The Destroyer Book 3 (43 page)

“Take care of things, Alexia,” I said over my shoulder. She was already a few hundred yards down the steep path of the mountain, but she raised her fist to let me know she had heard me.

Malek walked through the short series of time worn steps into the darkness of the citadel and I followed. We could have jumped and climbed up to the window on the top floor easily, but I guessed that my friend wanted me to explore the rest of the structure hoping I would change my mind. I made one final glance down the steep jagged slope behind me. Alexia had signaled the troops to make ready for departure and I saw the battalions tearing down their cold weather tents with a quickness that could only be gained by thousands of repetitions.

The inside of the structure was dark, the only entrance was the doorway we had just walked through, and there were no windows on the base level. A few of Malek and Alexia’s soldiers carried small oil lanterns and paced along the floor and the edges of the walls. We really didn’t need the light since our eyes could see in almost absolute darkness, but the glow the lamps provided would enable the more observant members of my army to see small etchings that might be obscured in the stonework. The practice evolved from looting Elven tribal homes that would sometimes have caches of fine metals, weapons, or art hidden in their walls or floors. The metals and weapons were a boon to the growing army.

I always destroyed the art.

“Anything?” Malek asked the closest soldier.

“No, sir. About to move up a floor,” the man answered. He looked at me and saluted. His action caused the other three in the room to halt their search and salute.

“Carry on,” I said. “No basement? That seems odd.” The room was almost fifty yards wide and a fat oval shape. The walls swirled like a seashell down from the peak in a symmetrical spiral, as smooth and fluid as melted glass.

“We can try breaking the floor.” One of Alexia’s soldiers tapped on the tiles with the butt of his hiking staff. It made a sound that could have been stone or metal.

“Focus on the floor then. We are going up. Come get us if you find anything.” Malek’s voice should have echoed off of the bare walls, but it did not. It was another mystery that he would love to solve.

We walked up the stairs and, as expected, the level above us was empty save a few piles of wood. I wondered if they actually resembled furniture, or if Malek’s description of them had infiltrated my imagination and influenced my observation. I decided that the curve of certain pieces resembled the back of a chair or the headboard of a bed, so I laid the matter to rest in my mind.

The third floor seemed to have more scraps of petrified wood arranged in a pattern that looked like a series of tables. Malek pointed at the array while we walked across the oval to the next set of stairs.

“Originally, I thought this may have been an eating hall, but we haven’t found a kitchen yet, so I believe it was a classroom, such as Elvens had for their young.”

“Perhaps there were other structures near this tower that cooked the food and then delivered it,” I said.

“That could be. If we had time to dig, we might find remnants!” His voice reflected childish glee.

“I doubt ten minutes will afford you the time you need for such a venture.” I smiled at him and he grimaced. “Would you rather the stairs be set up like this; with wells across the vast room? Or would you just devote one side of the building to house the stairs?”

“Hummm,” he mused for a second, his left hand scratching absently at the gray patch of hair at his temple. “For construction, it would probably be easier to have the stairs on one side of the structure. Else it would take too long to travel across the rooms, as we are, to reach the upper floors.”

“But they designed it for defense,” I stated and my friend nodded in agreement.

“They could hold off each floor with a small number of troops and then fall back to the next stairwell.” He pointed at the opposing stairway while he spoke.

“Whomever they feared must have won the conflict, since our mystery defenders aren’t around anymore,” I mused.

“Maybe it was our ancestors against the Elvens, and our kin lost.”

“Yet another reason to grind them out of existence.”

“And another reason to investigate this site further,” he added.

We made our way up the third flight of stairs and arrived at the top level. The space was the same dimensions as the previous floors: about one hundred yards by one hundred and fifty yards in a rough oval shape. Unlike the rooms Malek and I had just walked through, this was filled with destroyed furniture piled into mounds of petrified wood. The ancient stacks looked as if giant men had thought about starting a fire and then abandoned the process before steel could be taken to flint. Ten of our soldiers were carefully searching through the piles of wood and were so engrossed in their task they didn’t seem to notice our presence until Malek coughed. Then they shot to attention and saluted in unison.

“Show us what you have found,” Malek commanded the soldier who had summoned us while he returned her salute.

“Over here, sir.” The woman had intricate wolves etched into the metal of her armor. I recalled that her name was Elise and she had been in the army for around six years. She gestured to one of the mounds of rubble that a few of Malek’s other searchers were carefully unpacking. The three of us walked to the pile and she pointed at the artifact.

It looked like an oval stone, a little smaller than my hand, with four grooves on the top of the oval that could have been designed to place fingers. The surface was a greenish gray color that was a few shades lighter than the walls of the citadel. Covering almost every free space of the stone was intricate writing lightly etched into the rock by someone that must have had a chisel the size of a fingernail shaving and the steady hands of a master jeweler.

“It was at the bottom of the pile,” Elise said.

“You have found no human or Elven remains here?” I asked.

“No, sir. Just the wood and this rock. We have not finished searching though.”

I nodded and moved closer to the pile and its hidden prize. The writing was small and the light in the top of the tower came through dimly, but I could read the inscription:

Touch and will cannot conceal the ideas left behind

Voice and song hidden for long can be revealed with mind

Wind alone is proof of those who strive to free our kind

“What does it say?” Malek moved behind me and put his hand on my shoulder plate.

“Some simple rhyme. This is probably a child’s toy,” I said. My gloved hand wrapped around the oval rock laterally and I handed it to Malek. He held it up to his eyes and then pushed his arm out with a confused squint.

“You can read this?” He looked from the stone to me.

“Aye.”

“I can’t. The script makes no sense to my eyes.” I glanced down at the artifact and gave him a smirk.

“Are you fucking around?”

“No.” He chuckled a bit and spun the stone around in his hands slowly. “What does it say?”

I repeated the words aloud while he examined the oval stone again. He spun it between his fingers and let out a slow whistle that reminded me of a dove call. Then he tossed the artifact to Elise.

“Can you read the script?”

“No, sir.” She glanced down at it again. “None of us can.” She looked at me with questioning eyes. They were the color of a greenish ocean and framed with a dash of freckles. I recalled that under her helmet she had auburn hair.

“Weird.” I shrugged. “Another mystery that I don’t care to solve.”

“This device obviously does something,” Malek said urgently. “Can you give me more time to figure it out?” He took off his glove and motioned for Elise to toss him the artifact. It landed in his naked palm with a wet sound like a stone tossed into a river.

“Sure. Take it with you. It is easier to carry than this tower.” We shared a smile and then I turned to Elise. “Finish up in here and then return to the main--“ A sudden sucking noise from Malek’s direction made us both spin to face him, hands on our weapons. My friend had wrapped his bare hand around the stone and the script was now glowing and pulsing in bright blue.

“What did you do?”

“You said something about Wind, so I pushed Air into it!” The soldiers in the room drew their assorted weapons at the panic in Malek’s voice and fanned out toward him. It was common procedure amongst our army: if you didn’t understand something, approach cautiously with your team.

In the next second, my friend gained his composure, and it became obvious that the rock was doing nothing more than making a low insect hum and emitting a blue light. He released his grip on the finger slots slowly, but the noise and glow did not stop. If anything, it seemed to increase in volume and brightness.

“Our forces move on Lenaan as this message reaches you. Continue your assault on Jai-Laix. Press aggressively so that they do not realize our feint. I need more Ovules. Sacrifice a score of your retainers and send them to me.” The voice was a woman’s and the inflection reminded me of Shlara’s. I imagined she was a strawberry blonde, with her long hair braided up in a complicated nest of knots and purple ribbons to fit under her winged helm. She looked younger than me, but her gray eyes seemed aged and experienced, like the old pewter mug that my father used to drink his water. She was beautiful, but something about her bothered me.

The light faded from the stone and the hum cut to silence. The sudden silence was refreshing and I felt the muscles in my jaw relax. Then I realized that my whole body had been tense and I exhaled slowly, forcing calm Earth through my blood.

“Fascinating.” Malek held the stone in his bare palm again as if he held some strange bug. “It will probably take us a few months to translate the language. I’ve heard nothing like it before.” He looked from the oval rock to me. “If we could get more time to search this structure, there might be more devices like this. It's magic we have never seen. What’s wrong?” he asked me.

“You didn’t understand the girl’s words?”

“No. I could tell it was a woman speaking. Did you understand?” He already guessed the answer before he asked. Malek, Thayer, Gorbanni, Alexia, and Shlara, were my best friends, and we had spent more than half our lives leading our people in a war against improbable odds. He knew me too well.

But he didn’t know everything about me. None of them knew of Iolarathe.

“How did you understand it? Where did you learn that language?” He realized that his men were standing around us with their weapons drawn. “Leave us,” he commanded. They nodded and flowed quickly down the stairs like water. “Return in ten minutes,” he said to Elise. The woman saluted and followed the rest of the searchers. Her walk was much slower, matching standard pace, and I guessed that she wanted to eavesdrop on our discussion.

Malek and I turned to face each other, but he waited a few dozen seconds before speaking. Elise could probably still hear us, but he whispered anyway.

“Where did you learn the language? Did your tribe use it? I’ve never heard anything like it before.” I hesitated before answering because I didn’t want to talk about my past. Unfortunately, we had roamed our world for almost fifteen years and only encountered a few Elven tribes that used languages different than the one we currently spoke. The words of those tribes were almost sister languages, with dialects that had mutated the skin but left the core body the same. We had been able to communicate with the human prisoners we had freed and were more than successful with our interrogation efforts on the Elvens we captured.

“I don’t know Malek,” I said honestly. “I didn’t even realize it was a different language until you said you couldn’t understand. I thought she was speaking our language.”

“How can you understand it?” His eyes furrowed in disbelief.

“It just made sense.”

“So you can read the writing.” He pointed to the smooth gray stone. “And understand the voice that comes out of it.” I shrugged at his statement. “What did she say?”

“She was sending a message to someone. Telling them to continue to attack a place called Jai-Laix while she assaulted a place named Lenaan. Whoever she spoke to was putting up a feint attack. She also said she needed more Ovules and that twenty retainers should be sacrificed or sent to her.” I shook my head and tried to clear the memory. Thinking about the message contained in the magic rock made my stomach clench. “I guess I really don’t understand it. I have no idea what Lenaan or Jai-Laix are or what she meant by Ovules.”

“Anything else?” He had moved his gaze from my eyes back to the stone.

“No.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said mockingly with his charming grin. I shook my head and sighed.

“I felt as if I saw her when she spoke. Her hair was dark blonde, maybe light brown but bleached by the sun. Gray, hard eyes. Looked tough and capable, like Alexia or Shlara. She had on a winged helm and armor that was a silver blue with purple stitching on the leather pieces and embossments."

“Was she pretty? Think she’d like me?” He made a sour face that forced me to laugh.

“Something about her made me uneasy, my friend. I don’t like her.” I waved my gauntleted hand across the decimated room. “It doesn’t matter much. She is long dead, along with whatever civilization she came from.”