Bridgeworlds: Deep Flux (7 page)

There was no lock to his cell. Only bars in the stone. He had
shaken each one, hoping he could loosen them. Myles would have been
glad for a lock. Locks could be picked. Instead it was just him and the
bars and the constant drip of water that had first made him sick for
some time and then given him headache after headache. Sometimes he
sang in hopes of drowning it out.

His mind drifted to the poison he had stored in the heel of one
of his boots.
No, I just need to find a way out, there has to be a way out.

Myles still had some flash paper hidden in his hat but he knew
that what light it gave would be momentary and it would not be enough
for him to make out his surroundings. Besides he had felt his way
around and there was no secret way out. Haylale had teleported him
into this prison.

Finally, Myles heard footsteps.
It must have worked! They are
coming to try to force feed me!
“Hey,” Myles yelled, “over here!”

Myles could see a hovering ball of light and then the face of an
un-naturally thin man wearing a lit up uniform. He had a goatee and
dark hollow eyes.
A Gauntman? But from what I heard from the Magi
they are not from Soterion but from a world called Gnosis.

The man looked at a screen attached to his arm and looked back
to Myles in confusion. “You must eat or you will die,” he said in a quick
and tedious accent.

“Let me out, I don’t belong here,” said Myles.

The guard turned around quickly and ran down the hall.
Myles sighed. I can’t catch a break here
. I should have known
better than to go after Haylale by myself. Or with an army for that
matter.

His body was stiff and weak. He shifted to lean against the wall.
Myles had very little energy left. Time dragged on and he began to fade
out and drifted to sleep. Soon he woke to a small noise in the distance.
With the little power nap and the excitement of catching someone
bringing food he jolted awake with a surge of adrenaline.

Myles heard footsteps again. The guard was back and there was
another Gauntman with him. He wore a green cape and more
decorative clothing than the guard
. This guy must be a leader or some
kind of nobility.

The noble looked angry. His voice was a higher pitch than what
Myles would consider normal and he spoke quickly, however; Myles still
had the translator that Omar had given him on him allowing him to
understand the guard. “
Fat monkey
must eat, why for you don’t eat?
You don’t eat, you die. You die, cause trouble for me. Can you even
understand what I am saying,
fat monkey
?”

Myles cocked his head and looked down at himself
. Fat? I don’t
think anyone has ever called me fat. I haven’t eaten in five days!
He
looked at the noble and before Myles could speak he cut him off.

“Yes, you… tell me now how you got here,” he snapped. “We
find you here with no way in.”

Myles shook his head, “Look genius, do you think if I knew how I
got here that I would be sitting behind these bars? I woke up, and I was
here.”

The noble glared at Myles, “You are an intruder who has walked
where he should not go. I have given you a chance to plead your case.
We need answers. Now you will come with me and answer to the
Pontiff.”

The man reached his arm through the bars and grabbed Myles,
an electronic device on his wrist began to glow and then suddenly Myles
was on the other side of the bars. Myles blinked.
Teleportation! Omar
would kill for one of these!

From everything Myles had heard from the Magi, the Gauntmen
were hostile toward all other races. A meeting with this Pontiff would
likely go worse than his meeting with King Alagaar. If there was any time
to make a break for it, it was now. Myles followed the noble up the long
tunnel. They passed several other cells such as his own and there were
people of other races in the cells, even a Drakoni. He studied the device
around the noble’s arm and saw what he thought to be a release button
on it. The globe of light they were following was also some kind of
hovering electronic device. Myles would have to move with lightning
speed.

He would have to rely on his other senses like the blind
swordsman had taught him to do while traveling with the circus. And he
needed to act quickly while the adrenaline was still pumping through his
body. He took one last look to memorize his surroundings. Myles
grabbed the globe and rammed it against the tunnel wall disabling it
and quickly sliding it into one of the pockets of his sleeves. Then he took
one of his knives and used it to switch the release on the teleporters the
noble and the guard had on. The two arm bands fell and Myles collected
them as the men scrambled. He tried to put one on his arm but it was
too small. He could not activate it until it was shut and around his arm.

Myles doubled back to where the two idiots were fumbling in
the dark. He knocked them out with ease. Their bodies were so frail.

He ran out of the tunnel into the middle of a very large city. He
could smell the salty air of an ocean nearby
. I must get to a ship.
Myles
tried to imagine himself at the distant docks but it still didn’t work. In
fact, it seemed to gain him attention, instead. There were guards
coming towards him who wore sharpened metal armor with spiked
helmets.

The Knife Guard.
Sapphira, the Gauntman Magi, had said that
she’d been a part of the Knife Guard. They were skilled warriors trained
to use their entire bodies like a knife. Myles had only been able to best
Sapphira one-on-one in sparring a few times; now he could count about
ten of the Knife Guard. He tried again desperately to imagine himself at
the docks, but his nose started to bleed like when he overexerted
himself. Something was blocking him. Luckily, Myles remembered that
he had the invisibility device that Omar had given him. He activated it
and smiled when the guards stopped approaching in shock. He didn't
have time to celebrate, though. In unison the Knife Guards reached up
to touch a button on their helmet visors and all eyes focused on Myles
again.

He shrugged, tipped his hat, gave the guards a mischievous
wink, and ran for it. The guard closest to him jumped forward putting
his hands flat together in front of him and pointing his toes as if he were
a thrown knife. He sailed through the air towards Myles faster than he
thought possible. The sharp gauntleted hands hit Myles in the shoulder
blade. It was as if he had been sliced by a sword leaving a big gash on his
shoulder. The pain sent a wave of weariness through him.
No, I must
keep moving, or I will collapse
.

The fear of being in that cage again sent another surge of
adrenaline through him. Remembering his training with Sapphira, he
knew some of the moves to expect. Every move the guard made was
graceful yet precise. He blocked a few chops and butterfly kicks but
Myles had a hard time blocking full body strikes. For being so thin, the
guard was really hitting with a lot of force. Myles shuddered to think
how many stitches he would need.

He ducked and rolled out of the way of another full body attack
as the other guards started to surround him. As another came at him,
he grabbed the guard by the feet and thrust him towards three others
knocking them all down. That created a gap for Myles to run through. It
wasn’t in the direction he wanted to go but he had no other choice.
Myles would have thought they would be faster runners because they
were so thin and their fighting style was so fast but he pulled ahead of
the guards out-sprinting them.

As he surveyed the city for shadows and good places to hide, he
tried not to be taken aback by the super advanced technology. The
island city seemed to have very little foliage. It was made up of metal
and glass. There were domes of glass supported by metal frames and
large curved sky-scrapers that looked like buildings of residence. The
buildings had tracks that led from one building to the next, carrying
glass tubes full of people. There were also flying shuttle craft that
buzzed about the city, but from Myles’ vantage point he could see that
none of them left the city limits.

The highest building that Myles could see was in the center of
the city. It looked to be made of white sheet metal and glass. It was a
tall cylindrical building that ended in a loop at the top where Myles
could see greenery where he guessed a garden was. Upon the building
was what looked to be a sigil or stately symbol. It was a butterfly with
eyes in its wings. There were people dressed in fine shimmering cloth
like the other noble and Gauntmen wearing tall hats with the butterfly
symbol on them that looked to Myles like priests heading in and out of
the building.

I bet whoever leads this place lives or works at the top of that
building.
Myles turned towards the building as the guards chased after
him.
Heh, going in there would be kind of like being chased by the cops
and deciding to run into the White House to get away.
Myles observed
that it was the cleanest, well-kept building in the city. Outside of the
building there were those that looked like priests prostrating
themselves before a statue of the butterfly symbol.
This is a holy
building to them, something sacred.
Myles thought back to one of his
getaways. He had run into a "haunted" buildings and the natives would
not follow.
The odds are stacked against me but that is when I shine the
most, I’m going to get out of this place one way or another.

He sprinted right into the building and got into an elevator-like
mechanism. There were buttons with glyphs that Myles guessed were
numbers. The glyphs got larger as the buttons went up the panel of the
elevator. He pressed the button with the largest glyph on it. A loud siren
began to whale and water began to spray from a nozzle at the ceiling.
Myles sighed and rolled his eyes.
Of all the buttons I hit the fire alarm.
Myles quickly hit the button again and it stopped.
At least my luck
worked that time.
Then Myles tried the next largest button under the
fire alarm and lights flashed on the buttons as he passed each floor. No
one got on with him on the way up. The elevator stopped one floor
before the top.
Likely only accessible by important people. Gotta find
another way up.
Myles checked the tube he was in and found that the
top could come unhinged easily. He opened up the ceiling and lifted
himself into the elevator shaft. He found a ladder there and climbed it
to the next set of doors. There was a lock on the doors that looked like it
was designed to release when the elevator reached the top. Myles
braced himself on the thin platform in front of the doors and took out
his lock-picking kit. The lock was very complex but after a few minutes
he managed to pick it.

After picking the lock Myles force the doors open revealing a
white painted hallway that lead to the left. He walked down the hallway
and came to an all-white room with all white furniture. To offset the
blankness there were pieces of colorful art hung upon the walls. There
were colorful bursts of shapes on some kind of sheet canvas. He
scanned the room and saw a Gauntman seated at a desk stacked with
papers. Above his desk was a map of Soterion and to either side of the
room were whit curtains. The map was not like the other maps of
Soterion he had seen. The map included the larger continent to the east
that Myles had seen coming into Soterion’s atmosphere. It was the land
known as Tanniyn’erets by the Raphad. The map was marked and
sectioned out by Kingdoms.

Myles approached, believing that the invisibility device would
work since the man did not have a visor like the guards did. He also
knew that it was only a matter of time before the guards found where
he was and exposed him. He looked over the man’s shoulder to the
paperwork that the man was going over. He held out a page and
scrolled down it with his finger causing more words to appear. There
was strange writing that Myles could not read, but he did recognize a 3D
image of Omar on the page.

Myles could hear the clanking of the guards' armor. He dashed
behind one of the white curtains. One of the guards spoke, “Pontiff, we
are sorry to bother you. But there is an intruder in the tower and we
have followed him here."

As the Pontiff cleared his throat and began to address the
guards, Myles jumped out behind the Pontiff seeing that the guards
were bowed before the Pontiff. Myles hit the Pontiff with a right cross
as hard as he could. It worked; it knocked the man out completely.
These people were dangerous, but their paper thin bodies were very
frail. Before the guards could approach, Myles had a knife at the
unconscious Pontiff’s neck. The guards stopped. “Please, don’t harm
him. Take one of us instead,” said one of the guards.

Myles shook his head. “Oh no, this chump is my ticket out of
town.” He grabbed the paper that had the image of Omar on it. Myles
tossed the paper to the floor. “Read it,” he said as he pressed the knife
closer to the Pontiff’s neck.

The guard who had spoken reached down and grabbed the
paper very slowly. He read, “Magi. Origin: Earth. We are not sure how
they traveled to Soterion. Their science, though archaic, could be a
threat to us sometime in the near future. Leader: Omar, Race: Akana
but with a different biological make-up. Suggested course of action:
assassinate the leader and destroy all sources of knowledge and
technology.”

Myles shook his head. “Thank you.” He took the map from the
wall with his free hand and also pushed the release button on the
teleportation device on the Pontiff’s arm, pocketing that one, too. He
opened a few of the drawers in the all-white desk and in one he found
some kind of pistol. The guards’ eyes widened when they saw him pull it
out. Myles put away the knife and pointed the pistol at the Pontiff. “I
want safe passage out of here. If I think you are following me I'm going
to blow his brains out. Take the teleporters from your wrists and slide
them over to me.”