Six Heirs

by Pierre Grimbert

  Yan squatted, cupped some water in his hands, and wet his lips.

  “It’s salty,” he said, grimacing. “It’s seawater.”

  “It’s freshwater, actually,” said Corenn, “but the banks of the lake are covered in salt.”

  “Grigán, my friend,” Bowbaq pleaded, “don’t ask me to cross.”

  “I told you, you have nothing to worry about. We’re going to go around.”

  And that’s what they did, one behind the other, on a narrow, uneven ledge that ran the length of the wall. They soon lost sight of the path behind them.

  The room with the lake had to be 120 yards in diameter, Yan thought to himself. Maybe more. It was impossible to know, short of making a full circle or lighting the whole room, which was also impossible at the moment. They already had enough trouble focusing on their feet, trying not to make a false step and slip into the dark water.

  But they overcame the obstacle without difficulty. The only spot that was somewhat perilous being a yard-long section of the ledge that had crumbled away long ago, which they had to jump over. Corenn, lacking confidence in her physical abilities, was the only one who really had trouble, before Bowbaq carried her across the gap.

  “It’s a shame we can’t leave any trace of our passing,” the Mother commented, her feet back on the ground. “I’ve been wanting to put a little bridge at that spot for years.”

  “We could always hide a plank somewhere,” Yan suggested. “And remove it each time.”

  “There’s an idea worth considering.”

  This unsteady walk finally came to an end soon after. The ledge butted up against a wall pierced by a thin, three-foot-tall opening. Grigán asked for a torch, clasped his scimitar, and slipped through the narrow opening, followed by Rey, armed with his crossbow, then the rest.

  Bowbaq thought he was going to die here in the depths of the earth. In order to move forward through the small space carved in the rock, he was forced to turn himself sideways, which restricted his movements. He felt like he was squeezing himself deeper and deeper into a huge trap, and that he was going to be squashed or imprisoned at any moment. Briefly, he wondered whether he preferred being on the water.

  Then, little by little, the crack widened, becoming a wide hallway, and soon even wider. At last, they emerged into another room.

  “Stop,” Grigán ordered.

  The warrior swept his piercing gaze over the darkness. Léti found it a little ridiculous; he couldn’t see a thing. Unless he was listening? She listened closely, but all she could hear, like everyone else, was the distant sounds of the sea.

  Grigán paced around, inspecting the room before coming back. There was something uncanny about the sight of a man dressed all in black wandering about in the darkness, with nothing but the faint flickering light of his torch.

  “Nothing, Corenn. No one.”

  “That would mean that I was wrong...”

  “Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see when it happens.”

  “Speaking of that,” interrupted Rey, “now that we’ve fulfilled the conditions, would it be possible to finally get some explanations?”

  “It’s better to be surprised,” Grigán answered. “But I’m going to show you something anyway. Follow me, and be careful where you step.”

  They complied, all except for Corenn, who wedged her torch into a crack in the wall and sat down. Yan figured that everything was going to happen here. However, there was nothing extraordinary about the place. It seemed like any other cave, perhaps smaller than the one with the lake, but again, it was hard to tell in the dim light.

  They came to the edge of a pond, which Grigán waded into without hesitation, followed immediately by Léti, Yan, and Rey. Bowbaq sufficiently mastered his fears to not be left behind. But the water stretched a good fifteen yards. The warrior stopped on the other side, waiting for the others to catch up. They could hear the sound of the sea much better from here.

  They covered the remaining distance cautiously. Grigán finally came to a halt at the edge of a dark pit that spanned the whole floor of the cavern.

  “There. I wanted to tell you to watch out for that.”

  “And here I was thinking you didn’t like me,” Rey needled him. “Now you’re mothering me.”

  “Fall in if you want, it doesn’t matter to me. But I wanted to warn the others.”

  “How deep is it?” Bowbaq asked, almost shyly.

  “Sixty or eighty feet, depending on the tide; the sea comes up right underneath. The entire underground of the island has been hollowed out by water.”

  “Don’t tell me this is where our ancestors began their journey?” Léti asked incredulously.

  “Oh, no. In fact, they never went any further than here. But I challenge you to find any clues.”

  Nothing could have galvanized the young woman more than Grigán putting a challenge to her. She immediately set about searching every dark corner of the room, helped by Yan, who was recruited by default, but was no less curious for it. Bowbaq went back to keep Corenn company, while Rey proceeded with his own search, all the while trying his best to hide it.

  They soon gave up, admitting defeat. An absolute scouring of the entire room—the ground and the walls—didn’t turn up any clues. Léti felt more and more frustrated. Corenn noticed and decided to step in before it degenerated into another nervous breakdown.

  “Bowbaq, would you join me, please?”

  The giant docilely agreed and they walked over to Léti, who was examining a fault in the rock. They all gathered around her.

  “Here, I am going to help you a little. Climb onto Bowbaq’s shoulders. As long as he doesn’t mind, of course.”

  “Absolutely not. It’s just like when she was younger.”

  He simply picked her up and lifted her over his head, before setting her down on his shoulders. Grigán aside, they were all curious where this was going.

  “Now, go look at the rock face near the little lake,” Corenn finished with a mysterious smile.

  Bowbaq immediately trudged over to the wall, hurried by an encouraging Léti, whose mood had suddenly improved. Even with his feet in the water, the giant brought the young woman to a height that was unreachable before.

  They began to understand. The cavern ceiling, and the highest walls, escaped the faint torchlight. But they still needed more light to fully see.

  Rey took a step back from the others and threw his torch up in the air. It began its spinning arc up; before it fell back to the floor they could see, just for an instant, the highest wall. It was at least seventy feet high.

  “I found it!” Léti exclaimed.

  She found it right away. It was there, right in front of her eyes. Even though she didn’t know exactly what it was, she was sure she was right.

  Yan and Rey approached the wall, hoping to see something.

  “I don’t see anything,” Rey declared. “Point it out for us.”

  “There! And over there! And here too—oh, and it continues on up, really high,” she concluded, pointing all over the wall in front of her.

  “From here, all we see is the rock,” Yan objected timidly.

  “I see it,” said Bowbaq, who wasn’t much lower than the young woman. “It looks like the rock has been sculpted.”

  “That’s right,” Corenn said simply.

  “Yan!” Rey called, motioning to Yan that he wanted to give him a leg up.

  Using Rey as a ladder, the boy could see the higher walls for himself. Indeed, it couldn’t be a natural phenomenon. Various curving geometric forms had been carved into the rock wall, in a foot-wide ribbon that ascended vertically until it disappeared into the shadows.

  The lowest patterns were also the crudest, and their lines almost completely erased. But the ones higher up seemed surprisingly intricate and well-defined.

  Yan dropped down and took his turn hoisting the actor, who was just as curious.

  “What is it?” he asked, after examining the rock. “Some sort of writing? Or is it si
mply decorative?”

  “Unfortunately, we don’t know,” Corenn answered. “In his time, the wise Maz Achem thought there was a resemblance between these signs and those of the Ethèque language.”

  “Which no one speaks anymore, of course,” the actor complained as he jumped to the ground. “I mean, since he was Maz, we could expect this kind of quasi-religious delirium.”

  Léti frowned. She still didn’t appreciate his lack of respect for the Sages.

  “Does the pattern go all the way to the top?” Bowbaq asked.

  “And even higher,” Grigán answered with a knowing chuckle.

  Yan and Rey simply looked at each other before heading straight for the wall on the other side. Without a word, the actor locked his fingers together as a step for Yan, who hoisted himself up.

  He found the same signs.

  “Personally, I prefer the left-hand side. The marks are more intricate,” Corenn declared, joking.

  Bowbaq carried Léti over to the other side, so she could see for herself.

  “It would take years to do all this,” she declared admiringly.

  “I can guess that the patterns also cover the ceiling?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What is all this, Aunt Corenn? Magical symbols, or something like that?”

  “Exactly,” Corenn responded seriously. “These designs have a power, but we don’t know how they work.”

  This final answer was met with a long silence, as they all tried to put their thoughts into some sensible order.

  Arque tradition taught that one should respect and fear that which is beyond human intellect, which was clearly the case here. Therefore, Bowbaq was anxious for all of this to end, for them to leave this hole and cross that cursed stretch of sea, so they could return to normal things.

  For a long time, Léti had accepted the existence of magic, gods, and other unexplained realities and legends, such as her aunt’s powers and the mysteries surrounding her ancestors. But for the first time, she was finally getting to the bottom of things. For the first time, she was really going to see it happen. And she was as excited as she was apprehensive.

  Yan felt changed. Two dékades earlier, he wouldn’t have believed—even if he had been warned—that he would soon be hunted by and fleeing a large band of assassins.

  Yet that’s what had happened. He wouldn’t have believed himself capable of risking his life in a little Lorelien town he had never heard of, and yet that had happened, too. He wouldn’t have believed he would travel with strangers, or argue with Léti. He never would have believed he would do all of these unusual things. But he had indeed braved them all.

  Now they were telling him about magic. And he was ready to believe anything to satisfy his thirst for experience, which kept growing day after day. Yan was easily the happiest among them.

  Only Rey still doubted. His run-ins with magicians consisted of the sleight-of-hand tricks of fakes, which took place in all the big cities’ marketplaces. Completely rigged tricks. On top of that, he felt like the others were messing with him, and furthermore, he had waited long enough for them to tell him more.

  “All right,” he declared seriously, “that’s enough riddles for now. Corenn, I beg of you to explain something clearly, anything.”

  She paused in thought.

  “What do you think it is? Even if you feel stupid saying it?”

  “In my opinion? I would say really strange symbols, carved we don’t know when, how, or why, at the bottom of a remote cave, underneath a tiny Lorelien island no one gives a margolin’s ass about.”

  “A door,” Yan suggested, quietly.

  “What?”

  “In my opinion, it’s a door. The designs come together to form an archway along the walls of the cavern...”

  “And where’s the knob?” the actor said mockingly.

  “Yan’s right,” Grigán interrupted, happy at the chance to contradict Rey.

  “You will have to really work hard, I mean really work, to get me to swallow that load of nonsense.”

  “We won’t need to. It shouldn’t be long now. All of you come over to this side,” Corenn said, leading them to her side.

  “We shouldn’t be in the doorway when it opens, is that it?” Yan asked.

  “No, that doesn’t matter. But my feet are cold!”

  The boy realized that they had all been wading in the little pond for a while now. He had completely forgotten about everything else.

  “How do you know that it’s almost time?” Léti asked, once Bowbaq put her back on solid ground.

  “It always happens around this time of night, that’s all. For a while now, I have wanted to bring a clepsydra, which would give us a more accurate time, but there was always some reason I couldn’t.”

  “Tell me, friend Corenn...” Bowbaq began timidly. “This...this thing that we are waiting for, it’s not dangerous, is it? I mean, not sacrilegious, or something like that?”

  “We wouldn’t have asked you to come if it were,” Grigán responded for her. “Don’t you trust us?”

  “No, of course I do!” the giant apologized fervently, but a part of him continued to agonize.

  The conversation died. One by one, they quieted down to simply wait, staring into the dark void where something was supposed to happen.

  Even Rey stopped trying to interrogate his companions. After a few moments of waiting, Bowbaq sat down. The sensation of the cold, damp stone had the strange effect of calming him. It reminded him a bit of Arkary’s frozen plains.

  Corenn soon followed suit, fatigue overcoming her. The others stayed standing. For Grigán, who didn’t easily give up his vigilance, caution kept him on his feet. For Yan, Léti, and Rey, it was simple excitement.

  They didn’t really know what they were waiting for. Yan’s imagination ran wild. Léti simply waited, more and more nervous. And Rey meditated on his beliefs and whether or not they were well-founded.

  He frequently approached the archway, all his senses alive, looking for the smallest sign of change. But each time he returned more unsatisfied and frustrated.

  After his eighth trip, he walked straight toward Grigán.

  “We can’t wait here all night! You can see for yourself that there’s nothing here!” he yelled, pointing to the shadows.

  As if in response, a faint buzzing sound sprang up from the walls, and it grew louder and louder, quickly becoming a piercing hiss.

  “What’s happening?” Bowbaq asked, raising his voice over the sound.

  “It’s nothing, it’s normal,” Corenn reassured him.

  In the time it took for her to say those words, the noise stopped in a sort of sputter. Then, absolute silence.

  They all remained still, because they were awestruck, but also because it was happening so quickly.

  The center of the archway was still dark. Then the shadows began moving, brightening. A light appeared: first only a little dot, but it quickly grew as large as the cavern, illuminating it completely.

  It was a stunning sight. They saw before them a luminous form, as if the sun itself were trying to enter the cavern by the new gateway.

  A sixty-foot-tall gateway.

  The light slowly waned, no longer blinding, and was replaced by a hazy vision, as if hidden by smoke. Then the fog cleared little by little, allowing Yan, Léti, Rey, Bowbaq, Corenn, and Grigán to penetrate its secrets.

  It was like they were looking across a thin veil of water. It all seemed so close, but at the same time, as if beyond reach, a simple image, a cloudy trick of the eye.

  Yan rubbed his eyes, then gaped at the scene. He couldn’t deny it; before him, he saw a garden.

  Under his feet, the cavern’s rocky soil spread to the edge of the pond. From there, water, of course. And, three feet beyond the bank, he saw there was grass. The rest of the cave had disappeared. All of it.

  The gateway was a perplexing frontier between the space where they were and another, a living painting wherein dawn rose over a magnificen
t landscape, a verdant valley set in a mountainous backdrop.

  Yan focused all of his attention on the barrier between the two worlds. It was something...unexplainable.

  Bowbaq didn’t dare move. He too was under the enchanting vision’s spell. He had the impression that if he were to move, the spectacle would stop...or take a much darker turn.

  Rey searched for the trick, the trick that made such a thing possible, but he couldn’t find it. He decided to get closer and see, and dipped a foot into the pond.

  “Listen!” said Léti, with a smile on her lips as she placed a finger over her mouth.

  She heard something. Hidden behind the noise of herself and her companions, there was...

  She finally realized what it was. Birdsong. Even if they were very far away, she could hear the other world! The other world!

  They all smiled at her, understanding. They had heard the same thing.

  Rey covered the distance separating him from the phenomenon and grabbed the dagger he had strapped to his calf.

  “Don’t do that,” Bowbaq begged.

  The actor remained deaf to Bowbaq’s pleas and delicately pushed the tip of the blade through the surface of the aqueous vision. Not feeling any resistance, he kept pushing all the way to the hilt. Then he started over, using a flower that appeared right at his feet as a target.

  The results didn’t satisfy him. It was all just an illusion with no substance.

  Léti decided she wasn’t going to be left standing there, and joined the actor. She faced the landscape and took a deep breath.

  “Léti?” Yan called timidly.

  Whatever she was trying to do, he didn’t think it was a good idea.

  The young woman suddenly took a big step that should have brought her onto solid ground in the other world, and disappeared.

  At the same time, they heard a big splash followed by the sound of lapping water. Finally Léti appeared, walking back through the vision, soaked to her knees. It was as if she had fallen from a cloud.

  “You could have warned me,” she complained to her aunt.

  “I assure you, I didn’t know what you were planning to do,” Corenn responded sincerely.

  “I’m sure that on the other side, it’s all black,” Rey announced. “It’s nothing but an illusion, a magic trick, a simple optical illusion.”