Chapter 41
The hall stretched ahead, and then up.
Xiir’s sobbing followed them for the first hundred paces, then dimmed, then disappeared into the stone behind them. Mostly because they got on the stairs.
Verathras walked ahead. He didn’t look back, didn’t check that they were keeping pace, didn’t acknowledge that one of his lifelong attendants was mourning a brother.
Alsen’s gut wrenched at the thought. Sure, the drakes bullied the Oak Library. But that was on Verathras’s directive.
Luna walked at Alsen’s elbow. She moved more quietly now, movements economical, expression grim. “You’re thinking too loud,” she murmured.
Alsen only grunted in response.
The stairs stretched up. Far. They finally released them into an octagonal chamber. Eight walls, eight niches set into the walls at chest height, each niche holding a clay urn sealed with old wax and a sigil in the spiral script.
Alsen could read the sigil. The carvings were too ornate, but single words were easy for him to decipher. It read keeper.
He didn’t have time to consider what that meant.
The urns cracked, all eight at once, with the dry sound of bones breaking. Dust poured out. The dust did not fall.
It gathered. Eight columns of fine gray particulate, each one the rough size and shape of a person, each one sketching itself shoulders, a face, and a pair of empty hands. Where the eyes should have been, purple lines kindled.
Alsen pulled on his power, forming the omnidirectional shield. He tried to weave alternate anti-fire patterns into its sections, all founded on the last successful iteration.
The nearest figure raised a hand. An arc of dark purple energy gathered along its arm, the same color as the void-light in the construct’s back in the first temple.
Verathras only snorted. Fire exploded from him in streaks. Luna slipped behind Alsen’s shield.
The flames curved through the room, exploding at a dozen spots at once.
The sand blew around, and all the figures and urns shattered in an instant. The dust flew across the room together with the released heat wave.
Section four of Alsen’s shield blocked all the heat.
Before the dust even settled, Verathras returned to his usual pace.
They headed after him, Alsen remembering the successful pattern while withdrawing the shield.
Past the chamber, the corridor led up again. This was quite the trip, Alsen realized. First, they descended deep underneath the mountain. And now, they walked up in a loose semblance of a spiral.
A long band of relief ran the length of the corridor at shoulder height. Alsen, who was supposed to be keeping his eyes ahead and his curiosity professionally suppressed, found his eyes pulling sideways without permission.
The relief told a story he’d already half-figured out from books, but seeing it carved at this scale, in sequence, by the very creators of that story was different.
The story of the world ward being built.
He could read the original design of the temple pattern, built to support the ward, designed so that the pattern couldn’t be easily read, but still functioned for the spell.
The corridor opened onto a square room. No carvings. No dais. No urns.
Just a floor, and no exit.
The floor was wrong, too. He and Luna stopped at the edge.
Verathras walked into the center, looking around. He raised his hand. A set of fiery motes of power appeared above his palm. They blasted out, hitting the walls. Three sections of the wall let them pass through as if they weren’t there. The rest released a slight explosion.
Illusions.
Verathras picked one direction and headed there. Alsen and Luna followed.
It took them to a corridor that led to a dead end.
An illusory maze, Alsen realized.
The dragon spared him a glance.
Yeah, he knew, this would be very difficult to brute force. Alsen released a simple magic scan. That lit up the illusory walls in his mind. Since the spell pierced normal walls, it lit up the entire maze for him.
Over a hundred and fifty illusory walls, built into a circular labyrinth that spanned easily half a mile of walking.
He focused, mapping it into his mind, supporting that with a few more scans. The solution was going to be walking in a spiral, obviously, he just had to find the exit and map a spiral-like pattern to their current location.
Aha. There.
“This way,” he said, heading back. Luna and Verathras let him go first. She still looked for traps from his side, but he doubted there would be any here.
This was a test of faith for the followers in some twisted way. The point was to demonstrate the faith in the spiral by walking its pattern through a seemingly unsolvable maze.
Well, not all that unsolvable.
It took quite a bit of walking to get through, much to the displeasure of his left arm. Yes, it needed rest, but it wasn’t getting any anytime soon.
This maze was going to be perfect for retreating. Hopefully, the temple’s end was going to be close, because once they got into this maze, Verathras wouldn’t be able to easily hunt them.
They made it through, which took them to a platform at the base of a large, tall column that led up. An elevator, obviously.
The platform even had a large wheel for multiple people to spin to make it go up.
They all exchanged glances.
Luna shook her head. “Not a strength build.”
Alsen motioned at his wounded arm. “I’d need to be healthy for this.”
After a moment of intense glaring, Verathras walked to the wheel and started spinning it. The design assumed four people would move it by pushing with all their weight against it.
He simply stood by its side and spun it with his hands. The platform moved up.
And it was a much longer ascent than Alsen hoped for. While the maze was great for escaping, this was terrible. The platform was going to stop on top, and it surely had a mechanism that would stop it from descending too fast.
A slow descent in a long shaft would be death, with Verathras raining spells at them. He could probably blow a hole into it and fly down through, but so could the dragon, and a long, not-that-wide shaft didn’t leave any space for evasion.
Not to mention Luna was going to have to get down herself somehow. She couldn’t fly, and he couldn’t carry her while flying, especially not with a disabled arm.
The platform took them up into a dome. By Alsen’s read, this was high up inside the mountain, probably close to its peak.
The dome even had window-like holes, but they were all covered by dirt with vegetation roots from the outside.
The dome bore carvings, all the usual spiral stuff, including a large carving of the goddess. By the dome’s rim lay corpses. Hundreds of corpses, maybe even thousands of corpses, piled on top of each other, many with undecayed clothes, filling the walls except for the one passage.
That passage stole everyone’s focus. It was a wide doorway, about three feet wide, which led to a small chamber adjacent to the dome. They all headed there.
Alsen intensified the light to see inside.
Even from a distance, through the relatively narrow entrance, he could see that the chamber’s far wall had a map. His heartbeat sped up, drumming in his ears.
And Verathras walked first, again.
They entered the chamber, Alsen almost bumping into the dragon. A complex, arcane symbol covered the center of its floor. Symmetrical, runic, instantly reminding Alsen of the pattern he detected on the orb of frost he saw atop the harpy mountain.
Every temple served as a pillar for the world ward. So, each temple was built in a place where the connection to the Void was the easiest. The ritual circles merely serviced that connection.
The carved map was the problem, though. It started with this temple, marked by an obvious little spiral. It displayed these mountains, the forests beyond, and then desert, a lot of desert, a massive river, more desert, and then a city.
Theopolis.
It literally had the name written under it.
He couldn’t hide it now. He couldn’t pretend it was something else, because Verathras surely could read the name. Anyone could.
But the worst part was written underneath the map, with dried blood, smeared on the wall with the last of his strength, he wrote:
SHE’S LYING
And he drew a symbol: a spiral made out of six stars. A spiral shaped exactly as the symbol of Earth’s United Nations Mage Guild.
He understood.
Mana came from the Pellicle. The goddess that frequented the place was the most natural suspect for a world losing its mana.
Especially when dragons, magical beings whose life depended on mana, annihilated the religion of her.
The six-star formation was, when viewed from the correct angle, a spiral, the symbol of Alshaiel, the goddess of the Pellicle, and it announced her judgment upon the world. The judgment of disconnecting the world from the Pellicle, robbing it of access to mana.
In the grand scheme of things, the dragon and he weren’t enemies at all.
Luna’s backpack and spear landed by the wall to the side. Alsen barely registered it as his eyes found Luna spinning.
In a seamless move, she stepped to Verathras, released the twisted tri-bladed dagger from its sheath underneath her sleeve into her hand, spun, and rammed it into his stomach.
She instantly tore it out, sliding by him as he instinctively reached for her, drawing a curved dagger into her other hand. As she stepped past his side, so close their shoulders touched, and she cut at his throat.
The curved dagger slit his throat’s side, releasing blood. He spun, reaching after her, flames gathering around him.
But he only grabbed at the air. She rammed the stabbing dagger into his side, slid around him, cut another section of his neck, stabbed him in the other side, slashed the tendons behind his knee, returned to the front of him, rammed the twisted dagger into his chest, and rammed her shoulder into him with the last stab.
With a crunching impact, he flew from her. Luna stepped behind the edge of the chamber’s entryway, pulling Alsen with her.