Heavier Than a Mountain (Destiny's Crucible Book 3)

by Olan Thorensen

  Yozef felt more than ready to retreat to his workshops and to more concrete successes. But when he looked at Wallington’s eager face, he figured he needed to let one of his most enthusiastic converts to new knowledge show off his work—for a few minutes, anyway.

  “Oh course, Willwin, I’m eager to see the latest,” Yozef said, the lie evident only in his stiff smile.

  The next two endless hours tested Yozef’s patience. As much as he respected Wallington’s commitment to delve into new and unexpected realms of biology, the man demonstrated nothing Yozef didn’t already know and no items to interest him.

  Yozef perceived that the tour was winding down, when Wallington said he meant to ask Yozef about something. He led Yozef into a side storeroom piled to the ceiling with wooden boxes, crates, and loose objects of all shapes and sizes.

  “A herder brought me something several years ago that he found half buried in one of his pastures. It looks like intricate artwork, but neither I nor anyone else has any idea what it is. I’ve wondered if you might recognize it.”

  Wallington rummaged through boxes, mumbling to himself. “Now where did it go? I haven’t seen it for about year, but I know I put it somewhere in this area.

  “Ah! Here it is.” He pulled out a flattish object about eight inches across. “Let’s go back in the workroom where we have more light, over next to the window.”

  Yozef followed Wallington, who blew dust off the object, gave it a quick swipe with a cloth, and then held it out.

  Yozef reached for it, then his whole body froze, as he stared thunderstruck at the object. Seconds passed. Almost a minute.

  “Yozef? Yozef? YOZEF! Are you all right?” said Wallington, as his prompting morphed into concern.

  Yozef’s shaking hand moved closer to the object, barely touching it with a forefinger. He jerked his finger back, then forward again, and this time his hand gently folded around the cool surface. Suddenly, he grasped the object and snatched it from Wallington’s hand, eliciting a yelp, as a sharp edge cut a shallow furrow in the startled brother’s palm.

  Still speechless, Yozef pulled the object closer to his face. His pupils dilated, as his eyes bored into every detail. For moments, his mind searched for an explanation for what he held. He groped for and discarded the even remotely plausible and moved on to the fantastical before coming back to the first jolting impression.

  There was no doubt in his mind. Though he had never seen the exact form and design, there was no question he held a fragment of a printed circuit board—a piece of technology three or four centuries ahead of anything that should exist on Anyar.

  He turned it over. Minute metallic-looking lines snaked over the surface, intersecting small areas of different shapes, shapes he assumed were components whose purpose he had no clue. The circuits and the components were finer than anything he had seen on Earth. Though he reminded himself he wasn’t familiar with the most advanced technologies, it had the look and conveyed an innate sense of technology well advanced beyond Earth’s.

  Wallington gripped his left forearm and shook him. “Yozef! What’s wrong?”

  Momentarily shaken from his stupor, Yozef looked up from the board. An anxious Brother Wallington stared wide-eyed, the students flanking him with faces concerned or puzzled.

  Yozef felt the need to say something, but what clamored to exit his mouth couldn’t be said . . . not aloud and not to these witnesses.

  He cleared his throat, started to say something, then stopped. More moments passed. Wallington had quit shaking him but still gripped his arm.

  Yozef cleared his throat again.

  “Ah, sorry, Willwin. I think you’re right that this is a piece, or more likely a fragment, of an artwork. For a moment, it reminded of a decoration my parents had in their house. Naturally, that reminded me of home and that I likely won’t ever see any of them again.”

  It was lame, yet all he could think of. He felt desperate to be alone so he could process what he held.

  Wallington’s face relaxed. “Oh, sorry it brought back sad thoughts.”

  He didn’t know whether Wallington believed his explanation, but Yozef thought that for once, his reputation of being a bit odd had come to his aid.

  “Maybe this will give a clue to where your homeland is, Yozef,” said Wallington. “If it’s a style of art characteristic of where you originated, then there must have been other contacts between there and Caedellium besides yourself.”

  Yozef needed to deflect the scholastic’s thinking and get himself somewhere alone and in possession of the board.

  “No,” he said. “Now that I look closer, it’s not as similar as I first thought. It just reminds of things I don’t want to forget. Would it be all right if I borrow this for a few months?”

  Wallington hesitated. “Well, it’s unique, so I don’t want to lose it.”

  “I won’t lose it,” said Yozef, “and will return it any time you want to study it. I’ll probably only want it to remind me of home for a little longer.”

  Yozef didn’t say he thought the absent-minded scholastic might forget it existed, as months passed and he remained engrossed in the new realms of study revealed by Yozef.

  “Yes, please, take it. Just bring it back if you ever think you don’t need it anymore,” said Wallington with an almost apologetic tone, as if thinking he shouldn’t have hesitated to grant Yozef’s wish.

  With a stuttered thanks and a perfunctory nod to the three students, Yozef hurried off the abbey grounds. Instead of taking the common road toward his house, he cut through a grove of trees, the same grove where he had temporarily fled to gather himself after the Buldorian raid. There, in a small clearing, a decaying log provided a seat, or a prone platform, depending on Yozef’s mood. Today, he sat on the log and held the board in both hands on his lap.

  “A circuit board,” he said to the trees. “Good God Almighty, a circuit board—or something that serves the same purpose. Harlie told me the Watchers kept hands off the people on planets they observed. Had he lied? I have no way to judge the truth of anything he told me. I’ve just assumed things I had no reason to trust. For Christ’s sake, they’re aliens! Beings from a culture that has to be so different from ours that it was stupid of me not to think harder that they might not tell me all of the truth. Or maybe their version of the truth and mine aren’t the same.”

  He stopped talking aloud and brought the board closer to his eyes.

  “Wait a minute,” he uttered, using a fingernail to pry at a broken edge. What he’d first taken to be a single layer he could tease apart into multiple layers, like thin paper stuck together. He worried at the edge for several minutes before he gave up trying to determine the exact number of layers.

  “Must be fifty or more,” he mumbled. “Might even be hundreds, and I just can’t separate them.”

  He set the board back on his lap and looked up, not concentrating on anything specific, his eyes unfocused as he ruminated on the shocking revelation.

  “So, there is evidence of beings besides humans on this planet—if not now, then in the past. The board’s dirty. When I rub and scratch at it, the underlying surfaces are unmarked, so I can’t estimate how long it lay in the ground.

  “And it’s a broken piece. What broke it? An accident like the one that led me here? A battle between . . . who? Or should I say, what?

  “The technology is way ahead of anything on Earth. Although I shouldn’t try to second-guess how fast things developed there. Still, it’s well ahead of Earth, but is it enough ahead to be the Watchers? Maybe. Then again, maybe it’s not the Watchers, but whoever they said transplanted humans—some other alien race, ones the Watchers haven’t identified.”

  He shook his head. Once again, too many questions arose, to which he’d likely never have satisfactory answers.

  “I suppose all I can say for sure is that probably either the Watchers or the . . . what the hell should I call them? The Others? One of them visited the surface of Anyar and left a fragment
of a computer or something using advanced printed circuits? The original got damaged by accident or conflict and then discarded or lost when they left?”

  Yozef stopped speaking aloud, as another thought hit him. “Hell, why assume they’ve left? Harlie said they were observing, and I assumed from orbit, but why not from the surface or invisible drones? Whatever cloaking technology failed in the vessel that collided with my flight might also be used for occupied or robotic surveillance in the atmosphere. Shit. One could be hovering right over my head, for all I know!”

  This disconcerting thought made him reflexively scan the sky and the air space within the grove of trees. Nothing was visible.

  Of course, it wouldn’t be visible, you dimwit, he told himself, unconsciously switching to internal monologue, instead of speaking aloud where something might overhear. Then, realizing what he had done, he flushed with anger and yelled skyward.

  “Okay, so it’s stupid to think you’re monitoring me, but if you are, fuck you and whatever horse, jabberwocky, slimeball, robot, or whatever you rode in on! Thanks for nothing! Yeah, you ‘repaired’ me, but it was your fucking mistake that caused all this!”

  A two-handed, middle-fingered salute to the sky completed his statement, followed by his breaking into laughter so hard, it took several minutes to subside, as he held onto his stomach with both arms.

  When his semi-hysterical outburst was over, Yozef sat back on the log. “Okay. Get yourself back in control. Nothing has changed. I’m here. Even if I’m being observed, I’ll never know it, and I still have to live my life and deal with all that involves. The Narthani, my projects, Maera, the coming child, and the one already here.”

  He looked again at the sky, knowing once more that nothing would be the same. He would never again look up without lingering wonder, even if deep in a corner of his mind, whether someone or something watched him.

  It was time to go home. He stood and walked to the edge of the grove, then stopped short. He hadn’t asked Wallington whether he had any other objects like this.

  Yozef retraced his steps back to Wallington’s workroom. The three students had left. Wallington was bent over a flat of pea seedlings, examining some feature and making notes in a ledger.

  “Excuse me, Willwin, I forgot to ask you something.”

  The surprised scholastic jumped at the unexpected voice. “Yozef, back again? Did you forget something? Oh, you said you had a question.”

  Yozef held up the circuit board fragment. “Is this the only piece like this you have?”

  “Yes,” said Wallington. “I’ve never heard of any such object before. I asked the herder who brought this one in if there were any more like this. He said he had only seen it because he’d dismounted to check his horse’s hoof. Only a portion of it was sticking out of the ground. A month later, he was in Abersford and we ran into each other. He told me he’d gone back to the same spot and dug quite a bit, but he didn’t find anything else.”

  “Too bad,” said Yozef. “Next time you see him, would you ask him to come see me? I might be interested in going to the same spot and looking around myself.”

  “Of course, Yozef, I’ll let him know. I only see him every month or more, so I don’t know when I can give him your request. Unfortunately, I also didn’t get his name or where exactly he lives.”

  “No problem,” said Yozef, “and no hurry. Thanks. I’ll let you get back to your peas.”

  Yozef turned to leave, walked three steps, then stopped when yet another thought occurred to him. He turned again. “Besides this object, is there anything you or anyone else has ever come across that is odd?”

  “Odd,” Wallington repeated. “In what way?”

  “Just different from anything else people are used to seeing or something that is unexplainable and a bit mysterious.”

  “Well . . . Nothing I can think of . . . except for possibly Flagorn Eggs.”

  “Flagorn eggs?” repeated Yozef, suppressing an insane urge to giggle. “Are they like dragon eggs or maybe the ones of Fabergé? Best to keep the former out of the fire and the other ones locked up safe.”

  Wallington face appeared blank with incomprehension.

  Then Yozef did giggle briefly, before choking it back down. “Never mind, just some random thought of mine.”

  Like I’m going to explain the dragon eggs from Game of Thrones or the jeweled Russian Easter eggs of the Tsars.

  “Flagorn eggs?” repeated Yozef. “What in the world are Flagorn eggs?”

  “They’re supposed to come from a mythological creature that doesn’t exist on Anyar anymore. I only know they’re referenced in a few of the oldest known writings. It’s just legend, of course, but there are these odd-shaped rock formations that people have named Flagorn eggs. None around here, and I’ve only seen one myself, in Hewell Province. I know people who have seen the ones in Vandinke and Pawell Provinces, and I understand they’re found elsewhere on Caedellium. They look like two-thirds of a big egg sticking out of the ground, with the small egg end up. Now that I think about it, I wonder if anyone’s ever dug down to see if the buried part is the other egg end. Anyway, they’re about three feet high, completely smooth, smoother than polished marble, a dark blue color, and—I have my doubts about this part—some say they occasionally feel warm, even in the coldest weather.

  “Again, as you can imagine, there are rumors of strange happenings associated with the eggs, as happens with all phenomena that superstitious people can’t explain. I’m sure they’re just an unusual type of rock with a rational explanation for whatever they are.”

  Half an hour earlier, Yozef would have blown off Flagorn eggs. After seeing the circuit board fragment, however, and his thinking session on his log, he was of a mind to allow that anything could be possible.

  I’ll give it two options: either, as Willwin says, it’s probably some weird rock, or it’s a device of one of the alien races. If the latter, pick your favorite BEM—although I guess they could be slime blobs, instead of Bug-Eyed-Monsters.

  “That’s all I know about them,” said Wallington, “At the moment, I can’t think of any other strange objects like you asked about.”

  “Okay, thanks, Willwin. I’ll take my leave again and quit bothering you.”

  “No, no, Yozef,” said Wallington. “Any visit from you is always interesting, even in cases where I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  Yozef grunted and left. He took the common road home this time, and it gave him enough moments to decide that if the opportunity arose, he’d try to get a look at Flagorn eggs.

  CHAPTER 9: OBLIGATIONS

  Yozef questioned the ten surviving Narthani prisoners several more times while they settled into living around Abersford, and he added to his interrogation notes. Maera volunteered to organize his notes into a coherent report when they ran to fifty pages of his scribblings.

  “Father, Vortig, and Pedr need to read this,” she told him, after reviewing the final pages. “But not in this form. Pedr could make sense of it, but Vortig wouldn’t have the patience, and I wouldn’t want Father to miss any of the points.”

  During the next three days, Maera pestered Yozef to explain his atrocious penmanship and clarify written comments that had seemed clear to him when he wrote them but that needed translation for Maera. Not for the first time, he appreciated the clarity of his wife’s thinking, as she produced a readable report that included salient points Yozef had missed.

  Maera sent the report to Caernford in the regular mail packet, and a sixday later a response came in an unexpected format.

  The Kolsko house hosted a pleasant social evening with the Beynom family: Diera, Sistian, Cadwulf, and Selmar. Elian and Serys Clithrow prepared and served the evening meal. Serys was a new widow from the Moreland City battle and worked at the Kolsko house as part of Maera’s efforts to provide for families of the dead or incapacitated. Elian Faughn, the wife in the elderly couple employed by Yozef when he moved out of the abbey guest quarters to a home of h
is own, was still spry for her age but had noticeably slowed down, especially by evening.

  During the meal, they deliberately kept the conversation away from weighty matters, though without overt intention. Sistian recalled stories of his youth in Caernford and mischief he and his best friend, Culich Keelan, had gotten into. Maera laughed so hard at previously unheard antics of her father’s past that tears covered her face and she got the hiccups.

  Diera, Maera, and Yozef all recalled their own family tales, and the two Beynom sons elicited stories of everyone’s days as students and the common experiences with good and bad teachers, tests, homework, and wondering what all of them would do with their lives and where their studies would lead them.

  When the evening wound to a close, the Beynoms bade Maera and Yozef thanks, collected a promise of a reciprocal evening at the Beynom house, and left walking toward the abbey. The two moons of Anyar and a sky full of stars provided more than enough light.

  “Thank you, Yozef,” said Maera, sliding her arm through his.

  “Thank you? What for?”

  “For being you. For agreeing to marry me after my pathetic proposal of marriage. For our life together. For seeing me for who I am and not trying to fit me into a fixed role. Oh . . . I don’t know . . . just because. Thank you.”

  Her words touched him, but he was unsure what he had done to elicit them. Not certain what to say in return, he fell back to his stock reaction to awkward moments and said nothing.

  When the Beynoms faded into the darkness, Maera gave his arm a squeeze. “I didn’t have time to tell you between when you got home and the Beynoms arrived, but Father is coming to Abersford next sixday.”

  Yozef looked down at his wife’s face, lit by lantern light from the windows of the house. “Culich? Coming here? Why?”

  “Ostensibly, it’s part of his yearly tour of the province. He’s always tried to make a circuit to visit each district, meet with leaders and others, and get the pulse of the clan and let the people see him. With everything that’s happened the last year, the tour has been delayed again and again, and now he’s doing it.”