“You mean you’re wearing that all the way?” Kauom said. He gazed at Eris with some amazement.
She sighed. “Have we reached that time already?”
“You look like a whore! We’ll be waylaid by bandits! What good’s gold and velvet in the woods?”
“What good is a dwarf who does not follow his companions through a portal? Some questions are best left unanswered.”
She pressed past him. It was true, as they headed for the hills, that she was splendidly dressed: greens and reds, a new skirt lined with fur, a deep black cloak; she wore all her accessories from the Magister’s vault save the circlet, which was in her backpack—three magic rings, two gilt armlets, a jade ward, a Spellward gauntlet of her own craft—and, of course, she still carried her staff. She also wore Guinevere’s holy symbol around her neck. The only silver anywhere on her body. It was a sentimental thing, not really her style at all, but it wasn’t ugly—and for some strange reason she could never bring herself to sell it. So she wore it with the rest.
“You can’t adventure while laden like the jeweler’s storefront!” Kauom said. “It doesn’t make any sense!”
The road was steep all the way to Akancar. The journey reminded Eris of her time in Rytus, of their trek to the Manastone mines, except here the forest grew thick with bramble. They had to stick to the path.
The air chilled with each step. She fastened her cloak around herself.
She was at shouting distance with him now. “I am hardly laden; my movement is unimpaired,” she called.
If they made good time the trip up the mountainside could be completed in two days, but even a few hours in Eris’ calves burned. She already missed the life of careless luxury she’d grown used to. She regretted acquiescing to this foolish quest.
That night at camp, her skin tingled at the mere thought of a warm bath.
“You are fairly conspicuous,” Robur said.
Eris jumped. Her eyes shot open, but her hair was in her face. She realized at once who was before her, and with fingers curled into claws pulled that hair from her eyes.
She sighed. “And you think that an accident, do you?”
“Kauom may be right that it would be more prudent—”
“Leave me be!” she snapped. She was too tired to deal with the idiocy of her companions now. She wanted to be left alone.
Robur sat across from her, by her secluded place at their camp. He didn’t leave. He wanted something from her, but he was too timid to say it, so he was just sitting there, staring past her.
She could not wait until the day when she was able to travel alone. To be rid of these freaks, fools, and imbeciles that followed her now.
“What do you want?” she growled. Her voice low.
“Oh,” he said. “I…well. I’ve been reading more about the Essence. There was an excellent library I managed to purchase in Swep-Nos for only 200 drachmae, which was very cheap considering the age of some of the tomes. I got the idea because I heard you talking to yourself some nights in your room—talking to the Manawyrm, I mean—and I was reminded of the idea of a manashunt…”
“This again?”
“These new books mention wyrmic possession, I’m certain it would work. I’ve gathered most of the reagents already—it’s a simple potion. The effects are completely reversible with an antipotion as well, which we could brew beforehand, although some pain is inevitable when your bloodstream is reinfused with microscopic shards of manacrystal…but nothing worse than spellsickness.”
“I have told you already I am not interested in your potion!”
“It’s been many months since the Manawyrm last tried anything serious. As far as I understand it, such a creature is well within its power to replace your soul with its own—to merge your Essences—once it has enough power. There may be no other option to save your life—”
“Then death shall come for me,” she said, “as it comes for us all. Do I seem afraid to you? Does my voice quaver? Cease this—lecturing. I will not crawl like a serf to you on my hands and knees, begging for protection. Never mention this again!”
Silence.
Robur nodded. Then, “I was wondering if you might…wish for me to teach you Supernal Vision in that case. It would allow you to see the strength of the wyrm’s Essence within your own heart. Perhaps you might teach me Aethereal Voice in return—"
Eris scoffed. “A mage who can use magic needn’t reduce herself to merely finding it. Such a spell is beneath me. Now be off! ‘Tis late and I—leave me!”
Obedient as always, Robur slinked off into darkness. Eris was left alone. She regretted what she said immediately. Supernal Vision was beneath her but it was far from useless, and tedious as the boy was he wanted to help her. But the suggestion she should concede her ability to cast spells, for that was the true effect of a manashunt, in her battle against the Manawyrm—it infuriated her. So although a tinge of guilt clung to her as she tried to sleep that night, she justified her harsh words as a necessary evil to dissuade Robur from any future foolishness.
Just as numbness overtook her, the voice came.
Its vanity will be its unraveling.
----------------------------------------
It rained all the second day. Eris raised her staff. The difference between tapping energy from the air with this device and without it was the difference between moving a wagon on wheels and off. When she lifted her right arm, power poured into her from the heavens. The gem at the top of the staff glowed as its battery reserves charged.
She extended a thin green shield of magic over her head. What would have been exhausting to sustain before she now did effortlessly. She felt the tingling of mana in her veins, but she wasn’t depleted.
The rainfall stopped around her. The shield followed over her as she walked.
----------------------------------------
Lightning flashed behind Akancar. A half dozen squat buildings appeared for an instant in the dim, drizzling darkness, then vanished again into fog. As night fell and they approached the town Kauom had harangued Eris into dropping her spell for fear of being spotted. She reluctantly agreed with his assessment. So now she stood at his side, and Robur’s, and found herself soaked by cold rainwater. They stared at the town cloaked by darkness.
“Have you been here before?” Robur said loudly over the downfall.
“No, but it’s a Dwarf mine,” Kauom’s voice came, “that means the town out here is just for staging—the real Akancar’s carved on the insides.”
“What did they mine?”
“Arkwi ore. White iron.”
Thunder cracked. Her companions tarried while they caught pneumonia. Eris pressed on toward the outer town’s largest structure for shelter.
The night was pitch black. She could barely see her own hands; the darkness subsumed even the dim orange light from her new ring. That was when she remembered the spellbook from the Archon’s Vault—the first vault, the false vault. She knew a spell for this: the Embering Eyes of the Lynx.
She cast it quickly. Chiseling away, in her imagination, at the constraints of her eyes. Turning them into something different. Applying a mask of mana to herself.
When finished, she saw every falling streak of rain in the air. Every puddle on the ground. Akancar appeared monochrome to her, nothing but shades of white and gray and black contrasted, but she could see.
The town was deserted.
Dwarven buildings never had windows. As in Swep-Nos, most consisted of solid square bricks of a single storey. Basements were common living spaces. Eris prowled through the wide streets, toward the structure that stood like a keep in the town’s center. This had walls that rose three times higher than any other nearby. Its roof tapered as it rose. She was reminded of the Cathedral to the Cult of the Aether in Katharos; it appeared a well-fortified anomaly.
The rest of the buildings were deserted. The livery and a small inn attached seemed ransacked. Doors broken open everywhere.
She waded through a puddle to flank around the side of the central building, and there saw its gate clearly in black and white. A doorway about the height of Eris stood adjacent to an enormous sealed portcullis, an archway of stone set within the stone. The doorway, it seemed, was just a door, but the portcullis glistened with golden runescript—enchanted Dwarven characters.
The portcullis was solid. No obvious mechanism could exist to make it move.
“Let’s get…!” Kauom said. He and Robur caught up, stumbling all the way in the darkness. Eris only caught every third word in the storm. “That’s…town gate! Whatever…drove folk from… houses, it came…! Back…tomorrow!”
“Kobolds?” Robur said.
“No kobolds…ever…driven dwarves from their homes, there’s something else here!”
Leaving the town meant spending the rest of the night in the freezing downpour. She could shield them, but only so long as she stayed awake. She preferred a more direct approach.
Her hand tried to find a handle. There was no handle. She tossed her weight against the door, then tapped her staff, but it didn’t budge. This was a keep—a ‘town gate.’ Just as she lowered her staff to unleash a blast which the door could not withstand, as she felt herself energized, a slit at chest level opened.
A dwarf stood on the other side.
“What are ye doin’ out there?!” he cried. A cascades of locks came undone. Seconds later the door pulled open, revealing a warmly lit Dwarven gatehouse beyond. “Get in, before they come for ye!”
The door latched once again behind them. From this side of the portcullis, no wall was visible at all: only the one small door. The dwarf porter pressed his back against it once shut.
“Where on Earth’ve ye come from at this hour? Did the Rangers send ye?”
Another four dwarf men watched the newcomers in here, fidgeting awkwardly with crude weapons in their hands. Now in the light the porter looked Eris up and down, and saw Kauom’s arbalest, and his eyes went wide. No noise of the storm outside penetrated the masonry of the walls.
“Yer adventurers?” he whispered.
“Whatever gave that impression?” Eris said. The room before her burned her retinas; she shielded herself, decasting the spell.
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“We’re here for the bounty,” Kauom said. Beads of suspicion thicker than rain droplets ran down his forehead. “Where’s the damn ‘bolds?”
The porter gave another glance out the slit in the door. “They’ve taken over the whole town, ye see? Storm must’ve scared ‘em off fer now. We’ve been waitin’ for help to arrive from Swep-Nos for days!”
“Kobolds took over the whole town?” Robur said.
He paused for a moment as the party dripped. “The Mayor can tell ye more. Follow me.”
Past a second closed portcullis and a second door, this one ajar, was a bright, large, open room with a high ceiling. Dozens more faces lined the floor. Catwalks overhead were clogged with people. Dwarven men, women, and children, all of whom looked more or less the same to Eris, and whose hopeful looks electrified the air.
At the middle of the room was a huge platform. In fact every inch of this building sprawled with arcane machinery that hummed blue with aethereal energy. This was the town gate: the gate was an elevator.
The porter led them up a flight of stairs to the catwalks. There they were greeted by a tall dwarf in fine but very soiled clothes, identified by the porter as Mayor Uttaruom.
He gasped at the sight of Eris. He bowed, and at his lead all the rest of the dwarves in her presence bowed, too, so that she was left standing like the confused soldier who had slept through a battle and stumbled out onto a corpse-strewn field.
“When we asked fer help,” he said, “we didnae think a great Magister of tha Southlands would answer tha call! Stonemother bless ye!”
Eris’ mouth hung open for a moment, before twisting away into a grin. She glanced at her staff. Appearances were everything after all.
“Eris isn’t—” Robur started, but Eris hit him with her staff.
“Be quiet, apprentice,” she hissed, “we have no time to waste. The journey to this miserable—I mean to say splendid mine took us far longer than we wished. We had best hear what ails you, so we may best deliver you from its plight presently, hm?”
“Yeah!” Kauom caught on immediately, greedy thing he was, “listen to your master, kid. It wasn’t easy making it all the way up here so fast. I hope that’s worth extra to you, Mayor.”
“It is! We account ourselves most lucky ta be graced with the gift of the presence of a weaver of tha heavens,” Mayor Uttaruom said, groveling in the most appealing way.
She pounded her staff against the catwalk. “Rise,” she commanded. Uttaruom did first, then the rest after. “Pronounce to us your misfortunes.”
Actually she was exhausted, and she wasn’t really listening while he frantically explained the situation as follows:
“We always fight with tha damn kobolds—but somethin’ has them stirred up right-crazy. Two weeks ago they started pouring outta the tunnels all over these hills, up and down the mountains, attacking every miner. Goin’ after horses ‘n’ everything. So many of them swarmed up through the lower levels, we had ta pull out from tha town proper and come up ta tha town gates just ta keep everyone safe, hoping the Rangers arrived—and now ye’ve come!”
“You believe something is causing this?” Robur said.
“I donnae what ta believe, lad, but I can tell ye now that they ain’t the same as they was.”
“How much is it worth to you?” Kauom said.
The Mayor looked them all over. “If ye can calm the boldies down fer good, I’ll pay ye each three thousand drachmae, and give the Tower half off all shipments for the next six months!” He winked at Eris.
They all gawked. The specie kept on hand by the dwarves of Nanos never failed to astonish. Even after Kauom’s mouth closed he stayed silent, but never to pass up an opportunity for more money he amended the deal: “Make it four thousand and forget the discount.”
“Are ye sure? We do well more than that in business in half a year—”
“I am certain,” Eris said gravely. “We in the Tower have strict rules with…the limits of our business arrangements.”
Uttaruom nodded. “Same ta me. Deal.” He bowed again. “Kill as many o’tha bastards as ye can while yer at it, and I’ll praise tha damn Magisters every day fer all the rest of my life!”
Eris smiled. “Your problem is good as solved.”
----------------------------------------
They slept among the dwarves that night. Come morning the elevator called to them. Whatever was responsible for this disturbance, whatever caused the kobolds to flee toward the surface and overrun the town, it was the central mineshaft that would take them to it. Other avenues were a distraction.
“Eris,” Robur whispered as they stepped onto the elevator’s platform, “are you certain we are equipped to deal with creatures such as these?”
In response she raised her staff and let the gem charge. It would be harder to cast underground, unless they found Manastone. She intended to be well prepared. Still she glared down at him.
“You may doubt your own capabilities, but do not doubt mine,” she replied.
“There will be many of them.”
“All the easier to incinerate.” The platform was huge—two dozen dwarves could stand atop it at once with ease, and wagons could be taken up and down for transportation into and out of the true town of Akancar. Once Kauom had boarded and come to a stop, she nodded and proclaimed, “You may lower us.”
“Good luck!” cried the Mayor, and so followed the cheering voices of countless more dwarves behind.
The platform lurched. The elevator’s engine was Manastone, automatic, and it went quickly once activated. They plummeted deep into the mine. For a moment Eris lost the solid ground beneath her feet. She was certain she was falling, that the idiotic Dwarven contraption had malfunctioned, and she nearly cast a spell to dampen her fall. But she reached out and felt Robur beside her. He was still firmly on the ground. So was she.
Gray rock walls zoomed by. This elevator was much faster than the other she used in Seneria.
“You lied to those people,” Robur said. An observation. “You allowed them to pay you more for a mistaken identity than they might have otherwise.”
“Pay us more,” Kauom corrected.
“We will solve the problem as readily as any Magister delegate,” Eris said. “If he sleeps easier thinking we are officials of the Tower, so be it.”
“I sleep easier, too,” Kauom said. “Four thousand drachmae buys lots of blankets.”
“He was happy to pay this price for this service; we are hardly cheating him.”
“Wouldn’t be right to dissuade the old man of his delusions, anyway. All the hope he had. You want to tell him we’re not really the saviors he took us for?”
Robur frowned. “I suppose not…but the lie was very poor. How could I be your apprentice? And how are you a Magister? We’re the same age, and both too young—”
Eris winced at the comparison. They were not the same age.
“Human girls all look the same to us dwarfs,” Kauom said with a chortle. “Twenty or fifty—can’t tell the difference.”
Eris let the silence hold for a moment. “If you had not attempted to introduce me in a way that spoiled our cover,” she said to Robur, “I would not have been forced to introduce you. Be grateful I did not say you were my eunuch.”
Just then she felt herself pushed into the floor. Presently the platform came to a stop, and before them opened up a tunnel as wide as the central boulevard of Kaimas. The ceiling was low, barely six feet, and carved to perfectly rectangular precision, no blemishes or faults anywhere—except in those scars left in the rock from where veins of ore had been extracted eons ago. No effort was made to conceal the pockmarks left by the miners, not as they marred the walls and roof and floor of this place; that was evidently part of the charm for a settlement within a mine.
The boulevard was lit with sconces filled with black oil. Eris lit one with fire from her finger and it ignited, holding its light for a long while, like a candle, but hardly flickering. She didn’t know what this fuel was, but no mana burned for light here.
She lit each as they passed.
Even with the streetlights the boulevard was dark and cloaked in shadow. On either side of the tunnel were countless branching paths, narrow corridors that led to darkness, and then the more welcoming amenities of any normal town. Homes and shops. A temple to the Stonemother. A warehouse. Anything that might be required to live underground in a place like this.
All was not deserted. When Eris lit the second sconce she caught the shadow of a small creature fleeing down the main road.
Kauom raised his arbalest. “Be ready,” he whispered.
“One shot will do you little good against a horde of kobolds,” Eris said.
He showed her the underside of the device, which was affixed with a bayonet. “I’ll manage, witch.”
They pressed onward. More shadows. Eris noticed a trio of diminutive, half-feathered creatures slip from the entry of a house, then dart farther down the boulevard.
“We should clear each building,” Kauom said. He kept his voice down very low. “They might be waiting behind us, to ambush us.”
“That seems sensible,” Eris said.
So together they slipped inside the next house. They cleared it. This one was empty. Small, already ransacked, and reeking of a scent like guano. Down the street, another door. Here Eris lingered in the entryway while Kauom scoured for the signs of any creatures. This would be a very slow way to progress through these mines—
“I see you, birdie!” Kauom screamed. Eris turned; she saw a creature that looked like a cosmic compromise between a rat, a monkey, a chicken, and a dog scurry its way from beneath a bed, toward Eris at the door.
Of all the chimeras in Esenia she thought the kobold may have been the ugliest and most pitiful. It was too small to resist the dwarf as he grabbed it by the wing; its whiskers twitched against its arm and its tail batted against the floor helplessly, but it was no use. Still it scrambled. Robur tried to help apprehend the creature and it bit at him with rat-like incisors.
Eris, unthinking, took two steps forward into the room. Kauom finally found a good grip on the kobold’s neck, then tossed it against the wall. It hit it hard—it weighed hardly more than a turkey—and he raised his arbalest and pulled the trigger.
The force of an owlbear-killing arbalest sent feathers raining down throughout the room. Kauom burst into laughter. “Haha! That’s one!”
“Eris!” Robur shouted. He pointed over her shoulder, and only then she realized she had stopped paying attention to the main boulevard. There countless more kobolds flooded into the open, as many as ten from some rooms. They had been hiding. They moved through the darkly lit mine like runoff down a city street during a night storm. Some hurled stones at Eris through the doorway she stood in, but Robur raised a shield over the threshold and the projectiles deflected off.
The kobolds routed deeper into the mine at the sight of magic. Squawking like hyenas who had swallowed chickens whole. Eris turned to Kauom. “Are you finished?”
“Almost!” he said. He was still reloading.
She sighed in frustration. Impatience swelling. She decided to step into the open anyway. She had her wards and she was not afraid of these creatures.
The shadow of the last tail disappeared behind the bend of the shaft ahead of them. Eris picked up her pace, her companions trailing after. Jogging now she snapped her fingers as she passed the scones by, lighting each on either side of the road as proceeded forward. The shadows stayed far ahead, but always close enough to follow.
They reached the boulevard’s end. Akancar’s cessation, the mine’s beginning. Here countless sidepaths, alleys, and tunnels branched off. She thought then she might be able to track the kobolds directly to the source of their excitement—to a leader, or an artifact uncovered by the miners. That meant keeping up her chase. For another ten minutes she jogged and twisted through narrow, dwarf-sized mineshafts, pursuing the routing flood of kobolds until she came to a natural cave that reeked of rotting flesh, and she nearly tripped over herself when she heard the noise.
An animalistic sound. Like the call from an eagle that was ten times the size of any man. The creaking, squawking protestations of a hundred more birds followed. It was too dark to see here so she conjured fire into the air, holding it like a flare overhead.
In the light Eris saw an ocean of kobolds, packed shoulder to shoulder. All turned to look at her. Standing over them by a tunnel exit out of the cave was another kobold in a headdress, four times the size of all the others. One smaller creature tried to rush past it for the exit, but received a kick for its trouble.
Another bird’s call. The chieftain lowered its head toward Eris and stared. Strange intelligence in its eyes. A kind of knowing. Could she bring herself to kill these creatures?
She took a step backward. Kauom was behind her now, and Robur, too. She smiled. Yes, she realized. For four thousand drachmae there was nothing she wouldn’t kill. And it happened to be that these wretches were positioned perfectly for a flamestrike.
She concentrated on the cave’s roof above where the kobolds were grouped. Stepping backward, she focused her energy to that place, directing it, fashioning it into fire. Such a thing was nearly impossible on her own, but with the assistance of this staff she found it easy. Then she did the same with the floor. All the while the red gem dimmed. The kobolds did nothing. Finally their chieftain hissed and pointed forward; the whole tide of them moved in Eris’ direction, but by then it was too late. One jumped and Kauom shot it from the air, knocking it instantly back down to the ground—
And Eris let slip her spell.
Green flame engulfed the entire cave. From below magma shot from the earth like a volcano had opened suddenly underfoot, and from above came an inferno as thick as a cotton blanket. She pushed her party members backward into the mineshaft and extended her right hand; the fire licked away at her Spellward gauntlet, but it was as a shield against the heat, stopped easily in the narrow confines. The initial explosion might have killed everything in sight, but just to be certain she held the fire, letting it burn nothing but air and mana, solving this problem in a single stroke.
The red gem dimmed to darkness. Its light went out. Once it was drained, she would have to be more cautious. There was little mana in the air down here.
She let the fire stop.
In an instant all the flames vanished. Air rushed back into the vacuum of the cave, along with wafts of smoke from charred bodies. Most were turned to ash. Only those on the outskirts were identifiably still kobold; and even then, their corpses were blackened and destroyed.
Nothing felt so good as the power of destruction at her fingertips.
She covered her nose. Little smelled so bad.
Kauom hummed. “They didn’t put up much of a fight.”
Eris glared at him. She wanted praise, but none came. “Perhaps they decided accepting fate was easier,” she said.
“They were waiting to ambush us,” Robur said, “but fled when they saw our magic.”
“’twas wise for them to flee. They merely did a poor job of it.”
“They were afraid all right,” Kauom said.
“Not just of us,” Robur said. “Why not continue down the tunnels in flight? There must be something else here they fear more, deeper into the mines.”
That made a certain amount of sense, but Eris didn’t want to legitimize any idea that wasn’t her own.
Kauom lifted up his arbalest. “Another thing to kill. Maybe this one’ll put up a fight.” This was not an idea he relished, clearly, but one he found more natural than the casual incineration of an entire colony of monsters.
“Whatever else lies down these tunnels,” Eris said, “I have now done what it could not.” She coughed as she caught a lungful of smoke. “Let us press onward. If we find nothing of interest, we may report to the Mayor that his problem is resolved.”
“What if it isn’t?” Robur said.
“What they do not know shan’t hurt them. Come.”
Thusly they proceeded forward, deeper into the mines. And while they walked, although she couldn't quite be certain, she almost thought she heard the echo of distant words in her ears:
I will end its cruelty.