A Warrant of Wyverns

by Michael Angel

  I stepped forward, unlocked the heavy dungeon door, and swung it open with a haunted house creeeak. Nagura raised her head and sniffed at the air by flicking her forked snake tongue. Then she crept forward, moving through the open door and down a broad side passage.

  The Regent and I traded a glance over the wyvern queen’s choice. Of course, it arrowed straight to the cell he had been held in for almost a year. Without a word, he and I turned and walked in Nagura’s wake while Shaw brought up the rear.

  “The spoor leads us here,” the wyvern queen said, as she entered the large square prison block. “We sense preservation magic all throughout this place.”

  I suppressed a shiver as I followed. The stone room held more than a trace of dampness. The cool temperature wasn’t affected one bit by a bowl of glowing stones set in the nearby brazier.

  “I am familiar with this place,” Magnus said curtly. “Prisoners were held in stasis spells here. Perhaps that is all you sense, Queen Nagura. Nothing more.”

  “We sense these spells in here, yes. But elsewhere, too.” She extended one of her foreclaws to point at the rectangular flagstone in the corner. “Down there. Under there.”

  “‘Tis a griffin’s might that is needed in thy quest,” Shaw announced, but the Regent held up a hand again.

  “Bide,” he said. “Right now, you cannot slip a single sheaf of onion-skin parchment between the stones here, to say nothing of a griffin’s claw. I believe that King Fitzwilliam will forgive what I must do to assist a fellow monarch.”

  Magnus raised a hand and spoke a single incantation. “Výbuch toht kameňa!”

  The flagstone shimmered blue-white before cracking into eight pie-shaped wedges. Some of the wedges sagged ominously inward, but Shaw snagged these in his talons, dragging each piece out of the way. A choking cloud of dust obscured the view as the griffin set the wedges against the cell wall. We waited a few seconds for things to clear.

  “Fascinating,” Magnus said, sounding like Galen for a moment. “I would never have guessed to find that here.”

  “We would not have guessed either,” Nagura admitted. “We do not remember this being here in our youth.”

  Cold, damp air rose from the newly created hole in the floor. Mixed in with the chill was a strange, electrifying smell like charged air before the breaking of a thunderstorm. A faint light shone from far below, illuminating a broad stone stairway leading into unknown depths.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “We shall go first,” Queen Nagura said firmly. “We sense there could be danger. Wyverns can set magical traps.”

  “Your being in front would not be prudent,” Magnus countered. “Unless your magic is useful in combat, I am better suited to take the stairs ahead of you.”

  Shaw gave a classic griffin snort. “If combat is thy concern, only a warrior drake should stay in front.”

  I glanced around at all three of my companions. Centaur, griffin, and wyvern each seemed deadly serious. As for me, scouting ahead for magical traps wasn’t something covered in my forensics training.

  The solution was obvious.

  “Okay,” I said. “If you three need me to flip a coin or something, let me know. I’m volunteering to stay in the back.”

  “Any danger shall come from wyvern spellcraft,” Nagura insisted. “We shall be able to sense it earlier and counter it better.”

  The Regent opened his mouth to argue his case, then stopped, considering for a moment. Finally, he let out a sigh and moved to one side. Shaw followed suit.

  “I hope that wisdom has indeed come with age,” Magnus murmured. Nagura did not reply as she took her first few hesitant steps down the stairway. He and Shaw followed closely, while I lagged a couple of steps behind.

  The passage flowed in a broad spiral down to the right. We quickly lost the light of the prison cell above, but that proved to be no real problem. The faint gleam from far below was joined by the bioluminescent dot at the tip of Nagura’s tail.

  Yet more light came in the form of a steady, powder-blue phosphorescence. With a start, I realized that the walls were coated with softly glowing lichen. The exact same lichen I’d first seen in the Sepulcher of the Eight Talons.

  Nagura’s passage was marked by the tic-tac of her claws on stone, followed by the occasional scrape of scale against the floor or wall. Magnus’ heavy, sure tread matched that of Shaw’s. My own lighter step followed.

  Like the lowest levels of Fitzwilliam’s palace, the stairway appeared to be carved out of solid gray rock. It didn’t seem likely to me that a natural passage would plunge into the depths of the hillside, at least, not with the almost mathematical precision to the angle of descent.

  The wyvern queen halted. The sound of a quick scribble on the whiteboard, then her magically-gifted voice.

  “Wait for a moment.”

  We waited. Nagura made a series of small, harsh sounds under her breath, the equivalent of a wyvern whisper.

  Cho-ha. Nesh-ka, ssla-ka. Cho-ha.

  Magnus didn’t say anything, but he held his right hand at the ready, down by his side. One incantation, and he could throw a spell as deadly as any from Galen. Shaw likewise remained ready. A trio of unsheathed griffin talons glimmered in the dim light.

  The wyvern queen paused to sniff the air again with a flick of her fleshy pink tongue. Another scribble on her board, a longer one this time.

  “Possibly we are being too cautious,” she admitted. “We sense something ahead. It is definitely some type of magic.”

  “I too sense something,” the Regent agreed. “It seems familiar, somehow. Let us go see, then.”

  The steps continued downward. Again, my nose tingled with the charged feel of the air. The sensation increased as we advanced, so much so that I could taste it.

  Damned if Magnus isn’t right again, my mind noted. Something about this does feel familiar. But from where?

  Another corkscrew of stairs, and Nagura let out a compressed-air hiss of surprise. Shaw and the Regent moved to her side, still at the ready. Instead of reacting to some threat, they simply paused, blinking.

  “This is something worth seeing, Dame Chrissie,” Magnus said.

  “Aye, that much is true,” Shaw breathed.

  Both of their voices carried a hint of something I never would have expected to hear this far below the earth.

  Echoes.

  I let out a gasp of my own as I came around the last turn.

  We’d entered a large cavern lined with slabs of ice-blue crystal. The gentle glow we’d seen from the dungeon level came from the half-dozen or so planes of crystal that were honed or polished to a mirror-sheen. Yet more crystal lay strewn along the walls or floor in irregular chunks.

  While not as large as the throne room far above us, I couldn’t help but think of the similarities between the two chambers. Slanted beams composed of crystal columns held up the roof of the cavern. And the multiple aquamarine shades of blue made the place look even colder than it really was.

  “We definitely would have remembered this place,” Nagura wrote. Her voice also reverberated with the slight echo from the cavern. “Our sister could have built this, or one of our predecessors, who did not mention it.”

  “Not mention that they had a cavern full of magically charged crystals?” I asked, incredulously. “I don’t know…I think they would have passed that little tidbit on to each new generation. It might have come in handy.”

  “We admit that you have a point, Dayna.” The wyvern queen clambered over several of the piles of fallen crystal at the far end of the chamber. She flicked her tongue several more times. “The spoor is stronger now. Yet, we still cannot tell…”

  “Whether thou hast sensed young of the Hakseeka?” Shaw inquired.

  “We sense eggs of some kind.” Nagura rolled one of the couch-sized crystal lumps to one side, but dozens more lay beyond. “Dragon or wyvern, we cannot say. The way is blocked.”

  “I would urge caution,” Magus said, as he nervously
ran his fingers through his short iron-red hair. “There are several passages that lead out of here. All have been sealed off by rockfalls. This cavern may be less stable than it appears.”

  “Do you think this is part of a natural cave system?” I asked him.

  The Regent placed his palm against one of the chunks of crystal, closing his eyes in concentration before answering.

  “I sense that this cavern is completely natural. But the spiral passage down here was crafted. One can see tool marks along the edges where it was hewn from the rock. And the mirror-bright surfaces on some of the crystals indicate that work has been done to them. It has increased their latent magical potency, but it’s the spoor of spell casting that intrigues me.”

  Nagura made a slight chuff. “We sense nothing of the sort.”

  “Your senses are attuned to magical spoor associated with your own kind,” Magnus pointed out. “From what I can tell, potent spell crafting has been done here, but I cannot tell what kind of magic was used, or by whom. When the Protector of the Forest returns, we need to have him come down here. His natural fayleene abilities as a magical spoor-tracker far surpass mine.”

  I didn’t have any such abilities at all, but I did have my sense of smell. The scent in here was so damned familiar, it was gnawing at me like an itch I couldn’t scratch. I went over to the largest of the glass-smooth crystals. It reflected a convex image like a badly made mirror the size of my house’s front door.

  But I didn’t want to look at the funhouse version of myself. Instead, I closed my eyes and inhaled, letting my mind wander for a bit.

  A childhood memory of Pike County’s summer heat came rushing back. Of long, humid days and evenings spent hunting lightning bugs to put in glass jars for a night. And during those days, a visit to a friend’s pool. Splashing and diving in, forgetting my nose plugs…

  The rush of chlorinated water stung my sinuses.

  I smiled to myself as my brain gave a faint click. That was the answer.

  “Shaw, you’ve got a keen nose. Have you picked up on any scent in the air here?”

  He nodded. ‘Tis a familiar smell, like sea water gone off.”

  “It’s not sea water. It’s ozone. This whole cavern smells like it does every time I step into a transport spell.”

  “Aye, that’s it! But where is it coming from?”

  “Here,” I said, pointing to the flat crystal in front of me. “Magnus, would you be so kind?”

  “Of course,” the Regent said. I stepped out of the way as he stepped up before it. Planting his feet he raised a hand, calling out a quick pair of magical words. “Nayta itsesi!”

  A white spark jumped from his palm and into the crystal. The flat stone rippled as if he’d dropped a pebble into a pool of water from a large height. The blue color retreated all the way to the very sides of the crystal, leaving a translucent surface one could see through.

  Magnus let out a low whistle. “I know I said this before…but this is something worth seeing, Dame Chrissie.”

  Nagura arched her neck and looked over our heads. Her expression was one of curiosity and puzzlement. To her, all she could see were alien artifacts. But I recognized most everything.

  The view through the crystal showed the interior of an everyday supply warehouse in my world. As far as I could tell, the place was empty. A battered desk slumped in one corner, topped with a stack of papers. The stack was weighed down by a cube-shaped acrylic paperweight, complete with a preserved scorpion inside.

  Stretching away from the desk were multi-tiered metal racks, similar to the kind I saw at auto part stores. The racks were stuffed with wooden crates and gray-green boxes. Tools of some kind hung against the back wall, but it was hard to make them out against the glare from a nearby four-pane window.

  I squinted to look through both the crystal surface, as well as the smeary view through the window’s dirty glass. I was just able to make out a view of dark clouds and rolling hills. Said hills were covered in long wild grasses, now tinged with a hint of gold.

  But all that detail came to me later. Right then, I only had eyes for one single thing.

  Sitting the middle of that warehouse, between two rows of racks, was a slab of gemstone the size of my OME van. Only this crystal-like slab wasn’t a soothing aquamarine color.

  This one blazed with the red of a dying sun.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The gigantic slab of ruby did a visual tap dance on my eyeballs.

  Depending on the angle, deep scarlet shades veered from drying blood, over through vermillion, and finally to a post-sunset purplish-red. The spectrum of color made my heart skip a beat. Nothing like this had ever existed in my world. The van-sized gemstone wasn’t polished and faceted, not exactly. But I was pretty sure that ruby didn’t come naturally carved into rectangular slabs.

  “This is incredible,” Magnus breathed. “The ruby beyond is amazing all by itself. And this blue crystal…it’s been ensorcelled to constantly charge and power a single spell.”

  “Dost thou know which kind of spell?” Shaw asked.

  “A transport spell. Someone has set this stone up as a semi-permanent bridge between worlds.” He pointed into the white-blue glow before us. “A bridge between Andeluvia and Dame Chrissie’s world, right where they have access to yet another potent-looking magical artifact. I only wish I knew what that ruby was.”

  “‘Tis likely the source,” Shaw declared. “The source of the shards we have found in Dayna’s world.”

  Nagura exhaled languidly, her expression dreamlike. “We think this could be one of the many Hearts of the Mother. This is a blessed moment.”

  Personally, I wasn’t so sure about how ‘blessed’ things were right now.

  The words of the Ultari-thing that had nested inside Ronald Clarke came to mind.

  “He who sleeps in the Scarlet Crypt shall end you,” I murmured to myself.

  “What do you mean by that, Dame Chrissie?” Magnus asked, startled.

  “That was something told me by one of the Ultari recently,” I replied. “Just before I banished him.”

  “You banished one of the Shapeless Ones?” Nagura’s scales rippled down her back in a wyvern expression of pleasure. “We are duly impressed.”

  I swallowed, hard. “So. I’m going through that bridge.”

  Magnus turned to stare at me. “Now I’m duly impressed. We don’t know who or what is on the other side of that portal!”

  “No, we don’t. That’s why I need to go,” I insisted. “I can’t keep going back to my world with this threat hanging over us. Worried that some ruby ‘Crypt-Keeper’ is going to show up and avenge his followers.”

  “But–”

  “And Shaw brought up a good point,” I pushed on, over his objection. “This could be the source of the ruby shards that have shown up in connection with Chief Sim’s assassination, Crossbow Consulting, and the treachery involving Korr of the Seraphine. This could be the final break we need to call out and fight the Creatures of the Dark.”

  “And I shall be at thy side, as always,” Shaw promised.

  “No, not this time,” I said. I moved to smooth down the feathers on his neck as they began to bristle. “You and Nagura simply won’t fit.”

  “The room beyond is not so small. Thou knowest that I can exhale.”

  I had to suppress a smile on that one. “Not only is it cramped, but it’s still business hours in my world. If someone’s there, then I’m going to be hard-pressed to explain a griffin or a wyvern queen.”

  Shaw scowled an eagle-eyed glare at Magnus. “Regent, I wish proof from thee that thou art no longer a foe. I ask thee for a boon. That thou shalt accompany Dayna and protect her from danger. Thou art in human form, so there can be no objection from her.”

  Magnus shook his head. “We are no longer foes, drake. But I am bound by two chains of circumstance. First, I am under oath to remain here as interim ruler until King Fitzwilliam returns. Second, I have delved a bit more into thi
s bridge, and there is a problem.”

  I gritted my teeth. Just my rotten luck.

  “I think it likely that this portal can transport only a single person in a given fortnight,” the Regent said. “Perhaps even longer. Enchantments cannot last forever, as you know. The power invested in an object will slowly dissipate over time.”

  I nodded. I’d seen that phenomenon firsthand, most recently at Keshali. Galen had detected the bare remnants of Nagura’s protection spell from long ago. It kept bugs out, but that was about all it could do anymore.

  “This enchantment can only recharge gradually from the natural magic within this crystal cavern,” he continued. “Once you go through, you cannot get back this way. Can you protect yourself if something goes wrong?”

  I patted my side in answer. My action displayed a bravado I didn’t actually feel, but my shoulder holster and the gun inside were comforting weights.

  “I’m still going,” I said flatly. Shaw snapped his beak in annoyance.

  “Regent, canst thou help her in any other way?” he demanded. “I mislike this.”

  Magnus rubbed his chin in thought as he studied me for a moment. “Perhaps I can.”

  He picked up a thimble-sized chunk of crystal, cupped it in his hands, and lifted it to an inch from his lips, whispering an incantation. A rushing sound echoed in the cavern, and the crystal gave a luminescent flash, like the switching on-and-off of a neon bulb.

  “I have neither the time nor the materials to create a medallion like Galen’s,” he explained, as he handed the stone to me. It felt pleasantly warm as I slipped it into a pocket. “But this rock can hold a limited transport spell, at least.”

  “Limited?” I asked. “In what way?”

  “It cannot bring you back to Andeluvia. But grasping it and thinking of a destination within your own world should be enough to transport you out of danger.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and despite my insistence on going through the bridge, I felt a lot better. Having a ready-made escape route took a load off my mind.