The Conspiracy of Unicorns

by Michael Angel

  “Very well,” he said, “then I shall return us to the palace.”

  The Protector of the Forest looked uneasily at the edges of magical boundary. “Am I seeing things? Or has your transport spell sprouted…flames?”

  “It’s a variant of my usual spell,” the Wizard explained. “It is necessary to overcome the anti-magic barriers set up around the palace dungeons.”

  Shaw let out a low squawk. “Thou art taking us to the dungeons, Wizard?”

  “Alas, it is the closest I can take us to our final destination, for I have been no further than Magnus’ former cell in person.”

  Finally, my brain put everything together in a soft little click. There were only two ‘destinations’ from the cell that had imprisoned Magnus Killsheven. One led back up to the palace proper.

  The other led down along a hidden stone staircase. One which corkscrewed its way through the rock into a cavern. A cavern hidden far below where Fitzwilliam and his lords kept court.

  A cavern strewn with traces of dragons. And wyverns.

  “You’re taking us to see Queen Nagura, aren’t you?” I asked.

  Galen nodded. “You said that the problem was one of ‘time’, did you not? Who else would know more about that subject than a being who is more than three thousand years old?”

  With that solemn pronouncement, the Wizard spoke his enchantment. The bluish fire leapt up, increasing in brightness. The flames blotted out the field of Lady Quinton’s flowers as we vanished in an eye-frying flash of white.

  Chapter Five

  The sizzling brilliance of the transport spell (now upgraded with Fourth-of-July worthy blue flame effects) faded as we reached our destination. Flickering yellow light took its place, so dim that it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. The cool chill of the stone cell completely eclipsed the warmth of the noonday sun at Lord Quinton’s castle. The damp smells of wet stone and earth filled my nose.

  “This is a cheery sort of place,” Liam remarked, sniffing at the air.

  “To be fair, this is the ‘dungeon’,” Galen pointed out. “Since it’s meant for undesirables, it is hardly meant to be a pleasant place to stay.”

  The Protector of the Forest shuddered. “All ‘undesirable’ fayleene are simply driven into the forest. Exile is our only punishment. I should know.”

  I turned and put my hand on my friend’s cervine shoulder. Liam’s horrific past had always touched some deep part of me. He looked at me, grateful for the touch.

  “You do know,” I said. “But that part of your life is over now.”

  “The Regent hath been at work,” Shaw noted, as he gingerly moved his forepaw in front of his beak. “It doth seem that a magic barrier sits in place here.”

  Sure enough, a gentle shimmer hung in the air. It hovered in an arc over a section of shattered flagstone. Amidst the pieces of blasted and tumbled rock lay a massive hole, through which the first steps of a stairway could be seen.

  “This is a surpassingly simple magical shield,” Galen said, as he pressed his palm to the glistening surface. As with Shaw’s forepaw, his hand encountered resistance. “Magnus merely wanted to prevent the odd passerby from falling into the hole.”

  “Can you bypass it without taking it down completely?” I asked. “I’m guessing that it would be rude for one Wizard to cancel out another’s work.”

  “A most valid conclusion,” Galen said. He made a circle in the air with his outstretched palm and cried out, “Opnask!”

  The shimmering wavered for a moment. The Wizard nodded towards the breach, urging us on. Shaw moved ahead with Liam on his tail, and I followed up behind. Galen ducked as he passed through the shield, then scraped the top of his head against the rough opening to the stairway.

  “The ceiling gets higher a few steps further inside,” I said, urging him on.

  “That is excellent to know,” he replied, brushing the dust from his hair and then his jacket shoulders. He raised his hand again and called out “Nech, opnask!”

  The shimmering returned, now safely behind us. Ahead, the stairway flowed in a generous right-handed corkscrew. The light of the prison cell above quickly faded out, but Galen spoke another phrase and chased away the darkness with a swampy-smelling ball of weirlight. Mixed in with the methane odor was a strange, electrifying scent that came from below. I’d smelled it before, the sharp scent of charged air right before the breaking of a thunderstorm.

  As we moved lower, I stopped for a moment, listening closely. A chill shivered up my spine as I realized it wasn’t what I could smell that slowed my feet, but what I could hear.

  The gristly noise of flesh being torn off bone came from far below. It was followed by a crunch, then a wet, flapping sound. Finally, a jangle like someone shaving ice with a squeaky metal ratchet echoed off the stairway’s stone walls.

  “That sounds horrific!” Liam complained.

  “Nay, that sounds delicious!” Shaw insisted, as he bounded down the steps. Liam followed, muttering under his breath about the ‘utter insanity of the griffin species’.

  “Let me guess,” I said, as Galen and I followed at a more leisurely pace. “Magnus arranged for food to be delivered to Nagura down here?”

  “I believe that is the case,” the Wizard agreed, the clop of his hooves against the steps matching the meaty ripping sounds from below. “Ever since the Regent granted the Queen of the Wyverns temporary residence within the palace grounds, she has chosen to remain in this subterranean demesne. Obviously, he would not allow her to starve.”

  Galen and I rejoined our friends at the bottom. He snuffed out the weirlight with a gesture, the sphere winking out in a puff of struck-match smell. Shaw waited for us patiently at the base of the stairs, while Liam stood in place, staring at the cavern’s grandeur.

  The ice-blue glow from the crystals lining the walls made the cavern feel as if it were underwater. The cave’s floor had been swept free of debris, but the huge, slanted crystal columns remained in place. The columns swept upwards into an A-shaped frame supporting the softly shimmering ceiling high overhead.

  My eyes were irresistibly drawn to the mirror-smooth crystal to my left. Regent Magnus had identified the stone as a ‘self-charging transport bridge’ between my world and this one. As I looked closer, I noted the face of the stone was surrounded by yet another shimmering barrier spell.

  The awful sound of crunching and tearing halted. A sinuous movement resolved itself into the bronzed, snakelike creature we knew as the Queen of the Hakseeka. Her nightmarish wyvern face materialized out of the aquamarine gloom, jagged teeth dripped gore and gristle. The meaty, iron scent of freshly spilt blood filled the cavern.

  I knew Nagura. She’d saved my life, as well as answering questions that had vexed me and my friends for months. She was as intelligent, emotional, and literate a being as I had ever known.

  That didn’t keep a not-all-that-small part of me from wanting to run screaming back up the stairs.

  Nagura let out a husky dinosaur chuff! as she drew herself up. Her vast, scaly bat wings came up as she moved her claws closer in towards her neck. The hilariously out-of-place squeak of a marker against a whiteboard echoed in the cavern.

  That was followed by a regal woman’s voice.

  “My friends! What a terrible welcome we have given you! Had you arrived ten minutes sooner, we could have shared our lunch.”

  For a moment, I wasn’t sure what ‘lunch’ Nagura was referring to. Then I spotted a glistening mass of gore in the far background. I stood on my toes for a moment, catching sight of the bloody remains of several cow carcasses. Just as with the fayleene and griffins, the Hakseeka had never really developed the art of cooking.

  “It is good to see you too, Nagura,” I said. “Don’t worry about the food, we won’t miss it.”

  Shaw let out a surly grunt. “Speak for thyself.”

  At the sound of my voice, the Queen of the Wyverns bowed before me. To be honest, I still wasn’t comfortable with her honoring
me this way. But Nagura felt that I was responsible for saving her life, returning her to some form of society, and bringing her back to her ancestral home. She rose, surveyed our little group, and then more squeaks came as her dexterous claws moved the marker across the board in a blur.

  “We see that all of our friends have arrived. Drake Grimshaw, Protector Liam, and Wizard Galen,” she wrote. “Bide but a moment, and we shall make ourselves ready for the honor of your company.”

  Nagura turned away from us, showing off her sleek, snakelike body as she did so. The knifelike scales at the back of her skull still jutted out as sharp and horrific as ever. I was pleased to see that the bioluminescent lights tipping her head-spikes were brighter. What’s more, her body had continued to heal from the ravages of her ordeal. The small tears in her bat-like wings had begun to seal shut. While the rest of her still looked gaunt, at least her tummy looked full. Overall, the wyvern monarch was a far cry from the starved, pitiable thing I’d first met in the caverns beneath Keshali.

  The sound of a rock crusher with a leaky boiler erupted from Nagura’s mouth. The sound was horrible, but she wasn’t to blame. All wyverns – the ‘Raised’ Hakseeka as well as the feral ones – came with voices suited to the harshness of a reptilian mouth.

  “Maak skoon,” she said, in a voice unaltered by the magic of wizardry or whiteboard. “Maak skoon, omidelik!”

  The air crackled with magical energy. The smell of blood and slaughtered cow vanished, along with the carcasses. When Nagura turned to face us again, the gore trapped between her fangs had vanished, jagged ripping and tearing teeth glistening as if she’d been prepped for a tooth-whitening commercial.

  “I cannot help but be impressed, your Majesty,” Galen breathed. “That seemed to be a variant of my transport spell. Only wyvern magic is able to finetune it in a way that I have never seen before.”

  Nagura let out a throaty chuckle. “This type of magic comes as second nature to us. It is because our kind has long dwelt in caverns below the earth, such as this one.”

  “How does that figure into things?” I asked. “I mean, how does living underground help you perform that kind of magic?”

  “Necessity, of course. When one lives in an enclosed space for a long time, cleanliness is important. How else can one remove stray scraps of food, or the bodily wastes that result from eating and drinking?”

  She has a point, my brain admitted. The wyverns didn’t exactly go in for indoor plumbing, so it would have already gotten pretty ripe in here without the use of magic.

  “That is interesting,” Liam added. “The magical traces all through this cavern involve similar transport spells. Those cast by wyverns…and something else. The phoenix, perhaps. Maybe dragons. Since all three species are closely related, their magical spoors are similar. It’s hard to tell.”

  “Transport magic is partly why we reside here for now,” Nagura admitted. “Regent Magnus has been kind to us, indeed. Yet we had to convince him that we could serve a purpose. Otherwise, he may not have allowed us to remain.”

  “A purpose? You mean, one related to transport magic?”

  Nagura nodded, a gesture that still looked strange coming from a giant snake-headed reptile. “We wished to remain here to search for the eggs we sense, buried deep beneath us. And we wished to remain out of sight of the palace. There is too much pain in seeing our old quarters given over to human rulers and lords, as well as the fear of being thought a monster.”

  “No one thinks that,” I said, a trifle too quickly. “I mean, we’re making progress–”

  “We are too old to require kind words when the truth is evident, Dayna. We know that there are men above who wish to gain glory from our slaughter. And we wish to be of service, even now. Thus, when Regent Magnus sealed the crystal ‘bridge’ between here and your world, we offered our help.”

  “In sealing the bridge?”

  “No, of course not. Mixing wyvern magic with wizardry would be a most…unstable combination. We offered to stay here and guard the bridge should any attempt to open it again.”

  “‘Tis a most excellent decision,” Shaw declared. “One as mighty as thee wouldst be quite the surprise for any foe!”

  “Speaking of wyvern magic,” Galen said, “perhaps the delicate control you exercise over your spellcraft can help us with one of Dayna’s problems.”

  Nagura blasted a short breath through her nostrils. It sounded like the air brakes on a bus. “Should Dayna need our help, we are ready to assist.”

  I outlined the issue facing us. At first, the wyvern queen didn’t quite grasp why fermenting ‘bee spit’ could be so important. A valid inquiry, from her point of view. However, as I explained she began asking detailed questions about the process, repeating the steps to ensure she understood what we needed.

  Nagura’s questions gradually tapered off, and even her writing grew slower and more deliberate. She went silent for a while, until she wiped her board clean to get it ready for her next words.

  “Time is your issue,” she wrote. “Therefore, you must speed time up.”

  “And here lies the nub of my concern,” Galen said. “There has been much debate over whether one could alter the future of the world, or wipe out its past, by altering–”

  “This magic is tightly bounded,” Nagura wrote, sounding a trifle irritated. “So tightly that a person cannot use it to change anything. It is much like the ‘stasis’ spell that you used when sealing Regent Magnus in his cell.”

  For the second time today, Galen blushed a bit. “He spoke of that, I take it?”

  “We were not surprised to hear of it. With great power and ambition comes great risk.”

  Galen thought about that for a moment before tapping his fingertips together as he asked, “Might you be willing to teach me how to manipulate this type of magic?”

  “We can teach you,” Nagura allowed, though her voice came through as puzzled as she wrote. “But, we find it curious. From speaking with Regent Magnus, we thought that centaurs or humans who practice magic would already know of this spell.”

  “Magnus and I are the only two centaur wizards of any note,” Galen explained, with a note of pride. “This type of spellcraft is close to Archmage level, so perhaps it has been lost. My people are expert in many things, but they have never properly valued books. It seems the Hakseeka and the humans are the only ones who do.”

  “Then, why did you not consult a human wizard of this level before coming to us?” Nagura asked. “Magnus spoke of the wondrous library here in the city that has grown upon the bones of Teyana.”

  That was curious, now that I thought about it.

  Suddenly, realization hit me. Not in one of those mental ‘clicks’, either. This was more of a lightning bolt. A ‘how did I not see this’ smack in the face.

  “Now that brings up a whole new mystery,” I said, my voice shaky as I spoke. “Why haven’t I ever seen…why haven’t I even heard of a single human wizard in the entire Kingdom of Andeluvia?”

  Chapter Six

  Queen Nagura’s jaws widened in a sudden yawn.

  Whenever a creature like a fayleene yawned, it was rather cute. When a wyvern performed the same action, it was like watching a pair of industrial-sized saw blades open and close. Her serpentine forked tongue uncurled, before rolling back up into her mouth. In the meantime, I got a good look at the rows and rows of sharp teeth that seemed to go all the way down her throat.

  “We apologize,” she wrote, after she finished. “We were not thinking. That display of our teeth must have frightened you.”

  I shook my head with a small grin. Despite her feral appearance, Nagura was uncommonly gifted with intelligence and empathy. She was keenly aware of how fearsome she could look without even trying.

  “I don’t think that you’ve traumatized any of us,” I said. “We’ll look into whether there are human wizards who can do this, but I’d appreciate it if you would work with Galen yourself.”

  “We shall help
out in any way that is needed.” Nagura’s lids hung low as she continued to write. “If the Court Wizard comes back tomorrow afternoon, we should be ready and willing to teach what we can.”

  I felt a prickle of impatience that I had to tamp back down. “Why do we have to wait until tomorrow?”

  Nagura let out a sleepy reptilian sigh. “We have just eaten a large lunch, and we must sleep it off for the rest of today. Frankly, we have no idea how you mammals keep moving all the time after consuming your meals!”

  With that, the wyvern queen proceeded to coil up in a large scaly circle. I couldn’t help but notice the cow-sized bulges in her side as she did so. Given Nagura’s similarities to a snake, it did make sense. After a large meal – perhaps the first she’d had in ages – her need to sleep and digest would be non-negotiable.

  I watched Nagura’s warm amber eye disappear under its heavy lid. The deep sound of her breathing echoed in our ears, becoming slower with each inhale and exhale.

  “I realize that time is the issue here,” Liam said carefully to me. “But will one afternoon make such a difference?”

  “I suppose it won’t. It just feels like we’re this close to solving our problems,” I said, as I held my hand up, thumb and index finger a mere inch apart. “And my own schedule has to complicate things. I’ve got to be back in my world this evening, and I’ll have to stay there a full day after that. Aside from my job, I’ve got to see if King Fitzwilliam is well enough to return to the throne!”

  “Perhaps,” Galen put in, “it would behoove you to learn patience, Dayna.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but how long is that going to take?”

  The Wizard did his best to keep a straight face on that one. “Worry not. Even though you shall not be here, I will return to Nagura’s lair to ensure I am properly tutored.”

  “And I doth wish to ensure that I am properly fed,” Shaw declared, with a snap of his stout beak. “Surely thou wouldst not starve your friends! I find mine own hunger stoked by the scents of all this freshly blooded meat.”