Birthright-The Technomage Archive

by B. J. Keeton

  Ceril looked at the small canyon they had climbed out of. He scowled. “Would you go back and find her? She’s not out there.” He gestured to the plains. “There’s only one direction she could have gone.”

  Swinton trotted back toward the Instance portal as Ceril and Chuckie watched another sickly green bolt of lightning strike the ground. It was closer than the bolt Ceril had seen before.

  “I think a storm's brewing, boss,” Chuckie said. “We need to find shelter, a cave or something. And since this one don't have no roof…” His voice trailed off.

  “You may be right, but we’ll do it together. Once Swinton gets back with Saryn, and Harlo gets that sample, we'll talk about it.”

  Then, as if on cue, Swinton and Saryn came running from the Instance portal.

  “It's gone, Ternia,” Saryn said, out of breath.

  “What's gone?” Ceril asked.

  “The Instance. We don’t have a connection back to the Sigil.” Saryn breathed heavily before continuing.

  “That’s the plan, Saryn. We’re on our own for a while. They can’t keep the portal open. They just don’t have the power.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that sucks. I didn’t know that.”

  “Neither did I,” Chuckie said. “I didn’t realize this was a one-way trip.”

  “It’s not. We’re going to get back to the ship as soon as we can, with help, once we get ourselves back to Erlon, to Ennd’s. I thought you were all briefed on this.”

  Saryn ignored him. “Also, I thought you should know that I can't find a way to access the portal again. There isn’t a pad or a dial, no kind of device at all that we could use to get back to the Sigil. We’re completely cut off, Ternia.”

  Ceril swallowed. So much for giving a leadership pep talk on the other side, he thought. “Look, I knew we weren’t going to have connection with the Sigil, and I just assumed you guys did, too. I can’t say I like not having a connection device, but we don’t know this place, don’t know how it connects to any other Instances. For all we know, that could be a one-way portal that only allows travel in.”

  “They don’t work like that, Ternia. I—”

  “Either way,” Ceril interrupted, “we have a mission. We have our orders. We’ll find some way to connect somewhere eventually. Just not here. I mean, if this is a free-range Instance like Roman and Nephil seem to believe, maybe the connection the Sigil was able to get was more random than it should have been.” Saryn gave him an incredulous look. “Could there have been a shift of some kind that shunted where the portal came out as it traveled away from Erlon? If the Instance itself is moving, and the Sigil is staying still, could that account for not being able to reconnect?”

  Saryn thought about the possibility for a moment before she answered, “It's possible, Ternia. Not very likely, but it's possible.”

  Ceril nodded. “I guess we’re all just lucky we didn’t pop through in the middle of one of those rock walls. The entrance seems random to me, especially if there’s no way to use it again.” Harlo walked up as he spoke and handed him a lid with half a glass vial attached to it. The bottom had been cleanly sheared off at an angle.

  “What's this?” he asked.

  “What your tree sap did to my testing equipment. I put it over the edge of a branch and it burned clean through the glass.”

  “I see,” Ceril said. “Thanks for trying. At least we know to stay far away from those trees.”

  “That we do,” Chuckie chimed in as lightning struck again. “Now about that storm? If the tree sap is acid, I don't really feel like getting caught out in the rain. I doubt it’s gonna be gumdrops falling from the sky.”

  Ceril turned. “You’re right. We certainly don't need to get burned to death by acid rain, and if there’s no way to even access a portal here, there’s no reason to stick around out in the open like this.” Thunder cracked hard overhead, and a sickly green lightning bolt struck the ground a few hundred meters away from them. “I guess our first line of business will be to find a cave or at least something with a roof on it.”

  The team agreed, and Ceril took off walking to the left and the others followed him. Ceril turned the vial over in his hand and thought it was a good idea to put as much room as they could between them and the acid tree. He just hoped they could find a roof to sit under just in case Chuckie was right about the rain. With their current luck, though, he didn’t count on that happening.

  Chapter fourteen

  Damien Vennar walked around the house he had once shared with his grandson. After the intrusion—the attack—earlier that evening, he had to check to see if anything had been stolen besides his book. It was the middle of the night, and even though his old bones were tired and his joints ached, he could not settle in for sleep. There was too much to do; his mind raced with plans.

  From what he could see picking through the clutter, his belongings all remained intact except for the book containing the history he had been recording. Of course, he thought, they take the one thing in the house I can’t bear to part with. His mind moved to Ceril, and he thought, They have a tendency to do that.

  Just because the intruders did not take anything besides the book, it did not mean that the house was okay. It was in shambles. In just the short time they were there, furniture had been overturned, shelves had been swiped clean, even his refrigerator had been ransacked—two shelves with perfectly good food had been thrown aside and were now lying directly on the floor.

  Angry as he was, the old man marveled at the intruders’ efficiency. Even in his prime, he doubted he would have been able to do better work. What was worse, though, is that he let this happen. He ran. He got scared. He Conjured himself a veil and sat idly while those pretenders took whatever they wanted.

  He didn't fight, and that wasn’t like him. It had never been like him until recently.

  It had been too long, and he was taken completely by surprise. And on top of that, he hadn't Conjured in about four hundred years. That is, until just a few hours ago. When he had vowed to never Conjure again, he had meant it. He had put the nanites that made up his bloodstream on what amounted to a standby setting, and he had begun to age. He had expected to die within fifty to seventy years from that moment, like a normal person.

  Obviously, he had miscalculated. In the give-or-take four centuries since he had distanced himself from the Charonic Archive, Damien Vennar had aged at an extremely decelerated rate. There was no way to shut off the nanites in his body completely, and apparently, even their peripheral energy had been enough to preserve him six or seven times longer than he had wished.

  Four hundred years ago, he had wanted to die. But when the opportunity presented itself, he had run like a scared child. When he reactivated the tiny machines that comprised his bloodstream, he felt them go to work within his body immediately, repairing damaged tissue and giving him back the youth he had so willingly and fervently left behind.

  The next time he saw Ceril, he doubted that the boy would recognize him, and he was disgusted at the thought. Raising Ceril was the one good thing that Damien had ever done in his life. Ceril was a good boy, a good person. Then the Charons got their hands on him, and there wasn't a damned thing Damien could do about it.

  Now, looking at his scattered and violated home, he knew that he would not be able to stay here any longer. Someone had known how to find him. The only people who should have had access to that information were either at Ennd's or aboard the Inkwell Sigil. He doubted, as much as he despised them, that the Charons there would have gone to this much trouble over him, over the book. If they had wanted him to stop writing, they would have destroyed the volume. They would not have stolen it.

  Besides, the Charons had what they wanted. They had his grandson, and they had been indoctrinating him for six years.

  No, this was someone else, someone different. Someone with a new and different agenda. A cold knot developed in Damien’s stomach, and he knew that he wa
s going to have to start fighting again. There was no doubt that if he hadn’t Conjured when he did, he would have been killed.

  To fight, though, he would need a weapon, and Ceril had his sword, a fact that should not have been a surprise to him, but was. The Flameblade had bonded to Damien millennia ago. It had been the first of the weapons to bond with a person. After years of study, Damien and his researchers had discovered how it had happened. The nanites that formed the swords bonded at a quantum level to the unique physical signals his body put out when he was in a heightened emotional state. By learning to control those states, Damien had been able to wield the sword in ways the weaponsmiths had never intended. It was no longer just a well-made sword, a balanced blade that didn’t dull or nick; it became an extension of his body.

  And, against his better judgment, he had taught the other Charons the trick.

  Deep down, he had known it was just a matter of time before Ceril would bond with the sword, though. There had been the slightest hope that Ceril would go his entire life without ever seeing a Flameblade, ever hearing anything more than a few legends about the Charons in school, that he would live his life in happy ignorance of the life his Gramps had once lived. There was no chance of that now. Nor had there ever been, really, Damien admitted to himself. There was no need for self-delusion, after all. Of course, Ceril would bond with the same Flameblade he had.

  Damien had been relieved that the weapon had not just materialized at his grandson’s feet one day, or in his hand, maybe at the market or in the bath. Instead, Ceril had been working in the garden and enjoying himself. The sword was apparently drawn to the boy’s strong emotions and buried itself into the soil near him.

  And Ceril had been so young, then, too. Far too young for a Flameblade. Damien had been able to cover up the discovery, telling the boy a hodge-podge of legends and myths that halfway explained how the sword had come to be buried in their garden.

  The truth—that the sword belonged to his Gramps, who was really over ten thousand years old and had been kept alive by microscopic machines in his blood—was probably a bit much to handle.

  Damien had never felt guiltier about lying to anyone in his life.

  These days, Flameblades were hard to come by. Impossible, in fact. He had hidden his long ago—a lot of good that did with Ceril being able to call it—and was sure almost every other weapon of its kind was tucked away safely inside another Instance or aboard the Inkwell Sigil. New swords hadn’t been manufactured for centuries, unless the Charons aboard the Sigil had begun teaching newly Rited technomages how to Conjure them again. He had done what he could to stop that practice before he left. His last act of defiance before being exiled was selectively wiping all knowledge about the Conjuring of Flameblades from the memories of his colleagues. It was as though they had never known how to do it in the first place.

  Damien didn’t have a lot of options since Ceril had bonded with his old sword. He could Conjure himself a new one, but after four hundred years of Conjuring nothing at all, he doubted that he would have the dexterity or concentration required for the task.

  And then it hit him. Gilbert Squalt. The new headmaster at Ennd's. That prickly bastard would have one. Of course, he would. Ennd's wasn’t the only place on Erlon where Charons recruited, but it was the closest—but not by much.

  The Archive always had to have one of their own in the big chair at the end of the table. He knew Gilbert Squalt well enough to know that, Charon puppet or not, he would never give Damien his Flameblade willingly. Damien doubted that the man would even let him into Ennd's Academy in the first place.

  But he had to try, and at least now, he had a plan. He was no closer to finding out who had violated his home, or how they found him, or why. But he had a place to start.

  Sometimes, when there are too many variables, having one concrete idea means everything.

  So Damien Vennar made one last circuit around his house, packed up a few necessities as he ran across them, and walked through the back door of his home. The moon was bright, and the ground was soft from the storm that had left as quickly as it had come. The old man sighed as he looked back toward the garden in front of his house. He felt a twinge of regret for the life he built for himself that he was now leaving behind. He threw a hand up and waved at the house. The neighbors might have mocked it—and him—for being old fashioned, but it had been home for a long time. He was going to miss it here.

  His days of hiding from something he helped start were over. He said his silent goodbyes to the man he had tried so hard to be, and he set out toward Ennd's Academy to relearn how to be the man he once was.

  ***

  By shuttle, Ennd’s and Ternia were considered close. By foot, Ternia was a long way from Ennd’s.

  Even though their climates were nearly identical—temperate, green, and consistently lovely—Ennd’s Academy rested clear across the world from Damien and Ceril's home.

  Travel had taken nearly two weeks: Damien hitched a ride on a Skylane transport freighter for a while, and then he walked a bit—a few hours or days, depending—slept when he could, and then repeated the whole process until he finally made it to the school.

  The trip could have been easier and faster, but the old man had done his best to avoid mass-transit. With someone actively seeking him, he thought that it would be best to be inconspicuous.

  He had hitched a ride for the last leg of the journey with a farmer who had been kind enough to refill Damien’s satchel with the best Balsi-fruit he had tasted in years.

  “Thank you,” Damien said as the driver sat the air-freighter down in front of the school. “I really appreciate the ride.” He patted his sack. “And the fruit.”

  “Nah, it's nothin, Gramps,” the driver said. Damien had not used his real name in a long time, and he still looked old enough to go by the name Ceril was most fond of. “I just hope your grandson's okay. When a kid gets something that even pseira meds can't fix, I reckon there's a real reason to travel to see him. Give him my best, will ya?”

  “I certainly will,” Damien said with a smile on his face. He bit into the fruit he was carrying, and he said, “Thanks again, Curt. I'll pay you back for these eventually.”

  “You do that,” Curt said, and Damien shut the door to the truck.

  Both men threw up their hands, and the truck lifted off the ground and sped away. Such a nice guy, Damien thought as he turned around and saw Ennd's Academy rise in front of him. He had to admit to himself that Ennd's was still an engineering marvel. In the bright sunlight, the dozens of crystalline spires sparkled like candles on top of a birthday cake. The body of the building was fairly squat, with terraces circling the entire structure at different levels. At the center rose a single tower, higher than any of the other spires and much, much wider.

  Damien remembered when he had built the school. The ground it sat on was empty plains back then.

  When most people had only just begun their exploration out of Erlon’s habitable zones, Damien and his Charons were already creating new universes. He remembered being shunned by the religious leaders, and in turn, most of the population. They claimed the Charons were blasphemers and heretics, and the situation was only escalating. There hadn’t been any violence yet, but it was inevitable that there would be. So the order needed a headquarters, a place where they could work and research in relative safety. They could have found haven in an Instance, but their work was so tied to the high-yield energy pockets all across Erlon. While they were capable of creating their own universe to live and work in, they wouldn’t have had the same success there that they had in Erlon

  Hope came when initial surveys of a section of the Uncharted Wastes turned up a massive energy pocket—unstable, but possessing the highest energy yield they had ever discovered. Damien and a handful of his closest colleagues spent months journeying to it.

  These were the days well before the Blood Rites and internal nanites, before Damien would have near-total control over his molecular struct
ure. That technology would come later, after centuries of research at Ennd’s. Back then, the Charons all wore sleeves of nanites under their clothes. This technology, now treated like training wheels for Apprentices preparing for the Blood Rites, had once been the pinnacle of science on Erlon.

  Damien Vennar stood in front of Ennd’s Academy and let the memory of being a much younger man wash over him. He closed his eyes, and he could still feel how his nanite sleeve had reacted to the energy pocket as he had walked into the plain. Damien planted his feet—his body in one time, his mind in another—in the exact location he had ten thousand years ago.

  He had been the only one who could withstand the pressure. His colleagues fainted immediately. They were unable to push against the pressure emanating from the ground, the pressure that was magnified by their nanites’ reaction to it.

  But Damien had kept walking toward the energy pocket. His nanites began to move without any instruction from him. The machines would listen to his suggestions when he made them, but he let them work on their own for a while.

  The microscopic robots had originally been programmed to replicate only when one had been lost. They would draw energy and physical material from either the Charon's body or the surrounding environment to produce a replacement for the lost machine.

  That was their original program.

  What Damien Vennar had experienced on this plain was magnificent and beyond anything he had imagined possible. The tiny machines rushed from his body toward the source of the energy that excited them. None were lost, but they replicated as they surged away from Damien. They maintained physical contact with him and created a bridge between the energy pocket and his mind.

  The nanites flew toward the energy storm below ground, and that's when Damien knew what he could do. What he had to do.

  He stood tethered to the ground by the nanites burrowing deep within the ground. Time stood still for Damien; his colleagues remained unconscious. He fully exerted his power, pushing himself past any established human boundary. He went well into what he would have considered godhood before. Creating a universe was easy; he had created dozens of Instances, and they had never filled him with a feeling like this.