CHAPTER 58

Though the evening after the meeting is for celebration, Amelia doesn’t show me the least mercy the following morning. Six in the morning sees me out of bed, six ten jumping in place in the basement. This time, Amelia eschews the weights and for the most of training has me run laps around the house. I get to the end on shaky legs, unable to speak, but a little surprised with my performance. I’m faster than I remember being, and my muscles aren’t half as sore as they expected them to be after yesterday’s grueling practice.

Amelia says the added resistance, the improved physique, comes with the first few levels, until three or so, and tends to stay there unless modified by the more physical Archetypes. But about those, she adds with a shrug, she knows little.

We’re standing behind the house, looking on to an expanse of greenery broken only by an secondary building, a groundskeeper’s house, that I hadn’t yet seen.

“Amelia? We can talk about what happened, can’t we? Beyond the Doors. The people there.”

Amelia gives me a sideways glance.

“Aye. But stretch as you talk.”

I do as she says, pulling my foot up to my buttocks the way she taught me, feeling the painful pleasure of the extending muscle.

“Which Door did you go through?” I ask.

“Which time?”

“You did more than one?”

“Four, in total,” she says. She breathes in, inhaling the morning air and the building heat, the flower-scents and the musk of the nearby stables, before continuing. “The first time, I exited through the Gloom Door. On the other side, I met the Weeper. Sad sop he was, giving me an earful about old age and decay, rust and the end of everything. I can’t stand moping.”

“Is that where you learned necromancy?”

“No,” she says curtly without turning to me. “I got the Shadowmage Archetype then.”

“Oh. That’s when you learned to master your shades, then.”

Amelia shakes her head, denying me once again.

“You’re going to want to get rid of that sort of thinking. It’s not that here I learned shadowmagic, there I how to raise corpses. Every time you gain an Archetype beyond the first, it builds off from where you last you stopped, like a house or a tree.” She pauses, grumbling to herself. “Like you. You’re a—What?”

“Inquisitor.”

“Right, poking your nose into people’s business. Should have guessed. If now, say, you were to go through the Gloom Door, meet Weeper like I did, whatever Archetype you picked would join the first and make something neither of them could be alone. I started with shadows. Everything else came from that decision. When I passed through the Skull Door and learned about corpses, that was…”

Amelia stiffens suddenly, exhaling all the air in her lungs at once. She sniffs.

“Go on get bathed,” she says. “I don’t want you sitting at my table smelling like that.”

I open my mouth to protest, to insist, but Amelia’s expression brokers no disagreement. Nodding, I make myself scarce, going around the house and up to the first floor.

Gedden and Beckra haven’t made it out of their room yet, and from the amount of wine I saw them imbibe yesterday it will be a while still. I hesitate at the top of the stairs. I can see a knife of light streaming from the door to Lysander’s study, open a crack.

The things Amelia told me still swirl inside my head, incomplete information begging to be filled. There’s also the new sentence in the Kord conspiracy. It was there in the morning when I opened my eyes and checked the misty pages reflexively.

Lysander has found an old Dungeon, intact and undisturbed.

Nothing else. No questions to lead me on, just a note of something I happened to discover, begging a host of other investigations, and more Lysander than Kord in my Kord conspiracy. Since then, the elf’s little pocketbook has been on my mind. I’ve seen him take notes and read from there on occasion, the same battered tome every time.

I walk up to the study. Voices stream from within, an endless murmur of someone narrating their thoughts to themselves and hoping they’ll make more sense that way. I raise my hand to knock, but the voice raises, clear as a bell.

“Come in, Malco,” says Lysander.

How does he do that?

The study is alive and active, with a fire burning low to ward the morning chill. Delos, sitting on one of the comfortable armchairs, gives me a long and inscrutable look while Lysander leans over a table by a window, furrowing his brow at something spread out on it. Glasses are spread around the room and a collection of empty bottles stands by the door. The elf’s long blonde hair shakes in a wave as he turns to me.

“How did you sleep? I hope our little celebration didn’t ruin your training.”

“No, sir. I don’t think Amelia would have allowed it to.”

Lysander snorts.

“True enough. Come here. Something I want you to see. There’s a little bump me and Delos are trying to solve, and a fresh pair of eyes might be just the thing.”

I approach the table. Delos is observing me idly, so I look back at him and am surprised to find his eyes are red and puffy. The next second they slide off me and to the brazier without a word of recognition.

Lysander moves out of the way to allow me space at his side and I almost gasp when I see what he’s looking at.

It’s a map. A map like mine, only – I can see at a glance – this one wasn’t carried by a merchant by chance to be bought by a rich villager, it’s not any old map from before the Godtouched came, like the one Dala gave me, but a relic all its own. Its colors are still vivid and bright, the lines that break up territory much different, and more detailed, than mine, the limits of the world not vague mountains, deserts, forests and oceans; the detail is maintained for as far as the mapmaker could, and certainly farther than could be useful to anyone.

“You like it?”

I nod mutely. It’s a treasure of incomparable beauty.

“Someone who appreciates the finer things,” Lysander says with a smile.

Behind us, I hear Delos shifting in his seat. Lysander’s eyes aren’t puffy, but happy, steady, and aglow even in their red tiredness. It’s clear the elf didn’t go to bed last night.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Go on, look it over. I’m quite certain you’ve never seen one like this. It’s a collaboration of the best mapmakers I could find. Let me tell you, getting Olobo to accept a cartographer into his crew was a challenge. Worth it a thousand times over, however. There are places only pirates go.”

Lyander’s finger travels from the center of the map closer to its Eastern border. There it rests on a cluster of little specks of land separated by blue.

“The Domarian Islands is one of those places. Discovered in the reign of King Domar, who was entirely unbothered by the fact that the people already living in them had discovered them thousands of years earlier. The islands were always of little strategic advantage and no colonizing interest. The old texts use an expression like ‘a barren land of barren people.’”

Lysander’s eyes flit up to meet mine. He seems amused by his own history lesson.

“That’s where Olobo found the Dungeon,” I say.

“Precisely the place,” the elf says, and draws a gulp from a wine glass balanced on a tower of books.

“You said there was a problem,” I say after a moment of letting my eyes wander through the map.

“Yes. Can you tell what it is?”

A test?

My first meeting with Lysander involved an overly obtuse riddle. Since then, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling the man lives and breathes in a world of his own, full of little plots, machinations, and ideas that make sense only to him.

Still, I focus on the map. Even if I can’t solve his problems, I can use this opportunity to gleam useful information.

The center of the map is divided into four colors. Red, green, silver, and yellow. In between there are swathes of other hues, but these dominate the map. Within a moment, I find Red Harbor on the coast, above a mass of hills which I know to be the Barrows, my old home. Both are deep in the red area, the biggest other than the silver.

“Is this all the Black Sword guild’s territory?” I ask, pointing to the red.

“Yes. Good.”

I spend a moment searching for forested areas, first up close, then farther away from Red Harbor. There are too many, and none is marked with a helpful sign saying, ‘Lysander’s Hollow House’.

“Where are we?” I ask, giving up.

Lysander’s finger travels again, this time stopping just short of the frontier between the red and silver regions. I furrow my brow. The marker is there, a symbol I haven’t seen before, but we are much farther from Red Harbor than I thought possible. In fact…

My eyes take in the silver region to focus on its coastal areas. Sure enough, I find it clearly marked: Olvion. The silver region’s capital. It’s close to where we are. Barely a finger’s length away.

As I’m lost in thought, considering this new information, Lysander begins humming a tone. Though it’s happy and musical, it carries the unmistakable hint that my time is running out.

“I’d say the issue is the islands are in the ass-end of nowhere.”

The elf looks at me, surprised, and then lets out a small, breathy laugh.

“Precisely!” He claps his hands in sheer delight, a little of the dramatic Lysander I met in the Challenge shining through his regular calm demeanor. “The sea voyage alone would take us weeks, and that’s discounting the fact that you need to travel to the ship physically.”

He’s counting on taking me along?

“Can’t we do what you did to get us here? The way Godtouched always travel?”

“Fast travel between settlements seems to be for Godtouched only, I’m afraid, and that only when the Godtouched in question knows the place well. As for what I did to get you here…”

Lysander twitches his purple robe aside to show me a round medallion hanging from his neck. It’s strangely constructed, gold interlaced with an icon in smooth wood. There is a gem at the center, small but eye-catching. A diamond.

“This is what I used. The amulet is the only I’ve known to be able to transport people to any place the user is familiar with. See how the diamond shines very dimly? That’s the remaining charge. It takes a week for them to replenish.” The elf gives me an amused look. “Did you think Valkas set the trial a week from now out of the goodness in his heart?”

Before I can answer, Lysander hides a yawn behind his mouth and paces into the room, stretching and giving me space to observe the map. Now that I’ve had time to marvel at the details, I’m starting to notice the faults. The course of the Steel river is a little bit off from what I remember, for example, and Reach and the other villages in the Barrows are still missing from the expanse of greenery.

More glaring than all are the limits of the map. To the North, the drawings go sparse, the names of villages and geographical elements more and more spaced out until a white mantle covers the land. The mapmakers abandoned that area after penning The Frozen Wastes at the top. There is more detail in an East-West orientation. In the South West I spy something called The Ghalas Desert. In its Western border, at the edge of the map a city, Uri, has been noted to exist, but nothing beyond it.

“Why does the map end at weird spots?” I ask idly.

Only after does the thought occur to me that I should be acting more impressed rather than critical. If the elf takes offense, however, his little smile doesn’t show it.

“How dangerous were the areas around your village?” he retorts.

“Uh, the dire boars were a problem. Children were warned not to go too deep into the woods. Merchants hired a guardsman or two.” I shrug. “Really, people were more afraid of the hilldoors than any animal.”

As I answer I trace a path on the map with my finger from Lysander’s home to the city of Olvion.

“I visited the Barrows,” Lysander muses. “During my early explorations. I can tell you that no Godtouched would be in great danger there. The rest of the world isn’t so kind. See here.”

The elf rejoins me at the table, his eyes open wide and marred with dark circles, but his energy remains high, manic. As he steps closer to me, I realize Lysander is drunk. With his finger, he draws a wide circle on the map.

“Here is where most Godtouched appear. Don’t act coy,” he adds, noticing my expression. “I know Ged told you. There is no rhyme or reason to it. We’ve cropped up all over the place, but always within these borders. It is also where you’ll find the most agreeable areas. The climate is temperate, the monsters are mostly big animals, and if you want a challenge all you have to do is search for it.

Lysander blinks, then smiles to himself.

“Well, that was all you had to do. Before we got rid of the Challenge altogether. But anyway.” He stabs the map with his finger, right in the middle of the Ghalas Desert. “It took us a year of expeditions to cross the desert, an expanse that can be spanned in thirty days. The ghosts there are vicious. Delos finally did it, armed with all the magical items I could find, buy, steal or borrow, but even then he couldn’t go beyond Uri. Here,” the finger travels through the continent, crossing rivers and mountains, forests and entire countries in the blink of an eye. “The Frozen Wastes. Do you know why they’re called that?”

I don’t even attempt to answer.

“Because they’re cold as hell. That’s it. That’s all we could ascertain before the… whatever they were – teeth, fur, unfriendly disposition – struck from the blizzard and tore us all to shreds. To the South, the big forest?” I find it on the map. “Spent a whole three months trying to get more than a day’s travel inside it. Mossgreen laughed himself silly when I told him and said we were lucky to have come back at all.”

Lysander wanders away from the table, does a little dance in place, and falls down on his favorite armchair, feet stretched towards the fire.

“The problem is the levels,” he says half to himself. “We were stupid, didn’t want to risk it, and dismantled our only chance at advancement to make you kids run around for giggles. That’s why people like Amelia, Mossgreen, Olobo and you are so useful. You earned your levels. Those three can go to places we can’t. I don’t suppose Amelia would break much of a sweat getting to Uri, for example. Look,” Lysanders reaches into a pocket and pulls out his notebook, thick with added pages, markers, annotations. “That’s why I’ve been studying you, learning all I can. Valkas fears you like hell, did ya know that? He’s afraid of an uprising. Stupid.” The elf’s head falls a little as he stares at his book. “How are you going to rise up against immortals? All the guildmasters are the same. Even Kord is wary of you, even though he’s one of you. Bastard.”

I’ve been doing my utmost to blend into the background and let the elf keep talking himself to sleep, with the notebook so close in reach. But at the mention of Kord, I can’t help but prod.

“He’s not Godtouched?”

“Oh, he’s Godtouched, alright. But back when we’d found out about the Challenge – and your people didn’t make it easy to learn about it, let me tell you – some people tried their luck.”

“I heard about that,” I mutter, thinking back to Medrein’s story about the early days of Godtouched occupation.

“Did you hear about the one that made it back?” Lysander asks, his eyes shining like gimlets in the firelight. “Did you hear about Kord?”

Mutely, I shake my head and Lysander smiles, taps his notebook.

“I’m on to him.”

His eyes take in the room, the windows, the fire, me, and finally settle on Delos, facing him. His smile widens again.

“He fell asleep.”

Lysander gets up and leans over Delos. I can’t see their faces, but I hear the murmured words, and then a kiss, and I turn away, embarrassed. Half-awake, Delos gets up, stretches, and focuses a bleary eye on me.

“Come on, Del,” Lysander says gently. “Malco, could you close the door when you leave?”

I mutter that yes, I can.

With an arm around Lysander’s shoulders and watching me, Delos seems about to say something, but Lysander hurries him out of the room. Right before he leaves, he winks at me, and then they both disappear into the corridor, whispering to each other.

The fire creeps happily to its death, and the study sinks into comfort and silence. I look at the abandoned notebook in the armchair.

It’s too easy.

Do I dare? The feeling of uncovering clues, of delving deeper into the secrets around me, still percolates in my blood in jolts of pleasurable fuzziness that go up and down my spine. The notebook is food for a starving man. Quickly, I store it under my shirt and hurry out of the room. I remember to close the door behind me.