The Sorcerer's Skull (Cenotaph Road Series Book 2)

by Robert E. Vardeman

  “I believe this is what our pilgrim seeks,” said Krek.

  “Hardly seems worth the effort.” Even as Lan spoke, his attention became riveted to the stone hut. His eyes didn’t see, but his magical sensing ability ‘saw’ what lay within.

  The Kinetic Sphere gleamed as brightly as if it had become the sun itself.

  “Stop, wait, don’t go!” called Abasi-Abi, stumbling up the last few steps to join the others. “The danger. You don’t know what powers you’re meddling with.”

  “Krek, keep him here while I go exploring.” Lan drew his sword and began walking. He had to place his feet carefully; not only did the surface reflect like a mirror, it proved as slippery as one.

  He hadn’t walked ten feet when he felt tiny tendrils working against his face, caressing his body, holding him back. He turned and immediately located the source of the magical interference. He pointed the tip of his sword directly at Abasi-Abi.

  “Old man, try to stop me with your magics again and I’ll toss you over the edge of the mountain.”

  “Don’t go. Let me. You’ll ruin everything.”

  “You’ve been too closed-mouthed about your business. I can only conclude you want the Kinetic Sphere for yourself.”

  “The Kinetic Sphere?” The sorcerer appeared genuinely surprised.

  “That’s the potent magical device you seek,” said Lan.

  “Yes, yes, it’s here, but so what? I want to destroy the other. I want to prevent Claybore from regaining his power.”

  “If I keep him away from the Kinetic Sphere, he can’t regain his power.”

  “No, you meddling fool, you don’t understand You’re delving into matters of cosmic scope. You can’t control them. You —”

  “Krek, a few strands of your web, please. Yes, thanks.” He watched as the spider wrapped the sorcerer firmly in a double band of thick silk. One crossed the mage’s mouth and rendered him incapable of speaking. Lan Martak heaved a sigh, turned, and began his slippery way across to the hut.

  Less than halfway there, a wall sprung up in front of him, a wall even more highly polished than the ground. A perfect likeness reflected back to him. At the side, barely more than tiny black dots, he made out the reflections of the others so far behind him on the plain.

  Lan moved closer; the image came closer. He skirted the wall, studying its base. No seam existed between ground and wall to indicate how it had appeared so abruptly. He came to the end of the eight-foot-high barrier and peered around.

  His image wrapped itself around the edge, almost as if the two-dimensional being existed and dogged his steps.

  “Well, old friend, here’s where I leave you.”

  “No.”

  Startled when his image replied, Lan stepped back. The reflection did likewise. Lan studied the image more carefully now. It moved when he did. A reflection, nothing more. When he tried to go around the side of the wall, the image attacked.

  Quick reflexes allowed him to fend off the blow. Losing his footing on the slick surface, he slid backward and fell. The mirror-warrior stood where he had been before the attack — on his feet.

  Lan retreated and regained his feet. The image diminished in size. As he retraced his path, moving closer, the image grew until it matched him in size and detail.

  “Let me by,” he said, feeling silly about talking to a mirror.

  “No.”

  Coldness settled in his stomach. He swung his sword at the image and met the wall’s glassy material with a ringing crash. Glass tinkled and fell to cover the plain. The mirror image had vanished. He advanced and heard Abasi-Abi crying out behind, calling him names, telling of his mismatched and illicit parentage. Lan hoped Krek would spin another strand to cover the mage’s mouth.

  He hadn’t gone five feet when another wall appeared in front of him, also constructed of the glassy material and highly reflective. He again faced himself. Again he fought. This time his blows never even reached the wall. Shocks ran down his sword arm with the impact of the parry. Every blow he made, every parry', every riposte, was perfectly matched.

  He gusted a sigh of disgust and stepped back to disengage. How could he outmaneuver his own reflections?

  “Die!” came the single command.

  Lan Martak found himself fighting for his life. He succeeded in preventing his own image from inflicting damage, but only barely. Lan fought, then backed away. At ten feet, the image stopped its advance, a perfect reflection, mimicking his every move. He retreated further, returning to where the others stood and watched.

  “Release the web over his mouth,” Lan commanded. “I want him to tell me what’s going on.”

  Abasi-Abi sputtered when Krek pulled free the silk rope.

  “How do I get by?”

  “I … I don’t know. This is the center of his power. The Kinetic Sphere feeds the defenses. Claybore isn’t here, not yet, but he will be. Only he knows fully all the defenses to be found.”

  “You lying piece of garbage,” said Lan. “You know. You’ve got a spell to get by those images.”

  “No, honestly, I don’t.”

  “Do not desecrate this holy place, pilgrim,” said Ehznoll, holding back Lan’s sword arm and preventing him from running Abasi-Abi through. “The good earth will not keep us from the temple. When we are wanted, all defenses will go down. So it is written, so it is done.”

  “When? After sunset?”

  “No. The earth rejoices in the day, abhors the night. Night is the time for the infinite sky to intrude.” Lan shut out the rest of Ehznoll’s maunderings. He had no desire to be converted to the earth religion. He wanted the Kinetic Sphere inside the stone hut.

  Getting past his own reflection might prove difficult. After all, how could he outmaneuver himself?

  *

  “Well?”

  “Nothing,” answered Abasi-Abi. “I have found no spell that works.”

  Lan had felt the mage attempting one spell after another to eliminate the guardian reflections. The purpose of some of the spells he failed to understand, others he sensed even as they sizzled and eventually petered out. The wards placed on this mountaintop were powerful.

  “I’m going to try it again. I’ve got an idea.”

  “What is this, friend Lan Martak?”

  “Did a wall pop up after I went past?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to try to make that happen. The spell is a progressive one. The more I try, the more complex it becomes. The reflection actually initiated an attack last time. This time … I fight differently.”

  “Hurry, fool,” whispered Abasi-Abi. “He comes. He is so near!”

  Lan didn’t have to ask who “he” was. Lan skated across the surface, more sure of himself this time. After falling only once, he came to the spot Uttered with glass shards from his prior encounter. He hurried past. The mirrored barrier sprang up in front of him. Again, he faced himself.

  “Let me by.”

  “No.”

  “I mean no harm.”

  “No.”

  He tried to walk around the image. The one-to-one correspondence of movement between himself and the reflection no longer held. The image attacked. Lan found himself fighting to stay alive. And as he parried thrust after thrust, countered slash after slash, he turned.

  The image turned with him. Lan smiled to himself, something not reflected. His back was now to the stone hut where the Kinetic Sphere lay. The image fought in vain now.

  Lan turned and bolted for the rude door leading into the hut. Before he’d gone five feet, a new wall sprang up before him. A new warrior, identical to himself in every way, blocked his path, while the other reflection behind still charged after him.

  He glanced past the image and saw a “hall of mirrors” effect. The mirror in front reflected the mirror behind in such a fashion that there appeared to be an infinite number of both mirrors and reflections. A veritable army now faced him on either side.

  Lan dodged, ducked, slashed, fought. An
d as he moved closer to the one mirror, his image-opponents closed in on him. Their movements were not exactly identical; some independent movement was permitted by the spells. He used this to his advantage.

  He swung and purposefully missed. In the same movement, Lan whirled around and engaged the reflection behind. As he fought, he brought the images closer and closer together. Both swung deadly blows at the same time; he dropped.

  One image skewered the other.

  Lan felt his heart leap to his throat. He’d just seen himself kill himself, the scene repeated infinitely. His brief skirmish had confused the mirror image enough. He rose and thought the path to the stone hut now clear.

  The infinity of reflections supplied a new Lan Martak. A creeping sensation on the back of his neck warned him to duck. The image behind missed decapitating him by a hair’s breadth.

  “Stop this!” he yelled.

  “No!” roared a chorus, each component his own voice.

  He fought, his sword turning powerful blows. He struck, “killed” an image, only to have it instantly replaced. Lan soon bled from a dozen minor cuts, cuts telling him the penalty for slackening his guard for even an instant. He battled — and retreated.

  He couldn’t fight himself indefinitely.

  Lan Martak watched the images decrease in size as he backed away from the stone hut containing the Kinetic Sphere and the means to rescue Inyx from her living hell. The hut was only fifty feet distant. It might as well have been a thousand miles.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “I’ll bleed to death.”

  Not even this dire prediction brought Abasi-Abi from his trance. The sorcerer sat cross-legged on the mirrored plane, his eyes focused on infinity. His chest hardly moved to indicate life. Lan lifted one arm and found it totally limp. When he released it, the arm dropped heavily back into the mage’s lap.

  “How long’s he been like this?”

  “Since you left to do battle with yourself,” answered Krek. “And you are not really bleeding to death, are you? This is just a human ploy?”

  “Thought I’d shock him into responding.”

  “He has been shocked into his own world.”

  “Morto,” said Lan, “you know him as well as anyone. Is he in any danger?”

  “We all are. From Claybore.”

  “Are you an apprentice?” The vehement head shake told Lan the last thing in the world the man wanted was to be a sorcerer. He’d seen the glories — and the horrors — perpetrated by mages and wanted no part of them. But he did continue to serve Abasi-Abi. Lan asked, “Web, then, what are you to him?”

  “His son.”

  “I didn’t think sorcerers had time for such things.”

  “I was something of an accident, before he became so powerful. I’ve always been an embarrassment to him.”

  “You seem little more than a servant.”

  “He treats me that way to always let me know how unwanted I am.”

  “Why not leave him?”

  The man’s eyes showed the first spark of animation Lan had seen. Before, Morto had been little more than a whipped serving boy.

  “His goal is vital. I must aid him. I must!”

  “You want the Kinetic Sphere. I want the Kinetic Sphere. Everyone wants it.”

  “You babble on about the Kinetic Sphere. It’s a trinket, of no importance. My father battles Claybore to prevent recovery of more potent talismans.”

  “More potent?” Lan studied the plain with his magic sensing and “felt” nothing. “What is it?”

  “If he hasn’t told you,” Morto said, indicating his entranced father, “I cannot. This I will tell you, Claybore must never regain it.”

  *

  “We’re talking at cross-purposes, but one thing we’re all agreed upon. That stone hut is our goal.”

  “Contains our goal,” corrected Morto.

  Lan turned and walked a short distance out, thinking. He had the most unlikely assortment of men imaginable for this quest. One wasn’t even a man, by the strictest anatomical definition. Krek dropped in the midst of his eight legs, one still slightly stiff, and simply sat, thinking his imponderable spiderish thoughts. Abasi-Abi floated in his trance, whether doing sorcerous battle with Claybore on some plane undetectable by Lan or simply mustering his forces, Lan couldn’t tell. Morto busied himself preparing food, more to keep his hands occupied than to feed anyone. He was a pathetic figure, caught between trying to please an antagonistic father and trying to five his own life and fulfill his own goals. And Ehznoll had discovered his paradise, had completed his holy pilgrimage. What he found on this peculiar mountaintop Lan didn’t know, but the man prayed fervently, a vision of divinity.

  Just a few yards away stood the stone building containing the Kinetic Sphere. Lan “saw” it blazing, so potent was its trapped power. With it he could free Inyx, and together they’d go exploring the endless wonders of the worlds along the Cenotaph Road.

  The problem: getting into the stone hut. The solution: Lan Martak didn’t know.

  *

  The sun arced up and began to drop. Throughout the day Lan hadn’t come up with any clever method of getting past the mirrored guardians and into the hut. As the weakening rays began to bathe the top of Mount Tartanius in a bloody twilight, he broke the day-long silence and spoke to Krek.

  “Without light there isn’t any reflection.”

  “How profound.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. As soon as the sun sets, I’ll try again. The images won’t have enough light to form, and I can go right in.”

  “Do you think it will be so easy?” The arachnid shifted his bulk, favoring the stiff leg. Lan examined it, decided all had been done that could be, and turned his attention back to their goal.

  “I doubt it. But it seems logical.”

  “That is the problem. It is too easy an answer. The mage building this shrine controlled vast energies. I doubt he overlooked protecting his creation for half of every day.”

  Lan had to agree, yet what else could he do? Abasi-Abi continued in his trance, and Ehznoll prayed even more vocally than before. The night was his avowed enemy; his prayers drove away the darkening sky and put him more closely in tune with his precious dirt. Even worse, to Lan’s mind, was the occasional mention in those prayers of Claybore. Ehznoll still looked on his vision as revelation; Claybore had been in the vision, therefore the decapitated sorcerer had to be a god.

  Lan wondered if those prayers might actually attract Claybore. Then he pushed such nonsense from his mind. At worst, Claybore knew they’d arrived atop the mountain before him. He already knew what lay waiting here.

  “The reflection might be weaker, if not entirely gone,” Lan said, more to convince himself than to argue with Krek. “I’m rested now. My cuts are bandaged. Weak light, weak mirror-warrior.”

  “Yes.”

  Lan’s temper rose at Krek’s innocent tone, but he knew better than to answer. He had to direct his anger outward, at the spells guarding the hut. His magic sense detected no ward spells at all. The sorcerer protecting this plain had been both subtle and strong. Even if he hadn’t been, the magical emanations from the world-shifting Kinetic Sphere blanketed most wards.

  Lan drew his sword and strode out, appearing more confident than he felt. Behind him Ehznoll prayed, the words following him.

  “Sweet earth, protect your disciples, give us the strength to return to your opened arms …”

  The last thing Lan wanted to consider now was returning to the earth — ready for a grave.

  Fifteen feet from the building popped up the first barrier. Lan reacted instantly, his sword swinging. He cracked the wall; pieces tinkled to the plain, but the image remained. Lan moved to one side. The image followed. While his theory that the reflections would be weaker had been correct, he had neglected to consider one detail.

  He still fought his own image, but now the features were in shadow, blurred, vague. He fought little more than his own shadow. And that shadow carried
a sword all too substantial.

  The first overhead blow from the shadow image drove him to his knees. The shadow followed, steely glints showing off blade and belt. Both on their knees, Lan and his reflection fought. The image knew his every move and countered. The longer they fought, the more initiative the reflection took, feinting, slipping razor-sharp edges past his guard, even kicking out with an all-too-substantial boot to land on his shins. When he tried the same trick, his foot found only … air.

  Lan Martak retreated. The reflection matched his best and added tricks of its own. He fought himself and lost.

  Slipping on the glassy plain, now dappled with his own blood, the man reached the spot where Krek awaited.

  “You were right, old spider,” he said. “It didn’t work.”

  The spider shivered, his equivalent of a shrug, and said, “I find myself with no better idea. There is naught to string a web from and swing in. Burrowing through this glassy floor is out of the question. Can you not find a proper spell and counter the reflections?”

  “I’m no sorcerer, in spite of what Abasi-Abi says.”

  “I overheard. You’ve met Claybore and bested him.”

  “I haven’t bested him. All I’ve done is hold him back. There’s a difference. And I don’t even know how I did it. Whatever spells I used, I can’t remember.”

  “A natural talent,” said Krek, his voice gusting out in a tired sigh.

  “If only Abasi-Abi weren’t lost in his trance.”

  “But he is,” said Krek. “I see I shall have to give this more thought. Much more. I am sure there is a way in. Why else build a shrine?”

  “Would Ehznoll know the answer?”

  “His prayers have gone unanswered. This is a case where spiderish superiority will manifest itself, I am sure.”

  Krek settled back down, his dish-sized dun-colored eyes softly contemplating the distant stone building. Lan didn’t interrupt his friend’s peculiar thought processes. At the moment he didn’t care who figured out the way in, as long as they got in to recover the Kinetic Sphere. With every passing second, Lan Martak felt the increasing pressure. Claybore came.