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Alucius woke with the first light slanting through the small third-floor window of the Red House. He yawned and rolled over carefully, then swung himself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Sleep and food had definitely helped. His eyes no longer burned, and while he was still sore in places, he was better than he had been.
He still had no idea where Wendra was, or how to proceed, and he certainly had no idea exactly how to deal with the ifrits… or how he could even get back to Dekhron safely. Whatever he did, or could do, he would need to eat before he set out, and he would also need some small items, if they weren't too expensive—a water bottle that he could hook to his belt and some travel food. He knew he could not get ammunition for the heavy Guard rifle—not in Dereka. That had been a problem when he and the Northern Guard had been in Deforya before.
After dumping the water in the basin out the window and refilling it with what remained in the pitcher, he washed up. Then, as he was dressing, he checked his wallet. While he had added coins after getting paid the day before, he hadn't planned on traveling all across Corus. Still… he had two golds, six silvers, and five coppers left—more than enough for what he needed in the way of food and lodging and some modest supplies… for a short time.
Like it or not, he was going to have to try to become more proficient in using the Tables or portals, but if he started in Dereka, at least he'd have somewhere he could come back to without having to confront an ifrit. At least, that was what he hoped, but he certainly wasn't certain, not after discovering the power of a full ifrit in confronting Tarolt.
The sky outside his small window was a grayish silver green when he unbarred and unlocked the door. He left the rifle concealed and locked the room behind him.
Breakfast in the public room consisted of egg toast, so brown it was almost burned, with a berry syrup, two thick slices of tough ham, and a mug of ale. It cost him another four coppers, but he wasn't about to attempt any explorations on an empty stomach.
More than a glass later, he left the inn and began to walk southward along the main boulevard. The morning was cool, not quite chill, with but a light wind blowing out of the north. While the west side of the street was not empty, there were far fewer vendors than there would be later in the day. Most of those seeking to do business with the vendors were older women. Several glanced at him and the heavy rifle he carried, but most paid him little attention.
A block southward, he found a small store, not quite a chandlery, but one with provisions and even a belt water bottle. He spent more than a silver for hard cheese, travel bread, dried fruit and nuts, and the water bottle. He slipped the food into various pockets in his jacket. Then, after leaving the store, he had to retrace his steps to fill the bottle at the public fountain.
He had just left the fountain when a company of lancers trotted by, heading southward toward the Lancer Prime Base beyond the complex that had served as the palace of the Landarch. Alucius did not recognize the captain and overcaptain leading the column. The uniforms of the rankers at the end of the column were considerably newer than those of the riders leading the column, and several of the trailing riders glanced around them, as if they had not seen Dereka before.
Alucius did not cross the boulevard until he was opposite the ancient gold eternastone building that held the portal. As he walked swiftly across the wide street, he glanced around. His Talent showed no sign of any purpleness or any ifrits. He had not noticed anything of that nature since he had arrived in Dereka. Nor had he felt them when he had been an overcaptain fighting the nomads—except, of course, in his dreams.
Still, several of the vendors had been watching him, and he did not want to have anyone note his return to the structure. So he walked past and then into an alleyway that looked deserted. There, he concentrated on the illusion that he was but a vagrant breeze, occasionally stirring up dust.
"… see that?"
At the words, Alucius stiffened, but held the Talent-illusion.
"See what?"
"Herder type… dark jacket… just went away…"
"Just seeing things."
"Tell you, he was there. Big gray-haired fellow. Big as life…"
Alucius smiled to himself as he eased out of the alleyway and made his way back into the abandoned building, a structure that had to date back to the first ifrit occupation of Corus. He moved quietly, trying to keep his steps from echoing in the abandoned and cavernous interior.
He paused as he heard steps on the stone floor. He flattened himself against the wall of the corridor that led toward the chamber above the portal area, waiting and listening. Two lancer officers walked down the corridor toward Alucius, followed by two rankers. Alucius remained motionless, hoping that his illusion would prove enough.
"… you make of it?" asked the captain.
"… strange… boot prints there… don't see how they got there," replied the undercaptain, speaking as he walked past Alucius without even looking in the colonel's direction.
"… you think it was a demon?"
"… more likely a drunken ranker. Came down there, fell asleep, dust settled, and when he woke, he left tracks going out."
Alucius nodded to himself. It was a perfectly good explanation, and one he hoped the two officers reported. He did not move until the four men reached the end of the corridor and took the short flight of steps that led to the north exit from the building.
Then he made his made back to the inside stone stairway that led down to the former Table chamber, moving quietly and stopping to listen along the way. He neither heard nor sensed anyone. The chamber was empty, but the dust on the stone floor bore many boot tracks.
Alucius released his own illusion and looked around the dimly lit chamber, studying it more carefully than he had when he had first arrived there the afternoon before. The walls were all of stone. There once might have been wooden paneling or more ornate stone facings; but if so, no trace remained. Nor was there any sign of ceiling decoration.
His eyes dropped to the oblong space in the middle of the chamber floor. Concentrating, and using his Talent, he could sense a vague purpleness, as well as a crimson gold circle, in the center of the oblong carved into the stone itself. The stone that comprised the base of the oblong was darker, and Alucius could sense that it was part of something larger, but not something created by the ifrits, rather more like a lifeweb, except it was far more vague to his Talent, almost like the hint of a mist.
Did the world itself have lifethreads—lines that ran through rock and stone beneath the surface of the earth? It could be possible… He shook his head. The more he learned, the more he found out that he didn't know.
Still… the ifrits seemed to follow patterns, and he might be able to discover more if he could use what he knew.
Did the chamber have a secret door, like the one built in Salaan? He walked to the part of the stone wall closest to him. He let his hand range over it, then tapped it, first with his fingers, then with the rifle butt. It sounded solid, and from what he could tell from his Talent, it felt solid as well. He examined the entire wall, but all of it felt the same.
Then, recalling the use of light-torch brackets in the palace of the Matrial, he began to look for places where there might have been brackets. Once he looked, the narrow holes drilled into the stone were obvious. There had been four such brackets, two on each of the side walls, each head high. Alucius looked at each closely. When he reached the third set of bracket holes, he smiled, but he checked the fourth set as well before returning to the third.
Three of the brackets had been anchored by two holes drilled into the stone. The third set had four holes—the two standard anchors, and then two more in the middle, one above the other. Whatever cables had been used had long since vanished, but Alucius had a good idea that there was a door or something like it on one side or the other of the vanished four-hole bracket.
He studied the two center holes, then began to create a Talent-probe—the kind he h
adn't tried or used since he'd been confined in the hidden city of the soarers. He began by visualizing a thin golden probe, slipping it into the uppermost of the center holes in the wall. He had to concentrate more, using the probe to feel blindly what lay beyond the stone. There were silvery metal levers, and weights. He wrapped his probe around what felt like a lever and tried to pull it down. The probe slipped off the lever—if that was what it happened to be—as though the metal was heavily oiled. Alucius focused his probe with rougher edges, and greater strength, and sticky as well, almost as if with glue covered with sand. That allowed him to pull down on the lever, but nothing happened. He tried to push, but that didn't work either.
Sweat began to form on Alucius's forehead as he tried combination after combination of pulling on one lever, then another. A quarter glass passed, and then half a glass, and his entire body was shaking when, abruptly, there was a snap, a low grinding, and a section of the wall slid sideways, revealing a passageway beyond—one lit dimly by a pair of ancient light-torches.
Alucius inspected the area on the far side of the passageway, noting the very simple lever. He shook his head. He wasn't very good at visualizing what he'd never seen. Taking his rifle, he stepped into the passageway. He could sense no one in the passageway beyond. After a moment, he eased the lever forward. The stone wall slid back into place, more smoothly and with much less noise than it had made in opening.
He took a deep breath and walked along the narrow stone passage, seemingly cut from the stone itself. After a good five yards, it ended in another chamber—one that looked to be precisely five yards square. Unlike the other chambers or Table chambers, this room had not been touched.
There was a table desk in one corner and an odd settee before it, beside which was a chair with longer legs than most. Against the wall to the left was a wide chest of drawers, similar to the one in the buried Table chamber where Tarolt had hurled Alucius. The light-torches above the table desk shed an even, if faint, glow across the chamber. In a niche carved head high from the wall behind the table desk was a chest or casket of metallic silver and black, although the silver held a purplish sheen. The casket was slightly over a yard in length, and a third of a yard in height and in depth. A key with a triangular head remained in the lock of the casket, although the lid was closed.
A set of clothes lay on the floor, just inside the chamber, a green tunic trimmed in brilliant purple, with matching trousers and black boots. The garments had no dust upon them, and the fabric had a silvery sheen. They were laid out as if someone had been lying down and vanished, leaving the clothing behind. Alucius recalled what had happened in the chamber beneath the Martial's palace. Had the ifrit been trapped or killed by one of the ancient soarers? Or just been trapped when the soarers had disrupted the ifrits' lines of power?
There was a strange gleam to the garments, and he studied them with his Talent. Then… he swallowed. Like the eternastone of the roads and the remaining ifrit buildings, like the Tables, and like the green towers, the garments bore an infusion of lifeforce. The squandering of life-force on preserving mere clothing… the taking of something that held a whole world together—just for clothing that would endure for eons?
Alucius looked farther into the chamber. The light-torch bracket in the far left corner had been twisted down, and on the polished graystone floor below lay the metal fittings of a light-torch, but without the crystal. Beside the broken light-torch lay a silvery jacket, a pistol-like device, and a pair of boots on their sides.
Alucius nodded. The pistol-like device was like the one the engineer had used, but he could sense with his Talent that its power had long since dissipated. He took a deep breath and hurried back out of the chamber to the hidden door. He pulled the lever down. After a moment, and another grinding lurch, the door opened.
This time, when he returned to the furnished chamber, he left the stone doorway open. He thought he'd rather deal with live intruders than a mechanism that might jam and might well have already trapped two ifrits.
He went to the metallic casket in the wall niche first. As he looked at it, he realized that the casket was not set on the ledge, but actually embedded several spans into the stone so that it could not have been moved without breaking the slab into which it was set. The key had been left in the open position. Alucius lifted the lid. The casket was empty. Inside was a pair of heavy metal brackets, as if the casket had once held something. A purple crystal was set at each end of the casket, and from the position of the brackets, it appeared as if whatever had rested inside the casket had once rested firmly against each crystal. A silvery bar ran from the base of each crystal down through the bottom of the casket and into the stone.
For a time, Alucius studied the casket, but he could not determine what the missing object might have been. From the casket, he turned to the chest set against the wall, leaving the single drawer in the table desk for later.
He opened the top right-hand drawer of the chest. Inside were two greenish crystals. Even as he watched, both disintegrated. What remained in the drawer was a stack of sheets of the same eternal parchment. Alucius picked up the first one. The writing was regular, each symbol precisely the same size as the next—except none of them was familiar. He glanced through the other sheets. All were covered in symbols, without any drawings. After a moment, he slipped them back into the drawer.
The left-hand drawer contained a few odd-shaped coins, including several golds of a type Alucius had never seen, a pair of shears, and a thin coil of wire. He slipped the golds into his wallet and opened the double-width drawer below. Inside was a long shimmering garment of some sort, all golden silver, with large symbols down the front, symbols that Alucius had never seen, but which he suspected matched some of those on the sheets of eternal parchment.
Bending down, Alucius opened the lowermost drawer. It seemed to be empty. Then, in one corner in the back, he saw what looked to be another sheet of parchment, folded over twice. He touched it gingerly, but the substance remained firm to his touch. Slowly, he eased it out of the drawer.
The sheet was neither parchment nor cloth, but something akin to both, flexible and smooth. After a moment, he unfolded it. What he held appeared to be a map of some sort, which could have been drawn recently, with bright colors and clear dark lines. He studied it quickly, noting that it was clearly a map of Corus, although there were representations of parts of the continent that did not match what he knew. The map must have been made a long, long time ago, before the Cataclysm that had changed the world. He glanced back over his shoulder and slipped it inside his jacket and tunic.
He turned back to the table desk and opened the single wide drawer. Inside, he found little enough—a miniature knife with a purpleness to it that prompted him to leave it without touching it, an oblong block of jade with an enameled and unfamiliar seal upon it, and some sort of stylus in the form of a leafy branch. There were also a number of sheets of the eternal parchment, all blank.
Alucius closed the drawer and walked toward the broken light-torch bracket. Avoiding the boots and pistol on the floor and standing beside the broken light-torch bracket, he created another Talent-probe.
This time, as much as he tried, he could do nothing to open what he knew to be another hidden door. He could find no levers, nothing beyond the stone except more stone. Yet… once there had been. Finally, with sweat streaming down his forehead, he turned and studied the chamber again.
There were no books, nothing to provide knowledge, except the map inside his tunic and the sheets of eternal parchment with unreadable symbols—too many sheets to carry with him. And then there was the mysterious metal casket—with nothing inside it.
He turned and made his way back along the narrow stone passageway. He stopped under one of the light-torches just a yard inside the open stone door.
There he took out the map he had found and unfolded it. Despite having been folded for longer than he could imagine, once the map—and it was clearly a map—was flat in his hand
s, there were no creases or wrinkles. Before Alucius was a detailed depiction of Corus. Although he could not read the script that labeled the cities, all the eternastone highways that he knew were laid out, as well as some that he had never seen or heard of.
There were keys to the map—that he felt. One that leapt out at him was the placement of tiny green octagons. Each octagon had to be the location of a Table—or where a Table had once been. There were octagons in Tempre and where Elcien had once stood and more than a score across Corus. Each octagon was framed by a colored border edged in purple. Alucius looked more closely. The one in Tempre was blue edged in purple. There was another octagon of purple-bordered silver at Prosp in Lustrea. Had that been where he had fought the ifrit-engineer?
So where was he now? He studied one octagon after another until he found the one with the purple-edged, crimson gold border—and it was Dereka, by its location, although he could not read the symbols beside the city. He kept looking, finding a purple-edged, black-bordered green octagon far to the northwest, just to the west and south of what he knew as the Black Cliffs of Despair. He nodded. The icy and preserved structure had been in Blackstear.
From what he recalled of the sullen crimson Table where he had been sent, that buried Table chamber had to have been the one in Soupat.
For a time, his eyes refused to focus on the map as the thoughts of an entire web of Tables connecting all Corus flashed through his mind. Yet… the Tables were not laid out for anything except the travel of a few individuals. Why?
Not that many people—or ifrits—could have had the ability to travel the Tables… could they? From what Alucius had learned from the soarer, it was unlikely that anyone who was not an ifrit had been able to use the Tables when they had first been set up. The eternastone highways were what most people had had to use to get from place to place. That also suggested that not that many ifrits had the ability, and that all Corus had been ruled by a comparative handful of ifrits.
Corean Chronicles 3 - Scepters Page 60