by Ember Lane
“Sounds like we need some dragons,” Zenith said.
Lincoln took his pipe back and puffed its pot to ash. His eyes closed soon after, and he slept the dreamless sleep he’d missed the night before. He slept the sleep of the returning adventurer, and when he woke, he woke in a semi-dream state, and wondered where he was, who the pink imp was, and why a shaman was staring down at him. “I’ve gathered you some food,” Zenith told him, as Lincoln wondered where the hell he was.
Gradually putting the foggy pieces together, he took the plate from Zenith and stared down at it. “What?”
“Fruits—there’s an orchard behind the tower. Everything seems to be in a permanent state of bloom. Oranges, bananas, apples—all dropping fruit. A row of strawberries, a bramble filled with blackberries. I take it this Zeremoth loved his fruit.”
Lincoln rubbed his eyes. “No, not so much, but Joan did, very much.”
Dink coughed, and Lincoln set the plate down, grabbing her little bag and pouring some of its powder on her tiny hand.
“Where was I?” he said, after he’d sat back and pushed his fruit around his plate some more.
“You were telling me about Zeremoth.”
“Ah,” said Lincoln, “so I was probably rambling. Well, Zeremoth loved this cabin, loved Mellow, and loved his little pond, but he hated his tower, the learning, the books, the lore, the guests that demanded being putting up when they visited. He had no time for pretender kings, for the guilds, for any structure to that youthful land. Zeremoth only liked solving the unsolvable, and that was fine for a quester like me. So, the tower…”
“It wouldn’t be just there,” Zenith whispered, and pointed to a huge stone tower not thirty feet away.
“Damn straight; it’d be at the end of the vale, right by the waterfall, hidden by the dog leg.”
Zenith nodded. “And that’s how you know there’s a message here, somewhere.”
Lincoln stretched and yawned. “Yep, but that’s one big tower—a space pocket, like this is a time pocket.”
“But you knew Zeremoth; where would he hide something?”
“That’s just it—he wouldn’t. Zeremoth was too lazy to bother with that. He would accept that if someone bested his charms, walked through his shack unchallenged, then got into his tower, well, they deserved to get whatever they came for.”
Zenith hopped off the deck, landing on the bank and walking up to the tower. “Time dilation or not, we must get on.”
Lincoln sighed and pushed himself up.
Dink fluttered up. “Maybe we do,” she said. “Or maybe we’re just a minified land sitting on a shelf in Zeremoth’s tower.”
Looking at her, Lincoln knew she was being serious. He burst out laughing. “You been smoking Zeremoth’s leaf?” He skipped off the deck, following Zenith’s footsteps around the pond. Dink ranged ahead, soon flying around the tower.
The door’s open! she screamed in his mind.
Lincoln quickened his stride.
The door was correctly positioned and faced away for Zeremoth’s cabin. Dink hovered just outside, her head craning in.
“It’s a strange setup for a wizard’s tower,” she whispered.
Inside, the tower’s ground floor was completely clear, barring some straw, a trough filled with water, and a central ladder leading up to the next level. Lincoln wandered in, his hand on his sword’s hilt, his footsteps soft.
“Probably just open to guide us,” he said under his breath, but knew his words were lies—Joan would never leave a door ajar; she was too precise, too meticulous. “Remember, Zeremoth hated visitors, so he would make them stable their horses here and then have them sleep above, that way they had a restless night of stink and stir, and I should know. While he was training me I slept many a night in here.”
Zenith began climbing the ladder. As usual he had no weapons drawn, though Lincoln did spy a dagger’s handle tucked into his tunic. He looked around one more time, nodding to himself. Everything was right—a perfect copy. He grabbed the ladder and followed the shaman up.
The floor above functioned as a visitor’s rest and was stark enough to barely make that work. Around a dozen beds radiated from the tower’s walls like petals on a daisy. Each had a chamber pot, a washbowl, and a partly burned candle. Each had a single pillow and a blanket. It was entirely adequate, but also barely so. Once more, in the center, a ladder rose up, vanishing into a hole in the ceiling, which was also the only source of light. Zenith looked up and whistled.
“Does that ladder really reach the top of the tower?”
“The tower’s roof, yes. Zeremoth reasoned that should any of his guests wish to steal from him, or even just nose around, then they’d have to work for it. If they were prepared to do that, then they could have what they wanted…within reason.”
“So we have to climb up? That’s got to be a two hundred and fifty foot slog in a cramped, wooden shaft.”
“What’s the problem?” Dink asked, and flew up.
Lincoln barged in front of Zenith. “Watch out for the trick,” he said, and scurried up the steps. “Forty-eighth rung,” he shouted down, and stopped soon after. “Then,” Lincoln muttered, pulling out his knife, “about here should be the door.” The knife slid into a crack and a click echoed up and down the shaft. “Now we’re in the tower—the proper tower.” He drew his sword as a secret door popped open, and he jumped off the ladder.
Landing on a planked-wood floor, Lincoln smiled to himself. The room was, like the guest suite below, an exact replica of what he remembered. It was the study he knew and loved. Four holes in the flint walls served for windows. A set of stone steps led upward, hugging the tower’s circumference. The central, wooden shaft, which housed the ladder, rose straight through the room, all barring the doorway shelved with ranks of weighty tomes and leather-bound books, mirrored all over the stone walls and tucked under the rising treads. An old armchair sat with its twin, a cask of wine, and two goblets on either side, and that was the extent of the room’s furniture.
“Why the wine, if he didn’t like the place?” Zenith asked.
“That was mostly mine. He’d set a task, and I’d sit and learn. I needed magic for my build.”
“Build?”
“Bloodmage. Now that was more fun than a builder—that I can tell you.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Too late now. My stats are all out of whack. Shall we go get the message?”
“It’s not here?”
“It’ll be up those steps. That’s where I’d have hidden it. Despite every caution, she wouldn’t have trusted it to fate.”
“What’s up there?” Zenith asked.
Lincoln walked toward the first step, resting his foot on it. “That, I don’t know. The purpose of the room above was accustoming me to using my spells while getting attacked from every angle. If I remember rightly, it’s rectangular and around twice the length of this tower.”
Zenith joined him at the step’s bottom. Dink too.
“Let’s get on with it,” Dink said, and Lincoln realized they shared the same dread feeling.
At the top, a shadow-filled doorway waited for them, but as Lincoln was at the halfway point, a green glow grew, like a clear fog, and signaled the way. It was the shine of a green lamp, not an eerie glow, more akin to an electric light rather than any shade or luminescence that he’d seen in this land. Reaching the top, he stood at the edge of a flat, emerald sheen—still, like a tranquil lake. A silver disc popped through it, a mere pace away, and a narrow path of the same color ran right away from that—unnaturally straight.
On one side, two blocks of pale green rose up high into the light like two fat towers joined together. The towers had two vast squares cut out of their base, through which Lincoln saw two golden, turned columns rising up. On his other side, a lower, black building sat bulky and stout like it had been perched there as an afterthought. Hexagonal, silver cylinders protruded out from it seeming to serve no purpose.
Li
ncoln stepped onto the silver disc, studying it closer. It looked like it had been superheated then cooled and had retained its molten look. A light glowed out around the disc, a white light that then spilled along the argent path ahead. He took that as a sign, a way forward, and tiptoed along the path.
Stout sentinels, like two drips of crystal, suddenly lit up, one a pasty green, the other frosted white, their light bursting from a filament inside, strong and bright. He edged closer to them, the path so narrow that he had to put one boot in front of the next. A hint of dawn burst in his mind, and a glimmer of a smile touched the ends of his lips as he began to understand.
Once through the sentinels, he came to a low, black building lined with dozens of silver discs across its front, all with tiny filamentous pathways ducking into recesses in the black building’s walls. A burst of grayer lines fled from its side, angling sharply away, maybe ten in all, leading to the edge of the emerald. They gave the impression of being just below the sheen of the room’s surface.
Elsewhere, far over, he saw silver drums and more black temples, and his path turned toward them, taking him past peculiar pastel-blue blobs on stalks of silver wire. Eventually, he came to a copper sun, sitting on the emerald land, striated black and copper all the way around.
Then his path ended abruptly, appearing to duck under the surface, his only way forward a few dozen droplets of dulled silver like stepping-stones on a lily-covered pond. As he stepped on each, they lit up. Behind him, Zenith looked around wide-eyed, and Dink flew close to Lincoln.
At the stepping-stone’s end, he jumped up onto a black dais, like a block of perfectly carved slate. There he stood, Zenith catching up with him and standing by one shoulder, Dink by the other, and Lincoln surveyed his land of quicksilver, emerald, and unnatural color. Beyond them, a raised, green plate held up a large, pale-yellow building with perfectly smooth walls. A light beamed out of its top, and it billowed out into a skull shape, soon growing in detail, sable hair sprouting, gray eyes looking out, and a smile forming on her face.
“Quite the show,” Lincoln said, but his voice was all bravado and quiver.
“I thought you’d start with a flippant remark, that’s no less than I would expect. Know this, Lincoln Hart, if you have gotten here, then you are the man I knew you to be…my love.” Joan’s hologram looked down at him.
Lincoln fought back the dregs of his tears—he’d spent heavy the night before—but he couldn’t hold back his heart, nor steady his shaking hands. He fell to his knees trying to contain his anguish, knowing it to be but a representation of what he’d had, what he’d loved. Zenith knelt next to him, his hands clasped—prayer-like.
“This,” Joan continued, “is as much as I can reveal here. This should set you on the right path. This is what you face; this is what you must vanquish.”
Lincoln looked around, nodding. Pulses of white light ran along the silver pathways, now far too numerous to count. The whole room appeared to come alive, busy, running, pulsing, resting. He stood and pulled Zenith up.
“How? How are you even here?” he asked.
Joan’s hologram stayed stoic, impassive, as if she was waiting for a predetermined time to answer him.
“These are your gods,” she finally said, and then began to fade, to wither.
Lincoln shouted, “No! Don’t go! Don’t leave me so soon!” He sank back to his knees, his sodden eyes clamped shut, and he didn’t open them until gray-stone formed under him, and the smell of musty abandonment filled his nostrils. He knew she’d left him again, knew that the message had been a mere recording, but grieved to have lost the love that shone through.
Dink’s pink light shone once more, and Lincoln looked up at her through his reddened eyes.
“To Beggle, then,” Lincoln said.
“To Beggle,” Dink said, as well.
32
The Valley of the Beggles
The tall ship carved a path through the steel swell of the Petreyen Sea. Its sails billowed proudly, puffed by the winds carving their way north from Quislaine, squeezed between Petreyer and Irydia in an ever-decreasing taper. Had Lincoln been in the crow’s nest of the ship, he could have seen Estorelll diminish to a speck behind them, or even Lordslaner as they passed east of it. But he wasn’t, he’d locked himself away below decks with a barrel of red wine, his pipe, and his imp.
Dink had become his new sounding board, a convenient set of ears in a very rancid cabin, and there she faced question after question without hope of answering any. She took his raging, his lamenting, and his anguish, as the full immensity of his meet with Joan riddled his body with guilt, sorrow, and self-loathing in equal amounts. Dink listened to his wild theories about her world even though she appeared to have no clue what a number of the words even meant.
She saw him level up, saw him rise off his filthy bed and hover just above it, as the land bestowed on him his twelfth level, and she watched him drink himself unconscious as he berated himself for missing the advancements in Starellion, Sanctuary, and Joan’s Creek. He drank the last of another barrel, toasting their success with asinine rage. Then called for another barrel to be brought, so he could do it all again.
Lincoln’s despair was compounded by the boredom, by his need to be alone. He understood what she’d shown him, was even beginning to understand the peril it could put them all in, and there wasn’t one damn person on board the ship he could talk to about it. Not one damn person who would understand what they may actually be facing. So, he’d locked himself away, and he’d chosen Dink. She was in his mind. She knew his thoughts, and so she may as well take his raging, even if she didn’t truly understand.
He kept on, until he’d raged his way to its end, to the bottom of another barrel, to the last of his leaf, then he slept, wallowing in his own neglect, Joan’s frowning face looking down at him. He dreamed, and his dreams were vivid, horrible, terrifying, and he woke swimming in his own fetid sweat, three-day stubble the tidiest thing about him. But he woke on that third day, and he woke as Lincoln Hart.
Whether a thief had come in the night and stolen away his despair, he’d never know. Or if Dink had magically sucked it away, again, would remain a mystery. But gone it was, and he wished he could shed the skin of his vile self and emerge from his dire cabin like a freshly grown man, all clean and prim. Instead, he emerged like a putrid zombie and staggered up to the deck, surprised to see them moored in a bay, two claws of sand providing them shelter. He staggered to the ship’s side, oblivious to his companion’s calls and tumbled down to the calm below.
Plunging into the still seawater, he came alive as its exhilaration woke every nerve in his body. The confusion of the last few days receded and clarity of thought came back that matched the azure water all around him. He swam toward the sea’s rippling silver skin and burst through it with a great gasp. It was like being born again, renewed by the land itself, with Joan’s helping hand. Looking up at the great galleon that had brought him to this bay, he marveled at its majesty. Flip, Grimble, Cutter, and Ozmic were leaning on the ship’s balustrade, watching him tread water. Dink, now never far away from him, hovered a dozen feet above him, and Lincoln spied Zenith lounging on the bowsprit as if it were some luxury chair.
Of Amaya and Cutter’s apprentice, he could see no sign, and dreaded what they must think of him. He was the man who had cast a spell and put himself to sleep, and he was the man who’d wallowed in self-pity since breeching Estorelll’s perimeter. For that, Lincoln vowed to make amends. Ducking back under the surface and then bursting through again, he shook his hair out in a fan of a splash, and he turned away from the magnificent ship and looked upon Beggle. He knew at once that it was a special place.
What he’d thought was a bay was, in fact, an estuary, the mouth of a river that spread its banks beyond its end and into the sea as if it were cradling its own water and holding on to it for as long as possible, and theirs wasn’t the only boat moored there. A rank of white-wood galleons bobbed in the gentle swell, cle
arly moored, and all but one with its rigging stowed. Lincoln couldn’t remember ever seeing such a colored boat and wondered at it, but had to admit that it made the ship seem sleek, fast—a true clipper.
A long dock ran out to the clippers, but it was more a floating pontoon and closer to the shore itself. More boats were tied—fishing vessels, plain row boats, crabbers, and shrimpers, and the like. The sky was filled with swirls of gulls, their squawks the only sounds apart from the gentle lapping of the water on the mighty keel just by him.
Beyond the pontoon, a heel of land poked into the estuary, and a town of multicolored roofs clung to the slight rise that curved around and to a strange black ridge. His gaze lingered on that ridge and its blackness as it didn’t fit the scene, but as they wandered along it, it grew and grew like a giant root. He followed the root as it sloped up, becoming a vast ridge of black, and eventually joining a hunchbacked, charcoal-colored volcano, one he knew to be called Serenity.
It wasn’t as tall as the narrow peaks dotted along the Red Mountain’s spine—like his own mountain that stood guard over Joan’s Creek, but it was imposing, in a laid back, hunched-grandmother sort of way. The crone in question appeared to be headed south, and it was from the south that another vast, black root stretched out, cradling the Land of Beggle, and separating it from Irydia.
By contrast to the surrounding black, Beggle itself was a mash of vibrant green intermixed with strips of mauve and buildings of every shape and color, none uniform, and none the same.
Lincoln took this all in while treading water, and could see no more from his low vantage point, certainly not the extent of the valley that wound up to the volcano, not its trees nor its rolling plains, the patchwork colors of its fields, nor the deep blue of a series of plateaued lakes. Had he been in the crow’s nest, he would have seen even more and shared that sight with Cutter’s apprentice.