Wizard, Thief, Warrior

by Max Anthony

  “Up! Quickly!” barked Rasmus, realising that the most likely refuge was the floor above them.

  Viddo darted up the steps. He was fast, but not as fast as the ten or twelve mangy hounds that he found shouldering their way past him. A momentary alarm at their presence quickly passed when he realised that Rasmus had summoned them.

  He must be down to the bare bones if he’s only able to conjure up scrawny beasts like these, Viddo thought to himself as he climbed. His crossbow was loaded and levelled, ready to fire a snap shot at anything he didn’t like the look of.

  Viddo emerged from the steps and into a large chamber. It was full of strange paraphernalia, all of it appearing to be made of stone. There was no time to examine the objects, but he saw one large table, upon which was a construction of great complexity. It wasn’t clear what it was and it looked far too intricate to have been made from stone and nothing else.

  There were two exits from this chamber, and the last of the hounds disappeared through the closest one, nearly thirty feet away. Rasmus arrived at the top of the steps, just as the sound of rolling thunder reached them through the doorway. The bodies of two of the hounds came flying through, propelled at great speed by the force of whatever spell they’d just felt the impact of.

  Viddo sprinted for the doorway, becoming little more than a shadow as he did so. On the far side, a white cloud formed in an instant as Rasmus conjured up a blizzard of vicious, pelting ice shards. At the same time, a ball of orange flame, the size of a fist came through the doorway towards the pair. It moved in a straight line, almost lazily it seemed to Viddo’s heightened senses.

  The orange ball exploded, expanding into a vast sphere of angry flames. Viddo tumbled away as the outer edges of the fire licked at his clothing. He felt pain as it scorched his bare flesh and then the flames were gone, as quickly as they had arrived. Viddo rolled forward again, coming up against the wall on one side of the doorway. To his relief, he saw that Rasmus was mostly unharmed, though the wizard used one hand to pat at a smouldering patch on his robes as he ran towards Viddo. The undead wizard hadn’t known where they were and had thrown its spell at random, hoping to catch them both, yet hardly burning either of them.

  Within the other room, the blizzard continued to blanket the area with ice, as a freezing mist swirled viciously around. There was a blur and something shot through the second doorway, heading towards the stairwell that they’d recently climbed. Viddo was the one trained in combat and he managed to get a crossbow bolt into the shape. It was the undead wizard, acting under the influence of speed magic. The bolt took it in the chest, knocking it off stride, but failing to kill it. As Viddo tried to load for another shot, Rasmus vanished, leaving the thief alone in the room.

  “Gah, a sodding maze spell,” said Rasmus, finding himself transported to a place of drab grey walls, little different to every other corridor he’d walked along in the last few weeks.

  “Left, right, right, left,” he muttered to himself, using the power of his mind to force himself to move at a great speed through the twists and turns of the spell’s imprisonment. In this magical place, it was the power of his intellect that dictated how quickly he could escape.

  “I hope Viddo doesn’t get himself killed. That wizard is passably competent.”

  Rasmus was good at getting out of such mazes and his intuition drove him rapidly towards the exit. With a quiet pop of displaced air, he reappeared in the room, right at the spot he’d vanished. In the mere few seconds he’d been gone, things had taken a turn for the worse.

  Viddo had been frozen in place by a spell of greater paralysis. The thief was mid stride, with his sword raised above his head and his crossbow in the other hand, almost ready to fire. At the top of the steps, the undead was waving its arms in order to complete another incantation. It had two quarrels jutting from its chest and looked injured, though evidently not enough to finish it off.

  Rasmus thought he recognized the pattern of the casting and didn’t like what he saw, especially since he’d returned just in time to be afflicted by the upcoming spell of incineration. He had a spell that he could cast instantly and he used it to throw out a dozen tiny white dots of arcane sparks. They flew across the room, but Rasmus could tell that they weren’t going to land in time.

  “I hope it doesn’t kill us,” thought the wizard, knowing that their opponent wasn’t holding back. Some emergency spells were designed to be cast in under a second, whilst others – often the most powerful – took a time to weave.

  The spell did not reach completion. Just at the point where the final syllable was to be uttered, the undead wizard stumbled as if it had been struck in the back. A second later, twelve arcane bolts peppered it, wilting the undead flesh and melting the robes to its flesh. It still wasn’t dead and Rasmus saw it raise an arm as it prepared another spell.

  Human wizard proved to be faster than undead wizard and Rasmus got in there first. Everything in the room froze as Rasmus commanded time itself to pause at his instruction. He calmly crossed the room, glancing back once and seeing the starkly beguiling patterns of his dying blizzard spell, halted by his magic for a few moments. The undead wizard was still mid-stumble, rotting fingers twisting into the unnatural position needed to summon up another of its spells. Behind it in the stairwell, Rasmus saw the determined face of a young woman, with a short sword in her hand.

  Drawing his cosh, Rasmus covered the last few paces towards the frozen undead. He struck it firmly in the skull and then again. He delivered crunching blow after crunching blow, rapidly and all across its body. It didn’t flinch and it felt like he was hitting something completely unyielding, leaving no marks at all where the cosh landed. If he’d been pressed, Rasmus would have admitted to a tiny feeling of guilt at what he was doing. He was a good man at heart and no matter how evil his foe, some things just felt like cheating.

  A spell as powerful as the one he’d cast couldn’t last long and Rasmus felt his body wrench when the expiration of the magic battered at his constitution. The spell faded and time continued as it ever would. The injuries which Rasmus had inflicted appeared all at once on the undead wizard’s body. Its skull collapsed in numerous places, its fingers snapped and it fell to one side where it lay unmoving. Rasmus knew that dead wasn’t the most appropriate description for the state it was in, but it was easier and more convenient than saying destroyed.

  In the stairwell, the young woman he’d seen blinked in surprise as her mind assimilated the fact that the creature she’d just hit with her sword had moved from a standing position to a prone position, with its body smashed and broken.

  “What?” she asked nobody in particular, blinking in puzzlement.

  “Jera?” asked Rasmus. “Your father sent us to look for you.”

  The young woman recovered quickly, a testament to her ability to have survived in this place so far. “Yes, I’m Jera,” she said, her voice carrying a mild Gargusian accent. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Rasmus and I am a wizard,” he said. “That fellow over there is called Viddo Furtive. He has been frozen in place by a spell of paralysis, but he should recover soon.”

  Rasmus walked over to Viddo. The thief could blink his eyes, though nothing else would move. “I’m afraid I have no spells remaining that will remove the magic from you,” he said, patting his friend on the shoulder. “You’ll just have to stick it out for a little while.”

  Jera joined Rasmus in front of the thief. She was no more than a woman’s average height and slim of build. Her hair was long and tied back in a ponytail. She had pleasing features and her skin was heavily tanned from the northern Frodgian sun. She wore a vest of chain mail, accompanied by chain leggings and plate vambraces. Other than that, she had nothing to deflect the heavy blows that many fighters were expected to soak up.

  “Is that my sword?” she asked with curiosity.

  “It is,” confirmed Rasmus. “We found it on the steps which we assume you escaped down.”

  “Can I
have it back?” she asked.

  “I don’t think that Viddo can do very much to resist,” said Rasmus.

  Jera pulled the sword from Viddo’s unresisting grasp. “I’ve missed this,” she said, turning away and giving it a few practise swishes through the air. Rasmus had travelled with enough fighters, many of them as tough as nails, to realise that she had talent. Her movements were smooth and unhurried, her head level and her dark eyes sharp and full of focus.

  There was the faintest of groans and Rasmus gave Viddo a prod. “He’s coming around,” he announced, falling into the trap of referring to the thief as if he wasn’t there simply because he was incapacitated.

  Even strong magic struggled to keep a good thief still for long and within a minute, Viddo was stretching his arms and legs as he shook off the last vestiges of the paralysis. “I think we owe this lady our thanks,” he said. “Her timely intervention in striking at our opponent saved us from something unpleasant.”

  “Your assistance is much appreciated, Jera,” said Rasmus, not afraid to shirk away from giving honest thanks where it was due. “We came here to rescue you, but it appears that you have done us something of a good turn yourself.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said Jera. It was clear that she was not lacking in confidence but she was still unsure of her new companions.

  “Let us explore the nooks and crannies of this wizard’s lair,” said Viddo, striding off without ado. “A creature so powerful must have items of great value that we should examine carefully.”

  “He means we’re going to steal anything that will fit in our packs,” said Rasmus, in case Jera hadn’t already realised. “And then we can talk about our escape.”

  “Shouldn’t we check for traps first?” she asked, reminding them that a wizard couldn’t be expected to leave all of his worldly possessions unguarded for someone to steal every time he popped out for a loaf of bread, or whatever else it was that the undead would leave the house for.

  “Yes, I suppose that would probably be wise,” said Viddo, aware that his excitement at having found Jera and being close to a likely source of treasure had clouded his professional judgement.

  The chamber they were in had decorations all around the walls, but it wasn’t these which Rasmus was most interested in. As Viddo sniffed around for traps, the wizard examined the sculpture which he’d noticed upon a rectangular stone table of yellow stone. It had been partially caught in the fireball’s blast, and though stone was usually left undamaged by such magic, this particular model was so intricate that pieces of it had snapped off.

  Rasmus studied it – there were lines of grey interconnecting stone, leading to other lines of interconnecting stone. Here and there, these lines would branch, linking to other lines. There were areas where the lines became larger and squarer.

  “What on earth is this?” he wondered aloud. “And how on earth did they manage to make something so delicate out of stone?”

  “It looks like a map to me,” said Jera, standing next to him.

  “A map! I think you may be right! It must depict a part of this tunnel system. Over on this side you can see where the lines branch away and stop. These must be where the passages join to other areas underground which were beyond the scope of this map-maker’s design.”

  Viddo paused in his hunt for traps and took a look. “We’re here,” he said, pointing with confidence at a tiny area far up on the map. “Without any place of reference, it’s difficult to be certain of anything else, except that here is where we entered the tunnels next to the stone village.”

  Rasmus and Jera stared at the place which Viddo tapped with a fingertip. Neither of them were especially skilled in the arts of map reading and only average in terms of spatial awareness. Viddo lost interest in this marvel and wandered off leaving Rasmus and Jera nodding wisely, to give the impression that they now had an excellent grasp of where they were.

  The stone table had other items scattered upon its surface. Rasmus picked up a square stone box with a lid on it. If the box had ever contained anything, it was no longer inside and he put the box back where he’d found it.

  Jera picked up something which resembled a two-feet-long stone hook. “Some sort of torture tool?” she asked, furrowing her brow. There were other, similar items, whose purpose became no clearer the longer they looked at them.

  “Could these be magical?” Rasmus called to Viddo.

  The thief had now entered the other room where the blizzard spell had not long ago raged. Rasmus could still see glistening traces of frost in the sickly green light of the wizard’s mansion. He knew that all traces of the magic would soon vanish and the floor would look the same as it had prior to the spell’s casting.

  “I’ve already checked them,” said Viddo. “There’s nothing special about them. Oooh, what’s this?”

  Rasmus found his feet moving at speed in the direction of this other room. “You can’t say oooh just like that. A man could get excited,” he huffed.

  The room he entered was at the front of the mansion and had two of the large window openings on one wall. It was over twenty feet square and the floor was exquisitely covered in gold-flecked marble with swirls of black. There was furniture of all descriptions – a wide stone bed, two stone settees and a trio of stone chairs next to a waist-high stone table. There was a band of blue-tinged stone running the entire perimeter of the room at head height. It looked like there was writing across much of it.

  “Stone, stone and more stone,” grumbled Rasmus, almost losing his footing on the still-slippery marble.

  “It’s an undead wizard’s love pad,” said Jera with a giggle. Rasmus looked at Viddo. Viddo looked at Rasmus. They were going to like Jera.

  “What’s this oooh all about then?” prompted Rasmus.

  “I’m surprised you’ve missed it. There, on that table,” said Viddo.

  Rasmus took another look at the table. There was a pile of stone tablets on top of it. He could see that they were exceptionally thin and delicate. From the colour, he might have thought them to be made from ivory if he hadn’t known better. He made his way towards the table, noting that there were etchings on the top tablet.

  “More death god jibber jabber?” he asked, feeling slightly disappointed. He reached the table and the markings on the top tablet swam immediately into focus. “A spellbook,” he almost squealed, pulling over a stone chair with great difficulty. It made a scraping sound and left four scratches in the pristine surface of the marble flooring that would take a great deal of polishing to get out.

  “He must have got it out for a bit of night-time reading,” Viddo said. “There’s an alcove in the wall down here that must have been guarded by a dozen magical traps. Except that our opponent has helpfully deactivated them in order to view his most treasured possession.”

  Finding another wizard’s spellbook was the stuff of which dreams were made and Rasmus stared happily at this one. The writing was ancient and unfamiliar, but there was nothing magical that Rasmus couldn’t understand. Where the markings were different to his own script, his brain pulled them into shape and made sense of them as if he were reading nothing more than a written dialect.

  He already knew that the top spell was going to be useful and he gingerly reached out to lift the uppermost tablet away to see what lay beneath. To his surprise, the page turned as if it were anchored to the others by some sort of invisible hinge and he was able to fold it to the left-hand side of the others as if it were nothing more than a particularly heavy book page.

  On the other side of the room, Jera had perched herself on the edge of one of the stone settees. “They must have been gluttons for punishment to have made this,” she announced. “Imagine a world with no cushions!”

  “And no mattresses or pillows,” said Viddo. He was examining a tiny imperfection on the surface of the wall in one corner near to the bed. “Aha!”

  Rasmus recognized from the tone of the aha that his friend had located something, but the wizard was t
oo absorbed in the spellbook in front of him. Each time he cast a spell it was wiped from his mind and he had to re-memorise it from a spellbook. The more powerful spells generally took longer to memorise, which was why many wizards were reluctant to start throwing out the big ones without good reason. Rasmus wasn’t like most wizards and had already memorised three minor spells that he thought would stand them in good stead for their coming escape. He turned the page and almost fainted with happiness when he saw that the next spell in the book was a fireball. These took a bit longer to memorise, so he got started without delay.

  With Rasmus lost to the world, Viddo waved Jera over to join him. “Look here,” he said. “Another of the undead wizard’s hiding places. I have already disarmed a series of traps designed to kill any curious burglars and now if I press just here, there should be a clicking sound.”

  He pressed and the mechanism dutifully produced the clicking noise that indicated it had been defeated by a skilful thief. A large panel opened, hinging downward until it lay on the floor.

  “A chest!” said Jera. “A stone chest.”

  “Indeed. Look at the size of it. It must have taken six of them to get it upstairs.”

  The chest was a grey cuboid, with a perfectly-fitted lid. It was almost exactly the same size as the alcove in which it had been hidden, with a gap of no more than a centimetre all the way around it. There was no sign of a locking mechanism, but a lock would have been preferable to the problem they faced getting into their prize.

  “How do we open it?” pondered Viddo. He pressed the point of his dagger into the thin seam between the lid and the body of the chest. He managed to wiggle the lid open about half a centimetre before it become blocked by the top of the alcove. His desire for loot made him press his eye to the gap, but there was no way to see what was inside.

  Jera proved herself to be the practical sort and slid the tip of her own sword into the gap between the side of the chest and the alcove. She moved the blade left and right, trying to slide the chest out. In spite of her efforts, it wouldn’t move at all. Catching on, Viddo used his dagger on the opposite side of the chest in tandem. They strained for a time, without any visible sign of success.