Instead of allowing her to jump away, Angul pulled himself up like a spike to meet the mallet. For the blade, friendships and alliances mattered not. For Angul, overcoming the unrighteous and the abominable came first and last, damn every consequence. Angul was intent on sacrificing Monolith, if he still lived, to deprive the watery scourge of its weapon. "I'm the wielder!" hissed Kiril. As the blow descended, she crumbled and rolled back and to her left, slapping the damp stone with her left hand to absorb the fall instead of her hip and back. She maintained her grip on Angul with her right hand, despite its flare of displeasure. She was ruining its strategy! Kiril sprang to her feet as she exited the roll, anticipating the vortex's reaction. She charged the vortex's base even as its muddy crown coiled up and back. Angul's blue-white fire burned hot as she lunged forward and plunged the blade directly into the vortex. Cerulean battled sapphire, fire contested water. The ensuing steam explosion threw Kiril back across the wet floor. Angul's fire sputtered, but the water elemental's vortex was unraveled. The column of water collapsed, deluging the floor of the chamber. Prince Monolith crashed to the floor, and stone shrapnel from his fall scored Kiril's face. What remained seemed more a mound of mud than anything else. Kiril's will reunited with Angul's as she spied the tiny amulet that still pulsed with venomous luminescence. She dived at the glimmering shard. As a phantom, wine-colored tentacle reached from an interstitial space focused by the amulet, the Blade Cerulean smashed the malign talisman into a thousand burning, guttering splinters.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The pale-skinned wizard said Eined was dead. Even after the funeral, he couldn't grasp it.
Ususi said his sister perished nobly. Nobly or shamefully, the horrifying, dawning realization that his sister was gone occluded everything else. A gasping emptiness inhabited Warian's chest. It was an echoing hollow nothing could fill, but his thoughts swirled around it like water circling an abyss.
He clenched his crystal fist, ready to vent his sudden fury.
Violet light leaped dangerously in his prosthesis. What would he smash? He saw nothing but the path below his feet. No railway or embankment separated him from the gulfs of darkness that Ususi and Iahn's ancestors had constructed.
With a strangled sob, Warian dropped to his knees and struck the path with his flashing prosthetic. His fist punched a small crater, and cracks in the stone raced ahead and behind him. The path shuddered, and he heard his uncle cry out behind him.
A hand touched his shoulder. He turned his head, saw Zel. "Why?"
Warian asked. "Why'd she have to die?"
His uncle squeezed his shoulder and said, "More than your sister is dead this day, Nephew."
Warian realized Zel's own sister had also died, Sevaera. And perhaps Zel's own father was, if not dead, compromised to such an extreme degree that he might as well have perished.
"I'm sorry, Uncle. I just…"
"You'll have your chance to exact vengeance when we get into that tower, if the Imaskari are right. Unless you exhaust yourself out here battering the stone, or send us all screaming into the dark."
Warian nodded and allowed the lavender radiance flickering in his arm to lapse. Zel helped him to his feet as he weathered the momentary wave of faintness following his arm's surge. The weakness was not nearly as bad as before, since he'd started to practice accessing the arm's strength in controlled bursts. It was a triumph he would have enjoyed sharing with Eined.
Up the path, Iahn paused where he walked with Ususi. The wizard looked ahead to the wavering walls of the tower, now only a few hundred paces ahead. The vengeance taker turned and fixed Warian with his ice-cold eyes. He said, "The paths are not indestructible."
Warian nodded, blood rushing to his cheeks. Damn. He briefly felt much younger than his twenty-two years.
Iahn turned and conferred with the wizard, who was pointing ahead.
Feeling the pressure of Zel's hands on his shoulders encouraging him to proceed, Warian walked ahead.
"… some sort of broad interface with the Celestial Nadir and the world," Ususi was saying. The wizard had her keystone out and was studying the wavering facade of the tower through it.
"Yes," she continued. "It's a magical mechanism the Imaskari put in place in case the Purple Palace ever returned to the world. This path maintains a connection with some chamber inside the palace. If we walk the path to its end, through the interface, we should be injected back into our world, safely inside the tower."
"And not far from the weapons cache?" asked the vengeance taker.
"Only a floor or two below, from what I remember of the floor plans."
Iahn nodded and increased his pace. He threw over his back, "Time is precious."
Ususi turned to Warian and Zel. "Once we get into the palace, we could go up against Pandorym, plus whatever else Pandorym has released from the weapons cache to defend it. Be ready for anything." She looked dubiously at Zel, then turned and moved quickly to catch up with Iahn.
"Do you think that look implied something?" wondered Zel.
"She wants you to be careful, Uncle."
"And you?
"I've got my arm. You've got… a pickaxe."
Zel chuckled and slung the haft of the pickaxe over his shoulder.
Stepping through the wavering interface was like walking beneath a waterfall-icy, and just as shocking.
Warian stiffened, but the cold faded. He wasn't actually wet. And the gulfs of the Celestial Nadir were gone. Instead, the glimmer of Ususi's head-orbiting light revealed the confines of a cylindrical stone corridor. Inscribed glyphs spiraled endlessly around the passageway. He jumped when the glyphs pulsed, sending a whirl of white light corkscrewing down the passage a hundred paces or more. Zel suddenly blinked into the space next to Warian.
The wizard said, "We stand at the endpoint of a more sophisticated version of the stone circles, which are the usual means to access the Celestial Nadir. This is probably one of the twenty gates."
"Twenty… are you saying there are twenty gates into the Celestial Nadir?" asked Warian.
"Yes. Prior to this journey, it was my goal to find and catalogue all of them. I suspected the Purple Palace contained at least one gate, but figured it would be years before I learned whether I was right or wrong. Funny. Until recently, this gate wasn't even accessible from our world."
"You're sure we're back in the world?" asked Zel. He cast a suspicious gaze down the narrow, circular corridor.
"If not the world, then at least the Purple Palace," said the wizard. "Soon, we'll encounter Pandorym."
"And defeat it," added Iahn. The vengeance taker muttered a few words in a language unknown to Warian and trudged ahead.
Ususi nodded, apparently agreeing with Iahn's statement, and followed.
Warian and Zel brought up the rear.
The long, spiraling corridor opened into a wider space. Iahn and Ususi entered, and Warian moved just inside the new chamber. The wizard's light flickered around, revealing a wide, empty room with a single exit opposite the corridor. It was shuttered by a rusted slab of iron.
"If I recall correctly…" Ususi began, then a shudder rumbled below Warian's feet. He tried to retreat the way he'd come, but he bumped against his uncle.
"Get back!" Warian cried.
The floor dropped away. He fell, as did Zel and Ususi. The vengeance taker performed a desperate and impressive leap toward the far door, where an iron handle glinted invitingly, but he came up several feet short and plunged like the rest of them. He tumbled through a series of braking maneuvers against the wall.
Warian smashed hard onto stone. Thuds, cries, and gasps peppered the darkness around him, and he knew he wasn't alone. Ususi's light flicked back on.
The stone pit that enclosed them was perhaps fifteen paces across.
Putrid, slimy water pooled in the corners. Disintegrating bones lay scattered across the room. The walls rose on all sides about twenty or thirty paces, to a ceiling of rusted iron.
"It clo
sed?" groaned Zel, who lay next to Warian. "It closed us in!"
Iahn, who'd somehow managed to land on his feet, helped Ususi to stand.
Breathing hard, the wizard said, "An automatic trap, meant to apprehend intruders. How stupid of me not to foresee such a possibility. I know better."
"Then you should have warned us," accused Zel. A thin line of blood trickled from the older man's brow.
"Cease!" snapped Iahn. "Is anyone hurt badly?"
"I think my leg's broke," grimaced Zel. "I can't move it, and it hurts like a devil's got his teeth in me."
Ususi said, "I'll be fine when I get my breath back. Tend them, please, Iahn?" The wizard rooted around in her satchel and withdrew a vial she pressed into the vengeance taker's hand.
Iahn inspected Warian first and helped him to his feet. Other than having his breath knocked out of him, Warian was healthier than he expected after falling such a distance. He'd sport some terrific bruises later, though.
Next, Iahn knelt at Zel's side and probed Zel's left leg, which was splayed too far to one side just below the knee.
"Fractured," Iahn concluded. The vengeance taker unstopped the vial Ususi had given him and administered a portion of it to Zel.
Zel attempted to drink down all the fizzing fluid, but Iahn drew back. "Not all at once. We must conserve. Your leg should be mending already."
As Warian watched, his uncle's leg slowly straightened to true, and the lines of pain in his face eased. "I do feel better," Zel said.
"You'll walk with a limp for a while," said Iahn as he rose and turned to Ususi.
The wizard approached one of the walls, which wasn't as bare as Warian had first assumed. Subtle characters were reflected in Ususi's light, forming a script unfamiliar to him. A moment later, each strange letter began to glow with a cool blue radiance.
Warian joined the wizard and vengeance taker at the wall. "What is it?"
"Instructions for getting clear of the containment," said Ususi.
"Any Imaskari who resided in the palace would know the answer to this riddle, so if accidentally caught in the automated trap after coming through from the Celestial Nadir, he could regain freedom in short order."
"It's a riddle? And you know the answer?"
"Yes. Yes, it's a riddle, but I don't know the answer. For certain. But perhaps we can think of the answer together," said Ususi.
As Warian studied the lighted inscriptions, those in the center swam and changed before his eyes, forming words he could easily read.
Symbols on the periphery remained incomprehensible, but they didn't seem important.
Warian asked, "Couldn't someone not authorized to know the answer, like us, work it out, too? That would negate the entire point of the trap, right?"
"You would be correct, of course-however, if any but an Imaskari attempts to answer the riddle, the walls of this room will close down upon us and squeeze us dead. Or so promise these glyphs." The wizard pointed to the upper right corner of the wall at an inscription that remained meaningless to Warian.
"Oh. A trap within a trap."
"How efficient," said the vengeance taker.
Warian nodded and said, "Maybe I'd better not even read it. Zel, you look away, too."
Zel shrugged and turned away, as did Warian. Ususi read.
"The Thirty-Eighth Law of Veracity holds that a magical elixir can never be entirely drunk. A residue always remains behind. A miser mage who collects empty elixir vials can make a new elixir to drink from the residue of every five empty vials found. When he has collected twenty-five elixir vials, how many new elixirs will he be able to drink?"
Warian's uncle guffawed. "Ridiculously easy! Twenty-five vials can be arranged into five groups-so the elixir-grubbing mage could drink five more potions."
Warian flinched and whispered, "Only an Imaskari can answer!"
"Don't worry, Warian," said Ususi. "To formally answer this riddle, the changeable script now instructs me to answer aloud in the language of Imaskar."
"Say five, then," Zel said, rubbing his hands in anticipation.
"No," interrupted the vengeance taker. "Five is incorrect."
Ususi looked at Iahn. "Why so? Seems straightforward enough."
"That should be your first warning-too straightforward. A real riddle hides an answer in an answer. Otherwise, it's only a child's calculation. But a riddle has been posed, because the true answer is six, not five."
Zel said, "How do you figure?"
"The mage makes five new elixirs from the twenty-five empties he has, and after he drinks them, he has five more empties left for one more elixir. Thus the answer is six."
"Seems a little slippery."
Warian nudged Zel and said in an undertone, "Reminds me of the kind of merchant deals I've seen you put together."
"Fair enough," Zel allowed.
Ususi stiffened and said a word in a language Warian didn't know.
The cool blue radiance of the glyphs heated, transforming into an angry, scathing red. The sound of stone grating on stone vibrated up through Warian's feet.
"It was five!" crowed Zel. He was thrown to the ground when the floor gave a great lurch.
Doom bellowed a fell promise as stone scraped over stone. The walls began to close in.
"No, it was six," asserted Iahn, his voice calm as he began to trace his hands through a constellation of arcane movements.
The wizard, looking stunned, said, "The trap triggered with my answer. The choice was correct. Am I not Imaskari enough to qualify as one of the ancients? Has the bloodline diverged so widely?"
Warian concentrated, and his arm flared with violet potential. He strode toward one of the approaching walls and landed a terrific hammer fist. A great shower of stones exploded from the wall, but the stone was so thick that it actually absorbed little of the blow. The greater part of the force rebounded into Warian's prosthesis. The impact was so potent, it jolted him out of his Celestial Nadir mastery. He fell to his knees. Tiny points of light prickled his vision, and nausea grasped at his stomach. The light in his arm went out.
Iahn stepped forward, snatched Ususi around the waist with one free arm, and finished his somatic gesture with the other. When nothing happened, he noted, "Magical escape is blocked."
Zel tried to force his pickaxe blade into the advancing seam where an approaching wall met the floor. "The crack's too small-I can't get any purchase!" he yelped.
The wizard conquered her shock and yelled, "Stand next to me.
Quickly!" Without waiting for Warian or Zel to comply, she rushed through a spell, sputtering over some of the syllables. The Vaelanites stumbled toward her.
On a rising note, Ususi finished speaking, making a warding, circular motion with her hand above her head. Marble crystallized from the air, encasing the four delvers in a dome of solid stone. The harsh, scarlet light was gone, and Ususi's free-flying light bounced around the too-small enclosure. The sound of the approaching walls diminished, but did not cease.
"This will protect us?" asked Zel.
"I hope so. Long enough for the trap to reset…"
Either Ususi's summoned wall would block the crushing walls, or it wouldn't. Warian whispered, "Come on, come on," over and over, but he wasn't sure who he was urging to what end.
The air splintered with the sound of the advancing walls' contact with the marble dome.
"It's holding!" yelled Zel.
A deep whine became audible, then began to ascend in pitch.
"The walls still attempt to crush us," Ususi said.
A hairline crack appeared on the dome's surface and raced a jagged path down one side. Another appeared, then another. The whine was becoming the shriek of a harpy, and a fine dust of disintegrating stone began to rain down inside the dome.
"The dome is failing," said Iahn.
"Thanks for the news!" yelled Zel, his eyes darting around the tiny space, looking for some miraculous opportunity.
But there was no escape.
&nb
sp; The whine, threatening to rise in pitch beyond Warian's hearing, stuttered. The floor shook with the report of something like distant thunder. The whine regained its strength and ratcheted upward again.
Another detonation rattled through the dome, closer than before. A basso succession of sounds penetrated the damaged dome. The new noises almost resembled speech in their regularity and cadence.
"Is someone out there?" Warian asked. "That sounded like someone speaking!"
Needing no further encouragement, Zel yelled at the top of his lungs, "Hey! We're in here! Help!"
With one final boom, the whine failed completely. The cracks in the protective marble dome ceased multiplying. The deep-pitched noises sounded again, and comprehension dawned on Warian. He heard,"… ruined the crushing plates. Something is caught inside."
Another voice, this one much harder to hear through the stone, yelled, "Blast, blood, and rot! What do you care? It's probably another crystal puppet."
The first voice said, "I can travel as easily through the stone of the structure as through the passageways in between. If you feel that my choices are not perfect, perhaps you should consider…"
Ususi pointed to the dome, and with a flash and a pop, it disappeared.
Standing over them, amidst the rubble of shattered walls, was a massive animate sculpture. The creature was like a man made of fused boulders. It wore, or more accurately, sprouted from its head, a crown of uncut rubies and diamonds. It stood nearly three times Zell's height, the tallest of the group.
The silhouette of a mail-clad elf looked down at them from the lip of the pit. This one said, "Now, look! I told you to ignore it, but you had to mess with it. Just like before!"
A tiny creature flew down into the pit to alight on the shoulder of the great earthen being. Warian realized it was another animate sculpture, this one like a tiny dragon carved of reddish glass. It opened its mouth and pealed a series of tiny, bell-like chirps. The sound was reminiscent of laughter.
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