Darkvision

by Bruce R Cordell

  Two humanoids swathed in cloaks and hoods entered through the door. One had an arrow nocked in a long bow, and the other was pulling a new arrow from a quiver.

  “Wait,” yelled Kiril. The newcomers were Al Qaherans—she recognized their dress. Perhaps even Ghanim and Haleem, the compatriots of Feraih whose blade she bore. Kiril raised Sadrul higher and yelled, “We’re friends! See? I bear the blade of your friend Feraih! I was given it by—”

  Both newcomers let fly their arrows. One shaft flew wide, but the other pierced a hole in her shirt and scraped painfully on the fine silver mail she wore beneath.

  “Gods blast you!” she screamed.

  Lavender fire bloomed within the amulets each wore. Virulent flame limned them.

  Kiril recognized that hue, and charged.

  One of the corrupted Al Qaherans dropped its bow and pulled a great falchion from the sash around his waist. The edges of the falchion glittered with purple fire.

  The other figure turned to face Prince Monolith. His hand reached up and, with a swift jerk, broke the cord that bound the amulet around his neck. Drawing forth a new arrow, he wound the arrowhead through a knot in the cord of the glowing amulet.

  Monolith lumbered forward.

  As the flames limning his body began to sputter and fail, the corrupted elf fired the arrow toward the elemental noble, rending the air with an amethyst tail. Separated from his amulet, the elf toppled forward, his animation spent.

  Monolith ducked, but the arrow wasn’t aimed at him. The missile arced across the chamber and punched straight through the glass wall at the earth elemental’s back. Liquid spewed from the puncture. More disturbing, the amulet, floating within the fluid, pulsed back to life. The water draining from the transparent enclosure boiled, bubbling up in a wine-dark hue.

  Kiril’s attention was snatched away from the wall when a falchion nearly ended her. The other Al Qaheran hacked at her with fire literally burning in his eyes. She countered with Sadrul and groaned in surprise—the elf was incredibly strong! Her new blade absorbed the blow but was nearly knocked from her grip.

  Worse, the corrupted dervish was quick. She staved off a slash, a jab, and another slash, all in less than a heartbeat. Stumbling back, she sought an advantage.

  She decided to gamble on Sadrul’s supernatural sharpness, which Essam had asserted was the sword’s claim to fame.

  Instead of deflecting the dervish’s next swing against the side of her own blade, she fully rotated Sadrul, so its edge was bared to the falchion. Kiril hardly noticed the tug on Sadrul’s hilt when the falchion’s steel was cut in half. Kiril grinned and moved in.

  Without his falchion, the Al Qaheran couldn’t protect himself from Kiril’s salvo of razor-sharp blows. The elf dervish was dispatched. The Qaheran’s amulet tumbled away from his bleeding form and lay pulsing on the floor. Remembering the danger of naked crystal, Kiril aimed Sadrul for one more blow and shattered the amulet’s jewel into powder. She hoped it was enough to sever the evil influence and prevent other threats from being sent through it to contest her.

  Things were not going as well for Prince Monolith.

  The prince of elemental earth battled his nemesis, a great pillar of turbulent, chaotic water. The fury of the water elemental, held for ages since its last opportunity to drown the lower halls of the palace, was multiplied many times over from a crystal seed that pulsed in its depths like a fiery coal, goading it and feeding it with a supernatural strength far beyond its already potent abilities.

  Prince Monolith was held aloft in a column of freestanding water. The column swirled with the fury and speed of a deep ocean vortex. Held transfixed within it, the elemental lord began to dissolve. Muddy clumps spattered the walls of the chamber, out of reach of the elemental who might have used the material to heal himself.

  Through the watery roar, Kiril heard Prince Monolith screaming. The swordswoman dashed forward, Sadrul in hand. The blade was sharp—sharp enough to disrupt a water elemental? She slashed, penetrating the column at its base, scoring a wide incision in the fluid.

  A pseudopod of water lashed from the column. Despite her attempt to parry, it slid over her sharp blade and her body without pause. She drew in a quick breath.

  A fierce jerk sent her to join Monolith in the vortex, unanchored and spinning wildly. She flailed with the Qaheran blade, sending trails of bubbles flitting madly through the turbulent water. As the chamber spun round and round, she spied Xet as it ducked back down the corridor through which they’d first entered. Bastard familiar.

  Her quick breath had been too shallow—already her lungs burned. Worse, the gyration forced more and more blood to her extremities. She’d be pulled apart before she drowned. She relaxed her hand, and Sadrul flew from her grip and was expelled.

  Straining against the spinning water, Kiril retracted her arm and got a hand on Angul’s hilt.

  The Blade Cerulean slipped free of the bondage of his sheath.

  Lucidity seared her consciousness. Doubts, worries, and pains of mind and body faded as new certainty was born in her right hand and quickly spread to engulf her. The Blade Cerulean flamed triumphantly in her welcoming grip, its star blue fire burning and boiling the tissue of the watery creature that held her.

  The star elf was spat from the vortex with the velocity of a ballista bolt. She windmilled through the air, but a pillar came up too fast. Agony jolted across her shoulder and back. Robbed of velocity, she fell a full story to the floor. Her left ankle twisted, and she heard something snap.

  Through it all, she retained a grip on her sword. For her perseverance, she was rewarded. Kiril stood, her breath coming in ragged gasps. Angul took from her the pain in her back and arm. Her ankle supported her weight as if whole.

  Kiril raised the blade, and his blue-white light doubled, then redoubled again, shedding light like the day in all directions. Together, she and Angul said, “All abominations will be vanquished.”

  The vortex towered over her, and at its apex it held a madly spinning blot of earth—Prince Monolith. The column suddenly doubled over, like a striking snake, and attempted to smash her down, using Monolith’s body as the hammer.

  Kiril rolled to her left and was clipped on her right hip by one of the earth elemental’s thrashing arms. She kept her feet, and the vortex reared back, pulling itself out of reach and the muddy body of Monolith back into the air.

  The swordswoman took a step to close the distance, and her hip buckled. She fell on her face. The corrupted water elemental’s blow had been mightier than she’d supposed.

  If not for my shelter, Angul spoke into her conscious mind, that blow would have smashed every bone of your fleshy frame.

  Kiril understood the Blade Cerulean was apologizing for failing to fully protect and heal her from the last savage blow. It was the first time the elf could recall her blade not meeting a challenge. For some reason, the thought was a welcome one.

  “Blood!” she screamed, forcing herself to her feet despite the wrenching flare in her right side. The blade darkened as it registered her curse, but forwent retaliation for her impious word. The water elemental was aiming another blow, using Monolith as the weapon.

  Instead of allowing her to jump away, Angul pulled himself up like a spike to meet the mallet. For the blade, friendships and alliances mattered not. For Angul, overcoming the unrighteous and the abominable came first and last, damn every consequence. Angul was intent on sacrificing Monolith, if he still lived, to deprive the watery scourge of its weapon.

  “I’m the wielder!” hissed Kiril. As the blow descended, she crumbled and rolled back and to her left, slapping the damp stone with her left hand to absorb the fall instead of her hip and back. She maintained her grip on Angul with her right hand, despite its flare of displeasure. She was ruining its strategy!

  Kiril sprang to her feet as she exited the roll, anticipating the vortex’s reaction. She charged the vortex’s base even as its muddy crown coiled up and back.

  Angul’s
blue-white fire burned hot as she lunged forward and plunged the blade directly into the vortex.

  Cerulean battled sapphire, fire contested water.

  The ensuing steam explosion threw Kiril back across the wet floor. Angul’s fire sputtered, but the water elemental’s vortex was unraveled. The column of water collapsed, deluging the floor of the chamber. Prince Monolith crashed to the floor, and stone shrapnel from his fall scored Kiril’s face. What remained seemed more a mound of mud than anything else.

  Kiril’s will reunited with Angul’s as she spied the tiny amulet that still pulsed with venomous luminescence. She dived at the glimmering shard.

  As a phantom, wine-colored tentacle reached from an interstitial space focused by the amulet, the Blade Cerulean smashed the malign talisman into a thousand burning, guttering splinters.

  The pale-skinned wizard said Eined was dead. Even after the funeral, he couldn’t grasp it.

  Ususi said his sister perished nobly. Nobly or shamefully, the horrifying, dawning realization that his sister was gone occluded everything else. A gasping emptiness inhabited Warian’s chest. It was an echoing hollow nothing could fill, but his thoughts swirled around it like water circling an abyss.

  He clenched his crystal fist, ready to vent his sudden fury. Violet light leaped dangerously in his prosthesis. What would he smash? He saw nothing but the path below his feet. No railway or embankment separated him from the gulfs of darkness that Ususi and Iahn’s ancestors had constructed.

  With a strangled sob, Warian dropped to his knees and struck the path with his flashing prosthetic. His fist punched a small crater, and cracks in the stone raced ahead and behind him. The path shuddered, and he heard his uncle cry out behind him.

  A hand touched his shoulder. He turned his head, saw Zel. “Why?” Warian asked. “Why’d she have to die?”

  His uncle squeezed his shoulder and said, “More than your sister is dead this day, Nephew.”

  Warian realized Zel’s own sister had also died, Sevaera. And perhaps Zel’s own father was, if not dead, compromised to such an extreme degree that he might as well have perished.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle. I just …”

  “You’ll have your chance to exact vengeance when we get into that tower, if the Imaskari are right. Unless you exhaust yourself out here battering the stone, or send us all screaming into the dark.”

  Warian nodded and allowed the lavender radiance flickering in his arm to lapse. Zel helped him to his feet as he weathered the momentary wave of faintness following his arm’s surge. The weakness was not nearly as bad as before, since he’d started to practice accessing the arm’s strength in controlled bursts. It was a triumph he would have enjoyed sharing with Eined.

  Up the path, Iahn paused where he walked with Ususi. The wizard looked ahead to the wavering walls of the tower, now only a few hundred paces ahead. The vengeance taker turned and fixed Warian with his ice-cold eyes. He said, “The paths are not indestructible.”

  Warian nodded, blood rushing to his cheeks. Damn. He briefly felt much younger than his twenty-two years.

  Iahn turned and conferred with the wizard, who was pointing ahead. Feeling the pressure of Zel’s hands on his shoulders encouraging him to proceed, Warian walked ahead.

  “… some sort of broad interface with the Celestial Nadir and the world,” Ususi was saying. The wizard had her keystone out and was studying the wavering façade of the tower through it.

  “Yes,” she continued. “It’s a magical mechanism the Imaskari put in place in case the Purple Palace ever returned to the world. This path maintains a connection with some chamber inside the palace. If we walk the path to its end, through the interface, we should be injected back into our world, safely inside the tower.”

  “And not far from the weapons cache?” asked the vengeance taker.

  “Only a floor or two below, from what I remember of the floor plans.”

  Iahn nodded and increased his pace. He threw over his back, “Time is precious.”

  Ususi turned to Warian and Zel. “Once we get into the palace, we could go up against Pandorym, plus whatever else Pandorym has released from the weapons cache to defend it. Be ready for anything.” She looked dubiously at Zel, then turned and moved quickly to catch up with Iahn.

  “Do you think that look implied something?” wondered Zel.

  “She wants you to be careful, Uncle.”

  “And you?

  “I’ve got my arm. You’ve got … a pickaxe.”

  Zel chuckled and slung the haft of the pickaxe over his shoulder.

  Stepping through the wavering interface was like walking beneath a waterfall—icy, and just as shocking.

  Warian stiffened, but the cold faded. He wasn’t actually wet. And the gulfs of the Celestial Nadir were gone. Instead, the glimmer of Ususi’s head-orbiting light revealed the confines of a cylindrical stone corridor. Inscribed glyphs spiraled endlessly around the passageway. He jumped when the glyphs pulsed, sending a whirl of white light corkscrewing down the passage a hundred paces or more. Zel suddenly blinked into the space next to Warian.

  The wizard said, “We stand at the endpoint of a more sophisticated version of the stone circles, which are the usual means to access the Celestial Nadir. This is probably one of the twenty gates.”

  “Twenty … are you saying there are twenty gates into the Celestial Nadir?” asked Warian.

  “Yes. Prior to this journey, it was my goal to find and catalogue all of them. I suspected the Purple Palace contained at least one gate, but figured it would be years before I learned whether I was right or wrong. Funny. Until recently, this gate wasn’t even accessible from our world.”

  “You’re sure we’re back in the world?” asked Zel. He cast a suspicious gaze down the narrow, circular corridor.

  “If not the world, then at least the Purple Palace,” said the wizard. “Soon, we’ll encounter Pandorym.”

  “And defeat it,” added Iahn. The vengeance taker muttered a few words in a language unknown to Warian and trudged ahead.

  Ususi nodded, apparently agreeing with Iahn’s statement, and followed.

  Warian and Zel brought up the rear.

  The long, spiraling corridor opened into a wider space. Iahn and Ususi entered, and Warian moved just inside the new chamber. The wizard’s light flickered around, revealing a wide, empty room with a single exit opposite the corridor. It was shuttered by a rusted slab of iron.

  “If I recall correctly …” Ususi began, then a shudder rumbled below Warian’s feet. He tried to retreat the way he’d come, but he bumped against his uncle.

  “Get back!” Warian cried.

  The floor dropped away. He fell, as did Zel and Ususi. The vengeance taker performed a desperate and impressive leap toward the far door, where an iron handle glinted invitingly, but he came up several feet short and plunged like the rest of them. He tumbled through a series of braking maneuvers against the wall.

  Warian smashed hard onto stone. Thuds, cries, and gasps peppered the darkness around him, and he knew he wasn’t alone. Ususi’s light flicked back on.

  The stone pit that enclosed them was perhaps fifteen paces across. Putrid, slimy water pooled in the corners. Disintegrating bones lay scattered across the room. The walls rose on all sides about twenty or thirty paces, to a ceiling of rusted iron.

  “It closed?” groaned Zel, who lay next to Warian. “It closed us in!”

  Iahn, who’d somehow managed to land on his feet, helped Ususi to stand.

  Breathing hard, the wizard said, “An automatic trap, meant to apprehend intruders. How stupid of me not to foresee such a possibility. I know better.”

  “Then you should have warned us,” accused Zel. A thin line of blood trickled from the older man’s brow.

  “Cease!” snapped Iahn. “Is anyone hurt badly?”

  “I think my leg’s broke,” grimaced Zel. “I can’t move it, and it hurts like a devil’s got his teeth in me.”

  Ususi said, “I’ll b
e fine when I get my breath back. Tend them, please, Iahn?” The wizard rooted around in her satchel and withdrew a vial she pressed into the vengeance taker’s hand.

  Iahn inspected Warian first and helped him to his feet. Other than having his breath knocked out of him, Warian was healthier than he expected after falling such a distance. He’d sport some terrific bruises later, though.

  Next, Iahn knelt at Zel’s side and probed Zel’s left leg, which was splayed too far to one side just below the knee.

  “Fractured,” Iahn concluded. The vengeance taker unstopped the vial Ususi had given him and administered a portion of it to Zel.

  Zel attempted to drink down all the fizzing fluid, but Iahn drew back. “Not all at once. We must conserve. Your leg should be mending already.”

  As Warian watched, his uncle’s leg slowly straightened to true, and the lines of pain in his face eased. “I do feel better,” Zel said.

  “You’ll walk with a limp for a while,” said Iahn as he rose and turned to Ususi.

  The wizard approached one of the walls, which wasn’t as bare as Warian had first assumed. Subtle characters were reflected in Ususi’s light, forming a script unfamiliar to him. A moment later, each strange letter began to glow with a cool blue radiance.

  Warian joined the wizard and vengeance taker at the wall. “What is it?”

  “Instructions for getting clear of the containment,” said Ususi. “Any Imaskari who resided in the palace would know the answer to this riddle, so if accidentally caught in the automated trap after coming through from the Celestial Nadir, he could regain freedom in short order.”

  “It’s a riddle? And you know the answer?”

  “Yes. Yes, it’s a riddle, but I don’t know the answer. For certain. But perhaps we can think of the answer together,” said Ususi.

  As Warian studied the lighted inscriptions, those in the center swam and changed before his eyes, forming words he could easily read. Symbols on the periphery remained incomprehensible, but they didn’t seem important.

  Warian asked, “Couldn’t someone not authorized to know the answer, like us, work it out, too? That would negate the entire point of the trap, right?”