“Back!” Frond shouted at the kids, almost as forcefully as the horn. But they were already pressed as far against the wall as they could go.
Zed realized the figures appearing around them were the members of the Sea of Stars. The truth slowly dawned on him then. The guild members had been there the whole time, watching them from the wall, and even outside the wards, hidden high within the trees.
The monster snapped its head back around. Its serene white face took in the arriving figures. Then its mouth yawned open again—and it screamed.
The noise was two sounds at once. First, a bloodcurdling human shriek cut through the forest. It was a scream that could only mean one thing: murder. Below it, rising from deeper within the monster, another sound joined the first in a dismal harmony. A loud, wet hiss rose up from the creature’s throat—the warning of a cat backed into a corner.
The creature’s head reared back, and it struck.
There was a flash of bright light, and the minty scent of magic, overwhelming Zed’s senses.
The air was suddenly filled with small glittering particles. With writing, Zed realized. Symbols carved themselves onto an invisible plane, written in light instead of ink. They were everywhere, and with them came a susurrus of strange whispers. A hundred different voices buzzed like insects, speaking words Zed couldn’t understand.
The symbols were brightest where the monster’s face made contact with the wards. The writing there acted like a second wall, holding the creature at bay.
A chill swept through Zed’s whole body. He was actually witnessing the magic of the wards firsthand. They were beautiful. This was the power of the Mages Guild. The power that protected Freestone. A power he’d almost been a part of.
The naga reared back and let out another terrifying double scream.
It can’t get us here, Zed thought gratefully. We’re safe.
The monster turned its head, contemplating the glimmering barrier. Then the dark sockets of its eyes began to burn with an eerie light of their own.
“The naga’s using magic!” Frond called up. “Hexam, we could use you about now.”
From the top of the wall, voices began blustering orders. Zed looked up to see a pair of hands extend over the lip of the stone and begin to glow. Ribbons of light unfurled out from them, snaking toward the naga.
When they reached the creature, however, the ribbons began to fray. In the Danger’s presence the tendrils burned away like paper set aflame, right back up to the hands that had cast them. Zed could hear screams of alarm from atop the wall.
“It’s dispelling the magic!” the archivist’s voice yelled down. “It’s eating through my mana!”
“Fie,” Frond cursed under her breath. She turned her gaze sharply to the naga. “All right, folks, let’s get it—”
Another nightmarish scream. The monster threw itself at the barrier. There was a sick moment of resistance as the wards bent inward. Then the lustrous symbols began to burn away, just as the tendrils had. A dark hole formed in the wards, first the size of an apple, then a pumpkin, and then a cart’s wheel.
Zed waited for the hole to close. The spell would right itself soon. The wards were the constant work of the Silverglows and had protected the city for over two hundred years. Their magic was like a living thing; it was the flesh that coated the city’s tough stone skeleton.
The hole grew wider.
Zed licked his lips. His eyes darted nervously to Frond. The guildmistress’s mouth hung open, and she stared at the growing breach with unmistakable alarm.
It was only then that he realized something had gone very wrong.
“Attack!” Frond screamed, even as she was flicking her pointed stars at the naga in a flurry of impossibly quick movements. They climbed up the creature’s neck like footprints, the last striking it in the cheek.
Arrows rained down from the forest trees like shooting stars, most glancing off the creature’s scales.
The naga shrieked and reared back. The archers were high above them in the trees, so its fiery eyes searched for a target it could strike through the rapidly growing hole in the wards.
Zed watched as it found Brock, who was standing and gaping at it in horror.
“Brock!” Zed yelled, lurching forward.
But the monster was faster. Worlds faster. Its face split open and fangs appeared from within the mask. There was a blur of action too quick to see, and then the naga was back, as if it had never moved.
But its fangs were bloody.
Zed gasped. Brock was on the ground, pushing himself back up. His eyes were wide and he was saying something. Saying it over and over.
“No, no, no, no…”
Jett stood over him—right where Brock had been just a moment earlier—his body totally rigid. The dwarf had saved Brock from the naga’s strike by shoving him aside.
But then Jett looked down at his own leg, where two large punctures began to bleed. For a moment he appeared calm, almost thoughtful, watching contemplatively as a bloodstain blossomed on his pant leg. Then he teetered and fell to the side.
“Kill it!” Frond screamed. Having exhausted her stars, she pulled her gleaming curved blade from her back and threw herself forward, past the wards and into the path of the monster. Zed and Liza rushed over to Jett, whose gaze was clouding in shock.
“Help us!” Liza yelled, waving to the open guildhall door. Lotte had emerged from the door. She took one look at Jett and her eyes widened with distress.
The quartermaster rushed forward, ripping the sleeve off her own tunic shirt as she went.
“Raise him, now! Keep the bite below his heart!” Lotte shouted. “We have to get him to a healer immediately.”
Zed nodded dumbly. He grabbed Jett under one arm while Liza held the other. Together they hefted the dwarf up as Lotte tied the cloth into a knot just above the wounds. The three dragged him toward the doorway.
“I think…” Jett mumbled. “I think it bit me.”
As they carried the dwarf beyond the threshold of the door, Zed turned to search for Brock. He saw his friend was now standing, but still remained outside, staring down at the daggers on the ground. Beyond him, the senior guild members were all fighting the Danger.
“Brock!” Zed called. “Come on! Get inside!”
But Brock didn’t seem to hear him. Instead, he picked up the blades. Brock raised the dagger with the stained tip. Then he turned to the monster and ran past the crumbling wards, plunging the knife into the snake’s scaled belly.
“It doesn’t even hurt,” Brock insisted as a young man spread ointment upon his cracked and bleeding hands. He was sitting on a cot in a small room off the basement hallway. “I’m fine.”
“The hurt will come when the shock fades,” Frond said from the doorway. Lotte was at her side. “Which is why we don’t recommend stabbing creatures that have acidic blood.”
Brock glared at her. “Well, my first plan was to stay on this side of the wall and never encounter a giant snake-beast wearing your mother’s face, but I had to improvise.” He pulled his hands away from the physician, who had begun to wrap them in a cloth bandage. “I’m fine. Fie! Focus on Jett!”
Frond crossed her arms. “Your friend is receiving the very best care we can provide.”
“Curse it, Frond,” Lotte said. “It’s not enough and you know it. We need the Golden Way.”
“Healing is useless until we counteract the venom. We’re best equipped to do that here.…”
Lotte was a head shorter than Frond, but she stepped right up to the guildmistress and scowled menacingly.
Frond pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “However, once that’s done, feel free to take the dwarfson to Brenner and her cult of glowing dimwits.”
“We can’t carry him across town!” Lotte cried.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” the physician said. He wilted beneath Frond’s scornful look. “Is what I would say if anybody asked me, but they didn’t.”
Frond ran he
r tongue across her teeth. “Fine,” she said at last. She held up a finger. “One healer, and they stay upstairs.”
Lotte spun around immediately and grabbed a passing adventurer through the open door. “Send for a healer,” she said. “And have the boy moved up to my bedroom for now.”
“I’ll bring him up myself,” Frond said.
The adventurer paused, looking from Frond to Lotte and back again.
“Well, get going!” Frond barked at him, waving him on and storming out after him.
Brock wasn’t sorry to see her go.
Lotte put a hand on his arm. Her touch was light, but there was dried blood under her fingernails. Her torn shirtsleeve, which she’d used as a tourniquet, was a disquieting reminder of where that blood had come from. “You did well out there, Brock. I’m sorry things got so out of control. Now let Hank patch you up.” She inclined her head toward the young physician. “I’ll see your friend is taken care of.”
Brock realized he’d been puffing out his chest. He exhaled, letting some of the tension out of his shoulders. “Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” Lotte said, and the simple nicety was almost enough to reduce Brock to tears. She pulled a small object from her pocket, tarnished gold and pearl, and considered it in silence for a moment.
“Is that…You have a timepiece?” Brock asked.
“I do,” she said, tucking it away again. “A memento from a different life. You’re from intown, aren’t you?”
Brock nodded. “My parents are both with the Merchants Guild.”
“Well, I know firsthand what an adjustment this is, but you’ll get used to things here. Just try not to rile Frond up too much. Leave that to me, yeah?”
She winked, stepped briskly from the room, and began shouting orders as soon as she’d turned the corner.
Once his hands were bandaged, Brock stepped out into the long hallway that led, in one direction, beyond the wall, and he shivered. The metal door at the end of the tunnel felt like scant protection against the Dangers he’d now seen with his own eyes…and the hundreds he could scarcely imagine. He turned and walked the other way, following the path as it sloped downward. Lotte had already vanished, and the men and women who ran up and down the hallway didn’t spare him a glance.
Might as well take a look around, he figured. It could be some time before he had another opportunity like this.
He passed several doors, turning their knobs as he went, finding them locked.
Until he found one that wasn’t, and the door swung open to reveal a ghastly sight.
Hexam—the “archivist,” Frond had called him—stood with his back to the door. The sleeves of his robe were pulled back, and his arms were covered in green-black goo to the elbows. In one hand he held a small knife, dangerously sharp and wet with that same goo. His other hand held flesh—a black organ of some sort—which he was attempting to pull free from the dead body splayed open on the slab before him.
It was the body of the naga, its forked tongue hanging limply from its slack fanged jaw. Its false face was split down the middle and hanging open so that half of its features faced the far wall and the other half of its humanlike mask stared blankly ahead at Brock.
He recoiled in horror, unsure whether the fact that the creature was dead made it any less frightening than it had been before.
“In or out!” cried the archivist. “You’ll let the cold escape.”
Brock slammed the door shut, and realized only after the fact that he’d opted for “in.” It was, in fact, cold in the room. Unnaturally so—Brock knew magic had to be at work, and then he realized that was all the more obvious for the fact that the room was lit by a soft, diffuse light for which he could see no source. Zed would want to hear about this place, and Brock wondered if the guild couldn’t teach his friend a fair amount of magic after all. The entire room—floor and walls and ceiling—was set with tiles, a sharp contrast to the dirt and planks that gave sad, slanted form to the rest of the guildhall. Shelves crowded with glass bottles and jars lined the walls, and Brock was reminded of the trophy room—although these keepsakes were even more macabre: there were fragments of bone and eyeballs suspended in sealed jars interspersed with containers of colorful powders and liquids and oozes. The naga’s slab sat against the far wall, with a small table to the right and a lectern to the left.
There was a wet snapping sound as Hexam pulled the black organ free from the body of the snake-beast.
“What are you doing?” Brock asked. Overcome with curiosity, he crept forward, one shuffling foot at a time.
“Looking for buried treasure,” answered the man. “Bring a jar!”
Brock grabbed an empty and open jar with both bandaged hands, swung it toward Hexam, and the man dropped the organ into it with a wet plop.
Brock’s stomach quailed.
“Don’t faint on me, boy. That kidney’s worth more than three of you.”
“I’m not. I won’t.” Brock stuck out his chin. “I’m the one who killed this thing, you know.”
Hexam raised an eyebrow and turned to regard him for the first time. His hood was pulled back, revealing his sharp, dark eyes. His hair and beard were both trimmed short, jet-black with a smattering of white, and his skin was a rich shade of brown. “I think technically it was the smear of lurker’s alkali on your blade that killed it. How are your hands?”
“They’re holding a monster’s kidney,” he said. “Can I put this thing down?”
The man tilted his head toward the small table, on which Brock saw a variety of gleaming metal tools, like weapons in miniature. There was a dagger not much larger than a man’s finger, a hooked instrument like a tiny scythe, and the daintiest shears Brock had ever seen. He set the still-open jar down among them.
“Anyway,” he asked, “if its blood is so harmful, why are you rolling around in it?”
Hexam gestured vaguely at the jars on the wall to his left. “Secretions from the gastric mill of the karkinos. Slather a thick coat of it on a man’s skin, and any known acid is neutralized before it can do damage.” He stuck both hands into the large opening cut into the naga’s snakelike trunk and began rooting through its innards. “Doesn’t help terribly much with the smell, though.”
Brock wandered over to the other side of the room, where a book stood open upon the lectern. It was an old book, its pages frayed and stained and yellow with age. It was open to a detailed illustration of a naga, and Brock saw that the artist had taken great care to capture the beast in all its gruesome glory, drawing each scale upon its long serpentine form.
Brock read aloud from the small block of text written beside the illustration: “‘The naga is a solitary hunter of fiendish origin. Paralyzes its prey with a fast-acting and potent venom, which is produced by glands in the throat. Natural spell-casting talent (sorcery). Corrosive blood. Scaled hide resistant to acid.’”
There was another wet snap, and Hexam grumbled. “Now hold on. Was that a kidney or a gallbladder, then?”
Brock turned the page and found a second naga illustration, but this one appeared to show the beast turned inside out, its bones and organs exposed in a bloodless and sterile approximation of the scene unfolding now within this very room. Brock’s eyes went to the drawing of the monster’s throat, where its venom glands were labeled in neat script.
“Can this help Jett somehow? He was bitten.”
Hexam plopped an organ into another empty jar, his eyes darting from kidney to gallbladder, puzzling out which was which. “Of course,” he said. He turned to look at Brock, hands held up before him. “Whatever you’ve heard, we look after our own. I should have no fewer than three journeymen assisting here, but the first thing I did was extract this creature’s venom glands and set them to work on the antitoxin. They’re seeing to your friend now.” He rubbed the slime between his fingers. “But in the meantime, we can’t let this little beauty rot on us, can we?”
Brock emerged from Hexam’s chamber some time later, bone
weary and numb with cold. It was the middle of the night, and he expected the guildhall to be silent by now. But though the underground hallway no longer buzzed with activity, there was a commotion coming from somewhere nearby.
He crept along the sloping passage until it ended at the trophy room with its morbid mementos. The sounds grew louder. He could make out shouting voices and clomping boots coming from above—the ground floor. Suddenly there was a great racket as something large and heavy came crashing down.
It sounded like the guildhall was under siege.
This time, Brock chose a proper weapon, tearing a short sword from its place on the wall, barely breaking his stride on the way to the spiral staircase that took him up, up. He thought of the wards giving way to the naga’s assault; he remembered the undisguised panic the sight had instilled in warriors who were by all accounts above fear. Had something followed them back into the city?
Brock slammed open the door at the top of the stairs, and the chaos he saw left him breathless.
The entire guild stood crammed into the dining hall. Some of them held weapons aloft, catching the firelight against their blades while they swayed in song. Others wielded greasy drumsticks and flagons of sloshing liquid. There was a man playing a lute, though the music was drowned out by the din. A woman hung from the chandelier in the center of the room, spattering those beneath her with wax from the swaying fixture’s candles.
It was a party. The Adventurers Guild was having a party.
“Brock!”
Somehow, over all the clamor, he heard Zed call out his name. Brock scanned the crowd for his friend—and saw a snub-nosed beast with razor-sharp tusks charging his way.
Brock screamed, dropping his sword as he leaped backward, flailing his arms. He couldn’t get far, though—the crowd had already closed in around him, so that he slammed right into the unyielding press of bodies as the monster approached him.
Then the beast held up its hands—human hands. It tilted its head back, and Zed peered out from beneath its savage snout.
“Where have you been?” Zed asked.
The Adventurers Guild Page 8