The good news was that it had already found him, for a while, he had felt he was being watched, causing scurries of sensation through his material and arcane senses. Acutely aware that the golem was a hunter meant to track and kill prisoners it didn’t startle him that it could remain unseen while stalking him.
The biggest question was what it would do next; either attack him directly by gaining the height necessary, or find a way to bring him down.
He got his answer a moment later, just as he was about to make the running leap required to get to the other side of a wide street. Already halfway along the roof, the building beneath him shuddered from a massive impact. An ordinary being with standard reflexes would have been jolted enough to fall along with the sudden slide of rubble half the building had been transformed into.
But Fenix was far from average, supernatural agility allowed him to stagger in the opposite direction and use even the falling rock as stepping stones to regain the height and land on the unbroken section of the roof.
The prodigious sound of cracking stone and tumbling rock filled what had been a silent tableau, rock dust built on the general scent of dirt. The plume of broken grit and lighter particles drifted up with no wind to disperse it quickly, so all he could catch a glimpse of was a broad outline that moved away.
He waited.
Minutes passed, and nothing else moved, including him in his crouch on the edge of the collapsed roof. The dust settled, and he had a clear view of the street below, dirty rime on the other roofs, old washed up rivulets of dirt in the street next to a pool of mud drying in the sun.
The buildings were good hiding places, even the narrower streets, further along, were out of sight. A perfect strategic playground for it to lie in wait for him.
And he didn’t want to take the time to stalk and kill it, he wanted this over. He had to hit it, and hard, force it to draw on the magic power source so he could track it and get there to kill it. So there wasn’t much choice except to tempt it out, and the only available bait was him.
Fenix hopped down off the roof, enhanced musculature easily catching him from that height, knees bent, and an easy dissolution of momentum through the soles of his feet. He knew how to drop and roll, but it wasn’t necessary from that rooftop, and it would have created an uncontrolled opening. Instead, he stepped cautiously out into the street, every sense alert for motion.
Even so, it surprised him when the drying mud suddenly lurched up, forming several barbed tentacles that slashed out. Surprised but not rendered immobile, he threw a fire bolt at the rising tide of fluid-rock, powerful enough to slam it back with heat and a concussive force of superheated air.
Of course, they could shape rock, and what would you make if you could create anything?
Well if you were talented, one good option was to create a fluid golem, one that could morph at will into whatever was needed. With enough guiding intelligence, it made an excellent hunter, self-camouflaged and able to generate all sorts of weaponry instantaneously.
Very clever indeed!
Despite being impressed, Fenix chastised himself for not thinking of it earlier, the golem had hidden itself in plain sight. Of course, now he got a bead on its unique magical signature it wouldn’t be able to do that again. The only other thing was that in his surprise he wasn’t watching for the energy pulse when he injured it.
So he would need to do that again.
Even as the golem reformed, like rolling stones surging fluidly together and meshing like raindrops into a lake, he was readying his senses for the next strike. The created entity surged upward, flinging out tendrils of rock that grew spikes, underneath it grew exaggerated barbs and teeth so that when it fell on him, he could be chewed up glibly. But Fenix was a lot faster than that, even as the shadow of the golem came over him the gray-skinned warrior leaped backward in a summersault.
Mid-air, through his twirl that carried him out of reach, he let loose another two bolts of fire, sapphire comets that blasted the golem back. Between the surges pushing it away and the superior distance, Fenix could cover in a jump he was safely out of harm’s way when it fell heavily to the street surface. Smoke rising from beneath it where his magical projectiles had hit, and a powerful stream of energy emitted from the building he had guessed to house the effigy.
He was happy he had guessed correctly; the golem was reforming and getting ready for another attack, so he jumped up, dug into the wall of the house with his magic, and climbed onto the roof again.
So began the chase through the small town, with the golem flowing up the streets to swipe at him over the rooftops or when he leaped the gaps. All the while, he avoided its reach and outrageously dangerous shapes; every now and then hitting it with another fire bolt to be sure he was going the right way.
Something in the golem was keyed to self-preservation, the moment he got two streets away from that last building, it suddenly ignored him and sped off in a liquid mass. He understood why when he got closer, the building was a solid square affair with no windows, and the golem had slid up to the doorframe and risen to fill it.
Making a substantial barrier to anyone trying to get inside, and likely effective, usually.
Fenix figured that the giants who had built the town probably protected their buildings or at least this most important one, but they were long gone.
It was good, and all to protect the only entrance, and the golem was likely a lot stronger than the surrounding walls.
Which was precisely why its attempt to stop him would be fruitless.
He got onto a roof close to the last building and held out both hands, forming the fire circles he spat out glyphs from his palms. The small shapes blurred over the gap and burned into the opposite wall, forming small constructs that drew energy from the surroundings and into the wall itself.
The sunlight waned, the air grew colder, and even the surrounding stone took on frost and whitened. But the wall where he placed his spells began to glow, a sullen yellow at first, but building to an angry swollen red in minutes.
Burned rock had a distinctive smell, like heated metal, sulfur, and a sallow magnesium scent. The white-hot burn was actinic in one’s nostrils. It was mostly soundless, except for the slow sludge of pouring stone; the main sound was the hiss of steam where the frost touched the heated rock flowing down the side.
The golem didn’t react, as smart as its design was there was only so much room for instructions within its makeup.
There had been some residual magic in the stone, likely glyphs on the inside of the wall, but they sparked and broke in moments from the heat. Soon a gap large enough for Fenix melted through the stone wall. Now he needed to trace down the effigy within, and quickly.
Fenix was through the hole and into the passage beyond as fast as he could move, which meant an ordinary observer would have seen only a blur of gray skin clad in black outer garments. The moth’s skin had been tailored to serve as light armor; Fenix had found it to be as durable and protective as expected. The passage just inside the hole went both left and right, although a set of stairs was nearby to the right.
He knew from the surges of power he had gotten the golem to draw on before that the effigy was lower than the streets outside, and the stairs were away from the door frame the golem was even now leaving.
So he went right and down, the apparent floodwater of stone followed him quickly, a whisper of rock on rock that flowed all too much like a poured liquid. It would be easy to feel like he was actually within a building being flooded from the outside and that the golem was the wall of water following him down.
He blasted it back for a second with a fire bolt, the surge of energy it used in response to reconstruct the damaged portions came from further to his right, now left of the above entrance he had made.
Surely, the building couldn’t be that complex, he thought to himself even as he ran on ahead of the chasing golem.
It turned out that the building really wasn’t that complex at all, merely a set
of underground passages mirroring the square design above. Within the center of each square were four rooms and they only had three levels underground.
The effigy was in the northeast room of the second level, by all accounts the giants had constructed the level as a set of vaults with sealed doors of massive stone. The security measures had not been maintained since their creation had destroyed them. The magical enhancements now waned and for Fenix to blast through the rock was an effort, but not a great one. Between that expenditure of power and keeping the golem from killing him, the entire exercise had better be worth it though.
Not that he was running short on Vitae, between the battles he had planned and generally surviving the Prison it was easy enough to recover. But he liked to be more efficient, a thought coupled with pleasure when he broke through the outer wall of the vault and saw the effigy for the first time. The golem was snapping shaped claws like those of crabs at him even as he projected a wave of sapphire fire into the object.
It was shaped like an urn, a narrow base, widening as it flowed upward along the curves of its sides that were covered in depictions, diagrams, and glyphs, to a narrow neck and wide top.
The top was sealed and likely, the contents held mud and water, the elements needed to give the golem a source to draw from, which related to its existence. Some arcane student would have rolled in their grave when Fenix didn’t even pause to examine the impressive object.
Instead, it, and a good swath of the floor with it, were reduced to molten slag within a second.
The dull red flames burning impurities out of the stone floor contrasted with the blue and white lacework Fenix was splayed across. In that one moment, the golem stopped, trembled, and then poured to the floor like a dead pile of inactive sand.
Completely inert and lifeless, with no sign whatsoever that it had ever been animate at all.
**
A thorough search of the building met with results in the long chamber situated on the second floor.
With windows set higher than was Fenix’s norm to look out over the edge of the land mass the room was about fifty feet to a side and dominated by a center table filled with white sand. At first, he had thought it ornamental, but the magical pulse from the inscribed block of stone upon which the table stood attracted closer attention.
A bit of time was spent deciphering some of the runes, most magical circles tended to come across the basic building blocks. The universal language of the arcane was not mathematics, it was in the geometric designs underpinning all magical constructs and flows. Although little time among spellcasters finding out about each other for the first encounter was ever spent in peaceful dialogue.
Once activated, the white sand rose up from the table and formed shapes; at first, they were rough shapes, but the grains of sand spread about, shifted, and even fell where they were not needed until the floating mass resolved into an exceptional representation of the entire Prison.
There, floating above the table, was every land mass with exacting detail of the plants, mountains, trees, and even buildings.
It was depicted so accurately that it could only be a representation very close to real time, the actual buildings of the Festering Warrens, even the house of Quelina where she was visiting another land mass and not near Outsiders’ Town currently.
Quite the treasure indeed!
Fenix spent the next few hours wandering around the map, it was quite big as a representation above such a large table, and he couldn’t see it all at once. Because the Giants had designed it to look down upon he had to climb up to get a good vantage point, and he could only do that at different sides or risk falling into the magical sand.
But it was worth it, he devised a plan and constructed a small viewing orb from a crystal sphere he disenchanted and then re-enchanted from one of the vaults below.
Using a second sphere, he could look through the first and see the table’s depiction of the Prison through it. That way he could look at it anytime he needed to, and the table had enough Vitae powering it to stay on for quite some time. If it did go off, he could return and repower it. With his spy globe in place, he could also tell if anyone else happened to come along.
It was astonishing how much he was able to discern from this; indeed it was a worthwhile mission even though he couldn’t get any Vitae from the effigy he destroyed. Probably because it was not living and the Vitae had been converted from whatever its natural form was into the magic that powered the creature. But nevertheless, he was pleased with the map, it showed him a great many things.
For instance, the only way down onto the back of the giant being that carried the Prison land masses was on the other side of the Prison from where he was now, his next destination. He could also see various ways to cover the mist-shrouded back and get up through the thick fur around the neck and to the nose; close examination of the place showed him why he was so drawn to it.
There was a building there!
Small as it was, the structure was set into the back end of the nose of the colossal being, and he felt recognition of the form. So it was likely to be the sanctuary he sought, the one he had built the last time he was in the Prison, or the next step on his journey. He also examined all of the floating plateaus and as the moth described there was one cut off from the rest situated to the far east.
Whether it was the lost plateau or not didn’t matter, he’d likely work that out as well.
**
Well into the next morning, the two gargoyles out front of the town heard the knock and opened the gate. They had already sensed that the golem was destroyed, with such a thing so close and the reason they were there, of course, they had noticed.
“You are free now, to do whatever you want,” Fenix told them.
“Right, sure, as if you would know what we want,” said the one.
“He didn’t actually say that.”
“He didn’t?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, well, sorry then.”
Fenix smiled despite himself. “No problem.”
The two statues were now much more mobile, having let go of the energy projecting the barrier they instead used it to enervate their limbs and move about once more. Standing up, they were nearly half as tall as he was, with their wings going up much higher to the joints tipped by claws.
“I’ll be off then; I have other things to do,” he told them.
“Hey, do you go about finding good deeds and things or what?”
He paused and put on a thoughtful look. “Do I really seem the type?”
“Err, no, that’s why he asked.”
“Yeah, you really don’t. That’s why I asked.”
“You’re right, I’m not. No, I did this because it helped me. Why? Do you have another quest for an erstwhile hero to embark upon?”
“Hey, no need to get sarcastic.”
“But we don’t, do we?”
“No. We do not.”
“Ah, good.” The statue got it in before Fenix could say it.
He really didn’t want to be noticed for resolving problems inside the Prison.
He had to maintain a precise balance of anonymity even now. He bid the two goodbye and went off on his way, careful steps leading him across the strangely cracked landscape.
The gargoyles watched him go for a while, and when he was far enough away, they stretched out their wings, gave a few experimental flaps, and then took off.
Because they were not prisoners, just summoned by one, they could create a vortex that would pull them out of the Prison.
As they left one of them thought of a question.
“What do you think he found in there?”
“The way out?”
“I would believe the Goddess got a tattoo pointing the way to Nirvana between her legs before the Warden would let that happen so easily.
A Memory of Betrayal…
It was such a simple thing to use; that it would bring about the genocide of an entire race was just like his Mistresse
s’ designs.
The object in question was a small vase, probably a foot high with a broad base, tapered neck and then a spigot from which you could pour the insides. It had a hinged lid with a round handle that he hooked his thumb through to open.
The entire thing was a dull bronze, and the coloring shifted like tiger’s eye, all shades of metallic browns.
Fenix checked the sail of his small boat, made from the inside of a shell magically grown to fit him in, barely, and with a sail made of entwined branches. It wasn’t going to go very fast nor would it protect him from rough weather.
But while he drifted around on the massive lake, it was perfectly fine, allowing him to pour out the never-ending liquid from inside the vase. Purple, and often with a glow when it caught the sun, it smelled faintly of a dessert, sugary and fluffy.
He had been merely floating about for weeks, dong Her bidding, pouring out the liquid and watching it disappear into the lake. The continental body of water was the only feature to be seen in every direction, the horizon dominated by the light blue surface. In this place, created for Morgana’s fey subjects, the lake was the source of all their water.
It flowed upward in reverse waterfalls to gigantic slabs of land that floated above it at different heights.
The importance of a group of these people was determined by how high they were, the highest floating land was occupied by the palace of the sun. Aptly named, since it always sparkled as it followed the sun over the horizon each and every day. He found the exact details uninteresting since they didn’t concern him on this task; all he had to do was sneak in and deliver the liquid from the vase into their water supply.
To hide him Aurelian had placed a golden armlet around his upper right arm, it damped down his presence and covered up the bulk of his prodigious magical strength. Without any way to detect him magically, he had easily snuck down to one of the few islands that dotted the surface of the lake, beaten back some of the predatory guards for more mundane intruders and started on his mission.
Convict Fenix Page 36
