by David Dickie
The rest of the crew were all off watch and eating around a campfire when Grim returned earlier than usual from sharing his meal with Ziwa. Fayyaad raised an eyebrow. “She’s tired this evening,” said Grim.
Rotan looked relaxed, which seemed odd to Grim. Rotan was not an outdoorsy kind of guy. Grim was going to make a small joke of it, but suddenly stopped and really looked. In the two weeks since they had escaped the ohulhug, Rotan had lost a lot of weight. He seemed stronger and more confident in his movements. Lug had been giving him instruction in sword fighting when it wasn’t too conspicuous—Rotan had basic sword skills, but he was supposed to be a caravan guard—and while Rotan was far from a master, his swordsmanship was improving rapidly and he wasn’t winded after practice any more.
Rotan felt Grim’s attention and looked up from poking at his meal. “What?” he said, frowning.
Grim laughed. “Nothing. Just realizing you’re not the Kethem negotiator we started the trip with. Funny what a couple of weeks of hard living can do for you.”
Rotan looked a bit perplexed, then smiled. “Truth is, I hadn’t thought about it, but… I think you’re right.” He looked down at his plate again. “Don’t have the time for this kind of thing with what I do.”
Grim said, “And what does a negotiator do? I mean, besides the obvious?”
Rotan laughed. “Negotiating? Not as obvious as it seems. Negotiation is like playing a game of rulers and rogues, except you only get to see a quarter of the other player’s pieces. The rest you have to guess at their positions on the board based on how the other player moves his hands, how the visible pieces are placed, what would give the other player a compelling advantage on the board. And knowing the other player, the tactics and strategies they like to use, which usually means knowing people that know the other player, since they aren’t going to tell you that themselves. At the same time, you have to hide what you are doing, try to pick things from your playbook that fit your situation but that might not be the obvious move, because then the other player will guess what you are doing and counter it.”
Grim thought about it and realized Rotan was probably not exaggerating. Fayyaad frowned and said, “Sounds complicated.”
Rotan nodded. “Throw in that we are talking about people, cultures, and a vast array of needs and desires. Makes the nice, simple, structured rulers and rogues pale in comparison. I need to know languages, local dialects, the nuances of different phrases and words, details on local economies, costs of shipping, artisan and artificer enchanter specialties in the area, who’s who and who’s done what to whom so I can guess where the lines between friends and enemies are drawn.”
Fayyaad blinked. “I’m sorry Grim asked.”
Rotan shrugged. “It’s a job.” Rotan glanced at Ziwa’s wagon. The light from the glow disk inside had gone out. “Elves. Never hurts to have one in your debt. In fact, it’s worth as much gold as you can jam in a chest. They have the most sophisticated spells of any of the four races, a power to be reckoned with.” He turned back to Grim. “If you get a chance to help her with something, do it. That’s the kind of coin I can use, and I promise you will not regret it.”
Grim looked at Ziwa’s wagon. “Not a problem.”
One evening, when they had the night watch, Grim saw movement from Ziwa’s wagon, and quietly followed a shadowy figure who he knew had to be Ziwa to the outer perimeter of their camp. In the light of two moons, he saw her strip off her gray robe and, clad in something close-fitting enough he had a hard time concentrating, draw her sword. He watched her dance the forms, a sword fighter’s practice routine, with a grace and beauty he could not have matched, that he doubted even Lug could have matched.
Eleven days after leaving Struford, they hit the remnants of the ring road and turned north, their progress now substantially faster on the remarkably smooth surface left from the days of the old empire, before the fall. It was fractured in places but on the whole better than the best elementalist-fused cobblestones that were the main thoroughfares in Kethem cities. They made camp, and as the sun was setting, Ziwa, for the first time, came to Grim, who was eating alone that evening.
She squatted down, hand on the hilt of her sword. “I,” she said, “have a proposition, good sir.” Grim nodded attentively. “I joined this caravan because it will be passing by ruins of a Storm Bull temple from the days of the old empire, Harbolat by name. We will be there in two days. I intend to explore those ruins. While I am not expecting danger, I could use someone to watch my back.”
Grim said, “My Lady,” and then pausing, remembering Rotan’s words, finally said, “I would be honored.” Not because of what Rotan had said. Almost in spite of it. Grim owed an elf his life, an elf who had stayed behind in Tawhiem, accepting permanament exile from other elves in order to allow Grim and his friends to escape. It was a debt Grim had no way to repay. Perhaps helping Ziwa would help balance the scales. He’d have to square it with Alan, but it wasn’t like Alan needed a Pranan guide here on the trail. “Why are you interested in these particular ruins?” asked Grim.
Ziwa inclined her head. “I came across documents in Kethem that talked about this temple. I believe it has an underground section than may have been missed by ohulhug during the ohulhug-human wars, and that section may contain an artifact from the old human empire. I will not lie to you; it is an artifact of great power, but something you could not use even if you had it. If anything, it would put you in danger. If there is anything else we find there, it is yours.”
Grim thought about that for a moment. Temples represented power, and where there was power, there would be money. Some of that money would be in the form of gold and jewels, the trappings temples used to elevate their stature with the population at large. Things that would have survived the four hundred years since the ohulhug captured, and then two hundred years later lost these lands. The artifact Ziwa was after had to be very powerful if nothing else mattered to her. Still, Grim found himself uncharacteristically hesitant to take a deal that seemed to have nothing but upside, and not because he suspected Ziwa had a hidden agenda. He didn’t want to take advantage of her.
Finally he said, “The artifact is yours if we find it. On the rest of it, why don’t we see what’s there first, then talk about how to split it if we find something?”
Ziwa raised an eyebrow, but said, “That is acceptable.”
Grim gestured toward the wagon train. “Are you sure you don’t want me to bring along some of the others in case there’s trouble?”
Ziwa gave him a half-grin. “If there is anything there, it will have been buried for centuries. I am more worried about an injury from scrambling over ruins than I am about anything hostile lurking in the shadows.”
That made sense to Grim. This should be easy money, and the most likely foe he’d have to do battle with would be cobwebs.
Chapter Thirteen
Grim would have missed the temple ruins if Ziwa hadn’t pointed them out. Other than a flat area devoid of tall grass, there was nothing to be seen. Ziwa explained, “Ohulhug. They are not tolerant of religion in any form. They did not only raze temples in the territory they captured, they pulled them apart stone by stone.” Grim looked around and realized that some of the boulders cropping up here and there in the grassland did have an unusual symmetry to them, as if they might have been part of a column or a square bit of a wall.
The caravan stopped for the day about a mile past the ruins. Grim went off duty in the late afternoon, and there wasn’t much preparation needed. Ten minutes after he came off watch, he was slogging back to the temple with Ziwa. It was a cool day and the walk was pleasant enough, but Grim felt tense. Pranan wasn’t Tawhiem, with predators that might attack a man. But there were other kinds of predators, the kind on two legs, and despite having passed through the area a few hours earlier, he kept an eye out for anything that would indicate potential trouble. Despite his nervousness, they made it in less than half an hour without seeing anything amiss.
; Ziwa seemed lost in thought. Grim said, “Was there a town nearby back before the fall? The big temples tend to be near the cities, but I didn’t see anything that looked like it could have been a population center when we passed by.”
Ziwa frowned. “I am not sure. I do not think so. The records I have read indicated people came to the temple, and that it involved travel. The larger cities like Struford survived the fall in one form or another, either as a City-State if it had walls or a slave camp if it did not, and even the slave camps have bootstrapped themselves into some kind of population center since the ohulhug were driven back two centuries ago.”
“Odd place for a Storm Bull temple, then. Farmland maybe? People that needed dependable rain?”
Ziwa shrugged. “I do not know. Normally you would expect stone walls surviving if land was under cultivation, with mills and granaries and things that used stone instead of wood, things that would still be standing. I do not see anything like that. But it was on the ring road, so there would be plenty of people passing by. Maybe they were serving the merchants.”
Grim thought about it but couldn’t come up with a reason why a merchant who wasn’t shipping things by boat would care so much about the weather that they would offer tithes to the Storm Bull temple to change it. Finally, he decided it was idle speculation. Whatever the reason for building a temple out here had been, it had become moot during the fall and interregnum.
In short order, they were approaching the area where the temple had been standing. Ziwa led the way. They moved off the road a few hundred feet through knee-high grass, then climbed a small embankment. Now that he was standing on it, Grim could see the vague outlines of the building that had stood here once, covered in dirt and thin vegetation, but flatter than the surrounding terrain. He tried to recall the Storm Bull temples from Kethem cities. Kethem’s might have deviated from the old empire norm during the five centuries since the fall, but basic architecture didn’t evolve that quickly. What he remembered was that they were generally square, with doors facing the cardinal compass points and a huge spire in the center.
Ziwa pulled a small, square stone from her pocket, about the size and shape of a bar of soap. “Amon Trella Spee,” she said in Elvish. The stone took on a luminous quality. Ziwa pointed the bottom of the stone at the sky, and the top turned white. She pointed it back at the ground, and it went back to stone with a faint glow. “Detects empty space,” she explained. “If there’s something under the temple, there will be a way down.” She started to methodically walk the perimeter of the building, then started spiraling into the center. “This is large for a Storm Bull temple,” she said conversationally. She scuffed aside some of the dirt, and Grim saw the faint gleam of marble underneath. “Large, and made from stone that had to be transported some distance. Significant expense went into its construction.”
“Not worth much now,” said Grim, frowning. “Why did the ohulhug need to do this?”
Ziwa shrugged. “The high ohulhug do not like bowing to anyone, or anything, even a god, and the low ohulhug follow their lead. One reason they lost the orc-human wars—no one could lead them for any length of time before they started fighting each other.”
Grim didn’t know what else to ask, so he kept quiet. Twenty minutes later, Ziwa stopped in the middle of the flat area, frowning. “Nothing.”
Grim thought for a few minutes about jobs in the past where people had hidden things. “If there was an entrance they wanted to keep secret, I don’t think it would be in the temple proper. Too much traffic, too much of a chance someone would notice something. It would be a support building, something nearby that would be less visited.”
Ziwa looked thoughtfully at the surrounding terrain. “It is going to be difficult to find anything given four hundred years have passed.” But Grim was already moving. “Temples in Bythe, the ancillary buildings were at the four corners. The Storm Bulls like unobstructed views at the cardinal compass points.” Ziwa followed Grim. “The front has that drop. It would be odd to have something below the level of the temple itself. Has to be one of the back two corners.” When he reached the edge of the flat space, he motioned to Ziwa and pointed at her magicked-up stone. Ziwa took the lead without commenting.
About forty feet out, she stopped, looking around. “Another building was located here, smaller but still good sized.”
Now that she said it, Grim could see the outlines of the floor. It was irregularly shaped. “Not utilitarian. It had an entryway, a large one, I think. The head priest’s quarters, if I had to guess.”
Ziwa nodded and continued her sweep. After a minute, she stopped. “There is something here,” she said, pointing down.
Grim motioned her back, studying the ground. There was something odd about it. Finally, he realized that the small plants where Ziwa had been standing were dead, dry husks. He kneeled down and tugged at one. It didn’t give. He pulled harder, and it came up with a tearing sound. “This isn’t dirt,” he said. “Some kind of woven mat with dead grass and plants attached to make it look natural.” He looked more carefully, and now that he knew what to look for, he could see the outline of a square where the woven mat ended and regular grass began. “It's a door, a hidden door.”
They traced the outside. Grim looked around more carefully until he noticed small boulder right on the edge of the mat. It looked unnaturally smooth, like it had been touched over and over again. He nodded to himself. “This is it. Stand back.” Ziwa moved a few steps away, and Grim pushed, then pulled the stone to no effect. He tried rotating it, and this time it moved smoothly. It rotated a quarter turn, then there was a click and the mat popped up an inch, enough to slide hands under it to lift it up.
“I don’t like this,” said Grim. “This isn’t something that’s been sitting here unattended for centuries. Someone is maintaining this.”
Ziwa’s hand was on the hilt of her sword, but she made no effort to draw it. “There is no one nearby. There are no traps. Open it.”
Grim wondered. He was an expert at spotting traps, and he’d have to examine the entrance carefully to know. But Ziwa seemed confident.
Grim slid his hands in the crack and pulled up. The mat swung up on oiled hinges, counterweighted in the back. A staircase led down into the ground. Ziwa drew her sword, and it lit up with a pearly white light. “Let us explore,” she said, but she didn’t sound that confident any more. Grim pulled his own sword, a rapier, and followed her down.
The stairs went deep, sixty feet or more, before they ended in a corridor. Grim looked past Ziwa. There was a glow at the far end of the hallway, a flickering light that reminded him of a fire, but flashing in all the colors of the spectrum.
“I did not expect this. Be wary,” said Ziwa, and started moving down the corridor.
“That’s directly under the temple, I think,” said Grim. Ziwa nodded. As they drew closer to the light, Grim felt his throat tighten. That flickering, polychromatic light. He’d seen it before, had hoped to never see it again. The end of the corridor opened up to a large room, a couple of hundred feet from wall to wall, with a ceiling forty feet overhead. In the center were six obsidian pillars, eight feet tall, forming a hexagon. Running up and down the pillars were flickers of polychromatic phosphorescence. Nearby was a flat black panel facing away from them and standing on two legs. Grim knew that if they were on the other side, they would see words, commands to control the six pillars and the space they enclosed.
Ziwa said, “Mhaor ent agar, eller naa i' palurin ghaatiil sinome? Ta naa n' deanam!” in a stunned voice, with her sword pointing at the eerie display. Grim once again noticed how natural she seemed with the weapon, and it was, indeed, an Elvish weapon, long and thin and, he knew, razor sharp. But there was more to it. He had a sense for these things, and it was telling him this was not just a high-quality weapon. The glow it was casting would be a simple trick, simple magic. But Grim actually felt it, felt a hum in his bones that was coming from the sword. It was a happy hum, peaceful and pleasant,
pushing away some of the fear and uncertainty this strange place was causing. Grim had learned long ago not to trust that kind of feeling. It just made whatever unpleasantness that inevitably followed more painful by comparison.
He wasn’t that fluent in Elvish, but he knew what she had to be saying. “It’s a World Gate.”
Ziwa turned on him. Her sword was back and to the right, ready to swing. Her eyes were wild. “Who are you?” she hissed.
Grim dropped the rapier and held up his hands. “Easy, Ziwa. I am who I said I am.”
“Someone who happens to know what a World Gate looks like five hundred years after the last human gate was destroyed?” Her sword was still at the ready, but now Grim read uncertainty in her voice and in her stance.
“I swear to you, I had no idea there was one here. I am here purely to guard your back, nothing more.” Grim tried to put as much earnestness in his voice as he could.