The light briefly illuminated Wren’s puzzled face as she leaned toward the location and drifted toward it. Even flying at a good clip, the far side of the shaft took over thirty beats to reach. He didn’t know how Daena had even spotted the irregularity in the fluctuating light caused by the energy flowing through the conduits.
As the group closed with the wall, Azir’s globes lit up the area.
Bannor swallowed. “Damn.”
A tear the size of a barn had been opened in the side of the shaft. It was obviously not caused by a ground-quake or something natural. Blast marks marred the surface and in many places the metal looked melted.
Senalloy drifted into the gap. She looked tiny compared to the ancient scar surrounding her. She gestured and a brilliant shaft of light appeared in her hand. The silver-haired woman peered up. “Yes,” she reported. “This is why the lift stopped working. It cuts the housing for the car right in half. It’s hard to tell, but the lift itself may have been hit when this was struck.”
“Frell,” Ziedra said. “That’s a major hit.”
Azir leaned into the hole, sending his globes in to light up the mangled and twisted remains. The damage went back into the wall some ten paces. The square shaft that must have served as the rails for the lift were clearly visible in the floor and ceiling of the blast area. “I wonder if all sixteen shafts were crippled the same way.”
“It’s a safe gamble they were,” Wren said, hovering with folded arms. “Why was this done?”
“Maybe to keep whatever is in the core from getting out,” Bannor offered. “Gaea said the Lokori don’t have magic. You’d just about need to fly to get up this shaft.”
“Then, Gaea did it?” Daena said. “Still, that’s a mighty big hole. I don’t think any of us could do that.”
“I sure couldn’t,” Ziedra said. “Why wouldn’t she tell us about something like this?”
“Why wouldn’t she tell us a lot of things?” Wren murmured. “She has more than her share of secrets. Let’s move on. Speculating is just wasting time.” She leaned backward and swooped down into the darkness.
Ziedra did a slow roll as she dove to catch up. Daena and Azir dropped past him to stay with the others. Senalloy continued to stare, violet eyes narrowed in thought. She looked down the shaft after the others. She floated out toward him and they pursued the dwindling spark of Azir’s light.
“I don’t think Gaea had enough power to make such an attack,” Senalloy murmured. “The problem is, I don’t know what does—not against material that tough. It would have to be an artifice or a creature like we’ve never seen…” Her voice trailed off. She stroked ahead, increasing her speed to catch up with the others.
A cold chill went through him as he willed himself faster in her wake. That event took place eons ago. It couldn’t possibly have any bearing on anything happening today, could it?
It took another half bell of constant descent before the shaft opened into a recognizable bottom. He looked up the way they had come. A rough guess was they were at least ten leagues down. In an area that must be a league across, the floor was a churning sea of some viscous metallic substance that looked like quicksilver. Overhead millions of glowing crystalline projections hung down like the roots of a tree. Raw magic crackled and leaped from peak to peak in the turbulent sea. A caustic stench filled the air making the eyes water and the skin itch.
“A lake of incantralyte,” Ziedra murmured.
“It’s like a gigantic magic sump,” Senalloy said.
“What’s it do?” Azir asked.
“I’m guessing it’s a giant magic reclamation engine. Any free magic wasted above eventually seeps down the walls into this pit. Those nodes up there,” she pointed to the root-like structures above them. “Probably recollect and purify it.”
“I’m certain the engineering is fascinating,” Wren said. “I’m more interested in this door we need to find. Shouldn’t it be somewhere directly under that lift shaft?”
“Could that be a walkway over there?” Daena pointed to a metallic blister hanging down from the ceiling some hundred paces across. It sat adjacent the base of the nexus shaft and close enough to the lift that they might be connected. “See that, it looks like some railing there on the side facing away from us.”
“Good eye. Let’s check it out,” Wren stretched out and hissed off in that direction.
In a few instants, it was clear that Daena’s sharp eyes had found some kind of platform similar to the one they had stood on outside the creation lab. The door opening onto the platform was built like it was designed to resist having moons lobbed at it. The six toggles locking the valve each had to be more than a pace across, and probably weighed more than twenty tons.
“ ‘Giant’ seems to be the only size these folks know,” Azir said, shaking his head.
Wren raised her hand and pointed at the surface. The device glowed red. A white line traced around the mammoth portal. Eons old artifices chugged and hissed as the monstrous tenons scraped from their receivers to free the hatch.
“I’m guessing they didn’t need to open or close this thing in a hurry,” Daena said as they waited for the slow grinding of the paces thick wall of metal to make a gap large enough for them to slip through.
“It wouldn’t be used often,” Senalloy said, looking around the platform. “This whole area would be an inferno of pure magic if the installation’s power were being used in any capacity.”
The seal on the door finally broke, and air gusted from the opening, carrying with it a torrent of gray particles. Coughing and choking everyone reeled back from the caustic smelling residue.
“Gah!” Daena coughed waving her hand, trying to dispel the cloud swirling around them. “What is it?”
“Ash,” Wren said, covering her mouth and nose.
They waited for the cloud to subside. Azir shone a light inside. Beyond the doorway, the floor looked like a gray desert, completely caked in masses of charcoal-tinted grit.
“Interesting,” Senalloy said. She squeezed through the opening making sure not to disturb the substance. She stretched out a hand and pressed her fingers into the substance and pulled out a chunk of something black.
Bannor’s stomach twisted. He had a suspicion what it was the Baronian had found.
The silver-haired mage looked at it for a few instants, turning it over in her gloved hand, she drifted back out of the opening and handed it to Wren. “Like I thought.”
Wren looked at the charred hunk. “This isn’t bone is it?”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Senalloy said with a flat expression.
“Bleah.” Wren dropped it. “Is that whole chamber…???”
“I think so.”
“Oh gack,” Ziedra said, wrinkling her nose.
“That would be a lot of people,” Azir noted. “It can’t all be remains.”
“Okay, move slow, don’t stir that dren up,” the blonde savant said, floating through the crack as the door continued to grind open. “I don’t know if our bodies are immune to tomb sickness.”
“Tomb sickness?” Bannor wondered aloud.
“Lung rot,” Azir translated. “You don’t wanna know and you sure as hades don’t want to find out.”
The six of them floated gingerly over the piles of ash that had formed drifts all down the stairwell. The smell of ancient decay was overpowering. Bannor covered his face and breathed shallow to inhale as little of the stench as possible. When everyone was in, Wren aborted the door’s slow creak, ordering it to close behind them.
She then led the way up the stairs and through a mangled path of destruction. Ancient first one artifices were ripped apart and sundered. The devastation seemed random, some areas were untouched, and others even the metal had been ground down to dust by what must have been enormous force.
Navigating through the destroyed complex Bannor felt an icy sadness seize his chest; so much violence—so much death. Was that the legacy of his ancient forebears?
The ashen smell finally retreated behind them, making it possible to breathe normally again. The air still smelled stale, and reeked of melted metal and burned things. It was amazing to him that there was anything left to even make an odor after all the millennia that had passed.
Up another flight of stairs and through an archway they found what must be the obliterated lobby. This is where they would have come out had the lift been working. The doors that sealed the rail tunnel were bowed outward, probably distorted by the concussion that had ripped the nexus shaft wall apart. Scorch marks darkened the frame and floor where super-heated air had escaped through gaps in the mechanism. The blackened metal had secondary scoring that resembled claw marks, like something had tried to pry them open from the outside after the blast.
“We’re in the right spot now it appears,” Ziedra said.
Wren put hands on hips. Something was obviously bothering her. He didn’t blame her. There was something about the aftermath that didn’t fit their picture of when and how the first ones became extinct.
The destruction down in the lower chamber looked more like the damage that would have been done when fully powered first ones did battle with one another. Wren had mentioned that the first ones had fought each other at times. Just when they seemed to think they understood the history of this place, new evidence muddied the picture. They might never really know what had actually occurred.
Determining the path to the core gave them no difficulty. Archways some ten paces high showed the way. The filigreed and decorated metallic supports formed a broad-way with room for a dozen carriages to roll side by side. Of all the places they had been in Starholme, this was the first place where they had seen any ornamentation.
A lot of the decorations were bas reliefs of male and female faces.
“Oh, now there’s something to make you stop and ponder,” Senalloy said. She had moved ahead down the passage but was looking back.
Daena moved over beside her and looked up. The girl sucked a breath and covered her face in her hands.
“What is it?” Ziedra floated over and looked at what they were seeing. Her jaw dropped.
He drifted over to see what they were making moon eyes at.
On the opposite side of the arch was a carving of a male and female face, set close to one another in a romantic pose with the man looking down into the woman’s eyes. It was exquisitely detailed and realistic.
He blinked.
“That’s me,” he said.
“And me,” Daena murmured. “Was she—was I in love with him even then?”
Wren sniffed. “It would appear your taos have been getting each other in trouble for eons.” She gestured. “There he is again with another girl.”
Bannor turned. She was right. There was another image of him in a similar position with a different woman.
“It looks like you, Zee,” Azir remarked. “I guess back in the old days you got around too.”
The ascendant of magic frowned at him. “Very funny.”
The group of them glided along the curving gallery all of them fascinated by the first strong evidence that tied them all to these long deceased creatures. There were frescos made into the walls depicting the births and deaths of stars. He noted there were also what looked to be paintings depicting strange landscapes, often forbidding but starkly beautiful in their color and scale.
Azir passed a wall section, stopped, and abruptly hovered back. “Oh, this is a great one! Check this out.” He pointed to the relief in front of him.
Bannor floated over to see. It was an image of Wren and Ziedra together in a romantic pose.
The blonde savant caught sight of what they were looking at and flushed scarlet.
“Oh, that’s sweet,” Senalloy said, coming into viewing range.
He felt his own cheeks warm a little knowing that it would be embarrassing for Wren. He looked and noticed she was no longer floating where she had been. “Wren?”
Ziedra looked at the carving and smiled. “Some things just feel right.”
They found Wren at the end of the gallery hovering in front of the massive valve that must serve as the entry into the core. She didn’t look back at any one.
The huge gate was easily fifty paces across and some ten high. It didn’t have the horrendous reinforced locks that they had seen in other places.
Wren raised her hand and focused on the door.
After a moment, there was a boom that shook the corridor. Dust around the ceiled gate puffed into eddies. Unseen tenons retracted with a scrape of ancient metal on metal and clanked as they hit their stops. A chugging in the walls made the structure shake as the slab of metal rumbled upward.
Securing toggles a pace long and wide retracted from the floor as the monolithic construction retracted, making the opening appear to be the toothy maw of some gigantic beast. Wren flitted under the rising door. Bannor followed not wanting to leave her alone when they were so close to the core.
Beyond the door was a featureless segment of corridor fifty paces long that ended in another gate identical to the one they had just opened.
“Oh,” Wren murmured to herself. “Now I see how the monitoring works.” She glanced at him. Her face was still a little red. “Most likely the inner door won’t open unless the outer one is closed. With the security on, the outer one won’t close with more than six in here.”
The rest of the group gathered behind her. Wren snatched a peek at Ziedra, then focused ahead on the inner door. Ziedra grinned at Wren’s back. The lady mage derived tremendous pleasure from teasing the blonde savant.
They had to be patient while Wren ordered the outer door closed, and once sealed, began to unlock the inner door.
“Wait,” Senalloy said, putting a hand on Wren’s shoulder. “Zee, Daena, Azir, defenses up.”
Ziedra spun through the cadences of several spells covering herself and the rest of them in layers of magic. To Bannor, it felt like a coating of thin gossamer silk covering his skin. Daena spread her arms and a thrumming rumbled through the floor radiating outward from her. Shadows seemed to spin from her hands making the metal in his armor vibrate. A dull golden light surrounded Azir’s limbs as he focused. Last, Senalloy cast some additional layers of magic which became like a collar of sparkles orbiting his throat, wrists and ankles.
At their nod, everyone was ready, Wren again focused to trigger the open sequence.
The grating of tenons retracting sounded from the inner door, and it unsealed with a low thrum. The air that rushed under the gap smelled of vegetation, and a metallic odor Bannor associated with waterfalls and fast running streams.
Rays of red light spread into the waiting chamber as the door opened. The distant but distinct cry of a talon-feather tickled Bannor’s hearing. Closer by, insects hummed and birds chirped. Water gurgled someplace close by.
A breeze swirled dust around their ankles.
Wren peeked left and right and moved slowly under the still rising gate. Bannor stayed with her and gazed out at a truly bewildering vista.
It was like stepping onto the surface of a world. For all he knew, with the powers of the first ones, that’s what they were doing. The sky burned a dull crimson color. Clouds shaded the color of blood and bruises crawled slowly across the dome of the sky.
The doorway itself seemed to open out onto a mountainside covered with lush vegetation. Enormous trees with bark thicker than his leg and covered with moss stretched their stumpy limbs far above their heads. A fair-sized stream frothed down over rocks and wound a twisty course through boulders into a bramble-choked canyon below them.
“If I was first one, where would I put my magical supplies?”
“Frell, it’s a whole damn world,” Azir said. “It could be anywhere.”
“World or not, we have to search it. So, perhaps you can do something besides state the obvious.”
“The lake,” Senalloy said.
“The lake,” Daena said.
Ziedra nodded. “Lake.”
Bannor rubbed the back of his neck. It made sense to him too. “Lake.”
Wren glanced at her brother. “The lakes have it.” She glanced around their surroundings. “Let’s just hope we’ll be left alone to enjoy the scenery…”
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* * *
Chapter Twelve
Sometimes being powerful just isn’t
enough.
—Liandra “Wren” Kergatha,
2nd Princess of Cosmodarus
Senses sharp for the slightest hint of a threat, Bannor glided through the trees. There were so many animals that his heart already ached from surprises. An army could move undetected in the dense undergrowth. The titanic trees screened the light and created a maze of shadows that made anything beyond basic recognition impossible. The old-growth forests on the Moonshae peninsula in southeast Corwin were like this, the vast shadows and tranquil air that smelled of loam and tree sap. Some of the elder crimson-barks he saw there rivaled the height of the ones in this place though they were not as broad. He remembered bringing back some of the seed-cones and putting them on the mantel in his cabin; they had been nearly as long as his arm.
Tension rippled through the group as everyone wound down the mountain through a forest of titans.
“Don’t go where something might jump down on you she says,” Azir grumbled. “The damn trees grow almost to the roof. I swear Gaea is like the queen of the ironic admonishments.”
Reality's Plaything 5: The Infinity Annihilator Page 18
