by Ryan Attard
But that feeling faded after about twenty-four hours. Soon, this cool contraption became an evil shadow that wouldn't leave me in peace. You know that instinct you get when you see something moving in your peripheral vision and it makes you jumpy? Now imagine that feeling every other five minutes. That's what it was like walking with a giant Sentinel hovering stealthily behind me.
I had absolutely no use for it. Most Vensir used it to carry stuff or help with dexterous activities. Their delicate fingers were great for detail work and small feats of dexterity but they didn't have the strength to carry a heavy log of wood. That's where the Sentinels came in handy.
And of course, in case you ever had an epileptic fit, they would be more than happy to whip out their pikes and zap you into submission.
But aside from being the equivalent of a walking forklift, the Sentinels had one other cool feature. Information in the Citadel came in one of two categories: forbidden information, which would then be put in the aptly named Forbidden Archives and never spoken of, or general information, which was accessible to all Vensir. These guys did not believe in privacy. What one of them knew, they shared with their Sentinel, which in turn would share it with all other Sentinels. You could find anything from how to pick berries properly to the musings of a poet.
You could also find all of the High Council's decisions.
"Hey, Jarvis."
Don't judge me. Anyone with the opportunity to feel like Tony Stark will take it, and that is a fact.
My Sentinel's eyes glowed into life and it hovered an inch closer, ready to obey my commands.
"Where is my equipment?" I asked.
Jarvis replied with his usual monotone. "You have been provided with all the equipment necessary to live harmoniously in the Citadel upon entry. Your equipment is found here. Would you like me to narrow my search to a specific item?"
I rolled my eyes. "Okay then, let's rephrase." I found myself doing that a lot these days. "Before my judgment in the eyes of the High Council, I had my own weapons. Where would they be now?"
Any person would be immediately suspicious but that was the key word: 'person.' The Vensir were Vensir, not humans. They had a different mindset because they were an altogether different species. And they built their robots with that same mindset.
The Sentinel didn't even pause. "Any foreign items will be confiscated and deposited at the residence of the High Council member who passed judgment."
In other words, the old guy. The same old guy who also had access to the Forbidden Archives. Can you spell coincidence?
"I'm going out for a bit," I said. "Stay here."
"Negative. All citizens of the Citadel must be accompanied by their Sentinels at all times."
I sighed. Come on, Erik, you could have seen this one coming.
I nodded at the Sentinel. "Have it your way."
Having been a monster hunter my entire life, I had trained myself to always look for weaknesses. It's a passive thing, something that my brain just does.
And the Sentinels had two major flaws. The first was that whoever had built them had had one scope in mind, and that was to restrain any rampaging Vensir. The machines were attuned to a Vensir's movements and reactions; which are vastly inferior to a well-trained human's. I had spent the better half of my life battling against predators with every conceivable advantage nature could offer them. By comparison, a Sentinel was just a walking tin can.
The second flaw was in the software. The Vensir spoke only one language but the Sentinels obviously knew how to translate and teach the Vensir English. Problem was it took the Sentinels a few seconds to process what I said and translate it. Which made them even slower.
I snapped to one side and my hand reached for a screwdriver-looking device. It came as part of the maintenance kit for the Sentinels. We were required to clean and repair any minor damages ourselves. Incidentally, this particular device also made a fantastic shiv.
A step later and I was behind the robot. I grabbed the armor around its neck and wrenched it towards me, exposing the delicate mechanism inside. I jammed the screwdriver inside its neck and pushed upwards, tearing at the electrical pathways going towards its central processing system in its brain. The Sentinel let out a soft whirring noise and fell on the ground, dead as a bag of door knobs.
I left the screwdriver inside its neck and walked outside of my hut alone for the first time in days. It felt good. I really hated that Sentinel. The old guy's hut was only ten minutes away, if one chose to walk slowly, perhaps in the company of an annoying robot. I wasn't bound by such rules anymore and just took off in a sprint.
The two Sentinels stationed at the old guy's crib were used to seeing Vensir walking past. Perhaps they were even used to seeing the occasional pissed-off dude having an argument over something or other.
But I bet they had never seen a human wizard running at top speed, heading straight towards them, before leaping into the air and kicking one of their heads off.
The second Sentinel had enough sense to pull out its pike but it was too late. I grabbed the destroyed Sentinel's weapon and engaged the robot in a short round of staff fighting. It was no contest really. One parry and I slid underneath it. Using my momentum I stabbed it in the hover plate and the robot went crashing down face forwards. I impaled its head with my pike and left it there.
The hut was Spartan, devoid of everything except a cot, a small wardrobe and a desk. The old guy wasn't home, but I didn't dawdle around. The Sentinels may have given out some sort of alarm system and this place could be surrounded by robots in less than a few seconds.
I extended my senses, searching for Djinn's energy signature. The weapon called back and I found my stuff in a pile at the furthest corner of the hut. It was all there: Djinn, still in the black polymer sheath I keep it in, my gun, long devoid of any ammunition, my bow and arrows, as well as the Wurm-hide quiver and belt I had fashioned to make carrying my stuff easier. The pair of unicorn horns were still there too. Finally I found my coat beneath everything, still rolled up and covered in filth. I had been using it as a bundle to carry food rations, only putting it on when it rained.
I began putting my gear back on, slinging my rolled-up coat behind my back, parallel to the quiver. My gun went on my thigh. I didn't have to worry about making too much noise when channeling magic through it. If shit went down, I was going to fight my way out with everything I had. Finally, Djinn went horizontally along my lower back again and I felt the familiar mental buzz of the creature inside the weapon.
"Welcome back, old friend," I muttered. That weapon and I had been through a lot. It was my first and most reliable magical channel, without which I'd be just another vanilla human with magical healing powers. Essentially a self-repairing punch bag. The Jinn inside of the short sword had been part of a seal that kept the mummified remains of my mother intact and ready for a Siphoning Ritual our dad intended to use to steal both my and my sister's life-force. The weapon itself had been passed down as an athame within my mother's bloodline.
Trust me, whatever issues your family has, they aren't half as bad as the crap my family had put me through.
I stood up, checked my equipment for the last time and just listened. You'd be amazed at how much you can get out of your surroundings by just listening. There were the usual sounds of Vensir walking about, a few words in their native language, and the clang of steel against steel or the thud of wood. But beneath the layer of normality there was a quieter layer, built solely of tension. The calm before the storm. I heard no Sentinels going about and immediately thought that they were all waiting for me.
No.
The fact that I couldn't hear them meant they were either deactivated or far off. Either way, it was good news for me. I got out of the hut, looked around one last time and took off in a run towards the library.
Chapter 26
Getting to the library was easy. With the sun setting everyone's attention was now towards the sky, awaiting the Verdurous Moon. I wasn't sure
if the moon would actually turn green or maybe it was some sort of reference. What I really cared about at the time was that no one stood in my way. Not that I needed to worry; as I said before, the Vensir were pacifists at heart and no one stood on guard inside the Citadel.
Hell, they didn't even lock the door to the library.
The weird library Sentinels were still roaming around but didn't stop me as I calmly strode in and out of bookshelves and workbenches, and made a beeline for the Forbidden Archives. The force field was still there, alive and crackling, invisible to everyone but me.
Well, perhaps not everyone.
There was this theory that began forming in my head when I felt that spike of magic from the insane epileptic Vensir. And if I was right then either these people were in some serious denial or someone was fucking with them big time.
I waited for one of the Sentinels to hover by and walked up to it, placing my hand gently on its weird little head. Then I slowly began to channel my magic into it. Now usually, given my massive amount of raw, uncontrollable power I would instantly disintegrate something that wasn't specifically built to withstand magic. Sure, my lessons with Abi were a big help in teaching me refinement and control, but that was never my forte.
Blowing shit up—now that I could do, and do very well.
But the little robot didn't explode into a million fragments. It just stood there, motionless, waiting. My theory was correct.
"Open the Forbidden Archives," I ordered, keeping my voice low but my tone firm.
Without any response, the Sentinel walked over, clicking away as those spindly spider legs met cold hard stone, and stopped in front of the archway. It scuttled over to one side and began pressing on the sigils on the side of the archway. I felt the barrier dissipate and suddenly the Forbidden Archives were open.
"Leave it open and go back to work," I said as I slowly made my way in. Wordlessly, the Sentinel moved away.
I ran my fingers over some of the hardbacks and yellowed parchment, all the while scanning the spines for a particular volume. The wyrloga book. I found it tucked away in the back where it could only be seen from a particular angle. Carefully, I pulled it out and sat on a desk. My position was hidden enough from passers-by, not that there would be any at this hour. But I hadn’t survived this long by taking chances. If anyone realized the Archives were open and I was in here, I was ready to bring the roof down on them if I had to. The answers to me finally leaving this place and going home were all here. All I had to do was sit down, read, and hopefully not doze off before I found them.
I'm not going to bore you with over two hours of reading. Hell, even I can't remember all the fuzzy details. But here's the CliffsNotes version. The Vensir had a crap load of secrets but one of them confirmed every suspicion I had about them—that they were not so different from the Wild.
The book was a treasure trove of information, once you got used to the old English it was written in. And I'm not talking Shakespeare old. This was more like Chaucer meets Red Beard the Viking through ancient Gaelic. I had to read some sentences over ten times before I could make heads or tails of them. Halfway through I developed this ability that all college students manifest, especially during that first wave of studying for finals—skimming. I flipped page after page, scanning it for relevant details and moving on.
It was written by a Warlock, as I had rightly guessed, who had been part of an expedition that had ended up here by mistake and lived among the Vensir. I found entries on the Critters, the Sahuagin (who apparently got along with one another back then because they could eat as many Vensir as they wanted, until the latter got wise and built the Citadel), the Unicorns and Bicorns (where one of the Warlock's party tried to cook the former only to die a few hours later from a very agonizing bout of food poisoning) and of course, most expansively, there was information on the Vensir.
Now, the thing about these elf guys is they have absolutely no magic. I mean none, not even the slightest trace. Back on Earth, everyone has magic, or at least a trace of it. It's our life force, the stuff that keeps our heart pumping and our blood flowing. Not these guys. They operated on a strictly non-magical basis. According to the book, everything else on the island had magic, which meant that the Vensir were either giving it to someone or that someone was taking it away from them.
There was a nice chapter about Central that finally revealed some answers. Apparently, Central had always existed and was a magical beacon on the island, sort of like the Earth's core but for magic. When the Vensir built the Citadel around it, they began mutating because of Central's influence. That thing took their magic and made them the boy scouts that they were today.
With one tiny side effect: every Vensir, upon reaching a certain age, slowly began to assimilate magic into them again. This triggered a reaction, making them go all Bruce Banner in the middle of their own town square. Essentially, when a Vensir's body began to absorb magic they became Wild.
The book didn't have much information about the Wild, most likely because those guys were more likely to tear your head off than sit down for a coffee and conversation. Or it could be that the High Council, who coincidentally were all ancient and prone to turning into the very bogeymen they warned everyone about, had kept the subject a strict taboo.
That's what the Sentinels were really for. Screw protection and comfort—those robots were jailers, designed to sense their owner's spike in magical energy, and the beginnings of the transformation. When that happened the poor subject was locked down, using magically enhanced tools, mind you, and thrown out into the forest far away from the Citadel.
There was also a note about the Verdurous Moon, although my guess was whoever wrote this didn't stay for the actual event. However, during this night, the Wild went ape-shit crazy and started tearing everything down. They sometimes attacked Vensir and even assaulted the outer walls of the Citadel. Then the next day, everything would be back to normal and the attacked Vensir would wake up with total amnesia, making fact-gathering a real bitch.
Now this was all fascinating stuff but it wasn't why I was here. Finally, in the last chapters of the book, and after two hours of reading in painfully dim light, I found the one nugget of information that mattered. The Warlock said that in the few minutes he happened to be close to the Central obelisk, he felt the same energy signature as the energy of the portal which had brought them there. He even went as far as to say that Central is the Core of the plane, where all magic coalesces, like a giant ley-line, and that it may easily serve as the catalyst for a portal.
And that was all I needed.
I don't like Warlocks. I had grown up in a Warlock family, trained as one and I really disliked them and their methods. This Warlock was in fact one of those guys that had given my family a bad name a few millennia ago. They jumped from dimension to dimension, playing God wherever they could. But if there's one thing you can trust, it is a Warlock's magical senses. They detect magic like no one else does, and if this guy said that Central was the Core of the plane and a possible catalyst, you could take that to the bank.
As I said I don't like Warlocks; but I would have probably bought this one a beer.
"Human. I know you're in there. Come out."
I thought the library was supposed to be a quiet place. Legolas' voice echoed throughout the ginormous library, making the voice reverberate louder than it would have normally. I stood up, weapons at the ready and slowly walked outside the building.
Outside, surrounded by torches and eerie silence, Legolas and two Sentinels stood right at the library entrance. Both robots were armed and even the Vensir carried a small silver rod that fit into the palm of his hand. If I remembered correctly that thing could extend into a spear and he was actually pretty decent with it.
Behind them, a small crowd of onlookers had gathered and I spotted two High Council members, though not ones I was familiar with. I walked out, bow and arrow drawn and aimed squarely at the blond Vensir.
"What are you doing, huma
n?" Legolas asked. "You know that the Archives are forbidden."
"Would you believe me if I said the door was open?" I asked. "Why don't we discuss this nice and easy without the robots around?"
Legolas wasn't impressed. He pointed behind me towards the library, where the only sign of life now was the scuttling of library Sentinels carrying about their duty.
"Our Sentinels tell us exactly who is accessing the Forbidden Archives at all times," he said. "And how."
I looked behind me where the Sentinel who lowered the force field for me was busy putting it back up. "Snitch," I murmured. Then I turned back to the elf.
"Dude. You have no idea what kind of a mind-fuck those guys put on you," I said, pointing at the Councilors with my arrow. I raised my head a little to glare directly at the old guys. "Tell them," I called out. "Tell them how Central robs you of magic, and how once you get old enough you become Wild."
The crowed let out a collective gasp at the name as if I had muttered the most horrid of curses.
"Blasphemy," yelled out one of the old guys. "Disable him and throw him out where he belongs. You have abused the kindheartedness of the Vensir for long enough."
I looked at Legolas. "You know I'm right. You're one of the few who gets his hands dirty around here. You know something doesn't add up with Central and the Wild."
He shook his head. "That may be so. But when faced with the choice of either my people or you, I will always choose my people." The metal rod extended into a spear.
Before he took his first step, I let my arrow loose. I wasn't aiming at him. Sure he was being an idiot but what kind of a monster would I be if I killed people simply because they disagreed with me?
My arrow flew straight at one of the Sentinels, who began hovering towards me in unison with his twin. The arrow pierced one of the robot's eyes and its whole head exploded. The blast blew up the second Sentinel and that’s when I realized something about my own magic.