Thorns (12 page)

He kicked the mare forward, riding straight for the mountains. I followed. He was crazy. He was riding toward nothing.

But then out of the corner of my eye, I caught the faintest glimmer of light, as if the sun were reflecting off metal. “Wha….?”

Suddenly, the whole world seemed to shift, and there it was.

I caught my breath.

The curve of the ruined buildings hugged the hills and gleamed in the sun. I blinked to make sure I wasn’t imagining it this time. “How…? Where…? There was nothing there, and then suddenly there was.” I was babbling now, but I didn’t care. Was it magic?

“The ruins are shielded from sight during the day,” Adam explained. “I rode past this very place when looking for the gate months ago and saw nothing. Some sort of ancient mechanism in place tricks the eye and makes it see nothing at all. I don’t know how it works.”

“We saw it that night when we brought Gabe,” I protested. I drew a deep breath as the memories rushed over me in a waterfall of mental images. Cole, with a pistol in his hand. The dead Farther soldiers, their mangled bodies limp in the trampled snow. Gabe, his eyes on mine and his name on my lips. I gazed at the landscape.

Beneath this ground, he’d vanished in the blink of an eye.

“I’ve examined it several times since that trip. The shield dissipates at night, although I don’t know the reason why,” he said. “But that’s when the Watchers guard it. So no one has ever found it here by accident.”

“It’s beautiful.” Beautiful and strange. The smooth domes and arches hugged the ground and blended with the curves of the hills, almost as if their ancient makers had sought to hide them completely in the landscape. When I turned in the saddle to look behind us, the air was hazy, and the edges of the trees looked smudged. A shiver rippled over my skin.

Adam dismounted and led the mare to a cluster of small pines. He tethered her and then retrieved something from the bag hanging from his belt. I followed his lead and tethered the gelding. I dared ask the question that had been on my tongue for the last few hours. “What are we doing here?”

“This is our mission.” He smoothed the thing in his hand, and I saw it was a piece of paper scribbled with words. “We’re looking for something.”

I wanted to ask him more, but he was already heading for the entrance. I gathered up the ends of my cloak and hurried after him.

We paused together at the entrance. The passage that led below lay in darkness, and a dank smell wafted from the depths. “What if there are Watchers inside?” I whispered.

Adam met my gaze. “It’s still day,” he said. “And they almost never go in the passages.”

I had my doubts, but when he started down the crumbling steps into the blackness below, I followed.

The stone walls squeezed tighter and tighter around us the lower we went, and the light became fainter as we descended. My memories from our last visit were a blur of pale lantern light, utter blackness, and stained walls of stone. But the halls were just as dark as we left the light behind. I stopped on the stairs as the memories poured over me.

Adam paused and lit the lantern he’d brought. He waited for me, his face void of expression. I took a deep breath and nodded at him, and we moved on.

The walls were smooth stone, so smooth I could see no chisel marks. I brushed my fingers against them wonderingly. “So smooth,” I breathed. I hadn’t really looked at the ruins the last time we’d come. I’d been far too occupied. But now I drank in the sights of these miraculously smooth walls. The light of the lantern bounced off the floor and glimmered on the wall and ceiling, because everything was made from the same gray material. Stains colored everything brown and gray, and garbage littered the ground at our feet. My boots crunched over broken glass.

“This way.” Adam turned a corner, and I followed him into a shaft of stone as tall as a well. Stairs led down in circular shape, made from the same smooth stone as the walls in the hall. Our footsteps echoed.

Words lined the walls, and I brushed my hand across them. “Engineering Corps for Human Locomotion and Oscillating Systems,” I read aloud. The rest was worn away. I turned my questioning gaze to Adam. “What is that?”

“ECHLOS,” he said simply.

“What?”

“Each letter stands for a word.”

Understanding—and wonder—pierced me like a dart. I dropped my hand and moved on, unable to stop staring. “What do the words mean? Locomotion? Oscillating systems?”

“It’s talking about the portals,” Adam said. “This is where they used to study them.”

My mouth fell open as that sank in. “They? You mean the ancients, the Forgotten Ones?”

He nodded.

“How did you find this out?”

A faint smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll show you.”

We reached the bottom of the spiral staircase, and another corridor filled with instant, blinding light as Adam brushed his hands over a box on the wall. The glowing ceiling snapped and buzzed as if it were filled with insects. I lingered in the doorway, uncertain if it would collapse on top of me. “Is it safe? The noise…”

“Don’t worry,” Adam promised, brushing my arm with his hand as he started past me. “It’s just the power source. We’re safe.”

The place where he’d touched my arm tingled faintly.

I wet my dry lips with my tongue and followed him down the corridor. My boots whispered over the grit and dust strewn over the floor, leaving smeared footprints behind me in the filth.

We reached a massive wall of stone, and I noticed the straight cracks that split the stone into square shapes just before Adam touched another box. The stone wall parted with a hiss, the pieces moving apart like a curtain, and cold, dry air rushed over us and fluttered my hair. I smelled dust and paper.

“I discovered this room a few weeks ago.” Adam took a step forward, and his voice dropped to a reverent hush. “It’s some kind of place of record. I think most of the documents were stored in these.” He tapped an overturned gray box lying on its side. “I don’t know how to get them out. But there are some papers and books, too. I’ve been reading and collecting them.”

The gray boxes lay in disarray everywhere. Some of them had plates of glass covering their sides, and the glass was shattered and cracked. Shelves lined the walls, and I saw books, their pages scattered and torn as if they’d been thrown in a fit of rage. A few overturned tables formed a semi-circle at one side of the room, their legs extending out rigidly like animal corpses stiffened from the cold, and the light in the ceiling sputtered and flickered as if it had been somehow damaged.

“What do we do now?” My voice echoed faintly.

Adam crouched before a fallen table and began sifting through papers. “We look. I’ve been shuffling through these documents for weeks now, and I could use another pair of eyes.”

“Are we looking for anything in particular?”

He lifted his head. I could see him mentally chewing over what to tell me. “Anything mentioning something called a PLD.”

A PLD?

He didn’t explain further. When our eyes met, I felt as though he were silently measuring me. I breathed in deeply, tamped down my irritation at not being told answers, and crossed the room to the shelves. I would prove myself a good addition to the operation. I would find these PLD documents.

“Don’t look so dejected,” Adam said after a moment, and I swear there was a hint of humor in his voice. “I don’t even know what it is, and I am a seasoned Thorns operative.”

“Just like you don’t know what this place is?” I challenged him, but I was mostly teasing.

His snort echoed through the room. “Is that an insinuation?”

“I don’t know, Adam. Did it sound like one?” I forced myself not to look at him, although I wanted to see if he smiled faintly, because I imagined he was. Instead, I grabbed a stack of books and began rifling through the pages. I didn’t understand half of the words on the page.

“Officially, I don’t know more than anyone else—”

“And unofficially?”

He hesitated. “I have my theories and speculations. I’ve been spending time here whenever I can, cataloging and mapping. I discovered this room after I received orders from my superiors, orders that told me to find information about the location of something called a PLD.”

“What kind of theories?” I kept my voice even, lest my eagerness scare him off. Honestly, trying to get Adam to talk at length about
anything
was like dragging meat from the jaws of a starving dog. Especially if it had anything to do with the Thorns. But like any true-born Frost dweller, I was nothing if not stubbornly persistent.

“In Aeralis, there are great laboratories. Places of learning and science. My father worked in such a place, you see, before we fled north. I’ve seen things here that make me think it was once the same sort of place, only grander.”

“Your father?” I knew nothing of his family except their name. “But you are Brewers.”

Adam lifted his head and grinned at me. “He used to mix chemicals in a lab. It was a joke between us when we arrived. Now it’s our livelihood.”

I tried to imagine him living somewhere else, somewhere far south and much warmer. I couldn’t picture it in my mind. “What was it like where you used to live?”

“Warm,” he said. “The winters are short, and it only snows for a few months of the year. My people live in villages by the sea.”

The sea? I’d heard tales of the giant bodies of water south, east, and west of us, but I’d never seen so much as a picture. “Is it like a lake?”

“Bigger,” he said with a laugh. “The water stretches as far as the horizon, and waves lap the shore, and you can smell the salt in the water when the wind hits your face.”

“Why would you leave something like that to come here?” I mused aloud.

He laughed, low and short. “My homeland had its own problems. The Sickness still infected some, and there was much violence. We were safer here. And I had duties with the Thorns by then.”

“The Sickness,” I said. I’d heard mutterings about it, a disease that plagued the southern places of the world, but I knew no details.

Adam pursed his lips. “Yes,” he said, clearly not wanting to speak about it. “The extreme cold of the Frost and even Aeralis’s lands kills it. It spreads best in the warmer climates.”

I’d heard something to that effect before, but curiosity burned in me. I wanted to know more, but I could tell he would offer no more information. I let it drop. “You aren’t Farthers, yet you said your father worked in one of their laboratories?”

“We are not Aeralians,” he agreed. “But they conquered our home, and we moved to Astralux to find work. The atrocities I witnessed there convinced me to become a member of the Thorns, and the danger my family eventually found ourselves in led to our fleeing to the Frost.”

“Danger?”

A muscle in his jaw tightened. He looked down at his hands and weighed his words carefully, as if he might say the wrong thing if he didn’t plan first. “It’s a long story.”

I grimaced. I’d spoken without thinking. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t mean to interrogate you.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “It’s a reasonable question. Someday I’ll tell you more.”

Awkwardness filled the space between us in the silence that followed. I searched for a new topic, a safer one that didn’t pry into his past. “These people,” I said, grabbing a stack of papers and smoothing them out, “they spoke our language? How can I read these papers if they’re from an ancient civilization? Should I be able to read them?”

“Why not?” Adam asked. “After all, some of the Frost dwellers are descended from the Forgotten Ones.”

I dropped the papers. My mouth opened, closed, and opened again. I fumbled for words. “What did you say?”

When I turned to search his expression for any signs he was joking, I saw none.

“The Frost dwellers came from the south originally, just like your family,” I said. My pulse quickened. “Our ancestors fled here to escape oppression, and the Sickness, because it was safer here, and we actually had a chance of survival. No one wants to live in the extreme cold with monsters prowling about. We’re like the bluewings, hiding in the stingweed.”

“I know those stories,” Adam said quietly. “I’ve heard all the metaphors for the riddle of our existence here. But they’re only a fragment of the history, a tiny piece of the picture. Some of the Frost dwellers’ ancestors came from the south, yes. But a remnant of the Forgotten Ones stayed here as well, and their descendants populated the Frost villages. And part of that remnant preserved the history.”

My breath left my lungs in a gasp. “How do you know this?”

“There are bits of record in these ruins,” he said. “Chiseled here and there, scribbled on walls in this place. Names, accounts. I can show you. I wrote some of them down, as many as I could find. It’s very old.”

I almost couldn’t speak, I was so astonished.

“But Adam,” I said, “if the Frost dwellers are descended from the civilization that built this place, how did we ever forget about it?”

“Information is easily lost,” he said. “When people have more pressing things on their minds—like survival—other things fall through the cracks with time. It’s been centuries since the ancients’ civilization crumbled. And the location of Echlos itself has faded into folklore. The Watchers kept people away, and time did the rest.”

I considered this while we worked. Our people had few means of preserving history among ourselves. Maybe it had happened.

My eyes fell over a page in the bound document I’d picked up.

“Adam. Look.” I held it out wordlessly. The page was covered in diagrams and scribbles. At the top, scrawled in thick ink by hand, were the letters P L D. The diagrams were indecipherable to my eyes. I squinted at them, but nothing made any sense. “Is this useful to us?”

“Bring it,” he said, and I set it down to my left.

We kept searching, and after a while, my eyes started to ache from the strain of scouring faded pages while light flickered above our heads. I found no more papers inscribed with the letters PLD. Only the crumbled document with the confusing diagrams.

Finally, when I thought I couldn’t stand another minute of searching, Adam stood. “We need to get back. It’s getting late, and we need to stay ahead of the night.”