Amber caught up to me in the castle’s foyer. Admittedly, the castle was more manor by way of castle than an actual fortress. No clearer was that than the immediate opulence which bombarded you upon entrance. The floor was polished to a mirror sheen and held within its stone the impression of cosmic depth. I moved from floor to ceiling only to see spheres of light swim through the air above. Each of them bound by a rope of light that marked their formations out as constellations. Having learned my lesson, I didn’t try to see beyond them. I even gave my eyes a good blink to help my mind reset. It allowed me to see how much gold—or what passed as gold—gilded the walls. They too were spotless to the point of being mirrored sunshine.
I smirked at Amber. “Thanks for not abandoning me,” I said.
She flipped me off. “Oh don’t worry, I still am. I just wanted to be present for the look of despair when you try to capture a lindwurm without a single binding capsule.”
“Oh.”
“Mhmm,” she said before she slammed one into my hand. The capsule was a hexagonal prism of polished corundum whose ends were capped in filigreed silver. I turned it over and noted the button on one of the caps. You pressed it before casting the capsule at the entity you wanted to bind. Simple to use. . . provided you don’t forget them.
“Thanks. If I’m going to hunt this, I’ll um. . .” I trailed off.
Amber rolled her eyes. “Be a big girl. Use your words,” she teased.
I grimaced, “Can you tell—,”
“Please. Say please if you’re going to ask your more experienced senior a question.”
“Ugh, you’re obnoxious,” I said.
She shrugged, “And you’re self-serious. Fork found in kitchen.”
“Can you please tell me what I need to know so I can hunt the lindwurm?” I asked.
She threw her hands behind her head and sashayed over to a pillar in a room to the left of the foyer.
“Formed by the ruling Principle of Pyres and the advising Principle of Gloom, Desecration is the foul inversion of the reverence that can be found in its cousin courts.”
Amber squatted on her haunches and waved me over. Her other hand ready to guide my eye to the base of the pillar.
I asked, “What am I—?”
She cut me off, “It’s sorceries and entities agents of corruption and degradation. A toxin antithetical to existence itself.” Her voice was ironed to crisp perfection; an affectation held by whoever it was Amber’s rendition was in ode to. “The pillar, Temple,” she added.
My eyes had failed to follow her hand—something had caught my eye, I suppose—so she rapped her knuckles against the pillar. Careful to avoid the blotch of inverted color that crawled up its surface the way ink spreads against a wet page. I blinked my eyes before the uncanniness of the scene could take me. Redirected to something safe—Amber’s face.
The gravity of her attention folded down upon me. In some part of myself I recognized the feeling. It reminded me of back near the shrine—but my comprehension fled when she spoke.
“Temple, Desecration is a path for those ready to be a walking sin against life. Would you damn yourself that much for vengeance?” she asked.
I stared back unsure. “What’s sin?” I asked.
Amber quirked her lips in appreciation of a joke I never told. I had known sin was some Old World concept. Saw it mentioned in a book once. Felt like a heavy word. Same way that Desecration was. The way vengeance was. What humor she derived from my question clattered to the floor as she read something in me again.
I stood first. “Can’t say. . . to your question that is. Right now I just need the power to get started,” I said and pointed to the corroded remains of what had once been a cellar door. A small trail of inverted blotches led to it in the next room over.
We passed through the room and did our best to avoid looking at its overflowing bookshelves. I blinked so much that what remained in my head was more slide-show than memory. Books shot out. Fell open. Tomes rained down. Sensorial slices of the Underside’s most famous memetic hazards—knowledge.
To a summoner, any bit of information was as good as salt. A little stretched a long way whether it opened new doors or preserved something for when you’d need it most. The problem though was that few cared to make it widely available. Those sorceries that went unshared were the cornerstone to every family story of how they got through the Changeover. As such, everyone hoarded a little and in the case of collectives they hoarded a lot. Sure, the Public Record existed up on the NewNet as, “the world’s Grimoire,” but it was always a secret behind.
This might have been okay if the entities we bonded with were forthright. Unfortunately they played a game all their own. If you were lucky, the entity might teach you a hand-spell here or there. For most summoners you had to rely on pure observation. Divine a sorcery by watching an entity work miracles with about as much effort as it takes to breathe. It was why these books were so tempting. The Underside doesn’t lie, but it also doesn’t hold back. To figure out a sorcery on your own meant creating something a human mind can handle. Trying to learn from one of these auto-generating grimoires on the other hand would be akin to a deity inscribing the secrets of the universe into your gray matter. You’d be overwritten by the first page.
My body unclenched when we arrived at the trapdoor. While the literal door was in shambles the ladder that plunged down into that impenetrable dark was untouched. Some part of me clenched.
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“Can we send Nahey down? Scout things out for us,” I said.
“First rule of a hunt, don’t do anything that could tip off the target.”
I nudged her—well, I was tense so I really jabbed her. “I thought the first rule was to not explore the territory of unknown Courts?”
She replied, “Yet here we are. My job is to keep you from straying to your death. We do this the right way.”
My nervous attempt at a grin was trampled. I let out a breath and ignored the way my suit hummed as it cycled it away so I didn’t poison myself—though what’s life but an endless dosing of poison until one day it takes you.
I threaded my way past the inverted blotches and onto the ladder.
***
The ladder terminated before it reached the ground. We were high enough that we couldn’t peer into the room below. From within the dark of the tunnel we could only spy a sea of dusty blue stone. With nothing to compare to the fall could have been six feet or sixty. Amber didn’t press me to make a decision. When I looked up at her she read my face. I read her as she read me—whatever she saw made her smile softly and with great pity—so I let go of the ladder.
When you fall from a high enough height it doesn’t feel like falling. Instead it’s some sort of terrestrial parallax where all of creation moves around you. Until you hit the ground you’re weightless.
My legs buckled beneath me when I hit the ground. The face shield of the Undersuit slid atop a piece of stonework broken free from its neighbor tiles. My world became it as I hung at the edge of my senses. Was that a crack or a scratch? Could I smell the room I’d fallen in or was it simply my own breath? I heard a whistle. Thin and light, the teasing call of air slipping past. My heart chased after that whistle and banged a wretched beat within my chest.
“Are you getting up, Temple?” Amber asked.
The whistle stopped when she spoke. I pulled myself to my knees and watched her whistle—thin and light. A chuckle escaped my lips. When I found my feet I took in the room we had fallen into. The walls were roughly hewn stone. It was the striation in the walls that had stained the dust—and now us—with a faded indigo hue. A bright streak of stone ran through the walls. The streak was low to the ground and the cost of its light was that the ceiling was given over to a miasma of shadow.
It didn’t take me a single blink to turn away from it. I had become comfortable with the dark that teased me like some gothic ingenue. Instead I found more interest in the ground. Pitchfork shaped tracks—which matched the shape of the lindwurm’s feet—led a tight march down the length of the room. Then, they stopped.
Amber shook me by the shoulder. “Temple, the walls—,” she said.
My finger pointed at the absent tracks. “Can Desecration teleport?” I asked.
Amber snorted. “If any Court can, I don’t know which. Doubt it’d be that one.”
She turned around and measured the tracks with both hands.
“There’s a simpler answer than teleportation,” she said. “Lindwurm’s long enough that it probably just reared up and started walking on the ceiling. Put those gecko toes to work.”
I nodded in understanding, and saved my life.
The sound hit me before recognition did. A breath drawn in so fast that it clicked on a flameless lighter. The heat warmed the suit enough for me to feel the gentle caress of doom. I turned—stunned stupid—and drew my lips back into a polite ‘O’ the way one would to humor a child telling you a fact like, “the sky is blue.” That was my face when I saw the rigid spear behind me. It wasn’t there before the heat or the sound.
Amber—my trusty senior—had already summoned Nahey in the time it took for me to consider that I should turn around. The clump of unearthly butterflies took toward the ceiling. Each flap released a pulse of something that strummed the fibers of my spiritual musculature. Then, from nowhere at all, a spotlight fell upon me. The next pulse called a spotlight down onto Amber. The third banished the dark of the ceiling—that I had ignored, confident in assessment—to reveal the lindwurm. It’s maw unhinged and yawning. Past three sets of rotted teeth kept in place by black gums was the wiggling stump of its tongue. Sinuouslike it thrashed within the entity’s mouth as the tip bubbled with new flesh.
“Nadia we have to move,” Amber yelled.
Her hand clutched mine as she took off. We raced forward without knowledge of anywhere to run. I turned my head back to the lindwurm just in time to witness its tongue fully reform. Its head drew back like an atlatl and I marveled at how its tongue stiffened to a sadistic point. The corruption coating its tip as black and lustrous as an inkbrush.
“Down,” I called out. Amber didn’t question me and slammed us into the stone floor. Then there went that sound again as it fired its tongue-lance at the now vacant space. We shot from the floor after it as where it had gone was the opposite direction of the lindwurm. In the midst of all this—between huffed breaths and the way Amber’s hand was smaller than mine yet vicelike—I remembered the binding capsule.
My thumb pressed against the button. The red light of the corundum warred with the wall’s blue until they settled into an affair of violet. While the capsule was primed the new light had revealed where the dodged tongue-lance had landed. It had lodged itself into a great stone door that plunged seamlessly into the floor. Twin sphinxes with lids shut in pleasant contemplation framed the megalithic slab. A well-eroded inscription in some forgotten—though hopefully human—script. The door no doubt was commanded by some mechanism that the inscription explained. I watched Amber run her eyes—unblinking—over the door again and again. As if all it needed was one more read and would make way for her.
I left her to her battle, and set my eyes upon mine. The lindwurm has scurried at double pace along the ceiling. Its tongue not yet reloaded. My head raised in acknowledgment of its power. The entity’s forward body peeled away from the ceiling, and twisted itself mid-air. Closed its mouth so I might meet its eyes, and gifted me a tilt of its head. Acknowledgement.
Gone went my fear. Doubt banished to the hinterlands of my thoughts. They had no place in our duel. Instead I hefted the capsule and reared back my arm. From some primal part of my brain I discovered that a defiant scream had flown free from my throat. Just as the capsule cleared the tips of my fingers. There was no reason to scream, but I felt better all the same.
The capsule flew true in a tight spiral. Years of playing catch with my dad evident in the beauty of its arc. Unfortunately the lindwurm’s very existence was the corruption of beauty. It’s tongue-lance didn’t fire. Just thrust. Pierced the capsule and skewered my hope. The entity’s dark eyes drank deep of the red light—an accentuation to its merry sadism. Yet in the next moment, the capsule twitched. In the next it came undone. The facets disconnected and disgorged red threadlike tendrils that arced around the lindwurm’s body.
It fell from the ceiling as it tried to thrash, writhe, and slither its way free from the binding. In response, it flared and sizzled against the entity’s glistening flesh. The lindwurm loosed a bellow that made the rocks dance.
“I did it,” I said. “It’s mine. How do I bond to it?”
“You don’t.” She added, “At least not with the suit on. If you want power you need to be vulnerable. Though I don’t think you have to worry about that.”
As if cued, the bindings flared once more leaving the memory of stellar chains behind my eyelids. When they shattered and the light died I knew the lindwurm was freed.