Taellaneth Complete Series Box Set

by Vanessa Nelson

  “How does that help?”

  “I am not sure. Yet.” Her non-stomach settled. Her jaw set. A new puzzle to work out.

  “Can you find the others?”

  “Perhaps. Can you?”

  “Only if we are close enough. This place is huge.”

  “Give me a moment.” Arrow closed her eyes, sending her senses out. Nothing. Then she imagined that the fortress did not exist. Nothing existed here apart from spirit. Not quite second sight. Not quite the shadow world. Something else. Her head pounded with effort and she persisted. There had to be a way to see.

  All at once her mind’s eye was overwhelmed by dark blots of surjusi and she almost pulled back, frightened of discovery. There was a glimmer of amber in the midst of it all, and a fainter trace of something else that might be humans. She opened her eyes, silver bright, and tilted her head to Kester, indicating a direction.

  ~

  Searching the demons’ fortress was far more pleasant with Kester for company. She was not alone with her thoughts and the crawl of surjusi magic still running through her. She was not bombarded with Serran’s constant criticism.

  Instead, Kester kept pace with her, strides even and easy, one hand on a weapon hilt, eyes keen as he looked around and when they reached the fourth dead end, simply looked thoughtful.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “You said the rules here are different. And we have not seen any actual doors anywhere. But there were what looked like windows on the outside.” He was echoing Iserat’s comments from earlier. A warrior’s line of thinking.

  “True.”

  “What if there are doors, but we cannot see them in normal sight?”

  Arrow glared at the nearest wall, as though she could simply will a door into being. Kester came to stand beside her.

  “It looks solid,” he prompted, “but then a well-crafted glamour can look solid, too. The surjusi clearly have magic.”

  Arrow shuddered, still carrying some of that power inside her. He was right.

  “We were attacked earlier,” she told him, breathing light and too fast, “when the walls disappeared and stairs took their place. I …” She swallowed, turning her hand over, the palm no longer bleeding, wound healing over more slowly than normal. She had not spared any energy to heal it. “I can sense their magic. Use their magic.” She swallowed again.

  “Arrow,” Kester said, voice soft and urgent, hand reaching for hers.

  “No. We need to find the others.” She turned her shoulder to him, trying to hide her expression, drew the kri-syang and made a shallow cut across her palm, calming her breathing and her heart, finding the almost meditative state Academy-trained magicians used for complex spells.

  Her focus was disturbed by the sound of others arriving. A familiar pair.

  “There you are!” Dorian’s voice was only marginally more welcome than another surjusi. “Are you lost, too? This place doesn’t end. Why were you staring at the wall?”

  Arrow spared them a quick glance. The pair looked exhausted, shadows under their eyes, clothing a little more ragged than when she had seen them last, both covered in what looked like dust and missing quite a few of their vials. They were also purely human. No surjusi had taken hold of them. She wondered how they had reached the fortress and found their way inside, and set that aside for another time. There was work to do now.

  “Quiet, human,” Kester said, tone one of a senior warrior to a cadet. Without looking, Arrow knew he had moved, standing at her back, facing the magicians.

  Arrow ignored the subsequent argument, focusing instead on the sharper awareness her blood gave her. She put her hand on the wall, feeling the smooth, cool stone against her skin, sending her senses out again. This time there was more to find. Individual stones, put together over centuries by surjusi and the occasional slave, human or Erith. Shifkin did not come here, or were destroyed as soon as they did. The surjusi could not make use of shifkin power.

  And within the walls, spells had been crafted. Not in any way that an Erith would work. Or even humans. Maddening tangles of commands in a language she could not understand, the knots so tight she could not separate out the individual strands. And yet. There were commands. There were spells. And beyond those surface layers there was silence and noise and whispers in the dark, whispers that slid away from her the moment she tried to focus on them, like the sound of voices through an unwarded door where she could hear the pitch and tone but not the actual words. The whispers drew her in, calling seductively, promising comprehension if she would only listen more.

  The sword at her back pulsed, snapping her focus back to the here and now and she wondered how long she had been listening to those murmurs. She shut out the noise and the silence and focused instead on the spells she could see with the connection of her blood. Spells were simply commands, and could be used, if she could only work out how.

  Surjusi did not really have language. Or voices, despite the whispering. So perhaps the spells were cast by will. In the same way as her will had shaped her body when they arrived. And Kester’s will had dissolved his body, allowing the surjusi to escape and be killed.

  What she needed, she thought carefully, setting her will behind it, was an opening. Just there. To the right. A large opening big enough for a cadre. And a set of stairs leading up to the next level. Wide, shallow stairs with no hiding places. And the stairs should end at another wide opening. And the stairs should end near to where she could sense the six and Serran.

  The shocked gasps from the others broke her focus for a moment. She shut them out again, focusing instead on what she needed. An opening. Stairs. Another opening.

  The spells in the stone walls shifted, knots unravelling, new ones forming, working to implement her will.

  It seemed to take a long time. Eventually the spells were still again and she opened her eyes, finding a wide opening with a set of shallow steps had formed to her right.

  She took her hand off the wall, the shallow cut dried and all trace of her blood vanished into the wall.

  “Shall we go?”

  Kester was ready, weapons out.

  Dorian and Juniper were staring at her open-mouthed.

  “How did you do that?”

  “I used the demon’s magic,” she told them, not wanting to think about it. Applying her will to the existing spells had been less troubling than drawing the surjusi magic through her. But it had woken up the magic inside her and it was coursing through her body, agitated. She drew the sword. It was quiet, its surface and edges plain metal. Still, she would rather have it ready. “Serran and the others should be at the top of the stairs,” she told Kester. “But I do not know how long the opening will hold.”

  “We should hurry, then,” Kester said, and set off up the stairs two at a time, Arrow plodding in his wake. She was not drained, just a little tired.

  Dorian and Juniper followed her, grumbling and muttering under their breaths. She caught a few words. They thought she was leading them into a trap. Given how easily the fortress had obeyed her will, she thought that was possible, too.

  CHAPTER 19

  Finding the six, and Serran, was easy once they got close enough. They simply followed the sound of argument, voices raised to a level that even Arrow and the magicians could hear from some distance away. Kester’s face tightened.

  “Serran is a self-serving idiot,” he muttered as they drew closer.

  “What? Why do you say that?” Arrow asked, unable to make out the individual words.

  Kester shook his head, jaw tight, and kept walking, fingers tightening on his sword hilt, the skirts of his coat pinned back to allow him easy access to his weapons. He stepped ahead of her, a move that felt like protection. Somewhere in their time in the fortress, he had found time to put his hair into a simple warrior’s braid, she realised, seeing the tail of it between his shoulder blades. Her curiosity spiked, wondering just what Serran had said that made Kester feel she needed guarding. She wanted to tell him tha
t she did not need his help against the older mage, having judged Serran’s power far less than her own. The words lodged in her throat and stayed there. She should not dismiss Serran’s abilities so easily. Besides, she knew that magic was not the only way that she could be hurt.

  A moment later and they were close enough for her to make out the individual words.

  “… just go! There is nothing to be gained by staying here.” Serran was flushed under his white hair, bright spots of colour along his cheekbones.

  “We do not leave people behind,” Iserat answered, voice calm.

  “Then it may be too late!”

  “You are assuming we can leave,” Willan pointed out, temper also clearly frayed. “We have tried. Many times.”

  “Kester.” Ronath had spotted them. His face softened into a smile of welcome. “It is good to see you. And Arrow.”

  “And with company,” Iserat noted, making a shallow bow to Kester and Arrow impartially, frowning slightly at the humans. “Who are these oddly dressed creatures? And how did they get here?”

  “Willan,” Arrow interrupted before anyone could start asking questions, “do you know the translation spell that would allow us to talk more easily? I do not.”

  “Ah. Of course. A moment.” The war mage bowed his head slightly, movement sending a ripple through his floor-length cloak.

  “An Erith war mage,” Dorian murmured to his deputy, “and Erith warriors.” The human glared at Arrow. “What in hells is going on?”

  “A moment.” Arrow held up a hand, asking for silence.

  It was more than a moment before Willan lifted his head, sketched the runes in the air and applied his power, bright Erith magic cascading over the group.

  “There. We should now be able to understand one another. It will apply only to us.”

  “Waste of effort,” Serran muttered. “The surjusi are up to something. We need to go.”

  “Wait. I understood that,” Dorian said, wide-eyed, turning to Juniper who nodded, paler than she had been before. “What in hells is going on?” he asked again.

  “A long, long story, young thing,” Iserat said. “Some introductions first.”

  Arrow did not pay much attention to the introductions, listening with half an ear as Dorian described how he and Juniper had become lost and decided to seek higher ground. Seeing the fortress, the only building in the area, they had decided to explore it and see what they could learn. Arrow had to give them credit for bravery. The six, Kester and the humans exchanged the little information they had learned from the fortress whilst Arrow stayed silent, turning Serran’s words over in her mind. When everyone knew everyone else’s name, the humans’ eyes wide at Serran’s name, and the explanations paused, she turned to the Erith’s most famous mage.

  “Why do you think the surjusi are up to something? What is it?”

  “They always are,” he muttered in return, eyes sliding away from her.

  “That is not it,” she pressed. “You know something.”

  “Saul came to visit now and then,” he told her, jaw set, teeth bared in a shifkin-like snarl. “He kept saying it would not be long now. He was too confident.”

  “Saul?” Dorian asked.

  “The lord here,” Arrow said, absently, turning Serran’s words over.

  “What?” The word came from more than one of the six.

  Arrow shuddered, snapped out of her line of thought.

  “He is the lord here,” she repeated, pulling the sleeve back from her wrist. The black marks were still there. They had not grown or faded.

  “He wants you for something,” Willan guessed. “You managed to use surjusi magic. No one else has been able to do so.”

  Arrow’s throat closed at the memory, the remnants of power in her tightening into a coil.

  “Shadow-walker,” Serran said, as though that explained everything. “Most useful things. Very adaptable.”

  “What is it?” Kester asked Arrow, ignoring Serran.

  “The humans who were here. The ones ahead of us including the dead man.”

  “Brian,” Juniper supplied the name.

  “Yes,” Arrow tilted her head in acknowledgement. “They were here for a reason,” she was speaking to the group, but directing her words to Kester, urgency taking hold. “They were prepared for travel,” she remembered. “Dorian, do you still have the backpack?”

  He slung it off his shoulder in answer, setting it on the ground.

  “We never looked through it properly,” Kester said, crouching beside it, opening the straps.

  Catching on, Dorian crouched beside him and between them, magician and warrior emptied the pack of everything it contained, spreading it across the floor.

  Some changes of clothes. Reading glasses. Water and food supplies. A few odd bits of camping items including a lighter. Sheets of paper with seemingly random notations on them. Pencils, pencil sharpener. And a personal notebook full of scrawled notes.

  Dorian pounced on the notebook, he and Juniper huddling over it, muttering to each other. Pateris and Onalla drifted to stand close to them, listening intently.

  Arrow took the sheets of paper and knelt on the ground, spreading them out.

  “Looks like nonsense,” Willan commented, kneeling beside her.

  Arrow glanced up. Iserat, Yvan and Ronath were keeping watch, loosely arranged in a triangle, eyes keen on their surroundings although Arrow was certain that their ears would be listening to everything going on. Even as she looked, Kester stepped forward. The other three warriors moved without any consultation, making a square rather than a triangle, Kester joining the watch.

  Serran had settled himself cross-legged against the nearest wall, fierce scowl daring anyone to approach him or try and talk to him. He did not look well, Arrow thought, knowing at the same time that there was little if anything she could do.

  Satisfied that they were as secure as they could be, Arrow looked down at the papers again and answered Willan.

  “I do not think that he would have brought nonsense with him. There is nothing extra in the pack. These must mean something.”

  They worked in silence to begin with, spreading the sheets out. A dozen in total. Spread out in no particular order it quickly became clear that there was nothing random about the notes. Each sheet contained an incomplete rune for a spell, and a series of cryptic symbols at the bottom.

  “This is for opening,” Willan commented after they had both been studying the sheets for a while. He gathered four separate pages, set them together so that the incomplete runes overlapped.

  “Yes,” Arrow agreed, attention on the symbols at the bottom. “This tells us that this is the first part of the rune,” she pointed to the first sheet, the symbol a fat, blocky arrowhead shape, pointing to the next sheet. The next sheet had two such shapes, the third three and the final one a square.

  Now that they knew what they were looking for, they quickly arranged the other sheets. As well as the symbols showing the order of the pages for each rune, other symbols indicated where the rune went in the spell.

  When they had finished they had three complete runes set out before them.

  “An opening spell,” Willan sat back on his heels, mage’s cloak pooling around him, fabric brushing Arrow’s leg. “Not complete.”

  “There were other humans,” Kester reminded them, not taking his eyes from his guard duty.

  “If they each had a piece of the spell …” Willan speculated. “It would make sense. But what would they open here?”

  “A portal back to our world,” Juniper said, unexpectedly entering the conversation. She and Dorian had mostly ignored Arrow and Willan while they worked, but the magician crouched opposite them and held out the journal that Dorian had grabbed. “These are Brian’s personal notes. They’re in code, but it’s one we use. He didn’t write it all down.”

  “But there’s enough.” Dorian crouched next to his deputy. He seemed to have aged half a century in the time he and Juniper had spent p
oring over the journal. “He was betraying us,” he said, bitterly, “all of us. Along with others.”

  “So, they opened a portal above,” Arrow speculated, “and then brought plans with them to open a portal back. I wonder how they knew that they would need a portal back?” And how they thought they would find the power for it, she added in her own mind, remembering the tangle of bodies in the Abbey’s cellar.

  “He says they were told they would need it by a contact here.” Dorian took the journal back from Juniper, flipping through pages until he reached the one he wanted. “Someone called Saul.”

  Arrow’s breath caught and she looked up at the six standing station above her. Their faces had tightened.

  “You said Saul is the lord here,” Juniper said, voice thin, as though she had only just made the connection.

  “He is.” Arrow began gathering the pages up, fingers trembling.

  “Wait, I haven’t studied it.”

  “We have,” Willan said, catching Arrow’s urgency. “Burn them,” he said to Arrow.

  She opened her mouth to say that she did not have anything to burn paper, and Juniper held up the lighter from Brian’s pack. They all rose with one accord, Juniper touching the flame to the corner of the pages.

  The flame was blinding in the gloom, so she had to look away or risk her sight. Once the pages were ash, Arrow’s heart slowed a fraction.

  “Those were Erith runes, weren’t they?” Dorian asked, grim. “We have some Erith spells we use. Nothing too complicated.”

  “All your spellwork started off as Erith runes,” Arrow told him bluntly. “Humans did not have magic before they moved to this land.”

  Dorian’s face tightened and he looked like he wanted to argue, holding his peace with effort.