Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  "I suppose." Ascaros withdrew the diamond in its case and tucked its chain underneath his robe. As always, Isiem was silently relieved when the thing was out of sight. "What was he saying earlier?"

  "Threats and warnings," Isiem replied. "He said our spells and prayers wouldn't save us, and that our smoke could not shield us. He spoke with a woman's voice, but the language was that of demons, and the mind behind those words was not human."

  "I doubt he was talking to us," Teglias said with a frown. "The reference to ‘smoke' seems unlikely to be directed at anything we've done. More probably it has something to do with one of the original features of this place. Those smoke-producing plates in the halls, perhaps, or some other aspect of the work done in Fiendslair. Didn't you say you had found dried sage among the apprentices' belongings, or candles infused with it? That might have been the smoke the speaker meant. Something used for curative or purifying purposes. Something that couldn't protect them."

  "It could have been a haunt," Kyril suggested. "Many people died badly here, and it's not unheard of for the traumatic memories of the dead to find voice in the living. That would explain why it was a woman's voice, as well, if it was her death that created the haunt."

  The Nidalese exchanged a look. Ena caught it, and frowned at them both. "What?"

  "There were many traumatic deaths here," Isiem said. "Some might easily have become haunts."

  "But you don't think that's what happened." The dwarf squatted on her haunches, pulling up a few blades of grass and shredding them in as dramatic a display of frustration as Isiem had ever seen her make. When the last blade had been reduced to damp green fluff, she tossed it irritably at Copple. "Is he up yet? Can we ask him?"

  As if on cue, Copple's eyes drifted unsteadily back into focus, then locked onto the dwarf's face. He bolted up to a sitting position, gasping in panic. "What happened?"

  "Don't tell me you don't remember," Ena muttered. She dusted grass flecks from her thighs and stood, enormously resigned. "Fine. Let it be a mystery for the ages. Hopefully one that stays a mystery for the ages, because I'm going to be bitterly disappointed if it happens again tonight. Or tomorrow. Or the day after that. Note that I'm not counting any more days, because I don't intend to be here any longer. Two more days and I'm gone. I hate this place."

  "I don't remember," Copple gasped feebly. His hands twitched in the grass as if he were trying to cling to its reality.

  "I just told you not to tell me that," Ena said crossly. "I'm going back to bed. The rest of you can tell me if he says anything sensible." Stomping with each step, the dwarf departed.

  Copple turned his head, watching her go. When she was beyond his limited sight, the pudgy man looked back at the rest of them, still bewildered as a child. "Please ...I don't remember anything. What happened to me?"

  "It doesn't matter," Kyril said. She patted his shoulder reassuringly, then froze for the slightest of instants before her look of gentle concern returned. The paladin stood, checking her sword and glancing around their encampment one last time. "Sleep if you can. We have another day of work ahead. And then, gods willing, we can all leave this place behind."

  Copple nodded weakly and relaxed into the grass. Isiem turned to leave, Kyril close beside him; Teglias remained behind with Ganoven a little longer to keep watch over the recovering man. As they neared the Nidalese tent, the paladin grabbed at Isiem's sleeve.

  "He isn't well," she whispered. Her eyes were alight with something he couldn't quite identify—fear, and anger, and whatever it was that drove paladins to throw themselves against the great evils of the world. At that moment, Isiem thought, Kyril looked like a hunting hound that had just caught the scent of a lion. She was straining to leap to the chase, even as she wasn't sure she wanted to catch the beast she'd detected.

  The intensity of her alertness alarmed him far more than her words. But he answered dryly, trying to downplay it: "Yes, I'd rather gathered that."

  "More than what he said, or what we saw. When I touched his shoulder, I felt it, and by the blessing of Iomedae, I sensed it. There is an evil in him that was not there before." Kyril let go of his sleeve, but she stayed close. Her perfume took hold of him again, and now it was clearly hers: linden and green honeysuckle, blending subtly into the sweetness of the garden. It was a strange contrast to the grimness of her words. "It didn't just poison his mind, Isiem. It's in his flesh. And it's still there."

  Chapter Seventeen

  Discoveries

  No one slept well that night. Their haggard faces and fatigued movements the next morning told the tale: not one of them had rested after Copple's peculiar episode. His wound's discoloration had diminished by the time they broke camp, and he said his leg didn't pain him anymore, but no one seemed to take much reassurance from that, least of all Copple himself. It only served to underscore that some unknown power had indeed touched him.

  Their collective mood grew even darker when Ena reported that their food supplies were spoiled. Somehow the twice-baked hardtack had gone sour and soggy overnight. Their sacks of oats were fuzzed with green mold, and their dried sausages were soft and slimy brown under furry white-specked coats. The similarity to the mold on the skeletons that the Aspis company had taken was too close to miss, and the three of them received a number of hard glares from the others. Nothing else had been contaminated, only their food—but all of it was ruined beyond repair.

  "It's not natural," Pulcher muttered. He clutched his arm where the stick he'd used to haul water back to camp had slipped and bruised him, worsening the injury he'd sustained when his horse threw him while fleeing from the Splinter Men. Teglias had declined to heal the injury, saying it wasn't serious enough to warrant magical treatment, and that refusal, as much as the pain itself, had put the big man in a foul mood. "None of it's natural."

  "Of course it's not natural," Ena snapped. "This was all fine when I put it away after dinner. Now it's rotted worse than a deviler's heart and I don't even want to keep the bags. Burn it. Burn it all. I can't abide mold."

  Kyril shook her head. "We don't have time for a bonfire." She looked to Teglias and Ascaros, who had been experimenting with purification spells from the time Ena had first told them about the spoilage. "Can you remedy it?"

  "I don't care if they can." The dwarf scrunched her wide nose. "I'm not eating it. After seeing it all slimy like that, how could you? Eeugh."

  "It's resistant to our spells, anyway." Ascaros abandoned the sacks of verminous oatmeal and slimy sausages. "We can purify it, but it rots again within minutes when I do it, and half an hour when the Sarenite uses his magic. Given the unnatural speed with which the contamination returns, I would not advise eating this food even while it appears wholesome."

  "I'm trying very hard to convince myself that I don't need to panic about being in a demented wizard's laboratory where the doors are made out of tortured demons and people get possessed while sleeping and all our food is cursed to spoil overnight," Ena said. "You aren't helping."

  "We'll finish today and leave," Kyril said firmly. "Find whatever you want to find today; we're not staying any longer."

  "You don't think that's overreacting?" Teglias said. "Nothing that's happened so far has actually been harmful. Unsettling, yes. Unpleasant. But not harmful. We've come a long way for this opportunity."

  "It was harmful to our horses," Ena said, crossing her stocky arms. "And I, for one, am inclined to view that as a lesson. We thought the water bugs were harmless and they weren't. What else are we mistakenly assuming won't hurt us in here? What else are we overlooking until it lulls us into getting our heads chewed off?"

  "I don't take chances when it comes to demons," Kyril said, nodding in agreement with the dwarf. "Overreaching is what gets people killed, or worse. Plainly something can reach us, and we can't easily counter that magic. If it were up to me, we'd leave now. It's only out of respect for all you've sacrificed to come here that I'm willing to stay even one extra day. But after that, we go."

/>   Teglias inclined his head in reluctant acknowledgment. "Then we'd best make use of the time that remains. We haven't finished cataloging what lies behind the omox, and we haven't even touched the seraptis."

  "We'll finish the omox first," Ascaros said crisply. "Whatever dangers might be there, we've already been exposed to them, and they haven't killed us yet. The same can't be said for whatever waits behind the seraptis door. So that's what we'll do—and we'll do it together. No more splitting up. Not after this."

  Ganoven scowled at the shadowcaller, but no one voiced any disagreement. Even if they'd had food, Isiem thought, no one would have wanted to eat; certainly he wouldn't have been able to force much past the knot of turmoil in his stomach.

  They gathered their gear and filed back to the chamber of demonflesh doors. Once there, Kyril took hold of the corroded harpoon embedded in the omox's squashed body and gave it a heave, starting the slow process of opening that door.

  When the serrated blade had finished slicing away the omox's tortured flesh, the oozing door swung open to a reveal silver-plated hallway similar to the one Isiem had seen the previous day. Kyril led the way down, keeping a hand on the hilt of her sword. Copple followed, damp with nervous sweat, while Pulcher kept muttering curses and rubbing the bruise on his arm.

  Glow-globes flickered uncertainly on their chains, casting staccato swells of light and shadow across the curving walls. Here, too, smoke issued in unsteady spurts from some of the ceiling plates as the adventurers crossed below. And once again, the veil of smoke cleared to reveal an enormous oval-shaped chamber dominated by a great glass dome in its center and walled in by smaller glassy tanks.

  This room had sustained worse damage, though. A massive web of cracks splintered the glass of the central dome; a hole large enough for a human to step through gaped in its the middle. Fist-sized chunks of glass made a boulder field of the concentric rings on its floor. The glow-globes around the dome appeared to have exploded as well, leaving only inert, jagged stumps on blackened chains hanging from the ceiling. It appeared that Mesandroth and his underlings had been far more thorough in their destruction when they'd swept through this quarter of Fiendslair. Perhaps they'd released whatever was in the dome to do their work for them.

  Several of the tanks along the walls were smashed as well, and more glass sparkled along their floors like scattered diamonds. The remainder were much larger than the tanks that had held the fungal skeletons of rats and cats in the previous room. These were sized for sheep, calves—even people. Their dry bones, clad in desiccated shells of skin and brittle hair, littered the gleaming compartments.

  With its illuminating globes destroyed, the room was utterly dark. But Ganoven and Isiem had both conjured light spells to illumine the party's progress, and their radiance afforded a fleeting view into the bubbles as they passed. None of the human skeletons wore any clothes, and they appeared to have been quite elderly when they'd died, as they all had long, tangled gray hair. Unlike the remains in the other room, these had no furry coating of fungus.

  Some, however, bore other marks. Many had scarred and knitted bones that spoke of recovery from surgical wounds. A few were missing neatly severed limbs. Others had been altered in ways Isiem couldn't fully comprehend. Their bones had been molded like soft clay, and pieces of other creatures had grown into them. There were no graft lines, as he might have expected to see on a golem; rather, the changes seemed to have come into them organically.

  "The later experiments?" he murmured to Ascaros. The shadowcaller glanced at the human skeletons and nodded once.

  At the end of the room, a small bronze door stood to the right, while a broad archway led straight ahead to a rectangular chamber that appeared to be a combination of library and dissection room.

  "We haven't opened that," Kyril said, nodding toward the bronze door. "It's locked. Not with an ordinary lock, but with magic. We couldn't figure out how to get through yesterday."

  Enormous claws had gouged deep rents in that door, but it didn't seem that they'd been able to break through. Eight raised panels adorned the door, each of them densely inscribed with arcane runes. The lettering was in an archaic form, but the traditions of Nidal had been so faithfully preserved through the ages that Isiem could still understand them with little difficulty. They spoke of all-consuming fire and shattered bone. He traced his fingertips across the sigils, wondering what secrets they held.

  What had caused the damage to the door was less of a mystery. A jumble of razor-sharp horns and bones, held together by withered scraps of dry purplish skin, had been pushed into a pile against the wall nearby. Whoever had moved the bones—presumably his companions—had lifted the creature's skull up to crown the pile, and Isiem easily recognized the horned head as that of a kalavakus.

  Dismantled as it was, Isiem couldn't tell what had killed the fiend. Apparently anticipating his question, Kyril shook her head. "Corrosion holes and spell burns on the skin, a couple of penetrating wounds that might have come from a blade or a horn. There's more of that greeny-white mold on the bones, too. But what killed it? I couldn't conclusively say."

  "Nothing else in this room that might have done it?"

  "Only whatever might be behind that door. Do you think you can open it?"

  Isiem let his hand fall back to his side. He hadn't studied the lock carefully, but it didn't strike him as particularly complex at first glance. Quite simple, even. But that wasn't his first concern. "It seems a sturdy door, and its inscription suggests it's guarding something of importance. Are you sure you want it open?"

  "No," Kyril replied, tipping her chin surreptitiously toward Teglias and Ganoven. "But I'm sure they will."

  The others had continued to the rectangular room ahead. Isiem left the bronze door and approached the new room cautiously, his light spell floating over his shoulder.

  The first sight that greeted him was a line of three ironbound dissection tables. Each bore countless stains on its reddish wood: blood, ichor, corrosive slime. All were studded with fist-sized eyebolts to serve as anchor points along the sides and corners. Coils of steel chain, thicker than Isiem's wrist, dangled from some of those bolts.

  Shelves lined the walls around the tables, each burdened with innumerable bottles of alchemical reagents and specimens in jars. Most of those jars held organs or severed body parts floating in cloudy brine, but a few held entire creatures shrouded in swirling smoke, not liquid. Lesser demons, Isiem guessed; none appeared to be of this world.

  While demons' signs of life were less obvious than mortals', the wizard nevertheless had the unshakable sense that the fiends trapped in those smoke-filled jars were sleeping, or in stasis, rather than truly dead. Isiem had seen enough death in his time to recognize the leaden, absolute slackness of a body whose soul had flown, and he didn't see that same surrendered stillness in these.

  "This is where we stopped yesterday," Teglias said, gesturing to the shelves of bottled demons. "With them, and with those books." He pointed past the dissection tables to the two long desks at the very end of the room, framed by a pair of bookcases that were piled high with scrolls and dusty, black-bound tomes.

  From twenty feet away, Isiem recognized the silvered mark on the backs of those books and froze, gripped by remembered fear. A step ahead, Ascaros stiffened as well.

  Mesandroth's mark shone on the flat black covers, alongside the ancient sigil of the Umbral Court and the identifying runes of a dozen lesser arcanists, midnight clerics, and necromancers. Most were Nidalese, a few Ustalavic, the rest from countries that had fallen under the march of time and had their names forgotten.

  "Ghasterhall," Ascaros murmured, approaching the bookshelves with a measured tread. A ghostly light winked into existence on a nearby candle, shedding its light over the pages. "The Whispering Way." He paused, one fingertip hovering over the spine of a scaled book spotted in feathery yellow mold. Slanted, sinuous letters ran over its bindings; the way they were formed suggested that they had not been scribed b
y any human hand, nor meant to be read by human eyes. "This one, I think, might even be from Ilvarandin, if such a thing can be imagined. Eledwyn cast a very wide net."

  "For what?" Teglias asked. He made no move to approach the bookshelves; it seemed all those grim old pages unnerved the Sarenite more than the bottled demons did. Wisely so, Isiem thought. The texts on those shelves were an astonishing collection of writings by the great evils of the world, and those scholars or fools who had sought to preserve them.

  "Death. Undeath. Summoning. Shaping. All the ways that flesh can be bent and unmade and reformed ...and all the places that life comes from, in all the forms it can take, in this world and others." Ascaros drew out one of the chairs and seated himself at the left desk, drawing out one of the books that bore his ancestor's sign. It was locked, as were many of the others, but when the shadowcaller pressed his thumb to the silver bindings, the lock opened with a curiously loud click. Black dust limned his thumbprint for an instant, tracing its whorls and lines, and then vanished, leaving both the shadowcaller's thumb and the book's bindings clean.

  "Is that what you came to find?" the cleric asked.

  "It might be," Ascaros replied without looking up. "It very well might be."

  "Just take them all," Ganoven urged. He beckoned an unenthusiastic Copple to hold his enchanted sack open. "Drop them in the bag and we'll move on. There's room. You can have an entire compartment to yourself. Two, if you like. Keep what you want when you've had time to sort through it. We'll sell the rest."

  "That would not be wise." Ascaros glanced briefly at the tattooed thug, then dismissed him with a minute curl of his lip and returned to browsing the black-bound book. "Artifacts of power have their own wills and ways, and they are seldom kind to the imprudent. Many would argue that what is written in these books would corrode the soul, and what we've seen of Fiendslair suggests that is true. I will take what I need, and only that. Even that is a risk." He smiled into the pages, a mirthless and inwardly directed expression. "As for selling these texts ...No. I doubt you'd like the buyers they'd attract."