Page 35 of Elvenbred

Strange … my mage-light glows fine. My illusions were fine as well.

She slipped inside the door, and saw the stairway up to the Tower. She remembered the spiraling climb, and the stitch in her side it had given her when she made it to the top. She took a deep breath, ensured she relocked the door and quietly closed it behind her. Once secure, she sat on the stairs for several minutes resting, taking deep breaths to calm herself. The stresses of the evening built and she worked through a wave of fear and anxiety. I’m not used to this. I’m used to giving the orders.

After what felt like minutes the fear receded enough to continue. She decided then that lying mostly nude on a couch in a diaphanous gown while fencing verbally with elven lords who alternated between leering at her and trying to steal her estate was altogether much less stressful than all this creeping and peeping. She cupped her head in her hands, and pulled her hair back, before standing and shaking out her shoulders, and trying to ease the tension in her stomach.

She took a long look up the flight of stairs, dimly illuminated by flickering mage-lights, and sighed again as she remembered the climb.

This Gate is not going to open itself!

She crept up the stairs, using her tiny mage-light to provide a soft-tone glow of illumination for the steps … little more than firefly’s glow, and just enough to see the risers ahead. She proceeded, stopping often and listening carefully, in case she had been wrong, and that Haldeen was in fact in residence. The pauses also gave her a chance to calm her hammering heart and catch her breath. She was not in the best shape, and the winding stair had few holds or places to pause. Sweat prickled on her skin, and she grew warm as she climbed. She cursed silently when she realized she had forgotten to count the steps.

She had long since lost track of where she was in the tower, and only knew when she neared the top by the soft moon-glow shining dimly into the last turning before she reached the top. The upper door was open and her mage-light, small as it was, spilled out into the room. She quickly stilled the ’light, then bent forward, putting her hands on her knees to try and get more breath into her lungs. The climb had left her winded and feeling a little ill.

Once her heart had slowed to something like normal, she slipped into the room, moving lightly on the balls of her feet. The small tower room seemed just as cramped with just her in it as it had when Haldeen had brought her here … was it two-ish weeks ago?

She dared not make another mage-light. She knew that even the tiniest flicker where none should be would give her away. So, instead she relied on the fickle moon to give up his cloud lovers and shine into the room. When he did, she could just see the piles of open books and manuscripts on Haldeen’s desk.

Triana smiled with anticipation and crossed to his desk. It was a jumble of papers, books and drawings, and she hoped Haldeen was the sort who worked in clutter, rather than being the sort to know the precise location of each scrap. She waited for the moon to shine through again, eager to begin her work.

The moon gave up his light, enough for her to see the papers clearly. She felt the smile slip from her face. There were numbers there. She recognized those, shaped a little differently, but basically the same in style and purpose as those she knew back home. She knew enough of her numbers to do the sums, and subtractions, and the skills any competent estate holder would need to know to keep her books (and clerks!) honest … at least with her. The numbers weren’t the difficulty.

It was what lay between them that completely overthrew her. The ordinary numbers looked well separated by symbols; wavy lines, little triangles, letters, and a myriad of other symbols she could barely describe, much less understand. Numbers mixed with letters and symbols, and they clearly represented something, but to Triana, they looked no different than the maunderings of the insane. She sat down at Haldeen’s desk and felt the tears well up. The clouds passed again across the moon and threw the tower into darkness.

The respite gave her a moment to gather herself. The next patch of moonlight found her sifting through the papers looking for diagrams and images, some kind of picture, so that even if it didn’t tell her what the symbols did, she might find something that would tell her what they were for. She wanted to race through the papers, to rifle them in her impatience, but she forced herself to go slowly, and to put everything back exactly as she had found it. Given the mess, perfection would be extremely unlikely, but she could do what she could to hide her visit here.

In the distance, alarms began to chime. She rose, close to panic. Had she been caught? She moved carefully towards the balcony doors, where she could see down into the courtyard. She tried to stay back in the shadows so that she would not be seen in turn. No scramble of guards. No sign of alert in the courtyard. Something else then.

She crossed to the other side of the Tower, to the city wall where the battle had taken place. Mage-lights on the battlement dimmed and flickered, and the shield that warded the city on this seemed weaker than before. As she watched, it dimmed and flickered, thinning dangerously, its green glow fading out in places. She glanced up at the moon, just as he hid behind a cloud. She wasn’t sure but did he seem … normal … and not flushed with green?

She recrossed back to the courtyard side, and looked down again. All of the mage-lights there had gone out entirely, leaving pitch dark, except for the odd bit of moon-glow. What is going on?

She did hear cries in the distance, and recrossed the room tower again. Elves ran along the city’s wall, carrying torches instead of mage-lights, and running to man their defenses. She couldn’t see well, but they appeared to concentrate their efforts where the shield had seemed weakest. The turrets and batteries she had observed during that first battle moved sluggishly, though one fighting machine seemed spry enough. She took a deep breath, waiting for the beginning of another battle, then slowly exhaled. She could do nothing about whatever went on down there, but if she lingered here long enough, she would get caught. Meanwhile, all that noise would provide cover for any stray sounds she produced. She opened two of the balcony doors a bit, just enough for sound to better carry from outside.

She put aside the activity on the walls and forced herself to focus on the documents and drawing, going through each one slowly and carefully. She frequently had to wait for the fickle moon to bring his light back as he teased in and out of the clouds. Several times she paused, her heart hammering in her chest, as some noise or action outside came through the open balcony doors.

In time, she found drawings for some kind of a mechanical monster, with arms and legs, and some kind of weapons where its hands and chest should be. She shivered, recalling the metal monster in the cave before she had been captured by the gray creature. Many of the drawings looked like parts of the style of monster she had seen in the battle. She studied them for a long time before she understood these drawings showed the metal monster, subdivided into pieces, and drawn as though it had been taken apart, and floated on the paper, ready to be reassembled. She had never seen anything like this, and a tiny piece of her was fascinated by the drawings and diagrams. Each piece had its own set of complicated writing, numbers mixed with symbols, and letters.

She went through the whole stack, and found only one reference to the Gate. A circled notation in one margin of a drawing …. Gatespan limited to three-ells and change.

She wasn’t sure what en ell was, and she hadn’t heard the term here, and it certainly wasn’t one they used back home, but the notation, the word … limited … suggested it wasn’t very big. At least with regard to the metal monsters.

She picked up one of the drawings she had set down, and stared at it, trying to imagine the pieces drawn as though they fitted together instead of bursting apart. The moon shone through weakly, wispy clouds blocking a steadier light. She glanced out the balcony doors. The moon was nearly to the horizon. On impulse, she turned the drawing first one way, and then the other, then all the way over. She realized then that she had been holding the drawing upside down.

She recalled how the metal monsters had used their arm weapons to spurt fire, launching flames in cones and discrete plumes that burned the attacking creatures … the Predators as they called them. She traced her finger over the document seeing how the components aligned and where the arm joint bent and where the arm merged into the shoulder joint. She didn’t have a good feel for scale, as she’d had other, more immediate things on her mind at the time, but she guessed the metal monsters were roughly twice (thrice?) the height of an elf. She turned a couple of the other drawings over, and realized that she had been looking at the whole mess the wrong way. Orienting the drawings correctly, she traced her finger over the different segments. She could follow where this part fitted into that part, and how the different pieces oriented and how they went together. Now that she had the drawings correctly oriented, she struggled to understand what purpose the drawings served.

She pursed her lips, trying to understand. The last weak moonlight streamed in. The alarm on the Walls had passed, and the night guards called out to their reliefs as the predawn glow rose above the horizon. She straightened, her neck and back stiff and cracking from standing hunched over the desk most of the night. Hours had passed while she studied the diagrams and documents, and she was nearly out of time before the predawn workers would rouse to begin their work. She was no closer to finding anything to do with the Gate than she had been when she started. Regardless, it was time to go.

She felt bone weary as she surveyed the papers and tried to put them back into some semblance of the disorder they had been in when she arrived.

She needed to hurry. They would be awakening her soon after dawn, so even if she got back quickly, she would get a scant few hours of sleep before her next day began. She rose and made her way back to the small portal, the doorway that led down the stairs. She put one hand on the inside edge and ducked her head to go through the low door. As she dipped her head to avoid hitting the door lintel, she understood. The knowledge crashed in on her like a thunderbolt.

“You bastard,” she said aloud. “You’re trying to figure out how to take a metal monster through a little gate.”

Triana looked at Nora, covering her mouth with the back of her hand as she let out a jaw-cracking yawn. The dawn had risen with too much green in the sky, and with the sun had come an entirely too-chipper Nora. Triana really wished the tutor had chosen today to sleep in. She thought she had barely gotten back into her bed, and dropped the illusions, before the too early, and much too cheery tap on the door.

“Rough night?” asked Nora, a note of amusement in her voice.

“A bit,” admitted Triana. “Two lovers right outside my door, in the little brush next to my room. Guard ran them off after a good long while. Dozed a bit, but didn’t get much real sleep after that. Never been much for tossing and turning.” Triana knew the last bit went too far, sounding too much alibi building, but her brain remained befogged by the lack of sleep.