THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 15: Secret
“If we learned anything, it’s that we still have a lot to learn.”
– Phillip Arno, Cyran geologist (232 PA)
Duaal stared up at the Waygate. His head rang with sudden agony, worse than ever. He had to be dreaming or… or something. As suddenly as it had come, the pain was gone. But the Waygate remained, stark and graceful and impossible.
“How can that be here?” Duaal asked.
His voice was shockingly loud in the stunned silence. Everyone winced.
“You recognize it?” Kemmer asked.
“That’s a Waygate,” Duaal answered. “I heard a lot about them from Gavriel. There were loads of them all across Arcadia.”
“As well as on the worlds of the Jinn and within the great Nnyth hive,” Maeve said.
The Arcadian’s gray eyes were fixed on the Waygate. What could she be thinking?
“But no one’s ever seen a Waygate in the core,” Kemmer said. He sat on top of the generator powering the floodlights and grinned at the other archeologists. “I’m sure you understand now why I’ve kept this thing such a secret. The discovery of a Waygate on an Alliance planet is going to change absolutely everything.”
Xen was walking dreamily toward the Waygate. “This is absolutely amazing. The foundation is cracked, but the structure has remained completely intact!”
“We’ve been able to find a few shallow scratches and chips here and there,” Kemmer told him. “But no more damage than that. The material is pretty close to indestructible.”
“Simply amazing!” Xen said. “How old is this thing? Phillip, how far down the strata are we?”
The geologist shined a flashlight over some of the lighter stripes in the fissure wall. The stone was flattened in places, cracked and blasted away to clear the rock from around the Waygate. Probably microexplosives, Dannos’ contribution to the dig before his death.
“I couldn’t tell you for sure without some testing,” Phillip said. “But I estimate about thirty feet below that old volcanic flow. If the surveys are accurate, then we’re about three million years down.”
“Three million years?” Xia gasped. “Are you serious?”
“It could be even more than that,” Phillip said apologetically. “It depends upon how much things have shifted.”
“Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Waygate itself is that old,” Kemmer said. He motioned and they all followed the Prian archeologist to the pyramidal base of the gate. “It could have been placed here at some more recent point. One of the things I’ve been unable to do is get an accurate age on the structure itself.”
“Have you gotten samples?” Gruth asked.
“A few, yes, but the materials are all very hard to cut.”
The Lyran grunted and examined one of the sculpted stairways. Duaal looked over his twitching pointed ears. From a distance, the uniformly white carvings had been difficult to make out. But closer now, he could see the designs raised in relief from the smooth, milk-white… whatever it was. Stone, maybe? Ceramic?
The decorations were all celestial in theme: intricately rendered stars and planets, nebulae and comets. There was no mistaking the Waygate’s purpose — travel between the stars.
“Each Waygate is unique. Their structure and purpose remain the same, but each of them is subtly varied,” Maeve said. Slowly, she approached to look at the same part of the banister as Gruth and Duaal. “This one is similar to the Waygate in Kiarra’Na, on Wynerian. I… I went there often.”
Kemmer crossed his arms. “Well, what else can you tell me? I’ve questioned several Arcadians, but they won’t tell me a damned thing about the history of the Waygates. How did you build them? Why is there one on Prianus?”
Maeve shot the archeologist an irritated look.
“You are hardly the first to assume that Arcadians are simply unwilling to share our secrets,” she snapped. “There are none! We did not craft the Waygates. They existed on our worlds even before Cavain’s time, ten thousand years ago. We learned the secrets of their use, but neither we nor any of our cousins — the dryads, nyads or long-dead pyrads — claim to have built them.”
Maeve hesitated now. High above, the slithering, multi-colored glow playing over the surface of the segmented Waygate ring flared and swirled, but didn’t seem to illuminate the deep ravine at all. Maeve took a step back, away from the Waygate.
“The Arcadians are not the greatest scholars of the Waygates’ workings,” she said reluctantly. “The intricacies of their operation were taught to us by the Nnyth. The star-wasps know more about the gates than any race we have ever encountered, but even the Nnyth do not claim to have built the Waygates.”
“So you don’t know what they’re made of?” Kemmer asked.
“My brother was an adept of the Ivory Spire, so named in honor of the Nnyth Tower. The Spire was dedicated to the training of those who opened the Waygates. Caith and I spoke often of his education,” Maeve said. She nodded to the great blue-white ring. “Some of the sections of the gate itself are of a kind of glass, much like the glass we used to craft our armor and cities.”
“Our refraction tests seem to bear that out, as far as we can tell,” Kemmer agreed. “Do you have any of that glass armor? Captain Myles mentioned that you were some kind of knight.”
“I… lost my armor shortly after the fall of the White Kingdom,” Maeve answered. “I still possess the blade of my spear, though I have not replaced the shaft.”
“And that’s Arcadian glass? I’d like to examine that.”
Kemmer sounded only slightly more respectful now that he wanted something from Maeve. Duaal didn’t like her, either, but it wasn’t because of her race. Kemmer’s unexpected bigotry annoyed Duaal. The Prian had no right to hate Maeve. He didn’t even know her enough to hate her for the right reasons.
“Is this Waygate any different than the Arcadian ones?” asked Enu-Io.
“Other than the decorations, not as far as I can tell,” Kemmer answered with a shrug. “And it sounds like even those in the White Kingdom varied between sites.”
“Then it seems safe enough to assume that this specimen is at least ten thousand years old,” Enu-Io said. “If the Arcadians have documented their age at least that far back.”
Xen nodded. “Then we can start there. What else do you know about it?”
“Not much yet,” Kemmer said. “We’ve spent the last six weeks just clearing away the bedrock.”
Kemmer showed them the eastern face of the Waygate’s base. The floor of the crevice was rougher and bore the circular marks of recent cutting. The ashy scent of cold stone filled the ravine. Phillip squatted and inspected the ground at the base of the Waygate, then angled his flashlight up at the fissure wall.
“There are stress fractures all throughout the matrix,” said the geologist. “It must have shattered in the quake.”
“And that didn’t break or crush the Waygate?” Xia asked. “You haven’t repaired it at all?”
“No structural damage that we’ve found so far,” Kemmer told her. “Whoever did create these gates built them to last.”
Xia grinned at Tiberius. “Still want to go to bed?”
“Yes,” he grunted. “Sounds like this thing has been down under these mountains for thousands of years. Maybe millions. It’ll still be here when I wake up. Maeve, are you coming?”
The fairy stared up at the Waygate for a moment longer, then nodded. “Yes. A Waygate requires able and rested guardians.”
“This thing is going to make every one of us rich and famous,” Kemmer said. “I don’t want anyone stealing it out from under me.”
Maeve shot the Prian an odd look. That wasn’t what she meant at all. Duaal shuddered. Suddenly, he didn’t want to be down here, either. Something about the gleaming light of the Waygate made Duaal feel like there were insects crawling up his spine.
“I think I’ll come back up, too,” he said. “It’s quite a sight. But now comes a lot of dirty, tedious work. I think I’ll leave that to the experts.”
Duaal followed Tiberius as the old captain traced the ravine back to the ladder. Maeve simply spread her wings and flew away.
Panna stood on the steps of the Waygate. It was… amazing. She had never seen anything like it. Heard about them, read about them, yes… But the truth of the gates was something else entirely. It was monolithic, beautiful. Alien.
The strange alien, Gripper, stood nearby. Even after most of his crewmates left — of them, only Xia remained — he stood still, jaw hanging open. Kemmer cocked his head toward the Waygate.
“Do you want a closer look? I need all of you to be familiar with this thing before we begin,” said the Prian archeologist.
Xen grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Following close behind the two senior scholars, Panna climbed up the smooth white stairs. They had a polished, perfect finish — like porcelain plates. Even through her thickly cushioned winter boots, every step sent a jolt up Panna’s spine. She felt dizzy. Was it the Waygate or just the altitude? Or maybe just her balance failing her. It hadn’t been good ever since the surgery.
Or perhaps it was the unnatural spacing of the steps. They were huge and deep, as though meant for much larger creatures than humans — only Gripper could climb them easily. The balustrades were as tall as Panna. They seemed more like walls than guide rails as they closed in around her.
So Panna examined the carvings instead. Designs, really, since she could see no marks from any tools. Had they been poured or cast? Regardless, Panna didn’t recognize the arrangement of stars. She made a mental note to see if they corresponded to the constellations anywhere else in the galaxy. Was this the Prian sky or something else altogether?
The star and planet patterns grew fewer and farther between as the archeologists made their way up toward the Waygate ring. Panna wondered if the gate’s creators had simply lost interest in the designs, but doubted it. Everything about the Waygate seemed very… deliberate.
The top of the stepped pyramid was the size of a small lecture hall and was just as seamlessly smooth as the rest of the structure. The bottom segments of the ring — one made of a translucent ice-blue substance and the other of what looked like copper fish scales — seemed simply to be submerged in the white floor, as though dipped in cream, and left the gate’s inner surface flat and even with the ground.
“How big is it? Do you have measurements?” Gruth asked.
“The interior diameter of the Waygate is one hundred forty-four feet,” Kemmer answered. “The ring itself is about eight feet wide and five thick. We estimate that each section weighs an average of nineteen tons. There are sixteen segments.”
“How are they held together? Or to the base?” Enu-Io asked. He walked around the bottom of the Waygate.
“That’s one of a thousand things we don’t know yet,” Kemmer said. “We haven’t been able to get a sample from the seams to see if there’s any mortar. You can’t even slide a razor between the pieces.”
“Self-tensioned?” Enu-Io asked.
“Nope.” Kemmer swept his arm to encompass the whole huge ring. “The angles don’t line up. We have no idea why it doesn’t just fall apart.”
Panna looked up at another piece, made of a glittering black… stone? It was hard to tell. She pulled on a pair of green vorlex gloves and ran her fingers over the joint where it met the next section. It was fitted so closely that Panna couldn’t even feel the change of material. Not even a different texture. It all felt slick, almost wet, and… warm?
“What’s the temperature?” she asked.
“Ambient,” Kemmer answered, then laughed at Panna’s shocked expression. “I know the Waygate feels warm, and we have no idea why. But it doesn’t register on a thermometer.”
“It looks like the portal thing on Arborus,” Gripper said.
Xen looked at Xia, then at the alien. “She’s told me about your experiences, and that you believe you might have come to the CWA by means of a Waygate, or something similar.”
“Yeah.” Gripper stood at the base of the ring. He didn’t touch it. “It was the same shape, and all in pieces, but that gate wasn’t on a pyramid. This one has more sections, too.”
“How many more?” Xia asked.
“I’m not sure,” Gripper said. He traced one of the shiny, eddying striations in the air with a huge, clawed finger. “This is the same, though. The ones that were put together all had this kind of finish… or whatever the light is.”
“They? Then there were more than one?” Kemmer asked. His eyes lit up.
“A whole plaza. And they were a lot smaller than this. About as tall as I am, maybe.”
“Built to a personal scale, perhaps,” the Prian mused.
“Then I wonder what this one was used for?” Xen asked. “Without a loading ramp or something similar, it couldn’t have been used to move cargo.”
“Not necessarily,” Panna said. The awe hadn’t worn off or even faded, but she was full of ideas. “The Waygates were clearly built with much higher technology than we understand yet, but even we use null-fields. There’s no reason to believe that they couldn’t just fly or push anything they needed right up these stairs. The steps might just be for foot traffic.”
“I don’t think I’d call it technology, exactly,” Gruth grumped.
Like every Lyran that Panna had ever met, the man was an elitist when it came to machines.
“Just because you don’t understand magic doesn’t mean that it isn’t technology,” Panna reminded him, exasperated. “Waygates can cover more distance in less time than even the best superluminal drives. If we can just understand how these things work, places like Prianus don’t have to suffer just because they’re far away from the galactic core.”
Panna realized she might have gone a little too far and glanced at Kemmer. The Prian looked back with eyebrows raised. She bit her lip.
“Sorry,” Panna said.
“No need,” Kemmer said. He smiled. “Prianus isn’t a pleasant planet. I’m hoping this find will be enough to secure a tenured position at a Tynerion college.”
Xen crossed his arms. “That’s why you don’t want me authoring anything about this.”
Kemmer was unfazed by the Ixthian’s irritation.
“You’ve already got a Tynerion office and a beautiful assistant,” he said. “You’ll get plenty of grants off this, Professor Xen, but I need the credit. I don’t want to be stuck on Prianus my whole life.”
Panna blushed at the part about Xen’s beautiful assistant and returned her attention to the Waygate. The film of light playing over the surface had taken on a different texture. The layer of pale, multi-hued light moved faster now, curling and swirling like water eddying around rocks.
“What about this?” Panna asked. “This light? Is it some sort of reflection?”
“We haven’t been able to determine the source. Like the warmth you feel, it doesn’t register on anything,” Kemmer said. “No kind of photometrics or chemical composition. And it seems to react to people, too.”
“What do you mean?” Xen asked.
“Notice how quickly it’s moving now? It slows and fades when no one is around,” Kemmer answered. “We’ve set up cameras to record the changes. This is the most active I’ve seen it, but there are more people down here than ever before.”
“There are a lot of things we don’t know about the Waygates,” Xia said. Her eyes swirled with colors, not unlike the gate stones. “All things considered, I’m a little surprised you don’t have any Arcadians on your team.”
“Some Arcadians saw the base camp and came asking for work. I asked them some questions, but they had nothing to tell me,” Kemmer said. “I assumed they were keeping secrets, so I sent them on. If your friend Maeve is telling the truth, maybe they just don’t know much. Anyway, we don’t need their help.”
Xen clicked his tongue “The Arcadians know a lot more about them than we do. We should pay them a little respect, if only because we may need their help later.”
Kemmer shrugged. Gripper shifted his impressive weight back and forth, from one foot to the other. His bare feet, Panna noticed, and wondered if they were cold. But if Gripper was uncomfortable about anything but the arguments, it didn’t show. He was a tough creature. Physically, at least.
“I’m still not hiring Arcadian diggers,” Kemmer said, crossing his arms and narrowing his blue eyes at Xen. “They’re not suited for this kind of work, anyway. As for Arcadian consultations, we’ve got Maeve for that now. She seems to know a thing or two about Waygates.”
Gripper flinched at that. Panna wondered why, but Xen looked up at the much taller Kemmer and grinned.
“That’s all I ask,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. Let’s get started.”
Everyone in the ravine relaxed visibly as the tension in the air eased and the curiosity returned. Panna wanted to thank Xen for that, but remained quiet and did as she was told.
