The Zi'veyn

by Kim Wedlock

  "No, they strived for it, actually. They didn't want to be buried in the ground, they wanted to stay pristine, untouched, and with as many of their valuables as possible." He said the last with a carefully subdued tone, and his eyes flicked towards the shifting shadows cast by Kienza's slender fingers as she carried her flame, which, he noted, was surprisingly bright for something so small.

  "But it's so miserable down here..."

  He smiled sadly. "They didn't always want this. Before their magic, they wanted what you do. They were laid bare in the ground, no box, no headstone, no clothing but a simple veil of spider silk and leaves. Their bodies were simply returned to the earth that bore them while their spirits passed on into Vastal's care."

  "So what changed?" Rathen asked.

  "Need you ask?"

  "I suppose not. Magic - they got arrogant and decided they should be preserved, not covered in dirt and worms."

  "Exactly."

  "Who knew power could corrupt?" Rathen mumbled drily.

  The firelight was reflected back from something ahead of them, and their pace slowed cautiously as they approached the glint.

  "Water," Anthis surmised, and sure enough, the old stone floor disappeared beneath several inches of standing water. He strode in without hesitation and Kienza was close behind him, leaving the others lingering uncertainly at the edge. With a resigned sigh, Rathen lifted Aria onto his shoulders and shortly followed along, and Garon and Petra reluctantly followed suit, wading their way onwards into another burial chamber. "Of course 'corrupt' in this case is an understatement," Anthis continued thoughtlessly. "They used to be so pure."

  "So you've said." Rathen tried to ignore the bones that lay just beneath the surface, but his sight was caught by a skull that broke the water and stared back at him with empty eye sockets.

  "The magic changed them at their very roots. In fact, I struggle to fathom how such a drastic change could have taken hold of so dedicated a people. In the space of just three hundred years they completely forgot all of Vastal's faces. They knew Vastal and Zikhon by those two names alone, as life and death, good and evil, light and dark. Feira, Nara, Doru; nature, hands, mind, they were all forgotten."

  Dark clumps floated past them in the water. They seemed at first to be some kind of grey moss, but Petra tightened her jaw when she realised they were clumps of ash.

  Anthis didn't seem to notice as he continued to deliver his history lesson. "We learned of the gods' identities through the elves' fear - their carousal was, in part, because they feared death. They lived extravagantly rather than fully, leaving menial tasks to 'lesser beings' - humans - while they lived in indulgence. Because we were never exposed to their faith when it was at its richest, Vastal's many names and faces never appeared in our own religious texts. They're forgotten to history, even by the clerics.

  "And just as their devotion to the gods faded when they chose to no longer honour them, taking life for granted while ignoring or hiding from death, so, too, did they lose what made them worthy of the gods' attention."

  Rathen gave up and closed his eyes - fortunately Kienza noticed and guided him along by the elbow - but he couldn't help his musing, even despite their surroundings. "Perhaps your theory that Zikhon got to the elves is more justified than you think."

  "Meaning?"

  "That Vastal let him destroy them."

  He looked back at him critically. "Do you believe that Vastal would truly do that?"

  Rathen shrugged, though he hadn't missed his irritatingly pious tone. "Maybe. If they were so corrupted by the magic she apparently gave them and, as you say, 'lost what made them worthy of the gods' attention', then perhaps she decided that their time had come."

  "That's a tidy view," Kienza mumbled.

  "Please stop talking."

  All eyes turned onto Petra and they found her looking far more deeply unsettled than her squeaked plea had suggested. Even in the orange light she appeared as white as a sheet, and her usually thoughtful hazel eyes were wide enough that they might fall out of her head.

  They looked away shamefully. "Sorry..."

  The group continued through and out of the freezing flood water in a tense and jittery silence, their eyes snatched by the flitting shadows as they followed the passages until, at last, they reached another heavy-looking door. But this one, unlike the first, could only have been engraved by magic, and it had presumably been locked in the same manner. It opened far too easily.

  They surged eagerly out of the oppressive crypts and into the tower's cellar, and though it was just as old, dark and derelict, the air at least felt fresher - and they didn't feel dogged by vengeful spectres.

  They pulled the door shut quite firmly behind them and released a collective sigh of relief.

  "Where to now?" Petra asked, her colour returning as Anthis started across the cobwebbed chamber to the door at the far end, and she cast a paranoid glance towards the crypt that lay sealed behind them as she and the others followed close on his heels.

  "Right to the top. That's how this building was organised."

  "Right at the top so people won't want to walk that far," Aria reasoned. "I bet it's also on the highest shelf."

  "It would also have been protected by spells, I suspect."

  "This place has never been maintained, they should be long gone."

  "As is half of the tower!" Petra turned her desperate eyes onto the two mages. "Is it safe?"

  Kienza offered her an easy smile. "It is now."

  Garon narrowed his eyes, though he chose to spare himself and quickly ignored the fact that she had just done something with magic without weaving signs. "I thought you said reintroducing magic would destabilise it."

  "If I were to use it to remove a tangle of debris," she replied innocently, "yes. I could dislodge something. But freezing everything exactly where it is is harmless."

  Rathen nodded his approval from beside her, but Garon's suspicion barely decreased. Petra, however, accepted it, and became troubled instead by another detail. "What if what we need is buried under what's collapsed?"

  "It isn't," Anthis assured her. "I've been here before it fell, they were nothing more than study rooms. The secure storage was aligned to the eastern half of the tower."

  "It collapsed recently, then?"

  "Yep - and not my fault."

  "But how do you know it will be up there?" The red-haired woman pressed. "And, while we're at it, what is 'it'? This artefact, or more paper?"

  "Honestly?"

  "No, don't ask him that..." Rathen groaned, and decided not to try to read Anthis's unfavourable expression. Instead, he stepped through the door and into the darkened tower, encouraging the others to follow and climb carefully over the debris-littered floor behind him. He found it little different from Mokhan; there was just as much mess and uncertain footing.

  Again the historian was yielded the lead, and he moved though the crumbling building with the confidence and surety of a weekly visitor. He knew precisely where he was going; he warned them in passing when they approached an unstable floor or a step which was primed to splinter, he skirted around the edge of holes and climbed quite specifically over broken stairways, avoiding the obvious but surely precarious lengths of wood and metal that bridged what remained.

  With every floor they climbed the tower looked more and more likely to collapse, but nothing moved as they added their weight to the clutter or brushed close by teetering floor boards displaced from the level above. There was no dominoesque chain reaction, not even a puff of dust. None of them had realised how literally Kienza's spell had taken hold until they passed a collection of panels suspended in the air, frozen mid-fall. Even Rathen, who was familiar with how far her mysterious and impossible magic could go, found himself surprised, and looked at her sidelong in his usual wondering when they discovered two grinning ditchlings, stalled in their climb to the top of a cabinet. But, as ever, his curiosity didn't manage to creep onto his tongue.

  At one moment in th
eir ascent, Anthis made a curious point of directing their attention out of an obscured window which offered a very limited view over the ruined city. The Pavise Mountains, which were suddenly surprisingly nearby, could just about be glimpsed if they craned their necks far enough, but otherwise it was far from spectacular and certainly not worthy of being pointed out. The informative little speech he gave as they continued to climb past it seemed equally strained. Rathen discovered why when he looked away in disinterest and his eyes fell upon the pair of legs crushed beneath a collapsed ceiling, its dusty garments and rotting ankles indicative of a disturbingly recent death.

  Eventually, Anthis drew them to a halt outside of one of the many identical doors, though this one seemed in better condition than the rest, and he turned immediately towards the two casters. They looked at the door, then back to him.

  Kienza blinked. "Go on, then," she said expectantly, and after he gave her a brief, fleeting frown of confusion, he reached out to its handle and pushed it open. The spell that had prevented him from entering every time before had vanished.

  He turned and furrowed his brow again, wondering whether she'd removed it with no gesture at all, or if it had finally broken down. He supposed it didn't matter, and led them inside.

  Finally, there were things to see. The room was large, semi-circular and cluttered with all kinds of scrolls and various ornaments that could have been anything from the very artefact they sought to an over-dressed spice jar. But where there would once have been meticulous organisation, now was only chaos. The room was in the same disarray as the rest of the building.

  Anthis stepped with more caution than he had through the rest of the tower. "There are a few rooms from here onwards I've been unable to get into, I'd guess because of lingering spells," he said as the others spread out with equally tentative steps. "Those are where we should look - and be careful."

  "We'll be fine," Rathen assured him. "Kienza's spell has everything held in place."

  "Nothing will move unless you touch it or pick it up directly," she promised them, then began wandering quite carelessly through the room, stepping over the unmoving wreckage with perfect grace and surety while she looked about with a curious twinkle in her eye. Aria chased after her with Rathen obediently close behind, and though the others weren't quite as prepared to accept her assurances, they soon began to indulge their own curiosities.

  Something half-hidden behind a fallen bookcase caught Aria's eye as Kienza stopped and lifted a scroll from a damp yet dusty table, and she began a struggle to push it upright and out of the way. It moved immediately when the sorceress glanced at it, and Aria immediately crouched down to peer at the exposed painting that must have been as tall as she was.

  It was a portrait of a man - or perhaps a woman in men's clothing. The face was too elegant to tell for certain. His hair was long and black, though it distinctly glowed blue where the light had hit the model, and the white skin was similarly tinted silver. The clothing he wore was of black and gold and patterned with a scrolling and twisting design that reminded her of the city itself, and it was clearly unreasonably expensive, while thin, black-edged golden gloves covered his hands. But his eyes held her attention longer than any other detail, piercing and far too lightly coloured for his complexion.

  She narrowed her own as she stared at him, then a thought occurred to her. "Is this an elf?" She spun on the balls of her feet to look at Anthis who already seemed to be lost in a box of parchments. He spared only a brief glance and a nod.

  She looked back to it in greater consideration, then noticed the elaborate edge of another picture frame behind it. She stood and pulled the first out of the way to find another beneath it, and another beneath that. At first they all seemed to be of the same feminine man with blue hair and silver skin, just in different clothing, but a beauty spot on the chin of the second and a smaller, finer nose on the third encouraged a closer look. It was on that final painting of a woman with highly-dressed hair that she noticed the sharp and elongated ears.

  She smiled to herself in satisfaction, then her eyes dropped to a small plaque set into the bottom of the frame. Her eyes widened in surprise. "Koraaz!"

  Rathen looked up in confused expectation.

  "An elven house," Anthis said blandly. "Your ancestors were most likely in service to them - mine were to House Karth, though they, like all the others, would have been referred to as 'of House Karth' rather than just 'Karth'..."

  "Humans in elven servitude didn't have surnames?"

  Anthis merely shook his head, mumbled what sounded like 'none of them did', and continued to sink deeper into his reading.

  Kienza peered down at Aria as she released a soft little sigh beside her, and found her looking across the rest of the group with a lopsided purse of her lips. She knew the look. She felt like a useless child. She turned then towards Anthis.

  "Aria," he said suddenly, glancing up very briefly from the scrolls he held open in each hand, "we'll need your help."

  Kienza smiled in satisfaction and turned back to her own reading while Aria grinned in hope. "How?"

  "Your usual way," he smiled charmingly, and as his attention returned once more to the parchments, where he thought it had been all along, she began striding around the room with immense purpose, looking far too closely at everything insignificant before trying to push, pull or twist it.

  Rathen smiled as she all but hung off of a wall sconce, and Kienza stepped over beside him. "You can help, too, you know."

  "I have absolutely no idea what to look for."

  "Magic," she replied, noticing how ready his response had been, "obviously. If the artefact itself is here, it could well be protected by more spells, just like this room was."

  He considered her carefully. "And will you be doing the same?"

  "Of course."

  His eyes narrowed further. "Why do I get the feeling that you already know whether it's here or not, and that you're not going to tell us either way?"

  "Why, Rathen!" She gasped. "You wound me."

  His brow flattened.

  "Anyway, hop to it."

  He sighed in irritation but didn't press the matter. He should have known better than to ask in the first place; the woman was a beautiful but unshatterable bottle of secrets - and he had a growing suspicion that a few new and quite relevant secrets had found their way into her care since their previous meeting.

  But he decided to ignore the fact that she was certainly withholding important information and turned his focus onto the room instead, searching among the lingering traces of spells for something that might once have been, or still be, concealing something.

  It wasn't long before a fine but sturdy wisp hooked his attention.

  Chapter 29

  Rathen followed the presence of the small and subtle spell, trailing it to its source like a loose thread. He lifted away the mound of fallen plaster, ignoring the lack of cloudy residue that should have billowed out with its movement, and tossed aside the ruined painting of another blue-haired elf to discover the dusty old box beneath. It was small, little bigger than his own splayed hand, but decorated to such an extent that it could have rivalled a number of buildings in the city.

  "What is it?" Garon asked, stepping carefully to his side. Anthis followed, but his eagerness was restrained by another caution that imposed itself in Rathen's presence.

  The mage turned the box over in his hands. "I don't know, but it's locked as tightly as the palace doors."

  Anthis hurriedly withdrew the old elven key from the bag that never seemed to leave his side, and a small intrigue creased Kienza's brow at the sight of it.

  "There's no lock," Petra pointed out.

  "No, it's magic." He glanced to Kienza, but she looked back at him with the same expectation as everyone else. Clearly, this spell was his to break.

  His eyes dropped back to the gold-filigree lid and he extended his magic towards it, investigating the enshrouding spell. To have lasted this long it had to have been c
ast by a powerful elf, and that encouraged his heart to skip a beat in hope, but the contrasting simplicity of its construction also made him hesitate - although he was quick to remind himself that the ruin in the Wildlands had been hidden by no spell at all and yet had contained their best finds yet.

  Whatever the case, this counter-spell would be little trouble.

  He shifted the box into his left hand and began a simple contortion with his right, but the moment he released it and the seal popped free, that familiar but mercifully brief heat encircled his arm.

  He gritted his teeth as he fought to suppress any obvious reactions, but Kienza had been watching him closely and noticed immediately the resentful gleam in his eye. She snatched the box and shoved it into the hands of the hungry-eyed historian before steadying him against a sudden wave of dizziness.

  "I'm sorry, my love," she sighed softly, "you're still too weak for magic, it seems." Giving his shoulders an affectionate squeeze, she turned her attention after the others onto the increasingly ominous box.

  They waited for an agonisingly long moment for Anthis to open it, hesitant despite his enthusiasm, as though he desperately didn't want to feel the bitter pang of disappointment, but the steadily mounting weight of the air soon made his hands move on their own.

  The lid flew open, and he blinked at its contents.

  The others felt their hearts stop.

  Petra sidled closer alongside him and a frown knitted her brow. "Is that..."

  Kienza nodded. "Tea leaves."

  "...But..." Anthis shook his head, his expression having slipped away to leave his face blank in his lack of comprehension, "the spell was still active..."

  "A number of them are," Rathen sighed, "that's how the place is still standing at all."

  Petra grunted in disappointment. "I suppose this says something about the elves' priorities."

  Their luck continued along such lines for hours. They left the first room and entered another that had remained magically sealed despite the centuries, then another after that, and another after that. Rathen had searched them all for magic, but any time he'd discovered anything and Kienza had unlocked them in his place, there was nothing inside but more disappointing trivialities. Aria similarly pulled on candelabras, tilted pictures, pushed walls and pulled cabinets, but her search for hidden rooms and compartments came up just as empty.