D. MacHale - The Soldiers of Halla

“This is where I go to collect my thoughts. Do you like it?” Elli asked with more than a touch of sarcasm. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

She gestured to the chairs. I didn’t think it was possible to get comfortable in this nightmare ward, but 1 sat. Spader sat next to me. Elli leaned back on the dirty table. She looked tired and sad. No big surprise. I’m guessing she was near sixty years old, but at that moment she looked closer to a hundred. Her eyes were red. She was on the verge of tears. Having so many sick and dying people begging you for help will do that, I guess.

“I don’t understand, Elli,” I said. “How long have you been here?”

“That’s hard to say,” she answered thoughtfully, wiping her tired eyes. “There are no calendars or clocks. Time just goes by. But several nights have passed. I don’t recall how many. Ten? Twenty? I’ve lost count.”

That was odd. It’s hard to measure time when you’re bouncing between territories, but my own internal clock felt as if the Travelers had only left Solara a day or so before.

“The nights are the worst,” Elli continued. “Outside these walls it grows quiet, but in here the sounds of agony never end.”

I couldn’t imagine dealing with such sadness and despair.

“Why didn’t you go to your own territory?” Spader asked.

“I did,” Elli answered. “I spent nearly a month on Quillan.”

Spader and I exchanged looks. We were both thinking the same thing. Time proved to be irrelevant. Again. It seemed as if Elli had been sent back to a time on Quillan that was further in the past than we had been living.

Elli continued, “There are no exiles on Quillan. At least not anymore. As soon as I arrived, I made my way through the underground, searching for information, just as Press asked. It wasn’t easy. Blok controls every aspect of life on Quillan now. Throughout the territory. Most of the remaining revivors have been hunted down and…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.

“What about Ravinia?” I asked.

“It is the new government,” she said sadly. “Of course, they allow Blok whatever freedoms they wish for. The games are a thing of the past, by the way.”

“Well, that’s good, right?” I said hopefully.

“No” was her quick response. “It’s because there are no people left to wager on them.”

Oh. Not good.

She continued, “I did uncover one bit of information. I encountered a revivor who had escaped from a Ravinian prison. He was one of the few who survived. They’d beaten him unmercifully. Apparently the Ravinians are also looking for the exiles.”

“Did he know about any exiles?” I asked anxiously.

“He did, and he was nearly killed keeping the secret. He stayed alive long enough to escape and share it with me.”

Elli took a deep breath. Emotionally she was in rough shape. It seemed like she’d been through a lot since leaving Solara.

“Were there exiles on Quillan?” Spader asked gently, prodding her to continue.

“A few. They arrived in the city of Rune, looking for asylum. They found their way to the underground and actually connected with a few of the remaining revivors. But the entire time they spent on Quillan, they were on the run from Ravinian soldiers. They finally managed to escape back into the flume, and came here to Zadaa before they collapsed. That’s what the revivor told me… just before he died.”

Elli looked away from us. She was holding back tears. At least I understood why she landed back on Quillan when she did. She needed to get that information. If she had returned at a later time, that revivor would have died before meeting her. The power of Solara was an amazing thing. Time and again it put the Travelers where they needed to be, when they needed to be there. That was the positive power of Solara.

The dying power of Solara.

“So you came here looking for them?” I asked.

Elli nodded. “Six exiles left Quillan. They made the mistake of entering Xhaxhu looking for sanctuary and stepped into the lion’s den. The Rokador took them in, offering them refuge. But they immediately turned them over to the Ravinians. When the exiles realized their mistake, they tried to escape, and were killed before they reached the outer wall of the city.”

Elli couldn’t hold back her emotions any longer. She closed her eyes and sobbed. I walked over to her and put an arm around her. It was all I could offer and it wasn’t much.

“It is all true,” came a voice from the door.

Spader and I looked to see Loor and Saangi standing in the doorway.

Loor said, “We have just heard the same story from a Batu who labored in Xhaxhu. There are no exiles on Zadaa, Pendragon.”

Elli buried her head in my shoulder. I looked at Spader, Loor, and Saangi. They seemed shell-shocked. We had reached another dead end, and Elli was falling apart.

“Let me talk to her alone,” I said to them.

Spader nodded and walked to the door. “We’ll be outside, mate,” he said.

The three left, closing the rotted wooden door behind them.

“I am sorry, Pendragon,” Elli said through clutched breaths.

”For what?”

“This is all more than I can bear. I can no longer continue as a Traveler.”

I didn’t respond. It was clear that she had a lot of pent-up emotion that had to get out.

“It pained me to see what Quillan had become,” she continued. “It was far worse than when you were there. I couldn’t stay. It was a selfish thing to do. I know. I shouldn’t have come here. I should have gone back to Solara to let Press know what I discovered.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

Elli wiped her eyes and leaned away from me, trying to get herself back in control. “To try and do something positive. For once.”

“Everything you’ve done has been positive,” I argued.

“It hasn’t. You know that as well as I do, Pendragon. My life has been defined by a series of failures. My husband and I couldn’t provide a better life for our daughter, so it drove him to gamble on the Quillan games, and he lost. Everything. He was sent to the tarz, where he died. But instead of being strong for Nevva, I abandoned her. I abandoned my only daughter! I should have stayed with her. Perhaps she wouldn’t have turned to Saint Dane if I had been looking out for her.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “Nevva is a strong person.” “She is a traitor!” Elli snapped. “And I am responsible.” “Don’t say that.”

“And what did I do with my life instead? I dedicated myself to protecting the archives that were the history of Quillan. Mr. Pop. Another failure. It was destroyed, along with the future of our home. It was all for nothing. My life has been filled with one futile act after another.”

“But then you volunteered to be the Traveler from Quillan to take Nevva’s place,” I offered.

“Yes, and a lot of good I did. Quillan is in ruins, save for the Conclave of Ravinia and Blok. I did nothing to effect any positive change there. When Press gave us the task of finding and protecting the exiles, I thought it was my last hope of actually doing something worthwhile. That’s why I followed them here to Zadaa, only to discover that they had been murdered by the Ravinians.”

“How did you end up out here at Mooraj?” I asked.

“When I first arrived, I wandered through Xhaxhu and saw how the Batu were being treated. It was appalling. They were slaves and I knew why. The Ravinian flags told me all I needed to know. I came upon a young woman lying in the street. She had been whipped by her Rokador master for not delivering fresh fruit to his door in a timely manner. He beat her for that, and left her to die. I helped her. I found other Batu, and together we smuggled her out of the city. The only place to go for sanctuary was here. This isn’t much better than Xhaxhu, but at least here she wouldn’t be beaten. The Batu realized that I wasn’t a Rokador and let me stay. It was on the journey that they told me of the fate of the exiles. I’d only been here a short while before learning my quest was futile.”