Chapter 15

There was the Word

Of course, the history of Godbound invited all sorts of questions, not all of which I could answer. "I don't know," I said. "I read this in a book, remember? And this is all based on a good bit of speculation rather than fact. Doesn't help that this language just doesn't have the words for some of the concepts. But that traveler left that chest behind after the Shattering, and that was almost three thousand years ago during the Breaking. So a long, long time ago."

Sheraine shook her head. "You ask me to take much on faith. I've always thought that most people walk in the Light, that the destruction of the War of Power and the Breaking could be laid at the feet of the Dark One and those too weak to resist his temptations. Now you claim a history in which people did far worse for no greater reason than philosophy and personal power?"

I made a so-so gesture with my hand. "Is that truly worse than selling your own soul and the future of your world out to an abomination that had been imprisoned by the Creator herself?"

"I want to say yes," Gemiad said. "Especially since the Forsaken didn't destroy any worlds that I know of."

"I want to say that the Former Empires didn't do some of the things the Forsaken did," I said. "But some were truly alien in how they thought and viewed reality."

The Aes Sedai glanced at me. "And what of you? If these Former Empires were destroyed long ago, in what sort of nation did you grow up? One of their successors?"

"Ah, no, thankfully. We didn't reach such heights, but we have … more than what you all have," I told them. "And our own failures. Which is comforting, in its own way."

Sheraine frowned. "How do you mean?"

"If we are not just subjected to the whims of beings far beyond our power, if our failures are our own fault in the end, than it is possible to learn from our mistakes and do better. It means we aren't trapped to repeat our mistakes." I hesitated. "Unless you live in a world governed by the Wheel."

"Perhaps," Gemiad said slowly. "It's not that we don't learn from our mistakes. It's just that we eventually forget what we learned. But we'll never be lost forever."

"And some mistakes, we will never make no matter how many times we live," Sheraine said.

I guffawed. "Which would put you one up over the Former Empires. They made every mistake."

We finally reached something that might be an exit. It was a break in the row of tanks, and an oval frame jutted out of the wall. It could be a door frame, though I saw no seams. On both the right and left, so high I would have to reach up and almost stand on my toes, an arrangement of crystals and something that kind of looked like a tuning fork might be the door controls.

"This … place looks remarkably intact if it's truly from the Age of Legends," Sheraine said. "Though I wonder how we are expected to open this? Unless it can only be opened from the other side?"

"No," I said. "I think the crystals on either side can be used to open the door. Or perhaps it senses when those who are permitted approach and open on its own."

"You think?"

I took a deep breath. "I'll find out." This time, I didn't use a miracle. Instead, I dipped into the ocean of potential again and shaped a Gift I'd already used several times. If I had to puzzle out everything here, I couldn't waste all my Effort on miracling it.

Discern the Maker's Design

I went over to the controls on the right, studying both them and the wall. "These people used sound to open the door. Though it's not really a door. I think this worked more like the Waygates." That's why the controls were so intricate. It wasn't just about opening or closing the door but about telling the facility where to open it to.

"There's a secret way to open Waygates," Sheraine said. "Not many know it. Do you know the secret behind this one?"

"Doesn't matter, this place has lost power so this gateway doesn't work either." My attention was drawn to a panel sort of shaped like a pouncing vampire squid just underneath the controls.

"We can't be stuck here," Gemiad said. "The people that made this place must have thought of it. And they would have needed some way to move through the building while they were building it."

"You're not wrong. They did consider that situation." I pressed on the panel and rotated until it clicked and sprang away. The gateway was still a mystery to me, I was bound to Artifice, not Engineering. But the people that had made this place had been at a point in their understanding where magic and science converged, and magitech did fall under Artifice.

Reaching into the guts of the exposed controls I unclipped a handle, gave it a twist, and pulled. Then I had to walk all the way to the left, open the panel there, unclip that handle, pull it, and then twist. With a hiss, the gray metal filling the doorway faded away to reveal a passage running at least a hundred meters before it hit an intersection.

"This place must have been built by giants," Gemiad said as she stared down the newly revealed hallway. The ceiling was so high I could have walked through it in my draconic form, and I would only have to duck my head when I passed through the gateway.

"I'm getting the impression they weren't exceptionally tall for humans," I said, joining them. "But I don't know why they built at this scale." I wasn't getting much from my surroundings. Not only was this place old, but I got the impression that much of it had been grown rather than built. But since these were still devices and mechanisms, they did fall under my Word.

Sheraine tilted her head. "Does it matter?"

I made an uncertain sound. "The problem is that a lot of the Former Empires were inscrutable, according to what I read. They could value things you or I couldn't even comprehend, and not even consider things we worry about every day. That makes navigating one of their possessions even more dangerous because you can't assume. Except we don't have the supplies to take this slow."

"We don't," Sheraine said with a nod. "So lead the way." She peered into the hallway. Our lights only illuminated the first sixty to seventy meters, so she couldn't see the end of the hallway like I could. "You're our best scout in this place."

I swept my arm out. "Follow me. And don't speak too loud, sing, or hum. Sound appears to have been very important to these people."

We entered the hallway, but nothing happened. There were no alarms, no reappearing gate the moment we'd left that gigantic room, just silence as the rubbery metal floor material even ate our footsteps. I noticed that even here, they had avoided right angles. Wverything, even the walls of the hallway, curved or flowed from one shape into another.

When we reached the intersection I had hoped to see some sign, some marking that could tell us where we were or where to go. But there was nothing. Some light fixtures that I doubted could ever fully illuminate this place and some tubes about the length of Sheraine two-thirds of the way up towards the ceiling. They were arranged in a configuration that offset one from the other.

"We should take either left or right, and then stick to that heading," Sheraine said, looking into the darkness. "Unless you have found some clue in those … things."

I shook my head and turned away. "I've figured out how the people that built this place navigated it, but we can't use it."

"Why not?"

"Through music?" Gemiad asked, drawing both our attention. "You said they considered sound to be important. And those things look like giant flutes."

I nodded. "You're not wrong. The air of something passing by would move through the 'flutes' which would create a unique sound that must have been loaded with meaning. Meaning I can't even begin to figure out."

"Then we must treat this as a maze," Sheraine said. "We'll keep a left."

"No, I think we should go right." I stared down the hallway in that direction and unlike the other hallway, I saw the beginning of a set of stairs.

Sheraine regarded me, then where I was looking at. "You can see more than us. Part of your empowerment?"

"A minor benefit," I said as we started walking again. We did find the stairs I spotted, they were relatively broad and short, but that just mean we didn't have to pull ourselves up at every step. We started to find some rooms, some I figured to be examination rooms or maybe labs.

Certainly what equipment had survived gave me that impression, but whatever happened to this place had been sudden. Some sort of containment had been broken and those rooms were utterly trashed. The others, they just had dead workstations and emptied lockers.

Maybe whoever had worked here had evacuated the place, or maybe someone had gone through later and taken what was worth carrying out. What was clear, however, was that this wasn't how you were supposed to navigate the place.

The central room, the one with all the gateways, that had been how you moved from one level to another, from one place to another. It explained why I didn't see any elevators. They had something better.

Time had little meaning in this quiet, abandoned place. Though judging by our own needs it had been ours already. At least we had water, thanks to Sheraine. "I've never felt this before. Holding on to the One Power feels like I'm trying to control a skittish horse," she said, catching her breath before taking a swig from the canteen I'd made.

"I don't think it will get any better while we're here," I said as we headed for the largest intersection we'd come across so far. "We're lucky you can channel at all." I had wondered if the One Power would work offworld; now, we had our answer. We finally stumbled across something different as we reached the intersection.

Several hallways lead to a large hatch with several symbols in a circle in its center. I pulled out my translation glasses and put them on. My eyes stung as I looked up at the symbols, and my vision swam as the lines swirled into some sort of meaning.

"What does it say?" Gemiad asked as I squinted at the hatch.

"I … am not sure. The sentences keep shifting around. One sentence is 'Eagerly these bellies wait', another says 'Steam rises, food smells', and a third goes 'Delicious rush' … I don't get it."

"How are they shifting?" Sheraine asked, joining me in studying the hatch.

"The words stay in one group, but the order shifts. It can be 'The bellies eagerly wait', then it becomes 'Wait on the bellies eagerly'. This language might be too strange for my glasses to translate properly into something we can understand."

"It sounds like poetry, may I?" She held out her hand.

I had to admit I hesitated for a moment before handing the glasses over to her. Sheraine blinked rapidly as she looked through the glasses at the hatch, but that lasted only for a second or so. She nodded. "I think it is, perhaps, maybe …"

"Steam rises, food smells
The belly eagerly waits
Delicious rush"

The symbols lit up at the last syllable, then the hatch sprang apart into four flower petals that slid into the walls. It revealed the largest hallway yet as something clattered to the floor. The corridor was sparingly illuminated with bluish lights that just made the crevices in the undulating walls and ceiling darker. A rush of air slipped past us. It wasn't fresh air, though, as my nose wrinkled at the smell of iron and faint rot.

"It smells like a butcher's shop," Gemiad said.

"The poem was about food, or eating," Sheraine said, not showing any of the disgust or nausea I was feeling. "Though this smells fresh. We aren't alone here."

"How are you ignoring that smell?" Gemiad asked. "Is it another Aes Sedai secret?"

Sheraine shook her head. "Nothing like that. I've spent years in the North, fighting Shadowspawn. Once you've cleared a couple of Trollock camps with their pots still on the fire, a mere smell hardly compares." Yet her gaze turned inward and she pressed her lips together. One blink of the eyes and the mask was back, and I was sure it was that. "We need to investigate regardless."

"Before we do, I'd like to take a look at that," I said, pointing at what had fallen into the vestibule. It appeared to be a pile of crystals and silvery steel-alloy plates, but a closer look revealed that those could be arranged into the upper half of a vaguely humanoid figure; in fact, it once was. "And I'd like the glasses back."

"Oh, yes." She took them off and handed them over as we walked. "Those are surprisingly comfortable. I stopped noticing it was on my nose."

"Magic items like adjust themselves to their wearer as standard. If the person that made it has any idea what they're doing," I added as I secured it in its case again. We'd almost reached the construct when it shifted all on its own, and we froze.

Something in that heap of metal and crystal rattled, and then, like a plant reaching for sunlight, a fleshy stalk emerged. It wriggled around, its tip shaped a like a sunflower seed swaying back and forth.

"What in the name of the Light is that?" Sheraine exclaimed.

The thing whipped around to face us.

"Dangerous," I said as the head sprang apart and revealed a mane of slender feelers surrounding a central mouth that just had rows and rows of teeth as far down its gullet as we could see.

Sheraine's hand snapped out and she threw a fireball at it. Rather than dodging, the eldritch anemone turned to catch the fireball and swallowed it whole. I could actually see its stalk expand and contract as it went down its throat.

"Retreat!" I pushed Sheraine back, Gemiad was already stepping back herself, and threw a lightning bolt at the thing. To my horror, it caught the attack with its frills, the electricity snapping between the feelers as it traveled down to the central mouth where it got slurped up.

Light flashed up the stalk now, the mane strobing red and blue, and something traveled up the stalk. "Get behind me." I couldn't even check because I had to keep my attention on the eldritch abomination in front of me. I drew the club half of my spear and threw it with all my might as the giant anemone spit something wet, pulsating, and sharp at us.

They connected with the sound of a gunshot, both deflecting from each other, and whatever it had puked whistled past us and hit the wall some distance behind me while the club clattered past the downed construct.

"What is that?" Sheraine asked from behind me.

"I still don't know," I said, still keeping both eyes on it. Options were running out. It ate both weaves and my lightning. But that lightning wasn't really divine, just a move I learned through my instinctive grasp for the Lesser Strife. Weaker than a weave of the One Power, really. I could try and tear it apart with my claws, but I didn't want to touch it. Which left one other option.

"Close your eyes!" I took a deep breath.

The sun's wrath erupts!

I exhaled a thin beam of liquid fire, hot as the sun and just as bright, it connected with the stalk in a moment. My will still shaped the fire I breathed, though it had gotten so much hotter, and I only wanted to burn this thing. White flame with a blue fringe gobbled up the flesh, racing up and down the stalk, and in a heartbeat it was nothing but white ash that rained down on the pile of metal.

"That could have been right at home in the most corrupted parts of the Blight," Sheraine said. "I'm not even sure that was a plant or an animal."

"It kind of reminded me of a sea anemone," I said. "They are animals, but they live in warm, shallow seas and they don't get anywhere near that size. I'm going to take a closer look. Stay here just in case there's something else hiding in there."

"We can't get out of here without you," Gemiad said. "So we're dead anyway if something happens to you. We're coming with, three people will see more than just one."

"She's not wrong," Sheraine said. "I might very well notice something you would miss."

"Let's spread out a little, just in case," I said before leading them over to the downed construct. I stopped out of arm's reach and drew the other half of my spear, the metal clattered and crystal rang as I poked it.

"Is that a hand?" Sheraine pointed. "Is this like those moving statues and metal puppets you summon?"

"Yes. This is a construct, though a lot more intricate than what you've seen me create." Satisfied nothing else was hiding inside of it, I went to work tracing where that tentacle had come from. It had buried its way through a gap in the chest plate and into the inner workings.

There was a second covering in there that had been wrenched apart. I just used the maintenance access built into the construct to follow, and that revealed the core. It looked like something straight out of a Power Rangers show, except if they had a Game of Thrones-sized budget.

The creature had been wrapped around this, but in doing so, it had disconnected the chakra engine from both the motive cog and the cognition engram.

"Are you trying to repair this thing?" Sheraine asked.

"I'm considering it," I said. There were other systems in there. Something that could generate a forcefield, gravity manipulator.

"And what will happen once you do?"

"Hopefully, it will start up and provide us with some information. But chances are it can't speak a language we understand and it won't understand us. And it might just see us as intruders and attack." Something shifted behind the chakra engine and I shifted to peer behind it. My eyes grew wide as I saw the small beetle-squid construct reconnect two systems. "Get back, it's self-repairing."

I let go and we both took a few steps back. In that time, a hum filled the air and light flickered inside the construct's chest. Then everything slid shut again and the whole thing rose up into the air. It levitated on what looked like a reverse waterfall of blue light, gathering in from the floor and coming together at the crystal underneath the construct's belly.

The arms were free floating at its sides as well, connected by more intense flows of light. The head was connected in a similar was, a long hollow cone with crystals growing inside like a geode. The hum became a tinkling chime, a soft melody.

"The Fifth Note of the Third Line of the Seventh Chorus has regained awareness," it chimed. "This one can't detect the Song of Work and Study." Then it turned to face us. "Unrecognized individuals perceived in secure area."

It raised its right arm which transformed into a cannon, a crystal beneath the barrel lit up and a laser dot appeared on my chest.

"Preparing for hostile encounter."