The Traveller's Stone

by S J Howland

  ‘I said some light, not the sun,’ hissed Len.

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Ollie, and the light went out, plunging them into darkness again. Xander blinked rapidly; there were several glowing afterimages flickering in front of his eyeballs. One of them lifted and bobbed over towards them, and it took Xander a couple more blinks to realise that it was Len’s glowstone.

  ‘Here,’ said Ollie, sounding apologetic. ‘I saw it on the floor.’

  Len took it from him rather ungraciously. ‘I’m just amazed that you weren’t blinded like the rest of us,’ she said waspishly.

  Xander saw Ollie bristle and stepped in before they could start bickering again. ‘Shouldn’t we get on with it before someone comes to investigate the strange noises and lights?’ he suggested.

  Ollie satisfied himself by pulling a face at his cousin and then headed off towards the stairs. They had come out on one of the iron-railed balconies at the back of the hall and there were several spiral staircases to descend before they stood on the level again. Even trying hard to walk quietly, their footsteps on the metal stairs still rang out in the huge echoing hall. They couldn’t see anything beyond the faint circle of light thrown by the glowstone, and subconsciously all three walked close together, their eyes straining into the darkness surrounding them.

  ‘D’you think it would be faster if we separate?’ whispered Len.

  ‘Not really, since you have the only light,’ retorted Ollie, obviously trying to retaliate after his cousin’s earlier sarcasm.

  Len turned and glared at him.

  ‘Look!’ she said, with incautious loudness. They all cringed as her voice re-echoed around the Hall. ‘Look…look…look.’

  ‘Let’s just stick together and get through this as fast as possible,’ said Xander, when the echoes had finally died away.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Len, sounding rather subdued. ‘And I was thinking that actually we’d better find where that archive is; the one that holds the earliest records. The books we had before were full of footnotes referring back to older references.’

  Xander nodded in agreement and Len led the way over to their left, to a little nook by the wall where a large search terminal rose from the desk. Someone had left a pile of folders next to the keyboard, and Len gathered them up and moved them to one side before sitting down before the terminal. She handed the glowstone to Ollie and then began to type, her fingers almost blurring over the keys. Again, Xander and Ollie leant over her shoulder as the screen flickered with words and figures, too quickly for them to keep up. Len paused, with a small huff of frustration, and then continued tapping away for another moment, before she sat back in her chair and glared at the screen.

  ‘Is anything the matter?’ asked Ollie, unnecessarily. It was more than clear that there was indeed something wrong.

  Len gestured to the terminal with an aggravated frown.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ she said. ‘Every single reference to ‘ancient blood’ and ‘an enemy’ together leads back to documents in the oldest collection of records, all of which were historically stored in Archive 6, which used to open out of the main Hall.’

  ‘Used to?’ asked Xander, with a bad feeling beginning to grow in his stomach.

  ‘Used to,’ confirmed Len gloomily. She scrolled the screen up to the start of an article and pointed. ‘Read for yourself.’

  Xander and Ollie both leant forward. ‘The Halls of Records have remained largely intact for thousands of years, expanding whenever additional archiving was required and consistently well-funded by the Council of Twelve. However, it has not entirely escaped catastrophe. In a most unfortunate event, lightning struck the Halls during an unusually damaging July storm, causing Archive 6 to burn to the ground with the loss of many irreplaceable documents and records,’ read Ollie out loud. He looked up at Len and Xander. ‘You’re kidding!’

  Xander shook his head, disappointment pounding inside him. Everywhere they turned, access to the information he so desperately needed was withheld from him, if not by uncommunicative hobgoblins, then from inconvenient natural disasters.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ he growled in frustration. ‘After all of this, we can’t even get the records we need. They were all destroyed centuries ago. Now what do we do?’

  ‘Xander, you’re doing it again,’ Len said sharply.

  Xander looked at her and she gestured over his shoulder. Previously unnoticed in the dim light, and in their preoccupation with the research terminal, was another of those worn stone shelves butting out from the wall and above it was a smooth square of paler material. Lights were now flickering across the square, getting faster and faster until they almost began to look like letters.

  ‘It’s one of those old terminals,’ said Ollie, as they all stared at what was clearly now a partially functioning screen. ‘What’s it doing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Xander, slowly. ‘I didn’t even touch this one.’

  As if his voice was a trigger, the stone flickered even more wildly, and then suddenly blanked before brightening into pearlescent silver. Two words appeared and flashed in the middle of the square.

  ‘Login accepted?’ said Xander, blankly. He looked at Ollie and Len. ‘What login?’

  They both shook their heads, eyes glued to the stone. ‘Look,’ said Len. ‘It’s flickering again.’

  ‘Maybe it’s some kind of glitch?’ suggested Ollie.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Len, but she did not sound convinced. ‘It’s doing something else.’

  The two words vanished, and the screen flickered again before resolving into more words.

  ‘Seed of the ancient blood stand forth,’ read out Len. She twisted to stare at Xander, her eyes wide. Xander just gazed at the screen, a chill running down his back as he looked at the words which were still shining faintly.

  ‘It’s talking about you, Xander,’ Len said in a hushed voice.

  Ollie fumbled in his pocket for a piece of paper as the screen flickered, and then hurriedly scribbled down the words. He was only just in time, as the screen flashed and went blank.

  ‘What does that even mean?’ he asked, but Len shushed him.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing. ‘There’s something else coming.’

  Another sentence emerged from the flashes: ‘Only the stars can lead the way.’

  They were hardly breathing now; the only sound was Ollie’s pencil frantically scribbling on his paper. There was another flash from the stone, parts of letters appearing and disappearing, before words formed again across the stone: ‘The marks of the kin stand guard eternal.’

  After another interminable moment of flickering, while Xander bit his lip with the tension, slowly one more sentence began to form: ‘Rock upon the water where the power lies.’

  Even as Ollie finished scribbling the screen blanked, as if it could no longer maintain sufficient power to remain alight. All three of them stared at it, as if they expected it to switch back on again but it remained quiescent, just another worn-looking stone in the wall. Finally, Len let out a breath.

  ‘What just happened?’ she demanded.

  Xander sat back limply in his chair, looking down at the piece of paper with those strange, enigmatic sentences. He shook his head.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ he confessed.

  In the silence, the sound of a chair scraping back was disconcertingly loud and both Xander and Len turned to stare at Ollie, as he stood up decisively.

  ‘It must be about two o’clock in the morning,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘I don’t think any of us will figure it out tonight and we’ll be dead tomorrow unless we get some sleep. C’mon, let’s head back, and we’ll try and work out what it all means when we’re less sleep deprived.’

  Rather reluctantly, Xander nodded. Ollie’s words made sense, but he had an irrational fear that the ancient terminal might start spewing out more mysterious sentences while he was not there to see them. He glanced over at the terminal but it gave no sign it had ever been more than a pale
stone in the ancient wall. He turned to follow Len back up to the balcony with a plaintive sigh. There was a great deal of vent crawling to get through before they got home.

  Chapter Nine

  None of them were up early the next morning, and Mrs Stanton eyed them all thoughtfully as they trailed one by one into the kitchen looking for breakfast.

  ‘I would ask why you’re all looking like something the cat dragged in, but I probably don’t want to know, do I?’ she asked crisply. Ollie looked up, his eyes wide with feigned incomprehension, and she shook her head at him. ‘Don’t even try, Oliver,’ she said, and Ollie flushed guiltily.

  Len was quiet, staring into space as she ate, and Xander was certain she was mulling over the strange messages from the ancient terminal. He himself had been unable to think about anything else from the moment he had woken, blearily blinking away the midmorning sunlight.

  After their late breakfast, the three of them foregathered in the boys’ room and bent over Ollie’s scrap of paper, debating what it could mean.

  ‘Well, the first part is obvious,’ said Ollie again, after an hour of vigorous and rather repetitive discussions. ‘The hobgoblins said they could feel the seed of the ancient blood in you, and you’re ‘standing forth’ because you’ve come here to Haven.’

  ‘Maybe,’ allowed Xander. ‘That sounds like it could make sense.’

  Len lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling and tapping her lip with one finger. ‘That’s all very well, for the umpteenth time, but what about the rest of it? It makes no sense whatsoever.’ She sat up with a sudden glint in her eyes. ‘Maybe we need to head back to the Halls tonight to check the system using those sentences as search terms?’

  Xander groaned at the idea of more crawling through vents, but before he could speak, Ollie chimed in. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said firmly. ‘Gran has definitely rumbled that we were doing something late last night. There’s no way we’ll get away with it again.’

  Len pulled a face, but she didn’t disagree with Ollie’s assessment. Another long silence descended that was only interrupted by the sound of a bell clanging from downstairs.

  ‘Lunch,’ declared Ollie, rolling off his bed with an enthusiasm undimmed by only having had his breakfast an hour and a half before. ‘Come on, we’ll figure something out afterwards. It’s always easier to work things out on a full stomach.’

  ‘You would know,’ put in Len, as they all headed downstairs.

  They had intended to continue their discussion after lunch, but Mrs Stanton had other ideas.

  ‘Neither of you two have finished your civics project this term, have you?’ she said, in a tone that indicated that it was not really a question. ‘You can do something useful this afternoon and get it done. Take Xander along with you,’ she added. ‘It would probably be interesting to him to see how Haven is governed.’

  ‘If by interesting you mean utterly tedious and relentlessly boring, then yes it would,’ muttered Len, then threw up both hands in surrender as her grandmother pinned her with a trenchant look. ‘We’re going, right now,’ she muttered, and ducked out of the room.

  Contrary to Len’s opinion, the question of how this strange place ran quite intrigued Xander and was a welcome break from impenetrable messages. They headed over to Fountain Square again, and Xander could not help staring wistfully over at the Halls of Records. It was frustrating being so close, but he was under no illusions about their chances of getting in again under Primilla Pennicott’s glaring eye. Ollie pulled a sympathetic face at him, his thoughts obviously running along the same lines.

  ‘Nothing we can do about it right now, mate,’ he said with a shrug, before angling over to another of the massive, official-looking buildings that ringed the central square. ‘C’mon. This is the Council Chamber. It’s supposed to be one of the first places ever built here. Our civics instructor says it’s at least five thousand years old, and that we’re absolutely not to touch anything.’ With a quick sideways grin at Xander, he led the way into the chamber.

  As with so many of the stately edifices around the square, the Council Chamber sat atop a wide set of steps made from the same beautiful golden stone as the buildings, where the wear of many feet showed their antiquity. Following Ollie, and with Len trailing behind, Xander walked through the great doors into an ornate entrance hall. There was a large reception desk placed in the centre, manned by several people in formal green robes with wide silvery bands around the neck and sleeves. Each one wore a badge with their name on, pinned to the front of their robe. Two of them were busy with other people and so Ollie headed towards the third, a white-haired man with a wrinkled face and ‘Pritchard’ printed on his badge. As they approached, he looked up with a gap-toothed smile.

  ‘Standing for office or here for civics class?’ he asked them cheerfully, and his eyes twinkled as Ollie held up a lime green exercise book. ‘Civics it is.’

  Both Ollie and Len passed over their books, and he efficiently stamped them both, glancing at Xander as he passed them back to their owners, but not making any comment on his lack of a book. Ducking out from behind the desk, he pointed them towards a winding staircase in the back of the hall, tucked away in a corner next to the row of closed wooden double doors which ran along the wall. From behind them came a faint but continuous murmuring noise and Pritchard held up a hand in warning.

  ‘The session has already started so you’ll need to be quiet,’ he said, with a wink. ‘Head on up to the Visitors’ Gallery, and you’ll get a good view. You can leave whenever you want, as long as you don’t disturb anyone.’ With a friendly parting smile, he went back to the desk where someone else was now waiting for him.

  The staircase was broad, but it wound sharply upwards and there were no other doors until they reached the top, where a lobby led them to another wooden door. Ollie edged it open, and they entered a large balcony, full of rows of chairs but empty today except for a small figure at the front, scribbling in a notebook with a stub of pencil. Xander smiled as he recognised Petros, the little engineer from the Nexus, who glanced up as they came in and beamed at them. As he edged his way along the row, Xander looked over the side of the balcony into the room below and stopped short, staring in awe.

  The chamber spread out beneath him, its walls of rich golden stone inset with huge painted wooden panels. Some panels were decorated with intricate and beautiful designs, while others showed Haven’s landscapes or what Xander assumed were historical scenes. Portraits of distinguished-looking men and women hung prominently around the walls, looking down on the chamber, and these were interspersed with several deep-set alcoves, each one holding a statue of a person in sumptuous robes. As Xander’s gaze continued upwards, he saw that more painted panels and carved woodwork decorated the lofty ceiling.

  The chamber itself was circular, with three quarters of the circumference laid out in an amphitheatre-like arrangement of rows of green leather benches, set behind narrow tables ringing each level. Half of that area was currently empty, and the rest was filled with groups of people wearing various guild insignias, some scribbling at paperwork while others appeared to be chatting.

  The remainder of the chamber was taken up by a large stone dais on which sat an enormous, polished wooden table. Well-spaced along the length of the table were twelve chairs, each one with an ornately carved back rising above the head of the person sitting on it. The largest and most impressive was in the centre, occupied by an elderly man with thinning grey hair who was leaning to one side as an aide whispered in his ear. In front of each of the people sitting at the table was an elegant printed nameplate, and Xander’s eyes flicked across each of the famous names of the Founding Families: Lisle, Larcher, Peverell, Angove, Ingram, Melville, Larcius, Latimer, Blount, Raynott and Hackett, with Ferrars in the centre before the grey-haired man.

  Awed, Xander sat down in the nearest chair and gazed around him. There was something timeless about this beautiful and ancient building, a monument to a civilisation which str
etched back into the dawn of history, and Xander leaned over the railing as he tried to take it all in. Ollie nudged him in the ribs, leaning forward to whisper.

  ‘That’s Barton Ferrars,’ he said, pointing down to the centre chair. ‘He’s been Chief Councillor for ages now, almost twenty years.’

  As Xander looked more closely, he began to recognise some faces from the Solstice Ball. The elegant pale-haired man with the nasty sneer was sitting behind a marker stating ‘Melville’, while next to him was Perrin Thorne’s brother-in-law, dark-haired Felix Larcius. Xander also recognised the distinguished face and silver hair of Horace Peverell as he eyed Kirkland Blount, who appeared to be dozing. Several of the other councillors were taking the opportunity to confer with their staffs.

  Suddenly, Ferrars leant forward and banged a gavel sharply down in front of him. Blount started and sat up, looking around him in some confusion. The crispness of the sound, even all the way up on the balcony, surprised Xander; the acoustics of this building were obviously remarkable.

  ‘Back in session,’ Ferrars boomed in a surprisingly loud voice for his frail figure.

  Melville and Larcius ignored him for a moment, carrying on a quick, muttered conversation before deigning to turn back to the table. Ferrars continued on, announcing, ‘Mr Simm will now address the Council.’

  Petros stopped scribbling and peered over the edge of the balcony. Xander followed his gaze and instantly recognised Simm’s over-dressed form strutting across the floor in front of the dais. He mounted a small podium and turned with a flourish to face the councillors at the table. His outfit today was burnt orange with a lemon yellow cravat and sparkling buttons which flashed every time he moved, finished off with another pair of high-heeled boots, and a self-important smirk. Just behind him stood the squat form of Alan Latchet, gripping a pile of folders and watching Simm with fixed attention.