Vika stared at him a long moment. “A gateway?”
“That’s what it says.”
Vika gestured at the stone. “You mean … like a gateway to other worlds?”
Richard nodded. “It would seem so.”
She frowned as she considered. “I guess that makes sense. But it seems like an awful lot of writing just to say that it’s called the gateway. Does it really take all of that to say it’s called the gateway?”
Richard let out a deep sigh as he looked back at the stone. He gently ran his fingers over the symbols as he considered them.
“No, that’s only a small amount of what this says. There’s a lot more to it. The symbols are similar to those in our world, and many are the same, but not all are and there are key differences from any I’ve seen before. Some of the more complex symbols are meant to convey concepts by using underlying elements, but not all of those use the same elements as the ones I’m familiar with. Even though it’s in many ways different, it’s still hauntingly similar to what was once a common form of writing in our world.”
“You mean it’s the same as the writing all over that witch woman, Niska, back in our world? The one in the swamp by Agaden Reach where we caught up with the Mother Confessor.”
“The very same. And it’s close to the same as in a lot of other places in our world. It predates everything else. All other writing, which involves words rather than pictorial elements and concepts, came after the language of Creation.”
Vika gave him a blank look. “So … what, exactly, are you trying to say?”
Richard shook his head with a sigh as he looked back at the stone. “I don’t know. I’m just saying that this has to be very old. But more than that, don’t you think that it’s more than strange for the language of Creation to be on this stone in another world besides ours?”
“It has been here for a very long time,” Sang said from back beyond the sand, trying to sound helpful. He had stepped a little closer, away from the others watching. Richard had forgotten that the Glee packed in among the stone spires were listening. “Maybe that is what you mean? That it has been here for a very long time?”
Richard knew that Sang didn’t grasp the significance of what he had discovered. There was no way he could. He wasn’t in the mood to give lessons, though, so he kept it simple.
“Longer than that.”
All of the Glee looked to be confused as they whispered among themselves. They clearly had a hard time grasping anything Richard was saying. The language of Creation, after all, had no meaning for them.
Vika slapped a hand onto the stone. “But it could be that this thing, this gateway, may have once come to our world and given us the language of Creation, don’t you suppose? Much like it came to this world?”
Richard shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea, Vika. That seems like it could be true, but I don’t think that’s the case. I simply have no way of saying for sure. What I do know is that these symbols are instructions.”
Vika withdrew her hand from the stone as she leaned close to him. “Instructions?” she whispered. “Instructions for what?”
Richard leaned in toward the stone again to put his fingers on the symbols. “I’m not ready to say, yet. I need to read some more so I can try to piece it all together.”
Vika stood to leave him to it. She walked the perimeter just beyond the gold ring. Richard thought she looked like she might be making sure the Glee stayed back out of the way. The more he read, the more he thought that might be a very good idea.
On one of her rounds, as she went past him, she bent close. “Anything useful, yet?”
Richard looked up at her. “Tell Sang I’d like him to come over here. I want to ask him something. Be casual about it. I don’t want the others to hear me.”
When she strolled back with the tall, nearly black Glee, Richard stood.
“What is it?” Sang asked. “Why are you not destroying the device? I thought that was why you were—”
“How did you use this device to come to my world? You came a number of times. How did you do it? How did you make the device work for you?”
Sang was taken off-guard by the question. He thought about it briefly, and then looked over at the device.
“There is a place on the top, on the other side, that I used to make the device work so that I could go into darkness. That is how I reached your world.”
“Show me,” Richard said.
Sang nodded and then led them around the square block of stone to stand just outside of the ring, facing the slanted top. Richard came around with him and watched.
Sang spread his right claws to extend just the first one, much as a person would extend their first finger to point.
“When I wished to go to your world, I would put one claw into this place, here.”
Sang used the claw to tap the sloped top of the stone. There was a slot right next to where he tapped. It looked like he would be able to fit the single claw all the way down into the slot. That was what Richard had thought from what he had read so far. But he knew that there had to be a lot more to it.
“How did you know where to go? When you went into darkness, it didn’t just spit you out somewhere at random. How did it allow you to come to our world?”
“In the beginning, long before we all came alive, it is said that Glee would sometimes try putting their claw into that place. They were never seen again. No one knew what happened to them. So maybe, as you say, the device sent them someplace where they died. Or maybe it sent them nowhere at all and they long ago simply vanished into darkness.
“The Golden Goddess, besides being bigger than other Glee, was also smarter. She was the first to learn that she could ask the device to send her to other worlds where she could survive. I believe that was the key. The device then picked places like that.
“She learned right at first that she could return by what we now call the lifeline. She would travel to other worlds and then come back and tell others what she had discovered. As she found worlds for them to raid, they came to call her the collector of worlds.
“After she found a world she liked, she would then insert one claw, and think of the place she wished to go back to, and the device would send her into darkness until she arrived at that world. They began to call her a goddess, much like they thought of the ones who had left the device as gods. Because she alone knew how it worked, she began to gain followers who called her goddess, and then the Golden Goddess. She liked having followers who worshipped her.
“After a time, she would stand here, where we stand now, and in that way send her followers to the places she had found where they would hunt for food. That eventually evolved into sport for them.”
Richard knew that when the gods, or whoever it was, had brought the gateway to Sang’s world and left it where it now stood, it had to be adjusted so that the Glee could use it. It had protocols, shown in the symbols, that had to have been set so the Glee could use a single claw to activate it. From what Richard had read, once it had been set for the new use, such as had been done when it had been left here in this world, nothing else would work.
Until the gateway was reset.
From what Sang had just told him, the Golden Goddess was the first to finally figure out how to make the gateway work successfully. Now, all the Glee knew.
The implications were racing around in Richard’s mind as he tried to piece together all the things he had so far been able to read on the stone.
“Thank you, Sang. That explains a lot.” Richard lifted his sword halfway from its scabbard to show it to Sang. “You better go stand back there with the others where it will be safe.”