Sorcerer Rising (A Virgil McDane Novel) (43 page)

“You understand it?” Dorne asked.

“No,” she said. “But it’s similar in style to Rongorongo, the Easter Island script. I’ve studied the language before, and this varies wildly, but it has all the key similarities…”

I lost attention after that. A small stone building caught my attention. It was built into the hillside, pictorials depicting all kinds of scenes lining the frame of the entrance. The open tunnel was dark, yawning out at me. I clicked on my flashlight and illuminated a whole series of images that went down the tunnel.

I went in, my light playing over the images. A great mural continued down the hallway, all depicting a continuous series of events.

“Al, are you getting this? I want all senses in full recording mode. Don’t miss a thing.”

Aye,
he said distractedly. He had spent the night trying to decipher Arne’s message. The encryption was proving particularly difficult.

The hall ended in a great dome shaped cavern.

A step behind me alerted me that I had been followed.

I spun around and my heart skipped a beat as I came face to face with two eyes of yellowish green. Arne cocked his head up, his own flashlight illuminating the cavern ceiling. “My, my,” he said. “This is quite amazing.”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking off the shock. I shouldn’t have been spooked like that but I was nonetheless. His tone had lost much of its, well, toneless quality, becoming more familiar, more expressive as the days had rolled by. His late night message didn’t help either.

“
This is it!” Dorne said behind him. He was lighting a lantern. “This is what the spirits showed me. What do you make of it?”

“Hard to say,” I replied. “I’m going off carven images. It’s always hard to tell what’s myth and what’s fact. You?”

“You’re the one with the Sageship in cultural studies,” he said. “I just break things.”

I laughed, a bittersweet mix of emotions. “It was Aetherial cultures and my thesis was on Ni
dia.”

“Well,” Arne interjected, “I would postulate that it is safe to say there was a decline. Ecological or otherwise, their civilization died as a result.”

“I think it was more than that,” I said, pointing at one of the murals. “They had a major cultural shift. You can see here in their earlier works the kraken plays a prominent part in their religion.” I trailed my flashlight from the doorway to the center of the dome. “But as we continue, and you could see it going through the village, in their architecture and murals, the kraken falls out of favor. They abandoned their conservative faith, a faith based on the hunter gatherer…err fisher finder…life, and moved toward this.” My flashlight landed on a spot in the center of the dome, a chaotic scene of a cave, countless shapes and landscapes spilling from its mouth.

“What is this?” Dorne asked, pointing at a scene on the wall. It depicted several islands, boats passing in between them.

“Evidence throughout the village indicates that this island was the center of a chain,” Arne said. “A capital if you will. There was a loose federation of islands that fished this part of the ocean and this island served as a market for all.”

“
Not anymore,” Dorne said. “Not if what I deciphered was truthful.”

“I
agree,” I said quietly. “Look.”

The scene next to the map was a war scene, depicting the conquering of each of the islands. “It looks like near the end they did more than just cluster around the top of the island, they took the other islands as well.”

I found myself looking back at the center of the dome. Than back at the hallway, faster and faster my light playing over the images, taking them in.

My eyes widened.

Dorne interrupted me, breaking my train of thought. “Look!” he shouted. He was touching the far wall, running his hands over the stone.

“What?” I snapped, exasperated. I had no time for his rock crap.

Then he reached both his hands into the stone and pulled it apart. Hell, it wasn’t even magic. The wall spun sideways on a hinge, revealing a long path, blue light illuminating from its end.

We looked to one another, then without hesitation followed the path. What? You wouldn’t have?

It led down into a sea cave, deep beneath the mountain. The strong scent of saltwater wafted up toward us. The path ended in a large cavern, filled with a shallow level of seawater. Several tunnels lead off in other directions and it was from them that the water flowed in. More murals had been carved into the stone, all depicting more scenes of worship.

In the center of it all, sat a dark, ocean blue cloud of Aether. It was half submerged in the water, long trailers of mist reaching out from the cloud, caressing the murals.

Bright as the sun, the Arcus rose up through it and out the cave’s ceiling.

Rainbow’s end.
             

“You think we can do it?” I asked.

“It’ll be tricky, but it should be easier than you trying to come in here,” Al replied.

“I don’t understand why,” I said. “It’s harder to affect the world than my own mind.”

“Not for you,” Al corrected. “The way things stand, it’d be easier for you to cast a spell than dig your way into the keep
. Besides, I’m not changing anything, you’re just going to hallucinate.”

I sighed. “Alright, do it.”

I was in my tent, facing the far wall. We had spent days scrounging over the ruins, analyzing the art, the architecture, anything we could find. Half of it, I wasn’t even seeing, just shoving into the back of my mind to go over later.

And now it was time to do just that.

My vision faded, dimming as if the small bulb that illuminated the tent had blown one of its coils. The walls fell back, collapsing as if solid instead of canvas, throwing up big plumes of ash and dust. The far wall expanded, darkened until it was a great blackboard, like the one we had used in the Tower when going over difficult problems.

Images flooded into the room, slapping up against the board in a tidal wave of color and amorphous lines. They splashed up against it, solidifying into the various glyphs, artifacts, pictorials, murals, and other scenes we had compiled from the island.

Second, a trickle of color came in from all that we had seen over the past few weeks, all the things I hadn’t quite processed because they were too busy trying to kill us. Specifically, the octopus creatures and all that had occurred during their attacks.

Lastly, a drizzle that fell from the sky, everything I had read from Sol’s books, Priscilla’s files, Ben’s conversation, all the cold hard facts and ethereal myths about the Arcus.

It made a collage of images, dizzying in their scope, that stretched from wall to wall for thirty feet. I frowned. It wasn’t enough.

I held out my hands and flexed my fingers. The blackboard coiled around me, forming into a ring, then a second over it, wider than the first, and a third above that wider still. I stood in the center, surrounded by an amphitheater like structure of blackboards.

Al grunted in approval next to me.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get this sorted out.”

We spent the next hour sorting the images, collecting the facts in piles of information. Rainbow here, octopus creatures there, everything Aberland and his men had told me in another. Gulo, Dorne. Lambros. Arne. Books, myths, overheard whispers, glances and facial tweaks I hadn’t caught at the moment, glimpses, daydreams, postulations, hypotheses.

Lastly, most importantly, I sorted everything that had to do with the island, and the facts that surrounded these people. That went on the bottom ring, closest to me.

It swirled around me, a formula without numbers, a book I didn’t understand, a storm of information. It was too much and there had been so much going on.

My head pounded, my heart raced. I could see it all, hear it all, like a thousand movies playing all at once. It was everything the both of us could do to keep it straight and still the answers eluded us, just out of our reach.

Then I saw it, an image that put everything together, a piece of the puzzle that made all the rest fall into place.

The sun set with us around a campfire. Me and Dorne were arguing over our meal while the others watched. We were enjoying a fine stew, put together by the ship’s cook.

“So what do you think happened?” Dorne asked. “You don’t think they killed themselves out or ran out of food. You don’t think it was disease. You don’t think it was a migration. You don’t think the Arcus had anything to do with it. What then?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think the Arcus was here when they disappeared. If I’m right than the Arcus didn’t start appearing until afterward.”

“After what?”

I spooned the last of the stew into my mouth, then I rolled out a big sheet of paper on the table and began sketching from the rememberings Al had taken.

“Look,” I said. “We agree they’re not here. We agree it was a gradual thing.” I sketched out the map showing the war. “From this we can tell that near the end there was strife, disagreement.” I sketched some other figures. “This island moved beyond the ideal the whole culture had been built around.”

“Which was?” Lambros asked.

“Who knows?’’ I replied. “Doesn’t matter. What’s important is that this island changed first and it spread to the rest. They moved away from the old faith, abandoned the kraken as their totem. There seems to be an abandonment of the fisher’s lifestyle, of this seafaring hunter gatherer culture.”

I sketched on of the figures, a man standing at the mouth of the cave with a great headdress. “These guys led it. Looks like another sect took hold, using the power they discovered.”

“What power?” Dorne asked.

“Think about it, Wizard,” I said with a smirk.

He sat up straighter, absentmindedly rubbing his staff. “They found the cloud,” he said quietly.

“Give the man a prize,” I said. “These guys made their own Guild, but they took it to a whole new level. They worshipped the cloud, worshipped the Aether. Who knows what they were getting from it. Look at how they developed. They worshipped the kraken, the sea, for a thousand years. It was their bounty, their whole existence was based on its good will.”

I sketched the image of the cave mouth, the countless figures coming from it. “But then they found the cloud. For all we know it’s the only one for a thousand miles. Whatever it gave them, it replaced the sea, replaced their god. They grew dependent on it.”

I pointed back at the mountain peak, underneath which lay the cave where the cloud was located. “They conquered the whole chain, brought everyone back here. They moved closer and closer to the Aether. That in and of itself is unusual, you know that. It’s a double edged sword. We mine the clouds, take everything we can from them, but we don’t live around them, we shun them, we ward them, against prying eyes and wandering feet.

I leaned in. “These people embraced it!”

“And it killed them,” he said quietly.

“What?” I yelled. “Pay attention, man! It didn’t kill them! They moved closer and closer until they couldn’t get any nearer.” His eyes widened as I sketched out the last image, a train of people moving into the cave. “They moved in!” I hissed.

Dorne shot to his feet, knocking over his staff. “That’s impossible,” he whispered, sneering. “You can’t…you can’t live in the Aether.”

“They didn’t know that,” I said. “They had no grasp of magic, no idea what they were getting into. They marched their people into this place because it was the will of god.”

“Then it
did
kill them,” he said.

“Wait,” James said. “Those guys we saw in Africa, the fish people. You think…”

“Ding, ding, ding!” I shouted. “Conrad, give your prize to James.”

Dorne was pacing furiously, looking like he was about
to throw up. “Virgil, think of what you’re saying. The longest anyone has ever been in the Aether is…I don’t even know. I think it was Chen. They say when they dragged him out his mind was gone.” He trailed off, thinking.

Arne answered for him. “
The record was eight months, six days, nineteen hours. It was Wei Chen of the Pei Lin Guildhouse, Sage of eleven fields of study, Guildmaster of the council. To be clear, his mind was gone but initial studies indicated it had been…replaced. It is also worth noting that until his death a year later he radiated a field of energy that crystalized organic matter if exposed for more than a day.”

“Then why have we been traipsing through that shit every chance we get?” James asked. “Why in the hell do we have a whole fucking industry out of this?”

“Because we know what to do,” I said. I shot a look at Dorne. “Some more than others.”

“We have strict rules about this kind of thing,” Dorne said, sitting back down. “It’s why we partition. It prevents the Aether from getting a hold of your mind, digging into your subconscious. But no partition is a hundred percent. With enough time…” His eyes widened. “And to have generation after generation born in there…”

I nodded. “I don’t know what we’re going to see in there, but these people are still alive. Somehow they have adapted to the Aether.”