Stardeep

by Bruce Cordell

  Telarian found his steed traversing what had once been a street, its cobbles now buckled and misaligned. Squat tenements of white stone crowded along the road, mostly collapsed and shattered beneath the settling ceiling.

  Flashing lantern beams picked out hundreds of bodies lying in the street, in positions of casual repose, as if they had settled for a midmorning nap from which none had ever risen again. The humanoid shapes were as hard and pale as the sedimentary rock in the tunnels. Telarian’s first thought was that they were scattered, looted sculptures.

  Telarian dismounted. He saw the forms were not posed in any way, like a statue might be. No, the remains were apparently people who fell to a disaster unrecorded. An image granted him earlier by Nis flashed before his eyes—a slender, white tower burning as it receded into the sky, leaving behind a plain of absolute black. The image dissolved. Telarian leaned in to get a closer look at one of the bodies.

  Not elf, nor precisely human. Orc? The features were too gracile to be those of any modern orc. Some sages believed the farther one penetrated history, the more primitive one would find the inhabitants. Were these extinct people something related to goblins? Whatever they were, they hadn’t survived into the current age in any realm or plane Telarian knew. Nor had he seen any such creatures in any of his visions of the future. Whatever civilization and achievements these humanoids may have once known, reality moved on without them.

  Thindhul said, “Who knew Stardeep’s underdungeon opened upon such”—the Knight Commander fluttered his hand at the scene—“such enigma.”

  “One that doesn’t concern us,” said Telarian, more to himself than Thindhul. Whatever the nature of the secrets and treasures hidden away in Stardeep’s unexplored basements, they had no bearing on the reason they were there, or what he intended to accomplish.

  “Very well. Which way do we go from here?” asked Thindhul, his tone sardonic.

  Telarian rose and studied the wider streets and half-collapsed ceiling. A score more Knights issued from the tunnel out into the streets to set up a temporary perimeter. From the diviner’s vantage, he counted at least five side streets, each as wide or wider than the street they’d emerged upon, though at least a couple were choked by shattered walls, collapsed ceiling sections, and fossilized bodies.

  “We’ll continue to follow the street we’re on. Since it led to the tunnel, this was likely once a main thoroughfare. It should lead to the city’s center. From there, we’ll decide where to go next.”

  Thindhul nodded, and shouted orders for the Knights to form up behind the vanguard. With the streets so wide, the Knight Commander judged the space adequate for five Knights to easily ride abreast. Telarian left him to his duty and joined the vanguard as it picked its way forward, stepping around the twisted, stony corpses that littered the road.

  As they progressed, the crushing weight of the fallen ceiling gradually lessened, revealing more of the city’s architecture. Thick foundations gave way to arching white balusters, fluted columns, and slender balconies. The upward construction did little to draw the eyes away from the grisly, hardened remains of the city’s former citizens, whose numbers increased the farther they moved.

  By the time the vanguard entered the central city hub, the forms underfoot were as thick as cobbles. It was easier for the horses to trod those unfeeling backs than to pick their way through. Telarian was riding the vanguard, judging the Knights’ confidence would be bolstered by his presence.

  The ceiling arched up into a great dome, at the center of which a violet flame burned dimly, like the ghost of the sun. Beneath the flame rose a jumble of rock-hard bodies rising some forty paces from a broad base to a narrow tip. The cone-shaped cemetery mass was surmounted by a blood red throne of rough-cut crystal.

  A lone, bone white figure sat upon that throne, unmoving and lifeless as the hundreds of fossilized forms who made up its court and supported its high seat.

  Telarian called a halt. The vanguard paused some dozens of paces from the mound’s lower edge. He waited for Thindhul to catch up as he continued to observe the panorama.

  When Thindhul rode to Telarian’s side, the Knight Commander asked, “Do you sense a threat?”

  The diviner shrugged, “Perhaps we have stumbled upon the epicenter of some terrible genocidal ritual. However, that heap has the look of something assembled after the bodies were petrified.”

  “Either way, nothing to do with us, correct?”

  The Keeper replied, “If that statue sitting on its pretty seat maintains any cognition whatsoever, perhaps it can provide us with directions.”

  Thindhul’s mouth opened with a surprised gape. He said, “Is that wise?”

  Telarian fixed the Commander with a wintry look, saying nothing.

  Thindhul stuttered, shook his head, and finally declared, “I shall send someone to inquire.”

  The Knight Commander turned and gestured to one of the vanguard. “Knight Dilthari, ascend that heap and investigate.”

  An elf woman dismounted, gave the reins to a companion, and approached the heap.

  She walked the periphery of the cone, looking for the best route to ascend the pile of rigid bodies.

  The figure on the throne suddenly stood from its seat and looked down at Dilthari, just as the violet flame on the ceiling flared to three times its original luminosity. The figure, as naked and roughly preserved as all the other figures, absorbed that light across its hard surface in discrete patterns that resembled regalia and clothing. It was revealed as wearing a crown of light and a luminescent cape, and it brandished a long staff of streaming effulgence.

  It coughed a plume of dust, then mumbled something to Dilthari in a language unknown to Telarian. The tone made it seem a question. The diviner quickly essayed a charm of language comprehension, as the figure spoke again.

  This time, Telarian caught part of its question, “… more subjects whose salvaged essence can fuel my elaborate mechanisms?”

  Dilthari continued to stare up, uncomprehending. Telarian shouted, “Stand away, Knight!”

  The figure, despite its fossilized limbs, pointed down the slope with its intangible staff. Dilthari scrambled backward. The other Knights of the vanguard unlimbered crossbows and fumbled to fit bolts.

  Dilthari gasped as if punched in the stomach and ceased moving. She half turned her gaze back to Telarian, surprise dawning across her features. To the diviner’s eyes, it seemed as if the Knight exhaled a thin streamer of mist from her nose and mouth. The streamer flowed through the air toward the crowned one, who snared it with his blazing staff. Dilthari’s flesh instantly cooled and paled to the color of salt. She toppled, becoming one more rigid carcass among the thousands of inert, fossilized bodies. As she struck the previously hardened corpses, her outstretched arm broke off at the shoulder with an unnerving report.

  Even as Thindhul screamed, “Attack!” a volley of bolts battered the creature with such force it overbalanced and fell from sight off the back of the heap.

  Telarian waited to hear the creature crash down, but several heartbeats of silence dashed his expectation. Instead, the dusty, dry voice mumbled from behind the heap. “Wake, wake, wake my sleepy ones! Open your dull eyes and stand—your prophet commands it! Dream no more in lonely exile!”

  “By the Sign!” screamed Thindhul. The rubble on which the Knights rode began to shudder, heave, and crack. Every fossilized corpse scattered across the buried city’s central hub, and all the way down the road along which the Knights were assembled began to twitch. Each became a terror of eon-hardened hunger.

  A tsunami of screams scratched from a thousand rock throats. The noise slammed through the Knights, threatening to break even their renowned valor. The howls were of damned souls thrust suddenly back into bodies completely foreign to them. The hellish sound was one the survivors would hear echoing through their trances all the rest of their days.

  Nis was in Telarian’s hand a moment later, dashing his rising panic as water to a flame. Logic,
cold and untethered to emotion, become his only companion. As Knights pulled their weapons and began to slash at the stoic undead that rose as a pale tide all around them, Telarian made for the throne. Clearly, even if a few Empyrean Knights were to survive the next twenty or thirty heartbeats, the puppeteer of this ghastly city had to be eradicated.

  A dozen stony hands, blunt with erosion, pulled his screaming mount from under him. Telarian leaped free, his ebony blade pulling him up and away from the sounds of ripping horseflesh. Then he was on the central mound, dashing up the steep slope of solidified carrion, even as it began to shudder and separate. Each unit of the cone-shaped structure became a screaming zombie whose flesh was hard as bedrock.

  He stepped on a writhing arm, a yowling head, and into a palm and out of it before the hand could clutch and hold him. He batted away a face whose gaping mouth threatened to bite him, turning the pallid stone into so much sand. Then he reached the apex, just as the perpetrator of the uprising surmounted the opposite side. Unlike his own uneven ascent, the energy-wreathed lich was raised securely in the hands of its newly animated followers.

  Telarian and the relic lich faced each other from across the crystalline throne. The diviner looked into a countenance so weathered that only a shallow concavity faced him, incapable of displaying the least hint of feature.

  The obscene crater that once housed a mouth worked, and it somehow spoke without tongue to shape its words. “The mechanism requires fresh infusion. Blood is too sticky and prone to clotting. Souls serve best.” Telarian’s spell of translation allowed him to understand the creature’s supernatural utterances, but the lich’s allusion to a mechanism escaped him. In any event, the context implied nothing pleasant for him and the Empyrean Knights.

  Telarian swung Nis down and around from where it lightly rested on his shoulder, in a vicious cross-body swing. His foe easily blocked with its staff of blazing light. The contact jolted through the Keeper’s arm, but Nis steadied him despite the flexing, heaving slope on which he stood.

  My presence, or perhaps my twin’s, Nis projected into his mind, has awakened a thing that lay quiescent in Stardeep’s basements since before Stardeep was delved. Splintered desires fuel this ancient shell, desires so potent they bleed out from the host and share animation with petrified remains of a murdered species.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Stardeep, Underdungeon

  The demon gauntlet snuffled and coughed, straining forward, following the fading scent of those who’d gone before. Gage was pulled along in the fiend’s wake, his gloved hand held forward and down, slinking from tree to silvery tree. His quarry’s path had steered wide of chill mist rivers that sliced through the nighted landscape. He was happy to avoid intersecting the impenetrable vapor—even his bound demon shuddered and bucked when he’d tried to insert it into the first standing bank he’d passed.

  At length he came to the forest’s edge. A margin of dead rock lay beyond, decorated with craggy boulders and narrow fissures. Beyond that lay a sea of colorless fog, chill and endless. He drew in a quick breath when he saw several corpses littering the beach, the decaying bodies matching those he’d dispatched earlier. One group of dead monsters lay near the edge of the fog, though several marked the perimeter of a large boulder about thirty paces from the mist’s edge. The demon gauntlet bleated and tried to pull forward. Kiril and the other two had come this way. Had they entered the mist?

  Gage studied the scene a moment longer, then moved.

  The boulder was splashed with green and black ichor—the thief counted at least six of the loathsome creatures, battered, burnt, and …

  An opening! A rectangular portal pierced the boulder’s overhanging side that faced the fog sea. A massive iron gate lay torn from its hinges, scratched and partially crumpled. The lower portion of the cavity was choked with monsters, all dead, many showing signs of flashburn. Blasting magic had separated many of these from their putrid lives. He didn’t see evidence of any blade-work. Kiril had not drawn her Cerulean sword to defeat these beasts. Or was the slaughter the work of someone else? Impossible to say without a witness to describe what had occurred.

  His demon glove strained toward the portal. Gage spent another ten heartbeats examining the doorway before darting forward, diving to clear the sprawled bodies at the last moment. He tucked his shoulder and rolled to absorb the impact of his quick entrance. The steep stairs beyond made this tricky feat even more difficult, but Gage executed the maneuver with panache.

  At the stair’s foot a tunnel led off, its downward slope noticeable. The tunnel’s rock walls were streaked with deposits of white stone, but the light from the entrance topping the stairs didn’t reach far. Gage produced a clear glass vessel and shook it vigorously. The chemicals within were inimical to each other, and given time, slowly separated. When mixed, the hostile essences fought, producing light.

  His gauntlet yanked forward with surprising strength.

  Gage grunted and resisted. His glove muttered, “Never forget, your soul is forfeit.”

  “I quaver in my boots,” the thief replied. “Behave. Don’t forget, acid burns. Remember what happened last time?”

  The glove muttered something too quietly for Gage to hear. “Better. Now lead on. Quietly.”

  Gage advanced down the tunnel, surrounded by a dim sphere of light, his eyes wide for any evidence of his quarry.

  Gage gave his light another vigorous shake to rejuvenate its intensity. How long had he walked these strangely smooth tunnels?

  “More importantly,” he muttered aloud, “how’d Kiril and her friends get so far ahead of me?” He gave his gauntlet a suspicious squint.

  Ahead, a hole in the floor gaped nearly the entire diameter of the tunnel. His light picked out individual strands of thickly intertwined webs that obscured the hole’s sides, but opened into a twisting funnel at the hole’s center. A cold, dusty wind blew from the gap, as did a rushing, full-throated roar of moving water.

  His eyes lit on a papery scrap that lay ensnared in the web about two body lengths down the funnel. Though stuck, its outer edge wavered in the chill breeze.

  “I am on the right trail,” he whispered, relief washing over him. The chance of the glove misleading him wasn’t out of the question. It had grown more willful since the other glove, with the eye, was burnt to ash by Angul.

  Gage stared into the webbing, wondering who had dropped the scrap of paper—Kiril, or one of the other two? Vellum was expensive. In fact …

  The thief removed his pack. From it he produced an elven rope, a selection of iron spikes with eyeholes, and a battered mallet. He selected a point on the wall and sunk the spike with three strikes. The echoes of the malletfalls made him wince. Too late for second thoughts!

  He threaded the rope in the anchored spike, tied one end into his belt, and let himself over the edge of the webbed hole. Hand over hand he lowered himself until he was close enough to snatch the lone vellum scrap from the sticky strands. It took a little careful tugging to extract his prize without ripping it. It was blank. Unpenned and already-spent spell scrolls possessed the same sense of limitless possibility in their clean expanse. They seemed eager for the next spell, the wilder and more potent, the better. Of course, they also represented a tidy sum of gold. He stowed his prize, worth a tenday’s lodging in the finest festhall in Laothkund.

  As Gage hauled himself out of the hole, he heard the unmistakable cry of a wailing infant below.

  “What in Akadi’s name …?” He glanced down. A many-limbed white bulk filled the web tunnel beneath him. Dozens of pale, stone-hard eyes fixed on his own. From its mandibled mouth came the pitiful mewls of a crying baby.

  Gage screamed. The gargantuan thing, its legs shaking off the dust of ages, rose beneath him. Its flesh was stone, as if a statue come to life.

  The thief groped at his belt, his terror-numbed fingers finding the proper clasp more through luck than skill. He grasped a warm bulb—his most prized alchemical item, and worth conside
rably more than a tenday in a festhall.

  The arachnid was too close, but dangling as he was, he had no other option. He dashed the bulb down, whipping it with as much strength as he could muster. The bulb detonated on the creature’s face only a body length away.

  The explosive fount punched up into his body. It reminded him of the time he’d leaped for a neighboring roof but missed and fell three stories. Except this time he was on fire. But, just like then, he blacked out a moment later.

  Flickering light on a smooth white ceiling. Torchlight? A numbness slowly faded under a barrage of tingling—and pain. Gage blinked. Why would that be? He groaned as he sat up. His entire body was one contiguous bruise. Then he recalled the spider and the detonation.

  The webbed hole lay several dozen paces away, its gooey coating ablaze. The explosion had propelled him past the gap. About halfway between him and the burning pit crouched a figure silhouetted by the flames. At first the thief took it for a detached portion of the spider, blown loose in the blast. Then he noticed the black scales, the horns, and as it slowly stood from its crouch, its flaring batlike wings.

  Those black, finely grained scales looked familiar …

  Gage dropped his gaze to his right hand. His gauntlet. Gone!

  He jerked his eyes back to the figure. It stood now to its full height and beyond, reaching and stretching its long, clawed limbs as if waking from sleep. Or as if freed from an enchantment that bound its shape into something far smaller. Say, a glove?

  The creature, clearly a demon, began to chuckle. One of its eyes fixed the thief with a sinister, gleeful glare. A mass of burned flesh and scars festered where its other eye should have been. Gage recalled again how Angul had burned his other gauntlet to a cinder, the one with the single, enchanted eye.

  He scuttled backward on hands and legs. A sharp rock cut his palm.

  The demon flared its wings. It interrupted its mirth to speak. “Recall the payment I’ve reminded you that you owe me, mortal, time and again. I’m afraid our acquaintanceship is over. The time has come for me to eat your soul!”