Nothing grew down here on the stone, so we didn’t have a fire for hot food. There was still some of that dukkar seal meat left, and I passed it around. Joanna shook her head, showing me her teeth and pointing at them, then pointing at my own mouth. I didn't understand, but I didn't push the issue. I looked over at Nissikul and Thukkar, but they were engaged in their own quiet conversation while they ate their meal, and weren't paying much attention to Joanna or me. I turned back to her.
She seemed so small out of her armor, though she appeared no less self-assured. If anything, she came across as fiercer than before, more intense. I noticed that she wasn't speaking to any invisible spirits anymore. I wondered why that was. I couldn't think of some hand sign to describe the question, so I dismissed it. There was something much more important that I had to ask her. "Joh-ahna," I began.
She looked up from what she was working on, and I saw the little makeshift light she had been carrying in her lap, wires protruding from it seemingly at random. She wasn't wearing the hood now, and I marveled at the dusky smoothness of her head and face. I wondered if all of her people had no hair. It lent her countenance an alien aspect when combined with her wide eyes and dark skin. She was so much like one of us, and yet she was so much different. I realized that I was just sitting there looking at her and felt my face heat with embarrassment. Joanna shaped her eyes into an Erin-Vulur smile. She responded in her tongue, her voice high and sweet, reminding me of music. "Yes, Volistad?"
I struggled on, wracking my brain to arrange the few words of her language that I knew into the meaning that I was trying to convey. "You… you say one time you no god."
Joanna made an expression I couldn’t read. “No. I’m not. Not yet.”
I frowned. Not yet? “What that mean?”
“I brought…” she said, and then she paused, perhaps stopping to try to remember which words she had taught me. “I brought someone bad with me.” I opened my mouth to speak, but she put up a hand, asking me for silence. I obliged her, and just waited. “My friend. His name is Barbas.”
“Barr-boss,” I repeated, tasting the name as I said it. It was a strange name, just as difficult to say as Joanna.
She smiled a little at my repetition and continued. "Barbas was not bad before. But we came down here and…" she trailed off.
“We found something very bad.” Her face was drawn and pained. “Barbas is now… Barbas is atvaqa.”
I understood, or at least I thought I did. Barbas was her spirit. When she had fallen into the ice, they had come in contact with the darkness, and her friend had become corrupted.
I remembered the appropriate word, and I uttered it then. "Sah-ree."
Joanna smiled again. She seemed to like doing that. I didn't mind it at all. In fact, it looked good on her. It didn't really resemble the expression of threat that my people used. It was more in the shape of her red lips and the corners of her wide eyes than it was related to the showing of her teeth. "No, Volistad. I am sorry. I brought atvaqa to your people. Now I must find him, and I must kill him. I spoke to your god, Ravanur, and she told me to do so.”
The phrase was long, and I missed a few words, but I heard the name Ravanur, and I felt my breath catch in my throat. The Great Mother had spoken to her! She was now doing the bidding of Ravanur! Even if she wasn’t a god, as she said, this at least made her special, didn’t it?
Joanna seemed to read my evident excitement, and her expression became troubled and distant again. “I am not a god. But Ravanur wants to make me into one.” That drew me up short, but Joanna continued. “I have to stop Barbas. But to do that…” she trailed off and shuddered, clutching her head, and when she continued, still clutching at her skull, she was speaking the language of the Erin-Vulur, smoothly as if she had been born into it. “A god answers to no one but a greater god,” she intoned through gritted teeth, and I felt apprehension raise all the hairs on the back of my neck. Those were words straight from the high epic, like the phrases that had been carved in that standing stone, back where we had slain the spawn of the Eater-King.
I looked over at the others, who had gone silent. Thukkar and Nissikul were both watching Joanna intently. Nissikul seemed, for the first time I could remember, terrified of what she was seeing. What did her mage's senses tell her was happening? Joanna continued speaking in our language, her face tight with obvious pain, and a vein began to pulse over her temple. "Barbas has been consumed by one of the Dark Ones, and he will destroy this place. He will set free all of the Elder Ones lying dead beneath the stone, and unleash an irreversible doom on your people and mine. I have to save your people and mine. I am looking for the lost temple of Ravanur, and I need your help to get there." Sweat had begun to run down her face. It froze as it dripped off of her chin and clattered on the stone in tiny cloudy beads. Then, as suddenly as the fit had gripped her, Joanna relaxed, and looked up at us, trepidation written clearly on her face.
I was confused, but Nissikul evidently was not. Without hesitation, she pressed her forehead to the stone and lifted a hand in Joanna’s direction. “One thousand pardons,” she intoned formally, “Chosen of Ravanur, for my attempt on your life.”
Though it was clear that Joanna didn’t understand the words that Nissi was saying, she seemed to catch the meaning. She stood, weariness apparent in her movements. She crossed our little camp, and crouched beside my sister. She placed a gentle hand on Nissi’s shoulder and said something in her tongue that I didn’t understand.
"Of course we will help you," I said. Then, remembering myself, I simply said, in her tongue. "Yes." I looked over at Thukkar, and he shrugged, the meaning clear. He didn't know what in Palamun's name was going on, but he had come along. It wasn't like he had much choice since Nissi and I were with Joanna. This was it. The reason I had been chosen to see her descent from the stars, the reason I had been killed and made into the champion of my people. It was the reason I was down here, with Thukkar and my sister. We all had a role to play. We had to find the lost temple of Ravanur.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Joanna
The Great Mother's Temple
The four of us traveled beneath the ice for a week before the stone beneath us began to rise, taking the shape of mountains long entombed in the depths of the worldwide glacier. At first, I was worried that space would run out between the ice and the stone, but it proved not to be an issue. When the ice was just a foot or so above our heads, Nissikul reached one hand up and ran her fingers along it, and a way was opened for us. The black witch-ice, as she called it in her tongue, would snake out ahead of us and consume the ice in our path, rendering it into powder and piling it behind us as we passed. Between the call of Ravanur's compulsion and Nissi's abilities, we made good time, and it took only two days for us to find the mouth of the cave that contained the temple. Camp that night was a somewhat more festive experience than normal, and even though our rations were scarce, when we woke in the morning everyone's spirits were high. We packed our things quickly, excited to see the interior of the temple and find the conclusion to our quest. Before we knew it, we were standing at the entrance to the lost temple of Ravanur, and our excitement was very quickly tempered by unease.
"It doesn't look like a temple," Thukkar commented, disquiet evident in his voice. Volistad and I had been drilling in the language of the Erin-Vulur during the whole trip, and though I wasn't going to be carrying on a complicated conversation anytime soon, I could at least understand the gist of what everyone was saying.
Nissikul snorted and swatted Thukkar playfully on the back of the head, elaborately unconcerned. “Have some respect, ranger. You stand before the ancient heart of our god. It would not do to anger her here.”
The front of the temple was not particularly impressive. The cave we were standing in simply ended in a smooth, unadorned, unmarked wall of stone. Set in the center of the wall was an open doorway, gaping black like a window into the abyss. I shrugged. “I guess we just go inside?”
Vol
istad grumbled impatiently and started forward. "We came here to get you to the center of this place; we should just go. The Erin-Vulur are in great danger." He strode to the door confidently, his shoulders squared and determined. The rest of us followed a short distance back, wary even in the face of Volistad's obvious boldness. As the ranger approached the unassuming door, prickles of trepidation began to crawl up my spine, growing ever more intense the closer he got to the opening. Soon, the anxiety was so intense that I couldn't help taking a step forward and calling, "Volistad, wait!"
The ranger did not wait. With the kind of exaggerated nonchalance only displayed by someone who is very nervous, Volistad stepped into the doorway and disappeared into the darkness. We waited, all of us holding our breath. Three or four seconds passed in agonizing silence, and then Volistad called from within, "It's fine, come on!" We all sighed together and trudged to the door. My heart still raced in my chest, and that unfocused sense of unease remained. I looked over at Nissikul as she stepped past me and approached the door. She didn't seem to feel it. Sure, she seemed nervous, but no more nervous than her brother, or Thukkar. Why was I the only one affected like this? I shook my head and followed the Stormcaller inside, stepping into the darkness with my spine tensed against some unknown threat.
Nissi's light was making lazy circles of the room, and I was gratified to see that this room actually looked like it belonged in a temple. Every wall was covered in dense, circular script, just like the monoliths. Hanging from pins driven deep into the stone were long, limp banners, marked with Erin-Vulur phrases. They were lines from the High Epic, just like the graffiti on the monoliths had been. Had the priests here made the marks on the standing stone prison cells? There was no way of knowing. The room was broad and circular, arranged like an amphitheater. The stonework was the same as the outside of the temple. Everything seemed to have been shaped straight from the stone, worked by some method that left neither chisel mark nor errant chipping. The stone had not weathered or crumbled- though I guessed that had more to do with the glacier sealing this place off than it was the result of some magick or divine intervention. Scattered across the whole of the amphitheater was the detritus of regular ritual and use. Several vellum scrolls crumbled to dust on a low stone table that grew directly from the ground, flanked by several ritual tools, whose uses I could not divine from their shapes.
Nissikul crossed to the table and lifted one of the ritual tools, an odd contraption that looked like a mechanical six-fingered hand, tipped with claws. She held it carefully to her nose and sniffed, immediately grimacing with evident revulsion. “This is a kazakatta- a heart-taker. It has been used many times. I can still smell the blood.” She worked the handle in a manner I couldn’t follow, and the claws suddenly snapped forward, closing the hand as if it were wrapped around something. A heart, I thought, and swallowed hard. That was for tearing out a sacrifice's heart. "Your people would kill with that?” I asked, horrified.
“Not for a very long time,” Nissikul responded, putting the sinister thing back down on the stone. “They are mentioned in a few of my Elder’s scrolls, but they’re not needed anymore. They were for removing the hearts of the corrupted so that the Dark Ones hiding within could be entombed, or so I read.”
I stared at the razor claws, imagining them piercing my skin, sliding past my ribs, gripping… I shook my head again, forcibly not thinking about it- with only limited success. Volistad seemed not to have noticed Nissi’s revelation. Instead, he was inspecting another low table, this one spread with an array of weapons, each of them as fine as his own- but all of them crafted to a different pattern than the arsenal given to him by the Deepseeker. He ran his hand gently along the fuller of a thin, straight sword, the steel rippling with strange, beautiful patterns that must have been bestowed in the forging process. The hilt was wrapped in pale leather, which was still, somehow, intact. Perhaps it had been treated for longevity somehow.
As I looked along the whole table, I noticed that all of the weapons laid out there were made in the same style, every hilt wrapped in the same pale leather as the sword. I thought about the limited combat training I had received in the Former program, and then back further to my life… before. I could hardly wield a straight sword, I had never so much as swung a weapon like that before, and more than likely I would just end up hurting myself. In fact, most of the killing implements on this table were the sort of thing that required at least some basic martial prowess, and I had little of that. If only there were an ancient, leather adorned standard-issue Pan-American battle-rifle waiting here for me. Something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye, and I moved down the table to pick it up. It was a curved weapon, meant to be wielded in a single hand, possessing a wide, crescent-moon blade. I gave it a few experimental swings. To my surprise, it handled the way my long forgotten machete had felt. I wasn't going to be doing anything fancy with it, but looking down at the sword, I was pretty confident that I could hit something with the edge without simultaneously injuring myself. I checked beneath the table, and as I had suspected, an array of metal scabbards had been piled in a heap. I found one that matched the crescent sword and sheathed it, then busied myself fastening the weapon to my borrowed ranger's belt. Excellent. When I finished, I looked up to find the others all staring at me, shocked expressions on their faces.
"What?" I asked, hoping I hadn't committed some grave sacrilege. I figured Thukkar wouldn't do anything about it, and probably not Volistad, but Nissi?
“You just peeled a sword out of a carving on the table,” Volistad said, awed.
"No, there were weapons piled all over that table. Look-" I trailed off as I looked back at the table. Sure enough, all of the weapons I had seen were no more than intricate carvings in the surface of the stone. There were no scabbards lying underneath it either. It was some kind of ceremonial display, and I had… what? I looked down at the sword belted at my waist. It was the same weapon I had picked up seconds ago, real as could be. I took a deep breath. It must have been the work of Ravanur. Having a god casually perform miracles for me never ceased to make me nervous. "A gift from Ravanur," I finally said, with much more confidence than I felt. "Her ‘Chosen One' couldn't just keep wandering around with a dull old climbing ax, could she?"
The rangers agreed easily enough, but Nissi didn’t move. She just stared at me, clearly unsettled. I noticed then that she had shed Volistad’s cloak- which she had been wearing as a sort of makeshift robe- and donned a set of strangely intact ritual robes she had found near all the implements of sacrifice. Volistad finally broke the silence by clearing his throat. “We need to keep moving, everyone.”
I nodded in agreement and led the way down the steps of the amphitheater toward the black, gaping doorway at its heart. Nissikul flicked her hand in a throwing motion and a second ball of blue-white light came into being, streaking through the door just ahead of me and casting its light into the corridor beyond. I squared my shoulders and stepped through the door, closely followed by Volistad.
I hadn’t made it three steps into the low hallway before Volistad seized the back of my furs and yanked me back with a bark of warning. He was a moment too slow, however, and I heard the click of a pressure switch as part of the floor sank slightly beneath my foot. Without a moment’s hesitation, he swept past me, shoving me hard into the wall. He continued the motion in a whirl of his cloak, his crystalline armor and helm glittering with pale luminescence beneath the glow of Nissi’s light. As suddenly as he had moved, he stopped, holding something in his hand up to the light. Gripped tightly between thumb and forefinger was a fat steel dart, glistening with a dark, greasy fluid.
I straightened back up, waving off Nissi’s concern. “This place is…” I trailed off again, not knowing the Erin-Vulur word for ‘booby-trapped’”.
Taking my meaning, Nissi filled in my question. “Burtazzik.”
“This place is Burtazzik," I repeated, struggling with the unfamiliar word.
"We will need to b
e more careful," Volistad murmured, his head swiveling back and forth as he scanned the floor ahead of us. After a moment, he pointed. "Trap." I followed his gesture, and sure enough, I could see the faintest outline of a seam in the stone, likely another pressure plate. "Let's go," the ranger said and held out his hand to guide me around the trap. I accepted the guidance and stepped carefully around the plate. I retrieved my own light from within my furs and switched it on, casting its sputtering bluish beam over the stone ahead of us. As soon as we were all past the trap, Volistad squeezed past us to clear the next stretch of corridor.
We continued this way down the whole length of the corridor, creeping slowly along in the wake of the keen-eyed ranger, listening all the while for the telltale click of a triggered mechanism. After about a hundred meters the corridor ended and we found ourselves standing on a narrow stone bridge over a vast emptiness. Nissikul whispered her magick orb of light to its brightest state, but the light still revealed nothing around us but an empty abyss and the bridge, which was barely wide enough for one person to walk semi-comfortably. Shit. I wondered how far I would fall if I slipped. I didn’t exactly want to find out, but there was no turning back.
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 26
