The World Walkers: Konoran (Gaelom4): Clio: Running (part 2)

[k_a_webb]

Part 1

As Clio made her way through the room she kept telling herself that people rarely looked up. It was one of those things he’d taught her, because he always wanted her to look up. There was no way of knowing what might be up there, although the only things she’d ever found were spiders, but it was something she would try to remind herself to do. Even though she told herself it was impossible she couldn’t stop hoping that he might still be alive. He knew of more of the little hidey holes than she did, so if anyone could have survived the invaders it was going to be him, and he would meet her if she managed to make it all the way to the door he’d told her to leave from if the worst ever happened.

“Where is she?” his voice boomed again, almost making her lose balance and if she did… well, that was something she didn’t want to think about. “Why haven’t you found her yet?”

“It appears, my Lord, that there are ladders everywhere within the building, leading up to walkways that can take you all the way through the castle, and we think she may be up there.”

How had they already found the ladders? Clio bit her lip as she kept walking, hoping they wouldn’t think to look up, even though they knew she might be up there. It had to be luck. She hadn’t even known the ladders were there during her first week there and she’d walked past them every day. Of course she hadn’t been searching for someone within the castle. If she had of been maybe she would have found the ladders, instead of being told about them and their purpose.

“The longer I’m here the more I think it might be worth staying. It may not be the most beautiful castle I have ever seen, but there are some ingenious ideas that have been used to make this the sort of place a mage may hide herself easily and that is exactly what she has done, because she has been taught to fear us. She thinks we want to control her, when really we want to teach her to reach her full potential.”

Clio knew he was talking to her and she sped up, telling herself not to look down, because if she did she may well see him looking up at her and she didn’t want to know if he had seen her or not. Focusing on getting away from him was the most important thing, because they was what she should be doing, even though there was a part of her that couldn’t help wondering if maybe, if it were possibly, that they’d been wrong. Even though it was a voice she remembered for a reason, that reason being his promise that he would have her no matter what, there were always going to be doubts in her mind, as she’d never had a chance to speak to him, to ask what he wanted from her, and it wasn’t long after that she’d left her home behind.

Maybe it was really Clio’s parent’s need to keep control of her that meant she was running from someone who might be able to help her. Of course the men within the castle would have been told that she needed to be taught to fear everyone else, because of her abilities, but then he had killed everyone in the castle. They would never have surrendered, not even if they were given the option, as they’d been told to protect her with their lives and they believed that he was there for one reason only. Yet she couldn’t help wondering if he really was.

Which was exactly the sort of thing she should be wondering while she was crawling across one of the most dangerous parts of her route to safety. Clio reminded herself that she could think about her situation in more detail when she wasn’t high enough above the floor that a fall would lead to her death, because she didn’t want to die. She remembered being told that there were people who wanted her dead because of what she was. Was he one of them? Was he simply saying things in the hope that she would make things easier for him? Nothing was simple… it hadn’t been since she realised what she was and she didn’t know why she’d been unlucky enough to be born with magic. The first in three hundred years.

It didn’t matter how often she reminded herself of that. She still couldn’t quite believe it was possible and Clio remembered waking up after the strangest dream only to find that she was invisible. After wandering around for an hour it finally faded away, because she’d had no idea to make herself visible again, and if she’d experimented it would have been much easier to get around the castle, but her father had made her promise not to. Of course he hadn’t realised that when she made a promise he made it with magic, which made it impossible to break. Fortunately he had people reading through all the books they had on magic, to see if they could find out how her abilities worked, because obviously there was no one who could teach her.

She should have had someone to teach her, but the last mage had been killed and no one was quite sure how. No one admitted to having done it, so there was a chance he might have died of natural causes, and yet that was something that everyone seemed to think was impossible. Clio didn’t know why, even though she’d asked questions, as her father thought it best she had some time to get used to the idea that she was a mage before she started getting the answers she felt she needed. Maybe that was just his way of controlling her, because it seemed that everyone wanted her one way or another, and he was the lucky one, while she was trapped in a castle full of invaders with no idea what to do next.

“I’ve found her,” a voice called, echoing, and she told herself sternly not to look back. She knew exactly where he was, which was quite bad enough. “Although I have no idea how we’re going to get her down from here safely.”

“Follow her and wait until she climbs down of her own free will,” another voice suggested, sounding fed-up, and she knew exactly why he felt that way. She was beginning to feel the same way too. “It’s too dangerous to grab her while we’re up here. One or other of us might end up with a cracked skull when we fall off the paths. Whoever designed them like this really was only thinking about creating escape routes.”

“Well, wouldn’t you? I know this castle was built at a time when there were more mages, but even then everyone wanted their own and it didn’t matter in the slightest what the mages themselves had in mind, so their answer to the problem was to make certain that they had options, and, if I was in their position, I would have done the same thing.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I read when I get bored, unlike you, and when I found out where we were coming I thought it would be a good idea to learn as much as I could about the castle. None of the books we had mentioned the secret passageways up here, but that’s not really a surprise.”

“They could be a new addition.”

“Possible, but I doubt it.”

As Clio got further away from the two soldiers their conversation got quieter, but she kept listening, because she knew nothing about the castle she had found herself in. She’d been told that it was more important that she learnt her way around than it was for her to learn about the building itself, at least at first, and she didn’t know if that would ever have changed – it seemed unlikely when she thought about it, if she thought of her father as another person who sought to control, which was something she never had before. To think that of someone she believed loved her… until she found herself hunted by another one of the players in the game she hadn’t really stopped to contemplate why she had been hidden away. Everyone she spoke to said it was for her own safety, so that was the truth she had accepted, but what if they’d been lying to her. All she could really do was keep going and wait until she was somewhere safe, preferably alone, and then let herself think of what her future should hold, because she needed to focus on where she was going.

The pathways were dangerous. Each one of them was just small enough for one person to make their way along them and Clio had been close to falling off them before, although that was before she had spent days working out the best routes to get her to the door that she needed, the door she kept hoping would take her to safety and, if the was very lucky, the man who had taught her everything she knew. He was probably dead, like everyone else, because there was no one in the castle who wouldn’t have fought – even the cook – but there was a chance he’d put her future needs first. She knew she was only hoping that he had survived so she wouldn’t be alone, running from someone she wasn’t even certain she should be running from, in nothing more than a pair of slippers.

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.