Chapter 2 - The Music

  In front of Brinn, Favel stood, arms raised to brace his wand against any undead that would assault them from this side of the ice walls. Another hand lay in the pouch of his robe, grasping at something; but Brinn had never been able to identify what. This was the stance Favel took when he was prepared for battle, and it was battle that the pair of them had expected the moment they slowed down—and yet they hadn’t seen a single beast. It didn’t make sense. There had been hordes of the creatures when Brinn and the rest of the party had been working their way down the entrance hall. Part of the reason they hadn’t branched off is that at least they would know which directions the undead were coming from—everywhere except directly behind them. Brinn had assumed the entire place would be filled with the creatures, pressed against each other like sardines; like the lich had found some kind of ancient mass burial ground and begun his work. Yet, there was nothing.

  It was all so strange, and yet, everything just seemed so…normal, aside from the odd piece of art here and there. It felt textbook, exactly what an instructor would describe in a guild class about liches. Brinn’s mind raced. Was it too perfect? Brinn would have to consider it later, but for now, he set the thought aside. It sounded too much like something from the legends.

  Seconds passed. Minutes passed. There was an eerie silence, aside from the chimes; now that their breathing had calmed. Eventually, Favel had lowered his wand, and let it return to his belt. He began to pace back and forth under the flickering light of the ice orb.

  Brinn stood straight. He realized he’d been hunched over for some time. He looked Favel in the eye. The man was watching him now, still pacing; with a stricken look on his face. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but he turned again, and he began to press forwards down the hallway. Surprised by the sudden change of heart, Brinn followed. The side path they’d found themselves in stretched on and on, and the longer they went, the more claustrophobic Brinn began to feel. The walls were close. Were they closer than they were before? Brinn bit his lip. The orb bobbed above them, about a foot above their heads. Thick sheets of ice lay between them and the main hall, but they pressed on. The elf’s dark hair hung by his shoulders. Despite the grime covering the both of them, it was still pristine. Not one lock out of place. His breathing was as heavy as Brinn’s, and he swung his head about this way and that in a panic; his eyes wide in…terror? Anger? It could be hard to tell with Favel. The smell of death didn’t clog the air so much here, and Brinn could feel the cold air seeping from the icy wall behind him. A distant, a rhythmic chime. It sounded like some kind of instrument, distorted through the echoing halls.

  “I haven’t seen you this way since we were stuck in the Westwood with those wolves.”

  Favel had been exposed to rampant chaos mana there, and had a bad reaction. Alexander and Greta had to carry him out on a stretcher, and he hadn’t recovered for some time.

  Favel raised an eyebrow, but remained silent. In the silence after the confusion, he seemed to have schooled his emotions for the moment. Again, he traced an etching of a lute on the wall.

  “Seriously. What had you so rattled? What do you mean the others aren’t real?”

  “You might not be a wizard, but I know you’ve got some magical senses. Did you feel the shift when we first stepped from that antechamber, back into the hallway?”

  Brinn had, but he’d hardly noticed it. There had been a shift in the death mana in the air, a sort of stirring. He had dismissed it as the effect of stepping out of whatever lingered of the putrid healing mist the team had been using to fight back against the endless hordes of undead.

  “Sure,” Brinn said.

  “If I’m right, we’ve been separated from the rest of the group from the second we stepped back into the main hall.”

  “We can’t have been teleported.” asked Brinn. There’d been a shift in the ambient mana, but nothing nearly strong enough. He’d chalked it up to the room not being clogged with rotting undead. He racked his mind. Teleportation would have required so much mana that he should have been able to taste it, though; let alone just detect it. And, Brinn had seen the others run off before Favel stopped him. They couldn’t have been separated that way.

  “Illusions, lad.” Brinn stopped. The feeling he’d had earlier—that everything about this dungeon felt a little too staged, a little too crypt like. If this wasn’t transportation magic, but illusion magic, that would confirm his prior suspicion. Brinn pressed on. Could it be? It just didn’t make sense.

  “A lich couldn’t cast illusions that Alexander couldn’t detect.”

  “A normal lich couldn’t. And who knows?” said Favel, sneering. A little of his usual haughtiness was back in his body language now. That was good. Maybe feeling like he had one over on Brinn was helping him get back in the right mindset. “This is no normal lich.”

  To Brinn, the entire concept of a lich was incredibly strange. Any alchemist could tell you—and any noble with a penny to their name—that eternal youth was a solved problem. An alchemist could keep you young, beautiful, and alive, in perpetuity; and all for a reasonable price—to an aristocrat. Even some peasant families would work their entire lives to save enough to cheat their way from death’s clutches. It wouldn’t give them their youth back, of course, but it would keep them from aging any more. Let them go on, potentially into eternity, without losing all of the dignity they had left. It was why alchemy had briefly become a fad amongst the lower nobility and merchant class, more times than Brinn could count, only leading to plenty of young men and women blowing themselves up before their time. Brinn had nearly been one of those children.

  Like any alchemist worth his saltpeter, it could be best said that Brinn was very, very lucky. The life of an alchemist, especially an adventuring alchemist, was one of experimentation, explosions, and constant exposure to lethal chemicals. It was said you could tell the experience of an alchemist not by their age—eternal youth was part and parcel to the trade, after all—but by the marks the profession left on them. Brinn’s skin was pale and sickly from years on an immunization regimen. His arms were scarred, with burns from heat and from mana flow. He had scars on his face from broken glass, and explosives. One ran dangerously close to his left eye. Goggles are one of the first lessons any aspiring alchemist would learn.

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  A lich, on the other hand, traded away that youth for eternal life, granted some more physical protection than one who simply created a philosopher’s stone, through their phylactery. But Brinn couldn’t understand why that would be worth it. There were a thousand ways to gain power in a world like this, and nearly as many to gain longevity.

  They hadn’t stopped moving to converse. They pressed onwards at a light jog. The party had a protocol in place for these kinds of situations—but they’d never had to do it inside a dungeon before. Only if they were separated in the wilds between cities. The roads were dangerous, so if a threat drove party members apart, they were to stay paired up if they could, but scatter, to return to a pre-assigned point at the earliest opportunity. The hope was that their enemies plans couldn’t keep up with how fast they could move.

  For Favel, it was effortless. He had some kind of haste enchantment that he had cast on himself, and with it, the thin elf could keep up with Brinn’s jog at a casual walking pace. The visual was rather unnerving, as Favel’s form blurred and seemed to suddenly skip forward from time to time; or an arm would suddenly snap up to scratch at an itch on the elf’s nose. The haste spell had some effect on the pitch and speed of his voice, too. It was higher than normal, and occasionally seemed to squeak or pop. The spell was oddly unstable. Favel must really be shaken, thought Brinn. Even his insults and disdain weren’t nearly as cutting as Brinn had come to suspect. Haste spells normally fell under heat magic, but perhaps Favel had learned some kind of ice-based variant.

  “This was supposed to be a simple job,” complained Brinn. “We come in. We kill some undead. We fight a lich. We’ve done it a hundred times!”

  “Alexander has done it a hundred times,” corrected Favel. “We’ve only done it twice.”

  “And they both went swimmingly.”

  “You almost died, both times.”

  “I resent that. I’m quite good at not dying. I’ve been doing it for years.” Said Brinn. The music in the distances was beginning to get louder, now; the discordant notes that echoed through the halls forming into something more recognizable as an instrument. A harpsichord, maybe, or perhaps a particularly garish piano,

  “This isn’t a normal lich,” said Favel, after some time. The normal disdain had left his tone again, replaced by a grim certainty.

  “They’ve certainly got an odd aesthetic sense,” said Brinn. “And I’ve never heard of one who specialized in illusion magic.”

  “That’s because a wizard doesn’t,” said Favel. He kept his eyes fixed on something ahead of them.

  It was true enough, as far as Brinn noticed. There was simply no point, wizards could cast illusions perfectly well, but it could never match those of a bard, or second circle warlocks.

  “A wizard couldn’t craft illusions like that, not in a way I couldn’t sense,” said Brinn, hesitantly, but he left something unsaid. Brinn was beginning to harbor a suspicion about Favel—he had always been strange. Cagey. But could he really have been lying to them, the entire time?

  A few years ago even the light jog would have winded him by now, they had ran miles into the maze—keeping a consistent course; they chose left at forks—or straight, when left wasn’t available Maintaining a simple route so that backtracking to the main hall would still be plausible was paramount. The goal was to put distance between them, and whatever trap they’d been expected to fall into ahead in the entrance hall. To now, the party had relied on Alexander’s holy senses to keep things like this from happening, but they’d somehow found an undead that could fool even him.

  The two of them had yet to see another undead, but the party had killed hordes of the things on their way into the labyrinth. Even in a place this large, how many people could have possibly died here? The nearest city was miles away.

  The chimes in the distance grew considerably louder as they walked, and to Brinn’s pleasant surprise he found that he could make out the space ahead of them more clearly. A tight set of engravings and mosaics on the wall. He squinted, and yes, there was some kind of light source up ahead, a brightening in the distance of the dark hall that signaled something in that direction.

  Favel had been silent for some time, seemingly considering something. That was fine with Brinn. He walked with Favel for some time, satisfied with simply examining the imagery in front of him. He was beginning to suspect what it was that Favel had in mind about the lich—in context, the repeating musical motifs and overall focus on art—the utter, strange ambiance of this place, it was all too intentional; too perfect in its aesthetic. Brinn came to a realization. He would need to change his approach. After a moment of consideration, Brinn spoke.

  “He’s a bard, isn’t he? The musical motifs, the chimes, the illusion magic? It all fits. Is that what has you all worked up?” asked Brinn.

  Favel continued on silently. It was enough to confirm Brinn’s suspicions—if he’d been wrong, the elf wouldn’t have let him hear the end of it.

  “But why?” Brinn continued.

  “Why what?” said Favel.

  “A bard could just come to an alchemist, plop a sack of gold on the table, and smile; and they’d fall over their feet to craft them a philosopher’s stone. Why trade your youth, create a phylactery, become undead?”

  Favel laughed. It felt out of place, in this dark hall.

  “That’s simple enough,” he said. “It’s the fastest route to more power.”

  “Why would he need that kind of power?”

  “Why would anyone? But if this bard is who I think he is, it doesn’t matter why.”

  “How’s that?” asked Brinn.

  “Because if it’s who I think he is, he’s completely, and utterly insane—and we’re completely, and utterly fucked."