The First Kaiaru

by David Alastair Hayden

  “I am impressed,” she said. “You have accomplished in several months what should have taken you years. Though I think it would have been safer if you had taken your time, you are just as impatient as Lord Gyoroe.”

  “All of this is your fault,” he said seething. “The risks I’ve taken with magic…Iniru dying…Zaiporo dying and losing a hand…Awasa getting tortured…all of us getting tortured…. It didn’t have to be this way.”

  “You knew the risks before coming here.”

  “Yes, but you betrayed us. You woke him.”

  “Do you still honestly believe that Lord Gyoroe would not have awoken on his own the first time you tried and failed to open one of the gates? We have been over this before. There was no other way, and you know it. The problem is that you are unhappy with the decision you made in coming here.”

  Turesobei opened his mouth, but he didn’t have a good response.

  “Besides, this is the only way for all of us—you, me, and my beloved Lord Gyoroe—to get what we want.”

  “After he betrayed you like he did, what could you possibly want from him?”

  “Atonement, for starters.”

  The Blood King strolled pompously into the room, ending their conversation. He wore burgundy robes trimmed in gold, and from his neck hung a strange, metal amulet with jagged edges. It looked as if it had been torn from a larger piece. There were no markings on the amulet, and Turesobei did not sense any power coming from it.

  Lord Gyoroe’s blue-white eyes flared with passion. “Now we will ghost back through time together. And at last, I shall see the birth of the Kaiaru.”

  Lu Bei, who had remained silent throughout the prior heart stone session, made a crude gesture, but Lord Gyoroe merely smiled at him in response.

  “Maybe it would be better if you stayed in book form,” Turesobei said.

  “The fetch can do as he wishes,” Gyoroe said.

  “I can?” Lu Bei blurted out.

  “Within reason,” Gyoroe replied. “After all, you are one of the reasons Turesobei is perfect for this. You will help anchor him, and thus me, to our present world. In fact, I believe your connection to Turesobei and your recording abilities may boost our powers of observation as we move deeper into the past.”

  Lu Bei huffed. “Well…that’s just fantastic.”

  In one hand, Lord Gyoroe held a long coil of thick copper wire, and in the other, three copper circlets. “Both of you, kneel before me.”

  Hannya knelt, and Gyoroe placed one of the circlets on her head. Crimson runes lit up in sequence along the copper band. He then touched one end of the wire to Hannya’s circlet. The wire instantly fused to it. Then he unfurled the coil. Six feet from the end, the wire forked, forming two smaller strands.

  “What's all this for?”

  “Look carefully at the wire,” Lord Gyoroe said.

  Turesobei held it up and examined it closely. Runes were engraved down the entire length of the wire. He could hardly fathom the skill and precision it would take to engrave such tiny markings.

  “The circlets and the wires will link the three of us together.” Lord Gyoroe saw the obvious worry on Turesobei’s face. “It does not form a permanent binding. Have no fear of that. I no more wish to be bound to you than you to me.”

  He placed the second circlet on Turesobei’s head. Again the runes lit up crimson, and the cold metal turned warm. There was a slight tug at his internal kenja, but he felt nothing else. Lord Gyoroe connected one of the forked wires to Turesobei’s circlet, then he placed the last circlet on his own head and attached the other fork of the wire to it.

  With that done, he spoke a command, and three ornate patterns appeared on the floor of the Inner Sanctum. One was almost identical, save for a few symbols, to a protective circle a wizard would use during a demon summoning.

  Turesobei studied the other two, oddly familiar patterns for a few moments, then realized what they were. “These are summoning pentagrams, only the runes have been reversed.”

  “Very observant,” Lord Gyoroe said. “We are essentially summoning ourselves into the past. However, if you look closely, you will see that each of the runes has multiple dimensions. In that way, they are similar to the teleportation spells.”

  Turesobei chose not to examine them closely. He didn’t want the runes messing with his head. It was hard enough to deal with the heart stones and ignore the time stream outside the dome. Besides, it didn’t seem as if understanding these runes would help him in any way.

  Hannya knelt in the grounding circle, while Turesobei and Gyoroe knelt in the center of the reverse-summoning pentagrams. Lord Gyoroe spoke a command, and all the tiny runes along the copper wire flashed a multitude of colors. Turesobei experienced a few moments of dizziness as his head flushed with energy, but then it subsided. If he was connected to Gyoroe and Hannya, he couldn’t feel it.

  “Apprentice, bond with the stones as you did before, then direct your internal kenja through the wire using the same manipulations you would use when casting a teleportation spell. Direct the energy first toward Hannya and link with her. Then direct the energy toward me.”

  Suppressing his revulsion, Turesobei opened his mind to the passive heart stone of the Nexus. When it didn’t respond, he almost panicked, knowing how angry Lord Gyoroe would be if he failed, but he held himself together.

  Repeating the procedure he had used before, Turesobei imagined, in graphic detail, asking all his companions to sacrifice themselves in the Fire Realm, in order to achieve victory. Then he tried again to connect to the heart stones. This time, all the passive heart stones responded.

  For a moment, his consciousness was pulled toward each of the realms, as it had been before, but something blocked him and kept him rooted to his body—perhaps the circlet or some other magic Lord Gyoroe was using.

  Turesobei directed his internal kenja toward Hannya. Because he had talked with her telepathically before, the connection came easily. Their minds touched enough to allow basic communication, and he was glad he didn’t need to go any deeper. He reached out for Gyoroe. He attempted to make a connection…but failed. The Blood King’s mind was a jumbled mess of tangled energies from his many different personalities.

  “Choose one identity to focus on,” Lord Gyoroe said.

  That was the first time Turesobei had ever heard the Blood King refer to his multiple personalities. Turesobei took a deep breath and thought of the kind Gyoroe with the emerald eyes, the one who enjoyed teaching him. The link formed. And he felt even less connected to Gyoroe than he did to Hannya, which was a huge relief.

  “First, you need to enter your ghost form,” said a deep, somewhat familiar voice, both aloud and in his mind.

  “Like with an astral projection?” Turesobei asked, telepathically.

  “Indeed,” replied the voice that had to belong to Lord Gyoroe. “You need only to project yourself into this room. Be careful not to stray into one of the realms. Bringing you back here would be a waste of time and energy.”

  All of Turesobei’s knowledge of astral projection focused on entering the Shadowland. But the same techniques should apply here, too. He assumed he just needed to concentrate on his connection to the heart stones, instead of on the Shadowland.

  He followed the ritual and felt his consciousness leave his body. Though they tugged at him, Turesobei managed to avoid entering any of the realms. Unfortunately, he found himself in a sort of hazy nowhere, and he didn’t know how to get out of it.

  As his heart began to race, Turesobei tried to take deep breaths to stay calm. “All I see around me is…an empty grayness…I don’t know where I am.”

  “Do not panic. You are not far away. Follow my voice.”

  Turesobei focused on Lord Gyoroe’s voice as it called to him repeatedly, but he still couldn’t escape the grayness he was trapped in. Finally, it occurred to him that like with so many other things, the spell of locating that which is hidden would probably do the trick.

  While fo
cusing on the voice, he opened up the energy pathways for casting the spell. Instantly, Turesobei appeared in the Inner Sanctum as a ghostly form, standing over his physical body.

  Another ghostly presence lingered nearby.

  “Are you ready to begin now?

  Turesobei spun and faced a man unlike any he had ever seen before. This man…this Lord Gyoroe…was tall and ruggedly built, with dark brown skin and black hair that hung down his back in thick braids. He wore a long-sleeved shirt made of a strange, silvery material, like a blend between cloth and steel, and tight-fitting pants of a similar but darker fabric. His handsome, soft-featured face did not resemble the Gyoroe that Turesobei was accustomed to seeing. But his sullen, gray eyes were, unfortunately, very familiar.

  Turesobei did not want to travel anywhere with the gray-eyed version of the Blood King. However, he didn’t seem as angry as normal. In fact, he had sounded reasonable, so much so that Turesobei hadn’t recognized the gray-eyed one’s voice, which apparently had a different tone to it when he wasn’t morose.

  None of the Blood King’s nine kavaru were visible on this ghostly form, which wasn’t surprising, given this was the tenth personality. Instinctually, Turesobei realized the being before him was neither Kaiaru nor human, though he had no idea why he thought that or what the man could be. Regardless, this must have been the one who somehow slipped through Chonda Lu’s defenses to steal the kavaru that had belonged to the Council of Nine.

  “You seem unsure of me,” Lord Gyoroe said.

  “Well…normally, when you have gray eyes, you glare at me and hardly speak.”

  “Ah,” Lord Gyoroe said. “The personalities within the nine kavaru overpower this one. That is why you rarely see me, and that is why when you do, I am so sullen. It is only here that I can freely be myself.”

  Turesobei started to speak, but Lord Gyoroe held up a hand. “Do not ask who or what I am. Even if I wanted to speak of it, we have no time for such matters.”

  That was unfortunate, because Turesobei had a lot of questions, and it was information that could be important to defeating him.

  “So what now?”

  “First, we will ghost back in time to the oldest realm I created. This will only require a little energy, and it will be our starting point.”

  “How do we do that? I mean, is there something I’m supposed to do?”

  “Because you are linked to me, you do not have to do anything. I will guide us to where we need to go. However, it will make things easier for both of us if you relax and follow my lead willingly, without question.”

  When they ghosted into the Fire Realm, a pit of molten rock stretched out for leagues in every direction—right below their feet. Turesobei gasped and pawed at his spell strip pouch. But then he realized that he and Gyoroe were safely hovering in the air, exactly where the ground should have been. And their forms were, in fact, ghostly. They were not physically present in this place. Obviously. Otherwise, Lord Gyoroe would not have needed Turesobei to retrieve the heart stones.

  “I must say, destroying an entire area to prevent someone from taking a heart stone makes for an impressive trap,” Gyoroe said. “Naturally, I expected no less from Moshinga. And I am truly impressed that you made it out of here.”

  Turesobei didn’t want to think about how close to death they’d come in this realm. “Master, in this form, can we travel across the world faster than walking?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because we might have to travel a long way to find the place where the Kaiaru started.”

  “This location in Zangaiden is more important than simply being the world’s most powerful intersection of ley lines. This is where the Kaiaru began.”

  “Oh.” Turesobei chewed at his lip. “So those two things are probably connected, huh?”

  “One would think so,” Lord Gyoroe said.

  Turesobei frowned. “Wait. If you don’t know how the Kaiaru came to be, then how do you know this is the origin point?”

  A strange, almost confused look washed across Gyoroe’s face. “I know this because…” he shook his head, as if clearing his mind “…it is a long story. We need to move on.”

  That response was more than a little odd. “Um…okay.”

  “We will now shift from this realm to the true world in the same time and place.”

  “How far have we gone into the past?”

  “Nearly four thousand years, but that is nothing. We will be going much further back. Now, I must warn you. Ghosting into the true world will be painfully disorienting.”

  “Like looking outside the dome at the time stream?”

  “Like being outside the dome.”

  Turesobei took a deep breath and braced himself. “I’m ready.”

  As soon as those words left his mouth, an indescribable force struck him, physically and mentally. It felt as if he had cast a dozen spells back to back, while being spun around like a top and punched repeatedly in the gut.

  When the world appeared, solid and real around them, Turesobei fell to his knees, dizzy and gasping for air. His body might be ghostly, but the sensations he felt were all too real, presumably because his physical body back in the Inner Sanctum was experiencing them. After a few minutes, the streams of intense pain running through his body faded.

  He looked around. Below him was solid rock, and the location looked almost identical to the Fire Realm when he had first arrived there, before they had attempted to take the heart stone from Moshinga. While he had expected that the world around them would appear ghostly as well, that was not the case. It was as vibrant as it would have been if they had actually traveled there. Of course, they were still insubstantial apparitions.

  “Ghosting back in time from this point will not be as painful,” Gyoroe said. “You may, however, find it more disorienting.”

  “I can deal with disorienting. But what we just went through, I don’t ever want to feel that again.”

  “I am afraid you will feel it once more, when our spirit forms return to our bodies in the Nexus.”

  Turesobei had figured as much, but he would rather have found that out the hard way.

  “Now, let us discover our origins,” Lord Gyoroe said with excitement.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Successive waves of dizziness and nausea, so unbearable that he was hardly aware of anything else, rolled over Turesobei. He tried to gain control by regulating his breathing, but that didn’t work. Apparently, he couldn’t achieve a meditative state in this spirit form. Of course, that made sense given that he was already meditating in order to project his astral form.

  Finally, he remembered what it was like in Awasa’s mind, and how she managed to block out the constant presence of the Warlock’s anger. Mimicking her mental techniques as best as he could, he pushed the time stream sensations causing his vertigo to the back of his mind.

  Now he could clearly see what was going on around him.

  With entire decades passing in the blink of an eye, the landscape changed rapidly around them. Towering trees shrank to saplings. Rivers flowed backward, dried up into mere trickles, then flowed again. The earth quaked and lay silent. People came and went, with farms and villages, towns and small cities disappearing and popping up.

  Faster and faster, they retreated through time, until it was all a blur. But then suddenly, they slowed. The progression of centuries per second became months and then weeks. Blocking out the vertigo became harder, and he could feel kenja being drawn from his body back in the Nexus.

  They came to a standstill in the midst of a wondrous city that was easily twice the size of Batsa, the massive capital of Turesobei’s homeland. Spiraling towers kissed the clouds. Roofs tiled in a stunning array of colors washed through the city like dazzling waves. Narrow, cobbled streets serpentined through a chaos of lavish fountains, open markets, private houses, and apartment towers. At the far end of the city poured a waterfall Turesobei knew all too well. And perched atop that cliff gleamed a grand pa
lace of marble and gold, straddling the river like the thousands of slender bridges throughout the city.

  Bronze-skinned people dressed in belted robes of silk bustled about the jam-packed streets, talking and haggling and rushing about on various errands. In appearance, they resembled neither the zaboko nor the k’chasans and only slightly resembled the baojendari. They had sturdy frames, dark eyes, and deep brown hair. And all of them had birthmarks like the one Turesobei had on his forehead, marks showing they descended from a Kaiaru ancestor. Those few who were armed carried weapons of fine steel, defying Turesobei’s expectations of ancient people wielding more primitive technology.

  A man pushed a cart toward Turesobei. He darted aside, only to have three small girls run straight through his ghostly form. He cringed and shivered, but not because they had actually affected him in any way.

  “I will admit,” Lord Gyoroe said with a chuckle, “that the first time someone walked through me, I too found it disconcerting.”

  “Where are we?”

  “We are standing in the city of Korooka, at the height of its power and grandeur, twelve thousand years before you were born.”

  “I can’t believe a city this big was here. I didn’t see a single ruin in the realms. What happened to it?”

  “War broke out between the Kaia and their Eirsenda neighbors to the east. The war lasted for centuries, and by the time the Kaia finally won, they could hardly call themselves victors. The city was in decline, its wealth and manpower spent, its infrastructure ruined. Not long after, a series of earthquakes and volcanic explosions destroyed what remained.”

  “All these people you call the Kaia, they were descended directly from the Kaiaru?”

  “All people, save the alien Eirsenda whom you know as the Keepers, are descended from the Kaiaru. Did you not know that?”

  Stunned, Turesobei shook his head. “If—if that were true, then anyone could wield a kavaru.”

  “At this time, that would have been the case, but doing so would have resulted in a death sentence. In this great age, Kaiaru were always reborn into new hosts.”