Chateau Cascade

by Dusty Ridgeman

  “Huh. Hey, Jak,” Quentin said, walking back over to Jak and nudging him with his elbow. “Looks like Hohaym's in a bad mood today. Can't imagine why. Got promoted and didn't have to tussle with a barrel of mutants. Seems like a good few days to me.”

  “I don't think that's Hohaym, Quentin,” Jak said, an exasperated expression coming over his face.

  “Eh, if you say so. Come on, let's go.” Quentin loaded the last bag of azure powder into the wagon at the end of the caravan and surreptitiously snuck a smaller bag of the stuff into one of his cloak-pockets. Could come in handy... and at what a discount! he thought to himself, furtively glancing around to see if anyone had noticed. Jak was frowning at him. At this, Quentin just winked and raised a finger to his lips.

  The journey was quiet and boring. By the time they had reached Saltflat, both Cascadians had grown quite sick of camel milk, camel jerky, and cactus flesh. Those three items had made up the bulk of their diets for weeks now. In Saltflat, the hangman had unceremoniously parted ways with his companions. Before heading into the local Enforcers’ adjunct office for his debriefing, all he said was, “Y'all better get on your way.”

  From there, Quentin and Jak made their way southeast via rented stagecoach. By now, they had been gone from the Chateau for over a month and a half. Jak hoped that his performance on this first mission would end his provisional citizenship and grant him the status of a full officer in the Cascadian military, but he worried that the destruction of the scimitar would get him put on probation or worse. When pressed about this, Quentin indicated that they should be impressed that he fought an elemental and lived, but that they'd be more impressed with the farm boy's stupidity in fighting an elemental in the first place.

  ✽✽✽

  When the summoner found out that the portal had been compromised on the other end, he had a choice to make. He could have headed westward down the mountain, perhaps with an army of hypnotized mutants at his back. He decided that this would be pointless. The journey would have taken far too long to make a difference.

  Standing there in the portal room at the height of the Peril Mountains, he mulled over what had happened. He decided that it must have been a fearsomely powerful mage. That chaos portal had been built in ancient times, with magic that few – if any – understood; its destruction would have required incomprehensible power. The summoner decided that the Chateau must have gotten involved. It might have been the accursed violet witch herself. Could she really have had the audacity to personally rend their plans asunder? Why, though, would she involve herself at all, let alone so soon? Had she somehow scried out their goals? Could she see through them to their bloody conclusion? Surely not. Only his master wielded such powers of divination, certainly not that faithless pretender sitting on the Cascadian throne.

  Doubtless, she would have freed or slain the Ouroloan sacrifices by now. He surmised that the augmented slave was probably dead as well. Worse still, the elemental would either run amok or simply escape without the summoner around to contain it. This was an unmitigated disaster; even if Aksazyx ran roughshod over Imperial territory, he would probably only burn a few desert villages before the techno-savages found a way to contain him. Primitive as they were, the Westerners were devious. It was clear to the summoner that he had underestimated them, and he resolved never to make that mistake again.

  He wondered what the punishment might be for losing an augmented slave and an elemental, in addition to utterly failing in his mission. His unique talents would, of course, afford him some degree of immunity to the draconian punishments often meted out by the Tower Lords of the Affiliation. After all, it was the summoner who had brought Aksazyx into this world. With luck on his side and enough fuel to power his goëtic obscenities, he could always call and bind another such creature. He concluded that he was too useful to his master; there would be no need for him to turn outlaw and strike out on his own nor to flee to the service of another Tower Lord.

  Standing in front of the empty portal arch in the temple on the mountain, the summoner pulled out a small, black stone cube from his robes. It was perhaps an inch long on each side. He gripped the device tightly and pulled his white-wrapped fist to his forehead. His mind immediately phased into the dreamscape. His eyes were closed, but a whirling kaleidoscope of colors assaulted his vision all the same. This realm was full of dangers, but here the summoner could freely communicate with any being in possession of a properly linked Speaking Cube.

  His vision cleared. He – or really, his astral self – stood in a vast expanse of purple, hazy dreamscape. Everything was a similar shade of inky purple, from the clouds in the sky to the sand at his feet. This eerie monochrome was only broken up by the impossibly tall grey stone spires which occasionally jutted out of the desert like stony arms reaching up to touch God himself. He picked his way through an endless desert of purple, choosing his steps carefully. There were dangers here that went beyond the abominations that made the dreamscape their home.

  It wasn't long before he felt a familiar presence touch his mind. A jolt went through his entire being as his master's astral self came into view. No matter how many times he felt it, the unbridled force of the Tower Lord's magnificence always stunned him in this place. Even with the summoner's considerable magical might, he was far weaker than the entity floating before him.

  The purple, hazy dreamscape flowed and churned around him as the face of his master came into view. The visage was surrounded by an angelic white aura, nearly blinding in its intensity. As the figure began to speak, the light grew stronger. The summoner could not hope to make out his master's features in such luminosity – the entity revealed his presence only as a blindingly bright ball of white light, pulsating as it delivered words directly into his mind.

  “WHAT HAS TRANSPIRED?” the voice thundered. It was deep and heavy, sinking into the summoner's consciousness and weighing down his mind as it echoed around him. In the dreamscape, one's magical power created rippling waves of force, especially when one spoke. The summoner could feel the force of the Tower Lord bearing down on him now. If his master weren’t restraining himself in this strange place, he could probably shatter the summoner's mind in an instant just by speaking.

  “We had nearly gathered enough Ouroloan sacrifices. I was gathering more of the Changed Ones for the final phase of the operation. Then, the portal was somehow destroyed on the other side.” The summoner's own crimson aura pulsed strongly in the purple haze but was a mere candle next to the Tower Lord's dazzling white blaze.

  “NO MATTER,” the voice boomed. “THIS WAS FORETOLD. RETURN EAST-WAYS WITH AS MANY CHANGED ONES AS YOU CAN. THE VISIONS HAVE SHOWN A NEW PATH. AS MY SENESCHAL, YOU WILL LEAD MY FORCES DOWN IT.”

  The summoner brought his white-wrapped, tightly closed fist to his chest and knelt obediently before releasing it. He felt his consciousness immediately tear free from the dreamscape, and when he opened his eyes, the Speaking Cube was on the floor of the temple. He remained alone in the portal chamber.

  Despite his master's power, the summoner still distrusted divination magic. After all, the Tower Lord's prophecies had led him into this boondoggle in the West. Now he was supposed to believe that everything was going according to plan. The magic of divination was perilous and unreliable. Most who attempted it were gifted with utterly false prophecies, and many even lost their minds. When one gazes into the misty realms of possibility, there are terrible entities that might gaze back. Even the summoner – a specialist in chaotic summoning magic and the forbidden Ways Goëtia – was not willing to take such a risk. Still, one could not deny the Tower Lord’s power. Perhaps these seemingly random events really were unfolding perfectly according to the Tower Lord's visions.

  For now, the summoner would continue to serve. The seneschal of a Tower Lord had access to nearly unlimited resources, so long as he remained useful. Much of his meteoric rise to power had been facilitated by such resources. Gathering the sacrifices necessary to call and bind Aksazyx, for example,
would never have been possible on his own. Access to his master's library had proven invaluable in honing his art. He dreamed of a day when he might abscond with those books and spend his time ensconced in magical study, instead of enforcing the Tower Lord's schemes. That day was not today. He would need to gain much more power if he hoped to survive making such an enemy.

  The journey back down the mountain only took two weeks. It was easier heading down than up, especially without having to stop for the slave. Augmented as he was, the man was a cripple compared to a spellcaster. The summoner enthralled as many mutants as he could along the way, but they did not slow him down either. If they lagged behind, he simply rushed them. If they tripped and fell down the mountain or died of exhaustion, there were a legion of others to replace them. He spent most of the trek hovering his way directly down the mountain, only stopping to power his goëtic magic by culling one of the slower mutants from the herd. He never stopped to eat. From the moment he had started his dark transformation, food had not been much of a necessity for him.

  When he finally arrived at his home in the East, the sun was high. His arrival sparked a minor hubbub in the fief surrounding his master's fortress. He could have cleaved right through the town with over a thousand Peril mutants in tow; there was no wall to stop him, and the grotesque demihuman patrols would not dare to question him. The patrols did not even bat at an eye at the massive crowd of mutants shambling along after him; they had seen far uglier sights in their time.

  Before crossing into the city limits, he held the pocket watch aloft. While crossing the Peril mountains he had learned much of the relic's secrets and had attuned himself to its magic. Thus, he was now more able to directly command the feeble minds of the mutants. In a booming voice he commanded them to sleep, and the thousands-strong legion simply dropped to the ground all at once. Such was the power of the relic that they would sleep until roused.

  Inside the fief there were diverse crowds containing many shades of dark-skinned men and a plethora of demihumans and halfbreeds. All averted their eyes as the summoner passed, speaking in hushed tones. The fief was enormous, and signs of deeply entrenched poverty could be seen throughout. Thatched-roof houses and poorly built ramshackle huts dominated its disorganized layout and presented an obvious fire hazard. It was as though someone had taken an impoverished hamlet and stretched it out to the size of a true capital city without bothering to improve any of its infrastructure. People openly defecated in the streets, squatting down in the open without a hint of shame. Sometimes this happened mere feet away from the street markets where fresh lake fish were sold, but no one seemed especially bothered.

  Despite its poverty, the fief did not want for citizenry. Their varied forms crowded and jostled in the noonday heat, sweating profusely. Most were ugly or deformed in some way. Here there was a dark red-skinned orc with tusks; there, a four-foot tall albino human with sores all over his body. These teeming, wretched masses never failed to part and create space for the summoner's passage. Spellcasters were universally feared within the Affiliation, and this one was well-known to them as the seneschal of their master.

  His destination lay at the center of the town, where there stood a tower seemingly carved from a solid chunk of marble. Only a godlike mage – or an actual God – could have created such a thing. After all, where in the natural world could men have found such a massive unbroken piece of stone? It was the Marble Tower, known to scholars as the Tower of Vision. It was one of the ancient monoliths of the Affiliation. All such places were fonts of wonder and power. Those west of the Sphynx thought of them as places of horror, where demons made their way from the Underworld and crawled into the souls of men.

  Since time immemorial this place had been occupied by one of the most powerful wizards known to Genesis, though it had not always been the same wizard. Each of the Towers of the Affiliation straddled a confluence of leylines which maximized the power of a particular kind of magic. Verifiable information about the towers is hard to come by. Their godlike inhabitants jealously guard their secrets and, as a result, myths and rumors abound about such places. Some even hold that the towers themselves are living things, able to bond with their masters. One thing was certain: there could only be one lord of a particular tower at any given time.

  The current lord of the Marble Tower called himself Jodannu, though none but his peers would dare to call him by this given name. Instead, they respectfully addressed him as “my lord” or “master.” Like all of the Tower Lords of the Affiliation, he commanded great armies of mongrel servants who bowed and scraped so that they might survive in a harsh land and perhaps even grow mighty in his service. In the West, they worshipped the intangible God of Virtue, but here in the East things were different. The masters of this land styled themselves as living gods and expected to be treated as such.

  Jodannu had once been a man, but men are ephemeral things, condemned to waste away. When he won the tower and its magical secrets, he, like those who had come before him, had given up a great deal of himself. In exchange, he became unmoored from the natural cycles of life and death. Many in the Affiliation claimed that Jodannu had been master of this Tower even longer than Lady Acelia had sat on her gaudy throne of gems, and none remembered the man he had once been.

  The summoner approached the tower and placed his white-wrapped hand on its smooth surface. There was no obvious entrance into the tower; it was continuous unbroken marble and nothing more. As the summoner touched it, its surface began to shimmer in the sunlight. His hand slipped through the shimmering surface of the stone, and a moment later he stepped right into the face of the tower.

  He found himself in a long hallway. Every single thing inside this place was made of white marble; the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the staircases, and even the wall sconces where strange white lights burned with no apparent fuel. The combined effect might have been maddening to someone unfamiliar with the place, but the summoner walked through the featureless white void calmly and without hesitation. He had been here many times before and knew the path.

  This long white entrance hallway led to a four-way intersection with a central staircase that led upwards. Much like the rest of the tower’s interior architecture, this area did not seem to obey the laws of physics and was much too large to possibly exist within the confines of the tower's outer walls. He navigated the labyrinthine hallways and staircases with ease, making his way to the zenith of the tower. As usual, the summoner had not seen a single soul as he made his way upwards. Finally, he climbed the uppermost spiral staircase. It ended in a closed marble door which stood between him and an expansive chamber from which his master rarely emerged.

  The sound of shouting could be heard as he opened the door. The room itself might have been breathtaking to someone less emotionally deadened than the summoner. It was in the shape of an enormous circle, perhaps 1,500 square feet in breadth and a stunning thirty feet in height. Unlike the rest of the chambers and hallways in the tower, it was not a featureless void of white marble. Instead the walls were covered in a massive mural which depicted vicious battles between men, angels, and demons. The mural continued onto the flat ceiling of the room; here, the figures no longer did battle. Instead, a single massive open-palmed hand was depicted holding a crystal ball. Rays of painted light spread from one end of the room to the rest, shining out from the center of this sphere. Where it touched the walls and reached the figures, they were depicted in fear and agony. It was as though the light itself was burning them: man, demon and angel alike.

  There were four white marble columns arranged in the shape of a square, and they extended from the white marble floor to hold up the ceiling. Bookshelves stretched out below the mural, curving all the way around the room. They were completely filled with books of many colors and sizes; these were the treasures that had helped to secure Jodannu's power when he first laid claim to this place so long ago. Rich mahogany furniture sat near the bookshelves – comfortable looking tables and chairs from which he c
ould immerse himself in magical study.

  Jodannu himself stood near the center of the room in his flowing white robe. Unlike his dreamscape self, in person he looked relatively man-like. His appearance was that of an older fellow of extreme height, standing at around seven and a half feet. His white robes traveled down the length of his thin frame, reaching all the way to his feet. Just as in the dreamscape, an aura of white light obscured his face. In the physical world, however, it was not quite so bright. Looking closely, it might be possible to make out his pale skin, crooked nose, and lengthy white beard. It would be harder to get a clear glimpse of his crazed, ever-wide eyes. These were the eyes of a true believer. The summoner wondered how long the tower had sustained Jodannu's existence and felt a deep lust for the power it had given his master. Desire was one of the few emotions that remained to him.

  Eight ornate, man-sized scrying mirrors stood in a semicircle as the focus of the room. Jodannu stood on the other side of these mirrors, and a softly glowing circle of runes was carved into the stone beneath his feet. Each mirror was attached to a carefully carved statue of a bearded man. Each statue wielded a staff in one hand and a circular metal ring, the size of a man’s head, in the other. The mirrors themselves seemed to be embedded in the stone men's torsos, obscuring their bodies. While the statues seemed to be exact duplicates of each other in form, they were each painted a different color.

  Had they been normal mirrors, Jodannu would have been perfectly positioned to see himself reflected in all of them. Instead of reflecting anything, most of the mirrors displayed a living, moving figure which was conspicuously absent from the splendid marble room. The summoner understood that his master was presently conducting a meeting with the other Tower Lords – a rare thing, indeed – and quietly pulled a book from a nearby shelf. He sat down at a long table and pretended to read it as he hearkened closely to the proceedings.