Children of the Elementi (8 page)

The pregnant woman standing beside the door looked up but she didn’t stand a chance. There was no room to get off and she didn’t have time or the space to move out of his way. Kiera winced as he twisted and elbowed the woman in the stomach. The woman’s gasp of pain resounded loudly in Kiera’s mind. She felt as well as saw the woman collapse against the blue metal post.

Instinctively Kiera touched the woman. A flash of awareness greeted her - the baby was in trouble. She could feel the baby’s heart miss a beat. The pendant under her shirt began to throb. Surprised she stared at the crystal at the end of its leather cord. That had never happened before. The distress of the baby once again called for her attention. Without knowing why, she placed her hand again over the woman’s stomach. Using her new awareness and fleeting telepathy she reassured the fetus. At the same time, without knowing how, she erased the damage the man had done. As the woman hit the floor she knew the baby was all right. The mother would not even suffer a bruise.

Where the woman fell, a sudden vacuum was created. The man didn’t even stop to see who he had hit but moved on shoving people out of his way, frantic not to miss his stop. As he ran on to the exit, the rest of the carriage emptied.

A student sitting on the opposite seat to Kiera saw the woman collapse on the floor. Rushing across to the expectant mother, the boy pulled her to her feet. Concerned, he stood in the doorway calling for a guard to get help. Sure the pregnant woman was being taken care of, Kiera leant back exhausted. Her whole body ached but she knew what she had just done was right. She had saved a life! She had not just imagined it, she had felt the tiny life and because of her, it was alive. The mother would never know, but she did. She smiled. Maybe she could atone for all she had done.

A few hundred miles away, Jake and Mirim faced each other on the corner by the school. Jake was staring at Mirim in disbelief.

Jake felt it first. Connected to the Matrix, Mirim experienced it only a few seconds later as it travelled through the psychic link.

“Did you feel that?” she breathed. She felt the tingle of raw power leave her senses.

“Yes.” He said slowly.

“Someone used power! We need to find the other lost children of the Elementi. That had to be one!”

Jake squinted back at Mirim, “Lost children of the Elementi? That sounds like a bad sci-fi movie.”

“A what? No, one of the Elementi. You are one, I am one. There are three others. I am from the family representing air; there is still earth, fire and water to find.”

“What am I ?” He demanded.

“You, you are the spirit element. Your family’s color is white. You represent the focus of all the powers. You can wield all four, but you do not have as much of any one power as we do individually. You are however more powerful for having all four. We need you to complete the Matrix. There are five points, four on the outside and one in the middle - you. Without you, the four elements can do a lot, but without you, neither Aras nor the Magi can be defeated.”

As the Matrix transferred the coordinates of the energy surge, Mirim gazed into the distance, “I have the coordinates of where he or she was. From the data I downloaded from your networks, the power was most likely used on a train. I need you to concentrate on the power to find it. Now you know what it feels like you should be able to focus on it. Let the power draw you to it.”

“How do I do that?”

Mirim held back her impatience. She had grown up with the Matrix so she knew how to use it. She had forgotten the younger boy was new to it.

“Listen, follow my thoughts.” She hadn’t done this since before her mother died. It was dangerous. You had to trust the other person implicitly. After this, he would know her better than she knew herself and vice versa.

Taking a deep breath, she reached out with her mind. Feeling her mind touch, Jake tentatively reached out with his. Memories flashed back and forth to each other at lightning speed. He caught her intense loneliness of being alone in the Citadel for years and the grief at her mother’s death. How could she bear to be alone for that long? In his mind, she learned the thirst to find out about his parents, his heritage. She also saw the grief of losing his adopted parents and the wonder he felt at what was happening at that moment.

After the initial exchange, they turned to look at Jake’s core of power. Visualizing it as a thin thread of power snaking through his body, she showed him how to match the power they had both felt against the four different colors making up the white cord. Tweaking each strand, they resonated at a different frequency. As Jake experimented on the green color, he knew he had it.

“That’s the Earth element. She has an affinity with nature. She will be able to recognize metals or just make things grow better.” Mirim explained.

She drew him along the yellow thread that kept her in contact with the Matrix mind back on Eleria. Fear gripped him as winds buffeted them in the no-space between worlds. He felt himself spin out of control, his mind was fragmenting and darkness began to encase Jake’s mind. He was blown one way then another, there was no up or down, just endless night.

“Keep your mind focused on the yellow thread!” Mirim’s voice admonished as if from a distance. Getting a hold of his mind, Mirim gathered him in her psychic embrace. Her skills were tested to her limit as his consciousness seemed to slither under her grasp. Finally stalling his spin, she sensed the Citadel near and dumped his mind through the conduits to the main crystal controls into the full mind meld. Now Mirim, Jake and the Matrix combined to make one vast but still incomplete mind.

“I couldn’t do this on my own.” He heard wonder in her thoughts. “I needed your abilities to do this.” He knew how she felt - literally. He felt like he knew everything - could do anything.

He found his awareness spreading out though the planet of Eleria. Everywhere he looked there was crystal. He was the crystal. He understood how each crystal formed a part of the whole mind. “Wow, this is amazing.” The Matrix couldn’t think on its own. It used their minds. It was a partnership going back thousands of years.

He could sense it was grateful and even happy for him to be there. He felt an insane reciprocal happiness. It felt like home. The Matrix accepted him without any reservation. He now knew that Mirim, the Matrix and the others would be closer than any real family could ever be.

“Jake, you need to find that other element!” Her call brought him back to reality.

Leaving behind his own white cord so he could travel back if he needed to, he followed her by instinct. As his energy flowed into the Matrix, it multiplied. What he gave was given back to him threefold. Power called to like power and he felt himself moving at a great velocity back through the no-space to Earth. Still part of the whole, he found himself hovering above a girl. She could be no more than sixteen or seventeen at the most. She had long dark-brown hair. She was startlingly beautiful. She appeared to be sleeping on a train. As he watched, someone woke her up. This was the last stop on the line, the man told her. She twisted to look through the window at the sign for confirmation and nodded sleepily. After thanking the man, she left the train. Jake made a note of the name, Oakwood.

Mirim instructed the Matrix to disconnect their minds and to send them bodily to Oakwood. If they hurried, they would hopefully be able to catch her before she went any further.

CHAPTER SEVEN: SHENELLA

Shenella squinted into the far corner of the Great Hall. Marta and Ecu were leaning towards each other by the buffet table, obviously talking in whispers even though no one would be able to hear them in the general din even had they been talking normally.
What could they be talking about? Really, if you are going to plot something, don't act as if you are! They are spending far too much time together,
she thought.
What are they doing?

She was shocked at how quickly Ecu was rising at court. It seemed everywhere she turned he was there with that sly grin. And the way the First Adviser was dismissed - no good could come of it. She could already see Aras’ other advisers getting restless. He was talking to them less and less each day. That could only cause trouble.

The advisers were powerful people in their own right. If he continued to ignore them, it would betray his weakness. It was only a matter of time before someone took his or her chance.

She could understand that Aras would favor Ecu a little. After all, he had lessened his headaches when no one else could, but this was ridiculous. How could a simple healer rise so high?
Of course,
she answered herself,
he was no simple healer!
He was also a magician as well as a scholar, all that drivel about his ‘research in the Great Library’ on his first day. The Council had been advisers to the throne for decades. One adviser she believed had even served under the first Aras - her fiancé’s grandfather.

From her vantage point in the corner, Shenella had an uninhibited view of the entire room. No one paid any attention to her sitting by the doorway. It was as if she didn’t exist to them. If they thought about her at all, it was probably like the throne that Aras sat on each and every day she mused. There, important because he needed something to sit on but in itself not worth thinking about. Part of her of course was grateful. She wasn’t stupid. People disappeared or died regularly in the court for being noticed. She had no discernible power as the Magi recognized it, so she was not considered a threat. There were benefits to being invisible but it did irk her sometimes!

Ecu moved away from Marta and began to work his way around the different factions in the room. She began to notice it yesterday. First, he spoke to the head of the merchants’ union, the lowlanders. The islanders were next and now he was talking to the Ambassador to the Merpeople.

Although it was not recognized or even visible by the Magi she did have some of the old power.
And now
, she thought,
this was the time to use it.
Shenella sidled up to the table nearest Ecu. The combination of her status as being the future consort to the Emperor and her power to stop people noticing her was a potent one. She imagined a shield protecting her from people’s minds.
Either one makes me invisible,
she thought with a wry smile.
Maybe next year when we are actually married I will be someone.
She shivered at the thought.
Yes, but at what price?

She was close enough now to study the Ambassador’s features. She had never seen this man before. One of the servants had told her earlier this was his first time in Naven. He looked just like anyone else in the room but Shenella knew better. The only visible difference to the casual observer was his hair. It had a strange greeny-blue tinge to it. His face was ordinary, grey eyes, aquiline nose and a balanced jaw.

The way he held himself though showed her he was younger than most of the other ambassadors. He seemed confident but there was an undertone of nervousness about him. In his twenties she guessed. Merpeople were rarely seen outside their own domain. They coexisted peacefully with the islanders, spending most of their time in their underwater cities before having to go back to land.

All the other Ambassadors were probably in their second to third life cycle. One of the perks of being or helping the Magi was mind transference to another’s body when the original reached old age. It was the reason they were all so good-looking she supposed. There was no reason why they would choose ugly people to take over.

I wonder what happens to the people they were,
she wondered.
Are they still in there? Or was their consciousness pushed out to be eaten by the Gods?
She shivered. At least she would never suffer that fate. Without warning the Ambassador looked her way. He stared straight into her eyes and gave her a small smile. He winked.

Startled, she averted her eyes. He could
see
her. Mechanically she picked up a sweet cake from one of the silver platters beside her. One of the first warnings she had heard when she arrived a few years before had been that it was unwise to eat the food laid out in the Great Hall. The funny thing was they all thought it was poisoned. Stupid, each person thought that one of the others had poisoned the food so no one bothered to do it. Besides she had seen one of the castle’s tame crows eating one of the cakes earlier and it would have been dead by now if it was tainted. She took a bite.
Ugh, it tasted like sawdust.
The cooks obviously didn’t bother to make their sweets tasty for the same reason.

She tuned back into their conversation.

“Sori, you have to understand. The Elementi are nearly all dead. Soon the entire civilized world will be under the control of the two Magi Empires. Why not pledge your allegiance fully now? The Merpeople won’t stand a chance against the Empire’s military and once the last of the Elementi has been eliminated, well, Aras will turn to the independent states. Even underwater you will not be safe. And we all know that you can’t stay under there forever.”

“Surely not,” the Ambassador replied, “I have assurances from Aras himself that he will let my people be as long as we give him his yearly tribute.”

“Yes, but why settle for a yearly tribute when the Empire can have everything?”

“You know this for certain?”

“Of course no one can tell the Emperor’s mind but I have it on good authority that Aras’ policies will change soon.”

With the Ambassador in confusion Ecu left to talk to the Chirrian representative nearby. Sori lost in thought, went to re-join his party. Shenella was about to follow Ecu when the speaker at the door announced that Aras was now ready for petitions. All in the room craned their necks to watch for his entrance.

Ecu disappeared as the room melted to the sides to make way for Aras. All thoughts of him ended when she saw Aras’ figure enter. To Shenella’s eyes, Aras looked every inch the arrogant Emperor. His dark blonde hair was slicked back from his face. His mouth was pursed in a straight line, his head held high. How she hated him!