Stardeep (9 page)

These children guess too much. Stardeep’s defense is imperiled.

“Yes!” she agreed aloud with het blade, not the child. The sword lent her a focus completely new to her experience. It was almost like having Nangulis himself at her side. When he was alive, he had called her his Bright Star…

“You are? But that’s wonderful!” exclaimed the boy, misunderstanding her response. He had no inkling of the death sentence silently handed down by the Blade Cerulean.

She closed the distance between them with five quick steps and brought the sword around. When the blade swept through the space beneath the boy’s jaw, she hatdly felt a tug on the hilt. The youth’s head rolled into the underbrush. Fluids sprayed. She blinked blood from her eyes.

The murdered elf s companions stood frozen in soul-stopped hotror. She continued moving, making one harvestlike motion after another, taking advantage of the interlopers’ shock. Sword in hand, she moved to eliminate Stardeep’s liability.

Her lips moved, too, but Angul’s words were in her mouth. “We do not suffer abominations.”

She learned that day that Angul impelled where dry reason faltered. Angul excited where debate and philosophy failed to motivate. With Angul in hand came purpose, exaltation, and the ultimate high of being part of a spectacular moment. A moment in which Angul delivered triumph in the face of insurmountable odds…

The scteams of the children, as she cut them down, penetrated her blade-given conviction. She paused, wiping blood from her face with the back of one gauntleted hand, her eyes blinking. Abominations… ? What in the name of the Well was she doing? These were children! And she had… she was…

An arrow bloomed in her abdomen. She shrieked, went down on one knee. A girl had run when the others had remained within Kiril’s fatal reach. She’d escaped the swordswoman’s initial onslaught. But she stopped to loose an arrow, despite the fear trembling her limbs. The half-elf girl pulled another arrow to her bowstring.

Kiril struggled onto both feet, her breath ragged. Angul flared and the ache in her stomach melted. Like moral distractions, pain was a diversion to the glorious certitude Angul burned to dispense. With the pain, her moment of confusion, too, was swept away in cerulean light.

She raised the sword and his blue-white light doubled, then redoubled. Sunrise came early under the branches of Aglarond. Or was it sunset?

Kiril swatted the girl’s second arrow out of the air with a twitch of her wrist. The half-elf turned to run. The swordswoman launched Angul through the air as if he were a spear.

Her aim was true.

When all was quiet again, she gathered the bodies and burned them on a pyre. To do so, she sheathed Angul.

Latei, she retrieved from the heaped ashes the fire-cleaned skull of the girl, the elf archer, the only one who’d put up any

kind of fight. She decided she would bring it back to Stardeep as a trophy, a sign of her vigilance in keeping the hidden dungeon stronghold safe.

As the fire burned down, she resisted drawing her blade again. Instead, she fingered the skull, looking at it, worrying it between her hands. Something was hideously significant about the object she held so tightly. It indicated something pottentous, but like a puzzle box, she couldn’t solve its significance. She stood, thinking to return down the Causeway before the access failed. But…

The longer she avoided contact with the blade, the more the blade’s influence waned.

Finally, her captive conscience burst through the final, benumbed layers of Angul’s influence.

Kiril screamed, long and loud. She collapsed to het knees, clutching the skull in front of her, her eyes bulging in disbelief. It couldn’t be! She hadn’t! But the warm, fire-blackened skull in her bloodstained grasp refused to retreat to the phantasmal state she needed it to be.

Then Kiril went insane.

Kiril’s voice broke, but she managed to croak, “I slaughtered them.”

The elf looked down, tears streaking her cheeks. Gage whispered, “Damn.”

“It broke me. I’ve been running since then, running from what I did. But I…”

“… you kept the thing. Why?” interjected Gage.

Why hadn’t she gotten rid of the sword? At first, she was crazed, incoherent; she couldn’t quite recollect what she’d done in the year after she’d slain the children. One thing was certain; she had not returned to Stardeep. By fleeing, she renounced her position as Keeper and her identity as a star elf.

She’d thrown it all away. But Angul, she kept.

Even mad, she couldn’t bring herself to cast him away. And now, ten more years, at least, had got behind her.

Aloud, she said, “I couldn’t leave Angul behind! He’s all I had left of Nangulis! But he’s a curse, too, don’t I flecking know? And now you tell me Sathra dealt with someone called Nangulis. Impossible! Isn’t it? Where is she? I must talk to her.” Kiril made to rise, determination firing her eyes.

“Hold on!” Gage reached across the table and put a restraining hand on her shoulder. “After I got hold of the sword and got clear of her vault, she attacked me again. With the blade in hand, I killed her. So, uh… sorry. She can’t tell you anything because she’s out of the picture. But…”

“But?”

“She indicated the fellow she was working for hailed from someplace called Stardeep.”

Kiril shook her head, tears again tracing tracks on her face. She said, “Stardeep. After all these years, it reaches out to me.”

Slowly mastering herself, the elf considered. The name, the theft, the possibility, howevet minute, that Nangulis might somehow be among the living again. She couldn’t ignore that chance.

“Stardeep has called, and I must answer,” she decreed, tears breaking around a sudden unexpected smile.

Stardeep, Epoch Chamber

Cynosure?” Telarian asked the empty air of the Epoch Chamber.

“Yes?” said the disembodied golem’s cultured voice. “I’m done for now. Connect me to my quarters.” “Very well. Hold still…”

Telarian waited for the idol to set up the transfer. Cynosure always required a span of moments to process each new point-to-point telepottation in the Outer Bastion. Of course, such tricks were not allowed at all in the Inner Bastion, which contained the Well. That is, they were not normally allowed, but Telarian had been working on contingencies…

Just one more thing he’d failed to inform Delphe about. As with everything else, he justified keeping her in the dark on some of his activities because her role in Stardeep was so time consuming. Yet her dedication was futile. Her vigil at the edge of the Well was doomed to failure. He now understood, thanks to his visions, Xxiphu would one day rise whether or not the Traitor gained his freedom.

A blue flash and piercing odor, a moment of disorientation,

and Telarian was back in his private room, a few levels above where he’d secreted the doorless Epoch Chamber. His room opened off a common hall in the Inner Bastion.

His unsteady hands found the neck of a wine bottle, then a glass. Not even the finest vintage could withstand neglect, and the wine in the bottle had turned vinegary and rancid. He should have finished it sooner after opening it a few tendays past, but he drank alone these days, and in moderation. Hard to finish a bottle before it turned sour. But his own cussed fastidiousness wouldn’t permit him to throw it out and uncork a new one. Waste not, want not.

His thoughts remained on Delphe. For the thousandth time he wondered if perhaps he shouldn’t bring her up to date on his preparations. Would she understand the risk they must undertake to avoid the disastrous certainty he had foreseen?

No, he didn’t think she would. In fact, she would likely declare him mad with one bieath, and disown him with the next.

Madness. In the lonely passage of time between shifts, he sometimes wondered. There might be a tinge of madness to his actions. Then again, madness is what those with limited imaginations called inspiration, imagination, and even revelation.

He knew first hand of places where doctrine had taken firm hold, where free thinkers and visionaries were abhorred. But without revelation, civilization’s zenith would yet hunker in caves, drawing stick figures by firelight.

True, some prophets walked too close to the line separating inspiration from crazed imprecation. But the ones remembered as paradigm-changers and world-savers far after the fact were derided by their contemporaries. And though they sometimes faltered and fell, others in their wake benefited from the sacrifice.

Telarian’s problem was he couldn’t wait for the historians of later ages to acclaim his actions as heroic and necessary. What he had to do in the present, without the context the future would bring, was hard to explain to someone who doubted the effectiveness of divination magic to begin with.

Like Delphe. If he told her the truth, her apprehension concerning the predictive arts would lead to questions, accusations. Action. He couldn’t afford strife. It was the same conclusion as ever before: he would proceed as he had been.

Thankfully, convincing Cynosure to side with him relied less on the art of persuasion and more on technical wizardry. Telarian had a knack for golem and construct enchantment, despite his primary focus in oracular insight. He had surreptitiously applied that skill to the linked nodes making up Cynosure’s mind. After a year of gradual tinkering, the sentient idol was now partially under Telarian’s control.

Cynosure was free-willed no longer, though its greater mind didn’t realize a lesser portion of itself was almost completely commandeered. Despite this success, Telarian remained stymied; none of the tactics he’d devised had proven capable of overriding Cynosure’s control over the Inner Bastion. It was too fundamental to the constructs creation. He eventually realized he would never succeed in gaining complete control of the sentient idol. It had become necessary to pursue other options. Of course, even if he had complete control of the construct, another tool was also required.

He trailed a finger up the length of his sword scabbard. What would Delphe do if she found out about Nis?

He shuddered. He removed the scabbard from his belt, careful not to touch the pommel of the dark blade.

His conscience skittered across the surface of his resolve. Too late. He’d done it; he couldn’t undo what he’d forged.

He had learned the secret of the armory’s existence, a place created by the previous Keepers, with Cynosure’s help. In the

armory, he found the vessel containing the split soul.

It was a half-soul, separated from its lighter half. Before being split, all the soul’s goodness, all its righteousness, and all its morality were strained and infused into an animate blade of virtuous light: Angul. With that singula! blade, the Traitor’s most successful bid for escape in a millennia was foiled. The success of that event was known to all Keepets, though none realized what had gone into making the Blade Cerulean. None now recalled the sacrifice of the man who made the blade’s existence possible.

A soul split along philosophical lines has two parts, as there is no light without darkness. Sin would not exist without morality. What is certainty without doubt to measure it against? The half-soul Telarian found was the detritus left over from Angul’s forging.

Why the half-sentient thing had been preserved, when it should have been destroyed, was a real question. Perhaps the Keeper who forged it with Cynosure’s aid was too sentimental? Or had fate stepped in on Telarian’s side? Either way, that lapse was Telarian’s opportunity.

His elaborate plan took form in the ashes of dream-tossed nights, as so many of his divinatory visions had since he’d come to Stardeep and looked into the Well. Something had opened in him then, and now his best insights came unbidden. In fact, it was during just such a divinatory dream that he first learned of the atmory, and the stored half-soul. The future had seized his eyes and shown him the way.

Upon waking, Telarian asked Cynosure to transfer him to the armory, despite the idol’s protestations that no such place existed in Stardeep. But Telarian trusted his vision, and overruled the idol. Cynosure teleported him into a space that didn’t exist on any map—and found himself where Stardeep’s history had been fashioned.

A dark, decommissioned vault, it contained a furnace,

forge, magical fire, and masterwork tools capable of forging weaponry. And most importantly, in a darkened alcove resided a glass vessel where the fractured thing dwelled.

Soon thereafter, Telarian began his sword-forging project. He knew little of the craft, so his dreams began to instruct him.

He recalled how he carefully decanted the half-soul, inky and deceitful, into the cast already seething with molten steel. With Cynosure’s halting aid, he mixed soul and metal into a singular bound thing.

He remembered beating the howling, screaming shaft of white-hot metal. It cried for release from torturous pain, as if alive. He could still smell the acrid salt and oil of the quenching.

When he removed the blade from the bath, its white-hot glow was gone. But it was only as Telarian tempered the blade over the ensuing tenday that all trace of hue slowly faded, until it was utterly colorless.

The naked blade was like a blind spot, a gap in perception. It took the name Nis, the Blade Umber. When Telarian grasped its hilt…

When he grasped the hilt, he forgot fear. His disordered thoughts cleared. The solutions to problems and difficulties he’d noted in other parts of Stardeep rushed upon his brain as clarity washed over him, and cold logic grasped his heart and squeezed. As he caught his breath, it seemed to him that nothing was really beyond him—no problem couldn’t be overcome, nor challenge met, if only he was able to devise the appropriately reasoned plan. Lucidity wracked his frame, and his mind ran and leaped, but could not win free. Some part of him did escape, and darted out upon a dim plain of disquietude. But it was fragile, easily eviscerated.

Telarian gasped, allowing his reverie to lapse. He took another large gulp of the nearly rancid wine. He’d learned

not to touch the hilt. The time for drawing Nis would come soon enough.