"Hello, Acolyte Voss. We have not spoken in a while."
The voice was not Rex’s voice. It was lower, sounded older, and the cadence was wrong in a way I could not name precisely.
Then I realized that the words were arranged in the rhythm of a foreign language, translated into my native tongue without quite losing the foreign rhythm.
The voice was reaching me through Rex Aldran’s mouth, but the voice had not learned to use that mouth. The lips moved a fraction late, and breath came in the wrong place.
I did not move. The cold spot covering my torso had not changed since Rex’s possession. The weight of it was constant. Death-Touched was telling me that any motion I made, any cast, any strike, any attempt to break and run, would end with half my body obliterated.
The thing staring at me through Rex’s dead eyes was not waiting to attack. It was choosing not to attack yet.
Yet, why did I find the cadence of its voice familiar?
Still, as long as it was choosing to talk, I stayed still and did not finish my casting.
"You are afraid, Acolyte Voss."
I grimaced, and my mouth flew off its shelf, "I am cautious and afraid of the things I do not know, and there are many things happening here that I do not understand."
Rex’s dead eyes slowly blinked, "Ah, the distinction is one I am familiar with. Caution and fear are the same fluid in different vessels, and you possessing both in this instant is something valuable. Most people are either too cautious or too afraid. I find that... dull."
The phrase landed in me with a small click of recognition. The distinction is one I am familiar with. I had heard the construction before. I had heard it on the second day of the expedition, when Adept Varis had asked a question about the pyramid’s pulse signature, and someone had replied with that exact phrasing. The distinction is one I am familiar with, Adept Varis.
Then what followed was a careful explanation about resonance patterns, delivered in the careful, measured cadence of a senior scholar. I had been wide-eyed and soaking up all the knowledge, even though I could hardly understand most of it.
The cadence in front of me now was the same cadence, and it was enough for me to determine that the voice through Rex Aldran’s mouth was Scholar Orath’s voice.
The voice was different, maybe it had been altered by whatever discipline reached Orath’s consciousness across the distance to Rex, but the shape of the sentences, the pauses, and all the specific phrasings a man uses without thinking were there, and I recognized it.
I tried not to let anything change in my face, but the fact that Scholar Orath was speaking like this to me meant that he expected me to know who he was, but if, in the slightest chance, he did not realize this fact, I had to pretend that I had not recognized him.
"You are very calm, Acolyte Voss. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons you saw things that others did not?"
I shrugged, "I am told I have a talent for it."
"Oh, how interesting. By whom?"
"By people who are no longer alive to elaborate."
The mouth twitched. The expression was not Rex’s. Rex would have smirked. The amusement reached the eyes a beat late, in the way the lips had moved a beat late, because the consciousness operating the face had to push the expression through whatever distance it was reaching across.
If Scholar Orath had just crossed through to the Conclave, then it meant he was at least ten thousand miles away if not more... the distance between continents was massive, and yet he could still speak through the body of Rex.
Rex Aldran was not a co-conspirator; he was... furniture.
Did it make me pity the bastard? No. I am sure that whatever happened here, Rex was part of it, and I would not be surprised if he chose himself to be a host for Orath; he seemed like the sort to do something like that, especially if this possession could save his life.
At the moment, my staff was still buried in Rex’s chest, but Scholar Orath did not seem to care. A crazy part of me wanted to laugh. This is what Rex deserved when he gave up his body to become furniture for another man.
"What did you see at the eastern face, Acolyte Voss?"
There, that intonation again, that familiar voice, Scholar Orath was not hiding who he was from me, and I know that he must have realized that I had caught up to this information.
I shrugged, "You, crossing through the door."
"Ah." A pause. "You are more observant than your records indicate."
"My records were written by people who had not been paying attention. The last time I checked, there are more than twenty thousand mages in the Academy; that is a lot of people to manage."
"True" Scholar Orath easily agreed with me, and I found it disturbing. "Still, talent like yours should not have been so easily buried. Of everyone in this expedition, only you noticed something wrong."
Actually, the truth was that I didn’t, and it took eleven deaths to understand a small part of what was happening, but I had earned this knowledge.
I blinked. There was no way I was telling him that information, so what came out of my mouth was, "I have been paying attention."
"Yes. You have."
"What is on the other side of the door, Scholar Orath?"
The eyes flickered. Just a fraction. The naming had landed the way I thought it should.
"You have done your reading, Voss."
"I had a thorough teacher."
"Master Veth?"
My eyes widened a bit, even though there was no need to, and I replied with a question, "Oh, you remember him?"
"I attended his lectures when I was in your position. The chair I sat in still has the ink stain I left on it during the second-year practical examinations. The third floor of the eastern hall has been keeping that inkstain for one hundred and fifty-eight years."
The age was new information. One hundred and Fifty-eight years had passed, second-year examinations meant Orath was somewhere in the one seventy-five to one eighty-year range, and if he had not ascended past the Adept level, then he would be nearing the twilight of his life.
However, if Scholar Orath attended the academy at such a young age, did it mean that he defected to Vothar and the Conclave later in life?
Scholar Orath was well-traveled, one of the few Adepts to reach all seven continents, I believe. When did he become a turncoat?