by Max Anthony
“Look at this!” she exclaimed. She wheeled about, performing some hard-to-follow acrobatics with her hands and then dropped the head of the axe clean through the wooden footboard of the closest bed and bringing the axe to a halt barely an inch above the ground.
“Yes, that looks splendid,” said Rasmus. “Shouldn’t you have a shield with you as well?”
“There are times when every warrior wants to put down their shield and start doing some proper damage,” she replied. “Anyway, there are no shields in there, so this battle-axe will have to do.”
“There is neither of us who will give you an argument,” said Viddo.
With only one exit remaining, they clustered around the door. It was unlocked and they went through and arrived in a wide corridor. Directly opposite was the entrance to a narrow stairwell. Glancing about, they closed the guardroom door behind them and started up the steps.
13
The steps were in a spiral arrangement and wide enough for two, as long as the person on the outer edge of the tread walked fast enough to keep up. They reached the top without encountering any wandering creatures and found themselves on a short landing that took them to a corridor. The stairs continued on and while they’d have been tempted to skip this new floor entirely, the stairwell had been sealed off with mortared blocks of stone.
“I wonder why they’d do a thing like that,” said Rasmus, pressing his palms against the solid wall.
“Do you have any more stone dissolving spells?” Viddo asked him. “The best loot is always at the top, unless you’re in a dungeon, in which case it’s always at the bottom.” Nobody bothered to correct him by saying that they were here primarily to investigate the possible evils that persisted within the castle. They were all feeling a bit robbed since many of their magical items had been recently destroyed.
“None left, I’m afraid. They were very useful, I must admit.”
With no alternative route, they looked into the corridor beyond the landing. It was wide and with much greater care taken in its decoration. The ceiling was high and supported by a series of stone arches. A carpet ran along the middle of the passage, faded and discoloured, though it had clearly once been expensive. Light entered sporadically, finding its way through deep, slitted windows here and there. One or two tapestries hung, limp and forgotten. Doors appeared regularly in the right-hand wall.
“You can tell this is only the first floor,” whispered Viddo. “Higher up there may be tables to each side, with ornaments on them and these cheap tapestries will be replaced by portraits and other paintings to reflect the magnificence of the Baron’s achievements. There must have been a lot of guard patrols here and they wouldn’t be trusted to walk past a load of hideous family heirlooms without stealing them or accidentally breaking a few.”
“Which way shall we go?” asked Jera.
“This corridor will almost certainly follow the perimeter of the castle. If we follow it, there is a high chance that we will eventually reach a staircase to take us to the second floor. These other doors might take us anywhere. Who knows what secrets have been stored in these rooms for us to uncover?”
“You’re saying we should burgle this floor of the castle?”
“That is exactly what I’m saying.”
With that, Viddo strode across to the sturdy door opposite and studied it for a moment. He grasped the handle and pushed, whereupon it opened with a judder and a screech. He looked anxiously around. Rasmus and Jera crossed over the corridor and they swiftly entered the room beyond the door.
There was nothing obviously hazardous to been seen – it was simply a grey-walled room of a slightly irregular shape that one might expect to see in a castle anywhere. There were no windows and no fireplace, their lack speaking of lonely nights and coldness. Brackets for wooden torches were embedded into the walls, with only one holding a charred stub. A set of manacles dangled from the wall in one corner, with no clear reason why they might have ever been needed.
“Everywhere you go, there are rooms like this,” said Viddo. “Spaces with no reason to exist, that will have never served a purpose beyond being a place to pass through on route to one’s destination. I’ll bet this castle is riddled with them – years of toil and expense incurred for no reason at all.”
“Yonder door leads deeper into the castle,” said Rasmus, walking over to it. “Having seen this room, I am already fearful that we will find no riches on this floor.” With all the confidence of an expert thief, Rasmus wrenched open the door. “Let us…”
Rasmus’ sentence was cut short by his brain, which had just received a signal from his eyes to inform it that there was a werewolf looming in the aperture. The creature already had one clawed arm descending in an arc that would disembowel the wizard. All Viddo and Jera could do was watch, frozen in time for this incident to play itself out in front of them. Viddo felt his arm reaching, as slowly as could be imagined, towards his hand crossbow. Jera moved her battle-axe into position as if her arms were heavily mired by quicksand.
In the end, the werewolf’s claws did not slit open the inviting belly of a powerful wizard. Instead, they bounced off the hard stone belly of the statue that Rasmus had changed to in the blink of an eye. The werewolf was confused and raised its hand to strike again. Before this second blow could even reach the zenith of its arc, a crossbow bolt embedded itself deep into the creature’s brain, having entered through the roof of its mouth. Blood squirted from the wound, turning the light brown granite of the statue into a vivid red. The werewolf didn’t even have the time to howl and was dead before it hit the floor.
A second later and the statue once more became Rasmus. There was no transition – the mottled granite simply turned into flesh, robes and a backpack.
“That was close,” said Rasmus. He looked genuinely rattled by his close escape.
“A good thing you had that spell,” said Viddo, having already looked into the room to be sure there were no more such surprises in store for them. With that done, he pulled his bolt from the werewolf’s sightless eye, wiped it on his tunic and chambered it in the crossbow again.
“We have our friend the undead wizard to thank for it,” Rasmus admitted, referring to a foe they’d destroyed a few weeks ago, before plundering his house. “Normally I’d be packed to the gunwales with defensive spells, but since I’ve been deprived of access to my spellbook for so long I am grateful for anything I can lay my hands on. It should last a few more minutes, though I have no intentions of being caught so easily again.” He looked at his blood-splattered robes. “You might have wiped me clean when I was still in stone form.”
Viddo ushered them through into the next room, paying no heed to Rasmus’ accusations about wiping off the blood. He closed the door behind them, aware that there was more blood covering the floor outside. There was little he planned to do about it, so could only hope that it went unnoticed. Once the door was closed, he surveyed the room they’d entered.
“Oh dear,” he said.
The room was huge – approaching thirty yards to a side. Rasmus’ light didn’t quite reach to the far corners, but it didn’t need to, since the room was lit by a blood-red glow. This illumination came from tiny stones fixed into the walls at five yard intervals, with more of them in the floor and others in the ceiling ten feet above. The floor was filled with rows and rows of stone biers, each seven feet in length and three wide. Rasmus performed a quick multiplication and worked out that there were one hundred and fifty of these biers. All of them were empty, apart from three, the closest of which the trio approached carefully. There was a human corpse on it – naked, shrunken and half-decayed in places. It was twisted and contorted as if it had died in great agony, and the expression on its face spoke of unimaginable pain, with its sunken eyes wide and staring.
“Stasis gems,” whispered Rasmus, pointing to the red lights around the room. “To keep the occupants of these biers preserved until the desired time for their awakening.”
“What about
this poor fellow?” asked Viddo.
“We saw the same thing during our last venture underground. The magic is not perfect, or perhaps it was just poorly-created. I can only imagine that these three men were unable to withstand the ravages of time even with the assistance of the gems.”
“These were the werewolves, weren’t they?” asked Jera. “Something woke them and they started to hunt and kill beyond the walls of the castle.”
“That is almost certainly the case. I wonder if they have been woken unintentionally, or if this is the beginning of something more sinister.”
“What about the one which just attacked you?”
“A late riser, perhaps. Stasis magic isn’t exact, otherwise you’d find a lot more wizards making use of it.”
They looked at the other two bodies – they were twisted and bent in the same way as the first. A fourth had fallen from his bier, where he’d landed in a concealed position on the floor. He too was dead and putrefying.
“Are these gems worth anything?” asked Viddo, prying at one with a sword.
“Semi-precious at best, I should imagine,” said Rasmus. “Their enchantment will fail as soon as they are levered away, in case you were thinking of selling them to people who wish for eternal life spent asleep.”
Viddo lost interest at once. “Two doors lead from here. Which shall we choose?” he asked.
“That one,” said Jera, indicating an iron door in the opposite wall.
Viddo performed his usual checking-and-unlocking procedure with extra care and even pressed his eye to the lock in order to see if there was anything on the other side. A metal plate prevented his attempts to gain advance warning and there were no sounds to be heard. He opened the door and they crowded for a look into the next room.
“Werewolves,” said Jera.
This was a duplicate of the last room in terms of size and red illumination. Where it differed was in terms of its population – on each bier there was a muscular werewolf, lying as still as could be – one hundred and fifty of them, all told. Stasis magic was the wizard’s field, so Viddo looked inquisitively at Rasmus for guidance.
“It should be quite safe,” said Rasmus, in his normal tone of voice. The volume of it startled Viddo and he realised he’d been holding his breath.
They gathered around the nearest werewolf. It looked similar to all of the others – thickset and strong, with the appearance of its face suggesting a malice far beyond anything a normal animal could display. The creature’s chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly. Viddo pressed his hand over its heart. At first, he felt nothing, but then there came a single, powerful beat, after almost a full minute of waiting. Viddo drew his dagger, and drove it hilt-deep into the creature’s chest, causing Jera to jump. When he pulled the dagger free, there was no blood and the wound closed instantly.
“These creatures need a magical weapon to kill them,” he said. “I’ve heard a few people say that silver works, but we aren’t carrying any of that around with us either.”
“Do we still have that lich’s staff with us?” asked Rasmus. He’d not been paying attention to who had what since they left the armoury.
“The enchantment left it as soon as it snapped,” said Viddo. “All that was left was a sharp bit of metal that would be no more use than my non-magical dagger.”
“We can’t leave them here, can we?” asked Jera. “What happens if they all wake up while we’re in the castle?”
“There is little choice,” said Rasmus. “Were I possessed of many more area effect spells, I could conceivably destroy them all. Unfortunately, I only have two acid balls remaining, which could kill many, yet would leave dozens behind.”
“We should look for the weapons which will allow us to dispose of these evil beasts and then return.”
This room also had two exits and they chose the one which would take them closer to the centre of the first floor. It was a large, wide door and made of wood.
“Guard Captain Gartrom,” said Viddo, reading from the bronze plaque to one side of the door. “A captain might have been senior enough to have gathered a magical item or two over the course of his life.”
The door was unlocked and Viddo pulled it open, using a double-grip on the iron handle to overcome its inertia and its decades-old stiffness. There was a passage behind the door – ten feet wide and high, which led through the castle for twenty feet until it came to a big room, twenty feet to a side. There was wooden furniture of an uncomfortable and utilitarian type – three sturdy wooden chairs, a table and a sideboard. Two doorways offered a means of progress.
“Look at that crack in the wall,” said Jera.
The far wall and floor appeared to have sagged, with the usually fine joins between the castle’s stone blocks now wide and lopsided. There was a modest slope to the floor as it approached the cracks, as if some of the ground floor supports had been destroyed.
“We’re right over the place where your meteor knocked out that supporting column,” said Viddo. “I wonder how much damage you’ve done.” There was no judgement in these words – if anything, there was excitement at the thought that Rasmus could have ruined the castle’s structural integrity.
Although cracked, the floor still looked more than solid enough. Nevertheless, Viddo indicated that the others should wait so that he could test the footing. He crossed over lightly. Beneath his feet there was no movement at all and he judged it safe for them all to walk over. The closest exit took them ten feet through another corridor, with the cracks becoming wider as they went. Jera was dubious about their safety, but trusted Viddo enough that she didn’t complain. Still, she kept to the far side of the passage so as not to tempt fate.
They came to another room, also twenty feet square. Part of the floor was missing – there was a hole against the far wall that was almost ten feet wide. The wall had partially collapsed and the hole in the floor continued beneath the wall, presumably into whatever room was adjacent. Viddo walked tentatively to the edge. He felt the flagstones shift as he walked. Over the precipice was a clear view into the foyer below. There was no sign of smoke from the demon lord’s ichor, but there were bodies in plenty, a reminder of the recent carnage. A larger shape was visible, thin and wrinkled with dark red skin – it was the demon lord, decaying at unnatural speed. Viddo backed away from the edge and explained what he’d seen.
“Any sign of movement?” asked Rasmus. “I don’t think we’ve killed one hundred and fifty werewolves yet.”
“I didn’t see anything. It’s a big castle, though and they could be anywhere.”
“I hope they aren’t actively looking for us,” said Jera. “At least until I find a magical one of these.” She brandished her two-handed axe.
“It might be that we killed all of our pursuers and any remaining beasts are ignorant to our presence,” Viddo offered. He didn’t sound convinced.
“Anyway, we are not in immediate danger, so let us explore. This Captain Gartrom fellow appears to have been important enough to warrant his own suite of rooms.”
The single exit from here was in the opposite wall to that which had been damaged by Rasmus’ meteor. With Viddo in front, they went through into another of the short corridors. This took them into a differently-shaped room, still twenty feet wide, but with a length of over thirty. There were features of note within this room. In the middle of one of the longer walls were two levers. They were the standard sort of levers – dull metal bars with knobs on the end. Both levers were in the up position and one had an object of some type hanging from it. The far end of the room was the only area that was lit and this light came from three larger stasis gems in the ceiling. There was an area of the floor directly beneath these gems which was a different hue, being a much lighter grey. There was something lying there – something big.
Warily and with weapons drawn, they advanced along the room, ignoring the levers for the moment. As more details became apparent, the adventurers did not like what they saw.
“Capta
in Gartrom must have been a big bastard,” commented Viddo.
The werewolf lying beneath the stasis gems was closer to nine feet tall than seven and inconceivably broad and muscular. It looked like it could rip tree stumps out of the ground and throw them a hundred yards. It was completely still beneath the effects of the stasis gems.
“A gargantuan werewolf,” said Rasmus. “I’ve never seen such a brute before.”
“Let us take great care that we do not rouse him.”
There was a narrow passage in the wall behind the prone body of Captain Gartrom. A mere four feet wide and ten long, it led to a small room, the purpose of which was not clear. There were bodies within this room and the glint of steel.
“This doesn’t feel good,” said Jera, putting voice to that which they were all thinking.
“It’ll be a bit of a squeeze to get into that passage without touching this werewolf,” said Viddo, studying the position that Captain Gartrom was lying in. The creature was very close to the wall and partially blocking the entrance.
“Let’s not rush into anything,” cautioned Rasmus. “Do we have any idea what those levers are for?”
They left the werewolf, unconsciously stepping as quietly as they could. The levers gave no clue as to their purpose, though the object they’d seen dangling from one turned out to be a severed hand. It was rotten, though none of them could accurately guess how long it had been there.
“Hmmm,” said Viddo, staring and pondering. He inspected the levers, peering into the slots from which they protruded. “It doesn’t take a genius to realise that whoever pulled this lever lost their life shortly after. I wonder if both levers are equally dangerous.”
“The levers are in the up position,” said Jera. “Doesn’t that mean that the owner of this hand perished before they could pull it?”
“An excellent thought, but one which is not correct,” the thief lectured. “It is a natural reaction for the puller of the lever to panic upon realising that they’ve unleashed something terrible. At that point, they will invariably push the lever to its starting position, in the hope that they can prevent the unpleasant events from unfolding.”
