Oracle

by David Dickie

  Everything was quite for a moment. Then Ziwa said, “That was unfortunate.”

  Grim slowly elbowed himself to a sitting position. His entire body ached. “Thank you,” he said to Ziwa.

  Ziwa shrugged. “No. I thank you. You saved my life. If you hadn’t distracted him, we both would have been vanquished. And I know you acted because I appeared to be in distress, to save me. It was a brave and worthy thing to do.”

  “Brave, worthy and not too smart. I’m going to have to look for better options next time,” said Grim, wincing as he touched his bruised back.

  Ziwa picked up the staff. Grim looked at it, looked back at the headless body of Pellen, then back to Ziwa. “Not expecting trouble, huh?”

  Ziwa sighed. “I was not. I was not expecting any of this.”

  Grim said, “And would you be so kind as to tell me a bit more about what were you expecting?”

  Ziwa nodded, looking serious. “What led me here is nothing compared to what you have seen already. It was, in fact, an old military document that ended up in one of the archives in a Kethem Naval Intelligence installation in Kuseme. There was mention of a staff that controlled the polychromatic fires left in the hands of this temple. It was a vague reference, and I was not sure whether it meant control of a World Gate or not. But I did not have many leads, and for reasons that are my own, I need something like that.”

  Grim gestured at the staff. “That seems to be it, and seems like a giant mix of artificer spells in one package, which I thought was impossible. I thought you couldn’t overlap different spells on the same object… couldn’t even have objects with spells burned in too close to one another.”

  Ziwa shook her head. “No. The staff is a gate key, but it is not shaped like any gate key I have heard of before. More than that, it is the master key. The master key can tap the power of the gate if it is within range, out to a distance of approximately a quarter mile. Past that, it does have one burned-in spell, an instantaneous transport back to the middle of the gate. So it controls the polychromatic fires in a sense, but not in the way I was hoping.”

  Grim said, “You were hoping for something that could stop gate-created spells.”

  Ziwa nodded. “Spells, artifacts, effects. Anything made with the gate will be more powerful than any normal spell casting. It takes an equivalently powerful artifact to counter it.”

  Grim said, “Why do you need something like that?”

  “That is my business.”

  Grim said thoughtfully, “I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for, but perhaps what you have is better. You clearly know something about the gate and how to control it. Can’t you make your own artifacts now, ones that can counter whatever it is you are fighting against?”

  Ziwa shook her head. “No. What I need to destroy is about as powerful as anything that has ever been created with a gate. That takes… something more. And it seems this is not that powerful a gate in any case” She sighed. “I will continue my search. How did you survive that blast? That was not a typical spell, fire or some other destructive force; it was a weak form of chaos. I could not have survived that.”

  “I don’t know,” said Grim. Ziwa looked at him and didn’t say anything. “Honestly.” Ziwa waited. Grim sighed. “Well, I have a theory.”

  “Let us hear it,” said Ziwa.

  Grim pulled out the amulet from under his shirt. “I… acquired this a while ago. There have been a few times since that it seems to have suppressed spells cast on me.”

  Ziwa frowned. “It will stop more than just spells, apparently.” She pointed her sword at it. “This is odd.” She looked baffled. “What is it?”

  “Honestly, no idea,” replied Grim.

  “Well, it leaves me with a set of limited options.”

  “With regards to what?” asked Grim, suddenly nervous again.

  “With regards to a working World Gate no one seems to know about other than the two of us. You do not know what people will do to control it, or to destroy it to keep others from controlling it.”

  Grim thought about it. “I can see that,” he finally said. “Look, I get it. I’m not going to hold you to the agreement.”

  Ziwa looked baffled. “What?”

  “You said you get the thing you were after, I get anything else. If you can throw magic around the way Pellen was, or create artificer’s items… well, I see that’s worth a lot of coin. We can figure something out.”

  Ziwa shook her head. “Trust me, you do not want any part of that. I do not want any part of that.”

  Grim frowned. “Then… what options are we talking about?”

  “I can not have anyone talking about this. I can lock it down with the master key, make it unusable, but I can not destroy it, and I can not let word leak out.”

  Grim stood up and dusted himself off, making sure his rapier and daggers were within easy reach. “Not sure I like where this conversation is heading.”

  Ziwa looked at him without comprehension for a minute, then smiled. “No, I was not talking about taking your life. I owe you my life. I do not take that lightly. And, truth be told, I do not take life if I can avoid it, elf or human. I was talking about removing the information from your mind with memory alteration. That, or a geas not to speak of it. But your amulet makes that a bit of a problem, unless you are willing to take it off.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Grim.

  “I will not fight you for it. So I am back to having no options that I am willing to exercise.”

  Grim thought about the kind of money you could bring in with something like the gate. He sighed. Somewhere along the line, he’d turned into the old story of the man who changed everything he touched into dirt, who couldn’t keep a coin in his pocket. “We could destroy it right now. You said no one knows how to build one. If we wreck it, it’s useless.”

  Ziwa grinned, but there was no mirth in it. “You do not destroy these things without some collateral damage.” Grim raised his eyebrow. “The city I mentioned, Pleton?” Grim nodded, remembering her cryptic statement before Pellen had arrived. “The reason no one has heard of it is because it is not there anymore. There is nothing but bedrock and melted slag.”

  Grim blinked. “An entire city? Destroying one of these flattened an entire city?”

  “And much of the surrounding countryside,” said Ziwa. She gestured at the door to the room with the World Gate. “A World Gate taps into raw chaos, bypasses the rules and laws that keep it bound. They suck it out at a measured pace, build up a charge, and then you can use that. Spells are easy. Artificer items take more power, so the gate needs to charge again. There are other things, even harder things, and that takes both a charge and setup time. But the point is, it has a direct connection to raw chaos. Assuming you had enough power to destroy the gate, and that is not easy, you have a hole that raw chaos floods through. It does not last long. But it takes very little chaos interacting with normal matter to create a tremendous quantity of energy. Undirected, it is an explosion that will destroy everything within a mile. It would be more, but this is a smaller gate. A regular gate… three to five miles.

  Grim thought that one through. “You told Pellen the human gates had been destroyed. By the elves? Is that what happened to that city in Tawhiem you were talking about, Pleton? Did the elves kill an entire human city?”

  Ziwa paused for a moment, then finally nodded. “That was a long time ago, at the beginning of the fall of the human empire. There was a certain amount of desperation due to… many reasons, good or bad.”

  Grim didn’t know where to go with that. It was something that had happened generations before he was born. He said tentatively, “I could promise not to say anything.”

  Ziwa pointed her sword at him and finally nodded. “You could. So do.”

  “I promise not to say anything,” said Grim.

  “I will accept that promise,” said Ziwa. “We can find time to talk more when we rejoin the caravan. For now, let us disable the gate an
d return to the caravan. This place makes me uncomfortable.”

  Grim said thoughtfully, “You know how to use this World Gate to make artificer’s items?” Ziwa nodded. “Could I ask you create one for me before you lock the gate down? That paralysis spell Pellen used, could you burn it into something like a belt buckle, say keyword activated?”

  Ziwa looked a little curious, but she just nodded again and said, “I could, but it will be difficult to direct the spell properly with a belt buckle. Do you not want something easier to aim with?”

  Grim said, “I want it to affect the wearer.”

  Ziwa nodded slowly. “Certainly. What would you like as the keyword?”

  Grim thought for a moment. “Keyword lockdown.”

  “And you want a release?”

  “Keyword release.”

  “Given I have told you some things are my business, I will assume this is your business and not ask. Let us just finish this up.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was a quiet walk back to the caravan. The sun had set. Ziwa had the staff, which she’d used to lock the gate down, and her sword, which was giving off enough of a glow to see clearly by. They split up when they reached the caravan, Ziwa to her wagon, Grim to the small tents used for sleep by the caravan guards who were off-watch. Grim did not sleep well—the scenes from the temple running over and over again in his mind in strange loops. He finally fell into a fitful sleep with dreams of cities burning in conflagrations of polychromatic fire.

  He was tired the next day, but happy to be on the move away from that place. Alan and Lug asked him about the temple, and he told them it had been a bust, just rubble.

  At the end of the day, the caravan settled into the evening routine, setting up tents and cook fires. Ziwa came over before the sun touched the horizon. Grim nodded to her. She nodded back. “Fair evenings to you, Grim. Would you care to join me for dinner? Food has already been delivered to my wagon, and I asked for a second helping.”

  Grim nodded his head and said, “I would be honored.” As usual, Grim wondered what it was about Ziwa that brought the need for formal speech out in him. He couldn’t remember using that phrase at any point in his past, and with her, it seemed to be popping out of his mouth every other sentence. They walked the short distance to her wagon. Ziwa went inside for a moment and came out with a camp stool, which she set down for Grim, then went back inside and returned with two bowls of what appeared to be chicken stew. She handed one to Grim and sat on the steps that led up to the wagon door. Grim took a seat on the stool.

  Grim paused for a moment, trying to figure out the best way to approach things, and finally settled on the least likely of his options, that being honesty. He said, “I did want to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

  Ziwa did not speak for a few moments, and Grim saw her hand close on the hilt of her sword, but she showed no indication she was going to draw it. “I thought you might. I will tell you that I am generally forbidden to share knowledge with others. But I owe you a debt, and I am not sure when or if I will be able to repay it. So I will tell you what I can as a small token of my thanks,” she said at last.

  “Gensanthien, in Bythe” Grim said.

  Ziwa raised an eyebrow. “That, I must admit, is the last thing I expected you to ask about. What do you know about Gensanthien?”

  “Almost nothing. One of my friends said something about it. He didn’t give a lot of detail.”

  Ziwa nodded. “Yes. Alan. Alan and Lug. An interesting pair. There is something about them, something off. I would swear...” and she stopped.

  It was Grim’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “You know them?”

  “Just what I have learned on the trip. My journeys usually have a purpose, and when there is a purpose, there always seem to be some that want to thwart it. I like to know who I’m traveling with for that reason. You and your friends joined the caravan at the last minute, the very last minute. It is unusual for a caravan master to do that.”

  Grim thought about going off track for a minute. He had questions about the two of them he wanted answers to. But he doubted Ziwa knew any of them, and it felt wrong to ask her. He returned to the original topic. “What happened with Gensanthien?”

  Ziwa looked down at the ground. She touched the hilt of her sword again. Finally, she sighed. “Do you know anything about elves’ ability to share memories?”

  Grim nodded. “The racial mind matrix. Yes.”

  Ziwa looked surprised. “Very good, and unusual. This is not a common topic.”

  Grim said, “Not a common person.”

  Ziwa grinned for a second, then went back to looking sad. “Elves link telepathically. Not in the standard communicate-without-words way, on a more basic, fundamental level. They share memories, thoughts, feelings.”

  Grim nodded. “I know.”

  “I will not bore you with the details of my past, which are not that clear in any case, even to me. Something happened to me when I was a child, something that altered my link. I do not remember any of it, do not remember anything before meeting Gensanthien. My link is corrupted, somehow. The elves call it ‘madsend.’ I did not know it when I met Gensanthien. He was the first normal elf…” She paused for a moment. “The first elf I had ever met, as far as I know. The link is instinctual. I reached out with it, connected with him. It stopped his heart.”

  Grim shook his head. “I’m sorry. That must have been difficult.”

  Ziwa shrugged. “It was. There is nothing I could have done to prevent it. It was not my fault.” But she looked haunted to Grim. “I am not sure if the trauma from that is why I can not remember anything before the event. Since then, I have been… I can not say an outcast. There are a few elves who have found ways to block my sending. I would call some of them friends. And there is an effort to find a way to fix me. Elven lives are precious to them. In the meantime, the elves provide money for what I need, and other items to keep me safe,” and she gestured at her sword.

  Grim looked at the sword and frowned. “So. I assume that was the source of some of your… abilities. At the temple.”

  Ziwa nodded. “It is not supposed to be public knowledge. The elves let me run free because the few years I spent in the Evael, elven-home, I had to be kept segregated from others. I do not know much about my homeland. Because it is not safe for me to be with others, I wander, mostly in the human lands. I try to earn my way by taking on missions that require an elf, but that are considered inappropriate for the ambassadorial staff in the major human cities, or that are too sensitive for them to know about.” She started suddenly. “Not that there is anything I could not share with them. I receive my missions directly from Hotherial, who is…” And she stopped. “My apologies, I wander of topic. My sword is what’s called a gate-forged soul artifact. Soul artifacts are one of those gate-created items that require a significant amount of power and a complex setup. They also require the willing sacrifice of an elf. Their… spirit or consciousness is bound into the sword, along with raw chaos. That binding takes their life but gives them other powers. The humans called them Great Swords for the short period of time they could create them,” and an expression of distaste ran across her features, then vanished just as quickly.

  “Morpangler and the rest,” said Grim, nodding.

  Ziwa looked at him sharply, put her hand to the hilt of sword, and relaxed a little, but she was still frowning. “You know more than you should on a surprising variety of topics.”

  Grim did, more than he was willing to tell her. “The human Great Swords that precipitated the fall of the empire are the stuff of legend. Everyone knows about them.” Which was kind of true.

  She squinted at him. “Not by name. Not that they were gate-forged.” Then she pulled her sword out in a smooth, practiced motion and held it out in front of her, peering down the blade. “This is Facinalethvree” she said. “He has been… well, more than a guide for me; I have no parents I can remember, but I think I know what having a father fe
els like. He is perceptive, more than a living being could be. I don’t fully understand the limits of his power. There’s certainly detection beyond normal vision and hearing. He tells me who I can trust, and that is perhaps the greatest gift of them all. There are other things besides guidance. I can move through shadow when I need too, although I fear I am using up Facinalethvree’s power rather quickly doing that sort of thing, and when the power of chaos is gone, he is gone too. That is what I did in the temple to close with Pellen before he could use the gate key to stop me.”