Darkvision (33 page)

The wizard responded as if to some different statement. “My uskura is lost.”

“You pushed us clear of the darkness,” Warian insisted, waving behind him. No evidence of the veil of life-sucking night remained, except in memory.

“I didn’t push us clear. I saw through the darkness and helped you all do the same. But at what cost, I wonder? My sister may have given up her special sight…” Ususi’s eyes, glittering cold and hard, drifted out of focus.

“Your sister?” asked Iahn. “You have news of Deep Imaskar?”

“Slaughter walks the streets, she said …”

The bronze iris at the end of the hallway spun open. Beyond was a spacious, moon-bright hall, but a human figure just inside the opening partially blocked the view.

An icy breeze flowed from the figure, and a black vapor streamed away from its body, tinged with violet light. Iahn recognized the aura of a Pandorym agent.

The figure spoke in the vengeance taker’s native tongue. “Imaskari scions, if the dark won’t have you, I shall.”

It was Shaddon. Before the figure could unleash its lashing ribbons of murderous darkness, the earth lord’s long arm delivered a terrific punch, smashing Shaddon back into the glaring white chamber beyond.

Iahn rushed in.

Monolith’s blow was mighty, and Shaddon’s form smashed against the far side of a great chamber. Many creatures moved about the edges of the room.

He understood then why the chamber was called the weapons cache. The vengeance taker’s eyes widened. He ran, aiming neither for Shaddon nor the clot of creatures milling through the chamber. He saw something that his training called out for him to seize for himself.

Zel watched the naturally pale, dangerous vengeance taker charge ahead. Zel tightened his grip on the pickaxe and whispered, “So much for common sense.” Then Zel ran into the Imperial Weapons Cache.

Others barreled ahead of him. The pallid foreigner had gone first, and the wizard woman dashed after her compatriot. The foul-mouthed elf with the burning sword was only a step behind her.

Even his own nephew beat him through the door. Zel’s checks flushed, and he asserted, “I’m not afraid!”

He yelped when a great stone hand grabbed him.

The elemental lord pulled him back and turned him around, looking Zel in the eye. “Stay back, and remember what happens here today. And please guard my little friend.” The crystal dragonet on Prince Monolith’s shoulder hopped from the elemental to Zel. Zel was surprised to find that the creature weighed practically nothing.

The earth lord turned and dashed after the others. The dragonet belled loud and long, but the sounds emerging from the chamber were earsplitting. Zel moved forward tentatively to watch, relieved and ashamed that he had an excuse to remain out of the conflict.

The fabled Imaskaran Imperial Weapons Cache was essentially a fat, egg-shaped cavity seemingly wider than the tower’s dimension could contain. Ususi’s first impression was a cloud-swaddled sky, but the lines of the floor and curving walls and ceiling quickly resolved. Thousands of circles of every size were set into the floor. All were at least three or four feet in diameter, though many were much larger.

The circles capped thousands of inset storage cylinders sunk below floor level. The capacity of the chamber’s thousands of hidden silos took away Ususi’s breath.

The caps along the periphery of the great chamber were plain metallic bands, unadorned but for a simple symbol—sword blade, spear, bow, quiver, and so on. The wizard was no tactician, but she supposed there were enough of these mundanely-stamped silos to equip a small army with arms and ammunition, presuming each sunken locker contained what its stamp promised.

Toward the middle, intricate mechanical locks adorned the caps. At the hub of the great chamber, elaborate warding glyphs of inlaid Celestial Nadir crystal inscribed the sunken storage cylinders. Hundreds of protective warding circles were inscribed across the tops of all the innermost silos, some layered over one another, forming a diagram of staggering complexity, not dissimilar to the designs inscribed on the Great Seal back in Deep Imaskar.

But a great swath of the interlocking wards and circles was tangled and uneven. Here and there, cylinders stood raised from their compartments, their contents revealed. The wizard saw glittering black swords, slender steel wands, smooth-stocked crossbows, glassy darts filled with phosphorescent pink liquid, scarlet goggles, beetle-black gauntlets, dragonfly blades like the one Iahn carried, and other equipment that reminded Ususi of scuttling insect limbs and carapaces. But most disturbing were the raised cylinders that resembled sarcophagi more than equipment chests.

The sarcophagi were faced with glass. Creatures hung within, in a pale green briny solution, preserved against the long, slow grind of time. Ususi saw trolls behind the glass windows, demonic hoof-footed humanoids, human-sized eggs the color of flesh, bony shadow efts, mantis-headed insectoids, human-dragon hybrids, and at least one tentacle-faced humanoid with soulless white eyes frozen open in its captivity: a mind flayer of ancient vintage.

Several dozen unjacketed canisters yawned, open and drained. The creatures once contained therein, clustered near the room’s center, were decanted and active. Thankfully, the wizard saw no mind flayer lords.

Those freed were bad enough. Some were monstrosities she had faced in the caverns below the world. A few she knew through her studies. She recognized trolls, a dozen or more mantis-men. One figure towered over all the others, human in shape, but at least twenty paces tall! This giant’s skin was light green, as were its eyes and glittering hair, though it bore a purple crystal on its chest. A storm lord? Here was Shaddon, too, staggering back to his feet, though he seemed damaged from Monolith’s bold strike. Her arcane studies were unable to identify all of the monsters.

She spotted a free shadow eft! She shuddered, remembering again the sea passage across the Golden Water.

Each of the loosed creatures bore a violet-flaring Celestial Nadir crystal, some on cords, others pierced directly into loathsome flesh.

The cluster of Pandorym-controlled monsters stood poised and dangerous, guarding that which lay at the cache’s center.

The top edge of a canister ten paces in diameter peeked just above the floor’s surface, like a dais. The canister was only partially unjacketed from its silo. Ususi saw that the mechanical locks that once kept the container secured were only partly engaged. Worse, several lines of protection inlaid with Celestial Nadir crystal across the canister’s lid were chipped and broken. The canister wasn’t entirely free of its storage silo, and the bulk of it still languished in its cavity.

But for the thing sealed within, the slender gap in its cage was enough.

A whirling scab of lightlessness, as perfectly black as Ususi’s most terrifying childhood dream of the dark, streamed from the narrow gap in the floor. The darkness hovered, straining and pulling, but didn’t move more than a few feet from the canister from which it emerged, as if tethered.

Ususi called upon her borrowed percipience and gazed into the dark.

Pandorym was there.

If not in body, at least in purpose. It saw her and saw that its dark hid no secrets from her. In unison, every servitor intoned, “I require the keystone. Relinquish it, and I may spare your home.”

Ususi’s percipience pierced even to the center of Pandorym’s darkness. There, a circular gateway yawned, suspended several feet in the air. Ususi gasped when she recognized the streets of Deep Imaskar visible through the opening. The wide avenues, the tenement pillars, library spires … burning. Silhouetted in the flames, dark creatures moved to and fro, limned with violet malevolence.

The wizard of Deep Imaskar began uttering her most potent spells, suspecting they wouldn’t be enough.

Kiril advanced into the milk white chamber. Angul burned in her grip. A gruesome multitude opposed her, each suffused with a trickle of power from the demi-entity Pandorym. To her left, the young man with the crystal arm matched her stride, his arm shining with its own light.

The blade spoke in her mind. These creatures, and their master, are kin to the horrors we are pledged to destroy.

The swordswoman ground her teeth and took a practice swipe with the Cerulean Blade. Angul scattered radiant fire in his arc.

The blade instructed her. Whether they are abolethic horrors or evil unaligned, here lie abominations, and thus their existence is forfeit.

The sword’s anger burned brighter, and the certitude of his purpose steeled Kiril’s posture. More powerful than any drunken dream or induced high, Angul engulfed her in absolute conviction. She didn’t understand Pandorym’s origin, but with Angul’s influence pounding through her, she knew beyond certainty that it and its servitors deserved no mercy, nor quarter, nor even promise of redemption.

Kiril smiled, advancing.

Running into the chamber, Warian quickly evaluated what opposed them. Each bore the element of the Datharathis’ claim to fame—the damned crystal. Here was where Shaddon’s quest for wealth had taken him, and despite every warning, here he’d allowed his desire for power to subvert his reason. This damned chamber was where Warian’s grandfather had given up his soul.

The Imaskari wizard, chanting and gesticulating, stood to Warian’s left. Farther in and ahead of her, the vengeance taker jerked an ancient weapon from a container. Nearing Warian on his right, the elf with the burning blade advanced. A glance back showed him the earth elemental at the rear. He saw Zel peeking from around the bronze iris. Good. He didn’t want to see any more of his family … fall. His eyes welled with moisture.

Time to make Eined’s death mean something!

He summoned the full power of his arm and walked stride for stride with Kiril and her Cerulean Blade toward the room’s center.

Iahn reached an open canister. He crouched behind the stumplike protrusion, hiding from his adversaries, as he studied several pearl-stocked crossbows that hung within. He yanked the nearest from its mount and marveled. As finely fashioned as his other crossbow had been, before he’d lost it during the sea passage, this one was superior. Even more thrilling, the lower section of the unjacketed container held hundreds of bolt clips, each bolt lightly runed with magical vigor. He snatched a clip and worked the crank to load the crossbow. Smooth as silk. If he …

A four-armed, human-sized insectoid with a mantis head hopped into view from around the canister. With its amulet shining malevolently on its chest, it directed a ribbon of darkness at Iahn.

The vengeance taker screamed a syllable of warding, too late, and the ribbon found him. Pain seared his right leg. Iahn sighted along the crossbow at the creature’s amulet and pulled the trigger.

When the bolt struck the crystal, bolt and amulet were vaporized. The insectoid squealed and dropped, its legs and too many arms flailing madly before losing animation forever.

The vengeance taker allowed himself a nod of self-congratulation as he loaded another bolt.

Prince Monolith charged into the fray. His great strides propelled him past his slowly advancing smaller allies, through the forestlike maze of storage cylinders. Two mantis-men launched themselves at his legs, but he bowled through them without stopping, despite their speed and crystal-given strength.

The earth lord ran at the emerald-skinned giant. It was the creature most likely to match its strength against his own elemental power. The prince had always wanted to test his strength against a storm …

The giant’s eyes sparked, and lightning sprouted from every nearby surface, each bolt skewering Prince Monolith. The electricity seared through his mineral nerves, locking him in place. He strained, threatened with his booming voice, and tried to call upon his power to move through stone, but the electricity held him caged.

The pain crept toward intolerable.

Ususi spoke the words of a protective spell, and her sense of touch dulled as her skin protectively hardened. Monolith obscured her vision of Pandorym for a moment as he charged, but then her view was clear again. As terrifying as the force assembled before them was, her percipience allowed her to see that Pandorym’s true strength lay beyond the portal it maintained in Deep Imaskar. Destroying the creature would cut the puppet strings of all the servitors it had transferred there.

She saw Iahn take up a position on top of an unjacketed canister and fire his newfound weapon, one bolt after another. The others also advanced, but she couldn’t take time to watch their progress.

The wizard spoke a spell of wind, hoping to disperse or at least disturb Pandorym’s cloudlike form, and so disrupt the portal into Deep Imaskar, but the entity held its form.

If she couldn’t close the portal, could she block it? Ususi spoke the short, sharp syllables that beckoned a solid magical wall. Before she could finish, a hail of serpentine, night-dark rays emerged from the creatures at the room’s hub. Her eyes narrowed with concern as the shafts fell against her hardened skin … then she sighed. Her protective magic was diminished, but it held.

The wizard finished her utterance. She felt nothingness coalesce toward solidity. Though normally invisible, this time she saw her wall take shape in her star-bright gaze. She thrust it into the portal Pandorym hid at its core. The plane of force slapped into place.

Pandorym’s vaporous emanation writhed and bucked. The entity didn’t like the obstruction. Immediately, she sensed her blockade come under attack. Pandorym sought to eject it. The wizard gasped and tightened the clamps of her arcane will more securely about her magical construction. Her spell-craft was tested nearly beyond its limit as she struggled to hold the wall in place.

The portal at Pandorym’s heart hazed, warped, and wavered, but held. She had hit on a workable strategy! If she could maintain the blockade, Pandorym’s portal into Deep Imaskar would fail.

Then she saw crystal-faced Shaddon Datharathi, back on his feet, running at her with the speed of a zephyr.