Loran shouted for the men to fall back. They retreated to their second position while the eidola rain continued, fleeing past the creatures arising from the sands. The soldiers reconvened in a narrower part of the gorge, where only five horsemen could ride abreast and the walls rose to sky-scraping heights.
Not all of the men made it.
Those with Merdanti weapons crowded forward anew, but too soon the enemy approached—before his men could wrap their wits around the atrocity of the creatures’ existence, long before they’d reclaimed their lines, or their courage.
The eidola piled against the choke point in wave after wave of chittering, mindless malice. He watched his men falling like sticks swept away in the surf.
Gydryn felt ill.
Every time a soldier carrying a Merdanti blade succumbed, another scrambled to claim the blade and take his place. But it was like watching a beast with its fanged snout snapping, claws raking, chewing through his men.
That’s when Loran uttered a curse that Gydryn had never heard him use.
The king followed his duke’s gaze upwards to find more lines of the creatures, midnight black against the gloaming sky. Somehow they’d gained the ridges above them.
Gydryn did pray then.
Sixty-two
“Dare to be irreverent and bold.”
–Excerpted from the writings of Epiphany’s Prophet
Ean stood gazing across the canyon lands of western Avatar transplanted into Shadow—compliments of Rafael.
The view appeared as if a massive swath of land had been sliced off and spread anew inside a glass tube. Rather than viewing a flat expanse to the horizon, the land curved upwards before it reached...actually, it had no horizon. It curled back up and over itself, arching over Ean’s head.
Albeit...miles over Ean’s head.
He could see into every crevice, every slot, every sinuous trail. When he walked, his steps covered leagues, the world tube rolled beneath his steps, and the landscape shifted to accommodate his shifting view. He was a giant striding the land.
This is how Rafael had reconstructed Shail’s map of the Quorum temples of Avatar.
Faint bluish-silver lines crisscrossed the land in a glowing latticework—the Greater Reticulation as it applied to that section of Alorin’s world grid. Ean had used one of Arion’s magnetic resonance patterns to map Avatar’s present-day network of nodes and welds. Rafael had then affixed this grid to his map to show the nodes’ actual locations on the arching landscape.
Ean admitted there were some definite perks to making friends with Warlocks.
“The weld should’ve been there,” Ean pointed to a depression at the lowest point of a canyon; the entire amphitheater of rock chimneys appeared arranged around that spot. “But Shail’s map has it there,” and he pointed towards a rugged section of the arid mountains where a net of leis lay tangled. “If the weld has truly fallen askew of the grid—and I trust Shail’s assessment to that end—then it’s got to be locked up in that mess of leis.”
Rafael walked them towards the mountains. The view of the world shifted miles beneath each step. He stopped close to the tangle of leis superimposed over the rugged landscape.
If a vast net had been pinned over those mountains, and then something very heavy was dropped into the center of the net, dragging the whole of it down, stretching it where it could stretch and ripping free sections that wouldn’t give...the net would’ve appeared very much like that tangle of leis.
“These leis all appear frayed,” Rafael remarked. “I doubt they’re sustaining much magnetic flow. How will we reach the weld?”
Ean traced his chin with his thumb and studied the ley lines magnetically supporting the net of leis. Two longer lines extended out from the tangle. One magnetic line crossed northward into the desert, and the other ran westward through the mountains.
“Both of these ley lines connect to welds upstream of the weld of our interest,” Ean said. He followed the ley line to the north. Three steps turned the world beneath him, and a hill crowned by a large walled city came into view. The ley line vanished beneath that hill.
“Well, that’s out. As deep inside the city as the weld would have to be, it’s probably attached to some Furie’s palace and more of a hassle to get to than it’s worth.”
Ean returned to the tangled hub of leis and then followed the other ley line to the west. Mountains rolled beneath his steps and the sea came into view. Ean could just make out the star of the weld point glowing beneath the azure waters.
Rafael joined his side. Deyjiin, shedding off his wings, formed a squall across the sea. “This weld appears to be many miles off shore. It may be under a hundred fathoms of seawater.”
Ean flashed him a smile. “I’m game if you are.”
Getting there was the easy part.
Using the trick Pelas had taught him, Ean magnetized to the ley lines of the world grid and skipped from one to the next. The real world of Alorin whirled beneath him in a blur.
In that part of his mind not occupied with magnetic induction, Ean thought of all the things Pelas had taught him in their short time together and cursed himself for once being so shortsighted that he’d imagined they could win the game without him. He swore never to doubt Isabel again.
Then he hooked to the next ley line, magnetized the connection and hauled himself across the vast, empty landscape. Mountains and desert flew past in a wash of bleached color, and he wasted no more time pondering past mistakes.
He soon reached the approximate section of deep blue sea where the weld lay hidden beneath the waves. Ean made a bubble of the fifth, cast forth an anchor of intent and plunged towards the weld.
The ocean closed around him.
As he sank in a rush, the waters shifted from aqua through darker blue, until all became as midnight, and still he continued his descent encased in a silent, protective bubble of air.
Yet while the waters were as pitch, the weld swiftly grew brighter in Ean’s mind. Its gravity became increasingly more potent, like a sun drawing him through the darkness of watery space.
The wielder in Ean minded this business with diligent attention—keeping hold on the anchor he’d magnetized to the weld, maintaining spatial relationships between magnetic flows, holding the pattern of his shield to keep air around himself—but the twenty-year-old in him recognized the incredible thrill of the moment: of having imagined himself capable of such bold originality with the lifeforce and proving, in fact, that he was; of plummeting hundreds of leagues beneath the sea without fear...
All right, perhaps with a tinge of thirteen-hells-Ean! shouted in Sebastian’s voice, but knowing the while that he really could do this. That he was doing it.
He had just enough time for these thoughts before the weld became a star in his awareness.
An instant later, light flooded into being all around him, and Ean stood immersed in a river of gilded light on the Pattern of the World.
He oriented himself to his location using second strand patterns, and with the one anchor on the weld behind him, he cast the next anchor long on the current.
He sensed a lull as the anchor reached the mid-point of induction between welds, then it was flying again, being drawn in now by the weld of his specific interest.
The moment that anchor connected, Ean released his first anchor, and the second weld hauled him instantaneously into itself.
Accomplishment electrified his breath as he stepped off the Pattern into darkness.
I’m in, he told Rafael. He immediately perceived the Warlock coalescing behind him. An instant later, wielder’s lamps flared to life.
The unearthly light revealed an obsidian-walled node chamber, broken in half. On one side, the floor sloped severely, pitching the surviving columns at odd angles to strike against the wall...or, once-ceiling, as it were.
The stone floor appeared a choppy sea of broken tiles, glinting breaks atop waves of dark dirt. Across the long room, the lintels of an archway sat askew, op
ening into an irregular maw of deeper darkness.
I’ll look for the Archives. Rafael dissipated into the aether.
The prince studied the room.
Though much of it lay in ruins—doubtless a result of the temple’s weld being ripped out of alignment with the world grid—the room’s warding patterns maintained their integrity. In fact, Ean perceived that some cohesiveness having to do with the wards themselves was all that was holding the room together.
Ean could feel those patterns of warding seeking him—ancient patterns, sentient and malicious.
He let the first one taste of him, that he might better taste of it. The pattern darted a feint that stung Ean’s skin and numbed his mind, even while barbed tentacles struck for the tender flesh of his thoughts.
But Ean’s experience with Dore Madden had taught him to anticipate layered attacks from sentient patterns, so he set a snare for it in return.
Those barbed tentacles caught on his inner shield and snarled there, tangled in filaments of deyjiin, which wrapped themselves about the pattern and rendered its tentacles inert, enabling Ean to study it.
The sentient pattern was primarily inverteré, a convex design that wove the fourth strand to obfuscate thought and the first to numb the body’s responses in preparation for a killing blow. Its final tentacle held a scorpion fang of the first strand that would stop the heart.
Ean reverted the pattern to its native positive and set the whole thing to unworking. Then he moved on to study the next one. By the time he’d reached the angled opening that led deeper into the temple, he’d unworked a dozen such patterns.
He ducked beneath the slanted archway and summoned the fourth to light the corridor. To his right, the floor fell off an abrupt edge, while to the left, the passage angled upwards at a steep incline.
Ean summoned another pattern, and the second strand traced a ghostly kinesis through the temple, exhuming the millions of footsteps that had walked those stones millennia ago, outlining a shadowed route through empty halls and twisted passages.
As the layout of the temple gradually traced itself in Ean’s mind, he saw three floors of undulating, jagged corridors, following the uneven line of the mountain arm which the temple had broken across.
Ean studied the layout, seeking spaces large enough to have housed a library. Finding one, he started off in that direction, when—
The pattern of consequence flared in his mind, and a new branching path speared like lightning through the design.
Ean froze.
In one breathless glance, he knew whose path had just changed and how it had changed—if not yet why.
He also saw how other Players’ paths intersected it and what these changes might mean to the game...if he could somehow influence a few tenuous connections to grow towards one another.
This Player’s thread had long been obscured to him, fogged as it was by what he’d believed to be a Malorin’athgul’s shadow; but in this new unfurling, Ean saw clearly the actions driving the thread...and what he needed to do to unbalance the field at a whole new order of magnitude.
Oh...he prayed Tanis would forgive him.
In the same moment that Ean realized what he had to do, Rafael’s thought reached him.
Ean, I’ve found the archives.
Yes, I know. Ean closed his eyes and exhaled a slow breath. Decision resounded ominously in his thoughts. I’m coming.
***
The weirwarden Jaro Orulan, formerly of Vest, currently a kingdom unto himself, hung in limbo between metamorphic phases, somewhere between deionization and reconstitution, half transient crystalline refraction, half...something else.
As he hung from the arch of the world grid by one gauntleted fist, his refractions fibrillated between sine waves oscillating in harmonic frequencies at positive integer multiples of the fundamental; that is, he perceived the harmonic connectivity between the ley lines of welds, nodes and leis, for each of them vibrated at differing but constant wavelengths in octaves above and below each other.
No. Octaves wasn’t the right term. The harmonic factor in the variance of the waves was closer to twenty-three decibels, but the Sorceresy used octave to specify the distances between frequencies anyway—probably just to be obstinate, or to obfuscate, or for any of their other fethed up reasons for deciding things.
Dangling in refraction with wavelengths bombarding him, Jaro metaphorically sucked on a tooth as he thought about the Agasi lad, who was such a curiosity, and who he thanked greatly for the distraction that had enabled him to get to the Furie’s weld chamber; while another part of his mind nursed a faint irritation at how long it had taken him to best the seven guards protecting the weld, and a third part continued seeking the weld of his singular interest.
Refraction did that. Bounced you all up and down the harmonics of time.
Then, finally getting a fix on the weld in the Shaido temple, he dropped eight octaves on the harmonic arch and caught himself on the ley line of a node. The line’s magnetism pulled him up roughly, and hard, like falling off a cliff wall to be caught by an anchor—save that Jaro dangled from his magnetic handhold on the ley line instead of by a harness.
All the Nodefinders Jaro had ever talked with conceived of the world grid as two-dimensional, to wit: a river flowing across the earth, meeting other rivers, streams and tributaries, but essentially flat.
As a weirwarden of Vest, Jaro had learned to navigate the world grid in three dimensions—well, four, if he took into account the necessity of phase-shifting, the physics of which his masters at the Sorceresy refused to explain to anyone’s satisfaction, probably because they had no fethen clue how it worked.
He supposed the welds, nodes and leis could be conceived of as a two-dimensional pattern to be traveled using anchors. But Jaro didn’t travel the Pattern of the World. He traveled between it.
The welds vibrated at the lowest frequencies and thereby established the fattest ley lines. Coincidentally, or perhaps consequently, they also channeled the most energy, albeit more slowly. These formed the exterior magnetic grid.
Inside this grid, bound to the weld points, the ley lines of the nodes were smaller and vibrated at higher frequencies. There were more of them, and energy traveled faster through them. They formed the honeycomb within the globe.
The smallest leis webbed throughout everything else, vibrating at the highest decibels, their wavelengths shorter, thinner, faster yet channeling less energy, binding everything else together; the fascia of the world grid.
Leis acted as springboards for a weirwarden, bouncing him from one ley line to another. They could even propel him to an entirely new harmonic arch. Jaro was ever either bouncing and climbing or dropping and swinging through the grid, running glissandos along ascending or descending wavelengths.
Now Jaro hung suspended in refraction on the weld line while he assessed the physical node chamber. Finding it empty of lifeforms of any sort, especially the kind likely to be antagonistic towards him, he dropped off the harmonic arch and phase-shifted into the framework of solidity most people called reality but which Jaro with derisive humor called stasis.
With the echo of his arrival still bouncing off the broken walls, Jaro spun out a cubic webwork of magnetic points and charged the grid with a thought. This resonated back to him a fairly accurate view of the temple’s interior spaces.
The place looked like a drawing from a lunatic’s brain, with rooms and passages all askew of each other, stacked haphazardly up and down the sides of a mountain without any sort of nod to structural decency.
The left half of the temple had been crammed into a ravine, while the broken bone of the right half hung sideways over a cliff. The walls of those rooms had become their floors and ceilings.
The weld itself was holding the temple together, somehow charging all of the wardings and other patterns scattered throughout the temple into a magnetic stasis field.
Well, it wasn’t the worst of such places he’d been in.
Jaro
searched his mental grid for spaces large enough to have housed the archives. Then he phase-shifted out of stasis and vanished down through the broken floor.
***
Ean stood staring at the sacred archives belonging to the Quorum of the Sixth Truth, hardly able to comprehend what he was seeing.
He kept envisioning one of those geometry puzzles that Trell had excelled at but which his math tutor had generally assigned to punish him, where a cube stood suspended inside a sphere inside another cube, and he was expected to sort out the volume and surface area of each object from the inauspicious postulation of x equals y plus seven to the nth power or some equally absurd and frustrating equation.
The cavernous room that housed the archives hung lengthwise off the side of a cliff. Ean had magnetized himself to the original floor, which had become a wall, so his form angled out over the dark abyss. He was keenly aware of gravity’s pull beneath him.
Though the archive’s walls had become its ceiling and, presumably somewhere far below, its floor, the stacks themselves were floating in midair, preserved in a gyroscopic stasis field, rotating slowly on a gravitational breeze.
How they had done it, he was only beginning to comprehend by sifting the many patterns in play. Why they had done it was perhaps more germane to when—for surely it had been a last desperate attempt, as their temple was being ripped out of time and space, to protect the sacred history of their order.
Rafael stood beneath the floating archives, staring up at the stacks. His body was also angled out of the wall, which, even though he stood lateral to Ean’s own view, still made Ean feel slightly dizzy.
“This is an interesting conundrum.” Rafael walked from one wall around the floating stacks and onto another vertical wall, trailing his long wings behind him and increasing Ean’s spatial disorientation. “We cannot reach the books for the field, and if we disrupt the field to reach the books, the entire mass will collapse into the abyss.”
He pressed a gilded finger beneath his chin while his brow assumed an introspective arch. The raven flames of his hair danced languorously on a nonexistent breeze, as if for self-amusement. “I cannot imagine the Quorum planned it this way.”
The Sixth Strand Page 103