The Echoes of Sin (The Kinless Trilogy Book 3)

by Philbrook, Chris

  The giant metal door hissed shut behind them, and the world outside no longer existed.

  White discs of light appeared in the ceiling of the interior tunnel. One blinked to life every few perfectly spaced feet in a series of exclamation points that disappeared into the far distance. The five foot wide corridor painted the color of over-creamed coffee penetrated into the Duulani underground for a hundred feet before another smooth metal door ended its progression. The floor was covered in speckled white tiles made not of stone, but of some strange chitinous material similar to the black key. Spotted in staggered position along the entire length of the hallway were recessed white doors with steel paddle styled handles. Umaryn could see three lines of writing on each of the doors at roughly head height. Each line was written in a different language. She recognized easily the first line of Lish, but the other two markings below were entirely foreign to her.

  “What are these languages?” she said as she ran her fingers along the red writing. Her fingertips told her the door was soulless, just like the stones outside.

  “We don’t know,” Aleksi said. “Most of the white doors open with just a turn of the handle, and the Lish tells us within reason what’s inside each room. Personnel quarters, pantry, chapel, so on. Some of the words in Lish though, mean nothing to us. As do a series of symbols that clearly are important.”

  “Give me an example of some words you don’t understand,” Umaryn asked.

  “Reactor. Satellite observation room. We understand observation room, but no one knows what satellite means,” Aleksi spoke as if defeated.

  “Is there something in the room labeled reactor that reacts when you enter?” Malwynn posed as they started to walk slowly past the string of doors in the bright hallway.

  “No. Just strange machinery powered by some unknown force.”

  “Why is it you think it’s important to not speak outside of this place?” Umaryn asked as they passed a door labeled ‘Medical Storage.’

  “We are being watched,” Aleksi said softly.

  “What? By who? Scrying with The Way?” Malwynn asked him.

  “Not quite. We don’t understand it fully, despite having studied it periodically for two decades. But we have figured out how to… use whatever it is that we are being watched with. To a degree. Do you remember what the green words said? Site zero zero three one? One conclusion we can accurately make is that there are many more places similar to this across Elmoryn, though I know of no others that have been explored such as this one.”

  “That’s one of the most confusing things anyone has ever said to me,” Mal said with a chuckle.

  “The heart of this place is the room I mentioned earlier called the satellite observation room. From there, I can show you what I mean. That’s also where we keep the tome I mentioned earlier.”

  “Show us, please,” Umaryn said, and they continued down the hallway. She turned to Chelsea after running her fingers along the wall and cringing again. “Though I hate this place, I would kill to spend a decade here studying what was forgotten. So much science must be here, forgotten for three hundred years and ready to be deciphered.”

  “That’s part of what we fear, Umaryn. This place represents a time with no faith. No things with souls, and no unity through the Church. Think of the disaster it could cause if people started to use the soulless ways of making things again. How many dead items would be stillborn? How many people would turn from the ancestors and instead put their faith in pathetic science? Our entire society could crumble if it was done wrong,” Aleksi said. “Faith is the engine that runs Elmoryn. Not science.”

  “But what if it was done right? Do you think Alisanne was hiding all this because she was afraid scientific revelations would undermine our society? Especially the church?”

  “Churches, Umaryn. Plural. The Guild stands to suffer just as much as the Church of Souls if the past is revealed fully. I think she feared that, and I think she feared that the whole truth of our past would come to light. Secrets have been kept for longer than we knew, Umaryn. Let me show you the room I spoke of,” Aleksi said.

  The door at the end of the long hall slid open when they approached it. Aleksi explained that once inside, simply walking towards the giant doors would trigger their automatic opening. Malwynn’s head hurt trying to figure out how it all worked. Umaryn’s head hurt from the oppressive feeling of disconnection from the things around here. She held her hammer tightly at her waist, and kept a palm flat on the breastplate of her armor, trying to ground herself with the presence of the spirits inside her possessions.

  More lights blinked on in the depths of the room beyond, illuminating an alien place with strange shadows cast from oddly placed lights. The space looked nothing like anything the twins or Chelsea had ever seen before.

  They passed through the doorway onto a grated steel walkway that hung suspended above a floor filled with rows of strange worktables covered in a mosaic of strange square and circle shapes and images. The tiny shapes were illuminated, and seemed to hover on the surface of hundreds of smooth black plates that looked almost identical to the strange wall-mounted key object in the initial passage. The floor below the mezzanine they stood atop ramped downwards in tiers, descending to the right hand side. After several repeating levels an open space existed, and beyond that, a massive wall of glasslike blackness that grew to fifty feet in width, and almost thirty feet in height.

  Chelsea, Malwynn and Umaryn stood with their mouths agape, utterly confused by the room and all its bizarre contents.

  “Come,” Aleksi said, ushering them towards a set of steep stairs made of more of the metal grating. They followed his lead, their boots tapping and ringing on the steel underfoot. “When the key reaches the floor, the room awakens. Don’t be startled by what happens. It’s harmless.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Chelsea said. Malwynn didn’t see her winking at him.

  When Mal stepped foot on the solid floor of the tiered bottom of the room, the black wall came alive in a strange patchwork of words and muted colors. Green and gray dominated the screen with small flecks of bright orange and red here and there. Bursts of words dashed by right to left, spelling out strings of nouns that none of the three saw to be familiar. Digits formed complex numbers interspersed with strange punctuation telling a story in mathematics that none could decipher. They stood staring at the enormous wall as it gave away ten thousand secrets before one could be disassembled for the truth in their minds.

  “What in the ancestors is that?” Malwynn asked as the green and gray images broke up into multiple small squares along the outer ring of the wall. They formed a border of smaller strange images that went from floor to ceiling, and wall to wall. A larger image stayed central, fuzzy and gray and green like the others. Tiny bits of movement could be seen on the image, though the small spots of colors shifting about made no sense to the eye.

  “Come to this table of lights. There are a few things we have figured out how to do,” Aleksi said, walking to a tier one level up and centered in the room. They followed. The vampire leaned over the edge of one of the strange worktables with its black surface and colorful shapes. “Each shape and color when touched tells the wall to do something. We don’t understand some of the results, but if I push this red circle here for example, a list of seventy words comes up, look.” He pushed the red circle and as he foretold the wall suddenly spat out seventy five lines of text. Each line was sequential. The first was SITE 0001. The last was Site 0070. All of the Site numbers prior to 25 were in red. Numerous more in the higher digits were in red as well, the rest, including SITE 0031, were in green.

  “Seventy places just like this,” Chelsea said as she counted. “Thirty five in green. Do you think the others were destroyed?”

  “Watch,” the vampire said. He ran his fingers over a few other colored shapes after some thought, and the central image suddenly flickered and changed. It expanded and grew edges instead of being indistinct, and Malwynn knew exactly wha
t the shape on the wall was.

  “That’s Elmoryn. We’re looking at a giant map of the world aren’t we?” he asked. “Davisville is over there in the west, Daris right there in the center of Varrland. That dark green area is the Akeel Mountains.” He turned to Chelsea. “That’s where we saw those strange cuts in the stone that made the passes.”

  She nodded, remembering.

  “Yes. More accurately, a giant picture of our continent. There are other landmasses on the world. These pictures seem to be taken from far in the sky above. We do not know how the pictures were taken, but we know that the pictures are… accurate. Up to the moment,” Aleksi said.

  “Say what?” Umaryn scoffed.

  “See the dots on the map? Red and green?” Aleksi asked, pointing them out on the map wall. “You’ll see right where we are there is a green dot, and a tiny number Thirty-One. The vast majority of the red dots are buried in what is now The Plague Dunes, where the Great Plague was worst, and where we can no longer tread.”

  “Abandoned to the plague,” Umaryn said. “That makes sense. But what do you mean the pictures are up to date?”

  “Pick any place on Elmoryn. Any place at all,” Aleksi said.

  “New Picknell. Where we grew up,” Malwynn said.

  “Ah. You’ll need to point it out for me,” Aleksi said. Between Umaryn, Malwynn and Aleksi pointing and refining, Aleksi pushed colored shapes on the table until the central map image zoomed in on the great plains of northern Varrland. The gray and green map came into focus in greater detail as he walked the frame of the map over and up until they could see the burnt ruins of their home. They could clearly see the stone walkways of their home, the wells, and Umaryn could even see the remnants of the stone forge that she learned at beside Luther, her mentor. “What you see, is what’s happening right now. At this very moment in the middle of the night.”

  “Show me Ockham’s Fringe. Show me,” Umaryn demanded.

  It took only a few seconds to move the map north and west. Much had changed in the tiny trackside village. Walls had been erected and a moat dug. Smoke billowed out of the city from numerous large fires, and outside, on the plains east of the village in the same shades of green and gray, a massive army could be seen. Bodies were strewn in a three hundred yard scattering near the east wall of the village, and it looked dire. The footprint of the invading army was twice the size of the entire village. Tiny motes of bright green moved right to left from the invading force’s heart over the wall. They grew dim and disappeared before reaching the other side of the village.

  “Those are flaming arrows, aren’t they? May the dead help them,” Chelsea said. “I should be there. Marcus and the Ghost Makers… Where are the reinforcements? Why are they still alone? There should be three times as many Varrlanders as Empire forces by now.”

  “I don’t know. When we leave here we go straight there, though,” Umaryn said, her voice bubbling over with worry and yearning. The man she pretended not to love was somewhere on that dark map, as she watched it from so far away.

  “You’re going nowhere,” a woman’s voice said from behind them. Umaryn tried to turn to face the strange voice, but a hand shot out of the darkness and punched her with sharp claws straight in the throat. Nails long worn to a ragged point slashed into her flesh and pierced the thick artery inside, and a jet of red blood shot into the air. A redheaded woman—the vampire Aleksi had stood off with at the confrontation on the rails—jumped atop the table behind them and laughed.

  The artificer collapsed to the hard floor next to the worktable, spraying blood everywhere, dying.

  Malwynn screamed and dropped to his knees as Aleksi launched himself over the table at the redheaded woman. Chelsea drew her sword and went into the darkness with him, as there were other things moving in the strange shadows of the odd room.

  Malwynn couldn’t see. His eyes were flooded with tears as he lifted her up into his lap and tried desperately to cover the spurting wound in her neck with his hand. He pressed hard as he’d been taught, but the act was no use. It was like trying to stop the flow of a stream with a single rock.

  “Nooo... Nooo...” he pleaded, watching his last family member slip away to the darkness in front of him.

  Umaryn cried as well, as she too drained of color. All if it ran between Mal’s fingers. She smiled against her own death and tried as best as she could to lock her bright blue eyes with her brother’s. They shared the exact same eyes, and she took some comfort that her last moments alive would be looking into them. Her words had to be fought for.

  “Tell. Marcus. I loved him.”

  “Nooo. Nooo. I won’t. You will,” Malwynn stammered. His finger slipped.

  She nodded painfully as more blood ran out of her. The flow slowed. “Tell him. I love you and Chelsea too,” she whispered.

  “We love you too,” Malwynn whispered back. Suddenly his eyes shot open. “Wait,” he said as Aleksi and Chelsea battled whoever had ambushed them. “Do you want your decade? Do you want to study here?”

  Umaryn’s eyes were glazing over, fixing wide. She slipped faster and faster into the oblivion. “To study. To learn?”

  “To protect?” Malwynn asked her as someone nearby let out a grunt that signified the end of their unlives. “Say it and want it sister. Say it please.”

  “To protect…” she said, and she went still.

  The blood no longer ran between Malwynn’s fingers. He stood, soaked from face to foot in the blood of his fallen twin.

  Aleksi and Chelsea suddenly appeared, also soaked in blood, though theirs was the blood of enemies, not the beloved. Chelsea looked down at Umaryn and immediately burst into tears.

  “Malwynn… I am… so sorry,” Aleksi said, emotion welling up inside the dead vampire. His mind had been one with Mal’s and he knew the grief the necromancer had. The dead man couldn’t cry, but he felt another kind of death happening in his chest.

  Mal’s jaw quivered in anger and sadness and his eyes stared absently into the darkness. He took a deep breath, gathered himself, and forced the words out shakily. He had little time. “Show me this tome you speak of.”

  Malwynn threw the thick black leather bound book on the table, ignoring any effect it had on the colored shapes that manipulated the strange wall. He flipped the cover open and read the strange, magical language within. His feverish fingers guided his tear filled eyes sentence after sentence as a distraught Chelsea sat cross legged on the floor holding the hand of Mal’s dead sister. Her dead sister. Over and over she slid her fingers across Umaryn’s, tracing the strong lines of the artificer’s strong hands. The fingers hung limp and lifeless, and that hurt Chelsea. Umaryn was too strong for this. She deserved better. She deserved life.

  “I found it,” he said with purpose, flipping the book open to a specific page. He scoured the words again, searching for what he needed. “Aleksi, I need the blood of the devout. Yours will do. I have a candle of the right age, and I need the ashes of the undead. Quickly, set fire to one of their bodies somewhere. I need only a handful.”

  “As you wish,” the vampire said. He reached down and picked up the body of the redheaded vampire and tossed it over his shoulder with little effort. He ran up the metal grated stairs and disappeared into the corridor beyond where they’d been.

  Malwynn turned and produced a stick of chalk from his pocket. “I need to draw some very specific diagrams on the floor around her. Help me move her to a bigger space.”

  Chelsea nodded, confused, but she got up, and helped the man he loved start a ritual that, three months before, she’d have killed him for suggesting.

  Aleksi came back with a handful of ash. It could only barely be called ash. Some of it was still wet and sticky, and the fine ash had tiny bits of bone and hardened flesh inside it. Malwynn took the vampire’s cupped hands into his and they transferred it. Once Mal’s hands were filled to the brim with gray ash, Aleksi used Chelsea’s dagger to cut a small incision into his arm near the elbow. A trickle of blood
ran down his skin and puddled up in the center of the ash, forming a tiny lake at its center.

  “May the ancestors bless my gift to you, Malwynn, and may they give your sister time to become as my family.”

  The necromancer looked at the vampire with a mixture of appreciation and revulsion before he began chanting in strange phrases he’d only just memorized from the book. The words came quickly, and flowed from his tongue like dark summer honey.

  Chelsea prayed the young man’s mind was as sharp as she thought it was. She knew from what he explained of The Way that small mistakes in the manipulation of magic meant large changes in the effect. Most unexpected changes were unwelcome, as he had led her to believe. She rocked back and forth from her perch in a strangely comfortable chair and thought kind thoughts of all her deceased family members. She wished they would aid the man she loved in that moment.

  Her hair—tied back in a tight braid—felt lighter at the temple, and she lifted a hand to examine her head. The thin blonde strands were floating, and she felt as if the very air had changed. Gotten thinner perhaps. She looked to Mal and saw his hair too was floating upwards in a freakish joke. He looked insane, covered in his sister’s blood, and walking in circles around a strange series of diagrams he had drawn. At the center of it all, lay his sister’s body.

  The black haired man with the bright blue, tear filled eyes walked in circles for nearly an hour, chanting the same words over and over, if the noises he made could even be called words. The lights in the strange room started to flicker in sync with his words, pulsating and ebbing as he built The Way out of her dead spirit, the blood filled ashes, the lit candles, and the drawings.

  Soon the light came from within his very body, and his sister’s matched it. A luminescence emerged from their eyes and mouths that cast stranger shadows than before. As Malwynn circled Umaryn, the twin’s light formed a ribbon, an ethereal flow of life-force and death-force, channeling one into the other, forming, changing, and evolving.