“No… I can do this,” he said stubbornly. Setting himself, he drew a deep breath and began again. This time his face turned red as he exhaled through clenched teeth, but he didn’t give up. Groaning, he kept pulling until I began to wonder if he might burst a blood vessel… and then I saw it happen. The tips of his ears changed color, going from red to grey. The color spread slowly across his skin and even his hair changed, from deep black to a dusty white.
Alarmed, I shouted for him to stop, but it was too late. Straightening his legs, he ripped the massive stone slab up from its framework, tearing loose the iron bars that held it in position with a horrific shriek of stressed metal and popping stone. As chance would have it, it actually did hinge along the side he had suggested, and he pushed it back to rest against the floor on that side. Huffing from his exertion, he looked at me with an exultant expression. “See! I told you I could do it,” he said in a gravelly voice. “What’s wrong?” he asked as he saw the look on my face.
“We’ve got to release your bond!” I shouted at him, “Now!” All I could see was my friend turning into a golem right in front of me. I didn’t want him to wind up like Magnus, but I feared it might already be too late.
“What’s wrong with you?” he replied, showing me his hands. The skin on them was still pink and healthy, if a bit callused. Looking up from them, I saw the color returning to his face, even as his hair resumed its glossy black sheen. “I’m fine.”
“What the hell?”
“Now you sound like Rose,” he said with a chuckle.
I had some trouble imagining her speaking so uncouthly, but then again, she was probably much different in their private life. I was more astonished by the changes in my large friend, even his voice had returned to normal. If I hadn’t seen what had occurred, I might not have believed it. If he hadn’t taken off his helmet, I might never have known, I realized.
“You changed… and then you changed back,” I told him. “Did you feel anything?”
“Changed how?” asked Dorian.
I described what I had seen to him before adding, “I thought I might have imagined it last time.”
“You saw this before?”
I nodded, “After the battle with the gods… your skin looked different then, and your teeth were granite-like. Things were confusing, and I collapsed afterward so when you seemed normal later I assumed that perhaps I was mistaken. Did you feel different just now?”
“Just the strength of the earth, pounding in my ears like a heartbeat, but it always does that when I exert myself a lot. I didn’t think it was unusual. The other knights have described it in a similar manner,” he replied.
“But they don’t revert to normal after they start showing physical signs… and you were definitely showing signs,” I reiterated.
Dorian opened his mouth wide to show his teeth and then pinched his cheek. “Well I’m still flesh and blood.”
I thought for a moment before responding, “I wonder if it’s because you’re a stoic. You must have some innate resistance.” As I pondered on it for a moment, I heard a voice in my mind, the voice of a teacher in the distant past, ‘When an archmage chooses to make someone a targoth cherek, they must remember that stoics cannot accept the bond, their immutability makes them unable to form bonds with external agencies, elements, or even people.’
The sudden memory was unexpected, but for once not unwelcome. It surprised me and before I could focus on it, it slipped away. If that was true, then how did I manage to create a bond between Dorian and the earth? I wondered.
Dorian shrugged, “Are we going to worry about this all day or stick to business?”
I had been lost in thought for several minutes, and his remark served to bring me back to the present. “Sorry,” I answered, “You’re right. Let’s see what we’ve found.”
Gazing downward, the place the stone door had guarded now revealed a stone staircase, descending into the dark. With the concealing enchantment damaged I could now sense the areas it led to. “This stair goes down for more than fifty feet before stopping in some sort of antechamber filled with chairs and furnishings… and a considerable amount of magic,” I said aloud, for Dorian’s benefit.
“Anything along the way?” he asked in return.
“Nothing of note,” I replied, lighting the head of my staff to give him enough light to see the steps as we descended.
Dorian responded with a grunt and readied his sword. It was a signature grunt that told me immediately that, while he respected my ability to sense things ahead of us, he fully intended to remain alert anyway, which was precisely why Penny had insisted that he come with me.
Leading the way carefully, Dorian tested each step before placing his weight fully upon it; a procedure that I found taxed my patience. My magesight had revealed no hidden traps or pressure plates, and while I knew from experience that it could be fooled, I still disliked spending half a minute for every foot we went down. I knew better than to voice my opinion though, Dorian took his work seriously, and he was almost as stubborn as my wife when he put his heart into something.
After an hour of mind-numbing boredom, we finally reached the antechamber my senses had been exploring the entire time. It made no better sense once I put my physical eyes upon it. In form and appearance it seemed to be nothing more unusual than a sitting room or waiting chamber. The walls were decorated with ancient tapestries which had faded beyond the point of recognition and a collection of book cases covered one wall. There were no books to be seen though, just piles of dust and a few odd metal bookends. A modestly sized table stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by six chairs. Another, smaller table with two chairs sat near one corner, and a plain door exited the other side of the room.
Oh… and every item in the room, from the bookcases, to the tables, and even the chairs, radiated intense magic. Perhaps I should have mentioned that to begin with.
Two lamps suspended by iron chains from the ceiling lit automatically as we entered the room, suffusing the area with a warm natural glow. “Don’t move,” I cautioned my stalwart friend. “Every item in this room is enchanted.”
“For what purpose?” asked Dorian.
It was a sensible question, which irritated me for some unknown reason. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be saying, ‘don’t move’… now would I?!” I shot back harshly.
“No need to make an ass of yourself,” retorted my friend.
I took a moment to breathe before answering, “I’m sorry. I’m just tense. Give me a moment to see if I can figure out what these enchantments do.”
I spent close to an hour closely studying the chairs and tables, careful to avoid touching, or even approaching them. Magesight can be handy sometimes. By focusing my perception precisely, I could peer at the individual runes making up the enchantments on each object from almost any angle, though what I saw made little sense and only increased my frustration. My only satisfaction was that I knew that standing still for an hour with nothing to do, and no idea what I was doing, must have driven Dorian to distraction. It was a fair repayment for the laborious descent he had forced me to endure on the stairs.
“How much longer are we going to stand here?” he asked me again, as he had every five to ten minutes for the past three quarters of an hour.
I ground my teeth, “I don’t understand these enchantments. The structure is twisted somehow… askew in a way that should make them non-functional.”
“Well if they don’t work then they should be safe, right?”
I shook my head, “No, if they didn’t work they’d have faded by now. These things look just as fresh as the day they were made, which means that the alignment is properly balanced… I just don’t understand how.”
“So… are we going to stand here all day, or try that door over there? We could take some of these things back if you want to study them later,” said Dorian pragmatically.
“Let’s just move on. There’s something like a vault a short distance past that door
. Whatever they were protecting down here is probably in there,” I told him. “We should skirt the edges of this room though, just in case… and don’t touch anything.” Double checking my shield, I gave him a pat on the back, indicating he should start moving forward.
Everything went fine, until he reached the side of the room and we began edging toward the far door. A sharp surge of magical energy was my only warning before my eyes were greeted with the improbable sight of a chair grinning at me. That’s right, the goddamned thing grinned at me. The chair back twisted and changed, revealing two grotesque eyes and a mouth full of what appeared to be razor sharp teeth.
Before I could react, it stood and lunged at me. The back and seat rose, becoming the main body of what appeared to be an oddly shaped wooden stick-man, while the arms stretched out and showed enchanted claws, as if they were cat paws. It struck with breathtaking speed, ripping through my shield and almost reaching my suddenly vulnerable throat. I might have died then, but for the fortuitous presence of Dorian Thornbear.
I hadn’t seen him move, so focused was I upon the wooden monstrosity that had attacked me, but his sword struck with blinding speed, cutting through the wooden arms of the chair and sending a rainbow cascade of magical energies flying through the air. I doubted he could see the chaotic and colorful spray of aythar as his sword devastated the magical construct, but it hardly mattered… his sword still did its work.
Things would have been simple if it had just been the chair, for Dorian’s second and third cuts rendered it rapidly into antique kindling, but the chair was not alone. It came with a full set of chair friends as well as two brutes that had previously been perfectly civilized tables. As the first chair had already shown, my magical shield was virtually worthless against the enchanted claws and teeth that each former piece of furniture came equipped with, but Dorian’s armor was more than sufficient.
Reaching into my pouches, I started to bring forth another stone disk, similar in appearance to the one that served as my magical flying construct, but with a different function. I was interrupted by a massive table leg stabbing toward me with a gleaming spike on its foot. Dodging sideways, I was almost too slow getting out of its path, but fortunately I tripped over the remains of the first chair, and my fall helped me to avoid the deadly attack.
I wish I could say I planned the fall, but I hadn’t. I was just clumsy.
Meanwhile, Dorian had gone on a rampage. That’s the best way I could think to describe it. The man was an unbreakable, unforgiving, and utterly unstoppable engine of destruction. If other furniture items could see his actions that day, and if that same furniture then had dreams… well they’d have been horrific nightmares of wooden destruction at the hands of a metal clad monster, i.e. Dorian Thornbear.
He moved in a perfect rhythm of violence; graceful and terrible at one and the same time. He had somehow noticed my fall, and he stepped back and to the side to cover me, even as his sword clove through another barbarously deformed chair.
The smaller side table caught his sword as it recovered from the swing and sought to trap his arm. Given Dorian’s incredible strength and the nature of his magical blade, it was a futile maneuver… but it kept him off-balance and cost him a precious second as he ripped the blade free of his wooden opponent. During that time the larger table rushed him, slamming into him like an animated battering ram.
I tried to brace him with a hastily erected shield but the enchanted construct’s wooden arms tore through it as if it were tissue paper, and Dorian wound up being slammed against the wall, while I served unwittingly as a block to trip his legs as he fell backward. Scrambling forward, I hastily got out of the way, casting about with my senses to find my staff which I had dropped during my initial fall.
The enchantment that powers these things seems to be impervious to normal magic, I noted silently. As I had seen before, magic bound within permanent rune structures was virtually impossible to alter or destroy, unless you used something similar against it. Enchanted swords easily cut through my shields, as had the strangely fluid magic of the shiggreth leader, Timothy. His magic had seemed very similar to an enchantment, even though he created it spontaneously with nothing more than will and words. Spell-weaving, came an unbidden memory, the true difference between a civilized race and animals. Somehow I knew that the speaker had meant human kind when he had said ‘animals’.
Even while these thoughts raced through my mind, my hand reached my staff and I brought it up to bear on the swarming wooden chaos of the room before me. Dorian had recovered from his fall and was now grappling the larger table from his disadvantageous position on the floor. It hardly mattered though, as I watched, his greater strength prevailed, and he began ripping the heavily timbered opponent limb from limb, or leg from tabletop, in this instance.
Focusing my power along the channel of my staff, I burned through the remaining chairs with a white hot beam of pure aythar. Within moments the fight was over, and we were left standing amid the wreckage of the most vicious furniture I had ever encountered. I began chuckling at the thought.
“What are you laughing about?” asked Dorian as he rose from the floor.
“We finished the furnishings,” I snickered.
Dorian groaned, “Not again.”
That only made me laugh harder, “You smashed the sideboard and broke the buffet while I charred the chairs.”
“Alliteration?” said my friend bleakly, “I think I preferred your bad puns.”
“Wait,” I protested with a grin, “I think I can do better.”
“Better is worse,” said Dorian.
“You terminated the table’s tortuous tumult.”
“Even if the gods are false, there has to be a special hell for people like you,” he replied.
“A literal hell,” I said before pausing, “… or ‘alliteral’ hell. Is that what you mean?”
“Goddammit stop!” he cried before adding, “alliteral isn’t even a word.”
“Well it should be,” I said smugly and then I was forced to dodge a wide swing of Dorian’s arm. I knew he was only playing though… if he had meant to hit me, I’d never have had time to move.
Chapter 38
The door leading from the room we had just wrecked opened into a small hallway with walls faced in smooth marble. The hall ended in a heavy steel door marked with a single inscription in Lycian, ‘Shraybet gib Aystrylin’.
“Can you read that?” asked Dorian, pointing up at the strange lettering.
I nodded, “It means ‘Repository of Quintessence’.”
“And that means?”
“I’m not entirely sure. The word ‘aystrylin’ is related to aythar, but it refers to it in a more personal or unique sense. It could be used to mean personality, spirit, or mind, depending upon the context. We only have a short phrase here, so it’s hard to guess at the exact meaning,” I explained.
Dorian sighed, “Forget I asked. How do we open it?”
“Let me study it for a moment,” I told him, knowing that would only irritate him more. I ignored his impatient stance and focused my magesight upon the steel door.
Of course it was enchanted, but this was an enchantment I understood much better. In function it was related to the type of enchantments I used in crafting the armor worn by the Knights of Stone, it hardened and protected the metal that the vault door had been made of. It also included an identity spell, which in this case seemed to be very specific. I got the distinct impression I would never be able to satisfy the requirement that the identity spell was looking for. In all likelihood it was looking for a familial identity, such as being a member of the Gaelyn family.
“I don’t think I can open it with anything short of brute force,” I told Dorian.
He grinned. “Well I have plenty of that right here,” and so saying, he drew his sword again.
“No, wait!” I said quickly.
“What?”
“You might break the sword,” I replied.
Dori
an looked at me quizzically. “In eight years I’ve not encountered much that could damage one of your specially crafted blades, or even dull them. Why would this be an obstacle?”
“That door is similarly enchanted, and there’s a hell of a lot more of it,” I said quickly.
Dorian was dismayed. “So what do we do, if you can’t spell it open and it’s stronger than me and this blade… we just pack up and go home?”
“You aren’t the only brute force we have available,” I said wryly. “Go back up topside and wait for me. In fact, move back up the hill a bit. I don’t want you too close, just in case.”
“Why’s that?” said Dorian, confused.
“Because I might forget you’re here and kill you by accident,” I answered frankly.
“Oh,” he replied, and without further argument he left. Before he had gotten beyond earshot he called back, “How will I know when you’re done?”
I grinned mischievously, “You’ll know.”
I kept my magesight trained on him until I was certain that he had reached what I thought should be a safe distance… around a hundred yards or so. Once I no longer had that worry, I focused on the steel door blocking my way. It was almost ten foot tall and a little over twelve foot in width, but it was part of a large steel encased chamber that extended beyond visible sight and into the bedrock. The room it guarded was approximately twenty foot on each side and entirely protected by similarly enchanted steel. I couldn’t tell how thick the walls were, but I’d have guessed they were anywhere from six inches to a foot. That’s how I’d have made them.