No, I probably shouldn’t do that; it would be wrong on many levels. But I could still create an incantation to block or break these devices. That would cut the mage off from their primary magic source.
Remembering the red light that caught his eye, he turned and located it again. Dropping the remains of the necklace into his pouch, he stood and moved over to the light. Again, he brushed the dirt away with his magic, revealing a flat silver box. It looked like a pocket cigar case. Its surface was scratched, but the elegant engraving of vines across it was still beautiful. A series of six small rectangular crystal surfaces were along the narrow top edge. The second crystal rectangle was glowing red. If he hadn’t been in that exact spot, he would never have seen the dim light.
It wasn’t emitting magic. Lebuin slowly reached for it, ready to pull his hand away instantly. His fingers lightly touched the silver surface; it felt as if it held no surprises.
Picking it up, he was amazed that it was so light. It weighed less than his hairbrush, maybe three ounces. The case fit neatly in the palm of his hand. Turning it over, he tried to fathom what it might be. On what he presumed was the face of the case, a pair of equal rectangles were etched, side-by-side, which encompassed most of the face’s engravings. After fiddling with it a few seconds, he found that the long edge sides felt like something softer than metal. As he pressed one side, it yielded slightly. When holding it in his palm, it was a natural feeling to squeeze both edges at the same time.
Pressing the sides simultaneously resulted in the two rectangles on the front popping open. They were doors, which dropped into the case, completely disappearing. Without the door covers, the device presented a new face, divided in halves, upper and lower.
The lower face consisted of a number of circular indentations, with odd engraved symbols on them. Around one depression, a set of three circles inside each other formed something like a bull’s eye. The center of the bull’s eye was painted bright red. The top half of the face was a large, grey rectangle.
Running his thumb over the indentations, he concentrated, trying to get some kind of reading on it. Although it had a glowing light within, there was no magic flowing through the device at all. Even stranger, the device felt odd to his magical senses. It was unexpectedly magic-proof. The ambient energies flowed around it as if it were a rock and the magic was water.
As he touched the indentions, he felt them move, and realized they could be pressed down further. One was the universal symbol for power.
Curiosity won over caution, and he pressed his thumb down hard on the power symbol. The empty grey rectangle on the upper half of the face turned pitch black, with pictures brightly lit like a lantern shining through small slits in the surface. There were a number of mathematical graphs labeled in a language he recognized. Shivers ran down his spine and he felt a slight chill in his gut as he realized where this thing came from.
That’s Elracian. Oh Lords, this is an Elracian device!
Holding it closer, he read the labels. Available Power, Ambient, Focal, Argos Observed, and Recording Time.
All of the graphs were either percentages or some scale he didn’t understand, except for the recording time. That was clearly counting up in the Elracian time notation, and was at 463 years, six cycles, one week, one day, and twenty-three marks.
Just seeing this thing is an instant death sentence to anyone I don’t approve of.
Lebuin looked around, glad the team was outside of the main building, patrolling. Only Illa remained close by, but she was guarding the entrance in the main room.
I need another opinion on this.
He moved under the hole in the roof. With a telekinetic incantation, he created a force under his boots and pushed himself off the floor, back up to the main room. Illa saw him coming and walked over.
“Did you figure it out?” Her voice was relaxed and oddly pleasant to listen to, probably due to all her vocal training as a singer.
“Yes and no. What I’m about to tell you is for you alone. I need a second opinion.”
Illa kicked a rock into the hole. “Understood.”
“The truth is the Circumveni Desert is all that remains of the Elraci nation.”
Illa gave him her best tell-me-something-I-don’t-know look.
He held up a hand. “Let me work through this. I’m trying to organize it.”
Illa grabbed two intact chairs, dusted them off, and placed them facing each other and the hole. She sat in one and pointed to the other. “Care to sit and talk it through?”
Lebuin waved one hand in the air. “No, let me pace. I think better that way.”
She shrugged and leaned back, placing her wrists on her thighs, both hands still holding her daggers.
“Okay.... I’m the guardian of Elraci, but I don’t know how much to say or not say. I’m lost in this. I haven’t said anything about Elraci because of this.”
“Yes, we noticed. Are you going to tell me now?” She tried to keep her voice even, but her curiosity was sufficiently intense to cause her tone to step up enough for Lebuin to hear it. Illa shifted to lean towards him.
Lebuin tried to ignore her sudden penetrating stare and continued to pace, trying to organize what he knew. “For over 5,000 years, all knowledge of Elraci has been banned. The stated reason is that none of our races are ready for the kind of power Elraci had. It was an amazing nation based on the principles of science. The scientists there studied mundane and magical technologies, trying to combine them. From what I’ve learned, they’d amassed knowledge from all the races of the universes under a democratic-style system based on logic and reason. They had a blended society that was supposed to be the model for all of our peoples in this new universe. They took a conservative approach to research, favoring patience with oversight, focused on protecting and working with nature.”
Illa leaned back again and said, “That’s in all the legends about the fabulous shining society of Imridu-Nam, which was destroyed by its own hubris. They thought they knew better than the Gods, and destroyed themselves.” Her tone urged him to get to something new.
Lebuin shook his head. “Not exactly. Yes, something went terribly wrong. However, many of the Gods believe a rebellious faction, which had been debating endlessly that the combination of sciences wasn’t safe, had purposefully tried to demonstrate how unstable the blended technology was by building a small version of the great power sources, and lost control of it prematurely.”
“Really? No one ever says that.”
“Of course not. The Gods have hidden the history, turning it into a mythical parable about the dangers of going too far too fast. As far as I know, no one knows what happened. Lord Argos recorded exactly what occurred after the initial accident: without warning, an immeasurable blast of power slammed into Imridu-Nam, the great spiral capital city of Elraci. That blast overloaded the unique power systems there, and Imridu-Nam simply vanished in a release of power beyond anything thought to be possible.
“The energies, magical and mundane, rolled across Elraci, tearing the ground apart and destroying almost everything in its path. City after magnificent city was destroyed as the wave of power washed over the inhabited green lands of Elraci. Each city’s energy system exploded and added even more power and chaos to the forces of ruination. All of the Gods and thousands of mages leapt into a defensive fight that all thought impossible to win. They couldn’t stop the wave of destruction. Many of the Gods perished trying to block or absorb the energies.”
“Well, that last bit is part of every story I’ve heard about the loss of Imridu-Nam.”
“Yeah, I grew up reading the same tales. According to the records, it was Lady Dalpha who took charge and, with the help of many Gods and mages, managed to funnel and redirect the energy flood back into Elraci. The Gods and mages who tried to intervene directly died. Dalpha used forest fire tact
ics to fight it from a distance. They created massive magical fire lines. They chose to abandon all of Elraci, because they needed to direct the energies into the oceans on the east and west, where it could burn itself out, evaporating and destroying the waters.
“It worked, sort of. It took weeks before all the energy from the explosions of the Elraci systems finally dissipated enough to see past the fire lines, and the containment had cost even more lives from many of the magical races and the Gods themselves. In the end, all that remained of Elraci was a desert, which they named the Circumveni Desert.”
He paused, staring at the device in his hand. Illa stood and looked at it, too.
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure. But it’s Elracian.”
“Okay, so what are you saying? This was a leftover, previously unknown Elracian outpost, with one of those power sources down there?”
Meeting Illa’s eyes, Lebuin said, “That wasn’t the end of the disaster. A dramatic change to the world came soon after, as the climates shifted, making the central band of the Duianna Continent far hotter than it had been. Even worse, a surprising number of animals that had lived in Elraci survived, but they were horribly mutated by the energy storms that had washed over their lands. Most of the new creatures died, and those that didn’t were monstrous, with a thirst for killing. Many more people and animals had to move to survive the deadly climate changes and creatures. For years, the Gods worked to hunt down and kill the mutated animals.”
Illa sat back down, shaking her head. “Lords and Ladies be blessed! Never have I heard this.”
“It was 5,000 years ago, and most of the effort was by the Gods. The things they were forced to do changed many of them. Never before had such destruction been wrought with magic, and they decided then to keep it safe. Understanding the full extent of the damage, and with the agreement of the Duianna Empire, elves, dwarves, and another race hinted at in the texts but never named, the Gods decreed the ancient knowledge was to be temporarily banned. All the races were to turn their attentions to evolving into a stable society that could exist in harmony and balance. Only when all agreed such a society had been achieved would the ancient knowledge be unlocked. The Mages’ Guild of Argos was established to police the world, ensuring early detection of any advancements in either the technological or magical sciences that could lead to the discovery of the banned knowledge.”
Talking it out helped; everything fell into place in his mind. Like puzzle pieces, the necklaces, the power, and the fact that something was coming that no one could stop or detect, which would wipe out the world and possibly more, all came together.
Looking down into the hole, Lebuin whispered, “This wasn’t an old, lost Elracian power system. This was a new Elracian power source. Somehow, the Nhia-Samri have discovered how to build one. Only this was more than what I read about. They have advanced that technology further! They found a way to let their mages tap those energies for magic, to tie their odassi blades to the power, and to construct these power systems hidden from the eyes of Argos and his mages. In many ways, the Nhia-Samri achieved what the Elracian scientists and mages had been working towards!”
Illa stood, her face going pale. “My Lord, if the Nhia-Samri have these power systems, then they have the power to cause the end of everything, exactly as Elraci ended. They could burn the whole world if they had enough of these.” Touching Lebuin’s arm, she said, “I overheard my father once commenting on the fact that we no longer sent expeditions into the desert. I thought he was talking about some of the deserts west of the mountains in mid-Laeusia, but maybe he was talking about the Circumveni Desert.”
“It might have been the capital. It would be a large enough landmark to find, even in the ruins of those lands. Maybe a library or research facility was strong enough to survive the devastation. If so, we have to find it and seal it. I might be able to add some of its knowledge to the Argos Library for future needs.” Thinking the plan through, he felt a tingle down his spine. “Then, we have to go to the Nhia-Samri and ensure this knowledge is erased.”
His thumb toyed with the other depressions in the device. The glowing graphs shifted, showing an image of himself looking at the necklace.
“This thing was watching me?”
Peering over his shoulder, she said, “Apparently.”
He pointed at the bottom left of the image, which had the date in Elracian. “This thing had a display that said it had been recording for 460 years. Could it have been recording what it saw?”
After trying a couple of other controls, he still couldn’t get it to go back to the original images it had showed him. Instead, he discovered it had dozens, if not hundreds, of abilities. It displayed images labeled visual spectrum analysis, shielding control, remote link control, global position, local telemetry sources, and other things that provided waving patterns of light across the device screen. None of it made much sense, and through all of them, the lower right corner continued to count in marks and seconds.
Pushing the control for power made the device stop working, but the little red light was still glowing.
“I think it’s still watching us. It can show me images from its past. If I can figure out how to direct it, I can see what that room looked like before it was destroyed, and exactly what happened to it.”
“And then what?”
He paused, considering everything he knew. “This was Elracian technology. It was destroyed by some force or accident. I don’t think there’s anything else I can find here. I need to try to figure this device out, and then I might have a better idea about what we’ll be up against. No matter what, we need to penetrate the Circumveni Desert and find the knowledge cache the Nhia-Samri found. I might be able to learn the same thing they learned from it. This is worse than we thought.”
Illa looked around at the destruction. “We’re at war, being hunted by a Nhia-Samri death squad, and Nigan is cooking tonight. How can this be worse?”
Despite the gravity of the situation, Lebuin laughed. “He isn’t that bad a cook.”
Illa scrunched up her face. “The next day, I always have to deal with his cooking a second time.”
“I really didn’t need to know that.”
“Well, you asked for it.”
He could still feel some turmoil in her. “What? This isn’t worse?” he asked, gesturing towards the large hole in the ground.
Illa fiddled with her daggers. “I’m thinking about it.”
He laughed as they turned and walked out the corridor. They were halfway down the hall when he felt an odd tingling as magic passed through the area. His senses screamed as the power grew stronger and focused in on the corridor they were about to exit. Adrenaline blew into his system as he spun around.
Illa sensed some of the danger through their shared connection. Turning, she dropped into a defensive stance.
The magic built quickly, and the far end, near the main chamber they’d just left, began to glow in his magical sight. The power continued to increase, and the glowing soon grew into the visible light spectrum.
Illa screamed, “RUN!”
Lebuin, having felt Illa’s alarm even before she cried out, whirled around with her to bolt. Together they ran as fast as they could for the exit. Leaping down the few steps to the ground, they raced across the training courtyard.
Illa yelled the whole way, “GET OUT! GET OUT! WE HAVE TO RUN!”
Ticca and Nigan burst from the kitchen building’s doorway when Lebuin and Illa were nearly across the large yard. Ticca’s eyes were like saucers as she took in their approach. She didn’t even bother to ask.
Leaping over the railing, she ran towards the stables, joining Illa’s screaming with her own, repeating, “RABBIT RUN!”
Nigan ran a short distance down the kitchen’s patio before vaulting over the railing, landing at a
run only a few feet behind Ticca. She and Nigan disappeared behind one of the barracks, well ahead of Lebuin and Illa.
As they rounded the corner, the stables came into view, and they saw more of their team were also running for them. Only a few were carrying their gear. Ticca and Nigan arrived first, pushing the doors open.
The team’s horses immediately came out, herded by Epton and Persa. Ticca had ordered that the horses be kept ready. Nigan grabbed his mount and tightened the saddle straps with a few yanks before jumping up into it, while also grabbing some other horses’ reins.
Carda and Malla came from behind the stables, quickly tightened their saddles, and mounted. Ticca was on her horse by the time Lebuin and Illa got to theirs.
Nigan yelled, “Aside from away, do we have a specific direction?”
Spinning her horse around to face Lebuin, Ticca asked, “Got a preference?”
Lebuin took longer than most, but not by much, to tighten his saddle and climb up. “South to Elraci.”
“You heard him,” she told Nigan. “Get the rest of the team, and if we get separated, we’ll regroup in the south.”
“Don’t worry. Sabri and Coedy will be able to find you. GO!” Nigan shouted.
Ticca turned her horse and it leapt into a gallop. “Come on, you two! Move it!”
Towing four horses for Ditani and the three team members with him scouting their back trail, Nigan galloped off towards the east.
Taking the reins, Lebuin turned to follow Ticca. Digging his heels in hard, he held on for his life as his horse launched.
The animals picked up on the mood, moving faster than Lebuin could remember. The wind whipped past, howling in his ears. Looking back, he saw that Epton and Persa were staying behind him and Illa. Ahead, Ticca was concentrating on the ground while Carda and Malla were watching for any kind of threat.
Epton bellowed, “We got company!”
Thread Skein (Golden Threads Trilogy Book 3) Page 11