My eyes went wide. “They’re that old?”
“I cannot be certain,” Lethaira said with a shake of her head. “I only tell you what I have discovered in the tablets that Curym delivered to me. There were few mentions of this ancient magical language, but what I found has led me to believe that this tongue is the same.”
I narrowed my eyes and studied the inscriptions. On closer inspection, I could see a few similarities between these symbols and those I’d found beneath Whitespire and Windwall.
An idea struck me. Those runes had responded to magic, so perhaps these would as well. I tapped into my ice magic and summoned a thread of power to my hands. The moment my fingers touched the wall, white runes sprang to life all around the temple’s interior. The women behind me gasped as the walls, ceiling, and floor lit up, the runes like a thousand stars in the night sky.
I felt a strange rushing of wind around me, and suddenly the runes began to go dark. My magical senses went on full alert as the walls seemed to consume the magic I’d used to light the runes. One at a time, faster and faster, and the breeze grew more powerful.
“Look!” Irenya cried.
I turned and found her pointing at the eastern wall. With every rune that darkened in the rest of the temple, one flared to life on the stone. They formed a sort of glowing halo of white around the arched opening in the middle of the wall. Just as in the tunnels beneath Windwall, the magic was pointing the way for us to go.
But where would that door take us? The magic could be leading us toward some powerful artifact or treasure, not the way down into the crypts.
“Yes!” Letharia cried. “I knew something was strange about that passage.” She dug into her pack, pulled out one of her stone tablets, and scanned it quickly.
“The translation to your modern tongue is rough,” she said, “which is why I didn’t get it right away. But the tablet says something like ‘light of power lead you to death’.” She looked up at us with an eager smile. “The light of power, your magic, will lead us to death. I thought that maybe using magic might be dangerous in the crypts, but what if it actually means that the magic will lead us down into the crypts?”
“To death,” I echoed. “Like all the dead stored in the crypts.”
“Exactly!” Elation sparkled in her eyes. “There’s a lot in here about how to navigate once we’re down in the crypts, but this could be our way to get in.”
I exchanged glances with the other women. Irenya nodded, Rizzala shrugged, and Arieste said in a calm voice, “It’s worth a try.”
“Well done,” I told Letharia. “We’re going to need more of that clever thinking to get us where we need to go.”
Letharia blushed and ducked her head, but there was a proud smile on her face. She might not be a warrior, but it seemed she had found her own strength. That was a good first step toward helping her become a part of our little group.
Taking a deep breath, I led the way through the magic-illuminated archway. It led into a short stone tunnel, which ran for about ten feet before branching into two corridors to the right and left. White runes shone along the left-hand tunnel like runway lights, so I turned down that passage. The next intersection had three passages, each identical, but the white runes pulled us into the middle one. Almost immediately, we reached a set of stone steps that descended deeper into the hill.
“Looks like we’re on the right track,” I said with a grin as we started down the steps. “After all, we need to go down if we’re going to get underneath the sunken city.”
“It’s a long way down,” Letharia said. “This mausoleum was built atop a cliff overlooking Emerald Deep, and it descended deep into the earth beneath the city.”
“What was the purpose of these tunnels and crypts?” I asked.
“The priests used it to carry the dead of Emerald Deep up to the temple,” Letharia answered. “From what I’ve read, the people believed that the touch of sunlight on a dead body could pull a spirit back from the afterlife, and they would be restored to an eternity trapped between death and life.”
It was a strange belief, but I’d read about many equally strange myths back on Earth.
“These crypts allowed the priests to transport the dead to the Temple of Night, where they would burn the bodies,” Letharia said. “Cremation would sever the final connection between the flesh and spirit, and thus the soul would be free to remain in the afterlife.”
“So all those graves are just filled with ashes?” Irenya asked.
“I assume so,” Letharia replied.
We continued our descent, and before long we were all breathing too hard to talk, even the athletic Rizzala. I stopped counting after reaching the two-hundredth step, and still the winding stone stairwell went deeper into the ground.
I shot a glance back at Irenya. The red-haired woman’s face had gone pale, just as it had when we entered the tunnels beneath Windwall. Thankfully, it seemed she had gotten a better handle on her claustrophobia. Either that, or she was too intrigued by the mystery of the Elmentia and Emerald Deep to succumb to her fears.
Finally, after what felt like an hour of going down stone stairs, we reached the bottom. I guessed we’d gone at least a fifty yards beneath the mausoleum, which put us five or ten yards beneath the surface of the water.
In the light of the torches, I could see row after row of stone shelves lining the walls of the crypt. Each of the shelves held a single skull, an ornate ceramic jar, and a bronze dagger. Even after everything I’d witnessed here on Agreon, this was undeniably the creepiest thing I’d seen.
“I guess the priests didn’t burn the entire body,” Arieste said.
Irenya slid past me and moved toward one of the shelves. When she opened one of the ceramic, her face wrinkled in disgust. “It’s their teeth!”
Sure enough, I realized every skull had had their teeth plucked, which made their grins somehow more macabre. The priests of the Elmentia had rituals as strange as their beliefs.
“Maybe let’s not touch anything,” Arieste said, and I noticed her face had gone a shade paler.
“Yeah, disturbing the dead might not be a great idea,” I echoed. I was about as superstitious as any Chicagoan, with my lucky shirt to help the Cubs wins and a first date jacket that had always gotten a second date. But the sight of so many bleached, dust-covered skulls made even me nervous.
“Good thinking,” Irenya said as she replaced the ceramic jar on the shelf. She turned back to join us, but as she stepped, I heard a tiny click.
Time slowed to a crawl as my mind processed that sound. In every book I’d read and movie I’d watched, there was only one reason for stones to click like that.
“Irenya!” I said as I threw myself toward her.
I was two steps from Irenya when I heard a loud whistling sound and spotted something dark and thin streaking right at the red-haired woman’s head.
Chapter Five
“Shield yourself!” Nyvea shouted in my mind.
In an instant, I tapped into my ice magic and summoned a wall of ice to form around me as I threw my arms around Irenya. I heard a loud crack as I lifted the curvaceous redhead from her feet and dove to the ground, out of the way of the hurtling spike. Two more cracks followed in quick succession as more of the missiles slammed into my ice shield. I twisted my body as I fell so I hit the ground first, and Irenya landed atop me.
She stared down at me, wide eyed and breathless. “My hero!” she gasped.
I glanced up at the ice shield I’d thrown up, and I saw two spikes embedded there. The spikes were a quarter-inch thick, eight inches long, and perfectly rounded as if by a lathe. Instead of wood, however, they were made of the same black stone of the mausoleum. A black gooey-looking substance coated their tips, doubtless some sort of poison.
And there were only two of them? I’d heard three cracks in the ice.
“Ethan!” Arieste knelt beside me, and I felt a little stinging pain as she pulled something from my right shoulder. When she held i
t up, I saw the third stone missile. My blood stained its sharp, inch-long tip.
“Let me see that.” To my surprise, it was Letharia who pushed past Arieste and snatched the missle from her fingers. She sniffed the tip and wrinkled her nose. “Viper lily, enough to incapacitate three men.”
“No, Ethan!” Irenya pushed off my chest to rise to her feet, and lines of worry twisted her face as she turned to Letharia. “What can we do? Is there any antidote, anything to combat the poison?”
When I moved my arm, I was surprised to find no pain. There was a tingling running through my shoulder, as if it had fallen asleep, but nothing else.
“Uh, guys, I-I think I feel fine.” I stared at the puncture wound in my arm, and my eyes went wide. The skin around the wound had begun to shift color, and I could literally see the flesh re-knitting. I hadn’t even tapped into Rizzala’s darkness magic consciously, yet it was healing me?
I turned to the woman that had been Emroth. “You healed faster than normal, right? Because of the magic?”
Rizzala nodded.
“Did you have to consciously do it?”
“No,” Rizzala said. “The magic just did it on its own.”
“That’s awesome!” I said. “So, just like it automatically shifts the color of your skin to camouflage you with your surroundings, it also automatically restores damage on a cellular level.”
Rizzala shrugged. “Perhaps, though I am not familiar with this word ‘cell-you-lar’.”
“They’re the tiny building blocks of your body,” I explained. “Your skin, muscles, brain, organs, and everything else are made up of these cells, which are too small for your eyes to see.” My knowledge of microbiology was limited, but my EMT training had included at least the basics of the body’s repair mechanisms.
“But what about the poison?” Irenya asked, a near-frantic light in her eyes. “Can the magic heal you if it gets into your blood?”
“I-I think I can answer that,” Letharia said in a quiet voice. She cringed when all eyes turned to her, but I gave her a smile as encouragement to continue. “My…Zaddrith’s acid magic.”
“Of course!” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it. “Just like Irenya’s fire magic makes her resistant to heat and Arieste’s ice magic protects her from the cold, the acidic magic of the green dragon makes her resistant to acids.”
“And poisons,” Letharia added. “After all, many poisons are simply acids that corrode the body from within.”
The biology of acids versus poisons was a bit more complex than that, but there were many poisons that affected the body in the same was as acids.
“Another secondary effect of magic!” I said, excitement in my voice. “Rizzala’s magic healed the wound while Letharia’s magic neutralized the poison.”
“Whoa!” Irenya breathed. “That is--”
“Amazing,” I shot a glance at my right shoulder. The trickle of blood had slowed and the wound was healing, albeit slowly. However, I could see that the small puncture would be healed within the space of a few hours rather than a few days.
I climbed to my feet, but found the world swaying around me. I caught myself one a stone shelf and blinked until my vision cleared.
“I guess it neutralizes the poison,” I said, “but maybe it doesn’t totally shield me from the side effects.”
“Still,” Letharia said with a confident nod, “you should find the poison’s influence diminished and out of your system by the time that wound heals.”
“That’s a useful ability to have,” Rizzala said, “especially if we find ourselves confronted by more of these traps.” The dark-skinned woman had remained standing, her eyes alternating between me and the stone that had triggered the booby trap.
“Yeah, let me get a look at that.” I picked up my fallen torch and held it above the stone Irenya had stepped on. After a few minutes of study, I shook my head. “It looks like every other stone in the hallway.”
“A clever trap is one the enemy never sees coming,” Letharia said. All eyes turned to her in surprise, and again she shrank back. “S-Something Curym used to say.”
“Well, it makes sense,” I said. “We’re going to have to stay sharp and keep our eyes out for any more traps.” I turned to Letharia. “Do your tablets say anything about more nasty surprises like this?”
“Let me see.” The dark-haired woman dug into her satchel for one of her stone tablets. After a few seconds of careful study, she looked up. “I can’t find anything specific about traps, but there is one passage I think might be something.” She lifted the tablet and began to read. “’Honor guides your steps from danger, the heart of dragons signals the path to the…’” She wrinkled her nose, then shook her head. “There’s no word for this in your tongue, but I think the closest meaning would be ‘altar’.”
“Curym’s altar!” Irenya burst out, excited. “It has to be.”
“Yes, but what does it mean by the ‘heart of dragons’?” Arieste asked, her brow furrowed.
“And how does honor guide our steps from danger?” I frowned as I tried to figure it out. “What could that mean?”
“I-I don’t know,” Letharia said, and her voice faltered.
“I thought you said you could give us all the information we needed to get to the Mistresses and Curym’s lair.” I folded my arms over my chest.
“I know,” Letharia said, her words quiet.
“But that wasn’t true, was it?” I demanded.
Letharia’s face paled and she took a step back. “I-I’m sorry! I was afraid to come, and I thought saying that would convince you to agree to go without me.”
“So what, you would have just sent us in here with no clue what to do?” Heat surged in my chest. “Would you have made something up to sell the ruse?”
“It was a mistake!” Letharia protested, and tears streamed down her cheeks. “I was afraid for my life, not only from Curym, but from all of you. I thought...”
“You thought you might get rid of us,” Rizzala said. She took a menacing step toward the dark-haired women.
“Yes, I did, but that was before!” Letharia retreated until her back struck a stone shelf. “Before Ethan convinced me that we had to work together, to watch out for each other. When he said that, when I saw that he meant it, I knew I couldn’t send you in here on a lie. So I chose to come with you. Even though I know we’re walking into danger and possibly death, I chose to help you find the way. That has to count for something, right?” Panic filled her eyes as she looked from me to the three women around her.
“No,” Rizzala growled and tightened her grip on her double-headed spear.
“Yes, it does.” I placed a hand on Rizzala’s shoulder. “Like I said back in the swamp, fear is one of the most human things in the world. It can make us do all sorts of things, things we regret.”
“But Ethan—“ Rizzala started.
“He’s right,” Arieste cut off the dark-skinned woman.
“What?” Rizzala’s eyes narrowed and she fixed the platinum blonde with a dark scowl.
“Fear can drive us to actions that we would never consider otherwise.” She turned her attention to Letharia, who was cowering against the wall. “You made the choice to come, to help out, perhaps from a desire to atone for your cowardice.”
“Yes!” Letharia cried. Hope filled her tear-rimmed eyes, and she shook her head. “I want to help, I want to make sure you accomplish your mission safely. I will even allow myself to be put in harm’s way if it means I can make things right.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Arieste said. Her voice was strong, her posture as regal as any queen. “Your place is not as a warrior, but your knowledge is what makes you most useful. Ethan was right when he said that we will only be able to succeed with your help.”
“Anything!” Letharia threw her arms around Arieste and sobbed into her chest. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Arieste gave the dark-haired woman a moment, then pushed her back and fixe
d her with a stern glare. “But let me make this abundantly clear: everyone deserves a second chance, but not a third.”
Letharia’s expression fell, and her eyes widened a fraction.
“Your actions of the past are forgiven, but not forgotten,” Arieste’s voice was wintry, edged with a clear threat. “If you betray or deceive us again, there will be no mercy.”
“I…” Letharia swallowed hard and bobbed her head. “I understand. It will never happen again.”
I felt a moment of pride as I watched Arieste handle the situation with Letharia. She had come a long way from the cold, hard woman I’d discovered on the floor of Frosdar’s lair. I couldn’t help admiring the person she had become, and I experienced a moment of profound gratitude that I had someone like her in my life.
“Better not,” Rizzala growled, then took a step back. Though she lowered her spear, the wariness in her eyes remained undimmed. I had no doubt she would keep a close eye on Letharia, and it would take a long time before the dark-haired woman earned back Rizzala’s trust, if she’d ever had it in the first place.
“So, other than this riddle about honor and dragon hearts,” I said in a calm tone, in an attempt to defuse the situation, “is there anything else your tablets tell you about getting safely through these crypts?”
Letharia studied the tablet again and frowned. “I will continue searching, but I have found nothing else to offer any clear instruction.”
“Then we’re going to have to think this through logically,” I said. “We know these tunnels were used by priests hauling dead bodies up to the temple to be burned, right?”
Letharia nodded. “Yes.”
“And yet, these crypts have booby traps.” I gestured toward the stones. “Why would that be?”
“Yes,” Irenya added, “what would be the point of setting up traps if they were the only ones to use the passages?”
“I can only think of one reason that makes sense,” I said after a moment of contemplation. “Grave robbers.”
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