NOVEL NEXT 61. In Giant’s Halls
Excerpt from ‘The Tenets of House Deepstar,’ author unknown.
“44. There exists no worthless stone—every fragment may serve a purpose.”
There wasn’t much time for sightseeing. Even here, in one of the most heavily fortified sanctums in the known world, Aroearoe Deepstar was not in any mood to take things slow.
“We’ll proceed to the planning chamber and discuss the plan.” The Head of House Deepstar had disembarked her carriage as soon as possible, flanked by Suee and Myuu. “Have your mereu announce our presence to the servant posted by the front gate.”
If Mysilia took offence to being succinctly defined as merely Eone’s mereu, she didn’t show it—without a further word, the sparrow-winged woman took flight. Her tiny form vanished from sight almost immediately as she zipped down the immaculate streets. There wasn’t even time for the captain to direct the usual unloading procedures for Chime—the staff in charge of looking after Aroearoe’s carriage directed the enormous silupker to a nearby warehouse, and Eone directed everyone not required at the planning meeting to help with unloading the supplies and freeing up Chime.
This left a somewhat diminished party heading into the opulent halls of Highshine—Eone led the charge, flanked by Muut and Narasanha in much the same way that the priestess and guard stood either side of Aroearoe. Yenna tentatively followed them, proceeding on the basis of a lack of protest—she still felt distinctly out of place. Together they walked down an eerily empty, quiet road, Yenna’s hooves making loud clicks on the dark quartz stone.
A sinking feeling wormed its way into the mage’s guts, like the walls of this place were going to swallow her up. There was nowhere to run, no forest to disappear into, no comfortable library or cozy wooden surfaces. It was all stone, smooth and sharp, immaculately carved and artificial. It may have appealed to yolm sensibilities, every surface an example of incredible craftsmanship, but it certainly did nothing for kesh. Yenna quietly wondered if Suee was used to places like this—when she looked at the priestess, Suee looked right back, and Yenna swiftly turned to pretend she hadn’t been staring.
To calm herself on the short walk towards Highshine proper, Yenna let her magic sense feast on the other side of the gorgeous construction around her. Every surface was bristling with enchantments, in the foreign style of Miluran craftsmen. I’m the foreigner here, Yenna quietly reminded herself, though that thought served only to make her feel less at ease. The enchantments were a brilliant feat of careful planning, not a single symbol out of place, a genius display of three-dimensional thinking that allowed all manner of magic to flow freely.
The actual function of the spells embedded within the stone wasn’t of interest to Yenna—it was all relatively mundane in effect, simple things like lighting, security, remote scrying and climate control. What fascinated her was how much it resembled the work on the sorcerer’s skull, the very same piece of dark magic that was still hanging from Eone’s hip. Even the beauty of the work inside the stone paled in comparison to the absolute precision of the work on that undead monstrosity, but it made an uncomfortable parallel—another discipline of magic evidently available to the cult. Yenna tucked the thought away for later inspection as the group arrived at their destination.
Above them, the meteorite-metal structure loomed large and oppressive, the sun glimmering off polished surfaces and tracings of silver and gold, a masterpiece of craftsmanship so enormous that one could imagine it falling from a godly forge, crashing to the ground to be merely borrowed by mortal beings. An enormous gate stood shut in front of them, dark steel bound in gold and silver filigree that masterfully hid in plain sight all manner of defensive enchantments. Smaller, more reasonable doors flanked it, tall but not enormously so, gentle reminders of the scale of the occupants—If it weren’t for those, I’d suspect this was the home of a queen of giants. No more secure vault existed than the interior of Highshine. So why did it unnerve Yenna so badly?
From those large-but-reasonably-so doors, a coordinated procession of servants, guards and other valued pieces of the House machinery stepped forth to greet their Head. There was a very distinct order to all of them, some of which raised uncomfortable red flags in Yenna’s mind. All of the guards, dressed in black and gold armour, were yolm women of considerable stature, the tone of their skin similar to the dark brown-red that Eone and Aroearoe shared. The servants were largely yolm men, though Yenna spotted one man who looked like a massive lizard forced to stand upright and pressed into a fine outfit. Arranged nearby, like an afterthought, were a number of silupker.
While the guards committed to a formal salute and the servants gave a deep bow, the silupker arranged themselves into inconspicuous positions highlighted only by the sheer variance in their appearances. One was no bigger than Tirk, a lumpy biped with four arms arranged equidistantly around its mid-section, each carrying a small cup of water. Another resembled a long snake, spherical sections like Chime’s coiled to allow it to stand up, its head bowed in supplication. The final one was stick-thin, tall and fragile like a praying mantis, four legs below and two over-long arms poised before them. They took various items of luggage from Sergeant Myuu’s hands and scurried away without a word.
Eone looked distinctly uncomfortable at the sight of the silupker, and Yenna understood why—they were servants that stood even below the servants, one a glorified cup-bearer, another consigned merely to carrying luggage. Yenna wasn’t sure what service the snake-like silupker was here to perform, but they merely stood there—poised as though awaiting instruction.
Yenna realised belatedly that she had been staring at the snake silupker, and had missed the entirety of the small greeting ceremony—some kind of formal changing of the guard, recognising Aroearoe as the true master of the place or something like that. The silupker hadn’t looked back at Yenna in any way that she could decipher, though she understood that silupker senses were not at all like those of flesh and blood people. Still, they were the last to leave the gathering of those who had come out to greet the Head, and they ensured they were the last of all others, waiting for Yenna to head inside.
The inside of the entrance hall was colossal, a match for the giant’s gate just behind it. It was a grand ballroom, the floor a shimmering white of polished marble and black-and-gold rugs. Despite sunlight not reaching this room at all, the interior was warmly lit with magical light emanating from no particular source. It left the room with an odd lack of shadows that served only to put Yenna more on edge. The mage’s legs quivered as she took care to step only on the carpet—as though the click of her hooves on stone would trigger some security system to admonish her for being here.
“Yenna? You alright?”
The mage nearly jumped out of her skin, hands jumping up to grip the brim of her hat. She turned to see that Eone had slipped back to walk alongside her, concern clear on her face.
“It’s– Yes, I’m quite alright. Just being silly, is all.”
“There’s nothing silly about expressing your concerns. Just know that you’re safe here—with me, if the walls and wards of Highshine don’t convince you. Tell me immediately if there’s anything wrong, I’ll fix it up.”
Eone gave Yenna a wink that made the mage’s heart skip a beat before striding back to her rightful place, and the mere sight of the confident captain managed to calm at least some of Yenna’s tension¹.
The sheer size of the entrance hall could not be overstated, and Yenna wondered how anything got done in this place if it was so enormous—by her estimate, she could have galloped at full speed and still taken more than a minute to cross the floor. It was something of an anticlimax then, when the door they had intended to reach was barely tall enough to fit both of the noble yolm with their heads bowed. It seemed to be a side-passage, likely used by servants rather than esteemed nobility, but it acted as a much-needed shortcut to wide corridors once more, lined with sculptures and fine artworks of some of the most gorgeous yolm women Yenna had ever seen².
Trailing behind them was a shadow of servants—two yolm men, wearing enough make-up and finery that Yenna would care to call them fine if they were kesh, as well as the snake-like silupker from earlier. They followed at a safe distance, as though proximity with the Head might cause her some physical harm. Yenna nearly walked into Narasanha’s back for peering over her shoulder, the bodyguard side-stepping her and halting the mage with a hand on her shoulder as they came to a door.
A heavy stone door, once again traced with silver filigree, slid open at a gesture from Aroearoe. The slab of black quartz was thicker than both of Yenna’s arms, a vault door designed to withstand a siege all on its own, hiding a tidy, busy room nestled away in a web of powerful enchantments.
Within was undoubtedly what one would call a war-room. A huge round table sat in the middle of this circular vault, its outer edges a fine polished wood, its interior an immensely complicated spell circle that Yenna was desperate to read over. Racks of swords and spears lined the walls, as well as charts and maps marked with pins and thread, neatly maintained intelligence spanning the entirety of Milur tracked and quantified. The lights in here were decidedly mundane in the magical sense, but unusual in design—dotted along the walls in metal cages, they featured a thin filament of metal set within a glass sphere, the light produced by some mechanism that heated the filament white-hot. It cast a constant, if unsettlingly white light across the room, like a steady phosphorus flame. Inside the room, a single attendant in light armour was adjusting a map’s pins—she turned and bowed to the Head and went back to her duties.
“Eone, leave that gruesome trophy of yours outside.” Aroearoe stopped the captain before she could walk inside, gesturing to the bag at her hip. “You, take it to the research chamber.”
Yenna’s ears burned at the mention of a research chamber, and she made a point to ask about it later. The snake-like silupker took the bag in the coils of its spherical sections and slithered away at high speed, entirely without a word. That unsettling feeling returned, and Yenna wondered if it was a good idea to leave the skull out of sight. I shall simply have to trust the priestess’ bindings, the mage thought to herself—and saw Suee turn to look at her, as though she could read Yenna’s mind.
Within the vault, with the door sealed and the group arranged around the table—Mysilia had rejoined them at some point, perched imperiously on Eone’s shoulder—Aroearoe got down to business. Taking a position at the opposite side of the table, she leaned forward and pressed a hand against the spell circle in the middle. The plunging neckline on the Head’s dress did little to protect Yenna from the sight of the woman leaning forward in that way, and the mage did her best to remind herself just who she was and how utterly fascinating the spell circle before her was.
The circle itself shifted and shuddered, as though the central recess of the table had turned to water in a strong breeze. The wood flowed away, revealing a shimmering illusion of the many maps on the walls—Yenna realised that the pins and lines on the paper copies were no mere markers, but were intrinsically linked to this illusory display. With a sweep of her hand and the manipulation of some hidden control on her side of the table, Aroearoe revealed a scale replica of Highshine.
Meeting everyone’s eyes, as each member of the group found their place around the table, the Head of House Deepstar gave a small nod, and spoke with a solemn finality.
“Now, to the plan. Let us bring an end to this bloody war before it ever begins.”
¹ - It barely needs to be stated, but I can assure you that Yenna Bookbinder spends an incredible amount of time, effort, ink and parchment on describing exactly how that one wink made her feel, and upon my first reading I was convinced that our fair kesh sorely needed to stop reading quite so many romance novels.
² - Yenna manages to spend several more pages describing every painting she saw, and even had the gall to make this one of her few later edits to the book—when she had found out exactly which painting depicted which member of the Deepstar family. Yenna’s editing was few and far between, the occasional correction of a formula or spelling mistake, yet she somehow found time to come back and tell us the names of several generations of Deepstar women.
