The Ventifact Colossus (The Heroes of Spira Book 1) (12 page)

Even as she thought these things, Dranko stumbled and leaned heavily against the bar, dropping the bottle. It thudded to the floor, and Dranko leaned down out of sight to pick it up. Five seconds later he hadn’t stood up again.

“Dranko?” When he didn’t answer, she dashed to the bar, hoping that he had merely passed out and fearful that a heretofore undiscovered gopher-bug was chomping on his neck. But it was neither. Dranko was on his hands and knees, his head cocked, listening.

“The whiskey’s draining into somewhere,” he said. “You can hear it. And look.” He pointed to where a pool of spilled alcohol was collecting in a narrow crack between two floorboards and draining out of sight. But more than that, the crack continued around to form a fat rectangle in the floor.

“It’s a trap door,” she said. “And that bit of rope there is the handle.”

Dranko tugged on the loop of rope that stuck out from one floorboard, and the trapdoor came up about a quarter-inch, then stopped. “Locked.”

“From below,” added Aravia. “Which means someone is down there, right now.”

Still lifting the trapdoor, Dranko leaned down and put his mouth to the gap. “Hello down there! Exterminators here! We dealt with your vermin problem, so that’ll be ten talons fifty.”

“What are you doing?” Aravia made herself sound shocked, but was privately encouraged that Dranko had recovered enough to crack wise.

“Isn’t it obvious?” asked Dranko. “Whoever’s down there is hiding from the gopher-bugs. I’m letting them know it’s safe to come out now.”

“I suppose that’s likely. Let’s at least get the others over here before I shatter the lock. Just in case.”

She looked up to find the rest of the group drifting toward them anyway, no doubt curious as to what was going on behind the bar. Aravia cracked her knuckles and prepared to cast. “Dranko,” she asked, “how sturdy a lock would you say that feels like?”

Dranko pulled on the rope handle one more time. “Pretty sturdy. Why?”

“Just wondering.” Aravia had been itching to try her own improved variant of
minor lockbreaker,
a spell she had been calling
Aravia’s lockbuster
in her head. She had nearly cast it in Abernathy’s tower, and again to get into the Greenhouse, but both times she had been thwarted. Finally, here was a chance for a proper field test! Aravia twirled her fingers and uttered the words of
Aravia’s lockbuster.
Alas that Master Serpicore was not there to see it; he had never let her try it in his own home.

The trapdoor burst its hinges in a violent explosion, sending up a shower of wooden shards. Dranko cursed and slapped his face as a splinter lodged in his cheek. From somewhere below came the sound of scattered metal pieces clanging on stone.

“Dammit, Aravia!” Dranko barked. “There’s someone down there, remember? You could have just dropped a metal bar on their head. Let’s not kill anyone else today, okay?”

She had held the long “a” syllables of the chant for a hair too long, which combined with the motion of her left ring finger to impart too much kinetic energy to the target. Probably a result of her fatigue. She would fix that next time. “Sorry.”

Tor reached down for the rope handle. “I’ll go first.” He lifted the wooden hatch. Aravia looked around him and down into the darkness. Instinctively she cast
heatless light
on a mug, but this time exhaustion disturbed her execution too much, and the mug glowed brightly for only a second before collapsing into a heap of gray glass pebbles.

Maybe no more casting today.

Ernie brought over a lantern, which illuminated a steep stone staircase leading to a tiny storeroom. On the floor down below was the outline of a person, either asleep or dead. The foul smell of human waste drifted up.

“Careful!” said Ernie, as Tor descended. “There could be more gopher-bugs down there.”

When Tor returned up the stairs, he had the body over his shoulder. He set her down on the bar, and Aravia saw he had rescued a middle-aged woman wearing a stained apron over homespun work clothes. She was barely breathing, and her features were gaunt, with sunken eyes and cracked, dry skin.

Dranko moved to examine her. “Dehydrated, I think. Probably barricaded herself down there when the monsters flew in and hasn’t had anything to drink in days.” Aravia grabbed a jug of water from a shelf behind the bar and handed it to Dranko, who in turn dribbled some drops into the woman’s mouth. “When someone’s incredibly thirsty, you don’t just give them a huge glass of water. You have to let them sip just a little bit at a time.”

The woman reflexively swallowed the proffered water but didn’t regain consciousness.

“I’ll stay up with our patient,” said Dranko. “The rest of you get some sleep. Someone should be on watch all the time, though, so I’ll wake one of you up in a few hours.”

Aravia wandered upstairs with the others and picked out a room. It must have belonged to one of the victims because there was a duffel in the corner and the bed was unmade. She sat on the bed and reflexively patted it, expecting Pewter to jump up beside her, then sagged as she remembered her cat hadn’t made the journey with her. Was Serpicore feeding him? Her old master had never liked Pewter, being so averse to the horrors of cat hair on his furniture that the gray feline had been confined to her own room at all times. When they returned to the Greenhouse, she’d have to press Abernathy harder about retrieving him.

The bed itself had a wool mattress, which was plenty good enough for Aravia given the rigors of the day, and though she thought she might stay up an extra hour taking additional notes on her spells, sleep swiftly claimed her.

* * *

The woman from the cellar was named Minya; she was the owner of the Shadow Chaser
.
Some color had returned to her face, but her eyes were still too deep in their sockets.

“What happened here?” Aravia asked her over breakfast. Ernie had made himself at home in the kitchen and had scrambled some eggs with onions and scallions from the root cellar.

Minya’s voice was cracked and tired. She twined her fingers together as she spoke. “I wish I knew. Happened three, maybe four days ago. Lost track, hidin’ out down there. Had a room full of customers, troupe of actors goin’ from Minok to Tal Killip, couple a’ carpenters from Tal Hae headin’ the other way. Middle of a sunny day, heard the strangest noise, little bit like a thunderclap, but not exactly. Quicker, sharper noise than that. Not natural soundin’. Noise came from them creepy haunted ruins, and everyone got quiet for a minute, but that was it, and we just chalked it up to bein’ thunder after all.”

“The ruins are haunted?” asked Grey Wolf. “By what?”

“Hells if I know,” said Minya. “I’m smart enough to stay away, and so’s everyone else in these parts.”

Dranko raised an eyebrow at that. “Then how do you
know
they’re haunted?”

“Never mind,” said Grey Wolf before Minya could answer. “What happened then?”

“Nothin’—for about half an hour,” said Minya. “Then we heard a buzzin’ like a swarm a’ bees, and those eyeball critters came flyin’ in through the windows and landin’ on folks’ heads and necks. Everyone was screamin’ and runnin’ around, but the little monsters just started chewin’…chewin’ people’s…”

She stopped her narrative, grabbed Dranko’s mug, and took a deep drink before continuing. “I panicked, sorry to say it. Got myself right down in the cellar when I saw one o’ them things flying at me, heard it thump a few times on the door. Heard the…the yellin’ and runnin’ around of folks dyin’ and tryin’ to fight back. When the noise died down, I tried peekin’ out, but the air was full a’ them buzzin’ monsters, so I stayed put.

“Every few hours I’d take another look, but those things weren’t leavin’, and the noise of slidin’ back the bar attracted ’em and brought ’em buzzin’ right over, so I just settled down to wait. Should a’ grabbed a water jug on the way down, I guess. And that’s about it. Storeroom had some apples, but that was all the water I got.”

“You need to rest and to keep drinking,” said Dranko. He looked at his cup. “Water would be better, though.”

“You folks can stay as long as you like. You saved my life, no mistake about it. Don’t know how I’m going to repay that.”

Aravia was impatient to get to the important part of this conversation. A thunderclap from the woods where Abernathy’s monster-prison was located? Followed by an attack of unnatural creatures? She had learned to be highly skeptical of coincidence. “We won’t be staying long,” she said. “Tell us more about the ruins.”

“Oh. Well, I only been there once, when I was a girl. You go about a half mile north a’ here, you’ll start seein’ ’em. Used to be some great city out there hundreds a’ years ago, but not much is left now ’cept a bunch a’ crumbly walls. Didn’t stay long. The whole time I was explorin’, I had a feelin’ like I wasn’t supposed to be there, that somethin’ was watchin’ over my shoulder. And there weren’t much to see, so I only went the one time.”

Aravia sighed. “Anyone else here in town know anything about them?”

“Doubt it,” said Minya wearily. “Those ruins are bad news, and everyone knows it.”

* * *

Maybe someone else in Verdshane would have had more to say about the ruined city to the north, but they soon discovered that gopher-bugs had ripped through the rest of the village like a plague of deadly locusts, leaving no survivors. In the woodshed of one of the homes set back from the road, the company found the bodies of a young couple along with three crushed gopher-bugs. A heavy blood-spattered spade lay on the ground beside them. A hurried tour of the remaining homes revealed similar gory scenes. If any had survived the monster attack, they were either still in hiding or had fled down the Greatwood Road.

The forest north of the village was thick and difficult. The elms, pines, and beeches grew close enough together that navigating their territory was like winding through a wooden-walled maze. There were no game trails, let alone man-made tracks, to make the journey easier, and the trunks were thick enough that even Tor and Grey Wolf couldn’t hack a path through them with their swords. Aravia silently cursed Master Serpicore for so severely restricting her access to his spellbooks.

As if reading her mind, Tor turned to her as they bushwhacked. “Hey Aravia, do you know any spells that would make this easier?”

“I know
of
plenty,” she answered. “There are teleporting spells like the one Abernathy used to bring us to his tower. There are spells that change your substance to vapors, so you could slip between the trees like mist. There are spells that let people fly, so we could go
over
the trees. But Serpicore never let me see the books for them. Someday I’ll learn them all, but that doesn’t help us right now.”

“That’s okay,” said Tor. “The spells you know have been great so far.”

Aravia blushed, just a little. Then she thought about Abernathy’s library and the spellbooks he had promised her. What would be in them? What great heights of arcane learning would she achieve with the collected formulae of an archmage at her fingertips?

Distracted by these thoughts, she was surprised to find herself suddenly in among the ruins. The remains of a stone wall, twenty feet at its highest point, rose up among the towering pine boles. Chunks of rock were scattered around the wall’s base, and vines curled up and across its weathered stones.

Aravia peered into the morning haze rising from a carpet of last autumn’s leaves, and everywhere now among the trees were the husks of a long-dead city, the remnants of its walls and towers and roads resting in mossy silence beneath the forest that had conquered it. The Company crossed what was once a wide avenue, marked now only by a few brave paving stones reaching futilely out of the moldering underbrush. Then another enormous decaying wall loomed before them, the seams between its stones sprouting with moss and rough brown lichen. In the days when it was strong and whole, it would have blocked their path, but time and the woods had conspired to fill it with gaps.

“How long ago do you suppose people lived here?” asked Dranko. “Or more to the point, how long ago did they
stop
living here?”

“Hundreds a’ years,” said Kibi. The stonecutter had his fingertips on the stone and had the oddest expression on his face. “For hundreds a’ years, these stones’ve lived in silence.”

Grey Wolf snorted and gave a curt laugh. “They tell you that, did they?”

Kibi didn’t answer.

“I couldn’t care less how old these ruins are,” Grey Wolf said to the others. “What did Abernathy say we were looking for again?”

“A building with no way in,” said Aravia. “And a door with a bear’s head.”

“That don’t make no sense,” said Kibi. “If there’s a door, ain’t that a way in?”

“And
all
of these buildings have a way in,” said Morningstar. “Inasmuch as one could call them buildings at all. They’re just foundations.”

Kibi still had his hand upon the crumbling wall. Was the bearded man doing magic? She remembered his exact words from their first night in the Greenhouse. “It don’t feel like magic,” he had said. “Just feels natural-like.”