Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 164. The Heights

The enormous eagle brooding over her eggs was clearly disturbed.

Liv, crouched on a plane of blue mana fixed just close enough to the crest of the summit to allow her and her friends to get a glimpse of the nest, could imagine the bird’s point of view. Her mate had gone out to hunt, and never returned. The eagle didn’t want to leave her eggs, but sooner or later she would need to eat. Sooner, most likely: for a mana beast that large, an enormous amount of food would have to be found each day. That was, Liv realized, what would drive them out of the shoals.

With her left hand, she sculpted another flower - blue columbine - and channeled the waste heat into the others crouched on the platform. Along the ridge, they could all see row upon row of strange pillars, anchored into the rock. Half of the pillars were broken, but a few of them still remained intact, complete with long blades that rotated in the wind that scoured the mountain. Though they were shaped very differently than the windmills used in Lucania, Liv still recognized the function.

“There,” Wren said, pointing along the ridge. “I think that’s the entrance.”

A great door, reminiscent of the ones that Liv had seen at Coral Bay, and then again beneath the Well of Bones, was set into the very stone of the mountain. Beneath it was the only flat shelf of rock within eyesight, and it was clearly artificial: someone had carved it into the stone. It would provide a place for people to stand, while the doors opened, though Liv couldn’t see how anyone would get up this far without a means to fly, or days of climbing.

And the eagles had used the ledge to build their nest.

It was enormous, of a size to match the birds themselves: rather than branches, the mammoth mana beasts had uprooted entire trees, then carried the trunks, branches and all, up to the heights in their talons. There was no way to get at the door without going through the nest - and the eagle that guarded it.

“Please tell me that you intend to go inside,” Sidonie said, eyes sparkling behind her spectacles. Strands of her hair whipped in the wind: no matter how much work the women had put into braiding before making the ascent, the stiff mountain gales found a way to tear them apart.

Liv nodded. “We kill the eagle first, and then see if we can open the door,” she said. “It hasn’t seen us yet, so everyone strike at once, on my count.” Around her, Arjun and Sidonie drew wands, while Rosamund simply raised a hand, and Wren nocked an arrow to her bow. Liv aimed her own wand, and put her finger on the first button, before realizing that she hadn’t had a chance to recast her contingent spells since the night raid on the Foundry Rift. “Three,” she murmured, rousing Cel in the back of her mind. “Two. One!”

The daggers of pure blue mana launched forward, cast by Arjun and Rose, outpacing Wren’s arrow. While the others muttered incantations, Liv flung her own needle-thin shard of adamant ice silently, her family’s word of power feeling positively eager to move.

All four projectiles hit the eagle before she had time to see what was coming, or to react, tearing into her breast with savage force. Sidonie’s magic came a moment later, and in a different form, hurling the wounded eagle out of the nest and back against the metal door. For a moment, all five of them waited to see whether the mana beast would move, but it only slumped down, motionless, in a spreading pool of blood.

What followed was a great deal of work, but not really dangerous. They used the platform of mana to get over to the rock ledge, where Wren and Liv set to work dressing the kill. Arjun and Rosamund pulled the eggs aside, then helped Sidonie sort through the nest, breaking off and collecting branches that were small enough to use in making a cook-fire. Everything that was too big, Sidonie propelled off the side of the mountain using her family’s word of power, Ye. Finally, they cooked as much of the eagle-meat as they could, along with the eggs, which resulted in something like hard boiling them.

Besides the blood of the eagle, none of the meat was anything that Wren could eat, which was a problem. Liv knew the huntress would need to fly down to the lower slopes of the peak at some point, to get herself food that wasn’t dangerously saturated with mana. Whatever twisted magic Ractia had used to render her tribe or servants able to consume even mana-rich blood, it did not protect them from any other kind of food.

Finally, they stood in front of the great door.

“The mountain in Varuna wouldn’t open to anyone but Ractia until she’d done something with it,” Wren explained. “This one might be sealed the same way.”

“Most of the doors in the Tidal Rift and the Well of Bones opened easily enough,” Liv mused. “Though the Well of Bones had already been assaulted and fallen once: and Karis got into the Tidal Rift before I did. He may have done something to the doors while I was catching up to him.” And then there had been the sealed control room.

“If they only recognize Vædim, we have a problem,” Arjun pointed out.

“Not really,” Liv said. “Though this might take a little time.” She glanced back over to the coals of the cook fire, and the unused wood they’d stacked off to one side. “Sidonie, I need you to use Aluth to make a basin over the fire, connected to a channel that leads to the rock on the left side of the door.” Liv asked the other journeyman because she knew that Sidonie had been using Aluth longer than either Rose or Arjun, and she was not disappointed.

Sidonie unstrapped her spellbook from her belt, spent a moment musing over her notes, and then easily conjured a shape of blue mana, veined with gold, that did exactly what Liv had been looking for. Once there was a basin in place, Liv conjured a block of ice in it, and then melted that ice, so that the resulting water flowed down the channel of solidified mana to the rock. Liv followed it over, watched the liquid sink into cracks in the stone, and then froze it.

“What are you doing?” Wren asked, frowning.

“When water freezes, it expands,” Sidonie explained.

“Frost wedging,” Liv said, heading back to the fire to create more ice in the basin. “It’s something the masons in Whitehill have to worry about. Any sort of crack in stone can be widened by water freezing inside. It means that once a stone wall starts to crack from wear, it needs to be repaired and replaced with new, fresh cut stone as soon as possible, before the ice begins to pull it apart.”

It was a long, slow process, but really all Liv was doing was to move things around. She condensed moisture from the air into ice, melted the ice into water, moved the water where she wanted it to be: with Sidonie’s assistance: and then froze the water again. The fire helped her do the melting, and she channeled any waste heat she didn’t need into keeping her friends warm. When Sidonie had exhausted her mana, she showed first Rose and then Arjun how to make the shapes that Liv needed.

By the time the sun was setting over the western peaks, Liv had ripped the left side of the door out of the mountain in a spray of broken rock, scattered over the flat ledge. Wren and Rose went in first, while Arjun followed with a torch he’d made out of a branch wrapped in torn strips of cloth.

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Arjun and Wren had been with Liv beneath the Well of Bones, but for Rosamund and Sidonie, this was the first real glimpse of a place made by the old gods: not a machinery of production left to grind on endlessly, like the Foundry Rift, but somewhere made before the war. Liv was certain this was an earlier construction because of one simple reason: there were no Antrian war machines waiting for them.

The floors and walls were perfectly cut from the rock, and along the ceiling small, inset mana stone lamps lit as the companions approached. “Do you think it's the motion?” Sidonie asked. “Or something else? The heat of our bodies? The mana we contain?”

Liv moved past her, because she’d spotted what she was looking for: a pane of glass, lit with brightly colored lines and Vædic sigils, set into the stone wall at the far end of the room, next to a shaft that descended into darkness. “This is the map,” she explained, for the benefit of Rose and Sidonie. Together, they all walked over to examine it.

The bright lines traced along thin glass depicted a series of vertical slices, all connected by the shaft. Liv smiled to see Sidonie’s excitement as the other girl adjusted her glasses, then leaned forward.

“These are the levels, then?” Sidonie muttered. “Like a tower. Save that instead of a stairwell, there is only this shaft. Did the gods all fly? Or use Aluth?”

“No.” Wren shook her head. “All the shafts like these are enchanted. Watch.” She stepped off the edge of the darkness, and a blue disk of mana formed, even with the stone floor, beneath her boot. “It will descend once everyone has stepped on.”

“Control room,” Liv said, stabbing her finger at the second floor down on the map. “That’s the one we want.” She turned and headed over to join Wren, then stepped out onto the blue disk of solid mana. She’d never had a chance to examine the control room at the Tidal Rift after she killed Karis, and she’d hardly had a moment to study anything in the Well of Bones.

Once the five of them had gathered on the disk, it descended, taking them down the shaft to the next floor, where it hesitated. Liv stepped off, and once again polished pieces of mana stone lit their way along the top of a long corridor. The ruins weren’t warm, precisely - but compared to the mountain slopes, the absence of biting wind was a relief.

The corridor opened into a circular room perhaps half the size of the great hall at Whitehill. Semi-circular steps descended to a floor ten feet below the height of the corridor, forming a kind of amphitheatre. Enormous pieces of curved glass were attached to the walls to the front and either side, and as if aware that living beings had entered the chamber for the first time in centuries, they lit with glowing lines of moving sigils.

“Incredible,” Sidonie breathed.

“What do you actually want to do here, Liv?” Rose asked, stepping down the stairs and wandering the floor. There were padded benches and chairs made of a material that Liv had never seen before: certainly not wood.

“I want to study it,” Liv said. “I want to understand it. That’s why I went down into the Well of Bones, but it was a running fight the entire way, and it was a greater rift. The mana density here isn’t any worse than the shoals of Bald Peak or the Tidal Rift. As long as you all practice what I’ve taught you, I think we could stay here as long as we wanted without mana sickness.”

“You aren’t worried about those soldiers coming after us?” Arjun asked.

Liv shook her head. “We’re days ahead of them, at this point, and they’d have to climb all the way to the summit. The longer it takes them to follow us into the mountains, the colder it will get. And snow is coming. I think winter will force them back down to Valegard before they ever find us here.”

“We don’t have food,” Rose pointed out.

“I can hunt the slopes easily enough,” Wren pointed out. “Though I’ll probably need help hauling the meat up here. We can melt snow for water.”

“How long are we talking about?” Arjun asked.

Liv shrugged. “Long enough to understand:” she waved a hand at the great curved pieces of glass. “All this.”

“You don’t have to convince me,” Sidonie said, once again taking out her book, as well as the small bottle of ink and the quill pens that she seemed to take everywhere.

☙

The snows of winter came, and the days in the ruins quickly fell into a routine.

Exploration of the Vædic ruin quickly revealed that it had never been intended for anyone to live there: only to visit. Whatever facilities the old gods might have kept for their slaves in other places, here there were no bed chambers, no baths, nothing like a kitchen for cooking food or a cold cellar for hanging meat.

They slept on the cushioned benches in the control room, and they cooked over small fires built just inside the opening Liv had forced in the side of the mountain. They washed their clothing and their bodies, as best they could, using pure melted water. Wren left often, to fly down to the lower slopes of the mountain, or to find the valleys that surrounded it.

She returned with hare, pheasant, or deer. There were no berries this late in the year, but before the first snows came, the huntress was able to gather walnuts, acorns, and even a kind of pine nut that tasted buttery and sweet. There were mushrooms and meador garlic, and chicory in the place of tea. For the larger animals, Wren needed help from one of the mages to haul the carcass up to the peak using platforms of shining blue mana.

Arjun kept a careful eye on their recovery, inspecting everything from Liv’s ribs and thigh to Rose’s shoulder. He watched for signs of mana sickness, as well, and in the first days Liv spent a great deal of time coaching her friends: especially Rose. For her own part, she hardly even thought about the mana in the shoal anymore: Liv woke every morning to find her reserves brimming with power, but so much as she looked, there was no sign of her veins darkening.

Sidonie, in the meanwhile, seemed to have decided to copy down and record everything they found. From the map of the ruin’s levels, to the Vædic sigils on the great pieces of glass, she carefully and precisely drew everything using her small store of ink.

The floor beneath the control room they explored briefly: like the chamber in the Tidal Rift where Liv had fought and killed Karis, it was a place of dark machinery, low thrumming and occasional hissing, and odd blinking lights. They did not understand the purpose of the machines, and so they returned to the control room, where the friends made their camp and worked to translate the sigils on the glass.

“The glass responds to touch,” Wren explained, once Sidonie had taken down everything for future reference. The two journeymen were afraid that once they began experimenting, they might not be able to make the initial set of sigils appear again, precisely the same. “Ractia used things like this to connect the rifts between her mountain fortress and Soltheris - and to choose which rifts were going to erupt, as well.”

“The last thing we want to do is to cause eruptions that will get people killed,” Liv said, reaching out to the front piece of glass, and then withdrawing her hand. “We’re going to be very careful, and go very slowly, and we’re going to take notes at every step. What’s your best translation of all this?” she asked Sidonie.

“As best I can tell,” the other woman said, “the center pane is telling us how much mana is being generated by the rift, in a unit of measurement that I’ve never seen before. Valim. How that equates to our rings, I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

“The left,” Sidonie continued, turning and waving a hand to the pane of glass at her side, “seems to be tracking how many of those windmills fixed to the top of the ridge are broken, and how many are still turning.”

“And the last,” she continued, but Liv interrupted without thinking.

“This shows how it's all connected.” Liv couldn't help but drift over to the glass on the right hand side of the room, scanning over the sigils she recognized, guessing at the ones she didn’t. Her mind drifted back to the moment of comprehension beneath the Well of Bones - the waystone connected to the rift by veins of mana stone, and then to all the other waystones around the world, like the strands of a spider’s web. And all of it somehow of a piece with the ring in the sky above.

“Yes,” Sidonie agreed. “I think so.”

“Let’s start by experimenting with the glass on the left,” Liv decided. “If most of those mills are already broken, I doubt we can make anything worse by playing around with it. No one touch the other two yet.”

It was laborious, slow work: to touch a sigil, wait, and see whether anything changed. Then, to write down the change, as well as each sigil that had reacted, or not reacted. Oftentimes, the sigils made words they didn’t even recognize.

Every night, Liv went to sleep on one of the padded benches holding the smooth piece of mana stone, engraved with sigils and broken on one side, that had been sent by Master Grenfell. On the third night, when her eyes finally closed, she found herself face to face with the old man who had been her first teacher.