Void Spheres, page 15
“So, these people might have been more arrogant than halvar kings and the elvar High Court?” Brushfire asked. “That doesn’t make me want to like them much.”
Cat had pointed out the array of fortifications woven across the plate. Brushfire was far more aware of the underside of the Court and Kingdoms than her Captain, which meant she knew exactly why the Ironhands had kept soldiers on hand everywhere.
They hadn’t trusted their people. Even there, at the heart of their Imperium, they’d had soldiers and, presumably, spies in place to watch over their subjects.
“I doubt any of us would have liked the Ironhands much,” Armand agreed. “The best any of the old records and books I have says about them is that they brought order.”
Brushfire chewed on that mentally, but it was Cat who spoke.
“Not peace. Not prosperity. Not even safety. Order.”
“Yeah.”
Brushfire shook herself, turning away from the city and looking past Void Flyer to the other end of the plaza, over three hundred yards away. Six massive statues of unfamiliar, presumably mythical, creatures had been carved into the native stone wall. Like the rest of the plaza, they gleamed in the light of IronHome’s ember.
And in the middle of the central pair was a set of doors thirty yards high.
“Are we looking in the dead city or poking at the giant creepy doors?” Brushfire asked.
Armand held out his hand and conjured one of his flying cat-dragons. The spirit flittered around his arm and head for a few heartbeats before settling on the archmage’s shoulder and very clearly pointing its nose toward the mountain.
“Into the mountain, I think,” Armand said.
“Don’t suppose that friend of yours knows what we’re looking for?” Paintrock asked.
“No. It doesn’t work that way—all it can do is give me a direction or a yes/no answer,” Armand told the Master of Staves.
“Are we ready, Hunter?” Cat asked.
“We’ve a dozen var and half our officers ready to go, Captain. On your order.”
Brushfire fell in beside Cat and Armand as they strode toward the immense doors. Her brother and Smallwolf took up the wings of the formation, with Hunter at the center directing his dozen halberdiers.
Behind them, the rest of the crew would protect the ship and keep an eye on things. Nobody knew what to expect of this plate, only that they were looking for something there. Something that would make their passage through the rest of the void spheres safer.
In theory. If the whole thing wasn’t a trap.
Walking up to the hundred-plus-yard-high cliff at the inner end of the courtyard, she couldn’t help but be afraid. The doors towered ten times the height of even gobvar, and the statues around them were of creatures completely unknown to her.
To the immediate left of the door was an immense bird, its wings wrapped around itself to both keep it inside the same size as the other statues and to create a very clear impression of fire. If it had been painted, she would have expected it to appear to be made of fire from the shape of the stone.
Instead, of course, it was stark white like everything else in the plaza. White or red, the firebird was unknown to her, missing from any myths or stories she’d heard of.
To the right of the door was a similar creature, a sinuous snake coiling through the air to rise to the same height as the other statues. Feathers and wings had been added along the snake’s body, creating an impression of grace and motion, speed and flight.
Whoever had designed the statues had been an incredible artist. The other four were similar, one for earth, void, water, and aether.
“Six elements and six elementals,” Armand noted, surveying the statues himself. His gaze, Brushfire noted, lingered on the inverse statue that fit the void in her head.
It had roughly the form of a var, but where the other five statues had the stone carved away around them to create their forms, the void statue had the stone carved away to create an emptiness that made up its form.
It wasn’t a style Brushfire had seen before, and something about it and its shadows made her shift closer to her Captain and her archmage.
“I’m not familiar with that structure,” Cat said—his admission making Brushfire feel better. She’d assumed she’d just missed that part of her lessons.
“It’s…” The archmage paused, considering his words as he stopped their advance to look at the six sculptures. “It’s very old,” he finally said. “By which I mean it was old when the Ironhands ruled here. Earth and water, fire and air, void and aether.
“Some of the documents I have seen from the Ironhand era reference it; the Six were something of an emblem for the Dynasty. Even in those documents, it’s treated as an archaic throwback, an affectation of the Dynasts without any actual religious meaning.”
“It’s intimidating,” Paintrock said from behind them. “And I saw the hole in the Seventh Ward.”
Brushfire shivered at the memory. At the center of the darvar asteroid monastery in Brokenwright—once the Ironhand Imperium’s Seventh Ward, one of the protective shields of their inner empire—there had been a void. That void had been part of an ancient defense that could seal the void strait to the Warden of Fire—and in the hands of the Seeker of Her Dark Brother, it had turned into a weapon.
It had also been terrifying to stand above, with only a thick glass pane between her and a fall into the void itself.
The statues were a different kind of intimidation, an intentional statement of the grandeur and power of the Ironhand Imperium.
“The statue’s message rings hollow when everyone here is dead,” Brushfire pointed out. “The heart of the Ward still had real power. These are just… decoration.”
“The doors are a bit more,” Cat said, stepping forward again and eyeing the massive portals. “I presume there’s a mechanism to move them, but I wonder if that still works after all this time.”
Brushfire chuckled—and caught the edge of Paintrock hiding a laugh at what she suspected was the same thought.
“Cat, my Captain, you are too used to going in the front door of places,” she told him. “I have never been invited through the front door of anywhere important in my life. So, I can assure you there is a service access, intended for when the mechanism fails, near the doors.”
She surveyed the wall of stone as they walked up to the immense closed doors, then pointed at the base of the firebird statue. There was a gap between the plinth of the statue and the stone wall, easily missed with the angles and the sheer scale of the fifty-yard-high sculpture.
“There, I think.”
Brushfire got about four steps toward the gap before Paintrock managed to get ahead of her, the elvar managing a turn of speed that countered her longer legs.
“First officers only go first when the other option is the Captain,” Paintrock said brightly. “Trueshield, Moongleam, on me.”
A pair of var, a matched set of elvar and a Hammerhead gobvar, stepped up to flank the Master of Staves. Moongleam was a third-brother, which gave him enough familiarity to give Brushfire a reproving look.
Cat, she noted, had waited for the crew to take the lead. He wasn’t very far behind Paintrock’s picked pair of halberdiers, but he was clearly used to someone else leading.
She wondered how much doing so bothered him. She knew him well enough to know that he’d had a number of practices drilled into him in the High Court Navy that he neither thought much about nor actually liked.
In this case, though, Paintrock was right.
“Lead the way, Master Paintrock,” she said. She drew her wand as the three var approached the concealed entrance.
If there were any traps or surprises in this dead place, the entrance was the first place they would encounter them.
The dark alcove was the first place Brushfire found a use for the attack light-wisp she’d been learning. It hung overhead as Paintrock examined the door, everyone else outside the alcove.
“Everyone move back a bit,” Cat ordered. “If someone was being clever with nastiness, they’d trap out here, too.”
Brushfire stayed in her place, keeping a mental link to the light as the rest of the landing party spread out a bit.
“I don’t think there’s any traps,” Paintrock reported. “Can you get the light down… Oh.”
The light was smart enough to follow Paintrock’s gesture without any action on Brushfire’s part, flitting down to highlight the section he was pointing at before he finished speaking. The Master of Staves’ blue skin gleamed almost as much as the marble with the light that close, and Brushfire couldn’t see what he was doing.
“Well, thankfully, locks seem to be much the same everywhere and over all time,” he observed. He stepped back, the light moving with him as he pulled the door open.
The other side of the door was even darker than the alcove he stood in. Brushfire couldn’t see anything through it but the pure black of a space with neither lights nor windows.
“Forward,” she whispered to the light-wisp, which ducked through the portal and illuminated the room beyond.
Moongleam was there before Paintrock was, the gobvar delicately and politely blocking the Master—not technically an officer, but still one of the most important var on Void Flyer—from taking the lead himself.
A few moments of not-quite-confusion followed, but Brushfire and Cat were in the middle of the small group that entered the mechanism spaces of the mountain’s immense doors.
The space they’d found was as tall as the statue outside, allowing the lowest level to be clear of anything except the ladders leading up. Brushfire’s light-wisp gave her only the vaguest impression of vast masses of machinery above her head, and she sent the construct up into the works.
“Void.”
Brushfire wasn’t sure who had cursed, but she understood the instinct as she followed the wisp toward the top of the room. Immense cogwheels hung overhead, cast from iron and still, somehow, gleaming with lubricating oil.
Spaced equally through the machinery were eight great iron beams, presumably the rods that would pull the ancient stone doors open.
“That looks like it might still be in working order,” Cat said softly. “That makes no sense. Something has to be cleaning and oiling those cogs, or the iron would rust. They don’t need anything living to rust.”
“This may be machinery, but there is magic at play here,” Armand reminded softly.. “We need to find a way forward, into the mountain itself. Can we activate the doors?”
“No need,” Brushfire told him. “And probably a bad idea—even if this does still work, it will make noise and draw the attention of anything that is here. If it somehow missed the landing,” she conceded with a chuckle. “But there’s a door farther in over there.”
The door wasn’t concealed, but they’d been distracted by the heavy machinery hanging above them. At her gesture, Paintrock moved over to examine the door, and he sniffed derisively.
“The outer door lock was mediocre and this one is worse,” he observed. “Not the security I would have expected.”
“There would have been guards on each of these doors, I suspect,” Armand pointed out. “The Ironhands would not have trusted a mechanism to secure their mountain palace.
“Can you get us in?”
“Door wasn’t actually locked from this side,” Paintrock admitted, pulling it open. Something blocked their view out the door and he eyed it grimly.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It’s called a tapestry, Master Paintrock,” Cat said wryly. “The door is behind a hanging of some kind, to hide it. Unless I have missed my guess as to where we are, appearances would be everything in that hall.
“Be careful,” the Captain continued, looking back at Brushfire. She nodded her assurances to him. “We may be here for answers, but we’ve already learned how awake some of the dead things in the void can be.”
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Armand Bluestaves had studied the Ironhand Imperium, on and off, his entire life. The Dynasty’s existence was, after all, a significant portion of the reason why the Bluestaves Archive existed. His family had decided to make sure that the history of the time before the High Court was in charge wasn’t forgotten.
He knew they’d lost more than they’d kept, the handful of halvar, darvar and even elvar families that had tried to preserve knowledge and documents from the Imperium. So much had been lost that Armand figured the High Court had forgotten they were even suppressing anything.
Even with two var that lived five to six hundred dances, a thousand dances was enough time for a lot to be lost even without anyone burying things. With the elvar High Court pushing for all memory of a unified imperial state to be lost, only fragments of myth and legend survived.
Many of those fragments had survived in places like the Bluestaves Archive, and Armand had loved learning and books from a very young age. He hadn’t specifically studied the Ironhands until he’d turned to their charts to find a way around the border spheres, but they’d loomed large through the old books his family had kept.
And now he stood in a place that had been mentioned in those books. The Hall of Spheres, the texts had named it. While only half the size of the plaza outside, the Hall was entirely inside the mountain, one of the key formal entries to the Ironhands’ palace.
It was a cable long and half a cable wide, with a vaulted ceiling rising at least a hundred yards above them. And along those hundred-yard-high walls hung hundreds of banners. None of the symbols and flags were familiar to Armand, though he thought he’d seen some of them on the charts.
“Banners of subject kingdoms,” Cat said, before Armand could say a word. “You’d come here to pay fealty, I suppose, and you’d look to see your banner on the wall. Proof that you were valued. Proof that you were subordinate.”
“I don’t recognize any of them,” Armand admitted, glancing at his Captain. “Do you?”
“A handful. They’re archaic symbols, but they still show up from time to time.” Cat gestured to the one they’d just come through. “That one, though, was on the charts. It’s the flag for the Warden of Fire.”
Armand looked back at the hanging and nodded slowly. The symbols and iconography of the old charts still lost him occasionally, so he hadn’t realized that they’d integrated the stylized fort marking the Warden of Fire’s defenses into an emblem of the sphere itself.
Part of the symbol had been lost on the chart too, he judged. The hanging behind them had the stylized fort flanked by arcs of flame that rose to encircle it—but on the chart, a copy of a copy of a copy, the right-hand flame had been missed in one of the transcriptions.
It was still recognizable, confirming Cat’s point.
“I don’t see anything in this room that would give me an answer to… well, anything,” Armand murmured. He shifted his shoulder, urging the oracular spirit down onto his hand and looked down at the creature.
The spirit was a shortcut, allowing him some of the value of a more-complete divination without pulling out cards or dice—or the orreries and strange observers hidden in his tower back home. Like most shortcuts, though, it lacked the effectiveness of the full process.
Still…
“Anything here for us?” he asked it, lifting his arm like a falconer sending a bird off to the hunt.
The translucent cat-dragon rose into the air, circling above the party of crew and their limited pool of light. For a few moments, he thought circling was all it was going to do, and then the dragon flitted away into the darkness.
“All right,” Armand breathed. “I think we need more light.”
“Bogsong,” Cat said calmly. “With me.”
The two elvar raised their wands, conjuring more light-wisps like the one already hovering over their head. Smallwolf conjured a single wisp that joined Brushfire’s, expanding the pool of light around them.
Cat drew three more wisps out of the air, sending them up higher and brighter than his subordinates’. Armand wasn’t surprised Cat knew a version of the trick he’d been teaching the crew. Self-sustaining constructs were far too handy for an elvar Captain not to be trained in them.
Smiling, Armand set a trio of his own sparks into the air. His were physically smaller but just as bright and probably held a greater level of destructive power if he needed them to.
Eight lights spread out around the Hall, illuminating banner after banner, picking out colors and metallic threads that had no right to be as clear and vibrant as they were after a thousand dances of neglect.
It wasn’t until the lights were near the top of the Hall that the mural became visible. It was like a switch was flicked as one of the wisps rose high enough to cast light onto the concealed mirrors, turning the darkened ceiling into a sudden blaze of light.
Each of the pockets of the vaulted ceilings contained enough mirrors to light the entire roof of the hall, lighting up ancient paint and revealing the sphere chart emblazoned across the ceiling of the Hall of Spheres.
The hangings on the wall told the visitor who the spheres of the Ironhand Imperium were. The map on the roof told the visitor where the spheres of the Imperium were. Looking up at the mural, Armand could see that the charts his family had kept were a pale copy of the maps the Ironhand used themselves.
“Well… that’s something,” Cat said softly. “It would take us days to copy that onto a chart we could use, but I’d love to compare it to the copies you brought.”
“Me too,” Armand admitted. Not only was the mural immense—two hundred yards by a hundred—it was gorgeous, a work of art created for the glory of Dynasty, Imperium and the gods themselves.
It was not, he realized, where his dragon was headed. The oracular creature had stopped at one of the hangings, toward the inner end of the Hall and only three rows and twenty yards from the ground.
Armand set off to follow it, pausing for a moment to let one of Brushfire’s tribe go in front of him. He suspected that any traps there would be forged of magic, not mechanisms, and he didn’t have any sense of that.
