Of Limited Loyalty: The Second Book of the Crown Colonies Read online

  “I hain’t never seen nothing like this.”

  “Nor have I.” Owen pointed to a single tower that had somehow escaped destruction. “There are towers that high in Launston, but you can see where the stones are fitted together. Here, no seams, no mortar.”

  “And the color, milky white like a blind man’s eyes. Little bits of color where the sun is touching the top there.”

  “Like an opal.” Owen shivered. “There, at the tower’s base.”

  The closest thing he could think of to remind him of the statue at the tower’s base was gargoyle, but somehow that didn’t seem right. The sediments, which had dried and cracked, revealed little bits of the statue. It had been carved of a pale green stone and had a massively bulbous head that sagged back away from deep, empty eye-sockets. The creature’s face had no nose, just a pair of vertical slits, and no ears. While dirt covered the lower half of the face, stone tentacles emerged as if some obscene parody of a moustache or beard.

  “I reckon that when the Good Book talks about graven images, this is what them prophets and all had in mind.”

  The two men moved toward the north, giving the half-buried statue a wide berth. From their new vantage point they looked into the city. Most of the buildings had the same seamless construction, and were quite modest. Two of the three larger buildings had sustained significant damage. A third, set into the mountain’s flesh on the western side of the valley, was by far the largest and appeared intact. In fact, the center of the settlement appeared to be much lower than all of the surrounding area, and buildings leaned toward it as if being drawn down into it. Even so, the stresses that would entail had not cracked any stone.

  Owen had only enough sunlight left to make a basic sketch of the settlement. He chose not to draw the statue. He told himself this was because it was largely hidden, but he knew it wasn’t true. It would take more time to sketch it than he wanted to spend around it.

  Owen and Nathaniel made their way to the camp. They supped on smoked mastodon meat, which benefited from the applewood they’d use dto smoke it, though it still tasted gamey. Rathfield set up watches, and they all agreed to his schedule. No one believed they’d be sleeping much. Makepeace read Scripture aloud—Hodge and Rathfield chose to listen.

  Owen momentarily wished for moonlight, but then decided having a dark sky was better. The city would glow in moonlight, like a ghost from some ancient time. The mountain’s peak eclipsed a wedge of the night sky, which prevented the towers from being silhouetted against stars. He hoped that not being able to see the city would help him relax, but he could feel it lurking there, as if it were an infection in the earth, giving off heat.

  He decided it was best that he had no light, for he would be compelled to note all of his observation in his journal. He certainly would make complete notes, as he had at Little Elephant Lake, but were there light he would have put down more of his feelings—admitting to fear and dread. While he was not worried about such admissions casting aspersions upon his manhood, he wasn’t sure he wanted them set so raw on the page. He had, after all, promised Bethany Frost he would let her read what he wrote.

  Fear of what she would think of him didn’t give him pause. She had seen him at his utter worst, and had gotten him through it. She had edited the memoir of his previous adventures, and had even suggested cutting or modifying certain passages she felt might be open to misinterpretation. She had read more of his adventures than anyone else save for Prince Vlad, and had protected his interests through her editing.

  But here he could protect her, for nothing he had seen before had ever felt as wrong as this place did. He didn’t want her terrified. The second that thought burst into his brain, he had to smile. If he had told her that, she’d have scolded him. She was much stronger than she might have appeared—and much smarter. But in many ways he felt that what the dawn would reveal was something against which intellect could provide scant armor.

  Though he had not thought he would be able to sleep, when he finally stretched out, he dropped off immediately. He didn’t wake up until the first rays of dawn painted themselves against the gray spearhead of the mountain summit stabbing into thin clouds above. He sat up immediately and the world swam, as if he’d drunk far too much the night before. He remembered no dreams, and found that fact as unsettling as he did his companions’ pale complexions.

  Nathaniel reached his feet first and hefted his rifle.

  “’Pears to me that this here place is a mite unsettling for all of us. Colonel Rathfield was sent out here to find Postsylvania. I reckon that still needs to be done, but I also figger that this here place needs some going over. I hain’t got no book learning, but I’m thinking that those what does among us hain’t seen none of this before, neither.”

  Every one turned toward Count von Metternin. The small man smiled, but opened his hands. “You do me credit, my friends. I have traveled extensively, at war and in peace. I have read the Remian historians and attended lectures by those who have traveled to places I have not. Though my glimpse of this place was brief, I know of nothing like it.”

  Nathaniel nodded. “Colonel?”

  Rathfield shook his head. “I recall nothing like it, Woods.”

  “No disrespect intended to anyone else, but I reckon that’s as good as we’ll do on the book-learning front. So what I propose is this. We start looking this place over, but we do it the way Prince Vlad would do. And I reckon we can start with anything you’ve noticed already.”

  Hodge raised a hand. “Look around. I don’t see any sign of beavers, and there were a number at Little Elephant Lake. They should be here, shouldn’t they?”

  “Good point, Hodge.” Nathaniel scratched at his jaw. “Fact is, I don’t see no birds’ nests, no dead fish, no signs of raccoons or bears or anything else scavenging here. No claw marks on trees, neither. I don’t reckon much lived up here.”

  Kamiskwa stood, his expression as hard and eyes as tight as Owen had ever seen. “It’s the magick. Very bad magick. I can feel it.”

  Owen looked at him. “Like the heat from an infection?”

  Surprise lifted the Altashee’s brows for a second. “A bit more than that, but yes.”

  Nathaniel nodded once, strongly. “Good. I reckon you’ll want to be making notes, Captain. Let’s start in. Once we learn something gots some heft to it, we can figger if this is more important than Postsylvania and plan accordingly.”

  Their survey produced a great deal of information that led to speculation, the contemplation of which introduced a tremor into Owen’s handwriting. The statue, when excavated, showed a man crouched beneath the figure, wearing the tentacled monstrosity as a mask. Lettering ran all the way around the statue’s square base. No one had seen anything like it and none of them could decipher it. The serpentine lettering seemed to shift when he stared at it, frustrating any attempt to make an accurate record of the words. At least, it did before Owen had Hodge cover the writing up, then only reveal a handful of letters at a time.

  And while he was writing, Owen checked often to see if the infectious heat was coming up from his facsimile, but it was not.

  The intact tower provided a second set of revelations that set everyone on edge. A stairway spiraled up inside the walls all the way to the flat roof. The stairway had two sets of risers, with the smaller running right up the middle and adding two steps to the other set. The taller stairs rose eighteen inches between courses, while the smaller only six. Owen could take the larger steps, but not conveniently. Missing floor beams and planking hinted at tall ceilings and suggested that whatever used them stood ten or twelve feet tall. The lower steps suggested creatures smaller than men, but how much smaller he had no way to gauge.

  More importantly, while the windows in the tower’s lower reaches amounted to little more than slits, up top they broadened and had a wide sill at the bottom. While that sill would provide cover against shots from below, the window width made no sense unless man-sized creatures were meant to move in and
out. Owen ran his hand over the sill’s smooth, cold stone and could detect no scratches or other clues as to its purpose.

  The need to accommodate giants became evident elsewhere, as did provisions made for smaller creatures. Large doorways opened into houses with no inner partitions or decorations. For all intents and purposes, they were warehouses into which creatures were marched and stored. The lake’s water had long since washed away any murals or other paintings. Though he looked closely, he couldn’t even find signs of where someone had scratched marks corresponding to days on the walls, or carved his name for posterity.

  Count von Metternin found that odd. “I once heard that even in the Tombs of Kings in far Aegeptos, grave robbers scrawled their names. Men wished to be remembered.”

  Owen sighed. “I don’t think these were men. I’m not even sure they had names.”

  “Their names are here.” Kamiskwa ran a hand over the smooth stone. In its wake, letters glowed violet for a handful of heartbeats. Rendered in the same lettering as on the statue’s base, but more crudely so, they overlapped in some places, and in others had extra letters squeezed into place to correct an error. “But these are names that should be forgotten.”

  Owen raised his hand to the wall and concentrated. He didn’t feel anything at first, then, in his fingertips, he caught the same tug as a nettle might cause when brushing the flesh. Nothing glowed as his hand passed over it. He pulled in all fingers but one and began tracing invisible letters.

  Kamiskwa’s hand closed on his wrist with an iron grip. “Owen, stop.”

  Owen blinked his eyes. He stood a dozen feet from where he had begun and could not remember taking a single step. “I don’t understand.”

  “The winding path, you remember.”

  He nodded. “I do remember the winding path. That’s what’s odd. I don’t remember what I just did here.”

  The Altashee shook his head. “This magick is that much stronger precisely so you cannot remember.”

  Count von Metternin’s eyes narrowed. “You will forgive my impudence, Prince Kamiskwa, but your knowledge of magick could be taken as a knowledge of this place and the people who were once here.”

  Kamiskwa released Owen’s hand. “I wish I knew more magick and less of what these people were. To know less would be difficult, for what I know is echoes of whispers of stories half-heard in days long dead. None of it is good. Until I saw this place, I had no reason to believe any of the stories.”

  “What do you know?”

  The Altashee opened his arms. “There are creatures that come in the night to steal children and to crush and kill. Sometimes they are giants. Sometimes they are smaller fiends.”

  Von Metternin smiled. “Not so unlike the trolls and goblins of my nation’s folklore.”

  Owen frowned. “But I don’t remember you saying anything of lost cities like this in Kesse.”

  “True, Owen, but then we have not drained our deep lakes. There are glaciers which could bury a thousand of these settlements and we would never know.” He narrowed his eyes. “These creatures appear to be very reliant on magick, and this may, too, be a part of why we have no ruins for them.

  “In the Good Book we have the flood, which God used to wash away evil from His creation. What if this is a place that survived the flood? We could be standing in the last outpost of an Antediluvian civilization. I believe the Good Book even mentions giants on the earth. Mr. Bone would know. Perhaps we can consult him and…”

  A gunshot rang through the ruins. The three of them sprinted from the giant house, and a second gunshot turned them west toward the edifice they had taken to calling the Temple. They ran toward where Hodge and Nathaniel knelt on one knee on a patch of dried mud.

  There was no mistaking the clear moccasin print, now days old, in the middle of it.

  Nathaniel glanced toward the Temple. “’Pears we weren’t the first to find this place, and those what was here before us, they weren’t of a mind to be scientific about their exploring.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  1 May 1767

  Prince Haven

  Temperance Bay, Mystria

  Prince Vlad sat back, removed his glasses, and scrubbed hands over his face. How can my eyes burn when my blood is running cold?

  Documents and books lay strewn over his desk as if it were debris washed down the Benjamin River after the earthquake. The damage in Temperance Bay and Bounty was not severe, though requests for supplies had been sent down river and goods started back up in the hands of the militia. Prince Vlad had given Caleb Frost the responsibility for organizing a company of men to make the trip. Caleb, he trusted, would make sure the supplies reached those who needed them and would resist the temptation of profiteering along the way.

  Princess Gisella and Owen’s wife had spearheaded relief efforts in Temperance Bay. They solicited donations, sorted them, and arranged for them to be shipped south to Kingstown. Though Catherine Strake hated being in Mystria, she did enjoy exercising unfettered power. This made her very useful in dealing with the current crisis.

  Their efforts bought Prince Vlad time to work on two projects. One was Mugwump’s flight training. The Prince was proud of his effort; the dragon was flying short distances without tiring quickly and appearing to gain strength and confidence each day. He, as yet, did not have the agility to pluck a bird out of the air, but he enjoyed flying enough to chase after wood doves. Vlad had cousins who were devoted to the art of falconry, and the Prince entertained fantasies of bringing Mugwump to one of their hunting jaunts.

  The only thing the Prince did not like about the flight training was that he had no parameters for knowing how much dragons flew or pretty much anything else about the demands this would be making on Mugwump. The thing that troubled him the most was that Mugwump appeared to tolerate directions, but really didn’t enjoy them. The dragon had never given him a glance that suggested he was thinking of just devouring the Prince—more of a look that said, “I know what I’m doing,” which reflected a bit more annoyance than amusement.

  Prince Vlad generally ended training sessions shortly after such looks. Mugwump was content to eat his fill and sleep for a long time after his flights. Not only did this give the Prince a chance to recover from his own aches and pains, but to work on his second problem—the problem that had sent a chill through him.

  Bishop Bumble had sadly reported that none of the missives from Ephraim Fox survived. Within twelve hours of that message being delivered, however, a burlap satchel full letters and manuscripts appeared on the Frosts’ doorstep. Dr. Frost had brought them to the Prince, and Vlad had retreated to his laboratory to study them.

  They were remarkable in two ways. First, Ephraim Fox, or Ezekiel Fire as he had begun to call himself when he created the True Oriental Church of the Lord, had done an incredible job of cataloguing plants and animals in Mystria. The details he provided on each rivaled those recorded by the most careful of Tharyngian naturalists. His early work referenced some of their work and referenced journals that he appeared to have made of his observations of natural phenomena while studying in Norisle. Had the Prince known of the man and his passion for precision, he’d have hired him to travel with Nathaniel on expeditions.

  Unfortunately, as brilliant as the observations were, the conclusions drawn from them were utterly and completely insane. Right next to a traced outline of a leaf, onto which had been drawn the veins and to which had been added a host of critical details, would be a long list of Scriptural references. Some clearly related to the ratios of leaf length to width, or the number of ribs and veins, or the number of points or petals on a flower. Others were abstracted through more arcane formulae, most of which the Prince could not intuit. The Norisle journals appeared to be the key to deciphering some of the material.

  Prince Vlad tucked himself into Ezekiel Fire’s world so deeply he began to see things through the man’s eyes. He pulled out his own journals to double-check the man’s observations. He crawled around outside, look
ing for new samples which he could measure and test against Fire’s work. Before very long, Vlad began to see patterns in nature—very much the same patterns Fire did.

  And, unfortunately, he saw more.

  It all boiled down to the question of whether or not magick had predated the ability of men to read and write. Clearly it had. Illiterate men like Nathaniel Woods could be taught to use magick, so reading and writing were not necessary, but an ability to reason was. Prince Vlad’s initial instructions in magick had involved reading the formula for a spell, memorizing it, transforming it into a symbol or concept, and then invoking that concept. His instructor had mentioned, for example, that some men think of a torch when igniting brimstone, and others the sun. That symbolic representation allowed them to focus magickal energy for the desired result.

  As a teaching method, that made sense, but it didn’t point out how preliterate people learned that they could access magick or how they trained themselves to focus it. One of the basic laws of magick, the Law of Sympathy, suggested that like objects could have a similar effect on a target. In preparing medicines for the heart, the foxglove, because of its heart-shaped blossom, was considered extremely valuable. Such linkages would have been obvious to the preliterate. In fact, as Fire had appeared to discover, many of the measurements in nature encouraged abstraction, which generated a symbol, upon which focus could be devoted to attain a desired magickal result. The idea, then, that early magicians had learned how to do magick based on things they saw in nature, made perfect sense.

  Where Fire pushed it further was that he linked these measurements to scattered Scriptural verses. When Prince Vlad began playing with them, pulling them together and ordering the sentences, he immediately noticed two things. First, the words had the same sort of rhythm and cadence as offered in spell formulations. Second, and this had taken closer reading, the verses differed from the original Achean and Phaonaean verses. They were not so different as to be wholly incorrect, but the use of unsuitable or inexact synonyms for the original words made the translation more difficult than it needed to be.