I gave orders to my eldritches to follow Shallowlie’s commands in my absence. Then I got turned around twice in making my way through the sea of wights to the southern edge of the courtyard, where Winterprince was floating. He was busy directing a beam of white flame into the face of the avatar from the tip of his unmelting ice-sword, pushing it off-balance while Dimdweller’s blades flashed about its lower segments.
“You coming?” I yelled aloud to him.
He continued to keep up the pressure on the godling for a few more seconds, soaring in silence, ignoring me – then Mountainslide was in place, hitting it in the upper body with a slew of different attacks, and Winterprince reluctantly lowered his sword.
Then the arch-wizard was gone, darting ahead of me on the path the enchanters had supplied, whizzing between the towers so quickly I was hard-pressed to keep up, even with the fey wings augmenting my speed. Behind us, the purple mists swiftly receded; when I glanced back I could see the clouds there, barely stirring at the borders, lying like a huge, putrid mould upon the city.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” the wizard snapped over his shoulder at me.
I don’t, I wanted to reply. I’d never seen a giant ball of green energy before – who had? – but I had to try. The only thing I’d experienced which sounded similar was the Autumn Door; as much as I wanted this green orb to fall within my areas of knowledge, I hoped it wasn’t anything like as bad on my head as the Doors had been. Perhaps it wasn’t even sorcerous in nature; I was pretty certain a druidic implement might give off a green glow, and –
And then we came in sight of it, the Green Tower. I didn’t hold out much hope the sphere was a druidic invention once I saw it.
The tower was around two hundred feet tall: quite impressive, one of Zadhal’s tallest. It could’ve served as a minor college-building in Mund, or a guildhall. It was a broad, four-sided building, constructed from large black bricks. The top fifty-or-so feet looked to be a single floor, given that its sides were open as though huge windows had once stood there, now lost to time. That uppermost section was illuminated from within by a fierce emerald light that, had it been night, would’ve shone like a beacon clear across the city.
With my sorcerer’s-eye I could see the wild, tangled lines of faint green force, like otherworld seams bursting out, webs flailing and flopping in a patternless array all around those upper floors.
Zel would’ve been really handy right about now.
Even more disconcerting, bones were piled at the base of the tower so that they made a kind of pyramid about it, reaching three or four storeys up. The pile must’ve been made up of the remains of thousands, barely hemmed-in by the surrounding buildings, completely engulfing what should’ve been a fair-sized strip of empty land around it the tower.
“Timesnatcher, why did no one dare approach it, exactly?” I said.
“Why do you ask?” he replied. He couldn’t mask his tiredness, the grief into which his nervousness had transformed.
Before I could respond I noticed that Winterprince had halted ahead of me, freezing in the air, and I slowed as I approached him. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought the blank slate of ice looked anxious.
“The bones you mentioned – they’re here.” The wizard’s voice was low, so low it was hard to catch amongst the smattering of other instructions and exclamations being uttered over the link. “They’re dormant.”
“Dormant?” I didn’t want to know the answer, really, but I had to know, I supposed.
“The previous expeditions only got to this district twice,” Timesnatcher said. “Both times, the Green Tower was surrounded in what witnesses described as a ‘bony shell’. It appears that these bones you see may move over the building’s surfaces sometimes.”
“Maybe Belestae really does have our backs…” I mused. “Is it because we’re flying, or because we’re invisible, or something?”
“Usually it’s ‘or something’, but I don’t think it matters,” the arch-diviner answered.
“We can proceed?” Winterprince asked.
Yes, he was definitely coming across as anxious.
“You have Father Time’s permission,” Timesnatcher said wryly.
Winterprince grated out an expletive, aloud so that our leader wouldn’t hear, then sped off, at the front again. I could barely wrap shields around him.
It was a good job I could, because as we gained a sickening degree of elevation and drew ever-closer to the walls of the tower, it responded to our presence the only way it knew how.
I felt like sighing. It was just one thing after another today.
The bones reacted the way mist in a mistball reacted when you shook it. The motions weren’t just fast; they were practically instantaneous. Yellowy, spell-bound bones took to the air, whipping at us with the speed (if not the sharpness) of a hail of arrows. Hundreds of human skulls, femurs, spinal cords, all the other bits my rudimentary knowledge of medical terms didn’t stretch to – they hid the Green Tower from view, rising up before us, above us, behind and below us all at once –
But I did have my shields around him.
He halted and allowed me to catch up when he realised we were floating together inside a bubble of, as it would appear to him, invisible force. The white light of the sky was fragmented, almost entirely occluded by the unliving cocoon of bones into which we had plunged.
“Can you clear these?” I cried.
Winterprince floated in silence for several seconds, long enough that I thought he hadn’t heard me. Just as I was about to ask again, the gust of wind struck.
All the bones on one side of the shield were smashed aside – the white light of the sky once more fell upon us – and then within an instant we were surrounded again as the gale went by.
“Great,” I muttered.
“Can you do better?”
I shook my head. I shouldn’t have said anything, should’ve kept my grumblings to myself. I hadn’t meant to make it sound like I was criticising him.
Of course, there was a chance I could do better…
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
I brought up a double-line of spikes down the shield’s swell, two thin columns of force-blades that stretched from pole to pole. Then with a single motion I sent both columns out in twin waves, screeching around the shield in opposite directions.
The force-blades did little damage to the actual bones themselves – whatever ‘ill-will’ was present in the Green Tower’s defence-system, it only barely seemed to count. But that didn’t stop them sweeping the bones aside, clearing them all off into the air –
For a brief instant we floated free, while huge segments of bone soared about us, flecks in the mistball –
We saw what had happened to the tower, a single flash of understanding before the bone-storm closed in again.
The tower – it was covered in them, wearing the stuff as though it were armour. There didn’t appear to be a single crack through which we might fly.
After the spellbound bones closed in once more, I said, “Can’t we get in underneath?”
The cold response: “Can’t you go through them?”
I considered it. “Move forwards,” I suggested.
Gradually we advanced, and I brought the edge of my shields into contact with the tower’s undead shell.
No.
When I pushed, I damaged my shield, nothing more. The bone wasn’t going to give way like that.
“It’s not having it,” I reported. “You want to try?”
“This was your idea,” he grated, seeming surprisingly reticent to step up. “You should’ve stayed, sent Shallowlie.”
I resented the implication. Did he think Shallowlie’s barriers were more powerful than mine? She seemed very quick off the mark, but I didn’t think she’d ever displayed stronger work than I had.
Not that he was to know that, I supposed. Not like he was there when I’d saved half of dropping Firenight Square while he sauntered about…
I halted the thought. Em had been ‘sauntering about’ too that evening, and I wasn’t thinking badly of her for it…
Em. For a few moments, I remembered the touch of her hands, the smell of her hair. Home, my brother and sister, my extended family – the place I wanted to be, the people I wanted to be with.
But not so badly that I’d give up this.
“There might be another option,” I said. “Fancy distracting it? I might be able to go through, but I won’t be able to take you with me.”
“So long as you don’t run,” the icy head snapped out the words.
It was with some trepidation that I brought my wraith into the shielded space.
“What did you just do?” the wizard demanded.
“You can feel it?”
“You expected me not to?”
I shrugged. The wraith was almost invisible even to me, a mere shadow of a presence.
“Feels different to a ghost.”
“That’s because it is.” I held out my hand, beckoning, and the shadow-man came to my fingertips.
It would be the easiest to join with. It was transparent, insubstantial…
It didn’t matter what I told myself, I still couldn’t join with it. Six at the same time was still beyond me.
Without a touch of regret I ejected Zabalam and sent him home; I hardly had much use for him in a place like this anyway.
The ice elemental was just hanging in the air, watching me as I worked.
Now when I held out my fingers to the wraith it could come, it could enter, and I took its lack of substance into myself, felt myself reflect its abnormal nature.
Howling. Such tortured, aimless howling filled my mind that for a moment I couldn’t even feel, never mind see or hear or think.
“– they slew us! but he wore two shoes! I remember them! two shoes on two feet and I was there! and I had flesh and I had blood and I could pick him up and put him on my shoulders! and now everything would be okay if I just had blood! if I just had flesh like yours! but they slew us and then he was gone! when he wore two shoes –“
Silence!
The sudden cessation of the sounds was almost as relieving as moving away from the Winter Door had been. I could feel Gilaela and Avaelar’s disgust subsiding.
And I could feel something else – or rather, couldn’t feel things I normally could.
I held up my hand in front of my face and I could see through my ever-so-slightly purple-tinted flesh.
I could see the tower… through my palm.
“That might just do it,” Winterprince grated in a condescending, irritated – irritating – voice. “I’ll fly that way,” he pointed to our left, “and I’ll fly fast. My armour will protect me.“
“I’ll put extra shields on you,” I said. I thought about the bony shell surrounding the tower, preventing entry via any ordinary means; the last thing I wanted was Winterprince dying and the rest of the bones coming back, making my job that much harder. “Don’t you go running away, though, eh?”
He tossed his head, facing away from me, and then he was gone, flashing towards the edge of the shield I held about myself. As he went, a blue blur, he bore away his own faint blue circle-and-star formation that I could feel tapping my internal reservoir of strength.
Worth it, I decided, as the moment he left my unmoving barriers the bones poured themselves all over him, pressing in at the smaller, mobile shield that ringed him round.
I was left alone in the rain of skeleton-parts. I quickly soared upwards towards the Green Tower’s peak –
The sensation of my stomach dropping, dropping out of me to the floor far below, was suddenly diminished. I didn’t feel like I was going to fall again.
Marvelling at this new freedom, I stretched exuberantly through the air. My arms and legs felt twice their normal length even though there was no change in my actual proportions. My body itself seemed to be like a purple-green shadow, sailing on the wind far more easily than ever before; it appeared that after merging with the wraith my sylph-wings had become very sensitive, powerful, while the wizardry-flight weakened, went a bit sluggish.
Even still, it was definitely worth it for the fact I could fly higher without feeling sick, without swooning. That was something Zel hadn’t been able to achieve…
I saw the green radiance of spell-threads shining through the bones above me, and knew I had to be close.
I briefly considered dropping my shields and testing my new form on the skeletal storm, finding out whether I could let the missiles pass through me – but I decided I couldn’t risk it. Better to arrive safely in the right area then test it directly against the tower, with my shields still about me. If I was wrong, I could be clobbered to death in a matter of seconds, and my remains would go to join the storm eventually. It wasn’t like I could trust Winterprince to retrieve my corpse.
At last my barriers pushed aside the loose bones surrounding the tower’s highest floor, leaving only the armour in which it was clad; it was preventing the green light from getting out, but it didn’t stop the loose lines of emerald power from protruding through the bone, waving wildly and simmering on the cold air. The lines were eldritch runes stringed together into coils, their luminosity plain to my sorcerous vision, stretching through my shields with no visible reaction.
I positioned myself and my shields carefully, judging the height from the roof down: ideally I wanted to pass through the bone-armour in the right spot so that I could enter through one of the vast, empty windowpanes. Too low and I’d have to traverse the interior of the tower – and who knew what was in there?
I reached the right spot, then I experimented with a single foot; I didn’t particularly want to touch the bones with my bare hand.
It was like pushing my foot into very cold, very still water. A vertical sheet of cold, still water.
I wasn’t exactly comfortable doing this – it was no different to plunging a limb into a pool, a body of liquid so dark and murky you couldn’t see anything below the top inch. Some smarmy, all-knowing part of you expected to not get the limb back, and insisted on whispering about the inevitability of it constantly.
It’s like acid! You’ll push deeper into it and suddenly you’ll burn! You’ll never be rid of the pain of it!
I ignored my metaphorical inner demons and slowly, I pressed forward – my shin was in, the insubstantial skin responding by turning to goose-flesh – then my knee, my upper thigh – and then my foot was out the other side.
To the Hells with it, I cursed, and screwed my eyes shut as I flapped my wings in a single, powerful beat.
I passed through the chilling curtain of undead matter where it had covered the glassless window, and didn’t open my eyes or mouth until I was through, in the musty green air.
I could barely even open my eyes again, the brilliance of this sphere was so great, and I didn’t have Zel on board to adjust the parameters of my vision for me. This room was indeed a vast, black-pillared chamber, five storeys high. Barely-contained within the bounds of the columns and revolving clockwise at a fearsome speed was a huge, coruscating ball of white-green plasma.
A dozen lines of runic energy were passing right through me every second, moving on and being replaced by others as the sphere turned, hovering on the spot several feet above the ground – it was hard to tell exactly how high from up here near the ceiling.
I wobbled a little, and was just about to descend towards the floor and reactivate my shields when –
“I wondered how long you would dally before joining me here,” Direcrown said, stepping around the sphere and looking up at me. There was just a hint of amusement in his voice as he waved a hand and continued, “Come, young man. There is much for you and I to discuss.”