by John Bierce
His armor was battered, thinned, and cracked, but Godrick didn’t hurry while he rebuilt it. Rebuilding the armor slowly was much more mana efficient. Not to mention that the room was clear, and he wanted to fully refill his stone reservoir before exiting the labyrinth. Not that the aether wasn’t still absurdly dense in Skyhold, but better safe than sorry.
The whole fight had taken considerably under a minute, so it was quite gratifying to see the expressions on his friends’ faces as they followed him into the room. Talia and Hugh let out simultaneous, impressed whistles.
Godrick realized that they were probably whistling at the broken door, and not at him, and his ego deflated a bit.
Sabae pursed her lips as well, and Godrick briefly thought she disapproved for some reason, until he realized she was trying and failing to whistle yet again.
He did his best to keep his amusement off his face.
“Hugh, can you get your book to scry for Bakori?” Sabae said, clearly pretending she hadn’t just been trying to whistle.
Hugh scrunched up his face in concentration, then shook his head. “However my spellbook is doing it, it can’t scry outside the labyrinth.”
“I think we can probably just follow the trail of wreckage,” Talia said dryly.
Sabae nodded. “Hugh, have your book shield us from scrying as we leave. I don’t know how much it will help against Bakori, but better safe than sorry.”
The four of them slowly picked their way through the shattered wreckage of the doors. Any of the crystalline chunks they stepped between and clambered over were large enough to have smashed Godrick, even in his armor.
By the time they exited the labyrinth, Godrick had fully rebuilt his armor.
The entrance hall to the labyrinth was a disaster area. Huge craters had been torn in the walls and floor. Drifts of imp corpses littered the hall, and Godrick could spot at least four dead humans. He didn’t look too hard at them, or try to spot any more. Vines covered one corner of the room, where a plant mage had apparently made their last stand.
The four of them stared in shock, until Godrick managed to clear his throat and speak. “Ah didn’t think it would be this bad,” he said hoarsely.
Hugh’s head jerked up. “Avah!” he said, almost yelling. “She’s not a combat mage! I need to go after her.”
“She’ll be fine,” Talia said, rolling her eyes. “There’s probably a thousand mages in between her and the imps.”
Sabae grimaced. “Actually, it makes sense that Bakori would send his imps after Avah. He has more than enough to spare, and it would be an easy way to get back at Hugh for scorning him.”
“I need to…” Hugh started, but Sabae interrupted him.
“Not a chance,” she said. “You’re powerful, sure, but you’re also the least capable of the four of us in a fight by yourself. I’m not letting you run off on your own just to impress your girlfriend. I like Avah, but the council is more important. We can only spare one of us. I’ll do it, I’m the fastest here.”
Hugh started to open his mouth, but Godrick spoke first.
Godrick shook his head. “Yeh can’t. Yeh’re the one who’s goin’ ta have ta persuade the council that one a’ them is a traitor. Yeh’re by far the most articulate and persuasive a’ us. Hugh or Talia certainly can’t handle that part. Ah’ll get Avah.”
Hugh was looking mutinous at this point. He opened his mouth to speak again, but this time he was interrupted by Talia.
“By that logic, I should be the one to go,” she said. “I’m by far the least persuasive of us three.”
“Godrick and I have armor to protect ourselves when we’re on our own,” Sabae said. “You don’t. It’s a major risk for you to go on your own. As much as I hate to admit it, Godrick’s probably the best one to do it.”
“Armor,” Talia said dryly, “is for people with insufficient firepower.”
She reached out and hugged Hugh. “I’ll rescue your dumb girlfriend, Hugh.”
“Hold on just a second, Talia,” Sabae said. “We need to talk about this.”
“No time!” Talia said, walking away.
“Talia!” Sabae yelled after her.
Talia just made a rude gesture.
Hugh stared after Talia, looking like he wanted nothing more than to go with her.
Sabae sighed, and leaned towards Godrick. “Are you sure it’s the best idea to send Talia after Avah?” she whispered.
Godrick considered that carefully for a moment, then nodded. “It’d wreck Hugh if somethin’ happened ta Avah, and Talia’s way too protective a’ him ta’ let that happen.
He shouldered his hammer and walked over to Hugh, resting his hand on the smaller apprentice’s shoulder. “We’ve got a job ta’ do, Hugh.”
Hugh gave Godrick an uncertain look, then nodded.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Wreck the Halls
Hugh sometimes forgot how enormous Skyhold was. Even ignoring the numerous extradimensional spaces riddling the mountain— like the labyrinth and the Grand Library, and who knew what else— the tunnels carved through its granite stretched farther than the streets of any city Hugh had ever seen, with the exception of Theras Tel.
Most of Skyhold’s tunnels were abandoned and often sealed off. A few were sealed off due to magical experiments gone horribly wrong or structural instability, but mostly the population had just shifted through the mountain over time. Not because its population had dropped— Skyhold’s population currently numbered in the high tens of thousands, nearly as high as it had ever been— but because of a long history of digging new tunnels whenever you needed a new classroom, workshop, dormitory, or any other sort of room.
Unlike other universities, there was no need to wait for an older scholar to die or retire to get their office space— just find a nearby empty office and claim it for your own.
This led, of course, to all sorts of bizarre situations. There were countless stories of stubborn academics and researchers who claimed an office ahead of the crowded regions, then were left stranded through miles of empty tunnels when the crowds decided— through whatever mechanism crowds made any decision— to resettle an entirely different section of Skyhold.
Over the past two years, Hugh had grown used to Skyhold’s size, and he had stopped really considering it.
Sprinting up through the corridors and stairwells of Skyhold towards its highest peak, however, was giving him a new appreciation of its immensity.
Awareness might be a better word than appreciation, really.
The fact that they were having to fight their way through swarms of enraged imps on the way up didn’t help Hugh’s mood.
Trying not to worry about Avah— and Talia, for that matter— Hugh reached out with his affinity senses into the stone of a nearby cross-tunnel. A particularly dense swarm of imps poured down it towards them, trampling one another in their haste to get to the three of them.
Hugh found the crystal patterns stretching through the hall’s stone ceiling, and began unlinking them.
The hallway roof collapsed, crushing the swarm underneath it and sealing the hallway.
Even considering how many tunnels Skyhold had to spare, collapsing tunnels was definitely more than frowned upon— but, given the chaos in Skyhold right now, Hugh doubted anyone would be investigating where specific instances of damage came from.
He glanced over at the other two. Sabae had stuck a small, white furred imp to her buckler, which she was repeatedly pounding against the wall until the imp stopped moving. They’d run into a few of them— they weren’t any more dangerous than other small imps, but they were inexplicably harder to kill.
Godrick, meanwhile, was rebuilding his armor from scratch. They’d run into a morbidly obese large imp that had projectile vomited some sort of caustic bile all over his armor. It wasn’t an acid, so far as they could tell— it appeared to be digesting the rock, not dissolving it.
Rather than close with the thing, Hugh had crystallized wards buried in th
e rock above, below, and to the sides of the thing that trapped it in place and deprived it of fresh air. He’d had to continuously build new layers of ward against the encroaching bile eating through the stone until the imp had finally collapsed. The instant the imp died, the bile stopped devouring the stone around it.
“How much farther?” Hugh asked Sabae, trying not to sound irritable, and doing a bad job.
“We’re more than a third of the way there,” Sabae said, “but if we keep running into all these imp swarms, it could take us hours to get to the top. Plus, we keep missing shortcuts that I know should be there.”
“Why haven’t we seen more people?” Godrick said, somewhat distracted with his armor.
It was true, they’d hardly seen anyone. A fire mage incinerating imps across a large dining hall, a weaver mage binding and suffocating imps in fine tapestries, kitchen rags, and wool blankets, and several guardsmen simply hacking their way through a swarm with swords, but they should have seen dozens of people at least in this section of the mountain. Rather than go through one of the abandoned sections, Bakori had taken an odd path that led through several inhabited sections.
“They must have all been driven away by the swarm,” Sabae said, a little uncertainly. “Better than the alternative.”
Hugh’s spellbook sent him a hesitant feeling, as though it felt something was off. Hugh thought about mentioning it to the others, but decided against it. They needed to be heading for the council chamber, not investigating every oddity they found on the way up.
“We should get after Bakori,” Hugh said impatiently. He didn’t want to be waiting around doing nothing while Avah was in danger. He needed to do something, even if he wasn’t going after her.
Sabae shook her head. “We need to stop following Bakori,” she said. “We’re trying to get to the council chamber first, and following behind him just forces us to battle every swarm trailing behind him. We need to cut around him.”
“And where are we supposed to find a shortcut past him?” Hugh snapped.
Sabae and Godrick gave him odd looks, and Hugh felt momentarily ashamed.
Then he just felt puzzled. Sabae was making perfect sense, why had he been so resistant.
Something clicked in Hugh’s mind then. He shut his eyes, turned, and walked exactly in the direction he didn’t want to go.
“Hugh?” Godrick said. “Where’d yeh go?”
Hugh opened his eyes and looked back. He was standing in a narrow side passage, and he could see the other two plain as day, but it was clear they couldn’t see him.
Hugh looked down at the lines drawn on the floor and smiled.
While most cantrips Talia tried to use tended to fail catastrophically, or just set things on fire, there were a few that worked much better than normal for her. Unsurprisingly, they were all cantrips that mirrored fire-like effects.
One cantrip that worked particularly well for Talia was designed to evaporate small amounts of liquid— spilled drinks, for instance. When Talia used it, the liquids tended to flash into steam on the spot— a trick that Talia fully intended to use in combat someday.
For now, though, it was doing a great job of clearing her path of gallons of imp ichor. Her shoes weren’t even getting wet.
Talia delicately stepped over the bone-splinter ridden corpse of a thorned imp, humming a jaunty marching song Clan Castis sang on their way to battle. She couldn’t remember all the words, but the tune itself was easy to remember.
An armored imp charged at her from straight ahead, bellowing in rage. One of its arms hung uselessly at its side, having been turned into a drawing of an arm by dreamfire.
Talia drew her enchanted dagger from the labyrinth— it really needed a better name— and threw it at the charging imp.
It had taken a lot of practice to master this trick. The dagger wasn’t weighted as a throwing dagger, and it was extraordinarily hard to time exactly when to pump mana into the dagger.
Talia might not be the most patient person in the world, but she always had more than enough patience to practice new combat techniques.
Talia pumped mana into the dagger in midair, and it froze just a couple feet in front of the charging imp, point angled forward and up. Talia frowned a little at that— she’d intended for it to angle straight forward— but it still worked well enough.
The imp didn’t even have time to slow down or dodge. It rammed straight forwards against the dagger at full speed. Its thick chest plate actually splintered against the dagger. Its back chest plate didn’t break, but actually partially tore off its back as the imp passed through the space where the dagger was hanging, completely immobile.
The imp, its momentum lost by the impact of the dagger against its armor plates— and its insides— stared at Talia for a moment, then collapsed to the ground.
She aimed the evaporation cantrip at the dagger to clean the ichor off it. She wasn’t worried about damaging it— it was absurdly durable. It never needed sharpening, and she’d wager it hadn’t even chipped punching through bone plates.
The dagger did heat up quite a bit from the cantrip, but Talia’s gloves would handle that.
Talia smiled as she delicately stepped over the armored imp and snagged the dagger from midair and sheathed it while firing a dreamfire bolt at another stray imp.
If only she’d had an audience for this.
The hallways grew much more crowded once Hugh led Sabae and Godrick past the wards.
Someone had, so far as Hugh could tell, constructed a series of attention wards meant to limit Bakori’s movement choices through Skyhold. It wasn’t a full path, but instead merely blocked off key hallways from notice.
Whoever had drawn them appeared to be trying to mitigate the damage Bakori was doing in Skyhold without preventing him from reaching the council chamber.
What was even more interesting was the fact that the wards were built to decay. Hugh would wager money that if he returned to look for them an hour from now, he wouldn’t find a trace of them, or even of the chalk they’d been drawn in.
Hugh grudgingly had to admit— to himself, at least— that they were probably better than anything he could do yet.
Even if that didn’t massively limit the field of possible suspects, he was fairly sure he recognized the style of the wardcrafter.
He still hadn’t met his wards teacher this year, but Loarna’s wards were memorable, to say the least.
Mages were running around in a frenzy, trying to frantically establish order. There had been breakouts from the labyrinth into the mountain in the past, but never on this scale before.
It didn’t help matters that the imps weren’t nearly so focused on the council chamber as Bakori was, and were all over the place.
Hugh launched another slingstone at a pack of imps. It detonated, pulping most of them and cracking the stone beneath them. He’d packed a lot more power into these new ones than the old ones last year— not to mention getting rid of the risk of them just randomly exploding.
He was starting to run low, however. Hugh had calculated how many he’d needed for the labyrinth, then doubled it, but he’d never expected a situation like this.
Off down a hallway, he could see a shadow mage strangling imps with their own shadows, while someone Hugh guessed was a pollen or flower mage, or both, had put a few dozen to sleep and was— somewhat gruesomely— turning them into flower beds.
Magic was a common sight in Skyhold, but never on the scale he had seen since they passed the wards. The aether was noticeably thinner than usual from all the magic being used.
He’d seen a lot of mages clustering up and simply blasting fire, lightning, ice, or whatever else at imps. Nothing fancy, but for all the complaints Alustin had about the Skyhold curriculum, massed ranged attacks by groups of mages were both terrifying and effective.
But, then, Alustin almost always worked alone, and the standard Skyhold combat style wasn’t necessarily the best for that.
There had been plenty
of more unusual mages to be seen.
There’d been a light and stone mage riding a stone bull and filling a cafeteria with illusions of herself riding the bull as she trampled imps.
He’d spotted the angry journeyman girl from Emmenson Drees’ class. His suspicions about her had been correct— she was a hair mage. Not only was she strangling imps with her hair, which had grown to a good twenty or thirty feet long, she was also using her hair to construct spellform glyphs, casting as many as a dozen spells at once. It had been more than a little impressive.
It had grown even more impressive when Hugh led them on a quick detour to give his classmate copies of some of the wards he’d been using against the imps. Hair made for a pretty decent material to craft wards out of, it turned out.
They’d seen a mage surrounded by a whirling cloud of metal shrapnel. Lightning periodically erupted from his hands and arced through the cloud of metal. Imps that drew too close got shredded and charred.
A couple of their instructors had shown up as well.
The fire illusionist Talia had been working with on and off, while he’d had little luck with Talia’s training, was proving quite effective against the imps. He’d marshaled an army of foot tall soldiers made of fire against the imps.
Their cryptography teacher had made an appearance as well, battering and throwing imps with a localized windstorm.
The most impressive sight they’d seen so far, however, had been Emmenson Drees.
They were battling their way through a particularly thick swarm of imps when they saw him. The three of them had actually gotten bogged down in the swarm, to the point where Hugh had actually had to crystallize them a series of defensive wards from the rocks around them, and Godrick and Sabae were still having trouble keeping up with the imps making it through.
Hugh had known that Talia was the most offensively capable of the four of them, but not having her around really drilled in how much they depended on her.
The noise had been nearly inaudible at first, drowned out by the chittering, laughing, snarling imps. It quickly swelled— an off-tone, low pitched hum that seemed to resonate in the bones. It gave Hugh an immediate, low grade headache.
