by M. M. Perry
“The moment you think of a better way to find out the gods’ plans, we’ll ship him off. Deal?”
Manfred scowled again, but kept his tongue.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Manfred said as he stood, “I’ll be taking my leave. Nothing kills the appetite like overbearing haughtiness of a has-been deity.”
When he was gone Cass sighed heavily before turning to Nat and Viola, who still looked shocked.
“Hey you two, you don’t have to keep feigning awe. Manfred is a bit cruel, but he is right. Chort’s powers are spent. I’m pretty sure his perception isn’t any better than the average person’s, maybe less even. I’m certain he can’t tell…”
“Did you see it?” Viola asked Nat.
“Yeah, I did. He wore that symbol around his neck.
Chapter 4
Viola, Nat and Cass hunched over the small piece of the scroll.
“Here, look past this figure,” Viola pointed down at the scroll. Cass took her time, alternatively squinting and staring wide-eyed and unfocused at the parchment. Viola could tell the moment Cass finally saw it.
“It’s the same as the one Chort was wearing, isn’t it?” Nat asked, excitedly.
“Yes,” Cass answered.
“But what does it mean?” Viola asked. “I’ve never come across it before.”
“It’s very old,” Cass answered as she picked up another of the pieces of scroll Viola had set out for her, searching for the hidden figure there as well. “It’s not used anymore, not even by the gods themselves. Aside from Chort that is, who wears it to mark himself as a god, and to be sure everyone gives him the respect that should afford him. He’s just been so marginalized and oblivious for so long, he doesn’t realize that no one recognizes it anymore. Even I wouldn’t have recognized it if it hadn’t been for…”
Cass trailed off and her eyes seemed to focus on something distant and troubling. Her face became unreadable before she continued.
“It was in Oshia’s chambers. He wasn’t exactly big on providing me with entertainment. When he wasn’t… when he didn’t want me around, I’d wander. There wasn’t much too do, save look at all the artwork he’d amassed. I recognized, or could puzzle out, most of what I saw, save when I came across this symbol, or one very like it. One day, when I was trying to distract him, I asked about it.”
Viola held her breath. She had not intended to bring up Cass’ sacrifice. So far as Viola knew, Cass had yet to recount what happened in Oshia’s temple to any of them. Viola thought Cass might have spoken of it to Gunnarr behind closed doors to relieve herself of some of the pain of it, but if she had, the Braldashad wasn’t telling. Sometimes it was hard for Viola to remember that it had not been so long ago that Cass was still in Oshia’s clutches. For the rest of them, Oshia had vanished from their lives years ago. But Cass had endured what must have seemed an eternity with the god, and only recently recovered her memories of that time. To Cass, Viola feared, the memories were all still too freshly tender to be handled without pain. Cass’s hollow, haunted look as she harkened back to that time forcibly reminded Viola of the day Cass willingly took Callan’s place in Oshia’s temple. Viola couldn’t repress a shudder as images of Cass’s servitude came unbidden to her mind. Viola blushed and stared down at the scroll.
Concern knitted Nat’s brow as he listened. Like Viola, he worried Cass may still be injured in ways they could not comprehend and she refused to show. She was a warrior, after all, and as he had come to learn well, warriors always put the mission first. They did not stop and take stock of their injuries, visible or otherwise, until they knew everyone else was safe.
“Anyway,” Cass continued awkwardly, “it’s from ancient times. From a time, as Oshia put it, when men grunted more than spoke, and records of the gods were relegated to stick figures smeared on cave walls. Gods used to wear these symbols so they’d be recognized for what they are, revered and such by their followers. They grew out of that desire… not the wanting to be revered bit, but the mingling among humans bit. But eventually the gods grew bored with men, and most of them retreated to the River. By the time they took interest in the affairs of men again, there was no need for the pomp of symbols and robes. Humans had developed speech, music, art, written language, and a host of other ways to communicate who the gods were and how to recognize them. Oshia claimed the symbol he had in his palace had been taken from Natan’s private temple. One of the many things Oshia took an unexplainable amount of pride in.”
Cass’ voice trailed off as she stared blankly into space. Viola cast about for anything to say that might move the conversation out of these troubling waters as fast as she could.
“Well,” Viola started, “that’s helpful then. That makes the symbol the only thing even remotely resembling writing on the scrolls. There isn’t any other kind of formalized writing system here, there’d be repeating patterns if that were the case. The only repeating patterns are some of the basic elements in the pictures themselves. At first I hoped the whole thing might be a precursor to modern djinn writing, where the symbols each represented a meaning, and not sounds, and that over time the system slowly changed. In that case, I might have been able to work backwards from more recent djinn records. But Manfred claims his people have always had a written language based on characters representing sounds, not concepts. He claims that in all of his peoples’ recorded history, this way of telling a story is unique to these scrolls and that is why there is some argument among his people as to what they mean.”
“Seers,” Cass said sitting down in a chair wearily. “They can be odd about how they impart their visions. It’s not done on purpose mind you. They want desperately to tell everyone what they saw. It’s been my experience that seers that have seen something so far reaching as this, something Selina called the higher sight, well, channeling the power of it leaves them… off. They have difficulty even communicating simple things after experiencing the higher sight. Selina was always fearful she might have on of these types of visions. It could be the seer was having trouble communicating what they saw with words, written or spoken.
“I’ve seen a seer touched with powerful visons once. The elder of a village had interrupted a near naked man rummaging through the scrolls in the town meeting hall. When he confronted the man, he raved incoherently for a bit, grabbed a bunch of the scrolls, and bolted before the elder could stop him. The elder took me on to recover the scrolls. The seer was a babbling mess when I found him in the wood days later. By the time I came across him, what little clothing he still had was hanging off him in rags, and he was more like an animal than a man, living off whatever he could scrounge up and shove right in his mouth. The only remaining vestige of his humanity was the loose bundle of scrolls he still carried with him. When I came across him, the seer was using sharp splinters of wood to make himself bleed, and then using it to scratch out scenes right over the top of the writing on the scrolls. I couldn’t make heads or tails of them but the poor fellow was quite attached to them. He clung to them fanatically the whole way back, even when he slept.”
“I guess I should feel lucky these are somewhat organized then,” Viola said searching the scrolls. “Maybe there are more hidden symbols. Maybe something we could reveal another way with some sort of magic.”
Viola stared at the page thinking hard.
“Could it be that wherever the symbol appears it’s naming the god in that image?” Nat asked.
Viola shuffled the pieces of scroll around on the large wooden table. If there was an order in the arrangement, neither Nat nor Cass could see it, but Viola eventually stopped shuffling them, apparently satisfied. She scowled down at them.
“I can only assume the gods have never had access to these scrolls, or perhaps even know about them,” Viola said. “Timta didn’t seem to see any connection between you and the dragons when she first saw us. She thought you had just come up with the idea on the spot to find the dragons.
“I suspect Timta would have killed us right th
en and there as soon as she freed the other old gods if she had known anything about these, at least if I’m reading these right at all, but it would explain why djinn thought what they did. Look,” Viola moved some of the pieces of burnt scroll close to the group so they could see them better. She set aside the few pieces she was relatively certain had already come to pass, like the fair haired woman astride a dragon holding the sunstone. She sorted the rest in a line across the table and pointed at the first one.
“Now that I know how to spot the gods on this, I’m pretty sure this part is fairly straight forward. This,” Viola said pointing to the first scrap, “is the dragons fighting gods. There isn’t much else going on here. Dragons spewing fire at gods is pretty self-explanatory. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say this happens first in the prophecy. It’s got a big battle feel to it, and there are some things in the later pieces that make me think they come after a certain event. One of the things that concerns me is this part.”
Viola pointed to the bottom of the image. All Cass and Nat could see were what looked like crudely drawn images of flames.
“The ground is on fire. Makes sense, dragons fighting gods and all,” Cass said.
“Yes, but here… and here,” Viola pointed to two areas of the page. Much of the lower half of the scrap was burnt but Cass made out what looked to be crosshatching marks.
“I’m not seeing it,” she said.
“Roofs. I think these are roofs. Which means the battle is taking place over a village, or worse, a city.”
Nat and Cass looked again at the spots and now that it was pointed out, it looked much more like the peaks of houses to them.
“That’s certainly no good,” Cass said.
“I wish that were the only thing. Here,” Viola pointed at the next piece, and paused, hesitant to give voice to her fear.
She looked up at Cass and Nat before rubbing her eyes resignedly.
“I think something really bad happens in a piece that may be missing. I can’t really explain what’s going on in the pictures, because I don’t know what all the symbols mean, but notice the land. Whoever made the scrolls suddenly changed how the land is depicted. Here, it is drawn as black instead of green. And in all of these as well,” Viola pointed at the pieces of parchment she aligned near the right of the table. The ground was black in all of them. Then she pointed at the prophecy they knew very well, the scrap depicting Cass riding the dragons into the plains of the dead gods. There the grass was green, as well as other earlier pieces of the prophecy that were completely intact and depicted Cass first finding the sunstone.
“See,” she said, “it’s changed. The land is now black. Something happened between the battle here with the dragons and here. And it isn’t good. I thought at first it may be Xenor, since Xenor has that black rock everywhere. But then this piece is clearly a scene from the Plains of the Dead Gods.”
They could all easily discern the statues of the gods drawn on a flat plain, where all the land was blackened.
“Well, that’s no good,” Nat said trying to remain calm.
“Yeah. Well, at least it doesn’t mean the end of life. Because here you can clearly see humans, not many but some,” Viola pointed to another piece where a huge malformed figure was side by side with little human figures on the blackened land.
Both Nat and Cass unfocused their eyes while looking at the figures, trying to make the filmy symbol that surrounded the depictions of the gods appear, but saw none.
“Those aren’t gods then,” Cass said, “so that’s a small positive at least. But this fellow,” Cass said pointing to the hulking figure on the paper, “I don’t like the look of him.”
The huge creature was drawn all in black, and looked more bestial than human, with great pointed claws and red eyes. It did not look friendly or helpful to anyone in the room.
“I’ve no idea what that is,” Viola said sliding that page under another, “and it gives me goosebumps to look at it. I plan on asking Manfred about it specifically when I go over all my notes with him. The rest I haven’t really figured out yet,” Viola said shuffling a piece forward that portrayed a Djinn hurling blue light towards the burnt edge of the scroll. Whatever the light had been hurled at had been lost to fire long ago.
“This piece is probably the most important for our purposes.”
Viola pushed a larger segment of scroll towards Cass and Nat to look at. In this piece the Djinn and gods were standing together, on one side of a large post. The pole was too small to carry a great deal of detail, but the artist who made the scrolls had drawn two bolts of lightning near the bottom of the staff. On the other side of the staff were images of people walking. No Djinn were among them and they had no symbols over them, making it clear they were not gods either.
Viola pointed at the staff, her eyes catching Cass’.
“Until today, I couldn’t figure this bit out at all. I had wondered if it might not be a standard or flag pole, missing it’s banner after a battle, or maybe even something less literal and more symbolic. But it’s not, is it? This is why you had Gunnarr bring Chort here, isn’t it?”
Cass pursed her lips, “You don’t miss much, do you?”
“He has a staff. He’s the god of lightning. That, with the symbol he was wearing and the one we’ve found in the scrolls… It wasn’t a huge leap now that all the pieces have been brought together. But it’s only become clear just now. Why would you have sent Gunnar out days ago to retrieve Chort? You’d barely even looked at these scrolls, so far as I’ve seen. And Manfred is right about one thing, Chort is powerless and basically useless. Yet somehow his staff is tied up in the prophecy, and somehow you knew. Damned if it makes the meaning of this any clearer to me though. Gods and djinn on one side of Chort’s staff, what I’m guessing are humans on the other. Are they being controlled by the staff? Leaving in fear of it? There’s just too many questions and not enough answers.” Viola finally paused long enough to take a breath. In the momentary silence, Nat spoke up.
“How did you know about the staff?”
“Selina had a vision. She saw me holding a staff. It was all she saw, just me with a staff. When she described it, I knew I had seen something like what she described once before. Chort.”
Viola’s eyes lit up with an idea.
“Maybe we should also take the scrolls to Selina and have her interpret them. She’s a seer. Maybe this will be more familiar to her,” Viola suggested.
“Normally I’d agree, but her connection to Timta is too strong,” Cass said. “She’s been keeping distant from us for that reason. Once the dragons left, it made it much easier for the gods to look in on us. It’s both bad and good. Timta right now has a vested interest in keeping an eye on us. She believes we will bring the dragons to her when she needs them. But it also means, outside of this room, she’ll be privy to all we say. Particularly with Selina. Timta has marked her and they will remain connected until the day Selina passes.”
“Well, we don’t want to let these scrolls fall into the hands of the gods, that’s for sure. What if this shows us how to be rid of them, like the dragons suggested. I suspect they won’t be very happy if they get wind that’s our plan,” Nat said. “But… I think I might be able to help find a seer that can look at these. One that might have some experience with the higher sight you were talking about, Cass. When Gunnarr was trying to find you he considered finding a competent seer to help. He did track a promising lead down about a seer in Ledina, but we never made the trip. Apparently in the last couple of years Ledina’s elf problem has gotten out of control so Gunnar decided to follow up on some other leads first. That was right before we found that old fisherman who could take us to Xenor, which ended up being the right choice.”
“I’d say so,” Cass said with a bright smile.
“Yeah,” Nat grinned back remembering the day he finally saw Cass again after their long search. “Anyway, there is this really powerful seer who has taken refuge in Ledina. His visions are so
strong he’s chosen to stay away from everyone. We heard rumors he’s been driven so mad that he lives among the elves now. Some stories even say they worship him as their king.”
Cass gave Nat an incredulous look.
“I know!” he said, “It sounds like late night pub tales too me too, and I wouldn’t normally put any stock in it, but we got the tale from Randon.”
“Really? Old Reliable is still out there fighting? I thought Randon would have retired to some seaside village years ago.”
“Well, he mostly just travels about, kind of like an informal messenger between spots warriors gather. I don’t think he likes staying in one place too much. Anyway, he swore that he’d been to the seer and the seer was the real thing. Helped him find someone who had been lost at sea for three years. At least, a seer in Ledina helped Randon, but he wasn’t living with the elves. It could be that Randon caught up with the seer before he went to live with the elves. Randon says he didn’t know much else about him, other than he was crazy powerful. Emphasis on crazy. We found out about the living with the elves bit from other warriors later. But it seems pretty likely, given how rare seers are, that the seer Randon met in Ledina and the one living with the elves now are one and the same. Anyway, I figure since Cass clearly features in the prophecy, or at least some parts of it, and Manfred, since he’s a djinn and there are djinn here and there on the scrolls, and maybe even Chort since we think that’s his staff… If we can get all of you there in Ledina with the seer, there’s a chance it might trigger another vision that could help us figure all this out,” he said, pointing to the prophecies.
“Will it help, though?” Viola asked weakly. “I mean, if all this is happening anyway, what’s the point in doing anything. It’s all pre-destined.”
Cass got up and went to a chaise in the corner of the room and lay down on it. She rubbed her temples. Growing up with a seer, she often asked herself the same question Viola voiced aloud. She had never found a satisfactory answer, but Selina once told her something that was at least a comfort to her at the time. She decided telling it to Viola might help out her young friend.