The massive portal chamber was shaped like a pentagon, with the five walls tiled in mosaic instead of stone. Moonlight shone from above through a crystal as clear as glass. The portal, a massive diamond the diameter of two carts lined nose to tail, was embedded in the stone floor in the center of the room. Its diameter was about that of two carts lined up nose to tail. The diamond reflected the moonlight in milky lines and triangles over the stone floor surrounding it.

Sandy stone blocks spread out from the crystal’s edge to the archway where we stood. They had the same perfect proportions as I’d seen throughout this place, but the stone blocks showed no signs of age or wear.

The walls slanted outwards towards the ceiling like the entire space stood at the top of a giant funnel.

Funnel where?

I didn’t like that. I also didn’t like mosaic jackals on each of the five walls. Five jackals with ten glittering jeweled eyes, all staring at the archway. At me.

Outside, the clamor of goblins shouting and stamping was getting louder.

We had little time. Eira knelt at the edge of the crystal and shouted something to Larendil, who stood about the third of the way around.

“I think it’s the rune for rebirth,” Larendil said.

Rebirth. That was a weird one. I dredged my memory for what our instructor had said it was useful for. Funerals? That seemed ominous. But Runic Theory was one of those classes deemed useful for the well-rounded bard I’d mostly ignored. Except for the ones most used to guard estate windows. For obvious reasons. And to preserve wine and ale. If one of those got disturbed, you ended up with a cup of vinegar as your reward. I’d learned that one from a particularly lovely summer with a brewer in Taralia.

Someone had marked some of the stones ahead of us with circles, creating a path like lilypads over a pond to the central crystal. To the right of one of them, the stones had vanished, and an odd, yellow-white team curled up from the opening.

Xy’lint went first, moving with surprising grace and delicacy for one of his size and length. After he’d made it about a third of the way along, Zareb tapped my shoulder and pointed.

I stepped out, my guts churning. Why again had I agreed to this? Right, sniffer-rats the size of an extra-large dog. I’d wanted more than a lute at my back if I had to face a horde of angry goblins, hobgoblins, and the like. That part had worked out, more or less. I wasn’t dead, or even wounded. My feet had seen better days, and I’d never complain again about the week it took to break in a pair of good leather boots.

But now, as I hopped from one circle-marked stone to the next, I couldn’t help but consider we were probably heading some place worse. With larger monsters. And a warlock who had abducted a village full of children. Probably the same warlock who had stripped me and dropped me into a cage to become goblin stew.

A goblin shouted with the smack-smack of their wide, bare feet hitting the stone behind me. Zareb muttered something that sounded like “blasted darkspawn!” I turned to see Zareb had also turned and set his stance, sword swinging. The goblin dove out of the way, sliding off the marked stone into a bare one. I felt a searing heat as a beam of fire blasted from the nearest wall. It seared the goblin, the fire glancing off Zareb’s armor. Zareb hissed with pain, stumbling a step.

“Zareb!” I shouted, running back towards him. I wasn’t much, but if I could steady him enough to keep him on the path, that would be the difference between a fighting paladin and a roasted one.

Another pair of goblins approached the archway. The smell of charred leather and meat wafted from the dead goblin, who looked more like melted char than a proper corpse.

The two goblins, cinnamon addicted as they were, still took a moment to stare, one looking decidedly yellow.

When I got to Zareb, he was mumbling a prayer. A halo of light limned his face and armor.

Right.

Paladin.

He opened his eyes and took a shaky step. “Put your hand on my shoulder,” I said.

To my surprise, he did. His palm was sweaty, and I felt the heat wafting off his armor, even now. And that had just been a graze. “Water,” he said, his voice hoarse and gravely. I touched the waterskin hanging at his side. Thankfully, the opposite side of where the fire had grazed. The leather still showed discoloration from where it had touched his armor, and the surface felt warm. I twisted open the cap, touched it to my lips to make sure it wasn’t too hot to drink. Not quite. I handed it over. He tipped it back, gulping it down. Sweat tickled my brow, neck, back and well, everywhere, just from the running and terror. I couldn’t imagine how much worse it would have been if a firebolt had grazed me in full plate armor.

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“Thanks,” he said, his voice sounding less like a box of jagged rocks.

A dagger whizzed through the hair, clanking against Zareb’s armor. One of the two goblins at the archway shouted words I hadn’t heard in the Goblin courts. She had her thumbs in her ears though, her long, tapered tongue furled out and wiggling, so I got the message. Zareb turned, his fist on the hilt of his broadsword and growled. The goblin squeaked and jumped back.

“Let’s go,” I said.

He kept his hand on my shoulder as he got his footing, and then let go. More shouting sounded from the archway, and I kept glancing back. The two goblins who had stood there, taunting us, were gone, and none replaced them. The clatter-crunch of movement and shouting had increased, and I caught words that sounded more like directions than curses. “Left! Left! Left that not!” Then came a crunching-squeal that I could only assume whatever cart they had rigged up their blunderbuss to. It didn’t sound like a small cart.

When we reached Xy’lint, zhe lifted palms to Zareb’s face, dagger-like claws scraping over the paladin’s cheeks and jaw.

Zareb started, “It is not--!”

“Quiet.” The scalemaw’s eyes flared amber, and a slight glow shimmered over its hands. The faint smell of burnt flesh and fabric, which I hadn’t even realized was coming from Zareb and not a lingering memory of the goblin corpse, faded as Zareb breathed out a sigh. He said, “You need not have done that, my friend. To feel the pain of one’s errors encourages a man not to repeat them.”

“It also slows a human down. The lesson is learned, and now we need you strong at our backs.”

“You always say that.” Zareb sighed.

My gaze shifted from Xy’lint and Zareb, who had clearly had this same conversation many times, to Eira and Larendil. They were deep in an argument about runes. “Rebirth should be the key,” Eira said.

“We tried it twice. It didn’t work.” Larendil waved at me. “Bard, what do you know about runes?”

“His name is Les,” Eira said.

“He’s a bard, isn’t he? They learn about this stuff.”

“I wasn’t very good at them,” I admitted, walking over to the pair. “What do we have?”

Larendil knelt in front sheet of parchment holding a stick of graphite. She held it out. “We have seven: rebirth, fire, bone, music, wood smoke I think--.”

“It’s wood smoke,” Eira said. “See the accent mark?”

“Right. And child or maybe youth. But we don’t know this one.” Larendil pointed.

Runes were easier to parse than letters for me, especially when taken one at a time. I squinted at the rune, and to my shock, recognized it. “Looks something like the one used to preserve liquor,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Maybe,” I added. None of these made any sense at all. And if Eira didn’t get it, that probably meant this had nothing to do with magic, either. It reminded me of a song, one of those laments about a jilted lover and a bone harp. Which was nonsense.

Of course, most magic looked like nonsense to me, even when it was supposed to make sense. I imagined the runes as clearly as I could in my mind, trying to think of them as music, and thought them to Mischief.

The spirit sent back a long, groaning chord.

I know you’re sleepy, I sent with another couple of points of mana. Things were getting low on that front. This was the most mana I’d spent at once since that unfortunate incident at Pearl’s docks.

I shuddered.

Mischief perked up enough to look over the rune images and send back a flurry of discordance. Confusion.

Nonsense to Mischief too.

“Maybe there isn’t a code?” Eira said.

“How do we open it, then?”

“Maybe there’s something to do with the statues?”

A handful of goblins stood in the archway. They huddled around the end of a long, thick rope. “Right!” a goblin bellowed, followed by, “Forward! Set!”

Having nothing better to do besides contemplate my imminent explosive demise, I walked along the circumference of where the crystal met the floor. Like the walls, certain blocks along the floor were also marked with stone pictograms. Not runes, and nothing that felt magical, either. Just pictures. An Ankh, a moon. A scarab beetle, a sun with a key.

Key?

The key pointed straight toward one of the jackal statues. One with clear crystal eyes. Above it sat the rune for spirit. Even I knew that one. It was three slantwise lines, showing the connection between mind, body, and heart.

Could it be that easy?

I looked up, squinting. Above, the pictogram of a lock seemed to hover in the air.

Key. Lock.

“Over here!” I called out.

Both Eira and Larendil looked up.

Then I heard something crunch-clunk at the chamber archway, and the four goblins who had been clutching the rope dropped it as someone else shouted. “Fire in hole!”

“On the crystal!” I shouted, and dropped, putting both of my hands on top of the key symbol and pumping in mana.

A C major chord swelled in my mind as the key pulled mana from me, and the crystal vibrated. An odd click-scritch-click sounded through the air. My skin tingled, and the hair on my arms and neck rose.

“The jackals! By Khemri! They’re moving!”

I forced myself to look up at the walls.

Tic-scratch. Tic-scratch.

As tiles scraped over stone, the mosaics shifted, and the jackals seemed to turn. All of them, to stare straight at the middle of the crystal. Their jeweled eyes glowed in the shade of their element: the one in front of me glowing the iridescent white of spirit, to my right, fire red, following earth in pine green, air in amber, and water a shimmering blue-gray-brown.

“Bard!” Larendil shouted. “What did you do?”

“Fire!” a goblin shouted.

Then a blaze of red-white flared from the archway.

BOOM!