“Magelord, party of four.”
The voice cuts through the seeming chaos that we’d stepped into, and my attention swings to the side. There’s a young, or I guess young-seeming, person there, beautifully androgynous in silver-and-white robes of simple cut and intricate embroidery. They’re a soothing contrast, in voice and appearance both, to the colorful chaos of what is obviously some sort of control room or adjunct thereof; the room is tens of meters on each side and there are a half-dozen discrete streams of people queueing rapidly in front of a range of stations, handing over papers or receiving them, talking in excited bursts with each other and with other people sitting at desks.
“We are that party.” Amber’s words startle me; I’d gotten completely lost, again, in the patterns and energy of the room. “You are?”
“We are Khetzi.” My head tilts almost despite myself, and despite my knowledge that I might be being rude. “In this time, I am Khetzi Adn. We are, in other times, Khetzi Gvet.”
I nod at them, letting any questions I have wash off of me. “Khetzi.” I do my best to mimic the voiceless pharyngeal fricative of it, but it’s been a long time since I’ve married practice to theory in this regard, and I know I’m not doing it right. “This is fascinating, but I have the feeling we’re going to be in the way if we don’t get going.”
“It is as you say, Magelord.” Khetzi smiles at us, in what even I can tell is a perfectly professional smile. “If the Magelord and party will follow me.”
Their voice betrays a bit of a harried edge, and we move fast in their wake, slipping between two of the streams of incoming folks and avoiding a long-legged sprinter, two and a half meters tall with a disproportionately short torso and arms that touch the ground when they’re standing straight, who moves fast enough to leave a wind in their wake. I see, after their passing, the yellow markings on the ground that delineate the corridor they used, and we move along just next to it.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I say quietly, pitched only for Khetzi to hear, “what is the appropriate form of address?”
“Khetzi, Magelord.” That gets me a much more personal smile, one that moves the eyes and ears. “When we are about our duties, we are Khetzi, whether Adn or Gvet. When I speak to you as Khetzi Adn, I am yet Khetzi; it is only when we are entirely our own that we are not.”
“And when is that?”
“Not this turn of the cycle.” That gets me the purely professional smile again. “Perhaps the next.”
I redirect my curiosity, at least a little bit. Though I don’t let myself slow down, not even to gawk at the profusion of people in their wild array of shapes, sizes, colors, clothing styles, and more, there’s plenty to distract me from the misstep I suspect I just made. “What is this room, by the way?”
“It is… the management nexus for those who must be managed.” Khetzi doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow down. “To placate those who must be placated, to organize matters pertaining to those who are held to matter.”
“This isn’t central control, then.”
Khetzi snorts, then looks back, lips white with pressure. “Forgive us my lapse, Magelord, but no. Central control is elsewhere,” they eventually say, “some two orders of magnitude greater and placed where none who do not work directly for the Lady tread. We hope you will not ask us to bring you there, for we cannot.”
“Khetzi, you haven’t done anything for me to forgive. If you can’t bring us somewhere, that’s fine; it’s not like I was giving tours of the nav blister to random strangers.” I snort in laughter at myself, smiling. “Well, not random strangers.”
“The Magelord is gracious, to grant his understanding.”
There’s relief in Khetzi’s tone, and I throttle down the resentment, if with some difficulty. I know I have something of a problem with projecting my own mores and reactions onto other peoples’ situations, and it doesn’t help the other person. Instead, I shift my focus outwards, looking around at the walls and floor and the rapidly-thinning crowd.
It’s not a dull view, not that we’re slowing down a little and I can actually look at things. The floors are all geometric patterns, more of the tesselated polygons that I’ve seen a lot of in the aesthetic of the Tournament in general. The walls, though, are almost entirely covered in gorgeous, colorful murals, constructed from miniscule pieces of ceramic that I almost can’t see the lines for even inches away from my face. There’s a pattern to them; one by five of one-on-one panels, about a meter and a half wide and a half meter tall stacked vertically to reach a bit over halfway up the walls from the starting point of about knee-high, followed by a single illustration of a five-on-five fight, the same two and a half meters in height as the five one-on-one panels put together and maybe four, four and a half meters wide.
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They’re not exactly realistic, not photo-perfect renders. There’s something subtly off about distance and perspective, about proportions and a feeling of motion. It all comes through, though, possibly better than if it had been a one-to-one encoding of what you’d get in a frozen moment of time. My steps slow as I see here a mage with a staff trapping two young women under a glimmering shield as a dark purple light arcs from one to the other, and there a dozen birds made entirely of eyes strafing two men and a woman in red-and-purple armor whose fists are projecting tiny shields that deflect and reflect the beams. There’s a hundred stories on the walls, and my eyes drink them in greedily.
“Khetzi, are these… the climactic moments from battles in the Coliseum?”
“It is so, though we have not been present for all of them; we have been an imprint of the Temple only some several centuries, and do not always find ourselves able to observe the fights. But we have seen more than some have.” They stop, and that’s when I notice that we’ve turned off into a deserted hallway. “If the Magelord wishes, this passage is not in use at the moment, and his party might have something of a guided tour.”
“Yes.” Sara blurts out the word, and then looks at me, hands clenching.
“We’d be delighted to have a tour.” I grin at Khetzi and nod towards Sara. “Please answer any questions that Miss Evetheri has as though it’s me asking them.”
“Is there any particular area of inquiry which provokes the Magus’s interest?” Khetzi’s face is a perfectly composed mask, but there’s something in their voice that is less controlled. “We are happy to provide context and explanation on any subject, though my own interest is largely specific to the structure of the placement-challenges and, to a lesser extent, the use of magic.”
“I do not claim that title. Please do not use it in reference to me.” Sara’s voice is a little distracted, which is a first as far as I’ve seen. “If you must remain formal, Miss Sara is acceptable. Are the placement-challenges you speak of these five singleton panels?”
“It is.” Khetzi waves a hand at one in particular, and we sort of gather around it. “These five depict a Tournament I was not present at. The first, a cliff-climbing exercise; he of Wisdom finds himself isolated with no handholds and falls. The second, a wizard’s duel of elements; Wisdom sweeps away the psion with the power of the storm, and clinches the placement by dispersing the storm with the power of the psion.” Their face lights up with intensity. “It was the talk of the tournament. They lost the battle, but for the second of Wisdom to defeat his opponent in the placement with the mirror of what he’d so thoroughly won with?”
“You’d think if he’d won the first round so emphatically, he was wielding a counter; but then he turns the counter around and wins again.”
“The Magelord understands!” Khetzi beams at us all.
“This team Wisdom won their placements three to two.” Sara’s head is tilted to the side, her voice showing a rare degree of curiosity and emotion. “The third one wins by lighting the arena with a flare, against an enemy who dwells in the shadows; the fourth rides a boulder and crushes his foe. With this advantage, they still lose in the main event.”
“They did not press their advantage.” Khetzi sighs. “A fight turns quickly; the slow kill is one with a great deal of time in which you might make a mistake.”
“This one.” Sara is across the room, looking at another mural. “A beastmaster who fights with his fists as his companion fights with ice and claw, a pyromancer, a spearwoman, a guardian, and one other. Who do they fight?”
“Ah. Some time ago, that one. The one other wields a chain of great flexibility; they fight the avatar of the Hungerer and her… minions.”
We move slowly down the halls, Sara and Amber asking questions as they get more and more into it, while Khetzi answers at length. Zidanya starts contributing pretty quickly, giving context and commentary around who the people are and when they fought, and she and Amber carry on a heated side conversation about how the world and the fighting styles those contestants knew or even birthed have changed since.
It’s all too much for me. I wander behind them, letting the talk of the earthshatter echoes, whatever those are, turning a field of ice into explosive spikes and the talk of would-be champions held down by chains made of fire flow past me. I can’t shut it all out, but I can dissociate from what I’m hearing a little instead of matching it vividly to the visuals, and do my best to treat the murals in the hallway as just art.
I find myself recording it all anyway, Visor panning over stone without a hint of mana or magic in it.
Forwards, always forwards, even if my stomach churns.