Earth Day, Virgo 16th, 576 CÆ, Year of the Tiger
Players: Iodas (Ixian, Barbarian), Frakki (Viking, Shaman of the Musk Ox totem), Aeltrin (Viking, Assassin of Rel), Wulfweard the Sly (Anglo-Saxon, Legerdemainist of Rel), Xararxar Rhaan (Hyperborean, Paladin of Apollo)
(Xararxar rejoined the party at the edge of the pool. Rathar the Brash was elsewhere again this session — the road and the summer have their claims.)
They had gone into the dark with a commission and no way home. They came out of it the same way they did everything down there — running, with their arms full.
The pocket realm gave back nothing a man could use to steady himself: no horizon, no sound but their own boots and breath, a flat lightless sky pressed down over cracked volcanic rock and thorn that crumbled at a touch. The vault sat off to the northwest, a black basalt silhouette with a low red glow leaking from one side, and beside the pool the bone-dry vine climbed up into the black on its corkscrew of iron brackets — the one road out. Xararxar laid his Sense Evil across the ground and felt it everywhere at once, sourceless and total: a deep, ravenous evil. They started for the building anyway.
Fifty feet on, a low moan came out of the dark.
The gloom-eaters
They came into the torchlight lurching — desiccated dead in robes so old the cloth went to powder where it tore, five of them, slow and herky-jerky and wrong, with a malevolence in their dead eyes and a turn of speed that surprised when they lunged to bite. The fight ranged back and forth across the broken ground. Frakki's boomerang caromed off one skull and looped back to his hand; Aeltrin put crossbow bolts clean through their necks to almost no effect; Iodas charged, caught a boot on a stone and ended up nose to nose with one having done nothing, then carved the next apart. It was Xararxar who carried it — a head taken clean off with the longsword, another folded in half, a third's skull stove in with a footman's mace — and twice the light of Apollo flared at his shoulder and turned a biting face aside at the last instant. Wulfweard threw a wall of mist across the field and worked a scimitar in the crush.
Halfway through, the truth of the things came out: steel that pierced them barely marked them, an edge that slashed bit only half, but a blunt weight broke them outright — which is why the bolts had been wasted and the mace had been law. The last of the five came apart and settled into a little heap of dust. There was nothing on them to take. Frakki said a word over them anyway.
The thing that wanted out
Climbing the path to the vault, they caught a shimmer ahead — a piece of darkness that moved with its own geometry, vaguely shaped like a man, hovering a finger's breadth off the ground with smoke curling up off it. It came down the slope, stopped twenty feet off, and waited. Xararxar's sense of it was immediate and certain: great evil. Then it pressed on all their minds at once — confinement, an anchor, a pressure that never lifts, a threshold that is never crossed — and to Xararxar alone it put words he felt rather than heard: if the anchor is lifted, the walls fall. I want to leave. We want the same outcome. He bent his thoughts back at it and got nothing; the shape drew away up the hill and settled, motionless, where it would not block the door.
He told the others what he'd heard. Frakki set it against what they already knew — that Kós Athar's school had turned its work to containing what the Serpent Men left behind — and the shape of it came clear. The gem was the anchor. Lifting it would loose this thing. They weighed that for about as long as it takes to say four hundred gold a head, and went up the hill. If they turned a great evil loose on the world, someone would only hire them to put it back. Job security.
The vault
The door was a single clean cut in dressed black basalt, no door in it and never had been, the red glow rising from a stairwell sunk straight into the floor. Aeltrin found no traps at the threshold. Frakki took ten minutes under the musk-ox mask, working his rattle-drum, and closed the worst of Wulfweard's hurts. Then down.
A balcony over a great pillared chamber; Aeltrin tied off a rope as a line of retreat. The side rooms gave up a dead brazier and a man — a merchant, desiccated against a wall, twenty years gone by the look of him, with thirty-four gold, a seal ring marked with two crescent moons overlapping, and a letter addressed to a Lord Artair of Port Zangerios, confessing he had failed his charge and was trapped here. In the great room itself, four pillars stood wrapped in script that crawled with red fire, and against the far wall waited an eight-foot skeleton in ancient Hyperborean plate, a two-handed sword held point-down in both fists. It read as neither evil nor magic — the burning script fouled every attempt to know it — and it did not stir when greeted, when touched, when pulled at; sword and armor were fused to its bones. Read in silence, the pillars gave up the warning plain: the closing holds it; to lift the Eye is to unmake the closing; one stands watch — let no hand disturb what is kept. The skeleton was the watch. The gem was the keystone.
What she left, and what she became
The lower level wound through mirrored stairs and looping halls. They turned up a climbing-pack and twenty-five gold, a plain short sword, and half-buried in the rubble a fine Hyperborean hand axe of dark, fine-grained make, which Aeltrin took. And at the bottom of it all, on a plinth in a small chamber, the Eye: a faceted black stone the size of an infant's head, cut to no fashion any of them knew, black with a deep inner cast of purple. They left it sitting and turned to the dead first.
Frakki spent the priest's Speak with Dead on the merchant, and the body half-rose to answer three questions. He had been sent to carry off Kós Athar's working papers — her notes, her instruments, whatever she'd sealed in here with herself — for a patron who held her scholarship on pre-human sorcery the greatest work never set into the record. He had found the vault and searched it for three weeks, certain the study was here, and never found it. And he had died of thirst, unwilling to drink the foul pool, having climbed the vine some forty feet before his strength failed — climbed back down, and died heartbroken. Then he sank back into death.
It was the thread they needed. An hour of searching walls gave nothing, until Iodas's eye caught a worn dip in a stair-tread and, beside it, a stretch of wall fitted so well it read as solid. It slid back on a hidden study — Kós Athar herself small and desiccated in a high-backed chair, both hands set on a basalt desk. Three gold rings and an amulet on her; a strongbox of old Hyperborean coin beneath the scrolls, with four cut gems wrapped each in hide and four vials of liquid, two of them kin to the priest's amber draughts and two like nothing they'd seen. Among the papers, three scrolls Wulfweard could read — Spider Climb, Feather Fall, Web — and one great tome in esoteric Hyperborean that none of them could, plainly the heart of her life's work. They bagged everything that would travel and split the coin between their packs, resolving to lay it all before Photios before they let Golnai so much as breathe on the Eye.
Taking it
They did what the inscription told them to dread. Every door spiked open; the balcony rope left rigged; and with their spare line they hog-tied the Watcher's legs and lashed it back toward the pillars, since its sword and armor would not come free. Then they roped the Eye and, standing well outside the chamber, hauled it off its plinth.
The realm shuddered the instant the stone left the stone, and a low hum rose from everywhere at once. They ran. On the main floor the Watcher had woken and was hacking through its own bonds, half the rope already parted, shuffling and not yet free — and they did not stay to learn whether they could beat it. The vault began to shake, its lines bending and going soft, and outside the dead world was coming apart in spreading rents of fire through which they could see stars, and planets, and things they had no names for. The Shadow was gone. Only the pool's glow and the dark line of the vine were left to run toward. They climbed it weighted with treasure — Xararxar hauling himself up under his armor by main strength — and pushed their hands through the shimmer at the top like hands into a puddle, and were drawn up and out.
They broke the surface of the black pool in the Forest of Crows under a sun they couldn't find through the trees. And the crows rose — all of them, at once, into a vast shrieking column above the canopy — as the pool began to rumble and ripple, and at the top of that unbearable noise it folded in on itself and became a dry, ordinary dell. The road into Kós Athar's dark was simply gone.
They had what they came for, and a great deal more besides. The long walk out of the wood was the easiest thing they'd done in days.
Next: out of the Forest of Crows and home to Port Zangerios — to Golnai, who is owed a gem, and to Photios, who is owed a look at what came back with it.
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