by Dante King
Bron was standing by an open portal, clearly waiting to see if Horatio was going to catch up with him and the rest of the gang. He was wearing the same shitty brown robes that so reminded me of a Franciscan monk, but also had a tattered black hooded cloak clasped at his throat. Maybe it was a sign of rank among the Death Mages—I really couldn’t say—but it made him look like a vegan Dr. Doom. He took a step toward it as I sprinted round the corner, then put one foot in it when he came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to stop.
“Oh, shi—” Bron managed to get out before I collided with him and tackled him through the open portal.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I landed hard on the other side. Landed with me on top of Bron.
We were still in the prison, that much was obvious. Where exactly, I couldn’t say. We were on a square stone platform that dropped away into an abyss on every side. On each side of the square, a thin bridge of stone, only wide enough for a single person to cross at once, led to a passageway set in the wall opposite. It looked to me like we were at some crossroads within the prison; a crossroads constructed to make sure that—going in and going out—people moved slowly and carefully.
It was in a situation like this that an Earthling such as myself, while looked upon with slight scorn and underestimated by other magical races sometimes, had an advantage. Sometimes, mages born to the magical life, allowed themselves to become too dependent on spells and potions and all the rest of it. They forgot that, sometimes, you have to be prepared to go old school.
Not me. As an Earthling, fighting with my hands was the natural course.
Bron flailed a hand out for his vector, a short, ugly rod of iron, which he had dropped during our collison. I butted Bron hard in the face with my head, pulping his nose with a satisfying popping crunch of cartilage. Bron squealed and managed to fling out an elbow and caught me a lucky one on the temple. I rolled off of him, grunting with the blow. The Death Mage made a grab for his rod, but I swept a leg out and hooked it away so that it skittered to the edge of the platform.
Bron, spluttering and cursing through his broken nose, but with the contorted expression of a grade-A nutjob on his face, dived at me. He must have weighed about forty pounds less than I did, but he was strengthened by hatred and zealotry. He grabbed me around the neck, but I swung him off with a neat little hip throw that I had learned in a Krav Maga class I had taken once at college.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t been thinking where I was throwing him. He tumbled right across the platform and fetched up lying next to his vector.
Shit, was the only thought that crossed my mind, as Bron shook his head and noticed the iron rod lying only a foot or so away from him. I tensed, readying myself to leap at him, when my vector appeared in my hand.
Bron snatched his own vector from the platform and popped to his feet.
We let loose our spells at exactly the same moment. Furious light flared. The shadows around the chamber fled.
Bron’s spell, whatever the hell it was, rustled over my head like a cloud of bats, making my hair stand on end. I heard it slam into the ceiling above. I felt the shower of stone fragments rain down on me. Oddly, and for no reason that I could explain, the first spell that popped into my head was my Crystallize spell. It was a Gemstone Elemental spell that instantly encased the thing it hit in transparent crystal.
On this occasion, the thing my spell hit was the rather ratty cloak that Bron had fastened around his throat. It would have probably hit the Death Mage square in the face, had he not thrown himself back as he cast his own curse at me, but c’est la vie. The cloak turned instantly to solid crystal.
“What the… Oh… no…!” Bron gasped.
He had thrown himself backward to avoid my spell, and he still carried that slight bit of momentum now. However, with the sudden added weight of the crystal cloak, Bron was unable to stop himself from tilting back, further and further.
And he was standing right on the lip of the platform.
The Death Mage flailed his arms, beating at the air as he sought to find a purchase where there was none.”Shit!” he hissed. “Shit!”
As he beat desperately at the air, his vector flew from his grasp and disappeared into the chasm behind him. Due to his frantic windmilling, the neck of his robe also opened, and a sliver of bone on a leather thong that he had hanging around his neck was suddenly revealed.
The Skeleton Key.
I lunged forward and grabbed the key, just as Bron started to inexorably go over the edge of the platform.
For a moment, the thong held, I locked eyes with Bron.
Then the crystal cloak took its toll, and the thong snapped. With a small, disbelieving shriek, Bron toppled backward into the void and was gone.
I stood breathing heavily for about twenty seconds, regaining my breath and wiping the sweat from my eyes. In that twenty seconds, I didn’t hear the sound of Bron’s body hitting the floor.
I didn’t know where the fuck the rest of the Death Mages were. They might have gone through the same portal that I had bundled Bron through and then scattered. They could have gone through a different portal altogether. I had no way of knowing. All I could do was remain vigilant and hope that I could find Idman before he was carted off to the Castle of Ascendance.
I looked about. I had four directions to choose from and not a single clue as to where in the prison I was. I shrugged. When you were lost, each path held the same potential. With this cheerful thought in mind, I turned one-eighty and set off.
I must have been walking for ten minutes, through a section of the prison that looked vaguely familiar somehow, when I was hailed by a familiar voice.
“Ahoy there, matey!” the voice said, floating out of a cell door from my right. There was a small hatch open in the door, and it was from here that the salty voice emanated.
My head snapped about, and I raised my staff.
“Ooooh, you be quick on the draw. As quick as any good War Mage should be, I warrant! I shouldn’t be surprised though, the stories I hear about the way you handle that staff of yours…”
“Barry?” I asked. I looked about incredulously. I had, by sheer luck or the workings of fate, somehow stumbled across the poltergeist wing.
What was more, I had the fucking Skeleton Key with me!
Talk about two birds with one stone, I thought.
There was no hesitation. Goddamn, I had seen enough movies to know that you didn’t mess about when you were presented with a chance like this. Fuck introspection. I didn’t stand there, turning the key over in my hands, wondering whether or not I should free Barry for the good of my frat, when the immediate mission was to find Janet’s father. Nope, I rammed the Skeleton Key in the lock and opened the door.
“Barry, you perverted ghostly prick,” I said amiably. “How are you, man?”
Barry the Poltergeist, looking just as shabbily resplendent as ever in his seventeenth century sailor’s attire, glided up to me from the shadowy corner of his cell. He was glowing a dull green and looked exactly the same as he had looked the very first time that I had met him in his magical emporium. The one eye that wasn’t covered with a patch narrowed with suspicion at seeing me wandering about the Eldritch Prison without a chaperone.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, waving a hand to stop the questions and staff innuendos that I could see looming up into the conversation as Barry opened his mouth. “Look we haven’t got the time for any of our usual inane banter I’m afraid, Barry. The fact is that Idman Thunderstone is up to his eyebrows in the brown and sticky and we need to extricate him from it, savvy?”
“Aye, I see, young master.”
“Also, if we make it out of this in one piece and alive, I’d like to somehow smuggle you into my fraternity and set you up as the resident poltergeist. If you fancy it, of course? That way, we’ll have a fully functioning dungeon, and you’ll be protected from the Arcane Council.”
Barry flushed a deeper shade of green at the mention of the Arcane C
ouncil. “And how is it that you come to be outside my cell door today?” he asked. “And not only outside of my door, but with the means to open it?”
I held up the Skeleton Key. “That’s way too long a story, Barry,” I said.
Barry’s mouth had dropped open at the sight of the Skeleton Key. Mutely, he held out his manacled wrist. I slotted the key into the lock, and they popped open instantly.
“We’re on a tight schedule, Barry,” I said. “Those history rewriting, brainwashing bastards in the Arcane Council are on their way here to take Idman off to the Castle of Ascension—they might even be here right now for all I know.”
Barry spat, or at least made the gesture. I didn’t reckon spirits like Barry Chillgrave actually had access to working saliva ducts.
“Bleedin’ Arcane Council it was that put me in here,” he said. “Indirectly, o’ course. Thunderstone himself had me chained and led away.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You know what they say, Barry; we cast the chains that we wear in life—or something like that. Anyway, what all this boils down to is this: I need to find Idman Thunderstone, and I need to find him ASAP.”
Barry frowned. “ASAP?”
“As soon as possible, Barry!”
“Ah, I follow ye now.”
“Well?” I asked.
“What, young master?” Barry said.
“Can you help me find him in this damn maze of a place?” I said, trying to keep my voice as level as possible. For some reason—perhaps because the mayhem of battle had ceased—I had become acutely aware of the seconds slipping by.
“Oh, aye,” Barry said casually, “I can help you track him easily enough. Poltergeists are able to see magic on a whole different plane to you wizards, we’re far more attuned and—”
“Well, that’s great and everything, Barry, but how about we get the fuck on, eh?” I was in so much of a rush that I actually attempted to grab Barry by the arm. My fingers went right through him. It felt like I’d just passed my hand through something like a spider’s web.
“Ah, yes, yes, I’ll lead on, young master. We shall find the man you seek in no time,” Barry said, sweeping off his plumed tri-corner hat and bowing.
As we exited the cell, I asked, “Barry, you’re not going to do anything, you know, nasty to Idman Thunderstone, are you?”
Barry started floating off in the opposite direction to which I had come and said over his shoulder, “Nasty, young master?”
“You know, like curse his pecker off or something?”
Barry shrugged. “That’s quite the idea for a curse, but nay. When you have floated about this world for as long as I have, you come to realize what a bleedin’ waste o’ time vengeance is. It’s a young man’s game, is vengeance. A mortal’s game. Being alive for centuries sort o’ robs it of its poignancy.”
I nodded, though Barry couldn’t see me.
“Not just a pretty face after all, Barry,” I said.
The poltergeist guffawed.
It took a surprisingly short time for Barry to locate Idman Thunderstone’s cell, apparently honing in on the man’s unique thaumaturgical signature.
Barry stuck his transparent green head around the last corner, then slowly drew it back.
“Two Frost Giant guards stationed outside Thunderstone’s door, young master,” he said in a hushed voice. “May I suggest a cunning diversion o’ sorts? A tried and tested one that I liked to employ during my glory days as a privateer. I’d sneak down another adjacent passage and whistle, then when—”
I stepped around the corner with my black staff raised. I hit the first Jotunn guard with a Paralyzing Zap that locked every joint in his body. He went over like a statue that’d been knocked off its base and smacked face first into the stone floor. Due to the fact that the Frost Giants had next to no imagination, the second creature simply charged at me without pausing to think who I was or what I might be doing there. I guessed that was what made them such good guards; they protected what they were told to protect without any question, and attacked without hesitation.
My Storm Bolt engulfed the Frost Giants head. It managed to take three steps before it collapsed, electricity dancing across the blackened fur of its head. I stepped neatly aside, as the ten-foot, five-hundred pound body toppled past me.
“Sorry, Barry,” I said, over my shoulder, “I’m sure it was a hell of a diversion, but we just don’t have time for that pussy-footing sort of approach.”
“Right you are, chap,” Barry said.
I stepped up to the door. It was bronze but had oxidised over time and had taken on that nice green patina that bronze does. There was only a single keyhole in it, right in the very center. There were all sorts of runes carved over the lintel, but I didn’t have a clue what language they were written in, let alone what they said.
“Barry,” I said, “you used to deal in all sorts of magical paraphernalia. Is this key going to work on this door without setting off any anti-fuckery hexes?”
Barry looked at me sideways. As looks went, it wasn’t one that I’d put in my top three most confidence inspiring glances—or top fifty, if I’m honest.
“Uh… yes,” he said.
“Good enough, I said as I fitted the Skeleton Key to the lock and turned it.
There was no ominous boom, no flurry of clicks. It was all a bit anticlimactic, in a way. Of course, that was probably a good thing. The opposite of anticlimactic might have been a trapdoor opening at my feet and being dropped into a vat of hydrochloric acid.
The door swung open to reveal Idman Thunderstone. I had to admit, the motherfucker looked about as cool and composed as they came. He didn’t act surprised to see me in the least. It was almost as if he had been waiting for Barry and I to show up.
“Ah,” he said in his slightly patrician voice, smoothing back his hair with a hand, “Mr. Mauler, do I suppose that you are here to free me?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m here with others—your daughter and Chaosbane to name two.”
Idman Thunderstone straightened his cuffs. “Very good. I think it best that we leave this place with alacrity.”
“Those were my thoughts precisely, Idman,” I said.
The use of his first name seemed to rankle the High Warden of the Eldritch Prison for just a moment. Then he sniffed and said, “You better let me lead the way. There are passages that none but myself know. I’ll take us to my inner sanctum. The Arcane Council will likely be able to find us, but hopefully not before we can make good our escape.”
He breezed past me and Barry, giving the poltergeist a haughty nod of thanks as he went by him.
We followed Janet’s father back the way that Barry and I had come. At one point, we were forced to duck into an open cell and wait for a bunch of Frost Giants to troop past, but apart from that, we met no one. Idman clearly knew the ways of the prison more intricately and more intimately than anyone else possibly could. We came to the brink of another chasm. There was nothing in the way of bridges that would allow us to span the dreadful gap, but Idman simply glanced at his pocket watch for a few moments and then said, “And… now.” Then he stepped out into the air and strolled casually across the open void. Not daring to question what the hell I was witnessing, I hurried after him on what seemed an invisible bridge, with Barry floating behind.
Eventually, we came to a corridor that appeared to be nothing more than a dark and dusty dead end. I looked about.
“There better be a hidden door or something here, man,” I said.
Idman gave me a thin-lipped smile. “Now why would you think that?”
I tapped experimentally at the wall with my crystal staff. It seemed pretty solid to me.
“There are many ways to gain access to my inner sanctum,” Idman said.
Behind me I felt, more than saw, Barry shift and go to open his mouth. Then he shut it again. I grinned. It must have cost him horribly to bite back the pun he was obviously dying to make about Idman Thunderstone’s inner sanctum.
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“There are many ways,” Idman continued, “but I have found that everyone who looks always only looks ahead of them. As if paths onward only lead away to the distant horizon.”
He reached down and touched a flagstone. Instantly, and with absolutely no noise, the flagstone split to reveal a set of stairs leading down.
“Follow,” Idman said simply.
Barry and I followed Idman down the short set of stairs, along a low passageway, and up another set of stairs.
I blinked as I came out into the sudden glaring light of sunset.
“What the...? Those can’t be windows,” I said.
“No,” Idman said, “but they mirror the sun outside and so may well as be.”
We were standing in a spacious office. A large desk stood against one wall and, to either side of it, were two lifesize paintings of my parents. My father, Zenidor, stood on the left dressed all in sable. Istrea, my mom, stood on the right and was dressed from head to toe in white. I recalled that Janet had said she’d seen these portraits in her father’s inner sanctum.
“So, turns out Janet wasn’t misremembering,” I said. “You followed the Twin Spirits. You followed my parents.”
Idman raised one eyebrow about a quarter of an inch in acknowledgement.
“You said the Arcane Council is bound to find this place sooner or later,” I said. “What’s your plan?”
Idman gave a little sigh through his nose and gazed about at his secret office. “Well,” he said, “there is no way that I shall be able to operate any sort of front in Avalonia. Not for the foreseeable future. I am destined to be an outlaw.”
Barry grinned. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with the outlaw life. Why, I made a fortune for myself, and my family, by bein’ as slippery as a boiled onion and leading a life that many would consider to be downright ruthless. But, bugger me with a boat hook, it was fun!”
Idman scowled, and I got a crazy idea that was probably going to get me into deep shit with not only my frat brothers, but also Janet Thunderstone.
“Look,” I said, struck by sudden inspiration, “this might sound about as unappealing as suggestions come to a man of your former status, but why not come and stay with me and my fraternity in my parents’ old house?”