“You should have killed me.”
Calenus smiled. “Should I have? Are you not grateful to be alive?”
I smiled back. “I always repay my favors in full.”
His eyes sharpened. “Oh, I know how you are; believe me. But that’s not why you’re here.”
I didn’t respond, only stared.
“Come,” he said, heading for the door. “Let’s take a walk.”
I pointed at the podium. “What about your contract?”
“It’s on hold. I’ve sent word that we received their message, but it’ll take a while to choose a scholar. If there are any volunteers, that is.”
III
EDGE OF THE WORLD
Qaira Eltuan—;
I LOOKED OFF THE CLIFF, UNABLE TO SEE ANYTHING BUT RED HAZE. There was no mist or fog anywhere in Exo’daius that I had seen, until now.
I didn’t know why we were here.
Calenus had led me out of Enigmus and its courtyard, through several miles of rocky, uphill terrain. Exo’daius was not developed like other worlds, its domiciles only Enigmus and a giant cathedral-looking structure at the other side of the cliff, half a mile away.
I had watched it pass with curiosity. Calenus had noticed my curiosity but didn’t say anything of it. I wanted to ask, but didn’t want to seem too eager.
He talked, I listened. That was how this operation ran.
Calenus was crouched beside me, watching the swirling fog with an imperceptible gaze. His silver eyes looked pink against the luminosity of the sky, and I figured mine looked the same. The noble appeared exactly as I’d seen him eight hundred years ago; young, yet old enough to be a man, his long, black hair pulled away from his face. Vel’Haru here only ever wore one expression: introspection.
The silence was beginning to get awkward, and I shot him a sidelong glance.
“This is the edge of our world,” he said, on cue. “Long before I was born, our proxies attempted to make this theory fact by sending several of their winged guardians off.” He pointed ahead, into nothingness. “Some thought there was other land beyond our eyes. That Exo’daius as they knew it was just a little island floating amid a world of bigger islands.”
Like The Atrium, I thought.
He trailed off. More silence.
“And then?” I pressed, now invested in the story.
“They never returned.”
I looked back at the fog, cogwheels turning in my head. “Why not?”
Calenus looked up at me, questioningly.
“If they’d gotten tired and found nothing, why not turn back?”
He smiled. “Indeed.”
His response left me puzzled. “You think they found something?”
“Not sure. If they did, it must have been a lot nicer than here.”
My attention rose to the sky. “This place doesn’t feel like a world. It feels like a dream.”
Calenus nodded.
“What universe are we even in?”
He shrugged, and I stared.
“How don’t you know?”
“We have yet to locate our world in attica. It doesn’t recognize the waves here. Our portals are few and far between throughout the multiverse, only recognizable by us. You can’t get to Exo’daius by ship or interstellar voyage.”
“Attica?”
“Our multiversal map.”
“Are we in an alternate dimension?”
Again, he shrugged. “I haven’t wondered too much, myself.”
“I thought your group was full of wonder.”
“What I mean is I don’t think we’ll find any answers here. That’s why we look elsewhere.”
My legs were still sore and the uphill climb hadn’t helped any. I sat on the edge of the cliff, feet dangling over air. We didn’t speak for a while.
“Why were you injured?” he asked.
I hesitated, swinging my legs. Calenus was not going to like my answer. “I got in a fight.”
To my surprise, he smiled. “Did you kill Aczeva?”
“He went first.”
“Is the Nexus still in operation?”
“Probably not.” He waited for me to explain, but all I said was, “It’ll take a while for them to get things running again. A lot of damaged equipment and dead employees. I wasn’t really thinking straight.”
Calenus laughed. “Yes, I was counting on that.”
I lifted a brow. “You’re pleased?”
“Of course I’m pleased. The Anakaari Empire is fueled by slavery. They’ve taken over numerous worlds, valuable worlds.”
“Why didn’t you get rid of them sooner?”
“It isn’t that easy. Their empire spans across four solar systems and they’re allied with a few confederations. Going at them directly would cause tumult. I couldn’t risk our reputation. Not to mention once I brought you there I had no choice but to bargain for treaty. Sparing your life was expensive.” Another smile. “But worth it.”
My stare turned into a glare. “Was that your plan all along? Shove me into the Nexus so that one day I’d wake up and bring down the house?”
“I can’t predict the future, but I try to plan for every possibility. The Nexus was their main source of funding, and with their President dead an uprising is imminent.”
“Won’t they see you as responsible?”
“No, because you were with the Jury, not the Court of Enigmus. Technicalities. It’s all about the technicalities.”
I looked away, seething.
“Think of it as a first step on your road to atonement. You’ve just freed billions of people and spared billions more from a similar fate.”
Atonement.
I laughed under my breath.
“Why are you here, Qaira?”
The humor on my face melted away. I looked toward the strange cathedral in the distance. “Don’t have anywhere else to be.”
“You do have somewhere else to be. Even if you don’t want to be there, her resonance pulls at you. Guardian’s gravity, they call it.”
I felt my lip curl.
Instead of pressing, he nodded at the cathedral. “Why don’t we take a look?”
“What?”
“You’ve been eyeing that place since we got here.”
“What is it?”
“The Sanctuary. The answers you seek are there.”
I watched him rise, incredulous. Vel’Haru weren’t clairvoyant but Calenus seemed to read me like an open book. This was going to be a lot harder than I thought.
***
The Sanctuary rested on a tiny island, separate from the mainland. A glass plateau bridged them together, a narrow hundred-yard trek across red abyss. A flight of steps led up to massive doors with no obvious way of entry. It looked like a palace for giants.
“How did you build this?” I whispered, marveling.
“I can’t take any credit. It was here long before I was born. The proxies built it.”
“Proxies,” I repeated, having heard that word twice now.
“I’ll explain in a minute.”
He approached the doors and I hung back, watching. I had been so floored by the height and magnitude of the structure that I’d failed to see the runes etched across the surface of the frame. It almost looked like an Aeon switchboard, but these runes were akin to the placards at Enigmus. There were a dozen runes; Calenus selected one, placing his hand over it. It lit up in blue light, and then the light traveled through fractures between the doors.
A rumble shook the ground.
For a moment I thought the bridge was going to collapse and stepped away, yet all that happened was the doors opened inward, revealing black recess.
Calenus retreated inside. I lingered at the entrance, inspecting the runes. They were written in Exodian, each rune a single word concealed in a ring that connected other words, conglomerating into what resembled a chemical diagram. A super-molecule.
I unfocused my eyes, studying the larger picture.
Genetic materi
al.
The runes were arranged in double helices. Not human. Not anything I’d seen before, but specific enough for me to gain some idea of what they conveyed.
The words enclosed were colors. Scarlet, ivory, silver, celadon, violet.
The silver rune was lit, the others lay inactive.
I spent another minute remembering the shape of the molecule, burning the image into my mind. My most important skill was a keen attention to detail, which had skirted me through lessons for a hundred years. You couldn’t be a physicist without something like that. Not an amazing one, anyway.
Calenus waited for me in the middle of the corridor. All I could see was his faint silhouette in the shadows. I followed and he led me through a lengthy hall, lamps on the wall illuminating as we passed. Motion sensitive candles or pyrokinesis?
That question remained a thought.
The hall opened into a huge circular room, dimly lit by more candles on the wall. The lack of light caused shadows to dance along the floor and pews. It looked like a church, but there were engravings on the wall, much like the ones on the door. None of them were lit. A single podium lay in the center of the room, a black, leather-bound book resting atop it. My eyes rose to the ceiling; more engravings.
A staircase ascended to another door at the other side of the room. Calenus waited at the top, allowing me some time to look around.
“What’s this?” I asked, nodding to the podium and book.
“Kyothera.”
That was Exodian for compendium. Still, I didn’t understand.
“Our custom says we must write in it, once a day.”
“Who?”
“All of us.”
I stood at the podium, staring at the book. The cover was nondescript. “All of you write in this thing every day?”
“No, one person per day. I’ve been doing it the most.”
“What do you write?”
Calenus shrugged. “Whatever comes to mind.”
“So it’s like a community diary.”
“Yes and no. Emotions are left out of any account. Kyothera is used as a historical reference to our world and its members.”
“As a failsafe?”
He paused, confused. “For what?”
“In case everyone dies?”
That question seemed to strike a chord with him. “The proxies started the custom as a way of recording their lives. Their information was useful to us, now not so much.”
“Proxies,” I said again, cueing him to explain.
“The firsts.” I opened my mouth, but he beckoned me. “Come, I’ll show you.”
We walked through a mezzanine of stained yellow glass and skylights, up a small four-floor tower and out onto a plateau guarded by a black iron fence. Yellow grass crunched beneath our boots. Here five statues lay, each placed harmoniously to the rest. All but one was paired.
All of these statues resembled the one Leid had shown me on Atlas Arcantia. Now that I knew what they were, I took notice of how tall each was. Like Calenus, seven feet, some even taller. Nobles were giants.
But there were also slight deviations, too. The statues’ faces seemed… more feral. Sharper. Pointier teeth. Their arms and legs were longer than ours. Most of them wore armor that looked fashioned out of stone, or glass—or maybe that was because they were obsidian. Others were in robes that clung to their bodies like thin sheets of plastic. Their hair was long and twisted, even the men. This was not how I expected any Vel’Haru to ever look.
At my surprise, Calenus half-smiled.
“How old are their bodies?” I asked.
“Two thousand Exodian years, give or take.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“About one hundred thousand years on The Atrium.”
One hundred thousand. Few civilizations ever made it that long, even ones that had superseded their home world. The Nehel had made it forty thousand, and that was if you’d counted the primeval era of warring tribes.
“Longer in other places,” he added. “All depends on the universe and its gauge of time.”
“They look different.”
“Yes. Our transcendence to higher intelligence was unlike any other species. We are the product of two races—two separate worlds.”
“Which ones?”
“We only know of one. They’re called Razekhan, and they’ve been extinct for a long, long time. Kyothera gave us bits and pieces of our history through the accounts of our proxies, but didn’t say much about how we came into being. A war was waged between two supremely-intelligent worlds and we were the unexpected result. The Razekhan planet, Philo, is now a wasteland without an atmosphere. We’ve excavated it but turned up little information, other than a theory that they weren’t the victors.”
“And you have no idea what the second race was?”
“No. We’ve put the pattern of our genetic material into attica. Other than Razekhan, no other species remotely resembles us.”
“How do you know there’s another species at all, then?”
“One of the proxies mentioned a war of worlds; that and our genetic material is only a forty-percent match to theirs. From what we gathered during our excavation of Philo, their world ended around the same time Exo’daius began.”
And now I understood the purpose behind the Court of Enigmus. On the surface they were a conglomerate-race of scholars sent out to help underdeveloped worlds by educating them on the secrets of the cosmos. In reality they were trying to find their origins, and looked to the multiverse for any further clues. The more worlds they understood, the more that understanding could be directed toward their ancestry. Leid had mentioned there were thirteen known universes in the Multiverse. Known being the key word in that statement. Perhaps the answers lay in another that had yet to be discovered.
“Are there any more?”
Calenus shook his head. “Only six.”
“There are five statues here.”
His expression darkened. “One was destroyed.”
Destroyed.
Again, I thought of Atlas Arcantia. “Why?”
“You aren’t ready for that yet,” he said, casting down his eyes. “Soon, but not yet.”
I opened my mouth to object, but realized that maybe he was right. Maybe what he was going to tell me had something to do with Leid, and just the thought of her made my knees tremble.
We stood there, staring at the statues under the red, Exodian sky. There was no wind, and the silence was condemning. Calenus’ expression told me that he, too, had a sordid past.
“I was told once that wisdom perpetuates grief,” I began, and he looked at me, surprised. “Any comments on that?”
That question seemed random, but it wasn’t. I was letting him know that I’d noticed his tumult. I could tell he understood that, so perhaps it was my passivity that surprised him. After a moment, he smiled.
“Ignorance is bliss, Qaira.”
I didn’t smile back.
***
Jii was waiting in my temporarily-assigned room. I hadn’t noticed her until I shut the door. When I did, I froze.
She stood, gesturing to another plate and mug on the desk. “We don’t usually serve food after hours of operation, but you look like you could use it.”
“Thank you.”
But she didn’t leave. Instead, she lifted the robe from her shoulders and let it fall to her feet. My eyes trailed down her body.
“Calenus suggested you might need to relax a bit,” she said.
“He ordered you to fuck me?”
“Calenus doesn’t order us to do anything. I volunteered.”
I hesitated, fumbling for words. Jii took that as an invitation to kneel in front of me and start unfastening my belt. Before she could get my pants down, I stepped away from her and moved to the plate, as if she wasn’t even there.
I kept my back turned, listening. After half a minute I heard her rise to collect her robe. As she vacated my room I looked over my shoulder. She
was looking over hers. Rejection didn’t mark her face; her expression was something else. Something elusive.
Jii closed the door behind her.
That had been a test.
I didn’t know whether I’d passed or failed.
***
I dreamed of Sanctum’s final hour. Leid dangled me over Eroqam’s port, saying something, but her voice was on mute. I stared into her black eyes, seeing a reflection of myself. I was scared, confused, bloodied.
She let go, and I fell.
Weightlessness and silence, terror in the dark.
I tried to release my wings, but they wouldn’t come. Instead, pain ravaged my back and—
***
I shot out of bed, screaming. The pain bled into reality, and my screams grew even louder. Razor-like sensations shot through my shoulders and I fell to my knees, sobbing. I couldn’t see; the pain blurred my vision.
The door burst open and voices exploded into the room. Shadows loomed around me, discussing something, and then my shirt was torn away.
“Hold him down.” Calenus.
Hands grabbed my arms, keeping me flat on my stomach. I was still screaming.
I heard the unmistakable sound of a scythe unleashing. Fear muted the pain, and I thrashed.
More hands.
“Keep still.” Ixiah. “Your wing slits have sealed shut. We’re going to reopen them.”
My body went rigid and I clenched my teeth as the serrated edge of Calenus’ scythe sliced through my skin. He made a second slice. Blood trickled down my back and leaked over the floor. The pain peaked as my wings tore through the incisions and I screamed one final time.
I was released but couldn’t move, left shaking on hands and knees. My wings shuddered. I couldn’t open them, as they were too weak. Eight hundred years unused.
The pain had dulled to a burn. Ixiah rubbed ointment on the incisions, making it a cold burn. I hung my head and groaned.
The others stood back and surveyed my wings. They were covered in blood and sinew. Blood and sinew painted the walls, too. I’d made quite a mess.
“He needs a bigger room,” noted Zira.
The Antithesis- The Complete Pentalogy Page 66