Fractures (Facets of Reality Book 2)

by Jeremy Bullard

  "But Master..."

  "Just let an old man have his way, Lazul," he said, sympathetic to the dragon's plight, but unwavering. "You know I will, anyway. Might as well make it easier on yourself..."

  His voice trailed off as he felt a shift in the ground beneath his bare feet, and the auras he felt through it. Odd. Nestor and Jaeda hadn't even been in the map room for half an hour yet, and already he felt the map springing to life.

  Blast. The Tobin woman had everything turned upside down. Nestor was two days late in finding the map room -- Cao Tzu actually had to send him there today to keep the time frame manageable -- but then he'd uncovered the map almost a week sooner than he should have. How was Cao Tzu to know when, or if, Nestor would figure out how to...?

  "No matter. Things will right themselves. They have to, eventually," he said under his breath, slipping his feet back into his sandals. Thankfully, Nestor and Jaeda hadn't Merged with the floor, to reach out with their auras to find his. Yet. He didn't expect his good fortune to last, though. Holding onto the saddle horn, he walked up Lazul's proffered foreleg and into his seat. "It's time we were off."

  "You're certainly in a hurry to be gone," remarked the dragon.

  "I don't like how things are happening," the mage explained. "Too unpredictable. The longer I remain, the more likely it becomes that things don't turn out how they should. If I stay, Nestor will eventually ask me questions that for his sake I cannot answer, but if I don't answer, he will become frustrated with my obstinance and ultimately leave Aeden altogether. In either case, Nestor doesn't gain the insight that he needs -- in the manner that he needs to -- and this will all have been wasted time."

  "How can you know that?" Lazul demanded. "Tomorrow hasn't been written."

  Cao Tzu sighed, and second-guessed his obstinance, as he often did when this question came up. They always asked how he could know the things he did. It was inevitable. But how could he tell them without making things worse? He shrugged, and answered the way he always answered. "Live through enough tomorrows, and you eventually come to know what tomorrow brings."

  The dragon harrumphed, threw his wings out, and shook himself, limbering up for flight. "You may be long lived, Master, but you're not that long lived."

  "You'd be surprised," Cao Tzu insisted, as much a regret as a rebuttal. "Now quickly, let's be off, before our friends seek me out with questions I have no intention of answering."

  Chapter 16

  Sal floated through the breach that Eshira had created, releasing Amethyst as he touched down inside the storage room. Aten'rih swooped in through the hole behind him. The Ysrean sported wings of stretched and hairy skin, reminding Sal of a bat -- a barrel-chested, emerald-eyed, hook-nosed bat.

  "'Uniquely qualified?'" the wedge-shaped mage scoffed. "What in blazes is that supposed to mean?"

  "Well, Eshira started to lose control as she got closer to whatever was downstairs," Sal offered. "You know more about magically changing form than anybody else I know. It kinda made sense."

  "Eshira's not a mage," Aten'rih reminded him. With a sigh, he released Emerald, and the spell with it. Bereft of their magical buttresses, his wings collapsed in on themselves. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to settle the newly returned skin into its familiar shape. "By the Prophets, she's not even human. How could I hope to understand what a hotling can do to a dragon?"

  "It's a 'hot link', and I don't know, but you know this stuff better than me."

  "You couldn't rope one of your scholar friends into this? Surely somebody who's Academy-trained could make better sense of this than I can," Aten'rih argued. "Jaren's a competent emerald, and that aura ought to be enough to draw in any one of Caravan's amethysts."

  "Sure, but you're a soldier."

  "Yeah," he said sourly. "Who better to die at the hands of forces he don't understand?"

  As they made their way down the hall, Aten'rih let out a whistle. He paused at the landing to take in the sight, his emerald eyes blazing. "My, now there's something you don't see every day."

  "I know, right?"

  "Well yes, but... it's not bright white like you described."

  "Sure it is. What are you talking about?"

  "Oh, don't mistake me. It's white when I'm not channeling, but when I look at it through Emerald, I see Emerald," Aten'rih said, his eyebrows furrowing as he tried to piece his thoughts together. "Instead of the white I see when I'm at rest, my magical sight shows it to be a vibrant green -- very pure, very new."

  The mage stepped forward to the inner railing, and reached a hand out into the aura. Sal touched Emerald to see if he could capture what was going on, then Sapphire and Ruby on a lark, but the aura looked the same through whatever soulgem he employed.

  The opalescence parted slightly for Aten'rih's hand, throwing off eddies as it swirled ever so gently upward. "It's completely lacking any sort of decay. It almost looks like the aura that an emerald artifact has, but this aura seems... I dunno... 'unused' is the best word I can come up with."

  "Unused," Sal repeated, rolling the word over in his mind a moment before directing the commander to the stairs.

  He asked Aten'rih to employ Emerald again -- wings, hooves, whatever he found most convenient -- and then they began their descent. Ten steps passed, then twenty, then forty. They reached the place where Eshira lost control, but Aten'rih shrugged and shook his head. Whatever had affected the dragon, it did nothing for the emerald mage.

  They continued their downward spiral, passing landing after landing until they reached what they assumed to be ground level -- a solid floor that covered the full diameter of the central shaft. Here they found doors and hallways, branching off in all directions like spokes, just as the circular landings above. The white -- or green? -- aura emanated up from the very flagstones as if they weren't there at all. Looking across the chamber, they found the stairwell open again at the far side, nearest the inner wall dropping down into the bowels of the earth. Sal and Aten'rih shared a look, then made for the stairs.

  This stretch was much narrower than the previous flights, pitch dark and longer, without any landings to break the monotony. Sal provided a ball of flame to light the way, courtesy of Ruby, but after the brilliance of the beam of pearl he'd seen above, the darkness seemed almost primal, forbidding.

  Finally they reached the base of the stairs, and found only a tiny alcove with a metal door blocking off a single entrance.

  Metal? What the...?

  The door was recessed from the block wall, as if the bricks had been laid around whatever structure the door gave entrance to. The door itself had no knob, but a panel stood out from the jamb about chest high. With no better ideas, Sal pressed the palm of his hand to the panel.

  ...and very nearly yelped in girlie fashion when the metal panel turned translucent around his hand.

  As he watched, a soft white glow poured out from beneath his palm, running from the tips of his fingers to the heel of his hand, then back. The panel gave a very un-magical chirp, and the door slid silently into the wall, revealing a very un-magical corridor lit by un-magical lights.

  What the...?

  He stood there silent for a moment, trying to reconcile what he was seeing, like a vision of a world that no longer existed.

  "Blessed Crafter," Aten'rih breathed.

  "Amen to that," Sal replied.

  Was it possible? Could it be that this world had once been as technologically advanced as Earth was? Even more so, Sal corrected. While some of the corridor's features looked like Earth, others looked like something right out of a sci-fi novel. Whatever the Rending of Heaven and Earth had broken all those thousands of years ago, it had done a fantastic job, if Gemworld was all that was left.

  To his left, just inside the corridor, a flush-mounted plaque adorned the wall -- metal embossing against the stone background. The metal seemed to be writing of some sort, but so severely tarnished as to be nearly indecipherable. Had it not been for the metal standing in bas-relief, its black woul
d've disappeared completely into the black of its stone setting.

  Like impossibly old silver, set within obsidian.

  The writing was complex, more like symbols than actual words, and not in any language that he recognized immediately. But as he drew closer, puzzling out their shapes, the embossing started to make sense. After a fashion. It was like something out of a sci-fi novel, where technology auto-translated somebody's words from one language to another. But that was a machine, regurgitating something that somebody had already said. This was a sculpture, unmoving, not changing into English but able to be read as English.

  "Metaphysical And Neuro... manipulative Auto... restructuring Field Repeater Facility," Sal said thickly. The words may have been hard to read, but they were even harder to swallow. "MerriCorp, established 2241."

  He rolled it over and over in his mind. It fit too perfectly. Too perfectly by far. "M... A... N... A," he said. "Mana."

  "Sal," Aten'rih started. "What..."

  Sal skimmed down past the next few rows -- names, mostly -- until he reached the last line... and froze.

  He could distantly hear Aten'rih peppering him with questions, but he couldn't make out a single one. Not that he had any answers that mattered. None of it mattered. Not now.

  Not trusting himself to have the presence of mind to wield magic, he thumbed his sapphire earring. "Marissa. Tell Gaelen to drop what he's doing and come to the Spire."

  But, Sal, he and Learned Stella are hip deep in a discussion about---

  "I don't care what he's got going on. I need him here. Now."

  "Sal, what in the Abyss has got hold of you?" Aten'rih demanded.

  "Not the Abyss. Hainin Province, PRC," he replied hollowly. "The People's Republic of China."

  * * *

  Nestor hunched over the map bearing dais, leaning in toward this detail or that, trying to get a better look. Though he was convinced that the map was just that -- a map -- it also seemed very much alive, like a painting that changed with the mood of its subject. The table was littered with moving slivers of green light -- some converging, some retreating, some meandering without any obvious direction. And there were the occasional flecks of green, floating in the air above the pyramids of Aeden. Occasionally, he'd spy a larger fleck, like the blue one he'd seen moments before -- the one with a tiny brown speck on the top. Nestor hadn't noticed the blue-brown blob on the table's surface until it rose into the air and floated away, eventually winking out when it left the outer ring of the dais. It was almost as if---

  "What are you doing?" he demanded.

  Jaeda had knelt down and Merged her hands into the flooring beneath her. He could feel her aura stretch out from her, emanating in all directions at first, but then narrowing as it found its target. He'd been able to mostly ignore all this, even with the considerable amount of mana she was wielding, but when the steady beam of her aura became a series of rhythmic pulses, he found it intolerably distracting.

  "I'm trying to talk to my brother," Jaeda replied distantly. The string of her pulses continued unabated for a moment longer before she slapped the floor in frustration. "He's not listening. I could feel him for a moment, but then he just... vanished."

  "He's Lifting himself, most likely," he dismissed. "Come, look at this."

  He pointed to the central pyramid, specifically to a segment deep within the shifting colors of its otherwise white brilliance. "What do you see there, near the base of the Tower of Aeden?"

  Jaeda squinted at the image, craning her neck to get closer. "Where? What's it look like?"

  "It's right there, near the root of this eastern arm. A couple of brown specks. Gah!" he growled his frustration. "The colors keep hiding it, like river muck hiding a mussel. If there were some way to... I dunno..." He reached in with his other hand and made a parting motion, as one would to clear away the river muck. As his hands parted, the image of the Tower grew larger, more defined. The rest of the map pushed its way outward, disappearing as it passed the outer ring of the dais. Startled, Nestor jumped back from the table, the map shifting again as he went.

  He and Jaeda both stared at the dais for long moments, then Jaeda slid a hand gingerly back into the image and waved it about. Nothing. She added her other hand, moving them both. Nothing.

  Now curious, Nestor slid his hands back into the map, cupping them as he had before. This time, as he moved, the map moved. Bringing his hands closer together pulled the map in tighter, smaller, and showing areas that had been previously hidden outside the outer ring. Drawing his hands apart again, the map grew larger once more. Further and further inward he pulled the map, even to the point of having to remove his hands and reset their positions. Cracks in the pyramid became corridors. Squares became rooms. Finally, he drew in on the point that he had tried to show her, now clearly two figures in brown -- one with its arms outstretched over a round dais, its ends standing somewhat apart.

  "I think I've discovered what those brown specks were," he said lamely. "Of course, it seems a bit anticlimactic now..."

  Brown specks...

  Nestor became one with the floor beneath him, feeling intently for an aura that he was quite sure he wouldn't find. And he wasn't mistaken, though he sorely wished he had been. He pushed back the borders of his awareness, taking in the whole Tower of Aeden, then further, taking in the grounds of the Garden. Jaeda looked confused for a moment, then Merged as Nestor had, but he had already withdrawn his awareness, turning instead to the map.

  Where is it...? he thought, reaching his cupped hands into the light-born constructs and clapping, drawing the map in smaller. He repeated the action a few more times, until the great Tower was little more than a button on the landscape. Where...? Nestor scanned the "skies" above the map, noting the myriad pinpricks that wheeled overhead, but not finding---

  "There!" he shouted, shifting his hands and focusing the map on the tiny blue speck, floating all alone. As he drew the image in closer, the blue betrayed the brown speck Nestor had noticed earlier. Closer still, and he could tell that the brown was a speck all its own.

  Jaeda, still searching the auras of Aeden, furrowed her brows in confusion, until shock smoothed them. "Nestor, where's..."

  "Cao Tzu?" he asked pointedly, finally sharpening the map's image of the brown figure, riding atop a winged blue beast, well into the forests of Aeden's Garden and bearing due south.

  * * *

  Retzu lounged in the shade of the Conclave's foyer, his back to the wall bordering the marble steps, with one leg drawn close and the other kicked out. He bit a corner off his meatpie, the savory juices dampening his napkin and cutting a thin trail down the side of his mustache, as he watched the press of civilized humanity going about their business with only the mildest of interest. He really couldn't have cared less about what this jilted patron demanded from that merchant, or how this scholar's payments were past due to that usurer. That was the stuff of rumor and tavern tales -- of no concern to a shol'tuk until there was a price on somebody's head. The comings and goings of the Conclave mattered very little to the assassin. He had only one thing on his mind.

  He took another bite of his meatpie as that one thing passed before him -- a mage, sapphire, late in years with a surly disposition. He cast a lazy eye to the bottom of the steps, where Patrys stood against the central banister. Her sapphire eyes followed the curmudgeonly mage for a moment, studying him, then she met Retzu's gaze and nodded ever so slightly. With that, the assassin rewrapped his lunch, took to his feet, and angled to follow.

  Casually, of course. Nothing to see here.

  The elderly sapphire made his way toward a street hawker, presumably for something to eat. Before he could get there, Retzu laid a firm hand upon the old man's neck. "Hogan du'Cyphem," he said. "Might I have a word?"

  The mage's naturally surly expression deepened at the familiar manner, but smoothed slightly as he took in his audience. "I remember you from the other day," he rasped. "The displaced nobleman who became a shol'tuk... du'Nograh,
is it?"

  "You remember," Retzu said, doing his best to sound impressed.

  The mage shrugged his humility, though it was just as likely that he was trying to free himself of Retzu's grip. No such luck. "It's not every day that you meet a surviving member of a lost House. And one from so far away, at that. With all the humdrum that the Council has to deal with on a daily basis, the more uncommon stories tend to stand out."

  "Indeed they do!" exclaimed the assassin, gently nudging du'Cyphem toward a nearby alley. "And no story is as uncommon as the downfall of House Cyphem, is it?"

  The sapphire blustered. "I beg your p---"

  "Such an interesting tale, how one of the most powerful Houses of Bastion fell out of favor with its fellows," Retzu rolled on, cinching his grip down and paying the mage's complaints no mind. "They still tell it in the taverns around here, like the one your cousin Maxus once frequented."

  "Maxus..."

  "Yes. And Leb and Prau -- sad saps that they are. Or were. Oh, and we mustn't forget Faisal, the chap your kin Heramis sent to pick that granite's body clean. That granite... he was of House Cyphem, too, was he not?"

  "How dare you---"

  "Oh, I dare well, thank you," Retzu said, far too casually for the anger that seethed within him. Finally within the mouth of the alley, he slammed du'Cyphem first against one wall, then the other, careful to not let go of the old man's neck. Patrys slid up gracefully a moment later, leaning on the corner nearest the men. Catching the patriarch's eye, she slid her stoma cover to the side.

  Fury raged in the mage's eyes, which grew brilliant with sapphire magic... only to dim again to du'Cyphem's horror.

  "Amethyst ring," the assassin explained, tightening his grip and driving the simple gemstone further into the mage's neck. "Means we can't hear what my lady friend Patrys might want to say at the moment, but nah... I think we can figure it out."

  Panicked, du'Cyphem shouted for help. Not a soul looked their way. The mage shouted again, even more urgently than the last, but to no better response. Retzu fought desperately -- and vainly -- to hold in his laughter as du'Cyphem's horror turned to nightmarish terror as his shrillest efforts failed to stir even the slightest bit of interest.