Greatshadow da-1

by James Maxey

  She picked up the cup-shaped steel and began to smooth it between her fingers. “I haven’t felt like this since I left the palace. I used to be so timid and terrified. I never wanted to feel that way again.”

  I was surprised to find out she’d been afraid of anything as a child. It seemed counter-intuitive. As a princess, I would have guessed she’d been protected from everything.

  “I was treated like a china doll,” she said. “I wasn’t allowed to play outside because I might fall and get scratched. I couldn’t sit too near a window, because the sun might burn my skin. I slept with armed guards stationed at my bed because my father was afraid of kidnappers. My whole family had tasters who sampled our food to make certain it wasn’t poison. Being constantly reminded I was so fragile left me in a constant state of terror.”

  Relic nodded knowingly, but I had trouble imagining a fragile, frightened Infidel.

  She sighed. “I wanted to do this treasure hunt as a quick smash and grab, making stuff up as we went along, the way Stagger and I always played it. Events never got out of control when we were together, because we never tried to control them. We just moved on whim and instinct, living fast and fearless. Now, Tower is talking about destiny and history, the Black Swan is playing with people’s lives like they’re pawns in some game, and it sounds like my father is already studying maps of this island figuring out where to build his new palace. I can’t help feeling that all this planning has put things out of control. We’re all going to die.”

  Relic rose up, stretching his back, sinews popping. His hunch disappeared as he rose to the height of an ordinary man. His body was still hidden by the tattered cloak. His eyes glowed like red embers in the shadow of his hood.

  “Perhaps you’re saying these things hoping I will reassure you,” he said, in a stern tone. “I need offer no comfort. All the strength you need to prevail pulses within your veins. You ceased to be a frightened little girl the second you devoured the blood of a primal dragon. A dragon soul shares your body now, a soul more powerful than the sniveling child you once were. Surrender yourself to the dragon inside and our victory is assured.”

  Infidel shook her head slowly as she tested the second cup. Satisfied, she worked silently with the link of chain that held the cups together, crimping the ends between her fingernails, then slipping the whole thing on from the back like a vest before pinching the final connecting link between the cups shut at the front.

  She stood up. Relic, still standing straight, looked down upon her, a good head taller. She peered up into his glowing eyes. “Who the hell are you?” she asked.

  “I’m the second survivor of this mission,” he said.

  “How can you know this? Are you a seer as well as a mind-reader?”

  “No,” said Relic, as his head lowered once more, returning his outline to his hunchbacked profile. “But you cannot imagine the trials I’ve endured to reach this moment. There is nothing left for me to fear. Not even Greatshadow.”

  “So tell me about the trials. Tell me who you are. Why should I keep listening to you?”

  Relic shook his head. “I must remain an enigma until we achieve our goals. Greatshadow can pluck thoughts from the minds of others. If you knew my true identity, he might learn it as well. I’m the one enemy he should fear above all others… because he doesn’t even know I exist.”

  “Why are you his enemy? Why do you hate the dragon so?”

  Relic clenched his gnarled fist. “This too, must remain my secret. But know that my hatred for the beast is deep and righteous. Turning back is unthinkable. I cannot live any longer in a world that contains Greatshadow.”

  I rolled my eyes and said, “I’m really getting tired of your mystery man act. Just answer her questions.”

  Relic ignored me.

  Infidel shrugged. “Fine. I’ve lived with your mystery man act this long, I can put up with it for another day.”

  “And your fears? Can you put them behind you?”

  She pulled back her shoulders and clenched her fists. “Dragons are cold-blooded. That’s the only blood I’ve got now. So cold my heart’s just a block of ice, incapable of fear, or doubt, or remorse. Timid little Innocent has long since been devoured by the monster.” She cracked her knuckles, as all emotion drained from her face. She looked like a machine once more. “Let’s go kick Greatshadow’s scaly ass.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ROUGH TREATMENT

  After everyone had rested, we pressed deeper into the palace complex. The rooms we passed through were mostly barren. After all this time, I suppose items made of wood or cloth would have turned to dust, but it was curious that there were no ordinary objects made of stone or ceramic, which would have endured. The emptiness hinted that the people who had dwelled here had time to pack before they abandoned the place. On the other hand, it was tough to ignore the gems and gold embedded in the countless mosaics. Certainly, if people had time to pack up their dinner plates and chamber pots, they would have taken their valuables as well.

  With Aurora gone, everyone was sweating profusely. The narrow passageway we followed descended at a rather sharp angle, and stretched for what must have been at least a mile. It made me wonder what the ancients had been digging for.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” the Menageries grumbled. They were once more in their human forms, walking in mirror symmetry; as one miniature Goon swung his left foot forward, the other moved his right.

  “What doesn’t make sense?” asked Tower.

  “We’re heading toward a temple, right? This doesn’t seem like a good location to attract followers. Why put it so deep inside a mountain?”

  “Muhskuh wuh thuh,” said No-Face.

  The Menageries chuckled, a sound like chattering chipmunks.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  The mosquitoes were worse then, answered Relic.

  “Obviously, they were a mining culture,” said Zetetic. “You don’t produce the gold and gemstones we’ve seen simply panning in streams. These people spent a lot of time underground.”

  Relic nodded. “There was spiritual significance to the depths as well. The trees sink their roots deep into the soil. The ancients deduced that the earth was the origin of all life; the ground was regarded as sacred. Digging into the earth produced precious metals and priceless gems, further evidence that the divine dwelled beneath the surface. The deeper they dug, the greater the treasures produced. Temples were built as deep as possible so that the gods could better hear the prayers of the priests.”

  Father Ver shook his head. “How sad to live oblivious to the truth.”

  “A truth contained in a book your own church didn’t discover until a mere thousand years ago,” said Zetetic. “You have plain evidence men existed long before then. Does it strike you as unfair that your Divine Author condemned so many generations of men to ignorance by hiding the book?”

  Father Ver started to answer, but Tower raised his gauntlet. “This is the wrong time and place to debate this. According to the map, we’ve reached the entrance to the temple.” He glanced at Relic. “I assume you can verify this?”

  Relic nodded. We were in a long narrow room filled with arches covered with pale blue tiles. At the end of the hall there was a circle of stone, nearly fifteen feet across. Relic pointed to the stone and said, “That stone rolls aside. Beyond is a spiral stairway built of human bones leading down seven hundred seventy-seven steps. At the bottom is a natural cavern filled with gleaming crystals hundreds of feet tall; this was the most sacred spot in the kingdom.”

  I perked up. “If Zetetic is right, and the veil between the spirit world and the realm of the living is thin in temples, could I escape? Could I come back to life?”

  Relic didn’t look at me as he led the others toward the stone door. He replied mentally, saying, You’ve already escaped the pull of the spirit world, Blood-Ghost. Abandon hope; you will never be alive again.

  “You know, you could sugar coat that a little. There’s
no need to be rude. You still need me as your spy, remember?”

  For all the information you’ve so far gathered, I believe my circumstances would be materially unchanged without you.

  I punched him in the back of the head with a phantom fist. It passed right through, but I felt a teeny bit better.

  We reached the end of the hall. I’d seen this type of door before, a giant disk of stone sitting inside a matching groove. The ancients were marvelous engineers. Though the stone weighed several tons, no doubt it was so well balanced even a child could move it.

  The disk was ringed with cup-sized indentations. Tower placed his hands into the holes, then flexed to roll the stone aside.

  The door didn’t budge. Maybe it wasn’t that well balanced after all.

  “It’s locked,” said Relic.

  “I see,” said Tower. “How do we unlock it?”

  Relic ran his gnarled hand along the blue tiles that decorated the arch surrounding the stone. He found the one he was looking for and pressed it. It slid aside, revealing a shaft about six inches wide. He thrust his skinny arm into it. “There’s a lever that releases the…” A muffled SNAP caused his sentence to go unfinished. He pulled out his hand, opening his fingers to reveal the rusty remains of an iron rod. He sighed. “Not all ancient artifacts are as well maintained as the War Doll.”

  He looked back over his shoulder and motioned that Infidel should step forward. She placed her hands into the same holes Tower had tried. The muscles of her back bulged in sculpted relief as she strained to move the door. Whatever mechanism held the stone resisted even her magnificent muscles.

  “This looks like a job for a ghost,” I said, poking my head into the wall to examine the lock mechanism. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the jumbled of rusted gears and levers embedded in the wall. I drifted through the door completely, into the stairwell on the other side. I discovered that it no longer contained a staircase; the seven hundred and seventy-seven steps of bone must have crumbled to dust, though I could see the spiral holes in the wall where they’d once been anchored. Far below, in what must have been the temple, there was an eerie orange light that looked like boiling lava. The heat was unbearable.

  I poked my head back through the door to tell Relic that it looked like the temple had been claimed by the volcano. I flinched when I found the Gloryhammer flying toward my face. Fortunately, it passed straight through my nose and sank into the two-foot-thick slab of stone I was ghosting through. Shards of rock flew everywhere as cracks spread across the surface. I drifted aside as Tower brought the hammer around once more, delivering a second blow. The door crumbled. He kicked aside shattered rock and looked down the shaft on the other side.

  “There are no stairs,” he said. “I do see a green glow far below.”

  Green? I looked back down, and found that the previously orange light was, in fact, green. As I watched, the green broke apart into blue and yellow swirls, which were washed away by waves of purple. If this was lava, it was like no lava I’d ever seen.

  “Missing stairs are no problem,” said twin squeaky voices. A pair of squirrel-sized spider monkeys jumped to Tower’s shoulders. “I’ll check it out,” they said, before leaping into the shaft, bouncing back and forth across the gaps in the stone where the bone stairs once stood.

  Since stairs were optional for me as well, I decided I’d beat Menagerie to the bottom of the shaft. I dropped down, passing them, the heat growing in intensity as I descended. The disk of light at the bottom continued to change colors and patterns in a chaotic, unpredictable fashion.

  My ghost skin tingled as my body emerged from the shaft. What I saw defied my understanding. Relic had said the temple was in a crystal cavern, but this didn’t look like any cavern I’d ever been inside, and there wasn’t a crystal in sight. Imagine, if you can, a large, turbulent cloud, ever-changing as it drifts across the sky. Now imagine what it would look like if you were inside the cloud. The stone around me was an undulating, amorphous shape. The walls looked solid, despite their refusal to stand still or maintain a single color. The room was full of bones, no doubt the remnants of the stairwell. Fragments of skulls, femurs, and chalk-white teeth were scattered in all directions, resting on the ceiling and walls as well as the floor, though if I wasn’t looking at the round opening of the stairwell, I couldn’t be certain what was a floor and what was a wall. I closed my eyes, since the shifting walls left me feeling seasick. It didn’t help. I lost all sensation of what was up or down. My ghost form had only a tenuous connection with gravity at best, but here there was nothing at all to orient me. Fortunately, when I envisioned the bone-handled knife, I felt its familiar tug.

  I turned my face in its direction, glancing back up the shaft. The spider monkeys had reached the opening to the room, staring at the chaos with wide eyes. Further up the shaft I saw a shadowy figure clambering down the walls like some human spider. As it drew nearer, I saw it was Zetetic.

  The monkeys glanced up. Perhaps feeling a sense of obligation to be first into the room, they jumped, dropping lightly to the writhing stone. The monkeys stumbled as the stone shifted beneath them. Though they didn’t sink, it looked as if they were riding waves. One of the monkeys managed to rise on all fours, his tail wrapped around a shimmering polka-dotted stalagmite, but was toppled a second later when the pillar sank back into the surface. The confused monkeys tapped the stone beneath them with their knuckles, then rubbed their tiny fists. The stone was hard, despite its fluid nature.

  The Deceiver’s head popped out of the shaft and looked around. He dropped onto the shifting floor and landed on his knees, giggling. “By the unanswerable questions! False matter!” He looked around, delight in his eyes. “I saw a nugget of it once, preserved inside an enchanted pearl in the palace of the mer-king. I had no idea that such a large volume of the stuff still existed!”

  The monkeys had been carried by the shifting floor until one now stood perpendicular to Zetetic, while another was surfing a wave of stone fifty feet away. The monkey near Zetetic looked slightly green as it said, “What the hell is wrong with this place?” He rode the chaotic stone higher, until he was looking straight down on the Deceiver. “Shouldn’t one of us be falling?”

  The Deceiver shook his head. “Ignore your eyes. Think of down as whatever direction you point the soles of your feet.” Zetetic rose on trembling legs, holding his hands out to steady himself. His eyes were closed. A few seconds later, he cautiously opened his eyes. He grinned as the monkey was carried back and forth on currents of stone. “Imagine you are perfectly stationary. You are the center of your world, and let the room orbit around you. Everything is relative here.”

  The monkey responded by vomiting. The clear, frothy broth pooled around his feet. He closed his eyes and moaned, “Make it stop.”

  Zetetic shrugged. “I don’t know what else to say to help you. Your body is made of true matter. It still obeys the same physical rules it always has. You can control your physical response with simple willpower.”

  Menagerie was still two very sick little monkeys by the time No-Face, Relic, and Father Ver made it down the shaft on a rope ladder. No-Face and Relic were quickly toppled by the changing landscape. Father Ver managed to remain upright as he dropped from the shaft, frowning as he took in the bodies in motion around him. He responded by holding out his arms and turning around slowly. The stone in a ten-foot disk beneath him flattened out and stopped moving.

  He crossed his arms and said, in a firm tone, “I’m standing on the floor.”

  No-Face, who was directly overhead, suddenly plummeted onto the circle of motionless stone, landing at the Truthspeaker’s feet. The monkey who’d been speaking with Zetetic leapt from his perch on the wall and landed on No-Face’s chest. I had no idea where the second half of Menagerie had gotten to. It was impossible to estimate the size of the chamber. It seemed to stretch out for miles, but the rules of perspective were completely useless. Relic was just a little speck, seemingly a hund
red yards away, then he reached out and tapped the edge of his staff onto the circle that Ver had calmed and suddenly he was close enough to touch, crawling onto the island and collapsing next to No-Face.

  Zetetic didn’t seem bothered by the sudden emergence of a floor. He continued to ride the shifting stone, as surefooted as a forest-pygmy on a swaying vine. “Fighting it is only going to make you more disoriented.”

  “Fighting falsehood is my sworn duty,” said Father Ver. “The truth of what has happened here is plain. The pagans corrupted the true matter of the cavern, infecting it with falseness, which has flourished in isolation. In the beginning, before the Divine Author dipped the sacred quill in the holy ink, matter was devoid of such truths as width and length and breadth. By worshipping false gods, the ancient priests weakened the walls surrounding them. The stone has gone feral.”

  “This is going to shock you,” said Zetetic, “but I concur. We’re surrounded by the original stuff of creation, matter unshaped by mind. With practice, we could mold it to anything we can imagine. This is the greatest treasure we’ve yet discovered, far more valuable than gold, and you’re wasting it by turning it into mere rock.”

  “Stone must learn to respect the truth that it is stone,” said Father Ver, striding forward, calming more of the undulating rock into smooth gray solidity. Soon, he had an oblong island fifty feet long and a few yards wide frozen into rather mundane looking granite.

  Relic pulled himself back to his feet and said, “At least there is no question that we have found the perfect location to attack the dragon’s spirit. In a place like this, we should have little difficulty ripping the veil between the physical and the spiritual worlds.”

  Looking around, I realized that everyone was present and accounted for except Tower and Infidel. I flew back up the shaft, homing in on the bone-handled knife. I cut a path through stone and emerged in the hall where I found Tower with his helmet removed, on his knees before Infidel, holding her hand. He was kissing her knuckles.