The days were going by indistinguishably. Same road, same guard intervals. The same rhythm the column had established on the first day. By the third morning I had stopped expecting change.
I had learned little. Guard response times from my stumble. The rotation timing was confirmed after two waypoints.
In one section the road followed a long descending curve that followed a ridge. The front of the column couldn't see about forty paces of the back. The knowledge wasn't worth much, but I noted it.
Ruvuk's posture at the head of the column was the same as everywhere else. His attention didn't waver.
I had been thinking about the Truth Stone. I had used it on Bastien, on Jorax, on Orso. In each case I had seen their goal. I had not used it on Ruvuk. This was partly because the opportunity had not presented itself. And partly because I was afraid of it. But I needed to know what he planned for us in Spartova. Was there any chance that we could come to an agreement on a treaty? Did he seek to overthrow the Strategoi and become King of Spartova? Were there weaknesses in his plan or gaps that I could exploit to at least get my men home?
We halted at midday at an unmanned waystation, a structure built simply to provide water, shade from the sun and shelter from the wind. The guards ate standing. Ruvuk walked to the eastern wall and stood with his back to the men, observing the farmland below.
I had been waiting for an opportunity like this to come along. His back was toward me and the guards were distracted by their meal. I closed my hand around the Truth Stone.
The familiar sensations of the Truth Stone filled my mind. With Bastien I had received love and desperation. His future was a house, a wife, a daughter. It was an ordinary life that his fear was trying to protect. Jorax had felt fierce protective urgency without a plan and without hope. Orso had shown me a cold, structural loyalty to a system rather than a person.
Ruvuk was distinct. Cold, colder than Orso. Satisfied that his sequence was proceeding to a correct result. I reached for the end state, his envisioned future, his intention, and found something vaster than anything I had encountered before. Vaster than I had even conceived.
The stone had difficulty resolving it into images so I received fragments.
First the Great Pyramids of Olympos. Recognizable even in a transferred impression. There was nothing else like them in the world. Ruvuk had likely never visited them himself, so I could see how he envisioned them, separate from my own imagination. They were massive and fully real in his mind.
Behind the Pyramids, filling a quarter of the sky, was Mount Olympos. I had read descriptions. Not a set of peaks but just ground that wouldn't stop rising. Higher than any horizon, past the clouds and weather, an endless incline. His vision was grander than any description I had ever read of it.
From the mountain came a river. The river that gave birth to the world. Behind enormous walls, defended by an oxbow in the river itself, was a city. The greatest city in the world: Olympos, capital of the Third Empire. Center of the world.
The city was burning. Not wildly, but systematically. Structure by structure. An organized demolition. The smoke rose into the lower slopes of the mountain and disappeared into the endless clouds that never left it.
The citizens of Olympos were being led out in chains on the Via Triumphus. Soldiers in Hegemony gray did the leading.
The Imperial Palace was there too, its vast gardens burned to ash. Soldiers were tearing down the enormous stones it was built from. They would not stop until every stone was cast into the river.
Then I could see the world. All the cities rearranged. Qulomba was gone. Carth was gone. Heliqar wasn't even worthy of the vision. The gray of the Hegemony of Spartova blanketed the whole world. Every human being in their place, all working together under the Iron Code. Forever.
It returned me to Ruvuk's perfect certainty. His ambition was beyond anything that had ever existed, yet it was as certain to come about as his knowledge that the sun would come up tomorrow.
The three seconds when he first saw me take out the Justice Stone at the gate. It had taken him just three seconds to determine that this future was an inevitable reality.
Then it was gone. The images faded like the light from a door that has just been shut.
I took a deep breath of the plateau air and let my mind clear. My hands wouldn't stop shaking.
I had seen what Ruvuk's mind had constructed of Olympos. The stone provided his intention from his own mind's eye. I had trusted Bastien's vision of his daughter. It had been intimate and loving.
Ruvuk's mind was different. It had no edges. Olympos was just an example. His intention didn't end at the High Tribunal, or at Spartova, or even at the borders of everything that currently existed. It continued past the present world into every possible future world.
I would have expected a vision like that to place him at its center, a king, an emperor, the man the new order was arranged around. Yet his intention for the future contained no image of himself in it. Only the desire for permanent order, unencumbered by justice, mercy, or affection.
Ruvuk turned from the eastern wall and went back to the head of the column. He issued the order to reform and resume the march. The men moved.
Seven days remained.