Cloak Games: Shatter Stone

by Jonathan Moeller

  The cheers roared through the hall, and a woman stepped from behind the twisted throne.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect. The first time I had met Jacob Temple he had been wearing a massive suit of magical armor, but he kind of looked (and sounded like) the sheriff from a movie about the Old West. I expected somebody like a female version of Morvilind, cold and ancient and filled with terrible power, or maybe a female version of Nicholas, a woman of stunning beauty and charisma.

  Instead, Natalya Karst, the Knight of Venomhold, looked…unremarkable.

  She wasn’t unattractive, certainly, but she didn’t have the magnetic charisma of someone like Nicholas. Karst was about forty, and she looked like the villainous corporate executive in the movies Russell and James liked to watch, the ones where the evil CEO who shut down the local factory always turned out to be in collusion with the Rebels. She was thin to the point of gauntness and wore clothes that looked slightly out of date – a long black coat that hung to her knees, black slacks, a bright white shirt with the top button undone, and high-heeled black boots. Her hair was a tangled black mop and her eyes like black shadows into nothingness.

  At first, there didn’t seem anything usual about her.

  Then I noticed her shadow.

  It was far darker and longer than any of the other shadows in the great hall, so dark that it seemed to swallow the stone as it passed. As Karst walked towards Nicholas, her shadow twitched and flowed and changed, sometimes swelling, sometimes shrinking, sometimes breaking into smaller shadows that pointed in different directions. She stopped before Nicholas and extended her right hand. A heavy golden ring rested on her finger, adorned with a large emerald that glowed with the same radiance as the eerie light within the walls. Nicholas bowed over her hand and planted a dry kiss upon her ring, and Corbisher followed suit, leaning heavily on his cane to do so. Nicholas straightened up, his calm smile in place, but I knew him well enough to see the tension in his stance.

  He was afraid of Natalya Karst. Maybe allying with the Knight of Venomhold was like trying to ride the tiger.

  Karst turned, her shadow billowing around her like a large pair of black wings, and settled upon the twisted throne of stone and metal, crossing one leg over another. The shadow splintered and coiled around the throne like tentacles. The anthrophages and cowlspawn and bloodrats and the other creatures in the hall moved closer to the dais and knelt, or did whatever equivalent of kneeling their physiologies allowed.

  “Thank you, Nicholas, for that very kind introduction,” said Karst. Her voice was throaty, deep for a woman, and she had an Eastern European accent I could not place. Russian, maybe? “It is good to see you all here. I was pleased to extend my protection to the Rebels. I admit I hesitated to extend the same protection to the Archons once Nicholas suggested it.” She looked at the Archons, and I saw them attempt to remain calm beneath the weight of that shadowed black gaze. “But Nicholas’s wisdom has borne fruit once again. The attack upon Milwaukee could not have been staged without cooperation between the Archons and the Rebels. If you lost your Cruciform Eye in the process, that is your concern, not mine.”

  She laughed, and her shadow splintered again, seeming to shatter into angular shapes that looked almost like stylized tentacles.

  “But there are always setbacks upon the path to victory, are there not?” said Karst. “And now victory is within our reach. The fool Castomyr shall unleash chaos upon Earth. In that chaos, we shall strike, and Nicholas shall rid us of the High Queen once and for all.” She laughed again. “A long time ago I promised to bring horrible vengeance upon her head, and the hour has come at last. You were wise, Nicholas, to come to me, and wise to heed the words of the Forerunner. The Dark Ones are not your enemies. The Dark Ones will give you the power to destroy your enemies and crush them beneath your boots.” Her dark gaze swept over the hall, and I felt a little chill as it passed over me. Karst had the same aura of raw power that surrounded Jacob Temple, but unlike Temple’s aura, the Knight of Venomhold seemed to radiate icy malice. “And with the power of the Dark Ones behind you, victory shall be yours!”

  The creatures filling the hall cheered, as did the Rebels and the Archons, while the various embassies from neutral powers watched.

  “We should go,” hissed Riordan. “They’re all watching Karst and Connor. This is our best chance to get unseen into the Tower.”

  I nodded, and the four of us followed Riordan as we crossed the hall, keeping our movements casual. No one seemed to notice us. Every eye was on the dais, and Karst, Corbisher, and Nicholas were focused upon their cheering supporters. All it would have taken was one word from Karst or Nicholas, and we would have been swamped by dozens of anthrophages and bloodrats.

  Yet our luck held.

  We reached the archway and the stairs. Tanks stood on either side of the archway, the one on the right holding a man, the one on the left a woman. Both thrashed in their tanks, caught in the grip of endless nightmares.

  That might be our fate if this went bad…or Nicholas might capture me and decide to pay me back for the harm I had done to him.

  I swallowed and followed Riordan and the others into the gloom of the stairs.

  Chapter 10: Predecessors

  “We need to go back,” said Robert.

  “What?” I said, incredulous.

  The broad stairs climbed higher and higher into the Tower of Regrets. With every revolution of the stairs, we passed a window, and I saw the green-lit sprawl of Venomhold far below us, the dark mountains stretching away in all directions. I didn’t know how high the Tower went, but we were already a thousand feet above the lowest courtyards and terraces of Venomhold.

  “We have to go back,” said Robert.

  “Back to the Great Hall?” I said. “Where there are ten thousand different things that want to kill us? That Great Hall?”

  “No,” said Robert. “Back to Earth. You have to send one of us back to Earth.”

  I blinked. “Why?”

  “Someone has to warn the High Queen about what is coming,” said Robert.

  “He is right,” said Hakon. “This monstrous conspiracy…the Rebels and the Archons working with the Knight of Venomhold. God preserve us! I had always suspected something of the sort, but to hear it with my own ears…” He shook his head. “And they have allied with the Dark Ones.”

  “The High Queen must be warned,” said Robert.

  “The High Queen probably knows already,” I said, trying to think of a way to talk them out of this. I might need all three of them to get the Nihlus Stone and to get out alive again.

  “But she may not know all the details,” said Robert. “In war, a single detail may decide a battle.”

  “I must also warn the Shadow Hunters about the Forerunner,” said Riordan. I looked at him, hurt that he would take their side.

  “The Forerunner?” said Robert. “Who is that? And, yes, I know, I will never tell anyone about him, whoever he is.”

  “A wizard,” said Riordan. “An immortal of some kind. He founded numerous Dark Ones cults upon Earth before the Elves even came to Earth. There are records of him in Germany in the fifteen century, but there are hints that he, or his predecessor, have been active since at least the time of the Sumerians. The Shadow Hunters have been trying to find and kill him for centuries, but he is as elusive as smoke.” He looked at the other two men. “When the High Queen permitted the foundation of the Shadow Hunters, finding and killing the Forerunner was one of our chief duties, because the Forerunner is the herald of the Dark Ones. The principal mission of the Knight of Grayhold is to defend Earth against the Dark Ones. If you help me and Miss Novoranya take the Nihlus Stone, you will be depriving the Knight of Venomhold of a powerful artifact, and you will strike a blow for the causes of both the High Queen and the Knight of Grayhold.”

  Robert and Hakon looked at each other. That was a clever argument. I wouldn’t have thought of it on my own, but I would run with it.

  “Whatever this Nihlu
s Stone is, it’s powerful,” I said. “You really want the ally of a bunch of Rebels and Archons to have access to that thing?”

  “As opposed to your Elven lord?” said Hakon, voice calm.

  His voice might have been calm, but the question was a trap. Robert and Hakon both revered the Elves, even if Hakon had a more realistic view of them. Saying anything unpleasant about Morvilind would turn them against me.

  “My lord will hoard the thing,” I said. “He won’t use it. And he definitely won’t use it against the High Queen or the people of Earth.”

  “But the Inquisition should be warned that Baron Castomyr is a traitor,” said Robert, his doubt plain.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll send you back, and you march right to the Inquisition. What do you think will happen? That they’ll just believe the word of a human man-at-arms against a noble who has ruled in La Crosse since the Conquest? No. They’ll interrogate you thoroughly, which will get me killed in the process, and they’ll also question your wife and anyone you’ve spoken with for the last ten years. You’ll get in a lot of trouble, and they might not even believe you.”

  “I was going to send an anonymous report,” said Robert. I wondered if he even knew how to do that without it getting traced.

  “Oh, sure, an anonymous report,” I said. “The Inquisition will drop everything and investigate an anonymous letter, I’m sure. Listen to me, please listen to me. I can send you back right now, and you can talk to the Inquisition, and they might listen to you, or they might kill you. Or you can come with me, we can steal the Nihlus Stone, and we can strike a blow against the Knight and the Rebels and the Archons right now, right here.”

  Both men stared at me in silence for a moment.

  “I know who her lord is,” said Hakon at last. “He is one of the High Queen’s most loyal vassals. His reputation is…fearsome, but he shall not betray her.”

  Robert let out a sigh. “When I was promoted to captain, they said I would have to make the hard decisions, and they weren’t kidding. All right, Miss Novoranya. We’ll do it your way.” He pointed at me. “But when we get back, I am sending an anonymous report to the Inquisition.”

  “I will do it,” I said. “I know how to send it without it getting traced back to me. I think the High Queen already knows everything we have seen today, but I will keep my promise and send the report. Besides, if I screw it up, I’ll be the one they take in for questioning. Not your pregnant wife.”

  “Fine,” said Robert. “Mr. Valborg?”

  “Miss Novoranya’s argument is sound,” said Hakon. “We should follow her plan.”

  “Very well,” said Riordan. “I will take the front. Captain Cross, stay with me. We will need to shield Miss Novoranya and Mr. Valborg in the event of an attack so they can bring their magic to bear.”

  We moved into position. I caught Riordan’s eye as he went past and mouthed the words “thank you”, and he nodded. Robert didn’t see, but Hakon did. The old man said nothing, though. We might have changed his mind, but he had to know that we were right.

  Another wave of guilt went through me. Maybe I should have let Hakon and Robert go back to their families, to escape this mess before it was too late. Yet I needed their help. And my argument had been right, even if I had improvised it. Whatever the Nihlus Stone was, taking it would deal a blow to Karst and Nicholas and their allies.

  But the plain fact was that I had to do whatever was necessary to save him.

  We climbed higher, Riordan and Robert bringing up the front, Hakon and me following behind. As we climbed higher, I began to hear a low murmuring noise.

  “Whispers,” said Robert. “Do you hear that?”

  “Yes,” said Riordan. “They’re coming from the walls.”

  I scowled at the curved walls of black stone, flickers of ghostly green fire dancing in their depths. “Do you think someone’s watching us? Like, from a secret passage or something?”

  “No,” said Hakon. “I think that we are in the Tower of Regrets.”

  I started to say something sarcastic, and then I heard the whispers again.

  This time, I could make out the words.

  “I should never have cheated on her,” said one voice.

  “I should not have taken that money,” said still another.

  “I killed them,” said still another voice. “God forgive me, I killed them, I killed them.”

  Again and again, I heard the same voices repeating the same cries.

  “I should never have come to Venomhold. I should never have come to Venomhold.”

  I tried to shut out the whispering voices, and they faded into the background, a constant hissing lament of regret and sorrow.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Regrets.”

  “Let’s keep moving,” said Riordan.

  That was good advice, and we kept climbing the stairs. The endless whispers continued. After a while, I started to hear my own voice from the whispers, cursing myself for coming here, for holding Riordan at arm’s length, for getting Russell killed. I looked at the others, horrified that they would hear my inmost thoughts, but they were paying no attention. Riordan looked grimmer than usual, the black lines of his Shadowmorph flickering on his neck. Robert was scowling, and Hakon looked so stricken that in other circumstances I might have worried that he was having a heart attack.

  On an impulse, I cast the spell to sense the presence of magical forces. At once I felt the tremendous dark magic surging through Venomhold like water over Niagara Falls, and it made me shiver with fear. Yet I focused the spell against the torrent, and I felt the magic pulsing in the curved walls of the Tower, threads of power reaching from the black stone to coil around our minds.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey!”

  The men stopped and looked at me.

  “You hear whispers, right?” I said. “In your own voices, speaking of all the things you regret.”

  “I heard the whispers in my own voice,” said Robert. He looked around at us. “I…thought you all could hear it, that you were disgusted by my failures…”

  “By your failures?” said Hakon, shaking his head. “I am twice your age, and I have failed so many times I cannot count them all.”

  “I am older than both of you,” said Riordan, which startled me a little. He looked so strong that it was odd to think of him as older than Hakon. “And I have more failures than any of you.”

  They all started arguing.

  “Hey!” I said.

  They kept arguing. My own voice whispered from the walls, cursing myself for having fallen in love with Nicholas Connor.

  “Idiots!” I said. “Shut up!”

  That caught their attention.

  “It’s not real,” I said. “It’s a spell. It’s touching your minds, so you hear…personalized regrets, like ads on a web site or something. It’s not real. I’m hearing my own voice tell me that it was pretty stupid that my first boyfriend was a mass-murdering psycho, and I’m sure you’re not all hearing that.”

  “Of course,” said Hakon. “I am an old fool. It is a spell of mind magic. Humans in the Wizard’s Legion are not permitted to learn any spells of mind magic, but we can learn some basic defenses. Gather close around me, please.”

  We obeyed, and Hakon began gesturing, muttering under his breath as he summoned magical power. Gray light flashed from his hands and washed over us, and all at once the whispering voices cut out like a radio unplugged from a wall. I felt much better.

  “Dear God,” said Robert, shaking his head. “I hadn’t realized how bad that had gotten.”

  “Nor did I, and I should have,” said Riordan. “The Tower of Regrets. The defense is in the name. The Knight of Venomhold has a sadistic sense of humor.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I said. “Let’s stop talking and move. We can discuss it to death later after we’ve gotten out of this hellhole alive.”

  Riordan and Robert started up the stairs again, and Hakon fell in behind me.

  “Your girlfriend as a sharp t
ongue,” Robert observed.

  “I like her tongue just fine,” said Riordan.

  Robert guffawed, and even Hakon chuckled. I just rolled my eyes and kept climbing.

  “It’s odd, though,” said Robert. “Why use regret as a defense? It doesn’t seem…oh.”

  We had gone around another curve of the stairs, and a yellowed skeleton lay upon the steps. There was a sword jammed through the ribs, and to judge from the angle, the dead man had driven the weapon into his own heart. A few yards further up the stairs rested another pair of skeletons, both with rusted weapons jutting from their bones.

  “Why bother killing your enemies when you can get them to kill themselves for you?” said Hakon.

  “Let’s not find out,” I said.

  The damned stairs climbed higher. We saw dozens more skeletons scattered across the stairs. Going close to the windows gave me vertigo, so I tried to stay away from them, but the walls were the source of the mind-altering spell, so I tried to stay away from them as well.

  Hell, I just wanted to get out of Venomhold.

  The stairs ended in a large round chamber, maybe fifty yards across from wall to wall. More eerie green radiance shone from the black walls. In the center of the room rose a narrow spiral iron staircase, vanishing into a shaft in the flat ceiling.

  “I think we are near the top,” said Hakon, pointing at the wall. “Look at those columns. They are thick enough to support a dome at the pinnacle of the tower.”

  “Let’s hope so,” I said. “I’m tired of stairs.” My legs and knees and hips ached from the climb, and they were already sore from yesterday’s problems. “Wait a moment. Let’s cast spells to sense the presence of magic. I want to check if there are any traps or wards on those iron stairs…”

  The metal stairs clanged as someone descended.

  I cursed and drew myself up, gathering power for a lightning globe, while fire began to dance around Hakon’s hands once more. Both Riordan and Robert leveled their crossbows as a young-ish man in an expensive suit stepped to the floor, a cheerful smile on his face as he looked at us.