by BJ Hanlon
“Liar!” he screamed. He reached down and pulled out one of his blades. Probably the same one he used to kill the rat.
Edin saw tears in the man’s eyes and his jaw clenched.
He raised the knife and put it to Edin’s throat. Edin didn’t fight back.
“Your real name!” He pulled back and slammed Edin again into the wall.
Edin’s head felt woozy.
“Edin is dead. Laural is dead…” He choked on a sob but there was still rage in the man’s face. Rage and sadness.
“My mother died…” Edin said. “I did not… father.”
Rihkar growled. “Don’t call me that. Edin didn’t know… he never knew.” The knife blade bit into Edin’s skin and he felt blood trickling down his throat.
Edin tried to keep calm, his chest thumped and all his instincts wanted him to throw this man off. He was weak and malnourished and partially crazed. “I didn’t die…” Edin whispered. “Look at me, it’s been what ten years since you’ve seen me?”
“Thirteen…” Rihkar said and Edin felt the tip move from his neck. Rihkar stepped back, streaks rolled down his dirty face.
“You were safe… hidden.”
“I wasn’t safe,” Edin said. He held up his hand and summoned an ethereal shield around his body. It glowed and pushed Rihkar back a few inches.
Rihkar gasped and looked at the culrian. “A philios… you’re a philios. The isle hasn’t seen one in—”
“Hundreds of years…” Edin interrupted. “It gave people something to worry about.”
“You went to the isle? How was my… our family to you? How were the people? I didn’t exactly leave on good terms.”
Edin paused. Did he really want to say that his family was cruel? That he was jailed and nearly assassinated by the FAE? This probably wasn’t the right time. “Le Fie was good to me.”
“Iashah,” a smile grew beneath his scraggly beard. Rihkar was still hesitant as he stared at Edin. He didn’t trust that Edin was his son. “I wonder how he’s doing...” Then he turned to Edin, “why are you here? How are you alive… how’d you find out about the stone?”
“It’s a long story…” Edin said. Did he tell his father about the other talents? About how he gained the talents by contact with the Ballast Stones? What if someone else grasped them first? Would the talent become theirs?
“We have time,” Rihkar said. “If you are Edin,” his eyes suspicious, “I need to know what happened… there are a few semi-comfortable stone chairs in the city.”
“Stone chairs?”
“Much here is made of stone.”
After a descent they found a small front room on the first floor of a ceiling-reaching building. Edin began again his tale. The fight with the crillio, his mother’s death.
A sad glaze came over his face. “We met while she was in school in Calerrat. I didn’t know she was a noble.”
Edin nodded and continued. The story took a lot shorter than he’d expected though Edin left out the fact that the stones had transferred different talents to Edin.
“Edin Harlscot… I can’t believe that’s what happened to him. In our family, there is a taboo against naming any child that. I didn’t know why though. All I knew was he died in the usurping.”
“What happened to you?” Edin asked. “You were never around… I didn’t even know I was a mage until it happened…”
“Having me around could’ve only ended poorly for you and your mother. I was protecting you.” His eyes dropped to the ground. “Or I thought I was.”
“And the reason you’re here? You’re looking for the stone?” Edin paused. “You are looking for it aren’t you.”
He nodded. “There were histories the old folks said and books I’d found in more restricted areas…”
“The Boganthean Tower?”
He nodded. “I found an old page hidden in a history book when I was young. It said that the Ballast Stones were hidden around the old kingdom by a source close to Alcor. They were the symbols of magi power. A legend I’d heard as a child stated that when they’re all brought back together the magi will once again be accepted with the mundanes and be welcomed into the land of the gods. It was a way your mother and I could be together. But it was only research and after your mother and you were… well after I heard what happened I followed the only clue I had. Olangia.”
“How’d you…”
“A lot of research and cross checking. Some in the Citadel.” He shuddered when he spoke of the old mage college turned Por Fen training center. “It took years… so I guess historian was a good name for me. I told the sellswords I’d hired there was treasure…”
“And when there wasn’t any?”
Rihkar looked down, his face hidden in the darkness. “They wanted to leave.”
Edin swallowed. “So, you killed them?”
Rihkar nodded.
“And you’re not leaving until you find the stone?”
“I’ve searched the top floors, the broken lighthouse outside and the docks below. I don’t know if I have the strength anymore, even if I found it.” He sighed.
The lighthouse outside? That was where the elf told him. Showed him where to go. “That collapsed… you said lighthouse? Are you certain nothing is there?”
Rihkar nodded again, he was absently looking away. “I nearly pulled it apart.”
Maybe that was why the elf showed him. It was a lighthouse, a beacon that told where to start. He sighed and glanced around the small stone room. Everything was elaborately carved: chairs, benches, statues, and even some of the dinnerware was made of marble. It seemed ridiculous that the dwarves would’ve just abandoned a place of such beauty and craftsmanship. “I cannot. The dematians are marching and I need to stop them. Only I can…”
Rihkar looked at Edin with a curious gaze. Then he laughed. “You’re certainly my son, dreams of grandeur.” He shook his head. “I left the Isle of Mists for that same reason. Thinking I could do the impossible and reunite the peoples.”
Edin chuckled but didn’t speak. Did he tell Rihkar who he was and what he could do? He was his father. The prophecy though still seemed vague and unfinished in his mind. It was like a book missing the final chapter. What if it said he’d die? What if it said he’d destroy mankind and magekind? The rest of the prophecy was somewhere in his head hiding from him like a rabbit down a hole.
“So you haven’t found any others?” Edin said knowing that he couldn’t have found three of them.
“There was a reference to monsters and the Birth Stone. A chapel and the Blossom Stone.” He shook his head then paused.
Edin nodded. “So you’ve searched outside and up? Where else?”
His father. Gods, Edin thought, it was hard to call him that. He had a faraway look on his face and shrugged. “There’s a great building at the far end of the city, I’ve been searching it for weeks but found nothing. Maybe its somewhere more innocuous.”
Edin thought of the places he’d found the other stones. The altar, the statue, and somehow with the living corpse of his ancestor. None of them had anything in common and they were so far spread that it seemed foolish for anyone to believe they’d be reunited. Tilliac either had special knowledge or they wanted to prevent the Ballast Stones from ever being found.
“Show me this place,” Edin said though wasn’t sure it was right.
“You think you can find it?”
Edin shrugged.
They followed a main artery toward the opposite wall of the giant stairs. He was so confused he had no idea what direction it was.
Rihkar spotted three rats scurrying across the floor. He was able to get two of them and Edin wasn’t so sure he could turn down their meat now.
As they approached the massive wall, Edin began to notice it wasn’t a wall, it was the façade of a building.
A giant building.
It stretched from one side to the other and from the bottom to the top. There were giant windows and breezeways that were somehow
also rooms. There were columns with stone vines creeping up but there was very little else for decoration. Odd that they seemed to worship plants when they lived mostly underground.
A large stone door the height of four men was open. Flowing terraces held statues and Edin could see small channels of water toward open fountains. Directly above the main doors was an open-air platform where Edin pictured dwarven kings, or whatever leaders they had, giving speeches in a time long forgotten.
As he entered, they passed large antechambers that led to agoras or offices. A huge room with a long stone table and enough seating for at least fifty little people.
It felt as if the occupants would return at any moment.
But nothing gave him even an inkling of where the Rage Stone would be. Edin hoped maybe the elf wave could point in in the right direction.
He found out there was no throne room so he guessed there was no king. There were smaller chambers, some no bigger than Edin’s at the manor with large stone desks and covered in papers and books Edin couldn’t read.
In one of the rooms, there was a long stone channel in the rear wall angling down toward a hole in a squared off boulder. He’d seen a few before and his curiosity took him to it.
“What are these for?”
Rihkar grinned, he walked toward the wall where the thing began and pressed a stone with three wavy lines on it. A click of some sort came from behind the wall and water began to flow down a channel toward the hole.
“They had plumbing?”
Rihkar smiled, “they were well advanced, there are gears built into the stone walls and I believe there was some sort of light source as well.
“But all of the torches?”
“I cast the spells and placed them around the city. This many real fires would smother the inhabitants with smoke and dwarves never had a connection to the talent.”
They followed the corridors and looked into different rooms; his father was giving him the grand tour of an ancient dwarven civilization. They turned down small corridors and into nearly every room. There were hundreds.
Rihkar claimed he’d searched all of the rooms on the first three floors thoroughly. The fourth story was still unknown to him. Regardless, he found nothing.
After the third hour of just walking, Edin’s gut told him both that he was starving and that the stone wasn’t here.
They stopped in a room with a round table and Rihkar skinned and gutted the two rats. They were roasted over the unending fire and Edin chomped into one.
It was difficult, vermin like this were the harbingers of sickness and pestilence but he swallowed the protein.
They ate quietly and Edin barely was able to keep the food down. His father had seemingly lost all table manners and dug into his rat like a crillio cat.
Despite the reservations, Edin still searched room after room on the fourth floor. He found symbols in walls that controlled the plumbing and even one that looked like it should be for light but nothing happened. A button that looked like a V on its side let out a loud bell like peal.
They searched mostly the entire day before heading back. Again, he didn’t know why they didn’t just find a place to crash in the giant building.
As they approached the stairs to their quarters, Edin noticed to the right of the grand stairs, an arch built into the wall. It was dark beyond its entrance and there was no door. A weird air seemed to be filtering in from there but Edin was too tired to ask what it was.
Edin slept for a long time, or at least he thought he did.
In his dreams, he was in a small stone room with a single torch. Shutters were closed and the door had a chair lodged beneath its handle. Despite the flame, he was freezing. There’d been nothing to the search that day. No way out. He was trapped in this place and would die without ever seeing him again. Tears ran down his face to his chest. His ample chest.
A long and shiver drawing sound came from outside. He straightened. It was the sound of the tip of a blade slowly being drawn across stone. His eyes darted to the bow at his side, he was out of arrows and he knew they did little anyways. The bow looked familiar. But from where? He picked it up and threw it around his shoulder before grabbing a knife that was almost the length of his forearm. His hairless forearm.
When he woke, he remembered the bow. It was Arianne’s. Edin shook the thought from his head and left.
Outside his room, there was a note on the far door that said Main building doesn’t feel right. Searching eastern quadrant.
He wasn’t quite sure where that was. The spire and its ramp threw off his sense of direction. Edin’s stomach growled and the thought of another rat was oddly appealing.
Edin again thought of the tower outside. The lighthouse. That was what the elf showed him and he had a feeling he had to search it. What if the prophecy, or whatever fate was out there, only let him find the stones?
Edin thought of that for a while
standing at the top of the stairs, he didn’t know where Rihkar was. Soon, Edin descended the steps and stood there, looking for some sign of his old man. He’d tell the man he needed to check the outside still.
From behind him, he heard something moving and nearly jumped. Edin glanced back and saw the dark arch from the day before. Circling the arch were dwarven words.
Edin stepped toward it. He didn’t know why, but it felt like betraying Rihkar’s trust. Was this where he stashed the bodies?
Edin stepped into the shadowed arch and glanced back again looking for Rihkar. Not there. He
held out a hand and willed the ethereal light into existence. It blinded him for a moment, then when his eyes adjusted, he saw the large tunnel ran about four yards before it was barricaded.
Huge boulders blocked anything from passing. A rat scurried out.
Almost anything, Edin thought.
He summoned an ethereal knife and whipped it at the animal. The rat split in two without a sound.
He bent down to pick it up. As he bent over he heard a soft low hiss. The wind maybe. Edin swallowed, scooped up the rat and backed away quickly keeping his eyes on the collapsed stones.
Something touched his shoulder. “Ahh,” Edin screamed and spun around.
It was Rihkar, his scowl was nearly hidden beneath the grizzly beard. Edin held up the two halves of the rat but Rihkar didn’t look at them. He held Edin’s gaze making him feel more uneasy than at any time before.
“A rat…” Edin said.
After nearly a minute of silence Rihkar’s gaze moved past Edin to the collapsed passageway. “Let us eat.” Rihkar said and turned away.
It was so abrupt and unexpected Edin had a moment before he realized Rihkar was ten feet ahead of him. He jogged after the man and fell in behind as they reached their little dining room. Like before, Rihkar cleaned the animal and cooked it.
Though Edin knew he didn’t do anything wrong, he was beginning to feel like a schoolboy again. He could imagine Master Horston turning the corner and scolding him for some unknowable offence he may or may not have committed.
After eating, Rihkar waved Edin to follow but didn’t check to make sure he was. Edin took one last glance in the direction of the arch and followed. He thought about talking about the lighthouse outside but said nothing.
In the far-right corner of the long cave city, they searched a tall building with a carving of a hammer and a tome above the entrance. Maybe a university?
Most of the books they’d found would’ve been legible, but the language was impossible to understand for most. Maybe Dorset would be able to read it.
They checked nooks and crannies, on shelves and in desks of prominent offices. Or what Edin thought were offices. Edin dug through degraded crates and picked apart small oddities still pondering the tower. The urgency to find it was still there but with Rihkar, with his father, it was suppressed. Edin wondered if he’d disappoint the man if he searched a place that failed to yield their quarry. At that point, he realized he cared a great deal if he did.
In
the offices, he found stone and metal carvings of dwarves, balls with intricate fractal designs, and triangle tools with notches carved into them at equal intervals.
“It’s for measuring length and angles,” Rihkar had said, his first words since lunch.
Edin found flat metal plates that when wiped off with water, reflected his grim and hallow face. His beard was now at least an inch long and had ceased itching, his hair was dirty and matted in most places. He really needed to wash up.
There had been larger basins, baths almost, in some of the rooms with the sluiceways pouring directly in, though Edin could maybe sit up in them if his knees were bent.
For hours they searched, moving from that building to the next. Edin was bored, tired, and sweaty as they ended the day. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could handle.
Why couldn’t the magi have made this hunt a little easier? Why was it they had to hide things in such terrible places? Was there anything that connected them to each other?
Then, something hit him like a brick. The water stone was in the altar… an altar filled with water. The wind stone was in the hand of some sort of tornado spell and the lightning stone was in stone… where lightning had no effect.
What was the connection? Water with water, wind with wind… lightning with stone. That didn’t make sense.
Edin headed to his room and sat at the small desk. Was there something he was missing? Edin fell asleep with the thought in his head.
As he slept, something tickled his mind. He saw the dark caverns, it was like Olangia… but it wasn’t. It was dark and somehow Edin knew it was hexagonal. He felt like he’d searched everywhere for a way out. There were dark tunnels leading away but they were blocked. The roaring river he’d floated down had turned to a lake at the center of the city before continuing through a different darkened tunnel that delved into the unknown abyss. He’d caught fish in the lake, weird eyeless fish that tasted like cod.
There had to be a road to the surface. His supplies were running low, he had maybe two days of rations left to supplement the fish.
Then there were the things chasing him. They were slow and easily fooled, but they were dangerous.
