7. Bridging the Gap
Astra decides to challenge a powerful spell...
The Lost City continues the journey of Astra, respected Head Librarian of the Tiered Library in the renown monastery Qordashi deep in the Balashilar mountains, after an attack on her home destroyed everything she knew and took the lives of people she loved. Her childhood companion, Traz, has returned after 25 years for mysterious reason, and along with the Am’Ayat warrior Xavai they are on the run from the attackers: snow dragons and the dreaded tribe of Yosoi warriors.
Previously: Astra and Xavai walked into the darkness...
They both stood there, hands clinched together, staring down at the covering. It looked inert to Astra, but she did not doubt for a moment that there was powerful magic seeping up from the hole at their feet.
“A spell so powerful as to protect a whole city would have to be in constant contact with the source of the soul dust,” she explained, waving her free hand over it, drawing her conclusion from the many old texts she had read about protect magic for places and things. Although nothing truly compared, at least not that she knew of.
Xavai looked lost in thought for a moment, then nodded. “The spells would be woven together, I think. Not that I could do such magic, but I’ve seen it done.”
Astra raised her eyebrows in surprise. She had never seen anything of the like, although she had read myths and rumors of similar spells being used. But then, in Qordashi magic was rarely called upon by anyone other than the Superiors, the Hearth Keepers, and the Rangers. What magic she had seen was always in service to the Gods, and rarely very grand, nothing at all like the spell that was hiding a whole city from time and space.
Grimacing, Xavai looked over at her. “There is no chance that I will talk you out of this?”
“Talk me out of finding what could be our only protection from the snow dragons? No.” She glared back at him.
Grunting, he knelt down and grasped the recessed handle of the tunnel’s lid and tried to pull it up. Nothing happened. He twisted it one way then another, and it finally gave way. He dropped it to the side with another grunt, where it made a resounding ‘clang’ that echoed throughout the room. They looked down the hole, where a rope ladder hung down.
“We cannot remain holding hands going down this ladder. Let me go first, and you follow by feel. I can then grab you again when we reach bottom,” Xavai said. He did not look happy about it, but then, he hardly looked happy about anything, so Astra could not be bothered by that.
She sat down next to the hole and put one hand on the rim to center herself, closed her eyes, and let go of his hand. Light and sound fell away, not even the roar of the water through the spillways could be heard anymore. It was as if she was all alone in a vast, empty, lifeless cavern. She felt Xavai give her knee a squeeze and then he was gone. She counted to twenty then felt around for the ladder and started making her way down, still with her eyes closed, pretending the darkness was a choice, and not reality, at least kept her from screaming in fear. She at least had many years of scaling up and down ladders in Qordashi, and felt confident as she slowly made her way down. After a distance she judged to be about two stories, she felt Xavai’s hand around her wrist and she opened her eyes.
Then she screamed.
“It’s a totem! Just straw and clothes!” Xavai yelled, pulling her close to his chest. She clung to him, gulping for air, before turning her head to the side. The mysterious figure that had looked so real and terrifying a moment before was, as Xavai promised, just a straw man dressed in robes.
The room at the bottom of the tunnel was, like every place else in the complex, dripping with cloths and rugs and tapestries untouched by time and decay. There was a large moonstone off to the side, its light brittle and dim but still strong enough to see by. The room was small, though, and barely large enough for the three of them—Astra, Xavai, and the strange, standing figure. Unlike the ones in the yards she had seen outside, this one had no hat and was was not obscured by layers of clothes. There was no face, or hands, just bundles of straw to mark the general shape of a person. It was dressed in comparatively plain, brocaded cream colored dress, with a dark blue woven shawl over its ‘shoulders’.
However plain it was, it vibrated with magical power.
She reached out with her free hand and touched the fringe of the shawl, which was so clearly the heart they had been seeking. It was as if all the soul dust from the forests and the waters skimmed through the very weave of it, almost obscuring the actual nature of the material. As her fingers brushed the fringe that hung down from one edge, the feeling of fire danced up her nerves and she yanked her hand back, sucking on her finger tips.
Xavai was startled and watched her suck her fingers with a disturbed look on his face before turning away. Coughing, he pointed at the figure.
“This is what you asked me to seek, the heart of the protection spell for this city.”
Astra nodded. Neither of them were wizards, they had no hope of magically separating the spells from each other. The stones stole the soul dust that fed the power of the spell woven into the blue shawl. The dust it released was pale and white, and it sunk into the walls all around them, the life force of thousands of living things trapped to do the spell’s bidding in order to hold back time and shield the city from prying eyes. Astra explained as much to Xavai, who frowned again.
“What desperation would lead a wizard to create such an abomination?” Xavai asked with clear disgust in his voice.
“Fear.” Astra shrugged.
He reached out and let the edge of the shawl run through his fingers. It was long and nearly reached the ground from each ‘shoulder’ of the figure, and as he tugged at the edge, Astra realized it was more of a large blanket than a cloak, as she had first assumed. A death shroud, she wondered?
She shuddered. The disturbed soul dust wafting up from where Xavia held the cloth, but none of it passed through his skin.
“Oh, the spell was designed to work around people. It’s why the soul dust does not touch us. We can exist here, without harm.”
He withdrew his hand. “No one exists here now, so I do not think the spell was entirely successful.”
There wasn’t much to argue with in that statement, so Astra shrugged again. The thought that the people who built this might have been the architects of their own demise was disturbing enough on its own, without all the soul dust drifting around them.
“I do not want to grab the shawl with no more than a prayer to Tema’s eyes that it will work for us, but neither of us is a wizard.” Astra put her free hand on her hip and glared at the figure.
He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “You are a necromancer, can you not just bid the dead to do as you please? If the shawl is the crux of all the dead called to it, should that not give you power over it?”
Astra bristled. “That is not how my power works.”
“How do you know?”
With a huff, Astra reached out and grabbed the shawl and held it for a couple of seconds, jaw clinching from the pain. She let go with a cry and held her reddened hand up to his face.
“The dead don’t like to be touched or pushed around. They only want to be freed.”
“Then free them,” he said, lifting one shoulder.
Rolling her eyes and flexing her hand, she turned back to study the shawl. She had, back in the tunnels of Ice Mountain, bid many long-dead creatures trapped in the rock to agitate the walls as they fled to the freedom she promised. It had hurt her to do it, and exhausted her, and she still was not entirely sure how, in a moment of desperation and panic, she had actually freed those ghosts from their collective deathbed. Her magic had been censured from the time it manifested when she was eleven, and she had never been taught anything other than to shun it. Her use of it was instinctive and unrefined, while the act of touching soul dust burned her.
But.
Xavai had a point, even if it wasn’t the one he meant to have. The act of sucking the soul dust out of the blue forest was horrific and unnatural, and there was no one left in the lost city to protect anyway. The people who lived or served there, who had made the brilliant textiles and created the vile spells to preserve their way of life, were long dead, likely by their own hands, however unintended. The forest needed to be righted back to its natural state of being, so it could escape the endless void of being undead.
She curled the fist of her free hand. What was the value of a necromancer, if she could not bridge the gap between life and death?
NEXT: Ghosts of a Million Different Creatures
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