Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  Unsettling as it was for him, it was far more terrible for the Splinter Men. The eerie chorus of their chase broke apart, interrupted by spastic cries of fear and woe. Flashes of green and white fire flared through the fog, accompanied by the nightmare percussion of cracking bones. The slap of the Splinter Men's footsteps slowed, although it did not stop.

  And now Isiem could see something cutting through the mist ahead. A wedge-shaped slash of crimson light bled through the blanketing whiteness. Odd, interlocking geometric shapes rotated and spun in the radiance, as if the light were being projected through cut-outs in a screen. Sukorya's case, Isiem thought, and indeed the ghostly images in the light had the same mind-wrenching impossibility as the angles and shapes inscribed on that case. The lines refused to come together correctly, and they changed uncomfortably at the periphery of his vision.

  The fog receded where the red light reached. Against that newly empty patch of darkness, the largest of those geometric outlines brightened and steadied. It traced an impossible form, all warped curves and fractured angles stretching into dimensions that Isiem couldn't follow. The smaller shapes—which seemed to be only extensions of the same shape, somehow, connected across those same dimensions of impossibility—collected inside it, piling atop one another in denser and denser layers until finally, mercifully, there were too many lines to distinguish and they melted into an ill-defined crimson glow.

  Its light washed across the mute faces of the Splinter Men, standing in a rough semicircle two hundred feet behind them. The dead men were completely motionless. They stood as if in a trance, their black knives dangling forgotten at their sides. Some dripped fresh-spilled horse's blood. Mist skirled about their feet in curling wisps, but it was the only movement around them.

  "The gate," Ascaros said, stepping out of the foggy night to stand before the pulsing portal. Sukorya's case was in his hand. The silver shell had cracked open just slightly, and red light oozed from it like blood from a brawler's mouth. "I was right: its magic holds them at bay. But it will not hold forever, and when the portal closes, they will be free." He held an open hand out to Teglias. "Give me the key. Let us enter Fiendslair."

  Kyril glanced back at the Splinter Men. Their upturned faces were red with reflected light, their eyes empty and pitiless. She scowled, putting a hand to the hilt of her sword as she strode toward the disorienting gate. "Into Fiendslair it is. We don't have any choice, do we? We can't go back. There's only forward."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fiendslair

  Red light swallowed them.

  The world shifted under their feet, but Isiem saw none of it. Hot air blew across his face, and cold, and a breath of damp wind that smelled of musty spices and sour wine. It left a clammy coating on his skin, which lingered as the crimson glow finally softened and gave way to an ordinary lack of light.

  He raised a finger. Light blossomed around it, a brilliant hibiscus pink that changed to an equally vibrant emerald green after the first few seconds. The wizard nodded slightly, satisfied that the colors of his magic worked as he willed. Wherever Fiendslair was, it wasn't the Umbral Basin.

  They stood in a five-sided chamber walled in smooth brass. A circle of runes crawled across the floor under their feet. The living horses were still with them, crowding the room uncomfortably, but the spellsteeds had been dispelled. Reflections of Isiem's floating light danced across the polished metal, refracted into a thousand tiny, verdant suns. It was beautiful, but it was the only thing in the room that was.

  Five doors stood in the chamber, one in each of the mirrorlike walls. The doors were as dull as the brass was bright, for each of them was made of flesh.

  Scaly, spiny, or oozing with ichor, each door seemed to have been made of the flattened and contorted carcass of a demon. Isiem recognized the curling stripes and smoke-scented fur of a brimorak, the mangy hides and goatlike horns of a half-dozen spite demons pressed together, and a slaggy, melted face, coated in a thick layer of masking slime, that he thought might be an omox.

  As Isiem studied the amorphous visage, trying to determine if it was indeed such a formidable fiend trapped inside, its sagging eyes suddenly blinked. Ena's shaggy pony threw its head back in alarm. The pony retreated to the center of the room, where it huddled with the other animals and whickered nervously at the fiendish doors on all sides.

  "They're alive," Ascaros hissed.

  "Why yes, so they are," Teglias said. He approached the omox door, stopping two feet away with his hands clasped professorially behind his back. The cleric leaned down, marveling at the trapped demon, and Isiem waved his light toward the door to better illumine it for them both. "Yes, of course."

  The omox's slimy eyes squinted painfully as the light drew near. It tried to turn its squashed face away, pulling back under the layers of viscous greenish-pink ooze that constituted its body, but it was as trapped in its position as a butterfly pinned under glass.

  "What do you mean, ‘of course'?" Kyril asked. She frowned at the demonflesh door, flexing a mailed fist as if she wanted to smite it then and there. "How long did you say this place had been abandoned? How many centuries? And these things still live?"

  "They're demons. They do not age, they do not die. Unless you kill them ...and there's no reason to kill these. They'd lose their efficacy if they were dead." The Sarenite moved on to the next door, which was fashioned from some spiky fiend that Isiem didn't recognize. Its body seemed to be composed of thousands of fine white bones, like a fish's skeleton, with innumerable glowing crimson eyes scattered among them.

  "But as long as they live, they are considerably more durable than wood or stone. Impervious to many forms of attack, resistant to magic, virtually impossible to break down with ordinary weapons—you can see the advantages. I would wager that whatever enchantment keeps them alive and imprisoned in this state also enables them to heal whatever damage they do suffer." The cleric uncorked a small bottle of water and, before anyone could stop him, flicked a few droplets onto the door of red eyes and white bones.

  The blessed water bubbled like acid, eating a handful of tiny holes into the fiend's flesh. The door shuddered violently, as if it had been kicked; the crimson eyes scattered among its bones quivered and bulged. A dozen tiny mouths, which Isiem had not previously noticed, opened across the door's surface and shrieked soundlessly through the white needles of their teeth.

  Behind Teglias's back, Kyril and Ena exchanged an uneasy look. Pulcher muttered a village prayer, and although he got most of the words wrong, nobody laughed at his mistakes. They were too busy watching the fiend. Confirming Teglias's hypothesis, the wounds caused by his holy water healed within a minute, leaving no trace of damage on the door.

  "Well," the cleric said to Ascaros, capping his vial of holy water and sliding it back into a pocket. "I'm satisfied to be right—and a little apprehensive about what that means. Which way shall we go?"

  "I have no idea," the shadowcaller admitted. He handed the key to Fiendslair back to Teglias, then tapped the silver case that held Sukorya's diamond. Its glow had vanished the instant they passed through the portal; the stone appeared to be inert. "This offers no guidance. And while I am aware of what Eledwyn did, I know very little about how she did it, or how her workshop was arranged. All the stories that survive of this place came from Mesandroth's lackeys, and none of them worked here."

  "Then we'll go exploring." Teglias pocketed the key with a wry smile. "I'm not too old for adventure yet."

  "I want to know how we get out of here again," Pulcher grumbled, turning in a slow circle and scanning the demonic doors.

  "Easy," Ascaros said. "Just channel a thread of arcane magic into the runes on the floor here. The mechanism is simple from this side."

  "But I don't have any magic!"

  Ascaros gave a shark's smile. "Then you'd do well to stay close to those of who do, wouldn't you?"

  Ganoven snapped his gloved fingers, pointing imperiously at Pulcher and Copple. The latter was in the m
iddle of drinking a potion for his wounded leg, but he finished it hurriedly and massaged the life back into his slashed thigh as his superior turned on them. "You two, get out your bags. The special bags."

  Copple managed a serviceably smart salute. Being in this room seemed to have unnerved him as much as it had the horses; his brow was shiny with sweat, and he seemed more deferential than Isiem had ever seen the man. "Yes, sir."

  The tattooed thug wrestled a saddlebag off their uneasy, sidestepping packhorse with some difficulty. Eventually he got it open and pulled out two bulky sacks of quilted red-and-black cloth. He handed one to Pulcher and slung the other over his own back.

  Each bag was stitched with three horizontal bands of looping copper wire, by which Isiem recognized the enchantment that they bore. That particular technique was employed by a cabal of Chelish wizards who specialized in outfitting merchants undertaking risky expeditions; he had often seen similar bags being packed and unpacked in the market square of Pangolais. Such bags could hold far more than their outer dimensions suggested, and the quilted ones had the additional property of being able to isolate their contents into separate compartments.

  The sacks represented a substantial investment. The Aspis Consortium must truly have believed there was something valuable to be found in Fiendslair.

  "We'll begin with the spite demons," Teglias decided. "The weakest demon is likely to guard the least dangerous portion of this place, wouldn't you agree? That should give us a sense of how the rest of our expedition is likely to go."

  He gestured to the door covered in patchy fur. Goatlike hooves and sinewy legs had been folded at excruciating angles to make it. The bearded heads that rolled slot-pupilled eyes at them were wrenched backward and sideways on necks that had to have been snapped in multiple places.

  But they lived, somehow, and two of their curved black horns jutted out to serve as an apparent handle.

  With only the slightest hesitation, Ascaros took hold of those horns and pulled.

  At first, nothing happened. The shadowcaller pulled harder. Tendons stood out on his wrists and neck as he strained, and the trapped spite demons snarled and spat uselessly in their flattened prison, but the demonflesh door did not budge.

  Then some ancient magic in the door stirred fitfully back into service. A tiny, whirling blade, no greater in circumference than a silver coin, spun out from the top left corner of the door and carved along its side. A bright red ruby shone in its center, illumining its serrated silver edges. Those silver edges slashed through flesh and bone as the circular blade spun along the door's outline, spraying a fine mist of demon blood across the near walls where it passed. Judging from the deep discoloration of the brass in a two-inch stripe along those walls, this had been a regular occurrence in days long past.

  Once it was cut free, the door pulled open easily, trailing thin ribbons of gore and loose hair. Ascaros swung it open wide enough for everyone to see through, then paused.

  Beyond it stretched a ten-foot-wide hallway. Reliefs covered its gently curved walls, depicting floral vines and lush gardens with a fineness of detail that Isiem supposed must be a mark of elven crafting. Frosted lamps hung from the ceiling, their wide glass bowls supported by copper chains worked to resemble climbing mandevilla. The amber-hued light that glowed in the depths of their bowls was very faint, doing little more than softening the shadows that filled the hall. Several of the lamps seemed to have burned out over the centuries, and gave no light at all.

  At the end of the hall, twenty feet ahead, was an elaborate archway filled with dim and misty light. More carvings wound around the arch, again resembling some type of flowering vine, although Isiem could not identify the species from where he stood. The fluid music of a fountain echoed down the verdigrised hall, its serenity startling after the chamber of demonflesh doors.

  "Eledwyn was an elf," Ascaros said, eying the ornate lamps dubiously. "I suppose it's possible she wanted to have some part of this place resemble her homeland."

  "Possible," Ena said. "But likely?"

  No one had an answer to that. After a minute stretched away in uncomfortable silence, Ganoven waved his henchmen forward. "Time is wasting. Fiendslair might have an infinity of it, but the Aspis Consortium does not."

  "Me first." Ena pushed past Pulcher and Copple, holding up a hand to keep them back as she crouched to begin her survey of the amber-lit hallway. The Aspis thugs were only too happy to let the scarred dwarf go ahead of them. Pulcher dropped his immense hammer and leaned on it like a walking stick as Isiem sent his floating light forward to assist Ena.

  Working fastidiously, the dwarf probed the deeper recesses of the wall carvings with a long, angled steel stick tipped in a tuft of dusty wool. Amber light twinkled across the sweat beaded on her stubbly scalp. Occasionally, in response to nothing Isiem could discern, she paused to examine the floor. It took her the better part of ten minutes to cover the twenty feet, but after satisfying herself that no traps lurked in the hallway, the dwarf stood up and nodded to the rest of them.

  Then she crouched again to approach the archway, peering through its green-streaked bronze leaves into the next room. She stayed there, totally motionless, for almost a minute, then slowly withdrew.

  "It's a garden," she reported, sliding away her tools. "Or it was."

  "Was?" Kyril echoed.

  Ena shrugged. She went over to her pony, patting its soft brown nose to reassure the worried beast as it snuffled into her shoulder. "I suppose it still is, mostly. Go look for yourself. It seems safe enough. I'll watch the horses."

  "Fine." The paladin readied her sword and moved forward, cat-light on her feet. Again, Copple and Pulcher seemed quite content to let someone else take the lead, although this time they followed begrudgingly a few steps behind. Ascaros came after them, weaving a protective spell around himself as he walked, and Isiem did the same as he fell in alongside his old friend.

  The faint, sweet fragrance of white flowers drifted through the archway at the hall's end. There was a bitterness alongside it: the earthy scents of loam and leaf-rich forest soil, layered with countless years of death and renewal. It reminded Isiem powerfully of the Backar Forest.

  And, indeed, it seemed that Eledwyn had kept a forest of her own in this strange place. Past the archway, an enormous oval-ceilinged chamber held a garden so wild it scarcely fit that name. Enormous trees towered thirty feet above the ground, their roots covered by mossy blankets and spindly yellow mushrooms. White-skinned saplings grew in the spaces between them, as did dense patches of crocus and feathery ferns. High above them, an enchanted sun shone: a globe of burnished gold that traveled on a silver track around the ceiling, carrying its light across the artificial sky. It was a magnificent work of magic; its artistry took Isiem's breath away. And after all these years, it still worked.

  That sun no longer charted a steady course, however. In places the track had been bent or blackened as if by some fiery explosion. Whatever had caused the damage had left no other scars; the forest had likely grown over any destruction in the chamber's lower reaches. But on the ceiling, nothing hid the marks of that long-ago blast, and when the golden sun passed over the ruined portions of its course, its enchanted light faltered and failed.

  There were dead spots in the forest beneath the longer stretches of damaged track, where no light reached the plants to sustain them. Frilled shelves of mushrooms dotted the great trunks that lay sideways across the dead lands like half-buried bones, but otherwise they appeared to be devoid of life.

  Elsewhere, peculiar new forms of life flourished. As Isiem left the others to their own explorations and ventured deeper into the wild garden, he saw the source of the babbling he'd heard earlier: a marble fountain, its sides bearded with green-gray moss, that fed a spider web of creeks throughout the forest.

  The wizard's boots sank deep into the soft loam as he approached the nearest of those streams. Nothing else had left any tracks on the land, but there were things living in the water. He sa
w their pale blurred shapes flit away from his presence, but after several minutes of standing very still, he saw one hovering under a submerged tree root.

  It was a curious creature, about the size of his palm and so white that it was virtually translucent. A carapace of soft chitin covered its body, which resembled nothing so much as an oversized flea's. Its four faceted eyes were an opaque reddish-purple and moved freely at the ends of jointed eyestalks.

  "What is that?" Kyril asked, stepping carefully over a curly-headed fern to join the wizard. As she neared the stream, the insectlike creature in the water darted away, vanishing downstream.

  "I have no idea," Isiem said. "Some of the fishmongers in Nisroch keep snails in their tanks to eat algae. Perhaps these things—whatever they are—serve a similar purpose in the streams?"

  "Seems like it would have been easier to use fish." The paladin raked a stray lock of reddish hair behind a slightly pointed ear, glancing over her shoulder at one of the dead spots in the forest. "Then again, fish might not have survived this long. The birds didn't."

  "Birds?" Isiem echoed.

  "There were songbirds here originally. Generations of them, maybe. All dead now, though. Ena found the bones, all piled up together under some of the trees a little ways to the west. We're not sure what killed them, but it looks like they all died around the same time, and it was a long time ago." Kyril nodded toward the sparkling creek. "Those water bugs are the only animals that seem to have survived all these years."

  "I'm surprised anything did. Have you found anything else?"

  "Yes. It's ...some kind of sculpture, I think. Teglias is studying it, but he asked for your help. I came to find you so that you could take a second look." Extending a gauntleted hand to guide him, she led the wizard through the forest garden along a curving path that was barely visible under centuries of unguided growth. Once the path had been paved in flagstones, but time and tree roots had pushed many of those slabs aside, while others were completely covered by dead leaves and live ones. It was visible only as a wavering line of sparser vegetation in the wood, and as scattered stones amid the greenery.