The Light of All That Falls, page 46
Tal’s gaze flicked from the Banes to Davian, then to Niha. He rubbed his face tiredly.
“I suppose it doesn’t,” he said heavily.
He gave a reluctant nod to Niha.
Niha flicked her hand out, the spear already off her belt, sizzling with Essence.
In one smooth motion, she pivoted and threw the spear, taking the nearest dar’gaithin through the mouth.
The remaining two creatures hissed in alarm as they spun to face the threat; Davian watched in openmouthed shock as Niha calmly gestured, the whip of Essence that had lashed out along with the spear flashing as the dead dar’gaithin began slumping to the floor. She ripped the weapon free in a shower of black blood and spun it, the sharp-edged stone moving in a deadly dance as it flew at the two dar’gaithin, snaking at one and then the other in rapid succession, targeting the soft spots of mouth and eyes.
Davian stepped forward but Tal put a restraining hand on his arm, shaking his head. “You’ll only get in the way.”
Davian accepted the statement reluctantly, gazing in wonder as the short spear blurred between the two creatures, sparks flying every time it connected. Finally the weapon struck home again and the second Bane crumpled, the edged stone through its eye.
The final dar’gaithin snarled and vanished out the door before Niha could wrest the spear free again.
Davian’s heart leaped to his throat and he made to go after the creature, but again Tal restrained him. The other man gestured to the ground where the fight had taken place. “No need.”
Heart still pounding, Davian stared in confusion as he spotted what Tal had indicated: several dar’gaithin scales scattered across the steel, clearly torn off during the fighting. He watched mutely as Niha calmly snapped the spear back into her hand, taking a cloth from her pocket and wiping it carefully. She tucked it at her side again once it was clean, then proceeded to stroll over to the window.
“There he goes,” she said, sounding like she was commentating for them. “Athsissis always was a cowardly little creature. He’s so excited that he hasn’t even realized. He’s going as fast as he can. He’s reached the edge. The al’goriat have seen him. And… oh. Oh.” She watched for a moment longer, then made a face. “That did not end well for him.”
Davian stared, head spinning, as Tal wandered over to the dead dar’gaithin, giving one of them an irritated prod with his toe. “El take it,” he muttered. “We can’t afford this.”
Niha turned back from the window. The two both seemed more frustrated than anything else. “Three more down. That leaves… a dozen? We can’t afford to lose any more,” she agreed bleakly.
“You… didn’t want them dead?” asked Davian in confusion.
Tal reached out and shut the door. “Not really.” He rubbed his chin worriedly. “They are how we are getting food through the portal. They take the metal to Ilshan Gathdel Teth, and in exchange they get sent back with supplies.”
“Except that the journey sends them insane, they come back at random positions along the edge of the dome around the city, and then Tal and I have to help the other dar’gaithin hunt them down and kill them just to get the food,” said Niha. “So they are a limited resource.”
Davian thought back to his first night in the city. “I saw one, I think,” he said, shifting uncomfortably at the memory. “It was… eating one of its own.”
“Southeast section of the city?” Niha nodded cheerfully at Davian’s affirming gesture. “We’re responsible for the decorations. The smell of their own dead seems to attract them, so even though they could come back anywhere around the perimeter, they always seem to end up there. It’s made our job a lot easier.”
Davian shuddered, as much at Niha’s casual attitude toward the grisly scene he’d witnessed as anything else.
“What sends them insane?” he asked. “You said that the portal could be safely traversed, and the portal’s just down below. Why haven’t you just gone back the other way?”
Niha snorted. “Why didn’t we think of that?” She looked at Tal. “Why haven’t we just done that, Tal?”
“All right,” said Tal with a small smile, shooting a vaguely warning glance at Niha. “Don’t forget that you asked exactly the same question when we got here.”
Niha glowered at him, but subsided.
“The portal protects passage to the past. To here,” Tal explained to Davian. “The other way is essentially like the rift in Deilannis. You should be able to use it, but we certainly can’t.”
“Oh.” Davian chewed his lip. “But the dar’gaithin…”
“The dar’gaithin survive because of their armor. Their scales provide a natural protection against being drained; it’s a perfect shield, almost impossible to replicate. The Darecians nearly succeeded with the devices you know as Shackles, but even they couldn’t get it right. As soon as Shackles start interacting with the Darklands, they become… overzealous. Start stripping away anything that might dampen Essence.” Tal shrugged. “The dar’gaithin are ultimately not people, though—they’re smarter than animals, but they don’t have the mental capacity of a human. We think they sort of… drift, once they enter the time stream. Spend eons in there, an eternity of just flailing around, slowly going mad until eventually the time stream spits them back out where it thinks they’re supposed to be.” He rubbed his chin. “It’s like… if we were stranded at sea but we could see gulls circling in the distance, we’d recognize that there might be land and swim toward it. The dar’gaithin don’t have that level of ability to discern. They have to just swim blindly in any direction. If the possible directions included all of space and time,” he finished drily.
Davian rubbed his head. Things were becoming clearer. Gradually.
“Speaking of dar’gaithin,” said Niha from the corner, eyeing the two bodies on the floor. “I’ll start cleaning these up if you two are going to talk forever.” She wandered over to the corpses without waiting for a response, and Davian grimaced as she started using her spear to pry scales loose, revealing an oily dark-green skin underneath.
“All right,” he said to Tal, turning away from the grisly sight. He assumed that there was a purpose to what the woman was doing, but he didn’t want to know right now. “So they arrive back in their own time—insane from the journey—and then are sent back with supplies.” He paused. “Why, exactly, do they agree to all of that?”
“They don’t,” Tal assured him. “They’re Controlled—their minds get altered before they’re sent here. By Gassandrid, unfortunately,” he added, seeing Davian’s briefly hopeful look. “He’s the only one of us strong enough to do it. They still mostly think and act for themselves, but they have overarching commands that they can’t ignore—they’d never have organized enough to be in charge here, otherwise.” He shrugged. “And once they’ve gone mad back in Ilshan Gathdel Teth, there’s not a lot of negotiation. Gassandrid can Control them just long enough to keep them calm while we load them with food, and then we send them back through.”
Davian considered. “When they get back here, I assume they don’t come back at the beginning again? When you all arrived?”
“No. They return immediately. The length of time they spend in the outside world doesn’t seem to affect when they come back,” admitted Tal. “It lines up with a study Cyr did on some of the creatures that had been here, early on. He said that they all had these almost indiscernible… markers. A kind of time decay that permeated their body—harmless enough, but more pronounced the longer that they had been in Zvaelar. An invisible clock on their time here.”
Davian frowned. “So you think that the portal here adjusts when we arrive accordingly?” He shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense for me. I haven’t been here before.”
“You’ve traveled through time before. Perhaps you have similar markers,” observed Tal. He shrugged at Davian’s look. “It’s the best guess I have. And before you ask, no. I don’t know how long passes in the real world compared to here, but time is passing. The dar’gaithin who returned to Ilshan Gathdel Teth with metal all did so weeks after entering the portal, not seconds.”
Davian relented with a sigh. He glanced around at the sound of the door opening, making a face as he saw Niha dragging one of the dar’gaithin corpses—thoroughly descaled and smearing black blood everywhere—outside. He opened his mouth to ask, then shook his head and snapped it shut again, turning back to Tal.
“What is it about this metal?” he asked suddenly. It had been one of the questions burning in him since he’d joined Raeleth’s scavenging team. “I think I understand the rest—up until the Venerate started throwing prisoners in here. What in all fates is so important about this particular metal that the Venerate are going to all this effort, sending people to their deaths just to get it?”
“It’s not just metal. It might actually be the most important resource in Ilshan Gathdel Teth,” said Tal. “It’s why Gassandrid insists on everyone calling this place the Mines—it’s his way of focusing on Zvaelar’s new purpose, dissociating from the truth of what really happened. You know about the problem with Vessels in Talan Gol?”
Davian shook his head.
“They corrupt,” explained Tal. “After a few months, the kan just starts to… corrode whatever it’s touching. The others blame it on the portal here, or the ilshara, but we’ve been able to find nothing about either that should cause it. Personally, I think it’s something to do with Shammaeloth’s constant proximity—he was never in the one place for long before Talan Gol. But that’s an unpopular opinion amongst the others, to say the least.” He shrugged. “Regardless. Metal taken from here—so long as it’s been reforged into something new since the portal opened—is different. It’s… time-locked, I suppose is the best explanation. It holds that same time decay marker that I mentioned earlier. When we send that reforged metal from here back to the outside world, the Vessels we make with it are immune to the corruption.”
Davian exhaled as he put the pieces together in his head. Everything was beginning to make sense now. “The metal plates in Ilshan Gathdel Teth.”
“Exactly. They are the equivalent of these towers—suppressing the time corruption from the portal. Gassandrid made those Vessels from normal metal originally, but it was early on after the ilshara went up. Before we understood what would happen. Once they started to corrupt, we replaced them with the metal that came through. Almost all of the metal from here has gone toward that purpose,” Tal added.
Davian rubbed his face. “I don’t understand how you could have figured that out in the first place,” he admitted.
“We got a nudge from here, actually.” Tal gave a wry nod to his blank expression. “Following the flow of information between here and the outside world is… complicated, sometimes, to say the least. You have to remember that we’re all from different eras; we converge here and so, depending on who we talk to, it’s possible to hear news from a time much later than our own. And the dar’gaithin are no different. So when they go back to their own times, they can—in theory—take any information they’ve learned about the future with them.”
“Except they go insane,” observed Davian.
“Which isn’t an insurmountable obstacle,” countered Tal. “When Gassandrid first opened this portal, we sent several dar’gaithin through—we knew that they were most likely to survive the journey—along with a couple of volunteers. Actual volunteers,” he added, at Davian’s look. “Loyal people, good men and women. There was nothing for days, and we all assumed that it had been a failure. And then one of the dar’gaithin came back. It was mad, but it was carrying a steel plate inscribed with information. It told us what had happened. The cataclysm. The thousands of people from different eras, all arriving at the same point in time. The need for ongoing supplies.”
He shrugged. “Diara noticed straight away that the metal was strange; we were already seeing the corruption of Vessels in Talan Gol, so it wasn’t long before we experimented and discovered just how valuable that steel was. And of course, everyone saw the potential for getting information about the future. The description of the cataclysm was enough for Gassandrid to figure out what had gone wrong on the Zvaelar end, so we made the Vessels to build this tower, and sent them through the portal along with instructions.”
Tal sighed. “After that, it seemed logical to keep sending through dar’gaithin every few years with some food, knowledge of the current era, requests for more information—and any prisoners who were particularly… difficult. Ones who we couldn’t execute by law, but who could become martyrs if left locked up in Tel’Tarthen. The idea was that our people already there would manage messages and the reforging of the metal, the dar’gaithin would bring it all back, and the prisoners would do everything else.”
“So there are people in charge here, somewhere? They’re sending messages back?”
“No.” Tal looked troubled. “I wrote the first and only message. I actually already had the Vessels for the tower—they’d arrived here at the same moment I did—but I knew that if I didn’t send that information back, it meant that someone else would eventually decide to. And having anyone else communicating with the Venerate was dangerous, because they’d be able to relay anything they had learned about the Venerate’s future—as well as the fact that I was here, which would have raised all sorts of questions. So I did it, and then I gathered all the volunteers we’d sent through over the years. Convinced them that I was here to oversee things, and…”
He gestured, sighing heavily. “Took care of them,” he finished.
Davian didn’t follow for a second, then swallowed as he understood. “I see.” He shook his head dazedly. “Is that why the dar’gaithin turned on you?”
“No. They didn’t know. I thought that Niha and I were the ones from furthest along the timeline,” admitted Tal. “I came through alone, and she’d already killed the dar’gaithin sent through with her, so I assumed that none of the others would know that I’d switched sides. But there was one.”
“Theshesseth,” completed Davian, nodding.
Tal spread his hands. “And here we are. The dar’gaithin understand this tower’s purpose enough to let us maintain it, and the other Gifted know that if they don’t help supply it with Essence, we’ll all die. But the dar’gaithin also know that I’m a traitor, and most of the other people in this tower were sent to Zvaelar specifically because they wanted to kill me in their respective eras.”
“He is a very popular man,” chimed in Niha as she joined them again, wiping her hands on her clothes. Davian turned, gazing in vaguely disturbed admiration at the floor where the bodies had been. Completely clean, now. As if it had never happened.
“You need to rest,” added Niha to Tal, this time without any hint of playfulness in her voice. She studied Davian assessingly. “You too, actually. I’m assuming that you don’t always look this terrible.”
Davian scowled at her, but Tal just chuckled. “She’s right. You’re going to need your energy.”
Davian frowned. “For what?”
Tal smiled.
“To resume your training, of course,” he said quietly.
The crimson light filtered through the sole window, glinting dully off the steel floor, illuminating Tal as he finally stirred.
Davian glanced up from his study at the desk, where he’d been scrutinizing the reams of notes that Tal had been making about Zvaelar for the past few months. Tal had offered them to him the previous night, and they had been well worth the read.
He’d slept only a little, his body accustomed to wrenching itself up at first bell. Even so, he felt better than he had in a long time. Before retiring, Tal had restored a portion of Davian’s Reserve—it was nowhere near full, but neither was it close to running out anymore. That was enough, for now.
“Learn anything interesting?” asked Tal with a yawn, glancing at the sheets in Davian’s hand.
“A few things,” Davian admitted. He flicked around, then held up one entry in particular. “You say here that you think the al’goriat might be created from some combination of human bodies and Dark—but you don’t know for sure?” That had seemed strange to Davian. Al’goriat were supposed to be Banes, and Banes were supposed to be the creations of the Venerate.
Tal stretched. “I actually thought that they were a myth until I got here. Something the Andarran resistance made up to make us sound even more evil. Rumors of them have been around for almost as long as the ilshara, but trust me—if we’d known how to make and command creatures who could manipulate time, the war with the Darecians would have been over before it started.” He rubbed his face. “I don’t think that they could do what they do, or even exist, away from Zvaelar though: they cannot seem to come within the radius of this tower’s suppression, even though they are equally attracted to the well of Dark sitting underneath.”
He shrugged. “The other Banes are all inextricably tied to the Darklands, to the rift—without that connection, they die—so the dar’gaithin, and now you, are proof that it is on some level accessible from here. But it’s clearly still… barely so. The al’goriat seem more linked to the inherent corruption of this place. I think their abilities might actually stem from it—which may be why they’re able to manipulate time, even within the time bubble Gassandrid created.”
Davian nodded thoughtfully. He had wondered that about the al’goriat.
Tal watched his expression. “I made the assumption about the bodies because of the human likeness, and because we didn’t see any for the first week or so here. It’s all just speculation, though. I couldn’t even tell you whether the dar’gaithin have been the ones making them, somehow, or whether they are happening as a result of something else. By accident, even. The only thing I’m sure of is that the al’goriat obey the dar’gaithin, so long as they can’t see their source. And anything that they can see with a source… well. You’ve probably experienced that by now.” He rubbed his eyes. “Any other burning questions before we get started?”
