Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  Then he ate as quickly as he could shovel the stew in with the aid of a piece of tough, flat bread. The tea had an odd, astringent taste, but it was curiously soothing to his raw throat.

  As soon as he had finished both tea and stew, the same Shin'a'in took bowl and cup away from him. The others were already curled in their bedrolls for sleep, and he followed their example. The Shin'a'in blew out the oil lamps on his way out of the tent, leaving them in darkness.

  At some point before he went to sleep, Altra appeared, lying beside him and half over him, creating a swath of heat at his back. The Firecat purred quietly and said just one thing.

  :Karal... I'm proud of you.:

  With that added comfort—in more ways than the merely physical—he fell instantly asleep.

  The Shin'a'in woke them before dawn, and they broke their fast with more stew, bread, and tea. Then they were in the saddle again, and pushing outward.

  The second day was a repetition of the first, as was the third. Karal's eyes grew sore from the reflection of sun on snow, and from the red eyes that met his every time anyone—except the shaman and An'desha—turned to face him, the others must be suffering the same. The cold, dry air made his lips crack and chap, and his throat sore. After the second day, Lo'isha gave them each a little vial of aromatic oil to moisten their lips with, and advised them that they might want to anoint their whole faces. Karal took him up on the suggestion; Firesong resisted at first, but by midafternoon, with his cheeks flaming from wind-chapping, he had given in and done the same.

  Karal lost track of time; he was either riding or sleeping—too much of the former, not enough of the latter. The landscape they traversed was always the same; not quite flat, but close enough for a young man from the mountains, rolling hill after snow-covered, rolling hill, with scarcely a tree or a bush in sight except where they marked the passage of watercourses or the location of a spring. The cold numbed all of him, and he never was really warm except the moment that they awoke him. Firesong looked miserable, Silverfox looked resigned, and only An'desha and Lo'isha seemed to thrive.

  But then, this is—was—his home.

  The gryphons rarely appeared, and when they did, they were fixated on the goal and could talk of nothing else. At last—after how many days he could not tell, that goal loomed up on the horizon.

  It was singularly unprepossessing, for something they had chased across half a continent—an odd, melted stub of silvery-gray rock, poking up out of the top of yet another rolling hill.

  Then, when it didn't get any closer, he realized that it must be much larger than he had thought.

  Then he finally spotted the tiny dots of more Shin'a'in swarmed about the base, and the equally tiny dots of two gryphons circling it, and he understood how large it was.

  There was a long pile of something dark against the snow at the foot of the Tower-rich, turned earth. It looked as if the Shin'a'in had been digging for something.

  The closer they got, the more his skin crawled. The Tower simply didn't look melted, it had been melted. The great force that fueled the Cataclysm had made the rock of the Tower run like liquid wax. And they were about to play with forces worse and more hazardous than the one that had done this, weapons that the Mage of Silence, who had created this, thought were too dangerous to use!

  What am I doing here? he thought, aghast.

  It would not be the last time he had that thought.

  They rested and slept for what remained of that day and all suicidal to the next night; it would be stupid, and perhaps suicidal to enter the Vault with their minds fogged with fatigue. But the moment the sun rose, so did they, and one of the Sword-Sworn led them to the opening the Shin'a'in had been working on since this expedition had been decided on.

  The old door to the Tower lay somewhere beneath several hundred tons of melted, fused rock. The Shin'a'in had taken a more direct route to the Vault beneath the remains of the Tower. There must have been hundreds of them working on it to get it done in so short a period of time.

  They had burrowed down in a long slanting tunnel into the side of the hill supporting the Tower, straight to the ancient Vault wall. That was only stone blocks mortared together, and the mortar, after so many centuries, was old and weak. Urtho had never bothered to put any sort of armoring or defensive measures on the wall of the Vault—after all, anyone who got this far would still have to dig a hole in the full sight of the guards, the army, the Kaled'a'in, the gryphons....

  Not likely.

  The Shin'a'in, with advice from the miners of k'Leshya, and additional help from the gryphons, had been working nonstop; together they had made an impressive tunnel, chipped out the weak mortar between the stones, and pried out enough of the latter to create an entrance fully large enough for Treyvan and Hydona, not to mention Florian, who insisted on coming below as well. The other Companions were perfectly happy to remain outside and rest, and Karal caught them casting many glances askance at Florian as he prepared to descend the precipitous tunnel with the party of mages. They all had lanterns, but the light didn't help the feeling of being trapped beneath tons of earth and stone. The tunnel itself had been shored up quite expertly, and for a moment Karal wondered where they had gotten the timbers.

  The gryphons, of course. They must have flown them in from k'Leshya.

  A formidable task, equal to the task of digging this tunnel.

  Karal concentrated on keeping his breathing steady, reminding himself that as long as his lantern flame burned brightly, there was more than enough air down here for them all to breathe.

  At least I'm not cold. There's no wind blowing. There's no snow-glare.

  How much longer does this tunnel go on?

  He hadn't begun by counting his steps, but he started at that point. Fifty... one hundred... one hundred and fifty shouldn't they have reached the wall by now?

  His chest felt tight; was the light a little dimmer? The flame of his candle a little lower?

  :Karal. I'm right behind you.: The voice in his mind warned him, so when a head bumped against his thigh, he didn't jump and screech. :It's all right. There's air, and if anything happens, I can Jump you out.:

  Immediately the invisible bands tightening around his chest loosened. of course! Altra could get him out, even if the roof collapsed! He relaxed, and the flame in his lantern brightened again. Or perhaps it had never been dimming in the first place.

  "We're at the Vault."

  The shaman's voice, muffled by all the other bodies between him and the Shin'a'in, alerted him so that he didn't run into An'desha when An'desha stopped.

  The line ahead of him shuffled forward, step by step. "Watch yourself," An'desha warned, as the light from his lantern caught on the regular shapes of stone blocks. "There's debris in the way."

  An'desha moved forward and vanished into a hole a gryphon could barely squeeze through. There was a litter of stone pieces and other debris in front of the hole, as if it had just today been made. Perhaps it had!

  He stepped over the edge of the hole, following the gleam of light—and stepped into another world.

  The floor was smoothly polished white stone with a pattern, a compass rose of eight points inset in it, made of a rose-colored granite. This was a large, round room with white stone walls that rose in a conical shape to a point about two stories above their heads. Hanging down from the center by a silver chain was a large sphere of crystal, which shone softly in the reflected light from the lanterns.

  Karal stared at it in awe.

  "What is it?" he asked. "A weapon? Something like a Heartstone?"

  Firesong shook his head as he also stared; they stood in a loose circle with their mouths agape, gazing upward. Finally Treyvan laughed, and said, "Much sssimplerrr," and called out a word in a language that was not quite Shin'a'in and not quite Tayledras.

  Obediently, the globe lit up from within. Karal cried out and shielded his eyes, but he needn't have bothered. The radiance was remarkably soft, and left only a faint afterim
age that rapidly faded.

  "It isss a lamp," Treyvan said superfluously.

  Now that they could see clearly, they doused their lanterns and took a look around. This, obviously, was not the Vault itself, but probably a workroom to one side, for there was the dark gap of an open door in the wall. Firesong was the nearest, so he was the first one through it, where he stopped, just inside, blocking the door.

  "Well," his dry voice echoed back, "it would be nice if I could see. What was that command?" Before anyone could answer him, he tried several versions of the word Treyvan had used, and finally hit on the right intonation. His form was silhouetted for a moment as the light flared to life, then dimmed to the twin of the first.

  "I believe," the Tayledras Adept drawled, "we have found what we were looking for."

  He moved out of the way, leaving space for the others to enter behind him.

  Karal lagged back; for one thing, he was not sure he wanted to see what they were looking for. For another, he knew very well he wouldn't know what he was looking at!

  So he allowed all the others to crowd in ahead of him, and trailed behind. He expected exclamations, but he heard nothing but a few whispers.

  When he passed the threshold himself, he understood why.

  This was a huge room, but practically empty except for four of the crystal lights suspended from the ceiling, and a single floating barge in the middle. Faint outlines in the ceiling above the barge suggested a door or hatchway there.

  Around the periphery of the room were fifteen more doors, all of them closed.

  Where were the weapons? Had all of them been taken away?

  "The weapons must be behind each of those doors, one to a room," Firesong said authoritatively. "If I were holding dangerous objects, that's what I'd do with them. That way if you had an accident with one, it would be confined to the room it was in and not spread to the others."

  "You begin to sound like a career artificer, Firesong," Silverfox replied. "That makes entirely too much sense."

  Firesong turned to the nearest door on his right, and continued talking. "What's more, I'll bet the room we were in held a weapon that Urtho did use, and the reason that the barge is in here is to take large or bulky creations up to where you can—or could, I mean—move them out the doors."

  "I wonder why this place even exists," An'desha said, as Firesong checked to see if the door was locked before he tried opening it. "You'd think that a force that would melt the Tower would destroy everything, wouldn't you?"

  "Maybe because this was right below the event, none of the force went downward," Karal hazarded, trying to remember some of what he'd learned from the artificers.

  "Perhaps the shields on the Vault disintegrated, but absorbed all of the force in the process," Silverfox guessed.

  "Perhaps the Star-Eyed had something to do with it," Lo'isha said with great dignity.

  "Perrrhapsss all of thossse rrreasssonsss, perrrhapsss none," Treyvan said with impatience. "Isss the doorrr locked orrr not?"

  "Just stuck," Firesong replied, finally shoving it open. He spoke the word that lit the lamp and gave an exclamation of disappointment.

  "Come look for yourself, but I don't think this one is going to do us any good," he said, waving them over.

  Once again Karal held back, but on his own viewing, he was inclined to agree with Firesong. This room contained a conglomerate of bizarre parts, from coils of wire to animal skulls with jeweled eyes, all woven together in a crazed spider-web of colored string, ribbon, hair-thin wire, and rawhide thongs.

  "Good God, why skulls?" Karal exclaimed, revolted.

  "Perhaps because they had been used in shamanic ceremonies and so now were attuned to power of a sort he needed," Lo'isha hazarded. "Not Kaled'a'in ceremonies, but Urtho made use of the magics he had learned from many peoples, and many peoples were his allies."

  "I don't know about you, but I don't even want to touch that," Firesong said as he edged back outside. "I don't know what it does, and I'm not sure it would still do it at this point—and even if it did, how much of it would fall into dust if you brushed against it?"

  "Trrrue," Treyvan said, taking care to tuck his wings in as he moved back outside. With one accord, they closed the door with the greatest of care and moved on to the next room.

  By the time they were finished, they had eliminated eight of the fifteen possibilities. None were quite as bizarre as the cow-skull construction, but no one wanted to take any chances on them. Two were featureless boxes that had even Treyvan shaking his head in bafflement, one was an unidentifiable object that resembled nothing so much as a spill of liquid caught and frozen in midair. Two more were delicate sculptures of wires and gemstones that they were all afraid to touch lest they fall to pieces, and the remaining three Treyvan recognized from his litany as being simple weapons of dreadful mass destruction of life and property—not at all suited to their purposes, for there was nothing magical about the energy released when these things were triggered.

  That left seven possibilities.

  With each of the objects was a metal plaque, identifying how to destroy it, but nothing else about its nature, except the single line, "You cannot use this weapon without killing yourself. Neither could I. Be wise, and be rid of it." Each plaque was signed with Urtho's name and sigil.

  They gathered rubbings of all these plaques, together with a crude drawing of each object and the number of the room it was in—counting the empty room as number one and going sunwise—and sat down together in the floating barge to discuss what they had.

  "We have three days to decide which device and how to work it, one day to set up and practice, and that's all," Firesong warned. "If we don't succeed by then, working with the assumption that the waves going out can be made to match the speed of the ones coming in, the breakwater will go down. Irrevocably. Without that to break up the force, the next mage-storm through here might well trigger one or more of these things."

  "Sssurely not—" Treyvan said, but he did not sound certain.

  "Are you willing to stand around here and wait to see? I'm not, Firesong said bluntly. "Frankly, I didn't think we'd find more than one or two of Urtho's weapons existing; I never dreamed there'd be this many that were still intact. It seems to me that if we don't succeed here, we'd better evacuate the Plains and k'Leshya."

  "I wish I didn't feel the same way," the shaman said with reluctance. "I had not expected to find so many lethal objects here either. If one or even two were activated, the Tower and the physical containments still here would probably keep the damage to a small area—but if three or more went—" He shuddered, his face white.

  "Right," Firesong nodded. "And we are making a lot of assumptions about whether they'd 'go off,' for that matter. Some of them might be the magical equivalent of a slow acid, some might simply shred things randomly for a long period of time."

  "Then let's get on with this and make a decision!" An'desha exclaimed, his nervousness evident in the high pitch of his voice.

  But a few hours later, it was clear that they had another problem.

  Between the litany and the instructions for disposal, it was possible to deduce what each of the remaining seven objects did, and they were able to eliminate three more of the seven. The trouble was, when they had ranked the remaining four in order of suitability, they came to another, unexpected snag.

  The language that the k'Leshya thought was the purest Kaled'a'in, that they had cherished—they fondly assumed—as unchanged for centuries, was anything but pure and unchanged.

  "Look, we have three words here that all mean 'explosive'!" Firesong burst out. "Your version of Kaled'a'in has two of them, Treyvan, ko'chekarna and chekarna and from the destruction instructions I think we've got a third, ri'chekarna! So which is right? We have to know or we're likely to get our number one choice going off right in our faces!"

  "I—do not know," Treyvan said helplessly. "The language hasss ssshifted.…"

  "Languages do, over time," Lo'isha
said ironically. "Your mistake was to assume that since the Kaled'a'in were among peoples that avoided change, your language and ways were immutable. We need a scholar in ancient Kaled'a'in—"

  "Or someone with ForeSight, who could look at each of these things and determine which one we can use safely!" Karal said suddenly, as he looked directly at Florian and Altra.

  The two looked at each other, as if they were consulting silently. The little group stared at both of them in an expectant hush. It seemed to take forever before Florian turned back to them, but it was Altra who "spoke," although his eyes were directed off past Karal's shoulder, as if he was concentrating on something.

  :I cannot bring someone here in time. Florian cannot reach that far with his mind.: Karal's heart fell.

  "I can't build a Gate that will reach that far," Firesong reminded them, "And neither can An'desha."

  "Then we arrre rrright back to the beginning." Treyvan's ear-tufts flattened against his head. "Back to language, a ssset of verrrssse that hasss ssshifted meaningsss overrr the yearsss, and guesssesss which can get usss all killed."

  "No—" An'desha corrected, his eyes half-closed in thought. "We do have more than that. Mage-Sight should tell us something about the power sources, and that should tell us if it's something we ought to avoid."

  "It might tell usss otherrr thingsss asss well," Treyvan put in, his ear-tufts rising again.

  "And let usss make the bessst transsslationsss we can," Hydona added. "If we have the choicssse between a devicsse with a good trrranssslation and one with a half trrranssslation, need I sssuggessst which we usssse?"