Birthright-The Technomage Archive (36 page)

At the far end of the rubble dome, Ceril noticed a gap between stones that was slightly wider than the rest of the barrier. It was a potential way out. He lay on his back and kicked at the stone that partially blocked the opening, careful to place his force so that he would not topple the larger blocks above him.

A smile crossed his face as he did so. The concept he was using to free himself was not very different from a game that he and Gramps used to play. His grandfather had stacked different sizes of blocks in a tower a couple of feet high, and they would get points for pulling them out of the tower without making it topple. Larger blocks were worth more points, but were generally more dangerous to remove. Ceril loved the game, even though he had never been terribly good at it. He always wanted the high-point blocks even though they typically supported too much weight to be removed. He was always the reason Gramps had to rebuild the tower.

In his current situation, if he toppled the tower, he would do more than lose the game.

He carefully kicked the block to create an opening just big enough for him to squeeze through. He removed his pack and pushed himself through the tiny opening. Once Ceril was on the other side of the rubble, he carefully snaked his arm back through to grab his pack.

Even though he had spent very little time in the cramped little chamber, being able to stand up straight and stretch out was ecstasy. Once he had enjoyed just standing upright for a moment, Ceril called out to his friends again.

And once again, he got no response. He looked around, and he saw purple light above him. That must be the hole he had fallen through. He was too far below, however, for the sunlight to illuminate anything but dust particles in the air. Ceril boggled for a moment on how he had survived a fall from that height, but he pushed the thought from his mind. There would be time to dwell on that later.

The opening was way too high for any hope of climbing out, so Ceril had to make a choice: either he could wait for his friends to rescue him, or he could explore the chamber he had fallen into and try to find his own way out.

He opted for exploration, as there was no indication that Saryn and Chuckie were able to stage a rescue. The darkness around him was oppressive, but his Conjured light-gloves illuminated a decent radius around him. The ground, he noticed for the first time, wasn’t a typical cave floor. It was tiled with octagonal blocks, each containing a single symbol.

Ceril's brow furrowed as he knelt down to investigate the tiles. He traced his fingers along their edges and the symbols. He didn’t recognize the runes, but they felt familiar to him somehow. The tiles were not embossed or engraved, but completely smooth. Their most striking quality, though, was their color: the tiles were golden and the symbols were shiny silver. Not purple. Nothing was purple in here except for the dust and rubble that fell from above.

In a world that had been so permeated by a single color, its absence was shocking. He crawled along, looking at the tiles. Each one was decorated with a different symbol. He crawled for a while, and he never found even one that repeated.

Even more interesting than that, the symbols were not on the tower above, and therefore, not a part of the Jaronya’s Text. He could see no relationship to modern Erlonian scripts, nor ancient, nor any other languages he had researched.
Intriguing
, he thought and his heart raced as his mind raced with possible explanations.

Ceril stood up and secured his pack. He chose a direction at random and began walking. He soon came to a wall, golden like the floor, but not made of tiles. It was blank except for a silver strip that ran horizontally in two directions. Ceril chose to follow it to the left.

***

“
Ceril!” Saryn screamed. She fell to her knees and edged closer to the maw. The purple sunlight did little to penetrate the blackness, and she could see nothing but clouds of dust floating around. “Ternia! Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

No response.

She pushed herself to her feet, and the section of ground she touched gave way beneath her hand. She lost her balance and might have fallen in, too, if Chuckie hadn’t been there to catch her.

“
Careful, Saryn,” said Chuckie.

“
Yeah,” she said.

“
You good?”

“
I think so. You?”

“
I'm breathing and not in the hole. I'm dandy,” Chuckie said.

“
Ceril fell in.”

“
We need to get him out of there,” he said, and walked toward the hole.

“
Are you stupid, Chuckie?”

He stopped and looked at her. “Excuse me?”

“
You just saw the edge give way. You just stopped me from falling in, and now you're going right back to the edge? What, do you think you’re going in, going down there?”

“
Sounds about right, yep. If Ceril’s in trouble, we go in and help him. It's simple. You'd do the same for me. So would he. The thing is, though, I'm not going to be
falling
in like you were about to do. I'm going to take this rope,” he raised his left hand to show her the rope he had taken out of his backpack, “and I'm going to tie it to something solid over there.” He pointed at the nearest ruined building. “Then, I’m going to lower myself down there, make sure Ceril's alive, and get him out if he is.”

If he’s alive
, Saryn thought.
If
. She couldn’t think about that right now. He was alive, he had to be, and they had to do something to get him back to safety.

“
You’re right.”

“
Yep.” He turned and walked to the nearest building. “Mind helping me tie this off?”

She trotted over to him and took the end of the rope. “I’m not really good at any of this,” she said. “I never took anything but basic interdisciplinary combat, and I never had any survival courses. I don’t know how to tie knots.”

“
It’s not too hard,” Chuckie said. “It’s just wrapping the rope around itself a bunch. Just take your end, wrap it around the middle of this column here.” When she had done as he asked, he took the rope from her. “Yeah, and then you just take the loose end and…” He tied the knot effortlessly. “See?”

Saryn tugged at it, checking its stability. She looked Chuckie in the eye and said, “I'm going, too.”

“
What?”

“
I'm going down there, too, Chuckie. You can't think I'm going to stay up here in the open with you both down there getting into who-knows-what.”

Chuckie grimaced and said, “Well, how do you suggest we do that, then, Saryn? I need you up here to lower the rope for me to get down there. I doubt there are any walls to rappel down.”

She thought about it for a moment and said, “We'll Conjure our way down. Those Jaronya can Conjure wings, right?”

Chuckie nodded apprehensively. “Maybe…”

“
Well, I don't think we can do that,” she said. “Our nanite skins don't have enough tech to do it, nor,” she added, “do we have the finesse in controlling them if they did. But we can Conjure shock absorbers and parachutes. Combine that with the ropes, and I'm pretty sure we can jump into the hole and not, you know, kill ourselves.”

Chuckie blinked at her and said, “You're serious?”

She nodded.

“
What about meeting up with the head honcho of Purpletown here? We were given an hour. Don't you think that at least one of us should at least make it?”

“
Ceril is more important.”

“
It's not that I don't agree with you, Saryn,” said Chuckie, “but these guys have kidnapped us, and are keeping us prisoners. I'm thinking that maybe doing what they say this time might be a pretty good idea. Especially since it sounded like it may be our one chance to save our asses.”

“
Look.” She dropped her hands to her side and tossed a stray sprig of hair out of her face with a flick of her neck. “We don't know what they want. We know they think we're saviors of some kind. We know they want to try us for killing two of their soldiers or scouts or whatever. To me, those are pretty contradictory ideas. I don’t really want to see which one they choose. If we're late—”

“
We're going to be,” Chuckie interrupted.

“—
then we can deal with it,” she continued without pause. “And so can they. We need to make sure that Ceril is alive—like you said—and get him out of there if he is. And if he’s hurt, his chances are better with both of us down there than just one of us. And who knows what they'd do if only one of us shows up to their meeting. They might see that as being more disrespectful than missing it entirely.”

“
We’re so screwed,” he said. “Okay, whatever. You're the brains of this operation. Just tell me exactly how you want to do this.”

She did, and ten minutes later, they were both secured by ropes tied to the base in the ruins. They nodded at one another, and leapt into the purple haze of dust.

***

Not long after Ceril began to follow the wall, the chamber narrowed into a hallway. His light-gloves began to reflect off of a second wall, but the corridor was hardly confining. There would have been plenty of room for his entire team to walk side-by-side if they weren’t all separated on separate ends of the Instance by now.

He made a mental note to himself: once they were through this situation with the high priest, they would leave and find Swinton and Harlo. He had no idea where they were or what they were doing, but he hoped they were doing better than he was.

Ceril followed the wall for a while and never noticed any deviation in it. If it were curved, it was imperceptible. There had been no corners or turns. He occasionally looked down to note the symbols beneath his feet. He had walked over far too many now to know if there was any repetition among them, but he still recognized none of them.

It just didn't make sense to him. The writing on the broken tower had been Erlonian; he knew it. But beneath the tower, in whatever kind of subterranean building this was, the symbols were unrelated. That was absurd to Ceril—impossible, even.

There was
always
a connection.

Ceril was thinking about the languages when the hallway once again expanded into a chamber that opened around him. The wall he had been following disappeared when it cut a hard right. The wall to his left did the same thing, only in the opposite direction. The light from his hands no longer had walls to reflect on, and the darkness immediately became more oppressive. He froze in the doorway to a much larger chamber.

Cautiously, he stepped forward. The Conjured light barely cut through the darkness. As he made his way further into the chamber, the ground rumbled, but only slightly.
Not again
, Ceril thought.

He stopped and looked down. The tiles under his feet were still, but those around them looked different. He kept walking forward. When his feet touched the tiles in front of him, the tiles rose slightly.

The chamber was building him a staircase.

The increases in height were so small that he did not realize what was happening until he was already perhaps eight feet above where he started. His balance wavered, and he steadied himself before he fell. He doubted a fall from this height would hurt him—especially since his more recent tumble had been much worse—but he still preferred to remain standing for obvious reasons.

He kept walking, and the staircase kept rising with every step he took. Eventually, he was so high that the light from his gloves could not illuminate the floor of the chamber. However, it did light the ceiling. He was not close enough to it to breach and get back to Chuckie and Saryn, but he could see that the same tiles lining the floor decorated it, too.

Eventually, the subtle stair-stepping stopped, and Ceril found himself on a dais high above the ground. As he walked onto it, he heard another rumble and braced himself for a fall that never came. The floor that held him was solid. The rumble had actually been the lights coming online. One by one, the tiles in the ceiling began to illuminate. The silver symbols took on an unnatural glow that filled the chamber in soft, white light.

Ceril gawked at his surroundings. The wall he had been using to guide himself eventually led to a standard holonet terminal. Just like the ones he had always used back on Erlon. The entire outer perimeter of the room was lined with tables, chairs, and what had to be data terminals. Even from this distance, he could see that they were not as advanced as the ones aboard the
Inkwell Sigil
—these still had physical input devices with buttons and knobs.

How quaint.

He turned his attention back to the dais he stood on. There was a desk here, too, and a chair. There was a single data terminal with a manual input device. And that was it. The rest of the platform was empty.

Ceril edged closer, and a voice behind him said, “Welcome, Charon.”

The young man whirled to face another man. He was older than Ceril, but not by much. “Who are you? Where did you come from?” Ceril asked. The man looked familiar, but Ceril didn’t know why.

“
I am a holographic projection,” the man said as he flickered. The effect verified his statement. “How may I serve you, Charon?”

Ceril blinked. He thought rapidly, and said, “I, uhh…well…how do you know I'm a Charon?” Ceril wasn't technically a fully Rited Charon, but he saw no reason to make the distinction just now. Roman and the others had given them full discretion to act as full agents on this assignment.

“
I do not understand,” the hologram man said. “You are present in the Archive, a space that is reserved for Charonic use only. For you to have access, you are a Charon.”

“
Interesting logic,” said Ceril. He walked slowly around the desk. He had been walking for hours, which was bad considering that he was supposed to have had an audience with the Jaronya high priest shortly after he fell. His feet were killing him. He unstrapped his pack and sat behind the desk, resting. He hoped that Saryn and Chuckie had made the meeting, at least. All they needed was one more thing for the angels to hold them in contempt for. “What is this place?”