by Monte Cook
The well was not, as they sometimes made it out to be, a high-tech device or a pool of information. It was a literal well, stone-built ages ago, located half a mile or so away from the kubric. It used to serve the city of Ovinale, before Rillent had crushed it under his boot to make way for his power and the unearthing of the kubrics. Now it was Rillent’s personal water source. They’d originally thought to take him out by putting poison or something into it, but they had quickly discovered it was used for others as well, and didn’t want to take the risk of killing those under Rillent’s thrall.
Now they used it to pass messages back and forth. “Our high-tech messaging system,” they called it, laughing.
They wrote notes on small pieces of transparent sheets. The runners slid them into the chinks in the stone well. The others picked them up. Back and forth. Back and forth. It was always a two-day process, at least, since the runners from Rillent’s side were sporadic and closely watched.
Two days ago, Thorme had sent Stiler and Perem out with a message to see what Rillent’s plans were. When was he coming for them? How was he going to do it? Their answers would be rumors and hearsay. The runners on the other side weren’t high enough up in Rillent’s organization to get actual information. They listened at doors, strode through hallways as though they belonged there, gathered what clues they could and passed them along. Some of the bravest people he’d never met, when he thought about it.
Once Stiler had caught his breath, he handed Delgha a thin transparent slip. Delgha unfolded the slip and pressed the heat of her hand to one side of it. A moment later, a series of symbols appeared.
She read it in silence.
“They say Rillent’s not looking for us,” she said.
“But we saw them already,” Kyre said. “In the woods.”
Beside him, Aviend nodded. “He sent Faleineir. How can he not be looking?”
“It says he’s looking for something,” Delgha said. Her voice sounded as surprised as Kyre felt. “But it’s not us.”
“Compromised?” Aviend asked. She’d taken a look at Kyre’s hand and swiped the Second Chance card from it. She was trying to stand it on end beneath one finger.
“I don’t think so.” Delgha glanced at the runners, who shook their heads almost in unison. They were both digging into the food, murmuring thanks to Thorme between bites and breaths.
“Read it again?” Kyre asked.
Instead, Delgha handed him the sheet. It was still warm from her skin, and the inks had not yet started to fade. They only worked once, and only while still pressed to heat. Once he took his hand and heat away, they’d slowly fade and disappear forever.
The symbols were truncated, but they always were and they all sounded correct, so it didn’t seem like the runners had been compromised. Although the message still didn’t make sense.
He read it aloud to the group, parsing each symbol into a word or phrase to create something akin to sentences.
“Is aware of attempt. Claimed insignificant, other than loss of trencher. Otherwise, continuing on as before. Unable to find necessary… key? code? door? More as discovered.”
He looked at Delgha for help with the final and unfamiliar symbol. She looked at the sheet in his hand again and shook her head. “I’m not sure, but it might be less literal. Maybe inner circle?” She made a swimming movement with her hand. “Like slipping between two things.”
“All right, something about the runners trying to get closer to Rillent or his plans then. More to come as available.”
“Quenn?” Aviend said. She let the card fall to the table, face up. “He cares more about the loss of a trencher than he does about an assassination attempt? Than he does about knowing we’re alive?”
“That makes no sense,” Delgha said.
“Agreed.” Kyre took his hand away from the slip, watched the symbols fade. “But if that’s what’s happening, we need to figure out why.”
“Perhaps Rillent has grown a heart,” Aviend said, her words sly enough that if he was anyone else, he would have thought she meant them seriously. One of the runners choked on their food.
Delgha started laughing, her whole body shaking a bit. She didn’t laugh much, but when she did, it changed the very air in the room. Like everyone who breathed in her sound had to join her. And they did.
“Thank you,” Delgha said, when everyone had stopped laughing long enough to breathe. “I needed that.”
“Grave humor,” Thorme said. Her voice quiet. Had she laughed with them? He didn’t think so.
“So no new heart for Rillent. But what if this is false?” Aviend said. “Not a compromise, but a purposeful mislead. Is it possible that Rillent knows about the runners and is feeding them false information?”
They all looked at Stiler and Perem, who both shook their heads. “We’d know,” Stiler said. “If Rillent tried to feed the runners information, they’d know.”
Thorme nodded agreement. “They’re smart,” she said.
They waited until the runners were fed and rested and gone before they got down to the business of figuring things out. The less information the runners had, the safer everyone was. Thorme had them on watch, so they’d be back in a few days with any incoming information.
Until then, the group needed to get into Rillent’s head.
“For as easily as he gets into mine, I wish I could get back into his,” Aviend said. Then a moment later, with a small shudder, “No, honestly, I don’t. It’s scary in there. But it sure would help right now.”
All of them had crammed into Delgha’s tech room, even Thorme, although she mostly stayed leaned against the edge of the door. She said it was the tech – she wasn’t a fan of their whirrs and squonks – but he thought there might be something more. She never said, but it seemed that the very room itself was part of her discomfort. She was more human-focused than on devices, so it certainly wasn’t how close they had to get to each other to fit into the space. Claustrophobic? Devicephobic?
It was certainly loaded up with devices, and the back end did slope down weirdly, into such a small space that he wondered why they’d made it that way in the first place. Whoever had made this. They knew it wasn’t the Gavanites. All their stories – at least the ones he’d heard – told of coming upon it in the forest. It was forest even back then, and they’d found the place by accident. So it had existed before. To what end? Impossible to know.
Although, who knew how much of the Gavanites’ story was true? They’d also told of a giant room that connected you to the stars, but that seemed to be myth created out of nothing more than time and belief. So maybe it was all a falsity.
They had Aviend’s floating map of the Stere open, and Delgha was pointing to various places. “So we know that Rillent had destriatch guarding the forest’s edges here, here…” She ran her finger along the whole southern edge, a crooked, mangled line of trees that stretched long. “All of here. Plus various midpoints. Everywhere but the kubrics.”
“But the runners say that now he’s pulled the ones on the edges back and gathered them all at the main kubric. It seems to have happened right around the time of our plan.”
“Did he know?” Kyre felt something shift along his insides. What if it had all been a trap, a ruse to get them to reveal themselves. What i–
“No,” Delgha said. “Rillent’s smart, but he never questions himself. We know that. If he believed Aviend was dead, then nothing more than her showing up at his doorstep–” Aviend snorted at that. “Would prove to him otherwise.”
“So not only is he not coming after us, but he’s decreasing his patrols at the same time?” Aviend fiddled with the pendant as she talked. She’d taken to spinning it much the same way that Quenn had done. It was almost as if the object asked to be touched, spun, kept in motion. “That can only mean–”
“That he’s closer than we thought to completing his plan,” Kyre said. He felt the thing starting to happen between the two of them. He didn’t have a word for it, or at
least not a good one. The closest analogy he had was when you were walking with someone, side by side, and suddenly the two of you were walking at exactly the same pace, stepping at the same time, moving as one, without intentionally doing so. That’s what happened with him and Aviend, only it happened in their brains.
“Whatever that is,” Aviend agreed. He didn’t even think she was aware that she was smiling fully, perhaps the first time he’d seen a real smile out of her since the night on the crater’s edge. “We need to figure out what that is, exactly. And soon. We need to put the final pieces together before Rillent does.”
“What do we know about the kubrics?” Kyre asked. “We have notes somewhere, right?”
Delgha pointed behind Aviend. “Blue metal box, tucked into the tail end of the egg.”
Aviend took the lead, moving into the back corner of the room, resting on her knees as she opened the blue metal box. “Ghosts, Delgha. How much stuff is in here?” she asked as she started sifting through it. He could see not just papers, but memory devices. Not all of them still in working condition, if he was going to guess from the tangled web Aviend pulled out of the box and held up to the light.
“Just enough,” Delgha said. “And I have… Kyre, can you help me move this stuff? I’ve got a memory orb back here somewhere with audio notes on it, from when we were still in the clave. They might not be useful. It was before we knew much, but… remember that?”
Kyre remembered. He was still a believer then. A believer in Rillent’s desire to actually do good and protect the Stere, its people. The memory made his stomach churn. Embarrassment. Fear. His own arrogant ignorance. He didn’t push it away, though, as he might have done once. Instead, he let it sit for a moment, remembered through it, tried to find pride or at least a sense of comfort in how far he’d come.
“Do you think–” Kyre’s question was interrupted by a sound. Something shifted overhead. Far off to the right, a different space, a different thing, clonked, loud and hard, somewhere in the sloping ceiling.
They all stopped, mid-stride. Aviend lifted herself up from her kneeling position as far as she could without hitting her head on the wall. She dropped the pendant she’d been fiddling with and put a hand to the curved ceiling.
There were no more sounds.
“Rillent?” Thorme and Delgha asked in unison. Everyone’s fear now. That he was coming for them. That he was already here.
“I don’t think so,” Aviend said. She didn’t sound sure, but Kyre agreed with her.
“It sounded mechanical,” Kyre said. “Like it was coming from inside.”
“Yes.” Delgha had flipped on her scanner, was scrolling through the various feeds. They showed nothing but dark. If there was something out there bigger than a laak, the screen would be lit up. “Nothing out there of note,” she said.
They waited. Aviend and Kyre’s breathing was synced, a long pause to listen, a slow, quiet exhale. It was still quiet.
“Just something in the building?” Thorme asked.
“Maybe,” Delgha said. “Maybe something that happens all the time and we’re just never here to hear it.” She also sounded unsure.
“Let’s keep our eyes and ears open,” she added. “Just because we don’t think Rillent is coming for us – right now – doesn’t mean there aren’t a hundred things to be wary of in the Stere.”
“Two hundred, at least,” Aviend said as she went back to digging through Delgha’s papers and devices in search of a solution.
She started pulling papers and devices out of the box with one hand, setting them on the ground next to her. Kyre couldn’t see her other hand, but he could tell she was working the pendant. He could hear it whirring softly beneath her fingertips.
He trusted Delgha’s devices, but it was never bad to have a backup. Even contingencies needed contingencies. “I’ll go outside and take a look, just to see if–”
The whole room lit up, a pattern of bright green symbols arcing across the curves of the ceiling. The symbols – he couldn’t make them out, whether they were words or images or something else – whirred and spun across the ceiling, complex patterns that his eyes had a hard time following.
“Delgha, is that…?” He realized his hand was on his blade, poised as if he might start throwing it at a bunch of marks of light.
“No,” she said.
They both looked at Aviend. She was still kneeling, but she’d dropped the papers and was staring up at the ceiling above her. The dots moved over her, the same pattern, but smaller. The whirring of her pendant grew louder, seemed to rise and rise until it took over the whole room. Kyre felt like his very bones were shaking. And yet still, it was possible to hear everything that was happening. Behind him, Thorme gasped, a soft, wet sound of surprise and wonder. Delgha’s hand slid across her scanner controls as she turned, her touch falling away from the device. Even Aviend, farther away, facing away from him, could be heard as though she were standing right next to him.
His first instinct was to try to make it stop. But that was a fear instinct, and it quickly faded away into wonder. Everything rose and quickened. The lights, the noise, until Kyre’s very eyeballs were vibrating. He had a hard time swallowing, as though his mouth and throat no longer lined up properly.
“It’s talking,” she said, and her voice was a whisper. “The pendant is talking to the room.”
“Of course,” he said. “Of course it is.”
Why hadn’t they seen it before? That the pendant wasn’t just a pendant. It was a key, a way to discover… what? They’d find out soon enough, he thought. He didn’t believe they could stop it now even if they wanted to.
From beside him, he sensed Delgha moving forward. “Wait,” he said. He wasn’t sure if she could hear him, but she stopped either way. Standing at his side. He didn’t turn around, but he would have bet all the shins in the Stere that Thorme had stepped back out of the room. Not a coward, but already thinking like a chiurgeon. What if the roof fell? What if everything collapsed and she had to dig them out of the rubble? He wouldn’t be surprised if she was already on her way to gather med supplies.
“Do you know what it’s saying?” he asked.
Delgha, watching the lights move around the room, shook her head no. Aviend didn’t respond.
“Aviend?” he said. “You all right?”
A long moment of silence from her made his breath heavy. Her head was no longer lifted. It had fallen forward onto her chest. From here, he couldn’t see her face. Only the tightness of her shoulders, the loose lean of her torso toward her knees. He was about to step forward, to go to her, when he saw her empty hand raise off the ground and press downward slightly. Wait.
“M’all right,” she said a moment later. “Let’s give it time. See what else it has to say.”
What it had to say was a lot. High-pitched screeches and low moans. A few hard knocks that made Kyre want to cover his head and drop to his knees instinctually. He resisted, remained standing. Watching the lights on the pendant and the wall match up.
“I feel like the roof’s going to fall on me,” Aviend said.
“The roof’s not falling,” Delgha said, and Kyre was grateful for her confident dispersal of knowledge. “I think something’s working like it’s supposed to. Despite the noise. In fact, I’m betting the noise…”
She let her voice trail away to make room for another round of low, metallic screeches.
“I’m betting it has to do with how long it’s been since this… whatever it is… happened. Not in all the years since we’ve been here. And, if I had to take a guess, not in a hundred? Two hundred? years prior. Maybe as many as four hun–”
“Look,” Aviend said.
She said look, but meant listen. When she moved the pendant a certain way, small gestures between her fingers, they could all hear the building responding in time. As if her movements were creating sound echoes.
“It’s a key,” she said. “Quenn’s pendant is a key.”
“To what
?” Delgha said.
“I am going…” Her voice falling away as she worked the star, sliding its sides and points to various angles and then waiting to see what sound her actions would bring. “…to figure that out.”
She worked a new combination, let it slide into place. Then another. Another. Kyre felt like he’d been holding his breath forever, and he forced himself to let it out, a big whoosh.
“I feel like I’ve–” Aviend started.
There was an audible tone, shivery and light. And then everyone in the room was silent. And so was the room.
The back end of the tech room had just soundlessly, almost faster than he could comprehend what he was seeing, irised open to reveal a tunnel. Right at the smallest point of the egg. Right in front of where Aviend was.
From behind him, Thorme’s footsteps as she came back into the room. He heard the fall of her healing kit as it hit the floor.
“Calaval’s eyes,” she breathed.
“Agreed,” Aviend said.
The tunnel was similar to the one that they used as their main entrance and exit. A little too short for most of them, the same shape, the same almost-lit material. He couldn’t see the end of it from where he stood. He wondered if Aviend’s view was better.
He could see that on the floor right inside the tunnel was an etching of a symbol that matched Quenn’s pendant. Or perhaps it was Aviend’s pendant now. Or maybe it was, and had always been, Gavani’s. Just on loan to the rest of them.
Aviend glanced back at him, one brow lifted. Her face was filled with an excitement he hadn’t seen on her in a while. It almost made her skin glow. It certainly made her eyes wide. The green of the pendant overshadowed her natural color and made the whites into a weird yellow-green. As he watched, it faded. Both on the ceiling and in the pendant.
“Yes?” Aviend asked. Meaning: are we dropping our planning for the moment to see what’s behind this new discovery?
“It could help us in some way,” Delgha said. She spoke for all of them.
Aviend was already moving into what Kyre thought of as her leadership mode. If you asked her, he bet she’d say she wasn’t the leader, that the Night Clave was a cooperative effort. He didn’t think it was false modesty. More that she didn’t fully understand her leadership role because it came to her naturally, effortlessly.