Key to Magic 04 Emperor

by H. Jonas Rhynedahll

  "Is there something there, Wilhm?" Mar asked him.

  The Gaaelfharenii's head tilted back and forward once: a nod.

  While Eishtren and Aelwyrd walked to Wilhm, Mar floated over the intervening containers to land at the center of the one that the huge warrior faced. Immediately, he saw that this one had an occupant.

  "It's an old man!" Aelwyrd exclaimed as he arrived.

  "Or a well preserved corpse," Eishtren cautioned.

  The boy spun about suddenly and counted from the end of the row, then jumped slightly in excitement. "This is number thirteen! And this is the thirteenth level!"

  Eishtren frowned. "Ah, yes, the message."

  Mar assumed a matching expression. "Even if this man is still alive, what's to say that he should be awakened?"

  "He asked us to, my lord king," Aelwyrd protested. "We can't just leave him here!"

  "He may have the better of it, lad," Eishtren said. "Unless I miss my guess, we cannot get out the way we came in." At Mar's confirming nod, he went on, "It might be better to leave him to his rest.

  The recruit looked unconvinced. "He might know another way out."

  "Possible," the quaestor begrudged. He swung his gaze to Mar. "My lord king, the boy may have a point."

  "Releasing him from his tomb may be beyond my abilities," Mar said.

  He looked down at the casket, studying the interned man's placid face. Wrapped in long white hair and a thick white beard with a shaved upper lip, it was a normal face, weathered, seamed, and scarred. But, rather than the pasty gray tinge of death, the skin of his face had the flushed rose of life. It certainly seemed plausible that this man could be alive.

  The question remained: should Mar attempt to release him? He was not one to judge a man by character of his face, but this buried ancient certainly looked harmless.

  "I'll see what I can do, but stand ready with your bow."

  "Yes, my lord king." In a quick movement, the quaestor strung his bow, then took a few paces back, Aelwyrd following.

  "Wilhm, you take a few steps back as well."

  As soon as the young giant had moved to the other side of the aisle, Mar delved the coffin, trying to discover modulations that might be keys. He spent a good amount of time wandering through the complex maze of spells, but he may as well have been passing through a forest of near identical trees. Then he had an idea.

  "Wilhm, sing the message again, but just the part at the end, the letters."

  After a lengthy pause, during which he seemed to be running silently through the entire repeating message, the Gaaelfharenii complied.

  As Wilhm sang, Mar noticed that certain segments of the coffin's modulations would pulse in correspondence with specific letter groups, emitting minute whiffs of effervescent flux. When the Gaaelfharenii finished, Mar had him sing the codes again, watched closely and mentally marking each affected segment. A third repetition convinced him that he had identified all the segments. Tentatively, he nudged one of the segments and it immediately changed configuration. Selecting another at random, he applied the same ethereal stimulus, and it also changed configuration, but the first appeared to reset.

  "It's just a combination lock," he told the others. Quickly, he ran through the codes in the order that had been given, nudging each associated segment. Without fanfare, the interior of the coffin lit and its top and sides, formed as one piece, pivoted open.

  Mar drifted back from the coffin, watching the now revealed body. Eishtren drew his bow, an invisible shaft of flux forming between his hands. Aelwyrd clutched his empty quivers, holding his breath.

  After a few seconds, the old man man's dark eyes blinked open and he immediately sat up, not arthritically or stiffly as it seemed he should, but smoothly and spryly, and swung his legs over the edge of his container. Approximately Eishtren's height, he was lean, bony, and wrinkled and wore his hair quite long, it falling most of the way down his back. The well-groomed, lustrous beard was evidently a source of significant pride; the fellow straightaway ran his fingers through it to put it in shape and then gave a tweak to the end to re-establish a well-trained curl. He was entirely nude, but not self-conscious of being so and apparently unconcerned that they should see him thus.

  With evident energy, he looked expectantly from Mar to Eishtren to Aelwyrd, but then his expression fell to betray extreme disappointment. He said something that sounded close to, but was not quite the Gheddessii'n tongue, saw their incomprehension, then said something in an entirely different language.

  "That sounds like Stroovish," Eishtren said, "but I can't be sure."

  Listening to the quaestor, a look of recognition crossed the old man's face. "How about this language? Do you understand what I'm saying now?"

  Mar nodded. "Yes, we can understand you, for the most part."

  The man's accent was decidedly odd. He used archaic stems and abandoned conjugations, pronounced most of his vowels wrong, and rolled the wrong consonants, but his speech was close enough to Imperial Standard to be readily understood.

  "We heard your message," Aelwyrd blurted out.

  "Is that still going out? That was an old idea, a waste of time, really. I suppose I forgot to shut it off. I'm pretty sure that I intended to, but at my age plans tend to slip my mind." He took them all in. "Well, I must say, that you aren't what I expected."

  "How so?" Eishtren asked. He still held his bow at the ready. Mar gave him a look and he relaxed the string, diffusing the shaft of flux, but did not remove his fingers from the string.

  "I thought that when next I awoke, it would be at the hands of magenfolk."

  Absently the old man swung his head around to view the cavern, then back around at Mar, glancing down to see, apparently for the first time, that Mar stood in spite of having no legs.

  "Well, perhaps some of you are magenfolk," he corrected, studying Mar in more detail.

  Llylquaendt saw that they did not understand the word. "That's one of the words of the language of my people, the Pyrai. It meant 'those who live magic.' As I recall, this language doesn't have corresponding words for a lot of concepts that we had, especially technical terms. No matter. Let me introduce myself. I am Llylquaendt, medic second class, Army of the Republic."

  As Mar, the quaestor, and the recruit offered their names, Llylquaendt's eyes roamed over them again, almost as if they could not light on any one spot for any length of time, and then encountered Wilhm standing off to one side, at which point they widened slightly.

  "The really big fellow," he asked Mar sharply, "is there any chance that he is an uberman?"

  "I don't know what that is," Mar admitted. "Wilhm is from Mhajhkaei, a Mhajhkaeirii."

  "And a spirit-giant, a Gaaelfharenii," Aelwyrd inserted quickly.

  "Oh! I think I remember that place. Nice village on the sea, is it?"

  "It's The Greatest City in All the World!" Aelwyrd corrected proudly.

  "There must have been a lot of changes this time. The civilized world is a bigger place now, I take it?"

  "While the Great Waste is sparsely populated, all of the lands of the southern part of this continent, the islands in the sea, and the southern continent are inhabited," Eishtren informed him. "There are large cities throughout and robust trade."

  "And war, I suspect?"

  "Yes," Mar replied. "There is war."

  Llylquaendt sighed. "So it shall ever be. Now, I suppose that we should --"

  "You will fix the pirate."

  Wilhm's interruption brought Llylquaendt's somewhat capricious attention back to him. "You certainly look like an uberman. How did you get by the automatons? Their programming should have initiated their defensive protocols --"

  "You will fix the pirate." Wilhm drew his sword. "Now."

  The ancient shrunk back slightly. "Uhm, right, certainly, but which one of you is the pirate?"

  Not knowing what Wilhm meant by 'fix' but trusting that his dreams would not direct him to disaster, Mar pointed mutely to draw Llylquaendt's attention t
o Lord Hhrahld's body.

  "Oh, another uberman." The old man walked over to look down at the Lord-Protector. "He's been impaled on something? A sword, I suppose. Nasty things. Now, this is important -- how long has he been dead?"

  "Three hours," Mar guessed. Without access to the sun, it was difficult to accurately measure time.

  "That's within parameters. Has he ever expressed a desire not to be resuscitated?"

  "What does that mean?"

  "Ah, reinvigorated, resurrected, brought back to life?"

  Eishtren looked shocked. "You can do that?"

  "Only if the individual has never expressly forbidden it. My oaths prohibit me from administering treatment in that case. Death is the natural end of life and I may not interfere when a person has chosen release over existence."

  Eishtren and Aelwyrd both looked at Mar, who turned to the young Gaaelfharenii. "Wilhm, what do you think should be done? Do you think he would have wanted us to try to return him to life?'

  "He is not finished yet. My dreams say that he will breathe again."

  "Right, that seems clear enough." Llylquaendt bustled from the rows of caskets toward a glass and metal walled enclosure near the wall. Panels slid back at his approach. When he realized that no one had followed him, he turned about and gestured impatiently.

  "Now, you, the big one --"

  "Wilhm." Mar said firmly.

  "Right. You, Wilhm, if you will just get him up and put him in the autodoc -- this contraption here with the red hood. That's good. Make sure all his arms and legs are inside the green lines. His right boot is hanging out. Good. And also put in all the bits of him that you can scrape up, including the dried blood that is all over your armor. The more of him that we have, the higher the degree of certainty that the repaired structures will be properly cross-referenced. We don't want it to do a great deal of fudging. That tends to make things ... inconvenient."

  After Wilhm scraped the blood from his armor and sprinkled the crumbling mess onto Lord Hhrahld's chest, Llylquaendt made several precise gestures at the autodoc and multicolored mists sprang out to obscure the old pirate's ravaged body.

  "The process will take as much as two hours. Mind, when he awakens, he will be disoriented and slightly sedated. The autodoc routinely administers a mild euphoric and a strong analgesic, which work to moderate the trauma of his most recent memories, which would be, of course, those of his death. Often patients will experience short term memory loss, confusion, and negative emotional reactions."

  "This altar can bring any person back to life?" Eishtren asked with a neutral expression.

  "No, it can only revive those who have recently perished. This device is normally used in an ambulance on the battlefield. The absolute upper limit is two hundred and fifty-eight minutes. After that, the cellular degradation in the brain is too great. And, of course, it can only fully repair major injuries in the torso and limbs. It cannot deal with drastic head trauma that involves more than thirty-five percent of either of the hemispheres of the brain."

  Seeming to lose his train of thought, Llylquaendt strolled back toward his casket, found a folded blue garment on a counter and put it on. The one piece outfit had trousers and jacket made together and it sealed in front by means of double-breasted brass clasps. After donning a pair of ankle-length, soft boots, the old man came back over to where they stood watching the mists writhe and swirl.

  "There's no need for you to monitor the autodoc," he told them. "It works all on its own. I don't really understand all the protocols myself -- I just know how to operate it, not how it was made. It'll chime when he's done. Now, why don't all of you catch me up on the state of the world in this new age?"

  FORTY-SIX

  Aelwyrd, with occasional additions, corrections, elucidations, and explanations from Eishtren, eagerly did so. Wilhm did not contribute other than to give single word responses to the medic's direct questions concerning his life in Mhajhkaei. Indeed, Llylquaendt was full of questions, posing dozens to each of them, many of which suggested a detailed though centuries outdated familiarity with the lands of the southern coast and a broad awareness of the basic geography of the Silver Sea. He seemed most interested in the progress of magic -- though he frequently referred to it as technology.

  While the conversation flowed back and forth, Mar extended his magical senses with one part of his mind to surreptitiously follow the changes being enacted in Lord Hhrahld's corpse by Llylquaendt's mysterious and wonderful autodoc.

  Presently, the ancient seemed satisfied that his knowledge was sufficiently updated and, responding to questions from Aelwyrd, told his own story.

  "I was barely seventeen the first time I went into stasis -- that's just a suspended state of life, not really like sleep, but thinking of it that way might help you understand it. In stasis, a person does not age at all, does not need to eat or void their bladder and bowels, and is totally oblivious to the passage of time. The technology was brand new and a military secret. As far as we Pyrai were aware, we were the first to perfect its use with people. I was a volunteer, as all of us were, but I had only been in service for eight months, most all of that spent in training, and my main motivation was to avoid duty with a combat regiment."

  "There were two hundred and fifty of us in the pilot project, with our group organized as a heavy engineering company. We went into stasis expecting to be awakened after a test period of six months. The War came, though, and someone in the surface facility decided to reset our timers for one hundred and fifty years."

  He gestured both hands at the cavern. "This was a doomsday bunker, the most secure and protected fortress that we had ever constructed. It was encapsulated in thirteen redundant wards and made ethereally neutral by a cage of discharged flux woven into its very structure. The Construction Corps completed it scarcely a year before the stasis chambers -- what we called our 'coffins' -- were installed. The bunker was intended to preserve a contingent of our people through any calamity, even the utter annihilation of the entire surface of our world."

  He paused and grimaced. "Horrifically, that is exactly what the War accomplished. Pyra and every other habitation, large and small, were utterly laid waste."

  Aelwyrd, all ears, wanted to know, "What caused the war?"

  Llylquaendt shrugged. "What always causes wars, the stupidity of mankind. Our war had burned, cold and hot, for the better part of two centuries with only brief interludes that people optimistically deemed 'peace.' Ostensibly, it was an irreconcilable conflict between two major alliances over a small spit of land that had been invaded and reinvaded for millennia, but all that is ultimately irrelevant, since the coveted bit of land and all other points of contention were completely erased from existence."

  "In stasis with my fellow volunteers, I was oblivious to it all, of course, but the fragmentary records that we discovered when we emerged indicated that the wreck of the entire world and the fall of our civilization came very quickly, perhaps in as little as one night and one day. There were some survivors in out of the way places, some who were lucky or unlucky depending on their point of view, but the vast majority of the people, all of the cities, and the great bulk of technological devices were destroyed utterly and completely."

  "Your friend with the sword as long as I am tall, the one you call a Gaaelfharenii? He is a product of the war, a secret weapon, as it were. Because of my medical specialty, I was allowed access to the intelligence reports. Ubermen were -- I suppose I should say are since they clearly continue to this day -- genetic supermen. Do you have that word, genetic? No? Well, it has to do with genes, the stuff that life is made of, the inborn, inherited instructions, so to speak, that determine how fast a man can run, how strong he is, how long he will live, and so forth. We Pyrai found experimentation with the essence of man distasteful and unethical, but others did not shy from such. Even so, the reorganization and enhancement of genes was, I was told, an arduous and complex process with numerous opportunities for disastrous error. In our time, uber
men were rare. I had only seen images before this. "

  "Forgive me, I tend to wander. That's the blessing of the aged. As I said, we awoke from stasis to find our city and our people gone. You know something funny? We named the war that killed everything the 'Final War.' We should have just called it the 'one before the next one.'"

  Eishtren nodded in mute agreement.

  "At first, our commander remained convinced that we must rebuild Pyra, and we planned and labored to that end. From my perspective now, this made absolutely no sense. The ruins were centered in a parched desert and surrounded by a huge magically dead zone, both the results of catastrophic magical weapons."

  "What about the ice mountain?" Mar asked.

  "That came later, and I'll get to that in a minute. In the beginning, we only had to contend with the desert and the dead zone. The second, we overcame, at least as far as the former boundaries of the city, with an expansion of the bunker's protective grid. We thought that the first would readily submit to the proper application of hydraulic engineering techniques. We turned out the automatons stored in the bunker and set them to begin reconstruction of the city that was. All went well for five years, and though we were few, it seemed that with sufficient time and effort, we would achieve our goal."

  He laughed, derisively. "The questions of how we would repopulate the city, replace all of the technology that had vanished, and re-establish its industries and commerce, we silently conspired to ignore, trusting that dedication and service would produce solutions to these problems as well."

  "Then we made contact with the Remnants." Llylquaendt fell silent, his brow clenching at the unpleasant memory.

  "Who were they?" Aelwyrd prompted.

  "Descendants of disparate military units that had survived by luck or chance as we had, protected in hidden bunkers far beneath mountains and even under the ocean. They had continued to maintain advanced technology, unlike the scattered primitives who scratched for survival in the wilderness. Sadly, they had also maintained their great-grandfather's hatreds. Instead of joining together to recreate something new, they argued, strove at cross purposes, and conspired against one another. We learned of them and they of us just as they rushed to ignite the next war. Our commander proclaimed us neutral, beseeching them all to leave us in peace, but one of them decided to make sure of that by sealing us in with the ice. When we succeeded in melting an exit, the war was finished."