by Garon Whited
I wondered. Can I generate enough power to open a portal and go home? No, definitely not; travel to other universes is not a small undertaking. How about enough to just get outside? Maybe, yes, if I were better fed. Even if I was in shape for that, I had no idea how far to go, or where to aim for. At that moment, the Shoe Leather Express was my only real mode of transportation. I really needed to find a way out that didn’t tax my emaciated and hungry condition any further.
Since it seemed difficult to give my pet rock a clear idea of what I wanted, I decided to try some exploring on my own. The place did seem remarkably familiar; there was an almost-constant feeling of déjà vu as I walked the halls. I dreamed of this place; I was sure of it. With that familiarity, I thought I might be able to find my way. There was airflow, after all.
So, follow the breeze to its source, or to its destination? Upstream or down? Since I didn’t smell anything terribly edible on the breeze, I followed the air current upward again.
Logic. How helpful. Not that it did me any good. The air currents consistently led me to holes, about four inches across, angled up. Part of the ventilation system, no doubt, and not getting me any closer to breakfast.
I leaned against the wall and contemplated my situation. If I couldn’t smell dinner, maybe I could hear it. I took slow breaths as I removed my helmet and listened. My ears adjusted to the silence, then to the sound of my breathing, the thud of my heartbeat, the hissing of my blood sliding through arteries…
Buried under all that noise, yes, there was something. Voices, maybe? That way…
Several stops for navigation later, I was finding out just how tiresomely complicated this place was. Corridors circled around, angling gradually up or down, with occasional vertical shafts that had obvious hand- and foot-holds like ladders. There were some stairways, but very few. And all throughout, a deathly silence and utter darkness.
Eventually, I found what was obviously the great hall. Four firepits, currently empty, were placed in the center of each quadrant of the hall. A raised dais occupied one end, under a dragon’s-head throne carved right out of the living rock. The eyes flickered red. I stared at it for a moment. Not only was it impressive, it was pretentious. I also had the impression it was looking at me.
I wondered where Firebrand was. The spirit that moves it is bound to the metal, but could it be in the dragon’s head? No, because I checked. It wasn’t alive in any greater sense than the mountain itself.
I also took a moment and concentrated, thinking hard, projecting as loudly as possible.
FIREBRAND!
There was no reply, not even a faint whisper of a response. Wherever it was, Firebrand was far away from here. I don’t know what sort of range we have for communicating, but I was willing to bet that my sword was more than a mile away.
A balcony walkway, about twelve feet up, projected from the wall on both sides and over the main door, but not over the throne. And, of course, a massive stone door led out onto the upper courtyard. My glowing ring of light faintly illuminated the whole, vast room; the domed ceiling was polished with something vaguely yellowish and mirror-bright, throwing reflected light everywhere.
“I know this place,” I muttered, and it sounded loud in the emptiness.
Still, the voices were louder here. It seemed to me they might be just outside the ten-ton slab of stone disguised as a door.
I have exceptional hearing. Predators usually do. At night, it gets even more impressive.
I pushed on one edge of the slab. It refused to budge. I tried again along the opposite edge and it shifted, grinding slightly as it slowly revolved around the center axis.
The voices stopped instantly, possibly even in mid-word. I was amused for all of two seconds as the slab continued to slowly rotate. Then I discovered that my hovering ring of light was nowhere near as bright as I had thought. Daylight poured in like a river of molten gold and tried to set fire to my eyes. It was merely ambient light; the rays of the sun didn’t actually come in the door. With my dark-adapted vision, this was more than enough to blind me. I threw up one gauntleted hand and turned away, staggered as though by a physical blow.
At least it distracted me from my stomach.
The door continued to grind slowly open while I blinked madly and pulled a gauntlet off again. I wiped at my suddenly-streaming eyes. It was a bright day outside, and the shadow of the mountain didn’t seem to do much to cut down on it. Finally, I stepped back a few paces and dismissed my light spell while my eyes recovered from the photons torpedoing them.
Fresh air poured in, laden with the smells of plants and earth and animals. I coughed and sneezed, assailed by a massive overload to my senses. I must have spent too long in the stone; everything was too bright, too loud, too strong for me.
Eventually, the door ground to a halt perpendicular to its original position. Outside, there was a flat expanse of courtyard, a crenellated outer wall maybe six and eight feet high, and a strip of blue above so intense that my eyes watered again. I tried to stay calm and focused, to force myself to endure the amped-up sensory input and adjust to it. It hurt, eyes and nose, and I wondered if my ears were about to suffer the same. I could hear rapid breathing outside.
There was no sign of anyone. I wondered if I was hearing things much farther away than I thought.
While my eyes adjusted, I stepped closer to the door. There was no hurry that I could see; my eyes hurt from the light and I was quite willing to let them adapt in stages. I did want to find out what time it was—morning, noon, or evening—so I would have some idea how long it would be before I went into a full-scale undead hunger frenzy. I recognize from sad experience when I’m malnourished, and it was important to me that I not be near a population center when the sun went down. If I lose control, a small town stops being a place of habitation and turns into a buffet table whether I want it to or not.
When open, the pivot-door formed a center divider between two corridors through the thickness of the mountainside. I moved cautiously down the left-hand one.
Just as I reached the mouth of the tunnel, or about one step from it, someone stuck his head around the edge and looked in at me. From the glimpse I got, I would guess him to be between a mature fourteen and a smallish sixteen, nondescript brown hair, no real need to shave, gigantic eyes, and a voice that squeaked like a girl, because it did, just as he yanked himself back out of view.
“There’s somebody in there!” he declared. His voice probably wasn’t all that high-pitched, usually, but I guessed it was at least an octave higher than normal. Well, he was startled. His voice grated on my ears—yep, my hearing was oversensitive, too.
“Who is it?” asked someone else, much more calmly. I thought that a silly question.
“How should I know?” first voice replied, reasonably. Scared, but reasonably. He probably thought it was as much a silly question as I did.
“Look again!” said a third voice.
“He’s just inside!” first voice insisted.
“What, like, ten feet away?”
I approached during the conversation and now stuck my head around the corner. There were three young men with a small, two-wheeled cart of supplies. They all wore boots, breeches, short tunics, vest-like jackets—jerkins, that’s the word I want—and long, heavy swords. There was a goat behind the cart, its lead-rope tied to the back of it.
“Less than that,” I answered. There were yells and a general scrambling backward by everyone but the goat. I winced at the noise, but ears adapt fairly quickly to loud noises.
“That’s more like twenty feet,” I observed, when they came to rest. They looked more than a little frightened, but they didn’t run. One of them, the smallest of the three, a blond-haired young man, drew his sword. He looked as though he knew how to use it, too. It’s hard to explain, but I just looked at him, how he stood, how he held the weapon, and knew that he was trained to use it.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“Who are you?” I replied
, smiling my most nonthreatening smile—the one with my fangs retracted. It didn’t seem to help. My eyes were pretty much adjusted to the light, now. I blinked a bit more than usual, perhaps, but otherwise seemed fine. I stepped out and leaned on the rock wall, arms folded.
“I asked you first!”
“And I was here first. I am also your elder,” I answered.
“There are three of us,” the tall one—the first one I saw, with the brown hair—whispered to his friends. “We could take him.”
I smiled and spread my hands to be even less threatening.
“I am not the one holding a weapon; you drew on me, not the other way around. Wouldn’t it be courteous to at least introduce yourselves to the man you’re prepared to kill for no reason at all?”
They backed away another couple of steps. Apparently, either my hearing or my smile did not reassure them. With my mouth closed, I flexed my fangs, making sure they were retracted. Yes, they were; the points were a bit pronounced, but when pulled in were only a trifle longer than my other teeth. My teeth did feel a little strange, but I had other things to think about.
They glanced at each other from this greater distance. The shortest one spoke first.
“He has a point.” He lowered his weapon. He didn’t put it away.
“Shut up,” the other two explained, in unison. It sounded practiced. Perhaps they did that a lot.
“I’m Kammen,” the middle-height one—dark hair, bordering on black—said. “This is Torvil,” he nodded toward the tall one, “and this is Seldar,” the short one. “Now, who are you?”
“I’ve been called at lot of things,” I admitted, but did not add, Some of them are words you’re probably not old enough to use. “Most recently, I’ve gone by the name ‘Halar’.”
They all stared at me as though I’d just claimed to be from Venus, or sprouted another head. They muttered together for a moment. They were farther away, so I didn’t follow all their conversation, but I know I heard, “…can’t be. He’s not tall enough…” Eventually, they turned their full attention back to me.
“We will require that you prove your claim,” said the short one—Seldar.
“How?” I asked. I didn’t even have a driver’s license on me. Not that they have cars in these parts, of course. On the other hand, Bronze weighs more than most cars, and is about as fast, but she drives herself, really…
The question did seem to stymie them for a moment.
“You made stones sing, right?” asked Torvil.
“Once, yes,” I admitted. “I had a conversation with some, too.”
“Do it again.”
I glanced around the courtyard. Aside from ripping a chunk of rock out of the mountainside, that didn’t seem feasible. On the other hand, I had a sword.
“One moment.” I drew my sword, slowly, as gently as possible. I didn’t want to startle these dangerous-looking people, after all. I held it with one finger hooked through the bell guard. I flicked the curved blade with a fingernail; it chimed nicely. Good. A moment later, after working the vibration spell into the metal and pushing a little power into it, the sword hummed. I tuned the spell a bit, tweaked some of the vibrations for sound quality, and let the sword play back my memory of a piece of music.
They didn’t recognize my memory of “Princes of the Universe” by Queen—it was in English, after all—but they were still impressed. When the song ended, I put the sword away.
“Satisfied?”
They looked at each other. It struck me that they were lifelong friends. That look they shared communicated more in a glance than an hour of conversation could. You don’t see that anywhere else.
“For now,” Kammen said.
“What are you three doing here, anyway?” I asked.
“We’re to spend the night in the mountain, stand vigil over swords, and make sacrifice.”
“More power to you. I don’t suppose you have anything to eat on that cart of yours, do you? I admit I’m more than a little hungry.”
The three of them visibly blanched and stepped back, eyes going all round and frightened again. Considering the way my stomach was complaining, I didn’t blame them.
“Not that hungry,” I assured them, mostly to reassure them. I wasn’t at all certain whether I was telling them the truth or a comforting lie. “Any suggestions on where I can find breakfast?”
“There are many dazhu down in the plains,” Seldar offered. “The canals fence them in for the ranchers.”
“Canals?” I frowned. “I don’t recall any canals.” Seldar just pointed toward the courtyard wall. I continued to frown and headed that way until I could look between the crenellations. There were steps all around the base of the wall, presumably so defenders could do what I did, namely, to step up and easily see over the wall.
Everything was different.
The mountain was my mountain; I woke up feeling it all around me. So, with that as a given, I wondered why it didn’t look like my mountain. The whole thing was covered in what looked like sculpture of buildings—not a single brick or mortared wall, but buildings that looked carved out of the mountain like a scrimshaw town carved out of whalebone.
The mountain was also much, much broader than I recalled. The center dropped sharply, then curved outward, flattening drastically as it did so into a very slight slope for a little over two miles before hitting an outer wall. It reminded me of some of the more extreme diagrams drawn of spacetime distortion, or maybe a distorted Cissoid of Diocles. Beyond the wall was a wide stretch of water—a hundred yards, perhaps?—that would easily be a lake if it didn’t have a bloody huge mountain taking up most of it.
Make that “bloody huge city.”
While these changes were unexpected, possibly startling, definitely disconcerting, I still felt at home. Someone rearranged the furniture in my house, replaced the carpet, and put in new curtains, but it’s still my home. The worst change was the location of the mountain; not only did they remodel, they moved it! It wasn’t in the Eastrange, although there was a suspiciously mountain-shaped bite taken out of the near edge of the Eastrange and a flattened area from there to here. A canal ran westward, down the middle of it, bordered on both sides by a paved road.
I didn’t move it. I know I didn’t. I can do some amazing things, but mountain-moving takes effort, and I’m usually lazy. I’d remember. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was… familiar. Not exactly a sense of déjà vu, just a sense of something I ought to remember.
The main door faced north, so I was on the northern part of the wall. I made a circuit of the whole upper courtyard, all the way around the mountain, just to look out over everything. Something seemed familiar about it all…
Four stone-lined channels ran away from the lake, or moat, or whatever—I think I’m going to call it a moat—each with broad, flat roads running along both sides. One set of canals and roads headed into the Eastrange, right into the gap left behind by my apparently-mobile mountain. Another ran north, roughly parallel to the mountains. Another headed east, into the plains, cutting through the rolling hills. The last headed almost due south, toward the ocean; that one might angle slightly westward. Arched stone bridges crossed each of them, one over each canal, about a quarter-mile from the shore of the moat.
“Oh, those canals,” I noted. The water level looked about a foot lower than the lip of the canal, at least locally; I had no idea how deep it was. They were about thirty feet wide or so, a very effective barrier to something that looked much like a long-legged buffalo with curling horns like oversized rams. The nearest group of the shaggy things was, possibly, fifteen miles away to the southwest. Dazhu, hmm? Well, now I know what to call them. The smell of them reached me even miles away and a couple thousand feet up. Was that from the intensity of their smell, or just my hyper-acute senses?
A long, straight stone bridge crossed the lake-moat in a line to the southwest. It ran level over a series of wide arches—suitable for barges to row under, perhaps—until it
reached the shore. There it made a long, shallow descent to the dirt. This looked like the only connection between the city and the mainland. It was quite wide, something over fifty feet, with a low divider to form two lanes for traffic. It looked like both ends of a one-way street; traffic entered the bridge in one lane and probably followed the road around to the only obvious city gate, a giant pivot-door on the northeast of the city wall, between the one o’clock and two o’clock position.
Looking at it, I wondered if it saw much traffic. It certainly seemed needlessly awkward for a pedestrian; the trip in or out must have been six miles or more.
My guests did not follow me to the wall. They stuck by the door and their cart. I walked back, removing my helmet as I did so. It was warmer than I liked, and I was wearing more armor than I usually do—a bunch of blackened scales over chainmail wherever I might bend, with rigid pieces over the long bones, and the upper half of a breastplate. It was a nice suit, very mobile, and obviously enchanted. Further evidence that someone with money arranged it all.
“Okay, I see breakfast.” At their suddenly-increased tension, I added, “Over the wall. Down on the plains.” They relaxed visibly. I wondered what they might have heard about me, or if they were just naturally suspicious of strangers. Then again, I’d be suspicious of me, too; I’m a suspicious character. “Any idea where my horse is?”
“Um,” Seldar said, “the Lady Tort probably has it, if it belongs to anyone.”
“Tort?” I asked, surprised. Last time I checked, Tort was just a little girl. But, then, I had been out of it for a long time… possibly a very long time. Good to know someone was still around that I might recognize. “Where is she?”