by Greg Curtis
To add to the wonder of the ancient ruin there were towering pylons of steel emerging out of the top of that wall at regular intervals. Pylons that he assumed had once supported some sort of roof. He had seen towers that stood that tall before, but these weren't towers. These were just columns of steel that extended high above him to taper and curve inwards far above him. The roof itself was gone. No doubt it had been made of something perishable like wood, that had long since rotted away. Still, how could anyone build a roof that large? How could any structure support it?
One other thing he noticed was that the temple had been built for some very strange people. Big people with very short legs – at least that was the only way he could explain the strange seats that completely encircled the stage. If he had sat on them, he would have had his knees up at around chest height, while the backs of the stone chairs would have towered above his head. How long in the body had these people been to find chairs like this comfortable? And why were they made of stone?
Of course there were no people around to ask the question of. They had passed from the world – or this part of the world at least – thousands of years before. All they had left behind were ruins. And on those ruins, great screeds of writing had been carved. Writings that Val had assured him could be important.
Naturally Val couldn't tell him what was written. Nor could he read it. It wasn't written in Val’s language nor Hendrick’s. In fact, the small pieces of it he'd seen as he had fought his way through the jungle covered city streets looked more like the scratchings of wild animals. But that didn't matter when some of the afflicted had spells of translation. He in turn had carried in a large number of parchments and lumps of charcoal tinted wax to make some rubbings.
It wasn't what he wanted to do. He had set out walking from one world to another, thinking all he had to do was find a world with people in it and start asking questions. But things hadn't worked out that way. First he'd discovered that most worlds didn't have people. Those that did, he often only found by hunting them out – his vision of other worlds was limited to only a dozen yards or so until he actually crossed. And then when he did find people they weren't necessarily friendly and neither did they speak Enstyr.
But even if by some miracle he could make himself understood, they didn't have the information he wanted. At least not so far. The two peoples he had managed to speak with so far had lived in caves and mud huts. One of them had been nomadic, and had spent their lives hunting down the great herds of huge ox like creatures. The other people had at least been farmers with towns and villages. But their knowledge of great beasts only extended to giant mammoth like beasts that they tried to avoid. They knew nothing of any value to him. Which was why exploring an ancient temple on a dead world had somehow become his best option.
One thing that did trouble him was that both of those peoples had once been much greater races. They had had cities and technology and magic that was far in advance of anything he had ever seen. At least that was what Val had told him. In fact the only reason the sage could speak with them, was that their language was similar to the language of those he called the Honoured Ones, the ancient ancestors of Hendrick’s own world. Tragedies had befallen both peoples. A plague in one case, a world turning to ash and water in the other. As a result all of their advances had been lost. Now here he was in the temple of a third ancient race, and they were gone too.
What was it? Some curse of the gods? A doom that befell every people when they advanced too far? When their civilisation became too great? Whatever it was, Hendrick didn't like it. He especially didn't like that the idea that it could happen to Styrion one day. Assuming that this great beast wasn't the start of their demise.
Putting such thoughts aside he explored the temple. This was not the place to be distracted. After all he didn't know what dangers might await him here.
Hendrick walked carefully down the aisle between the rings of seats heading for the arena in the middle. He had to be careful because the stairs were surprisingly small and he didn't want to trip. Not when it was such a long way to the bottom. Obviously the builders had had small feet to go with their short legs. But others weren't so pleased with his apparent sloth.
“How can you be lame in both legs as well as your brain?!” Val asked him impatiently. “Surely the gods should have shown you some favours!”
“I'm just gifted that way!” Hendrick retorted. Privately he was wondering if it had been such a clever idea to have the sage there. It wasn't as if Val could read the ancient script. But he supposed he would have had to have answered to the Goat Footed God himself if he had dared to visit the ancient temple without Val present. The temple was famous in Val’s world and had been extensively spoken about by the scholars of his people. And to be fair the sage had been the one to tell him of it.
Val's only answer was to grumble impatiently at him. Hendrick ignored him as he made his way carefully down the stairs. Instead he spent his free thoughts wondering at the structure. How large it was! He'd thought the temple in Styrion Hold was large. This was ten times the size and could have fit the one in Styrion Hold on its central stage complete with its gardens. He couldn't begin to guess how many people must have been able to sit in the seats surrounding it. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? More?
Eventually he reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out on to the flat stone concourse that was the stage, only to be surprised once more. Where were the cracks between tiles? There were none as far as he could see. The entire concourse was made up of one round, flat piece of stone that had to be a hundred yards in diameter. Just to be sure though he knelt down and started brushing some of the millennia of dust away with his hands, looking for places where the stones might have met. He couldn't find any.
After that he stood up again, and stared back up to where he'd come from. The rows upon rows of seats surrounding him, climbed up a massive stone embankment. What must it have been like he wondered, for the priests or the leaders of the people to address the throngs from her? His father the King would normally have spoken to the people gathered on the concourse outside the castle in the heart of Styrion Might from the balcony. Maybe this was similar? Then again, his father wouldn't have been completely encircled by crowds.
“Well, are you just going to stand there like a possum playing dead?” Val called out to him grumpily. He was impatient to see the obelisk – the very reason for Hendrick’s visit to this world. It was huge and stood in the very centre of the arena, and it seemed that the arena had been built around it. Walking up to it he could see clearly that it was no part of the structure. Instead the obelisk – a three sided spire – rose from out of the ground like a crystal of glistening black rock, through a gap in the arena floor Why was that, he wondered? It was almost as though the builders had been afraid of it in some way.
“Val?”
“It's fascinating! Quite wondrous!” The sage answered him rapturously, his mind not really on the conversation.
“Yes it is. But is it safe to touch?”
“Well, how should I know? I'm not physically there – I can't touch anything!”
Hendrick groaned. Some days Val was incredibly useful. Other days he was no use at all. This was looking like one of those other days.
He gave up and cautiously reached out with a finger from the safety of the stone floor.
Nothing happened and he let out the worried breath he'd been holding. The obelisk was solid. Its gleaming black surface felt perfectly smooth. It didn’t seem to react to his touch though he noted it was slightly warm. That seemed odd. This thing was made of stone – or maybe volcanic glass – and he assumed it was solid. There was a slight chill in the air and there wasn't much sun out today. It should be cold.
That bothered him a little. But as time ticked on and still nothing happened, he risked placing his palm on the black stone. And when that caused no change he pushed against the obelisk with both hands.
Still nothing.
The other thing he
noticed as he continued exploring the obelisk with his hands, was the sharpness of the edges. The corners where the sides met were almost as straight and sharp as blades. They would cut his skin if he pushed too hard. The edges where the chisels had carved the strange lettering into the stone were the same. Perfectly straight. Perfectly sharp. Too straight and sharp to have been carved he thought.
Still, it would make it easy to get a good charcoal wax rubbing. That was going to be tricky though. The obelisk stood twenty feet high and there weren't any steps.
Fortunately he had a way. One of the latest spells he had received was one of warping. It didn't warp objects but the space in which the objects were contained. But the effect was much the same. Hendrick stood back a little way from the obelisk and cast the spell on the ground around it. Soon enough it looked as though the stone floor had blown up like a bubble. What mattered though wasn't what it looked like. It was that it allowed him to walk up the sloping side of the bubble until he reached the top of the obelisk and to press the parchment against it to do the rubbing.
It was a simple process, and the sharpness of the carved symbols meant that he got a really clean sharp rubbing as the charcoal wax pushed the parchment into them. Hopefully back in the temple when he put all the pieces of parchment back together, someone would be able to give him an accurate translation. That someone he guessed, wasn't going to be Val, whose disembodied head was busy floating around the obelisk making untranslatable noises.
Hopefully the translation would tell him something about the behemoths. But there was no guarantee. All he knew from Val was that these people had once been among the oldest and wisest of all the races. That their name – something that wasn't able to be pronounced let alone spelled in his native tongue – was famous among scholars. And that if anyone had known anything of the terrible beasts it was them. It was just a pity they were no longer around to ask. But they'd been gone for many thousands of years, lost to war and disease according to Val.
As he worked, casting and recasting his spell to move a little lower down the obelisk to take further rubbings, he found himself absorbed in the task. It was good to be able to do something menial from time to time. Something that didn't require him to worry about things. Marnie and Tyrollan could deal with most of the important matters regarding the afflicted and their bargain with the King. Despite his mother's beliefs that he was some sort of leader, he didn't want to be that. When this was behind him what he wanted most in the world was to return to his life as a brewer. Though admittedly a little more acceptance of his nature from the people of Burbage would be nice. And having a few extra spells wouldn't be a bad thing either.
“Hendrick!”
He was half way down the second side of the obelisk when he heard Val call his name, and for a moment he was slightly annoyed by the interruption. “Yes?”
“Turn around! Now!”
That caught Hendrick's attention, and he immediately spun round. And then he stopped and stared in shock.
Standing in front of him were three figures. Two women and a man. People, but not humans. They were too tall and thin, the planes of their faces too flat, the edges too sharp. Almost like the obelisk he thought. They appeared to be like carvings of people instead of actual living beings. And their skin was bronze. Not brown or tanned, but bronze. But it wasn't just their skin. It was their hair and their clothes too. They looked like living bronze statues.
“Ahh … hello?” Hendrick wasn't actually sure what to say to these people, and so he stuttered and stammered a little as he came out with the greeting. And then he felt like a mist breathing dullard for saying it. After all, these people weren't from Styrion. The chances were that they didn't speak Enstyr. But then again, what else was he supposed to say?
They didn't respond. Instead they wandered around the obelisk and him, talking among themselves as if he wasn't there. And from the fact that he couldn't hear what they were saying but they obviously could, he quickly began to suspect that they weren't actually there. That they were like Val, simple visages. Except that these images weren't so simple. They were complete bodies, and they looked disturbingly solid. But it would explain why he hadn't heard them approach. They hadn't. They'd simply appeared. And when he asked, Val confirmed exactly that.
So it was a visage. A strange version of the spell and one he'd never heard of. But still similar enough to what he was familiar with that he could understand it. Why were they here? Had they come to see him? And if they had, then how had they known he was here? Did they watch the ancient temple? Or had they responded to his touching the obelisk?
“Can you understand me?” He tried again, waving his hands to attract their attention and pointing at his mouth to make his meaning clear. It didn't seem to help much.
“Can you even hear me?” It suddenly occurred to him that if he couldn't hear them then maybe they couldn't hear him either. Still, he tried a few more times just in case. And then when they still didn't respond he tried jumping up and down in front of them. That earned him a few stares, but nothing more.
After that he wondered what he was supposed to do. For a while he decided that since they were studying him, he should return the favour. But there wasn't really much he could learn from staring at the three of them.
Their clothes were strange, but what did that mean? It would have been odd if they weren't given that they obviously came from another world. Still, he found the long lengths of bronze coloured cloth draped around them like curtains, odd. Most especially when they were all wearing the same types of garment despite two of them being women and the third a man. The dresses hung from one shoulder and were belted with a sash around the waist.
One thing he did notice was that they were all wearing amulets. Little crystals on what looked like leather straps hung around each of their necks. It was hard to be sure though when everything about them was bronze. But it seemed an odd thing to wear. They didn't seem like religious icons or badges of office. If they had been they would have all been the same, like the staffs of the Priests of the Benevolent One. These were of different shapes and sizes. But if it had simply been a choice of fashion then why would they all be wearing them? Surely some would have chosen other things to wear? Or not wear.
He had no idea what age the visitors were. Clearly these people were all fully grown, but other than that he couldn't decide if they were in their early adult years or advanced old age. There were no wrinkles showing, but nor did they seem to have the vibrant energy of youth. Maybe they were ageless? Immortal, if such a thing were possible. Or maybe it was simply an effect of the spell they'd cast.
But the thing Hendrick found most curious about them was their demeanour. They all had an air of wisdom and calm reflection. They seemed like people who were curious, but not wildly so. A people who took a measured approach to life, and weighed all their actions carefully before they did anything. Perhaps that was why they weren't speaking to him? Perhaps they hadn't yet decided what they wanted to say.
“Val,” having failed to get any response from the bronze people he turned to his friend, “could these be the builders of this place?”
“How would I know? How would anyone?”
He had a point Hendrick realised. The builders of this place had been gone for thousands of years. Maybe tens of thousands of years. And the three people in front of him who he assumed might know, weren't talking. But one thing he did realise – they wouldn’t have sat on those stone seats any more comfortably than him.
“Any idea what I should do now?”
“Why do you keep asking foolish questions?!” Val snapped at him. He hated being asked questions he couldn't answer. Especially when he was worried.
“Some sage you are!” It would be nice Hendrick thought if Val could give him some answers. But he supposed that wasn't a fair thing to expect of him. This was completely new for both of them. Val could be extremely useful when it was a problem with logic, or something that he knew about. But he could tell him little
when it came to things that were completely unknown. Hendrick had become acutely aware of that as he'd explored new worlds.
“And you're no prize as a client!”
Hendrick held his tongue instead of retorting as he wanted to. Not because he was bothered by the argument, but because he was uncomfortably aware that they were being watched. He didn't see any sign of hostility from the trio. But he still felt embarrassed to be caught arguing like children in front of them.
Eventually though, he decided to do the only thing he could. To ignore them and continue his work. None of the visitors tried to stop him. Nor did they say anything – at least that he could hear. But they watched him closely as he worked.
Hendrick did his best to ignore them, though at times that was hard. Especially when one of the women walked up the warped floor to stand behind him and stare over his shoulder as he rubbed the charcoal over the parchment. He did wonder why she was walking when as a visage she could have simply floated as Val did. It seemed pointless.
But who was he to judge what was pointless and what wasn't? After all, these people had created and sent their own visages, not summoned the visage of another as he did. He didn't have that spell. He didn't know how it worked.
