by C H Duryea
“Is there any alternate route?” Zeke asked.
“The only other way is a fissure two clicks back, and that access is under the water table.”
“Then this is the way we shall proceed,” Feldspar declared. “Men, clear these rocks and heed Lord Rattus. Use no theurgy.”
The prince’s men went to work on the rock pile, and the others joined in. The whole party dug in determined silence. Zeke fell into a comfortable rhythm of grabbing a rock with his left hand and easily tossing it with his right, and Qaant Yke made quick progress, raking huge chunks of broken rock aside with his powerful chelipedic claws.
They soon cleared the rocks to reveal a small opening on the other side—not much more than an uneven crack in the rock, the path descending sharply on the other side. A faint glow issued from a few yards down that gave Harbinger’s silhouette a subtle green corona as he gazed into the opening. Zeke and Vibeke crept up behind him and peered over his shoulder. The glow came from an odd, blurry barrier separating the fractured passage from a larger chamber just beyond. As Zeke stared, the blur resolved itself into what looked like tiny, glowing marks, like pixels on a screen, floating in the air. Harbinger pushed his way into the passage, and Zeke and Vibeke crept along wordlessly behind him, moving carefully to maintain their footing on the steep rocky floor. As they came closer, Zeke realized that, like the markings in the painting back at the temple, these floating, glowing marks consisted of ones and zeros. Binary code.
“The warding, I presume,” Zeke said.
The passage widened somewhat where it met the warding. Apparently, the same seismic activity that had caused the rockfall behind them had deposited an additional pile of fragmentary rock at their feet, forming a threshold that was held up by the energy field.
"It keeps the Dodecahedron contained,” Harbinger explained, “but it also acts like a force field. I have to deactivate it before we can pass.”
“Seems kind of small,” Vibeke observed.
“It forms a sphere that encompasses the entire area,” Harbinger said. “Through openings as well as solid rock.”
“Everything okay down there?” Augie called.
“Five by five,” Harbinger responded. “But stay up there till I get this open.” He turned to Zeke and Vibeke. “You guys step back a bit.” Zeke and Vibeke shuffled up the slope, their boots scraping uncertainly against the rock.
Harbinger turned and focused on the energy screen. He raised a tentative hand and touched a finger to it, and the code symbols dancing within the glow seemed to respond to his touch. They closed in on the point of Harbinger’s finger and followed it around as if magnetized.
“I got this,” he said, his voice quiet but intense. He began to move his finger quickly across the surface of the warding. Zeke saw ones turn to zeros, under Harbinger’s touch, and zeros to ones. “The warding has two layers. The outer to keep anything—or anyone—from getting in. The inner layer then does the work of containing the Dodec’. It’s what steps up its power and transforms it into Inverketh’s mag—”
A sudden tremor rocked the passage and Harbinger flinched backward.
“What the!” Zeke exclaimed.
Then the rocks resting against the energy barrier suddenly fell through it into the darkness beyond. Harbinger tumbled back, holding his hand in pain, and the passage kept shaking.
Vibeke lost her footing and began to slide. Zeke reached out to stabilize her—and then his feet slipped out from under him.
As the rocks fell past Harbinger and through the barrier, Zeke and Vibeke followed. Harbinger stretched out a hand, but it was too late.
As they passed the barrier, Zeke felt a violent jolt of pain at the base of his skull, radiating like fire down both of his arms. Vibeke screamed.
In a tangle of limbs, they fell and bounced hard off a ledge, then flipped out over a wide, deep crevasse. There was a wide open cavern on the other side of the chasm, but their momentum would not carry them across. They were going to drop into the depths.
But then a flash of bluish-white dazzled Zeke for a split second, and the two of them fell hard on the safe, cold stone beyond the drop-off. The pain in Zeke’s skull still rang, and the impact of falling exacerbated the painful tingling in his arms and hands.
“What the? …” he repeated.
“Are you okay?” Harbinger yelled as he quickly manipulated a last series of symbols in the warding. The energy field faded to a faint shimmer, and he dropped through onto the ledge. “I saw you guys drop into the abyss. I thought you were goners!”
“What happened?” Vibeke gasped.
“I dunno. One minute you were falling, the next—” he gestured at where they still lay sprawled on the rock as if that were explanation enough.
Augie and Narissa came through the opening, and Feldspar and his men followed warily. Harbinger took the ledge to the left, where the chasm disappeared into the cavern wall. There, a set of carved steps led to the rough stone floor of the cavern. He came across and the rest followed.
The cavern was large, with evidence of both chemical and fluid erosion as well as seismic factors involved in its making. Dramatic displays of stalactites descended from overhead. The peripheral chasm curved away and into the darkness opposite the steps, and from somewhere close by, Zeke heard the sound of running water. He got his feet under him and help Vibeke back up.
“Where’s Qaant Yke?” she asked.
Augie thrust his thumb over his shoulder. “Seems like he must have finally found a crevice he couldn’t fit through.”
Feldspar approached, his guards and undermages just behind.
“Lord Rattus,” the prince said, pointing up to an elevation across from the chasm. “Is this your objective?”
Everyone turned.
The elevation was ringed with stalagmites, and from beyond the ossified columns, a baleful green glow radiated.
Narissa glanced sideways at Harbinger. “Green?”
“Couldn’t resist,” Harbinger replied. “Yes, Your Highness. That’s what we’ve come for.”
Harbinger broke from the group and ran towards the glow.
“Cool it, Chuck!” Zeke yelled. “We don’t know if it’s safe.”
Harbinger stopped and turned.
“Zeke,” he said, with mock condescension. “I know exactly what this is. And I have to get it offline fast—not just so we can get out of here, but before it has a chance to do any damage to us. Don’t forget just what this construct can do.” He turned and continued up the slope.
“This I gotta see,” Vibeke said and took off after him. Zeke followed, then the others. Looking back, Zeke saw Feldspar and his men following more carefully, slowly fanning out. Harbinger reached the edge of the ring of speleothems, leapt past them, and disappeared out of sight. Vibeke had reached the stalagmites when Zeke caught up and stopped next to her.
Beyond the edge of the elevation, the surface depressed slightly, and in the center of the area sat a large stone slab. Harbinger stood still before the slab, fixated on the object resting there.
The Dodecahedron of Doom.
“Sure is green,” Vibeke remarked. “Ugh. It hurts my eyes.”
“Don’t look directly at it,” Harbinger warned.
The Dodecahedron was no larger than a basketball, and it was certainly green. But not the calm and pleasant green of nature and bounty—rather the unsettling green of mold, sickness and greed. Zeke’s stomach did several backflips.
“Ecchh,” Narissa spat. “Hurry up, Chuck! Put that damn thing out!”
Harbinger took a deep breath and pulled up his sleeves.
“All right,” he called out. “Let’s invoke the rule of ignorance!”
He strode purposefully into the green brilliance, reaching for the Dodecahedron. He approached the slab. He stepped up. He thrust his hands forward and seized the globe.
And—nothing.
Harbinger stood paralyzed, his hands frozen on the Dodecahedron.
“Shouldn’t it be, like,” Vibeke
wondered, “getting dimmer or something?”
If anything it was getting brighter.
“The rule of ignorance!” Feldspar called. Zeke and the others turned. The prince and his men encircled the group, standing several paces abreast and advancing slowly. “I must admit, I almost laughed out loud when you uttered those words earlier. For it is you, Charles Harbinger, who is truly the ignorant one.”
A chill ran down Zeke’s spine. He couldn’t tell if it was because Feldspar had just called Harbinger by his real name, because of the weird, sizzling blue glow that suddenly appeared in midair behind him, or because Feldspar and his men had just drawn their swords.
“And I apologize,” Feldspar went on, “but I must now ask all of you to drop any weapons you may have in your possession. Otherworldly or otherwise.”
Twenty-Three
Harbinger leapt back out of the stalagmite enclosure and half-ran, half-skidded down the slope.
“We gotta scram!” he declared. “it’s only a matter of time before—”
His warning died in his throat when he saw Feldspar and his men closing the circle around Zeke and the others—and the strange blossom of blue light sizzling in the air behind the prince.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Seems we’re to drop our weapons,” Zeke explained.
Harbinger’s eyebrows raised in sudden comprehension.
“Feldspar,” he said. “So it’s you. There always has to be a betrayer among the NPCs. But I figured it was your friend Scar. I took you for the paladin.”
“Then, Dr. Harbinger,” the prince said, “you are an idiot.”
“You know my name.” He turned to Zeke. “He knows my name. That could mean a game-level meta-cognizance. That would be bad.”
“Care to explain what’s going on, Your Highness?” Zeke asked.
“Yeah, what’s the big idea?” Vibeke added.
“The big idea, dear lady, is that in a few moments each of you will be lying in pieces at the bottom of that chasm, and my colleagues and I will extract the Dodecahedron and take it with us.”
“Hold the phone,” Vibeke protested. “If you were just going to kill us why didn’t you just come down here yourselves and leave us out of it?”
“You used me,” Harbinger growled. He pounded a fist to his head. “You couldn’t read my code. You needed me to find it for you.”
“I don’t get it,” Zeke said. “Are you and Mica in this together?”
“My poor dear aunty,” Feldspar said derisively, “is so clouded by her grief and lust for revenge that she doesn’t even know who her real enemies are.”
“And what’s in this for you?”
“For me? A second-rate character on a second-rate world? Ask your companion. My benefactors have promised me freedom and power—in better worlds than Inverketh.”
“Definitely a meta-cognizant agent,” Harbinger said. “Definitely meta-bad. Zeke, we can’t let him do this.”
“Well, since he’s planning to kill us,” Zeke said, “I’m inclined to agree with you there.”
“It’s more than that. If he takes the Dodec out of here it will lay waste to Inverketh—and who knows how many other worlds if he means what he’s saying. And I led him right to it.”
“And for your assistance, we are much appreciative. However—” The prince cast a glance at the sizzling blue mass. “Time is of the essence, so we must proceed to the ‘casting you into the abyss’ stage of our agenda.”
No, Zeke thought. Harbinger hadn’t led Feldspar here. He had. Qaant Yke was right. Zeke’s continued existence was blowing Fate’s whole day. And too many were going to suffer for it.
He didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did it. He stepped forward and brought up his fists. His vambraces surged with energy—even if he didn’t know what that meant.
“Can’t let you do it, Feldspar,” he said, assuming his best approximation of a fighting stance.
Vibeke stepped to his side and drew her sword.
“Ditto.”
Augie broke off a lengthy hunk of stalagmite and swung it lazily before him, feeling its weight. “My sentiments exactly,” he added.
Harbinger drew his own blade. “Through me, ass-hat!”
Narissa said nothing, but she held her fighting stance and Zeke could see her eyes taking in the position of every opponent and the layout of the cave, calculating the physics of her own mass times velocity squared.
Feldspar glared at the group, as if weighing the exact degree of inconvenience each was going to cost him. He glanced at the sizzling blue splotch in the air and the undermage working hard on some kind of spell over a pair of small boulders near the vortex. His gaze shot back to the green light radiating from behind the stalagmites, and then came back to Zeke.
Feldspar sighed. He gestured at his guards. “Dispatch them,” he ordered.
The prince’s men advanced. Feldspar signaled to a mage and, with a grin, sent him against Zeke. Then he turned his back to check on whatever the undermage was doing at the boulders.
Augie surged into the attackers, swinging the stalagmite in wide, formidable arcs. Chuck went after two swordsmen and blocked their blows, holding both at bay. Narissa threw a staccato chorus of punches and laser-precise kicks that were almost too fast for Zeke to see. Vibeke must have gotten more out of a single sparring lesson than Zeke thought possible. He couldn’t get a clear view, but she seemed to flash to either side of her opponent, practically engaging him from two directions at once.
Zeke shuffled back and forth, unsure of what to do as the mage closed in, summoning a swirl of energy in the air. He tried to remember what he had done in his fight with the gnoll--but it had been dumb luck that had kept him alive. And luck didn’t jibe at all with physics.
The mage swept his arm forward and the glowing swirl slammed into Zeke, sending him skidding back. The mage laughed. He recalled the swirl with a backward sweep and it shifted into a long, snaking rope of energy.
“The Defender of Inverketh,” the mage sneered. “You can barely defend yourself!”
The glowing rope lashed forward, wrapping around Zeke, lifting him off the ground. The only move he could make was kicking wildly at nothing.
Vibeke sidestepped her opponent and clocked him on the helmet with the pommel of her blade.
“You let him go!” she shouted, coming after the mage. The rope uncoiled around Zeke as the mage turned and sent it against Vibeke. Zeke fell to the ground, and by the time Zeke could focus, Vibeke had managed to knock the mage unconscious and had turned back to deal with the soldier she had just dropped as he got back up.
The mage, coming around, reignited his spell and hurled the rope back at Zeke. This time, he reached out and caught it, and it coiled, quickly constricting around his left vambrace.
Defend with your left, Chuck had said. His left vambrace had absorbed the kinetic energy of the gnoll’s blows.
Zeke pulled the glowing rope taut—and he felt a surge of power rush from the vambrace and up his arm. The rope’s glow paled, and he pulled on it, sending the surprised mage stumbling towards him.
—And attack with your right.
He balled his fist and slammed his knuckles into the mage’s puzzled mug. The surge he felt coming into his left shot out of his right as his knuckles connected. A ball of force, like a wave of kinetic energy, radiated out from the point of contact—throwing the mage backward. But the reaction threw Zeke back as well, and he slammed into the rise just outside the Dodecahedron’s speleothem cage. He blinked and stared at his unfurling fist.
“What was that?” Chuck called. Shreds of the energy ball still circulated around him as he met one cross-cut after another. He jumped clear of his opponent and grabbed one of the remnants. “It’s like the warding!”
He made a couple of quick gestures with his fingers, similar to those he had made outside the chamber when he had opened the barrier spell. His opponent rushed him, his blade raised, but then the rippling gl
ow jumped from Chuck’s hand to his attacker’s sword. The blade shuddered as the energy struck—and then dissolved. The soldier swung a useless pommel that met nothing. Then Augie stepped in and batted him aside.
“Nice trick,” Augie said.
“Thanks,” Zeke and Chuck said in unison.
One more of the prince’s men remained, and he was going after Narissa. He didn’t seem fazed at the sight of the circle of prone stiffs around her. She whirled to face him, fists and legs primed and ready. He held his blade at his side and advanced slowly.
Then Vibeke appeared in front of him. Zeke thought he was hallucinating. One second she was several paces away, the next she stood in front of the startled soldier.
“Surprise, creep!”
She grabbed him and they both winked out for a split second then reappeared a few meters away, Vibeke spinning him and flinging him at Narissa, who delivered the coup-de-gras. She kicked him in the midsection hard enough for him to slam against the cave wall and slump limply to the ground, under the rockfall triggered by his impact.
Zeke stood momentarily stunned by what Vibeke had just done. They all stopped, catching their collective breath, Feldspar’s men sprawled in piles around them.
“Nicely done!” The prince clapped slowly, and they all turned to him. Next to him, the undermage summoned strong tendrils of force, radiating out from the sizzling blue energy blossom and wavering along the ground around the boulders. “I didn’t think you off-world weaklings had it in you.”
“Stop that mage,” Narissa said urgently. Her gaze took in everything around the rippling blue glow, and she didn’t like what she saw. “That’s a portal, Zeke. If those anchor lines manage to secure on those rocks—”
Zeke flung his right arm straight and with a twist of his wrist, the haptic blaster slithered its way down his arm and into his palm. He leveled it at the prince.
“You amuse me,” Feldspar said. “The Dodecahedron remains active. Your little trinket will not work here.”
“Tell that to the gnoll,” Zeke said, and he pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Zeke stared at the weapon, puzzled. Why didn’t—