Revelation (Seeds of Humanity: The Cobalt Heresy) (11 page)

“
Maybe
,” Aemir replied, mocking the little man’s own inflection when he said the word, “it was
your
people who set them, Dancer,” my Champion retorted.

I chuckled in spite of myself, even after seeing Dancer’s look of disdain. “Back to searching, everyone,” I instructed.

Nothing jumped out at me immediately, but after a few more minutes of examination, I noticed something promising.

“Look here,” I said to Pi’Vari while pointing at a jagged section of rock around which the water was flowing.

He obliged and studied the area closely before straightening himself. “I see nothing, Jezran,” he said finally, shrugging his shoulders. “It is where the water enters the cavern, nothing more.”

I nodded, glad to have the upper hand for once, when it comes to a test of knowledge. “Yes Pi’Vari, it is where the water enters the cavern. But do you see how uniform the channel is in the center of the room?” I gestured toward the stream of water. “It took thousands of years to carve a cavern like this, and that means a lot of water running more or less consistently.”

Pi’Vari nodded. “I am versed in basic geology, Jezran,” he replied with a hint of sarcasm.

I smirked. “Then you would know that such a flow of water, over thousands of years, would have carved an equally uniform entry point into this chamber,” I retorted triumphantly, pointing toward the area from where the water was coming. “But what we have here is a set of jagged stones which the water is passing around. Thousands of years of water erosion would have at the very least smoothed the edges of those stones.”

“So the stones are new?” asked Aemir.

I shook my head. “The stones aren’t new; the flow of the water is new,” I replied.

“How new?” came Dancer’s voice from above us.

“Not long,” I mused, “probably only a few years, but I’m no expert.”

“Then precisely where is the old path, Jezran?” inquired Pi’Vari.

I looked at the direction of the canal, which led to almost exactly where we were standing. “I’m not exactly sure,” I said, more than a little puzzled. “The canal indicates that it should be right here.”

“It appears that Dancer might have found the answer,” Aemir said grudgingly. I looked up and saw the little man scampering up the rock face at a speed which would have made a spider monkey envious. He was almost to the roof of the chamber when he stopped and studied the stone surface intently, wiping it with his finger.

Apparently satisfied with his appraisal, he gripped his spear awkwardly in one hand and began to chisel on the stone, making an odd, wet sound as the blade met the wall.

“Dancer, you need to be careful,” I warned, fully forty feet below him. “We don’t know what might have-“

I was interrupted by a loud, brief, sucking sound from Dancer’s position, and I leapt to the side as a huge section of stone came crashing down toward us.

The three of us managed to scatter away from where the boulder landed, and I turned just in time to see it impact on the hard, grey stone of the floor.

Only it didn’t land with a crack, or a crunch, or any other noise I would have expected from a boulder of its size. Instead, it landed with a wet thunk, and the entire thing deformed on impact without throwing a single shard.

“Not stone,” yelled Dancer confidently, “painted mud.”

He was right; the entire thing was a large, previously sculpted chunk of mud with a layer of paint clearly intended to make it blend in with the rest of the wall.

“A little warning is too much to ask before you send a giant mud ball down at us?” I barked up at Dancer.

Dancer’s head popped out of the hidden passageway. “What?” he shouted.

I shook my head, and decided it best if I let the whole thing pass. “We could probably use your rope about now, Aemir,” I observed, not particularly wanting to die by falling down this particular slick, rocky wall.

We climbed up to the passage Dancer had discovered, and after Aemir had retrieved and stowed his rope, we made our way down the stone tunnel.

It wasn’t perfectly round, but it was pretty close to it, and it was remarkably straight for a natural corridor which naturally sent off alarms in my head.

After at least two hundred meters of progress, the tunnel opened into a far less natural chamber. The room was cubical, and probably fifty feet on a side. The inner surfaces of the chamber weren’t perfectly smooth, but it was clear that a lot of work went into its construction. After getting a better look at the alcoves dotting the wall, the purpose of the chamber became clear.

“A ritualistic burial site,” Pi’Vari remarked casually, passing his light stick over the neatly laid bones inside one of the human-sized alcoves.

“Bone pit,” spat Dancer apprehensively, gripping his weapon tightly in both hands.

I shook my head. “I think it’s neither,” I said quietly as I moved to the center of the room. Standing there, on opposite corners of a six foot tall dais about twenty feet wide, was a pair of obelisks about ten feet tall. One had a large crack spiraling around it which ran most of its length, but it was more or less intact while the other appeared undamaged.

I walked carefully up the dais steps until I was standing between the two pillars. The arrangement of stones comprising the floor space between them confirmed my suspicion.

“It’s a teleporter,” I said. “The obelisks each perform a unique function; one sends, the other receives. This is probably part of a permanently linked system, with a similar apparatus on the other end somewhere.” The amount of knowledge I seemed to intuitively possess regarding magic and enchantments was really uncanny at times.

Pi’Vari came up the dais steps after me, while Aemir and Dancer remained at ground level. Dancer was clearly uncomfortable here, while Aemir was examining the old bones.

“The chamber appears to be thousands of years old,” Pi’Vari mused. “The water used to flow come from that corner,” he gestured toward a distant corner, where a pair of crypts had collapsed to reveal the continuation of the waterway which had brought us here. “There is no water here, however, so the diversion must have occurred further upstream.”

“Do the obelisks still function?” asked Aemir, who was still examining the bodies which had been laid to rest here.

I shook my head. “If I understand the principle behind them, then this one,” I pointed to the cracked pillar, “is the sender, and the other one receives. So we could return to this room if we found the other pair, but we can’t safely use this unit to transport ourselves to the other end.”

“Of course not,” quipped Aemir dryly.

I continued to study the runes engraved into the obelisk’s surface, hoping to find some indication as to the object’s origin or any other useful piece of information I might glean.

“Rather sophisticated for such an ancient structure,” commented Pi’Vari quietly as he also studied the runes on the obelisk.

I nodded. “It does appear that way,” was all I could muster.

“It seems to beg the questions of who built it, and what happened to them,” he continued, “to my knowledge, teleportation is incredibly draining. Moreover, the Empire is the only known entity able to produce stable teleportation systems, and it is a resource we have only had at our disposal for a little over a thousand years.”

“It does appear to be a mystery, I’ll give you that,” I agreed. “Can you decipher any of these symbols?” I asked hopefully.

Pi’Vari passed his light stick over the carved surface and squinted at the markings. “Some of the symbols appear to be pre-Verukian, but they failed to develop stonework this advanced. The age and craftsmanship would fit the Da’nelite artisans of the period, but they never ventured this far inland and their written language was hieroglyphic, rather than alphabetic like this,” he remarked casually. “Stationing ‘Death Watchers’ at culturally important sites like this was a common practice among the Da’nelites, as well,” he said, waving his hand at the hundreds of alcoves carved into the walls of the room.

I really didn’t know what he was talking about, but I hoped it meant he was getting close to an answer. “Your best guess, Pi’Vari,” I prompted and gestured toward the collapsed corner of the room, “we still have a tunnel to follow.”

Pi’Vari straightened himself and looked up and down the intact obelisk. “Two options,” he finally answered, “the first being that a previously un-catalogued civilization possessing these skills and written language built this room in secret, which still leaves us with the questions of ‘why’ and ‘who enchanted the obelisks’.”

I nodded in agreement. “And the second?” I asked, pretty sure that I already knew the answer.

Pi’Vari shrugged. “The second possibility is considerably less likely…” he trailed off slowly before taking a deep breath and continuing, “but far more complete in terms of clarity: these obelisks were commissioned by an Imperial Wizard, who coordinated their completion across the great distance which separated the Da’nelites and the pre-Verukian people nearly a thousand years ago.”

“If that were the case,” I countered with a raised finger, “then each of these obelisks would bear the patent and license markings issued by the Imperial Archives, not to mention the Imperial Sigil of the wizard’s city—which couldn’t be Veldyrian, since it’s only been around for four plus centuries.” I waved my hand up and down the obelisks. “I see no such markings.”

Pi’Vari hesitated before a smile slowly spread across his face. “As you say, Jezran; it is a mystery.”

I narrowed my eyes as I got the distinct impression that he was holding something out on me. “We can’t learn anything else here,” I said after a long pause. “We should continue upstream.”

Once inside the tunnel, it was clear that it had not been created naturally. It was perfectly cylindrical from the top all the way to the bottom, where it had a groove worn into the center of the shaft through which water had apparently run. But that channel was dry now.

The tunnel wound for a few hundred yards before once again opening into another cavern, only this one was partially natural and partially man-made. The sound of running water was clear as we entered the chamber.

As we exited the tunnel, the wall to our left was made of smooth, solid stone which appeared to have been hewn meticulously by hand. The only problem with that assessment is there was simply no way to transport all of the debris from such an effort out of the cave system without leaving significant evidence, of which we had found none.

“Magic did this,” I said as I approached the wall, inspecting it more closely.

“Indeed,” Pi’Vari agreed, “there is little doubt that this surface was created using magical means.”

I backed away in silent amazement. The wall was thirty feet tall and over a hundred feet long. There were no doors, windows, or features of any kind to be found on its face, save for a giant crack running down the middle of it which extended across the floor of the cavern where that floor joined the wall.

“Jezran,” said Pi’Vari, trying to get my attention, “look here.”

I made my way to where he was kneeling and found what he was looking at. In front of the crack in the wall were two distinct piles of thin bits of rubble, and on closer examination these piles appeared to have at one time been statues. We finally had the connecting piece we had been seeking.

The figures were originally over eight feet tall, had bat-like wings, four arms ending in long, bony fingers and tails which resembled scorpions. It appeared they had once been hollow carvings representing the creatures which the Coldetz soldiers had referred to as ‘flyers.’

“Some sort of sentry,” I mused. “It’s reasonable to assume that whoever opened this chamber did so against their recommendation.”

Pi’Vari chuckled lightly. “Indeed,” he agreed, “however, it is impossible to determine whether or not this was done at the exact same time, so it must remain a well-conceived hypothesis.”

After finding nothing of further interest in the piles, we continued our search of the cavern. The water was flowing from the side of the room opposite to our entry tunnel, and nearly all of it was now running down into the crack which extended from the stone wall across the floor.

“Now we see why the water was diverted,” remarked Aemir as he carefully studied the various natural stone pillars in the chamber. “These pillars are like the teeth of a great beast,” he said apprehensively.

Pi’Vari airily waved his hand. “Those were formed by the gradual flow of water, which deposited the minerals forming their structures over thousands, or even millions, of years,” he explained. “Rest easy, for there is very little in the way of food for any beast they might belong to, in any event,” he assured him haughtily.

Aemir shook his head in apparent wonderment. “In my homeland water is a scarcity, but here it is in such abundance that it can work wonders such as these uninterrupted for millions of years,” he said wistfully. “Wars are fought over what you would consider to be an insignificant spring, and thousands die to defend this precious resource.” He reached out and touched a damp stalagmite next to him and closed his eyes reverently.

Dancer had made his way up the crack along the wall during our conversation, and when he reached the top he shoved his light stick into the opening. “Open here,” he barked down to us as he disappeared into the hole.

“Dancer!” I snapped, finding myself increasingly tired of his reckless dashes into the unknown. “Get back here!”

The little man’s head popped out of the hole in a familiar fashion. “What?” he yelled, bringing his light stick out and holding it behind his head.

“I need to know if the hole is large enough for everyone,” I said impatiently.

Dancer shrugged. “Blankets make Aemir fat,” he quipped, “but fit.”

“Good, then tie the rope and we can all come up,” I ordered.

Dancer muttered something under his breath, probably in his native tongue, which sounded a lot like a harsher form of German, phonetically—at least to my untrained ear. I didn’t understand a word the little man said in that foreign language, but I’m pretty sure he was bemoaning our limited mobility.