Call of the Colossus: An epic fantasy novel (The Mindstream Chronicles Book 2) (24 page)

Chapter 15

Jora spent the following morning in her lesson, tapping her foot impatiently, eager for the day to pass. Her mind drifted periodically to her adventure the previous night and the big warrior she had befriended, and Bastin grew increasingly annoyed at her lack of attention. In the afternoon, she stayed focused during her meeting with Elder Devarla, partly because she did most of the talking and partly because Elder Gastone and another elder named Alton joined them. She tried to explain the concept of the language of Azarian without teaching them how to decipher Elder Kassyl’s book of tones. Fortunately, they each had court cases to hear and criminals to sentence, and so the session lasted only two and a half hours.

Jora returned to her room and tried to study, but the combination of boring text and a disrupted sleep the previous night made her eyelids heavy, and she dozed until supper, then spent the evening alternately pacing and gazing out the window.

Hours crawled by, and the dormitory gradually quieted. She wasn’t sure how she was going to get out this time, since she’d returned Korlan’s keys to his pocket before sneaking back to her room the previous night. While the ’twixt allowed her to slip through the city unseen, unfelt, unheard, and unsmelled, it didn’t allow her to walk through walls or locked gates. She needed a key… or another way out.

Outside, she crept around the interior perimeter of the complex, searching for a tree to climb that would enable her to scale the eight-foot stone wall that encircled the dormitory and rear of the justice building. The wall behind the privy was lower, but still intact.

As she was walking past the dining hall on the ground floor of the dormitory, the sound of quiet laughter put a momentary hitch in her heartbeat. It was coming from below and growing more distant, the soft snickers of men who didn’t want to be overheard. She crept down the staircase at the far end of the building opposite the exit that led to the walkway. The corridor was dimly lit by candles spaced every twenty or thirty feet. No doors eased shut, but she could still hear the muffled sound of footsteps. A door on the left looked different than the others. She approached it, took a breath to ready herself for whatever was on the other side, and pulled it open.

Recognition bloomed in her mind. It was the tunnel that Korlan had carried her through after her punishment. She’d been in too much pain to walk, and the enforcers weren’t permitted to use the door at the other end of the building. The dim glow of a candle emanated from the left and went out. Then all was quiet, the footsteps and whispers gone.

Remembering that Korlan had blown out a candle and put it in a basket, she felt around on the wall, found the basket, and lit it from one of the candles in the corridor, tiptoeing so as not to wake the enforcers sleeping nearby.

The tunnel seemed longer than the above-ground covered walkway between the two buildings, but maybe it was because it was narrow and oppressive. The single candle gave off enough light to see a good dozen steps ahead. When she came to another tunnel on the left, she turned, thinking that was the way the others had gone ahead of her. What she would find at the end remained to be seen. She was both excited and scared. If she were caught trying to sneak out, she would no doubt be punished. But if luck was with her, she was about to find a way to sneak in and out of the justice complex without anyone knowing.

At the end of the tunnel was a door, not as smooth and well-built as the ones in the justice building, but it looked sturdy. She pressed her ear to it and heard nothing. She pushed it open, cringing when it scraped the stone floor, but no one came running. It was a storeroom, she saw. Wooden casks sat on the floor along the walls, some stacked two and three high. There were a few crates as well, and a large burlap sack. On the floor beneath the sack were a few crushed peanut shells.

On the other side of the room, a steep staircase rose up to a door. Light spilled out from around its edges. She climbed the stairs and pressed her ear to the door. She could hear the hum of conversation punctuated with laughter and the occasional clink of glass. A tavern. When she opened the door, the sound rushed at her.

She found herself in a kitchen. A girl in an apron, her dark hair wet with sweat, stood over a wash basin rinsing out mugs and setting them on a table. Jora eased the door shut, hoping to slip out unnoticed, but the girl turned, her face aghast.

And then a smile curved her lips. “A novice, are you?” she asked. “Slipping out for a little fun?”

Jora nodded and put a finger to her lips.

“Oh, don’t mind Nob and them. They’re not supposed to be here, either. If they tell on you, they’ll have to explain why they were here. Go on, have a seat out in the main hall. Ganda will bring you an ale—unless you prefer wine.”

“No, no,” Jora said. “I’m actually… is there a way out where the enforcers won’t see me?”

The girl pointed a wet hand to Jora’s left. “You can go out that way. You sure you don’t want a drink first?”

“Perhaps next time,” Jora said. “Thank you.”

“We close at three,” the girl said. “Don’t be late, or you’ll be locked out of the Justice Bureau ’til sunrise.” She lifted her chin toward Jora. “And you’ll have a hard time explaining why you’re not in your purple robe.”

Jora wondered how popular this place was among the justice officials. “I won’t.”

When Jora arrived at the Legion headquarters, she noticed that Archesilaus was not only slightly out of position, but he looked cleaner than the others, as if five hundred years of dust and grime had been scrubbed away. Hopefully, no one else had noticed. She summoned Po Teng and told him to release Arc from his statue form.

Now of flesh and bone, Arc looked down at her. “How long wilt thou be afield?”

“I’m back. A full day has passed since we last spoke.”

He laughed. “Thou art a trickor.” And then his smile fell away when his eyes scanned the sky. “The stares have moven.”

She looked at the dark sky, impressed that he noticed that the stars had changed position. “It’s later now than it was when we met last night.”

“How can that be?”

“I’m the Gatekeeper, remember?” she said with a grin. “My ally made you into a statue again and released you on my command.”

He looked her over again, then gave Po Teng a sidelong glance. “And ere that, fif hundard yeres?”

“That’s right. Five hundred years. Say it that way.”

“Retar is the god, thou didst say? Nie Hibsar?”

“That’s right. Retar challenged Hibsar and defeated him on the Isle of Shess. He’s unlike the gods before him. He was the first to pledge allegiance to the people of the world, rather than insist on the reverse. He helps us by sharing knowledge and insight.”

“The god talks to thee? Thou hast spoken wyth the god thyself? And he spake to thee?”

“I have. He has. He’s quite a pleasant fellow, too, with a sense of humor.”

The drone of crickets in the weeds grew momentarily louder.

“See? He agrees.” She smiled.

“It is amazing.”

“Before I came to set you free the first time, he told me I needed an army.”

“Wherefore?”

She started to tell him about the godfruit smuggling and realized she first needed to explain what godfruit was. “After Retar defeated Hibsar, Retar’s brother planted a tree in the blood of the fallen god. That tree now gives us godfruit. Those who eat it can survive one death.”

“Gar!”

“It’s true,” she said, amused at his surprise. She thought of her own averted beheading. Godfruit couldn’t possibly have saved her from that. “Mostly,” she added.

“Telle me more o’this godfruit,” Arc said.

She explained how it worked and that the soldiers of the Legion ate it every day in case they fell in battle. Arc asked questions, such as why the enemy soldiers weren’t frightened off by the fact that the Serocians lived again and why they didn’t try to steal the fruit. “They do,” she said. “And someone is helping them do it. Someone is smuggling godfruit to our enemies and profiting from this war—and from the deaths of Serocian soldiers”

Arc’s eyes narrowed, and his jaw tightened. “’Tis not right. We must stop them. We will redress this.”

Jora nodded. “That’s why I need your help and perhaps that of your friends, too.”

Arc pursed his lips as he regarded the statues lined up along the exterior walls of the Legion headquarters. He strolled past them, naming each one and touching them on the arm or shoulder. Jora followed him around the building, keeping her eyes open and her ears alert for a sign they’d been spotted. The leather trousers and mail tunic might not draw much notice, but the glaive would, as would the black marks on the inside of his left forearm.

“What is that on your arm?” Jora asked.

Arc turned his wrist to display the strange characters imprinted there. “’Tis the vision ward, imprinted on the arm of e’ry Colossus.”

“What is it for?”

“Wyth this ward the portwatcher and others wyth the mind vision can nie ken our emplacement.”

Jora couldn’t be certain without looking at Rivva’s wrist cuff again, but she suspected the symbols were the same. A barring hood of sorts. She nodded appreciatively at the ingenuity of tattooing the symbols directly into their skin. “Do you know what the symbols mean?”

Arc ran a finger over the black shapes sewn into his skin. “Nay, only that it achieves the purpose. Scribes know them and guard the knowledge well.”

“What kind of scribes?” Jora asked.

“Scribes who study the scripture,” he said with a crooked grin. “I wot little o’these matters. Thou mustest ask another, mayhap the dominee, if thou wishest to wit.”

Jora groaned. The dominee was the last person she wanted to talk to—about anything.

“You yet have a dominee in these modern times?”

“We do.”

He continued around the building, naming each warrior and touching them as if he were greeting them after a long absence. His brow was crinkled in concern, his shoulders stiff. He stopped in front of one in particular and stared.

It was a female, Jora realized, a few inches shorter than Arc. Apart from the small breasts beneath the mail shirt, she looked every bit like the other warriors—fierce, muscular, and filled with rage.

“Was she your friend?”

He said nothing, but the way he touched her shoulder was different. Tender.

Jealousy burned in her gut like the ember from a dying fire. At some point, she’d begun to think of him as hers, but he wasn’t hers. He belonged only to the king. The magnanimous thing to do would be to release her so they could be reunited, but the thought of sharing Arc’s attention with another woman gave her pause, which embarrassed her at the same time. “I’ll free her next, if you want.”

“Nay,” he said, moving on to the next statue.

Jora was ashamed of the satisfaction she felt. “You haven’t seen her in a long time.”

“I did see her just this morn.”

She supposed he was right. From his perspective, only a few hours had passed since he began the battle that resulted in his battalion turning to stone. She followed him around the building, seeing the emotion in his face as he acknowledged each statue. The distress in his eyes was plain. These were his friends, stony and silent for over five hundred years. What surprised her the most was that a warrior so hard and fierce could feel so intensely.

“What bechanced Hadrian?” he asked, stopping before one statue. It was cracked across the face, shoulder and arm, and a few small chunks of stone had crumbled away. Its right hand, broken off at the wrist, lay by its feet, a tempting toy for a mischievous child.

“I don’t know. It must have fallen down and broken. Maybe we can have a sculptor repair it.” Jora didn’t know whether the loss of his hand would mean a loss in the flesh, but a repair would at least give him a chance to regain use of the hand. It might not work, but it was worth a try.

At last, they returned to the corner where Arc had been standing. Once she’d taken the time to look at them more closely, Jora counted three female Colossi in all.

“Where are the others?” Arc asked. “Scipio and Septimius are not among the rest.”