Path of Shadows

by Ben Wolf

  Had the shadow claimed Boros’s life in exchange for making him so much stronger? Or was it some tool of Lord Valdis to personally control the fight? Had Boros been dead—or undead—the whole time and Garrick had just never realized it?

  It didn’t matter now. The threat was destroyed, unless the shadow itself intended to fight, but it just continued to hover there, as if glaring at them despite having no eyes.

  For good measure, Garrick swung his hammer at it, but the shadow dissipated. It vanished into the air without a trace, leaving the Blood Mercs alone in the throne room, accompanied by the sound of the fires flickering in the iron bowls around them.

  “See, Garrick?” Kent collected the ice cannon once more. “We are far more effective as a team.”

  “Whatever. I still did most of the work.” Garrick added, “As usual.”

  “Let’s go,” Aeron urged. “We’re running out of daylight. The ritual will start soon.”

  Thanks to some relentless flying on Wafer’s part and some horses liberated from Lord Valdis’s stables, it only took another three hours to reach the tower despite the snow, the wintry weather, and the actual distance being closer to ten miles. Their relatively prompt arrival had filled Aeron with hope once again.

  But the sun had already started to sink from the sky. Within only a few more hours, night would fall, and Kallie’s life would end.

  It was a stark reminder that they had no time to waste. They had to get to work.

  A quick survey of the tower from the air revealed no way in through the top and no significant weak points. The young soldier had been wrong about the tower being ruins. It looked as sturdy as if it had been constructed yesterday.

  “Aletians,” Aeron grumbled as Wafer dipped down to rejoin the others at the tower’s base.

  The tower, made of black, shining stone, stood nearly as tall as any of the spires at Valdis Keep and spread several hundred yards in diameter. It looked thoroughly out of place amid the expanse of white emptiness all around it and under the red skies above.

  Then again, to Aeron, not much made sense about Xenthan. It was a cruel, harsh country populated with dark lords and their soldiers. Perhaps a black tower built by ancient Aletians amid this sprawling wasteland of snow was a good fit after all.

  Save her, Wafer sent to him through their bond. It wasn’t a command so much as it was a rudimentary encouragement.

  I will, Aeron sent back. Even if I have to die to do it, I will.

  Careful, Wafer replied.

  They landed before the other Blood Mercs and reported their findings.

  “If there are no ways in from the top, then I do not know how we can get inside,” Kent said. “There are no discernible entrances around its base, either.”

  “Cursed magic.” Garrick spat into the snow.

  “Or brilliant architecture,” Kent countered. “It is an Aletian structure, after all.”

  “So there’s some trick to get inside?” Garrick huffed. “Great.”

  “Perhaps,” Kent said. “Or perhaps not.”

  He dismounted his horse and trudged over to the tower while Aeron and the others watched. If anyone could find a way into a tower with no entrances, it would be Kent. For Kallie’s sake, Aeron needed him to.

  Kent extended his right hand toward the tower, placed his palm against one of its smooth, black stones, and closed his eyes.

  The instant he touched the tower, Kent sensed an incredible amount of magic running through each and every stone in its structure. The magic felt heavy and oppressive, comparable to the potent darkness in Lord Valdis’s throne room.

  Whether or not Lord Valdis was the source of this power had yet to be determined. If he’d learned anything about ancient Aletian buildings thus far, it was that they didn’t always make sense.

  Kent opened his eyes. As an experiment, he tried to push some of his magic into the stone, but it didn’t work. His hand flared with blue light, tinted a slightly brighter blue thanks to Fjorst’s blessing, and the magic dissipated along the tower stones in ripples of dark blue light. Kent pulled his hand back and considered what he’d just seen.

  Interesting. Some sort of magic barrier coated the tower. If Kent’s raw magic couldn’t pierce through, perhaps god-forged weapons could. But where should he aim?

  Rather than try to push magic into the tower again, Kent touched the stones and tried to draw magic out of them instead. It worked all too well.

  Mutilated faces flashed before Kent’s eyes, and desperate shrieks split his mind wide open. Shattered bones drenched in blood. Ravaged flesh. Sharp teeth, claws, spikes. A sickening tearing sound accompanied the wails.

  His teeth rattled to the point where he thought they might break, and his mouth filled with the tang of copper.

  And then the pain hit Kent. It screamed up his right arm and hit him in his shoulder hard enough to knock him back a step, and he winced.

  “Kent, you alright?” Aeron called from behind him.

  Kent shook his arm. It still tingled from the jolt, and his fingers trembled when he looked at his hand. He clenched his fist, willed it all to stop, and it gradually subsided. “Fine.”

  “Well?” Garrick asked.

  Kent interpreted the barrage of sensations and images as a type of defense mechanism, perhaps to ward off the Blood Mercs—perhaps him in particular. But amid the assault on his senses, he’d also seen the truth.

  “I know the way inside,” he said.

  They all just stared at him.

  “There’s a barrier protecting the tower, but it’s more than just a barrier. It’s also a cloak,” he said. “When I tried to force my magic in, the barrier repelled the magic. But when I tried to take magic out, it downright attacked me. And when someone is attacking you…”

  “They’re exposed,” Garrick said.

  Kent pointed at him. “Exactly.”

  “What does that mean?” Aeron asked.

  “It means there is a door,” Kent said. “We just cannot see it. But I know where it is.”

  “How?” Aeron asked.

  “Because the barrier showed it to me.”

  Garrick wondered if Kent had gone senile, but he swung his ice-forged hammer at the spot on the tower wall anyway. It bounced off harmlessly, and he looked at Kent.

  “Come now, Garrick.” Kent shook his head. “Surely you can put more heft into it than that. Or is your strength diminishing in your old age?”

  Garrick glared at Kent, then he wound up for another swing, this time much harder. When the hammer struck, Garrick felt a distinct crack under the force of his blow, but he saw no signs of damage on the tower or the supposed barrier.

  Then he craned his head for a different angle, and sure enough, a network of glowing fissures spiderwebbed across the stones in front of him—or more accurately, across the barrier. Garrick grinned. He drew back his hammer again and delivered yet another mighty strike to the invisible barrier.

  It cracked yet again but failed to shatter entirely. So Garrick reared back for another swing—this one the most vicious of them all. When his hammer struck, green sparks and debris erupted from the tower. The barrier shattered—at least in part—and fell to the ground in thousands of glowing green shards that slowly faded away.

  In its place, an arched doorway with no door yawned open at them. It hadn’t been there a moment earlier—only a façade of stones. Where the barrier had broken, green light twinkled and shined and oozed down toward the door again, seeking to reseal it.

  “Hurry.” Kent snatched up the cannon. “The barrier is re-forming. Get inside.”

  Garrick let the others rush in first. If need be, his hammer could break through again. Aeron said a quick goodbye to Wafer—he was too large to squeeze through the door—and followed Mehta inside. Kent went next, and Garrick entered last.

  The barrier’s broken edges rejoined with a flicker of green light, sealing them inside. Interestingly enough, the barrier looked the same from the inside as it had on the outside,
except Garrick could now see the archway to mark the entrance, whereas he couldn’t before.

  Above them, concentric circles of floors and ceilings ascended so far up that Garrick couldn’t see the top of the tower. They looked like different levels—maybe twenty of them, maybe more.

  Various colors of light glowed in the gloom high above them, suggesting activity of some sort, though Garrick didn’t want to guess what that activity might be. Sometimes it was better to not know.

  On the ground level, only a single ring of blue glowed around a raised, circular section in the center of the floor. Thanks to that blue light, Garrick could see that they were alone on the bottom level.

  Garrick stared at the stone platform, then he glanced up at the next level. The opening above looked about the same size as the platform. He wondered if…

  “It is a lift,” Kent said as Garrick’s mind forged the connection. “Likely powered by magic to ascend to the top.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Aeron jumped onto the platform and motioned the others to join him.

  They did, although Garrick did so tentatively. He’d encountered more than his fair share of trickery in Aletian structures as of late, and he didn’t want to experience any more if he could help it.

  But the others were already standing on it, and it hadn’t dropped out from under them, or exploded, or anything else crazy, so he stepped onto it, too.

  Kent bent down and pressed his palm on the stone platform, and his hand glowed an identical color to the blue light around its perimeter.

  The platform lurched upward, and Garrick stutter-stepped to maintain his balance. They rose up to the first level, and the platform stopped there, conforming with the edge of the floor around it, creating a solid, flat surface for the whole level. The blue light disappeared.

  “What are you doing?” Garrick snapped. “Why’d we stop?”

  “I am trying. It will not go up any farther.” Frustration edged Kent’s words.

  “Well, try harder,” Garrick barked.

  “Perhaps you can climb below and push?” Kent fired back.

  “At least we’d be moving if I did,” Garrick countered.

  “Uh… guys?” Aeron pointed at something ahead of them. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Garrick turned to look. Before them, at least two-dozen pairs of glowing yellow eyes peered at them from within the darkness.

  “There are more over here,” Mehta said.

  Garrick looked back in time to see two-dozen more pairs of yellow eyes pop open. As he scanned the rest of the room, more and more yellow eyes opened, fixated on them like a fat man staring at a basket of sweet rolls coated in honey.

  From all around them, a single voice boomed, “You dare to challenge me?”

  It was Lord Valdis’s voice, though more angry and fierce than Garrick had ever heard it.

  “You’re already too late,” Lord Valdis taunted. “You’ll never reach me in time. Soon I will become a god, and you will perish under the force of my new power… that is, if you manage to survive long enough.”

  Excited chitters swept throughout the creatures around the Blood Mercs, but they promptly silenced when Lord Valdis spoke again.

  “You will all die here today, whether by my hand or otherwise. Before the night is done, you will all walk the path of shadows. Your lives will end, your essences will be mine, and you will forever do my bidding.

  “Ascend the tower, I implore you. If you prevail, you will face a foe more powerful than any you could ever imagine.” Then, at the end, he added, “I’m waiting.”

  A moment of cryptic silence hung between them, until Aeron finally said, “Kallie’s still alive.”

  If that was the kid’s only takeaway, Garrick wanted to smack him. But he self-corrected; after all, Kallie was the reason they were all here in the first place.

  “He would’ve come right for us if he already had the power, right?” Aeron asked. “He needs the dragon’s essence to become godlike, and he needs Kallie as a sacrifice to somehow bind her soul to the dragon’s. So she’s gotta be alive. And if we can make it up there—”

  “Then we can save her,” Garrick finished for him. “And put an end to Lord Valdis’s unnatural existence once and for all.”

  “Agreed,” Mehta joined in, and Kent nodded.

  “You’re sure the platform won’t move?” Garrick asked Kent again, this time more calmly.

  “Positive.” Kent set the cannon down in the center of the platform and drew his ice-forged sword.

  “And it won’t go back down, either?”

  “Not that we would, but no, it will not move either way. I tried.”

  “Then we’ve got a fight on our hands.” Garrick faced the army of fell beasts surrounding them. Eagerness crawled up his spine, and he shifted the hammer in his hands. “Circle up. Let’s kill some bad guys.”

  They formed a four-person defensive circle and held their weapons at the ready.

  A glowing, green film formed a barrier in the opening over their heads, and its light gave some structure to the things behind the eyes. Pointed ears, small in stature, lithe. Stirring and writhing with tension. Wielding jagged swords, spears, clubs, and chipped axes.

  The glowing yellow eyes didn’t move at first. Then an ear-splitting screech sounded, and a horde of goblins burst from the darkness, shrieking war cries and running straight toward the Blood Mercs.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Mehta had faced multiple enemies before, in quick succession, but there had to be at least a hundred goblins storming toward them. And it would only take one errant sword or spear to catch Mehta unaware.

  But on the plus side, the goblins were small—even smaller than Mehta—and frail, too. Hardly any weight to them whatsoever. Even so, he didn’t want to engage all of them up close with his knives, so he opted for an alternative.

  “Kent, dagger!” he called.

  It flew out of Kent’s hand a second later, and Mehta caught it. He held the ice-forged dagger, a part of his grandfather’s legacy, in his right hand and held one of his ice-forged knives in his left hand, its blade pointing down. With a bit more range in his right hand, he would unquestionably fare better.

  The nearest goblin raised his cracked old sword to strike, but instead, he earned himself a swift kick in his chest from Mehta’s boot. The goblin careened backward into a bunch of his comrades, taking them down with him, and freeing Mehta to fight only half the number that had charged at him.

  He danced and dodged and ducked and wove between attacks, always counter-attacking with extreme force. Several times they’d come close to pricking or cutting him, but they lacked any real fighting prowess. They telegraphed their movements and hurled pitiful attacks.

  Ferne, a nine-year-old girl, was more dangerous than any one of these wretches. After all, she’d not only defended herself against a Xyonate High Cleric but also delivered a fatal blow to him. These goblins’ sole strength was in their numbers.

  In almost every encounter, Mehta felled goblins with one vicious blow. The dagger cut through them as if they were made of feathers and twigs, and before long, partially frozen carcasses piled up around Mehta.

  He caught a glance at the others and saw similar carnage around them, only in greater numbers. He attributed it to the reach advantage that their weapons all had over his—that, and the fact that Kent’s magic had frozen a chunk of the goblins’ force solid.

  The entire battle only lasted about five minutes. When the last goblin perished, courtesy of a blow from Garrick’s hammer that all but reduced the goblin to a splatter of black slush, the blue light around the platform began to glow again.

  “Well, now we know how that works,” Garrick grunted.

  “Let’s not waste time,” Aeron said.

  “Agreed.” Kent bent down and placed his palm onto the stone, and it began to ascend once more.

  They stopped at each floor, gradually ascending toward the top of the tower, and with each new stop, Aeron
’s frustration multiplied. This was a stupid series of traps and battles, but it effectively delayed them from reaching Lord Valdis and rescuing Kallie.

  The only plus side was that he had ample opportunities to vent his fury on a wide range of foes on each floor.

  On the third floor, the Blood Mercs took out a nest of black, helmet-sized insects that Garrick called “Scorpers.” Apparently, he’d encountered them before, and he made it known that they weren’t to be trifled with.

  The name actually fit them pretty well—they looked to be half-scorpion, half-spider, but bigger than any version of either type of bug Aeron had ever seen. They had eight skittering legs, spider-like fangs, and scorpion pincers.

  Aeron found that stepping on them worked best if he managed to get their heads. The few times he hadn’t, the scorpers refused to die, and they’d just screech at him and try to grab onto his boots or his leg armor.

  Aeron’s naginata didn’t help much, but thanks to Kent’s magic and some torches on the walls around the third floor, they burned up pretty quick. Toward the end of it, Aeron had taken to just kicking them across the platform so Kent could incinerate them en masse.

  The blue light reappeared, and the platform ascended once more.

  On the fourth floor, a few dozen undead skeleton warriors—skulks, Garrick called them, because he apparently had a name for everything—attacked, and the Blood Mercs dispatched them in short order.

  Floors five through eleven yielded a variety of other threats, ranging from a pair of rock golems (easily destroyed with Garrick’s hammer) to a flock of dog-sized spiderbats—yet another moniker chosen by Garrick—that were just as nasty as their name suggested.

  Knocking the spiderbats out of the air was unnerving, to say the least. Several times, Aeron had needed to knock them away from his fellow Blood Mercs before they could latch on and sink their dripping fangs into flesh. And the others had done it for him probably just as many times.