by Dante King
Will bobbed up and down a couple of times, showing every sign that us following him was what he had always wanted out of life, and nosed ahead, slipping through the open double door.
The door was open, but only a little. Since it was carved out of solid stone, I had been prepared to exert a bit of force getting it open. However, when I set my hand to the hefty double doors, they swung backward as if they were on oiled hinges. So unexpected was this that I stumbled backward into Saya.
“Did you bring a hip flask of General Shiloh’s Hangman and not tell us, Mike?” Saya said, giving me a little squeeze as she helped me right herself.
“Gods, a drop of that potent shit would go down a treat right now, wouldn’t it?” I said back.
Saya snorted. “Might warm the cockles a little bit.”
I looked up at the heavy stone door that reached almost to the ceiling. I pushed and pulled it back and forth a couple of times, marveling at how light the mechanism that hinged it made the door feel.
“Hell of a bit of craftsmanship right there,” I said.
Saya nodded. “Yeah, a little uncanny too if you ask me. You’d expect a place that hasn’t been entered for who knows how long to be a little crustier, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, uncanny is right,” I said.
I led the way after Will. The others followed, treading softly, with the eagle-eyed Tamsin bringing up the rear. Her spear too was in her hand. It had not been a second before, so I assumed that her dragon, Fyzos, was now occupying her Weapon Slot A.
Will led us unhesitatingly through a series of corridors, all of which were lit by the same constant, unwavering internal light. It unnerved me a little because the light cast no shadows.
“There’s nothing to really show what this place was or why it was built,” Elenari said, her voice echoing strangely in the hallway that we were making our way down.
“There’s nothing left to show what this place was or why it was built,” Penelope corrected her gently. “Who knows, it might have been cleared out when whoever, or whatever, dwelled in took its leave.”
There was a soft scrape of metal on leather as Saya pulled free a dagger, at the same time as Hana loosened her sword in its sheath.
Will, oblivious to the unease creeping over the company, continued bobbing ahead of us. I took heart in the little guy’s pleasant nature and followed close behind him.
In all honesty, the quiet and the emptiness was getting to me a little bit too, but I did my best to hide that fact. No one had designated me as the head of this expedition, but I figured a leader should act like he knew what was going on, even if he was just as clueless as the next person.
We continued, taking more lefts than rights, working our way deeper into the heart of the castle.
Finally, we came to Will’s destination. It was a corridor wide and tall enough for a Titan-sized dragon to stroll down as easy as pie.
Here, unlike any hall we had traveled down so far, there were great, detailed frescos carved into the ceilings and walls. They depicted all sorts of creatures fighting and warring with one another. Most of these giant creatures were topped with little figures riding between their shoulders, brandishing swords and axes and flails.
Will was waiting patiently for us at another set of double doors. These ones were far bigger than any doors we had yet seen and must have weighed a couple of tons each if they’d been laid on a set of scales big enough for the task.
Hesitating just long enough to press my ear to the crack but hearing nothing, I set my palms to the cool, glowing stone and gave them a hearty shove. They swung wide, just as easily as the other set, fluid and precise.
I stepped into the room beyond, Will at my heels.
It was a humongous, echoing space, with the same pervasive light shining from walls and ceiling and floor.
There were effigies and statues of all kinds of beasts, monsters, and mythical creatures dotted around the hall. Giant slabs of basalt, granite, sandstone, feldspar, calcite, and other rocks that I couldn’t hope to identify sculpted into the shapes of brutal, beautiful critters. The statues were the only things in that ginormous vestibule not carved out of white marble. They were so realistic, so detailed and gorgeously fashioned, that I would not have been surprised to see them breathing. The eyes of each of the huge representations were sparkling black gemstones.
“What the hell…?” Saya said. It was, I was positive, the question on the tip of everyone else’s tongue.
“Statues. Effigies,” Elenari said.
“Idols,” Penelope said slowly. “They are representing different magical monsters, of course,” she continued in a ruminant voice. “And, I believe, that they are the various kind of monsters that mancers can bond with.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“It is a place of worship,” Penelope said. “A temple. These creatures can be found throughout our world, yet they are sculpted here with obvious reverence. Combined with the etched murals outside in that oversized corridor, I would say that these monsters were of special significance to whoever it was that used to dwell in this place.”
Monsters. Significance. Those words alone were enough to send just the slightest tremor of apprehension trickling down my spine.
We walked carefully and cautiously. We spread out, moving like a team of SEALs through the hall; spaced far enough apart to make killing all of us at once quite hard, yet close enough so that we could help each other out if we were attacked.
Will was hanging at my heel now, no longer leading but following along like a hound. He had brought us this far and would narrow the search no more. I didn’t know what we were looking for, if anything, but there had to be something here the wisp wanted us to see.
“Mike! You might want to come over here and see this!” Penelope called out from over near a wall on the other side of the hall. Her voice rebounded off the carved pillars that held up the roof.
I hurried over, while the rest of the company continued to spread out and explore the hall of effigies.
I saw straight away what Penelope had wanted to draw my attention to.
“Whoa,” I said, “is that what I think it is?”
As well as the statues, against this far wall, there were also large deposited piles of pearlescent powder. Decent-sized mounds that were, perhaps, big enough to fill your average wheelbarrow with.
“That’s - that’s dragondust, right?” I asked Penelope.
I took a closer look at the dust and noticed that there were subtle differences in the sheen and coarseness of each pile. Some had the consistency of coffee-grounds while other piles were more like sand or powdered sugar. Some piles had a slight red luster to them, others pink, others blue, others green, others yellow.
“I think that it is dragondust—or at least a substance very much akin to dragondust,” the Knowledge Sprite replied. “If you want my initial opinion, one that is not founded in research of any kind, then I would say that it’s clear that these piles of dust were once magical creatures of various kinds.”
“You mean that, like the dragon outside, these creatures actually inhabited this place?” I asked.
Penelope nodded slowly. “That would be my initial assessment, yes.”
“What, so there were bears here too?”
“Not just bears I don’t think,” Penelope said. “All sorts of creatures. All the statues that we see here are possibly representatives of the beasts that were once living at this temple. There is a great world outside the confines of the Mystocean Empire, and many mancers other than those who ride dragons or bears.”
I looked around at the statues of the phoenix, merlion, hippogriffs, and basilisks. I tried to imagine all these beasts living in the equivalent of a mythical creatures’ fraternity house. It really did stretch the mind—and my mind was one that had grown rather elastic over the past few months.
“So, this place once held many monsters,” Elenari said, coming over to join in the conversation. “Unlike the
Bronze Citadel, which only houses wild dragons—so far as we know—this great, ancient temple once held all kinds of wild monsters?”
Penelope nodded once more, looking surprisingly somber.
“All of which are now, apparently, dead,” she said.
“Would snorting that dust, from the different creatures, have the same rejuvenating effect on my seed as dragondust?” I asked the Knowledge Sprite.
Pen shrugged. “I simply have no idea,” she replied. “It would be just as easy to hypothesize that it would as it would to guess that it wouldn’t.”
Not exactly helpful and, if life in that fantastical world had taught me one thing, it was that rashness in battle is one thing, but rashness when it comes to ingesting something into your body is quite another.
“There’s something you should see,” Hana said, appearing at my shoulder. “Runes.”
I raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t sure what I could do with runes, but I nodded all the same.
“Sure. I’ll check them out.” I turned to Elenari. “Why don’t you take a sample from each of these piles? Maybe the Lorekeepers will be able to figure out if they’re useful.”
Elenari nodded. “A great idea.”
Penelope and I followed Hana through the collection of statues to a wall where a large block of text took up pride of place. Hard lines cut into hard stone.
Despite the rustic nature of the runes, there was something about them that I found fundamentally beautiful. I imagined it would be like staring at prehistoric cave paintings—the first recognized form of ‘art’ of our species.
As incredible as it might have been, it was all ancient Egyptian to me, if I was being honest. The runes looked like all the other runes that I had ever seen in my life: straight lines that looked awesome in their blocky, savage way, but might have been spelling out the date of the end of the world or simply the grocery list for some old civilization.
“You can read this?” I asked Hana.
The bearmancer waggled her hand from side to side in the universal sign of someone who isn’t willing to bet the bank on something.
“I can read the broad general meaning, I believe,” the Vetruscan said. “I can puzzle out what the primary message is. Although the subtleties, the details, of what is written escapes me.”
I looked sideways at Penelope. Naturally, the Knowledge Sprite was gazing up at the wall of lettering with a fixed and avid look on her face, her all-blue eyes skimming carefully backward and forward.
I went to ask her a question, but the blue-skinned beauty preempted me with a finger held aloft, which made me close my mouth again. After about thirty seconds, Pen dropped her gaze and regarded me. Her mouth was a thin, thoughtful line. Her brow was puckered with consternation.
“I’m guessing that it’s not some sort of love letter? Or a bawdy song or limerick of some description?” I quipped, trying to lighten the somber mood that was falling over Penelope like a raincloud. “You know the type I mean, Pen; There once was a young sailor named Bates, who could dance the fandango on skates. But a fall on his cutlass had rendered him nutless, and practically useless on dates.”
Hana shot me a look that was at once exasperated and, at the same time, amused.
Penelope simply shook her head and said, “No. No, there’s no limerick here. No limerick, or any other kind of poetry for that matter, more’s the pity.”
“I didn’t think so,” Hana said.
“What is it, then?” I asked.
Penelope shook her head, as if she couldn’t really believe what she was reading. “It's a dense and archaic text. And I only recognize the language because of some light reading that I skimmed through a few weeks before we headed to the Galipolas camp.”
“It’s something to do with the Shadow Nations, no?” Hana said.
Penelope nodded her head slowly, as if she was unwilling to admit such a thing could be true.
“It turns out that this temple that we’re standing in,” she said, running her eyes over the beginnings of the text once more, “was the birthplace of a religion or a cult or a sect of some kind that brought all the Shadow Nations together. There must, if I’m interpreting this correctly, have once been a whole host of smaller nations that were brought together in this place and where the Shadow Nations, as we know them, were formed.”
I looked around us at the fairly pristine hall. It was basically empty, so far as I could see, except for all the statues, obviously. There wasn’t really anything that would have pointed to this place being the must-visit destination for the Shadow Nations. Somewhere like that, I thought, would have been all far gloomier and more ominous and fucking subterranean, surely? That the who’s who of bad guys got together in this well-lit, spacious temple on top of a mountain didn’t really gel with my preconceived notions of how baddies acted.
I was on the verge of pointing this out when Penelope, who had been doggedly reading through the rest of the dense block of runes, said, “Whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! There’s more here. Much more!”
“What is it?” Hana asked. “What information is up there?”
Penelope was mouthing the words as she read them, almost reading aloud. It was evident to me that she was doing her best not to misinterpret what was carved into the wall.
“Okay…” she said after a few more seconds. “Okay…” Her eyes started darting about at the base of the wall, looking for something. Something specific.
“Okay what?” I asked.
I appreciated that Penelope was, basically, the brains of our operation—no surprise there, what with her being a Knowledge Sprite and all. Gods though, I got more than a little frustrated when people went off half-cocked and didn’t explain the mental revelation they were having as they were having them.
“In the top line of the text,” Penelope said, “there is mention of a special tomb.”
“A tomb?” Hana asked. “As in a place where someone or something is buried?”
Penelope shook her head, her blue hair flying around her face. “Sorry, I meant a tome,” she corrected herself. “My apologies. Like I said, this text, these runes, are very archaic and confusing. Many of the words have double meanings or triple meanings.
“A tome? A book?” I pressed, trying to keep the Knowledge Sprite’s mind on track.
“Yes,” Penelope said. “The text states that there should be—ah!”
She had been fiddling around at the base of the wall on which the runes were carved. There was a dull click, and a compartment in the white stone opened out. Penelope, showing little concern for any boobytraps that might be waiting for the incautious hand, reached into the hidden alcove and pulled out a slim, but dusty, book.
“More of a journal of some kind than a tome,” Hana commented.
The book looked old, but it was quite thin. When Penelope opened it, there were words written in crimson ink by a steady neat hand.
“Surely, isn’t blood?” Hana asked, looking at the cursive script.
“Nah, that’s not blood,” I said at once. “That’s red ink, I’d say.”
“How do you know?” Hana asked.
“Blood would dry as brown,” I said simply.
Penelope flicked through the thin tome. There was very little written in it, most of the pages blank. She stopped at a heavily decorated page and scanned through it with her finger.
“Well?” Hana asked impatiently.
“It will take more study,” Penelope said, “but it looks to me like this mentions some place called the Fateseeker’s Cavern.”
I looked at Hana, hoping that the name would ring some bell or other, but the Vetruscan’s face looked just as perplexed as mine felt.
“Is that here?” I asked the Knowledge Sprite. “Is that what this temple was called?”
Penelope cleared her throat. There was definitely a little sigh of resignation in there too.
“No,” she said, “it appears that this Fateseeker’s Cavern is found within the Subterranean. This little book mention
s that there is a ‘contrivance’, to be found there. I assume that this contrivance is similar to the relic that you have in your pocket, Mike, because it is described as ‘holding power the likes of which the foe can only guess at. Power that can shape a mancer to become a weapon of unexampled valiance.’”
“Keep a good hold of that tome, Pen,” I said. “And keep slogging your way through the rest of that text up there, if you can. Hana you stay here and watch her back.”
“What are you going to do?” Hana asked me as Penelope craned her head up and began reading the runes on the wall.
“I’m going to find our wisp,” I said. “I’ve just realized that that floating magic detector of ours has vanished.”
I walked away, weaving my way through the statues, looking up at them as I passed and trying to identify the different creatures.
Could it be true? Could all those mythical beasts have been under this one roof? And, if they had been, what had been the reason for it?
I wandered through the collection of statues, softly calling out Will’s name. I had no way of knowing whether Will had some other name before we met him in the Subterranean Realms, but he had been responding to Will ever since I had started calling him that, so that’s what we used. As I searched for the wisp, I couldn’t help but wish that there might be some way that we could find to communicate with him—or her. Will was obviously smart, and he had one hell of a nose for sniffing out the rare and highly sought after.
I found the helpful little fellow over in one corner, doing the ghostly equivalent of snuffling about with his nose to the floor.
“What have you found now, Will, huh?” I asked. “This place is a fucking treasure trove, and we wouldn’t have really found it, if it wasn’t for you.”
Will glowed in what I took to be a satisfied manner, then he zoomed around in a circle over one particular spot. Kneeling down, I saw that the clever little guy had found a loose tile, or else it was another hidden little nook.
Pulling free my belt knife, I knelt down and jimmied up the loose slab a bit, got my fingers underneath it, and heaved it up. The slab was a lot thicker and bigger than I had first anticipated. It was covered with a light dusting of grit and dust, which had concealed how far back it ran toward the wall. If it hadn’t been for my dragon-enhanced strength, I doubted I’d have been able to lift it unaided. The damned thing must have weighed all of four-hundred pounds. Maybe a little more.
