by Mark Acres
At the top of the stairs by the door, the soldier barked at the guards. “Open it!”
“You know the rules,” one guard protested. “No one goes there on pain of death.”
“Hurry!” Bagsby shouted, thrusting at one of the two guards opposing him with his quarterstaff. “They’re just outside the door! We can’t keep them out!”
“They’re already inside there, you dolt!” the would-be leader growled. “Open it!”
“We ain’t got a key,” the guard protested.
“Then break it down!”
Bagsby rammed the end of his quarterstaff up against the underside of his opponent’s jaw, rendering the man unconscious. At the same time, George dispatched his foe, using nothing but a dagger, as the stairway was too narrow for his great pike.
Bagsby glanced up. The four men at the top of the stairs were preparing to force the door; two of them would hit it to break it down.
“Now! Duck!” he shouted.
The trio of thieves threw themselves down flat on the stone staircase and covered their heads with their hands. Bagsby heard a solid thud, followed by a loud crash. Then the explosion flashed.
Deadly magic fire flared up from the floor of the tower room, consuming the fallen door and two of the guards in the first second of its existence. The two remaining men screamed in panic and beat the flames that rose from their tunics.
“In there—let’s go!” the leader still ordered. The second soldier hesitated. The first, glancing back down the stairwell, cursed and charged into the room. A second great explosion rocked the entire castle. Even with his eyes closed, Bagsby could see the flash of that second explosion, and an instant later the peculiar odor of ozone was in the air.
“Lightning trap,” Shulana called.
“Right,” Bagsby answered. “Let’s go.”
The little thief pounded up to the top of the stairs. “You!” he barked at the sole remaining soldier. “Out of my way!” The man dropped his spear and fled down the stairs past George, who tripped him, and Shulana, who watched him tumble toward the bottom of the great spiral far below.
“Shulana, hurry!” Bagsby said.
He stepped into the tower room, where everything that could burn was in flames. George was right behind Bagsby.
“Stay put until Shulana comes,” Bagsby ordered.
Shulana stood in the doorway, quickly chanting the words of the spell that made the magic auras of all things visible. When the spell was completed, she reeled backward! Never had she seen such strong auras, and so many, in so small a space.
“Hurry, hurry,” Bagsby urged.
Shulana forced herself to concentrate despite her shock and fear. She quickly spotted the glowing, pulsating, red egg-shaped auras in the center of the room. Next, she checked the floor. Only the magic circle glowed.
“The floor is safe,” she announced. “The Golden Eggs are right here.” She reached out her hand, touched one egg and then the other, and to her great relief saw them become visible. Then she located the source of the other extremely powerful aura that flooded the room.
“That crate against the wall. Don’t touch it—it’s enchanted,” she warned.
Bagsby noticed then that the plain wooden crate had not burned, despite the fire that had consumed shelves, parchments, and books in the room, and devoured human flesh in an instant.
“Valdaimon,” he breathed.
Inside the crate, in another realm reached through the gateway of a specially cut diamond, the soul of Valdaimon stirred. Intruders? Could it be?
Bagsby ran to the crate, despite Shulana’s warning. “Do what you must,” he said to her. “I will do what I must.”
Shulana once more set herself to casting a spell, this time a spell of diminution that made whatever she chose to affect shrink to a mere one-sixth of its normal size.
Bagsby flipped open the crate and screamed.
Before his eyes he saw living dust, thousands of tiny particles, swirling and blending with one another to take on a vaguely human form. First there was the hint of the outline of a head, then a torso, then a bony arm took shape.
Shulana finished her spell. She reached out and touched each egg again. As she did so, each shrank small enough for a man to hold easily in his hand.
George, who had watched all this in astonishment, nodded dumbly as Shulana extended her hand to him. She touched him, and he shrank. She picked him up and placed him on the tiny ledge of the arrow slit in the wall.
“Bagsby!” she shouted. “The rope!”
But Bagsby could not tear his eyes from the fascinating, horrifying sight inside the crate. The head, which moments before had been a vague, smooth outline, now revealed a face—a face which after a lifetime Bagsby still recognized.
“Valdaimon!” Bagsby bellowed. “You foul, murdering…”
“No time!” Shulana called. Already her keen elven hearing picked up the clank of armor coming from the bottom of the great stairway. “Get to the rope!”
“No,” Bagsby shouted. “No! I have to kill him! Now’s our chance!”
Shulana raced to Bagsby’s side, carefully turning her head so as not to stare directly into the forming face. Instead, she peeked side-long into the crate, aiming her glance at the middle portion. She saw the smooth outline of robes forming over the shape of two, scrawny, bony legs.
“You can’t kill him,” she said flatly. “He’s already dead.”
“I must!” Bagsby proclaimed, still staring at the now plainly visible, wrathful face as an almost solid arm began to reach slowly toward him.
Desperately, Shulana glanced about the room. Bagsby was useless, he was already in the power of those rheumy, dusty eyes whose gaze was locked on his. On the floor, just a few feet away, she spied a vial that had survived the explosion. A faint, pure-white aura still glowed about it.
“Water of the human gods!” Shulana exclaimed, excitement peaking in her voice.
“What?” Bagsby asked, turning in surprise to Shulana. So unusual was the excitement in her voice that his attention was drawn from the wizard’s eyes.
“Pour that vial on him—and quickly!” Shulana said. “Look out!” she added, suddenly shoving Bagsby backward, out of the grasp of the withered hand that suddenly darted from inside the crate.
Bagsby, taken by surprise and off balance, started to fall backward, and instinctively went into a back somersault. He flipped himself over twice, and rammed his head straight into the curving wall of the room. With a stunned, questioning look, he slumped over, unconscious.
Without further thought, Shulana grabbed the vial, ripped out the stopper, and poured the half contents over the bony arm. The remainder she splashed, without looking, into the crate. A piteous, wailing scream arose from within, as water blessed by the gods burned into the undead body! The arm crumbled into dust.
Shulana worked with lightning speed to complete her mission. She slammed the crate shut without looking inside, for she knew full well what was in it. Then she took the rope from around Bagsby’s waist, tied it to his sword, and dropped it out the arrow slit. She placed the eggs in a cloth sack she’d brought for that purpose. Lastly, she knelt beside Bagsby and roused him.
“Huhhnn...” Bagsby moaned.
“Quickly, awaken,” she whispered.
Bagsby’s eyes fluttered open.
“We leave now or we die here,” Shulana told him. The thief staggered to his feet. He was extremely dizzy but able to stand.
“Get to the rope,” Shulana ordered.
The last thing Bagsby remembered was holding the rope in his hand, gazing back in confusion at the wooden crate, while the sounds of clanking armor and confused shouts drifted through the door.
“And then, after I had reduced us in size, George helped me carry you down the rope. We were so small the guards never noticed us in the dark,”
Shulana explained.
Bagsby raised his head and winced with the pain.
“I’m surprised we carried it off,” he said, grinning broadly.
“Who was that guy who appeared in the tower window while we was runnin’ across the field?” George asked. “’E ‘ad the ugliest face I ever saw!”
“Valdaimon,” Shulana answered. “What you saw,” she said to Bagsby, “was his body re-forming as his soul returned to it.”
“Why didn’t he just blast us with a fireball or something?” Bagsby wondered out loud. “He must have been able to see us, despite our size.”
“He could not cast spells,” Shulana answered softly. “The blessed water damaged him. His right arm was gone, and from what George said, I think his eyes and mouth may be injured as well. No human mage can cast spells without gestures and the careful forming of the words of power.”
“Then he’s powerless!” Bagsby said, thirst for vengeance again rising in his breast.
“No!” Shulana said. “Only until he finds a way to heal his dead flesh or, more than likely, take on a new body.”
“A new body?” George said, incredulous.
“The undead, such as Valdaimon, need to preserve only a portion of their original body to maintain their existence.”
“You think he knows who we are?” George asked.
“Certainly,” Bagsby responded with a grimace.
“Well, then, we’re in for it someday,” George said cheerfully.
Bagsby gazed around at their woodland campsite. In the near distance he could hear the sound of flowing water and the splashes of a large animal.
“There’s water nearby?” he asked.
“Aye,” George said. “And fat Marta’s about ‘er bath. I think I’ll go and join ‘er. If I’m goin’ to die by some undead thingie’s ‘and, I want a bit of sport before I go!” George winked at Bagsby, then got up and disappeared into the bushes.
“It’s the River Rigel,” Shulana explained. “We’ve been on the run from Heilesheim troops for two days. We have to stay in the woods. The only natural route led here, to the river.”
Bagsby looked at the large sacks that lay by a nearby tree.
“The Golden Eggs of Parona?”
“Yes,” Shulana answered.
“So, now you kill me, eh?” Bagsby said, trying his most charming grin.
“Only if you keep me from doing what I must do.”
“And what is that?”
“I must destroy them.”
Bagsby stood, shakily. He walked over to the large sacks and opened first one, then the other. “Why,” he asked, “would you want to destroy these?”
“You don’t know what they truly are,” Shulana said simply.
“And I’ll not let them be destroyed until I know their secret,” Bagsby stated flatly.
“Then I must kill you,” Shulana answered. “For their secret I cannot reveal, even to you. It is a secret known only by Elrond, myself, and some on the Elven Council.”
Bagsby leaned back, resting his weight against the two large treasures. “Go ahead.”
Shulana’s eyes met his in a level gaze. “You know I cannot,” she said.
“Nor can you tell me the secret?”
“No.”
Bagsby opened his arms and drew Shulana to him. “Then I must learn it for myself,” he said. “It may be that there is one other who knows it. There is a man with the desert tribes who knows wondrous things from ancient times.”
Bagsby basked in the warmth of Shulana’s body pressed against his own. Only then did he notice with some surprise that there was also great warmth radiating from the Golden Eggs of Parona, and a strange vibration, almost like a series of blows, coming from inside them—as the magical words spoken five thousand years before drifted through the web of time and came together to work their speaker’s will.
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