Beryl grunted and turned to walk away. Khari didn’t follow. “You’re not coming?”
Khari shook her head and, if anything, her expression grew even more grim. “No,” she said. “I need to speak with a man who would be king.”
* * *
Beryl took the red-glass knife, inspecting the wide body and wicked hook. The weapon looked like an elongated meat cleaver with an axe spike affixed near the end. He grunted in approval.
Farah smiled and brushed aside her long, blonde hair. “Sorry to have troubled you. The idea simply came to me after the first few failed attempts. This is thick enough to take a hit or two, but still extremely light, and razor sharp.”
Beryl grunted again. Yes, it looked unconventional, but it was a perfect replica of the weapons one of the voices in his head remembered so well. One of his own designs actually. Well, he couldn’t take the credit himself. The way the magic worked, the way the energy crackled and snapped down through the sand and melted it to glass, it was really the only way to make them.
“Make more,” Beryl found himself saying.
Farah gave him a puzzled look. “How many more?”
“As many as you can,” Beryl said, turning to leave. Memories swirled in his mind to the accompaniment of arguing voices.
Farah said something that Beryl didn’t quite hear as he left, absently scratching at the metal flakes embedded in his flesh. It was happening too quickly. History was repeating itself.
He needed to remember.
His left hand squeezed convulsively on his right forearm, hard enough that Beryl was sure it would leave a bruise. Memories were dangerous things. Memories gave power to the voices, to the past versions of himself that he’d spent centuries repressing. He couldn’t let the voices back in control, couldn’t let them take over again. The last time that had happened, the last time he’d lost control—well, that time had been the beginning of the end for everything and everyone he’d ever loved.
He growled in frustration at himself, then a thought came to him.
The grottoes.
The Rahuli and the others had left a history of the people, a record of both the Orinai and the Rahuli slaves. Beryl didn’t need to consult the voices. He could simply read the words himself.
One of the voices groaned in disappointment. Beryl ignored it and turned down an unlit path. Though he hadn’t been down to the grottoes since before the desert sands had been stained red, he knew the way down to his own damnation.
* * *
Beryl stopped before the entrance to the grotto. As old memories came flooding back, the voices swelled within his mind and threatened to overcome him. It was a constant battle, a never-ending war between Beryl and the voices. One of the voices rose to the forefront, piercing the strata of the soil, probing down through the metal shelf, and reaching into the sweltering, roiling heat of the volcano’s heart beneath. The ground trembled slightly beneath his feet, a testament to the power that voice contained and which Beryl constantly suppressed.
“No!” The sound echoed through the cavern and bounced off the water, giving the returning sound an ethereal quality.
“No,” he whispered.
He couldn’t let them win. Couldn’t let them win.
Beryl wrestled back control, suppressing the voices by reaching out to the metal in the walls. He pulled on it and tore out a massive chunk of ore, rock still clinging to the metal hunk. He worked it, the mental concentration forcing back the voices until only Beryl remained, alone in his own mind. The ground stilled.
He let the lump of contorted metal fall onto the sand. It struck the ground with a muted thump. It was a twisted, misshapen mass, pulled and pushed in a dozen different directions. Ignoring it, Beryl grabbed an unlit torch from a bracket on the wall and lit it with his striker. It flared to life, the flames licking at the oiled rope. It reminded Beryl of the flames in his forge, which were dormant now that he was so distant from them.
Pushing that thought aside, Beryl strode into grotto, allowing his eyes and mind to follow the hundreds of light patterns cast on the ceiling and walls by the reflective nature of the water. The soft sound of cascading water and dripping rocks created a soothing, calming atmosphere. Elyana had loved this grotto, loved the water pulled from deep within the earth and collected during storms. She’d helped create it back before the genesauri, before the rest of the Orinai had turned against them.
None of the voices rose up at those memories. They were Beryl’s own. There was one thing alone upon which all the voices agreed. Elyana. Memories of her were able to be shared and dwelt upon without any of the voices trying to take control. It was Beryl himself that refused to think about them often. They were simply too painful.
Beryl limped forward with confidence. He knew the path to the hidden archives. The Rahuli had lost the original language of their people hundreds of years ago, so the scrolls hidden here were meaningless to them. There were a few scrolls in the Rahuli tongue, true, but Beryl imagined those were now missing, if his suspicions about Kaiden were true. But Beryl—he knew the language well. He could study them without awakening the voices who knew the knowledge Beryl sought. Or at least, that’s what he hoped.
The pathway down the center of the lake opened up into the island. Beryl limped out toward the left-hand side. He knew how the scrolls had been organized—Elyana had rarely stopped talking about it, even after they’d already completed the other two grottoes. Anything about the mystics, about magic itself, was on the left.
Beryl placed the torch in a bracket on the wall and reached into the first cubby, feeling for the glass tube. His fingers closed over the thin cylinder and he pulled it free, brushing away the dust with his other hand. The scroll inside was still intact, preserved by the wax seal around the stopper, which kept the container air tight.
Beryl removed the stopper with a powerful twist of his wrist. He tossed the stopper aside and carefully tipped the scroll into his hand. His hands were steady and sure on the brittle paper. A diagram unfolded before him, a square inscribed with nine smaller squares.
One of the voices immediately recognized it. The Schema—the chart of the three magics and their degrees of power. The voice remembered long arguments with Elyana about the divergent tiers of power. She thought each hierarchy of magic was simply different manifestations of the same power. The voice, Beryl’s old voice, had thought them individual powers with some overlap. However, Beryl himself was living proof that that thought process had been wrong.
He rolled the scroll back up, placed it in the tube, and set it aside. The voice faded with it, though it had never really been trying to take over. It had merely shared a fond memory with Beryl, one it had kept hidden from him for centuries.
Beryl reached into another cubby, startling a sand spider the size of his hand. The creature scuttled over Beryl’s hand and up the wall, vanishing into the gloom. One of the voices, an ancient one from before even Elyana—from back when Beryl had lived far from here, beyond the Forbiddence—shuddered. Beryl ignored it. His current Iteration had no fear of spiders. The scroll in this cubby hadn’t fared as well as the first. The wax seal had been broken some time ago and the scroll within it was now little more than a loose pile of dust. That was one of the reasons they’d duplicated their work in two other such hidden shelters. Beryl knew one of the three had been destroyed over the years but, hopefully, the missing scrolls were still intact in the other one.
And so it went for hours upon hours. Thirty of the forty-five scrolls remained whole. He didn’t move on to the bureaucratic or historic sections of the grotto; there was really no need. Beryl himself already knew those answers.
Thirty scrolls. Still, fifteen broken scrolls was a severe loss. One of the voices inside Beryl’s mind wept unabashedly. The history of the magic which ruled both the Orinai and the Rahuli slave people—how much of it was lost in those fifteen piles of dust? How much of it would be important to the Rahuli in their upcoming fight?
“Why are
you helping them?”
Beryl started until he realized the voice was his own. Well, partially his own. One of the voices in his mind seized momentary control and spoke aloud using Beryl’s own voice.
Beryl let his hands curl into fists. He hadn’t realized he was helping them. Hadn’t he just betrayed them by sending the message to the Orinai? No, that had been one of the voices—the vulcanist. That wasn’t Beryl, not really. Beryl himself had already decided to help the Rahuli prepare for the coming war. He’d done it before. Both he and Elyana had done it before, back when Elyana’s obsession with protecting the people had led to the creation of the genesauri. There had been others, of course, but they hadn’t been as strong, hadn’t been as worthy of the fight as he and Elyana.
“Why help them?” Beryl mused. “Because they deserve it.”
Several of the voices in his mind laughed.
Beryl’s fists tightened until the knuckles cracked. “Because Elyana would have wanted it.”
The voices stilled. Beryl took the silence as agreement.
He looked down at the scrolls arranged neatly in little rows within their glass cylinders. He would need to translate them. The Rahuli would not be able to read them otherwise.
“And you’ll need to let them make the discovery for themselves,” one of the voices said. It was the angry one, the one which pulled at the fire beneath the earth. “They will not believe it if they don’t discover it themselves.”
Beryl nodded, though surprise slowed the motion. That voice was the most vehement in its argument for the destruction of the Rahuli. Beryl had fought against that voice for centuries. Why change now?
The voice spoke. “For Elyana.”
Beryl grunted and turned to leave. He had work to do.
Chapter 2: Broken Ties
“As with all things feared by men, that which can be quantified can be understood for what it truly is, rather than the superstitious musings of those who are easily impressed.”
—From Commentary on the Schema, Volume I
Gavin strode through the red sandstone passageways of the Roterralar Warren, trying to ignore the self-conscious itch between his shoulders. As always, the effort was a futile one. A woman appeared in the hall ahead of him and, noticing him, stopped and gave a small bow. Gavin sighed internally, but inclined his head and smiled back at her. She wasn’t wearing a shufari, though Gavin didn’t recognize her as one of the Roterralar. He was glad at least some of the clans were interested in the Roterralar ways. The woman scurried away.
His grandmother would have been upset with him for not asking the woman’s name. If she’d been here. She’d died well before the life-altering events of the broken Oasis. Before the death and destruction.
He paused for a moment, fingering a spot on his stomach beneath his robes. The woman Lhaurel had healed him, but he swore he still felt the hot pain of the dagger digging into his gut. He could feel Taren’s fetid breath on his face.
Gavin shuddered and shook himself, glancing around to make sure he was alone. He couldn’t afford to appear weak, not with how the clans were already bickering and returning to old ways and alliances. No one trusted the clans that had followed Kaiden and turned on their brethren. The only thing that kept all the clans working together after that betrayal was an even greater dislike of the Roterralar. That and the fact that there were so very few of them left. Shared pain was a great unifier of peoples.
He shook his head and kept walking. He caught a glimpse of Khari walking in the passageway ahead of him. Khari, Matron of the Roterralar, walked with the grace of a warrior and the air of one born to lead. As Gavin had come to realize, Khari was as equal to the task of leadership as her husband had reputedly been. Some of the Rahuli disapproved of the woman’s position of rule, though others welcomed the change.
“What are you about today, Matron?” he asked, steeling himself for a long, complicated conversation.
“We are running short of food again,” she said. “There are simply too many of us in one place. This Warren was never meant to house the entire populace of the Sharani Desert.”
“I think it may have been, once. It would explain the vast number of individual rooms in the main cavern, not to mention the entire network of tunnels and storage rooms beneath us that haven’t even been explored yet.”
Khari glowered at him. The look was so reminiscent of ones given him by his grandmother that Gavin almost smiled. Almost. Khari’s expression held little love in it.
Gavin felt a deep-seated need to unify the clans, to defend and protect the outcasts and, to a lesser extent, the Rahuli people as a whole. The greatsword—the short, curved blade he’d pulled from the skeletal remains atop the Oasis walls—was the first step in that, but it was merely the first of many steps he needed to take to secure their safety. Unfortunately, Khari had become a major obstacle to the rest of them.
“You know what I mean. We don’t have the resources. The grain fields we have are fallow during this time of year and our stores were meant to sustain the Roterralar only. We’ve several hundred mouths to feed now. The clans respect you. You need to convince them to leave.”
“All the clans, or just those who followed Kaiden?” Gavin asked.
Khari didn’t respond, though her expression answered the question.
Gavin sighed, out loud this time. It had only been a few weeks since Kaiden had tried to destroy them all. But not a single day had passed yet that Khari hadn’t tried to get the clans to leave and go back to the way things were, or hadn’t protested his continued insistence that the Heltorin and Londik be allowed voice in their meetings. At least, that’s how Gavin took her complaints.
She didn’t understand. No one did. Gavin wasn’t sure he himself even understood completely. But he did know one thing, at least: they couldn’t simply go back to the way things had been. That life was over. They had to change. He often asked himself why she’d volunteered the Roterralar Warren in the first place if she hated having it full.
“There are a few patrols out already,” he said, ignoring her request. “Several have been directed to gather what they can from the old warrens. They’ll bring back more grain and whatever else they can find there. Others are searching for the herds scattered by the Oasis rains.”
“So the storms haven’t stopped, then?”
Gavin shook his head.
The rains were customary for the Oasis during the Dormancy. Nine months of near constant rainfall, centralized over that one location. Gavin had always found that singularity of rain odd, but now the rains were spreading out over the entire desert, spreading water to sand so devoid of moisture it had become a desiccated hell. It was changing. Returning to life.
Khari sniffed and brushed her short, greying hair back. The wounds on her hand and face were almost healed, only faint lines of darkness nearly hidden in the wrinkles of her flesh.
“We’ll hope they come back with something, then,” she said. “Still, I do not think it will be enough.”
When Gavin didn’t respond, Khari inclined her head slightly and turned back the way she had come, vanishing around a corner within a few moments.
Gavin shook his head and resumed his walk. The woman chafed under the current situation. The Roterralar had existed as a hidden entity for far too long. They were used to their autonomy and independence. That had to change. Everything had to change.
Running a hand through his hair, Gavin resumed his course, heading deep into the bowels of the Roterralar Warren. Actually, it was more than that, now. It was the Warren for the entire Rahuli people. It really was large enough to hold the entire populace of the desert, but—Gavin hated admitting it, even to himself—it most likely wouldn’t support them all.
Tensions were already high between the clans. They’d gathered into three effective groups (since no clan was large enough on its own anymore to pose any sort of organized threat), with Gavin, the remaining half-dozen outcasts, and the surviving Roterralar outside them all. The only thing
that kept them together at this point was Gavin himself, and that was a tenuous hold at best. They honored him for freeing them from Taren’s oppression and so gave heed to his words. Some of the time, at least. They didn’t understand that Taren himself was only a puppet, a little man pulled along by Kaiden’s strings.
Gavin rounded a corner and entered a passage that ended in a thick wooden door. Two guards, both members of the Roterralar clan, stood in front of the door. They both held axes in hand, though not conventional ones. These had blades of black stone. Though Kaiden hadn’t shown any signs of trying to escape, they couldn’t take any chances. No one was allowed to bring metal around the man. Gavin knew it was a gesture in futility—there was metal in the very sandstone walls themselves—but they had to do something, didn’t they?
The guards nodded toward him as he neared. Gavin entered the lightless room, holding aloft an oil lantern fashioned completely of glass provided by one of the guards to chase away some of the darkness. The door creaked softly on its modified hinges as it shut behind him, the guard outside locking him in as he’d been instructed. Light from the lantern glinted off metal in the walls and illuminated the thick leather bonds holding a disheveled man. Kaiden didn’t look up when Gavin entered.
Gavin hung the glass lantern on a wooden hook near the door and picked up the chair resting beneath it. The air was heavy with the scent of sweat, urine, and refuse, which only grew stronger the closer he got to the prisoner. Gavin was no stranger to the stench of human misery, but he stopped short a few feet away from the man, placed the chair in the loose sand, and took a seat. His nose wouldn’t let him get any closer.
“Good morning, Kaiden,” Gavin whispered.
The man didn’t stir. He was imprisoned here on Gavin’s orders, though there were many within the Warren who wanted the man’s death, Khari being chief among them. He’d been able to persuade most of them that the man was more valuable to them alive. After Kaiden had tried to kill them all by drawing the genesauri monsters to the Oasis itself, it had become clear that the man hadn’t really wanted them all dead. He’d wanted to lead them. By destroying the Roterralar and crushing the resistance within the Rahuli people themselves, he would set himself up to be their united leader. The survivors needed to know why.
Sharani series Box Set Page 30