by Steve McHugh
“What’s going on?” Remy asked me.
“I have no idea, but it feels off,” I said.
We dropped Birik off at the medical center. Irkalla and I went to Chloe’s room, hoping that whatever was wrong had nothing to do with her condition.
“What happened here?” I asked Jinayca as she left Chloe’s room.
“We were betrayed.”
“Chloe?”
“She’s fine. She needs a scroll, though.”
Irkalla dropped the trunk at her feet. “Pick one.”
Jinayca nodded to Grundelwy, who dragged the trunk into the room and closed the door. “They’ll find the right scroll, I promise.”
“So what happened here?”
“Jurg was murdered, and we were betrayed,” Jinayca explained. “Kasey.”
I swore I felt my heart stop beating. “Where is Kasey?”
“She was abducted by Stel: the one who put the runes on you all. We don’t know why he took Kasey, but it happened not long ago. He drugged her, and took her through a freshly built tunnel, collapsing it afterward. He killed Jurg on the way out for trying to stop him.”
“Why would Stel do that?” Irkalla asked.
“We don’t know. The rest of the earth-realmers and our guards are searching the city for answers. Stel’s home has been turned inside out; the room in the temple too. It was rune-marked with defensive runes. It took a long time to get inside, but there’s nothing there.”
“I want to help,” I said, making it sound like she had no choice in the matter. “How long has Stel lived here?”
“Since we lost the war. He’s been a studious and helpful member of the community. There was no indication that he would ever be involved in something like that.”
A thought occurred to me. “Kasey was half elemental, and Zamek said that some dwarves don’t like elementals. Could that be something to do with it?”
Jinayca paused. “It’s possible, I guess. We didn’t consider that as a theory because we didn’t know what she was.”
“Can you take me to Stel’s house?” I asked. “I’d like to have a look around myself, if that’s okay?”
Jinayca nodded and led me down toward the temple. She’d told me that Stel’s room returned nothing of interest, but that it was still rune-marked. It was an odd thing to do: protect your room from people snooping around but keep nothing incriminating there. Maybe it was just a place for whatever research he was conducting. Once we’d arrived, I decided to check for myself and entered the temple while Jinayca spoke to the guard outside before leaving me to my investigation.
I asked the dwarf on guard where Stel’s room was and he gave me directions. When I’d reached the room on the second floor, there were several more dwarves, none of whom asked me why I was there and just accepted it as I entered the room and began looking around.
“I’m sorry for your friend,” Morgan said from the corner of the room. “We will find her.”
“Where’s Mordred?” I asked.
“Running laps.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “He was in here and started humming something, so I told him to go outside as the noise was somewhat disturbing while we were searching. He couldn’t stop doing it, so he went for a run. I think he’s trying to get his head clear. He’ll be back soon enough, though.”
I nodded. “You find anything, by chance?”
She shook her head. “It’s weird. Stel went to a lot of effort to hide absolutely nothing. Well, nothing except his weird obsession with the blood elves.”
“There’s a new player with the blood elves,” I told Morgan. “That hooded guy the dwarves spoke about? He threw me around like a rag doll, crushed a dwarf’s head with one hand. He’s like nothing I’ve ever come across. His power is insane.”
“Sorcerer?”
“Couldn’t tell. His hands and arms were covered. Oh, and Kay’s here, too. I almost killed him, but got interrupted.”
“Wait: Kay is here?” Morgan asked.
“He’s sort of working for Hera, although she’s not in charge. There’s someone above her. No idea who it is, but I can’t imagine it’ll be anyone nice.”
“So Kay can jump from here to the earth realm and back again?” Morgan asked.
“I have no idea. I’m hoping Nabu will be able to shed some light on it. Where is he, by the way?”
“He went off to search closer to the tunnel they found.”
I dropped a bunch of empty scrolls onto the floor. “I’m going to go walk the tunnel they found in case they missed something.”
I left Morgan to continue her search and exited the temple, spotting Mordred doing laps around the building while he loudly hummed the theme tune to Super Mario. And yes, that’s as weird as it sounds.
I found the mouth of the tunnel by following the sounds of dwarves arguing.
Stel had put the tunnel behind a small shack, partially blocking it from view with the use of large boulders. You could only find it if you actually walked around to the back of the shack and behind the boulders.
“Who owned the shack?” I asked the dwarves.
There was a lot of shrugging, but no one seemed to know. I tried the door and found it unlocked, and the interior to be completely empty. It was just a big empty box.
“Weird, isn’t it?” Nabu said as he left the tunnel and walked toward me. “He went to a lot of effort to hide the tunnel behind an empty shell.”
“It must have belonged to Stel, then.”
“Maybe.”
He didn’t sound convinced, and I took a few minutes to update him with what had happened in the library.
“So it looks like Kay has the ability to jump between realms with the use of a tablet,” Nabu said when I’d finished, latching on to the one thing I knew he’d find interesting. “And from what he said about being the go-between with Hera and this realm, I get the feeling he can come and go as he pleases.”
“Any idea how?” I didn’t bother mentioning that he’d helped create the damn tablets in the first place, and should shoulder some of the responsibility for their use, mostly because it was pointless. I couldn’t blame Nabu for their creation, anymore than I could blame ancient man for the creation of the bladed weapon. It might not have turned out very well, but I doubt Nabu envisioned this particular circumstance when he helped make them.
“It was the problem we had when we created them,” he said. “It’s why we gave up on the project.”
“Not everyone, apparently. Who else was involved in their creation? Non-dwarves, I mean?”
Nabu paused, and for a split-second I thought he was going to lie to me or fob me off. “Siris was there. She knows how the tablets work.”
I sat on the steps of the shack. I really wanted to punch Nabu, but it wouldn’t have helped very much. “Of course she was. And obviously Siris is alive and well.”
“We never found her, Nate. Not even a glimpse of where she might have fled. But my guess is she’s involved in this somehow.”
“How long have you had those concerns? Because they might have been helpful to share, Nabu.”
“Sharing information is not in my nature. I find the idea of people knowing more, or as much as I do, disconcerting. Several of our pantheon have expressed irritation with my methods over the years.”
“You mean you got punched a lot?”
“On occasion, yes. Irkalla is usually very quick to show her displeasure at any secrets I’ve kept from her.” He sat beside me. “In the interests of cooperation, I believe that Siris has had help from within our pantheon. In fact, I think several people within Avalon are working with her. Not including Kay, Hera, and whoever this hooded man is. I’ve been trying to get information on them for the better part of a thousand years, and have gotten exactly nowhere. Whoever they are, they went very deep underground after the Acre incident, and are only now showing their true colors again.”
“You know, I’ve wondered before about all the plots I’ve managed to sto
p over the years, and just how many I might have missed—small pieces of a larger plan being moved around without anyone ever finding out about it until it’s too late.”
“Avalon is corrupt. You know that.”
“I know that Elaine, and the people she trusts, are doing their best to stop that from spreading.”
“Yes, and they should be commended for it, but you can’t stop this kind of disease; you can only operate and remove the part causing the problems. The thing is, everyone knows that Hera would like more power. Everyone has known that for centuries, but Zeus managed to keep her in check until he vanished. For the better part of five centuries, she’s had free rein to plot against Avalon.”
“She’s not in charge. Kay all but confirmed that.”
“I never assumed she was, but to whom would Hera report? Who is so powerful that she would allow them to take control? And whoever that is, we should not want to confront them. Not without being prepared.”
“Okay, those are future problems. Let’s deal with the one at hand. Kasey has been taken by Stel, presumably to the citadel. Why?”
“She’s an oddity.” He quickly raised his hands when I shot him a look of anger. “I didn’t mean that in the way it sounded. I, too, am an oddity. I am a rare species, an och, and there are very few of us. Some consider us spirits of creation, and more than once someone called us ‘Olympian Spirits’, a term I despise, as there is more than one person who is each kind of spirit. I am immortal to the best of my knowledge, and can understand any language I’ve ever read. I remember everything. I knew the world was round thousands of years before it was deemed a fact. I understood our place in the cosmos before humans were even capable of writing their own name in something other than dirt. I am an oddity: an anomaly. And Kasey is the same: an elemental werewolf. That is something people would want to study.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to study her without drugging her and taking her to wherever Stel took her? Surely that’s a lot more complicated than just studying her.”
“True, but you’re thinking with logic, and it appears that Stel made the decision hastily. Maybe Kasey discovered something he was doing, or interrupted him. I don’t know.”
I stood and entered the shack. “If you were going to hide something, where would you do it? A sealed room, or somewhere out of the way?”
“Out of the way. A sealed room is a giant red flag.”
“Exactly. But you can’t just leave stuff lying around; that would defeat the purpose of your little hidey-hole. So, where would you keep it?”
“You believe that Stel kept his secrets in here?” Nabu looked around. “There’s no writing on the wall or floor. The room is devoid of everything—there’s not even a bed or table. Why would he keep things here? And where?”
I stared at the shack’s floor; something wasn’t right about it. The grain in several of the wooden boards looked peculiar and didn’t quite match the rest of the floorboards. I searched, but found no mechanism or handle to lift a trapdoor.
“The answer is in here somewhere, I’m sure of it.”
Nabu walked around the room, which didn’t take long, and then paused. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Go outside and throw a ball of fire under this shack. The building is at least two feet off the ground, so it should clear across to the other side.”
I did as he asked and crouched outside, readying a small fireball, before throwing it under the shack. It hit something halfway and extinguished. So I threw a second and the same thing happened. I walked to the next side and did the same thing, with the same results.
“There are polished mirrors under here, to make it look like there’s nothing there,” I told Nabu.
“Yes. I imagine that Stel picked this place because of that. This shack is far too old to have been created recently. It’s probably a throwback from when this whole place was used by the dwarven priests. Everyone has secrets they’d like to hide, and if memory serves me correctly—and it always does—the ground under here would have been a small stream a thousand years ago. It was diverted so that it didn’t come down this far when Sanctuary was created. Now it goes to several wells that litter the main living area above. It’s a wonderful piece of construction.”
“You know this how?”
“I did some light reading on the city while you were all gone. I wanted to know how things worked. Looks like it was useful after all.”
“You think it’s safe to punch a hole into the floor?”
“I assume so. Stel probably used his alchemy to move the wooden boards aside.”
I used my air magic to cut a hole in the floor roughly where the mirrors were and found a hole below.
“I’m going to see where it goes. Care to join me?”
Nabu nodded and I allowed myself to drop down into the hole, falling only a few feet before landing in a much larger, and darker, space below. I ignited my shadow magic and my vision became perfect. It was much better than using my fire magic.
The hole beneath the house was essentially an entire room. There were tables made from the rock, and after I looked around, I found a rune that had stopped the crystals on the ceiling from glowing, and wiped it out, bathing the room in a more natural light. I removed the magic eyesight as Nabu read scroll after scroll from the rock table.
There was a small bed in the corner, and I wondered why anyone would want to sleep here.
“Okay, so how would he communicate with anyone outside of the city?”
“With this.” Nabu passed me a small mirror. On the back were several runes that essentially turned it into a phone.
“A magic mirror?” I asked. “Isn’t that a bit . . . Disney?”
“Where do you think those stories of magic mirrors came from? While I’ve been here, I’ve been looking into several dwarven inventions that have fallen out of use. According to the records I found, the dwarves had been using them as communication devices for years, although after the fall of the city, they were used less and less. They’re easy to . . . I guess the word is ‘hack’. The blood elves already have an advantage, so the dwarves stopped carrying them whenever they left Sanctuary. If the elves got hold of them, it wouldn’t take much for them to listen to whomever was on the other end.”
“How?”
“The mirrors are only capable of connecting with one other mirror elsewhere. They would have been made together, and then given to the people who wanted to communicate.” He took the mirror from me and tapped it in each corner, and then once in the middle. It shimmered, and the mirror turned into the view of a room somewhere I’d never been.
“Can they hear us?” I asked.
Nabu nodded.
“Nathaniel Garrett.” The hooded man came into view. “You found Stel’s hiding place. I knew someone would, but he didn’t have time to destroy everything. I apologize for the mess he made in bringing me the girl. A friend of yours, no doubt.”
I clenched my jaw shut.
“Don’t bother threatening me; I’m not going to kill her. I didn’t even want her; she’s here on Kay’s request. He’s pretty angry that you nearly killed him. He wants to punish you, so he took her. You come here, and you get her back.”
“And you kill us both the second I arrive.”
“Actually, the girl can go about her own life the second you arrive. She was never a threat to our organization, and certainly not to me. She’s fun, though, isn’t she? Tore the throat of one blood elf right out. Funniest damn thing I’ve seen in ages. Oh, and when you come—and we both know you will so don’t bother arguing—bring Mordred. I’d really like to kill him. It’s been so long, and I’ve got so many ideas on how I’d like to prolong his agony.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Nabu there will tell you.” He waved. “Hi, Nabu. Miss me? How’s the wife? Still dead? Shame; she really was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know it’s a bit of a trek to the citadel, so I won’t give you a time limit, Nathaniel, but the longer you delay, the more
likely it is that Kasey will turn into a very dead werewolf half-breed.”
The mirror went dark.
“I’ve got to go to the citadel.”
“He’ll kill you. We’ll come up with a plan. And then we will all go and get Kasey. I won’t leave you to his whim. There’s no one on any realm who deserves that.”
“Who is he?”
“That’s Baldr, son of Odin. And one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet.”
CHAPTER 34
After talking to Nabu, we both left the temple area and I got everyone together to discuss future plans in the elders’ building we’d been using since we arrived.
Chloe had insisted on joining us—her recovery was nothing short of remarkable. She was still weak, and looked pale, but it had taken a few hours for her to be up and around, and it appeared as if she was getting healthier by the minute. It was a big weight off my mind. And even more so knowing that Jinayca was the person keeping an eye on her.
“Baldr is here?” Morgan asked, her voice unable to hide the fear.
The group had reassembled in the elders’ meeting room, along with Zamek, who still looked worse for wear: his face bruised, with several healing cuts on his forehead.
“Where’s Nabu?” Jinayca asked as Chloe sat down beside me, placing her hand on mine and squeezing slightly.
“Baldr mentioned his wife, so he decided to take some time to himself,” I told them. “He seemed pretty shaken up by it. Wasn’t his wife killed before I was born?”
Irkalla nodded. “Murdered in her home while he was away, along with every single one of her guards. A human was caught and punished, but there was always a suspicion that there was more to it. Nabu and Baldr had never gotten on, and Baldr had made vague threats against Nabu for investigating something Nabu was keeping pretty close to his chest. This was a few hundred years before the Norse pantheon vanished. So although Nabu suspected Baldr’s involvement, once everyone went missing, Nabu couldn’t find any concrete answers from him.”
“Why are you afraid of Baldr, Morgan?” I asked.