by RW Krpoun
Cleaning up after the fight had taken longer than the fight itself.
Their destination was a chamber with a couple of crude tables and benches, some piles of straw for sleeping, niches hacked into the walls for storage, and a hole in the floor for a privy. It was lit by a dull yellow crystal hanging from a rusty metal loop, and stank of violent death, an uncleaned privy and unwashed bodies.
The chamber had been excavated via magical means as evidenced by the smooth stone, now much defaced with Goblin graffiti. In the northeast corner a ten-foot length of smooth corridor ended in a dark red wall that appeared to be made of some textured material with a richly-carved green disk set into its center. Unlike the rest of the area the corridor and the wall or door did not appear to have been touched by the Goblins.
“Well, there it is,” Shad jerked his chin towards the door as he scrubbed his throwing knives clean with a fistful of straw. “Derek, you’re up.”
“Yeah.” The Shadowmancer knelt at the red panel, pulling the stone bottle and the leather bag from his pouch. “I think the door is porcelain.”
“That’s odd,” Jeff observed. “What’s the green part?”
“It’s an inset disk, might be jade or something similar.” Derek ran his hands over the door. “It’s warm…getting warmer.”
“The door or the disk?”
“Both.”
“Let’s get this done,” Shad said as he inserted knives with intact charms into the scabbards tacked to the inside of his shield. “It might just get warm in cycles.”
Derek carefully removed a silk handkerchief from the bag, and dripped a light, clear oil from the stone bottle onto it. Working quickly but without haste he rubbed the oil onto the green disk.
There was a noise, the nature of which none of the Talons could later agree upon, and then the door collapsed into red dust that was swirled into the chamber by a cold gust of wind that smelled of freshly-falling snow, the Talons’ balls of light winking out as the dust reached them although the yellowing light crystal hanging from the ceiling merely swayed on its length of leather cord.
From beyond the now-empty doorway they heard the sound of a stone object crash to the floor and shatter.
Shad drew his sword. “Well, shit.”
Chapter Sixteen
Derek scrambled backwards into the chamber as the Black Talons formed into a battle line.
“Could we run?” Sam asked, fitting a lead ball into the pouch of his sling.
“Better to fight here than get tracked down in the tunnels,” Jeff sighed. “At least we might slow her down a little.”
“Maybe,” the Shadowmancer gasped as he staggered to his feet and joined them. “That wind drained my power reserve. She’s obviously a major hitter.”
“Surrender?” Sam ventured.
“That’s up to you,” Shad said. “Me, I’m not so inclined.”
“Doesn’t seem to be a viable option,” Fred agreed.
Without fanfare Fu Hao stepped into the chamber’s weak light, a slender young Asian woman who reminded Derek of the female cop on the new Hawaii Five-Oh. She wore the loose tunic, pants, and sandals he associated with coolies, except that this outfit looked like silk and was decorated with dragons and fanciful swirls of embroidered color.
Planting her hands on her hips, she surveyed the filthy chamber, the stacked Goblin corpses, and the grim-faced Black Talons with a dissatisfied look. “It took you long enough.”
The Talons gaped at her.
Shaking her head, she flipped a small plate of something into the air in the manner of someone flipping a coin and her garments became unadorned dark blue cotton. “Wait here,” she snapped and returned to the shadowy chamber beyond where the door had been. A light came into being beyond the line of sight of the doorway, and they heard another stone object shatter on the floor.
“What the hell is going on?” Jeff whispered.
“She was expecting us, or someone,” Derek whispered back. “Maybe we should stand down.”
“Might as well,” Shad sheathed his sword. “If she can change clothes with a spell we’re out-gunned. I though you said she was like Derek, Sam. A ‘mancer.”
“Sam, you were told that by Astkar, right?” Jeff pointed out.
“Yeah,” the Bard muttered.
“She doesn’t have the shoulder thing,” the shop teacher continued. “I don’t think she has a class or level. She’s old-school for this place, the old rules.”
“Why is she young?” Fred whispered. “Sam said she fought sixty campaigns in China.”
“That’s how it went-sometimes those who got directly banished came here younger and looking different, also with modified abilities,” the Bard whispered. “The old books are clear on that.”
Fu Hao emerged with a ball of light bobbing over her head and a pair of Chinese swords on a belt around her waist. She was carrying a pack by one strap, and cloth bandoliers loaded with what looked like dozens of small plates cut from tortoise shells crisscrossed her chest. “Here,” she tossed her pack to Fred. “Carry that. Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Shad asked in as polite a tone as he could manage.
“To war.” Realizing they weren’t following, she stopped and faced them. “The task is only half-done.”
“What task? We were sent here to refresh the lock on your prison,” Shad said carefully. “We aren’t even from this…world.”
“Of course you aren’t. An outlander’s touch was the only thing that could break the seal, and there haven’t been outlanders in a thousand years or more,” Fu Hao snapped.
“Ah.” Shad glanced at the others. “See, we were operating under…different assumptions.”
Fu Hao rolled her eyes. “What assumptions? Keep it brief.”
“What happened to Chinese customs of greeting…” Sam interrupted.
“A thousand years in a cell is what happened,” Fu Hao cut the Bard off. “And we are not in China, nor do I even remember how to speak Chinese. All that became as smoke when I was banished here. I never looked like this, nor could I do in China what I can do here. But I am still Fu Hao, and because of that they shall regret many things.”
“Who will?” Shad asked.
“The Council of Twelve. Follow me; we shall return to the surface-I want to see a sky again. You can pester me there.”
Uneasy, the Black Talons followed her.
Fu Hao had a large straw coolie hat hanging on the back of her pack which she donned before briskly climbing the rungs to the surface.
Shad waved the Talons back from the shaft to the surface. “OK, we have been played, and played hard. Thoughts?”
“The box opened and we have our gut stones, the exit location, and the incantation,” Derek pointed out. “That part appears to be straight-forward.”
“Which means freeing her was the job, because Astkar set the box to open when the job was done,” Jeff observed grimly.
“Maybe he didn’t know about the lock,” Sam protested.
“He had to, or the box wouldn’t have opened,” Derek shook his head. “I didn’t refresh the lock, I opened it.”
“We’re through the looking glass, boys,” Shad was angry. “We’ve been lied to since we got here. Let’s get on the surface and see what happens next. Derek, empty the contents out of the box, and then ditch the box. Just in case.”
On the surface they found Fu Hao, a loosely-woven cloth tied over her eyes, standing with her arms out flung, drinking in the sunshine and fresh mountain breeze. No one was very surprised to see Astkar approaching from upslope, dressed as he had been the last time they had seen him, with a case much like the one that housed their Chest on his back and armed with an ornately carved staff of bone or ivory going tan with age.
“Well, well,” Jeff glared at the mage. “The local representative of the Ebon Assembly.”
“To be truthful, I am effectively the entirety of the Assembly,” the mage shrugged. “But the task was in all practical senses the one you agr
eed to perform and the payment was as promised. You may go home whenever you wish.”
“How did you get here so fast?” Derek asked.
“The group before you had a more complex task than you might have thought. One part was to establish a portal here so I could come when the matter was concluded.”
“They couldn’t sort out a few Goblins and open the lock as well?” Shad asked.
“They were not of your caliber-they had been here far longer and accomplished less. I knew that sooner or later the Council would make the mistake of bringing in outlanders such as yourselves.”
“Just to clip some Goblins?”
“No. We needed warriors, men of action, not dreamers. So did the Council, for other reasons. I expected that these needs would intersect nicely.”
“I’m happy for you. Now we’re leaving.” Shad started towards their cached gear.
“Stop.” Fu Hao’s voiced cracked through the air like a Sergeant-Majors’, and the Talons instinctively halted, except for Sam, who had yet to move. “First you must listen to the truth.”
“If I remember correctly, we just rescued you from a cell,” Shad snapped, his temper getting away from him. “No need to thank us because we got paid, but we don’t owe you anything.”
“You don’t. But what do you owe your home?”
The Talons shifted uneasily. “We’re paid up,” the Jinxman said quietly. “All our dues, in a place that in your day was called Babylon.”
Fu Hao nodded. “I fought in China, before China was. Did you see the thing through to the end?”
“Our part of it, yes. We were ordinary soldiers, not a general.”
“Good. Will you serve your homeland once again? Is risking your lives too much to ask one more time?”
“What does this place have to do with our home?”
“That is the truth you need to hear.”
“We’ve heard a lot of things since we were brought here. Most have turned out to be lies.”
“I was banished here, rightly so, and I may not leave, but I will fight for my land nonetheless, for China. I may be damned, but I will stand for my home. You were banished here, unjustly so, and you may leave; will you stand for your home?”
Shad could see why she had been so good at leading troops: he had been pissed and eager to leave, but the way she said what she did reached something in him. A glance at the other Talons showed that he wasn’t alone. “Say what you will.”
Fu Hao gestured, and Astkar stepped forward. “Fu Hao was imprisoned in the mountain. That is true. You were banished here by the Council, subject to twenty year’s duration, unless the conditions of your binding are met or you trick the bindings with the harnesses and incantation, which is true.”
“The truth you need to hear is the why. We have always been aware of your world, while your world forgot about us. The founders of the Council of Twelve were the banished who nurtured a hatred for the old world, the world of the banishers; they vowed revenge upon the old world. Others who had been banished, like Fu Hao, accepted what was done and intended to make new lives here. The Great Field is a legacy of the war between the two factions, a war which broke the great powers.”
“Long ago the Council of Twelve began to study the Great Field, and they discovered that the revenants were essentially outlanders. They discovered the secret of the revenant origins, and the truth behind certain old legends, and with generations of work they established what some of the first banished knew: that there can be roads between your world and ours.”
“They offered freedom to Fu Hao for her help, an offer which my Lady refused. The offer made my Lady aware of their efforts, and what the Council did not know was that her prison had windows, small ones, but sufficient to find and recruit those who shared her beliefs. Very few at any one time, but sufficient to follow the Council’s actions.”
“The Ebon Assembly,” Derek said.
“More name than we warranted, but yes. There is much to this of an arcane nature, there are endless details to a plan that has been developed by generations of long-lived mages, but you need not bother with any but the salient points. It was not your minor beliefs which re-shaped our world, but the Council discovering and exploiting those beliefs, such as they were. These minor beliefs opened the roads, to use a metaphor, between our world and yours, and changing the laws of learning in our world made the roads…stronger, to put it in simpler terms. From there they brought in the first seven outlanders, only to discover that they could not control them. They adjusted the roads based upon their errors and brought in more outlanders, telling them the purpose was to kill the seven intruders, but in reality the Council needed outlanders coming here, living here, and dying here.”
“Why?” Jeff asked.
“Because to use a metaphor the Council needed regular travel upon the roads between our world and yours, travel back and forth.”
“That explains why they weren’t overjoyed when the gunpowder tagged two intruders,” Shad nodded. “And why they give incoming outlanders no real help: they want to maintain a specific number of outlanders here.”
“Just so,” Astkar nodded. “Both ordinary outlanders such as yourself and the more powerful intruders.”
“I suppose that’s why they were angry that we came up with a workable way to kill revenants,” Fred shrugged. “And taught others the trick.”
“Yes. And why they have forced unarmed commoners into the Great Field since,” Astkar noted. “The presence of the revenants in sufficient numbers has an effect in the arcane equation.”
“So what is the bottom line?” Shad asked. “Why all these years of great effort? What does the Council of Twelve want?”
“In a nutshell, they desire revenge. They wish to send something back along the roads to punish your world for what it did to their ancestors.”
“Thousands of years later and they’re still holding a grudge,” Jeff shook his head. “Who are these guys, the Irish?”
“What kind of revenge?” Derek asked.
“On this, I am not clear, but they have created something, a disease, a dark attacker which will infect the slave-artifacts of your world and smite them mightily, so mightily that their ilk will never rise again.”
“Slaves?” Sam wondered.
“There’s more slaves now than there were in the 1860s, just not in the USA,” Shad shrugged. “They call it human trafficking, but its still slavery.”
“They’re talking about computers,” Derek snapped. “Slave-master linkage? Database replication? They’re planning on sending a magically-based computer virus back.”
“Oh, crap-they’re basing it on the revenants,” Sam snapped his fingers. “Undead creatures which create mirrors of themselves when they kill a creature-the virus won’t just corrupt programs and documents, it will convert them into copies of itself.”
“What do you bet it can move like the revenants can move? Outside physical laws,” Shad said glumly. “It could jump into stand-alone systems.”
“The Electronic Age would die forever,” Sam sighed.
“It would create a new Dark Ages-a virus that acts that way, in defiance of natural law, would knock out everything electronic. The world would come crashing down. It would be worse than an EMP strike,” Derek threw up his arms. “Game over.”
“So, that’s the truth,” Shad said slowly. “And I expect you are going to try and stop them?”
“Yes,” Astkar said blandly.
“What do you need with us? We’re sixth level.”
“All that the Council has accomplished is bound up in a grand device, a device which has taken them generations to design and decades to construct. A device which is nearing the stage whereupon it can send the dark attacker to your world.”
“And we have to destroy it,” Fred shook his head. “One campaign hook after another.”
“We need your help to close the roads,” Astkar corrected the barbarian. “To isolate the device from them.”
“Wha
t good will that do?” Shad shook his head. “A hundred years here is fifty days in our world. We knock the thing out and the Council’s kids hit us less than two months later. That is not a solution.”
“It is a solution. The roads between our worlds exist only if held open, and once something has been done, it cannot be done again.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just as once you have been returned to your world you cannot be banished here again, so are the roads between our worlds: if those roads cease to be, they may never be reopened. New roads would have to be forged, using new methods.”
“Remember the Greek legend, the guy that went into Hades to get his girlfriend?” Derek nodded, enthused. “She looked back, and had to stay. He couldn’t go back for her.”
“So closing these roads stops the Council’s plot?” Shad was unconvinced.
“The term ‘road’ is a metaphor. When they are severed, the changes to our world based upon the Council’s modification of your minor belief system will cease, and all outlanders will be returned home.”
“The level system will be gone,” Derek grinned.
“Yes, although few people will notice at first. Knowledge will go back to experiences and effort, but with one exception. Or more to the point, twelve exceptions: the Council members have tied their powers to the roads. This act has allowed them to reach great power, but it means that when the roads stop, they only have what they learned, which is minimal.”
“What about you?”
“At the advice of my Lady I have acquired my powers solely through study and practice, slow methods but ones which will survive the closure of the roads.”
“What about the revenants?” Shad asked. “Will closing the roads affect them?”
“No, they have a different method. Since the Council originally exploited that method to start their undertaking, when the roads close that method is forever barred to them as well.”
