He tried seeking beyond the tube of chill purple blackness, but could sense nothing. Were the soarers gone? Or were there so few that they could no longer maintain their own portals?
With his Talent, he studied the markers—far more than he recalled. There was one of an ancient-looking sullen red over blackish purple, but that, he felt, was the one for where he had already just been. Another was of maroon and dark green, the Table that Tarolt had used to throw Alucius against the barrier. Alucius had the feeling he had been a tool to reopen the Table in the underground chamber, but he had no idea why, since that Table hardly seemed usable.
He struggled to focus his attention on the remaining arrow markers. One was silver, a silver he recalled from his encounter with the ifrit engineer. That wouldn’t do, because his departure had brought the walls down around that Table chamber as well. If the chamber had been rebuilt, then there would be more ifrits in it. If it hadn’t, he’d be trapped in another underground place. Another marker was a shining cold black, a narrow threadlike arrow that bespoke little use, if any.
With a mind becoming increasingly slow and muddled, he Talent-groped toward the black disused thread, mind-levering himself toward whatever portal or Table it represented.
Once more, he hurtled toward a barrier, but one of thin blackness that sprayed away as he smashed into and through it.
There was more darkness…but fresh air, if chill.
That was all Alucius could recognize before his legs buckled, and he fell into oblivion.
126
The Hidden City, Corus
In the amber-walled tower room, he soarer hovered before Wendra—holding the scrat before the herder.
Wendra looked quietly at the creature known to be terribly shy and skittish. It rested motionless in the palm of the soarer’s hand, its head cocked, its eyes on Wendra, not paying attention to the child in the carrypack.
Use your Talent. Study its lifethread, but do not touch the thread with your Talent. It is very frail compared to you.
Wendra took the slightest of breaths, letting her Talent observe the scrat.
Look at the nodes. Those are where the threads twist together.
Wendra stiffened, looking down at the black stone of the herder’s ring she wore. The sharp chill that had jabbed through her finger was gone, as suddenly as it had come.
She looked at the soarer. “Something happened to Alucius.”
It is likely that he translated himself somewhere, using a Table of the ifrits.
“Translated?”
That is how the ifrits travel, both from their base world and also across Corus. They must have Tables or portals at the beginning and at the end of their journeys. Even so, world lifeforces change images. You see the ifrits as the world translates them, and were you on their world you would not appear as you do now. Enough…you must learn more about life itself, not Tables. The Tables mean little.
“I thought Alucius had destroyed the Tables.”
He destroyed one that had already been weakened, and buried another. One of the ifrits has regained access to that Table and is rebuilding another. They have also repowered other Tables. The “voice” of the soarer sounded tired. Forget the Tables. There is so little time. So little…
“So little time?” asked Wendra.
You must learn about the nodes. They are the key to all that you must do.
“Alucius might need me.”
He might indeed, but you can do nothing to help him until you learn. Observe the scrat.
“How will this help?”
Unless you understand how to untwine the lifeforce of the ifrits, and their massive threads, they will brush you aside as the frailest of butterflies, as the most short-lived of moths. Your Alucius thought his efforts were sufficient. They were not. He ignored the signs on his stead as well.
“You expected him to stand watch over something he knew nothing about? When you did nothing? You expected him to guard all Corus? To have no life at all?”
We have done all we could. You would not be, and your world would be long since drained and dead, had we not acted long years past. We have taken only what was necessary. We did not destroy a world to build cities that will endure forever on lifeless lands. We did what was best for both ourselves and for others. From that forbearance, we have never recovered. Do not speak to me of how one should live a life. We will not live that much longer, no matter who triumphs. If those who can stop evil do not act, then it will triumph. That those with ability are called upon is unfair. The able must always do more. The universe cares nothing for fairness. Beliefs do not matter. Only what is done or not done matters. You and your mate can choose to act against the ifrits. You can choose not to act. Acting without the knowledge you need to change what otherwise will be is futile. How can you help your mate if you know even less than he does?
Wendra could not refute those last words, much as she wanted to, much as she felt Alucius needed her. Nor could she refute the fact that the soarer would not help unless she cooperated. She took a long and slow breath and concentrated on the small creature the soarer held.
Observe the scrat once more.
127
Once more, Alucius found himself on a flat surface, except he was sprawled half across it, and the Table—if it was a Table—was sucking the very heat out of his body. His chest was numb from the chill. With an effort, he rolled sideways. That movement split his skull with an internal thunderclap and sent lines of fire down his arms and legs that left his vision blurring and his entire body shaking. He took a slow breath, then another.
Even after remaining still for a time, his vision was still blurred, his eyes watering, and every part of his body ached.
Was that because he’d burst through two barriers, one practically after another? Or just from the strain of traveling through the dark tubes?
After a moment, he eased himself into a sitting position, although his knees ended up higher than his thighs because there was dirt or rubble piled around what he thought was a Table. There was no light where he was, but he felt that he was in an enclosure of some sort. The room was cold, chill—and dark—but the darkness didn’t feel like the previous chamber that had held the buried Table, and there was a definite icy wind filtering in from somewhere.
Alucius slowly moved his head, trying to make out something in the blackness. He stopped. There was an oblong almost directly before him that seemed somehow like a lighter patch in the darkness. He eased himself to his feet, still holding the heavy rifle, and gingerly stepped toward what he hoped was an archway or doorway, or even a window. His boots sank into an oozy substance that felt partly frozen. An acrid odor of decaying vegetation rose in the chill air. Carefully, the herder took one step after another, crossing close to three yards of uneven, unsteady footing until he stood just short of the opening in the dark stone wall.
A doorway of sorts it was indeed, with stone pillars and a lintel. The bottom of the doorway was filled with rubble that had been covered with dirt and possibly moss or something else. He felt the stone, polished into a glassy finish, and with cracks in only a few places. There did not seem to have been a door, not from the smooth-finished edges of the stone.
He studied the corridor beyond the doorway, somewhat lighter, enough that he could make out an incline leading straight ahead and up. It might have been a gradual ramp, although the ramp or steps were covered with dirt.
Before leaving the Table chamber, he glanced back over his shoulder at the Table. Like the previous one, it had also begun to show a purple glow visible only through his Talent. With that glow, he could tell that it was half-buried in dirt and debris.
He turned back and began to make his way up the ramp. Halfway up, on the left side, there was a gap in the stonework, chest high and almost as wide, through which the wind gusted. Alucius peered through the gap. Overhead, through a break in the roof or ceiling, Alucius could see stars, and they looked familiar, as they might from Iron Stem.
He w
anted to shake his head. Of course it was dark. With all the hours he had spent in the one buried Table chamber and the time when he had been unconscious, wherever he was now, the sun had set a long time back. He couldn’t help a slight smile at the thought that at least he wasn’t trapped underground. Alucius kept climbing the ramp until he reached what he thought might be the ground level of the ruined building. At the top of the ramp, he stood in an antechamber or foyer. Directly ahead of him was a stone wall, with some sort of carving or drawing, but the light was far too dim for even his sight to make it out. To the right and the left were archways. A massive tree trunk had fallen and blocked the archway to the right. Under the trunk were sections and fragments of stone.
Alucius moved slowly though the remaining archway into a long hallway lined with columns. The roof above the columns appeared relatively solid.
Miniature lights or stars flashed before his eyes, and for a moment, he felt weak and dizzy. He stopped and put out a hand to one of the columns to steady himself. For a time, he just stood there, sore and tired and disoriented, various thoughts spinning through his mind.
As little as two years before, he would not have been so shocked at the happenings of the day. But after returning to the comparatively peaceful life of a herder, and then the seasons of battle and riding, it was hard to believe that he was back dealing with ifrits and Tables. Or was that because he wished he were not?
He’d tried to escape the power of Tarolt and been thrown through a Table barrier and ended up nearly buried alive. Trying to escape that fate had led him through another barrier to somewhere else dark and cold, to yet another abandoned Table. Yet his actions, or the power of the ifrits—or both—had rejuvenated Tables that had been dead or inactive.
The ifrits were far more powerful than he’d believed, and he still had no idea who had taken Wendra or where she might be. From what little he had observed, the ifrits he’d encountered hadn’t seemed to know. They’d seemed disconcerted or uninterested in the idea of herder disappearances. Alucius also had gotten the feeling that there were far more ifrits in Corus than he’d seen. Far more.
Another flash of dizziness confirmed that he needed to get some rest…or he’d end up sprawled out somewhere else, with perhaps even more serious injuries.
Step by slow step, Alucius made his way along the columned corridor, which seemed more sheltered than other parts of the building. Near the far end, through a narrow doorway in the stone wall, a doorway whose door had vanished sometime in the past, he finally found a corner free of most dirt and debris, in what might have been a small room before whatever destruction had visited itself on the place. Setting his rifle close at hand, he curled into the corner.
Everything still ached, but sleep might help. He hoped it would.
128
A flat, silvery light suffused the hallway outside the small room where Alucius was sleeping, reflecting off polished stone walls and into his eyes, bringing him slowly awake. Recalling his awakening from his last Table trip, Alucius opened his eyes and turned his head slowly.
A dull but faint throbbing throughout his skull reminded him of his unwise exploits of the previous day, as did the soreness across his chest and arms. So did the dryness in his mouth and his cracking lips. He thought he’d seen the strength of ifrits before, but he’d had no idea that a true ifrit was so powerful. Then…with his rifle and the lifeforce-darkened cartridges, he had killed one. The only problem was that there had been three…and who knew many others that he didn’t know about.
His breath steamed in the still air, although Alucius judged that it was not quite cold enough to freeze water. Still, he was more than glad he had been wearing nightsilks and his winter riding jacket.
He eased himself into a sitting position and looked out through the doorway at the columns on the far side of the corridor he had traversed the night before. Each was of amber gold stone, like the towers of the soarers or the ancient buildings of Dereka—or of the ifrit palaces about which he had dreamed more than a few times. The light was coming through translucent clerestory panels in the high roof of the corridor.
One thing was very clear. He needed to take care of more than a few bodily necessities, including finding some water.
He rose to his feet, then reclaimed the rifle, checking it over before he stepped into the ancient corridor. His boots had left the only tracks in the span-deep gray dirt that covered the pale greenstone revealed by his own scuffing steps of the night before. He turned to his right, hoping that there might be an exit somewhere ahead, although the corridor seemed to end in a gloomy recess less than fifteen yards away.
Alucius walked forward.
There was an exit—or there had been one—but it had been walled up, with square sections of goldenstone mortared in place. The herder tapped the stone with the butt of the rifle and was rewarded with a dull clunk. The stones were definitely solid.
He turned and retraced his steps back along the corridor, checking each of the chambers that opened off it. Every single one was empty of all furnishings, and every outside window had been mortared closed.
When he finally returned to the ramp that led downward to the Table, Alucius was not only thirsty and needing nourishment and relief, but also more than a little puzzled. Supposedly, the Cataclysm had been abrupt and without warning, yet someone had sealed the building carefully, and in a way that could not have been done in haste. Who had done it? How long ago? And why? To protect the Table? That thought alone was even more chilling than the air in the ancient building.
As he eased his way down the ramp, he could see in the indirect light that it was covered with a grayish dirt that had drifted in from the broken part of the wall. He made his way to the gap in the stonework, where sunlight filtered around the massive tree trunk. On the upper side there was a gap between trunk and goldenstone—a gap perhaps half a yard in width and a yard long.
Alucius managed to lever himself high enough to grasp a section of stone that looked as though it would break in his hands. But the jagged goldenstone was as unyielding as iron, and he had to stretch to set his rifle in one of the cracks in the stonework overhead, then use both arms to pull himself up. He was panting and sweating by the time he had recovered the rifle and gotten up far enough to squirm into the opening between trunk and broken stone. The tree looked as though it had fallen recently, with the indentations in the bark still clear and fresh. But to his Talent, the wood felt dead, lifeless. Yet it had not decayed. He touched the trunk of the tree, a fir of some sort, a good three yards in breadth, from what he could see. It was cold, like stone.
After a moment, he began to inch his way upward at an angle and around the trunk until he was on the upper side and sitting in weak and hazy sunlight, light that offered no warmth from the biting chill that enfolded him.
He bent and tapped the tree trunk with the rifle butt. It even sounded like stone. As he caught his breath, he took in everything around him. In front of him, the fallen tree rose at an angle above the goldenstones and green tiles that formed the roof of the structure he had just escaped. Neither snow nor ice clung to or touched the tile or the amber stonework—or the tree. Alucius’s mouth opened as he realized that even the needles and the branches of the tree had ossified, as if the massive fir had been alive one instant and turned to stone the next—stone that had retained all the color and shape of the original tree.
There were no other trees anywhere in sight. The building itself was situated on a low rise whose slopes were covered with snow. Below the rise—in all directions except north—was a snowy plain with low hummocks irregularly dotting the whiteness. There was not a single sign of any sort of vegetation, nor any rock or stone not covered with snow. To the north, from the position of the sun, the snowy plain extended about a vingt—and ended. The land just dropped away, and beyond and below that cliff edge was a mass of gray clouds or swirling snow, or both. Above was an ever-darker mass of clouds.
Alucius turned and looked away from the
clouds and the tip of the stone tree. At the bottom of the rise to the south of the building was an open rivulet of dark water running between snowy banks. A slight mist rose from the water. Alucius resisted the urge to rush toward it. He’d rushed too much lately. Instead, he used his Talent to scan the area around him, ignoring the headache the effort caused.
He could sense a number of birds, a creature he thought might be a snow fox, and some rodents, like scrats, but different. Beyond the low rise on the far side of the small stream, the snow extended as far as he could see to the south.
Slowly, he edged his way down the trunk until he reached the part where bare stone roots jutted upward, blocking any further progress. From there, holding the rifle high in his left hand, he slid off into the snow. The top was crusty, but beneath that crust was white powder that flew up around him, momentarily blinding him.
When the flurries settled, he was standing in thigh-deep snow. His boots, he felt, rested on packed snow and ice, not frozen stone or soil. Step by step he waded down the slope toward the stream, stopping on a flat area short of the water’s edge and testing his footing as he edged forward. Finally, he bent down, reaching out and touching the water. Despite the foggy vapor that rose from the surface, the water felt like liquid ice. Alucius could drink it only in very small swallows, and it chilled him all the way through by the time he felt he had had enough.
Alucius glanced around, but the air remained chill and still, with no life except a few birds that skittered across the snow and rodents burrowed somewhere beneath the snow. He needed to get out of wherever he was—and as soon as he could. But it would help to know where he was. From what he had seen, he had to be fairly far north, perhaps near Northport or even Blackstear—although he supposed that, with the range of the Tables, he could be somewhere just as far north, but far to the east in Lustrea.
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