Son of a Liche

by J. Zachary Pike

  “Sound familiar?” said the tortoise.

  “I… there are… it’s…”

  “The worst part comes after the shakes,” the falcon said to the tortoise.

  “Oh, it’s awful,” agreed the tortoise. He looked to Kaitha. “You remember the final stage of elixir withdrawal?”

  “Hallucinations,” said Kaitha. Icy fear hit her in the gut.

  “And delusions,” said the falcon.

  “Like talking spirit animals,” said the tortoise.

  “I’m hallucinating,” said Kaitha. “And now I’ve wandered off… and all my weapons and armor, and oh gods. I… I…”

  “Yes?” said the tortoise.

  “I have a huge problem with salve,” sobbed Kaitha.

  The tortoise nodded sagely. “Good. Good. Now remember that on the other side of withdrawal. Admitting your problem is the first step to recovery.”

  The falcon spread its wings as the tortoise started slowly ascending.

  “Wait!” cried Kaitha. “Don’t just leave me out here!”

  “Sorry, but you’ve had your epiphany!” said the tortoise. “I’ve helped you all I can. Now it’s up to you to follow your path and reach your true potential. Besides, I don’t want to be here for what comes next.”

  “Oh yeah,” said the falcon. “Things are about to get weird.”

  “Really weird,” agreed the luminous tortoise. “Hey, where are you headed anyway?”

  “There’s a shaman up in House Galantia that just ate a bowl of night mushrooms,” said the falcon. “I’m going to go have a talk with him about his relationship with his father.”

  “Sounds fun. Mind if I come with?” The tortoise was ascending rapidly now, keeping pace with the falcon as it flapped away into the sky.

  “Not at all. I’d welcome the company,” said the falcon.

  “Wait!” Kaitha shouted after the retreating spirit animals. “I need help!”

  “And now that you’ve recognized that, you’re ready to move forward!” the tortoise called back to her. “Good work!”

  “No, I mean your help!” cried Kaitha. “Help getting back to camp!”

  “Some journeys you must walk alone,” yelled the tortoise, now merely a blue dot among the fading stars. “Or something like that.”

  “Close enough,” said the falcon.

  Then they were gone, disappearing into a sky that was starting to melt and run down over the plains. The moon opened its great eye, and its laughter summoned spider-squids with tongues of flame from the earth and water. Sobbing and screaming, Kaitha turned and fled into a nightmare.

  Chapter 14

  Gorm awoke with a cold sweat on his brow and a scream in his throat. His fists were clenched and his knuckles white as he thrashed into a sitting position. Blood pounded in his ears so hard it sounded like a roaring beast.

  “Keep it down,” said a voice beside him, prompting another yell from Gorm. Burt was standing atop his rucksack.

  “Oh,” said Gorm. “It’s ye.”

  “‘Oh, welcome back, Burt,’” the Kobold pantomimed. “‘Haven’t seen you in a week, Burt. Sorry I abandoned you in the wilderness, Burt.’”

  Gorm rubbed his temple, as if to dislodge the last of his memories. Inky black tentacles still swam in his mind’s eye, and he could almost hear the echoes of Az’Anon’s laughter. “Aye, sorry… Sorry. I just had the most terrible dream.”

  “Yeah, things aren’t too much better out there, either,” said the Kobold, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at the tent flap. “They could use your help.”

  Gorm paused to listen. His heart’s pounding had slowed a bit, but the roaring sound remained. And now it was punctuated by the shouts of his party. “Bones,” he swore, scrambling for the tent flap.

  The wan light of an oncoming dawn filtered into the campsite. Heraldin and Gaist stood stiffly by the dying remnants of the cookfire, weapons drawn, while the mages tried to calm them with outstretched hands and presumably reassuring words. It was difficult to make out what they were saying, however, as there was a Troll storming around the camp.

  “Gone!” bellowed Thane, running in panicked circles. “She’s gone!”

  “Gorm!” shouted Heraldin, wearing a forced grin as he turned to the Dwarf. “Jynn and Laruna say you might offer some explanation for this.”

  “In a minute,” said Gorm, marching past the other heroes. “Thane!”

  The Troll stopped in his tracks, wild eyes focusing on the Dwarf. Something primal in Gorm shoved his heart into his throat. Friend or not, staring down a furious Troll was enough to freeze the blood. He took a deep breath. “Thane, it’s me, Gorm.”

  “She’s gone,” said Thane. “Gorm, she’s gone.”

  “Kaitha’s left?” Gorm turned to the other heroes.

  “That seems to be the matter at hand, yes,” said Jynn.

  “One of them,” said Heraldin, eyes never leaving the Troll.

  “And she left her weapons and armor behind,” said Laruna, holding up a bow and quiver.

  “Why would she do that?” Gorm shook his head. “But we’ll find her. We will.”

  The Troll nodded. He was still breathing heavily as he sat back on his haunches.

  Heraldin seized Gorm’s arm. “You knew about this?” he hissed.

  “Aye. Thane’s been protecting us for a long time now. But we got bigger problems to deal with.” Gorm brushed the bard’s hand aside, along with his comments.

  “Bigger? This one’s twice as tall as a man and just destroyed our campsite!” said the bard. “I thought we trusted each other!”

  Gorm raised his eyebrows in reply.

  “Okay, fair enough,” conceded the bard. “But I thought we weren’t keeping these sorts of secrets, at least! Right?” The bard looked back at the weaponsmaster.

  Gaist shrugged.

  “We’ll talk about it later. Our ranger’s gone missing in the wilderness, unarmed,” Gorm told the bard.

  “We have to find her!” fretted the Troll.

  “This isn’t something you just shrug off,” snarled the bard.

  “It sure as fire ain’t something you’ll make me talk about while the lass is missing,” snapped Gorm.

  “She needs her potions!” said Thane.

  “Aye.” Gorm gestured to the Troll. “She needs her—wait, what now?”

  “These,” said Thane, reaching into his pouch. He pulled out a couple of vials of elixir and handed them to Gorm. “I hate it when she takes them—she has to cut her arms, and then it’s like she’s not herself. But if I don’t let her have any for too long, she shakes and acts strange.”

  “So ye bought her healing potions?” asked Gorm.

  “No! Of course not,” insisted the Troll. “She finds them on her own, gods know how. I’ve… I’ve just been keeping the potions from her unless she really needs one.”

  “How?” demanded Jynn.

  “Ah, well, I am sorry about this part,” said Thane, scratching the fur on the back of his head. He pulled another fistful of vials from his pouch, and then a third. Soon a mound of bottles of elixir lay at Gorm’s feet. “I’ve been… managing the party supply. I make sure the only potions available are what’s needed. And I keep the rest safe.”

  “Okay, I didn’t know anything about that,” Gorm told Heraldin.

  “Do you think that makes it any better?” said the bard.

  “I think I knew,” said Laruna quietly. “Well, not that Thane was hoarding salve. But I’ve suspected Kaitha had a problem with healing potions since we left Vetchell.”

  “Why didn’t ye say something?” asked Gorm.

  “Well, if that isn’t the Orc calling the Goblin green,” said the bard. “Her addiction might have come to light earlier if your Troll here wasn’t keeping her in supply.”

  Thane turned away as though struck in the face. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

  Jynn took Laruna’s hand in his own. “Listen, I’m sure we all realize that it’s best not to keep secrets
from the party,” said Jynn. “I learned that lesson myself a year ago. But we need to focus on what’s important now. Kaitha is likely suffering from withdrawal from elixir. She could be hallucinating, or delusional, or…” He trailed off, and the silence spoke volumes.

  “Aye,” said Gorm grimly. “We all know what it could be.”

  “So we go after her,” said Heraldin.

  “Just like that?” Burt’s hackles rose. “You couldn’t wait an hour for the Kobold and Troll to get back to camp, but you’re just going to drop everything to charge after the Elf?”

  “Burt has a point,” said Gorm.

  “Thank you!” said the Kobold.

  Gorm shook his head. “Much as I hate to say it, the undead could reach the fortress gates any day now, and if Laruna ain’t there with that fancy staff, the whole world’s at risk.”

  “That wasn’t the point!” Burt barked.

  “We can’t just leave Kaitha,” said the solamancer firmly.

  “I know, but we can’t just abandon our quest,” said Jynn.

  “So, what?” said Heraldin. “We split the party?”

  “We can’t split the party. Not any more than it has been,” said Gorm. “But without our ranger, there’s only one of us with any chance of trackin’ Kaitha through the wilderness.”

  The adventurers looked as one to the Troll, who looked uncomfortable with the sudden attention. “I… I don’t know if I can do it—”

  “Ye found us, didn’t ye?” said Gorm. “You’re the only one who can bring her back safe.”

  The Troll hesitated. “But when she sees me, she might… what if she—”

  “And what if you don’t go?” asked Laruna, pressing Kaitha’s bow and quiver into the Troll’s hands.

  Thane stared at the ground and took a deep breath. When he looked back up, any traces of indecision on his gnarled face had melted away, leaving only stony resolution. “I’ll do it,” he said.

  Gorm looked east, where the glow of dawn had set the edge of the mountains ablaze. “Good,” he said. “Ye best get moving. We all should, for that matter. We’ve got to make for Highwatch.”

  “I know they’re making for Highwatch,” said Garold Flinn. “The question is, how are they moving so fast?”

  The mechanical gazer chittered softly—a sibilant chatter produced by the muffled prattling of the sprites encased within Barty’s hideous creation. The construct had seven tentacles made from interlocking plates, each terminating in a glass orb that contained an enchanted sprite of some variety—search sprites, sentry sprites, pathfinder sprites. The seven arms connected to a brass orb, featureless save for a pair of whirling propellers and a large porthole, luminous with the glow of additional sprites fluttering among the gears within.

  A hatch approximating a mouth swiveled downward. The tiny shouts of trapped sprites strung together in a high-pitched cacophony, but Flinn could catch a few words above the din. “Don’t know!… Teleportation?… It’s probably magic!… Elven horses?… Giant eagles!”

  “Enough,” said Flinn, waving a hand.

  The little flying construct shut its hatch obediently and hovered over to the unit of combat golems. The twelve sorcerous constructs kept pace with the assassins’ horses, striding along in their odd, four-legged gait. Flinn wished he could send the rest of Barty’s golems ahead to scout, but Mr. Ficer had a certain modus remotus operandi that mandated the engineer remain safely in Andarun and left his combat golems unable to do much beyond their basic murder protocols.

  “The liche might do our work for us,” said Deathbloom.

  “Do our contracts have an undeath clause?” asked Udina.

  Flinn pursed his lips. “No, I have it on good authority that the undead will fall swiftly. And even if they got to Mr. Ingerson beforehand, the Dwarf has a habit of surviving circumstances that he shouldn’t. We’ll need proof that he and his companions are dead.”

  Captain Jones pulled up beside the Tinderkin. “Yarr, that may be, but if’n we, uh, sail too close to the reefs of the damned—”

  “Just say it like a normal person,” sighed Flinn.

  “If we get too close to the thrice-cursed undead, they may do Ingerson’s work for him,” said Captain Jones.

  “I’ve no desire to face Detarr Ur’Mayan,” said Mortus.

  Neither did Mr. Flinn. Then again, he’d seen what Johan the Mighty was capable of, and he’d set himself against anything living or dead before he’d get on the wrong side of the paladin. He gave the other assassins a tight smile. “All the more reason to make haste.”

  “That’s right. You’d best get moving, fast,” said the bannerman. “You won’t get in here. Nobody gets into Highwatch.”

  “Ye’ve said as much,” said Gorm. “But ye need to listen!”

  “We can stop the liche,” Jynn said.

  The guard’s face wasn’t discernible through the slot in the ironbound door, but he managed to effectively convey a smirk nonetheless. “Oh, so the five of you have the key to stopping the undead? I suppose the fate of the whole world depends on you right now?”

  “Um, yes,” said Laruna.

  “Yeah, same as every one of the thousand heroes up on the walls,” said the bannerman. “You know how many times I’ve heard this spiel in the past three days?”

  Heraldin raised a hand. “But—”

  “Listen, everybody wants a shot at the loot and the points that are gonna flow when the undead finally fall. And everybody thinks they’re the chosen ones who finally found the secret to bringing down the liche,” said the bannerman wearily. “But everybody else has a corporate sponsor, and a contract to fulfill the quest, and arrived with His Majesty’s army as requested by the Heroes’ Guild. So if you want me to open this door, you had better have a remarkably good reason.”

  Gorm hesitated. Talking about the Wyrmwood Staff would be tantamount to confessing to robbing the Museum of Andarun. He couldn’t imagine many worse places for the crime to come to light than in a massive fortress full of bannermen and guild heroes. “Er, it’s… our destiny?” he tried.

  “Right. Look, the undead will arrive by nightfall. You could be nearly a day’s ride away from Highwatch by then. And that’s exactly what I would do in your shoes. But if you want to stick yourself between the liche and the walls, that’s your problem. So long as you sod off!” said the bannerman. The slot in the door snapped shut.

  “And so here we are, locked out in the middle of nowhere with the undead bearing down on us,” said Heraldin, throwing his arms in the air.

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” said Jynn.

  “First of all, being dramatic is my job. I am a bard.”

  “It’s easy to forget, given the way you play the lute,” said Laruna.

  “Hurtful. And second,” continued Heraldin, “this is exactly where I expected to wind up.”

  “Don’t matter now. We need a new plan,” said Gorm.

  “We could break down the gate,” suggested Laruna. “Force our way in and then try to sneak up to the ramparts in the confusion.”

  Gorm looked up at the wall in front of them, as tall and unassailable as the mountain cliffs around it. The banners on the fortress’ towers looked like ship sails on a vertical horizon. He shook his head. “Nobody’s ever forced their way into Highwatch, lass, and plenty of armies have tried. This is just the door to the gatehouse. There’s a bigger gate behind it, and a hundred more in the tunnels beneath the fortress. We’d get nowhere.”

  “Well, we can’t take the undead on from down here,” said Laruna. “We’ll be trapped with our backs to the wall.”

  “I think I know a way,” said Burt, poking his head out of Gorm’s rucksack. “Or at least, I know about a way.”

  “A way into Highwatch?” asked Laruna.

  “Well, no. But almost as good,” said Burt. “See, our legends say that Kobolds used to live in the mountains south of Highwatch. Back when heroics was still more of a hobby than a profession, Humans and Dwarves used to run quests
to drive out the Highwall tribes and loot their lairs. So this one Kobold, Ratrup, decides he’s sick of his people getting murdered and robbed. He and his warriors make a path up the mountain next to Highwatch and set up their own fort there. From there he could keep an eye on Highwatch and warn the other Kobolds when any adventurers were riding out to quest.”

  “I’m not familiar with that story,” said Heraldin.

  Burt snorted. “And how many Kobold legends do you know?”

  “Fair enough,” said Heraldin.

  “Still, I’m not sure we should go chasing after it,” said Laruna. “Even if the legends are true and Ratrup did build a fort, there’s no way to know if it’s still around.”

  “Of course there ain’t,” said Burt. “It’s not like anyone’s been there since back in the Sixth Age. The Highwall tribes got driven out long ago, and nobody’s left to care what the Lightlings are doing in Highwatch. But Ratrup’s path might still be there, and if it can get you to a good, defensible point with line of sight to the battle, maybe you can, I don’t know. Do whatever it is that staff does.”

  “It’s a chance, at least,” said Gorm.

  “A slim one,” said Jynn.

  “That’s as good as we ever get these days.” Gorm set off. “Let’s go.”

  The adventurers led their horses down the winding path away from Highwatch’s western gate toward the scrublands at the base of the mountains. They mounted and rode south once they reached the foot of the mountain, making their way around the rocks and crevasses along the edge of the Highwalls.

  Burt gave up his spot in Gorm’s rucksack to ride in the saddle in front of the Dwarf. The Kobold’s misshapen ears were perked up and alert. His long tongue flapped in the wind as the horse raced through the low brush.

  It was nearly noon when the Kobold leapt up, his tail wagging furiously. “There! Right there!”

  “Hold up!” hollered Gorm, raising a hand.

  Burt led them a short way up the side of the mountain to a large boulder with several smooth stones piled atop it. At its foot, they found a stake in the ground with a rusted chain dangling from it.

  “This marker probably used to have a bunch of bones and skulls around it,” said Burt. He scratched at the ground and sniffed. “And Kobolds have been here since Ratrup’s day. A group came through a few years back. The path to Ratrup’s watch must be nearby.”