Forging Divinity (12 page)

I can never trust my eyes around Jonan,
Taelien realized.
And he hasn’t told me he can influence other senses.

The other guard inserted a key into the door and turned it open, revealing a small room with a pair of stairways, leading up and down. The guards headed to the stairway going downward, and Jonan and Taelien followed.

“Do you know the number of your box, or do you need me to check?” the other guard asked.

“It’s number forty-four,” Jonan replied.

The guards led them past three small rooms on each side before stopping at the fourth door on the left side. One of the guards turned the key and opened the door, gesturing politely for the pair to step inside.

Jonan nudged Taelien and waved a hand almost casually down the hall. The gesture was conspicuous since Taelien knew to look for it, but the guards didn’t seem to notice. Jonan stepped into the room, and one of the guards went in with him. The other guard closed and locked the door from the outside, leaving Taelien standing in the hall.

The remaining guard was looking right in his direction, but seemed to have no idea he was there.

Taelien lifted a hand. He could see himself clearly, and glancing back, he could still see his own shadow as well. Would the guard notice his shadow? He didn’t know if the illusion masking his presence would cover the shadow or not – shadow sorcery was a different type of spell casting, but that didn’t mean an image couldn’t conceal a shadow.

Tentatively, Taelien took a step forward. The guard didn’t react – in fact, he looked sort of bored. He leaned against the wall next to the door, shaking his head. After a minute or so passed of Taelien inching forward, the guard took out a book and sat down.

Taelien resisted the urge to sigh with relief, stepping forward slightly after once the guard had settled into place.
How long ago did Jonan purchase this storage unit? How long has he been planning this mission?
Taelien wondered, glancing back at the guard every few moments.
How did he get this far by himself last time he was here?

Taelien slowed himself after passing three more doors, realizing he wasn’t sure which one Jonan wanted him to investigate. Thus far, they all looked identical, save the numbers atop. Each door, he realized, must have led to another hall that contained several storage units. Was the warded area in this hall, or one of the ones beyond the doors?

Fortunately, a few steps later he found his answer – the wall on his right was bare, missing a door to match the left side. As he continued walking, he passed two more doors on his left before finally reaching one on the right – a broad door of steel, at least twice as wide as the wooden doors elsewhere in the hall.

Well, that’s conspicuous.

Taelien tentatively reached out a hand to touch the metal. He thought he felt a slight tingling sensation, but he dismissed it as being his imagination. His thoughts surged into the metal, picturing the door as if it was an extension of his body. He found three redundant locks, as well as pins to anchor the door directly into the stone walls of the building. It was, Taelien considered, probably a very effective defense against most threats.

Metal sorcery made that defense a triviality.

Taelien glanced to back toward the guard, finding the man to be still reading. A glance to his other side showed no signs of any other guards.

He thought he heard movement to his right, so he swung a hand out at the open air, but it didn’t catch anything. Gritting his teeth, he put his hand back on the door and concentrated.

Open
, he told the door. Rather than causing the door to swing outward, he simply opened a Taelien-sized section in the center of it and stepped through. The hole remained open behind him. While dominion sorcery spells typically produced temporary effects, Taelien’s core sorcery manipulated metal permanently unless he chose to deliberately reverse it.

Inside the room, he saw intricate runes written on the inside of the door – as well as the walls – in a language he did not understand.

The left side of the room had two tables sat end-to-end against each other, lined with metallic objects.
Weapons
, he thought at first, but a moment later he recognized the shapes with greater specificity.
No, torture implements
, he realized, taking in the wicked curves of tiny blades and the elegantly arrayed lines of needles. Glass bottles containing colorful fluids sat beside the tools, but there were no labels to espouse their functions.

More importantly, however, he also saw a figure sitting in the center of a web of runic markings about twenty feet away. The runes flickered with purple light, causing reflections to play across the sitting figure’s thick obsidian-like scales. Even in a sitting position, the figure’s head was nearly level with Taelien’s. A thick spinal ridge of similar material to the scales marked the creature as male. Taelien could see that the figure’s eyes were closed, but that it drew slow breaths into its lungs.

The figure within the weave of sigils was not a Rethri, like Taelien had been searching for. He was an Esharen, the fabled race native to the Xixian Empire, a race Taelien’s history lessons told him were centuries dead.

Gods,
Taelien cursed in his mind. His hand instinctively drifted to the sword at his side, but he forced the hand back away when he realized what he was doing. He would not kill a helpless opponent, even if that was almost certainly what the Esharen would do to him.

Years of his schooling flooded his mind. The Xixian Empire had once spanned most of Mythralis, using humans and Rethri as slaves. He had been told that the Rethri had rebelled, overthrowing their Xixian masters, and freeing their human brethren as well. Of course, since Taelien was raised in a Rethri city, he knew their account would be somewhat biased.

He did not expect them to be wrong about the species being eradicated, however.

Was this just a single remnant, the last of a defeated race? It was possible – but it seemed infinitely more likely that there was a darker explanation. The city of Orlyn was once a Xixian city – could some of the empire have survived here? Were they working in secret somehow?

Taelien turned around and touched the door again.

Close,
he told it. The door reverted to its previous state.

He needed time to think.

Aside from the Esharen, the tables, and the runes, the room appeared to be completely bare.
Not even a chair – the torturer must like to stand.
The floors, walls, and ceiling were all the same nondescript grey stone. Taelien saw no other entrances or exits, nor any obvious traps.

He had to have answers.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped away from the door to get a closer look at the Xixian. It still did not respond to his presence, but he kept himself outside of the boundary of the runic pattern, not knowing if the Esharen was faking unconsciousness or what the functions of the runes were.

As he approached, he noted that the Esharen’s breathing was rough, wheezing, like a man with a damaged lung. Its blackened scales were marred with cracks, especially along its chest and neck. A single large pattern of damage showed at the back of the creature’s head. Though he knew little about Esharen physiology, the patterns were fairly obvious – the creature had been smashed with some kind of heavy bludgeoning object. If the tales were true, no ordinary weapon could pierce an Esharen’s scales – but perhaps a heavy enough weapon could crack it. There was no blood near the apparent injuries; just a dry white powder of some kind.

He walked to the table next, inspecting the implements laid out there. The blades of each of each of the cutting implements looked clean, but he noted a scalpel that appeared to be bent out of shape. Touching the metal handle, he extended his senses into it. He felt the flaws that had formed near the blade, where the surface had been distorted by jarring force.
Someone tried to jam this into the Esharen, but it bent against the creature’s scales
, he deduced.

In a moment of obsessive neatness, he bent the object back into its proper shape and set it back down. He went down the line of objects until he found the likely culprit for the Esharen’s missing scales – a medium-sized hammer with a pick on the opposite side of the hammer head. Scratches on the hammer head confirmed that it had been used, but there was no sign of the white powder he had noticed on the Esharen’s body on the surface of the metal.
It’s been cleaned
, he considered.
If that white powder is dried Esharen blood, perhaps they’re testing its alchemical properties in one of these vials. Or maybe the powder is some kind of poison, and they’re applying it to the Esharen to keep it weak.

Setting the hammer back down, Taelien took a cautious step toward the Esharen. A quick glance at the floor told him that the runes – much like the ones on the wall – were indecipherable to him. This was intriguing, since he could read and write in both Velthryn and Liadran, and he could recognize several other languages, including Xixian. This was nothing he could remember seeing before – except in one place.

The runes on the blade of his weapon.

In moments, he picked out two of the seven symbols on his sword. He did not find any of the others, but the ones he found were identical to his sword’s markings. No scholar or sorcerer he had met could tell him what the origin of those runes were – merely that they represented the gods of the Tae’osian faith.

If these symbols represent gods, well, this Esharen is surrounded by an awful lot of gods.

If he had carried paper, Taelien would have taken the time to write down the symbols before doing anything else. He hadn’t, however, and this find was too significant to leave alone. If this room was some kind of holding cell, it was plausible the Rethri had already been held here and transferred elsewhere – and that the same could happen to the Esharen if he left.

Not only did he need to know what the Esharen knew, he could not justify leaving it to whatever fate awaited it at the hands of the sorcerers that bound it here.
No creature, not even a creature of Xixis, deserves this.

“Esharen,” Taelien said, “Can you hear me?”

Jonan appeared at Taelien’s side an instant later. “What are you doing? Don’t talk to it!”

Taelien took a step back away from Jonan, startled by his sudden appearance, and put his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be investigating your box?” Taelien asked.

“An image of me is,” Jonan explained. “I never went in there. I was going to warn you that I was following you, but I couldn’t think of a way to do it without alerting the guards.”

“You changed the plan,” Taelien muttered bitterly. “Wait. How do I know who I am speaking to? Perhaps that Esharen is invading my mind.”

He glanced warily at the Esharen. Its eyes still appeared to be closed.

“Well, if I was the Esharen, I’d probably want you to free me. I, Jonan, want you to get out of this room. Right now,” Jonan replied.

“We can’t just leave him here,” Taelien said, glancing back at the Esharen. “Whoever captured those Rethri probably took him prisoner, too.”

Jonan shook his head, reaching into a coat pocket and removing a mirror. Taelien glanced at the mirror dubiously. “You’re not going to leave that here, are you?”

“No need,” Jonan said, waving the mirror around for a moment and then putting it back in his coat. He removed a second mirror, held it up to reflect the image of the Esharen, and then tapped the surface of the glass. Looking satisfied, he put that mirror away as well.

Taelien took a step closer to Jonan, gritting his teeth. “You are beginning to try my patience, ‘Jonan’. Explain yourself.”

Jonan took a step back, a look of surprise crossing his face. “Um, hold, there’s no need to be aggressive,” he said, backing away further. “Look, I can use the mirrors to send images to other mirrors, like I explained before. If I leave one here, that’s the best, since I can watch it constantly. I just cast a spell to send an image of what the mirror saw – just an image – back to another mirror I have. So we can study these runes later.”

Taelien nodded, but his jaw was still set tightly. “For the future, I would appreciate it if you disclose your plans to me further in advance.” After a moment, he waved his left hand toward the Esharen. “Accurate plans.”

“I didn’t know this thing was here, I mean that,” Jonan said.

Taelien nodded. “But you told me you’d be in your vault. You followed me instead.”

“And you were supposed to take a look and leave, not talk to the – nevermind. We don’t have time for this,” Jonan said.

“You’re right,” Taelien said. He ducked down, grabbing the hilt of his sword and scraping the metal-lined scabbard across a line of the glowing runes on the floor. The runes sparked as the metal impacted against their surface, and then faded out. “We will use our time to get answers.”

Jonan’s eyes widened and he stumbled back several steps, running into the stone wall of the room. “No, no, you didn’t,” he stammered.

The Esharen’s eyes fluttered open, revealing yellow irises with thick red pupils. Aside from that, it made no obvious movements.