by Lori Hyrup
“Hmm,” said Aria. “I’m sure there is a way to do both.”
The Guardian sighed.
“Zephyron, I promise, we’ll get her out safely.”
“Thank you,” he whispered, the pain of worry clear in his eyes.
When they finally lay down for the night, Aria’s mind refused to rest. She worried and fretted: two things she had never done much of in the past. She had been resigned to her fate and accepted that she was nearing the end of her days. However, having met Zephyron and Kharra and having learned about the bigger world, she found she no longer had that resignation. She wanted to learn and experience so much more, but she feared she would never get the chance.
18
THE CAPSTONE
Kharra’s head stopped spinning. The pain given by the collar left no marks, but the sensation set her skin afire as if it had been stripped from her body and reattached. She had tried to reason with Oracle Lukav. That had only brought additional punishment. Though never showing on his face or in his voice, the man radiated paranoia, and he was more than a bit mad. The insanity was contained though, focused inward, and his subordinates believed his plans and logic to be sound.
Kharra allowed her mind to wander, sensing around for something she might use to free herself. She had done this for many days, and each time she had failed to find what she sought. She growled to herself in frustration and then stopped as a spark of thought took form. Up until now she had been searching the area with mind seeking, but out of habit she had continued to keep her empathy shielded. Having nothing to lose in the effort, Kharra relaxed her mental shield. Her heart raced and her body surged with adrenaline as a torrent of emotions assaulted her. She slammed her shields back into place.
What in the world was that? Kharra thought.
Better prepared, Kharra relaxed her shields once again, a tiny bit at a time. As before the emotions threatened to overwhelm her, but she fought against them to maintain control. With long-practiced discipline, she sorted through the emotions in an effort to locate their source. Sweat beaded on her brow from the exertion. Her weakened state made retaining control more difficult; sheer willpower kept her going.
Kharra succeeded in separating from the mass three sets of emotions, ones that seemed to be closest to her physical location. Her breath caught. She peered at the statues across the room. They were not statues at all but people—people who had been transformed, crystallized. Kharra had no idea if they had been kruustas who had been consumed or just ordinary people trapped in crystalline shells. Though their minds had long since deteriorated, they remained alive, preserved in a perpetual state of heightened emotion—anger, terror, hate; each was different. Unlike the krumetuses, which were bulky with jagged shards protruding from their shoulders and elbows, massive ridged heads, and powerful limbs, these were thin with long, sinuous arms and legs, narrow heads, and smooth exteriors. Their faces were noseless, and solid dark crystalline facets composed their eyes.
As if awakened by her contact, the three statues moved for the first time since she had arrived in this place. They did not walk upright. Instead they collapsed upon their appendages and skittered about with quick, jerky steps one might describe as a creeping crawl—a most unnatural, disturbing motion. The three creepers approached Kharra. She screamed at them to scare them away, but they ignored her.
Oracle Lukav returned, his blue-white robes swishing as he walked. Behind him followed Priest Kilgor, who wore some type of crystalline bracelet on his wrist. The three creatures backed away when the two men entered. Lukav glanced at them and then the priest. “Why are they already active?” Lukav asked.
“I didn’t give the command,” Kilgor replied, fidgeting with his bracelet.
Lukav unlocked Kharra’s shackles, and she slumped to the ground. He peered down his hawklike nose. “I suggest you stand unless you want more pain.”
Kharra rubbed her wrists and forced herself to her feet. Her legs quivered so much she thought she might collapse, but they steadied.
“Let’s go,” Lukav ordered as he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her along through the archway of crystal. “Kilgor, bring them.” The bald priest bowed his head. The bracelet on his wrist glowed briefly. The creepers turned and followed behind him. Their awkward movement made Kharra shiver.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“You’ll see soon enough.”
Aria scanned the cave entrance, a simple opening. She climbed down along the rocky terrain, picking her footing carefully to avoid slipping. Large plates of rock overlapped, creating a crisscross pattern at the apex of the entrance. Water from the spring rains trickled down from higher on the mountainside and into the mouth of the cave. Water stains and erosion marred the rocks, and moss and lichen clung to them in the shadows of the overhang.
“This fits Pleria’s description,” Zephyron observed. “And I do sense a vein somewhere within the mountain, but who knows if this will take us to where we need to go. Xi’ari’asi, the home of the Guardians, is located within a cave system as well, but there are thousands of tunnels and caverns within the system. A person might travel for weeks and never actually find the city.”
“Let’s hope that’s not the case here.” Aria glanced back at Xierex one final time before moving into the cave. Not knowing how long they would be gone, she had left him untethered. His stomping had been a clear protest over her departure, but he would wait in the area until she returned.
The two companions descended into the cave, following the small stream created by the runoff. The entrance was wider than tall, forcing Zephyron to duck in a number of places to avoid hitting his head on knobby protrusions from the ceiling. Using materials gathered outside, Aria ignited a torch. Zephyron summoned his energy blade, which provided a surprising amount of light. For hours they climbed over rocks, slinked through narrow openings, and crawled into dozens of holes.
Eventually the cave ended, but they located the long, vertical shaft described by Pleria. Using rough-hewn handholds, the Guardian and the kruusta descended deeper into the mountain. The amount of dust collected on the handholds revealed someone had used the passage recently—a good sign. At the bottom of the shaft, the pair squeezed through a narrow crack between two large slabs of stone.
They found the second shaft and descended. A large boulder, once part of the ceiling that had collapsed at some point long ago, blocked the base of the shaft. The boulder had landed upon a V-shaped area of the cave wall, giving them just enough space to move through by crawling on their hands and knees. Beyond the boulder, the pair encountered and passed under a small waterfall, probably from the same stream they had followed up above. The stone was cold and slick but not treacherous. Through a zigzag bend and over a low wall, they finally emerged into an enormous cavern. Aria doused her torch, and Zephyron dismissed his blade.
Pleria had referred to the room as Kargan Cavern. Ambient lighting by an unseen source illuminated the area. The ceiling was pocked full of ridges, reminding Aria of the inside of a person’s mouth. Tiered rock shelves meandered back and forth across the floor, with each shelf moving lower than the previous. She and Zephyron had emerged from the side of the cavern, and the shelves from each side met up in the middle. There, a wide man-made stone path snaked along the length of the cavern, disappearing around bends in either direction.
“She said for us to go to the right,” whispered Zephyron, pointing at two massive stone columns. The columns were ancient, having long ago joined the bodies of stalactites from the ceiling and stalagmites from the floor.
Aria nodded in agreement. She listened carefully before moving in the direction indicated by Zephyron. She sensed the faint presence of shard beasts as well as the deep resonance of a shard, but she had difficulty pinpointing any specific location.
Zephyron’s eyes scanned the ceilings and walls as they advanced up through the cavern, staying near the walls rather than on the path. “We’re beneath a large vein,” he whispered observantly. “It stretches for se
veral leagues to the north and east.”
Aria looked up at the ceiling and nodded, unable to sense what he sensed. According to him, the Guardians’ power came to them through their connection to Mattekan. The crystal veins were similar to both a human’s nervous and circulatory systems. Like blood vessels the veins pumped life force into Mattekan. Like nerves they served as pathways for transmitted information. The closer a Guardian’s proximity to the veins, the stronger their connection to the transmission. Zephyron believed the shards were like a collection of nerve endings with very refined sensors, similar in purpose to a mouth or an eye or an ear, transmitting and receiving information to beings other than Guardians. He had never seen exposed shards such as the ones in Tanoria, so his belief was only a working theory.
Aria and Zephyron followed a series of tunnels upward, all illuminated along well-worn walkways and smooth walls. Aria grew concerned. “Why are there no guards?” she whispered.
“I was wondering that myself,” Zephyron answered.
Kharra shuffled along beside Lukav through dozens of tunnels and caverns. At last they emerged onto an overlook within an immense domed cavern, one large enough to house the entire city of Quan’li’ru within its interior. Brightly lit crystal veins snaking across the ceiling and down the walls illuminated the whole area.
The overlook was lavishly furnished with velveteen gold-and-blue sofas, dark-stained carved wooden chairs, plush rugs made up of a type of white animal fur of which Kharra was not familiar, and an assortment of wooden tables of different heights and lengths.
“How do you like the view?” Lukav asked, approaching the edge of the overlook.
Kharra followed. She examined the transparent cover separating the edge of the overlook from the rest of the cavern. Priest Kilgor stood back against the wall with the three creepers. They were motionless once again.
“That is a single piece of crystal,” her captor explained. “I encouraged it to grow thin and wide so as to cover the entire frame. It took me a long time to get it right.” He ran his fingers down along the glass-looking material. “Years of practice, in fact. They were always too thick, too opaque, or too brittle. My ability to direct a crystal’s growth is not as strong as my mother’s was. A pain of being a half-breed, I suppose.”
Kharra glanced at Lukav from the corner of her eye.
“My mother was Sauru, but my father was Zumai,” said Lukav. “Though not forbidden, leyoen-gifted people were generally discouraged from marrying outside their tribe for fear the result of their union would dilute the tribe’s specialized gifts. Because I am only half Sauru and half Zumai, my gifts are not nearly as strong as a full-blood of either tribe, but I showed them that using the two halves together could accomplish much greater things than they had ever imagined.”
“To be honest,” Kharra said, her dry voice cracking, “I don’t know a lot about the tribes or how they lived. I was not raised among them. That is just one of the many things I had wished to learn.”
Far across the cavern, Kharra spotted dozens of similar overlooks, some the same size and others much larger. Lights illuminated most of them, and she picked out the vague shapes of people moving about within.
What type of place was this? A reflection of light below caught her eye. Looking down, she immediately knew her answer. Several thousand glimmering dots twinkled beneath the cavern lighting. Prism wraiths, krumetuses, shard drakes, glimmer worms, creepers, shentahks, voreeks: the spacious cavern floor was filled with every type of shard beast she had ever seen as well as dozens of other types she did not recognize. All of the creatures stood motionless, arranged perfectly in straight lines. One of the creature types in particular grabbed her attention: a behemoth standing as tall as a golden oak tree and just as wide. Jagged shards, larger than a man, protruded from its back. Its arms looked too long in proportion to the rest of its body, with thick-clawed appendages hovering inches off the ground. The legs were thick like the trunk of a tree. The behemoth would not topple easily.
A surge of anxiety welled up within her. Oracle Lukav was building an army, and he had been using the Order of the Shard to help him achieve his goals. A handful of krumetuses or a pack of mutated splinter maws were frightening enough. What type of destruction could a force of this size do?
Lukav stepped away from the vista. He turned to the priest who had been standing off to the side. “It’s time. They are making their way up through the south corridor and will arrive at the Atrium shortly. Get your handlers in place.”
Priest Kilgor bowed his head and moved toward the door. The bracelet on his wrist glowed white, and the creepers followed.
Lukav turned back to Kharra. “Impressive, no?”
Kharra suddenly felt a faint but familiar presence brush the edge of her senses. Her collar grew cold against her neck. She ignored the sensation with a small smile and a lot of worry.
Zephyron, she sent.
Kharra! he responded. Aria and I are coming for you. Are you okay? Your sending feels different, muffled.
I’m fine. Kharra tried to sense his location but found she had difficulty pinpointing him. She touched the crystalline band around her throat. I have a collar similar to the ones Xareen uses, but it’s not quite as efficient. It blocks mind moving completely but not my other abilities, though it does dampen them some.
Zephyron was silent for a few moments and then responded. Stay put. We’ll be there soon.
No, Zephyron. You two need to turn around. It’s a trap.
Silence again. At last he answered, When has that ever stopped me before?
A jolt of pain through the collar sent her to her knees, and she grunted.
Lukav strode to the door. “Follow. My capstone arrives.”
Aria surveyed the room. Fragments of shattered shard beasts littered the floor. That was the third swarm they had dispatched since reaching this level. Fortunately they had not encountered anything too powerful.
Thick lines of crystal intermixed with the natural cave walls. The farther they moved north, the more prominent the crystal became. Aria stepped forward, entering a low-ceilinged room. A shallow pool of clear water lined either side of the stone path. Blue light shimmered below the water’s surface. Hundreds of narrow crystalline stalactites dripped down from the ceiling above the pools. The ceiling resembled wax after someone had gone through with a candle and tried to melt it from beneath.
Not wanting to be trapped in such a small area, Aria moved toward the opening at the end of the path. She wove around three giant crystal protrusions and stopped. The walls of the cavern rose sharply, forming a domed ceiling of dizzying heights. That, however, was not what gave her pause.
Before her, motionless and arranged in perfect lines, stood thousands upon thousands of shard beasts. Aria had never seen so many gathered in a single place. The swarm of prism wraiths in White Bluff did not begin to compare. What in Tanoria was going on here? Zephyron touched her elbow and pointed a short distance away to a series of ledges along the edge of the cavern just above the floor. On four of the ledges were three men and a woman, one per ledge. Their blue robes were unmistakable as priests of the order, and on each of their wrists they wore a glowing white bracelet. She remembered the bracelets from Priest Malechi, the priests in Haan, and some of the priests in Quan’li’ru.
The front row of shard beasts, made up entirely of rhokathedes—long, segmented, mostly transparent creatures with a dozen pairs of legs and deadly pincers—surged forward unexpectedly. Aria and Zephyron both brought up their weapons and backed away, parrying the first attacks as they did. They knew they had a better chance fighting these creatures on the opposite side of the pool room they had just exited, using the narrow tunnel as a bottleneck to funnel the attackers.
Zephyron stopped. “The doorway,” he said, “it’s gone.”
Aria spared a glance behind her. A thick crystalline slab now obstructed the entire wall where the entrance had been. She had never seen such a thing before. Any other time sh
e would have stopped to investigate but not here. Aria focused her attention on the rhokathedes, pushing her way back out through the thick crystal protrusions in order to give their weapons more room to work.
Though quick, the dog-sized shard beasts attacked single-mindedly. She hacked the pincers off the one closest to her and spun toward the next. Beside her, Zephyron’s energy blade sliced off the heads of three more.
“In the center!” Zephyron shouted over the roar of their battle. “Kharra is up there.”
Aria scanned past the attacking tangle of snapping pincers and over the wall of crystalline figures. Rising in the middle of the cavern, far from their current location, towered a conical pillar of stone, a lonely mountain peak amid a field of snow. About a quarter of the height up the cavern, the pillar tapered off with a wide, round platform following the circumference near the apex. Aria saw movement of some sort on the platform, but the distance was too great for her to discern clear details. She sensed a shard up there as well.
Aria nodded, and the two of them pressed forward. Two new rows of shard beasts surged toward them. Some of them were rhokathedes. Several were glimmer worms, and many were voreeks. Though all minor shard beasts, large numbers of any of them could quickly overwhelm even the most seasoned warriors. One of the voreeks launched itself over the backs of the others, landing in front of Aria with its razor-sharp jaw clapping at her face. Its jaw found her sword as soon as it landed. Greenish liquid oozed from its wound. The other voreeks, savage creatures with cannibalistic tendencies, pounced on their fallen kin. One of the priests on the ledges hollered something, but Aria was too focused on the fight to distinguish what he said.
Aria and Zephyron fought their way through the sea of shard beasts, sometimes facing just one row at a time and other times several rows. The less dangerous ones approached in greater numbers. Aria glanced at the priests, trying to figure out if they were only spectating or planning to engage them as well.
