Free The Stars Askew by Rjurik Davidson Page B

despaired. They had called out to the universe for a new force to bring order to the city. They spent their nights invoking powerful equations until they summoned the strange Elo-Talern, who had ruled over the city like shadow puppets, hidden from the light. The Elo-Talern had become myths to frighten children, strange creatures who were said to secretively influence the Houses, though Max could not be sure what part they had played when the seditionists and the Houses had come into conflict on Aya’s Day.
    Then their technology will still rest beneath the mountain somewhere.
    Max’s despair lifted for a moment. He would be free from that other cold and distant personality lodged in the recesses of his mind. The thought filled Max with savage excitement.

 
    SIX
    Max passed the still-sleeping Omar and continued along a route he’d traveled before, into the heart of the ancients’ underground domain. He walked down that strange corridor leading to hundreds of hexagonal chambers filled with strange skeletal cadavers lying on beds, tubes plunging into their orifices, others piercing their veins. Those corpses seemed like a symbol for the ancients themselves: strange, mysterious, dead.
    â€”If we succeed in freeing you from my mind, I want you to teach me the prime language—said Max.
    And what do I receive in return?
    Max thought rapidly. —If you don’t agree to teach me, I won’t let you free.
    You know, it would take you years to master the prime language. To join the Magi requires decades of study, of practice. It requires a journey into the dark lands, for you cannot understand the language without knowing both its sides. You would have to give up everything else. Your seditionism, your Kata.
    â€”They no longer need me. They never did.
    Maximilian did not remember the way, and so he put himself at the mercy of the ancient mage, for this was Aya’s world—a world of strange spaces and weird technology. They continued down, down into the mountain on a central elevator and into a vast ruined complex, a melancholy pleasure palace of empty ballrooms and baths, fountains and broken amphorae, rooms filled with chessboards and dice pits for two-knuckled jolly. On and on they went, deep into the heart of the mountain.
    *   *   *
    The vast circular door was covered with intricate inscriptions. At the sight of it, Max’s anxiety intensified, and the muscles in his body felt tense and ungainly. They were about to pass some deeper threshold.
    Let me control your hand, said Aya.
    Maximilian hesitated. He feared losing even part of himself.
    Do you want to pursue this course of action or not?
    Max released some part of his mind. It was like forgetting something for a moment, knowing the knowledge is somewhere within you but you can’t quite retrieve it.
    As Max let it go, Aya picked up his hand and moved it across the door in a complex configuration. Suddenly the door lit up and hummed with uncanny power; silver ideograms descended its face like snowflakes falling in winter. The door slid open, revealing a vast hexagonally shaped hall. Max felt Aya’s feeling of revulsion and surprise alongside his own feeling of horror, for the perspectives of the hall were impossible: the farthest walls seemed closer than those nearby. Staircases and walkways crisscrossed the space like spider’s webs, reaching up to places that appeared to be other floors but now were deserted.
    But this was not what horrified Max. No, his heart thumped rapidly at the sight of the strange creatures, long and thin like a fusion of spider and human. There seemed to be too many vertebrae in their wiry bodies, and their long horselike faces were composed of too many gaunt planes to be human. Some were robed, others half naked, their shriveled breasts and tiny genitals absurd and horrific to see. One group lay upon chaise longues, clasping tankards, their dead eyes staring at the roof. Over