Plan to repeat the Desolation

According to Manfred, Deimos, disguised as a native, had poisoned the governor of Aquila himself, had fanned the war through contacts within the Empire and wanted the invasion so as to hold power. Under another identity he had held long scholarly talks with Orson, arranged by the noblewoman Rozanna in her house; when Orson saw the dangerous purpose behind them he broke them off and kept to the castle, and he was carried off so that he could be reached again. Manfred believed that Deimos backed the war party and weakened the governor for his own power, not to save the land, and had heard that Orson had spent time in the archives and with the Chainbearers and had seen the Living Wall.³⁴⁵⁶

As Manfred told it, Deimos and the radicals believed that the native peoples had been spared the old catastrophe because no gods dwelt here, and meant to bring it about again in such a way that it would pass over the natives and strike only the Empire; Manfred himself thought this absurd. He said that Deimos meant to bring stones said to be left from the old catastrophe out of the southern desert and spread their power, though he stressed that he had not seen the stones with his own eyes.⁷⁸

The band debated why war was needed: perhaps to win the right to rule as a saviour, perhaps because the source of Deimos's power had aims of its own. Manfred claimed to have seen more than one of Deimos's bodies, though never all five together, and spoke of his mastery of magic, the sword and new engines of war.⁹¹⁰

When Finli later read the crystal, it showed an operative taking orders from Deimos, meeting a legion captain named Aetius, dealing with Rozanna, trading for a large chest and an ornate box, and five Deimos with covered faces receiving that box. The band wondered whether Deimos might be hidden within the Legion's command; nothing confirmed that the legatus who landed at Aquila was he.^1112131415