Alium, page 25
*
After five days of monotonous, empty climbing in the stuffy dimness of ore-veins, and four sleepless nights huddled against friable walls of rock listening to what horribly rhythmic breathing issued from the direction of the inert Zefloz, Elts came up out of the cavern behind the company onto a high snowy slope. At last she stood somewhat level with the enormous dark towers of Ardua, like titanic stalagmites clustered against the wall of rock. The distant eye’s dream that the city was formed straight out of the mountain dissolved, for its great mass of black spires rested rather upon a grand shelf of ice wrapping along that sheer face.
Outside the snow was deep and pure, so the going again became slow. By nightfall they camped at the foot of a hill which rose no more than a mile to the high city walls above. Again Feox planted his axe like an unnatural burning weed, and lay lifeless beside the Zefloz of his ilk. Zelor sat strangely near to the fire, looking into its surging flames, his hated bags pushed far away from the glow into the dark snow. Elts kept her eyes too on the fire, though she could sense each time that Zelor looked back to those evil, black humps on the edge of their camp, and slowly back. All through the night, before she retired, it seemed as they sat there shivering with their tails tucked inside their robes that the sorcerer wished to say something to her.
They rose with the white sun and strode up the slope in a line of black shrouds against the pristine snow. As the crumbling wall, tilted onyx buildings, and steep conical roofs rose more massively over them, Elts realized that the whole city was quite destroyed. The great, frost-lacquered metal gate was warped and twisted open, as if blown apart. The broken streets were empty, riven with huge trenches and shifting plates of pavement. Skeletal buildings overflowed with snow and ice. Dire vacancy peered round collapsed corners. Terror loomed in every shadow.
Considering the scarce population of Quiflum in the valley below, tens of thousands more Arduans unable to escape through the caverns must have had their graves beneath it all. Ardua’s death did not seem at all natural, or to have anything to do with the plague of the delver’s telling. Something huge and chaotic had descended upon the city; or had it ascended, thought Elts, as they stopped in procession before a great abyssal hole in the ground before them. Circumnavigating the tower-thick gulf, as they walked, and as the wall and gate were obscured behind the debris they passed, other such vast and inexplicably circular holes appeared—in the roads, in the shattered foundations of buildings—opening on total blackness below the city.
Still, Zelor seemed to ignore the possibility that whatever had burst from these noisome pits might still persist here. When they arrived in a kind of cobbled nexus, he sent the company out to search for the Secret Mine, as he had seen it in the old Quiflumian delver’s memory, a statue of the God-Queen beside it. Feox marched rhythmically ahead. Xirell descended a steep hill down into the icy shade of similar road winding to the right. Xelv took the left, where a host of broken towers leaned together and enshrined a street which was quite straight compared to the others they had seen.
“Stay with me,” Zelor said coldly as Elts turned to a narrow alley.
She did not reply, but followed him in the direction Feox had taken. The Red Zefloz had already disappeared over the crest of the torn and buckled incline. As they walked in silence up the rising land, their elevation grew such that over the broken buildings Elts saw the concentric inner walls of the city as they shrank in increasing height like tighter and more sheltered rings towards the centre of Ardua. At the clouded, high rim of the furthest wall, she thought she saw the slightest hint of green, but as the wind blew away that nebula she saw only black stone. Turning with the gale she saw over the outmost, lowest wall, far below, the misty canopy over the valley of Quiflum. Down in that fog was a statue of Fexest, a reminder to the villagers of that which passed through their remote domain. She shivered to think that she shared any design with the man who froze her there. Surely Zelor lied; surely he would take the Alium for himself.
He surprised her by speaking. “You should find it easy to search these streets.”
Elts kept her eyes on the valley below. “If it is a mine we seek, unless it is hewn into the face of the mountain, which is unlikely, it must be below us. We might simply plunge into one of these holes.”
“There are too many. We cannot be sure of their synthesis. The path will be subtle.” Zelor seemed almost in discussion with himself. “Magic is better for these sorts of things; or, I suppose I should say folding. But I am unaccustomed to the Fabric.” He stopped walking, staring into the road. “I have heard that you are able to map a place by the flow of its air. These open chasms are like windows into the subterranean.” His tails swirled, froze. “Teach me to walk them through the Fabric of the wind. Then we can separate and search the vastness of Ardua more thoroughly.”
Only Xirell had ever asked Elts about her powers. She was looked down upon by all in Fozlest’s council, and even the old man was quite the diplomat in Xoldra for all his playfulness beyond its roots. Xol called her the specialist, the colourless White Zefloz, who made up for her lack by being an intellectual—who would say “white is all colours” to much condescending laughter—and a technician, for her ropecraft and gamut of knives were a boon to the military. Whatever compliments decorated her, all Xol—excepting the Novare-raised Zelor—could feel the stuntedness in her aura. But more ironic than his choosing her in all the Zefloz for a lesson was his destroying the minds of any who might have been useful to him when they were lucid. She frowned disgustedly. Perhaps he was not even after her power, but had at last realized that he could not stand the silence of his puppets. She could see how the drooling dispositions of Feox, Xelv and Xirell perturbed him. He kept them always at a distance. Was she now just a voice to hear? An animal noise to remind him that he was not totally alone?
“Or must I take over?” Zelor’s tails curled in threat.
“Whatever it is you did to the others, it would not avail you of my abilities,” Elts said coldly. “I have no powers.” She held up her empty hands as if to signify the lack in her spirit.
“You lie, White Zefloz,” Zelor said sharply.
Elts sighed, looked down at her naked feet, violet from the cold. Then she brought out from its sheath beside the ropes and knives against her belt her elz-bark mask, holding it out for Zelor to see. “The wings of this mask are enchanted. My adopted mother was a wind mage before she was an elz smith. She gave me this mask when I was very young. It allows for only very simple manipulation of the element, but I’ve studied it and practised all my life. At last I can do things most wind mages accomplish when they are children. But, I have had to be more creative then.”
“You cannot use magic without this… toy.” Zelor faded into thought with the severity of his scowl. “I see now why you are Zefloz,” he said broodingly. “To think that you could do such things—I’ve heard the stories—with such limited resources. Imagine what you could do with an Item of Power.”
Elts grimaced with those words which in some form snaked about her heels or formed in the tails of passersby in every corner of Xoldra. How incredible it was that she ranked among the Zefloz; how genius was her work with tools; how innovative was her fighting technique. “I have no desire for such a thing,” she spat. “I joined the Zefloz to see the world, to understand it and experience all there is. Our mission is dangerous. You have made it all the more so, yet what is Zenidow? What is the Alium?” Her heart rose in her chest. “What is Ardua, even? The Kingdom of Lucetal has as little notion of this place as the greatest scholars in Xoldra!”
Being Wyxian, Elts was naturally unaccustomed to the royal rituals of aversion, but the ferocity with which she had turned her eyes upon Zelor as she spoke seemed more purposeful than accidental, as if she sought to know him, though she figured he would not return the glare. It was strange for any Xol but Xirell to communicate with her not only through the manipulations of sound, thought, and tail, but by the sight of the mind exposed, so their culture believed that act of meeting eyes most intimate among the psychic. Yet Zelor—pureblood as he was, yet taught in Molavor always to honour one’s attention—did not hesitate to complete the act.
Now his eyes were not so black as they appeared before, for subtly they were latticed with striations of white converging on opal centres, and as he spoke in reply those asymmetric gyres seemed ever so slightly to turn. “Your ambition is honourable. Recently, I too have become more open to what I do not understand. You must know I have always detested magic. Now I see that it is not only mighty but subtle, and far reaching. I thought of it before as weak and fearful.”
“Perhaps in a swordfight it is.” Elts lowered her eyes to Zelor’s scabbard, though she could feel his gaze still upon her face.
“Yes.”
“So—you will kill me if I refuse?”
Zelor looked away, down at his empty hands. “I am a killer. But if any part of my honour remains, I will leave you be. Fexest acted valiantly, but dangerously, surprising me in my sleep when…” He fell silent. “If she had challenged me outright I may have been able to control myself.”
“Doubtful,” said Elts, feeling confident now. “I’ve not once seen you hold back.” Images of the collapsed skulls of those whose minds had been drunk by the palms of Zelor wavered in the periphery of her vision as her voice rang through the empty streets and alleyways, but as it faded into distant, feeble echoes she was left only with the sensation of the sorcerer’s black-white gaze lingering as strangely in her heart as before she’d looked away. There was little evil as there was kindness there. Even more certain was the ambition of the spirit contained within those vitreous lenses, an ambition wholly unattached to need or want, a righteousness, perhaps, a vocation to sacrifice.
She broke the silence. “If for now our goal is the same, all I can do is believe you. But if I discover that you plan to wield the Alium, yes, you can be certain that I’ll not cut your throat at night. I’ll slay you in the light of day, and with a blade. If honour is suddenly so vital to you, you owe me an honourable end.”
Zelor did not turn, but it seemed as though his long chin were raised to hear such noble words out of his distant past. So it was that Elts, seeing and now beginning to feel some new side of him unveiled and vulnerable, asked the question which had troubled her since Quiflum: “If I’m to help you more than by abiding your ego, tell me first: who is Duxmortul?”
Zelor’s tails snapped like whips. Gouts of packed snow lifted from the street, fell hissing. Yet when his black-white stare turning met again the steeled blue of her own, Elts was struck not by the wrath, but by an ageless, seething terror at last fully revealed in his naked eyes as he hissed, “Where have you heard this nefandous thing?”
“In a dream,” said Elts. Her abdomen coiled for defence, stout legs slightly bent, gloved hands hovering over the knives against her belt. “I saw a black, tentacled monster flying through the outer deeps. It ate worlds. Its followers called it by that name.”
The screaming fear was in a blink veiled with spiteful rage, though it seemed now to Elts like a helpless guise barely holding to its seams. “A great evil reaches out to you from the stars, Elts.” He closed his eyes as if to centre himself, as if that costume of anger was all too familiar in its sway over his actions. “Fozlest would use the Alium to conquer Altum. But this thing is by far the greater danger. The one you speak of is but a herald of things more great and terrible than we can imagine, for it can only overcome us in time. All that we can do is destroy the Alium, for if the Shadow claims it, at the very least Altum will be thralled to doom, and the Whorls of Secundom cast into darkness. All is at stake.”
Elts breathed, but did not relax her position. “If you are so righteous then, how do you atone for the blood upon your own hands?”
A ripple of pain passed through the grim mask of Zelor’s face seeming so horribly concentrated on shutting off the rays of its sight. “There was a time when It was my ally. It lent me power, promised me more.” Now he opened his eyes and looked clearly again into Elts’. The trembling, suffering mask of rage had broken, yet beneath it those bottomless deeps of horror were not revealed. Instead there were the eyes with which he and Elts had first made contact. Here was the absence of both good and evil; again there was purpose severed of self. These, thought Elts almost reflexively, were the true eyes of Zelor.
“That power consumed me. My mind was absorbed and buried. For many years I was a possessed thing, a machine servant of the black sky. It bent me to its will, and forced me to destroy those I loved in ways for which I can never forgive my intimate involvement. I laid waste to cities, slew men, women, children alike. I inspired and led the new front against Novare who had no connection with Lucetal, and granted Fozlest’s wish that the war become one of the races, one for extinction of all Novare! This is how I came to know true evil! Only through pitiless endurance and unerring focus did I reclaim myself, and even now I am unable to draw on those powers which fester ever hotter in my heart without killing or silencing those who oppose me. Ever I hear the whispers from beyond the stars beseeching me, telling me to drink life, demanding from me the prize of Zenidow.”
Zelor crushed his hands into fists, swept his tails fiercely through the snow, and the crumbling house behind him split down the middle with a loud crack. A rising sheet of icy powder blossomed through the street. Rumbling rattled the teeth and bones. Large slabs of rock fell into the hard-packed snow. “Fozlest of course would not allow that the Alium be lost. Even the knowledge of it she covets more closely than her throne. Xelv is undying in his faith to her; he was my first opponent in this quest. But as soon as I set the will of my new powers against him, his mind disintegrated. He became as I was once to It, as a tentacle, an arm.” He held up his hand as if disgusted by his intimate control over it. “I meant only to change his loyalty.”
“Now you lie,” said Elts, tails slowly weaving, “Silver Zefloz.”
“I swear upon Caelare and Xeléd. I intended with all my will not to kill him, and thank the gods the Zefloz are so strong as to persist at least materially under the full black of the Shadow. This state of mastery was the result of my effort and Xelv’s greatness. The same as with the others. I could not describe what grace it was to see that they had not perished as do most with their mind in my hand, but then… they have perished in a different manner, for they walk the world in a mockery of their image.”
“It is despicable,” Elts said through her teeth, jaw tight. “It was Xirell that unmasked me. It was he who taught me everything I know about the Xol, who brought me one day before Fozlest and earned me these white-hemmed robes. I wish that you had killed him rather than… this.”
“As do I. But he was the first to sense my treachery against Xelv, and quick to catch me as I took Feox. In that moment he unleashed the extent of his might upon me with far greater ferocity than Fexest. All that I knew to do which could contest with his power was to call upon the dark.” Now in the sorcerer’s eyes there was only grim and grave dimness, and the great chasms of endless fear began once again to open like inexorably shifting plates of rock. Elts looked away. It was not easy to behold this particular shade of Zelor so abandoned of all hope.
“Xirell was a fierce sorcerer,” he continued. “I feared that he wouldn’t understand the danger of the Alium, and it was too late for me, considering my deeds. The glorious power… it nearly consumed me once more. Killing those villagers, Fexest, it was a feast during famine. Nearly I slew everyone in Quiflum, but I reclaimed my purpose through no small effort. Each day I train my will to contend with the pull of this artifact.” Zelor threw down his bags and from the leather sack produced the black idol of Duxmortul.
As soon as the red columns of its eyes arose from the leather, as that shining black beak caught the dawn sun cruel and harsh, Elts felt a suffocating darkness fall over her heart, squeezing it like a toy, throttling all sense from her blood. Zelor went on, brandishing the thing as if it held no sway over him. “On that day, for a moment, its influence grew weak, as if it were distracted by some other prey, and I saw the blood all around me, cursing myself for the evil I’d brought to the village. Yet still I crushed that delver’s skull, yes consciously, lucidly, with utmost awareness and responsibility, for there is a part of me that knew an efficient route to Zenidow is the only route… Is this infandous image not new to you?”
Elts stared at the awful nest of snaking arms and bloody, gibbous eyes, wondering how Zelor was able to touch its substance with his bare hand without being utterly overcome. “It is the same as in my dream,” she said at last.
Zelor frowned, seeming to accept this. “It fell one dark night from the sky, as in a lone shooting star, into the fields of Molavor, where I bunked with the Novare I would one day betray. I was drawn to it, dreamt of it, fetched it after many fitful nights. Months it took to discover the rim of its impact crater. Then there it was, a bottomless black presence at the pit of the site. As soon as I touched it, Zelor was no more. Soon I was kneeling before Fozlest speaking of the evil of all Novare, how they were all like the King of Lucetal and his hated ancestors. I became the Silver Zefloz. Molavor burned.”
Zelor wrapped up the idol and placed it in its private bag. When the last crimson eye had been covered, a great peace seemed to settle, as though a gnawing agony had always filled the air, and Elts’ heart seemed to expand all around into the air like a spirit released into heaven.
