Warrior Prime, page 27
part #1 of Ink Mage Legacy Series
The fish’s open mouth arched ten feet above the canal. They craned their necks gawking up at it as they passed underneath and into the enormous dome.
Peyne heard a slight splash and looked down. He stood in an inch of water.
The four of them dropped to their bellies immediately and began to drink. At first, Peyne simply stuck his lips directly into the water, sucking from the floor of the canal. The water had a strong metallic taste, but Peyne didn’t care. To him it was the sweetest, most refreshing thing he’d ever put into his mouth. He started scooping in water with his hands, looked up briefly to see the others doing likewise. He splashed a handful onto his face.
Nobody talked for the next few minutes. Only the sounds of slurping and lips smacking and contented sighs.
When Peyne’s belly was tight and full, he forced himself to stop drinking. He didn’t want to make himself sick. He paused now to take in his surroundings.
The pool of water was only an inch deep, but it covered the floor of the canal, leading into the dome. This part of the canal must have been subtly lower, just enough to keep the water from flowing onward.
Peyne stood, moving farther into the dome as the others continued to drink.
It was cooler beneath the dome. Twenty feet ahead of him, the canal terminated at a gigantic door, apparently made of the same metal as everything else. As he approached, the water became slightly deeper. When he was close enough to place his palm against the door’s cool metal, the water was three inches over his ankle.
It seemed an extravagant amount of water after all the time spent in the desert.
The door looked formidable. Again, made from the same metal as the dome itself, it looked like it joined in the middle, two heavy bars with interlocking mechanisms keeping it sealed.
But perhaps not completely sealed after all.
A slight trickling sound drew his attention. Peyne ran his hand down the crack where the two halves of the door met. Water was coming through, leaking through the crack, but not much. He wouldn’t have noticed at all if the trickling sound hadn’t tipped him off. How long would it have to drip like that to form a pool like this? Months? Years? A long time but certainly not as long as the city had been deserted. So the leak had begun relatively recently, he supposed. The builders of this city had been far more advanced than today’s, but nothing lasted forever.
He bent and scooped in another mouthful of water, wondering if the metallic taste came from the door. Maybe it was some kind of storage tank.
Peyne heard the others splashing up behind him and turned.
“Is there water behind this door?” Peyne asked Maurizan.
Peyne wasn’t sure why he thought she would know. She’d never been here before, was seeing the place for the first time just as he was.
And yet some instinct told him she did know. Maybe not everything. But something. “You knew we’d find this.”
Maurizan shook her head but with hesitation. “Not this exactly.”
“But something.”
The hesitation again, but then she nodded. Her eyes flicked to Zayda and Jaff.
Everyone waited.
Maurizan sighed. “I need to tell you a story.”
She led them up a narrow metal staircase that wound around the outside of the dome, taking them gradually upward.
“Is this strictly necessary?” If not for the water, Peyne wouldn’t have been able to climb so many stairs. As it was, his legs still ached. He preferred the cool shade underneath the dome.
“I want to show you something,” Maurizan said. “It’ll help my story make sense.”
“What a view this must have been at one time,” Zayda said with wonder. “A shame what happened.”
They arrived at the top of the dome where there was a ten-by-ten landing encircled by a metal railing. A large curved brazier sat in the middle of the landing. This evidently was why the stairs existed, Peyne thought. Was the brazier a signal, lit for specific ceremonies?
Maurizan called them to the south side of the landing. She leaned against the rail and asked, “What does a city need to live?”
“My father would say a good economy,” Zayda said. “Trade.”
“Not to thrive,” Maurizan said. “Just to live. The basics.”
“Water,” Jaff said. “Obviously.”
“Food,” Zayda said.
“Which can’t be grown without water,” Jaff said. “Nor can you keep livestock without water.”
“Water. And food too,” Maurizan said. “What else?”
“Wine,” Peyne guessed.
Maurizan frowned at him.
Peyne shrugged.
“What else?” prompted Maurizan. “What does a body need in a climate like this?”
A long, thoughtful silence.
And then Zayda said, “Salt.”
Maurizan smiled. “This is a story of water and salt. Peyne, you wanted to know what was on the map in my head, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Rivers,” Maurizan told him. “Or what had been rivers once upon a time.”
Peyne nodded, crossed his arms. “Okay. Let’s hear the story.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The story.
When Maurizan was young, she’d been given the Prime. Other tattoos came later. She understood firsthand the power of an ink mage. She’d seen an ink mage destroy a city simply by calling the wind and creating an enormous wave of seawater. The variety of tattoos and the powers they granted fascinated her.
So for the next twenty years she traveled the world in search of ink magic.
She quickly discovered that the study of ink magic was also the study of history. The origins of the arcane were thought by the learned to be in Fyria, but not the Fyria of today. An ancient Fyria now lost to the ages.
And so Maurizan searched. She chased rumors, cobbled together scraps of information from here and there, piecing together legend and lore, leaving no stone unturned. She haunted civilization’s great libraries and listened to stories told by the elders of any tiny village she happened upon. Slowly a picture began to form, and over the years, Maurizan began to feel she intimately knew a city she wasn’t sure existed.
The key, of course, was the aquifer.
Find any village or town in Fyria, and it would soon be obvious it had been built around a well or along a river. Jaff had been correct. Farming, the raising of livestock, life itself depended upon water. And so when the greatest store of clean water in Fyria was discovered, naturally a city was built on top of it. Who had done this? A sultan or king of old? Perhaps. The information Maurizan had unearthed suggested one of the original wizards himself.
There were no salt mines in Fyria. Not one. But the sea provided ample salt. It was extracted on the coast and carried inland and traded for other goods and services.
The lost city perched atop a plateau next to what once had been an inland sea. A salt sea. By whatever luck or blessing of the gods that made it possible, a plentiful source of salt and a limitless supply of freshwater had existed side by side in this place without contaminating one another.
And so a great city rose and prospered. Not only were the wizards more advanced then, but so too were the architects, engineers, physicians, and so on.
From the city sprang three rivers. One flowed more or less to the east. The second west and the third south. Swaths of green flourished along these rivers. Villages were built. Farms raised crops. Foodstuffs flowed into the city. Salt and manufactured goods flowed back out. A thriving, unparalleled paradise.
These were guesses, but good guesses, Maurizan thought, based on puzzle pieces she’d been trying to fit together for two decades.
How long had this magnificent civilization stood? A hundred years? Five hundred?
But all things end.
The calamity was so sudden and utterly complete that it had nearly wiped the city from all memory.
Maurizan had long pondered what had caused the great wave. She’d talked to the southern islanders on one of her visits there, and an old woman had told her offshore earthquakes could generate such waves. Or perhaps it had been the work of some mage.
In the end, what caused it didn’t matter. The wave hit. A destructive force several times larger than the wave she’d witnessed so long ago in Sherrik.
The city took the brunt of the hit, but by no means was the catastrophe an isolated incident. The momentum of the wave carried along all three rivers, a massive surge of water, smashing riverside villages as it went, sweeping away huts like handfuls of twigs. The paths of the rivers funneled the destruction hundreds of miles and into the oceans on both coasts.
Since the water was salt, it ruined all farmland. Nothing would ever grow there again, even if anyone had been alive to plant.
And then the rivers themselves vanished.
Slowly, inevitably, the desert took over. The region became so inhospitable that travelers shunned it. And several generations later, nobody could think of a good reason to risk journeying there. Stories? Oh, yes. A lost city filled with untold wonders. The foolish could risk their lives on such nonsense. Not the wise.
A lesser empire grew up along the coast and the rivers in the north. Sultans had vowed to return Fyria to its former glory with only the barest inkling of what that glory had looked like.
Few found their way to the city now. Fewer still returned.
And Maurizan had spent half her life getting here.
“What do you mean the rivers vanished?” Jaff asked.
“It’s not unheard of,” Peyne said. “The courses of rivers can change over the centuries or dry up altogether as the climate of a region shifts.” In spite of his best efforts to avoid his tutors as a child, some of the learning had evidently stuck.
Jaff hit Peyne with the side eye. “Always the expert.”
“Peyne’s right,” Maurizan said. “It can happen that way. But I don’t think that’s the case here.”
Jaff crossed his arms. “And?”
“I think the rivers were turned off,” Maurizan said.
They stared blankly at her.
Maurizan shifted nervously. She must have known how her theory sounded. “I’m actually not being figurative.”
The blanks stares did not abate.
“Look.” Maurizan turned and pointed at the canal they’d used to approach the dome. “One river leading east.” She shifted her pointer finger to the next canal. “A river going south.” She pointed at the final canal. “And one going all the way to the western ocean.”
Very slowly, the blank stares became incredulous.
Finally Jaff said, “You’re telling me they created their own rivers? I don’t believe it.”
“I’m forced to agree with Jaff,” Peyne said. “Aquifers are replenished by rain, and it doesn’t rain in Fyria. The biggest aquifer in the world would eventually run dry.”
“I’m thirty-four years old,” Jaff said. “I’ve seen it rain four times.”
“You didn’t even think they were canals,” Maurizan said heatedly.
“Fine. I’ll concede the canals,” Jaff said. “I do not concede rivers.”
“Peyne said climates can shift.” It was Zayda finally speaking up. “For all we know, it rained every week back then.”
“I’m not saying I have all the answers,” Maurizan said. “I don’t know everything about rivers or aquifers or wizards. I wasn’t even sure I believed this city would be here until I saw it. But now that I have seen it, I have to think almost anything’s possible.”
Peyne waved his hand in front of him, as if trying to banish the clutter of guesses the conversation had become. “Look, we’re going about this all wrong. Let’s say the rivers were made by the ancients. And let’s suppose they did turn them off. So what?”
Maurizan sighed. “Because King Gant wants me to turn them back on again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“You know Gant?” Peyne asked. “Wait, he wants the rivers back on? No, forget that. You know Gant? He sent you here?”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Maurizan said. “Gant was more interested in the ink magic. He knew I’d been investigating it for years and that the key lay in Fyria.”
Peyne nodded as he listened. Ambassador Korick had told him something similar. If Fyria was raising an army of ink mages, then Gant needed to know. That had been Peyne’s mission until he’d postponed it to help win Zayda’s freedom.
“But when I told Gant my three-river theory, it intrigued him,” Maurizan said. “It’s why I sought you out, Jaff. If people had another place to go, out from under the sultan’s thumb—”
“And I told you then we’re not separatists,” Jaff said. “We want to remake Fyria into something we can be proud of again. Not run away and start over somewhere.”
“But there are separatists,” Maurizan said. “Anyway, Gant didn’t specifically tell me to turn on the rivers. How could he have guessed that? It’s impossible. He simply told me to show them. Show the people of Fyria such a place exists. Then whatever happens will happen.”
“And why would anyone in Helva care about such a thing?” Jaff asked. “For what purpose?”
“To stir the pot,” Peyne said. “To make the sultan look inward instead of north toward Helva.”
“We don’t need foreigners stirring anything,” Jaff said.
“It’s what you and the rest of the insurgents are doing.”
“We’re not foreigners!”
“We should turn them on.” Zayda’s voice was so quiet and calm that it somehow demanded their attention more than if she’d shouted. “The rivers. All three. Let them flow again.”
“You agree with them?” Jaff didn’t use the word foreigners again, but it was clear what he meant.
“I agree to turn them on,” Zayda said. “But not to distract the sultan or win a war or do anything like that. We should do it because it’s an amazing thing. An impossible thing. How can we come this far and look something impossible in the face and not try? Because if ever this place had been green and living, how could we not know that? Not know how it happened? We must know. I demand to know.”
They all looked at each other.
“Works for me,” Maurizan said.
It had been only the promise of an opportunity to prove them all wrong that finally got Jaff to agree.
But Peyne could see it plain enough on the man’s face. Curiosity. Zayda had been right. To come all this way and not investigate such ancient wonders? Folly.
The four circled the dome a few times, attempting to divine the workings of the three great doors. The other two didn’t leak. Knocking on the doors produced a sound like knocking on a great tank of water.
“If we open the doors, we can release the rivers,” Maurizan said. “I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t see levers or crank wheels anywhere,” Peyne said. “And those interlocking mechanisms . . . well, we’re not going to force them open. That’s for sure.”
“We’re missing something obvious, I’m sure. Keep looking.”
They fanned out, each methodically searching some section of the dome’s interior. The structure actually consisted of two domes. The large outer dome was merely a hollow covering for the structure beneath, the huge ornate fish affixed to the outside, their gaping mouths set to vomit the rivers in three directions. The inner dome was somewhat smaller but seemed to be made of a thicker metal. Was that because it was holding back tons of water? Peyne could only guess. The enormous doors occupied three sides of the dome. He casually circled the structure to the fourth side.
Before he could begin his examination, Peyne heard someone coming up behind him, turned to see Zayda approaching. They’d had the presence of mind not to toss aside the empty skins when they’d run out of water in the desert. Zayda had three of the skins, refilled, slung over her shoulder.
“I have to go,” she said. “I’ve already told the others.”
He blinked. “Go where?”
Zayda flicked the collar around her neck, and it rang dully. A wan smile. “This is why I came, remember? There are answers somewhere in this city, and that domed palace is my guess. I need to get this thing off.”
“But . . . but . . .” He gestured vaguely at the dome and its environs. “We’re turning on rivers and whatnot. It was your idea.”
“It was Maurizan’s idea. I just agreed,” Zayda said. “And anyway, three can do this as well as four. Three of you for the three rivers. That’s good symmetry, don’t you think?”
Peyne frowned. “I don’t like the idea of you mucking around an ancient lost city all by yourself.”
“I’m an ink mage. Is there really anything extra you could do to protect me?”
“I still don’t like it.”
She stepped closer to him, touched his cheek. She tilted her head up and leaned in, lips softly touching his. They stood like that a moment, and then she stepped back, smiling, and he could see she was trying to be cheerful.
“You’re not allowed to get yourself killed while I’m away,” she said.
“You be careful too.”
She gave him a final peck on the cheek, then turned to go, leaving at a jog as if she wanted to be away before changing her mind.
Peyne watched her round the dome and vanish from sight. The possibility of not seeing her again struck him harder than he’d anticipated.
He immediately turned back to the task at hand, trying to put her out of his mind. Zayda had been right. That he might go with her as some sort of guardian was laughable. She was an ink mage.
Whereas Peyne was just some fool who’d somehow stumbled into this mess.
He ran his hand across the cool, smooth metal of the doorless side of the dome. This was going to take longer that Maurizan thought. They could be here for weeks trying to figure out the doors’ mechanisms, and Peyne was acutely aware there was a wizard two days behind them.
But we can’t be sure of that. We don’t have Maurizan’s bird spying for us anymore. They could have caught up. They could be here any minute. Or maybe they ran out of water and perished in the desert.
One could hope.
