Return of the Paladin

by Layton Green

  Yasmina swallowed her first retort. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t defend yourself at times.”

  “What would you say to the parents of those children? Would you describe your respect for the habitat of the owlshrike, and explain how you once stayed my hand?”

  “That’s just one example.”

  “How about the terrengar?” Skara said, turning to point at a six-legged reptile with huge incisors and curved tusks on either side of its snout. “A species also fond of human flesh. Or the Carpathian banderfiend, which skins and tortures its prey for weeks in its lair before the kill?”

  Her jaw tight, Yasmina turned away and said nothing.

  Mateo had eased Dalen to the ground. The illusionist stirred on occasion as if dreaming, but he was still out cold. “When will he recover?” Mateo asked.

  “When I deem it so,” Skara said coldly. “We do not look kindly on mages around here. Now,” she said, turning to Will. “I’m waiting for ye to tell me how ye can diffuse magic?”

  “Sure. But there’s some information we need from you as well.”

  Skara chuckled. “Yer not in much of a position to bargain.”

  “I am if you want that door opened. We’re not asking for much. We just want to know who stole the Coffer, and where he is now. The thief came from Praha, so we thought you might know something about it. That’s all. A fair exchange, I think, for what you propose.”

  The adventuress tapped her thumb against the hilt of her hatchet, then fingered the chain to which it was connected. “I’ve no idea who stole the Coffer. There are legions of thieves in Praha.” As Will’s hopes fell, she continued, “But not many are able to afford a gateway bauble. Not only that, a gateway, as you know, leaves a magical residue.” She gave a mysterious smile and said, “It appears our interests may be more aligned than we realized.”

  After her enigmatic proclamation, Skara waved for Will and the others to follow before disappearing down one of the corridors exiting the amphitheater. Mateo picked up Dalen again, and Skara’s bodyguards led Will and the others through a twisting series of passages into a modest-size chamber with a hodgepodge of velvet furniture that looked stolen from a Victorian mansion. There was a stocked liquor cabinet, lit torches hanging from sconces just below the ceiling, and mortarless stone walls covered in maps, charts, and anatomical drawings of monsters. Will saw a list of exotic creatures on one wall and wondered if it was a wish list of targets, or some kind of danger metric.

  The adventuress flopped onto a sofa as one of the bodyguards took a bottle of amber-colored liquid out of the cabinet. “Drink with me,” she said, after pouring herself a glass.

  Will looked at the others and shrugged. He accepted her offer and watched her pour a glass from the same bottle, in case it was poisoned. Though Will wasn’t too worried about that. At that moment, deep inside the mazelike corridors of the Nilometer and surrounded by allies, Skara held all the cards.

  The smooth but fiery drink tasted like a vanilla-coated bourbon, the best he had ever had. “It’s delicious.”

  “Granth came from Praha,” she said, “though the original recipe has been lost. Some of the finest granth in the world,” she raised her glass, “was recovered from abandoned Nephili manors.”

  “So you believe in the legend?” Will asked.

  The corners of Skara’s lips upturned, and she peered into her glass as if enjoying a private joke. “It’s impossible to trace magic from within Praha,” she said after a moment. “The energies are too scrambled. Which is why, of course, your thief departed from here.”

  “Who might have sent him?” Mateo asked. “A wealthy guildmaster? A warlord?”

  “There are no guilds within the city. And the residents are too factious to unite under any warlord.” She smirked and swept a hand down her chest. “As far as I know, I command the largest number of loyal subjects in all of Praha.” She buried her nose in her glass, inhaling deeply. “I’ve no idea who stole the Coffer, or how to go about finding them. But I know someone who might.”

  Will exchanged a glance with the others.

  “I said it’s impossible to track magic within Praha—and that is true. At least for a human mage. A being exists who might be able to unravel the skein of magic surrounding the use of a gateway bauble. The problem is, ye’ll never receive an audience.”

  “Who?”

  “A being who might be insane, or who might as easily decide to extinguish your life for having the impudence to gaze upon the visage of such an exalted creature. I speak, of course, of the former rulers of this city. Those who created this otherworldly architecture, invented these marvelous feats of engineering, and who might hail from some other world or dimension. I speak,” she said softly, almost reverently, “of the Nephili.”

  Will swallowed as Skara’s eyes sparked with an intense light. “I want one, Will Blackwood. I want one for my collection.”

  “You’re mad,” he whispered.

  As the light in her eyes dimmed, she eased back in her sofa. “Mad I may be. But driven and capable I am, too. Imagine the treasures, the wonders we would find in the palace of the Nephili! No one has breached the walls above the Agora since the Plague.” She rose and wagged a finger as she paced. “Yet I, Will Blackwood, have spent my life studying the byways of Praha. I have all the maps and know all the legends. I’ve ferreted out the records of the ancients, and all those explorers who came before me. Yet even if we navigate the Agora and face the guardians of the Wailing Wall, the only way to lure such a being into our midst—if the legends are true—is to present it with a wafer.”

  The Nephili love vanilla wafers?

  Will opted not to express that particular thought in front of Skara.

  Skara returned to her seat, her long blond hair swishing against her leather shirt. “There is a door to a storehouse in a forgotten part of the city—forgotten to all but me. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, yet its magic is impenetrable to every device I’ve tried. This includes enlisting the aid of a powerful geomancer who lost his life trying to dismantle the door.”

  “The wafers are in this storehouse?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they?”

  “They’re called the Wafers of Sephyr. It’s said they arrived with the Nephili when they came down from the heavens, and are the source of their eternal youth. It’s said they desire them above all else.”

  Will steepled his fingers on his forehead. “So you want us to open this door and go with you to the Old City—which no one has entered since the plague—in the hope that one of these beings, who may or may not exist, can tell us who stole the Coffer?” His eyes flicked to Yasmina and Mateo. Both looked slightly ill.

  “If the Nephili lives and knows the answer to your question, it will tell you. I’ll stake my reputation on it. It will tell you in exchange for the wafer.”

  “I don’t understand—why do you think one of the Nephili still exists? Wouldn’t they be, like, thousands of years old? I know there’s a rumor about it, but rumors exist about a lot of things that aren’t real.”

  Though Urfe has proven a lot of those rumors true.

  She spread her hands. “A fair question. There are signs. The presence of the Skinwalkers—the guardians on the Wailing Wall—are one. They’re said to draw their life force from the Nephili, and I’ve heard them with my own ears. The density of magical energy that persists in the Old City is another. Perhaps it’s residue from the plague, perhaps not. And what if they do not still exist? We will still have gained access to untold treasures in the palace, and what have we lost? Maybe ye’ll find something else to aid yer quest.”

  “How about our lives?”

  She opened a palm. “Ye risked yer life to come to Praha and seek my counsel. Would ye stop now?”

  He didn’t need to look in his cousin’s eyes to know the answer to that question. They all knew how much was at stake. If they failed to find the thief, they had no other way of finding the Coffer.

  And Pr
aha was their only lead.

  Another thought came to mind. What if this Nephili being knew something about Val, and could be persuaded to help him? What if he could help the Revolution and send them all home?

  “Why would the Nephili help?” Mateo cut in. “Why not just take the wafer and kill us?

  “Because I can only imagine that any surviving Nephili are too old and plague-ravaged to leave. Else why stay in the Old City for so long?”

  Will thought there was more to Skara’s story than she was letting on. Even with her obsession for tracking monsters, she seemed too calculating to embark on a mission without knowing more about it.

  He couldn’t force her to reveal her hand. Not yet. And she was right: for the moment, their interests were aligned.

  “One step at a time,” he told Skara. “That’s all we can promise.”

  The wintry eyes of the adventuress shone bright in the torchlight. “A most excellent choice.”

  -15-

  The Tower of Elarion had no windows, and only one entrance: a wooden door at the base of the structure. No one, the Brewer had said, knew the true purpose of the freestanding tower. It could have been a lighthouse, except there was no light. Or maybe a campanile, except there was no bell. The best guess was that a wizard made the tower long ago, perhaps an adventurous mage who had flown across the oceans long before the Age of Sorrows, and established a home on the Barrier Coast.

  With the Brewer snoring softly beside him, Caleb lay on his back and stared at the tower, backlit by a panoply of stars glowing like exploded quicksilver. In the morning, with his energy restored, he would walk through that simple wooden door from which it was said no one ever returned.

  Who was this person inhabiting his body, he wondered, who would attempt something so foolish? Something that wizards had failed to do?

  Did he have a hardened inner core that defined who he was, a Caleb in the back of the cave, or was his true self a mutable thing, changing with time and circumstance on a continual basis, second by second, pinwheeling in response to fortune and tragedy and all the little variables in between, as ephemeral as a summer breeze?

  Because the Caleb that he and everyone else knew was someone very different from the man who was about to walk through that door, and most probably never come back out. That Caleb’s credo was chill and let life flow. That Caleb would never have left Freetown in the first place. That Caleb’s idea of an adventure was trying out a new bar in the Faubourg-Marigny. That Caleb had traveled to Costa Rica with his inheritance, yes, but only because he could make the money last longer in another country, live in flip-flops and board shorts, and smoke in peace on the beach.

  True, that Caleb was the brother who cared about living life to the fullest, and was always trying new things. Will was a man of causes, Val a power broker and successful attorney. Caleb relished sampling different cuisines and craft beer and women from around the globe.

  But those sensual experiences he had always craved most definitely did not include putting oneself in danger, ever, for any reason. That Caleb was a pacifist, a preserver of life and limb, a coward.

  As well as an atheist.

  “What is this,” he whispered as he stared at the bone-white tower in the darkness, wrapped in a cloak he had pulled out of a Coffer with eerie parallels to the Ark of the Covenant, and which the Roma worshipped as a religious artifact of immense power.

  He barked a laugh, which caused the Brewer to stir. Why me, of all people? A nonbeliever and a case study in lack of ambition and wasted youth? Has there ever been a greater irony?

  The thing was, he really didn’t care about any of that. The reasons behind these miracles did not interest him. What he cared about was the awesome power that had surged through his bones and leapt out of the Coffer to incinerate an elder mage. He cared about picking up that diamond-headed mace he had glimpsed in his vision and carrying it into battle.

  He cared about anything, anything at all, that got him closer to ending the life of the man who had given the order to murder Caleb’s wife and adopted child.

  Content in his thoughts at last, he closed his eyes and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  The aroma of fresh coffee eased Caleb awake the next morning. He opened his eyes to sunlight spilling over the hills, then turned to see a watery horizon with a dreamy hue that reminded him of the orange sherbet push-ups he had loved as a boy.

  He and the Brewer ate and drank in silence, sipping coffee as the chill of the night receded and the haze burned off the tops of the peaks. Sunlight glistened on the jellyfish and shells that had washed ashore. It was a beautiful day.

  “We’re really doing this?” the Brewer asked.

  “We’re not doing anything. It was just me in the dream. So I’m going in alone.”

  “Maybe together we can change what . . . what I saw.” He opened his mouth and then slowly closed it, having seen Caleb’s dark expression and the futility of further argument. “I’ll forage while you’re inside,” he said quietly. “Try to replenish our supplies.”

  “Good idea.” Caleb drained the last of his coffee and stared at the empty cup.

  “Take my sword,” the Brewer said, holding out the blade.

  “Whatever’s inside, I don’t think that’s going to help. How could anything be alive? Plus, I don’t know how to use it. I’d probably just stab myself.”

  The older man let out a deep breath and clasped Caleb on the shoulder. “Then be careful, kid, as if I need to say it. And listen—I didn’t make this trip for nothing, okay? Give me something to sing about. I need some new material.”

  “Rock and roll all night, man.”

  The Brewer grinned and thrust his left hand skyward, holding up his pinky, thumb and index finger, the only appropriate response to Caleb’s words.

  With a smile, Caleb started walking across the beach. The Tower of Elarion rose above him, tall and silent, the white stone pockmarked with age. Thoughts of his past flashed through his mind as he plodded through the sand. The taste of a cold beer with his friends after his shift ended, his parents surprising him with a birthday party at Chuck E Cheese, going to the first crawfish boil of the season with his brothers, young and carefree.

  He also remembered a parade of gorgeous women that had never satisfied him, not even Yasmina, and the feeling of guilt from knowing he was using them in some way. He didn’t deserve the peace and happiness he had felt when he bent down on one knee to propose to Marguerite on a rock in the middle of a forest stream as sunlight streamed through the trees. Yet that wasn’t how life worked. The undeserving got what they wanted all the time—and the very best of us, like Marguerite and Luca, were often taken too early.

  Before he knew it, his hand was on the iron pull ring set into the door.

  It wasn’t even locked.

  Inside the tower, the first thing Caleb saw was a spiral staircase, the same dull white color as the stone on the outside, twisting into the darkness above. In fact, the staircase was the only thing he saw, so wide it took up almost the entire bottom level. The rest of the tower was empty as far as he could tell, and appeared pretty much exactly as he imagined a thousand-plus year old abandoned tower would appear: silent and creepy, full of cobwebs and dusty stone and gloomy upper reaches.

  When he turned back to close the door, it had disappeared, leaving Caleb facing a blank stone wall.

  Of course the door disappeared.

  Despite the lack of an opening, a lambency of daylight remained, though he couldn’t tell why. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light and he gazed upward, searching for answers, he realized the staircase was a tightening spiral that wound almost to a point at the top. It was weird, and he had no idea what that meant. Will would know. He always knew about those weighty sorts of things. Val would be pounding on the stone where the door used to be, trying to get out, while Will would be expounding about some geeky trivia concerning the mythological significance of a tapering spiral staircase and what sort of monster was about t
o come bounding down it.

  The disappearing door and the thought of his brothers, that window into old Caleb, caused a little shiver of fear to sweep through him. He took a deep breath, looked down at the first step, and saw an inscription carved into the stone.

  KNOW THYSELF

  The cryptic words caused him to chuckle. Know myself. That’s always been the problem—I know exactly who I am.

  After staring down at the step for another moment, he tilted his head back and howled, in defiance of the perverse creator of the tower and the mystery of the two worlds and the cursed shadow land of human consciousness.

  And then he started to climb.

  On the third step, the tower disappeared.

  A vision of heaven replaced it. Instead of a deserted stone building, Caleb found himself lounging on his back in a sea of cushions and plush Persian carpet, surrounded by dozens of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, women of all colors and cultures, half-naked, their delicate waists wrapped in colored silks. A white stone ceiling rose high overhead. Looking around, he couldn’t even see the end of the room. He saw colonnades and shallow basins, tables laden with exotic foods, pleasure devices of all sorts, women and more women. The aroma of the place almost caused him to swoon, and he realized with a start that he recognized the scent. When Caleb was eleven years old, an eighth grader had sat next to him and kissed him on the way to school. He had never forgotten the illicit taste of her lipstick, the warmth of her tongue, and the intoxicating smell of her, a rosewater and cinnamon blend that was probably a cheap perfume but which had metastasized in his memory as the most sensual of all fragrances.

  All the women in the room smelled exactly like her.

  The first one to approach, a dark-haired temptress with sky-blue eyes, slid into his arms and nuzzled his neck. With a shudder, Caleb eased her away and stood, blinking to see if the room would disappear, pinching his own skin and the cushions and one of the women, who giggled at his touch. He even picked up a fig, shrugged off the myths about eating food in strange locations, and bit into it.