Descent of the Maw

by Erin MacMichael

  “Then maybe this is the one where Gran and Dad—” Minla uttered quietly and stopped, her features tightening with heartache. Sera Choden had sent her young granddaughter with Sundar to safety while she, Minla’s father Tashi, and several other masters had lead Chao Rong’s forces away from the cities to buy their people time to escape. Sundar had never been sure exactly where the yeshe’s group had been when their communication with the underground colonies abruptly ceased.

  “With this much damage, it could very well be the place, love,” Kirian replied, squeezing her hand with understanding. “Besides Namkha, there are only two other sanctuaries we haven’t checked on the map of the valley my dad sketched out.”

  “Do you think we’ll actually find anything useful this time?” Selina groaned. “We’ve gone through every bloody library on the plateau that wasn’t incinerated and still don’t have a clue about how to reweave the portal.”

  “I know you’re tired, Fluff, but the small collections out here in the valley are our last hope for help from any of our predecessors. If we don’t find the answers we need in any of these, I don’t know where else to look.”

  “Well, let’s get on with it,” Asti said with a weary sigh. “We could really use some luck today. Our stores have gotten so low since the Shitza started raiding the villages.”

  Kirian’s solar plexus tightened at the reminder of the colony’s dire situation. After Senga’s mishap in Edu over a year ago, the bombings across the plateau had escalated dramatically, making it crystal clear that Chao Rong was aware of their existence. Arman’s infrequent surveillance reports confirmed that Drahkian presence had increased in the capital and that the Shitza leader was desperate to find the underground Makhás.

  To make matters worse, Anil’s prediction about military harassment on the surface had turned into all-too-real threats to the outlying Ustagi people whose loyalty and generosity kept the Makhás alive. Minla still made the rounds to the hidden drop sites, but at Kirian’s insistence, her appearances as the lady in white had been radically shortened or suspended if Kalden and Senga’s security teams discovered Shitza presence in an area. As a result of the Ustagi’s growing fear of the soldiers, many villagers had stopped bringing their children to see her while several communities had ceased leaving caches of goods altogether. The young yeshe was all too aware that if he didn’t find a way off of Lyonnae soon, he and his people could very well starve.

  “Alright, let me go in first,” Kirian declared more roughly than he intended, throwing an automatic hand out in front of Minla to indicate she should stay outside in the courtyard while he checked the interior spaces.

  Asti let out a snarl of exasperation. “She’s just pregnant, Kirian. She’s not some fragile little flower that’s easily crushed.”

  Kirian twisted his mouth and glanced at his brusk friend in mild annoyance while his twin rallied to his defense.

  “Oh, let him be protective, Asti,” Selina admonished with a smile. “It makes him feel closer to the experience.”

  The bony tigerwoman snorted and shook her head. “Minla, you’re too easy-going with this big brute. I’d bite his head off if he treated me like that.”

  “Stay put or I’ll bite your head off,” Kirian growled right back with the surly banter he’d exchanged with Asti since they were kids.

  “Okay, okay!” the scholar conceded, rolling her eyes to the heavens and putting her hands on her hips.

  Kirian turned to his placidly smiling wife and gave her a quick kiss. “I’ll let you know in a minute if everything’s alright.” At Minla’s patient nod of agreement, he closed his eyes to focus on sending a mental probe past the wall of boulders into the sanctuary’s interior, searching for an intact space which would allow him to stand. The outer rooms had been completely demolished by disruptor blasts and cave-in debris, but the rubble gave way perhaps a hundred feet into the mountain to what felt like a partially open chamber within the rock.

  Throwing a quick transport matrix into the space, he shifted himself into the room and held out his hand, spinning a softly glowing orb within his palm to give himself light. The stone room was chilly, but surprisingly dry, with the strong smell of char still hanging in the air. The wall closest to the front had collapsed into a pile of rubble, but the side wall appeared to have been a natural hollowed formation within the rock and had withstood the blasts that had decimated the front rooms of the sanctuary.

  The door to the small chamber stood ajar and Kirian moved out into a hallway which led back deeper into the mountain. Continuing on across the hall through a damaged door frame, he stepped into another partially collapsed room, wider and longer than the first, lined with shelves and cabinets full of dusty books, scrolls, and manuscripts. Several splintered ceiling beams lay at odd angles within the rubble covering the front half of the room and most of the ornamental rug on the floor. Stepping carefully around rock and demolished furniture, he increased the luminosity of his orb to reach further into the room and stopped short when his eyes landed on a withered, white, fur-covered arm extending out from the rubble on the floor.

  Kirian swallowed and let a wave of startled shock pass through his system, only to be replaced by a well of aching sadness. He let his eyes move on to examine more of the piled debris and recognized other distinctive shapes which he knew could only be the remains of the people who had perished here so long ago.

  Through all of the searching he’d done over the past year and a half, it wasn’t the first time he’d encountered the physical remains of Makhás who had lost their lives when the sanctuaries had been destroyed, but he somehow knew with bleak certainty that the bodies under the rubble in this room belonged to Yeshe Choden and her band of dedicated masters.

  With a heavy heart, Kirian opened a link with the women waiting for his call in the courtyard outside. Asti, I need your help. Can you lock onto me and transport in? Minla, Selina, hang on a few minutes, would you?

  A moment later, the lanky scholar appeared behind him and stepped around to his left. Kirian held the glowing orb in his right hand out in front of him and nodded toward the floor. “You chide me for being overprotective, but this is what I wanted to save her from finding on her own.”

  Asti pulled in a startled breath and put a hand on his shoulder. “By the Prime, that might be Sera or Tashi. I’m sorry, Kiri, you were right. It’s disturbing for any of us, but if it’s your own flesh and blood—”

  “It hurts even more,” he finished. “I know she’ll want to be part of the sending, but I thought maybe you and I could lift the debris away and find something to cover the bodies we pull out.”

  “Ok, I’ll go check the other rooms for something suitable,” Asti agreed, raising a hand to form her own orb of light before heading out into the hall.

  With a sigh of resignation, Kirian tossed the glowglobe into the air over his shoulder and spun a matrix around it to make it hover while he went to work on clearing a space in the middle of the library floor, transporting fragments of rock and wood to the far side of the room. By the time Asti returned with several pieces of what looked like crumpled bed linens, he had uncovered the crushed remains of four Makhás adepts, one of which was smaller than the others and clothed in the tattered fragments of the yeshe’s violet-colored robe, but he had no way of discerning whether any of the other corpses belonged to Minla’s father.

  Kirian motioned for Asti to stay by the door while he carefully surrounded each of the bodies with an energetic matrix and shifted them over to the cleared area on the floor. With hushed reverence, he and Asti draped the deteriorating cloth over the four adepts as best they could and stood back while he opened the link with Minla and Selina.

  Sweetheart, I found the remains of four people in here.

  I assumed as much when you called Asti in.

  One of them is definitely your grandmother and my guess is that your dad is here, too. We’ve covered them and are ready to tone the sending.

  We’ll be right there.


  When the two women appeared in the hallway, Minla walked over to stand beside her husband, her eyes pinned to the cloth-covered mound as silent tears rolled down her cheeks. Kirian slid his arm around her shoulders, pulling her against him, knowing just how difficult it was to come to grips with the harsh reality in front of them.

  “No matter how much you think you’re prepared—” she choked out and drew in a shuddering breath. Lowering her head, she cried quietly for several moments before raising her hands in front of her. “I love you, Dad. I love you, Gran. Good-bye,” she croaked, clearing her throat to begin making a soft, shaky tone.

  Kirian shifted a few steps around the bodies and lifted his hands while Selina and Asti did the same, adding their voices and melding their sounds with Minla’s, shaping the complex overtones to form the proper cadence for the sending. The mound on the floor gradually dissipated, becoming a diaphanous shape until it thinned away to leave nothing behind.

  Pulling Minla into his arms, Kirian stroked her hair, waiting patiently until she looked up again and sniffled. “Are you ok?”

  She nodded and wiped her eyes. “Yes, thanks. We’d better get busy,” she said, looking around in the dim light at the dusty mess all over the room. “You know, if they were in here when the Shitza attacked, they must have been studying something. From what Sundar told me about my dad, he was the best portal expert they had at the time and may have collected the manuscripts he needed here in this library in order to help him figure out how to repair the portal.”

  “That makes a lot of sense, Minla,” Asti replied with a hint of excitement. “Maybe that’s why we only found standard texts and histories in the other sanctuary libraries. They did seem a little picked over now that I think about it.” The scholar raised her hands and spun a couple more glowglobes into the air as she and Selina stepped carefully over broken furniture, moving steadily toward a long table covered with fallen scrolls and debris at the back of the room.

  “Let’s pick up what’s on the floor and start organizing scrolls by topic,” Selina proposed, bending over to gently lift and dust off of several objects below the disheveled shelves along the side wall.

  “We may have to clear more rock away and search the debris. Shall we start—” Kirian turned his head toward his mate and found her standing by the door, staring out into the darkened hallway with a sadly wistful expression. “Minla?”

  “Yes, I’ll be happy to help,” she answered vacantly without turning around.

  Kirian stepped over beside her and rubbed his hand soothingly between her shoulders. “What’s bothering you?”

  “It’s just—we’ll never come back here. I’d like to see if there’s anything—”

  “Any of their belongings?” he asked gently. Minla lifted her silvery eyes to his and nodded. “Then I’ll go with you,” he said, planting a kiss on the side of her head before turning toward his sister. “Selina, we’re going to take a look at the rooms further down the hall. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Ok,” his diminutive twin replied distractedly as she headed toward Asti with an armful of scrolls.

  Kirian summoned another glowing orb into his right hand and motioned for Minla to move on into the hall. He followed close behind her, holding up the light to guide their way as they walked carefully along the carpeted stone corridor that led further into the mountain.

  The large kitchen just behind the library was in shambles, the floor covered with fallen pots and pans as well as piles of broken dishes. The first door along the left side of the hallway opened into a small sleeping chamber like the partially crushed room Kirian had initially transported into.

  Minla stepped across the carpet and swept her gaze slowly around the dusty surfaces of the sparse but finely crafted furnishings, scanning for anything that might identify the adept who had once occupied the chamber. Kirian took a step in behind her and held the light up, glancing to his right where his eyes landed on a set of small shapes neatly placed on top of a low bookcase. Setting the globe to hover, he walked over and picked up one of the silver bells, tilting it slightly to let it ring, his heart squeezing automatically as the pure, crystalline chime resounded for long seconds within the small chamber.

  “You miss him, don’t you?” Minla asked softly, picking up the subtleties of her mate’s expression as she watched him in the dim light. “You never say anything, but I see the heartache in your eyes every time a bell sounds.”

  Kirian nodded as his throat tightened, ringing the small bell one more time before he placed it carefully back on its dusty shelf. “Yeah, I miss him.”

  “Why don’t you contact him more often?” Minla probed gently, stepping up next to him and running her hand down his arm. “You don’t have to wait for him to call you.”

  “I know, but he told me not to hover, so I try to leave him alone.”

  “He probably just didn’t want to be a burden since you have so many other things pulling at you as the yeshe.”

  Kirian’s twisted his mouth and glanced away.

  Minla squeezed his arm with understanding. “You’re entitled to miss your friend, Kiri. I know it’s been hard on you. You two have been close since you were little. I’m sure Arman misses you, too. Why don’t you call him when we get back, just to have a good, long talk? Hmm?”

  Kirian tipped his head back down and nodded. “Alright, I will. It would be good to hear his voice.” With a short exhale, he grabbed hold of the globe and made a quick glance around the chamber. “So, did you recognize anything in here?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” she replied wistfully. “Let’s keep going. There are still several more rooms along this side of the hall we can check.”

  In the next room down, Minla stepped inside and repeated her slow scan of the chamber’s furnishing, shaking her head silently before closing the door. The third chamber’s contents were quite obviously a female’s, with a dainty hairbrush and mirror laid out alongside several bottles of perfume on a high console table.

  “Not your gran’s?” Kirian asked.

  “Noooo, not her style,” Minla replied quickly, crinkling her nose at what she apparently considered feminine frippery.

  When she opened the door to the fourth chamber, she paused for several seconds while she looked over the room’s disheveled contents. Walking briskly past a chair piled high with dusty clothing, she headed straight over to the bedside table that held a sizable stack of books and picked up a small object, blowing it off before cradling it in the palm of her hand. A glowing light form appeared above the piece of quartz which made Kirian suck in a startled breath.

  “It’s you!” he exclaimed, staring at the moving image of a beautiful girl of about six or seven laughing in sunshine. “This was Tashi’s room. How did you know?”

  Minla looked up and glanced around the room, nodding at the nightstand. “He was always messy—except for his books. Take a look at them, sweetie. Maybe you’ll find something useful.”

  With a touch of hopeful hunger, Kirian crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed to begin sifting through the portal master’s nighttime reading while Minla walked over to a table against the wall to sort through a few things that her father had laid aside.

  “Anything good in that stack?” she asked without looking up from her search.

  “Yeah, I think so,” he answered as he read through titles and flipped through the pages of dusty tomes. “It’s odd, though—the one on top is a detailed survey of the geological formations around Mount Tsari, and the next several volumes are histories and personal writings of the earliest Makhás adepts. No technical manuscripts on sound constructs or portal science that I would have expected.”

  “Maybe he kept those in the library where he was working,” Minla suggested as she turned back around to face him.

  “Could be,” he replied, stacking the books neatly once again before standing back up. “We’ll take them all with us when we leave, but it’ll require a bit of reading to figure ou
t what he might have been onto. Did you find anything special?”

  “Yes,” she answered quietly and held out the sleek, carved object in her hand. “My mother’s wooden flute.”

  “It’s gorgeous. Did your father play?”

  “No, but it shows me how much he missed her if he kept this with him. She played the most wonderful, haunting melodies when we lived up in the hills above Lhari. It still hurts to think about those days, Kiri, even after all this time.”

  “I know,” Kirian replied gently and when he saw tears well in her eyes again, he pulled her into his arms. “I remember how hard you cried the day my father told you they weren’t coming back. I think that’s when I fell in love with you.”

  Minla wept silently against his chest before she pushed away, blinking rapidly and shaking her head impatiently. “I’ve got to stop doing this. Let’s keep going. I’d still like to find Gran’s room.”

  Returning to the carpeted hallway, they moved on to the last remaining doorway on the left before the hall turned sharply to form a back corridor. Minla pushed open the heavy wooden door and stood for several moments, gazing around the large, well-appointed chamber. “This must have been set aside for the yeshe,” she began in a puzzled voice before stepping inside and sending her gaze across the furnishings a second time.

  Kirian walked in beside her and brightened the glow of his orb to reach the corners of the longer room. “What are you looking for, Min?”

  “It’s all tidy, like I thought it would be in Gran’s case, but something’s missing. There should be some sort of desk or writing table. I remember her scribbling on something all the time.”

  “Wouldn’t it make sense that she had a separate office near the front?” Kirian ventured. “Those rooms were so hard hit, we’d probably never find anything salvageable.”

  “Yes, I imagine so, but Gran was really private. She kept journals ever since I can remember and I don’t think she would have wanted any of her personal writings to ever fall into the hands of the Shitza. Give me a second,” she said absently as she moved her eyes from the bedchamber furnishings to the back wall, studying the positions of the tapestries that had been hung over the rough cavern stone. “Yes, yes, yes,” she whispered, holding her palms out in front of her toward an empty space between the tapestries. “She planted a sigil in the wall—I can feel it.”