by DB King
The cellar, Marcus realized. That was where the magic dust would be, he was sure of it. An underground cellar was the perfect place for magic to happen—it was private, secure, and with only the one entrance, it was easily guarded.
Marcus moved silently, drawing a long, thin tube from a fold in his well-fitted black cloak. He drew a small dark thorn, which glistened with a thick liquid, from a pouch at his belt. The widow’s tear poison—so called because the victim bled from his eyes before dying—was a cruel one, but swift. A man pricked with a poisoned dart was paralyzed. His blood would leak from his eyes as he suffocated, his muscles no longer able to work his lungs.
Not a pleasant way to go, but needs must. Marcus wanted to get to his loot, and this man stood in his way.
He slipped the thorn into the tube, taking care not to scratch his fingers with the point of the dark projectile. He raised the blowpipe up to his lips and fired with a practiced puff of air.
The guard looked up when he heard the sharp hiss of Marcus’s breath. But it was too late. The thorn wedged itself in his neck, and immediately the man stiffened, hands clutching at his throat as his muscles locked up.
Marcus left his hiding place and sprinted down the corridor. The guard made a strangling noise as Marcus reached him, but Marcus had a dagger in his hand, and before the guard could make another sound, the dagger came up and slammed into his chest, the razor-sharp point punching through leather, mail, and flesh to find the heart.
Marcus flipped the guard onto his back as blood began to soak the man’s jerkin and leak from his sightless eyes. Swiftly, he dragged the guard’s body up the corridor to the first room. He listened for a moment, then shouldered the door open and glanced in. A study, dark and empty. Marcus dumped the body into the gap behind a low sofa. No one would find the guard there until morning.
And Marcus would be long gone by then.
He was about to shove the sofa back into place when something caught his eye. A jeweled dagger glinted on the guard’s belt. Marcus knelt and cut the man’s leather belt to free the dagger along with its wood and leather sheath.
It was a nice piece of work. Black ivory was carved into a comfortable handgrip and topped with a pommel of red crystal that glowed faintly. Red and green light shimmered along the blade’s folded steel. The edge looked sharp enough to shave with.
He’d promised himself that he was only here for the magic dust, but this dagger was too nice a piece to pass up. It was rare, too, that was clear. The workmanship was beautiful, and the hard ivory of the handle was worn with many years of use.
Too nice to leave with a corpse, Marcus thought, glancing at the swiftly cooling body of the guard. He attached the dagger to his belt, heaved the sofa back into place to hide the guard, and pressed on.
Going back to the corridor, he was pleased to see that not a drop of blood had stained the carpet. He looked within himself for regret for killing the guard, but there was none. The guard was a mercenary, paid to fight and to accept the risk of death in his master’s service. The Bloody Hand were notoriously vicious in battle, and this man had probably done worse things than killing in his days.
I’d have felt worse about killing the dog, Marcus thought, glad that he’d not been obliged to harm the docile animal.
The door was warded, and Marcus felt the warm rush of satisfaction as his spell increased in potency from breaking the ward.
Spell: Charm and Disarm Level 4
Level increase: 2%
Progress to Level 5: 52%
The spells increased in potency fairly slowly, particularly this one, since it was fairly advanced already. Marcus calculated that it took roughly four wards disarmed to gain a 2% increase, but that was hard to say for sure because it depended on the strength of the ward.
That last one had been a good one, and he felt relieved that his spell had been enough to disarm it. To be truthful, breaking the ward spells was probably the most unreliable part of his plan. There was no way to tell in advance how strong the Diremage’s ward spells were likely to be.
Still, Marcus had thought it through and concluded that it was worth the risk. The Diremage was buying magic dust in bulk. Why? If he were an immensely powerful mage already, why would he have need of the dust? Not to sell—his wealth was as legendary as his miserly hoarding of it. No, Marcus calculated that Diremage Xeron was buying magic dust in quantity because he wanted to level up fast.
A man who sought to use his wealth to buy shortcuts was likely not a man who had put a great deal of effort into increasing ward spell levels. Ward spells were neither flashy or prestigious, and a man with Xeron’s arrogance and riches would be unlikely to put careful effort into unimpressive spells.
So Marcus had hoped.
By contrast, Marcus had diligently put time and effort into developing his Charm and Disarm spell, and now that had paid off.
He held his hands over the padlock and muttered, “Ethereal Key.”
The spell’s power coursed through him, and the pins inside the lock clicked back as if pressed by a key. The well-greased lock popped open silently. Marcus slipped the bar back, pushed the door open, and stepped through into the darkness beyond.
Spell: Ethereal Key Level 6
Level increase: 1%
Progress to next level: 34%
The Ethereal Key spell, already at level 6 from many years of use, hardly leveled up any further, but Marcus barely noticed. He was on the cellar steps now, making his way down carefully through the pitch darkness. When he reached the bottom of the steps, he stood completely still, listening, until he was content that he was alone.
Practice had given him an instinct for dark spaces. From the feel of the air around him, he judged that he was in a small space. Experimentally, he let his hand fall gently against his leather belt. The sound fell flat, without any suggestion of an echo. So, not only a small space, but a small space filled with things to muffle the sound.
He crouched, touching the floor and feeling stone flags. Groping outward, he contented himself that the floor was stone for at least six feet all around him.
Working quickly now, he drew out the flint and tinder he always carried, then huddled over them to strike a spark onto a little ball of dried linen fibers. On his second try, he got a spark which quickly developed into a flame. He lit a black candle and blew out his little pile of kindling.
Marcus stood and looked around.
The orange light of the candle showed him a long, low room with a floor of big stone flags and walls piled high with stores. Shelves were stacked with dusty bottles, and some chests had been rusted shut. Stacks of scrolls decayed in one corner.
But at the far end of the cellar, there was a stack of four crates next to a big black table. Unlike the rest of the cellar’s contents, the crates did not look at all dusty or worn. They looked, in fact, as if they had only just arrived.
Jackpot.
He moved swiftly toward the boxes, shielding his candle flame with one hand. As he approached, the black table caught his attention. It was no ordinary table. It was cut from obsidian, and his candlelight glowed and reflected back at him from countless facets in the carefully carved decorations that ran all over its surface.
An enchanting table.
Standing over it, Marcus gazed in fascination at the carved runes and inlaid red crystals that were all over the table. But something else caught his eye: a stain on the black surface.
Holding his candle up, Marcus leaned forward to get a closer look, and a shiver ran over him. The table was stained with dried blood.
What the hell have you been doing down here, Xeron? he thought uneasily. But there was no time to wonder. It would soon be first light, and Marcus wanted to be well away from the manse by then. Whatever horrors the Diremage was up to were no concern of his.
He turned to the crates, pulling out his old dagger—the new one he’d taken from the guard was too fancy for opening wooden crates. There were four boxes, three smaller ones and one large
one. Marcus took a step toward the boxes and then froze as a sound cut through the silence of the cellar.
A sniff, then a choking sob.
“What the…” he said out loud but stopped himself. A sudden burst of weeping filled the cellar. It was a woman, and it was coming from the crates.
Marcus took two steps backward. His hand shook, and he cursed his own nerves and the instinct that had made him talk out loud. What the hell was going on here? Was this some spell? Some trick to deceive him?
He cast Ward Detect but found nothing. The crying continued, a hopeless, distraught sobbing in the voice of a young woman. It cut through him and found his heart, and pity welled up in him like blood from a wound. He felt sudden tears prickle in his own eyes; the voice sounded so desolate.
Get a grip, he thought severely, blinking hard. That was not like him. He stepped up to the box, holding the knife. No doubt about it: the crying was coming from inside the big crate.
What could he do? The smaller crates probably held the magic dust, and yet the woman’s crying was getting louder. If it kept up, it might carry up the stairs and alert a passing servant.
“Quiet, please!” he hissed, and the voice stopped suddenly.
There was a sniff. “Please…” a small voice said. “Please don’t hurt me…”
“I’m not going to hurt you, but please, don’t make a noise.”
There was a pause, then the voice came again, quiet, but sounding defiant. “If you don’t let me out, I will make a noise,” it said. “I’ll scream, I will. I’ll scream as loud as I can.”
“All right, all right,” Marcus said. “Just keep quiet and I’ll let you out. Hold on…”
He stepped up to the box. It was secured by rows of iron nails holding the wooden lid down. Marcus drove his dagger in between the edge of the wooden lid and levered it up. The nearest nail came up with the wood, and he moved around, doing the same at each corner and then in the middle. While he worked, only the sound of rapid breathing came from the box. When he could get his fingers under the lid, he hauled it up and pulled it off.
The lid was awkward but not heavy. Careful not to jab himself on the nails, he laid it down on the floor and held up the candle. He peered inside the box.
Sudden magic washed over him, and for an instant he saw something vast and strange. It was as vivid as a fever dream, and for a split second that felt like an eternity, it filled his senses.
Power rushed through him. He was standing on top of a rocky cliff—or was it the battlement of a huge fortress?—and elemental powers were blazing around him. Lighting flashed from the rocks at his feet, fire flooded from his hands. A tidal wave roared across the sea and smashed up against a storm-tossed shoreline. Armies clashed below him.
He turned and saw a vista of twisting corridors and wide-open chambers. He blinked—what was he seeing?—it was like looking at a cutaway of an anthill, with hundreds of tunnels leading from room to room. In each room, there were monstrous shapes of every kind imaginable. Monsters of metal, of bone, of fire and shadow. Monsters of ice and of stone. And there were warriors, too, fighting the monsters in the chambers and in the corridors.
The vision changed again, and he saw a vision of himself, standing on top of a burning wooden wall. Below him, an army of monstrous figures charged at him, screaming. He lifted his hands and called down doom upon them.
Again, a change—gold flowed through his fingers, and he saw himself standing on top of a high tower, looking out over Kraken City. But the city was different—instead of slums, a pleasant and affluent town of wide streets and comfortable houses stretched from the Docklands to the Wastelands and up to the edge of Merchants’ Town. Well-dressed and well-fed people walked around the streets and in and out of the buildings.
And then he saw a ship. It was silver and gray, then black and red, and it cut through the waves, heading toward a shore that he didn’t recognize. White towers soared skyward, and a lighthouse burned red at the tip of an outthrust spear of rock.
The vision passed. Marcus blinked, gasping as if he’d just been doused with cold water. He was still in the cellar, still looking down into Diremage Xeron’s crate. The candle burned steadily in his left hand, and the dagger was a reassuring weight in his right.
There was an iron cage in the wooden crate, about three feet across by four feet high. The floor of the cage was lined with straw, and in the corner of the cage, huddled in a protective ball and glaring defiantly at him, was the strangest figure he had ever seen.
She was small, her head not much bigger than his clenched fist, and her body couldn’t have been more than two feet tall standing. Bright, scared green eyes were unnaturally large in her narrow face, and her skin was the dark green of wet leaves. Her nose and chin were small and human-looking, but her big ears swept up into sharp points.
She had a great mass of wild, pale hair like dry straw. Her tiny hands and feet were bare, but she wore a garment of rough-spun linen that came up to her chin and down to her ankles, leaving her stick-thin arms bare. She sat in the corner of the cage farthest away from him, her knees drawn up protectively to her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around them.
“You’re no Diremage,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but it was surprisingly mellow for such a small creature. “Who are you?”
“I’m a thief,” Marcus replied honestly.
“Have you come for me?”
“No, I came for the magic dust.”
“The dust?” A look of displeasure crossed her face, but it passed quickly. She got up. The three-foot-high crate was just tall enough for her to stand upright in. Three steps took her closer to him, and she reached up and put her tiny hands around the bars.
“Free me, please. Free me from this cage,” she said in a desperate voice.
Marcus glanced at the smaller crates. Time was passing. This was not what he had come for, but the sight of the little creature in the iron cage went to his heart. However, old instinct and long practice made him bargain anyway.
“What’s in it for me?” he asked, as if his mind was not yet made up. In truth, he knew there was no way he could walk away from her. He glanced uneasily at the bloody table next to them.
“I’ll reward you,” she said.
“What with?”
She laughed, a beautiful, tinkling sound like water over stones. “Everything I have to give. What else?”
“You’re a faerie?” Marcus asked. He’d heard of such creatures. Over in the Kingdom of Doran, there were faeries, it was said. Men made alliances with them and gained magical powers, but Marcus had never seen one.
“I’m one of the fae people, yes,” she agreed. Then she reached up into her hair and drew out a long, thin steel pin, “Here, if you free me, I will reward you. Come here, look, give me your hand.”
Marcus reached out warily, but before he could say anything, she dug the pin into her hand and drew a spot of blood. She reached through the bars and smeared the blood on the skin of his hand.
“That’s a blood-oath!” Marcus exclaimed in a whisper. The blood-oath was the most sacred promise anyone could make, and it was seldom used except for the most solemn of vows. For magic users, however, the blood-oath was even more sacred. Marcus had never seen it done, but he had heard of it.
He looked at the little creature in her ragged linen shift on the floor of rough straw. He believed her about the reward, even without the blood-oath. With it, he was certain.
“Hold still,” he said, and with one motion he heaved the iron cage up and out of the wooden box and placed it on the floor. He knelt, then held his hands over the iron lock, casting Ethereal Key.
The spell didn’t work.
“There’s something…” Marcus said, feeling toward the lock with his magic. “An enchantment. The lock is covered by a spell I’ve not seen before. I don’t know if I can break it.”
The faerie’s small hand reached through the bars to lie against Marcus’s wrist.
“Try now,” she s
aid.
He tried again. This time, his own magic seemed to flow more powerfully, a strong spell rushing along like water through a dam. The lock ward dissipated like mist in a morning wind. The lock gave a sharp click, and the door sprang open.
Spell: Ethereal Key Level 6
Level Increase: 1%
Progress to next level: 35%
Immediately, the faerie sprang out and leaped up onto the top of the cage. She seemed to grow a little, her form filling out and her hands and feet getting more substantial until she stood a little under a foot tall.
“Wow!” Marcus said. “What was that? Your magic boosted my lockpicking spell!”
She looked at him quizzically. “Well, yes, that’s the nature of a faerie alliance. Didn’t you know?” Before Marcus could reply, she continued. “Thank you for freeing me,” she said with a smile, then gestured toward the steps. “Shall we go?”
“I still need to get my loot,” Marcus said, moving to the smaller boxes.
“You’ll have no need of that now that I’m with you,” she said. “I made you a blood-oath. Don’t you believe me?”
“Oh, I believe you,” Marcus said, popping the lid off the first box and looking inside. “I believe you even without the blood-oath. I can tell when a person’s lying. You don’t get far in the life I’ve led without being able to tell truth from lies. But all the same, I came here for this, and I’m not leaving without it.”
In the box, clear pouches full of bright-colored powder were stacked up together. Each bag would have fitted comfortably in the hand. Marcus could not tell what the bags were made from. He’d never seen anything like it before. It was smooth to the touch, clear as glass but as pliable as fine leather, with a strange, slick feeling like oil in the hand.
He filled his bag with the dust pouches, while the faerie stood on the cage, hands on hips, looking on in obvious disapproval.
