by Dorian Hart
Aravia sighed. “Anyone else here in town know anything about them?”
“Doubt it,” said Minya wearily. “Those ruins are bad news, and everyone knows it.”
* * *
Maybe someone else in Verdshane would have had more to say about the ruined city to the north, but they soon discovered that gopher-bugs had ripped through the rest of the village like a plague of deadly locusts, leaving no survivors. In the woodshed of one of the homes set back from the road, the company found the bodies of a young couple along with three crushed gopher-bugs. A heavy blood-spattered spade lay on the ground beside them. A hurried tour of the remaining homes revealed similar gory scenes. If any had survived the monster attack, they were either still in hiding or had fled down the Greatwood Road.
The forest north of the village was thick and difficult. The elms, pines, and beeches grew close enough together that navigating their territory was like winding through a wooden-walled maze. There were no game trails, let alone man-made tracks, to make the journey easier, and the trunks were thick enough that even Tor and Grey Wolf couldn’t hack a path through them with their swords. Aravia silently cursed Master Serpicore for so severely restricting her access to his spellbooks.
As if reading her mind, Tor turned to her as they bushwhacked. “Hey Aravia, do you know any spells that would make this easier?”
“I know of plenty,” she answered. “There are teleporting spells like the one Abernathy used to bring us to his tower. There are spells that change your substance to vapors, so you could slip between the trees like mist. There are spells that let people fly, so we could go over the trees. But Serpicore never let me see the books for them. Someday I’ll learn them all, but that doesn’t help us right now.”
“That’s okay,” said Tor. “The spells you know have been great so far.”
Aravia blushed, just a little. Then she thought about Abernathy’s library and the spellbooks he had promised her. What would be in them? What great heights of arcane learning would she achieve with the collected formulae of an archmage at her fingertips?
Distracted by these thoughts, she was surprised to find herself suddenly in among the ruins. The remains of a stone wall, twenty feet at its highest point, rose up among the towering pine boles. Chunks of rock were scattered around the wall’s base, and vines curled up and across its weathered stones.
Aravia peered into the morning haze rising from a carpet of last autumn’s leaves, and everywhere now among the trees were the husks of a long-dead city, the remnants of its walls and towers and roads resting in mossy silence beneath the forest that had conquered it. The Company crossed what was once a wide avenue, marked now only by a few brave paving stones reaching futilely out of the moldering underbrush. Then another enormous decaying wall loomed before them, the seams between its stones sprouting with moss and rough brown lichen. In the days when it was strong and whole, it would have blocked their path, but time and the woods had conspired to fill it with gaps.
“How long ago do you suppose people lived here?” asked Dranko. “Or more to the point, how long ago did they stop living here?”
“Hundreds a’ years,” said Kibi. The stonecutter had his fingertips on the stone and had the oddest expression on his face. “For hundreds a’ years, these stones’ve lived in silence.”
Grey Wolf snorted and gave a curt laugh. “They tell you that, did they?”
Kibi didn’t answer.
“I couldn’t care less how old these ruins are,” Grey Wolf said to the others. “What did Abernathy say we were looking for again?”
“A building with no way in,” said Aravia. “And a door with a bear’s head.”
“That don’t make no sense,” said Kibi. “If there’s a door, ain’t that a way in?”
“And all of these buildings have a way in,” said Morningstar. “Inasmuch as one could call them buildings at all. They’re just foundations.”
Kibi still had his hand upon the crumbling wall. Was the bearded man doing magic? She remembered his exact words from their first night in the Greenhouse. “It don’t feel like magic,” he had said. “Just feels natural-like.”
She moved closer to him. “Kibi, how do you know the wall is that old?”
Kibi turned red and looked at his boots. “Oh, jus’…jus’ a feelin’, is all.”
“Is this what you were talking about?” she pressed. “You’ve learned some kind of rock magic?”
“No, no…” Kibi took his hand from the wall and fidgeted with his thumbs. “I ain’t never learned no magic, I promise you. Rocks sometimes give me a sense of ’em, but I ain’t no wizard like you are.”
No, he wasn’t. Kibi was a quiet, kindly man but obviously not a great thinker, and wizardry demanded formidable intelligence. Whatever he was talking about, real or imagined, it wasn’t going to be relevant to her studies, career, or ability to perform her new duties.
Now that the ruins surrounded them, there was no need to push on in any particular direction. Spreading out would accelerate the search, but Grey Wolf was quick to point out that splitting up would invite disaster if there were any more gopher-bugs buzzing around. Not that there had been any sign of them, nor of any other animals for that matter. Aravia hadn’t spent much of her life in the woods, but she had read about them. In her books, forests like these were teeming with life—birds, squirrels, chipmunks and the like. But there was none of that: no birdsong, no animal tracks, no rustling of rodents or telltale bear droppings, none of the signs Aravia expected to see.
The animals knew better. Like they should know better. An unsettling realization fell upon her, as though she had just recalled an important but forgotten errand. She fought down an urge to stop and turn around.
Ernie put a voice to Aravia’s anxiety. “We don’t belong here. I think we should go back.”
“We can’t go back now,” said Tor, though his voice carried little of its usual exuberant conviction.
“Ernie may be right,” said Dranko. “This place is making me tingly and not in the good way.”
Grey Wolf stopped. They all stopped. Aravia wiped sweat from her brow. A feeling of something akin to dread was growing in her mind—nothing overwhelming or panic-inducing, but a persistent, niggling fear that they had strayed into a place not meant for them.
“Maybe Abernathy was wrong to send us here,” Grey Wolf said slowly.
Kibi walked forward until he was up at the head of the group, next to Grey Wolf. “What’re you all talkin’ about? I don’t feel nothin’ tingly. We’ve come all this way. How are we even thinkin’ ’bout stoppin’ now? You want Mrs. Horn to have died for no good reason?”
Aravia fought against the worry. A part of her mind had retained its clarity and was swiftly forming a hypothesis. “It’s an enchantment. At least, I think it is. But I take it as a sign we’re getting close to our goal. Minya said the ruins were haunted and no one comes here. I don’t think they’re haunted at all. I believe a subtle magical suggestion drives people back. Abernathy probably put it there himself to keep people from blundering into his monster-prison, but in his haste neglected to tell us. We have to fight through it.”
Grey Wolf grunted nervously. “Let’s keep on, then. Abernathy said the building we’re looking for is intact, right? Everything else has been just bits of buildings, so something with four unbroken walls and a roof shouldn’t be too hard to find. We’ll walk in a group, but everyone pick a different direction to focus on, and we’ll see what we see.”
Half an hour later it was Kibi who spotted it. Despite her knowledge that their unease was artificial, Aravia found it hard to concentrate, and she kept looking back toward Verdshane. She caught the others stealing sidelong glances southward, or looking worriedly at their feet when they should be alert for Abernathy’s building. But Kibi showed no sign of concern, and it was he who shouted, “Hey, I bet that’s it over there. Dang, but it’s huge.”
The building in question would have looked immense just by dint of being s
urrounded by smaller fragments of its fellows, but its apparent size was augmented by its placement in a wide clearing. Also, it really was huge, a great stone rectangle topped with an enormous dome, the apex of which must have been a hundred feet off the ground.
The two sides in view had many window-like depressions, but these were filled in solid with stone blocks. There were no doors, marked with bears or otherwise, so Grey Wolf led the company around clockwise. On the far side, in the center of the wall, they found what they sought: a small door carved with the face of a snarling bear. (Calling it a “door” was not quite accurate; it was a door-shaped indentation, but there was no handle, no hinges, no keyhole, and no crack to show how it might open.)
“Abernathy said to close our eyes and walk through it,” said Aravia.
“That sounds easy,” said Tor. The boy closed his eyes, covered them with one hand for good measure, and stepped into the wall of stone. He passed through the “door,” melting into it before vanishing entirely. His voice came from the other side. “Come take a look at this! It’s amazing!”
Aravia was not at all practiced in illusions, but she could recognize a well-formed magical effect when she saw one. Her heart raced. Maybe she could convince the others to give her time to study it, after they’d checked out Abernathy’s body-in-the-field.
While she stood admiring the illusion, the others phased through it, their bodies swallowed up with nary a ripple in the fake stone. She hurried in after them, only remembering at the last moment to shut her eyes. (Though was that truly necessary? She’d read the theory, that with a strong enough surety of disbelief, one could pass through illusionary barriers while observing them. She’d have to try it on the way out.)
The interior of the building was one gigantic chamber, the flat sections of its ceiling supported by soaring squared columns, and every surface—the walls, floor, columns, even the interior of its central dome—was of uncracked white marble. That alone would have impressed her. But in the building’s center, on the floor directly beneath the dome, was a fifty-foot high hemispherical cage made of a glinting silvery metal. Its curved bars were thin and widely spaced; it wasn’t a cage that could contain anything smaller than a bear. She looked closer. There were additional hemispheres of decreasing size, nested one inside the other, and in the center of them all was a glowing blue light. More detail than that she couldn’t make out from where she stood, other than a large bundle of rags on the floor, just outside the blue radiance.
A ringing hum came from the metal bars, like the noise from a tuning fork that hadn’t quite stopped oscillating. Magic was emanating from them, a magic so thick and powerful it almost had taste and smell. Here was a place of immensely powerful enchantment, just as Abernathy had promised her at the Greenhouse. Yes, her primary motivation had been to get her hands on his magical library, but almost as compelling had been his assurance of the wonders she would witness in his service. “My dear girl,” he had said. “Working for me, you will see practical magic, out in the world, of a type and magnitude you will not find in your old master’s house. There are old magics in our kingdom that most people have never seen. But you will.”
She was certainly seeing some now! She walked forward while the others stood and gaped. The white marble floor was drab and dusty closer to the “door,” but the slabs beneath the metal hemispheres were pristine and polished.
She stopped twenty feet in, at the edge of the outermost cage. She didn’t recognize the material. It was the wrong color for either silver or iron, its shiny gray surface gleaming with a bronze-ish cast. The metal ribs were round, about four-inches in diameter, and so far apart from one another that she wouldn’t even have to duck to step inside the cage.
“Aravia,” said Grey Wolf, “do you think it’s safe to get closer?”
“I’m slightly out of my depth,” she admitted. “But I doubt Abernathy would have told us to get close enough to measure something in the middle of all this, if it weren’t safe.”
“Really?” said Grey Wolf. “Because I don’t doubt that for a minute. He didn’t mention anything about these metal bars. He might not have even known they were here.”
Tor answered the question by stepping past both of them, crossing the perimeter himself, and turning to look at her. “It’s fine. Come on.”
They passed through three more curved metal cage walls, progressively smaller, and by the last of these Aravia had to crouch down to get through the shrinking gaps between the bars.
That’s where she stopped, with only the innermost cage before her, and stared, puzzled.
“Uh oh,” said Dranko.
“Aravia,” said Grey Wolf slowly. “Do I remember right, that there’s supposed to be a person suspended in that blue light, and our job is to measure how far off the ground his foot is?”
“Yes,” said Aravia. “That’s what Abernathy asked us to do. But…”
The innermost hemisphere was indeed filled with a soft blue glow, a magical field just as Abernathy had said. The hum of the metal bars was louder here, and the field was charged with vibrating energy.
There was also a person, a man with ruddy skin and golden hair, wearing baggy brown clothes of an unfamiliar style. The problem was, the man wasn’t in the blue light at all. He was what she had mistaken for a pile of rags, lying in a pool of blood that had dried black on the white marble tiles. His neck had been torn open.
Hovering in the volume of azure radiance were about a dozen gopher-bugs, their insect wings frozen in mid-flap. They looked like museum pieces, perfectly still, single eyes open. Saliva glistened in their mouths. The closest of the creatures was nearly at the outer edge of the blue field, while the others formed a loose cloud of furry vermin that extended back to the very center of the concentric metal hemispheres.
Dranko frowned at the body. “So, zero inches off the ground then. That will be easy to remember.”
Aravia stepped forward until her nose was only inches from the edge of the blue radiance—an edge that was crisply defined, like the curve of a colored glass bowl. The nearest gopher-bug was at eye-height, barely a foot away, a specimen pinned to nothing. “It’s a stasis field,” she whispered. “Time isn’t passing in there.”
“Really?” said Tor. “What would happen if I put my hand inside it?”
“Don’t!” she barked. “Abernathy said not to touch it. I haven’t made a great study of stasis fields, but my guess is that any part of you that went inside it would be permanently stuck there. We’d have to cut your hand off.”
Tor took a step back.
“But what happened?” asked Grey Wolf. “Why are there gopher-bugs in there?”
“Let me think.”
Thinking, of course, was what Aravia did best. In less than a minute she had it figured out. “I have a theory. Two theories, actually.” The others watched her expectantly.
“Theory number one: the stasis field is part of the lock on Abernathy’s door.” She pieced the last few puzzle pieces together in her mind as she spoke. “The door itself is probably in its center, a magical portal, invisible. If anything manages to get through, it gets stuck in the stasis, a bug trapped in amber.
“That man, he’s been in there for a while. Abernathy expected him to still be suspended, but something happened, and time started up again just for a second or two, and he escaped. But the gopher-bugs were waiting for him, and killed him before he could get very far. Then the stasis reactivated while the gopher-bugs were still flying around, and these were caught in it. That means someone knew the stasis field was going to drop, and had sent those monsters to kill the man before he could escape. It was only incidental that some of them found Verdshane and went on a rampage afterward.”
The others just stared at her. She’d explain all this to Abernathy later; he at least would understand it.
“That’s the less likely theory,” she went on. “Theory number two is similar, though. Maybe Abernathy’s monster has figured out a way to turn off the stasis for
a very short period and get through the actual door, but didn’t want to try itself, in case it didn’t work. So it sent the gopher-bugs as a test. Maybe the man was from a previous test, I don’t know. But the stasis snapped back on before all the gopher-bugs could escape its area.”
Kibi scratched his beard. “So his test worked, then. And if he knows it worked, I’m thinkin’ next time he might decide to try it himself.”
One thing was certain: they had to report to Abernathy without delay.
CHAPTER TEN
TOR SURE WAS glad Aravia knew what all that stuff with the metal cages was. What would they do without her? It was like having a smaller, prettier version of Abernathy traveling with them, and would his hand really stick in that blue light? Couldn’t he just pull it out again? Why was it blue?
The others were leaving the building, which wasn’t good because he should be in front in case anything happened—that was his job, to be in front, to catch any approaching perils before they could menace his friends—so he dashed ahead and went through the not-really-there doorway right after Grey Wolf.
Good thing he did that, too, because when he emerged in the big clearing there was someone waiting, watching, a person maybe thirty feet off at the edge of the woods with blue paint all over his face and no hair. There was a long, awkward pause while he and the blue-faced stranger stared at each other, and just as Dranko said, “Who’s that?” the mystery man turned and bolted into the woods.
So Tor did the logical thing and took off after him because Blue-face must be up to no good to have fled like that, and Abernathy would want to know what he was doing there, so of course Tor had to give chase, and if he caught up and there was a fight, well, he was a great swordsman, and better it be him in case the man was dangerous because one person in their group dying was enough. And the others would be close behind if he needed help. And what if he wasn’t up to no good, and maybe Blue-face was just scared of them, scared of a bunch of armed folk popping out through a solid panel of stone like that? But in that case Tor still wanted to talk to him and let him know they were friendly, and maybe the stranger knew what was going on with the gopher-bugs. Or was it her? If it was a woman maybe he shouldn’t fight her even if she were hostile because you didn’t fight against women. That’s what Master Elgus had taught him back at Castle Firemount, though his father had scoffed at that and said that if a woman ever came at him with a blade, just worry about the blade.