Guild Mage 134

Chapter 134: One Frozen Moment

“A second waystone?”  Commander Jagan scoffed.  “Impossible.  Why would there be two at the same rift?”

“I can think of at least one good reason,” Liv said.  “If I were a goddess, doing – well, whatever it is she was doing, down here – I wouldn’t want to walk up and down those stairs every time I moved between the surface and here.  That might be fine for marching your army of corpses, but I’d get sick of it pretty quickly.”

“So she built something to solve the problem,” Arjun concluded, nodding his head.  “What else do you see here?”

“There’s a control room,” Liv said.  Just like under the Tidal Rift, but she didn’t speak the words out loud.  Jagan had made it clear that she couldn’t trust him, after all.  “I don’t understand all of this, here,” she continued, touching another point on the map.  “One of the words is ‘ring,’ but I don’t know the other.  This –” Liv moved her finger, “– includes the word for ‘dock,’ but I can’t see how that would be possible this far underground.  I saw a river, from the walls, but not an ocean or a lake.  And then there’s clearly something here, in the center,” she finished, “but it isn’t labelled, or even mapped out beyond the door.”

  “I can tell you what this is,” Wren said, putting her finger over the Vædic sigils that included the ‘dock.’  “I recognize it from Ractia’s rift in the mountains.  I don’t know the words, exactly, but that’s where they stored Antrian war machines.”  The huntress shuddered.  “Creepy.”

Liv considered her plan for a moment before speaking out loud.  “We’re going to the waystone first,” she decided.  “I want to know whether I’m even right about what it is, and then I want to know how functional it is, and whether it links up to the one on the surface.  If it does, we know our way out.  If it doesn’t, that means we’ll have to fight our way up the stairs again.  Once I know the answer to those questions, I can decide our next steps.  Stay close,” she told the group, and set off along the right hand corridor.

After so long abandoned, Liv would have expected a layer of dust to coat everything, and the air to be foul, but that wasn’t at all what they found as they walked.  In fact, every surface of the hallway seemed clean, the air odorless without even a hint of being stale, and even the mana-stones set into the ceiling were more intact than those in the tunnel that led to the Well.  Perhaps, Liv speculated, wandering corpses had caused the damage.  

When they came upon the first Antrian, Liv was forced to reconsider that idea.

The war-machine was crouched on the floor of the hallway, leaning against one wall, and when she recognized its distinctive bulk in the dim light of the mana-stones, she held up a hand to stop the others and raised her wand.  Behind her, she could hear the ksatriyas lift their shields by the rustling and clinking of their armor.

Liv watched the Antrian for a long moment, but it did not move.  “I don’t hear anything, do you?” she asked, and both Wren and Arjun shook their heads.  Together, they crept forward, until the light of the oil lantern revealed things more clearly.

The ancient war machine looked much like Karis had.  It was all made of rusted and corroded steel, with Vædic sigils etched into its arms.  Portions of its armor were melted, broken, or removed, and Liv could see the telltale signs that it had been hit with hammers and hacked at with swords or axes: scratches and dents in the metal, especially around the torso.  Someone must have finally wrenched the armor plating that protected the chest off, and inside Liv could see shattered glass.  If there had ever been a brain inside, it had long since decayed.

“How long do you think it’s been here?” Arjun asked.

“If I had to guess?  A thousand years,” Liv said.  “Didn’t your ancestors come here and kill Costia?  They must have had to fight their way past her guards to do it.  Look.”  She pointed at the wall around where the Antrian had fallen, which had been dented, scratched, and scorched as well, though it had not rusted.  “The only question is whether they used the stairs to get down, or the waystone.”

The answer to that question became clear the further they went, as three more rusted and wrecked Antrians slumped at various points in the passageway, and a fifth had been rolled aside off the waystone itself, as if to clear the way.  Liv was surprised at how small the stone actually was: unlike those she was used to, this one was only perhaps five feet across, with no more than eight or nine sigils engraved on it.

“So?  Does it work?” Wren asked.  The huntress remained near the entrance to the circular room, which appeared to have been built entirely to encompass the waystone, and nothing else.  Once she’d established there was no threat in the chamber, she turned back to keep watch over the hallway.

Liv knelt down and touched the waystone.  The mana inside practically leapt up to welcome her hand, and she actually had to pull back and stop her mana from flowing down to activate the device.  “Fully charged,” she said, but she didn’t stand up yet.  “And there, you see?”  Liv pointed to one of the sigils.  “That matches the one we used to come from Coral Bay to here.  But there should be a lot of others, and they’re missing.  The only other marking I recognize is for the Tomb of Celris.”

“We should use the waystone to return to the surface,” Jagan said.  While he’d approached with Liv to examine the stone, his two soldiers had remained back with Wren to watch for any threat from the hallway.

“You can feel free to do that if you wish,” Liv told him.  “But I’m not done down here.” She stood up, and turned to head back out into the corridor, but the commander stepped in her way, forcing her to halt.

“You’ve already gotten one of your friends killed,” Commander Jagan told her, with a sneer.  “Isn’t that enough to prove to you how foolish this was?  Go up now, before any more of us die.”

The sight of Isabel’s body being pulled backward into the shaft, the monstrous corpse’s paw over her face, the crack of the neck, all came to the surface of Liv’s mind like a fish suddenly leaping out of the water in the Aspen River.  Ruthlessly, she pushed the memory aside.  “We came down here for a reason,” Liv said.  “We need to learn more about what Ractia is doing.  I’m not leaving until I’ve done that.  You can come with us, or you can go back up to the city.  I’m sure you know how to work a stone yourself, Commander.”  She stepped around him and back out into the hall.

“Where are we headed?” Wren asked, falling in behind her.  A third set of steps told Liv that Arjun was bringing up the rear.  

“I want to make certain that we won’t be interrupted,” Liv explained, heading back toward the intersection.  “The place the Antrians were stored is near the control room.  We’re going to make sure there aren’t any left waiting around in there, first.  If there are, we either disable them or seal it off.”

As they passed the map, Liv paused just long enough to cast a second barrier of ice, blocking off the passage back to the shaft itself just about a foot beyond where the rectangle of glass was mounted on the wall.  For a moment, she tried to listen for sounds from the end of the hall, but either the distance was too great, or the hordes of the dead had abandoned pursuit.  In any event, the spell left her with only eight rings of mana, so she drained her rings and bracelet, as well.  By the time she’d done that, Jagan and his men had caught up with them, much to Liv’s disappointment.  Everything would probably just be easier at this point if the man had left; certainly, she’d be worried about one less thing going wrong.

Regardless, she pushed down the left corridor, on toward the control room.  They passed the occasional rusted out and broken hulk of an Antrian as they went, always moved off to the side against one of the walls to clear the way.  “They must have taken their dead with them, after the battle was over, don’t you think?” she asked Arjun.

He’d come up to walk at Liv’s left, while Wren trailed behind, keeping herself between Liv and Jagan.  “They would have, yes,” her friend agreed.  “For funeral rites.  I was thinking the same thing - only the remains of enemies left behind.  It means they had time to care for their wounded and take the dead out after the battle was over.”

“Or that all the dead stood back up and joined the enemy,” Wren pointed out, and Liv couldn’t help but shiver.

The ‘dock’ –  whatever that meant, in this case – was easily reached, and whatever door had once been there was gone.  Metal steps led down onto a kind of raised, long metal platform, almost like a hallway but without the walls.  Instead, to either side, strange arrangements of metal, pulsing, glowing mana-stone, and peculiar metal wire formed row upon row of strange cradles.  Every one was empty, but the entire room still seemed to thrum with magical power.

“This is exactly what the place she found Karis looked like,” Wren said, pointing to one of the bizarre standing cradles.  “He was in one of those things, just standing there like he’d been asleep for a thousand years.”

“Do you think it's worth sealing the room off?” Liv asked Wren.

The huntress shook her head.  “We’d be able to see it if any of them were still in here.  It’s pretty obvious.”  

Trusting in Wren’s judgement, Liv led them deeper into the rift, toward the section on the map marked ‘control room.’  Unfortunately, when they arrived at their destination, unlike the chamber which must have once housed all of the shattered Antrians, the great metal doors were shut, and Liv could find no way of opening them.

“We could try to break them open,” Wren suggested.  “Call up one of those giant fists of ice you make, Liv, and just batter it down.”

Liv bit her lip, considering.  “I’m willing to try that if we aren’t able to find anything else,” she said, after thinking it over.  “I’m worried about what might get broken or damaged if I force our way in.  Before we do that, let’s see what else is open.  We can always come back here, but I can’t unbreak something once I hit it.”

The followed the hallway to the next intersection, and took a right, making for the section of the map that had been labelled as having something to do with a ‘ring.’  With every step, the density of mana in the rift increased, until Liv could feel it pressing against her skin. The route took them past the doors which had been unmarked on the map – and unlike the entrance to the control room, these had already been battered open.

A pile of crushed, scorched, and rusted Antrians had been heaped up around the open entrance, and that – along with an amount of mana that was nearly crushing – was enough to draw Liv over for a closer look.  “Be careful,” she cautioned, as she picked her way through the ancient hulks.  “Some of this metal looks sharp.”

“There must have been something inside,” Arjun guessed.  “They were defending it.”

Whatever the Antrians had been defending, the rooms beyond must have seen the heaviest fighting.  More of the war-machines were thrown up against the walls, and the signs of fire magic, the dents and slashes left by weapons, broken mana stones, all of it pointed to a battle where spells had been thrown about desperately.  After a thousand years, anything that wasn’t made of metal or stone was gone, though again, something had prevented dust from settling.  It was even possible, Liv reflected, that the ancestors of the Dakruimans had simply looted everything of value that might have been here.  Perhaps likely.

“There’s something here,” Arjun said, and broke off from the group, striding deeper into the chambers, toward the very heart of the rift.

“Arjun, wait!” Liv hissed, suddenly aware of every sound she made.  She hurried after him, wand in hand.  The last thing she wanted was one of them to get into a fight alone.  Something crunched under her boot, and Liv looked down to see fragments of bleached bone, broken off from a strange protrusion on the floor.

She followed Arjun into an immense inner chamber, a great circle with a high, vaulted ceiling, all made not of metal, but of beautiful marble.  Liv thought the floor might be made of the same substance, but it was difficult to tell, because it was nearly entirely covered in bone.

Not bones, or individual skeletons, Liv realized, slowly moving her eyes over the scene.  No, it was as if someone had frozen a wave while it was in motion.  The bone rose in crests and sprays from a point in the center of the room, where a single spear had been thrust through a woman’s corpse, impaling her to the floor.

The corpse was made entirely of bone, from the fingertips to the curls of hair falling back from the dead woman’s head.  A second woman, the one driving the spear down through the first, was also sculpted entirely of bone.  Each of them was dressed, as well, with each fold of fabric sculpted as if with painstaking precision, and mana pulsed out from them in tangible waves.

“Ksatriya,” Commander Jagan murmured, and Liv looked back to see that he and his men had dropped to their knees and lowered their heads.

“What does he mean?” Liv asked, turning to Arjun for an explanation.

Arjun had moved forward, as close to the center of the room as he could get, without stepping onto the frozen crests of bone.  “Ksatriya killed the Lady of Bones by impaling the goddess on her spear,” he explained.  “But the stories say that she died doing it.”

Liv swallowed.  “Which means if that’s Ksatriya, then the other one is Costia.”

“We must leave this place,” Commander Jagan said, his head still bowed.  “We cannot disturb the rest of our ancestor.”

“It doesn’t feel like being in Ractia’s presence,” Liv said, glancing over to Wren, who nodded.  “Let me…” Liv took a deep breath to center herself, and allowed her eyes to close.  She allowed Aluth to wake in the back of her mind, from where it lay coiled next to Luc and Cel.  When the word had first been imprinted, back in Coral Bay, she’d been able to sense mana all throughout the building: not just the power of the people in the room with her, but those walking about the halls or sitting down for lectures.

Now, she sought to feel what might be left of a goddess who was a thousand years dead.  Just an instant was enough - the light that flared from the woman of bone was blinding.  “There’s something there, though,” Liv told the others, after she had opened her eyes again.  “The bone is – permeated with mana?  Or maybe actually producing it.  I don’t think it’s just the ambient magic from the rift.”  Liv recalled the wands that Duchess Julianne and Princess Milisant carried, crafted from the bones of a dead god.

With a murmured incantation, Liv conjured a platform of shining blue mana beneath her feet, and then used it to lift herself off the ground, until she was high enough to skim out over the frozen waves of bone and make her way to the center of the room.  The spell came easily, as if the magic in the air around them was desperate to be used.

“No!” Jagan shouted, and Liv turned to see the Dakruiman commander rushing at her, club lifted for a strike, his forehead popping with darkened veins.  Before he could cross the distance, however, Wren interposed herself, with a drawn dagger in each hand, and Jagan hesitated.  In the meanwhile, both of his soldiers had gotten up to their feet, but they looked uncertain, and pale with mana sickness.

“Tell them to stop,” Liv said, looking to Arjun.  Her platform hovered over the outer crest of the bone spray, rather than pushing forward.

Arjun began shouting at the two ksatriyas, one of who said something back.  Liv counted it as a victory that they hadn’t charged yet: it was a sign of how afraid they were, she thought.

“Jagan,” Liv said, spinning the disc of mana about so that she faced him, “you need to leave now.”

“I don’t follow your orders,” the man said, with a scowl.

“Did General Mishra order you to draw your weapon on me?  Did he order you to kill me?” Liv asked him.  The commander’s hesitation was answer enough.  “I didn’t think so.  Vivek Sharma warned me about you before we set out,” she told him.  “I could put up with it when you were just not helping us.  But if you’re going to try to attack my friends and I, then you are choosing to make yourself our enemy.”  

Liv lifted her wand, slowly and deliberately, and levelled at Commander Jagan’s face.  “As my enemy, you can either flee, or stand and fight.  Which one will it be?”

Jagan’s eyes flicked between her wand, and Wren, who remained in front of him with her daggers raised.  He looked to Arjun next, but the dark-haired boy shifted so that he was facing off against the soldiers, as well.  “You’re a traitor,” Jagan growled.  “If you had any hope your jati would take you back before, bury it now.”

“I’m not the one who just tried to attack someone from behind,” Arjun pointed out.  “I don’t think our ancestor would appreciate that.”  He nodded in the direction of the woman who stood in the center of the room, spear in hand, an eternal statue of frozen bone.

Jagan growled something, and the two soldiers fell in beside him, their shields raised together, just as Liv had seen the ksatriya fight against the horde of the dead.

Liv’s fingers tightened on the smooth wood of the wand in her hand, and she licked her lips to wet them.  “Leave,” she repeated.  “Or I will make you leave.”