Profiles in History: Candeth Martine

If you should wander into the Virindi Museum, among the exhibits you might notice a cracked porcelain mask, like those the Virindi wear themselves, but subtly different in shape. You will read this label beside it:

Martine's Mask. This mask is all that remains of the great Candeth Martine, Hero of the Dominion. Martine's tragic story reminds the Quiddity of its early failures to comprehend mortal mentalities, but his victory over Gaerlan is a testament to Martine's indomitable spirit. The ancient mask, once shattered and broken, has been carefully reconstructed by Virindi curators.

Now there is some truth in that text, but the way it is worded could easily lead the casual reader astray. I will tell you the story of Candeth Martine, a story to make the heart weep and sing.

He worked in the business office of a shipping company on Ispar. Day after day he would watch the ships come in laden with cargoes from distant lands, and he would see she ships going out again, sails swelling in the wind, gliding over the breast of the ocean till they disappeared under the horizon. He longed to go with them; he longed for adventure; but he had a wife and daughter whom he loved, and so he stayed home and went to his office every day.

Until one day a strange thing appeared in front of him: a whirlpool of purple light, hanging in mid-air. Seized by a sudden impulse, he stepped into it, and was whirled through portalspace and found himself on Dereth, as all our ancestors did--and learned, like them, that he could never go home again.

His heart was sick with the loss of his wife and child, but--there was a new world to explore. He joined the Society of Explorers, and its founder, Sir Mikael Alayne, became his friend. He went on many expeditions, exploring and mapping the sunlit plains and hidden dungeons of Dereth, and acquitted himself so well that he gained an honorary rank and was styled Sir Candeth Martine (and addressed as "Sir Martine", not "Sir Candeth" as you might expect).

We have images of what he looked like in those days: a fair-skinned Aluvian with reddish-gold hair and blue eyes, the sort of human you could pass in the street and never look at twice.

Then the last crystal was broken, by ill-advised humans, in the array that kept Bael'Zharon imprisoned. The Fourth Sending began. The water turned the color of blood, and the Hopeslayer walked Dereth, amusing himself by finding new ways to kill those who tried to fight him. An unlikely alliance formed against him: the Dericost undead nobles; Asheron both on his own part and representing the mortals; and the Virindi.

But Sir Mikael Alayne, knowing nothing of this, secretly made contact with the Virindi on his own. If they would fight against the Hopeslayer, he would give them something they desired: a human subject to study.

Tragic irony! The Virindi had already determined to oppose the Hopeslayer, for they had plans of their own for Auberean which he might hinder. But they were not about to refuse so tempting a gift, so freely offered.

So Sir Alayne sent his friend Candeth Martine out into the wilds of Dereth, to report upon certain activities among the Mosswarts. These Mosswarts, previously instructed, captured him and turned him over to the Virindi.

The Virindi did with Martine what they habitually did with their research subjects. They took him apart (without anaesthetics) to see what he was made of, and then they put him together again in different ways to see how this would affect him. They applied pain stimuli to him, to observe how he would react. The subject of such treatment, if it has a mind at all, usually goes insane. Martine went insane. But he kept his intelligence, and his experimenters were increasingly impressed by his resilience and his versatility. They called him Puppet, and began to teach him some of their own techniques. They implanted part of a Virindi consciousness into his brain, to let it observe him; but he quickly learned to push it down into a secondary role and then to no role at all: it wept and gibbered in the back chambers of his mind, begging for death. It may have been about this time that they clad him in a grey robe enchanted with several useful spells, and gave him a mask like their own to wear: for his face was gone by now, and if you chanced to see him from behind, you beheld the naked lobes of his brain.

Martine studied very hard at all his captors had to teach him, for the reward for success was a lessening of pain. They taught him to torment and kill their other test subjects, Tuskers and Drudges that had been brought in for research. He became very good at it, and presently they set him a task: to go out and slay a Mosswart chief who had been defying them. Since this was the same Mosswart who had delivered him to the Virindi, Martine obeyed very readily. He found the Mosswart Chief and tormented him and slew him. Then he went and found Sir Mikael Alayne, and spent a whole evening talking to him, and then no doubt killed him, for no one ever saw Sir Alayne again. And then he went back to the Virindi who had tormented him, and overcame them. He made puppets of them in their turn, and set them to work his will. He made other servitors, called Simulacra, and put them in dungeons to work on various projects.

Martine wrote books about what had happened to him, and put some volumes out for sale from the scribes in Dereth's shops, and hid other volumes at the bottom of dungeons. He built a many-tunneled retreat under Rithwic, and gathered people to live in it who, like him, were grieving for their lost homes and families.

He opened new portals that led from Dereth to the northwestern island called Marae Lassel by the Yalain and Palenqual by the Tonk (we call it Arramora now), in the hopes that the humans would fight the Virindi stationed there and kill the young Olthoi Queen that was gathering strength in its caverns. In that process, one day by accident he reached into the Sundered Lands where the last Yalain slept suspended between the worlds, and he brought out a mage named Gaerlan, Asheron's former student and implacable enemy. Gaerlan spoke soft words into Martine's ear: he spoke to his grief and his resentment. Now that he had taken vengeance on the Mosswart, and on Sir Alayne, and on the Virindi, there was one more guilty person remaining, the one responsible in the end for all Martine's sorrows, the mage who had opened the one-way portals out of Ispar: Asheron.

Beguiled by Gaerlan's magic and his cunning words, Martine set out to destroy the nine nexus towns that had been built around the arrival points from Ispar, hoping that no more Isparian newcomers would arrive. Queen Elysa was able to protect three by sending her Royal Guards there, but the other six were destroyed. Gaerlan then persuaded Martine to attempt to assassinate Elysa's son Borelean, but the Royal Guard and the concerted action of many adventurers thwarted this attempt. Increasingly thereafter, Gaerlan concentrated on creating his own attack forces, leaving Martine to his own devices. Martine became obsessed with Elysa, confusing her in his mind with his lost wife; he would portal into her bedroom and gaze on her while she slept, vanishing again before she woke.

In those days Asheron and Elysa made a series of visits to some of the Festival Stones of Dereth, proclaiming that the land now belonged to Elysa's people (we must note that Asheron was then the only living member of the royal family, the Realaidain, and had the right to make this grant if anyone had), and that they were to be called no longer Isparians, but Derethians. Martine appeared at several of these meetings, hurling words of abuse at Asheron, speaking of love to Elysa and begging her to come away with him, then vanishing again. At the fifth meeting, Martine cast a bolt of energy at Asheron, wounding him severely. Before he could finish him, Gaerlan himself appeared, hoping to deal Asheron's death-blow himself. But he could not resist the opportunity to boast of what he had done, how Martine had been his tool, how he would wipe humanity from the face of Dereth and allow the Yalain to return to power. And while he was speaking, Elysa took Asheron and portaled him away to his tower, and Martine, devastated by the truth, returned to his retreat. Enraged, Gaerlan began to kill all those present, but the human mages were able so to weaken him that he must portal away, leaving some living behind.

While Elysa tended Asheron's wounds, unable to heal him, Gaerlan sent his forces out over Dereth, elemental creatures of all sizes and strengths, from little knee-high things suitable for new adventurers' target practice, to the four tremendous Generals. While Derethians fought Gaerlan's creatures and Martine's, a portal opened in the center of Rithwic, leading to Martine's long-hidden Retreat. Inside, adventurers found Martine's followers, distraught over their chief, who sat alone in his throne room in a state of shock, unmoving, unspeaking. Elsewhere they found the remnants of the first Tusker Martine had killed; they could give him this to remind him of his hatred of his captors and of Asheron. Or, they could give him a letter he had written to his wife, to remind him of his love for his family and of his basic humanity. While battle raged over his head, for weeks Martine's mind hung in the balance.

The deciding action was taken by none of the warriors or adventurers, but by Borelean Strathelar, then twelve years old. While his mother was occupied tending Asheron, Borelean slipped away and went to Rithwic and Martine's Retreat. Making his way to the throne room, he asked simply, "Martine, why did you try to kill Uncle Ash?" Learning that Asheron still lived, and moved by the innocence of this child who reminded him of his own daughter, Martine rose up and went with Borelean to Asheron's tower, and laid his hands upon him and healed the wound that he had given.

Asheron, as he recovered, in turn healed Martine of his madness and bitterness. In the following weeks Martine led the attacks against the four elemental cores that were the source of much of Gaerlan's power; during these fights he sometimes wore an enchantment that made him appear to be the man he had once been. And sometimes he appeared as he now was, his cracked mask before, his naked brain behind.

Gaerlan had a great flying castle, a fortress that drifted slowly over sea and land, protected by an impenetrable shield of energy. When the fourth and last clemental core was destroyed, this shield fell, and Martine came forth to attack it. He was unable to harm Gaerlan himself, but he cast all the power of his magic against the fortress: he cracked it and brought it down near the Crater in northern Osteth, barely accessible among the mountains but unable to fly or to defend itself. Martine was consumed in the release of energies, leaving only his robe and mask behind; but visionaries all across Dereth beheld him, released from the fetters of the body, looking on the faces of his wife and daughter once more before death, which ends all torments, veiled him from sight.

Gaerlan's fortress was laid open to attack by Asheron, the Derethians, and the mage Nuhmudira, who imprisoned him in a crystal prison that lasted throughout the Golden Age. Gaerlan may be seen now as a shambling undead among the guardians in the Malthabbor vault, despised and vanquished again and again by the heroes who pass through there.

And now the Virindi call Martine a Hero of the Dominion.

You can see how the statement could be interpreted in two ways. If they were to claim that Martine was a Hero of the Dominion while he lived, it would be a feat of revisionism verging on fantasy fiction. If, however, they have named him a Hero in order to remind themselves "of the Quiddity's early failures to comprehend mortal mentalities," and to check them from taking such actions again, they have done well. Consider that the Virindi no longer take people apart and put them together at random, to see what will happen. Consider that after many generations sede vacante they replaced the fallen Imperator not with one of their own, but with a mortal: young Thromer Olvidan who sent back the message, "The Dominion need me ... The Virindi don't mean to cause harm, but the Quiddity still does not understand our world; they need me to intercede." All may yet be well.

Remember Candeth Martine, who lost everything that he loved; who suffered torment and went insane; who did great harm and great good; who healed Asheron and was healed by him, and found redemption in giving his life to save his people. May we all have so good an ending.