Hard Mettle

by John Hook

  “You good?” Blaise teased. “You usually only handle one goal at a time.”

  “I’ll make a list.”

  2.

  “So, where shall we start?”

  I held the crude map unfolded in front of me. It was made on what once may have been bark but had been softened to the consistency of parchment and could be folded. There were actually several maps drawn on it in charcoal. They were of the interiors of buildings, made by Azar, who made more frequent trips over to the old city than we did. Izzy and I had been brought here by Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who then disappeared. They were good at knowing when they needed to show up again. And where. I had no idea how they knew that. Maybe it was the psychic connection Saripha maintained with us.

  The old city was a small area compared to the rest of Antanaria’s spread, but it had clearly belonged to a ruling elite at one time. Most of it was similar in architecture to Ohnipoor, and like Ohnipoor it was largely deserted. However, there were three palaces. I call them palaces because their interiors were extravagant and called that idea immediately to mind. Well, I had only seen one of them, but Azar confirmed the others were similar. However, they were more vertical than you think of when you picture a palace, almost like royal skyscrapers. Not that tall, but tall enough.

  The first palace, the one I had been in before, was the largest. It housed the dream chamber at the bottom and had the sleeping Guido on a throne on the roof. It was maybe ten stories, although it had been made for a much larger being, like the one whose form Guido was trapped in. The creature was called a Magister and these giants must once have been the rulers. Thus there were only seven floors.

  The two other palaces were smaller, maybe eight stories by human measurement. According to Azar’s maps they had five floors.

  “Do we know what we’re looking for?” Izzy asked. He probably knew the answer.

  “Do I ever?”

  We were pressed back against the wall of one of the smaller palaces, in the shadows. I had my gaze fixed on the sky, watching the horsemen make slow lazy circles around the main palace. Around Guido. I really had no idea what kind of beings those were. I had seen them much closer when they obliterated Rockvale. The riders were an almost translucent pale white with pulsating red lights shining through their skin in the patterns of bones. Their eyes were also red and their hair, both men and women, was like fire, including the men’s beards. The horses that they rode, if that’s what they were, were even stranger. They had the shape of wild stallions; however, under their translucent skin it appeared as if they had dark and angry clouds with lightning arcing through them. Their eyes were midnight black with a thin line of gold around them. The horses seemed to float and swim more than gallop or trot. Each rider carried a staff with a glowing tip that was an energy weapon.

  I didn’t know what their perception was like, but I just didn’t think they were scanning the streets. If they were after me, they knew I’d be back for Guido and they could afford to wait. It did seem odd to me that the forces in Hell so often choose to wait for me. How hard would it be to come after me and end the threat once and for all? The only explanation seemed to be the blue power. As long as I had it, they were reluctant to eliminate me. They had tried about everything to contain me. I didn’t do contained very well.

  “We know what’s in the center tower.” I looked down at the map. “Let’s try the smaller tower on the left. We’re less exposed crossing to it.”

  We dashed across, watching for street-level movement, and ducked into a dark doorway. It was impossible to see what was inside. If anyone had been lurking there, there would have been very little we could have done. Luckily there wasn’t. We waited a few moments for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. It was typical for these ancient architectures. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture. Buildings seemed to be more hollowed out than constructed, with surfaces and curving benches cut into the walls. In the center would be a staircase, usually of the spiral variety, befitting the generally curved aesthetic. As such, these buildings were easy to navigate even in dim light, which was good for us because not a lot of light reached the windows of this one.

  The other lucky thing for us was that the powers that be here didn’t put a lot of energy into guarding things. They had Shirks posted on the other side of the wall and they were clearly guarding Guido with the horsemen, but other than that they depended more on locking things away.

  Since I seemed to be hesitating, Izzy spoke up.

  “So, we are exploring, hoping to find something that can help us free Guido? Or are we just killing time?”

  “Probably both.”

  “I don’t get it,” Izzy confessed.

  “There’s a lot I don’t get about this place. What don’t you get?”

  “I don’t know how long we’ve been here, but it’s been quite a while. Surely Saripha had some idea of what she was going to try to rescue Guido. Instead, we just sort of seem to be building a new life here.”

  I shrugged, although it may have been too dim for Izzy to notice.

  “You know every so often she has us bring her some of the people that gamble in her casino?”

  “Yeah, she picks out certain ones and makes sure they do a little better at the tables.”

  “I think she’s been looking for certain kinds of information. At first, I thought she was just trying to get a better line on how things work. There was that, too. But she started going after very specific information. She got wind of something, but she keeps most of this to herself.”

  “What do you think she’s after?”

  “A way to free Guido would be my guess.”

  “But you don’t know what she has specifically homed in on?”

  “We’ll know when it’s time,” I replied.

  “She’s a lot more patient than I would be if I lost Anika.”

  “Saripha is a lot more everything than any of us. But I get you have to do it right. Just like I have to wait to do anything about Rox.”

  “How is that going for you?” I could hear the concern in Izzy’s voice.

  “Until I figure out how not to have a big fight with her over the sword, there’s not much I can do. Tweedledee and Tweedledum check on the progress of the sword. For now, there’s no hurry.”

  “You avoided my question.”

  “It is what it is. Let’s worry about what we’re doing right now.”

  Izzy let out air. “Where shall we go?”

  “Azar has two things marked as points of interest on the map.” I couldn’t actually see the map, but I had studied it long and hard. “One is at the top and the other down below us, in the basement.”

  “Your pick.”

  “Let’s start with the basement. It’s closer, and I have an idea about what it is.”

  We crossed to the staircase that descended in a wide curve. It was even darker down there so I raised the blue illumination of my body to give us some light. We picked our way carefully across to the far wall where there was a boxy, dark shape.

  “Bingo,” Izzy said before I had a chance to.

  It was one of the doors we had found in several different locations. They were constructed of a material that was similar to petrified wood and formed a vault door with a large wheel that had to be cranked to open it. The problem was that the releasing mechanism wasn’t simply mechanical but involved energy patterns. I had discovered that I could merge my power with them and will these doors open. They had always opened underground tunnels that supposedly connected the great cities of Hell, although they were rarely used anymore.

  “Let’s see what’s on the other side of this one.”

  I gripped the wheel. I tried turning it, but I knew it wouldn’t budge so I only gave it half an effort. I pulled inside myself and began controlling my breathing as Saripha had taught me. I could feel the ripples of energy fanning out from the door, and then I felt my own energy flow out lazily and begin picking up the same harmonics. I felt the energies merge and swirl in a da
nce and finally the wheel started turning in my hand.

  There was a deep sound of sliding bars and then the door popped open, releasing air into the room. I wondered how ancient that trapped air really was.

  Izzy and I stepped through into the cave passage. I raised the illumination of my body a bit more. It was typical of these passages we had seen. They were mostly natural rather than carved out, meaning that there was a honeycomb of caverns under this world’s surface. The formations were what you would expect from years of natural sediment deposits. The doors were simply placed wherever the caverns came into the cities rather than building a door and then digging a tunnel. Occasionally there were short lengths of carved rock to bridge two different cavern systems.

  I was always interested in checking out these cavern tunnels. I knew they were eventually going to come in handy if we ever could reunite Zaccora and needed to move a large force around without being detected. But then again, you’ve seen one tunnel, you’ve seen them all, and we weren’t planning to hike to Zaccora right now. I started to turn back but Izzy grabbed my shoulder.

  “Quentin. Hold up.”

  “What?” I turned. In the blue glow I gave off, I could see that Izzy was pointing, but I didn’t really need to. I now saw what he was pointing at. There was a light in the distance and it didn’t seem to be coming from above, so it wasn’t likely some kind of vent in the ceiling.

  “More fire monkeys?” Izzy asked.

  “Doesn’t look orange enough. Definitely not lava, either.”

  We crept closer, trying to be as quiet as we could. We listened but couldn’t hear any sounds. Finally, we came to an unexpected end of the tunnel as the earth just fell away. We were standing at the edge of a large open pit. It looked a bit like a canyon because the sides weren’t smooth and standing rocks and other formations had appeared. There were also signs of charring and sections of rock that seemed glassy smooth, suggesting great heat. The formation was vast, and if the tunnel continued in the far darkness on the other side of the chasm, we couldn’t see it.

  “Guess we won’t be invading Antanaria using this tunnel.” Izzy had clearly made the same observation I had.

  I looked straight down, though I had to hang on to the side of the tunnel and go on one knee to not be overcome with vertigo, Yes, I could levitate, but old instincts die hard. The drop was sheer and very deep. I couldn’t say how deep, but it looked like something greater than 7,000 feet, probably much greater. At the bottom was the source of the light. From this distance, it looked like a very thin, irregular slit. I made the mistake of looking at it directly and for the next ten minutes or so everywhere I looked there was a slit of blue or greenish color blocking my vision.

  “You have any theories about what we’re looking at, Izzy?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “I could float down and take a look.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “I won’t?”

  “Not now, at least.”

  “Why won’t I? Exploring is how I find stuff out.”

  “You won’t because we don’t yet know how or if it figures into anything we are trying to do.”

  “When has that ever stopped me?”

  Izzy laughed.

  “You won’t because if you get into trouble there is no way I or anyone else could scale the sides to rescue you.”

  “Eyes on the prize?”

  “For now.”

  I looked at Izzy. “I need to know what that is.”

  I could see his smile in the blue light.

  “I’m a physicist. You think it’s easy for me to ignore that. Let’s focus on Guido and see if we can learn what that is before we plunge down there.”

  “Maybe Guido knows.”

  “There you go!” Izzy pulled me back from the edge.

  We made our way back to the tower. There was something bothering me about what we had just seen. I felt something deep within me. I couldn’t decide what it was exactly, but I knew the feeling would keep tugging at me, pulling me back to the pit.

  I tried to push the feeling away and once we were back in the tower it seemed to lower in intensity. We made our way to the top floor to find out what the other thing Azar had marked was. I wondered whether Azar had marked the door in the basement or if he had known about the pit and was marking the door as the path of the pit. I’d ask him, but he probably wouldn’t give me an answer.

  We wound up the stairs. Like the other tower we had seen, the stairs had been created for larger beings and it was a little more challenging to climb them than normal stairs. We didn’t explore, but nothing on the floors we passed grabbed our attention. They were dark and probably empty.

  When we reached the top, we found ourselves in a small foyer with further entry to the floor blocked by a door. This was not an ordinary door, not even like the doors to the underground tunnels. It was massive, maybe fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide. It had no handles or any other means to open it by physical mechanics. It was comprised of squares that would blink on and back off with different colors and textures. Sometimes curious symbols appeared in the squares, but they looked like letters from no alphabet I had ever seen. At other times they looked like they could be pictographs, though I had no idea what they were depicting.

  “Wow,” Izzy muttered with reverence.

  “You think it says ‘Eat at Joe’s’?”

  Izzy walked up and began running his hands over the door.

  “If there is a way to open this door, I can’t find it. No hand grip, no keyhole, no dial or levers.”

  “Let’s see if it’s a purely energy thing.”

  Again, I turned my attention inward and connected with my breathing and then with the energy flowing within me. I reached out and placed my hands on the door. I felt the energy of the door, but it was unlike anything else I had experienced. I tried to merge my energy with it but every time I did it changed into a different pattern, a different set of harmonics. Finally, I had to stop and back away.

  “What happened?” Izzy asked.

  “I’m not sure. It keeps changing. It’s like a very complex puzzle that I can’t solve.”

  “Must be something pretty important back there.”

  “Be my guess. That’s why we are going to get in there.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “We know someone who is very good at puzzles.”

  3.

  “Find anything interesting?” Anika asked as she gave Izzy a tender peck on the cheek. Anika stayed mostly in male form in Antanaria. It was easier to give off a certain hard toughness that was almost currency in this place and Hell in general. Anika, who mostly used the same name for all of her forms, was a transgender—or maybe the term should be multi-gender. She used the power that our glamour bodies allowed us—to appear as we thought of ourselves—to slide easily in and out of different forms, including exotic forms like one might see in cosplay. I was pretty sure some of the regulars to our casino thought we had four or five more people in our party than we actually had.

  “Define interesting.”

  “Usually anything that attracts your attention.” Anika winked at me.

  “Then, yes. We found a couple of hidden things.”

  “Were there ‘keep out’ signs?”

  “If there had been I probably would’ve broken in by now.”

  “I think they were hoping he wouldn’t notice.” Izzy grinned.

  We sat at an empty table near the entrance. It was hot and unpleasantly humid, as it often was here. It had something to do with being surrounded by desert but having a river flowing through the city. The river must come up from somewhere underground, but we had never managed to find its source, although it hadn’t been made a priority. In the casino we had flanged woven fans. Since there was no power in Hell other than the alien technology we had seen at the pain farms, we had people who were willing to operate them by pulling ropes in exchange for gambling credit.

  “So what did you find?�
� Anika pressed.

  “Don’t know. We found a light source that wasn’t lava buried deep in a cavern. That would suggest a power source.”

  “Which suggests the alien technology,” Izzy added.

  “Suggests?” Anika looked from Izzy to me. “You didn’t explore it?”

  “Actually, I wanted to.” I rolled my eyes for emphasis.

  “Surprisingly, he listened to me. It was at the bottom of a very deep gorge with sheer sides. He can float, but if anything had happened to him we wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.”

  “And he agreed?”

  “I can be reasonable.”

  “Since when?”

  What had been a relaxed conversation was interrupted by chaos. The ornate doors on the Lotus Queen casino flew open forcefully and banged against the interior pillars on either side. People shouted in panic and fled to other chambers and exits. Without adding to either the noise or the confusion, both Izzy and Anika had stood and moved off on either side of the casino entrance with bows strung and shafts ready to fly. It was more like choreography than challenge, but there would be no mistake about the quickness or accuracy of their shots if it came to that.

  I arose from my chair as an almost guttural shout was barked from the entrance. If they were words, I couldn’t tell, but the anger and intent were clear. I stepped into the middle of the casino entrance hall, now deserted. I was calm and centered.

  In the doorway stood a large blue man, though a much deeper, almost purplish, blue than me. He was a big man, standing almost seven feet tall. He was as bulky as he was tall with bulging, taut muscles that rippled with the tension being bottled up inside, anxious for release. Wearing a tightly wrapped animal skin tunic and hair pulled back into a ponytail, he looked like some unbelievably pumped-up TV wrestling star. However, there was also something centered in his stance and motions. Despite the initial shout, whatever that was, he was not lashing out and moved with a grace that belied his mass. He moved like royalty, someone who expected the world to simply order itself before him. His green eyes scanned the casino and finally landed on me.