“Yes, it did change over time for the survivors here. You have no idea what they went through merely to stay alive,” Javen snapped. “You Earthers are so soft, you can’t even imagine that level of hardship.”
I sighed. We were back to the comparisons between Earth and Fosaan. I’d heard too much of that in the past.
“Don’t make assumptions about us,” I said, really loathing his smug face at that moment. “You aren’t exactly an expert on Earthers and our history.”
“I don’t like arguing,” Wren said, covering her ears. “Please stop.”
She sounded so distressed, I felt guilty for upsetting her. “Okay, we’ll stop. There’s no point in it anyway,” I said. Javen and I could argue about any number of things. “Let’s keep going.”
We walked a little farther along until the path split again. “Which way now?” Lainie asked.
One path ran downhill, where the plants thinned out enough for us to see it led back into the open. The other led farther up the mountainside and was so shrouded in mist it disappeared. We still couldn’t see the palace complex from our position because of the curve of the mountain, but I thought it couldn’t be far.
“This leads right to the palace,” Wren said, pointing to the one leading up the mountain.
“It doesn’t look like it.” Decker took a step toward the other path. “Why is it so foggy?”
“It’s a fog garden. You have to see it.”
“You mean something is making fog in there?” Nic asked.
Wren laughed. “No, everything in the garden is meant to be viewed in the fog. The fog rolls in off the bay and lingers in this spot for some reason. That’s when you are supposed to walk through it. There are sculptures among the plants too, and it’s lovely to see their shapes in the fog.”
“How do you know about viewing it in the fog?” I asked. “Did you meet some Fosaanians here?” I couldn’t imagine what a Fosaanian would think of Wren.
“Divana told me. She asked one of the Fosaanians because she knows I like gardens.”
“No one knows what it actually looked like during the empire,” Javen said. “All the records of it were destroyed. I think it’s a waste of time. There are other things that are far more important to restore than gardens. I think Wren is right, though, about it being the shortest way to the palace. I saw the plans when they were discussing how to restore the landing bay.”
Decker sighed. “Okay, let’s move.”
It was odd Ansun had agreed to spend time, effort, and funds on the restoration of a garden. That didn’t sound anything like the Ansun I knew. I felt a tinge of apprehension as I stepped onto the path.
We had only walked a few more paces when Wren stopped. “Listen.”
I tensed, ready to bolt at the sound of one of the giant lizard-like creatures. Like Decker, I wasn’t fond of them. I didn’t hear anything at first. And then I thought I heard music, but it was so faint I wasn’t sure it was actually there.
“Music,” Decker said. “Where is it coming from?”
Wren turned to us and smiled, her whole face shining. “There are wind instruments hanging in the trees. Tiny ones made to look like part of the tree. Each one barely makes a sound, but the combination is quite beautiful. I suppose they wanted it to be subtle. Or maybe there were more and they haven’t finished putting new ones in.”
I listened, thinking about how much Mira would love this. One of her biggest regrets was that all the art and culture of Fosaan had been lost. I was amazed they’d been able to recreate it.
As we walked, each sculpture revealed itself only when we got close to it. Even though I liked the idea behind the garden, I didn’t like the actual space. The fog felt like it was weighing me down, trapping all of us inside it. The coolness began to feel clammy and uncomfortable. When the path made a sharp turn, we found ourselves walking underneath a large sculpture that covered the space like a cage made of twisted bars, spiraling high into the mist so that the top wasn’t visible. It had gotten so foggy, I couldn’t see more than a foot in front of me. I reached out and touched one of the bars that came down on the side of the path. It felt solid and sturdy, like the bottom of it was embedded in the ground. There was another bar next to it, so close a person couldn’t squeeze between them.
“Wait,” I said. “Don’t go any farther.” I glanced back. I could only see Lainie and Wren, but I knew Decker was behind them. Nic and Javen were too far ahead.
“Ouch!” Nic said. “What is this?”
“What’s happening?” Lainie called.
“I can’t go any farther. There is something like a barred door over the path.”
“We’ll have to go back and go around,” I said. I heard a clanging behind me.
Decker cursed. “We can’t. Part of the sculpture swung down and closed the path behind us. There is some sort of trip mechanism.”
“Wren, what is this?”
“I don’t know,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself. “This wasn’t here last time.”
“Javen, where are you? What’s going on?”
He came back to us, Nic following.
His face was grim. “I didn’t know it was here. I didn’t even know it was planned.” He grabbed hold of the bars with both hands and shook them. “It shouldn’t be placed in a Nifre garden. It’s an abomination! Ansun has warped the whole purpose,” he said. He shook the bars again, his face turning red. When he stopped, he was breathing heavily. He leaned his forehead in to rest against the bars.
“What is this?” Decker said. “Is it a trap? Like you’d trap an animal?”
“It’s a trial,” Javen said, not looking up. “It’s called a Realiss, which I suppose you could say means something like a convergence.”
I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. I’d been through a Fosaanian trial before. “Not like the whole water pit thing, where if you don’t figure out how to get out, you die?” I looked around, trying to see the danger I knew must be lurking.
“Maybe not death, but certainly pain.” Javen said, his face tense.
Lainie reached up and touched a bar overhead. “There’s no water here, so what happens if we don’t figure it out?”
Javen pointed up. I didn’t see anything. “We climb. That’s the way out, but there will be something up there to test us. I don’t know what. The old records were incomplete.”
“Knowing Ansun, he’s thought up something particularly unpleasant,” I said.
“Wonderful,” Decker muttered. “I’d almost prefer a giant lizard.”
Nic took hold of one of the bars and shook it. “This is ridiculous!” The bar didn’t move so she kicked at it.
“This is Fosaan,” I said. “Ansun’s Fosaan. You have to deal with the unexpected.”
She gave the bar another kick. “I wish I’d killed him on Reyet!”
Decker gave a harsh laugh. “We all do.”
“Can we get out of here?” Wren whispered. “I don’t like this place.” She still had her arms wrapped around her.
Lainie put an arm around her shoulder. “Yes, let’s get out of here,” she said to the girl, her voice calm. “Why don’t you follow me? I’m pretty good at climbing.”
“Any tips?” I asked Javen. “I assume this is a trial where you have to use the whole mind-body-clan idea in some way.”
“Yes, you must focus your mind to achieve your objective.” Javen begin to clench and unclench his hands, all while taking some deep slow breaths. “Too many distractions will cause you to fail.”
“That doesn’t sound so complicated,” Lainie said. “There’s a saying on Earth: You can’t see the forest for the trees. I think this means you can’t see the trees for the forest.”
Javen shrugged. “Think of it that way if you like.” He took one more deep breath, put the knife back in his belt, and began to climb.
I climbed after him, wanting to find out as quickly as possible whatever it was we
had to face. Delaying it would only make the dread grow. At first, the metal bars were close enough together and twisted in such a way as to make for easy footholds and handholds. I had hoped the fog would lessen as we climbed, but it remained unchanged, heavy and dense. I couldn’t see the others, but I could hear them. As I expected, the higher I went, the harder the climb because the spacing between the bars increased. They were also slippery with condensation from the fog and colder than they should have been given the air temperature. The cold seeped into my fingers, making the bars even harder to grasp.
I put my hand on a bar above me and felt a sharp jab of pain. I jerked it back. Blood dripped from two of my fingers.
Javen called out, “Don’t come any farther!”
“Too late,” I said, wiping the blood on my tunic.
“What is it?” Lainie called out.
“The bars are covered in sharp barbs. They slice right into your fingers.”
“How are we supposed to keep going then?” Decker said. “We won’t be able to hold on if we’re bleeding all over things.”
“Focus and go slowly,” Javen called down. “There are gaps without barbs. If you get cut, ignore the pain, and concentrate instead on finding the way out.”
“Who’s bleeding?” Lainie said. “A drop of blood just hit me.”
I looked down at my hand. One of my fingers was still oozing blood. I wiped it off again. “It’s me. They really are sharp.”
“We’ll have to work together,” Javen said. “Follow us, and we’ll call down directions about the best way to continue.”
It sounded good in theory, but it didn’t work as well in practice because it was hard to relay instructions about exactly where to place a hand. Wren had the hardest time since she was the smallest and the handholds were too far apart. At one point, she clung to Decker’s back while he climbed up one section.
It did require total concentration. I became so focused on each little move that all I could think about was the space surrounding my hands and feet.
We were all peppered with cuts by the time Javen said, “I’m at the top. There’s an opening.”
There was a ladder on the outside without any barbs. When we climbed down and walked out of the mist, I took big gulps of air, trying to shake off the heavy feeling of the fog.
“That was just stupid,” Decker said. “So you endure a lot of pain to get out. What’s the point of that?”
“Do you really want to debate Fosaanian philosophy?” Javen asked.
“No! I’m just saying it’s stupid. I haven’t had any great revelation from that trial.”
Javen rolled his eyes. “Do you ever have any great revelations?”
“At least we are out of there. Let’s keep going,” I said, wanting to get as far away from the fog as possible.
We walked into a garden area that was open enough to see the ocean below. The garden was filled with dozens of slender pillars made of stacked stones. The pillars were different heights, some made of only four or five stones, and some of so many they were a couple of meters high.
Decker reached out and touched one. The top part of it collapsed. He jumped back, cutting off what might have been a shriek as some of the stones rumbled down the hillside and spilled into the ocean. “I didn’t mean to do that! I thought they were fastened together.”
We watched as the last one disappeared under the water. “We can’t take you anywhere,” Lainie teased.
I turned around to suggest we move on and stopped when I saw Javen’s face. He was staring up at the stacks of stone, a look of horror on his face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What is this place?”
He knelt and began to restack the stones that still remained. “It’s a new graveyard,” he said. “A big one.”
Chapter Eleven
Decker came over to help Javen stack the stones. “I didn’t know,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t know how many Fosaanians in total had been in the village in the south. Three hundred? Four hundred? Maybe more, because I was sure the Earth estimates were off. I didn’t know how many had been sent north, but seeing Javen’s reaction made me think something terrible had happened here.
“I’ll see you back at the ship,” Wren said abruptly.
“Why don’t you want to come with us?” Javen stood back up. I could hear the suspicion in his voice. “What are we going to find?”
“I don’t know.” She ran down toward the path back to the tunnel.
Javen pulled out his knife again. “I don’t like this.”
“Wren isn’t hiding anything. If you haven’t figured it out by now, she is not that kind of person,” Nic said to him.
Javen stared at her. “Everyone has hidden motives.”
“Maybe every Fosaanian. Don’t judge everyone else by your culture,” Nic said.
I didn’t point out the hypocrisy in her statement. She’d grown up on Reyet, and everyone we met there certainly had a motive. Basically it was every person for him or herself.
“The real question is, do we go ahead?” Decker asked.
“Yes,” Javen said, his voice tight. “I need to see.”
He led the way, striding fast. Down below us, the beach’s black sand glittered in the sun. In the heat of the day, the water looked very tempting, though I suspected a number of lethal creatures lurked below the surface.
We rounded a corner to find the palace complex spread out in front of us. I had seen images of the royal palace before the eruption of the supervolcano. It had been a series of buildings constructed at the base of a mountain. None of it had looked incredibly impressive from the outside, and there had been no images of the interior.
One larger building stood in the center of the group, though it was no more than two stories tall. It was very long and curved around to match the curve of the mountain.
Javen walked up to it and opened the two large doors. I knew before we went in that we wouldn’t find anyone. Complete silence waited for us. No distant sounds of voices, no closing doors, nothing.
“I don’t think we are going to find anyone,” Lainie said. “We would have seen someone by now.”
“I agree. Let’s go back,” Nic said. “We’re wasting our time.”
I felt a weight settling on me. I had known I couldn’t count on finding Mira here, but there had been a spark of hope. “We should at least look. We might find some sort of clue where they’ve gone.”
“I’m not going back yet,” Javen said. “The rest of you do what you want.”
“We should stay together,” Decker said. “We might run into trouble on the way back.”
“Then you’ll have to stick with Quinn and me,” Javen said.
Reluctantly, the rest agreed. We all walked inside, our footsteps clicking on the tiled floor. As we passed through the entryway into the main part of the building, it was like entering a whole different world from the simple exteriors.
We’d seen some interiors that the Fosaanians had built on Reyet, where they had tried to replicate old Fosaan. They’d only gotten it partly right.
“Incredible!” Lainie exclaimed.
It was spectacular. The floors and walls shimmered with mosaic tiles, each tiny piece edged in gold. The mosaics were stunning on their own, but they were magnified by thin sheets of mirrors hanging from the ceilings, angled so that the light reflected off every surface. It was fantastic, like walking through a three-dimensional painting that had come alive. I’d seen a painting in a museum once on Earth done by an artist a long time ago who had painted golden mosaic pictures. I couldn’t remember the name, but these rooms reminded me of him.
I could imagine Mira here, dressed in the old style Fosaanian robes, her head held high, surrounded by her people.
I couldn’t see myself in that picture. It would be just like on Reyet, when we’d gone to see the leaders of important Fosaanian families. I’d been an unwelcome intruder and had onl
y been tolerated because I had come with Mira. Viewing this place made me more aware of the distance between us.
We walked through a series of rooms of different sizes, none of them furnished. They were all beautiful and must have been built by incredible craftspeople. They emphasized just how much the Fosaanians had lost in the Apocalypse—not just the physical structures that had been scattered in cities across the planet, but the people who had made the culture thrive with their skills. I didn’t know how I’d feel if I discovered Earth had a whole history full of traditions that had disappeared, especially if that vanished society was far more advanced.
We came up to an enormous hall and stopped. “This looks like the main hall, or a throne room, or something,” I said.
Lainie swung around, her arms out wide. “Maybe it was a ballroom.” She stopped. “Do Fosaanians dance?” she asked Javen.
“The ones who live on Reyet do,” he said, “but it’s a very stately dance that is more like a procession. They claim it is a traditional dance passed down. We didn’t dance in the Fosaanian village. It would not have been our way to do something so frivolous.”
I could believe that. The one time I’d been to the Fosaanian village, their entertainment had consisted of a puppet show meant to tell the story of their survival, and a fighting competition between two people to see who could knock the other one down until they couldn’t get up.
I usually liked wandering around empty places, though they were hard to find on Earth. I knew enough of the history of this place to be aware of all the tragedy that had happened here. When the volcano exploded, how long had it taken the people within these walls to realize they were doomed?
“I can’t believe Earth wanted to destroy all this,” Lainie said.
“It wasn’t this they wanted to destroy in particular,” Decker said. “It was the emperor and the way he terrorized his own people. He was brutal. He had thousands of his people killed for protesting the way the government operated. It’s one of the reasons Earth went to war with Fosaan.”
Paradox Hunt Page 12
