CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
They stood at the edge of the grass, silent and solemn. The only sound was a distant fountain chuckling softly, its basin angled so that the water fed the pond that fanned out from it.
Ahearn glanced at his feet; dust and dead moss clung to his boots. That mixture filled the ghostly streets of Zatsakkaz. The yellow light that had been so helpful to movement in the tunnels had become disquieting, even oppressive, as if it encouraged the decay of everything except for the moss and its jaundiced glow.
But within the perfectly circular world of the garden, there wasn’t a hint of that bilious haze. It was a perfect half-sphere of clear, bright light which cast shadows that shifted with the slow progress of the unseen sun. None of the cavern’s detritus spoiled its cool green lawn or had crushed its irises and lilies. Butterflies flitted back and forth between the flowers and the willows that seemed to lean toward the surface of the pond, as if mesmerized by their own reflections there.
“It’s not real,” Ahearn announced firmly.
S’ythreni stared sidelong at him. “Of course not.”
Impatience got the better of him. “Well, if yer so eager to sound like a schoolmaster, teach us a bit then, hey? What’s behind this? How could it be here after all this time?”
S’ythreni frowned, grumbled. “I’m no mantic, but maybe it’s not so complex as it looks.”
“No,” Elweyr corrected gently. “It’s more complex than it looks.”
Umkhira frowned. “Explain, please.”
Cerven was nodding as Elweyr replied. “Firstly, Ahearn’s wonder at it being here at all is quite apt. This is a mantic effect. That means it is effected by a constant influx of manas. I know of no construct, not even from the cosmantic codices, that could sustain so great a flow for so long a time. And its design is not static.”
Umkhira’s sigh was slightly impatient. “Please, friend; I do not speak the language of wizards. Do you mean that because it moves, it is a more intricate creation?”
“An image that has no movement within it is a ‘still’ construct, the simplest kind,” Cerven offered when Elweyr did not. “A ‘static’ construct moves, but only in a set pattern that continues until the effect is discontinued. But this? Watch the butterflies.”
“I have been doing just that.”
“In all the time you have, have you seen their movements repeat? In the slightest particular?”
Umkhira’s brow rose. “No. It is as if they are alive, each beat of their wings different from the last.”
Elweyr, tired by the day’s many mantic exertions, gratefully nodded for Cerven to complete the explanation, who did so in the same patient tone with which he’d begun. “Designing a mantic construct to vary as much as life itself, and indefinitely, is very, very complex.”
“Frankly,” Elweyr added, “I have never even heard of a static design that followed a pattern a tenth as long as the time we’ve been observing this one. And it has yet to repeat in any particular.” He shrugged; at the end, his shoulders drooped lower than usual. “When this day began, I’d have told you it was impossible. Yet here it is.”
“Which delights me no end,” the dragon murmured in an unusually reflective tone. “After having spent decades watching the same tiresome parade of events, I have seen three wholly novel things in a single day: this city, the Eye of Oblivion, and now a garden that is as ageless as I am.” When he spoke again, it almost sounded as if he was speaking to himself. “For this alone, I am glad to have joined you, come what may.”
Ahearn took it upon himself to break the silence that followed. “Well, having picked our way through the rubble surrounding this tower”—he glanced up at what was left of it—“and finding no way in, it seems that the way down to this Loësnum must be through this garden. But I’ve misgivings about what happens if, by stepping into it, we pop this mantic bubble.”
Varcaxtan nodded. “You’re not alone in that.” He squinted into the pastoral scene. “I’m no mantic, but what I’ve seen suggests that a trespasser would disrupt the pattern. So given all the effort that was involved, it stands to reason that it must also have a way to repel intruders.”
“That,” Elweyr said, “is my fear, as well. But without knowing anything more about its creation or creator—”
“Perhaps,” Cerven said quietly, “this might help.” He was pointing at the ground just outside the faintly curved limit of perpetual perfection. “I saw an irregular shape through the dust.” He toed a spot he’d cleared with his boot. “There is a legend here, written in an ancient forerunner of the modern language of northern Mihal’j. But it does not make any sense to me.”
“What does it say?” asked S’ythreni, leaning over to look at the strangely whorled script.
“‘Where we met.’ There was another, similar phrase, but the last word was pulverized, probably by falling debris. What’s left reads ‘Where time… ’”
“‘Where time ended.’” Elweyr finished in a haunted voice. “I know this place. My mother”—he had to pause before continuing—“my mother told me fairy tales about a garden where a great wizard and a wise princess met, married, and ultimately watched the world end.” He stared at the garden, eyes wide. “Is this just coincidence? I mean, can small, ancient events really live on through so many ages as… as a fairy tale?”
“They can,” R’aonsun answered with finality. “The details are lost, but your species holds on to lives and deeds that embody your essential values.” His voice became a mumble. “It is one of your redeeming features.”
Ahearn wondered if the dragon had hit his head at some point, or if his face-to-face bout with the Eye of Oblivion had damaged his sarcastic wit. But perhaps it was also a consequence of dwelling in human form for so long. Harder to taunt a folk when it’s one of their faces you see in the mirror every day. He shook off that notion and squared his shoulders. “Right. Well, unless the fairytale says anything about how to enter the garden, there’s really only one way to find out.” He started undoing the buckle of his baldric; if the ‘construct’ somehow had a mind of its own, then any weapon might be seen as ill intent. At any rate, Ahearn suspected it would be useless once he stepped over the boundary. But before he could finish removing his gear, he felt a hand on his shoulder; he turned.
Varcaxtan’s smile wasn’t just one of a fond uncle, but a husband torn between despairing grief and desperate hope. “No, lad: this is for me to do. And save the objections you’re readying. I’m the one to make this appeal, or to suffer the consequences for trying.”
Before Ahearn could object, the Dunarran had handed his weapons off to the dragon and moved to the edge of the garden. He advanced a finger over the boundary…
The sunlight darkened, taking on an orange tint. Not the color of a setting sun, but of fire, as if the garden and the city around it was on the verge of bursting into flame.
Varcaxtan paused until the change had finished, then eased his whole hand in.
The orange light roiled, as if beams of the unseen sun were being riven by the liquid wavering of heat mirages. As red flecks appeared in it, one of the nearby butterflies abruptly became jet black and approached his hand. It did not alight on his finger—the one with his vow-band—but hovered, though the wings were beating too slowly to have kept a real insect aloft. For several long moments it remained there…
Its former colors flooded back into it and it flew off, even as the unseen sun’s light became less agitated and angry. It mellowed but never quite returned to the bright, clear hue they had seen as they approached. The faint tint of orange left Ahearn with a purely subjective impression that conveyed a wary warning, but not an actual threat.
Very slowly, Varcaxtan stepped across the threshold. The orange deepened, but faded again when he did not advance any further. He hung his head as he started. “I would that I had never needed to see this place, friend. That I never had to come here to disturb it, to trouble the memory you left here. Not for posterity but as a testament to each other, a love you meant to defy mortality and time itself: to say, ‘this one I loved beyond all else. Beyond wealth, beyond works, even beyond words.’”
Varcaxtan lifted his head. “I do not belong here. I want to turn about and leave your garden untroubled, leave this place where both your worlds became one. And ended as one. There’s nothing I wish more than that… except to save my own love.
“I wish I knew your love’s name. Mine is named Indryllis. She’s my heart and my all. They say she’s alive, but by now, she may be dead or, worse yet, adrift in some Limbo. All I know is that I will find her or die trying.”
He put out his arms in supplication. “I don’t know if there’s something here, listening to my voice, or not. And if there is, whether you can understand my words, or feel my feelings, or simply know whether I mean harm or not. I only ask this: whatever or whoever you are—or were—I hope you feel a kindred spirit in me, not a despoiler, and so, shall let me pass.”
For a moment, the only sound was the distant burble of the fountain. But then the leaves rustled; a faint breeze went through them with a soft rush. Which built into a wind that bent the branches as the sunlight darkened into a sullen orange.
“It’s going to kill him,” Elweyr muttered, hands raising into a pattern that drew a thaumate from his memory, complete and ready for creation. Umkhira had her axe out. Ahearn drew his sword and he brought the point up. For all the good it’ll do.
But R’aonsun stepped between them and the limit of the garden. “No.”
In the moment he stayed them in place, the orange light darkened into an apocalyptic red. Dark shadows of absent clouds scudded across the tableau as the rising wind bent the tips of the willows to dab at the frothing surface of the pond. The shadows and the red light merged, burgeoned, filled the garden so that there was nothing in it but a tempest of light and shadow… and the solitary form of Varcaxtan.
“Damn you, wyrm, he’ll be—!”
“Hold, I say.” R’aonsun’s voice was strangely calm.
The gathering storm did not rush over Varcaxtan, but broke, swirling around its own core, stretching upward. As it breached the top of the garden’s limit, it coalesced into a vague figure of sable and scarlet, roaring like an approaching tornado. The outline of a head emerged from that ominous shape, in which two blazes of white light existed long enough to register as eyes, angry and sorrowing…
Before the image folded in upon itself and faded, as if made of dust motes blown asunder by an unfelt breeze.
Varcaxtan stood, head bent. The garden was gone. In its place was what, obviously, had been there all along; a barren circle made of a single, smooth expanse of stone—or possibly, a cement so fine that it rivaled the kind found in a few Consentium ruins.
Directly across from them, a metal gate hung askew in the side of the tower. Beyond it was a darkness that seemed to bend down and away from the pervasive yellow glow.
“I suspect,” the dragon said quietly, “that is the way to Loësnum.”
As Ahearn stood, arms akimbo, surveying the long, precisely cut stone receptacles of the moon-plate repository, he could not help but be unimpressed. Given how long they had traveled and sought this archive, it and the final descent had proven quite anticlimactic.
The moment they pushed beyond the hanging gate, it was clear that if any explorers or creatures had reached this place since the creation of the garden, they had left no trace of themselves. Even the dust and debris of Zatsakkaz had not managed to find its way to this precisely constructed but austere interior, where a staircase—a match for the one they’d descended earlier—led down into blackness. Periapt out, torches in one hand and weapons in the other, they readied themselves for whatever might lie ahead. Yet, despite their prodigious and dire imaginings of what that might be, none of them foresaw the true strangeness of what they discovered:
Absolutely nothing. From the first step, they encountered no sign of trespass or habitation, only a patina of dust. No debris from above, no remains, not even any signs of leakage. And if the extraordinary regularity of the steps made them easy to descend in the near dark, they also became dreadfully monotonous. After four hundred, Ahearn stopped counting.
Much later, they arrived at a landing in the shape of a hexagon. One side accommodated the end of the staircase, the other five presented wide, identical doors, one of which was ajar. The sai’niin ring pulsed in its direction, so they rearranged themselves to enter.
It was a worrisome maneuver, insofar as the opening was barely wide enough for them to slip through sideways, and the door itself could not be moved. It was, if Ahearn recalled the correct term, a pocket door: one which slid in and out of a reservoir, or “pocket,” built into the wall. But whereas they were usually reserved for lighter constructions, this door was a heavy slab fashioned from more of the smooth stone used throughout the tower. Because they could not widen the aperture, even a small number of indifferently trained and equipped defenders could make it a deadly business, indeed.
But the tense, whispered debate Ahearn and the others had over the best way to enter proved extraneous. There were no mysterious guardians, no metal soldiers, no traps. Just row after row of the chest-high stone sarcophagi, filled with moon plates. Even those weren’t protected or locked; the metal plaques were arrayed vertically in slots carved into the brutishly plain rectangular boxes. Elweyr muttered that it looked like a library’s worth of basalt shelves had been tipped over on their backs. But to Ahearn, the Repository of Loësnum resembled nothing so much as a painfully austere mausoleum.
Cerven immediately discovered that the work of finding the desired moon plate would prove much easier than feared. Unlike other archives and libraries—even those still in use, and with attentive staffs—the plates themselves were organized not by subject or scholar or even date. Rather, each had a different code incised on its top: a string of numbers that matched those which Mirroskye’s loremasters had conjectured to be a filing system. And, because the repository had not been rifled by fortune-seekers, or gnawed by vermin, or ruined by damp or heat, the plaques were not only completely legible, but still arrayed in numerical order.
Cerven located the master list of osmotia within five minutes, called for steady light, and dropped into the trance that was a near approximation of fullsee. After ten minutes, he leaned back.
“What did you learn?” asked Elweyr eagerly.
The Amitryean frowned. “Many names, but not many details. But enough to discern which additional plaques we might want.” He yawned, looked around at the dimly lit walls. “Such a pity that there’s no way for us to carry more than a few out.”
Ahearn raised an eyebrow. “I’m sweating at the mere thought of us each carrying one. Like bars of gold, they are.”
“No more than a quarter that weight,” the young man replied with a puzzled frown.
“Yer a scholar,” Ahearn replied through a sigh, “so I’m supposing you’re acquainted with the phrase, ‘a figure of speech,’ yeh?”
Cerven may have blushed; it was hard to tell in the faint light. “Apologies.” He waved at the moon plate he’d been hovering over. “Sometimes it takes a while to return to a… a regular state of mind.” He rose. “I’ll set about finding those plaques I mentioned.” As soon as he was out of earshot, most of the others turned a brief glare or frown toward Ahearn.
He stared back. “What?”
“Boor,” S’ythreni hissed as she stalked off.
“What? Lad is too precious to take a joke?” he whispered after the aeosti.
As the dragon turned his back on the exchange, his chin and nose a bit higher than usual, Elweyr slipped an arm around his friend’s much wider shoulders. “Give it up, Ahearn. You lost that debate before it started. You were only a little bit of a turd, but he’s a lovable innocent.”
“I’m lovable!” It didn’t sound that convincing, but had he claimed to be “innocent,” Ahearn knew it would have elicited barks of laughter.
Elweyr only chuckled. “Oh, yes. Certainly. Lovable as a puppy, you are. Now, down to business: what’s the watch rota? It’s been a long day. Besides, you need extra sleep.”
“Me? Why?”
Elweyr’s grin was very wide and slightly malicious. “To keep the lovable, boyish twinkle in your eye.”
Ahearn stalked off. A few minutes later, the rota was set. Cerven was not included when it became obvious that either the day’s physical demands, his fixed focus upon the plaques, or both had exhausted him. As soon as he’d finished half a ration, he wrapped himself in his sleeping roll and was asleep in seconds.
The positions from which any pair on watch could best protect the five that were asleep were at either end of the repository. Because the opening was so narrow, a skilled fighter was stationed near the half-open door. The other person on that watch was selected for their ability to attack at distance, and so, was perched upon one of the receptacles at the far end of the chamber, ready to force any intruders to duck back and reconsider. By then, hopefully, the fighter watching the opening would have roused the rest of the company with kicks, curses, or anything else that might make them scramble to their feet.
Ahearn relieved Umkhira as the door guard at the start of the second watch, heard some hushed conversation at the far end, where Varcaxtan was relieving S’ythreni. Gesturing for Umkhira to stay alert a minute longer, he moved back to the post at the other end of the chamber. But instead of finding either of them watching the door from the top of the last receptacle, they were both standing in front of the rear wall. “What gives?” he muttered.
S’ythreni pointed at the wide slab of stone. “Something’s in there, scratching.”
“Beneath us, too.” Varcaxtan added. “I think.”
Ahearn listened. “Too soft for me to hear, I suppose.”
The aeosti shook her head. “It was just a moment, when I hopped down from the receptacle and moved close to the wall. But nothing since then.”
Ahearn frowned. On the one hand, it was just some vague scratching. On the other hand, they hadn’t encountered so much as a cockroach since descending from the illusionary garden. “I don’t like it.”
Varcaxtan’s frown was a match for his own. “Nor do I, but there’s no way to learn more about it, not without having the means to pull apart the walls or floor.”
Ahearn nodded. “Aye, but at the first hint of more scratching—”
“I’ll sound the alarm.”
But the watch passed without the faintest sound or disturbance. At its end, Ahearn jostled R’aonsun to replace him, and then Elweyr to replace Varcaxtan. He unfurled his sleeping roll and had just slipped his feet back into it when Elweyr shouted from the rear wall—not words, but a cry of alarm.
Words were hardly necessary, though. Even at the other end of the room, Ahearn could hear the groan from the back wall, which was almost immediately joined by a vibration that ran the length of the room. He was already on his feet, sword in hand, when the sound became motion, as well.
The entirety of the back wall was lowering into the floor, rasping as it went.
“Uncle,” the swordsman shouted over his shoulder, sprinting for the rear, “defend the door with the dragon. The rest: with me!”
He ran past Elweyr—whose hands were alive with the motions of calling a thaumate to mind—and stopped at the edge of the new opening, sword in a high guard as the wall finished sinking into the floor. The others gathered to his flanks, ready to attack, lights aiming at the widening gap.
They showed a broad ramp, large enough for a small wagon, leading upward at a gentle angle. As in the tower itself, there was no sign of any creatures, their spoor, or their remains. And if there was a bit more dust, there was still no sign of leakage.
They waited for any further hint of sound or movement. There was none, except for a gentle inward breath of air; it was slightly warmer in the space that had been revealed.
After a full minute of waiting, S’ythreni muttered, “And now what?”
“Good question.” Ahearn considered the options. So long as the damned door had been in place, they’d no need to worry about attack from that direction. Now, in a trice, they were exposed at either end. On the other hand—
As if awakened by the mere thought of the word “hand,” the sai’niin ring pulsed toward the opening.
Ahearn nodded. “We go up.”
“What?” asked half of the others in a ragged chorus.
Ahearn held up the hand with the ring. “Apparently, this is the best path toward Druadaen. Besides, it’s that or try to finish sleeping with an opening to front and rear. Frankly, even without the ring’s say-so, I’d have been ready to give this ramp a try. It’s the only way we’ve seen to leave these damned caverns without going through the dry-men again. Or has someone seen a better way back up to the surface?”
The group was silent; most shook their heads.
“Well, then: half a sip, weapons out, and then a morsel as we move. Let’s see where this ramp leads. And who knows? Maybe this lazy ring will show us the fastest way to the Swiftsure!”