Visions: Knights of Salucia - Book 1

by C. D. Espeseth

  Matoh saw a set of crutches resting against the foot of his bed. He took them and slowly made his way over to Wayran.

  He could hear the slightly shallow sound of Wayran’s even breathing. There was a bandage wrapped around his head. The strange book they had found was on his chest, and even in sleep Wayran clutched it as if it were about to be taken from him. Out of all the wondrous things they had seen, Wayran decided to take a dusty old book.

  That was just like him though, and the thought made Matoh smile.

  He found a chair and pulled it over beside Wayran’s bed. He sat down and, gently as he could, propped his injured leg on the foot of the bed, grunting slightly against a stab of pain.

  Uncle Aaron can wait, he thought, and clenched his jaw against the image of how angry that decision would make their uncle. Just then, however, he pushed the thought away, as it was their father’s words that resonated in his mind: “Brothers are there for each other.” His father’s soft words had more power than his uncle’s anger ever could.

  So Matoh let his head droop to his chest as he held the lucky shard of glass, and he waited, firm and resolute as a stone, for Wayran to return to him.

  8 - Bad Dream - Wayran

  Tales spoke of how the Dread Queen led an army of Soulless against the young nations of the north. Most today believe “the Soulless” were so named because of their grisly accoutrements: armour made from the bones and skin of vanquished enemies. This theory has gained significant weight as digs in southern Nothavre have uncovered some of these horrific adornments.

  The Soulless swept through the North with little resistance until they clashed with the Navutians and their culture of ruthless, efficient and brutal warfare.

  The Northern nations united under the great Navutian warlord Rykavin Stonesplitter, and this unification turned the tide of battle against the Soulless and the Dread Queen.

  Rykavin has been immortalised in dozens of poems, ballads, and myths in which he led the charge against the Soulless, wielding his mystic sword, Hunsa. In the myths, Rykavin personally cuts down hundreds of the enemy and almost single-handedly wins several battles. To this day every school child knows of how the Navutian Lord bested the Dread Queen to win the battle of Bransburg, now modern-day Palisgrad. Though the Navutians returned to their raiding and pillaging ways, the nations of the North owe them our freedom.

  - Chronicler Simon Rathelson in A Common History: 1851–2850 ATC, 45th Edition, 2850

  It felt like he was swimming. No, not quite swimming – sailing, perhaps? He couldn’t quite place it. Whatever he was doing, there was a current of some sort pushing him forward, a great current, and it was all he could do to steer haphazardly from right to left, and yet always he had to move forward.

  Wayran didn’t question the direction, as it seemed as natural as the earth or the sun. Yet around him he could feel swirls of energy, eddies within the current, and within those eddies he dived into one of those eddies and the world changed.

  A tall man, dressed in rich black silks, laughed with delight at the end of a city street. Wayran watched in horror as he licked blood off the long blade of his hunting knife. He was staring at him, and he could see the manic hunger in the eyes tracking him. The man smiled showing a mouth full of needle-like teeth.

  “This will change the world. Don’t you see! This changes everything!” the tall man in black cackled at Wayran, just before he charged straight for him with the hunting knives gleaming in the pale light.

  An eddy opened around him, and Wayran let himself be sucked into it.

  The world shifted.

  The black-robed man stood in front of him again. Yet this time his back was to him. Confused, Wayran stepped forward. The man was crying.

  Some impulse made Wayran want to help the black-robed man this time. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder, who then spun to look at him.

  Matoh stared back at him.

  “Why, Wayran? Why?” Matoh pleaded, tears in his eyes.

  Wayran didn’t understand and shook his head in confusion.

  It was then he saw that Matoh held something in his hands.

  Wayran looked down.

  Wayran held the pommel of a golden sword, which morphed into a black sword and then a white dagger. The weapon had been plunged into Matoh’s chest.

  “How could you betray me?” Matoh asked as tears slid down his cheeks. His brother coughed up blood and grasped at his arm.

  “Matoh, I didn’t – I …” Wayran couldn’t breathe.

  “HOW COULD YOU!!” Matoh screamed, and the world exploded in lightning and fire.

  ***

  Wayran opened his eyes.

  “Which one was it this time?” Matoh said as he stared straight at him.

  “Matoh!” Wayran jerked and tried to sit up.

  “Woah.” Matoh put up his hands. They were not covered in blood. Though one was wrapped in bandages. “Easy. You were dreaming.”

  Wayran took a deep breath and tried to make his heart slow as it pounded in his chest. He looked at Matoh and felt sick as he remembered the end of his dream. It wasn’t real, Matoh’s fine. I was just worried about him.

  “Nightmare again?” Matoh asked.

  “Yes …” Wayran trailed off, remembering the horror he had felt. He took another shuddering breath and could feel his heart begin to settle. “Yes, well, this one was different.”

  Matoh nodded and handed him a wooden cup. “Not surprising really, considering how we both nearly died. Here, have some water.”

  Wayran moved to take the drink and realised he was holding something.

  The book. He still had it, and scrawled across his arm were his attempts at the words the strange ghost had spoken. He would have to copy the words down on something more permanent before the ink from that strange quill washed off or disappeared.

  He carefully placed the book on his lap and took the drink from Matoh. As he drank, he couldn’t quite believe he had a book which was thousands of years old. It certainly didn’t look that old, yet it had to be. The ghost had been speaking Jendar, Wayran had recognised a few of the basic words.

  “How did we get here?” he asked. “The last thing I remember was the Roc standing on top of you.”

  “Yeah,” Matoh said, “that’s about where I blacked out too.”

  Wayran looked at his brother and saw the world exploding in lightning and fire, the image from his dream. A shiver shot down his spine, and he forced the image away. Yet there had been an explosion.

  “Lightning,” he said as he remembered. “You did it again.” He looked up at Matoh, trying to remember. “You stabbed it in the foot, and then … lightning.” Wayran tried to make sense of his memory. “The lightning – it struck upwards, away from you. As if it ripped itself out of you. How is that possible?”

  Matoh’s eyes went wide. “I remember things going white, but – are you sure? I mean, I feel fine. Wouldn’t that have killed me? It must have just been a close strike again, like the one that knocked me out of the sky.”

  Wayran tried to remember. There had been lightning, and Matoh had caused it. He was sure of it. “The first one shouldn’t have been possible either,” he said, eyeing his brother. “What did you do exactly?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Matoh said. “I was just reacting. Trying to save our skins is all.”

  “Just reacting? That can’t be it, I …” but then Wayran began to feel dizzy and he put a hand to his head. Instantly a spike of pain sliced through him, forcing him to close his eyes and reach for the bedpost. His cup clattered to the floor, forgotten, as he tried to fight through vertigo.

  “You alright?” Matoh was standing beside him with a steadying hand on his arm. “You took a really nasty hit in the head as we ran out of that big room with all the glowing panels.”

  “I’m fine.” Wayran held up his hand. “I think.”

  “You better lie back down. What was that place anyways? Jendar obviously, but have you ever heard of anyone findin
g a place like that before?”

  “No,” Wayran admitted, taking Matoh’s advice and lying back down.

  “And why was there only that one skeleton? Was he the only person in that huge building? A king of some kind? But where were all his subjects?”

  Wayran laughed. “I don’t know, Matoh. Those are the sorts of things I wanted to find out, but right now thinking about it is making my head hurt.”

  Matoh chuckled then. “Oh, that kind of makes sense. Well, maybe if you take that book to the Chroniclers some of the answers will be in there.”

  “Maybe,” Wayran agreed. Matoh was trying to cheer him up. It was admirable, but he knew this routine: Matoh was also stalling, which meant they were in serious trouble. “How angry is Uncle Aaron?”

  His brother’s cheerful demeanour vanished. “Ha, I was hoping to avoid that topic as long as possible. He kind of asked to see me after supper.” Matoh grimaced. “That was two hours ago.”

  Wayran closed his eyes and sighed. “Really angry then, as we’ve lost a fortune's worth of santsi globes and the glider he loaned you – plus you’ve kept him waiting for another two hours. Why keep him waiting exactly? Just to rub salt in the wounds?”

  “No.” Matoh looked hurt. “I wanted to make sure you were alright.”

  Wayran sighed. He couldn’t very well be mad at Matoh for that, which was all the more frustrating. “Okay. Well, let’s not keep him waiting any longer then.”

  “No chance of food first?” Matoh asked.

  “I think any food I ate would just come right back up,” Wayran sighed.

  “Oh, I almost forgot. Apparently there was no building around when they found us,” Matoh said. “What do you make of that?”

  “What do you mean ‘there was no building’?”

  “Well, Ariel said no one mentioned it, and she didn’t see it when she helped us onboard.” Matoh shrugged. “But you’ve got that book, and I still have my piece of lucky glass, so we must have been somewhere.”

  Wayran squinted, trying to make sense of it. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Could it have sunk back into the sand like those metal spires did?” Matoh asked.

  “Possibly.” Wayran pondered on it for a bit longer, but the concentration was making his headache worse. “I don’t know, perhaps Uncle Aaron can shed some light on it as he rips our heads off. Let’s just get this over with. Give me a hand would you?” It was then he noticed Matoh’s leg and the crutches he was using.

  “One of the Roc’s talons. It stabbed almost all the way through,” Matoh explained with a shrug. “It’s pretty disgusting.”

  Wayran tried to give Matoh a reassuring smile, but it felt weak. They were both lucky to be alive, but at that moment Wayran felt anything but lucky. The two of them hobbled out of the infirmary to go and have a talk with their uncle, and part of him thought he would be less scared if he were going to face the giant Roc again.

  9 - Course Correction - Wayran

  The wind hasn’t abated now for fifty-three days. It feels like it’s drilling through the hatch down into my mind. The world is screaming at what I’ve done.

  Most days I cry.

  Cry for the thousands of innocents, and when I’m done, I feel better.

  Then I chastise myself for being weak.

  For in truth, no one was innocent. No one stood up to say stop, no one did what was right when they knew our greed, apathy, and traditions were destroying it all.

  No one stood up, except me. So, they had to die, and that is why I am damned.

  - Journal of Robert Mannford, Day 073 Year 01

  Wayran was no longer a Storm Chaser.

  He had left to go into the wastes with a well-made glider, promises of discovering unsolved mysteries, and a chance to get rich doing it.

  He was returning with an old book he couldn’t read, no glider, no money, dashed dreams, a constant headache, a scar which had left him with a line of white hair upon his head, and the memories of a giant Jendar complex beneath the sands, a talking ghost and a weird dream. It had all left him in such a state of stunned bewilderment, he had been in a daze during the entire trip home. Hells, he was still in a daze.

  Wayran had spent nearly all of the trip back home up on the top deck of Deliverance. He had watched the rolling dunes, the rock fields and the Jendar ruins of glistening glass for what was probably the last time. He had watched the bustling activity of the Storm Chasers, watched how each person had a role to fill and how they filled it with an eagerness and efficiency.

  All of it was gone.

  It had been Uncle Aaron’s almost detached coldness as he explained to him and Matoh his accounting of what had happened. Their uncle had sat behind his big polished redwood desk. Uncle Aaron had meticulously and deliberately cut two pages out of the back of his ledger book. Quietly Uncle Aaron shifted through a set of other papers he had and began to jot down what looked like figures and notes from these papers onto the ledger paper.

  Neither Wayran nor Matoh had dared breathe during this display. The ominous quiet in the room communicated everything which needed to be said.

  Uncle Aaron had handed each of them one of the pieces of ledger paper.

  “What you have in front of you is an accounting of just how much your little stunt has cost my operation. See, what you failed to understand is that I run this ship as a business. Let me repeat, a business. And it is a very specific business at that. It’s not a sightseeing tour, nor a month-long escape for rich thrill-seekers, as your actions suggest.”

  It was with that opening volley that Wayran had seen his dreams disappear, and he remembered the rest of the tirade word for word, with painful clarity.

  “Those santsi were part of a chain, you see. Merchants, craftspeople, artisans, even kings entrust to me their highly priced santsi globes. It is my job to come all the way out here to fill those same globes to capacity. The process of said filling, as I thought you knew, as you promised me you understood, is quite a dangerous process. The globes return to those merchants, craftspeople, artisans, and kings with a level of energy no one else in all of Salucia has been able to match. It is our techniques and the storms we find all the way out here which allow us to gain this marginal advantage over the competition. And it is the margins which matter in a business.”

  Wayran remembered that Matoh had opened his mouth at this point. As if about to say something. Uncle Aaron had stopped in mid-flow and the halting of his words made the silence which followed crack with ominous repercussions.

  Matoh’s mouth had closed then. Their uncle continued in complete control, as a judge delivering a verdict to the condemned.

  “Those very finely crafted, very expensive globes, which very wealthy people entrust to me will have to be replaced, because our reputation with those very wealthy people is everything. A reputation of repeatedly delivering excellence within such a risky enterprise draws investors like sharks to chum. It draws potential glider pilots like flies to a dung heap, and all of those people have mouths. Mouths that like to talk and carry rumour like wildfire on the plains. Continue to be successful and all are happy. Everyone wants to join the feeding frenzy.” Their uncle’s tone changed then, turning icy. “Just imagine, though, if those same people heard about some of my glider pilots disobeying orders, heard about them flying off to go sightseeing with other people's expensive santsi globes strapped to their backs. Now, that could be the sort of rumour that would make a captain mistrust his pilots, or even worse, the kind of rumour which could lose a business its reputation.” Their uncle had let those last words hang between them for a moment.

  Wayran had understood then, and he hung his head in shame.

  “Yes. You see now, don’t you, nephew? You know what I have to do.” Uncle Aaron’s words had a tiny measure of sympathy in them, but that sympathy evaporated like a drop of water on a hot skillet. Wayran had felt tears on his cheeks then. He hadn’t wanted them to come, but it had all been too much. He cried in stunned silenc
e, waiting for his sentence.

  “Listen to these words above all else ... nephews. You never crashed. You never flew gliders with santsi attached to them. You never found a Jendar complex, a complex which doesn’t exist, because if it did, you would have to explain how you got out there. Understood?”

  Marcus’s secrecy about what he had found when he rescued them had clicked for Wayran then. He had to tell Matoh later about why there was a cover-up, but it made sense. This meant they really had found an ancient Jendar complex, but their story was being buried so thoroughly that no one would ever believe them if they told it, not even most of the crew aboard Deliverence. Which meant no one would talk about the disaster.

  Their uncle had continued, “I allowed you to take a few gliding lessons as a favour to your father, and you both returned happy and satisfied. Your father will know the truth of the situation, and my investors will have to be satisfied with whatever we’ve collected so far. I will return you both home, where you will begin a repayment plan to pay back the damages in full. Once home, however, you will never set foot on this ship again. You will not tell the story about what happened out here. Understood?”

  Wayran sat on his bed now, still and numb, looking out of his window at the street below. Watching the humdrum everyday existence he had seen out that same window his whole life as he dreamed of something more, of something important. He still heard part of his uncle’s last words to him on that trip reverberating through his mind: “never set foot on this ship again”. The words were like nails in the coffin of his dreams, and he had no idea what to do.

  Yes, he understood. Hells, he even understood his uncle had been lenient with them given the possible damage it might do to his business. Yet that knowledge didn’t help. He was indebted to his uncle and had no way to pay him back quickly as everything he had saved had gone towards his glider and getting on the crew in the first place. He had no other recourse but to pick up some menial job to pay off the enormous sum, because despite his uncle being family, Uncle Aaron was still a Koslov, and they never let debts slide.