Upon This World of Stone (The Paladin Trilogy Book 2)

by James A. Hillebrecht

  “I am sorry, My Young Lord,” he said softly to the boy before him. “You should have lived a long and noble life. Those that committed this atrocity upon you shall be brought to account. Of this, I give you my sworn word.”

  More shouts, more threats, more leveled weapons, but Darius ignored them all, a greater duty calling him. He held Sarinian before him, the Sacred Tree of Mirna bathing the fallen in a soft light, and quietly, he sang a verse from the Great Song, the stanzas rising to the listening sky.

  “Now Trueheart take your final trip,

  Across the Astral Sea.

  Your honor and your fealty safe,

  Blessed by Divinity.”

  “With heavy heart, we gladly take

  Thy banner left behind,

  Let Father take a Fallen Son

  Two hearts forever Bind.”

  “Sacrilege!” cried a harsh voice, the acrid sound of Father Rathman. “Put down your sword, Paladin!”

  Darius slowly rose to his feet, holding Sarinian before him, the sacred Tree of Mirna still gleaming upon the blade, oblivious to the swords leveled against him. Staring up into the starry heavens, he slowly, softly muttered, “Great Lord, take this boy into Thy keeping, and bear him into the presence of his fathers where he may be judged by You and them. Raise him from the shadows in death as ever he rose from them in life.”

  For a moment longer he stood there, and the guards shared his silence, all hearts touched by the simple blessing for a fallen comrade. Then Darius turned to them.

  “I tell you for the last time to put down your sword,” Rathman said grimly. “Guards! Do your duty!”

  “You…you must come with us, Paladin,” a young guard was saying, his eyes wide, the ready sword quivering slightly in his hands. He wore the golden armor of Maganhall and the insignia of a subaltern, and Darius realized the man’s fear came as much from facing him with the gleaming great sword in his hands as finding his lord dead at his feet.

  “I am innocent of any harm to Lord Boltran, but I will come with you peacefully,” he said as he calmly dropped Sarinian to the stone walkway, the cold ring of its fall echoing along the battlements. “I advise you to have a care handling that sword.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Malcolm’s Choice

  Malcolm the Magnificent was scribbling on the walls of his prison cell.

  The clean surface was covered with runes, phrases, even pictures, an array of thoughts related to his imprisonment and the events that lead up to it, as a conjured quill with an endless supply of magical ink floated in the air ready to scribe down the next item at Malcolm’s behest.

  Scribing was a means of focusing, and Malcolm was becoming ever more focused as he studied the lost room within Llan Praetor in which he found himself imprisoned.

  Not frustrated. Frustration was to dwell on the past, wasting crucial thoughts on matters that were now history, to make every effort a self-fulfilling prophecy so that all future attempts would end in the same ignoble state as the others.

  Not angry. Anger was to indulge in the emotions of the present and cloud the mind with images of injustice and vengeance that had no part in finding a solution to the problem.

  And certainly not frightened. Fear was a prediction of future disaster, the mind allowing itself to contemplate entombment within the walls, never to see the light of day again, never to breathe the fresh air of the mountains, never to see another living face…

  No.

  Focused.

  Bringing all his powers and wisdom to bear on the issue, leaving no option excluded, considering every perspective of his dilemma in order to find a way out. The quill automatically began inscribing the word “focus” on the wall, and Malcolm raised two fingers and brought the feathered scribe back to his hand. That was one word he did not need repeated further.

  “Every problem has a solution,” he said clearly and loudly as if addressing a companion. “That is the first rule of magic.”

  He had taken to speaking to the ornate statue in the middle room as if it were a fellow captive, partly to counter the growing sense of isolation that was trying to impose itself upon him, partly because putting thoughts into physical words was a valuable discipline, and partly because he had learned years ago that Llan Praetor itself was at least semi-conscious, the stone vaguely aware of the events transpiring within it. It might be no more than a flea speaking to the horse on which it was riding, but if it gave the flea some sense of holding the reins, what was the harm?

  “Old Eldecleses would have beaten me bloody for taking so long on a single task,” he said with a rueful smile as he remembered his first tutor of magic. “Review, he would say. Review, speculate, hypothesize, and test, the four keys to unlock every door.”

  The problem was there were so many strange details to be reviewed, which was the original reason for conjuring the quill scribe.

  He kept his eyes resolutely away from a single rune off to the left, quarantined from the rest of the writing, a symbol of three interlocked triangles that represented the Astral Plane. If all else failed and no other recourse were available, Malcolm would go ethereal and try to leave via the Astral Plane. Astral travel through any sort of solid material risked disorientation that could easily disrupt the spell and eject the caster out of the Astral Plane and right into the material through which he was attempting to pass, essentially entombing him in solid rock. But risky as passing through standard rock might be, Llan Praetor was much more dangerous, its energies almost certain to cause the fatal disorientation.

  Resolutely, Malcolm turned away from those three interlocked triangles, determined to find another solution.

  One entire wall was covered with script beneath the heading of a single dragon rune, clear proof of the dominant position the great wyrms had in the Wizard’s thoughts. The ability and knowledge of the dragons had opened the main gates of the citadel that had defied all of Malcolm’s efforts and power for two decades. It was clear they had no need of his puny efforts to gain entry, so why had they made the pact with him in the first place?

  Llan Praetor, he believed, was associated with giants. The sheer size of the rooms and passages suggested as much, but the artistry, the design, the latent power of the castle suggested giants of that distant time were a far different species from the savage brutes that now bore the name. And dragons and giants had ever been the deadliest of enemies, once contending against each other for mastery of the entire world, a struggle that had resulted in the decline of both lines and the gradual ascension on humanity. But that struggle lay in the remote past, the current race of giants dispersed and leaderless, no threat to anyone, let alone Mraxdavar and his children. Why, then, had the Eldest Dragon sought to enter this citadel of his ancient vanquished foes?

  “You have failed even the first test, human,” Albathor had said to him as he thrashed within the dragon’s trap. “You are lost in the ether, caught between the eternal stone and the timeless ones, and from here you shall never emerge.”

  Eternal stone…timeless ones…never emerge. Albathor had been thirsting to pay off old scores against a mortal who had humiliated him in the presence of his august father, so Malcolm felt quite sure the dragon would not have sullied the moment of revenge with lies or half-truths.

  With time to reflect, it was now painfully clear that the dragons had played him for a fool from the very first, engaging him in the lengthy discussions in the dragon warrens to wear him down and force him to use the Sustaining Spell in order to keep pace with them, an easily predictable spell given the circumstances. Then he had focused almost exclusively on Mraxdavar and ignored the fact that both of his children were worthy spell casters in their own right. Fool! He had thought himself cunning when he had insisted on Mraxdavar bringing them along, their vulnerability the key to his safety, when in reality, it was they who had slowly undermined the Sustaining Spell and magnified the natural exhaustion that always followed its use.

  It was so infuriatingly simple now that he had ample
time to reflect upon it. The dragons had put him off his guard through one of his greatest weaknesses, his thirst for knowledge about Llan Praetor, and once he had been sufficiently distracted, it had been only a minor task to drain his strength at the right time and leave him helpless. He shook his head. All the convoluted questions surrounding the dragons would fall in place in due course. He must first resolve the problem of his immediate surroundings.

  “There is no hidden door in the walls, in the ceiling, or in the floor,” Malcolm said out loud. “No physical entry of any kind.”

  Interestingly enough, whether by madness or wishful thinking or some echo of his own mind, it had begun to seem as if the pillar were making some answer to him, and he smiled slightly as it whispered back his question.

  “But if a room exists, there has to be some kind of door into it,” Malcolm reasoned with the pillar. “Entry is a vital and necessary part of the act of creation. Whether it be through stone or ether or the corridors of the mind itself, the engineer must be able to reach the area in order to make a space.”

  …but why… came the spectral voice.

  Malcolm’s eyebrows rose at the question, seeing it not as a challenge but as a shift in emphasis. Why, indeed? Why build such a room at all? He had been aware of the existence of these “dead-ends” for years and had always been careful to avoid them, knowing the threat they posed, and he had simply assumed they were originally intended as some sort of storage area, perhaps even treasuries (though now he was adding prison cell to that list of possibilities). What if there was some other choice, however, some option he had ignored after his first dismissive thought? He frowned, a finger going to the tip of his nose and tapping it lightly, an automatic gesture of concentration of which he wasn’t even aware.

  “What if it is intended as some form of study point?” the Wizard speculated. “A scholar’s cell where an individual might escape the noise and distractions of the fortress for solitude in some academic pursuit. A sculpture might be the perfect centerpiece for such a purpose.”

  …not students… came the whispered response, and, Malcolm had to nod. He had found many indications about the previous occupants of Llan Praetor, signs of their power, their skill, and their incisiveness, but he had to admit that nowhere had he found any sign of scholastic tendencies. Indeed, he had often been puzzled and even appalled by the indications he had uncovered of great power not balanced by great wisdom.

  “Perhaps they are reception areas,” Malcolm suggested. “It has been clear all along that the fortress can transport beings to far places, always offering a way out. Perhaps in some fashion, these are a way in.”

  …as you came in… said the voice.

  Malcolm nodded, intrigued, the thought explaining how he might have ended here when he threw himself blindly out of the dragons’ trap, and it gave him a completely different perspective on his surroundings. The statue suddenly assumed some practical purpose, its twisted form now functional rather than aesthetic, and he examined it as if for the first time, even though he had studied it a hundred times before. Possible. Yes, it did indeed seem possible. But even if he were right, and the statue was a device for beings entering Llan Praetor, what good could that be to him?

  …an affinity…for the fortress… the voice said unexpectedly, and Malcolm’s jaw dropped. Suddenly, it was if light had sprung up in a darkened room, bringing everything into sight. It all came together in a single mind-boggling epiphany.

  The closeness he had always felt for the citadel, the belief that there was a latent intelligence within the stone, an entity with which he might communicate if he could just find the right “language”, the right means of translation.

  His fixation that had held him here for more than twenty years, cutting himself off from his own species in his desire to draw closer to the entity that is Llan Praetor, to finally hear the voice of the living stone…the living stone that now, at last, seemed to be reaching out to him…

  And finally, the reason the Dragons had not entered the citadel without him. He had an affinity with the fortress and they knew it, an affinity that helped to shield them, an affinity that held off any retribution, an affinity that perhaps alone allowed them to enter. He remembered the questions that had been posed to him, the questions that were to reveal as much about the questioner as the answers themselves. The questions had probed Malcolm’s own relationship with the castle, and that would have told the dragons much of Llan Praetor’s current state. But it had also called Malcolm’s attention to his own history with the fortress, a review that a mortal, and one long removed from others of his kind, might easily have ignored. The last of Mraxdavar’s three questions now came unbidden into his mind: “How did you first discover travel through the halls of the castle?”

  Malcolm actually smiled at the pillar as the simple response came to him: I learned to trust the stone.

  “Then I have my answer,” he said to the voice within himself. “This is a prison of my own making. And the exit is right here within my own hands.”

  He knew immediately that this was the best answer he would produce, and he also knew himself well enough to realize he would waste days reviewing and reconsidering all the options, procrastinating under the guise of being careful and thorough, losing time he simply could not afford. Without allowing himself to think, he turned to the statue in the middle of the room and cast a simple Entry spell as if he had done it hundred times before, sending his body blindly into the stone and entrusting his life to the silent rock of Llan Praetor. An instant at later and he was gone, a prisoner no longer, leaving behind an empty room, a discarded quill, and a glowing, pulsating pillar.

  CHAPTER 14

  Nargost Castle

  Nargost Castle rose out of the Plains of Alencia like a giant among ants, a breathtaking group of towers around a massive central keep surrounded by solid walls that rose to the height of at least ten men. A double gate was the only access point, and the black iron appeared impenetrable to a blow from any conceivable battering ram. The sheer amount of stone used in the construction of the fortress was in staggering contrast to the gentle grasslands that surrounded it, an alien armored mountain in a quiet pastoral setting. We’ve come to break people free from that? wondered Shannon, the first real chill of doubt touching her heart.

  After two days’ hard travel across the empty grasslands, they had come upon a dry river bed with steep sides, clearly carved by flash floods from the fierce storms that sometimes struck the plains. Zarif had left the 400 men of his company behind, and with only a handful of troopers and Shannon, Jhan, and Adella, he had started up the river bed at a slow trot. Shannon had looked nervously up at the edges of the riverbed, trying not to think what would happen if even a dozen of the Northings would attack from ambush, but she quickly realized their strongest defense was their speed and sheer audacity. Even if a scout were to spot them, they would be passed any potential ambush sight before the alarm could be given.

  After nearly an hour’s travel, Zarif had brought them to a halt, dismounted, and carefully climbed the bank to peer over the edge of the gully.

  There now, less than a mile off, was the daunting fortress of black and grey stone. Looking more closely now, Shannon saw that while the gates were intact and tightly closed and the walls manned by watchful sentinels, one of the corners of the castle had been battered into rubble. Efforts had clearly been made to close the breach with broken stone, but even her inexperienced eyes lit at the inviting tumble of rock. At the top of the breach, of course, at least a dozen guards already stood in position to challenge any who might try to exploit the weakness, but it was by far the most promising route offered.

  “A grim sight,” Adella said, and Shannon’s eyebrows rose slightly at the odd touch of sympathy in her voice. Compassion was not normally one of the woman’s strengths.

  Zarif merely shrugged. “No more than any other unburied corpse in the grass, Matron. This one is made of stone and just takes longer to rot.”


  Adella paused, and then said softly, “We do not need to take this fortress, Warrior, in order to free the hostages. We need no more than a distraction.”

  Zarif studied her before asking, “How long?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “To get in, rescue the prisoners, and get out again?” the man asked skeptically. “I think you trust too much in your god, Matron.”

  “Getting in unseen will be the hard part. As for the escape, there is a tunnel that leads from the dungeon out to the Gatestones.”

  “You speak of the Lord’s Way?” Zarif asked in amazement. “That secret was held only by the Lord’s family and his closest advisers. You know its exact location?”

  “Close enough. We can only hope the Northings have not yet discovered it.”

  “The Gatestones are out of arrow range of the walls,” Zarif answered. “But not entirely out of sight. I think we must keep the garrison entertained for more than twenty minutes.”

  “It would be a help,” Adella acknowledged. “For after that, the real race will begin.”

  The man nodded slowly, then with a single gesture, he called his men away from the sight of the castle and gathered them in the ravine.

  “So, what think you, Exelar?” Zarif asked of the tall Captain dressed in green rags that had once been the uniform of Kargos.

  “A wasted visit,” Exelar answered with a shrug. “I had hoped the black titan did far greater damage when it broke the castle, but it breached only a corner of the outer wall, and even that has been largely rebuilt. The best cavalry can still do nothing against a well-defended fortress.”

  “Our goal is not to re-take the fortress but merely to make enough of a diversion to allow a party to rescue the prisoners,” Zarif reminded him.

  “But we must make more of a threat than simply riding around the walls,” countered Exelar.

  “The breach is still the weakest point,” said Zarif. “Even without ropes and grapples, we could gain the battlements by climbing the tumble of rocks.”