Scepters (81 page)

His
eyes dropped to the oblong space in the middle of the chamber floor.
Concentrating, and using his Talent, he could sense a vague purpleness, as well
as a crimson gold circle, in the center of the oblong carved into the stone
itself. The stone that comprised the base of the oblong was darker, and Alucius
could sense that it was part of something larger, but not something created by
the ifrits, rather more like a lifeweb, except it was far more vague to his
Talent, almost like the hint of a mist.

Did
the world itself have lifethreads—lines that ran through rock and stone beneath
the surface of the earth? It could be possible… He shook his head. The more he
learned, the more he found out that he didn’t know.

Still…
the ifrits seemed to follow patterns, and he might be able to discover more if
he could use what he knew.

Did
the chamber have a secret door, like the one built in Salaan? He walked to the
part of the stone wall closest to him. He let his hand range over it, then
tapped it, first with his fingers, then with the rifle butt. It sounded solid,
and from what he could tell from his Talent, it felt solid as well. He examined
the entire wall, but all of it felt the same.

Then,
recalling the use of light-torch brackets in the palace of the Matrial, he
began to look for places where there might have been brackets. Once he looked,
the narrow holes drilled into the stone were obvious. There had been four such
brackets, two on each of the side walls, each head high. Alucius looked at each
closely. When he reached the third set of bracket holes, he smiled, but he
checked the fourth set as well before returning to the third.

Three
of the brackets had been anchored by two holes drilled into the stone. The third
set had four holes—the two standard anchors, and then two more in the middle,
one above the other. Whatever cables had been used had long since vanished, but
Alucius had a good idea that there was a door or something like it on one side
or the other of the vanished four-hole bracket.

He
studied the two center holes, then began to create a Talent-probe—the kind he
hadn’t tried or used since he’d been confined in the hidden city of the
soarers. He began by visualizing a thin golden probe, slipping it into the
uppermost of the center holes in the wall. He had to concentrate more, using
the probe to feel blindly what lay beyond the stone. There were silvery metal
levers, and weights. He wrapped his probe around what felt like a lever and
tried to pull it down. The probe slipped off the lever—if that was what it
happened to be—as though the metal was heavily oiled. Alucius focused his probe
with rougher edges, and greater strength, and sticky as well, almost as if with
glue covered with sand. That allowed him to pull down on the lever, but nothing
happened. He tried to push, but that didn’t work either.

Sweat
began to form on Alucius’s forehead as he tried combination after combination
of pulling on one lever, then another. A quarter glass passed, and then half a
glass, and his entire body was shaking when, abruptly, there was a snap, a low
grinding, and a section of the wall slid sideways, revealing a passageway
beyond—one lit dimly by a pair of ancient light-torches.

Alucius
inspected the area on the far side of the passageway, noting the very simple
lever. He shook his head. He wasn’t very good at visualizing what he’d never
seen. Taking his rifle, he stepped into the passageway. He could sense no one
in the passageway beyond. After a moment, he eased the lever forward. The stone
wall slid back into place, more smoothly and with much less noise than it had
made in opening.

He
took a deep breath and walked along the narrow stone passage, seemingly cut
from the stone itself. After a good five yards, it ended in another chamber—one
that looked to be precisely five yards square. Unlike the other chambers or
Table chambers, this room had not been touched.

There
was a table desk in one corner and an odd settee before it, beside which was a
chair with longer legs than most. Against the wall to the left was a wide chest
of drawers, similar to the one in the buried Table chamber where Tarolt had
hurled Alucius. The light-torches above the table desk shed an even, if faint,
glow across the chamber. In a niche carved head high from the wall behind the
table desk was a chest or casket of metallic silver and black, although the
silver held a purplish sheen. The casket was slightly over a yard in length,
and a third of a yard in height and in depth. A key with a triangular head
remained in the lock of the casket, although the lid was closed.

A
set of clothes lay on the floor, just inside the chamber, a green tunic trimmed
in brilliant purple, with matching trousers and black boots. The garments had
no dust upon them, and the fabric had a silvery sheen. They were laid out as if
someone had been lying down and vanished, leaving the clothing behind. Alucius
recalled what had happened in the chamber beneath the Martial’s palace. Had the
ifrit been trapped or killed by one of the ancient soarers? Or just been
trapped when the soarers had disrupted the ifrits’ lines of power?

There
was a strange gleam to the garments, and he studied them with his Talent. Then…
he swallowed. Like the eternastone of the roads and the remaining ifrit buildings,
like the Tables, and like the green towers, the garments bore an infusion of
lifeforce. The squandering of life-force on preserving mere clothing… the
taking of something that held a whole world together—just for clothing that
would endure for eons?

Alucius
looked farther into the chamber. The light-torch bracket in the far left corner
had been twisted down, and on the polished graystone floor below lay the metal
fittings of a light-torch, but without the crystal. Beside the broken
light-torch lay a silvery jacket, a pistol-like device, and a pair of boots on
their sides.

Alucius
nodded. The pistol-like device was like the one the engineer had used, but he
could sense with his Talent that its power had long since dissipated. He took a
deep breath and hurried back out of the chamber to the hidden door. He pulled
the lever down. After a moment, and another grinding lurch, the door opened.

This
time, when he returned to the furnished chamber, he left the stone doorway
open. He thought he’d rather deal with live intruders than a mechanism that
might jam and might well have already trapped two ifrits.

He
went to the metallic casket in the wall niche first. As he looked at it, he
realized that the casket was not set on the ledge, but actually embedded
several spans into the stone so that it could not have been moved without
breaking the slab into which it was set. The key had been left in the open
position. Alucius lifted the lid. The casket was empty. Inside was a pair of
heavy metal brackets, as if the casket had once held something. A purple
crystal was set at each end of the casket, and from the position of the
brackets, it appeared as if whatever had rested inside the casket had once
rested firmly against each crystal. A silvery bar ran from the base of each
crystal down through the bottom of the casket and into the stone.

For
a time, Alucius studied the casket, but he could not determine what the missing
object might have been. From the casket, he turned to the chest set against the
wall, leaving the single drawer in the table desk for later.

He
opened the top right-hand drawer of the chest. Inside were two greenish
crystals. Even as he watched, both disintegrated. What remained in the drawer
was a stack of sheets of the same eternal parchment. Alucius picked up the
first one. The writing was regular, each symbol precisely the same size as the
next—except none of them was familiar. He glanced through the other sheets. All
were covered in symbols, without any drawings. After a moment, he slipped them
back into the drawer.

The
left-hand drawer contained a few odd-shaped coins, including several golds of a
type Alucius had never seen, a pair of shears, and a thin coil of wire. He
slipped the golds into his wallet and opened the double-width drawer below.
Inside was a long shimmering garment of some sort, all golden silver, with
large symbols down the front, symbols that Alucius had never seen, but which he
suspected matched some of those on the sheets of eternal parchment.

Bending
down, Alucius opened the lowermost drawer. It seemed to be empty. Then, in one
corner in the back, he saw what looked to be another sheet of parchment, folded
over twice. He touched it gingerly, but the substance remained firm to his
touch. Slowly, he eased it out of the drawer.

The
sheet was neither parchment nor cloth, but something akin to both, flexible and
smooth. After a moment, he unfolded it. What he held appeared to be a map of
some sort, which could have been drawn recently, with bright colors and clear
dark lines. He studied it quickly, noting that it was clearly a map of Corus,
although there were representations of parts of the continent that did not
match what he knew. The map must have been made a long, long time ago, before
the Cataclysm that had changed the world. He glanced back over his shoulder and
slipped it inside his jacket and tunic.

He
turned back to the table desk and opened the single wide drawer. Inside, he
found little enough—a miniature knife with a purpleness to it that prompted him
to leave it without touching it, an oblong block of jade with an enameled and
unfamiliar seal upon it, and some sort of stylus in the form of a leafy branch.
There were also a number of sheets of the eternal parchment, all blank.

Alucius
closed the drawer and walked toward the broken light-torch bracket. Avoiding
the boots and pistol on the floor and standing beside the broken light-torch
bracket, he created another Talent-probe.

This
time, as much as he tried, he could do nothing to open what he knew to be
another hidden door. He could find no levers, nothing beyond the stone except
more stone. Yet… once there had been. Finally, with sweat streaming down his
forehead, he turned and studied the chamber again.

There
were no books, nothing to provide knowledge, except the map inside his tunic
and the sheets of eternal parchment with unreadable symbols—too many sheets to
carry with him. And then there was the mysterious metal casket—with nothing
inside it.

He
turned and made his way back along the narrow stone passageway. He stopped
under one of the light-torches just a yard inside the open stone door.

There
he took out the map he had found and unfolded it. Despite having been folded
for longer than he could imagine, once the map—and it was clearly a map—was
flat in his hands, there were no creases or wrinkles. Before Alucius was a
detailed depiction of Corus. Although he could not read the script that labeled
the cities, all the eternastone highways that he knew were laid out, as well as
some that he had never seen or heard of.

There
were keys to the map—that he felt. One that leapt out at him was the placement
of tiny green octagons. Each octagon had to be the location of a Table—or where
a Table had once been. There were octagons in Tempre and where Elcien had once
stood and more than a score across Corus. Each octagon was framed by a colored
border edged in purple. Alucius looked more closely. The one in Tempre was blue
edged in purple. There was another octagon of purple-bordered silver at Prosp
in Lustrea. Had that been where he had fought the ifrit-engineer?

So
where was he now? He studied one octagon after another until he found the one
with the purple-edged, crimson gold border—and it was Dereka, by its location,
although he could not read the symbols beside the city. He kept looking,
finding a purple-edged, black-bordered green octagon far to the northwest, just
to the west and south of what he knew as the Black Cliffs of Despair. He
nodded. The icy and preserved structure had been in Blackstear.

From
what he recalled of the sullen crimson Table where he had been sent, that
buried Table chamber had to have been the one in Soupat.

For
a time, his eyes refused to focus on the map as the thoughts of an entire web
of Tables connecting all Corus flashed through his mind. Yet… the Tables were
not laid out for anything except the travel of a few individuals. Why?

Not
that many people—or ifrits—could have had the ability to travel the Tables…
could they? From what Alucius had learned from the soarer, it was unlikely that
anyone who was not an ifrit had been able to use the Tables when they had first
been set up. The eternastone highways were what most people had had to use to
get from place to place. That also suggested that not that many ifrits had the
ability, and that all Corus had been ruled by a comparative handful of ifrits.

Maybe…
just maybe… there was some hope.

He
frowned. Was that why Wendra was missing? Because the ifrits were few in
number, few enough that he and Wendra might make a difference? But if that were
the case, why hadn’t Tarolt or Halanat known about Wendra?

He
looked at the map before him once more, forcing himself to go over each green
octagon, checking the colors of each and trying to visualize what he knew.
Originally, according to the map, there had been a Table in Elcien and Ludar,
but not in Southgate, and one in Alustre. And in the time of the Duarchy, there
had not been a Table in Salaan or anywhere in the Iron Valleys—nor anywhere
near the Aerial Plateau.

After
studying the map for a time, he carefully folded it and slipped it back inside
his undertunic. His next trip would be somewhere that was hopefully closer to
home and less dangerous, but someplace where he hoped he could find out more,
either about the ifrits or how to discover where Wendra had gone. The more he
thought about it, the less it seemed likely that the ifrits had Wendra—unless
there happened to be more than one group of ifrits. But… he had to do
something…