Birthright-The Technomage Archive (15 page)

“
They’re bending physics, Ceril. They’re tricking the universe. Think of it like it’s a mini-Instance. We broke off a piece of home and carried it with us to trick the universe into believing that we’re still in the same spot. At least, that’s one theory. It’s why my thesis is taking so long.”

“
No wonder,” he said. Ceril turned his head to the side, then back toward Saryn. “Do you hear that?”

“
Barely,” she said. “I think it’s Roman. Maybe he’s explaining all this.” The duo had finally made their way to the Instance portal. They were at the very far end of the crowd that congregated in front of Roman. The muscle-bound scholar was standing in front of the archway that, until now, had always shimmered with energy.

Now, though, the dull frame looked cheap, fake. “Want to push our way through?” Ceril asked.

“
Looks like we're going to have to.”

The crowd of people was focused on Roman’s address. Saryn let Ceril lead and cut a path through the other Charons. Occasionally, someone would grunt or nudge them back or give them a “hey, watch it,” but the pair eventually made their way to the front.

“—
are not trapped. There will be a full investigation regarding the cause of this disturbance and we will be in our way,” Roman said. He was a good speaker. He knew how to work the crowd. He scanned the crowed as he spoke, and his eyes fell on Ceril. He frowned, almost glared. It was momentary, but Ceril caught it. “Now, if you'll excuse me,” Roman said, “Professor Lim Nephil from Ennd's Academy will answer any questions you may have.”

What’s Nephil doing here?
Ceril thought.
He shouldn’t be bringing new Recruits through this late in the year.

Roman interrupted Ceril's thoughts as he came off the stage and took the younger man by a shoulder. Ceril had grown to be a large young man, his chunkiness from adolescence turned into muscle over the years by his soldier training. He was still no match for Roman, though, who stood nearly a foot taller than he did. Ceril allowed himself to be led away from the crowd, where he found himself being pretty much thrown into a small meeting room attached to the portal chamber. The lights were dim, and it took Ceril’s eyes a few moments to adjust.

“
Just what the hell do you think you're doing?” Roman said. Ceril looked toward the door that Roman slammed behind them and wondered if anyone outside this room would be able to hear this conversation. “No, they can't hear us, Ceril, if that’s what you’re thinking. So tell me, just what the hell do you think you're doing?”

“
I don't understand. I had just come in to see what the big deal was, and you pulled me in here to yell at me.”

“
Why were you not at your briefing this morning, Ceril?” Roman might have been angrier than Ceril had ever seen him, and he had been plenty angry after Ethan Triggs’s death. Roman was shaking as he waited for Ceril to answer.

“
I overslept, sir,” Ceril said. He tried to keep his voice calm. “I must not have set my alarm when I went to bed last night, and I woke up when people started making noise outside my door. It might have been ten or fifteen minutes ago.”

“
You didn't set your alarm? That's your story?”

“
It's not my story, sir. It's the truth.”

“
Ceril,” said a voice from behind him, “do you have any idea how important your Rites are?” Bryt leaned over the conference. Ceril could see Howser there, too, and a few other professors he had known at Ennd's. What was going on here?

“
Yes, sir.”

“
It appears that you don’t,” Roman said. “After all of the work you’ve put in over the years, I can’t believe that you would think so little of your Rites. Of us. Of yourself.”

“
I didn’t realize that oversleeping was a capital offense, sir,” Ceril said.

“
Don’t get smart with me, son,” Roman snapped.

Bryt interrupted their exchange. He said, “You were going to be briefed for a mission that was uniquely suited to you and the team we were sending with you.”

“
With me?”

“
Yes, you were to be team leader this time around.”

Ceril squinted at him. “Doing what? You said my Rites were going to be looking around to see if I can find connections, and I’ve been doing that solo for a while now.”

Bryt stood up and said, “Yes, you have. It’s a little different than that, though, Ceril. We’ve expected this kind of failure for some time.”

“
I didn’t fail!” Ceril shouted. He was getting frustrated with them attacking him like this, but he knew that if he didn’t control himself, his Flameblade might make an appearance. With them already doubting his abilities, the last thing he needed was for them to think his soldier training didn’t take.

“
Not you, Ceril. The hyperdrive. The
Sigil
is an old ship. Older than most people can reasonably comprehend, and she's been traveling a long time. Some of our engineers noticed that there was too much of a variance in the power being fed to the hyperdrive. And into the Instance portal. They calculated that if we didn’t do something soon, we could overload the system.” Bryt touched his forehead lightly with his fingertips. “If that happened, then our lifeline back to Erlon would be severed.”

“
But what does this have to do with me?”

“
More than you’ve been told so far, actually,” Bryt said. “But plans have changed somewhat. The base mission remains the same, however. You were initially going to be sent to an Instance where there might be ties to the Untouchable that you would be…uniquely able to utilize. Given our current predicament, we’re going to need you to not only find those ties, Ceril, but use them to physically get back to Erlon.”

“
I’m not sure I understand, Bryt.”

“
You don’t have to,” Roman said. “That’s why you’ll have your team. You’ve all been chosen specifically for this mission. It’s up to you to figure out how to get yourselves back to Erlon. Back to Ternia, actually, so that you could help elicit some assistance from that end.”

“
Why Ternia? Why me?”

“
Because, Ceril,” said Bryt, “I don't think that anyone else on board this ship—present company included—would be able to convince your grandfather to come back and see if he can fix what he screwed up in the first place.”

Chapter Ten

Gramps looked at the sky and sighed. Storms were on their way, and from the look of the sky, he would need to secure anything he didn’t want blown away. He loved living in Ternia more than he’d ever loved anywhere else, but the storms could get bad enough that he considered moving. Almost.

Still, such thoughts did him little good at the moment, and he figured that he had maybe half an hour before the worst of the storm came. He spent that time moving whatever he could carry into his storage buildings behind the house.

By the time the storm hit, he was back inside, safe, dry, and sitting in his favorite chair—the one next to the window where he told his grandson stories. He lit a candle and wondered just what was going on with Ceril these days. Nearly five years had passed since he had been allowed to speak with the boy.
So much can change in five years
, he thought.

He missed Ceril terribly. The boy wouldn’t have had family if it weren’t for him, and then Nephil and those other damned technomages at Ennd's took him and tried to make him one of
them
. The old man’s stomach clenched at the thought. He had wanted more than that life for Ceril. He just hoped that wherever Ceril was, he was safe and happy.

It didn’t do well for him to dwell on Ceril, on the Charons. That’s why he had his book. The old, leather-bound book that he cradled on his lap was a point of contention for most of the people in the village. While they were not illiterate, most of their reading was done on tablets or PDAs and dealt with whatever hot topic had taken over the ‘Nets that day. Gramps
harrump
hed to himself at the thought of it; he would bet good money that half of the people in the village had never owned a real book, and that even fewer had read one cover to cover. At least he couldn’t say that about Ceril.

He had done what he could to shield the boy from technology, and even though he knew that Ceril loved him, Gramps was sure that decision had frustrated Ceril. Especially with the other boys from the town ranting and raving about their new gadgets every few weeks. But Gramps put his foot down; he would have none of it in his house. He had seen firsthand what an obsession with technology could do to someone, and he would do his very best to shield his family from it.

But now…now, the damned Charons had him. Once they got their hands on someone, it was tech or bust. There was no other way for them, and he knew that better than anyone. He hoped that Ceril was a smart enough boy that he didn’t buy into their rhetoric and propaganda without thinking about it. After six years of immersion, anyone would pick up a few habits, become comfortable. A new device here and there may not seem like much at first—in fact, Gramps remembered it being pretty all right indeed—but it became an addiction all too quickly. It stopped being about progress and became complacency, laziness. And the Rites? The nanites? And worst of all, when they started in on your blood…

Gramps shuddered. He couldn’t think about that. Ceril was okay. He knew it. His wrinkled hands stroked the cover of the book in his lap and found the purple ribbon he used to mark his place. He opened the book to a blank page about three quarters of the way through and grabbed a pen off the bookshelf. The storm would give him the perfect opportunity to get some writing done since he obviously could not tend his garden, no matter how much he wanted to.

The book was his love, his legacy really. Gramps knew that he wasn’t going to live forever, even if it sometimes felt like he would. When his time finally came, there was a lot of information and history about the Charons that would be lost—at least to the Erlonian public—if he never completed this book. Gramps knew a great deal more about the Charons than he had told Ceril the summer he had found the Flameblade.

He also knew that there was no public record of the Charons that wasn’t more legend than fact. At least, not in Ternia.

So, since the day that Gilbert Squalt had called to inform him that Ceril had been recruited for training as a Charon, Gramps had spent the last six years writing the history the world was missing. He honestly had no delusions that anyone would ever read it. He had no desire to publish it or push it onto the ‘Nets. It just eased his mind to know that it was there, would be there when he was dead and gone (
Whenever that may be
, he thought). Maybe someone would stumble across the book in a few centuries, dust it off, crack the spine, and know the truth about how the world became so messed up.

After all, who better to tell the story of the Charons and of their rise and fall, than the one man who had been there through it all?

***

The pen had barely scratched paper when there was a knock at the front door. Gramps thought there was a knock, at least. The storm outside had picked up, and he couldn't very well imagine that anyone would be out in it, much less knocking at his door. The storm probably tossed a limb at the house. There was another sound, talking maybe, and that made his head jerk up. Gramps’s aged muscles were not used to motion that quick, and he groaned involuntarily. The book slid off his lap onto the floor and closed, the purple ribbon barely caught between the pages.

“
Who’s there?” he asked as loudly as he could. He wasn't expecting anyone, and he couldn't remember the last time anyone had just stopped by to chat. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had stopped by at all.

Another knock. And voices. There was definitely someone there; it wasn't just something being tossed against the side of the house.

“
Who’s there, I said?”

The knocks grew more insistent, slower but harder. Gramps bent to pick up the book off the floor and placed it back in its home on his bookshelf.

More knocking, louder voices, probably yelling. Even though they didn’t socialize, Gramps knew his neighbors in the village. They were not terribly fond of him, definitely not fond enough to come knocking in a storm like this. That meant it was someone else. Gramps muttered to himself and hoped it wasn’t as bad as he expected.

He went toward the bedroom to put some more space between him and whoever was outside. What he needed was a weapon, but he didn't think he had time to get one.

A loud crash came from the front of his house, and the voices were no longer muffled. He heard a man and a woman speaking to one another. They spoke a language that he recognized, that he had once spoken himself, but had not spoken for many years. He had thought it died out centuries ago. It had been so long since he had even heard it; he couldn’t quite understand what the intruders were saying.

It didn’t matter. Gramps knew the kinds of people who had spoken that language once upon a time, and that was enough. One side of his mouth curled upward in a snarl, while a cold rock formed in the center of his stomach. His heart raced.

If he did not act quickly, there was a chance he might not make it through this encounter.

The man was becoming more insistent, yelling faster and louder. Every time he yelled, a crash punctuated his statement. This went on for about thirty seconds, and each crash indicated to Gramps that the burglars were working their way through the house.

They would find him in a minute, which meant there was no time to search for a weapon. There was a crash from the hallway outside the bedroom he was in, and the woman yelled something Gramps could almost understand.

Fear filled him. He wasn’t ready to die, after all. He had thought he was. He had thought his life had been long enough, but no. Not like this. If he was going to die, it was going to be on his own terms, not because someone invaded his home.