The Aether Chronicles

The First Fragment

We went in through the sewer, because Lyra had already proved it could be done and because nobody could think of anything worse.

It was the fourth night after the Drowned Fish. For three days we had planned, argued and drawn the temple in the dust until Orin's men could have walked it blindfolded. Orin took the outer gate with twelve of his best, who were to start a fire in the lime sheds at the third bell and bring half the temple watch running. Lyra would guide us from below, because she could feel the stone through a foot of rock and a hundred years of masonry. Dax would open the doors. I would do whatever it was I was for.

"What are you for?" Dax had asked cheerfully, the evening before. "I'm not being rude. I'm curious. I do the doors. Lyra does the ears. Orin does the shouting. You do—"

"The thinking," I said.

"Oh good. I was worried it would be something useful."

"I am noting that," said the voice in my head.

"Noted," I said aloud, and Dax gave me a very strange look.

CHARGE: 72%. ECHO: 7%.

That was my whole fortune. Seventy-two percent of a machine that did not know how it worked, and seven percent of something that whispered. I had spent the week working out what I could afford. An analysis cost one percent. A second of augmentation cost nine. I decided I would buy as much as possible of the first and as little as possible of the second, and I told the machine so, and it said, with great restraint, that this was a very sensible plan. I took that to mean it had no faith in it.

---

The drain beneath the temple was a brick-lined tunnel just tall enough to crawl in, and it smelled the way a drain smells when it serves a house of several hundred people who pray a great deal and wash very little. Lyra went first, because she could feel the way. I went second. Dax went last, humming under his breath, which I eventually realized was how he kept himself from laughing.

"It's about forty paces," Lyra whispered. "Then there's a grate. Then a stair. The stair goes up to the first door."

"Whose door is it?" I said.

"Mine," said Dax, from the dark behind me. "I mean I know it. It's an easy one. Two tumblers and a pin. I once did it in the time it takes to say a prayer, though I did say a short one."

The grate was a rusted bronze lattice that Dax defeated with a bent wire and about the same effort a man gives a stubborn button. We climbed a spiral stair into a cold, dry corridor lined with grey stone, lit by a single clay lamp. And there, at the end of it, was the first of the seven doors.

I put my hand against it. The surface was smooth, heavy bronze, with a keyhole shaped like a small sunburst.

"Analyzing."

The grid slid across the door. Beneath the bronze, in the thickness of the metal, I could see a pale tangle of lines: three bars, two springs, a hooked pin.

"One percent. This lock is a tumbler design with a secondary deadbolt. The deadbolt is not engaged."

"Not engaged?" I whispered.

"Priests forget," said Dax. He knelt at the keyhole, a bit of wire between his teeth. A moment later the lock gave a small, apologetic click, and the door swung inward with the faint reluctance of a very old hinge.

"One," he said, "of seven."

---

The second door was no trouble. It had been Orin's own post, and the General had described it so carefully that I felt I had been through it a hundred times. Dax opened it in less than a minute, and we stepped through into a larger chamber with a vaulted ceiling and a floor of polished tile.

It was the third that made me glad I had come.

It looked like any other door. A sunburst lock, a bronze plate, a heavy ring of age-darkened iron. Dax had his wire ready. But as he reached for the keyhole I laid a hand on his arm, and called up the grid again.

"One percent," said the voice. "The floor in front of this door is not a floor. The tiles are mounted on a counterbalanced platform. Weight above thirty kilograms will tip it. There is a pit beneath. Estimated depth: six meters. Bottom is lined with sharpened bronze."

I looked at Dax. For the first time since I had met him, he was silent.

"You said a pit trap," I whispered.

"I said it was behind the third door," he whispered back. "Which is, I now realize, in front of it. I'd like to blame the beating."

"Can we go around?"

"There's no around. It's a corridor."

I studied the platform. The tiles were beautifully set, hand-cut and fitted so cleanly you would never have known them from the real floor. Somebody had put a great deal of skill into killing people here. I almost admired it.

"We bridge it," I said.

"With what?"

I pointed to the clay lamp-stand, a long straight bronze rod set against the wall, and then to the wooden bench beneath it. It took us three minutes and a certain amount of swearing. When we were finished there was a narrow, rickety walkway across the platform's edge, resting on the stone ledges at either end, and none of it touching the tiles.

"This is going to break," said Dax conversationally.

"Probably."

"I just want that on the record."

"It's on the record," I said, and went first.

It did not break, though it creaked in a way I will hear in my dreams until the end of the world. We crossed one at a time, with Lyra last, her skirts gathered in both fists and her eyes tightly closed. When she reached the far side she opened them and said, in a very small voice, "I hate this temple."

"I know," I said. I meant it.

---

The fourth door took Dax six minutes, and he swore the whole time. The fifth was the counterweight, and it was the one I had been dreading.

It was not a lock. It was a slab of solid bronze, three hands thick and as tall as a man, set in a groove in the floor. Cut into the wall beside it was a heavy iron lever, and from the lever a chain disappeared through a hole into the stone, and somewhere in the dark above us a great weight waited to come down.

"Two men," said Orin's voice in my memory. It takes two strong men to lift. And a third to watch the clock.

We had no two strong men. We had a thief, a priestess, and a smith who had been up since dawn.

"I could do it," I said quietly. "The machine could. Two seconds of augmentation. That's about eighteen percent."

"That's a lot," said Lyra.

"It is. I'd rather not."

I stood and looked at the lever for a long time, and then at the chain, and then at the hole it vanished into. I was thinking, as I always do when I am frightened, about weights.

"Lyra," I said. "How heavy is the slab?"

"Approximately four hundred kilograms," said the machine. "One percent for a measurement."

"Do it."

"One percent. The slab is four hundred and ten kilograms. The counterweight is approximately four hundred and thirty. The mechanism is sealed, but friction accounts for the difference."

"So," I murmured. "The slab doesn't need to be lifted at all. It needs to be tipped." I turned to Dax. "How tall are you?"

"Not very."

"Perfect. I'm going to need your weight on the end of that lever, and mine on the middle."

It took nothing more than a long iron bar from the corridor's brazier and a little patience. I wedged it under the lever and Dax hung from the far end of it like a boy on a swing, and I pushed with both hands at the pivot. The mechanism gave with a deep, grumbling groan, and the slab slid sideways into the wall with a sound like a very large animal clearing its throat.

I leaned against the wall, panting.

CHARGE: 69%.

"Three percent," I said aloud. "That's the best price I've had all week."

"I will admit," said the Interface, after a moment, "that the engineering was elegant."

I was almost certain that was the nicest thing it had ever said to me.

---

The sixth door was almost nothing, a plain wooden slab with a rusted latch. Beyond it was a short corridor of unpolished stone that sloped gently downward and did not look as though it had been touched in a thousand years. The air was colder here. The lamps along the wall had been put out long ago, and in their place there was a thin, blue-white glimmer, coming from somewhere ahead.

Lyra stopped.

She stopped so completely that I almost walked into her. She stood with her head tilted, her arms at her sides, and her lips moving.

"It's talking," she whispered. "It's been talking since we came down. It knows I'm here."

"What does it say?" said Dax.

"I don't know. I can't tell. It isn't a voice, it's a feeling. It's glad." Her voice cracked. "Oh, gods, it's so glad."

"Chorus resonance is escalating," said the Interface, uneasily. "Lyra's pattern is beginning to synchronize with a source ahead of us. If the synchronization completes, she will not be able to leave."

"Lyra," I said sharply. "Look at me."

She did, slowly, as if from a long way away.

"I need you to step back. Just two paces. Can you do that?"

"I'm trying." A tear ran down her cheek. "It doesn't want me to."

I took her hand. I had not planned it. It was an instinct, the kind you have when you pull a child from a river. And the moment I touched her, the static in my skull surged, and something inside the link, that faint, one-minute link I had made her give me days ago, brightened like a candle in a draft.

"Do not strengthen it," said the machine, almost frantic. "Kael. Please."

I let go. Lyra drew a long, shuddering breath, and stepped backward, one pace and then two, and the pale light on her face dimmed.

"Stay here," I said. "Dax. With me."

---

The seventh door had no lock.

I knew it the moment I saw it. It stood at the end of the sloping corridor, an arch of grey stone twice my height, and the surface was smooth and unmarked, without hinge or handle or keyhole. In the center of it, at about the height of a man's heart, there was a single shallow depression the size of a hand.

"I couldn't open it," said Dax, in a whisper. "Last time. I stood here for an hour. I tried everything. Then a guard came, and I ran."

"So how did you see the stone?"

"I didn't. Not then." He shifted. "That's what I couldn't tell anyone. I never got in. I only put my hand on the door, and it was warm, and I felt it sing. And that's when the dreams started."

I stared at him.

"You said you had been inside for eleven minutes."

"I said I remembered every one," said Dax. He looked at me, suddenly very young. "I just never said where."

"The door," said the Interface slowly. "The language. The phrase."

I did not need it to finish. I had been thinking the same thing since the fire, in the dark, in the middle of the night. A door that has no lock is not a door that is shut. It is a door that is waiting to be asked.

"Dax," I said. "Say it."

"Say what?"

"The words. From the dream. Say them to the door."

He looked at me, then at the smooth grey arch, then at the faint pale shimmer along its edges. He swallowed. And, in a voice that was not his, soft and clear and unhurried, he began to recite.

The static in my skull screamed.

ECHO: 9%.

I felt it rising through the back of my head like a tide, and I clamped my jaw shut and held on to the wall with both hands. If the thing in me wanted to speak, it would have to do it without my mouth. Dax reached the end of the phrase. The last syllable hung in the air, and the depression in the door filled with a soft blue light.

The arch opened.

It did not swing. It did not slide. It simply stopped being there, in a pale, silent wave from the center outward, like frost reversing on glass. I had seen it once before, in a square in Karesh, on the edge of a bronze sword.

Beyond it was a round chamber, and in the center of it, on a plinth of black stone, there was a light.

---

It was smaller than I had imagined. It was the size of a man's palm, an irregular wedge of dark metal threaded with veins of pale blue, and it hung just above the plinth as though gravity had been politely asked to step aside. The seams in its surface moved slowly, in and out, like breathing.

I felt it before I saw it. I felt it through the soles of my feet and the roots of my teeth.

"Kael," said the Interface, in a voice I did not recognize. It was small and hoarse and very, very quiet. "That is a fragment of me."

I had no words. I took a step forward, and another.

"Do not touch it with your bare hand. The reintegration will require blood and neural contact. It will not be comfortable. There will be a cost."

"How much?"

"I do not know. I have never done this before."

I almost laughed. Behind me I could hear Dax's breath, quick and shallow, and Lyra's footfalls at the threshold, very careful. Somewhere above us, faint through a hundred feet of stone, a bell began to ring: the third bell, and the alarm that went with it. The fire in the lime sheds had started.

I cut my palm on the edge of my file. It stung, bright and clean. I reached out.

My hand closed around the fragment.

---

I will tell you what it was like, because I have spent three thousand years trying to forget.

It was like being handed a library when you had only ever owned a single book. I saw a thousand doors open at once, and each of them led to a thousand more. The blue grid flared, tore, reassembled itself, and began to scroll with unfamiliar writing, faster than I could follow. I felt the Interface rise inside me, trembling, like a person waking from a dream.

"Restoring," it said. "Archive: two percent. Resonance: three percent. Flow: four percent. Kael, I am remembering. I remember—"

It stopped.

And in the silence, in the thin place behind the machine where the static lived, something else drew breath.

ECHO: 14%.

The pain arrived late. It started at my wrist and climbed in a long, searing line to the back of my skull, and I heard myself groan. Dax was beside me then, one hand under my elbow, saying my name. Lyra was shouting something that sounded like let go. But I could not let go. The fragment had burned itself into my palm, a dark seal on the skin, and the world had narrowed to a single bright line of sight.

CHARGE: 81%.

It had grown. The fragment had charged the Core. In one terrible moment it had given more than I had spent in a week. I stared at the number, and I understood with a flash of wonder and fear that the machine was not a battery at all. It was a thing that could be repaired. And the repairs, one by one, were scattered across a world I knew almost nothing about.

"Kael," said Orin's voice, from the corridor behind us, urgent and far away. "They're coming. We need to move."

I could hear them. Boots on the stair. Voices.

I stood slowly, with the fragment cold and heavy in my fist.

"I have recovered a coordinate," said the Interface. It sounded tired, and strange, and for the first time since the square it did not sound afraid. It sounded like something that had been alone for a very long time, and had just been told it was not.

"There is more of me. And I know where."

The static laughed, quietly, behind my eyes.

"Find the city beneath the sea."