by Greg Curtis
“Chy?” She nudged him, worrying that he was about to wander off into some sort of tangent.
“Of course. It starts with the guards here. The shades. And if they were born as ogres and transformed into this I have to wonder two things. How and why. The how is obviously the potions and injections. But the why is more difficult. Why take an ogre, a powerful being in his or her own right, and transform them into a much weaker one? That seems foolish. Especially if you're then going to send them out to battle with other, stronger beings.”
“But they weakened them in more ways than just physically. Look at what they taught these children. Ogres have magic. Good, powerful magic. But the shades have only been taught one simple form of it – enchantment. Why? Again it makes them weaker. And we all know now, the way to beat a shade in combat is simply to remove their enchantments. After that they're as weak as kittens.”
That didn't seem quite right to her, not that she'd thought about it much let alone fought a shade. But Elodie let it pass without comment.
“But these are old writings. Very old. From before the worlds were divided. Before the Temple existed. And what if that was also a time when the only magic there was, was enchantment. Then these guards would be powerful. None would be able to stand against them. And what if that was also a time when there were no ogres. No giants either. No trolls. A time when there was only one people – Ancients. Then these guards would be physically powerful too. None would stand against them.”
“No ogres?” Nga Roth let out a laugh. “Boy have you been at your cups again?!” A couple of the others joined her in the laughter.
“I wish,” he replied. “Because it gets worse. There was only one people in the world then – and they were the shades in front of us.”
That statement drew a gasp, and then a chorus of objections, most of them based on as little evidence as his claim. But they fell away when Chy raised his hand.
“If I'm right, these ancient prisons aren't prisons at all. They're not hospitals or clinics either. They're laboratories. Strange, impossible almost incomprehensible laboratories. Places where the ancients set about mastering the most incredible technology and magic then known. All in pursuit of a singular goal. To improve themselves. To make themselves stronger in every way.”
“So they started working on making themselves physically stronger and created the ogres and the trolls. Taller – so the giants and titans were born. Better able to know the thoughts of others. And the dryads came into being. Tougher. And so came the dwarves. More intelligent. That was the sylph. They wanted to be flexible and have sharper senses. And so came the elves. And of course they wanted to improve their magic. To move beyond the limitations of enchantment. And all of us can do that to some extent.”
“Naturally, once they'd started work and created their new races, they had to study them. Let them grow in numbers. Learn what they could from them. So they created prisons where that could happen. And they trained their most powerful guards to deal with these new, stronger people. They designed a training system. A school of a sort, to teach the guards how to deal with them. And they taught them the enchantments they needed to keep their prisoners in line while they worked.”
“These shades weren't weak. At the time they were the strongest they could be. Trained to be deadly. It was just that their prisoners grew stronger still.”
“Naturally it all went wrong. The new people were too powerful to be contained. They escaped. And over time they became not prisoners or subjects, but rebels. The changed ones became enemies. And the rebellion grew. It gained strength. And a rebellion became a war. A war to the death. At some point it became clear, only one side would survive.”
“That's when one side or the other, but most likely the rebels, knew they had to do something drastic. It was about survival. And as strong as they were they could not fight the ancient kingdom or whatever, forever. And they came up with a plan. A terrible plan. But one that would completely destroy their enemy. Shatter his cities. Scatter his armies. Destroy his most powerful weapons.”
“Of course they needed power to do that. Vast power. More than any spellcaster or group of spellcasters could summon. They needed the Heartfire.”
“So they used the power of the Heartfire volcano in N'Diel to create the portal walls and divide the world into pieces. And even then the magic they used was too powerful. So powerful that it caused the volcano itself to erupt. To be wiped out almost. But it worked. The war ended. And the different peoples with their different worlds spent the next ten, twenty thousand years becoming who we now are. And everything was forgotten.”
“But there were still problems. Things that cropped up. Ancient relics. One of them was the ancient laboratory prison where the shades came from. Somewhere in that is a device or a being. Maybe something like a throne. Whatever it is it remains perfectly true to its instructions. And it turns out new guards. Exactly as they were ten thousand years ago. And they go out, and recruit new children to become guards, and try to control the escaped prisoners, exactly the same way as they did ten thousand years ago. Nothing changes for them. Not even when the world does.”
“Something else of the ancients has been unleashed in N'Diel. I don't know what. A shared dream someone suggested. But whatever it is, whenever it was activated, the moment it was awakened it set about fulfilling a single purpose – rebuilding the volcano. And it has bent everybody's will to that single purpose.”
“That's not possible!” Someone called out. “You can't rebuild a volcano!”
“Yes. You can.” Elodie replied even before she thought about it. But she knew she was right. “The Heartfire volcanoes are fed by heat. Magical heat. The Heartfire itself. The one that exploded scattered its Heartfire far and wide. Across an entire world. But if you can find enough underground rivers of molten rock flowing in the right direction, and you toss the remnants of the Heartfire into them so they are carried back to the volcano, you could heat it up again.”
“Of course it might take all of the people of an entire world and a lot more besides who they'd have to capture. And they might have to dig for a thousand or a million years. But you could do it.” And that she understood, was exactly what was happening. The slaves were rebuilding the volcano.
The question was why. She understood that there could be some ancient device in N'Diel, undoubtedly a construct of ancient technology and enchantment, doing what it had been built to do ten or twenty thousand years ago. But why rebuild a volcano? What was the purpose? All of which presupposed that Chy was right.
But what he was saying sounded right. It was terrible. It would undoubtedly anger a great many people. It angered her. But it still fitted together well. It took all the things that they didn't understand and wove them together into something that made sense. A story that might or might not be true. But which explained everything.
Of course Chy fell silent after that having told everyone his latest theory and then run out of words. Which was when the objections began. And there were a lot of objections. Though really they all came back to one thing. No one wanted to be part of a race that had been built like a machine by an ancient race.
There was a lot of shouting. Even more swearing. Gods were invoked. Demons too. And it only grew louder and more angry as the time passed. Meanwhile the shades stood in the middle of the yard, staring at them, no doubt wondering what was happening. Everyone seemed to have forgotten about them. Even the dryads who were supposed to be interrogating their memories. But instead they were shouting as loudly as everyone else.
Sometimes, she thought as she sat there and watched the chaos unfolding, Chy was actually too clever for his own good. And equally, he might claim that he didn't want to be a bard or a minstrel or have anything to do with his family's way of life, but he could still weave together a fine story. He had their gift.
It was hours before the argument died away, and when it did it wasn't because anyone had found agreement. It was simply that people were simply
too tired to continue. Chy was looking absolutely exhausted, even when most of his responses had been that he didn't know. An answer that he had repeated time and again.
“Come on you.” She grabbed his hand feeling a little sorry for him. The man looked as though he had been run over by a stampede – several times. “I'll let you walk me back to your home and make me a good meal while I lecture your cat about proper manners.” The arguments had more or less finished by then and others were leaving so she thought they could go too. And besides, she liked the goats. It would be nice to see them again. And he had a portal she could use to take her back to the Temple.
“Are you sure you want to be seen with me?” he asked. “I do seem to be a bit of a pariah at the moment.”
“Are you suggesting that you don't want to feed me?” she replied with a smile. “I mean what would your mother say?! Peaches would be horrified!”
“Oh she'll say whatever she wants no matter what choice I make. There is no winning with her.” But despite his rueful complaints she noticed, he still got to his feet quite quickly and helped her up.
“Then I think we should forget her and lose together.”
“I like that.” He smiled for the first time in ages and squeezed her hand a little. “But we should be wary of the pig. That walking slab of winged bacon is a damned muck spout!”
Chapter Thirty Seven
Fylarne liked his cell. It was quiet and peaceful. He didn't have to talk to anyone, not even the other prisoners in their cells. They were a little distance away. He only saw the guards a couple of times a day when they brought him his food. Which meant that most of the time he could simply sit back on his cot and think. What he liked most about it though was that it was where he belonged.
The others weren't sure of that. They weren't sure of anything where he was concerned. Not what crimes he should be charged with. Not who should charge him, or even on what world. He suspected that they not only didn't know, they didn't want to think about it. So he had simply been locked away and left. A difficult problem best forgotten. Especially when they had so many others to deal with.
But that was fine by him. He could spend his time thinking and occasionally praying.
But recently, ever since the stone polisher had come up with his theory – the Martin madness as many were calling it – he had been less at ease.
Chy was right he suspected. But he wasn't sure it helped. Maybe the idea that there were these ancient devices or whatever left over from the time of the ancients – the first ancients that was – explained so much. And it fitted with the fact that the thrones were apparently now wandering around as seeming flesh and blood. That at least demonstrated some of the ancients' mastery of science and magic. But how did having that knowledge help anyone? It didn't.
The shades were still out there, working according to some ancient imperative to wrest order from what they considered chaos – those who had true magic. And the sprites and their prisoners were still living in some ancient shared dream, rebuilding a volcano – a task that they would no doubt be working on until time itself ended.
And he was still sitting here, unable to do anything to help with either of them. But even if he had been free, he couldn't have helped.
“What are you staring at?!” a gruff voice growled unexpectedly.
Fylarne looked up, caught by surprise. But then he saw the prisoner in the cell opposite him and remembered. He wasn't alone in this prison. Not any more. Mostly he thought he was because the other prisoners in their cells said very little. But every so often they burst into life to yell something or hurl an insult.
“Just thinking,” he replied, and returned to his staring. The shades had nothing to say. And now thanks to the dryads he knew why. They were prison guards, and everyone else to them was a prisoner they needed to beat into submission. Even if they were actually the ones locked up in a prison.
What sort of monstrous machine, he wondered, could shape a person into that? Bend and twist and warp their thoughts and their entire lives into something completely alien to them? Even change their forms? The ancients – the first ancients that was – had had some powerful magic – despite the fact that they had only had enchantment.
More than that though. The machine, whatever it was, somehow perpetuated itself. It kept building more and more of these guards down through the centuries. The millennia. And no machine that he knew of could do that. Machines broke down. They wore out. His mother's wheel which she had used to spin the right thread for each repair had needed to be repaired constantly. As a small boy with sharp eyes and small fingers, he had forever been putting bits of it back together. But not this ancient machine. It would, it seemed, run forever. It would place the imperatives on the guards to among other things, go out and find more children to become new guards. Then it would drug them, reshape their bodies, and teach them. And none could resist. It was a cycle that never ended.
The sprites too. There had to be a machine out there doing something similar. And one that he suspected, never broke down. Because the sprites had been abducting people for centuries or millennia or even longer. And now they knew, all those who had been taken had simply become slaves to a dream of some sort.
Another question struck him. Why was there no sign of this ancient machine? The previous session with the shades had been interrupted by the stone polisher's revelation, but still they had seen much of the memories of the prisoners. And there had been no memory of a machine in anything they had seen. They had not been forced into any device, just fed drugs and stuck in classrooms. Where was the machine in that? Or, if it wasn't a machine, if instead it was a person, where was he? There had been no sign of an ancient being in their memories either. And in any case, if it had been an ancient being of some sort, surely he would have learned by now that what he was doing was pointless? Why keep building an army of guards to control the prisoners when the prisoners had not only escaped but become the entire world? You simply couldn't put them back in their cells. A person would understand that.
A person would also understand that rebuilding an entire volcano by hand was futile. It would take longer than the world would exist.
So it had to be a machine of some sort. An enchanted technological device that no one had ever seen or noticed being used on himself. That was a riddle and a half. In fact it was enough to make a man take up the grape.
Meanwhile his fellow prisoner, still somehow under the influence of this machine, continued yelling abuse at him. It was as if he imagined he was still somehow his guard even when he was a prisoner with him. Did the man see no reason?
Fylarne closed his eyes and ignored him. He knew the man would grow quiet in time. He would as the humans said, run out of steam. He always did. All the shades followed the same pattern, almost as if they were working from a script like an actor. They would find some pretext, usually something that made little or no sense, to become angry. Then they would start with the insults and taunts. Naturally there would be threats made. Even when they couldn't make good on any of those threats since their markings were gone. And eventually they would grow quiet. Until the next time.
It was like clockwork. Or one of the steam machines the humans and the dwarves built. Except that it was some sort of enchantment, and the people themselves had become a part of it. A giant enchantment machine that somehow perpetuated itself.
“You're weak!” his fellow prisoner abruptly yelled at him. Raising his voice loud enough to break through even Fylarne's resolve. “I will crush you like an egg!”
“Lovely,” he replied sarcastically. And then he regretted saying it. He should never respond. It only encouraged the shades. And sure enough the man began screaming at him at the top of his lungs, threatening him with dire fates, most of which involved beating him senseless and then crushing his bones into a paste.
Fylarne squeezed the bridge of his nose as he listened to the endless barrage of threats. If there was one thing that could give him a headache, this was it. C
ouldn't he be given a cell further away from these madmen? Although he knew even as he thought about asking, that it wouldn't help. More shades were arriving every day. And not just here. In all the realms where the casters had established outposts to work from. There had to be hundreds of the shades now locked away. And all were probably yelling the same things as the man in the cell opposite him.
“I will break you so badly that they will sing songs of your defeat! The entire world will pity you until the end of time!”
“I do hope they get my name right!” Fylarne retorted flippantly, and then regretted it as he waited for the coming explosion.
But it didn't come. In fact as he sat there on the cot with his eyes closed and waited for the man to go completely crazy, he heard only silence. That was enough to make him open his eyes and stare at the pale skinned being. And when he did he realised that something had happened to him.
The shade was standing there, his face twisted in ways he couldn't understand, while words were clearly trying to force themselves out of his mouth, but refusing to come. Instead it seemed that he had locked up somehow. How?