Ghosts of Ascalon (guild wars)

by Matt Forbeck

  Adelbern did not finish his sentence, for the ground beneath their feet began to hum and shake. Slowly, one of the bones pulled loose from the others and arced out, over the nearby buildings, to the east. Then another leg bone, this one belonging to a charr. Then a skull. All of them were suddenly magnetic, pulled by some unseen force toward the east. The air was soon filled with the shards of bones, daggers, and clubs of skeletal remains forming a broad gray-white river.

  "What is this?" shouted Adelbern. "What sorcery is this?"

  "Kranxx," said Dougal, kneeling down next to Riona in the shade of a toppled pillar, safe from the blows. "He said he had one more trick. He must have gotten the Golem's Eye to work again."

  The ghosts themselves were confused as the bones sailed through them, leaving ripples in their spiritual form. Then one, then another, turned and started to chase the airborne rainbow of remains. These may have been their own bones in life, and perhaps they were incensed that they were being disturbed.

  "Halt!" shouted the king at his deserting followers. "I said halt! Kill these interlopers, and then we will deal with the sorcerer."

  The was a huge thumping noise, as of a building filled with kettledrums collapsing, and Adelbern, the ghostly king of Ascalon, the Sorcerer-King who had struck fear in the hearts of the charr, turned, his face contorted in shock and awe.

  Above the line of buildings behind him arose a titanic figure, humanoid at the top and serpentine at the bottom, made entirely of bones and bone fragments. It was the same shape as the tomb guardian Dougal and the others had fled, the defender of Blimm's tomb. Except it was made of every bone in Ascalon City.

  And at the back of its neck rode a small figure with a large head, gripping the bones like a rider holding on to his saddle. In his other hand he held his misshapened hat and beat the side of the creature with it.

  "I got it to work!" Dougal could hear the asura's thin voice from the height. "Praise the alchemy, I built myself a city guardian!"

  "Destroy it!" shouted Adelbern. "Destroy the abomination!"

  Now another serpent appeared, this one a thin blue-white one that snaked around the torso of the city guardian. This one was made entirely of ghosts, each crawling on the backs of others as it spiraled upward, trying to reach the small asura.

  "Kill the little monster!" shouted the ghost king. "Kill it and take its power!"

  Kranxx apparently noticed the ghosts trying climb its creature's form and kicked his great mount hard. The serpent-bodied city guardian lurched to the left, collapsing buildings in its way and scraping off hordes of ghosts. More spirits rose in their place, and Dougal could hear the king laugh.

  "You will join my kingdom!" exhorted Adelbern. "You and all the world of the living! I shall take you, and you will join my generals, and we will march on your cities and sweep them all from our path."

  "It'll be a cold day in Rata Sum!" snapped Kranxx, and the city guardian got taller now, reaching up to the overcast clouds.

  "I will command your power!" bellowed Adelbern, ghostly spittle flying from his lips.

  "I'll give you your wish!" answered Kranxx, his eyes as mad as the ghost's. "This is for Gullik! I will send you and your minions back beneath the earth!"

  And with that, the city guardian, made of all the mortal remains of the ghosts of Ascalon, lunged forward like an arcing cobra, its huge head and massive arms before it as it descended right onto Adelbern and his spire.

  "Command this, bookah!" shouted Kranxx. The late king barely had time to scream.

  And then the centuries-old remains of Ascalon City cascaded down onto the king in a tidal wave of bone. The ossified skeletons turned to dust as they hit, but they were relentless and eternal, and the rest of the body followed, pouring ton upon ton of disintegrating legs, arms, and skulls onto the king's bastion.

  It went on for what seemed to be several long minutes. And when it stopped, a huge fog bank of dust and death hung over the city. And there was no sign of ghosts, kings, or asura.

  The pair stumbled through the cloud of pulverized bone, making for the hazy pillar of light.

  "He must have pulled in every loose bone in the city," said Dougal, shaking his head.

  "And the ghosts with them," said Riona. "It will be a while if they re-form."

  "You think he got Adelbern?" asked Dougal.

  Riona shrugged. "I'm sure he drove him back. It is going to be a long time before he shows his undead face aboveground, though I bet he won't be alone when he does."

  The air was so thick, they almost toppled over the edge of the pit without seeing it. The dust cleared enough to show a huge beacon lancing from the bottom of the pit toward the sky, punching through the low-hanging clouds. Somewhere at the base were the remains of the tower where Adelbern, the Sorcerer-King, invoked the Foefire.

  Dougal reached into his pack and pulled out a length of rope. He handed it to Riona. "Find something solid to anchor this," he said. "I'm going in."

  "I'm going with you," she said.

  He shook his head as he peered down into the blackness of the well. "I need someone back here guarding my way out. Otherwise, I'm never coming out of there alive."

  Riona frowned but nodded in agreement as she went to fasten the rope around the base of a nearby statue. Dougal recognized it as a portrayal of Adelbern in his younger days, soon after he had returned from his battles with Kryta to claim the crown. It hurt to think how far the king had fallen from that hopeful age. He and the rest of the world.

  Once Riona secured the rope, Dougal swung his legs over the ridge of broken stone around the pit. He mentally overlaid Dak's map. No, Savione's map. Was that the ghostly courtier's curse: that he could not leave for the Mists until the ghostly dagger was removed? Would he return as well?

  Carefully, Dougal climbed down the side of the pit, Riona playing out the rope from above. He could feel the intensity of the light on his back, almost pushing him against the wall. If he was right, he would not have to crawl all the way to the bottom of the shaft.

  The wall was slippery as well, and slicked with moss. Dougal had a hard time finding handholds. The rope meant he didn't have to, but he didn't like to trust himself entirely to his equipment. Ropes had been known to snap, and there was always the chance the ghosts would find it and cut it loose. Of course, if that happened, the lack of a rope would likely be the least of his troubles.

  There. About halfway down the pit, a passageway delved farther into the depths. At some distant point in time it had been framed by a pair of heavy doors, but one was missing and the other canted at an angle, its wooden face reduced to splinters. Now it reminded him of the empty eye sockets of a sun-bleached skull.

  Dougal swung over to the entrance. There was a thin perch before the door. Dougal reached into his pack and fished out a small lantern on a lanyard. He lit it and hung it around his neck. He would need the light once he moved away from the Foefire.

  "I'm there!" he shouted up to Riona.

  Her head appeared at the rim of the pit. "Good. What do you see?"

  "This must have been a secret escape route for the royal family," Dougal said as he moved deeper into the foundations under the main square. "I'm surprised to see so little security."

  As the words left his lips, Dougal felt something under his foot click. He recognized the sensation right away: a pressure plate. He braced himself for something horrible.

  Dougal froze and nothing happened. All right. Then the trap would spring when the pressure was removed.

  The trap was probably meant to go off when he walked past the pressure plate. That meant that if he leaped backward, he might survive. The trap would go off where it expected him to be, and he'd be just fine.

  Or maybe whatever it was would affect the entire tunnel and kill him anyhow.

  Dougal decided that that was unlikely, if this tunnel had been made for people who had to get out of the royal chambers in a hurry. The artisans who had crafted the trap would have known that. They wouldn't have pu
t in a trap that might accidentally kill the people they were trying to protect. A smart trap maker would have it so that it would affect only people entering the catacombs this way, not leaving them.

  And it must be older than the charr invasion itself, made for earlier rulers. He could not imagine Adelbern ever using a tunnel to escape.

  Dougal threw himself backward, spinning about and throwing himself flat on his face and covering his head with his arms.

  The trap sprang as Dougal's weight left the pressure plate. Fire did not engulf the passage. The floor did not drop away. Instead, he heard something come crashing down into the passage, right where he would have been if he'd walked blithely past the trap.

  Dougal sat up and looked back up the passageway. In the light from the tiny lantern still hanging from his chest, he saw a series of spiked poles that had stabbed down from a set of concealed holes in the ceiling. These would have run him through and left him impaled on the poles until he either bled to death or died of thirst.

  Despite that, there was just enough room around the spikes for Dougal to squeeze his way past. "I'm all right!" he shouted back toward the entrance, but Riona said nothing. Perhaps she could no longer hear him.

  Dougal snaked his way through the catacomb. There were multiple passages now, some doorways crushed, others as open as spoiled tombs. The Foefire had twisted the catacombs when it struck. The darkened halls here had probably stood tall and unshaken once, but now the place was littered with bricks that had fallen from the ceiling and walls. In some sections the roof had caved in entirely, and in others it looked as if it might do so in an instant.

  Finally he reached the site of the vault on his mental map. It was a slab of stone that seemed solid enough to serve as the foundation for a castle. It showed no hinges, knobs, or other features, only a dark hole in its exact center, just a little bigger than the size of his fist.

  Five years. It had taken him five years to get to this point.

  Dougal scanned the door with his eyes and his fingertips, hoping to find some flaw in it, some hint of what he needed to do to make it swing open. Finding nothing, he knelt down, brought his light up to the hole in the middle of the door, and peered into it.

  He started cursing right away. "It's a Thief's Nightmare," he said to himself. To work this sort of lock, you have to put your entire hand into the hole, grab the handle, and then turn it in the proper sequence. If you screw it up, a blade springs out to remove your hand at the wrist. Worse, you can't see what you're doing. Your arm blocks the way. Barbaric. And effective.

  Dougal steeled himself and stuck his hand into the black hole, hoping that it would still be attached to him the next time he saw it. The metallic handle felt cool in his hand as he grabbed it.

  He turned the handle counterclockwise until it reached a point of resistance, and there was a click. There was no sudden pain, no blade dropping. He had unfastened the first tumbler. Sweating now, he began to turn the handle in the other direction, past the original point. There was a bit of resistance. Was that the second tumbler, or was it the trap about to spring?

  "Stop," said a voice in Dougal's ear, and for a moment he thought Riona had followed him down. He craned his head around, but he was alone before the stone door. Still, he had heard something. Or perhaps it was his own imagination, translating some shifting of the stone into words.

  Nevertheless, his gut said he had gone far enough. He brought the handle back to where it had been, then started turning it counterclockwise again. Soon he felt the handle click into place. Yes. It had been the second tumbler.

  Dougal adjusted his grip on the handle and turned it clockwise now. When Dougal reached the point of resistance this time, he felt something sharp push up against his wrist. He stopped cold.

  "Good," the phantom voice seemed to say in his ear.

  Screwing up his courage, Dougal took a deep breath. If he got this wrong, he'd soon be missing his favorite hand. He could only hope that he'd be able to open the door with his other hand before he passed out from a lack of blood.

  Dougal cranked the handle with a sharp twist. The blade that had been pressed against his wrist moved away. Within the stone slab there was a grumbling as iron bolts were withdrawn.

  Dougal turned and looked behind him, but there was no one there, only a blue-white mist that curled around a statue of a female warrior and then was gone.

  Dougal pulled on the handle, and the door swung outward on well-oiled hinges.

  The vault of King Adelbern lay open to him at last.

  Dougal stepped through the door and into a large room lined with shelves. Magical lights illuminated the place from ceiling to floor, glowing with a bluish hue that cast everything in an otherworldly light. The walls and ceiling of the room were made of perfectly fitted cut stone bound together with crisscrossing strips of iron. These had no doubt been made to keep thieves from drilling into the vault, but by the way the iron bands sagged violently in the center of the ceiling, Dougal knew that they'd also kept the room from collapsing under the pressure from the fallen tower above.

  He hoped they'd hold just a few minutes longer.

  The shelves on both sides were filled with terra-cotta jars, each filled to overflowing with gold coins and jewelry. At the base of the shelves were piles of ornate swords and armor salvaged by King Adelbern from the wreckage above and tucked away, much like an elderly woman might hide silver pieces throughout the house in case of burglars. Rough sacks of gold and platinum were tucked into every nook and cranny.

  A particularly large, ironbound chest sat on the far side of the polished marble floor, its lid unlocked and flipped back to rest against the wall behind it. A few gold coins lay scattered about the place where they had spilled out of a single sack that sprawled open on the floor next to the chest.

  Dougal slipped into the vault, moving carefully and scanning for traps of any kind. The adrenaline coursing through his veins magnified his senses. While he didn't expect to find any more dangers located behind such a complicated and lethal lock, he'd known many people who'd died from making such assumptions.

  He reached the chest and looked inside.

  The Claw of the Khan-Ur sat inside the chest, atop a bed of gold coins and precious gems. Diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies sparkled back at him in the tiny lantern's light.

  But the Claw held Dougal's attention. Two blades pointing forward, two pointed back, a handgrip in the middle. An ungue. It was set with four gems-red, black, gray, and golden-for the four children of the imperator, and the four founders of the modern legions.

  There was something else, though, hanging from the forward, upward-turned blade. A simple golden chain, and hanging from that chain, a locket, twin to Dougal's own.

  Dougal picked up the locket and held it up to the light, then opened it, although he knew what he would find. His own cameo, jet, set in ivory.

  He thought of the soft voice in the hallway. "Thank you, Vala," he said, not sure if she could hear and not caring if she didn't. He pocketed the locket and turned to the Claw itself.

  Dougal reached into the chest and carefully grasped the Claw by its jewel-encrusted handle. No trap was sprung. He didn't expect that Adelbern would have the desire or knowledge to construct a trap in the chest, but he couldn't be sure. Time was wasting, though, and he needed to move fast. Steadying himself, he yanked the weapon from the chest with a single sharp movement.

  The Claw came out of the chest without incident, and Dougal examined it in the light. It seemed undamaged, despite having survived the Foefire and the intervening centuries. It looked exactly as he'd described it to the others, right down to the gold plating and the colors of the four jewels embedded in its handle.

  The blades were clean and sharp enough that he could see his reflection in them, something he'd not done in a long time. He had to admit-without any surprise, given everything he'd been through-that he looked horrible. Dirty and ragged and covered with a thin coating of bone dust. Still, he could
not hold back a smile.

  He handled the blade gingerly, as its construction seemed to threaten to poke him at every moment. He looked around at the scattered treasure and wondered if he should risk taking more. Almorra, after all, had promised him and the others any additional treasure they found. But anything would have to be hauled back up the pit and out of the city. In the end, he quickly chose two small sacks of gems-emeralds and diamonds-and a good-sized satchel of platinum coins stamped with the seal of the Royal House of Kryta.

  Dougal turned and sped back through the catacombs, lacing his way back through the bars of the trap, leaving the vault doors open. When he reached the pit, the rope still hung there.

  "I have it! And gems and platinum as well!" he shouted upward. Riona appeared at the top of the pit and waved. The Claw would be too bulky and sharp to carry up on his back, so he tied it to the rope and gave the line a tug. Riona hauled hard on the rope, and the Claw went up in an instant and disappeared over the rim of the pit.

  Dougal waited for a moment for Riona to throw the rope back down.

  But the rope didn't return.

  "Riona?" he called. "We need to get out of here. Just cut the rope off the Claw and toss me the free end!" Had something happened? Had the ghosts gotten her?

  Riona leaned over the top of the well, brandishing the untied Claw in her hand. "I have it! Thank you, Dougal!"

  "Wait!" Dougal strove to keep the panic from his voice. "Throw the rope down."

  Riona's voice cut like a sword. "I'm afraid I can't do that."

  Something ice-cold struck Dougal in the heart. "What do you mean?" he managed, but the horrible realization was already dawning on him.

  Riona gave a mirthless laugh. "I have what I came for and have to leave now. Thank you for all your help. I could not have done it without you."

  Dougal's blood ran cold. "This was your plan from the start, wasn't it? You're the one who alerted the Ebonhawke guards."

  Riona chuckled. "And told Clagg where to find you. Almorra isn't the only one to send messengers through the asura gates. Though I will admit that I wasn't sure about it all until we returned to Ebonhawke, and I saw the charr forces arrayed against us."