another world is a privilege of the Elects. No one, not even the Mercurius, knows of this.”

“What was that thing in the middle?”

“We aren’t past the barrier; we’re wrapped in it. Technically, that makes us outside. It also means our ingress will not be detected.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“To the only person who matters.”

The Mercurius.

With the Red Elect almost definitely part of the Meraculus Mercurius, the only hope they had of salvaging the Order was if its Outer Head was still true.

The two crossed the lawn and entered the cool interior of Azhure’en. The light through the windows high above was brighter than it was on Mercurius, though it was duller, too. They headed up one of the colossal naves to the five-way crossing at the center of the structure. They summoned fast-moving circle of stone cut the travel time to less than half an hour.

Miles above them, clouds beneath the ceiling bestowed a thin rain partway along.

There weren’t nearly enough Hermetists in the Thirty Aions to fill a single iteration of Azhure’en. Abram was used to seeing the odd one in whatever nave he happened to be in, though. It took a few minutes for the lack of others to become a conscious discomfort. “Are there any others in this iteration?”

“There should be six in Temple at any one time. Bazziom currently has a standing contingent of twenty-four. It’s unlikely we’ll meet any but keep a sharp eye out, anyway.”

Soon, another deeper discomfort crept over the junior Hermetist. “There’s no Portal at the crossing.” There should have been a bright blue-white line stretching up from the center of the nave.

It was absent.

The Albedo looked across to Abram. “We’re technically outside the Mother Lodge. That means we cannot access any iterations other than the one we’re in.”

“We can still access the Mercurius, though.” The genius of the White Elect’s choice of backdoor was suddenly apparent.

Abram’s fellow Hermetist smiled, cat-like.

The moving circle of stone embedded in the floor slowed and stopped at the edge of the pentagonal nave. Abram craned his neck to look up, awed as always by the beauty and enormity of the space.

Each of the five naves was over a mile wide and, just here, seven miles high. They were flanked by seven aisles of decreasing height. The upper halves of the naves and of each aisle was filled with stained glass.

At the crossing, each nave merged with its neighbor. Each row of pillars flanking the naves ended where it intersected its neighbor. The largest and tallest rows of pillars, those that defined the nave itself, intersected to form the corners the pentagonal space of the crossing itself.

The effect of seven retreating series of stained-glass windows supported by slender pillars was of stacked rows of coloured light, fading into the distance.

Above them was the central spire. A pentagonal lantern tower entirely in coloured glass, it began where the ceilings of the nave left off and, interrupted twice—by first the six naves of the middle level then the seven of the upper—closed over a full fifteen miles above their heads. They couldn’t see that ceiling from the floor.

The long way up was a spiral staircase inside one of the corner-defining pillars.

They took the short way: a circular elevator the stair coiled around. It was a moving platform with a handrail.

It took a full minute to get up to a speed that would get the two to the apartments of the Mercurius above the ceiling of the uppermost crossing in a reasonable amount of time. Rising vertically at sixty miles per hour would have been a boring experience were it not that the pillar was transparent to the inner part of Azhure’en. That meant a full three hundred sixty degrees for the first part of the journey, two hundred eighty-eight for the middle, and one hundred eight for the last half.

It took almost as long to slow down as to speed up. The twenty-minute trip had always seemed too short to Abram.

The lift was entirely enclosed only for the last few feet.

They stepped onto the landing as a curved oaken door opened of its own accord.

The space within was large, ornate, and furnished in the ubiquitous blue stone of the mountain city. Indirect silver blue lighting made it seem airy.

Standing in the center was the red-dressed form of the Kokkinos. “Good day, Brothers.”

— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, September 2026

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