“I’m impressed, Minalan,” Lilastien agreed. “I didn’t really think you’d figure it out, either.”
“I’m still mad at you,” Alya said, though she sounded less angry.
We waited for nearly twenty minutes for the level of the water to drop below the last step, revealing a much smaller version of the fake door up above. I led everyone down the dripping stairs to the entrance. The door was sealed, but it appeared to have a perfectly ordinary mechanical lock, made of wrought aluminum. Ormar fetched some of the discarded tools from above and we used them to pry open the long unused catch. The door clicked.
“It’s open,” Lilastien said, in a whisper.
“Shall I fetch torches?” Ormar asked.
“No need,” Gareth said, activating a portable tekka light, presumably from the Beast. “I anticipated the need. I brought a few of these. I’ve even got a bigger camp light we can use, back in the Beast. Who’s first?” he asked.
I took the light from him and went in. The first rooms were filled with simple stone shelves on which lay case after case, small square and round boxes with elaborate carvings. There were hundreds of them.
“Irionite,” Gareth said, opening one. “They’re dormant.”
“War stones, confiscated from the Enshadowed or surrendered to the Council by the Great Houses,” explained Lilastien. I nodded. Raer Rinthon and Prince Maralathus recognized them at once. I got a flash of memory of dozens of battles involving these ancient stones.
“What are these?” asked Ithalia, as she popped a round box open. Inside was a small, milky ball of crystal.
“I don’t know,” Lilastien confessed. “There must be a lot of forgotten stuff down here.”
“That’s a rajaleana,” I offered, with help from my Alkan hosts. “They’re organic minerals that can project power far beyond normal ranges. Very useful . . . but very dangerous, when used in conjunction with other songspells. It’s related to the Covenstones,” I explained.
“How did you know that?” Taren asked, confused.
“I read a lot,” I said. I wasn’t ready to talk about my hosts, yet. It would take too much time.
Beyond that, the rooms and the items got larger. One contained legitimate weapons – spears, arrows, bows, shields, axes, hammers, and other implements of war. One chamber had a rack of staffs of different sizes, thicknesses, and ornamentation. All of them were inert. Yet another was covered, floor to ceiling, with shelf after shelf of odd-shaped bottles filled with liquids and powders. Yet another was stuffed full of exotic corals, seashells, and the like.
Between Lilastien and I, we were able to identify many of the items, but by no means all. Many of the confiscated items were components of larger enchantments or sorceries, I knew.
“What are those?” Nattia asked when we came to a chamber filled with large wooden and leather cases.
“Thoughtful Knives!” Ithalia gasped. “Dozens of them!”
“Those are a lot bigger than the one they gave us,” I pointed out to Alya.
“Some were far more dangerous than mere flying blades,” Lilastien informed us as she studied the cases. “The one the Council gave you is no more than an assay in the art. These were the powerful ones. The ones that can destroy cities and decimate armies.”
“Take a few of the smaller ones,” I directed Taren, quietly. “Get them packed in the Beast. And grab a few boxes of witchstones, on the way.” He nodded and understood why I wanted to be quiet about it.
“Minalan, over here!” Ithalia called, as we came to a central chamber that branched off into several separate vaults. “I think you’ll be interested in this.”
“What are they?” Ormar asked, as his curiosity drew him toward the cases. He opened one and stared for a moment at something horrid: some tiny beast frozen in raw chunk of irionite.
“Natural kulhinara,” I explained, as I opened another. There was an insect caught in this one. “Like Sheruel. Looks like five or six of them.”
“They can be even worse than something like Sheruel, if you can believe it,” Lilastien assured. “They aren’t hampered by higher thought and tend to react on instinct . . . only with the power of a god. Except for this one,” she said, holding up the largest of the chunks. It was murkier than the others and less crystalline, but it was a perfect sphere. I could barely make out the thing within.
“It’s the Vundel Nymph,” Lilastien explained. “The Enshadowed captured it, and then encased it in irionite about five thousand years ago. It was the first time that someone made a kulhinara on purpose. They figured that they could use it to control a Leviathan,” she snorted. “Idiots!”
“How did that work out?” I asked, curious.
“Catastrophically,” Lilastien answered, looking at the mollusk-like creature inside. “The nymphs are highly intelligent and have deep levels of rajira. But they don’t think like terrestrial creatures. Unlike the enneagram you’re using in your enchantments, a kulhinara uses all the elements at its command: intelligence and instinct. Once they activated it, they did not understand or appreciate just how such a creature would react.
“It worked beautifully, at first – it was during the peak of the Enshadowed war effort, and it was devastating. But within a few years it had achieved enough sentience to rebel against them. Its rampage decimated them and turned the tide of that particular war. That’s probably where they got the idea for Sheruel,” she decided. She put the nymph back on the shelf carefully.
“Wouldn’t the Vundel object to that?” I asked.
“Not as much as you might think,” she said, looking around the other shelves in the chamber. “They produce thousands of nymphs every year. Only a small percentage of them are expected to survive to metamorphosis. They aren’t even taken seriously as individuals until they become clippermen. The Vundel might be appalled at its disrespect, but they wouldn’t care about the individual. They aren’t like that.”
“You’re sure?” I asked, anxiously. We didn’t need another reason for the Vundel to be pissed at us.
“One of my hosts is a clipperman. Dek’tagalish,” she replied, quietly.
“Oh,” I nodded, understanding.
We went to the next chamber, and both of us gasped. It was filled with various pieces of rare coral – Golden Coral. The stuff the Vundel followed on their great nomadic treks across the sea. Lilastien was full of information about them, thanks to her new insights. There were some truly dangerous pieces there, too, I realized as she informed me what each was capable of.
“Master Min! Look at this!” Tyndal called, excitedly. He was in the next chamber, which was filled with what seem to be a neatly organized brush pile. It proved to be specimens of Met Sakinsa growths . . . including two smaller pieces of the fused heart of the Leshi, striekema, as we had recovered from Stonetrunk.
“Some of these are examples of old Met Sakinsa weaponry, from their great struggle against the Formless, ages ago,” Lilastien explained. “Others are . . . I don’t know, I’m afraid. But clearly Met Sakinsa.”
“That looks like weirwood,” Tyndal pointed out, when we came to a bundle of long, mostly straight limbs.”
“That’s not weirwood, that’s wood from a Father Tree,” I said, as Prince Maralathus’ memory gave me the answer. I shuddered, involuntarily. “It’s been burnt,” I pointed out.
“The Met Sakinsa would not be happy about that,” Lilastien nodded. “Not at all. But it is incredibly powerful for enchantment, far more powerful than weirwood. It is said it never truly dies. An enchantment wrought with it would be extremely potent. And likely piss the Leshi off to no end. Kind of like using a human bone in an enchantment.”
“That happens more than you’d think, actually,” Tyndal informed her. “Books bound in human skin, wands made from bones, ink from human blood . . .”
“And it is just as repugnant to us as this would be to them, I think,” said Lilastien. “They gave us Stonetrunk’s heart. This . . . this looks depraved, from their perspective.
”
“Minalan!” called Gareth, his voice urgent. “You need to come here and see this!”
Gareth didn’t ordinarily get that excited, even in a place like this. He was generally too analytic. But the tone in his voice compelled me.
“What is it?” I asked, as I entered the next darkened chamber. His light was splashed on a shelf filled with nice, neat little boxes that were decidedly not of Alkan design.
“Something troubling,” he said, as he took one of the boxes from the shelf and examined it closely. Then he showed it to me.
It was in Old High Perwyneese. It was from the original colony. Unlike everything else here, it was labeled.
COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION AUTHORITY
CI5 REPLACEMENT UNIT, UNINITIATED
FOR CIVIL USE ONLY
Please Refer To Installation Procedures To Avoid Faulty Initiation
There was a long code at the bottom of the label that, I knew, was the designation number.
“Do you have any idea what this is?” Gareth asked, excitedly.
“It’s . . . it’s one of the back-ups for the Colony’s information infrastructure,” I said, the Old High Perwyneese flowing off my tongue. Andrews knew precisely what these were. I began looking at the other boxes. “Ishi’s tits, this is . . . it looks like all the back-ups for the colony! There’s C5s, C4s, a bunch of C3s . . .”
“This one is labeled CI5M,” Gareth said, quickly scanning the boxes. “Military grade!”
“Why would the Alka Alon have our tekka?” I asked, confused.
“Because they wanted to keep you from being able to rebuild your civilization, after Perwyn,” Lilastien informed us, as she followed us into the room. “Remember I told you about the anti-Vundel faction in the military? They weren’t the only political faction of the colony. After the New Horizon was sent away, power was shared between a number of entities for a few decades. The Colonial Defense Force. The United Nations. The Terraformation Authority. And a number of corporate and social interests who took turns taking over the Colonial Administration.
“One of these,” she continued, as she took one of the boxes and read the label, “was the New Denver Metaphysical Society, led by a young, charismatic leader who preached an embrace of Callidore and its gifts and a rejection of the traditional ways of Terra. He later became the first Archmage. But not before casting the entire colony into chaos.
“Some of his followers developed a method of attacking the higher-functioning Constructed Intelligences of Perwyn and destroying them. In fact, they did just that, and every CI on the network above Level Two was ruined.”
“That’s horrible!” Gareth declared, his mouth agape. “That explains why Forseti cannot find any of his peers in the system!”
“Oh, it’s worse than that,” Lilastien said, slowly. “You see, the attack would have been a mere nuisance, if the colony hadn’t misplaced its remaining uninitiated CIs. But they were stolen. I found out later that the New Denver revolutionaries had taken them. I had presumed them destroyed, but it appears as if the Alka Alon Council took custody of them. Each of these,” she said, replacing the box, “is capable of running an entire city. Or a warship. Or . . . all sorts of things.”
“They’re uninitiated, though,” I pointed out, as Andrews’ memories informed me. “They have never been used. And there’s almost . . . there have to be at least fifty or sixty, here. That would be almost all the Colony’s back-ups. Without those . . .”
“Without those, there was no one to check the calculations of the engineers who tried to reclaim Perwyn’s bay,” Lilastien nodded. “Without the CI5s, it was left up to humans and lower-level intelligences who would not have – did not, apparently – discover the problems with the plan. I—”
“What have you done?” shrieked an Alka Alon voice from the doorway, pregnant with anguish.
We all whirled around to see Ameras gaping at us, as we pawed through the warehouse of forgotten things. She looked shocked and angry.
“You have opened the vault!” she nearly screeched.
“We did,” I agreed. “Well, I did. I take full responsibility,” I added.
“You cannot! You must not!” she insisted. “Only the Aronin can open the vault!”
“Apparently not,” Lilastien said, coolly. “But certainly, the Aronin would know why the vault shouldn’t be opened by just anyone. It’s filled with the evidence of our guilt. In many things.”
“It is for the Council and the conscience of the Aronin, alone, to determine when the vault is opened!” she demanded, angrily.
“I told you, I’m a representative of the Council,” Lilastien shot back. “They asked for you to open it.”
“And I was told by your sire to seek you out and persuade you to open it,” I reminded her. “I told you I would do it. You knew I would do it, if I could.”
“I . . . I . . .” Ameras stuttered. Rolof appeared behind her, a look of great concern on his face.
“It needed to be done, Ameras,” I soothed. “We need the weapons. More, we need the truth. Lilastien is correct: there is much in this vault that exposes the past wrongs of the Council.”
“The Aronin are not told what they are guarding, necessarily,” Ameras said, hotly. “Our duty is to protect our charges; not inquire why we must do so.”
“Then you are not to blame for any of this,” I shrugged. “You were just following orders. Tradition. Your conscience. I don’t blame you for this.
“But I’m not going to go quietly away from here, now that I’ve seen this,” I continued. There was other tekka here, and thanks to Andrews I could recognize most of it.
Of note was an example of a military grade plasma rifle – more compact and powerful than the sport model I carried. I set mine down and picked up the new one. There weren’t any charges in it, but it was a much more durable and powerful weapon than the first one.
“Some of this I claim as a . . . as a duly recognized regional colonial administrator, namely, the Count Palatine of the Magelaw. These things were taken from my people,” I said, as I examined the rifle. It was nearly pristine. “I am taking them back.”
“And we’re taking many other things, too,” Lilastien informed her. “As per the Council’s request. We shall be judicious, but the need is great and . . . and, well, I’m not asking for your permission. I’m asking for your acceptance.”
Rolof put a hand on Ameras’ shoulder, and that seemed to calm her a bit.
“Then take it,” she sighed. “I have failed in my duty, as my father did before me. I will go before the council and resign my position.” Her long ears drooped depressingly as she spoke, and she looked at the ground.
“Oh, stop that,” I insisted, as if I was addressing my own daughter. “You did nothing wrong. If the last few days has taught me anything it’s that most people do the best they can with the situation they’re presented with, and it’s usually not their fault. Sometimes it is, but often it is not. You discharged your duty honorably, to the best of your ability. And now we can use these things to help recover the molopor,” I reminded her.
“This is not how this is supposed to work, Minalan,” she said, her eyes wide with sadness.
“You’ve been overtaken by events,” I suggested. “As Lilastien says, you should just accept it. Even help us. We could use your help.”
Rolof studied me carefully. Then he recognized . . . something, and gasped.
“You . . . you had congress with the Yith!” he whispered.
“Yes,” Lilastien agreed, calmly. “Minalan and I both did. Last night. He almost did not survive. But that is a discussion for another time. Now is not the time to engage in excited behavior. Now is the time—”
She was interrupted by the sound of my wife engaging in excited behavior: Alya’s voice was screaming hysterically.
I flew out of the room, grasping for the new rifle that hung from my shoulder automatically, forgetting it had no charges. It turned out I didn’t need them. Alya was standi
ng in one of the larger chambers, where she was pointing at a great stone cask, the lid slightly askew.
I recognized that cask, I realized. Indeed, there were two dead and desiccated bodies in front of it, one with its broad skull caved in, one who had been strangled.
I also recognized the substance the cask was made of: jacasta. Umank’s memory informed me of the importance of the prized stone as a highly coveted magical insulator. It was what the Karshak were delving for when they came upon the Beldurrazeko
Alya was standing between the two ancient corpses, staring in horror at the cask.
“What is it?” I demanded, as the others came in behind me.
She said something in a language I didn’t know. That frightened me.
But Lilastien apparently understood what she had said. She looked confused, at first, and then glanced at the cask.
“No!” she said, in a whisper. “No! No, they didn’t!” she said, her own face twisted up in horror.
“What?” demanded Tyndal, who was standing with a drawn sword at the door of the room.
I walked forward to join Lilastien. We looked at each other a moment and knew that this was important. I took one side of the great stone lid, and she took the other. With a great heave we removed the lid to the cask and stared at the thing within.
It was round, dark, and had a rough organic pattern on its surface. Lilastien fell to her knees in shock, as if she’d seen one before. Perhaps she had.
I hadn’t seen one, of course. No one on Callidore had seen one for eons. But I knew it from its description – at least, Prince Maralathus knew, as his friends in the Met Sakinsa grove had told him of it repeatedly. It was just as they had described it, to the point where I was as certain as Lilastien what lay before us.
It was the last egg of the last Celestial Mother.
And the Alka Alon had hidden it from them . . . and the rest of Callidore.
Chapter Forty- Seven
The Stolen Hope of the World
The nighttime stars in the Desolation of Anghysbel are beautiful, in the summer sky.
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