by Duncan Pile
“Is it safe?” Taurnil asked.
“I’ve done it before, but never on this scale. I don’t think it’ll be a problem though.”
“What else are we gonna do? Climb back down?” Baard said. “Let’s get on with it.”
“Baard’s right. Do what you have to do Gaspi,” Sabu said.
“Okay, everyone gather round and make sure you’ve got your packs.” They did as he said, clustering in a tight circle. He drew on his power slowly and evenly, trying to avoid a surge that would alert the shamans. Ultimately, there was no avoiding a fight, but he’d prefer to put it off as long as possible. He formed a platform of air under their feet.
“Everyone ready?” he asked. “Okay, grab onto each other and try not to move.” He drew the platform into the air and began to lift them up the stairwell. Emmy gave a little squeal and grabbed onto Taurnil when she saw the shelf falling away beneath her feet. “You might want to close your eyes,” Gaspi said. Emmy hated heights as much as he did! All of a sudden, he realised the flaw in his plan – he’d overlooked the dangers of his vertiginous reaction. As the platform lifted higher and higher, he started to feel dizzy. He tried not to look down but it was difficult not to. The shelf disappeared into blackness, and he was keenly aware of the long, long drop down the stairwell.
Sweat broke out on his brow as they continued to rise. A pressure started to build on his temples and he felt sick to his stomach. He knew he was in deep trouble when a cold prickling broke out over his scalp. He was going to faint! Panicking, he tried to slow his breathing. If he fainted, the platform would disappear and they’d all plummet to their deaths! His breathing steadied for a moment but then he glanced down again and his heart rate shot back up. There was only one thing to do! Pouring his energy into the spell, he sent them speeding upwards. Ignoring the frightened yelps of his companions, he made them go even faster, rising through hundreds of yards in just a few seconds. Black spots swamped his vision just as they reached the shelf. He drew them up beyond it and, with the last of his concentration, slid the magical field over solid rock. The summoned platform collapsed, sending his companions tumbling to the floor as he fell to his knees. His globe light flickered out too, plunging them into blackness, but Emmy quickly had another one in the air.
He flopped to his back, cold sweat prickling all over, but he didn’t black out. Summoning a little strength, he lifted his neck just long enough to make sure no-one was missing and let his head drop to the ground in relief. Everyone had made it!
“What was that all about?” Taurnil asked, shocked and angry.
“Gaspi are you okay?” Emmy asked, dropping to her knees at his side.
“I nearly fainted!” he said, his breathing still ragged.
“You mean you might have dropped us?” Taurnil said, his eyes wide.
“Yeah,” Gaspi said, and then broke into a ragged laugh. “I nearly did!”
“It’s not funny!” Taurnil said.
“Give him a break!” Emmy said.
“I’m sorry,” Gaspi said between bursts of wild laughter. “I know it’s not funny. I just can’t stop laughing.”
Taurnil opened his mouth to say something more, but Sabu put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “We’re alive. Let’s just drop it.” Gaspi was grateful when Taurnil didn’t respond. He tried, with some success, to stop laughing, but he was still chortling when Sabu spoke again: “Look, up there!” The blademaster sounded excited. Gaspi sat up to see what he was talking about and finally stopped laughing. It was another stairway, leading up towards the temple. Gaspi almost groaned when he realised they had even more steps to climb, but then Emmy sent her globe light floating up the shaft, revealing the true source of Sabu’s excitement. A hundred yards above them was the rocky roof of the stairwell. They had reached the top.
“Wait there,” Sabu said, and took off lightly up the stairs. Emmy left her globe light lingering up there to give him light. He disappeared over the top of the stairs and moments later was back, heading back down towards them. Emmy drew the light back with him. “We made it,” he said with a rare grin.
“You found the cellar?” Gaspi asked.
“A trapdoor, but I’m pretty sure we know where that leads.”
“Crap! I just released a serious amount of spell-power, and we’re right below them!”
“So let’s get up there,” Baard said. “Time ter break some ogre heads.”
“There will be hundreds if not thousands of them!” Sabu said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “If they sensed Gaspi’s spell we might have to make a stand right here, right now, but if they don’t, we need to plan this a bit more carefully.”
Stirred to action by Sabu’s words, everyone got to their feet, nervously anticipating a flood of enemies attacking from above. Gaspi’s guts twisted and churned as he waited on tenterhooks. They were far from defenceless, but this had always been a quest that could only be accomplished by stealth. If the whole Ogre Nation fell upon them at once, they couldn’t hope to succeed. More to the point, they couldn’t hope to survive.
Minutes passed in strained silence, each of them listening for the slightest sound from above but, as time stretched out, the tension began to fade. Amazingly, it looked like they’d escaped their enemies’ notice.
“Maybe they don’t know about the cellar,” Gaspi said at last. The rasp of steel on leather sounded around him as weapons were sheathed. No-one was going to relax, but they didn’t need to stay battle-ready either. “Don’t worry Baard,” Gaspi said with a smile. “We may have to fight our way through them yet!”
Baard grinned sheepishly. “Sorry Gasp! I wasn’t thinkin’.”
“So what do we do then?” Taurnil asked. “We have to go up there some time.”
“Sabu?” Gaspi asked. He didn’t have a clue how to plan an assault.
“We should wait till after midnight,” Sabu responded. “Ogres have to sleep too, so that’ll be our best chance of sneaking through unnoticed.”
Baard groaned, eager for some kind of action, but Sabu’s suggestion made sense. “Okay, that works. I guess we’re waiting around here for the rest of the day then.” After all they’d been through, they couldn’t take the chance of ruining everything because of a little impatience at the crucial time. Gaspi understood how Baard felt, of course. He was a man of action but, for Gaspi, this was the last moment of peace and relative safety they were going to get until they had either completed the quest, or were dead.
Taurnil stepped over to Gaspi and sat down beside him. “Sorry Gasp. I was shaken up, that’s all.”
Gaspi grinned. “Don’t worry, I almost killed you.”
Baard laughed loudly but Sabu shushed him, pointing up at the entrance to the cellar. “Let’s keep it quiet,” the blademaster said.
Baard grimaced. “Sorry,” he whispered, and sat down next to Taurnil, tapping his foot impatiently. The rest of them joined him, settling in for the long wait.
…
The day passed slowly after that, waiting interminably for the last stage of the quest to begin. For the first hour or two, they kept battle-ready eyes on the stairway, in case the shamans had found the cellar and were coming to get them. After a while, they assumed the immediate threat had passed, but the knowledge that they were soon to go into great danger kept their bodies tense, which was wearing on both their endurance and spirits.
As morning turned to afternoon, they planned every possible detail of the assault in hushed voices. Sabu and Gaspi pored over Voltan’s map, trying to make sense of the tight mesh of lines depicting the various levels and rooms of the temple. There wasn’t anywhere marked ‘altar’, but the largest room on the western side of the complex was scribed with the word ‘sanctum’, which had to be the right place. They marked out a path from the cellar to the sanctum and committed it to memory as best they could, but the map was confusing in places, and their route was far from failsafe. If all else failed, they’d just have to head west and up, and hope for the best.
Once they’d worked out their route, Gaspi turned his thoughts to protecting the vulnerable members of the group after they’d gone through the trapdoor. He glanced at Emmy, who looked grimly determined, but the pallor of her complexion gave away how scared she was. If Voltan had returned, she could have transported back to Helioport before it got too dangerous, along with anyone else who wanted to go, but that was no longer an option. She wouldn’t have gone for it anyway, and besides, he’d learned the hard way that they were meant to stay together – not just him and Emmy, but Lydia and Rimulth too. No, the only option they had was go into danger together and transport out once they had the fragments. Having said that, there was one thing that would help keep her safe.
“Emmy, it might be better if you were invisible,” he said, trying to sound reasonable. Emmy wore a bangle that granted invisibility to the wearer when magic was channelled into it. He interpreted her expression as an objection and rushed on: “You’re not a battle mage and you don’t have any combat skills. If you fight, you’ll only put yourself in danger, and we’ll be distracted trying to defend you.”
“Alright, alright!” Emma said indignantly. “If you let me talk, I was about to say that I agree with you. I’m not stupid you know!”
“Sorry,” Gaspi muttered, but mostly he just felt relieved.
Emmy made a small, irritated noise but didn’t say anything else.
Taurnil cleared his throat. “Lydia, maybe you should be invisible too,” he said tentatively.
“Not a chance,” Lydia said, folding her arms sternly. “I’m not hiding away when there’s fighting to be done.” The fire spirit raised itself to its back feet and flung its wings out impressively, and Lydia lifted her hands, fireballs swirling above her palms.
“Can’t argue with that!” Baard said. Gaspi silently agreed. Now that she’d bonded with the fire spirit, she was one of the most potent spell-casters among them. He couldn’t blame Taurnil for trying though! Gaspi glanced around at the rest of the group, wondering if anyone else would be better off invisible, but was forced to dismiss the idea. They were all formidable! Like Lydia and the fire spirit, Rimulth and the air spirit were a force to be reckoned with, and all the rest were seasoned warriors. Even Heath, a man of peace, was extremely dangerous when it came to a fight.
Now that Emmy was taken care of, his next concern was for Loreill and Lilly, who didn’t have combative powers. They were extremely vulnerable in corporeal form, but neither of them could take their natural, spiritual bodies in this environment for longer than a few moments, and even that would cause them intense pain. There was no way they could endure that while they searched for the altar! All of a sudden, he had a brainwave.
Reaching for his pocket, he withdrew the teardrop necklace, which also granted invisibility to the wearer. It had never occurred to him that the enchantment might work for elementals as well as humans, but why wouldn’t it? They couldn’t channel the right kind of power into it, but he could. If this worked, it would mean that all the vulnerable members of their party would be invisible!
“Loreill,” he said. The elemental, who was curled up in his lap, looked at him quizzically. “Just let me slip this on,” he said, extending the necklace and passing it over the spirit’s furry head. The chain was far too long, but it would stay on. Gaspi dribbled power into it – about as much as it took to summon a globe light – and, to his great relief, Loreill disappeared from sight.
“Fantastic!” Emmy said, her irritation forgotten. Gaspi stopped channelling and Loreill popped back into sight. “And we’ve got the other one for Lilly.”
“There you go,” Lydia said, taking the enchanted clip out of her hair and passing it over to Emmy.
“Actually, I think we should swap,” Emmy said to Gaspi. “Lilly’s fur is shorter than Loreill’s, and the clip might fall off.”
“Good point,” Gaspi said, lifting the necklace from around Loreill’s neck and exchanging it with the hair clip. He fixed the clip to the thicker ruff of fur around Loreill’s neck, giving it a tug to make sure it was firmly attached. He tried channelling a trickle of power into the clip, and once again, the elemental disappeared from view. “Well that solves our biggest problem,” he said.
“Who’s gonna lead?” Taurnil asked.
Gaspi looked around. “What do you reckon Baard? The ogres are afraid of Bonebreaker. Maybe you should go out front.”
“Works fer me!” the giant said.
“I’ll join Baard,” Sabu said. That made sense too. Sabu was their deadliest fighter, and the battle was likely to be thickest at the front.
“I’ll take the rear,” Heath said.
“And I,” Talmo volunteered.
“Okay, that leaves me, Taurn, Lydia and Rimulth,” Gaspi said. “If we take the middle and spread out a bit, Emmy and the elementals can stay between us.”
“Works for me,” Taurnil said. Lydia and Rimulth agreed as well.
“Looks like we have a plan,” Gaspi said.
Forty-one
“Yes I remember this Tarek you speak of,” the fortune-teller said. She was curtained off with Belash in the rear section of her tent. The crime-lord frightened her. When the gift was upon her, she saw all kinds of ugly images surrounding him – images of cruelty and murder that sprang from a heart made of stone. His was the hand that fed her, but she wanted him out of her tent as soon as possible. Belash was asking her about a specific occasion when someone had used her tent as an exit from headquarters. Hers was not one of the principle entrances or exits, and was only used on occasion, but even if people came and went with much greater frequency, she would have no trouble remembering Tarek.
“You seem very certain.”
“How can I forget a man with two faces?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He had two faces, one beneath the other. I have never seen the like.”
Belash stared at her, his expression cold as ice. “What do you think this means?”
“I see many strange things – it is the lot of the fortune teller. My job is to say what I see, but that doesn’t mean I always understand. In this case, I couldn’t begin to guess what it means.”
Belash stared at her for long moments, his expression unchanging. “You wouldn’t be deliberately unhelpful now would you?” he said at last.
“I assure you I know nothing more,” Silandra said, cold sweat breaking out on her palms.
“You should have come to me with this,” the crime-lord said.
“I didn’t know what it meant,” she implored. “Please believe me.”
Belash regarded her stonily for another long moment. “I must look into this further. Don’t go anywhere Silandra. I may want to talk to you again.”
“Of course,” she said. Belash climbed down through the hatch and she lowered it after him, thinking all the while of the quickest way to get out of the city.
…
“So what do you think Kenril?” Belash asked his pet magician.
“It could mean many things, it could mean nothing,” the magician answered. “Silandra is hardly reliable.”
“I know that, but what’s the very worst it could mean?”
“A disguise of sorts, possibly magical,” Kenril responded after a pause.
“If it’s a magical disguise, why haven’t you detected it?” Belash asked dangerously.
Kenril flushed. “There are ways of hiding your spell-work.”
“Could you create such a disguise and hide your tracks?” Belash asked.
Kenril cleared his throat nervously and squared his shoulders. “Not with such seamless precision,” he admitted. “Which is why I don’t believe it is a disguise.”
“But if it is, that means Tarek is not only an enemy, but has infiltrated the innermost circle of this organisation with the aid of a powerful magician. So tell me this, Kenril – how do we prove if it is a disguise or not? Because I’m not the kind of man to leave something like this to chance.”
“Why not just kill him?”
“I’m starting to think I need to acquire the services of a new magician,” Belash said flatly. “If Tarek has help, I want to know who from and why!”
“Of course, sorry!” Kenril blustered, but then he brightened. “You can use a magic nullifying device! If Tarek is wearing a disguise, it will fail the moment he steps within its range.”
“Do you have such a device?”
“No, but I can get one. I’ll use my contact at the college.”
“Then do it quickly, and don’t get caught. Forget everything else you’re doing and get on it! Report back to me morning, noon and night.”
“Absolutely,” Kenril responded.
“What are you still doing here? Get out!” Belash snapped. Kenril leapt to his feet and fled from the room like a scalded cat.
…
“I’ve found her!” Jonn said.
Hephistole smiled from ear to ear, delighted by the news. Jonn had been returned to the Wrench’s service the previous day and, as luck would have it, had found the perfect opportunity to get away; the Wrench had sent him on a delivery, right into the heart of the city, so he’d completed the job in the quickest possible time and run up to the college, where he’d sent for Hephistole. The chancellor had met him at the gate and taken him into the office to talk.
“How is she?” Hephistole asked, urging Jonn to take a seat and then taking one of his own.
“Alive,” Jonn responded grimly. “Belash keeps a harem of women in an exclusive part of headquarters. I had to guard them for the last few days, and there she was.”
“Does she know it was you?”
“Yes. I got a moment with her, and she knows rescue is imminent.”
“Good,” Hephistole said, scratching his chin thoughtfully. “Will we have to fight our way into the complex to get to her?”
“No. That’s the beauty of it. Belash has built himself a little pleasure palace on the roof. During the day, she’s up there most of the time. If I can lead her up there, can you get us out?”