Warsinger

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Other than that it causes awful cancer and turns you into a mutant? Uhhhh, let me see if I can research it.”

  “Actually, you know what?” I went into my Inventory and scrolled through my inventory, remembering something Masha had said. “I've got [Stingcrab Blood]. You can use that to sublimate organic substances in mana. It shouldn't adulterate it that much.”

  Suri, Rin, and Karalti watched as I added the [Stingcrab Blood] to Suri's, and only then did I take a transfusion from Karalti - about ten points’ worth. They both watched on as I agitated the flask, then added the glowing blue liquid to the others. The seal between the flask and the transfusion tube hissed as the mana made contact... but the three liquids blended without blowing the flask out of my hand, settling into a pale lilac potion with an eerie crimson glow.

  “Here goes.” I gave it one last swirl, uncorked the restless purple ooze, and connected it to the mana intake valve on the floor.

  There was a low hum from the altar, and then a flash of light that radiated out from the medallion through the stone. We stood up in alarm as metal surface rippled with patterns of runes, and then something that looked a lot like a white hologram of the entire planet pixelated into view. By the time it was finished, a crystal-clear sphere hung over the table, a projection of the entire planet, plus one face of Erruku.

  “Is that… Archemi?” Suri was drawn forward, lips parted in wonder as she leaned around.

  It sure was. Artana, Daun... and a third small continent I didn't recognize were laid out on the sphere. There were countries with borders that no longer existed, big spaces of unoccupied territories where countries were yet to form... and a series of different-colored markers. Karalti curiously reached out toward one like a kitten batting at a toy, and gave a little squeak as the whole globe spun around in contact with her fingers.

  “What are those tags about?” Suri caught the globe before it continued to spin. “Hey, look here! There's one OFF the damn planet!”

  She was right. One of the glimmering markers floated in the air above the surface of Southern Archemi, well above the edge of the stratosphere. And that's when it hit me.

  “Oh, holy shit.” I reached out to turn the sphere to where Myszno was, and sure enough, there was a black marker on the approximate location of Matir's Dragon Gate. “Guys! That's the Gate of Veles! And this is Matir's... look! Solnetsi’s Gate is in Ilia, and these are all the others!”

  Karalti gasped, pressing her hands to her mouth. Rin made a strangled squeaking noise of joy over the line, and Suri nodded in appreciation as we all got the same notification.

  [You have gained: World Map]

  [You have new Map Markers: The Nine Dragon Gates of Archemi]

  The Gates were scattered all over the world. There were three in Artana: Matir's gate in Myszno, Solnetsi's gate in Ilia, and Khors' gate, which was in a heavily volcanic area in the center of the continent, almost directly along the border between Vlachia and Jeun. There was one Gate in the middle of Zaunt, an island in the far north; one in the heart of Meewhome, and two in Daun. One Gate could be found in the elven territories of Lys, and one was in my cold northern homeland of Tungaant. The eighth was centered on the smaller continent I knew for a fact was no longer above water on Archemi... and the ninth, torn from the crater that formed the borders of Myszno, orbited the planet as the Dark Star.

  “What are these?” Karalti pointed excitedly at several small symbol markers around the map. Unlike the dragon gates, these ten symbols were all the same color, but each one was a different shape. Also unlike the dragon gates, they were heavily clustered in Artana. There was one barely a hundred miles from us, spinning gently in the heart of the Bashir Desert. There was one each superimposed over the Dragon Gates of Khors, Solnetsi, and the Gate in Zaunt. There was one in the far mountains of Myszno, one just off the coast of Meewhome in the ocean, and a cluster of three all together in northern Jeun. There were none in Daun or on the mystery continent.

  “That's a rose,” Suri said, pointing to the one that was closest to us. “Could it be...?”

  “Withering Rose. It’s got to be. And this one might be Nocturne Lament.” I tapped the icon that twirled in the center of Myszno, and jumped when the map zoomed in. The globe faded, replaced by a clear schematic of the Warsinger I’d fought, along with rows of Old Agatic script.

  “Ohhhhhh.” Karalti's eyes grew big and shiny. “This is amazing! Our quest just got so much easier!”

  “Right?” But even as we stood there, the images began to flicker and fade around the edges as the small amount of mana and blood potion ran dry. We hastily flipped through each icon and took screenshots of the untranslated information, and as we did, we got another notification:

  [You have gained new map markers: The Chorus Vaults]

  “This is bloody brilliant.” Suri strode to the altar and pulled the medallion free as the images sputtered more. “We know exactly where to go now.”

  “Yeah, but how?” I turned to look back at the stone ring. “Do you think… this is a portal, maybe?”

  The empty stone ring was about twelve feet around, looming over us from the apse. It had two bands. There was a triple row of random letters around the outside band of the ring, each one in a different script: Old Aga, Tlaxik, and – strangely enough – plain old English:

  ZQKARLCTMDVNFWOGXPJ

  The inner ring also had three lines in the same scripts. I couldn’t even begin to translate the first two, but with effort, I made out the third English sentence:

  Come, human: die by sword or spear.

  “Oh no,” I said. “It’s a fucking puzzle, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like one,” Suri said dubiously.

  Karalti cocked her head from side to side for maybe five seconds, then sighed and plopped down onto the floor. “Welp. I give up. Do either of you have anything to eat?”

  “This isn’t good.” I pulled out five pieces of Bronto Jerky and threw them to Karalti. “All three of us are sub-fifty points of Intelligence. Team Meathead paging Rin… Can you help with this?”

  Rin laughed. “I’ll try! Keep the video feed on it. Give me some time to work it out.”

  I put the Shield of the Firmament back on in the hope it would give me some insight into what the hell we were supposed to do.

  “Blood got us all the way here. Do we have to sacrifice someone to get through this damned thing?” Suri asked.

  I rubbed the metal with my thumb. “There has kind of been a blood theme, hasn’t there?”

  “I say we sacrifice Suri,” Karalti said, gnawing her way through the first piece of jerky.

  “Cheers,” Suri said flatly.

  “Z… Q…” I sounded out the letters, but I actually had more of a problem with individual letters than I did with whole words. These letters had serifs, too, which made it even harder to work out what shape I was looking at. “H?”

  “K,” Rin corrected me fussily. “Okay, let’s see… based on what I’m seeing from the Tlaxik lines, I don’t think it’s a cipher. The phrases for each language are different, and when I tally up the letters, the same letters are missing from each alphabet. B, E, H, I, S, U, Y.”

  “Behisuy?” I tried saying it aloud like a Word of Power, but nothing happened. “Do we need mana for this thing?”

  “The pipes suggest there’s a storage tank somewhere,” Rin said. “Let’s see… I think maybe these do scramble out into some Words of Power, though they don’t really make a lot of sense. Try ‘Bey, Su, Hi!’”

  “‘Bey, Su, Hi!” I waved my hands like a magician. The portal didn’t even hum.

  Suri sucked a tooth. “Bugger.”

  “Okay, that’s not it.” Rin hummed to herself over the voice chat. We could hear her scribbling for a couple of minutes, and then she drew a sharp breath. “Oh! I’ve got it! If you remove the missing letters from the phrase, you get the sentence: ‘Command word ORPAR.’”

  “Remove the missing letters and divide by zero, right.” I turned
to the portal, flung my arms up like a muppet, and yelled: “Orpar!”

  The ancient pipes creaked as mana gas surged into the portal and converged in the center before blooming out into a crackling blue haze.

  “You first, brat.” Suri kicked Karalti in the leg.

  Karalti made a face at her, clambering to her feet.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “Hang back. One way or another, I’ll see you on the other side.”

  Chapter 49

  The portal dumped me into a room so hot it felt like being punched in the lungs.

  Warping via portal was much faster than teleporting with Karalti. On stepping through, I almost felt the difference in air-temperature from the rooms behind and ahead of me. The portal deposited me on a disturbingly narrow ledge above a sea of lava. Everything glowed a baleful orange from the molten stone, which glooped and plopped and patiently waited for us to fall in and die.

  “Well, I did wish for lava before,” I muttered to myself. “Versus like… larvae.”

  [New location discovered: The Rose Vault]

  Suri followed behind me, with Karalti last. Both of them winced as they walked into the wall of heat.

  “Oof.” Suri groaned, shielding her face. “Great.”

  “Look! Over there!” Karalti leaned her torso forward with her hands drawn up against her chest, just like she would in dragon form. “There's a gate on the other side!”

  There was: a heavy black steel gate that wouldn't have been out of place in a bank vault. Between us and the gate was a series of gently swinging platforms suspended by chains from the ceiling. Four of them led from the ledge to the gate, but three more led down almost to the surface of the lava. There, my eyes picked out a large pull-style handle inset into the wall.

  “Wow. These platform dungeon puzzles take on a whole new level of 'yeesh' when you're not behind a headset or a console.” I clicked my tongue. “Looks like we have to pull that to open the gate.”

  “You don't say?” Suri was looking out over the platforms with trepidation.

  “I can get down there, no sweat. My Path was made for this kind of platformer shit.” I shook out my shoulders and puffed a short blast of scalding hot air. “You guys focus on getting over to the other side.”

  “Right!” Karalti pumped a fist. “Come on, Suri! It's easy! Just watch Hector.”

  “Be careful, guys!” Rin said. “Unless you’re like… a Fire Elemental, lava in Archemi is an instadeath.”

  With that in mind, I set myself into position, did some mental calculations, and then sprung up. The platform shook and swung to the right as I landed on the left side of it, and I used the momentum to Jump and spring all the way down to the first descending platform.

  “Oh, yeah. Look at that. Super fuckin' easy,” I heard Suri say from behind me.

  I landed lightly, caught the chain to slow my skid, and hung on until the platform stopped swaying before hopping down two more. It was lung-blisteringly hot. The air swirled and shimmered, and I felt the leather of my armor start to sweat as I reached for the handle. From overhead, it had looked like it was able to be reached by hand from the last hanging platform, but up close, it was clear that it was not. The thing was about three feet beyond the reach of my arm, even as I held onto the chain and grasped out over the seething lava barely five feet below. I was going to have to trapeze it.

  [Warning! You are dangerously overheated!]

  I heard a crash and thump from overhead, and looked up to see Suri using the chain of the first platform to get to her feet. She unequipped her armor all the way down to her underwear before trying the next platform.

  “Okay...” I grasped the chains to either side of me, slid a foot back, and started to rock my weight. The platform barely seemed to swing at all, jerking a little up and down before it began to move more smoothly. I bunched down and pulled the way I had when I was a kid standing on a swing at the playground. Inch by inch, it began to move, and the more it moved, the more momentum I could build. Soon, I was riding the damn thing like a pendulum. I let go of one chain, hung on to the other, and groped forward, reaching for the handle as Suri THUMP'd onto the next platform along.

  “Two more!” Karalti sang.

  On the arc of the next swing, I caught the hot metal handle. It came out on a heavy chain, and the shock of resistance nearly pulled my arm out of its socket and me off the platform. I hung on, sweat pouring into my eyes, and hauled back on it. The iron chain groaned, clanking until it locked out with a deep crunch.

  The bolts of the gate unlocked, and both sides of it rumbled as they slid into the walls.

  “Thank god.” I was so hot that my teeth were chattering, my Hydration meter was flashing red, and I was pretty sure that I could have cooked an egg on my armor. I hung on until the platform stopped gyrating, then turned and leaped up to the next one. Leaping up on top of suspended platforms was harder than jumping down onto them, but I kept my footing until I reached the comparative coolness of the main walkway. Suri was on the last platform now - which I noticed only had two chains, not four. She was holding onto them with grim tenacity, trying to find her center of balance so it didn't dump her in the lava.

  “Use it like a swing!” I called. “If you step on the front, it'll flip!”

  She shook her head in disbelief, but tried it anyway. Karalti and I watched from opposite ends of the room as Suri got the big slab swinging, and then, when it was close to the open gate, kicking off from it. She landed halfway onto solid ground, hitting it with an 'oof!' of effort. I tensed, ready to jump and do something, anything to stop her from sliding in, but Suri clawed her way up and got to her feet, panting and smeared in carbonized dust.

  “Yay!” Karalti jumped in excitement, then tensed and sprinted forward. She landed lightly on the first platform, bounced from it to the second, did a handspring off the third, and caught the chains of the last one, on her way down. She swung between them like a gymnast, then flipped herself up and over to land beside Suri. “Ta-dah! Best at platforms!”

  “Showoff,” she grumbled.

  “In her defense, she's got a fully functional gyroscope in her head.” I sprung up and landed neatly on the second to last platform. “It’s a dragon thing.”

  “That explains the lack of brains,” Suri said.

  Karalti hissed at her. “Shut up! You didn’t figure out the puzzle either!”

  I did the same thing she had: I Jumped, caught the chains, swung and used them rather than the platform to drive me forward. I landed in a roll, tumbling over into a crouch, then took out my waterskin and chugged. Suri held out a hand. I passed it wordlessly as we trudged off into the next room.

  Dungeon Room #2 was a simple square antechamber with a row of magelight torches set into brackets, and a heavy steel door that bore a handprint seal. Suri pricked her finger a second time and put her palm into the inset lock. The mechanisms inside turned, and the door was pulled up into the roof of the cavern, revealing a pitch-black room beyond.

  “Welp. Guess it’s torch time,” I said.

  Suri grunted, and took one out of her Inventory as I did the same. We passed into the next room, casting light across a tiled floor covered in sand. There was a row of four empty braziers next to the locked door. Each one of them had a symbol of the Nine carved over it.

  “Okay... so we have to light these in some kind of order?” Suri drew up in front of it. “Or what?”

  “Guess so.” I held my torch up to get a look at them. I readily recognized three of them: Veles' hourglass, Matir's nine-pointed star, and the heart of Veela. The other one I had seen, but had never associated with one of the gods: a hexagon with a cross drawn through it.

  “Okay... so Veles, Veela, and whoever that is,” I muttered. “No Khors?”

  “Nope,” Karalti said. “No hammertime.”

  I wracked my brains, trying to think what order they represented. “I’m thinking this is some ‘who was the daddy?’ family tree shit. If so, the order would be Veles, Matir, the
n... uhh... Veela, then the last one, I think.”

  “Try 'em,” Suri said.

  I shrugged, and touched the torch to the oily scones. Veles, Matir, then Veela, then the hexagon cross. Once all four flames were lit, they almost immediately extinguished. There was a crunch from inside the walls, and I perked up, looking at the door.

  The entrance behind us slammed shut, and the walls shuddered. Dust rained down on our heads as they began to quickly close in from either side.

  I groaned. “Balls.”

  “Try it again!” Karalti squeaked.

  “Okay, okay… Let me think. Veles is the eldest, Matir is his son... wait. Didn't he have twins? Fuck. Now I remember. That has to be the symbol of Rusolka.” I winced, quickly touching the torch to the brackets in order: Veles, Matir, Rusolka, then Veela. We heard something mechanical wind down, and the walls came to a halting stop with about seven feet of space between them. The bars across the door slid open, giving Suri access to another palm lock.

  Karalti scowled. “You need to study the Nine some more.”

  “Do I look like a priest?” I jerked my shoulders and straightened up. “C’mon. Let’s get out of the squish room.”

  The door rumbled up, just like the previous one, and admitted us into a great, dusty hall – dark, for a moment, until rows of soft white mage lights came to life along the walls and overhead. This place, more than any other we’d found so far, looked like some kind of church. It was eerie and gothic and beautiful, large enough that two fully grown dragons could have walked side by side down the aisle. The door we’d come through was human-sized, but the one at the end was definitely not. The massive double doors towered over the double row of statues that lined the aisle leading to the dais in front of them. There were nine statues: two rows of four facing each other, and one standing above the others in front of the doors. The Warsingers, each one perfectly cast in metal at about 1/20th their actual sizes.

  “Hmm.” I took a step forward. “My Boss Arena sense is tingling.”