by Paul Barrett
“We’re getting ready to go into a fight, and you want to drink?”
“It helps. If I’m going to die, I want to do it with alcohol in my body. The way a dwarf should go out.”
Quinitas shrugged. “Then take whatever you want.”
I grabbed a bottle at random and used the slim dagger to cut off the wax seal. No way to pull the cork, so I rapped the neck against the wooden rack. The top shattered. Fruity red sloshed out. I chugged half the bottle and offered the rest to Klaus. He took it and poured the remainder into his gullet.
He grimaced and dropped the bottle. “It’s a liquid fruit salad. You got any real drink down here?”
I was beginning to like this hob.
“Sorry,” Quinitas said, “throat-burning swill isn’t our bailiwick. Can we proceed?”
The sickly-sweet taste clinging to my tongue dissuaded me from grabbing another bottle. “Yeah, let’s get this done so Klaus and I can get a real drink.”
“Half a bottle of wine and you go from ‘I’m going to die’ to ‘when’s my next drink.’”
“You should see him after a bottle of grog,” Liz said.
The elf shook his head.
We left the wine cellar and headed back toward our holding cell. I again took up the rear. As we slipped into the hallway, voices drifted from our former prison. The door still lay on the floor. The elf I had knocked unconscious no longer lay there.
“Now what are we going to do?” an unseen voice asked inside the room, speaking in Elvish. I understand the language, even though the sound of it makes me want to shatter my teeth.
I heard an odd clicking sound, like two wooden sticks hitting each other.
“We have to find them,” a deeper voice answered. “If we don’t, she’ll have our heads.”
More clicking. I struggled to remember where I had heard it before.
Quinitas drew his rapier. “Not if we have them first,” he said loud enough for the other elves to hear.
Silence in the other room. Some more clicking.
Then two elves stepped into the hallway and looked toward us. I remembered. I had heard the clicking in the warehouse fight. It was—
Three skeletons armed with halberds and dressed in ragged armor came out behind the elves, bone clinking against bone.
The elves wore the Greenstreet livery over stout leather armor and sported leather leggings. They both had long blond hair and two triangles on their forehead, drawn in what looked like blood. Each wore a thin silver circlet with a tiny ruby in the center on their head, touching where the bases of the triangles connected. Something niggled at me. I had seen a similar headpiece and couldn’t remember where. These memory lapses were becoming an annoyance.
The shorter of the two elves also had a large bruised knot on his head. So he was the one I had slammed against the wall. They held their rapiers in a guard position.
“Talanis,” Quinitas said. “Are you going to participate in this blasphemy?”
“Blasphemy is what was done to our Clan by that stinking human wizard,” Talanis said. He pointed at his companion. “Blasphemy is letting a mud digger assault one of your Clan without retribution. Blasphemy is what stands behind you. But then, we always knew you were a goblin-lover. So sad about your bodyguards.”
Quinitas’ shoulders tensed. “Siralanna has poisoned you. She’s poisoned this whole Clan. I’m going to stop her.”
“No, we’ll stop you.”
“How?” Quinitas asked. He threw his arms wide, rapier still in hand. “Go ahead and kill me.”
The other elf moved forward to do that. Talanis stopped him. “We can’t. It will kill the Grand Mistress.”
“The Grand Mistress?” Quinitas laughed. “And I thought she had an ego when we were children. Let us pass, or die.” He looked at the elf who had advanced on him. “I never liked you much, Lefilan. It’s a shame that door didn’t squash you flat. Talanis, you I would mourn with all my heart.”
“We don’t have to kill you,” Lefilan said. “We only have to stop you. A few holes in your legs should accomplish that.” He thrust down with his rapier.
Three things happened in less than a breath: Quinitas blocked the attack, an arrow struck Lefilan between the triangles on his forehead, and Quinitas brought his rapier point against Talanis’ throat.
“Thank you,” Quinitas said over his shoulder.
“Happy to help,” Liz said in a cheery voice.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Quinitas told Talanis.
Talanis closed his eyes for several seconds. He smiled and opened his eyes. “And I don’t want to die. You may pass. You have my word I won’t hurt you.”
“That may be good enough for him,” I walked up to stand beside Quinitas, “but it doesn’t work for me. Dismantle the skeletons.”
“I can’t,” he said. “Only the Grand Mistress can do that.”
Quinitas pulled his point away from Talanis’ throat and put it up near the silver circlet. He flipped it off the elf’s head, scratching him in the process. Blood trickled down his forehead. The circlet clattered on the floor.
“Now he has no command over them,” Quinitas said. “We can walk right past them.”
“What about him?” I said.
“If I let you go, do you swear on your honor as an elf to not pursue us or send a warning to Siralanna?
“I don’t think I can do that,” Talanis said.
Quinitas shook his head. “Then I must in―”
Klaus pushed past me and swung a meaty fist. It slammed into Talanis’ jaw. The elf crumbled like a three-day-old biscuit.
“Sometimes you people talk too damn much,” Klaus said.
Quinitas looked at Klaus. “That wasn’t necessary.”
“It solved the problem,” I said.
He turned narrowed eyes on me. Then he sighed a dainty elf sigh. “It did at that.”
His attention went to the two elves on the floor, the unconscious Talanis and the dead Lefilan. “Clan doesn’t kill Clan,” he said, pain wringing his voice. “My sister truly has done irreparable damage to us. Why didn’t I see it sooner?”
“We never see what’s right in front of us,” I said.
He looked at me. “Maybe you don’t, but I pride myself on being a step ahead.”
I considered an appropriate comeback. Given his somber look, holding my thoughts seemed the best response. “Let’s bust up the skeletons,” I said.
“No,” Quinitas said. “Siralanna will know it happened and we’ll lose the chance to surprise her.”
Something told me we had already played that particular card. “If you say so.”
We walked past the downed elves. The skeletons did not move as we went around them. Shades of Pastrik Forest tugged at me. The hairs on my neck prickled as we left the undead at our back.
“That’s creepy,” Klaus said in his gruff voice.
I nodded. “You said a mouthful there.”
We passed our former cell, went around a corner and down another long hallway. We turned another corner. I tried to get a sense of our location. The wooden, plant life-rich nature of the building beyond these stone walls confounded me. Inside underground caverns, I can pinpoint my spot within inches. Here I was having no such success.
We reached the end of our third hall. Although it was well hidden, I spotted the concealed door with little difficulty. My stone sense hadn’t completely failed me.
Quinitas reached up to a spot on the right-hand wall I could never reach. He pushed. The door clicked and swung out a few inches. Quinitas pulled it open and waved us through.
We stepped onto a stairwell wide enough for two. The stairs pitched so steeply that I saw eye-to-eye with Klaus even though he stood only three steps lower than me. Warm air flowed up from below. It carried a faint odor of grease. Quinitas glided past us and took up the lead again.
“Don’t go too fast,” I said. “These stairs could kill me.”
“We’ll go slow,” Quinitas promised. “
You’ll want to skip every fourth step unless you want an arrow in your stomach.” He looked at me. “Although in your case it would probably hit your face.”
“I assume this is an old escape route,” Liz said.
“Clever as well as beautiful,” Quinitas said. I wanted to kick him in the shin.
It took us longer than it should have to reach the bottom. The steepness and width of the stairs forced me to jump every fourth one instead of stepping over it. To my credit, I almost fell only three times. On the third time, Klaus said, “You want me to carry you?”
“Touch me, and you’ll draw back a nub,” I said. “I’ll make it.”
I was more careful the rest of the way.
We eventually left the final step. By the time we hit the landing, we stood a hundred and twenty feet below the surface. The air had grown warm, the opposite of what usually happens underground. A smell of wood smoke overlaid the grease. A long dark hallway stretched before us. Nothing stood in it. At least, nothing that gave off heat.
A faint sound reached us. Drums and chanting.
“They’ve started the ritual already,” I said.
“They can’t have,” Quinitas said. “It must be a preparatory measure.”
I didn’t know enough about magic to question him. And it didn’t change our agenda. Either way, we needed to stop whatever was happening.
Quinitas strode with purpose down the hall. I broke into a trot to keep up. Liz and Klaus followed.
We hit a T-intersection after a hundred feet. Quinitas paused. He looked down both halls and listened.
“I thought you knew where she was,” I said.
“It’s one of two possible places. Stay quiet so I can figure out which one it is.”
I fumed but kept my mouth shut and listened. The drums and chanting had grown louder. It echoed down through both halls. I had no idea which way we should go.
The look on Quinitas’ face told me he didn’t either. “Liz, you think you can help Mr. Uncertain here?”
“I thought you were the detective,” Quinitas said.
He had a point. Liz came up and flicked her tongue at the air. I put my ear against the wall. The sound still echoed from every direction, even in the stone. No help there.
I knelt on the floor. Even without heat, I can see in the dark if I’m close enough. Rust colored granite squares held with gypsum mortar. Decent artistry. Not dwarvish. Certainly not elvish. An elf working stone is like a toddler building a catapult.
I went to the left hallway and ran my hand across the stone floor. A fine coat of gypsum dust came away, gritty and dry. I went to the right. Ran my other hand over the floor there. Nowhere near as much dust. I knelt closer, my face almost touching the floor. Fine lines and scratches etched in the mortar. A wide swath of clean through the dirt. Something or things had been dragged down here.
“This way,” Liz and I said at the same time. I stood up and brushed my hands off on my pants.
Quinitas nodded and continued down the path. “We’re going to go through a small maze. Stick with me. Don’t wander into any of the side passages. Most of them are trapped.”
“Did you ever actually have to use this?” Liz asked.
“During the war, we came close, but the battle turned a different way. Every Clan member knows the path, and we walk it once a decade to do maintenance.”
We moved in silence through twists and turns of the maze. Considering the hidden door and trapped stairs, the labyrinth seemed like overkill. Elf Clans are a paranoid bunch. The higher they ranked, the more they feared.
As we walked through the maze, some of that paranoia rubbed off on me. Twice I thought I heard something behind me, over the echoing drums and chanting. When I looked, I saw nothing. Klaus’s good ear twitched, and he glanced over his shoulder. So I wasn’t the only one.
“Liz, can you smell anything behind us?” I whispered.
“With all that maple smoke, I can’t even smell you,” she whispered back.
“What are you whispering about?” Quinitas asked. “Nobody is going to hear us over all the noise they’re making.”
“Just trying to formulate a plan,” I said. If something was behind us, I didn’t want it to know we knew.
“I assume the plan is we step in, find the machine, and the three of you protect me while I blast it into dust. If anything gets in our way, kill it.”
“The four of us against everybody,” I muttered. “My favorite kind of odds.”
We spent another couple of minutes winding through the maze. Either what I had heard was my imagination, or it had gotten stealthier. I didn’t hear it anymore. The air grew smokier. The noise got louder. We turned the last corner in the maze and finally saw some actual light. It spilled into the hallway from a room twenty feet away.
Quinitas stopped and turned back to us. “There’s a large room ahead. It’s a pit from where stone has been quarried. It’s wide open, but on either side are rooms that were set up for the overseers when the quarry was in operation. As soon as we step in, slip into the room on the left. We can study the situation without being seen and come up with a plan.”
“I thought your plan was to go in blasting.”
Quinitas smiled at me. “No, I just figured that was your plan. I want to think I’m a bit cleverer than that. One step ahead, remember?”
I grumbled as I nodded.
We eased down the hallway. The light grew brighter. The chanting continued. My skin prickled at the power in the words even though I didn’t understand them. The harsh, guttural sound told me there was nothing good in what they said. I had heard similar sounds shouted between the Demon Twin’s forces during the war. Unpleasant memories tried to stand. I stomped them down. “That sound like preparation to you?”
“It sounds like the voices of hell,” Liz said. Her eyes narrowed, and her hands twitched.
We reached the end of the hallway. Everyone disappeared to the left, so I followed as instructed.
I found myself standing on a fifteen-foot ledge. A fifty-foot deep pit stretched across the cavern until the darkness swallowed it. Fires burned at the near end, creating the smoke that drifted in the air. Torches also dotted the bottom. Where I stood, broken shards of stone and chips of mortar formed a barely visible rectangle on the floor. Evidence of where a building used to stand. It had been torn down and removed. Rather than being hidden by walls, we stood exposed to any who cared to look.
And someone looked. No sooner had I stepped out than the chanting stopped. A giant clockwork machine occupied the pit. Siralanna stood on the top platform. Maniacal Mage stood beside her. The falchion lay on a red cloth atop a table. Well-crafted wooden boxes stood in the middle of each side of the square platform like upright coffins. A graceful bridge with solid handrails ran from the ledge to the machine. A hundred-foot run would put us on our enemies.
A sound to my right attracted my attention. Six elves emerged from the hallway we had just exited. They pointed rapiers at us. They faded into view as the invisibility spell dissipated and revealed them. My justified paranoia offered me no comfort. All the elves wore silver circlets on their brows.
“Hello, brother,” Siralanna said from the platform. Her voice echoed to us. She wore a glimmering red and black robe. I caught a glint of silver at her brow. She also wore a circlet with a ruby hanging from the center. The same circlet she had worn the day I “rescued” her in her manor. I kicked myself for being an idiot. I wanted to kick Quinitas more. He was the magician. He should have known.
“So pleased you and your friends made it,” Siralanna continued. “Since Pater Loray couldn’t kill your allies and capture you,” she glared at the bug-eyed mage. He stared at the platform, chagrined, “I decided you should join us. Perhaps it’s fate because they’ll serve us better as sacrifices than they would as cinders.”
The whole time she blathered, Quinitas had been muttering an incantation under his breath. “I don’t think so, dear sister,” he said.
He p
ointed his hands toward the two on the platform and said melatonum, the Elvish word for “sleep.”
Bright green light flickered a brief moment on his hands, then died. His face showed the unpleasant surprise of someone stepping in horse shit.
“Sorry, dear brother,” she said. “Your cuffs were lined with triculess.”
A delayed anti-magic powder. I cocked an eyebrow at Quinitas. “How’s that whole ‘one step ahead’ thing working out for you?”
17
The guards disarmed us. I threw the weapons down like a petulant child, annoyed at getting outfoxed…again. “Communication tiaras. How come you didn’t notice that?”
“If you’ll recall, I did notice one on Talanis,” Quinitas said. “I just made a mistake concerning with whom he was communicating.”
“Mistake? More like a fatal error. We played right into her hands. I don’t ever want to hear again about how easily I’m duped by a beautiful woman.”
“Silence,” the elf with the circlet said.
“Aladale,” Quinitas said, “Why are―”
“I said silence,” Aladale emphasized the command with a fist to Quinitas’ gut. He doubled over. Only his hand on the top of my head kept him from falling. I grumbled even as I supported him.
“Weak,” Aladale said. “Your leadership has made this family weak. The Great Mistress will bring us back to our true place.”
“The psychopathic bitch will get you all killed,” I said.
The kick to my stomach didn’t surprise me, though it came too quick for me to stop. I dropped to the ground. Quinitas landed on top of me.
Aladale knelt down and leaned over us. His breath smelled of mint, which seemed wrong given the situation. “My Mistress’ wish that you remain alive is the only reason I don’t throw you off the edge. She gave no orders about how battered you could be on the way to join her. So please, say some more things I don’t like.”
I stayed quiet―mostly because the wind had been knocked out of me.
“Just do what you’re going to do,” Liz said. “He won’t cause any more trouble.”
The weight of Quinitas disappeared off me. Hands reached under my arms and lifted me up. I sucked in smoky air as I stood.