by David Dickie
Ziwa hesitated, then lowered her sword. She looked in his eyes. Then she gestured at his rapier. “Pick it up. How do you know what a World Gate looks like?”
Grim paused in turn. “I’ve seen one. One in great troll lands, in their City of Transcendence. I was trapped there with a group of people. We escaped by using teleportals that were disabled after we used them. I couldn’t get back if I wanted to, and I also swear to you, I have no desire to. These things,” and he gestured at the pillars, “they’re nothing but trouble.”
Ziwa seemed much calmer, but there was still an edge to her voice. “This is very true. How much do you know about them?”
“A little,” said Grim.
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. These gates are powerful, and they attract the wrong kind of attention. The kind of attention that can get you and many other people killed.”
“Many people?” said Grim. On the way back from Tawhiem, Daesal had told him that the elves would kill any human who knew about the gates, but had not said why, just told him not to speak to anyone about what he had seen in great troll lands. “Who? How bad could it be?”
“Have you ever heard of a city in Tawhiem named Pleton?” she asked. Grim shook his head. “That bad,” she finished cryptically. “We are now looking for two things. The original artifact I was trying to acquire, and the gate key, which will be a black rectangle, six inches by two inches by half an inch.”
Grim was going to ask more questions but decided there would be time back at the caravan. For the moment, he just wanted to finish up here. Despite the happy hum from Ziwa’s sword, he felt tense and out of place near the gate. He nodded, and they turned back to exploring the rest of the room. There was a doorway on the other side, and Grim gestured at it. Ziwa nodded and they moved forward. As they moved by the pillars, giving them a wide berth, Grim could see something in the center of the circle they formed. As they grew closer, he realized it was a set of manacles chained to large bolts driven into the ground. He touched Ziwa on the shoulder and pointed at them.
She looked, frowned and shrugged her shoulders. “I do not know. This configuration is not a normal World Gate. It is much smaller than what I have seen before. We will come back to it.”
Grim nodded and they continued on until they reached the door. Grim tested it carefully. “Not locked. Hinges are oiled; it’s been maintained.”
“Open it,” said Ziwa. “No one on the other side.”
Grim pushed it cautiously, and it swung open. Glow disks came on, casting a soft white light. The room looked like a library, wooden tables surrounded by chairs, the walls lined with bookcases that went twenty feet high. There was a thick rug on the floor, worn in places but not shabby. Many of the book shelves were empty, but there were still what had to be thousands of books sitting in neat rows. There were other doors leading off the room.
On one table in the center, ten skulls stood in a line facing the door. There was a chair that had been set back, facing the skulls, like someone liked to sit and admire them from time to time.
“I find this disturbing,” said Ziwa. Grim thought it was a bit of an understatement.
Ziwa moved into the room first, swinging her sword back and forth, but not like it was a weapon. More like it was a diviner’s rod. Grim sniffed the air. It had a musty smell, and more, an underlying stink, faint but noticeable. It smelled like death.
Ziwa’s sword slowly settled on a door to the right. “There is life behind that door. But…” and she stopped looking confused.
“But?” echoed Grim.
“But I can not discern what it is. It is not human. It is… spread out somehow.” said Ziwa. “I do not know what this is. I do not know how to proceed.”
“Through the spread-out-life door?” suggested Grim.
“It is as good as any option,” said Ziwa. They moved through the room toward the door, staying against the wall, away from the eerie display of skulls. When they reached it, Grim moved forward and examined it carefully, visually first, then with gentle touches. There wasn’t anything particularly different about it, and it wasn’t locked. He kneeled down at the base and sniffed. His nose wrinkled. This was where the underlying scent of a charnel pit was emanating from.
Grim looked back. He said quietly, “Something’s dead in there. Dead a long time. Ziwa, this life detection thing… it’s not picking up dead things, is it?” She shook her head. Grim stood up and sheathed his sword. Ziwa faced the door, sword level. Grim held up three fingers, then two, then one, then opened the door and stepped aside. He couldn’t see in, but he could see the reaction on Ziwa’s face. It wasn’t fear or concern. It was disgust.
He peered around the door. A glow lamp on the inside had lit up when he opened the door, so he could see clearly.
It was a charnel house.
Bones were scattered everywhere, piled on top of each other, scattered haphazardly here and there. Bones of people, maybe of orcs, but there were others that might have been livestock or wild animals. Some of them, the ones on top, still had meat on them, and those were covered in a thick layer of beetles. There were beetles everywhere, not just on the bodies, but they tended to congregate there. He could hear them, a faint crackly sound as they slowly worked flesh off bone.
Grim slammed the door shut and tried to keep from retching. Ziwa was looking like she was doing the same thing.
“What… the… hell?” said Grim.
Ziwa shook her head. “I… I do not know. There is nothing I have seen that would explain this, but I do not think it is safe. I think we should leave until I can gather a larger group with soldiers and enchanters.”
Grim nodded. He gestured back toward the door they had entered, and Ziwa said, “Lead the way.” They were about halfway there when a man entered the room through one of the other doors.
Chapter Fourteen
The man was tall, gaunt, almost emaciated, with sunken cheeks, eyes that seemed too big for his head and thin, straw-colored hair. He looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, clean shaven, with a pallid complexion. He was dressed in the blue robes with electric-yellow trim of a Storm Bull priest, but the outfit looked a little off to Grim. It was more than the minor differences between the order in Kethem and the order in the Pranan City-States would account for. It had some kind of armless jacket that laced in front, the yellow trim was wider than usual, and it had a large, flaring collar that looked dated. It was also threadbare and worn, with patches in an almost-matching blue sewn over knees and elbows, and here and there in other spots. The man had a black staff in his hand that was nearly as tall as he was. He looked at them without any discernible expression. After a moment when no one moved, he said, “And who might ye be?” His speech sounded archaic.
After Grim and Ziwa glanced at each other, and she did not seem included to take the lead, Grim finally stepped forward. “Grimalkin, but you can call me Grim.”
The man looked at him. There was something in his eyes Grim didn’t like, some little light that flickered and sputtered behind his eyeballs. But the man said “Pellen, Pellen Barso,” congenially enough.
Ziwa drew in a deep breath at that and looked startled, but she said nothing. Grim thought about pulling his sword, but it seemed too aggressive. The man hadn’t done anything threatening yet. But he did drop his hands inside his cloak. He could draw daggers from inside pockets much faster than the sword anyway.
“My apologies, we didn’t know the area was occupied or we would have announced ourselves,” said Grim.
Pellen said, “Occupied, and hard to find.” He walked closer, past the table with the skulls sitting on it, and cupped his chin in his hand. “Yes, hard to find. Did someone tell ye about this place?”
“No,” said Grim. Recalling what Ziwa had told him, he said, “There were some records suggesting there might be an underground section of the temple that survived the ohulhug-human wars. We were passing by on a caravan, decided to see for ourselves and got lucky, that’s all.�
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Pellen cocked his head one way, then the other, as if he was trying to look at Grim from different angles. “Centuries-old military records that have just come to light, hmmmm? They were the only others who knew about this place.” He shook his head. “Sounds a little far-fetched to me. A little far-fetched. What do you think, Farand?”
Grim looked around for the person Pellen was talking to, but there was no sign of anyone else in the room. Of course, they could be invisible, or there could be some kind of scrying enchantment going on, so they didn’t need to be physically present, but that took some fairly serious spell casting with no real reason for burning the mana needed for such tricks.
He was about to ask who Pellen was talking too when Pellen turned around to face the other way and said, “Really? How droll. Ye do slay me sometimes, Farand.” Which was when Grim realized he was talking to one of the skulls, and that the crazy light he’d seen in Pellen’s eyes was, in fact, the real thing. Pellen turned back to them. “Farand is quite the kidder, but I feel quite sure he agrees with me.”
Ziwa’s sword was out in front of her, pointing at Pellen, not in a threatening way, just following his movements. “I did some research on this place, with what records survived the ohulhug-human wars. They talked about a Pellen Barso. He was the head priest at the temple at the time it was overrun by the ohulhug four centuries ago. Are you a descendant of his?”
Pellen smiled. “In a manner of speaking. I like to think that we are much the same, the Pellen of that time and I. Small differences, of course. In four hundred years, things change. People change. Are they the same person? Or two different people, or six, or a thousand, tied together by a strand of time? Hard to say, very hard to say.”
Grim blinked and said, “I think he just said he’s four hundred years old,” to Ziwa.
Pellen shrugged. “Is that what I said? I’m not sure it is. Am I four hundred years old? An interesting question. If someone doesn’t age, can you measure their lifespan by the number of years they have wandered the earth? The days blend together over time. It’s hard to remember one from the next. Maybe they’re all the same day, squashed together, overlapping somehow. “What?” He turned back to the skulls. “No, Ethan, I remember that quite clearly, I remember all of ye quite clearly. It was different back then. I appreciate all ye sacrificed, how all of ye sacrificed thyselves, my friends, my priests and priestesses. I could not have survived those troubling times without ye.”
He turned back to Grim and Ziwa and sighed. “Now, the sacrifices are whoever passes by. Or in a pinch an animal. I don’t like animals. I feel… tainted draining them.”
“Ummmmm…. Screw this,” said Grim. He pulled and threw a dagger at Pellen in one smooth motion. Pellen made a slight motion of the staff, and the dagger stopped in mid air like it had hit a wall and fell to the ground.
“Tsk, tsk,” said Pellen, gesturing with the staff, and Grim felt something like a wind blow by him. “Not to worry, it’s just paralysis,” said Pellen. “I do not want to damage you before you are consumed. Although I will have to put one of you in stasis—no need to consume two at the same time.”
Grim slowly bent a finger. It did as he asked. He tried not to move. Whatever Pellen had done, he seemed to think they were immobilized.
Then Ziwa cocked her head and said, “That staff is not an artificer’s device.”
Pellen looked at her and frowned. “How did ye block that? It’s much more powerful than your garden-variety spell.”
Ziwa nodded. “This is the truth. Your staff is a gate key. I have never seen anything like it. I have never seen a World Gate like the one in the other room. It is smaller than…”
“The ones the elves control?” Pellen laughed. “That’s because it’s made by humans.”
Ziwa paused, then said thoughtfully, “One of those. I thought they had all been destroyed. And I thought they were just copies of the existing design. Why is there one here?”
Pellen shrugged. “There was some concern that your people might find out. We hid the ones we made. It took inordinate amounts of effort, and to hide that and the cost, they were integrated in with other construction.”
Ziwa’s eyes opened wide. “Your temple. It was camouflage for building the World Gate. That is why it was so far out from the cities,” said Ziwa. Pellen nodded. “But… how did humans discover how to build one? The elves have been studying the gates for centuries, for millennia, and have never found the secret to their construction.”
Pellen shrugged. “I do not know. It was before my time, knowledge that was lost when the first empire fell, when the Lanotalis Island vanished in fire and thunder. The agreement back then was that the military paid for the temple, and the order allowed them to use it as a cover for the gate. It seemed like an opportunity for the order, a fine temple, a place so grand people would come from all over the empire to see it. We had a teleport pad. The emperor himself visited twice during my tenure. The true emperor, the house of the North.”
Grim wasn’t a history buff, but he knew the house of the North had been the Pranan side of the empire when it split in half five centuries ago.
Pellen seemed to shake himself. “But what is done is done. I lost my temple and my faith.” He turned back to the skulls. “Ethan, I know, I know. I despise my fall from grace, all of it. I wish things had been different. I wish I had run. Or, if not that, I wish I had died.”
Ziwa said, “How did you learn to use a gate to…” and she gestured in Pellen’s direction.
Pellen turned back to Ziwa, chin lowered. “To extend my life? It was one of your people. An elf.”
Ziwa had gone quiet. Pellen didn’t seem to notice. “He was the one that showed me how to drain the life essence from others. But he didn’t tell me about the cost, no, not the cost. When the ohulhug swept through the territory, I convinced my cadre to hide down here. I put them in stasis, froze them in time, with the gate. And then I used them, one by one, to survive, to stay alive while the ohulhug tore apart the temple above. Did I lose my ability to channel my god because of that? Or does using someone else’s life to extend your own make you something different? I am not sure I am even human any more. I do not get sick, do not bleed. I just… exist. I am changed, and I cannot go back to what I was before.”
“And the elf that showed you this… this feature of the gates?” asked Ziwa.
“He left shortly after he arrived. The gate was not a primary gate, was of no use to him. I was glad to see him go, he and his sword, his terrible sword.”
Grim was still trying to keep the spell’s lack of effect on him a secret, but Ziwa staggered at Pellen’s words and almost fell, and Grim was running at Pellen with two daggers in his hands without thinking about it. That wasn’t going to be anywhere near fast enough, and he knew it had been a foolish thing to do.
Pellen turned and said, “Another one?” The staff was already leveling in Grim’s direction before he was half way there. And then a blast of polychromatic flame came shooting out of the end directly at Grim. There was a table between them, and it disintegrated in the heat of the fire, not even burning, just turning into dust. But when the flames hit Grim, they just vanished. He didn’t even feel heat.
He finished his charge, stumbling a bit because he’d intended to jump up on the table and take a flying leap at Pellen, but instead he just ran through the gap left by the strange bolt of shimmering color and slammed his daggers into Pellen, who was frozen in surprise. One dagger went into the stomach and one into the neck, the one to the neck not centered, a slashing cut to one side to slice the jugular. Both hit, but no blood flowed out of the wounds, and Grim, moving too fast to check himself, crashed into Pellen. As he hit, Pellen took a hold of Grim’s clothes and heaved with a strength that was more than human.
Grim went flying through the air and came down on his back on the table full of skulls with a crash, sending them flying in all directions. The table collapsed under the blow, and he rolled down the tabletop as it f
ell and hit the ground hard. He was stunned for a few seconds, but some sense of self-preservation made him roll over on his back. Pellen was standing a few feet away, a knife hilt protruding from his stomach, flaps of skin sticking out from the cut in his neck. He didn’t seem to notice either wound. His eyes blazed with fury, and the staff was held up and out, pointing over Grim’s head. Grim looked up. The heavy table he’d just destroyed, or at least what was left of it, hovered overhead.
“Ye should not have done that to my friends,” said Pellen. “I see ye are immune to my magic. But ye do not seem to be immune to physical blows.” He raised the staff higher, and the table, which had to weigh at least a couple of hundred pounds, rose to the ceiling. Grim looked back at Pellen, and Pellen was smiling in a nasty, going-to-get-whats-coming-to-you kind of way. And then, in the blink of an eye, the empty space behind him was suddenly full of Ziwa, Ziwa swinging her sword as hard as she could. Pellen’s head went flying off his body like it had wings. Grim rolled out of the way as the tabletop hit the ground with a bone-jarring crash, just where he had been lying. Pellen’s body slowly fell over. No blood poured out of the severed neck. Grim looked around and saw Pellen’s head not too far from him. The eyes were still moving, and he mouthed what Grim would swear was “thank ye.” Then the eyes dimmed and the mad little flame behind them went out.