Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  "Nor would we," Kyril said, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. "We'll leave you to your reading, and we'll take none of those books for ourselves. None of them," she emphasized, touching her sword hilt meaningfully as she looked at Ganoven.

  "Are you threatening me?" the Aspis agent asked, puffing up in disbelief.

  "Not unless I have to. But I am trying to ensure that you respect the threat posed by these books. I don't recognize those sigils, nor their authors, but I know the name of Ghasterhall. That's nothing we need to take back with us. It's nothing the world needs at all." The paladin stepped away from the library, flicking a final look of distaste over its tumbled heaps of books and scrolls. "We came for a weapon. Let's find it, and go."

  "Bronze door?" Ena suggested. "I'm just dying to know what's behind it that made someone, or something, try so hard to rip it down."

  "Fire, if I read the runes right," Isiem said. "Raw, elemental flame."

  "Oh." The dwarf sighed in vast disappointment, rubbing a hand over her stubbled pate. "That hardly seems worth the bother. Well, let's open it anyway. Maybe they meant the fire of ...diamonds. Huge, enormous diamonds that flash with fiery brilliance. It could be metaphorical, right?"

  "I'm afraid that's not likely," Isiem said. "Warding runes tend to be fairly literal."

  Ena threw her hands into the air. "Fine. Fine. Shatter my dreams, crush my hopes of finding anything remotely worthwhile in this blasted place. You're worse than Teglias."

  The cleric cleared his throat. "Tell me when you're ready to open it," he said to Isiem. "I'll prepare a protective spell."

  "Thank you." Isiem inclined his head to the Sarenite and went over to examine the bronze door more closely. The inch-deep scratches clawed into its face interfered with his reading of the runes, but nonetheless he was soon able to confirm his suspicions. The metal was enchanted to withstand incredible heat, and to do so for prolonged periods: hours at a time, if not days. Isiem touched its scarred bronze tentatively, fanning his fingers over the door before daring to make any contact. He couldn't feel even the slightest warmth.

  A secondary enchantment, nearly as powerful as the first, enabled the door to lock firmly into place and hold fast against eruptions of incalculable fury. Modern Nidalese magic used the same symbolic inscriptions as that centuries-old door, and it was clear that the door would be impossible for anything weaker than a god to force open once it locked.

  And yet the lock itself was almost nothing.

  "What is it?" Ena asked, squinting warily at Isiem's expression.

  He moved aside, extending a hand to the circle of sigils that served as the door's arcane seal. "This lock. It's ...I could have opened this after a year and a half at the Dusk Hall. When I was a child barely past my first cantrip, I could have unlocked this door. Easily. It's enchanted to be extraordinarily resistant to brute force or mundane lock-picking, but it opens easily to the proper magic."

  "Good thing whatever clawed at it didn't have any." The dwarf paused, looking mildly alarmed as a new thought occurred to her. "Or do you think it did? Could this be a trap?"

  "I have no way of knowing. Do you still want this door open?"

  "We've come this far," Teglias said. "It would be foolish to stop short out of baseless speculation. We have no reason to believe anything unpleasant waits on the other side."

  "Except fire," Ena muttered.

  "Except fire," the Sarenite agreed, "and that I can counter, if you will allow me."

  Isiem bowed his head and pressed his hands together as Teglias raised his holy symbol over the wizard to begin the spell. Warmth flowed over him, slow and rich as honey, and settled into his skin. There was no heat to it, nor cold, only a pleasant, soothing languor, accompanied by a sense of assurance that the world meant him no harm.

  It was an illusion, of course, but Isiem allowed himself to take solace in it for a few short seconds until Teglias finished his incantation and lowered his golden emblem.

  Then he exhaled, gathered his focus as he had been taught to do in the Dusk Hall, and turned to the claw-scarred bronze door. Keeping his own magic ready, the wizard unlocked the spells that bound that fiery door shut.

  Almost before he had finished unraveling the last of its arcane bonds, the bronze door slid into the wall to its right, revealing a square compartment that measured five feet to a side.

  It was an incineration chamber. The gray stone of its walls were rippled with scorch marks, while the ceiling was seared solid black. A dusting of grainy ash and charred bone fragments flecked its floor.

  Most of the compartment, however, was occupied by a dead man dressed in the same gray-green robes that Isiem had seen in the apprentices' closets.

  The man had been dead for a very long time. His skin was the color of old parchment, flattened against his skull and desiccated to the point that it was impossible to identify his features. Soot and ichor stained his back and the outside of his sleeves, suggesting he had hunched forward to protect himself from a blast at his back. The cloth over his lower torso was brown and stiff with dried blood. Ancient as the wound was, the sheer quantity of the blood loss suggested that had been what killed him.

  The corpse's hands were knotted protectively in the pit of his stomach. Holding his breath, Isiem leaned into the ash-gritted compartment and forced the dead man's fingers open. Up close, he could see that the corpse's teeth were bared in a yellowed grimace, and that whatever had clawed into his torso had not only exposed his ribs, but crushed several of them. One, completely severed, had fallen to the floor underneath his body.

  Something about the contorted position and the evident agony in which the man died suggested that the dead man's tortured grin wasn't just the expression of a mummified skull, but that the apprentice had actually died with his face clenched into that grimace of determination.

  What could he have wanted to protect so badly? It seemed obvious that the apprentice, mortally wounded, had fled into this incineration chamber to hide from the kalavakus. Whether he had intended to immolate himself rather than allow the demon to kill him, or had merely hoped that the heavily enchanted door would prove a sufficient barrier to hold off the fiend, was something Isiem would never know. But one way or another, he'd meant to take refuge here—for himself, and for whatever he was holding.

  Wincing in anticipation, Isiem broke the last of the corpse's stick-brittle fingers and let the hidden object tumble from its dead guardian's grip into his own. He closed his hand around it hurriedly and pulled back from the compartment, seized by a sudden claustrophobic dread. Only after his breathing had steadied, and he felt somewhat more like himself, did Isiem open his hand to see what lay in his palm.

  It was a key.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Seraptis Door

  After Isiem retreated, clutching the key, Pulcher hauled the mummified apprentice out of the incineration chamber. Ganoven cataloged the dead man's belongings, but unless the Aspis agent had a hidden talent for sleight of hand, it did not seem he found much. The apprentice had died possessing nothing more than the clothes on his back, and those only barely; the stiff, shredded robes fell away from his bones as soon as Pulcher moved the body.

  Those bones were profoundly discolored, and although Isiem couldn't tell whether their chalky yellowy-gray appearance was caused by the incineration chamber, the sheer passage of time, or anything else, the wizard couldn't shake a suspicion that something had poisoned the apprentice down to the core of his being.

  But kalavakus demons were not known to have venom, and in any case, no poison had been necessary to kill the unfortunate man. Kyril winced when she saw the corpse's condition under those ruined robes. She lifted a smashed arm to show the rest of them. "It's a wonder he lived long enough to climb into that chamber. Look at this. Broken arm, slashed legs, crushed ribs. How could he possibly keep standing?"

  "Desperation can give a man strength," Ena said. "For a while."

  "That's a lot of desperation." Kyril
glanced at Isiem as she gently returned the corpse's arm to some semblance of a resting position. A red curl fell over her brow, tumbling across her right eye. "What was he holding?"

  Wordlessly, Isiem held his hand out to her. The key, an outwardly simple piece of cut steel, lay across his palm. It pulsed with magic against his skin, but it bore no ornaments, no inscription. Other than the blood dried on its handle, there was nothing about its appearance to suggest it had any significance at all.

  "The seraptis door," Teglias murmured.

  As he spoke, the incinerator's bronze door slid back out from the wall, closing off the compartment with a loud clang. Pulcher, who hadn't been looking at it, jumped visibly at the noise.

  Isiem, who had, scarcely concealed his own flinch. He was tenser than he'd realized. "I thought you said you hadn't touched the seraptis."

  The Sarenite shrugged. "Almost true. We did open it. But it only opens onto another door, and that one we couldn't pass. The key that let us in here did nothing. I had thought to try it again with Sukorya's diamond, but now I think this must be the proper key instead."

  "Why?"

  It was a moment before Teglias answered. For an instant, the cleric's eyes seemed to lose focus, as if he were racking the deep recesses of his memory for a near-forgotten detail. A pensive frown formed on his lips. "I ...am not certain." He pinched the skin between his eyebrows and massaged it between his fingers, closing his eyes. "Perhaps it was something I saw in its design."

  Isiem touched the man's wrist. "Is something troubling you?"

  "No. No, I'm fine." With a shake of his head, Teglias opened his eyes and moved away, stepping carefully over the chunks of glass that littered the chamber's floor around the broken central dome. A thousand tiny, distorted reflections moved across the facets of the larger chunks, following him. "Just tired. I didn't sleep well last night."

  "I don't think any of us did," Ena said. She, too, looked concerned, but her tone remained brisk. "Do you want to go in?"

  Teglias nodded, clearing his throat. "Yes. We must go on. We still haven't found the nightblade."

  "Let's get to it, then," Ganoven said, abandoning the apprentice's rag-clad bones. Annoyance twisted his habitual sneer deeper than usual. "There's little profit to be had here, since our sorcerer has decided we're not to be trusted with any of those books."

  "You aren't," Kyril muttered, not quite under her breath. She shifted her scabbarded longsword to a more accessible angle and headed back across the room, stepping around the bigger pieces of glass and crunching the smaller shards under her boots. "If we're doing this, let's get it over with. Best to be ready. The kalavakus might be dead, but it wasn't the only demon in here, and I doubt it was the only one Mesandroth freed."

  Summoning her own divine light around the end of an unlit torch, the paladin led the way back toward the demonflesh doors.

  "Ascaros, are you coming?" Isiem called.

  "I suppose I must," the shadowcaller replied with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm. He rolled up the yellowed scroll he'd been reading and returned it to its leather case with the care of a new mother handling her infant. As he slid the case into his satchel, Ascaros nodded pointedly toward the receding glow of Kyril's torch. "We agreed to stay together, after all."

  "That we did," Isiem said. "Do you need help carrying anything?"

  Ascaros shook his curly-locked head. "The Aspis Consortium isn't the only source of storage enchantments. My satchel can carry what I need."

  "Is it what you need?"

  "I think it might be. Part of it. This is some of Mesandroth's early work; it dates to when he was still refining his curse, and had not yet laid it on his own bloodline. Some of his original sources are here, too. If I can follow his reasoning and see what he did, I might be able to unravel the magic." The shadowcaller's fingers stilled over the silver buckles of his satchel, hovering reverently upon the cold metal. Then he shook off that momentary trance and resumed piling more books into the seemingly infinite depths of the bag.

  Isiem watched him work, guarding his own misgivings. He did not doubt that the world would become a more perilous place with those books' secrets released from their imprisonment in Fiendslair. But the nations of Golarion had survived those threats once before, and would survive them again, and the secret libraries of the Umbral Court were a far safer place for them than an Aspis auction table would be. Short of destroying them—and Isiem wasn't sure he could do that, even if he'd wanted to—this seemed the best course.

  By the time Ascaros had finished transferring Eledwyn's collection to his own keeping, Kyril's light was long gone. In its absence, the cracked and bloodstained hulk of the main room's central dome seemed full of menace; the glass cages around it, littered with bones of gray-haired victims, were repositories of ancient misery. He was Nidalese, and he should have had no fear of shadows, but Isiem found that he didn't want to walk past any of them in the dark.

  "A locked door shouldn't be enough to stop a demon," he said.

  "Why? Because some of them can teleport?" Ascaros asked wryly. "Not in here." He motioned to the walls that enclosed them. Only vague curves and lines were visible in the limited light of their spells. Above them loomed the silhouettes of bookshelves, shaggy with loose paper. "The creators of this place warded it against such magic. Perhaps it was meant as a precaution against escaping fiends; perhaps it's simply a natural side effect of this space existing outside the world. Regardless, one cannot fold space or travel across the planes here. Any attempt to do so results in violent failure. The only way out is the way we came in: through the brass room."

  Isiem rubbed his ruby ring uneasily. He had seen no signs of such enchantments himself, but if Ascaros was correct, his stored teleportation spell was worse than useless. "So much for contingency plans. How do you know?"

  "I tried it soon after we arrived, thinking I might want to have a ready escape if Fiendslair proved more dangerous than anticipated. I didn't test the spells on myself, obviously. I'm still alive. But there's a pulverized water bug in the garden who can attest to the dangers of attempting to teleport in this place. The magic bends in on itself, collapsing in places and stretching unpredictably in others. I killed the bug before I sent it, but the rebounding magic macerated the corpse completely. Nothing would survive that."

  "When were you planning to tell me?"

  Ascaros slung his satchel over a shoulder. Although he'd packed at least a third of Eledwyn's library into it, the black leather bag showed not the slightest bulge, and it didn't seem to weigh any more than its usual ten pounds. "When you expressed an interest in teleporting."

  "And the others? When would you have warned them?"

  "The same." The shadowcaller's black eyes were piercing and pitiless. "If they didn't mention it to me before they tried, and they hadn't the sense to test it themselves, they would have gotten what they deserved. Shall we go?"

  Taking the lead, Isiem motioned for his glowing sphere of light to float forward. It circled around his shoulders, casting infinite reflections along the glass tanks in the main room, as they left the experimental chamber and returned to the demonflesh door. Fresh ichor still stained the door and the walls around it; the trapped fiend had only just begun to heal back into place. The wizard pulled it open and the two of them stepped through, rejoining the rest of their party in the brass room.

  They had already cut open the seraptis door. The maimed fiend stared hatefully at them from her confinement. Her long black hair was a tangled net around her face and torso. Strands of it caught in the crimson slashes that crisscrossed her arms. Those red wounds gnashed futilely at the adventurers, opening and closing convulsively like so many ravenous mouths.

  None of the companions, however, paid the trapped demon any mind. Their attention was focused on a second door that stood thirty feet down a straight, smooth corridor behind her. The new door was a perfect circle of steel brushed to a matte gray finish by innumerable tiny, crosshatched scratches. Other than a
single pinprick of black in its center, it was entirely featureless. Contrary to Teglias's uncertain suggestion, nothing about the door's design suggested the apprentice's key should fit.

  "Ah, you're just in time," the cleric said as the Nidalese came to the seraptis door. "May I have the key?"

  Reluctantly Isiem handed it over. The Sarenite pressed the key to the tiny hole at the door's center, which dilated to accept it. A moment later, the steel spiraled back in, flowing like water to engulf the key completely. A soft, almost musical click sounded, and the door released the key as it rolled smoothly into the wall.

  Beyond it was devastation.

  Blood painted the walls of the bronzed hallway ahead. Moldering bones, pulverized so badly that they looked like gravel, had been heaped high against the newly opened door. As the steel slid aside, they tumbled through in a clattering avalanche. More lay shattered on the floor amid the wrinkled, stiffened rags of apprentices' robes.

  The silver plates that lined the floors and ceilings of the previous corridors were repeated in this one as well, but here they had been ripped out of their housings and used as weapons to crush and dismember the unfortunate apprentices. Thin coils of fragrant white smoke leaked out of the gaps in the ceiling where the disks had been, casting a partial shroud over all those ancient dead.

  Earlier, Isiem had wondered if Eledwyn's apprentices had escaped the fall of Fiendslair, since they'd only found the single body in the incineration chamber. Perhaps, he'd thought, they'd managed to evade or outrun the fiends that Mesandroth had freed to wreak havoc upon them.

  Now he knew it was not so. They had died here, all of them. And they had died horribly, clawing at the uncaring steel door even as one of their own number locked them in, quarantining them along with whatever terror had brought them down. It hadn't been the kalavakus, or at least not the same one whose bones they'd found outside the incineration chamber. Death had come upon these people from behind, and had departed the same way.