Trials (31 page)

A huge wave hit the boat to starboard, drenching the four fugitives. Iruki shook the fresh water from her face and hair and stared at the waves. Her heart shrank. The waves were reaching unbelievable heights now. Fear began to take hold of her.

“The boat won’t hold! The waves will overturn us!” she shouted to Yakumo, in horror.

“Keep on rowing, or the boat will capsize!” said Yakumo as they rode a huge wave.

It seemed to Iruki that they would not make it. But suddenly the boat began to rise, riding a wave as enormous as the one before. Lightning lit a nightmare sea, and the deafening blasts of thunder which followed spoke of an abysmal storm.

“We’re going to die!” she cried desperately.

“Keep calm and don’t stop rowing! said Yakumo. He was trying to maneuver the boat to take the next giant wave. Sonea and Lindaro, drenched and terrified rowed on without a word. They knew their lives were at stake.

Iruki glanced at her medallion and cursed bitterly to herself. It was all the fault of that wretched jewel from the Temple of Water.

“Curse the medallion! Curse the magic!”

And right then, as if the medallion had listened, Iruki felt it drawing on something within her chest, a pool of energy unknown to her. And it flashed again, like a beacon in the night.

A giant whirlwind began to form in the center of the lethal storm!

The lightening was getting worse, zigzagging amid the surrounding darkness illuminating waves of unbelievable height. In the midst of that killer storm a gigantic whirlwind was beginning to swallow sea and sky alike.

“By the Light! It’s not a storm, it’s a cyclone! We’re lost!” cried Lindaro as he watched the huge swirl rising into the infinite blackness of the sky.

The boat was a tiny nutshell beside the gigantic size of the whirlwind.

“The cyclone has generated an enormous eddy! It’s something that doesn’t often happen on the water!” explained Sonea as she contemplated the incredible strength and voracity of the immense natural funnel.

“It’s swallowing everything! It’s going to swallow us!” shouted Iruki as she saw it growing in size and virulence. The wind had the strength of a hurricane.

“Row backwards! Let’s get away!” ordered Yakumo in a desperate attempt to avoid perishing in the maw of that monster of a thousand winds.

Despairingly, the four began to row in the opposite direction.

“The vortex is too big; it’s going to eat us up!” cried Sonea.

The cyclone was gathering shape under the black, terrifying sky, painting spirals of hopelessness. The giant began to approach them over the lake. The four fugitives could barely hold on to the boat with the hurricane thrashing it as if it were paper. The boards were beginning to work loose with the violent shaking of the killing storm.

“We’re going to die!” cried Sonea.

“Hold tight!” yelled Yakumo.

“By the spirits of the deep! We’re all going to die!” cried Iruki.

“May the almighty Light take pity on our souls!” prayed Lindaro.

“We won’t die!” cried Yakumo bravely. “Hold fast! We’ll manage to ride the storm! Hold tight and fast!”

A tremendous bolt of lightning exploded in the black sky behind the Assassin, accompanied by a deafening blast of thunder. The sky split open.

The gigantic whirlwind came down on them. Its vortex generated such an abyss that it seemed to reach down to the very bottom of the lake. Everything around it disappeared, sucked in by the devastating force of the vortex. The water itself gyrated in giant spirals which climbed to the dark heavens.

They were trapped by terror.

The phenomenal whirlwind reached them. It gulped them down with devastating power, pushing the boat up to the sky, trapped in a giant spiral of pure terror.

“Noooooooo!” screamed Sonea.

“It’s the end!” shouted Iruki.

And in that moment of absolute despair, the Ilenian medallion round Iruki’s neck flashed again with blinding intensity.

The great vortex swallowed them up.

Blackness.

Silence.

“Iruki! Wake up!” Yakumo’s voice was urgent.

Iruki felt herself shaken. But she could not open her eyes, did not wish to open them, knew the whirl was devouring them, taking them to the abode of the evil spirits.

“Iruki, it’s me, Yakumo. Wake up.”

As she heard her beloved’s voice, her fear began to vanish from her heart. After a moment she managed to open her eyes. She found herself in a cave, whose strange limestone walls were encrusted with crystalline minerals which shone with an unusual mother-of-pearl sheen. The floor of the cave was also limestone, and Sonea and Lindaro were still lying on it unconscious. Iruki looked round the cave, wondering. She noticed that part of the ground they were standing on had disappeared, most likely crumbled and submerged in the water she now looked upon.

“What’s happening? Are we alive, Yakumo?”

“Yes, we’re alive. I don’t know how but alive we are, although we should be dead. Nothing could survive such a whirlwind, nothing. All the same, here we are. I can only assume it’s because of the magic of the Ilenian medallion.”

“And what about them?” she asked uneasily, pointing at the other two.

“Unconscious but alive. I just checked. I thought it best not to wake them for now, until we know where we are and what happened.”

Iruki looked around the unusual cave and felt glad that the priest and the librarian were also safe. “They seem to be kind-hearted people. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to them. Yakumo, what is this place?”

“I don’t know, Iruki, I’m absolutely at a loss. It looks like the inside of a cave, but I have no idea where we are. I do suspect… let me check…”

Yakumo walked to the water’s edge. With a look at Iruki, he said: “I’ll be back presently, don’t worry.” Then he dived head first into the water.

“Be careful!” she cried.

Moments that seemed endless passed before Yakumo resurfaced. Iruki’s heart beat faster as worry cramped her stomach.

Nimbly as a cat, Yakumo emerged from the water. “I was right after all. I know this will sound crazy to you, but we’re at the bottom of the lake, in a cave in the deep…”

“But… that’s impossible. The spirit of air dwells in this cavern. That’s why we can breathe. If the spirit of air wasn’t present we’d die. Those are the laws of Mother Steppes and they always apply. But the water does not flood the cave. That’s against Nature’s teachings. It shouldn’t be like that, should it?”

Lindaro and Sonea woke up with the explanations.

“Not necessarily…” said Sonea, massaging the back of her neck.

“No? How can we be at the bottom of the lake and still breathe? It should all be submerged. The spirit of air should have left this place, to be replaced by the spirit of water. This goes against nature. The laws of Mother Nature have been violated in this cave.”

Lindaro looked at Sonea in some surprise.

“I’m totally with Iruki on this. This place defies the laws of nature and the teaching of the Light. The water should have submerged and covered this cave if, as Yakumo says, we’re at the bottom of the lake!”

Sonea stood up. When she had composed herself somewhat, she explained:

“It might be just that the cave has a great bubble of air in it, and because of that the water can’t penetrate. The pressure of the water can’t overcome that of the air bubble.”

They all looked at her in puzzlement.

“When a boat capsizes, if it’s well built it can sink with a certain amount of air inside. That air can’t escape because of the pressure of the water around the boat. In some cases, men have been able to save themselves by breathing this air under water. They study this at the Great Library.”

“I shan’t oppose you in this,” said Lindaro, sounding extremely doubtful. “You’re the scholar, and you have more knowledge of advanced sciences than this humble man of faith.”

“Or it could be due to some powerful Ilenian magic,” said Yakumo.

“That might be…” admitted Sonea.

“Whatever the case, we’re alive, we’re breathing air under water and we have to find a way out,” said Iruki, rather more calmly.

The four adventurers composed themselves as best they could and prepared to go into the cave. They went along a narrow corridor of curved walls, white as lime, with encrustations of strange luminous minerals.

“Let’s go on very carefully,” warned Yakumo. “I don’t have a very good feeling about this place.”

“The way we’ve reached it makes me think of magic,” said Lindaro.

“I agree with Lindaro. I guess the reasons and the means point to some very powerful kind of magic,” said Sonea.

Somewhat fearfully, they went on until they reached a great oval chamber. Walls, floor and ceiling were of a polished lime-white, as if the whole chamber had been smoothed with infinite care. In the middle of the hall several mysterious symbols had been etched on the floor. Iruki and Yakumo went to look closer.

“Those strange symbols again,” said Iruki.

Yakumo knelt and stretched out his hand. “Yes, I can feel the power emanating from them.”

Sonea and Lindaro came to stand by the symbols. They studied them carefully in silence.

“Do I gather from your comments that you’ve come across symbols like this before?” said Lindaro nonchalantly.

“Yes, we’ve seen this type of symbol in another cave,” said Iruki.

“And, was it in that cave that you found the medallion?” Sonea asked, also nonchalantly.

“That’s right…”

“Why all these questions about the symbols and the medallion?” asked Yakumo, with suspicion.

Sonea and Lindaro exchanged nervous looks.

The Assassin put his hands on his daggers: “You’d better tell me all you know right away.”

“All right, don’t get upset… There’s no need to resort to violence, we’ll tell you everything,” said Lindaro now very nervous. “Sonea and I are here for a very concrete reason. We’re looking to solve a great mystery. We’re trying to decipher the Enigma of the Ilenians.”

“What do you mean, you’re here? Were you looking for this place?” Iruki was looking at both scholars with her brow furrowed.

“Well, not exactly… we didn’t know the exact location but we knew it was in the lake…” stuttered Lindaro apologetically.

“How could you even know of the existence of this place?” said Yakumo, with a threatening voice. His gaze was distrustful.

“I can explain. Calm down, we’re not hiding anything,” Sonea said in a soothing tone. “The strange symbols you see on the floor and the hieroglyphs they make up belong to a very advanced civilization which disappeared mysteriously more than three thousand years ago: The Ilenians, the Lost Civilization. Both Lindaro and I have spent most of our lives studying them, the few remnants they left behind.”

“Did this civilization you speak of use ancient, powerful magic?” asked Yakumo, as if this was something he wanted to check.

“That’s right, extremely powerful magic,” said Sonea. Lindaro nodded in corroboration.

Iruki was very interested in what she was hearing. It fitted perfectly with the dramatic events she had lived through in the Temple of Water.

“What brought you here?” she asked.

Sonea looked at Lindaro, who nodded. The Librarian came to stand in front of Iruki and Yakumo and without omitting a single detail, told them the strange things which had happened in the Great Library when she had unwittingly activated the Ilenian grimoire, and the decision they had reached when they found the place the ancient mysterious book had shown them.

Yakumo and Iruki remained silent, digesting what Sonea had told them. After a moment Iruki asked: “And where did the grimoire Lindaro sent you come from?”

Sonea looked at the priest, who smiled back at her.

“We’d better sit down. The story I have to tell is a long one, and the details are very important.”

They sat down on the floor around the Ilenian symbols, and Lindaro told them about his incredible adventure in the Temple of Ether, under the great Lighthouse of Egia. He told them about his companions, Komir, Hartz and Kayti, of the monsters with the body of a man and the head of an animal, of the Ilenian magic, of the Guardian Mage and the sarcophagus containing the King of the lost civilization. When he had finished his tale, Iruki gave Yakumo a look of understanding. Here were answers to a puzzle whose pieces were beginning to fit together.

“And what did you find in the Ilenian King’s sarcophagus?” she wanted to know.

“Some very valuable jewels and a great two-handed sword, bewitched with Ilenian magic,” said Lindaro.

Iruki unsheathed her Ilenian sword and showed it to the priest, holding it out with extended palms.

“Were the engravings at all similar to these?”

Lindaro examined it carefully. Sonea stretched her neck to look at the sword curiously.

“The symbols are the same as those on Hartz’s sword. There’s no doubt it’s Ilenian, is there, Sonea?” Lindaro looked at the small scholar as she scratched her dark hair with an intrigued expression on her face.