“Over here!” Piraeas hissed, pointing. Hours of constant toil had passed, and the leader’s cool demeanour was finally starting to slip. “The rat’s gone under this one. Hurry!”
A wizard stepped forwards, reaching into her demiskin once more to produce the rod of destruction. The long, gnarled staff held in both hands, she took careful aim and started incanting, loosing the charges in short, focussed bursts.
The boulder didn’t last long, pulverised by gobbets of green-red energy.
“Enough,” Flower Guy said. “We’re going to bring down the ceiling if you continue, Kriss.”
“Cut it off,” Piraeas agreed. “We can fit through, now, if we go one by one.”
Alrior watched them go through, one after the other, sliding feet-first into the hole the wizard had created. Holding to the fact the magisters seemed to trust their ability to foresee danger, Alrior consented to squeezing through the crack, constantly reassuring himself as he did so that they wouldn’t all be doing this unless it were safe…
Once he was committed, halfway through the narrow space with his feet kicking out into the open zone beyond the crack, he heard Piraeas’s voice from above.
“Ovin. Brint. You stay up here, wait for a message.”
“Aw, but I –”
“If we all get crushed to death, you’ll need to contact the high-ups,” Piraeas finished grimly.
Alrior, several feet below him and with several thousand tons of rock poised to slam down and trap him, started to whimper.
Then he saw the shadows of Piraeas’s feet entering the groove over his head.
“Come on, Al, get a move on. The longer you’re in there…”
Piraeas left the rest unsaid – he didn’t need to continue. The moment Alrior took the magister’s meaning he hurled himself into his task, knowing there were only two options, two directions: down and up; in and out – and of the two options, only one made sense –
To be a champion. To not be made a laughing-stock by these rich runts. To be useful. To find the corpse of a dragon and –
His spiteful, selfish little mantra was enough to get him through the trial; within a few seconds he’d wriggled down deep enough to get his backside out of the crack, into airy freedom.
He half-dropped, half-scrambled down the face of the rock-pile, then turned and went to join the magisters on the lip of the ledge, staring out in wonder. Radiant illusions lit the scene, and it was like something from a dream.
After a few moments Piraeas stepped up, regarding their surroundings like the rest of them… A minute or so later he broke the silence, saying in a choked voice, “Alright, all of you. Listen. They’ll scrub our minds and they’ll know if any one of us takes so much as a single coin. We’ve got a job to do. Let’s do it.”
Alrior had never, ever before imagined such a treasure-trove. It was a hundred, a thousand times greater than the canvas his mind might’ve painted. The stories of the Ord’s hoard weren’t exaggerations – if anything, they undersold the sheer scope of this titanic cavern. Lagoons of sparkling platinum met meres of glinting gold, rivers of silver sitting like water-rapids between the boulders, bearing up a foam of electrum, a sand of pure, uncut jewels riding the surface, sparkling…
“Do you sense anything?” Piraeas asked him quietly. No one had moved so much as a muscle yet, paralysed by awe (and greed), and despite the fact Piraeas had been the one exhorting them all to get on with their jobs, he hadn’t moved either.
Alrior did sense something. He’d been trained on all manner of undead at a seminar with the late Dustbringer, but this shape he could sense, it was – it was too much –
“Yes,” he said hoarsely, his throat suddenly constricted, as tight as the passageway the wizard made through the rock. The magisters all turned to stare at him. “But I can’t tell what… what it is. It’s like the whole place is dead.”
The two sorcerer-magisters exchanged a long glance, then started casting spells, shaking sand and muttering in Netheric.
“Can you shield us?” Piraeas asked tautly. “Just as a precaution, you understand?”
“With pleasure!”
Alrior started spinning out his shields – if there was one thing he knew, it was shield-work.
“I’m getting peril,” said a male diviner.
“Seconded,” a female one immediately piped up. “It’s just saying, ‘Get out, get out, get out!'”
“Can you link me with Ovin?” Piraeas asked an enchantress, just as Flower Guy’s voice came echoing down through the narrow crevasse behind them:
“Thirded!” Flower Guy cried. “You guys need to get out of there!”
“You don’t know what we’re lookin’ at, man!” someone cried back.
Alrior had hunted coin all his life, like a ranger hunted deer. His ethical core sat deep, solid, fixed in its foundations: he wanted to provide for his family, so the children and his job came first and foremost in his calculations. The accolades that would come with championhood were secondary.
One choice pocketful from this hoard would set not just him and his kids up for life, but their kids too, even if they chose to have ten each…
Piraeas had crouched by the edge of the ledge overlooking the ocean of wealth, and he spoke quietly again: “We can’t just abandon the quest. It’s not about the bonus – look, guys, it’s not like I’m going to lie and say I’m not tempted to palm a few coins. I am. But it’s not going to happen – not me, not you. Not any of you, unless you want excommunicating.”
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Nods and shivers, sighs and whispers; that was how the magisters of Mund responded. No mutiny to be found here, even in the face of the Ord-hoard.
But where is the dragon? Alrior found himself wondering. It was supposed to be right there, wasn’t it? And why is the cave so choked in death?
He suddenly felt as though a wolf, or wolves – dead ones – had been here. He looked for their shapes, but there was nothing distinct. Just a morass, a mire of shadow aspects that vanished even as his sorcerer’s-eye tried to seize upon them.
The sorcerers finished their spells, and agreed with Alrior’s assessment; they too were incapable of providing a precise reading on the place, why it might be so steeped in nethernal energies. After another five minutes of nervous back and forth, Piraeas finally gave the order Alrior had been waiting for – the order he’d been dreading.
“Al, Falia, you’re with me. We’re going out there, getting the lay of the land. Kriss, give us flight.” The wizard quickly got to work, drawing out her spell-components and starting to chant while he was still talking. “And Gholoros, Vosta, get started on wards. Fix them around the opening, yeah? That’s our only way out – we need it clear if things go wrong.”
“I can fix a shield here, as well,” Alrior said. “Maybe two.”
“Excellent!”
Piraeas seemed so enthused at his participation that Alrior managed to make three of his finest shields, bold bubbles of blue light surrounding the escape route. This success spurring him on, he floated off the ledge after the druid and diviner. It was only his third time flying and he was still wobbly on the air, but it was a hell of a lot easier than flying up the dropping mountain, and Piraeas led the way, filling Alrior with confidence.
Vast shields surrounding them, shapes circling lazily, the trio settled down on a huge mound of coins like a small golden hill.
“Anything else?” Piraeas asked at once. “I can’t feel much by way of animal life – nothing with enough of a memory to tell me what happened here.”
“Danger,” the brunette seeress said. “That’s all, Piraeas. Ovin was right. We shouldn’t be here.”
“Wait,” Alrior found himself saying.
What is that I’m feeling?
“That’s more like it.” Piraeas clapped a friendly hand on the arch-sorcerer’s shoulder. “You’re getting a better grip on what you’re detecting? Are there corpses under the treasure?”
It’s too big…
“No,” he said in a strangled voice. “I mean, yes… I think –” he dropped to a whisper “– I think the dragon is undead.”
“Undead,” Piraeas repeated blankly, seemingly failing to understand due to the strain he was under.
Alrior pointed, and the creature made itself visible, audible, a cacophony of coins raining down as it clawed its way out of the treasure-mound in which it had been hiding. Dull scales dripped like tattered banners from its pinions, wings bigger than ship sails. Legs powerful-enough to kick buildings apart like molehills. Tail longer than a dire worm. A mouth fit to devour fifteen magisters and a stupid arch-sorcerer whole.
Gigantic eyes, appearing like orbs of pure amethyst, but for the black slit of a pupil in the centre.
A wave of fetid air washed over the cavern.
His first thought was of terror, wanting to flee, scream, panic. Certainly the body language of Piraeas and the seeress – and the swearing the dragon’s appearance elicited from those on the ledge – seemed to indicate he wasn’t alone in that. But the second thought through his head was one of wonder, that an arch-sorcerer might have the magical reserves to reanimate such a tremendous beast. On the heels of that:
They were wrong about him.
“Redgate didn’t die! Look!” Alrior moved his pointing finger to the scarlet shape sitting astride the immense, stinking mass of gleaming ligament and bone. A masked shape, hunched over, unmoving. “Redgate!” he cried.
“That’s not Redgate,” the seeress said ominously, taking off almost instantly towards the others, towards the ledge. Towards escape.
Alrior hesitated for just a second before finally getting to grips with what he was sensing. It was no wonder he’d been confused – a dracolich was one thing, but an archlich…? He’d never thought to see such a thing, sense it, and yet it was the amethyst eyes behind the spider-mask he’d been perceiving all along.
He got to grips with it – and he fled.
He was halfway to the ledge, aloft in the air just behind Piraeas, when it started.
Nethernal gateways. Hundreds, thousands of them, each releasing a single zombified kobold. They poured across the serene sea of gold, disturbing it with their footfalls, the stench and sound of their arrival making Alrior sick to the stomach.
They were on the ledge, ahead of him, already straining the shields covering the exit. The wizards were hurling spells, the sorcerers were summoning their imps, but the kobolds they destroyed didn’t want to stay dead, pulling themselves back together, rejoining the fray.
Alrior was about to land on the ledge and glanced back over his shoulder at the unmoving dracolich and its unmoving rider. He had no idea what to do. He’d once read about using lines of force to cut through enemies, but he’d never had to try it before –
He set his foot down on the ledge, and his shields drove back over thirty of the arch-lich’s minions, allowing the trio to regroup with the others near the cracked boulder.
“What do we do?” an enchanter screamed desperately.
“Damn it,” Piraeas shoved the enchanter back towards the escape route, “just go! Withdraw! Withdraw!”
One by one, the magisters wedged themselves into the opening, squirming into the tight space. Alrior stood far from the group, grimly facing the undead hordes, using his personal shields to push them back. The zombie-kobolds would’ve been vile creatures even if they’d still been alive, but now their tufted bodies were broken, bestial faces frozen in maniacal death-grimaces – most of the monsters were useless drones but the ghouls and wights amongst them were clearly more formidable. They moved far faster, scraping away at his barriers with greater ferocity and diligence respectively.
It was just as the fourth magister clambered up that everything changed. Screams started to emanate down the crack, Flower Guy’s amongst them. One magister’s voice was lifted in a shrill shriek that cut off in a protracted gurgle, echoing out of the escape route. The fourth dropped back to the ledge, looking petrified.
Alrior sprang back towards them, bringing his larger shields with him, but by the time his lines were submerged deep enough in the boulders to cover the magisters trapped on the far side, the barriers covered only their corpses.
He was still desperately attempting to come to terms with the terrible mess he’d found himself in – the situation had evolved far too rapidly for his mind to fully grasp – but his sorcerous instincts came to the fore, came to his rescue. The training finally paid off.
He gripped his personal circle tight, shivering, as the acid rained from the dracolich’s maw, consuming the remaining shields, the remaining magisters. He stood alone in the centre of the stone-eating flood, protected on his tiny island from the gushing fluid, its noxious fumes. Piraeas, positioned at the rear of the group and facing the acid-breath as if to shield his subordinates with his body, disappeared beneath the wave – and when it receded he was gone, not even bones discernible where he’d been stood. They were all gone.
Except they weren’t. Their ghosts, twisting on the air, failed to evaporate. Wails left their insubstantial lips as they contorted, sickly purple light descending on them as though from a great height.
They’re outside my shield.
He turned to face the red rider upon the dragon.
They’re his now.
We’re all his now.
Alrior felt himself fainting, felt his shield disappear. Before he even hit the ground the acid started rushing in at his feet, but he breathed deep of the fumes; the merciful grey-green mist stole away what was left of his consciousness, letting him collapse into the darkness without fear.
* * *