by S. R. Witt
The door cracked again, and Bastion slipped an inch before he could shove it back in place. “Hurry!”
The fiery sword chewed into the wood, but it was slow going. I twisted the blade through the wood with all the strength I could muster. The plan was to cut an escape hatch through the ceiling, but I didn’t know if there was going to be time for that.
If the hole only had to be big enough for me, I was almost there, but Bastion needed a much wider gap to accommodate his armored bulk.
“Wedge the door,” I said. “Stick a knife under it or something.”
Bastion took my advice and ripped a dagger from a bandolier strapped across his chest. He dropped it to the floor and kicked the pointy end under the door’s edge.
In response, whoever was on the other side of the door slammed their weapon into the door again. A chunk of wood fell away to reveal a single massive eye.
Without hesitation, Bastion drove his fist straight through the hole in the door. The idiot on the other side stumbled away, howling in pain.
Bastion took advantage of the respite to drive another dagger between the door and the floor. “Get us out of here before they chop the damned door down.”
The flaming sword carved out another chunk of smoldering wood, but the hole still wasn’t big enough. “Almost there.”
The door rattled on its hinges, and Bastion drew a knife and stabbed through the jagged hole. Someone yelped, but I doubted Bastion had been lucky enough to kill whoever was on the other side.
Another chunk of the door splintered off. This wasn’t going to work.
“Trade me places,” I said as I hopped off the kegs.
Bastion left the door and clambered up onto the kegs. He snatched his sword out of my hand and went back to work on the ceiling. “This better not hurt my baby.”
Wood wasn’t going to hold our enemies at bay, but we had something else that might.
I kicked coals away from the desk and corralled them toward the door. Smoke rose from the bare floor as the embers smoldered.
The barrels and kegs told me we were in the estate’s liquor cabinet. I hoped they had something stronger than beer on hand.
Bastion sheathed his sword and grabbed the glowing edges of the hole in the ceiling. His heavy-metal gauntlets clawed at the weakened wood, ripping out chunks of it and widening the gap.
A thick, armored forearm punched through the hole in the door and pulled away a chunk of wood.
Great, dueling strong men. Just what I needed.
A straight up fire had started on the floor near the door, but it wasn’t growing fast enough. It needed fuel.
There was a rack of bottles against the wall to my left. I darted over and yanked one free, pulled the cork loose, and took a swig. It was a sour wine that tasted like old flowers and bruised apples. Gross.
The arm jutted through the broken door again, clawing for purchase, and I ran back to the door.
I rammed a stiletto between the armored plates covering the arm. My bracers’ magical effect triggered and the knife in my other hand immediately joined its brother. The arm’s owner howled as blood gushed from his arm. He tried to pull it back through the door, but he was too slow. I stabbed him again, and my bracers gave me yet another free attack. By the time the big guy had rescued his arm from my tender mercies, there was blood and gore everywhere.
Score one for the thief.
More burning wood crashed down from the ceiling, and Bastion kicked it toward the barricade, narrowly missing me as he added to our little bonfire.
“Watch what you’re doing,” I snapped. There was a cabinet above the wine rack, and the rectangular bottles looked promising. I snatched one up.
“Stop your whining and get over here.” Bastion dropped off the keg and made a stirrup from his interlaced fingers. “Time to go.”
“One second!” I uncorked the bottle and balanced it on the top edge of the door.
Bastion caught my left foot as I hopped up toward the hole in the ceiling. He heaved with all his might, and I shot toward the hole we’d carved.
I probably should have made sure the hole was big enough for me to fit through before I made that jump.
My head, right shoulder, and right arm went through the hole with no problem. My left side, on the other hand, hung up on a jagged edge of smoldering wood.
I dug the gloved fingers of my right hand into the carpet on the floor for purchase, and Bastion shoved up on my legs with enough force to knock me loose. The wood clinging to my left hip cracked and broke away, leaving me with a few scratches and bruises as I burst into the third floor.
The door to the room below crashed open. The barrel skidded across the floor, and my bottle fell.
It shattered on the floor, and its contents spilled onto the fire.
The high proof whiskey blazed to life when it met the embers and formed a barrier of hungry flame.
Bastion leaped up through a cloud of smoke. His arms and head came up through the ceiling before he stuck fast. “Help,” he grunted.
I grabbed the straps of his harness and dug my heels in, straining to haul him up through the hole. I grunted with the effort. “You get fatter every damned second.”
“Something’s hung up,” Bastion gasped. Smoke billowed around where he’d wedged against the smoldering edges of our escape hatch.
Flickering firelight reflected on Bastion’s armor, and the smoke would fill the room we were in before long. Time was not on our side.
I braced my feet on the floor on either side of Bastion and threw my weight back. He punched the floor, hammering the scorched edges of the hole with both fists.
Bastion burst free of the hole like a champagne cork popping from its bottle. We tumbled across the floor in a tangled heap, rolling over away from the flames lashing up through the opening.
“How about that fire I built?” I asked, eyebrows wiggling.
“Next time, keep it in the fireplace.”
He had a point, but I wasn’t going to let Bastion get away with critiquing my fire building skills. “At least we don’t have to worry about anyone coming up through that hole after us.”
Bastion helped me off the floor, and we looked around the room by the light of the fire.
There were no windows in that room, and the door was an impenetrable slab of dark metal with a bulbous lock set into its center instead of a simple doorknob. A sinister design flickered in and out of sight across the door’s surface. I earned a headache just for glancing at the thing.
An idea popped into my head. “We’re inside Wenderly’s vault.”
“You sure?” Bastion asked.
It all matched up. The door, the crazy lock, the arcane symbol. That meant the Burning Codex was in here with us.
But where was the damn thing? “There should be a book in here. Help me find it.”
The room was a little over a dozen feet on a side, with bookshelves on three walls. Hundreds of volumes, some thick, some slim, some tall, some short, filled those shelves in haphazard rows.
Bastion let out an exasperated sigh and choked on the gathering smoke. “You have any hints as to what the thing looks like?”
I racked my brain for any clue but had nothing to offer. “It’s important. That’s all I’ve got.”
Bastion grumbled and pulled the first book from the shelf on the far right of the room. “We’re going to suffocate before we find this stupid thing.”
The floor around the hole was no longer smoldering. Tongues of flame licked the air as the carpet caught fire and burned at an unsettling pace.
If I was the Burning Codex, where would I hide?
Any of these books could be the one, and I had no idea how I’d even tell if I had the right one. None of the books had titles on their spines, and every page was filled with row after row of indecipherable symbols instead of the clean text I’d seen in Wenderly’s journal.
I guess it was too much to hope for the book to have Burning Codex stamped into its spine.
Frustrated, I tossed the books I’d already examined onto the floor. Their covers scorched, then burned. The leather curled as heat consumed it. The vellum pages crinkled and blackened, then became ash and floated into the air.
The obvious solution to my problem smacked me right in the face.
“Burn them.” I scooped up an armful of books off the shelf in front of me and tossed them all onto the growing fire without a second glance. “Burn them all.”
Bastion looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “Are you nuts?”
I tossed another armful of books onto the pyre. “Maybe. Just do it. Burn those books while I work on getting this door opened before we’re cooked.”
The fire gave me light to examine the complex lock mechanism, but the smoke made my eyes water, and the lack of air made it hard to think. It wouldn’t be long before smoke inhalation took its toll. I needed to get the hell out of the library before it was too late.
Bastion threw books on the fire, and the flames grew at a frightening rate. The room was turning into an oven, and we were going to be roasted if this didn’t work.
Fortunately, I’m one hell of a thief.
SUCCESS! The nefarious lock succumbs to your wily skills.
Spokes erupted from the lock’s outer edge, and brass arcs unfolded from their ends. In the blink of an eye, the lock had transformed itself into a wheel.
It took three revolutions before it stopped and the bolt shot free of the door frame with a solid click.
But it still wouldn’t budge.
“That’s all of them,” Bastion said. The pile of books he'd created was almost as tall as he was and covered most of the floor.
The tomes burned merrily, their covers burning away to reveal pages that blackened and curled like the legs of dead spiders.
Flames roared through the pile of books at an unnatural speed. In the blink of an eye, all of the antique books had burned away to greasy black ash.
Except for one.
“Yes,” I hissed, pumping my fist in triumph.
The Burning Codex, as its name suggested, wasn’t just any old book. Its cover was fashioned from scaly hide, which glowed bright red but didn’t burn.
I kicked the book away from the fire, and the glow died at once. It didn’t even smoke against the unburned carpet. I tested it with one gloved finger, and it had already cooled.
“Got it!” I shouted and shoved it into my backpack, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Whoa, nice work figuring that out.” Bastion said with a glint of admiration in his eyes.
I didn't want to admit it, but impressing my brother was the highlight of my day. “Thanks. Let's get the hell out of here.”
Bastion shoved the door, but it didn’t move. “I thought you unlocked this?”
“I did,” I said, and choked on a lungful of smoke. “It’s plastered over on the other side, remember? Bash it down, big man.”
Bastion reared back, then slammed his shoulder into the center of the door—and the center of the arcane symbol on the door’s surface.
Whatever arcane trap guarded the door, Bastion set it off. Thunder cracked inside my head, lightning coursed through my body, and everything turned white and numb.
Then the pain set in, and I only wished I was dead.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I woke to the taste of blood and ashes. I felt like I’d been dumped in an ice bath and set on fire at the same time. My skin was too hot, and my bones were too cold. I couldn’t stop shivering, and if it weren’t for Bastion dragging me away from the hole in the floor, I would’ve fallen headfirst into the fire we’d started in the room below.
My muscles wouldn’t hold still. They jittered under my skin and left me too unsteady to stand. “What the hell was that?”
Bastion twitched. “Some kind of trap.”
That was putting it mildly. The lightning blast left me with less than a third of my full health. I was also afflicted with a trio of negative modifiers.
MANA ARC TRAP TRIGGERED
DAMAGE: 25 health
STATUS EFFECTS
SHAKEN: -10 penalty to all skill checks. (Duration 10 seconds)
SHOCKED: - 10 to all Dexterity-based skill checks. (Duration 10 minutes)
BURNED: -10 maximum health. (Duration 1 hour)
Status effects can be healed with proper medical attention, the correct healing herbs, or magic.
Ouch, ouch, and really ouch. With no way to heal myself, those status effects stung. Shaken would pass soon enough, but having my Dexterity-based skills crippled and my health cut by a third was harsh. Bastion didn’t look like he was in any better shape.
“Give it to us!” The woman’s jagged voice called from below. I could hear her over the crackling fire I’d set, but her voice was muffled, so she must still be waiting outside the burning room. The clear leader of our enemies, she seemed to think she could order us around, too. “You don’t have much time before the fire burns the whole house down. Toss it out the window and run for your lives.”
Maybe I would’ve done just that if I’d had the option. But this room had no windows and the door, though unlocked, was still sealed by the same magic that had flash fried Bastion and me.
I struggled back to my feet and tottered away from Bastion on stiff legs. I felt my way around the edges of the room for any breaks or openings we could escape through. The walls behind the bookshelves weren’t wood or stone, but the same dark metal as the door. The only way out of the smoke-filled deathtrap was through the hole in the floor or the door, and both of those options were as likely to leave us dead as not.
“We don’t have it!” Bastion called down. “Whatever it is, we don’t have it.”
It was a good bluff, but I didn’t think they’d buy it. The leader of their merry band had seemed convinced we had the stupid book even before we had it.
“You lie! Give us the Codex, and you’re free to go. There’s no profit in killing each other.”
My circumnavigation of the room complete, I crouched in front of the sigil engraved on the door. Tracers of electricity still sparked within its grooves, waiting to lash out at anyone foolish enough to attempt opening the door. I considered breaking the pattern somehow, but that seemed like a good way to set it off, too.
“I don’t know how we get out of here,” I confessed.
Bastion stared hard at the door. “I could take another shot at kicking it down, but we might not survive another round of shock the monkeys.”
The longer I stared at the sigil, the more I sensed something hidden just beneath its surface. It wriggled at the edges of my vision but vanished when I tried to focus on it.
It was a trap. A magical one, sure, but still a trap.
I turned my Thief’s Eyes to the door.
The arcane symbol snapped into sharp focus and revealed its underlying magical pattern.
A central hexagon glowed vivid blue. Thick circles surrounded each of its six corners, and the one on the bottom left burned more brightly than the rest.
The wiggling I’d seen at the edges of my vision resolved into a thin blue thread that was anchored to the pattern’s glowing circle by a sparking knot.
I traced the electric blue line away from the door, across the room, to the northwestern corner. It terminated where the walls and ceiling met. Something glittered up there, and I clambered up the bookshelves to get a closer look.
The flat head of a metal spike jutted a half-inch from the corner. The metal was blackened by years of neglect and the recent addition of soot to the room, but part of it still gleamed. A simple, jagged depiction of a lightning bolt stood out from the dark metal, shiny as the day it was made.
There was a pattern underlying that symbol, as well, and it was connected to the pattern on the door by that same, electric blue line. Sparks gather
ed on the surface of the spike, then flowed down the thread to the door in steady pulses.
The spike gathers up lightning and feeds it to the symbol on the door. The symbol stores up the juice. If anyone touches the door, the symbol discharges the power it’s stored up.
“If I disrupt the power leading to the door, then the trap door won’t be able to shock the shit out of us,” I muttered, lost in thought.
Bastion coughed. “What’s that?”
“I figured it out,” I coughed back. Smoke filled the room, and my stamina was dropping at a slow, but steady, pace. My health wouldn’t be far behind it. “I’m going to try something. If it works, we’re outta here.”
Bastion hacked up a wad of soot and spat it on the smoldering floor. “And if it doesn’t?”
“Been nice knowing you.”
I held my breath and extended my right index finger toward the thread.
The hairs on my arm stood up, and a faint tingle ran through my hand. It was strange, but it didn’t hurt. Time for the next step.
I closed my fist around the thread.
My head didn’t explode, and a bolt of lightning didn’t blow me out of my boots. The thread pulsed and twitched in my hand, but it didn’t hurt me. It was nice to know the thread just transmitted the power, it didn’t conduct it into anyone brave, or stupid, enough to fiddle with it.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered and gave the thread a hard yank away from the spike.
A shower of blue sparks spewed from the spike and into my face. Pinpricks of pain erupted across my cheeks and forehead, and my vision went white.
FAILURE! Your attempt to tamper with the primal forces of magic backfires!
You have damaged the thread you were trying to weave.
Damage: 5 health
