Very soon, the trio sat in the grand parlor of the late
Sister Miligred. Laurel sat across from the man, eyeing him warily while
absently massaging her scar. He wondered what sort of battle could warrant such
a wound.
“Tell us your name, stranger,” she demanded brusquely.
“My name—“ the man hesitated, and finished, “I am called
Carsius.”
Laurel stared at Carsius with those strange, multicolored
eyes; he had never seen such eyes before: shades of lavender, dark blue, and
green all reflected on top of each other, and overshadowed with flecks of
brown. She stared at him so hard and long he wondered if she was one of those
who could read minds and see into the souls of men.
“Well, Carsius,” Laurel finally responded dubiously, “I am
called Laurel, and this is my friend Renata. What is your business here? Who
are these Elitinati of which you speak? Are they the ones oppressing the people
with these maddening, evil, pervasive, devious—starekidoreshu?” She spat a long, foreign epithet with particular
venom.
Carsius glanced around at the blind, innocuous puffballs
milling about the room, noticing as well the numerous pools of gore from dead
wyrts (cleaned, of course, insofar as could be managed, after the fashion of
female housekeepers who only happened to be warriors). He turned back to the
Elf. “You speak of the wyrts as if you know of them,” he observed. “Part of my
business here is to discover as much as I can about them so that my people can
destroy them and free the people from their influence. We know only very
little, only—“
“Only what?” Laurel cut in quickly, sitting down and
fidgeting with the handle of the dagger hanging from her belt. She leaned
forward with intensity, “How much do you know?”
Carsius sighed and recounted what the Black Hand had
discovered about the althraxine. “My superiors surmise that the wyrts
themselves might be able to be exploited, say by ‘hacking’ into their neural
frequency via—“
WHAM
It took all the training Carsius had received to keep from
flinching as Laurel flung her dagger at a wyrt crawling between his legs. She
scowled darkly.
“Pick it up,” she said, “Look; all that’s there is blood and
neurons. They absorb energy through their foot-pads and excrete blood-waste
there, too; that’s why they don’t have any other organs. The blood is there to
feed the neural network. Besides, hacking won’t work. Once a wyrt is exploited,
it dies and disconnects from the neural network. The minute you interrupt the
flow of information from the wyrt to the mother, the connection is severed and
the wyrt is a useless piece of brain tissue.” She sighed and her face cleared.
“You say they use this althraxine drug to open the way for the wyrt to take over?”
Carsius nodded, extremely curious now. “Why do you ask? How
did it work on your planet?”
Laurel’s eyes glazed over, and her face grew sad. “They
just… took,” she murmured. “Maybe it was
because Noelle—I mean, because a certain Elf on my planet found the mother and
actually used dark magic (in my tongue we call it the Kidor-Nadjeroth) to somehow impart the knowledge and power of the
wyrt-mother to herself and her daughter—“ Laurel’s voice caught and she pressed
her lips mournfully. “I felt it—the power of the wyrts, I mean. They connect to
the nervous system of their hosts and then the hosts become part of the neural
network. The ones controlling the mother can see what the host sees, hear what
he hears—there is nothing hidden!”
“And are your people still enslaved, that is why you are
here to defeat these?” Carsius mused.
Laurel’s face expressed agony of the heart. “No,” she
replied hollowly, “all the wyrts on my planet are dead. I wish to save these
people from a similar fate.”
“It is possible to defeat them all, then?” Carsius leaned
forward with a gleam in his eye. “How did it happen?”
Laurel closed her eyes, wishing fervently she did not have
to relive the worst nightmare of her life, but seeing no other choice.
“Very well, Carsius, I will tell you,” she began.
“The Elf I spoke of—the one who became the mother-mind—was a
jealous, dark-hearted mistress who desired power and riches however she could
get it. My father, though the nephew of my people’s king, was made heir by the
Elvenking at the request of his sister, my grandmother. He did not know—in
fact, no one but the midwife who birthed him knew—that my father had a twin
brother who was weaker than he, and was not expected to live long. Under the
care of the midwife, the twin grew into a mature Elf, though always a weak, shriveled Elf,
knowing nothing of his heritage until the midwife told him, as she breathed her
last.
He married the mistress, who soon learned of his true identity and
desired the king’s riches for herself. She went to the wyrt-mother and took her
place, causing the wyrt-mother to die and all the knowledge to pass to the
mistress, who found it too much for her. Her daughter, however, had been
preparing herself for just such a moment, and when her mother was about to die
from the neural overload, the daughter took the knowledge for herself and
became the wyrt-mother over her own mother’s dead body.” Laurel paused in the
chilling tale and smiled grimly, “Both Elves thought that the symbol of great
authority would be a crown of some sort, but they never realized that the
inheritance of the Elvenking to his heir would be a sword—this sword.” Laurel turned to the rack of tools standing
next to the fireplace and picked up an old, beaten scabbard, from which the
magnificent hilt of a sword protruded.
Carsius watched carefully as she undid
the straps and unbound the leather cover, and he could not restrain a gasp as
the material fell away to reveal a scabbard of such brilliance it fairly
dazzled him to look upon it. Swirls and scrolls of gold and silver, speckled
with sapphires and emeralds, coursed over a flaming-red background. Laurel drew
the sword, and showed it to him. The mirror-bright steel bore an inscription in
some strange language, perhaps Laurel’s native tongue. She saw him studying it
and smiled,
“The inscription reads Oy Raenna-Anoy-Rethanandaru, which means ‘the heart of the Elvenking’ in my
tongue,” she explained. “What the daughter—Gwynna, was her name—realized at
last was that the key to getting what they thought would bring them the crown
was my name, which the Elvenking had given as the password for the last haven
of my people in Glastoskan.”
Carsius nearly asked her about this, but he sensed within
that another story in and of itself, much longer than this one, so he remained
silent. Besides, Laurel now grew angry again.
“She tried to get this name from my friends by overpowering
them with the wyrts, but my friends did not know it. Then she tried to get it
from me, but—“ Laurel stopped, and anger turned to confusion.
“What happened?” Carsius prompted her.
“For some reason,” Laurel continued slowly, “Instead of
Gwynna taking over my mind, I suddenly found myself in hers, viewing her
memories in my own head.”
Carsius blinked in surprise, “You can reverse the neural
transmitting of the wyrts?” he burst out incredulously.
“Laurel,” Renata finally spoke up, after sitting silent for
so long, “Is that what happened when Father went to rescue you? Andron and I
found a lot of records on Noellewynn and her husband Thengoran, but nothing
that talked about these things!” Renata winced at the memory, “I wondered why
Father never wanted to talk about it.”
Laurel smiled and stroked her friend’s red curls, “Yes,
young one, I’m afraid that’s what happened.” She turned back to Carsius, “I
don’t know how I did it, but I was able to redirect the influence of the wyrts.
I tried to use that influence to save her, because she was my cousin, but she
was as full of hate as I was full of love, and when she killed herself to
prevent the love from taking over—“ Laurel stopped and blinked as the
realization occurred. She smiled and her eyes danced as she declared, “It
was the conflict of fundamental ideologies that killed the wyrts!”
Carsius blinked, “Is it really that simple?” he asked with a
frown. “One belief asserted against another will break down the influence of
the wyrts?”
Laurel jumped up, her eyes aflame with the light of battle,
“Quick! You must tell me where the mother-mind is, so that we can defeat these
nefarious creatures once and for all!”
Carsius admired the enthusiasm of the Elvish maid, but he
threw his hands up in the air, “I confess I only recently learned about the
wyrts and the neural networking; besides, you realize that by trying to take
down the wyrt-network you are going up against the Elitinati.”
Laurel frowned in frustration, “But who are the Elitinati? You speak as if they are supremely
powerful beings.”
Carsius nodded, “And verily, they seem wiser than any other
race in the universe, and as cunning as the Devil himself! They have been
around for ages, assuming control of planets and destroying civilizations in
just such a way as this! They are like this Noellewynn of whom you speak,
greedy for riches and power.
"Eillumaeia was once a fertile land, one of peace and love
and unity. Then a certain sect decided that they would rather have dominance
over other species, and called themselves the Elitinati and set themselves over
the other races here on Eillumaeia. It was their ideas, these ‘Six Pillars of
Illuminus’ you’ve no doubt heard of—“
Laurel nodded, “I used it as a password to enter this city;
I had no idea what it meant, only that the name of the Elitinati inspired
reverential fear in the faces and actions of the people around me.”
Carsius stood and began pacing, thinking furiously. “These
Six Pillars serve as the foundational principles of supreme authority for the
Elitinati. If we could topple these pillars—“
Renata leaped to her feet, engaging in the conversation.
“Down fall the Elitinati, and the people are free to live in community once
more!” she cheered.
“So where is the mother-mind?” Laurel repeated her question.
“If we are invisible to the wyrts, then we should have little trouble locating
it without being discovered.”
“We are only invisible to the wyrts and their victims,” Carsius reminded her. “The Elitinati have the
capacity to train their own operatives to resist and even manipulate the
influence of the wyrts. We would not be so invisible to them. I would imagine
that the mother-mind lay somewhere deep beneath the great Temple-University at
the center of the city. To get there would be no problem—getting in, if I know anything about the Elitinati and their
security systems, will be nearly impossible.”
Laurel flopped onto the chair again and immediately
squirmed, reaching behind her back to retrieve a wyrt that had burrowed there.
She looked at the creature in her hand, recalling the way she had been able to
at least start influencing Gwynna’s thoughts—and thus the entire wyrt
network—through one of these.
“I know of a way,” she told the others.
At that moment, a distant bell began ringing incessantly.
The Elf and the young woman looked around in bewilderment, but Carsius
identified the noise immediately. He ran out into the hall.
“Laurel,” he called over his shoulder, “bring your sword: an
intruder has triggered the silent alarm!”
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