Percepliquis

by Michael J. Sullivan

  Words were engraved in a band encircling the room and could also be found on recessed plaques, yet Arista’s training in the Old Speech was verbal, not written. Unable to decipher the meanings, she did spot the words Techylor and Cenzlyor.

  A majestic stair gave access to the gallery above and she climbed it. At the top were a series of doors. Some rooms lay open and she spied small chambers, living quarters with beds, shelves, and closets. Lantern light spilled from one.

  She found Hadrian standing near the bed, staring up at the opposite wall as if entranced. He was looking at a suit of armor, a shield, and a set of weapons. The armor was not at all like the traditional heavy breastplates, pauldrons, vambraces, and tassets of typical knight attire. This was one piece and appeared as a long formal coat, but made from leaves of gold-colored metal. It hung from a display with a great plumed helm like the head of an eagle resting on top.

  “Planning on moving in?” she asked. “I got a little worried when you didn’t come back.”

  “Sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “I didn’t hear any shouts. Is everything all right?”

  “Gaunt is sleeping, Myron reading, Magnus is arguing with Alric, Royce still hasn’t returned, and Mauvin wandered off. And what are you doing?”

  She sat down on the bed, which promptly collapsed under her weight, issuing a cloud of dust.

  “You all right?” he asked, helping her up.

  “Yes,” she said, coughing and waving her hand before her face. “I guess the wood rotted over the years.”

  “This is it,” he said.

  “What?” She brushed the dust from her robe.

  “This is Jerish’s room, Jerish Grelad, the Teshlor Knight who went with the emperor’s son into hiding.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The shield,” he said, and pointed across the room at the heater shield hanging on the wall. On it was an emblem of twisted and knotted vines around a star supported by a crescent moon. Hadrian reached back and drew forth the long spadone sword. He held it up so that she could see the small engraving at the center of the pommel that matched the one on the shield. Then he stood up and crossed the room. As he did, she noticed for the first time that the suit of armor had no sword, but there was a sheath of gold and silver. Hadrian fitted the tip into the opening and let the great sword slide home. “You’ve been parted a long time.”

  “Doesn’t quite match anymore,” Arista said, noticing how the sword was marred to a dull finish.

  “It has seen a thousand years of use,” Hadrian said, defending it. He looked back at the armor. “The sword was the only thing he took. I suppose he couldn’t expect to hide very well dressed in shiny gold armor.” His fingers played over the gleaming surface of the metal.

  “Looks like it would fit,” she said.

  He smirked. “What would I do with it?”

  She shrugged. “Still, it seems like you should have it. Goes with the sword, anyway.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  He lifted the coat. “So light,” he said, stunned.

  Arista looked back down at the bed and, as she did, noticed a small object—a figurine carved from a bit of smoky quartz. She picked it up and rubbed it clean. It was a statuette of three people, a boy flanked by two men, one in leaf armor and the other in a robe. The likeness of Esrahaddon was remarkable, except that this figure had hands. Whoever the artist was had a rare gift.

  “Interested in what he looked like?” she said, and held out the figurine.

  “He was young,” Hadrian replied, taking the statuette and turning it over in his hands. “A good face, though.” Then his eyes shifted and he smiled and she knew he was looking at Esrahaddon. “So this must be Nevrik, the heir. Doesn’t look like Gaunt, does it?”

  “How many generations are there in a thousand years?” she asked. “Funny that he left this. It’s so beautiful you would have thought he’d taken it with him, or at least…” She paused and glanced around the room. Except for the expected silt of a thousand years, the room was neat and ordered, the bed made, drawers and cabinets closed, a pair of boots standing side by side at the foot of the bed.

  “Did you… straighten up in here at all?” she asked.

  He looked at her curiously and appeared as if he might laugh. “No,” he told her.

  “It’s just that it’s so tidy.”

  “What, because he was a knight you think—Okay, so there is Elgar, but he’s more of an exception. No one is as messy as he is, but—”

  “That’s not what I meant. It’s just that after Jerish left—after he took Nevrik and ran—I would have thought they would have searched this room, tore it apart looking for clues, but nothing looks out of place. And this figurine—don’t you think they would have taken it? Why didn’t they ransack the room? It’s been a thousand years. You’d think they would have gotten around to it by now, unless… maybe they never got the chance.”

  “What do you—”

  The blare of a horn blowing from somewhere outside the guildhall reached them, followed by the distant beat of drums.

  “What’s happening?” Hadrian asked, returning with Arista to the front of the hall, where Alric was once again at the windows. He carried the armor in a bundle and the shield over his back.

  Alric shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t see a thing out there. Did you find an exit?”

  “No, everything is sealed by rubble. So on the one hand, we’re safe, but on the other, trapped.”

  “I think more are arriving out there,” Alric mentioned.

  “Get your head back from the window before you catch an arrow,” Royce told him, returning from a side hall Arista had not taken.

  She knelt down beside Gaunt and looked over his wound. The bleeding had finally stopped, but his face was still moist despite the chill in the air.

  “Anything?” Hadrian asked.

  Royce shook his head; then he looked around, concerned. “Where’s Myron and Mauvin?”

  “This is the Teshlor Guild,” Alric said. “Mauvin has wanted to explore this since he was ten.”

  “And Myron?”

  Alric glanced at Gaunt, who looked up painfully, blinking. Then all of them turned to Magnus.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know where he went. He wandered off.”

  “I’ll look for him,” Royce said.

  “Wait.” Alric stopped him. “How are we going to get out of here?”

  “Don’t know,” Royce replied.

  Alric slumped against the front wall with a miserable look on his face. “He’s not serious, is he?”

  “You’re the king,” Gaunt said. “You tell us. You wanted to be in charge. What does your family heritage and blue-blood breeding say now? What insight has it provided you that we commoners can’t see?”

  “Shut it, Gaunt,” Mauvin ordered, trotting down the stairs.

  “There you are,” Royce said.

  “I’m just saying that he’s the king,” Gaunt went on. “He’s in charge. So far all that he’s managed is to get me bleeding to death and all of us trapped. This is a perfect chance for him to shine and prove his worth. All the other teams that came in here didn’t have a noble king to lead them. Surely he will not leave us to the same fate as they. Isn’t that right, Your Majesty?”

  “I said, shut it,” Mauvin repeated in a lower, more threatening voice. “Have you forgotten he just risked his life to help save yours?”

  Alric looked at each of them as they sat around the entrance hall in the flickering light of four lanterns, each casting four separate shadows of everything.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He peeked back out the window. “You heard the horn and the drums. There could be dozens of goblins out there by now.”

  “I doubt that,” Hadrian replied, and Alric looked hopefully at him. “I would say there were hundreds by now. Ghazel prefer uneven battles, the more one-sided, the better, as long as it is in their favor. Those horns and drums are calling all goblins within e
arshot. Yeah, I would say a couple hundred at least are gathering.”

  Alric stared at him, shocked. “But… how are we going to get out, then?”

  No one replied.

  Even Gaunt gave up his taunting and lay back down. “And I was going to be emperor.”

  “The imperial hunts were massive.” They heard Myron’s voice echo as Royce led him back. “You can see by that tapestry. Hundreds participated—thousands of animals must have been killed, and did you see the chariots?”

  “He was looking at the art,” Royce told them.

  “They were master bronze craftsmen, did you see?” the monk asked. “And this building, this is the guildhall, the knights’ guildhall. This is the very place mentioned in hundreds of books of lore, often thought to be a myth—the Hall of Techylor—and isn’t that amazing—not Teshlor at all.

  “It’s astounding, really, in all the years of reading about the Old Empire I never found anything about it, but clearly it was true. Techylor is not a combat discipline or martial art any more than Cenzlyor is a discipline of mystical arts. They’re names. Names! Techylor and Cenzlyor were the names of people who were with Novron at the first battle of the Great Elven War. The Teshlor Knights were literally the knights trained by Teshlor, or actually Techylor.”

  “This is hardly the time for studying history!” Alric snapped. “We need to find a way out, before they find a way in!”

  “I see a light,” Mauvin announced. “There’s a fire, or a torch, or some—Uh-oh.”

  “What?” Gaunt asked.

  “Well, two things, really,” the young count Pickering began. “Hadrian was right. I can only see silhouettes but—oh yeah—there’s a lot out there now—a whole lot.”

  “Second?” Hadrian asked.

  “Second, it looks like they’re setting up for flaming arrows.”

  “What good is that?” Alric asked. “This place is stone. There’s nothing to burn.”

  “Smoke,” Hadrian replied. “They’ll smoke us out.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Gaunt said.

  “Another locked room,” Hadrian said to Royce. “How many is this? I’ve lost track.”

  “Too many, really.”

  “Ideas?”

  “Only one,” the thief said, and then looked directly at Arista.

  She watched Hadrian nod.

  “No,” she said instantly. She stood up and backed away from them. “I can’t.”

  “You have to,” Royce told her.

  She was shaking her head so that her hair whipped her face, her breath short and rapid and her stomach tightening, starting to churn. “I can’t,” she insisted.

  Hadrian moved toward her slowly, as if he were trying to catch a spooked horse.

  Her hands were starting to shake. “You saw—you know what happened last time. I can’t control it.”

  “Maybe,” Hadrian told her, “but outside that door are anywhere from, I’m guessing, fifty to a few hundred Ba Ran Ghazel. All the bedtime stories, legends, and fables are true. I know firsthand, and actually, they don’t tell even half the story—no one would dare tell the real stories to children.

  “I served as a mercenary for several years in Calis. I fought for warlords in the Gur Em Dal—the jungle on the eastern end of the peninsula that the goblins took back. I’ve never spoken about what happened there, and I won’t now—honestly, I work very hard not to think about it. Those days that I lived under the jungle canopy were a nightmare.

  “The Ghazel are stronger than men, faster too, and they can see in the dark. They have sharp teeth and, if they get the chance, will hold you down and rip into the flesh of your throat or stomach. The Ghazel want nothing better than a meal of human meat. Not only are we a delicacy to them, but they also use their victims as part of their religious ceremonies. They will make a ritual out of killing us, take us alive if they can—eat us while we still breathe. They’ll drink their black cups of gurlin bog and smoke tulan leaves while we scream.

  “That door is the only way out of here. We can’t sneak out, we can’t create a diversion and hope to catch them off guard, we can’t hope for a rescue. Either you do something or we all die. It’s as simple as that.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking me to do. You don’t know what it’s like. I can’t control it. I—I don’t know what will happen. The power is—it’s—I don’t know how to describe it, but I could kill everyone. It just gets out of control, it just runs away.”

  “You can handle it.”

  “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “You can. It caught you off guard before. You know what to expect now.”

  “Hadrian, if I go too far—” She tried to imagine and realized she did not want to. There was an excitement in the thought of the power, a thrill like standing on the edge of a cliff, or playing with a sharp knife; the exhilaration came from the risk, the very real fear that she could step too far. It lured her like the still beauty of a deep lake. Even as she spoke about it, she remembered how it felt, the desire, the hunger. It called to her. “If I reach beyond—if I go too far—I might not come back.” She looked at Hadrian. “I’m scared what would happen. I don’t think I would be human anymore. I’d be lost forever.”

  He took her hands. Until he touched her, she had not realized she was shaking. His hands felt warm, strong. “You can do it,” he told her firmly. He stared into her eyes and she could not help looking back. There was peace there, a gentle understanding familiar to her now, comforting, reassuring.

  How does he do it?

  Her hands stopped shaking.

  An arrow whizzed through Mauvin’s window, just missing him. It streaked a thick dark smoke that stank of sulfur. It flew to the far wall and bounced off the stone, continuing to smolder and burn. Two more managed to find their way into the narrow slits while outside it sounded as if it were raining. Then a line of smoke began to leak in through the cracks of the door.

  “You have to try,” Hadrian told her.

  She nodded. “But I want you with me. Don’t leave me… no matter what happens.”

  “I swear I will not leave you.” His voice and the look in his eyes were so sincere, so resolute.

  Degan began to cough, and Mauvin and Alric climbed down from the stairs.

  “Everyone gather,” she told them in a soft voice, trying to keep her eyes on Hadrian. “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. Just try and stay as close as you can, and don’t you let go of me, Hadrian.”

  CHAPTER 18

  DUST AND STONE

  The smoke was growing thick and it was becoming hard to breathe as Arista remained standing still, muttering, her eyes closed, her hands twitching.

  “Is she going to do something?” Gaunt asked, and followed this with a series of coughs.

  “Give her a second,” Hadrian told him.

  As if in response, a light breeze moved within the room. Where it came from Hadrian could not tell, but it moved around the chamber, swirling and stealing away the smoke. The wind grew stronger and soon it ruffled the edges of their cloaks, slapping their hoods and spinning the dust into little whirlwinds that twirled, dancing about. All at once, the flames in the lanterns went out and the wind stopped. Everything was deathly still for a heartbeat.

  Then the front wall of the guildhall exploded.

  Arista’s robe flared brilliantly as from beyond the missing wall, Hadrian heard the cries of goblins, like a million squealing rats. The square cast in darkness for a thousand years lay revealed, illuminated as if the sun had returned to the Grand Mar. They could finally see the beauty that once had been, the city of Novron, the city of Percepliquis, the city of light.

  “Gather your things,” Arista shouted, opening her eyes, but Hadrian could tell she was not fully with them. She was breathing deep and slow, her eyes never focusing, as if blind to what was around her. She was not seeing with her eyes anymore.

  Mauvin and Alric hoisted Gaunt between them. He grunted but said nothing as he
hopped on his good leg.

  “Come,” she told them, and began to walk toward the collapsed pile that had once been a palace.

  “You’re doing great,” Hadrian told her. She showed no sign of hearing him.

  The goblins stayed back. Whether they retreated from the explosion of stone, the harsh light, or some invisible sorcery that Arista was manifesting, all Hadrian could tell was that they refused to approach.

  The party walked as a group clustered around Arista.

  “This is crazy,” Gaunt said, his voice quavering. “They’ll kill us.”

  “Don’t leave the group,” Hadrian told them.

  “They’re fitting arrows,” Mauvin announced.

  “Stay together.”

  Struggling to shield their eyes as they bent their bows, the Ghazel launched a barrage. All of the party flinched except Arista. A hundred dark shafts flew into the air, burst into flame, and vanished into streaks of smoke. More howls arose from the Ghazels’ ranks, but no more arrows flew, and now more than ever, the goblins showed no willingness to advance.

  “Find the opening!” she shouted, sounding out of breath, her tone impatient, like someone holding up heavy furniture.

  “Magnus, try and find the hollow corridor,” Hadrian barked.

  “To the left, up there, a gap. No over farther—there!”

  Royce was on it, throwing rocks back. “He’s right—there’s an opening here.”

  “Of course I’m right!” Magnus shouted.

  “Something…” Arista said dreamily.

  “What was that, Arista?” Hadrian asked. She mumbled and he did not catch the last few words. He kept his hands on her shoulders, squeezing slightly, although he was not certain if by doing so he was reassuring her or himself.

  “Something… I feel something—something fighting me.”