Swordmage (21 page)

“I think I’ve got something, Hamil,” he said, and he hurried back out to the room outside Terlannis’s crypt. He turned in a small circle, trying to sharpen the glimmer of perception he’d felt, and then his eye fell on the small statue of the angel in its niche.

“There,” he breathed. He bent close to examine the small statue in its niche and thought he could make out a paper-thin seam in the joining of its arm to its shoulder. “Hamil, have a look at this.”

The halfling moved up close beside him and peered at the angel statue. Geran had learned to respect Hamil’s skill with subtle traps, hidden triggers, and concealed mechanisms during their time with the Dragon Shields; the halfling had made it his business to know as much as he could about such devices, prowling the curio shops and antique collections of every city in the Vast to collect clever puzzles, charms, locks, and even toys in order to study the workings of each. Hamil’s house in Tantras was littered with those devices he prized enough to display for visitors … and guarded by more subtle and dangerous ones to make sure that no uninvited visitors would find it safe to linger there.

Hamil studied the statue for a long time, then examined the niche all around it carefully. Finally, he drew out from a pouch at his belt a small paper tube full of silvery powder, which he blew out over the statue. It sparkled oddly in the shadows as it settled. “No hidden rune-traps or symbols,” he said. “I think it’s a simple lever. Likely it opens a hidden panel or doorway.”

Geran glanced around the antechamber. “It’s very well hidden, then. We both had a good look here.” “Should I pull it?”

“I really don’t want to try the sarcophagus before we’ve exhausted all other options. Give it a try.” “Stand back,” Hamil warned.

The halfling slid to one side of the niche, pressed himself up against the wall, and gently pulled the angel’s arm toward him. The seam between arm and body widened. Then Hamil

rotated the arm back—it did not move that way far at all— reversed his motion, and twisted it forward. It moved a good quarter-turn and clicked, and the whole statue rose a quarter of an inch; the halfling rotated the angel on its base until he heard another faint click, and he raised the arm again until it locked back in place.

Metal and stone groaned somewhere under the feet, chains clanked slowly, and suddenly the floor of the antechamber began to sink. Geran quickly stepped back into the doorway leading to Terlannis’s crypt, while Hamil moved to the door opposite. A section of floor about ten feet across sank until it was a good eight feet lower than it had been, revealing a door of brightly polished bronze, untarnished despite the age of the mound. Hamil looked across the space to Geran. “I guess it was an elevator,” he said. “The sounds you heard were the counterweights. Clever. I didn’t expect the floor to move.”

Geran stooped down to grip the stone sill, swung himself ovet the edge, and dropped easily to the floor. He crossed over to give Hamil a hand down, since it was a long drop for the halfling, and the two companions turned their attention to the polished bronze door. It was inscribed with a great sunburst, ringed by a strange, flowing script.

“What does it say?” Hamil asked him.

“I don’t have the faintest idea. I think the script might be Celestial, but I can’t read a word of it.” The swordmage frowned and whispered another spell of perception—this one to reveal the presence of magic. The beautiful lettering shone with a fiery gold radiance in his eyes, and he felt the old, undiminished strength of ancient wards. “It’s divine magic of some kind. Some sort of spell of concealment? I can’t be sure.”

“Well, that would stand to reason. If the Lathanderians buried something here to keep it away from Aesperus, they would have used magic to deflect his efforts to scry its location.” The halfling blew a little more of his silver powder over the door, and again it sparkled as it drifted down to the flagstones. “No symbols or runes here, either, but it’s locked. Do we open it?”

“Yes. If we can find this place, so can Veruna’s soldiers.”

“All right, then.” Hamil worked for a moment on the lock and pushed the door open. Cold, dry air sighed out of the room beyond-—a large, low-ceilinged hall, its roof supported by dozens of pillars. A great bronze statue of a leonine creature dominated the center of the chamber, lying with its paws outstretched on the floor and its head held high. Its face was human in shape, surrounded by a great mane. Behind the statue stood a stone chest, covered in fine carvings. Ancient sconces holding slender golden staves lined the chamber walls; as Geran and Hamil moved into the room, flickering flames guttered into life around the golden staves, giving the room a rich yellow glow.

“Well, the servants of Lathander hid a crypt below a crypt,” the halfling observed. “I admit, I didn’t expect work of such skill here.”

“The chest,” Geran said. He looked carefully at the room and did not see anything to alarm him, so he started to circle around the statue to the left.

He was only five paces from the door when the lion opened its eyes and looked at him.

The statue shuddered once, and old metal squealed against old metal as it slowly began to clamber to its feet. Geran stepped quickly back, moving away from the thing, but a bright golden fire sprang up in its eyes, and it opened its mouth to speak. In a voice that sounded like the clashing of cymbals, it roared in Old Tesharan, “Speak now the Three Secret Names and state thy purpose here, or I must destroy thee!”

A guardian construct! Hamil said in alarm. He retreated too, backing away in a different direction. Geran, what in the Nine Hells did it say?

Geran felt a pillar at his back and stopped retreating. The bronze lion was not alive, of course—it was an enchanted statue, long ago imbued with the power to animate and attack any strangers who made it into the vault chamber. It might lack the speed and ferocity of a real sphinx or lammasu or

whatever it was supposed to be, but it would be a formidable war machine nonetheless, tireless and implacable. We’re supposed to know a password’, he replied to Hamil.

“Answer now, interloper, or thy doom is assured!” the statue roared again.

The bronze monster was easily the size of a large horse, its clawed feet the size of dinner plates. We need time to think, Geran decided. We might be able to puzzle out the password, but not quickly. “Back out!” he said.

He turned to race for the doorway, only to spy something above the door’s lintel—a baleful golden rune inscribed on a heavy keystone, facing in toward the lion. They’d walked right under it when they entered the chamber, which was likely what had triggered the magic to animate the statue and give it a voice. But two other runic marks were cut into the stone on each side of the glowing golden one, and when Geran’s eye fell on them they kindled to life as lines of sullen crimson fire. “Wait, no!” he shouted. “Stay away from the door. There are symbols over it!”

Hamil was closer to the door than he was; when the symbols awoke, he gave a strangled cry and fell to one knee, already within the influence of the magical trap. Somehow he managed two staggering steps away from the door, but now the statue turned with a scraping of bronze and fixed its burning golden eyes on him.

“Defiler!Infidel!“‘the statue’s voice proclaimed. It advanced on Hamil, who still reeled from his brush with the Lathanderian runes.

“Damn!” Geran swore. They had a fight here, whether they wanted it or not. He quickly cast his dragon-scale spell, even though he was not sure how much it would help against a foe of such strength. “Theillalagh na drendirf’he whispered, and around him the cascading scales of glowing violet light shimmered into existence.

The swordmage darted forward to distract the thing from Hamil and lunged out with his blade at the statue’s eye. Elven steel clanged shrilly against ancient bronze; the impact jarred

his hand, and Geran almost dropped his sword. The thing was hot, radiating heat-shimmers. The leonine monster turned on him with startling quickness for something so big and inflexible, and raked at him with its huge paw. Geran leaped back out of the way, and the statue followed, bulling its way straight at him. He saw that his thrust had dug a deep gouge just under the blank molten eye, creasing the bronze without penetrating it. He ducked behind one of the pillars in the chamber, trying to keep it between the statue and himself.

How do you destroy something made of metal? he thought furiously. He’d encountered animated statues and magical constructs before in his years with the Dragon Shields, and he well remembered that they were difficult to defeat. Some had vital mechanisms that could be ruined by a very well-aimed sword blow, but this one had been brought to life by powerful magic; as far as he could tell, it was a cast statue of bronze, hollow inside, with no vital mechanisms to destroy. The bronze itself was not even articulated; the magic of the ancient ritual that animated the thing gave the cast metal the suppleness and flexibility of living flesh.

While he tried to figure out how to deal with the thing, the statue moved around the pillar to get at him, and Geran circled away from it. It reversed its course and tried the other direction, and once again Geran moved with it. Then the bronze sphinx simply hurled itself straight at him, shouldering its way past the pillar. Stone cracked and splintered under its weight; dust sifted down from the ceiling. Geran grunted in surprise and danced back before taking his sword in a two-handed grip. He threw all his strength into a mighty cut across the statue’s face, and this time the elven steel actually parted the bronze in a shallow cut; molten red-gold fire seeped from the wound. A drop splattered the top of his boot and set the leather to smoking. Then the statue caught him with one mighty paw. Geran’s dragon-scale spell held, mostly— the deadly claws did not tear through his flesh, only scoring him lightly. But the spell did not guard against the crushing impact of the blow. He was batted away like a mouse flipped

head-over-paws by a cat, and he skidded to the ground a dozen feet away.

The bronze sphinx bounded after him, but just as it raised its paw to crush his skull, a pair of arrows thudded into its golden flank. “Come on, you lump of lead!” Hamil shouted. “Chase after me for a bit!”

The halfling had rallied from his brush with the symbol spell and crouched behind a pillar on the far side of the room, firing arrows as fast as he could draw his bow. They did not penetrate far into the bronze hide, but the range was short enough for the halfling to drive the steel points half an inch into the old bronze. More molten metal began to leak from the pinprick wounds, and the statue whirled away from Geran to pursue the halfling.

Geran groaned and rolled over to all fours, slowly pushing himself to his feet. His whole left side ached from where the sphinx’s bronze paw had caught him. He found his sword lying nearby and stood again. On the other side of the chamber, the statue snapped and clawed at Hamil, who dodged from pillar to pillar, just trying to stay out of its way.

“We need a better plan, Geran!” Hamil shouted to him.

The swordmage glanced left, right, and all around as he cast about for some position or advantage over the powerful bronze sphinx. Then his eye fell on the first pillar he’d used for cover against the construct. Its head was visibly out of vertical, and deep cracks spiderwebbed its surface. A desperate idea sprang into his mind, and he quickly measured the vaulting of the ceiling with his eye.

“Stay near the wall!” he called to Hamil. “I’ll get its attention again!”

“You’re welcome to it,” Hamil answered.

Geran ignored him and charged the statue’s hindquarters, taking a strong cut at its hamstring—or at least where its hamstring would be, if it were a living creature. He creased the bronze enough to spill a little more of its molten metal and drew back quickly, even as the monster whirled to face him again.

“Come on!” he shouted. “After me!”

The construct hurtled after him, and Geran darted back several steps. At the last moment he ducked behind the damaged pillar … and the statue lunged after him in response, striking the column almost dead-on. The pillar toppled with an awful roar of shattering stone, and the ceiling over it sagged and collapsed.

“Seiroch!” Geran shouted—a spell of transposition, magic that simply teleported him from one place to another close by in the space of an instant. He flickered out from under the collapse, reappearing on the other side of the room beneath the vaulting by the wall—the strongest part of the ceiling, or so he hoped. The warm yellow light filling the chamber dimmed and failed as billowing clouds of dust and debris choked the chamber. More of the ceiling gave way, and a cascade of rock and earth poured down into the middle of the room … but finally the collapse slowed, and an eerie silence settled over the room.

Hamil coughed once on the dust and looked up at Geran. “What would you have done if the whole ceiling had come down?” he demanded.

“I was hoping that it wouldn’t.” Geran eyed the heap of debris filling the center of the chamber. He could see one great bronze paw amid the wreckage, but it was hollow, empty; there was no molten fire within. Wearily he sheathed his sword—the magical steel was unmarked from its encounter with the old bronze—and picked his way over to the stone chest against the far wall. It was carved with images of angels armed for war, carrying swords and shields. Another trap would seem redundant, but he could not be certain. “Hamil?”

The halfling joined him by the chest and quickly examined it with his silver powder and a careful visual inspection. “I think it’s safe to open.”

Geran nodded and lifted the lid, which was cleverly counterweighted so that it operated easily despite its weight. Inside, wrapped in cloth that had long since disintegrated to

dusty scraps, lay a large tome bound in black leather. He reached in and lifted out the book, brushing the remnants of the wrapping away. Lettering embossed on the cover in the old Dethek runes read: The Infiernadex, being a Compilation ofSpells & Arcane Lore set down by the Hand of Aesperus, King of Thentur. He was sorely tempted to flip it open to a random page, simply to see what sort of things Aesperus might have deemed worthy of compiling, but that was not a good idea. Reading from magical books could be quite dangerous or cause unintended consequences of all sorts. For the moment, it would be enough to secure the thing and spirit it away to some place where the sellswords in Veruna’s service couldn’t find it. Instead, he wrapped the book in a spare cloak and slipped it into his pack. “Now, we’ll have to find a new hiding place House Veruna’s men won’t suspect,” he said.