Broken of Fire (The Cloud Warrior Saga Book 9) (21 page)

A
t the bottom
of the stair, a wide open area greeted them. Tan shaped a tiny spark of fire, expecting that saa would be drawn to it, as was usual in Par. The elemental did, but came with much strength, almost too much, flooding the room with light, forcing Tan to tamp back the shaping.

You are too powerful here,
he sent to saa through the fire bond as way of apology.

Let me help,
the draasin said, jumping from his shoulders. A shaping of sorts built from her, something, Tan realized, that he had never noticed from other elementals, and her entire body started to glow with a soft white light. This intensified, growing stronger, and pushed away the shadows in the space below.

You continue to have new tricks, don’t you?

I continue to change.

When will you be done growing?

Are you done growing?

Tan almost laughed, but remembered their conversation about change and growth. Maybe he wasn’t quite done growing. His body might no longer change, but his understanding and his abilities continued to, as did his knowledge of the world and the elementals. Would he ever be done?

Where does this lead?
he asked Kota.

The hound had modified her form again, shrinking somewhat, almost becoming more compact.
There are many paths from here, Maelen.

“Where would you have us go?” Elanne asked. “Wyln tells me that this opens in multiple directions.”

“As does the hound.”

Earth sensing gave him an understanding of where this opening went, but he wondered how much more he might learn from the wind. Tan focused on his connection to the wind and reached the wind bond, noting how it gusted softly through the room. Corridors or tunnels led off in many directions. Tan closed his eyes, thinking about the way that they moved, and realized that the tunnels followed the shape of the pattern he saw from above.

“We should go toward the tower,” he said.

“How do you know this can reach the tower?”

“Listen to your connection to the wind and form the pattern in your mind. You will see that they match.”

“Maelen, I am not strong enough with wind to use it in that way.” She turned to him, her brow creased. “Can you?”

He nodded slowly. “The wind. Earth. They work together for me. Through the combination, I can see how this stretches away from here.”

Elanne cocked her head to the side as she considered him. “I understand how he was no match for you.”

Tan had started forward and reached the opening leading away from the estate, which he suspected he would be able to follow until it reached the tower. “He was more than a match for
me
. But when I faced him, it wasn’t only about me. It was about everything, and everyone, I connect to.”

Tan started into the tunnel, thinking that it would be much like what was found in Ethea. There, the wide tunnels were shaped deep beneath the city, and for a moment, he paused, thinking of the pattern that they formed, before deciding that it wasn’t anything like this. They were simply tunnels, a way to move through the city unseen – which the archivists had exploited ruthlessly. Now they were Tan’s preferred method of moving between the archives and the palace when in Ethea.

This corridor looked less like it was shaped and more like a formal hallway. Timbers crossed overhead, creating a pattern in the smooth sheet of rock. Tan wondered if they were decorative or truly supportive. The walls were nearly as smooth. He expected to find lamps or shaper lanterns, but the walls were otherwise unadorned. Even the rock was nearly perfectly smooth, almost like a floor set in tile. This corridor was meant to be accessed.

The estate can’t be the only access,
Tan realized.

I sense none others,
Kota shared.

He continued onward, the draasin moving quickly on one side, Kota on his other, and Elanne trailing behind them. She spoke little.

The long corridor curved, matching the spiraling arms that he had seen from above. Tan knew that they neared the tower itself.

They passed through another doorway and opened up into a wide space that matched what he expected would be the base of the tower. The ceiling now rose to nearly twenty feet, but remained perfectly smooth. The timbers in the ceiling took on more decorative shapes. The outer walls of the room matched where he expected the outer walls of the tower to have been.

With the size of the room, even the light from the draasin was no longer enough to see all the way across.

Tan again shaped a spark of fire, this time knowing that it would burst into brighter light and ready for the way saa raced to it, flooding the shaping with even more power. He held onto it, rather than releasing it and letting saa control it. He swept the shaping out and around him, careful to keep it from getting too close to the ceiling and risk damaging the thick wooden beams. They might be nothing more than decorative, but he didn’t want to take that risk. If the tower were to collapse on him, he didn’t think even his shaping, or his connection to the elementals, would be enough to save him.

“This is the tower,” Elanne said.

Tan looked around, searching for some reason why this would be hidden. Maybe even a way back up into the tower, but he saw nothing.

That wasn’t quite right. A far wall wasn’t quite as smooth as the others. Tan shaped himself over on wind, followed by Elanne. The wall had a slightly lighter shade of gray than the rest, and the light from the flame reflected off it with a strange sheen.

“There was something here,” he told her. “Look at the wall. I think these were stairs.”

He looked up, but the ceiling appeared no different than the rest. Using his connection to earth, he detected the difference and the way that there was an opening above him that he could almost shape open, but like in the estate, there was something blocking him.

“He prevented others from reaching this level,” Tan said.

Elanne stared up toward the ceiling, unable to take her eyes off it. “Why would he have prevented others from reaching here?” she asked.

Tan wondered if he feared someone discovering the rune, or if there was another reason. Did he hide something here? The binding rune could be seen from the sky, and he certainly hadn’t been afraid of his shapers taking to the air, so that made Tan wonder if maybe there was another reason.

He doubted that the Utu Tonah had left other ways into this level. If he had gone to such pains to hide it, and had made a point of keeping his estate as the only way down, then it was unlikely that he’d ignored others.

Tan frowned. Stairs wouldn’t be necessary, not to reach this level. A shaper would need to have access, which meant peeling back the doorway overhead, but stairs? Any of his shapers would have been able to shape themselves to the ground.

Are other stairs removed like this one?
he asked Kota.

Kota pawed at the ground, and it trembled slightly beneath their feet. The hound tipped her head to the side and listened.

The others remain.

Tan reached toward the wall. If the others remained, that meant that he had removed the stairs here for a purpose, but what purpose would that be? Not to prevent others from reaching this level. He had already decided that whatever shaping the Utu Tonah used to obscure entrance to these caverns would do that well enough. And not to keep someone from simply walking down. Shapers, or anyone with a rope for that matter, would be able to reach here just as well.

The Utu Tonah must have had a reason. Tan was sure that he had been the one to remove the stairs, much like he was sure that the Utu Tonah was the one who had sealed access to this level.

Using a shaping of earth, he found the same resistance as there had been above. Now that Kota had mentioned it, Tan recognized it as well. It was different than what he’d seen with the Alast Temple. This was
more like the barrier.

At least the barrier was something that Tan had experience with. The shaping required binding each of the elements and twisting them in such a way that the effect caused a push back. In the kingdoms, it had been done by individual shapers, but Tan knew that Lacertin had been the one to originate the barrier.

And had
he
seen it before?

Tan would have to ask Roine about that the next time he saw him. Lacertin and Theondar had not been close, but they were both warriors and they had both served the king.

This barrier was more complex in some ways, but connected to fire, and now to wind, he saw the individual patterns of the shaping mixed in, tying it to the stone. Using a steady shaping, Tan pulled the strands of fire and then wind away. As he did, the shaping unraveled with a burst of air.

The wall suddenly changed.

Where there had been a slightly different shade of gray, now there was a large slab of steel. A series of runes had been etched into the steel, some darker and others lighter than the surrounding door. Tan only recognized a few of them.

“Can you read these?” he asked.

Elanne shook her head. “Some. Most are complex, and… and I don’t think they are meant to say anything.”

Runes of power, then. In the kingdoms, there were similar runes, though they were markers of the different elements. Tan used these type of runes to reach the archives, or to reach the draasin den.

He stepped back, eyeing the door, but even the distance didn’t reveal enough for him to recognize anything. “I can’t see what they might be, either,” he said. Frustration seeped into his tone, and Tan wasn’t able to do anything to keep it away.

Attempting a shaping met with resistance. Tan had expected that it would. Much like in the archives, shapers couldn’t simply pry open the doors to the lower level; they had to use the right rune and have the right kind of shaping. Without that, there was no access.

But there, the walls were infused with elementals. That was the reason that he couldn’t simply shape past the stone.

Are there elementals in the walls?
Tan asked Kota.

As I said before, earth is strong here.

Only earth?
Was it possible that he would be able to use fire or water or wind to get past? He hated the idea of damaging the walls and didn’t know how that might damage the binding rune, if at all, but what other options did he have to find what the Utu Tonah might have been hiding? Tan needed to understand the Utu Tonah. Par needed for him to understand the Utu Tonah.

Search for yourself,
Kota suggested.
I think the others remain as well.

A thought came to him.
By choice?

Kota pawed at the ground.
I cannot tell.

Could the Utu Tonah have forced the elementals to bond to the door here? If he did, how was that any different than what the ancient shapers of the kingdoms had done? They used bonds that tied the elementals to the archives, essentially holding them in place. With the rebuilding of the university, that had changed. Ferran had ensured that golud was treated differently, more welcoming, and they had willingly joined with the building. Tan doubted that the elementals would have willingly worked with the Utu Tonah, but then, he didn’t know for certain.

He experimented with a shaping. At first, nothing seemed to work. Tan mixed fire and earth together, and felt as Kota added her influence, but they weren’t able to pierce through the door. Shifting his attention to the stone on the side of the door did no better. Adding water and wind shaping, pulling on the wind bond now that he understood that he could, and reaching for his distant connection to the nymid—in some ways the first, but still the most distant of the bonds that he had formed—and adding that to the shaping.

Still there was nothing.

Tan stepped back. How would he get through the door?

“What is it, Maelen?”

“Shaping doesn’t work. I’m not sure that I can do anything to open this.” If he couldn’t, did that mean that the Utu Tonah had finally won?

The draasin crawled over to the door and stood on two legs. As she did, she stretched out her tongue, almost impossibly far, touching a series of different patterns on the door. As she did, her connection to fire and spirit surged. The patterns started to glow slightly.

Then the door opened with a soft gust of air. As Tan entered, the draasin jumped onto his shoulders, still glowing brightly.

The room on the other side of the door was small. Much smaller than Tan had expected, though he wasn’t sure what he should have expected. The walls were carved out of the earth, a lighter shade of gray than the stone of the tunnels but barely higher than the top of his head, and without any of the same polish that was evident in the rest of the lower level.

A short table abutted one wall. Stacks of thin, leather-bound books rested on the top. A bottle of ink remained stoppered and pushed to the wall, and a pen rested on the table. One of the books lay partly open, resting on a chair, almost as if whoever had been here—likely the Utu Tonah—had left in something of a hurry.

Other than that, a few shelves lined each wall, and books were stuffed into them. So many that Tan could scarcely believe that they were here. Why would he have brought them here? Why secure them in this way?

Unless he feared others gaining access.

He picked the journal off the chair and started to read. Written in
Ishthin,
the writing was more difficult for him to piece through, but as he did, he realized that this
was
one of the Utu Tonah’s journals. This one in particular might have been the earliest, as it mentioned leaving his home, searching for a way to prevent something that he called a dangerous force from returning. From his writings, he was clear that it was his destiny.

“What have you found?” Elanne asked.

“The Utu Tonah. Or what is left of him.”

This was what Tan had been searching for. These were his journals, his records. And now Tan might finally understand what had brought the Utu Tonah to Par, and whether it had anything to do with what Marin represented.

He glanced up at Elanne as the door closed.