Visions: Knights of Salucia - Book 1

by C. D. Espeseth

  “We need to get out of here!” Matoh yelled over the noise. “There’s got to be another door!”

  As if commanded by Matoh’s voice a large part of the wall began to slide sideways. They could see light flooding into the room from behind it.

  Light from outside. Wayran could see sand dunes.

  “That’s our way out! Let’s move.” Matoh was already running.

  But Wayran couldn’t just leave. He needed to take something back with him, something to show he had been here. To prove that this wasn’t all just a dream.

  He looked back at the chair and its skeletal occupant. The book.

  Wayran dashed forward as more of the glowing panels flickered to black and crashed off the walls around him.

  Another horrible screech of metal on metal, then the floor lurched up, knocking him to his knees. The spire was going to rip this place apart.

  His hand closed on the book, and from the corner of his eye he thought he saw a person. He turned and saw the red-eyed man staring at him.

  Something grabbed Wayran’s wrist.

  “Damn it, Wayran! Come on!” Matoh had returned to get him. “Let’s get the hells out of here!”

  Wayran looked back to where he had seen the man, but again there was nothing.

  “The door is sliding back closed!” Matoh yelled as he pulled Wayran away from the chair. “Move it!”

  Wayran didn’t argue this time. He held tight to the book and ran for the now disappearing daylight.

  A section of roof fell to the floor from above. Wayran threw himself to the side, but a piece of metal bar smacked into his head. He felt warm liquid trickle down his face, and suddenly he was on the floor of the corridor outside the giant room.

  “Wayran!” Matoh yelled, and a strong hand pulled him up and dragged him forward into the corridor leading outside. The wall slipped closed behind them in a cloud of dust. There was no going back it seemed.

  Suddenly all was quiet. The floor had stopped shaking; the screeching of metal gears had disappeared. The only sound was the quiet bass of thunder as the storm rolled away.

  It was eerie, but Wayran’s head was throbbing, and they didn’t have time to stop. They needed help fast.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Matoh said, looking up at his head with more worry on his face than he had shown the whole time they had been trapped inside the building.

  Wayran had his arm around his brother’s shoulder for support. He didn’t know if he could stand without him. He felt so dizzy.

  “Can you walk?” Matoh said. “We need to get out onto the sands. The Storm Chasers might still be in the area.”

  “I’ll try,” Wayran said, holding his free hand up to his head. He still held the book with the other. His fingers came back slick with blood.

  “Here.” Matoh untied the sash on his waist.

  Wayran held up a hand. “No, that’s from the general.” The red sash had finely stitched yellow lines of flowing Paleshurian script on it. It had been a gift from General Kiprosov in remembrance of their mother, whom he had fought alongside during the Union wars.

  “Can’t be helped,” Matoh said and pushed his hand aside.

  Wayran winced as the soft silk sash touched his forehead.

  Matoh finished tying off the makeshift dressing, with only a slight grimace of remorse. “Come on. Let’s get moving before this place starts trying to shake itself apart again.”

  The brothers took a few tentative steps down the hallway towards the open archway at the end. It almost looked like this had once been some kind of balcony. They were encased in a long corridor of curved glass which held back the dunes around them, yet at the end of the odd balcony there was an opening, and they could see daylight.

  Matoh pulled Wayran along towards the daylight. Something gigantic and white flashed across the opening. Its huge shadow whipped by, blocking the outside light almost completely for that instant.

  “What was –” Matoh started to say but was cut off by a piercing screech, although this time it hadn’t been gears grinding. This sound was much more alive.

  Wayran let go of him, and the pair stood frozen in place.

  Matoh finally edged forward, his eyes scanned the opening.

  A giant feathered head burst through the exit and let loose a terrible screech.

  Wayran and Matoh jumped back.

  It was a Roc, a giant raptor-like bird.

  Wayran had no time to wonder how, or indeed why, the giant cliff-dwelling seabird was somehow in the middle of the desert. Its great white wings flapped once and allowed the Roc’s huge taloned feet to touch down inside the archway.

  The immense bird stood blocking the exit. Its luminous yellow eyes watched them, sizing them up, and waiting for them to spring.

  “Wayran ... do you also see a giant white bird standing there?” Matoh backed up another step as the yellow eyes tracked him.

  The Roc screeched again in defiance and Wayran wondered if his eardrums would burst. “Yes. I see it,” he whispered, not daring to take his eyes from the terrifying bird.

  The Roc stepped forward, its talons clicked on the metal floor, and the brothers tensed.

  “You’re going to have to run,” Matoh whispered.

  Wayran watched in horror as Matoh seemed to be slowly reaching for something in his pocket.

  “Matoh, don’t!” he hissed.

  “Now!” Matoh cried.

  Wayran watched in horror as Matoh launched forward, charging the giant bird.

  His mind was in shock, but somehow his legs were moving.

  The Roc shot forward meeting Matoh’s charge, and a wing slapped out to try and block Wayran, but the Roc was too big, and Wayran ducked under a partially opened wing.

  “Go!” he heard Matoh shout behind him. A pained screech ripped through the air. He looked back. Matoh was holding the piece of glass he had picked up from the room they had crashed into. His brother had stabbed the bird just above its eye and now waited to strike again with the bloody piece of glass.

  The Roc thrashed about in pain. Matoh tried to run past, but the bird’s giant head slammed into him and Matoh hit the side of the hallway hard. His head bounced off the glass wall.

  Wayran felt his heart lurch. The bird was going to rip into his brother with those talons. Matoh was going to die.

  The panic let something free inside of him, and once again he saw possibilities open up before his eyes. If he ran, he wouldn’t get there in time. Shouting wouldn’t distract the enraged bird. No, no, no! Choice after choice rolled through his mind, and each one showed Matoh dying. He saw it again and again.

  His mind lurched as it brushed up against an idea. He was watching it happen ... but so was something else; another consciousness was following his thoughts somehow. In the slowed time of his mind’s eye, he saw a figure standing back in the darkness behind Matoh and the Roc, waiting and watching him with red swirling eyes.

  The book. The thought snapped into his mind. Possibilities and choices blurred before his eyes. He had to take it out of his pocket.

  Wayran threw his hand into his pocket and whipped out the book. Red eyes hiding in the shadows seemed to widen. And miraculously the Roc stopped moving.

  “Back!” Wayran yelled, moving towards the Roc, brandishing the book as if it were a torch. “Get away from him!”

  Best be careful with that, the thought came into his mind, almost as if it were not his own. Somehow he knew it had been the red-eyed man.

  A chill went up his spine. “Leave him alone or I’ll ...” Wayran didn’t know what he’d do. What could he do? It was a book, after all. That the Roc had stopped didn’t make any sense, but he stepped closer and the Roc backed a step away.

  Matoh groaned and Wayran gasped in relief. He was alive.

  “Matoh!” he yelled. He had almost reached him. “Matoh, get up! We’ve got to move.”

  And where will you go? How can you escape? The strange voice echoed in his head. You cannot outrun this Roc. You hav
e angered the bird.

  Wayran shook his head, trying to rid himself of the voice. “Shut up!” he yelled at where the red-eyed man had been standing; but once again the shadowy figure had disappeared.

  Matoh was finally up on his feet. His brother held his head and groaned, but somehow Matoh was standing. Wayran grabbed his hand, pulling his brother away from the Roc, which watched them with only one of its yellow eyes. The other was shut against the blood dripping down into it.

  “It’s still there,” Matoh said, his speech a bit slurred as his eyes blinked open. “I had hoped it would fly away.”

  “Not yet,” Wayran said through gritted teeth. They had inched backwards to the opening and Wayran cursed under his breath. They were at the end of the balcony, but only now did he realise that it stuck out of the sand dune. Behind them was a twenty-foot drop to the sand.

  Give me the book! The voice yelled in his head, and a metal hand shot out from the shadows to try and grab him.

  Wayran lurched back away from the hand, sending Matoh and himself falling towards the sand below.

  Wayran hit with a thud and the air was driven out of his lungs as he rolled backwards down the dune. He stopped as his head slammed back into the sand, and lay dazed, looking up at the balcony they had fallen from.

  Great white wings opened up above him and the Roc took flight overhead.

  Wayran tried to move but for a moment couldn’t, as the movement had made his stomach lurch and his vision spin; but then Matoh stood over him, pulling him up out of the sand.

  “Here.” Matoh shoved the ancient book back into his hand. “You dropped this. Whatever magic you were using back there; we might need it again. I think that damn bird is coming back.”

  “I don’t know what I did,” Wayran gasped, as his breath came back to him.

  “It doesn’t matter, move!” Matoh pushed him forward down the dune as they both saw the Roc bank sharply in the air above to shoot down straight towards them.

  Wayran tried to run, but his feet kept getting caught in the falling sand they dislodged.

  “Down!” Matoh dived, knocking him off his feet, as a screech split the air above them.

  He heard Matoh yell in pain.

  Wayran turned to get up and saw with horror the Roc standing on top of Matoh. Its hind talon had punctured his brother’s leg.

  “Matoh!” He scrambled to his feet and brandished the book at the Roc.

  Its yellow eye found him and a wing snapped out from its body, slamming into his head.

  The book fell from his hand and his vision swam. He tried to get up, but all he could do was watch as the Roc opened its razor-sharp beak to rip into his brother.

  Matoh was gritting his teeth in pain and anger up at the Roc, and Wayran somehow heard his brother’s words clearly through the grogginess in his mind.

  “I’ve had enough!!” Matoh roared in defiance, and Wayran saw something flash in Matoh’s hand. The glass shard: somehow, in all the craziness, Matoh had held onto it. He plunged the glass into the Roc’s foot.

  Then the impossible happened.

  The sand around them seemed to crackle, and then lightning shot straight up into a nearly cloudless sky, bursting forth from Matoh’s hand. The Roc screamed in pain as it was blown backwards. The lightning streaked up and a thunderclap slammed through the air around them.

  The force of the thunderclap sent a shockwave through the air and slammed Wayran back down to the sand.

  It was one too many hits, and Wayran’s world went black.

  7 - Patients with Patience - Matoh

  The Jendar even had the power to alter the fundamental principles of human biology. Technologies they called “gene splicing” and “nanoengineering” allowed them to give living organisms new abilities, such as “electromagnetic sensitivity and manipulation”. However, so great has the loss of knowledge been since those glorious days of enlightenment that deciphering the meaning of such terms is an almost insurmountable task.

  Chronicler Rutherford believes the latter deals with what we now call Siphoning, but even he admits that there is almost no method which we could surmise to validate this claim.

  Yet as Chroniclers, it is our hope, as always, to one day recover even more of the vast cornucopia of knowledge lost in the Ciwix, so that one day we might understand what happened.

  - From the journal of Chronicler Jason Hicks after the 487th Chronicler Symposium of 2766 A.T.C (After the Ciwix)

  “No!” Matoh sprang up and rolled. Something had been standing on him.

  He fell and landed hard on a wooden floor.

  It stunned him and he had to blink several times before he registered what he was lying on. He turned onto his back and squinted against daylight streaming through a round window. The room was familiar. The walls were lined with labelled white cupboards.

  The medical bay. Matoh tried to clear his head, squinting against the pain that the bright daylight was causing him. And ... I’m not dead.

  He breathed out slowly and found the movement a bit difficult. His chest hurt. Why? The Roc!

  “Wayran!” Matoh sprang to his feet; his head spun and he had to grab the bed he had only recently fallen out of.

  “Alright, that’s quite enough, big fella,” a familiar voice said from behind him.

  Matoh turned, once again squinting against the light in search of the speaker. It was Ariel, one of the Storm Chasers.

  “Where’s Wayran?” Matoh demanded. “Tell me you found him.” He stepped towards Ariel.

  “Sit.” Ariel’s hand pushed him down onto the bed. “Your brother is resting, we got to both of you just in time.”

  “So, he’s okay?”

  Ariel nodded.

  “What happened to the Roc?” Matoh asked, putting a hand to his chest and then to his leg. He found the bandages wrapped tightly and securely over his thigh, as he remembered the giant bird towering above him.

  “I don’t know about any rock.” Ariel raised an eyebrow.

  “No, the bird, you know, looks like a giant white falcon. A Roc!” Matoh threw his hands wide, demonstrating a giant wing span. It was then he noticed the bandages covering his hand. “What happened here?”

  “You had a piece of glass embedded in your hand. Fairly ugly cut. Took fifteen stitches,” Ariel said. “As far as giant birds go, we didn’t see any; but that would explain your leg I suppose.” She winked at him in a playful manner. “And, of course, there was enormous white feather you were clutching when we picked you up.”

  “You sound very calm, considering the two of us nearly died,” Matoh snapped.

  “And who in the hells’ fault is that?” Ariel crossed her arms over her chest with a “don’t you take that tone with me” look. “I seem to recall hearing about the Spierling brothers flying way out of position just as the storm was rolling in. Sounds to me like the two of you did most of that on your own.” Ariel looked questioningly at him. “You’re sure it was a Roc? You do know we are hundreds of miles from any sea or coastline?”

  “I got rather a good look at it as it was stabbing me in the leg and preparing to rip out my guts. It was a giant white Roc.” Matoh shook his head.

  “What was it doing way out here?” Ariel asked, arms still crossed.

  “How should I know?” Matoh shrugged, exasperated, but his head had cleared and other than the cut on his hand and stiffness in his leg he felt pretty good, all things considered. “If I were to guess, I would say the Roc was guarding that Jendar building we came out of.”

  “Alright,” Ariel said, and stood up. “I think you better lie back down and wait a few more hours for that head of yours to clear. You’ve obviously suffered quite a bit of trauma to the head as well.”

  “What? No, I’m fine. Let me see Wayran.” He went to push Ariel’s hand away.

  “Ah, ah. Enough of that.” Ariel wagged a finger at him. “You’re obviously still fuzzy from what happened. There was no building anywhere near where we picked you up.”

 
; “What?”

  “You hard of hearing now too? I said there was no building.” Ariel pushed him back down onto the bed with more tenderness than her voice alluded to.

  “But we fell out of a balcony. A giant glass balcony. It would have been right next to us, jutting out from a sand dune,” Matoh said, now more than a little confused.

  “Well, it wasn’t there when we showed up. We saw that lightning blast as if the old storm goddess Esan was showing us the way to you two herself. Marcus found you both lying on the sands out cold,” Ariel said as she gently pried the lids of his eye open, inspecting it and then the other.

  The lightning. He remembered the Roc standing on him and then … lightning? Wayran had said that was how he crashed, but that was impossible. Wasn’t it?

  “Do you still have the shard of glass?” Matoh endured Ariel’s inspection patiently. “And Wayran had a book. That proves we were there.”

  “Well, maybe it does,” Ariel said, her suspicious tone relenting slightly. “Hmm, you don’t look like you have concussion.” She placed her hand on his forehead. “And no fever.” The Storm Chaser shrugged. “All I know is Marcus didn’t mention any building, and from what you describe, it doesn’t sound like something he’d miss.”

  “No …” Matoh thought, frowning, “… he wouldn’t have.”

  “Here.” Ariel held out the shard of glass to him. “Try not to cut yourself anymore. I’ve had enough of stitching the two of you up for one day.”

  He took the glass shard from Ariel. She stood up and turned to leave. “Get some rest,” she said. “The Captain wants to talk to you. I’ll tell him you will be ready to see him after supper, which is in an hour.”

  Matoh nodded. The idea of trying to explain to his uncle why he and Wayran had lost two gliders and several fortunes worth of santsi globes was not one he relished. “Can I see Wayran?” he asked as Ariel was leaving.

  She nodded. “Don’t wake him though. That cut on his head was bad.” She waited to make sure she was fully understood.

  “I understand, I just want to see him is all.” Matoh shrugged.

  “He’s just around the corner in the other bed.” Ariel gave him one last stern look and then took her leave.