Chapter 6
~ Looking Upward ~
“Ah,” the old man said, kneeling down and glancing at Basjon’s face. He had reappeared only seconds earlier, after having been gone for hours; it was now quite dark, and the chickens had long since gone to roost up in the trees. “I see you’re back with us once again. Completed your training, eh?”
Jon blinked, looking to either side of him. Apparently, he had come back to the same forest he had trained in for months, with its familiar green grass and rough-barked but not spiky trees. What confused him, of course, wasn’t this at all, but the fact that he had ended up lying on his back on the ground in the middle of a stream, and he was beginning to get uncomfortably wet.
“Gah!”
He quickly stood up from that uncomfortable position and spent the next few minutes trying to wring out his shirt. The old man who had taught him the ways of Num Power just sat patiently all the while, waiting for the answer to his question; eventually, Jon finished what he was doing and answered.
“Yeah,” he said, “I think I’ve got it down pretty well now.”
Eying the ancient (and now somewhat wet and soggy) reed in the boy’s hand, the old man raised one eyebrow and then pointed at it questioningly.
“What good is this old thing?”
“Well… not much on its own,” Basjon answered, attempting to wave it about a little but finding that it was more prone to flopping than waving in its current state. “But watch this.”
Just like before, he gripped the stick with both hands and then concentrated on pushing his Num Power outward and surrounding it with what seemed like a solid “shell” of orange energy. It only took seconds this time—though it flickered a bit at first, the shape of an axe had clearly formed around the soggy reed. Jon swung his new weapon down and shattered a fallen log with little effort, then repeated the process with one of the larger rocks in the streambed, splitting it cleanly in two. The old man leaned his staff against a nearby tree and gave him a round of applause.
“Very impressive! Very impressive indeed, young man!”
He waited for the orange light to fade, then snatched the reed away and effortlessly snapped it over his knee.
“You’ll need something a bit more durable than that old thing, though,” he continued, taking his own staff from the place he had left it and presenting it to his pupil. “I imagine you’ll need it a lot more than this old man ever did. Go ahead, take it.”
For a second, Basjon just stood and stared at him, then nodded and took the staff from him. He took a closer look at it for a few moments, then slung it over his shoulder and began to walk back toward the little forest hut alongside the old man.
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With his training now complete, Jon went to work at preparing himself for the long journey across the countryside and up the mountain. Just as he had practiced his combat skills in the previous years, he now spent a lot of his time working on other things that would probably end up being even more important for the majority of his trip—how to pack enough supplies into a backpack, how to set up a tent, how to avoid getting lost in the wilderness, and of course how to find and cook his own food once he had run out of what little he was able to bring along with him. He had no idea what the trip up the mountain would be like, but he figured that these sorts of skills would be useful in pretty much any situation that could come up when long-distance travel and overnight trips through unknown lands were involved.
When the day that he planned to leave finally drew close, his parents managed to get the entire village involved. Though their story was almost unbelievable at times, the Gershams were not a family with a reputation as the type who would fabricate some impressive story just to con other people, and they had always helped the rest of the village out during their own hard times. As the days passed, slowly but surely, more and more of their friends and neighbors showed up at their door with something that they thought might be useful to Basjon during his expedition up the mountain. Everyone with any talent for cooking had brought some sort of food that wouldn’t go bad even if kept in a backpack for days on end—loaves of bread, nuts, candy and other snacks, strips of well-preserved salted or smoked meat, and dried pasta and fruit of all kinds. Kasandra Marek the gunsmith had provided one prototype of a new type of pistol she had recently begun work on, an unusual-looking gun which held its ammunition in a revolving cylinder and did not need to be reloaded until all of them had been fired. Several families had come with blankets and additional clothes, while the owners of various shops around town had brought him a new pair of sandals and several sets of tools for doing various minor tasks and repairing the rest of his equipment. Dr. Gosse brought a kit containing various medicines, bandages, and the thread and needles required for making stitches. And finally, one of the merchants from the east who had been living there for less than a year decided to give him a simple traveler’s cape, much like that which Aykathla had worn when she first arrived all those years ago.
It took nearly a full day to actually pack all of his gear, due partly to the fact that it would have been nearly impossible to bring every last bit of it along with him; there just wasn’t enough space in his backpack, and he only needed so many shirts or belts or blankets. Or hats—several villagers had given him headgear of various types as gifts, despite the fact that he disliked wearing them and tried to avoid doing so if at all possible. Eventually, however, he managed to narrow down all of the piles of stuff he had been given (as well as some that he already had in his own home) into a smaller pile of things that were either absolutely necessary or would most likely come in handy. In addition to those things he thought would be necessary for the journey, he also brought along Aykathla’s scroll—it was certainly important, after all, and she would most likely want to have access to it after she was away from her captors once again. The revolving pistol, as interesting as it was, ended up being left behind along with the several stacks of unnecessary clothes and duplicates of tools he already had—based on how poorly his father’s shotgun had fared against the golems and their master, it seemed that it wouldn’t have been of much use against the enemies he was likely to encounter on his journey anyway.
With his backpack nearly overflowing (and so heavy that it would have probably kept him from moving entirely if he had tried to carry it before his training), Basjon finally set out from the outskirts of the village, with a crowd of what seemed like at least half of its residents standing around waiting to say goodbye. His parents, of course, were the first among that group, both giving him big hugs as soon as he came near them. Those who had helped him with his training over the years, along with those who had provided equipment for his trip, were all waiting around to say a few last words to him; nobody knew when they would see him again, or even if they would see him again, so almost everyone who had ever known him showed up if at all possible. Visiting merchants took one last chance to sell him their wares, though for the most part they were ignored—Jon did take a bunch of ripe grapes from one fruit-stand owner as he passed, but he had little need for what the majority of the salesmen were offering. Once he had said his farewells, he walked off onto the small dirt road leading away from the village, heading toward the ever-present mountain looming off in the distance.
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Over the course of only one day, Basjon managed to clear nearly half the distance between his village and the base of the mountain, thanks partly to his physical training and partly to his Num Power-enhanced speed and endurance. He set up camp on a low hill, gathered up sticks for a fire, and made himself a bowl of plain pasta before wrapping himself in blankets and drifting off to sleep. He slept surprisingly peacefully that night, considering that he was traveling further from home than he had ever been before; his thoughts remained focused on the trip itself, and he never once considered just how great a task he was undertaking—climbing the highest mountain in the world, facing off against enemies so dangerous that the ordinary person couldn’t even begin to imagine their power, and essentially starting a one-man war against an entire society and its worst traditions, all for the sake of rescuing one person who was taken away from him. He woke up the next day refreshed from a good night’s sleep, ready to go almost as soon as he had finished eating breakfast.
By the time the second night of his journey was over, he had moved into the foothills surrounding the mountain. From this distance, he could get a better idea of exactly what the place looked like, and just how enormous it was—from where he had set up his camp that night, he was unable to see the mountain’s peak due to a layer of clouds which had moved in around it earlier. What he could see, however, were several cities built upon the side of the mountain; the closest of these had tall buildings of an unusual design that he had never seen before. Further up were more ordinary-looking houses, or at least that’s what it looked like from the foothills—because they were just so high above his current position, it was hard to get a good idea of what he was seeing.
On the third day of his trip, he began to see more signs that he was entering enemy territory. Occasionally, he would spot a glint of metal in the sky, which he suspected was one of the metallic-bodied golems floating high overhead; once, while traveling through a small forested area in the hills, he actually saw one moving among the trees only a few dozen feet away from him, though it didn’t seem to notice his presence at all. It was at this point when he really began to think about where he was going—if one of the robots saw him, it was likely that those who had sent them would know about him as well, and he would no longer have the element of surprise. Mekedzis probably assumed that the boy he had fought all those years ago had died from the injuries he had suffered, which meant he probably wasn’t expecting anyone to come after Aykathla—so Jon definitely didn’t want the blue-haired creep or his people to figure out that he had survived after all. This meant, of course, that he would need to avoid the mechanical sentries if at all possible and quickly destroy any that did manage to identify him before they could communicate that fact to their superiors. For now, anyway, he figured it would probably be wiser to avoid fights and just sneak around any golems that he saw.
The hilly land made his trip a bit slower than it had been on previous days, and his progress slowed even further once he reached the bottom of the mountain itself. The cliffs in that strange world he had been sent to during his final test had prepared him for some of the trials that awaited him, but not nearly all—some paths he came across were blocked off by landslides, and in a few places old bridges had completely rotted away over the years and what would have once been an easy path had become an impossibly wide chasm that he couldn’t have jumped across even with his Num Power. Seeing the clouds growing ever thicker overhead, he decided to set up camp inside a small cave he had discovered rather than out on the mountainside itself; this ended up being a wise decision, as the storm that passed through that night would have surely sent his tent flying off the side of some cliff if he hadn’t staked it down as tightly as possible. He sat inside the cave and watched the rain pour down outside, thankful for the fact that he didn’t have to be outside in that sort of weather so early in his trip.
The next morning, he got a glimpse of the strange wildlife that was to be found in the area. Whereas he had seen fairly normal creatures in the foothills, even the lower reaches of the mountain itself were completely different—he spent nearly an hour watching what appeared to be skeletal fish “swimming” through the loose rocks and sandy soil, occasionally leaping out and snatching a bug out of the air. Once he tossed a raisin to them, and several of them swarmed over to it immediately, briefly fighting over which one got to have it before a fish that had previously been uninvolved slipped in and took it out from under the others’ noses. He wasn’t sure what to make of the skeleton-fish; they certainly moved and acted like living creatures, but there was no way anything would ever develop into nothing more than a living skeleton just through natural processes. Was there some strange curse placed upon the mountain that made things like this happen, or was this somehow the doing of its pointy-eared residents? No matter how long he watched them, he never came closer to figuring out the answer, so eventually he just packed up and continued his upward climb.
Toward the end of his first week of uphill travel, Basjon decided to take a seat on a flat rock and take out Aykathla’s scroll for the first time on the trip. Though he had looked at it before, he had never actually tried to read it, especially not out loud as Aykathla had done when she had used it to summon a bird all those years ago; fragments of its text looked vaguely similar to an older form of his language, but the majority of it was written in a collection of all sorts of unfamiliar tongues. Just glancing over it, he could pinpoint at least five separate languages—possibly more, though some were so close that it was hard to tell if they weren’t just different handwriting rather than different languages. After staring at the ancient writing for several minutes, he slowly attempted to read what few clusters of letters he could recognize as his own alphabet.
“Rift… something, something, something,” he began, mumbling over completely unfamiliar words as he went. “Sky… something, um… something else… world… strike?”
Almost immediately, the words on the scroll began to glow—but it was obvious that something wasn’t right. The glow began only on the words he had actually read, only spreading to the rest of them later, and instead of the golden yellow-orange that they had been when Aykathla had activated the scroll, they were more of a reddish color that gradually shifted toward orange as the symbols began to glow brighter. Rather than a pillar of light, the scroll only emitted a dim red-orange glow and a dangerous-sounding humming noise that was gradually growing louder and faster. As this hum shifted into a high-pitched whine, Jon instinctively dove to the ground away from the scroll—which turned out to be a very good idea, as immediately after this noise stopped, a blast of flame erupted from the scroll, climbing nearly a dozen feet into the air and leaving dark scorch-marks all along the rock wall nearby. Once it was all over, the startled boy waited for the scroll to stop glowing and then rolled it up once again before carefully packing it away.
Many uneventful days passed after that, with Jon slowly climbing higher and higher up the side of the mountain but seeming to never really get any closer to the top. The peak was just so high above him that every little bit of progress he made seemed insignificant, but he kept going anyway; he knew from the very beginning that it was going to be a long trip, so getting some indication of just how long it was didn’t really bother him much. Climbing straight up the rocky cliffs and slopes ahead of him was nearly impossible and seemed like more trouble than it was worth, so he had ended up traveling back and forth in switchbacks, blazing new trails along the mountainside and further slowing his movement up toward the top. Eventually, however, he came across what looked like an old road that had long fallen into disrepair; though it also went up around the mountain back and forth in low slopes, having a solid, flat surface to walk on for once made the trip a lot easier and allowed him to go a bit quicker than he had been before when a section of loose ground collapsing out from under him was a real possibility. He had to wander off the path to find a campsite every night, of course—setting up a tent in the middle of a road that might still be in use didn’t seem very smart, after all—but it was always easy enough to find his way back, so he had no problem doing so.
After several days’ travel on the ancient road, Basjon spotted something in the distance that he recognized—the same city of tall, boxy buildings that he had spotted when he was down in the foothills before. As he came closer and closer, he noticed that not all of the buildings were completely intact; some of them seemed to have had holes blown out of them, while others were missing large chunks of their structure and still others had been reduced to little more than their internal framework. From this distance, it was impossible to tell if the place was still inhabited, but he honestly hoped that it wasn’t; living in such a ruined place had to have been miserable. On top of that, he occasionally got a whiff of some horrible smell on the wind, seemingly originated from somewhere within the city; how could anyone live in a place that smelled like that all the time?
One night, when his camp was set up within a short walk of this city of ruined towers, he was suddenly awakened by some sounds of movement outside his tent. Peeking out from between the flaps, he watched as a pointy-eared child clothed in little more than rags scrambled down the side of the mountain, seemingly in a hurry to get away from something. He had no supplies, aside from a rusty knife in one hand and a bottle of water tied to his side by a tattered old rope; on top of that, he looked as if he was already exhausted, hardly in any shape to be stumbling down through the wilderness on his own. After a few minutes, several more children in similar states appeared, the new additions meeting the first of the kids after a brief sprint down the path and then stopping to talk about something in hushed whispers. One of them pointed straight down the mountain, apparently indicating the way that he intended for them to go; others seemed to argue that they should follow the old road for a while first, or at least find a safer route down. Before too long, however, their conversation was interrupted by the sound of an alarm rising up from somewhere within the city. The sound made them freeze in place at first, and then rush off in all different directions, trying to find someplace to hide—they had heard this alarm many times before, and all of them knew what was coming.
Basjon, however, had no idea what this sound warned of. He continued to watch, occasionally glancing over to the tall buildings in the distance, but for a long time nothing seemed to happen. Just when he was about to duck back into his sleeping bag and get some rest for the trip ahead of him the next morning, he noticed the light of the moon glinting off of something metallic hovering in the air over the city—a golem. Or more accurately, half a dozen golems, which were all headed in his general direction. Now, it was obvious what was going on—the children had left the city without permission, and someone had alerted the golems to this fact and sent them out to retrieve the unfortunate kids, just like what had happened to Aykathla. He could only watch as one by one the metallic sentries swooped down from the sky, snatched up their targets, and then floated off into the city once again, bringing them back to what was surely a hellish existence that anyone in their right mind would want to get away from. Until, that is, one of the golems that didn’t have a runaway child to capture turned its head toward his tent and stared directly at him with its one glowing eye.
In the mind of the golem—or, at least, what vaguely resembled a mind for the mechanical being—a variety of symbols, shapes, and colors flashed past in rapid succession as it slowly turned its head, surveying the landscape. Before long, however, it had locked in on a patch of off-white that was not supposed to be there. And hiding away inside that whitish canvas shelter was an unfamiliar entity, one which was not supposed to live on the mountain. The golem’s eye shifted and rotated slightly, staring at Basjon through the open tent-flaps, and its view suddenly flashed orange—it had detected an unusual power emanating from this stranger.
Inside his tent, Jon fumbled around for the walking staff the old man had given him, eventually gripping it with his right hand. He prepared to run out and attack the golem before it could relay the news that he was still alive to its superiors, but he quickly realized that it was too far up in the air for him to reach it; even if he attempted to jump and take a swing at it, it would likely see him coming and avoid the attack by simply rising up even higher. For about a minute, he wondered what he could do to improve his range a bit—could he run higher onto the mountain first before jumping in for an attack? Or maybe climb up the side of one of the tall buildings and then strike from the roof? But none of these ideas seemed like very good ones, and they were probably a bit too complicated and time-consuming to be of any use. For a moment, his mind went blank; there just didn’t seem like any good options. And then, out of nowhere, he remembered his father’s attack on the robots with his shotgun when they had first appeared in the village. Raising his staff up to his shoulder in the same position one would hold any sort of long gun, he began to focus his Num Power, not sure if this would work but figuring that it would be better to at least try. Before long, the shape of a gun began to form around the stick, shaped out of glowing, translucent orange energy. He glanced down at this new weapon for a moment, then shifted the positions of his hands so that his finger was on the trigger, took aim, and fired.
Almost instantly, a perfect sphere of energy about the size of a walnut exploded from the barrel of the Num Power-shaped firearm, rocketing toward its target at incredible speeds. It pierced straight through the robot’s metallic body on impact, punching a round hole through its torso and then fading away as it continued to fly off toward the horizon. For a moment, the golem paused and looked over its damaged body; this was just enough time for Basjon to aim and fire once again, this time hitting it right in the eye. The machine dropped from the sky, exploding halfway to the ground and showering the mountainside with mangled bronze-colored shrapnel for a few seconds afterward.
With the threat of the golems gone for the moment, Basjon allowed the rifle-shaped shell of energy around his staff to fade away into nothing, laid down, and finally returned to his sleeping bag for some much-needed sleep.
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