Slithering Maze 26: Dust, Ink, and Forgotten Maps

Medilus 1, 1278: Arth Prayogar. History doesn’t forget. People do, or at least try to make it look that way…

Author’s Note: Kingdom of the Slithering Maze is a serialized fiction story that is a part of a collection called the Windtracer Tales. It follows the adventures of Tela Kioni and her crew dealing with expeditions in and around the world of Awldor. There they hunt down lost, and possibly lethal, relics of the Ancient Order, a near-mythical kingdom lost to the centuries old cataclysm, the Great Collapse.

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Previously: Having escaped Gregori Elkerton and his bloody-handed warriors, Tela and Azure make a small camp in the Mandami Hills. They take the time to rest, recover, and plan their next moves. But what starts as a moment to catch their breath turns into deeper conversations, and a small goodbye. One where Tela is left to return to the city of Arth Prayogar alone to face the future waiting ahead.

Medilus 1, 1278: Arth Prayogar. History doesn’t forget. People do, or at least try to make it look that way…

It was a long walk from the Mandami Hills to the city gates. The evening winds pelted me with rust-red dust devils that tasted like regret. Overhead, the diamond-speckled night sky pressed down on me like a judgment.

I reached the gates before midnight, then slipped in with the last merchant caravan for the day. The gate guards barely gave me a second look. They were either too busy to notice one short human woman in yesterday’s sweat-stained clothes, or too tired to care. I certainly wasn’t going to question it.

It was another half-hour along a winding route until I reached the Lemongrass Inn. To my surprise, the others were still awake in my room; nose deep in some plan to rescue me from the tunnels. That made me pause—it meant Garrik really had warned them. Maybe I owed him a little for that.

“Yoi T’kalo,” I greeted everyone wearily. “Look what the basilisk dragged in.”

Kiyosi and Mikasi leaped up from the table and all but tackled me.

I let out a relieved rat-squeak when they did. They wrapped their arms around me so tightly I thought my ribs might stage a revolt.

Even Skarri and Atha seemed glad to see me. The temple guard dropped some of her professional stiffness for a relieved, but slightly awkward, hug. Atha? He offered me a steaming mug of tea that he swore was jasmine, and so hot I thought it scalded my eyebrows. It almost smelled like jasmine—once you got past the honey taste and what I swore was whiskey.

“Next time, please keep to jumping between balconies, not trying to bury yourself in a cave-in.” Skarri hissed firmly with a sharp nod. Still, there wasn’t any heat in her words, just a subtle relief as she gently squeezed my arm.

Kiyosi snorted lightly, scowling over my latest injury.

“Don’t hold your breath,” he sighed, tail tucked tense and low against the back of his legs. “I’ve been trying to encourage her to take the safe road for years.”

He stuffed a long slice of the brown, honey-pepper awari root into my hands.

“Now you. Chew. I see that new cut on your arm. It also needs a fresh bandage. Do you know how many diseases are in the Deepland tunnels?”

Mikasi pursed his lips. “Actually, Ki, I did some calculations. It might not be as many as people think.”

Kiyosi rolled his eyes, wandering across the room to grab his healer’s kit. Mikasi followed as my best friend’s usual rant about ‘mysterious diseases that will kill us all’ chased them both.

I chewed on the bitter, spicy root and winced from the taste.

“Now, wait. How did you get Ki loose?”

“While hyu was off playing ‘dodge the falling ceiling’, healer go off and freed himself,” Atha chuckled. “Gave lich’s pet mage a headache, too. Iron skillet to the head beats magic threads, who knew? I gotz to get me an iron skillet to carry along. So, where hyu get to since you didn’t get squished?”

“Ah, well…” I said, gathering my thoughts. Then I briefly told the story, with a few of the sharp edges sanded off. Kiyosi didn’t need the extra strain. But I hit the high points of the Deepland Hollow, ancient workrooms, and all the rest. The long conversation with Azure? That I kept to myself.

When I told the part about the basilisk coming to our rescue, Kiyosi raised his eyebrows at me in an ‘I told you so’ expression.

“Shut up,” I said without any heat to it.

Normally, I would’ve said something snarky at the lot of them for being worry-warts, if my tongue hadn’t been strangled with emotion.

With the moment past, we broke up for our respective rooms after Kiyosi patched my knife cut. As for me, I had a long moment with a hot bath, then a bed, in that order.

The next morning, after a breakfast of eggs, fruit, and oats, I left the inn with journals and more in my satchel. Azure’s departure had bought me a little time being ‘invisible’ and I wasn’t going to waste it.

So, I met the others at the pale-wooden tables inside the Koriss Grand Archive. It was the nearby library, run by an army of priests and monks devoted to the Dreamspinner Scribe goddess. By the time I arrived, they had already fortified themselves with books, maps, and old papers of questionable origin.

“They’re a little ragged, maybe even weird. But they’re my crew,” I murmured with a grin. “That’s good enough for me.”

A small ache thumped in my heart as I noticed Azure wasn’t there. Of course, she wouldn’t have been, but I still felt her absence like a sore bruise. I took a slow breath, then joined the others.

Most think being a Windtracer is leaping off unstable ruin walls with a knife or whip in their hands to ambush art thieves. Then you dash away with some half-baked, but daring, plan to save a precious relic from greedy fingers. Maybe even grin, despite getting a few bruises in the process.

Well, all right. I’m guilty as charged. But that isn’t the entire story about Windtracers.

The truth behind it all was that Windtracers—even me—spent about ninety percent of their time in a library. Reasons varied, but in the end it was all research to learn about long-vanished cultures, languages, and more. This wasn’t an exception; only here you had to play nice, since the Archive was as much temple as it was library.

I slid into a chair between Atha and Mikasi, bearing a few books and two maps. Atha removed the tiny reading spectacles from the end of his snout.

“What is this?” he rumbled.

I handed a book to Mikasi and Skarri, then unrolled a generations-old trade map. Two other books were slapped down to keep the parchment unrolled.

“Hopefully, what we’ll need to sort this enormous mess out,” I replied. “We can’t take this with us, so we’ll need to make a lot of notes.”

“We can steal them,” Atha suggested helpfully, yet not quietly.

I winced, glancing over into the steel-eyed gaze of a brown and gray robed monk of the Dream-Scribe. The elder human arched a gray eyebrow at me. His sky-blue eyes gave so little quarter, I felt I owed him a debt.

“Ah, hm, just a joke,” I told the monk, wiggling a hand nervously. Naturally, that was when my voice cracked.

The monk harrumphed, then went on his way. I spun back toward the table to give everyone a hard-eyed look.

“Don’t even joke about swiping books.” I pronounced each word as if my life depended on it. “These are the Dream-Scribe’s people. Libraries, books, and knowledge are sacred to their goddess. Practically blessed.”

The minotaur pursed his lips and subtly unfolded the corner of a page he had dog-eared.

I rubbed my eyes, suddenly wishing for a cave-in. But that didn’t happen, so I looked around the table.

“Now, so. We’ve got the Sunfate Sisters, who have way too much to do with the Iraxi and Toshirom Ifoon. Including a really peculiar stonemason model with moving parts.”

Kiyosi tapped a finger on the book in front of him about early Sunfate Sister religious practices.

“A model that they needed to reference but went out of their way to keep hidden and guarded by a water elemental for, what, centuries?”

I opened my mouth to say ‘ten years’ but decided against it. This wasn’t the time to explain that horrid ‘Bargain’ Azure’s people had been trapped in.

“Something like that,” I replied. “What else?”

“There’s the Deepland Hollow you found,” Mikasi suggested. “The one you said might predate just everything here?”

“Journals, too,” Skarri added. “You said you saw the name ‘Vasam’ on a door. That he had written about places built like you found yesterday? Water patterns to archways?”

“Yes.” I rubbed my chin. “A lot of water designs on everything, and there’s an ancient groundwater lift structure down there, too.”

“The stonemason model was submerged in water,” Mikasi added, raising his eyebrows at us. “That’s a lot of water references.”

“It is.” Slowly, I tapped the table as I stared into the middle distance. “I can’t say why, but my gut says those water patterns are important. More than hiding the model underwater or forcing a water elemental to guard it against her will.”

Kiyosi arched a subtle eyebrow at me, but I gave him a subtle shake of my head. He nodded.

Skarri leaned against the table, chin in her hands.

“My people don’t hold anything too sacred about water. Yes, we like water, as does any water reptile. Our long-towns are always along rivers or lakes. We’re taught to honor the water spirits.”

“Binding one to guard an underground temple is a strange way to honor them,” Kiyosi said warily.

Skarri sighed with a frustrated hiss.

“I know. It was upsetting, and I don’t understand it.”

Azure’s explanation about her people and ‘debts’ rang loud in my memory. I kept my mouth shut. But Skarri’s comments about rivers gave me food for thought.

“What if it’s not the waves but the motion?” I suggested.

Mikasi’s eyes went bright at the idea.

“Tela, the model had portions that moved, right?” His words tumbled out of him in an energetic rush. “Skarri’s ancestors dealt with the Ancient Order. The Ancient Order liked making underground buildings with movable rooms. Just like that place you wrote a paper about last year.”

“The Tirak ruins to the southeast of here?” Even as I said the words, I knew what he meant.

The halfling inventor waved a hand at the copy of Ancient Order Aqueducts in front of him.

“Exactly. Those. Remember how those model pieces moved? You told us you suspected those stonemasons were being hunted.”

I nodded. “They were. How else would anyone keep knowledge of the Iraxi secret?”

Skarri’s facial scales flushed in shame over the idea her ancestors might have committed mass murder. Atha patted her on the shoulder, the minotaur looking suddenly sage-like with those reading spectacles perched on his snout.

“Hyu no worry. I gotz aunt who rustles mountain goats and runs an illegal cheese smuggling ring. Not proper mercenary work. We all have stinky skeletons in closets.”

I blinked, giving the pair a pensive glance. Kiyosi leaned forward, intent on Mikasi’s idea.

“So, you’re saying that Toshirom Ifoon has movable rooms?” he asked uneasily.

“No idea,” Mikasi shrugged. “But I think there was more to that model than just a ‘model’. What if it’s also a puzzle? It shows the wrong picture—or route—until you turn the pieces in the correct direction.”

The air went brittle as none of us spoke; instead, we stared at each other. Atha, who hadn’t seen the model but only heard our stories, spoke first.

“So tunnel path on model was a lie?” The minotaur narrowed his eyes at us, then at the map on the table. “Oh, no. Not lie… a lock.”

I sat back in my chair, letting go of a slow breath.

“One set up to keep the Iraxi a secret, or maybe escape getting slaughtered. Could be both. By the Lady Deep, that’s a lot.”

“Yes!” Mikasi was practically bouncing in his seat. “That! We could go back and check the model, but I’m pretty sure I remember all the moving pieces.” He scrambled for a blank piece of paper, then pulled a pencil from his vest. “Here, I can draw what I remember.”

We poured over Mikasi’s meticulous sketches. At first, not a bit made sense. But then one comment from Skarri made everything snap into place.

“The tunnels? They almost look like rivers,” she hissed, flicking her tongue.

Between the trade map, Mikasi’s sketches, and three books, the truth took shape.

Kiyosi ran a hand through his hair and over his horns. Skarri grinned, and Atha cleaned his reading glasses on his vest while Mikasi looked ready to cheer. I simply sat back, stunned.

“That tunnel,” I said, low and almost reverent. “It was the wrong direction from the start. That’s why the Deepland Hollow had a hidden tunnel. It connected to the real way in.”

Mikasi tapped the sketches, then the ancient map on the table.

“If we’re right, it also means that ‘front door’ Herd Tolvana is trying to pry open is a fake. The real front door is near a dried-up riverbed.”

“Water,” Skarri hissed reverently.

I frowned at the sketches, then positioned them over the old map of the area.

“Problem. Elkerton will be all over that Deepland Hollow, so that’s out. Also? Sure, Herd Tolvana is digging in the wrong spot, but they’ve put their camp on top of the real entrance.”

Kiyosi turned pale, putting his face in his hands.

“Oh, Mending Brother and Lady Deep,” he moaned.

Silence fell like the cave-in I had wished for.

“Exactly.” I traced the route along the map with a finger, then tapped a location along a bend of a dry riverbed where Herd Tolvana currently had set up camp. “All we need to do is slip into their camp without getting spotted, then find a way down to the real entrance.”

No one said a word. Instead, we just exchanged uneasy looks. We knew where we had to go; now we just had to survive.

I rubbed my hands together, grinning. “They’ll never see us coming. Probably.”

“You just had to say that,” Kiyosi groaned.

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Windtracer Tales is a work of pure, unashamed fiction. In fact, it considers itself rather fancy and quite proud of itself. Names of characters, places, events, organizations and locations are all creations of the author’s imagination for this fictitious setting. Any resemblance to persons living, dead, or reanimated is coincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s, since the characters and the author tend to disagree a lot.

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