Gorinthians Read online

  Celdic walked silently, trying to sort through all of the new information. Selindria sped up to Terrance, throwing a warning glance over her shoulder at Celdic to stay back. Celdic began to have his own suspicions about where she had come from. I guess you could call it another country, she had said when he asked her about Zerans. Earlier Terrance had said there is a bond that was created of which every human descendant of this Mountain land is a recipient. Had he been suggesting that she was inhuman? With his mind buzzing with unanswered questions, Celdic followed the other two up the side of the mountain. They were headed toward the Altar of Guardia, or the Altar of the Guardian, as most people called it now.

  It was said the Altar of Guardia was created as a token to the founder of Chasel Ri’ Aven. Some of the Elders claimed it had existed before the city was built, however. Celdic and Lendel had visited it for the first time the previous summer. It had been an odd experience that left them both arguing about the true nature of the Altar for months. They had set their blanket rolls out next to it that night and had a fire crackling in a worn fire pit other youths had used when they visited the site. Lendel had suggested the proximity to the Rajan gardens might be affecting Celdic in some way, resulting in his inability to use his yar. They had decided to try a few exercises before going to sleep for the night since they were so far from the Rajan Gardens. Celdic had felt an odd resonance in the area as he opened his mind to the matter around them, as if there was a river nearby. As he probed deeper for the cause, he realized it was coming from the Altar and seemed to be going straight down into the ground. Lendel had said that he could not feel anything. Celdic had tried to push out with his yar to touch the source of the resonance. As his yar touched the object, there was a sudden detonation from thousands of feet beneath the hill. The entire hill began to shake and Celdic hurriedly pulled his awareness back. There were a few more slight tremors and then the hill was still again. Celdic had looked at Lendel and saw his own shock mirrored in Lendel’s expression. They had left the Altar and camped a couple of miles away instead. It had stretched chance a little too far to pass the occurrence off as a coincidental earthquake that happened at the same time Celdic probed the Altar with his yar. They had spent months talking about the possibilities of what the Altar might be. The fact Lendel could not sense the Altar’s resonance had them both speculating as to why Celdic could when Celdic could not even use his yar the way everyone else did.

  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 ha
d 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.

  “Well met, Terrance, my friend,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I see that you are taking more than you bargained for.”

  Terrance was very conspicuous in not glancing at Selindria. “I tried to leave Thistledown, but the Elders didn’t want him hanging around causing trouble. You know how they are.”

  Jalorm chuckled as Thistledown shot up behind Celdic’s head with an outraged expression on his face. Before he could begin his tirade, however, Selindria broke in.

  “You’ve met before?” she asked Jalorm coolly, ignoring the interplay.

  “Many times,” Jalorm said with an abashed look. “It was Terrance who taught me a lot of the new ideas that I brought to class after I started training on the borders.”

  Selindria just grunted with a slightly disgruntled look on her face. It seemed that everyone in Chasel Ri’ Aven knew about Terrance except Selindria and Celdic.

  “Jalorm will accompany us from here,” Terrance announced in the silence that followed. “He is one of the best Guardians in Chasel Ri’ Aven and some of his talents will be very useful.”

  Jalorm did not say anything, but he did flush slightly with the compliment. Celdic felt somewhat better knowing that another person he knew would be joining them.

  “Shall we press on?” Terrance said briskly. “We need to reach the border by sundown.”

  “Impossible,” Selindria said flatly. “The border is still another full day ahead of us.”

  “Just take my word for it,” Terrance said wearily, starting down the path once more. They followed him for another
quarter of an hour, when he unexpectedly veered off the barely recognizable path into the thick foliage that surrounded them. Celdic glanced around curiously as they made their way toward a small hill that rose from the side of the mountain. As they drew closer to the hill, Terrance slipped out of sight without warning. The others continued following, walking into the seemingly substantial side of the small hill in front of them, each of them disappearing in turn. Celdic looked closely as he stepped into it as well and realized that the achelnise plant covered the hillside in order to disguise it.

  Celdic stumbled to a halt as he came out the other end and then spun around to look behind him in amazement. Above them reared the steep mountains that they had been descending. Looking around, he realized that they were in the foothills at the base of the mountain.

  “What happened,” he blurted out in astonishment. Selindria was also staring around her in wonder.

  “We had to take a small shortcut in order to make it to the border by nightfall.” Terrance allowed himself a small grin as he continued down the gradual descent of the foothills.

  Jalorm did not look surprised, already following closely behind Terrance. Celdic shared a glance with Selindria as they both began the descent as well, wondering if she was thinking the same thing that he was. If there were shortcuts throughout the passes that could take you through the mountain in the blink of an eye, what would happen if an enemy discovered them?

  “Only those who know how to activate a wave-gap can use one,” Thistledown piped up behind Celdic, as if reading his thoughts, “and Chasel Ri’ Aven is protected from random wave-gaps. Only wave-gaps that have been synchronized with those on the inside can enter the mountain.”