Reborn Raiders (The Weatherblight Saga Book 4)

by Edmund Hughes

  Ari ducked under the flail, feeling his entire body tense almost to the point of seizing as he considered how easy it would be for the whirling weapon to crack open his skull like an eggshell. He slammed his shoulder into the steam golem, knocking it off balance. Eva had placed herself in the perfect spot to trip the metal construct backward as it tried to find its footing.

  It clattered to the stone with a noise that reminded Ari of dropped pots and pans. He immediately reached his arm out, intent on using Azurelight to finish it off. Eva seemed to have plans of her own, however.

  She grabbed the two-handed mace the purple mesmer had once wielded and hefted it into the air. Ari was surprised that she could lift the massive weapon, though she was just about the strongest woman he knew. Eva brought the mace down once on the steam golem’s chest and then again on its head, smashing the metal exterior of its body open in several places.

  Within the chest was an odd device that looked like a rubber waterskin with tubes running out of it. The central rubber part inflated and deflated in time with the puffs of steam leaving the golem’s body, which told Ari all he needed to know.

  “There,” he said, gesturing toward it. “Hit that with the mace!”

  Eva brought the spiked weapon down on the rubber component, puncturing it and releasing a cloud of hot steam. The golem instantly went still, and Ari breathed a sigh of relief.

  “That was annoying,” he said.

  “Very much so,” said Eva.

  “These things are like the opposite of mesmers,” he said. “They have bodies, but no spirit. It’s like they’re empty, metal husks.”

  “Let’s just hope that we don’t encounter any more of—”

  A high-pitched hiss came from further down the hallway, and two steam golems identical to the first began moving toward them.

  Ari ran a hand through his hair and shot Eva an exaggerated glare.

  “You were saying?” he said, with a sigh.

  “We should retreat,” said Eva. “I doubt we’d stand a chance against two at a time, Lord Stoneblood.”

  Ari was about to agree with her when something rather curious and unexpected happened. The steam golems suddenly halted in place. One of them had been wielding a spinning blade, the other a whirling flail, and both stilled their weapons. They stepped to the side of the hallway, leaving room to pass between them, and went as still as statues.

  “Deeper…” The voice that sounded through the hallway came from everywhere and nowhere at once. “Go… deeper…”

  Ari glared at the empty hallway, glancing from side to side.

  “Who are you?” he called. “What do you want?”

  “Go deeper…” repeated the voice.

  The steam in the hallway began to clear, revealing a circular chamber through the open doorway at the far end. Copper piping ran across the walls and ceiling throughout the passageway, and faint, metallic groans, like metal being twisted, came from somewhere further beyond.

  “Well then,” said Ari. “The ominous disembodied voice is right. We should go deeper.”

  “Aristial, you cannot be serious,” said Eva.

  “Where else will we get the essence we need?” he asked.

  He didn’t expect her to give him an answer, and he watched in surprise as she immediately bent down and began pulling open the cracked metal face of the destroyed steam golem. Behind it was a thin crystal glass tube filled with a dark liquid that Ari immediately recognized.

  “That’s distilled essence,” he said. “Huh. Well, I guess they aren’t completely steam powered after all.”

  The vial was connected to a thin rubber tube, which Eva cut on the edge of one of the mace’s spikes and tied off, containing the liquid. She passed it to him and Ari pressed his finger to the surface of the glass, feeling to get an approximation of the amount of essence within.

  “This isn’t enough,” he said.

  “How many would we need to restore the tower’s teleportation functionality?” asked Eva.

  “At least four, maybe five, per teleport,” said Ari.

  “Are you serious?” asked Eva.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Ari. “I can’t say I’m overly disappointed, though. It means we’ll be going deeper in, and that’s where all the fun happens.”

  “Was that an attempt at some sort of perverted play on words, milord?” asked Eva.

  “What?” said Ari. “Of course not. I’m just saying. You never say no when someone tells you to go deeper.”

  Eva slowly shook her head, the cool disapproval in her eyes slightly offset by the smile she tried and failed to hold back.

  CHAPTER 12

  They took the time to break open the other two steam golems before moving on. Ari took a turn wielding the mace after they’d tipped one of them over onto the ground, and the process of cracking the copper face mask and extracting the distilled essence vial reminded him a little of harvesting the meat from cave crabs down in the Hollow.

  “We should take this with us,” he said, proffering the mace toward Eva.

  “It will slow us down, given how much it weighs,” she said.

  “Think you could carry it with you in your sword form?”

  Eva sighed, and gave him a reluctant nod. “Yes, I suppose I could.”

  She became Azurelight while holding the mace, taking the weapon with her as she shifted forms. Ari caught the sword by the hilt, feeling no extra weight in how the weapon felt in his hand. Her ability to take objects with her through the transformation could be more useful than he’d realized, and he felt like he needed to spend some time thinking of other ways to take advantage of it once they were back at the settlement.

  He sheathed his sword and headed into the circular room at the end of the hall. Ari frowned as he glanced around, not immediately spotting another door to exit through. Long, curved crystal glass windows ran horizontally across the walls, but the only thing visible through them was more stone.

  “There,” said Eva. “Directly across from the hallway.”

  Ari frowned and took a closer look at what she’d been referring to. There was a rune ward set into the wall with a pattern that he didn’t recognize. He set his hand on it, wincing as he discovered how much essence it would take to utilize.

  “We’ll have to spend the full contents of at least one of those vials,” he said.

  “Do we have a choice?” asked Eva. “If what you said about the amount of essence we shall need to teleport the tower is true, there is no turning back.”

  “You’re right,” said Ari. “I guess we should hope to encounter more of those steam golems, as obnoxious as they were as enemies to fight.”

  He pulled out one of the distilled essence vials, untied the rubber tube ending, and then tipped it into his mouth. The taste was unpleasant, sweet but with a burn that made it seem like a liquid not meant for human consumption.

  Ari grimaced and reached for one of the waterskins, quickly washing down the taste as much he could. He felt the essence immediately transferring into him after a few exhalations, a tingling, vibrant sensation, as though he’d dipped himself into a hot spring that was just ever-so-slightly too warm.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  Pressing his hand flat against the rune ward, Ari pushed the essence outward and triggered the enchantment with his will. He started to take a step back, expecting the wall to slide upward and reveal another door.

  Instead, the floor bucked underneath him, throwing him off balance. He glanced over his shoulder just in time to see the hallway they’d entered in through rising upward. Or rather, to notice that the entire circular room was beginning to drop downward, stone grinding against stone as the archaic mechanism moved for the first time in centuries.

  “Mud and blood,” muttered Ari. The hallway and their way back to the upper level of the spire disappeared completely after a few seconds, and he felt an odd sense of claustrophobia that was strong enough to shake his nerve, even though he’d grown up underground.r />
  “There will be a way back up, I’m sure,” said Eva. “Perhaps even just triggering the ward again is all it will take.”

  “That’s probably true,” said Ari. “There’s a lot of space down below where we were in the spire, though. Like, a lot of space.”

  “My Lord Aristial is so articulate,” said Eva.

  “Oh, hush,” said Ari.

  He moved to stand near one of the walls with the inlaid crystal glass windows just in time to see that descending room pass through something other than the stone shaft it had been in. Ari stared out into a huge, open chamber, lit by powerful ward lights and filled with a scene that took him a few moments to process.

  The chamber was easily two hundred feet from floor to ceiling and almost as wide in diameter as the spire itself. It reminded Ari of Golias Hollow, in that it was a completely self-contained world. There was grass along the floor, bushes, small trees, even, but none of that was what made Ari’s breath catch in his throat.

  Scattered throughout the open space were dozens of fishers, moving about idly with an unhurried ease. It was somehow raining in the chamber, if the condensation beading against the rune lift’s windows was anything to go by. Ari was staring out into a contained habitat for a single variety of Weatherblight.

  “Mud and blood…” he muttered. “Are you seeing this, Eva?”

  “I do not understand it,” she said.

  The rune lift continued at the same slow speed even as it drew level with the chamber’s floor. One of the fishers noticed the movement and threw itself at the window Ari was looking out through. The rune lift’s wall didn’t even shake, and the monster fell back in a sprawl of tentacles.

  They continued downward, passing through the floor of the strange chamber, which was made of thick stone and a dozen or so feet thick. Ari blinked in surprise as the rune lift lowered them into an almost identical space, except with a different, contained, artificial biome.

  A violent windstorm raged through the chamber, stirring up dust and obscuring much of the room. Ari didn’t need to see clearly to know what it most likely was filled with. He saw the figure of one of the vodakai, the long, venomous wind snakes birthed from windstorms and tornadoes in the same manner that fishers were spawned from the rain.

  “Is this some kind of harvest?” asked Ari. “Like a farm, with animals grown for slaughter?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Eva. “I can’t imagine what of use could be taken from the bodies of the Weatherblight.”

  “Their blood, for one,” said Ari.

  “You spoke of Mordus and the Escions as being capable of controlling the monsters directly,” said Eva. “What use would they have for the potion Lady Amber can create?”

  “Good point. They must have another purpose for them, then.”

  He had a few guesses, though there were issues with them all. It seemed unlikely that the Escions would need to keep the Weatherblight contained for study, given that they seemed to already have a deep knowledge of their creation and attributes.

  Keeping them on hand as potential soldiers for a monster army also seemed problematic, given how the Weatherblight could only manifest during adverse weather. Ari shuddered as he considered the possibility that Mordus and the Escions might have a method for creating Weatherblight independent of the weather. The idea of facing fishers or lurkers at any time, without any chance of safety or security, was too terrifying for him to take seriously.

  They passed through more of the Weatherblight biome chambers, one containing fog and the slow, disgusting slimes, another filled with water and the wriggling, alligator-like lurkers. The rune lift continued through an empty stone shaft after the second, and there didn’t appear to be any more chambers for the rest of the types of monsters.

  The rune lift let out a hissing noise, and steam gushed outward from the door as it slid open, revealing another hallway. Ari waited until he could see what they were heading into clearly before taking Azurelight in a firm grip and starting forward.

  “I really hope this thing can take us back up after,” he said. “I have no real interest in attempting to make my way through those chambers.”

  “We can only hope,” said Eva.

  Steam jetted from pipes on either side of the hallway at regular intervals, making it hard for Ari to get a good view of what lay ahead of them. The air felt hot and sticky, and within seconds, his clothing was nearly soaked through by the combination of the steam and his sweat.

  One of his feet splashed into a puddle of water, and a rectangular opening became visible in the floor a dozen feet beyond where he was. It was filled with water up to the floor, wide enough for Ari to drop down into and deep enough to make it impossible to guess how far down it extended.

  The hallway seemed to continue on behind it, but after jumping across and investigating, Ari found that it actually led to a dead end. He doubled back to the water and tested it with his fingers.

  “Well, it’s warm,” he said. “It’s not all bad.”

  “This does not seem like the best idea,” said Eva.

  “If you’ve got a better one, I’ll hear it,” said Ari. “I see no other path forward.”

  Eva didn’t answer him, and he took that to mean she consented to what he was about to do. Ari sat down and draped his feet into the water, letting out a small, not-displeased groan. The temperature wasn’t comparable to the hot springs back in the Hollow or even the tower’s shower, but it was still enough to relax his tired muscles.

  He could see another opening below him, an underwater tunnel just a few feet beyond his body’s length in depth. Ari spent a minute gathering his nerve before taking a deep breath and letting himself sink down to it.

  He took heed of his own cautions and resisted the urge to immediately swim into it. The tunnel was filled with more pipes, some of them set into convoluted, twisting patterns that partially blocked the way at points. It looked dangerous, but doable, especially since he could just barely make out the existence of the connecting shaft on the other side that presumably led back to the surface.

  “Ready Eva?” he asked. “The sooner we get this over with, the better.”

  “Be careful, milord,” she said.

  Another deep breath, another drop back down, and Ari was kicking his way into the tunnel. He kept his movements as fluid as he could, focusing on the breath in his lungs and keeping calm. He’d done a fair amount of swimming back in Golias Hollow, even venturing into the underwater caves once or twice, though the Hollow Lord eventually banned access to them.

  He stretched his arms out forward, ducking his head slightly to pass under a pipe. There was another pipe that made a loop right next to it, and the back of Ari’s left hand brushed across it as he attempted to squeeze through the section.

  His hand stuck to the pipe as surely as though he’d thrust it against a wall covered in resin glue. Ari breathed out a bubble and stared, only realizing what had apparently happened after a few seconds of impotent confusion.

  His Ring of Insight was firmly stuck against the pipe. Ari couldn’t see clearly enough through the water to tell if it was caught on a hidden crack, or pulled by some unseen attraction of metal, or perhaps snagged in some other way, but it didn’t really matter.

  His hand, and by extension, the rest of his body, was going nowhere. Ari felt a momentary, irresistible flash of panic, and briefly flailed his arm in a desperate attempt to get the ring free, to no avail.

  He forced himself to calm down and instead tried twisting his finger in a bid to slip the ring off his knuckle. Losing the Ring of Insight would be heart breaking, given how many times it had led him to life-saving answers, but losing his life would be heart breaking in a more literal sense.

  The ring wouldn’t come off. Ari breathed out another small bubble and felt the tingling in his lungs that served as a precursor for the burning, and the inescapable urge to breathe that would come after.

  He reached his left hand up and fumbled with the hilt of Azurel
ight, which was meant to be drawn by his other hand. It came loose after a few reluctant pulls. Ari tried to swing the sword at the pipe, hoping to cut away at the metal, or the ring, or even his finger, if need be. The effect of the water slowed his movements too much for the weapon to be effective.

  Azurelight flashed with light, and Eva took the sword’s place, already abreast of the situation. She grabbed Ari’s hand and started pulling, but even their combined efforts weren’t enough.

  Ari met her gaze for a second and managed a shrug. He’d faced off against monsters, mesmers, and the Saidican Emperor, only to meet his match in the form of a steam pipe tunnel flooded with lukewarm water.

  Eva swam away from him, heading out through where the end of the tunnel connected to another shaft, which presumably led upward. Ari knew that she’d come back to him, loyal as she was. The burning in his lungs was already too much, however. Even with the full weight of his will, he could barely resist the temptation to spend the last of his energy thrashing ineffectively before giving in and letting his body’s compulsion to take a breath take over.

  Eva was coming back. Ari watched her through squinted eyes, already resolved to his fate. She grabbed his face, inadvertently causing him to exhale a bubble into her face. She pressed her lips against his, and…

  Air. So sweet. Ari would have kissed her if he, well, hadn’t already been kissing her. Eva gave him the kiss of life, breathing what little air she could carry down to him into his lungs to buy them more time to figure the situation out.

  His thinking was clear enough to let her take the lead. Eva brought her scrutiny down on the Ring of Insight and the pipe, pulling close enough to see exactly what was going on. She pulled at his wrist, twisted at the ring, but still, nothing happened.

  She waited for a few seconds too long before turning to head back up for more air. Ari knew as he saw her feet disappear down the tunnel that she wouldn’t make it back in time, regardless of how stubbornly he tried to resist giving in.

  He closed his eyes. The water was warm, at least. Blessedly, he felt his awareness begin to fade to black before he’d taken that final, traitorous breath.