The God-Stone War

Chapter 37

“Explain to me why we’re here again?” said Dorian.

We stood on a low rise, overlooking the remains of the place that had once been the Gaelyn household. It was a desolate location, dry and rocky. It might have been uninhabitable but for the oasis that was only a few miles distant. The people who had lived there had probably relied upon wells that tapped into the aquifer that rose close to the surface in this region.

“This was the last thing Marc investigated before his death. He thought there might be leftover relics of their magic or even books. The magic protecting this place prevented him from entering before he died. I’m here to find out for certain,” I repeated, since my friend had obviously not paid close enough attention before, and then I added sarcastically, “You’re here because my wife thinks I need looking after.”

Dorian grinned, “You do take a lot of watching.”

“Is that what you were doing last night?” I shot back amicably. “It seemed a lot more like you were trying to see if you could induce a hangover.” The night before, we had visited Marc together, and honored an old promise to share a drink at his grave. It was something we had decided on as young men when we had had our first stolen taste of beer.

It had been a struggle to take the first drink. My treatment at the hands of Dorian’s mother a year before had been brutal, and the memory of that time still made me nauseous. After that I had managed to have a couple more, but I wasn’t able to do more. Besides I had had my hands full keeping Dorian from drinking himself into a blind stupor. The grief he found at our friend’s grave, combined with his natural inclinations, made it almost impossible for him to moderate himself.

He growled, “Are you going to badger me about that?” It was readily apparent that he was still suffering a few lingering after effects.

“It’s what Marc would have wanted,” I pronounced solemnly.

“What, the drink at his grave or harassing me about my overindulgence?” asked Dorian irritably.

“Both.”

He snorted. “Yeah, you’re right about that.” Shading his eyes, he looked down at the scattered collection of broken walls and tumbled stones that hinted at what must have once been a large group of buildings. “What do they call this place again?”

“Drakon Perket,” I answered, “It means ‘Dragon’s Nest’.”

“Not a very inviting name,” he observed.

It probably wasn’t meant to be, I thought. I could sense magic hovering in the air around the place, like a diffuse aura, encouraging visitors to stay away… to forget what they had seen. “It must be an enchantment,” I muttered to myself, “otherwise it would have faded by now.” I started to extend my shield to protect Dorian from its effects before I realized that it probably wouldn’t work on him anyway. His mind was utterly impervious to magic of that sort. “Let’s go down and see if we can find an entrance,” I told him.

“To what?” he asked.

“There’s a network of tunnels and cellars beneath the rock and sand. Some of it I can sense, and other parts seem to be shielded,” I replied. “Whatever is there, I want to know what it is.”

We walked down a gentle slope until we reached the center of what must have once been a large courtyard. Tumbled stone marked places that had once been walls, and a crumbling structure near the center looked as though it might have been a well, although it was full of rubble now. After fifteen minutes of careful searching, we still hadn’t found an entry.

“You’re sure there are tunnels and rooms down there?” said Dorian.

“Yes.”

“Because there’s no entrance,” he added.

“I think you’re right,” I responded, wondering where he was heading with this line of thought.

“Doesn’t make much sense to build it without an entrance.”

“Well the old one might be covered by fallen stone. I can create a new way down if necessary,” I replied.

“Oh,” said Dorian, “then why are we wasting our time looking around?”

I took a deep breath, “Are you like this at home?”

“Why?”

I had a hunch Rose might regret having him home full time if he completely quit doing patrols, but I decided to keep my opinion to myself. “No reason,” I replied, before walking in a new direction.

I found a location directly over one of the closest rooms beneath us. It was only twenty feet down, under an assortment of rock and sand. I briefly considered talking to the earth, to allow us to slip unhindered through the ground, as I once had with Rose. It was a short distance though, and talking to Dorian had left me with a bit of tension, so I decided to use my own power to create a more normal entry. “Step back a bit,” I told Dorian, and then I focused my will on the ground in front of me. “Grabol ni’targoth,” I said in a commanding voice as I exerted myself. The ground shook as I forced it open, tearing a hole in the earth and reshaping it to form a ten foot wide opening and a steep ramp downward.

My large friend stood next to me with his sword drawn. He looked menacing.

“What’s that for?” I asked, pointing to the sword.

“Just in case.”

“There’s nothing alive down here,” I responded. “Nothing close enough for me to sense anyway.”

Dorian ignored my wisdom. “You’ve been wrong before.”

Shaking my head, I led the way down. The room that my new entrance led to was full of rotten boxes and dry dust. The smell of mold was overpowering. It appeared to have been a storeroom once, and I’d have guessed that the contents had been food stuffs. Needless to say, they were no longer good.

Dorian started coughing from the foul air, and before I realized it a powerful but subtle wind swept down from above, threading its way through the room and into the tunnels, rapidly replacing the stagnant air with fresh. Damnitt, watch yourself, I mentally chided. That was the very reason I was supposed to have a mielte watching me. My abilities as an archmage occasionally manifested without conscious thought.

“Good thinking,” said my companion, grateful for the fresh air. Of course he didn’t realize that my self-control had slipped.

“You’re welcome,” I said dryly.

A wooden door that had long ago succumbed to dry rot was all that barred our way out of the storeroom. Dorian swept it away with his hand, and we began searching the hallway that led from that point onward. Eight similar storerooms and a few smaller closets connected to it, but in each we found nothing more interesting than dust and ruined foodstuffs. Some of the wood was well preserved in the dry air, while in other places it had nearly disintegrated from occasional exposure to moisture.

An hour of careful searching revealed nothing of interest.

“Seems like we’ve come up empty handed,” noted Dorian at last.

I shook my head. “No, there’s more… beneath us somewhere.”

“Well I’ll be damned if I can tell where the entrance is,” he answered. “How can you tell?”

“I can feel an empty space beneath us, but it’s shielded by magic. It’s more than a hundred feet down, so I can only assume that it must connect with this area somehow,” I told him.

Dorian grunted, “That doesn’t make much sense. How did they get in and out?”

There was the possibility that they had used a teleportation circle, but I had a hunch it was something else. “I think they’ve used an enchantment to hide the entrance, and some distance beyond,” I said as I thought about it. The mistake had been in not hiding the deeper portion of their sanctuary with the same enchantment. “I’ll create another way down.”

I began using my magic to create another tunnel, but as soon as I started I found that the floor was not what it appeared to be. Beneath a thin veneer of tile lay heavy granite rather than earth or simple bedrock. To my magesight it still appeared to be mixed rock and earth, but now that I had removed the tile, I could see the granite slabs with my normal eyesight.

“That looks an awful lot like a door,” said Dorian, pointing at a large square section in the center. He was remarkable in his ability to state the obvious.

Bending down, I could see fine lines traced across the surface of the stone, marking the enchantment that hid the truth from my arcane senses. Cleverly done, I commented to myself, noting the pattern that some long dead enchanter had used. “There’s something else in this enchantment though… I don’t understand why they included these runes,” I said aloud. “Give me a few minutes to think. I can probably figure out where the key runes are.”

“Key runes?”

“The central nexus of the pattern, the point they would have gone to when opening the door… it may require a specific magical input, or a physical sign. Depending upon how they designed it, I might be able to fool it, or at least figure out what the requirement is for unlocking it,” I explained.

Dorian frowned, “I forget that you don’t speak the common tongue. How long will doing whatever you were talking about take?”

I ran my hand over my chin, pulling at my beard. “I’m not sure… an hour or two maybe,” I answered.

“How about this…,” said my friend, “this line appears to be central, and I’d bet the stone is less than a foot thick, if this is truly a door. So there are probably only one or two points here that actually keep it physically in place, behind or within the stone.”

I raised an eyebrow, “And?”

“If I can create an opening in the stone, somewhere around here,” he said, pointing to the center, “then I might be able to apply enough force to break whatever bar is holding it… assuming that it hinges along the sides there.”

“Well yes,” I replied, amazed that he thought he would be strong enough to do such a thing. I could have done the same thing with brute magical force, but I had a strong suspicion that the enchantment was tied to something else… something we might want to avoid if possible. I opened my mouth to explain, but I had spent too much time thinking about my answer.

Dorian had already taken my ‘yes’ as full agreement. Raising his sword, he held it between both hands, with the point facing downward. Exhaling, he drove it into the granite seam. Rock chips flew in several directions and the point bit deeply into the stone. I also felt a surge as the enchantment was disturbed. Something had happened, though I couldn’t be sure what.

“Shit,” I said bluntly.

“What?”

“You triggered something,” I replied.

Dorian was quiet for a moment. “Nothing seems to be happening,” he said, and then he drove his sword into the rock again. “How about that time?”

I sighed, “No, whatever it did, has already been done.”

He smiled, “No use crying about spilt milk then.” In the space of a few minutes, he cut a crude hole through the stone in the middle of our ‘door’. It turned out to be no more than six inches thick, and the opening he created was five or six inches in diameter. He stopped to wipe his brow. “This is a lot harder than it looks.”

“Swords really aren’t meant for cutting stone… or even wood for that matter,” I told him wryly. Even enchanted as it was, and with Dorian’s considerable strength behind it, cutting holes in granite slabs was a difficult task.

“I think it’s enough now,” he said, setting his sword aside. Dorian tried to reach inside, but his gauntleted hand proved to be too bulky. Stripping off his armored gloves and removing his helmet, he tried again (I had replaced his armor during the past year). Kneeling down, he slipped his right hand in far enough to grip the inside edge of the stone door.

I watched carefully as he braced himself and began pulling with his right arm, while pushing down against the floor with his left. His face turned red and veins stood out against the side of his head, but the granite didn’t move. “You’re going to hurt yourself,” I warned. “Let me do that. You probably shouldn’t be overusing the earth power anyway,” I said, remembering what I had seen happen to him after our battle with Karenth and Doron. I still didn’t understand what had occurred. In the past, physical changes such as he had undergone were permanent, without immediate removal of the earth bond… and timely intervention of an archmage to help the afflicted warrior recover his humanity. Assuming the process hadn’t gone too far.

“No… I can do this,” he said stubbornly. Setting himself, he drew a deep breath and began again. This time his face turned red as he exhaled through clenched teeth, but he didn’t give up. Groaning, he kept pulling until I began to wonder if he might burst a blood vessel… and then I saw it happen. The tips of his ears changed color, going from red to grey. The color spread slowly across his skin and even his hair changed, from deep black to a dusty white.

Alarmed, I shouted for him to stop, but it was too late. Straightening his legs, he ripped the massive stone slab up from its framework, tearing loose the iron bars that held it in position with a horrific shriek of stressed metal and popping stone. As chance would have it, it actually did hinge along the side he had suggested, and he pushed it back to rest against the floor on that side. Huffing from his exertion, he looked at me with an exultant expression. “See! I told you I could do it,” he said in a gravelly voice. “What’s wrong?” he asked as he saw the look on my face.

“We’ve got to release your bond!” I shouted at him, “Now!” All I could see was my friend turning into a golem right in front of me. I didn’t want him to wind up like Magnus, but I feared it might already be too late.

“What’s wrong with you?” he replied, showing me his hands. The skin on them was still pink and healthy, if a bit callused. Looking up from them, I saw the color returning to his face, even as his hair resumed its glossy black sheen. “I’m fine.”

“What the hell?”

“Now you sound like Rose,” he said with a chuckle.

I had some trouble imagining her speaking so uncouthly, but then again, she was probably much different in their private life. I was more astonished by the changes in my large friend, even his voice had returned to normal. If I hadn’t seen what had occurred, I might not have believed it. If he hadn’t taken off his helmet, I might never have known, I realized.

“You changed… and then you changed back,” I told him. “Did you feel anything?”

“Changed how?” asked Dorian.

I described what I had seen to him before adding, “I thought I might have imagined it last time.”

“You saw this before?”

I nodded, “After the battle with the gods… your skin looked different then, and your teeth were granite-like. Things were confusing, and I collapsed afterward so when you seemed normal later I assumed that perhaps I was mistaken. Did you feel different just now?”

“Just the strength of the earth, pounding in my ears like a heartbeat, but it always does that when I exert myself a lot. I didn’t think it was unusual. The other knights have described it in a similar manner,” he replied.

“But they don’t revert to normal after they start showing physical signs… and you were definitely showing signs,” I reiterated.

Dorian opened his mouth wide to show his teeth and then pinched his cheek. “Well I’m still flesh and blood.”

I thought for a moment before responding, “I wonder if it’s because you’re a stoic. You must have some innate resistance.” As I pondered on it for a moment, I heard a voice in my mind, the voice of a teacher in the distant past, ‘When an archmage chooses to make someone a targoth cherek, they must remember that stoics cannot accept the bond, their immutability makes them unable to form bonds with external agencies, elements, or even people.’

The sudden memory was unexpected, but for once not unwelcome. It surprised me and before I could focus on it, it slipped away. If that was true, then how did I manage to create a bond between Dorian and the earth? I wondered.

Dorian shrugged, “Are we going to worry about this all day or stick to business?”

I had been lost in thought for several minutes, and his remark served to bring me back to the present. “Sorry,” I answered, “You’re right. Let’s see what we’ve found.”

Gazing downward, the place the stone door had guarded now revealed a stone staircase, descending into the dark. With the concealing enchantment damaged I could now sense the areas it led to. “This stair goes down for more than fifty feet before stopping in some sort of antechamber filled with chairs and furnishings… and a considerable amount of magic,” I said aloud, for Dorian’s benefit.

“Anything along the way?” he asked in return.

“Nothing of note,” I replied, lighting the head of my staff to give him enough light to see the steps as we descended.

Dorian responded with a grunt and readied his sword. It was a signature grunt that told me immediately that, while he respected my ability to sense things ahead of us, he fully intended to remain alert anyway, which was precisely why Penny had insisted that he come with me.

Leading the way carefully, Dorian tested each step before placing his weight fully upon it; a procedure that I found taxed my patience. My magesight had revealed no hidden traps or pressure plates, and while I knew from experience that it could be fooled, I still disliked spending half a minute for every foot we went down. I knew better than to voice my opinion though, Dorian took his work seriously, and he was almost as stubborn as my wife when he put his heart into something.

After an hour of mind-numbing boredom, we finally reached the antechamber my senses had been exploring the entire time. It made no better sense once I put my physical eyes upon it. In form and appearance it seemed to be nothing more unusual than a sitting room or waiting chamber. The walls were decorated with ancient tapestries which had faded beyond the point of recognition and a collection of book cases covered one wall. There were no books to be seen though, just piles of dust and a few odd metal bookends. A modestly sized table stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by six chairs. Another, smaller table with two chairs sat near one corner, and a plain door exited the other side of the room.

Oh… and every item in the room, from the bookcases, to the tables, and even the chairs, radiated intense magic. Perhaps I should have mentioned that to begin with.

Two lamps suspended by iron chains from the ceiling lit automatically as we entered the room, suffusing the area with a warm natural glow. “Don’t move,” I cautioned my stalwart friend. “Every item in this room is enchanted.”

“For what purpose?” asked Dorian.

It was a sensible question, which irritated me for some unknown reason. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be saying, ‘don’t move’… now would I?!” I shot back harshly.

“No need to make an ass of yourself,” retorted my friend.

I took a moment to breathe before answering, “I’m sorry. I’m just tense. Give me a moment to see if I can figure out what these enchantments do.”

I spent close to an hour closely studying the chairs and tables, careful to avoid touching, or even approaching them. Magesight can be handy sometimes. By focusing my perception precisely, I could peer at the individual runes making up the enchantments on each object from almost any angle, though what I saw made little sense and only increased my frustration. My only satisfaction was that I knew that standing still for an hour with nothing to do, and no idea what I was doing, must have driven Dorian to distraction. It was a fair repayment for the laborious descent he had forced me to endure on the stairs.

“How much longer are we going to stand here?” he asked me again, as he had every five to ten minutes for the past three quarters of an hour.

I ground my teeth, “I don’t understand these enchantments. The structure is twisted somehow… askew in a way that should make them non-functional.”

“Well if they don’t work then they should be safe, right?”

I shook my head, “No, if they didn’t work they’d have faded by now. These things look just as fresh as the day they were made, which means that the alignment is properly balanced… I just don’t understand how.”

“So… are we going to stand here all day, or try that door over there? We could take some of these things back if you want to study them later,” said Dorian pragmatically.

“Let’s just move on. There’s something like a vault a short distance past that door. Whatever they were protecting down here is probably in there,” I told him. “We should skirt the edges of this room though, just in case… and don’t touch anything.” Double checking my shield, I gave him a pat on the back, indicating he should start moving forward.

Everything went fine, until he reached the side of the room and we began edging toward the far door. A sharp surge of magical energy was my only warning before my eyes were greeted with the improbable sight of a chair grinning at me. That’s right, the goddamned thing grinned at me. The chair back twisted and changed, revealing two grotesque eyes and a mouth full of what appeared to be razor sharp teeth.

Before I could react, it stood and lunged at me. The back and seat rose, becoming the main body of what appeared to be an oddly shaped wooden stick-man, while the arms stretched out and showed enchanted claws, as if they were cat paws. It struck with breathtaking speed, ripping through my shield and almost reaching my suddenly vulnerable throat. I might have died then, but for the fortuitous presence of Dorian Thornbear.

I hadn’t seen him move, so focused was I upon the wooden monstrosity that had attacked me, but his sword struck with blinding speed, cutting through the wooden arms of the chair and sending a rainbow cascade of magical energies flying through the air. I doubted he could see the chaotic and colorful spray of aythar as his sword devastated the magical construct, but it hardly mattered… his sword still did its work.

Things would have been simple if it had just been the chair, for Dorian’s second and third cuts rendered it rapidly into antique kindling, but the chair was not alone. It came with a full set of chair friends as well as two brutes that had previously been perfectly civilized tables. As the first chair had already shown, my magical shield was virtually worthless against the enchanted claws and teeth that each former piece of furniture came equipped with, but Dorian’s armor was more than sufficient.

Reaching into my pouches, I started to bring forth another stone disk, similar in appearance to the one that served as my magical flying construct, but with a different function. I was interrupted by a massive table leg stabbing toward me with a gleaming spike on its foot. Dodging sideways, I was almost too slow getting out of its path, but fortunately I tripped over the remains of the first chair, and my fall helped me to avoid the deadly attack.

I wish I could say I planned the fall, but I hadn’t. I was just clumsy.

Meanwhile, Dorian had gone on a rampage. That’s the best way I could think to describe it. The man was an unbreakable, unforgiving, and utterly unstoppable engine of destruction. If other furniture items could see his actions that day, and if that same furniture then had dreams… well they’d have been horrific nightmares of wooden destruction at the hands of a metal clad monster, i.e. Dorian Thornbear.

He moved in a perfect rhythm of violence; graceful and terrible at one and the same time. He had somehow noticed my fall, and he stepped back and to the side to cover me, even as his sword clove through another barbarously deformed chair.

The smaller side table caught his sword as it recovered from the swing and sought to trap his arm. Given Dorian’s incredible strength and the nature of his magical blade, it was a futile maneuver… but it kept him off-balance and cost him a precious second as he ripped the blade free of his wooden opponent. During that time the larger table rushed him, slamming into him like an animated battering ram.

I tried to brace him with a hastily erected shield but the enchanted construct’s wooden arms tore through it as if it were tissue paper, and Dorian wound up being slammed against the wall, while I served unwittingly as a block to trip his legs as he fell backward. Scrambling forward, I hastily got out of the way, casting about with my senses to find my staff which I had dropped during my initial fall.

The enchantment that powers these things seems to be impervious to normal magic, I noted silently. As I had seen before, magic bound within permanent rune structures was virtually impossible to alter or destroy, unless you used something similar against it. Enchanted swords easily cut through my shields, as had the strangely fluid magic of the shiggreth leader, Timothy. His magic had seemed very similar to an enchantment, even though he created it spontaneously with nothing more than will and words. Spell-weaving, came an unbidden memory, the true difference between a civilized race and animals. Somehow I knew that the speaker had meant human kind when he had said ‘animals’.

Even while these thoughts raced through my mind, my hand reached my staff and I brought it up to bear on the swarming wooden chaos of the room before me. Dorian had recovered from his fall and was now grappling the larger table from his disadvantageous position on the floor. It hardly mattered though, as I watched, his greater strength prevailed, and he began ripping the heavily timbered opponent limb from limb, or leg from tabletop, in this instance.

Focusing my power along the channel of my staff, I burned through the remaining chairs with a white hot beam of pure aythar. Within moments the fight was over, and we were left standing amid the wreckage of the most vicious furniture I had ever encountered. I began chuckling at the thought.

“What are you laughing about?” asked Dorian as he rose from the floor.

“We finished the furnishings,” I snickered.

Dorian groaned, “Not again.”

That only made me laugh harder, “You smashed the sideboard and broke the buffet while I charred the chairs.”

“Alliteration?” said my friend bleakly, “I think I preferred your bad puns.”

“Wait,” I protested with a grin, “I think I can do better.”

“Better is worse,” said Dorian.

“You terminated the table’s tortuous tumult.”

“Even if the gods are false, there has to be a special hell for people like you,” he replied.

“A literal hell,” I said before pausing, “… or ‘alliteral’ hell. Is that what you mean?”

“Goddammit stop!” he cried before adding, “alliteral isn’t even a word.”

“Well it should be,” I said smugly and then I was forced to dodge a wide swing of Dorian’s arm. I knew he was only playing though… if he had meant to hit me, I’d never have had time to move.