Gorinthians (10 page)

Celdic brought his mind back
to the present and realized they were nearly to the top of the
hill. He could see the Altar of Guardia now and suddenly realized
why it had been given that name. It consisted of a large slab of
basalt lying horizontally across two vertical sides of basalt.
Engraved on the lip of the six-inch thick top slab was a depiction
of an armored warrior with his head thrown back and his arms raised
to the sky where lightning bolts were shooting into his upraised
palms. Celdic had not noticed the depiction the last time he and
Lendel had visited. As they approached the Altar, Celdic once again
felt the same resonance he had felt the previous summer. He
motioned to Selindria as they all stopped next to it. She walked
over to him with an eyebrow raised questioningly.

"What is that resonance
coming from?” he asked curiously.

"What resonance?” she
replied blankly.

Celdic gestured toward the
Altar. "It seems to be coming from underneath that. It almost feels
like a river is running under it."

Selindria looked at the
Altar and Celdic could sense her reaching out with her
yar
. After a moment, she
turned back to Celdic. "I don't sense anything."

"You can sense
yara
?” Terrance asked
suddenly, looking strangely at Celdic.

"What?” Celdic asked in
puzzlement.

"
Yara
,” Terrance replied, still
watching Celdic intently. "It is the planet’s
yar
."

"The planet’s
yar
?” Celdic said, still
feeling confused. "I thought that people could no longer feel
it."

"It can't be felt,” Terrance
said slowly, “by most people. There are a few living that can still
sense it. There will be more over the next couple of years. Have
you ever been here before?"

Celdic wondered if Terrance
had just read his mind. Nodding, Celdic told him of his last visit
here with Lendel and the odd phenomenon. When he finished,
Thistledown let out a low whistle.

"You are lucky to still be
here,” Terrance said gravely. "You tapped into
yara
without any knowledge of what
you were doing. It is about as dangerous as opening the door of a
dam without being killed from the current. This Altar was made for
tapping into more of the
yara
without being overwhelmed, but it sounds like you
bypassed the Altar and went straight to the core.” Terrance looked
slightly impressed.

"Are you saying that I can
use the planet’s
yar
?” Celdic asked incredulously.

"
Yara
,” Terrance corrected absently.
"And yes, you can use
yara
."

"Impossible,” Selindria
said flatly. "No human can use
yara
. Even non-humans are extremely
limited in their ability to use
yara
and their generations are much
fewer."

"That is true, with a few
exceptions,” Terrance admitted calmly. "However, I do believe
Celdic is one of those exceptions."

"Celdic is from Chasel Ri’
Aven,” Selindria protested. "They are all of pure human
descent."

"What are you talking
about?” Celdic interrupted. "Why does it make a difference how many
generations exist for determining whether a person can feel
yara
?"

They both looked at him in
surprise. They had obviously forgotten that he was there.
Thistledown chuckled evilly as if it were some kind of
joke.

"We'll get to that in a
minute,” Terrance said brusquely. "I need to take care of something
before we leave."

Terrance walked up to the
Altar and put his hands in a small indention on either side that
Celdic realized was made for the palm of a hand. Terrance's eyes
grew suddenly brighter and Celdic felt a huge surge of power coming
from the Altar into Terrance. For the first time in his life,
Celdic could see something’s
yar
. There was more power pouring
into Terrance than Celdic would have believed was possible. There
were threads splitting off from Terrance in all directions,
shooting into the ground and up into the sky. Even as the threads
buried themselves into the mountains and disappeared from sight,
Celdic could still feel every tendril of power as it twisted and
turned. It reminded him of a root burrowing into the ground. It was
going into people as well, Celdic realized. He could feel it going
into various Elders and other people that he knew. There was
something odd about the pulse of the tendrils that Celdic did not
understand. The scope of what was happening was so complex it
astounded Celdic’s mind that a person could manage something so
complicated. Terrance's face was glistening with sweat and his eyes
were tight with concentration. His neck muscles were corded with
strain, as if the effort was physical as well as mental. The
tendrils slowly began to pull back toward the Altar where Terrance
stood. It looked like he was exerting as much effort to pull
everything back as it had taken to do whatever it was he had done.
Finally, as the last tendril pulled back within Terrance, the power
surge that Celdic had sensed rushing through Terrance abruptly cut
off.

Feeling slightly shaken,
Celdic looked at Selindria with a questioning look. There was shock
wide in her eyes, another expression that Celdic had never seen on
her face. After a moment, she seemed to come back to
herself.

"I felt that,” she
commented, sounding impressed despite herself.

"I think everyone felt
that,” Celdic replied with a somewhat strained laugh.

Terrance staggered away from
the Altar to sit on a rock by the fire pit. Selindria wordlessly
handed him a water skin, which he accepted with a grateful nod and
promptly drained. He sat panting for a few minutes as he caught his
breath. Eventually, he arose again and handed the water skin back
to Selindria with murmured thanks.

"I suppose we better start
moving again if we want to make it to the boundary by nightfall,”
Terrance said as he scanned the horizon before them. He hoisted up
his pack and began walking down the trail.

Selindria had been patiently
waiting for him to start moving again before barraging him with
questions. She had such a preoccupied look on her face that Celdic
had held off some his own questions.

"What exactly did you do?”
Selindria finally asked him, her expression a blend of curiosity
and suspicion.

Terrance gestured at
Thistledown, who had managed to perch himself on Celdic's pack
again. "I will let him explain it to you. I need some time to
recover."

Thistledown stood up
eagerly and cleared his throat. "I will need to give you a little
bit of background in order for the answer to that question to make
any sense.” He paused and then added, "A lot of background in
Celdic's case. The Altar of Guardia is only one of many Altars like
it scattered throughout the world. When Terrance first started the
Derinian Order, one of the members discovered that a person could
tap into more
yara
by creating a conduit that embedded itself deeply into the
planet's crust. Terrance took that discovery one step further and
found that if these conduits were placed in specific places around
the world, a person could unite their power.” Thistledown rolled
his eyes. "He spent weeks on the chalkboard playing with formulas
and mathematical figures before he could make it work."

Terrance finally looked back
at them scowling. "What does this have to do with her question?” he
demanded.

Thistledown blinked and then
laughed. "I just wanted them to know how the Altars were first
created."

Terrance shook his head in
resignation. "The Avenry were put in this valley for several
reasons. One of the most important was to protect the human
bloodline. There will be those that can use
yara
who will soon try to alter the
Avenry. What we did back at the Altar was create a shield that
connects all of the Avenry together with a kind of energy. I have
hidden the building blocks that make up their physical bodies in an
algorithmic code that pulses through the energy link, disguising
their true identities.”

Celdic suddenly remembered
the pulsing that he felt as the tendrils of power emanated from the
altar. “Is that what that pulsing was? A code?”

Terrance nodded, looking
pleased for some reason. “It was a trick that I learned in another
lifetime, in another place.” He slowed down as they came to the
edge of the hill. “They have what you could call a reinforced aura
now. They will not be able to use their
yar
as effectively any more, but they
are immune to the Gorinthian’s power, as well as others that would
try to change them.”

“
It is all downhill from
here,” Selindria said, as she began walking down the thickly
vegetated path. “You should have plenty of energy to tell me why
that was necessary.”

Terrance muttered something
to himself. Celdic thought he heard something about a mule, but
could not be sure. “The people of Chasel Ri’ Aven were put here as
Guardians.” Terrance said when he had finished muttering. “They
have forgotten they are guardians of more than the Chasel. They
guard the pure blood of the human race, some of the only human
blood that will be able to sense
yara
. We quarantined them from the
rest of humanity and kept close to the Rajan Gardens so they could
preserve a seed with the ability for humans to touch
yara
once the planet has
healed.” Terrance gestured to the valley down below them. “The
humans down there will never touch
yara
on their own. It has been bred
out of them because generation after generation passed away without
sensing enough of the planet’s spirit to bond to it. For a long
time after the Sundering, nothing would grow except in the Rajan
Gardens. It was three hundred years before people could begin
traveling throughout the continents again.”

Terrance walked for a while
in silence, brooding over the past. Celdic shuddered, thinking of
what it must have been like watching the planet die all around you,
being forced to share hot spots on the planet with anyone else that
survived.

Thistledown picked up where
Terrance left off. “After they saw what they had done to the
planet, the Derinian Order selected a group of people to live in
isolation in these mountains. Terrance visited often here with them
for a couple of centuries, helping them build a society and shaping
them to be guardians of the Chasel as well as their own bloodline.”
Thistledown shook his head slowly, “I would never have thought the
Avenry folk would turn out so well sitting in isolation that
long.”

“
It’s called the power of
tradition,” Terrance interjected flippantly. “Give someone a
tradition to pass on to their descendants and it will last longer
than anything else man can make, even if it does become somewhat
corrupted.”

Thistledown looked at him
oddly for a moment before continuing. “Anyway, the idea was to
bring the Avenry folk back into the world once the planet’s spirit
healed completely and reintroduce their pure blood into the
mainstream bloodline.” Thistledown barked a laugh. “They certainly
didn’t anticipate what the
yara
hotspots would do to humanity. Now we have Talons,
Zerans and thousands of odd creatures that never existed back then.
There aren’t any full-blooded humans left in the world except in
Chasel Ri’ Aven.”

Celdic pondered what they
had said. His entire world seemed to have shrunk to insignificance
in the last couple of hours. The Mountain land had been his world
when he woke up that morning. Now they were just an abnormal
offshoot in a sequence of freak accidents in a world gone crazy.
Where has all of the order in the world gone? Celdic thought
desperately.

Selindria pursed her lips
thoughtfully as she glided down the steep mountainside, avoiding
obstructions without any conscious effort. It was said that she
could sneak up on a fox through a bed of dry leaves, and Celdic
believed it as he watched her smooth descent through the thick
foliage. It was all Celdic could do to keep from being twisted up
in the long vines hanging from the green canopy of trees above
them. Celdic noticed that Terrance had no more difficulty than
Selindria making his way down the lush path.

The sky darkened as the sun
dropped lower on the horizon. Abruptly, Terrance stopped and raised
a hand to signal them likewise. Celdic looked around for the reason
they had stopped. Immediately, a guardian materialized out of the
forest and tapped his hand to his chest in salute. Celdic
recognized him as he drew near. It was Jalorm, one of the guardians
that would come to the Tar Ri’ San to teach them stealth. He was
taller than most men were and possessed piercing blue eyes and a
strong chin. He wore the achel, a uniform that was made from the
achelnise plant that grew in the Rajan Gardens. The plant was a
predator that was invisible to the naked eye. It could bend light
around itself so that only a person adept at sensing other
being’s
yar
could
sense it.