Forgotten Ages (The Complete Series)

by Lindsay Buroker

  “From what I understood of the journal,” Rias said, “it was the story of an affair between one of your married ancestors and a Turgonian sailor on a treasure-hunting expedition.”

  “An affair?” Tikaya tripped over a rocky protrusion and caught herself on the wall. “I didn’t get that far. The author was describing his voyage and arrival here in the first few pages.”

  “The journal gets rather torrid once he meets Uouri.” Rias took a couple of tries at pronouncing the name, then gave up and stopped to light the lanterns. They’d gone around a bend, and the entrance was no longer in view. “The young woman apparently found him dashing and handsome in comparison to her stodgy farmer husband. Also, according to the author’s lurid descriptions, she was unexpectedly skilled at copulation methods.”

  “Must have been one of my cousin Aeli’s forebears.” Tikaya’s mind wandered into curious musings at what Rias, an ecumenical man in his own right, considered lurid and torrid. “I’ll need to get the journal back from you then. For further research.”

  “Research, eh?”

  “Er, yes. About my ancestor. It sounds like she may have been historically significant by family reckoning.”

  “Well, then, the research section starts about halfway through. It’s quite descriptive. I hadn’t realized how flowery Middle Turgonian could be.”

  Glad the shadows hid her blush, Tikaya asked, “What happened to them in the end? And does any of it tie in with our missing year?”

  “The last entry describes the pair’s plans to escape the island together. His treasure-hunting ship had finished searching for signs of the lost colony and was ready to depart for its next port. She was going to meet him at the docks where they planned to sail away together on his vessel.”

  “That’s it?” The ledge on their side of the channel dipped away, and Tikaya hiked up her dress to follow Rias into thigh-deep water. Currents tugged at her legs as the tides fluctuated. Barnacles scraped at the bottoms of her feet—maybe she shouldn’t have left her sandals up above. “If the journal and the man’s sword ended up in my attic, that doesn’t bode well for the relationship. Perhaps her husband grew wise to the affair and decided to stop it.”

  “Murder?” Rias asked.

  “Violence isn’t my people’s hallmark, but I imagine a man who’d learned his wife was sleeping with some foreign sailor could be moved to extreme acts.” Despite her words, Tikaya had a hard time believing any of her ancestors would have shot a man full of arrows, then snatched his belongings like trophies for the attic. Perhaps the bereft Uouri had taken the letters, sword, and journal herself and hidden them away as keepsakes. “Even if there had been a murder, why would any of that matter now? Why hide the record of the entire year? I can see where my family might be embarrassed if news of the affair leaked out, but in a minor manner, I should think. How upset can you be over something that happened ten generations ago?”

  Rias didn’t answer right away. He had to duck his head and maneuver around bumps in the ever-lowering ceiling. Their tunnel was angling slightly downward. That was surprising—Tikaya had assumed that, if anything, it would slant upward. She eyed the walls, wondering how much deeper they’d be able to go. So far, Rias’s lantern hadn’t illuminated anything more intriguing than graffiti that hadn’t yet been washed away by the tides. She caught a mention of a professor at the Polytechnic and what embarrassing things someone hoped would befall him. Tikaya had taken classes from the man years ago and found herself nodding in agreement at some of the suggestions.

  The water kept rising as they descended, and it lapped at her thighs now. The barnacles had been replaced by algae that squished beneath her bare feet. Rias took her to such lovely places.

  “From what I could tell,” Rias said, finally answering her questions, “our lovelorn sailor was so focused on his affair that he wasn’t documenting the ship’s expedition thoroughly, but perhaps you can find something when you read through. I struggled to read the language.”

  “I did notice,” Tikaya said, “from my original flip-through of the entire journal, that there were more than three months’ worth of entries from the time he reached the island until he stopped writing. Why would your people have been here so long? In two weeks, you could sail around all the islands in our chain and have time left for hunting, fishing, and lounging on the beach.”

  “That suggests they either found something to cause them to spend more time here, or they believed they’d find something and didn’t want to stop looking too soon.”

  “Yes. Uhm, Rias?” The ceiling had continued to drop while the water level rose, and the current tugged at Tikaya’s waist. They’d entered a wider area, the channel turning into a pool. “How far back are you planning to go? Though I’m certain you’re aware of this, I feel compelled to point out that this cave will be underwater when the tide comes in. I shouldn’t like to hold my breath to swim all the way back to the entrance.” In water that would be inky black. The thought stirred uneasiness, and she had to remind herself that tides didn’t come in that swiftly.

  Rias lifted the lantern and pointed toward a wide ledge on one side of the pool. “Let’s climb out there for a moment.”

  By the time they reached the spot, the end of the passage showed up in the lantern light. Though she knew Rias wanted to find something interesting, Tikaya was glad they wouldn’t have reason to linger.

  They crawled out of the water and sat on the ledge—the low ceiling didn’t offer room for standing. Seaweed, dead crabs, and broken sand dollars littered the rocks. Rias considered the back wall and watched the pool with intensity. Tikaya was almost to the point of asking if he’d seen something moving around in there when he slipped off his shirt.

  “We’re disrobing?” Tikaya asked. “If you’re thinking we should practice the torrid, three-hundred-year-old copulation techniques described in that journal, this wouldn’t be my first choice of locations.”

  Distracted, Rias only said, “I’m going to check something. Back in a moment.” He removed a couple of matches from his oilskin pouch, laid them on the lanterns, then tightly tied the knots closed on the pouch and tucked the remaining matches into a pocket in his clam diggers.

  Before Tikaya could ask what he expected to find, he slipped into the water, head disappearing beneath the surface.

  She eyed the dark walls around her ledge. The idea of making some discovery down there intrigued her, but she doubted it would happen. The tides scoured the caves clean every day, and they must have been explored countless times over the years.

  Long seconds meandered past—minutes?—and Rias did not resurface. Tikaya crept to the edge and peered into the pool. The lantern light did nothing to illuminate the dark water, but surely she’d see ripples from his movement if he were down there. Where had he gone? Further into the lava tube via an underwater entrance? If he didn’t find some pocket of air inside, he’d be in trouble. As heroic a constitution as he had, even he couldn’t hold his breath for more than a minute or two.

  “Rias.” Tikaya gripped the lip of the ledge. “Drowning on a date would be a stupid way to die.”

  Leaving the lanterns, she slipped her legs into the water, intending to submerge and see if she could see where he’d gone. Before she’d gone more than a step, Rias popped up in front of her, short hair matted to his head. He wiped water out of his eyes but didn’t draw in a huge gasp of air. He must have found some pocket of air nearby.

  “Going somewhere?” he asked.

  “To look for you of course. I thought a giant squid might have eaten you.”

  “The waters are a touch shallow here for them.” The soft light from the lanterns failed to show any humor on his face. He considered her for a moment, his face grave. “I have a couple more matches. I think you’ll want to see this.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s not a sure bet. Not like romping puppies or wrestling kittens.”

  “Is it worse than that room in Wolfhump?” Tikaya asked, refer
ring to the bodies she and Agarik had found, the frozen corpses mutilated from garish combat with crazed human beings.

  Rias brightened. “No. Not now, anyway.”

  “Not now?” Tikaya mouthed.

  Rias pointed toward the water under the back wall. “It’s about a twenty-second swim. There’s nowhere to get lost, as it continues on as a lava tube, but it curves downward and then back up, so it’s easy to scrape your hands. You can hold onto my leg if you want.”

  “I’ll be fine.” If it was as straightforward as he said, she could make it without a guide. Besides, she ought to save her wimp moments for truly frightening scenarios. Like climbing back up that cliff later.

  “Can you swim with your spectacles on? You’ll want them when we come up on the other side.”

  Tikaya wasn’t as certain about that, but she took them off and clenched the wire frame between her teeth. She hadn’t thought to bring another pair along and would hate to lose them down here.

  Rias took a deep breath, then dropped below the surface again. Despite her assurance, she didn’t want him to swim out of reach, so she followed after promptly.

  They’d left the lanterns on the ledge, and the light didn’t extend far. Tikaya had to grope her way through the darkness. With one hand running along the bottom and the other stretched ahead, she found the opening Rias had mentioned and kicked her way into it. In the cold blackness she kept her fingers outstretched and fluttered her feet for forward momentum. The tide surged about her, one moment helping her progress and the next hindering it, but her fingers soon bumped into bare skin instead of rock. She identified Rias’s leg and pulled herself upright beside him, her feet finding the bottom.

  He hadn’t yet lit a match, so utter darkness greeted Tikaya. The air was cooler than outside and musty as well. Old. It smelled old. She thought of poisonous gases that could accumulate in sealed tunnels and hoped Rias didn’t plan on staying long. A shiver ran through her. It was from the coldness of the water and the air, she told herself, though perhaps her senses were warning her that she wouldn’t like what she was about to see.

  Rias hugged her with one arm, then moved away. “I’m going to strike a match.”

  Tikaya wiped water out of her eyes and hooked her spectacles over her ears. “Ready.”

  A couple of soft scrapes sounded, the noise oddly loud. Little of the roar of the sea penetrated the walls around them.

  “Too wet,” Rias muttered. “Let me see if—”

  Light flared. At first Tikaya noticed the flame and the match held between Rias’s fingers. Then her eyes focused on what lay behind them. Bones. Skulls. Partial and complete skeletons. She swallowed. Human skeletons covered with the dust of the ages. So many bones were wedged in crevasses or laid on ledges that she would have believed someone had brought them in bags and dumped them. Could so many have come in on the tide? How would they have—

  Rias grunted and dropped the match. Blackness engulfed them again.

  Tikaya took a deep breath, not certain whether she preferred the view now or before. Either way, the image would be imprinted on her mind. Suddenly her cousin’s proffered surfing lesson was sounding like a pleasant way to spend the day.

  “Kittens are less disturbing,” Tikaya said, trying to sound nonchalant, “but you’ve certainly lit my curiosity here.”

  Rias wrapped an arm around her. “This would have made my former wife scream.”

  “A not inappropriate response to a cave full of bones.” One Tikaya might have made if he hadn’t prepared her for the notion of something bad. “I was busy debating whether they’d been placed here or if the tide—some storm perhaps?—could have brought them in.”

  “The sea, I believe, though there must have been a lot of corpses if so many found their way into this cave.”

  “That’s why you were thinking shipwreck,” Tikaya said. “Your colony ships? Did some storm get them before they could reach land?” And did the incident pre-or post-date the arrival of her own people?

  Rias shifted away from her. Soft clunks sounded. Was he… sifting through the bones? Why?

  “Last match,” Rias said and struck it. In his free hand, he held a skull with a hole in the side. He shook it, and something rattled inside. “Arrowhead. A stone one.”

  Tikaya skimmed the scene again, looking for any other clues she could take out with her, but the light winked out before she could do more than gawk at all the bones. “I can’t believe nobody has ever found this.”

  “Perhaps people haven’t been encouraged to look.”

  With more and more evidence stacking up to support Rias’s hunch that all wasn’t as it seemed on the Kyatt Islands, Tikaya couldn’t bring herself to disagree. Someone knew what had happened out there all those years ago, and was going to great lengths to make sure she and Rias didn’t find out what it was.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 13

  It had been a long time since so much work filled Tikaya’s desk, and it doubtlessly accounted for the fact that she couldn’t find a pen. Any of them. Pages of notes battled for space with the old Turgonian journal, family lineage trees, and teetering stacks of Kyattese archaeology and history books. After more than two weeks of reading and note-taking, Tikaya was finally compiling a summary of her findings. The damaged skull Rias had pulled out of that cave presided over it all, empty eye sockets staring at her as she worked.

  The obsidian arrowhead sat on a shelf above it. Based on the style, she’d placed it as Kyattese and estimated it at seven hundred years in age, but it differed from sketches of other arrowheads from the time period. It was sharper, finer, and smaller than the giant lizard-and boar-hunting projectiles of the era.

  “It looks like it was made for hunting people,” Rias had said in a note. He hadn’t been by for a while, but he’d sent encrypted messages almost every day. She’d come to look forward to receiving them, like one might anticipate love letters, albeit these “love letters” focused on ancient mysteries, modern bureaucrats, and pesky telepaths showing up at his shipyard.

  “My people have never hunted human beings,” Tikaya had written back, though not with the same certainty she would have felt a few weeks earlier.

  Rias hadn’t brought it up again. Subsequent notes had detailed the progress he was making with the submarine-that-looks-like-a-surface-ship. He’d mentioned little of troubles, but Tikaya sensed he was leaving things out. One day, he’d informed her that he’d switched to living aboard the ship. That same day, a colleague at the Polytechnic had shown her a newspaper that mentioned a fire at the Pragmatic Mate.

  More than once Tikaya had thought of bringing the arrowhead to the Polytechnic or the archaeology museum to seek out physical specimens to compare it to, but she’d had little time for extracurricular activities. After leaning on the police to get her back at work, Dean Teailat had been keeping her busy from dawn to dusk—often later—every day. Her colleagues were not only studying the sphere and the ancient language held within but deciding what to do with the information. Should it be locked away or shared openly in hopes of furthering man’s understanding of nature and the world? As much as Tikaya wanted to be out helping Rias, and delving deeper into their subaquatic mystery, she couldn’t walk away from the decision-making process when it came to that alien technology. Her colleagues hadn’t seen the horrible things it could do, and too many of them were leaning toward publicizing their notes and inviting experts from around the world to study them.

  Tikaya pushed away the thoughts; she’d been worrying about the technology at work all day. This was the time she’d set aside to study her and Rias’s mystery. She’d best make use of it. Iweue had sent the energy source to the shipyard a couple of days earlier and, in his last note, Rias had alluded to a maiden voyage. Tikaya wanted to have as much information as possible for him when the submarine was ready, even though she worried about what they might find out there, or more precisely that they might dig up something that would mean she was no longer welcome in Kyatt.
She bent back over her work, refusing to grow weepy-eyed thinking about being exiled and never seeing her family again.

  Just as Tikaya finally found a pen, a knock sounded at the door.

  Tikaya pushed a few papers over the Turgonian journal and propped a history book in front of the skull. “Come in.”

  Her cousin Aeli sauntered into the room, a letter clasped in her hand. She wore a flowing ankle-length skirt—one might have called it modest—with a sleeveless top that left everything except her breasts bare—definitely not modest. Tikaya had confirmed that the adulterous Komitopis who’d been the love interest in the Turgonian’s journal was indeed Aeli’s ancestor. Who knew such tendencies would breed true through the centuries?

  “Thank you for coming, Aeli,” Tikaya said after her cousin flopped down on the bed.

  “But of course. You don’t often ask for my help. In fact, you never have. I can only assume you’re seeking advice in regard to your relationship with your strapping Turgonian.”

  Tikaya had been on her way over to shut the door, and she almost tripped and used her face to do the task. “My what?”

  “Your relationship. You know what an expert I am on matters such as pleasing a man in the bedroom. Or on the beach. Or in the waves. Wherever you choose, though knowing what a prude you are, I imagine a bed is involved. Likely with little ruffling of the sheets.”

  “Aeli!” Tikaya shut the door with a bang. She’d intended to close it to keep the discussion quiet anyway, but this was a topic she was even more certain she didn’t want escaping into the hall.

  “You’ve found yourself a handsome stud, one most certainly accustomed to less… cerebral mates, and you’re worried that he’ll grow bored with you. Or perhaps he already is.” Aeli patted the bed. “Come, I have all sorts of suggestions that you can try.”