Age of War

Chapter 34

A crisp white layer of fresh-fallen snow covered the mountainside and the skeletal ruins that clung to it. It hid the decay and desolation, so Jonis felt like she was in a strange forest of glittering ice towers. The sky was clear and blue. It was much colder than she remembered. She stood outside the same door they’d entered by, hugging her furs closely to her body as she shivered, watching the line of dark shapes dwindling as they walked away. She could just make out Huldane, taller and broader than the rest, with his bloody shield still strapped to his back. The rest were anonymous cloaked figures, tiny against the towering white walls of Omega, the lost city. She was alone here now. Alone to face whatever truths about her past she could uncover. Why had she been so insistent on this? She didn’t know the answer to that, except that it had felt very important that this be hers, and hers alone. No matter what fanciful stories Huldane might tell around the fire, it was she who was the heir to whatever people once lived here, and she who seemingly possessed some fragment of their mysterious power. What could it all mean? What had happened here? She looked up at the pale sky. The air was as clear as glass, but brittle as ice. A cold snap, she told herself, and yet she knew it had begun yesterday, when the black lightning had flown from her fingertips and turned those dogmen inside out. It had sucked the warmth away, as if clouds had rushed in to cover the sun at her command. The phenomenon was not unknown – sometimes, when a Cyclops unleashed its eldritch vortex of destruction, Keepers reported something similar. A chill in the air: a darkness descending. It was little more than a curiosity, but now as Jonis stepped back into the entrance to the underground complex, she mused on its possible meaning. Ice and cold were gradually becoming facts of life for Atlantis. She’d seen the great white sheet that covered the ocean to the north, and she understood the danger it presented. Tonnes upon tonnes of grinding, chewing ice, freezing and thawing over and over, turning cities and mountains into dust. That was the future of her homeland, unless she could find some way to prevent it, and as she traced a finger in the frost that sparkled anew on the walls, she pondered the possible connections between this ancient cataclysm and the one that now loomed before them.

She re-entered The Circle and took in its splendour once more. Now she was by herself, if seemed very much larger. The precarious ceiling of ice was still in place, though she could hear creaks and groans as it started to melt. She didn’t want to be in this chamber when it came crashing down. Fortunately, she thought she’d probably learned all she could from this place. There were other parts of this city to explore. She turned away, sparing a glance only for the hasty graves of the soldiers who had been killed. They’d heaped rubble on their bodies, making nine small cairns in a neat row beneath a damaged fresco showing the mysterious twin queens of Omega in their thrones. No one had felt right giving a proper eulogy. Tayne had just spoken briefly, giving their names and ranks and adding the traditional soldier’s lament at the end. Jonis could still hear her words, echoing around the chamber as the grey dawn light had filtered through the snow and ice over the dome. “They died in service to their Empress, for the betterment of Atlantis and all its children, far from home. May they find their way back.”

“May they find their way back,” they’d all repeated, even Huldane, who must surely have his own observances to his brutal god. Now it was all silent, save for the continuous drip-drip of water from the ceiling. Jonis had her supplies in her pack already. There was nothing left to see here. She walked down the steps and back into the tunnels.

She knew where she had to go next, although she wasn’t absolutely certain of the way, particularly as these passages were just subtly different enough from the ones in Atlas to leave her disorientated. Before, she’d had guides, but now she was alone. She carried aloft a burning torch, but the light it cast was dim and unsteady. She began to regret sending the others away, but then as she chanced upon an intersection that looked hauntingly familiar, she dismissed the cowardly thought. She was a Cyclops Keeper. This was her city by rights, and she would not be lost and scared in its depths. She continued with more confidence now, casting her mind back to the strange night she’d walked this way – or its equivalent in her home – with Calam and Calad. In comparison to this, that felt like an exciting adventure, something closer to a childish prank than a transgression made with the ostensible aim of saving the world. It was all real now though. This is where her path had brought her. As she turned a corner and entered a wide, black chamber, she thought she heard a voice, just a ghostly whisper near her ear. She whirled, waving the torch around. “Hello?” she called out, voice sounding high and reedy. She was certain someone had spoken – she heard the words, just a faint murmur on the edge of hearing. ‘All paths visible…’ it had said, or so it seemed. Silence greeted her hesitant enquiry but she wandered around the chamber again, trying to methodically search every corner. She didn’t like being in an unfamiliar open space like this. She hastened out through the opposite doorway and back into the more comfortable corridors, where she only had in front and behind to worry about. She heard no more mysterious whispers, and began to feel more sure of herself again. She knew precisely where she was now – the entrance she sought should be just down the next passage. She bounded up a set of shallow steps, turned a corner and then skidded to a halt. She’d been expecting a short stretch of tunnel leading to a kind of stepped dais in front of a wide door, but she remembered that this wasn’t Atlas, and it wasn’t her home. She sought the Archive, or its counterpart, but here it wasn’t a pit bored into the ground – it was a tower rising from the mountainside. Unwittingly she’d been moving not through an underground labyrinth, but had walked right out from a shoulder of the mountain, where a crumbling building of the same black stone as everything else in Omega jutted out. The Archive itself was a slender pinnacle perhaps two-hundred strides distant, and connecting the rest of the complex to it was a bridge, but not of any kind Jonis had seen before.