Collision: The Alliance Series Book Three (18 page)

KAY

Perhaps the world-key was tuned into the places it had already opened doorways to, because it took only three attempts to reach the base. Avar hovered outside, clawed feet shifting anxiously.

“There has been a… complication.”

I glanced back at the others, all of whom seemed hesitant. But this was an Alliance base, technically. No danger to us. I took the lead and followed Mathran into the building, and through a door to a side room.

A couch lay in the centre of the room, and on it, a man. His face was wrapped in bloodstained bandages, as was one arm. Wild, scared eyes stared at us.

“It’s all right,” Mathran said, in Vey-Xanethan. “These people won’t harm you. They work for the Inter-World Alliance, and they’re here to help us.”

If we can.
Through the bandages, I glimpsed long lacerations that could only be claw-marks. The scars on my own arm seemed to tingle in response, a reminder.

Avar turned to us. “We should discuss this elsewhere.”

He led us back to the meeting room.

“What happened?” asked Iriel. Of the others, she seemed the least spooked. Ada and Raj both hovered close to the door, neither taking a seat at the table.

Avar himself stood in front of the window and faced us. “He was attacked on the mountain. The entire group of merchants was, in fact. They were late midway through their passage when the continents stopped moving. We found him halfway up the path. Something attacked them. We’ve yet to investigate what exactly did. There were two hundred of them, and he was the only survivor.”

“Did he say what attacked them?” I asked.

Everyone jumped as the door opened, but it was Mathran. “He used the word
verek–
abomination,” he said. “I do not know to what he refers.”

That might mean anything, as far as this world went. “And whatever it was killed everyone else?”

“Apparently so,” said Mathran.

“Whereabouts?” I asked.

“Northwest of here. The other side of the mountain.”

“You’re not going out there alone!” said Ada, guessing my plan before I spoke. “Are you crazy?”

I checked the world-key. I barely felt the magic charge, which suggested it was running out. We didn’t have long left. Maybe enough for one more use… after this one.

“We’ll have to return to the base soon,” I said. “The battery’s running low on this, but we have another one on Earth.”

“I see,” said Mathran, forehead creased with worry. “I hope time does not run out for us. If such abominations have appeared, it may be that the reassembly of the world has begun.”

“Uh,” said Raj. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

“It’s a belief held by some scholars,” said Mathran. “And it is in my notes. I made it my life’s mission to understand the few documents left by the people who lived on this world before we did, whoever they were. This is part of the reason we set up base here, because the carvings are inside caves in the mountain itself… but as I said, they spoke of a cataclysm, of their world reshaping itself. We have never found an efficient way of translating the words on the carvings, though we’ve taken imprints. An obscure people from an outlying world is not of interest to the Alliance, and precious few of Vey-Xanetha’s own show an interest in the history of a species unknown to us.”

So this happened before?
“How long have your people lived on this world, exactly?” I asked.

“Approximately one thousand years, by your measurement. We ourselves have a more complicated system. We count years by multiples of cycles–three day-cycles to a moon-cycle, and fifteen of those to the turn of the first sun. When our world has completed its orbit and the trio of stars is visible, then comes the start of a new year.”

Well, that wasn’t complicated at all.

“And do you know how long passed between the last inhabitants leaving this world, and your people’s arrival? How long they lived on this world for?”

“It’s impossible to tell. They left nothing save for the carvings, and trinkets of metal. Whatever the metal is, we’ve been unable to determine. It has never been found on this world since.”

“I see,” I said slowly. “Do you have samples of this here at the base?”

“We do.”

“Can you show us?”

He hesitated, then nodded, leading the way to another room two doors down, which contained a sort of computer. Not Earth tech, but not Vey-Xanethan, either. It resembled a block of glass, wires twisted inside and hooked up to a wall-sized projector screen.

Mathran manipulated the wires with hesitant hands. It was beyond me to figure out what he was doing, but after a moment, an image appeared on the projector screen. Three symbols surrounding a circle. The top one I recognised as the glyph he’d drawn in the rock.

“Your three deities?” I asked.

He pointed to the one on the left, then the right. “Veyak. Xanet. And Aktha.”

“I can scan this and take it back to Central,” I added, taking out my communicator. “Those are the only carvings you found?”

“No, there are others.” He fiddled with the wires again, and more images flashed across the screen. Other symbols, glyphs. Unreadable, at least to me, with no resemblance to any language I knew.

“What does it say?”

He shook his head. “It’s incomprehensible to me. It is not Vey-Xanethan as we know it. Wherever the previous inhabitants of this world went, they took their secrets with them.

“And you haven’t been able to translate it here?” asked Raj. “I know the Alliance have translators.”

“We have limited access here,” said Mathran. “But you said you can record an image?”

“We can code it into our computers and work on a translation. If I can take a picture with this?” I held up my communicator, and he nodded. I swiped the touch screen and found the image-recording application. It even had an image-reader, but as I expected, the language and origin came up as unknown. Worth a try.

“Okay,” I said. “What did you say about finding some metal the previous people who lived here left behind? Is that here, you said?”

“I will fetch it.”

As he left the room, I turned to the rest of the group. Ada regarded the screen with a vaguely puzzled expression.

“That’s odd,” she said. “Those symbols look familiar–but I’m sure I haven’t seen them before.”

“Hmm.” I studied them, but I couldn’t say they looked like any I’d seen before, and I’d seen text from more than a dozen worlds. But Ada had had contact with worlds the Alliance didn’t usually deal with. “I haven’t. I’ll scan them, though.”

“I can do that,” said Iriel, switching on her eye-scanner. “Hmm… this isn’t coming up with anything. These are pre-Alliance, though.”

“What, you can translate with that… eye?” said Ada, her expression a cross between revulsion and fascination.

“I used to be a code-breaker in the tech division on Klathica before I transferred to Earth,” she said. “This comes in handy. But those glyphs don’t match up with anything in our database. I might be able to do more with full access to Klathican technology. I bet I can wrangle some from the Embassy.”

“Good luck,” said Raj. “If
you
can’t crack it, then Klathica’s computers can’t.”

Iriel rolled her eyes–one considerably more intensely than the other. “I’ll record this here anyway.” As she recorded each image on her communicator’s scanning device, I took out the other device I kept in my pocket, alongside the world-key. This particular piece of Alliance tech gleamed black, rectangular and palm-sized. A magic-scanner, or tracker.

It was a long shot, and if anything odd happened, I’d have a hell of a lot of explaining to do to the others. But as long as the battery kept running, I could use it in any world. Thanks to the amplifier.

And there were definitely traces here. More than one. Now I’d practised, I could isolate a single magic trace. Like when I used the Chameleon’s magic to become invisible, similar to tuning into a radio station. Except tracking magic signals was more like a tangle of radio waves at slightly different frequencies. Four… no, five. Four magic-wielders had recently been in this room, though there were others hidden beneath. And that included Ada, Iriel and Raj. Mathran was the other, and one came from the room next door.

It must belong to the surviving nomad. And if I amplified the tracker and focused on his signal, I could use it to find where he’d come from.

The question was: how to do that without giving away the nature of my abilities to the others? I hadn’t used magic yet here, either. I’d have been a fool to risk it. Even more than using magic inside Central. The amplifier didn’t count as it was an internal source, and I could even use it on Earth, to some extent.

Mathran returned, accompanied by Avar, who held three pieces of silvery-coloured metal.

“We believe one corresponds to each of the deities,” said Avar, with a glance at Mathran. “Though, of course, we cannot be sure. But the symbols carved on the rocks match the other carvings inside the mountain caves.”

The metal piece was roughly fist-sized and made up of hard planes engraved with swirling glyphs. When he passed it to me, it was lighter than I’d expected, like it was hollow on the inside. I turned it over. The same symbols marked each side. Six in total.

I passed it on to Ada, who regarded it with puzzlement, and examined the second. Though a different symbol was on each base, they were otherwise identical.

And the magic pulsed through them, enough that I didn’t want to hold onto each one for too long. The static of the third in particular buzzed against my skin, like raw power waiting to be unleashed. These weren’t dormant. They were alive.

Shaking off the uneasiness, I turned to Mathran. “Who found these originally?”

“The first settlers. There was a museum, at first, I believe, a collection of such objects as these. But with the reshaping of the continents, so much is lost that this particular historical detail was forgotten.”

“I see,” I said. Now I concentrated, I sensed the trail of magic from each rock like another radio station signal. Crap–the last thing I wanted was to get wrapped up in more strange magic I didn’t understand. But once again, magic had the upper hand through the astounding lack of information, even here on this high-magic world.

So be it. “I think we should leave now. We’ll be back later once we have another one of these.” I drew the world-key. “There’s one at the West Office branch of the Alliance. How long before night falls here?”

“Half an hour in your time.”

“
All right. That won’t be enough time for us to find another one of these–” I indicated the world-key–“but I’ll ask my supervisor if we can come back later.”

“Then we are grateful, Ambassadors.”

I couldn’t help but feel the next step was to find these deities–whoever or whatever they were.

But we left the base, again, and I opened a door back to the Passages.

One return-trip left. I knew what I had to do. The tracker still responded, and I had a feeling this might work.

I turned to the others. “Right,” I said. “We’ve one shot in here, not much, but I have an idea. I think I know how to check on those merchants.”

“How?” said Raj. “Even if it’s possible, something killed them. Horribly.”

“And the details don’t add up,” I said. “It might not even work, but there’s not enough charge left in this for a longer trip. Just give me a minute.” I was eighty percent sure this would work, anyway. I held onto the magic trace, though it was a fragile thing, and I couldn’t be fully certain I’d picked the right one. But if I did, the amplifier would mean I could follow the injured merchant’s magic trace to the place he’d last been. The place everyone had died. I knew we wouldn’t find anything good on the other side, but if there was a clue at the site of the killings, I had to be sure.

“Kay,” said Ada. “You know what you’re doing?”

I knew she must suspect how, exactly, I intended to follow the trail. I hoped the others wouldn’t guess. More for their own safety than anything. What I could do was so uncommon as to be unbelievable, as far as magic-wielders went.

And no deity had granted me this power, I knew that much. Life had played its hand and I was stuck with the consequences. But I was damned if I wouldn’t use it to try and solve this.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure. You guys don’t have to come. I’ll only be a minute. Less than that, if I can help it.”

“I’m not letting you go out there alone,” said Ada, moving to my side, as I pressed the doorway-opener to the wall once again. I could tell from the set of her jaw she wasn’t budging.

Damn it all. The door opened, the magic-sense tugged at my veins, and the ground behind the door was dark with blood.

“You should stay back,” I said to Ada, but she shook her head fiercely. Out of the corner of my eye, Raj hung back, muttering to Iriel.

I stepped through the door and down the slope, following the trail of blood. Then I saw the first body, a woman’s. Three long claw marks almost severed her body into three pieces, blood soaking into the rock.

I stared for a long moment, transfixed. Somehow, no matter how mentally prepared you were, whatever you expected to see, it never did justice to the reality.