Conscience

  I scouted ahead while Attart worked. If she was attacked while we were separated the spell would alert me and hopefully allow me to extract her or fight off her foes from afar.

  It wasn’t quite the same being able to see through her eyes and mine as it had been before. I didn’t have an extra brain this time to handle her information. It was more like my ring sense, an extra thing to keep track of, disorienting, especially as I couldn’t control where she looked or when she blinked. For the first few minutes I’d half hunch in anticipation every time her eyelids closed. It felt like I was constantly being dive bombed by birds.

  The hexagonal prison cell contained three exits and nearly a score corpses. I tried to not let my study of one take away from the other.

  It was a struggle not to meet their glassy gazes.

  “May you find rest in Elysium. May the fields forever roll green. May the sea birds call you home as the sun warms your cheeks. Let the wind ruffle your hair. Let the foam and the water invigorate you. And never shall you feel hunger nor thirst.”

  I found myself spending a quarter of my spell’s hour closing eyelids and setting the men to rest, for as pitiful a rest as I could give them. They’d probably be eaten by rats before the day was over.

  Three exits.

  ?North Star?

  One exit pointed north, the only which was a door rather than a gate. That felt familiar. My sword remained from where it had severed the chains. I retreated around the bend of the room while I sent it to find me a passage.

  The door was sturdier than it appeared. Sturdier than its latch. It crashed open but the wood held. Something else gave. A gear, a heavy *Clunk*. The floor in front of the door dropped away.

  Water gurgled and hissed.

  That was new.

  I crept forward toward the newly revealed hole. The entirety was unveiled by my ring before my eyes could view it for themselves. A pit, ten feet deep and filling with water. Another trap meant to capture alive.

  Probably.

  For a brief moment, the sun reflected at the bottom of the pool, then the dark water poured over it.

  Why was it filling with water?

  Maybe it stopped the undead.

  I could probably make the jump, even with my gear weighing me down, but it wasn’t something I wanted to risk unless I had to.

  I increased my shine until I could see a ways into the room beyond. It was large enough that it remained dimly lit, even to my ruby eyes. Gold glittered near the centre. The walls peeled away at angles suggesting a second hexagonal structure.

  This was the room where I’d painted Tom’s portrait. It was the right path.

  The water was still gurgling. Soon the whole pit would be filled. If only I could freeze the water. It was an idea for a future spell.

  Glass Aura might do it. I still didn’t understand how the warlock’s dark magic worked. Was it my will or their which informed the spell? Did the spell have one effect or many?

  I didn’t want to use dark magic anyway.

  I could teleport across of course, but that wasn’t a long term solution, especially not with Attart following me.

  I sent my blade to the eastern wood portcullis. I was sheltered near the pit, as the pit was sunk nearly twenty feet into the wall. The portcullis itself was inset ten. The room was almost more like a wheel with spokes coming off than a hexagon when viewed in that way.

  A light not my own began to ooze outward from the gaping hole the moment my sword tore down the portcullis.

  I dimmed my own light in sync with its growth.

  The light was white-blue, like the centre of a star. Not as illuminating as my own, but far sharper. Easier to see in the dark even if it failed to reveal its surroundings.

  It was a light made to attract attention.

  A stone drifted along the ground, light as a firefly. A spear, a pillar. At four feet in height, calling it a stone was insufficient.

  A kin to one of the strange stones I’d found guarding the cursed armour and my bone discs.

  The stone drifted to the centre of the room and then stopped, apparently satisfied with its migration.

  A single half-step toward the stone sent my gear jangling and banging against its self. The light dimmed at once from the stone.

  Creepy thing.

  I gave it a wide berth as I made my way to the eastern portal. Another hex waited.

  This one was nearly empty. A single shattered mace lay in a corner. Cobwebs decorated the ceiling. Large cobwebs. To the south were two exits, to the north a third.

  “Hello?”

  If the room contained more voice stealing spiders, they were silent.

  I sent my sword up and along the ceiling, tearing the webs apart as it went. No spiders fell out. Not even normal ones.

  Hadn’t the spiders duplicated my spells before? I could bait them out.

  Fireball

  I sent the flame to scour the webs as well. If a torso sized fire didn’t get their attention, they weren’t in here.

  By all that is true, don’t them be in here.

  I stepped into the room with my ring off and my hands over my head. A spider dropping onto my face would be far more distracting than the split second warning my ring would afford me was worth.

  Nothing.

  I hunched my shoulders and made my way to the room’s centre. More accurately: my shoulders hunched. I didn’t have control over that decision.

  Nothing.

  I let myself ease half a fraction.

  Nothing.

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  I eased more fully.

  Perhaps the webs had just been for show. A bit of decorating for some warlock dungeon holiday.

  I retreated back to the doorway, ring on, and sent my sword to the north door. It was only wood, my sword had it down as soon as it arrived.

  It was another hexagonal room.

  I was trapped in a beehive.

  The hexes weren’t perfectly aligned, or the shallow edges of the hexes in a square had overlapped, either way it resulted in a thirty foot corridor between the two. To the left of the corridor was an open archway, leading back into the room of dwarf gold where I’d painted the portrait.

  To the right was a warm fireplace, merrily crackling along as though it were set in some cozy tavern and not a forsaken warren of torture and death.

  Beneath the hearth—and beneath the wall all along the edge of the room—was nothing.

  The room was built around a central plateau. Below it plunged a void, ten feet wide and endlessly deep. My light didn’t reach the bottom.

  Memories of crawling around in the dark came back to me all at once.

  Had I come this far without my ring or without light, had the warlocks trapped me on a lower level, my journey may have been a much shorter one.

  I didn’t need to cross any of the five bridges in the room to make it over to the archway. The path hugged one of the few sections of the floor still attached to the wall.

  I sent my sword ahead, just in case, but neither sword nor ring found a trap in the doorway.

  All the searching for traps was slow. My sword vanished as I entered the room. I only had another half hour or so before Attart was done and I’d only travelled fifty feet from where I’d started.

  Two unexplored exits awaited, both directly in front of me, one three side steps to my right, one three side steps to my left.

  One held a door, and the other was an open arch, so I went for the arch. If all options were equally likely, the easiest made the most sense to me.

  As it turned out, ten minutes of study revealed nothing, whereupon I stepped through the arch and found a twenty foot corridor terminating in a solid wall. My ring revealed no secret hinges or panels at the end, even after a thorough investigation.

  At least I had an alcove to hide in while I broke down the other door.

  Magic Swords III

  “Tear down the door.”

  The door was iron, meaning it didn’t break, and it was loud.

  It was not, however, locked or latched, and my swords managed to knock it open without difficulty, an observation I was able to make through the wall separating us with my ring.

  Miraculously, the noise didn’t attract any more wandering stones or hordes of rats. Perhaps this low down they’d already fell to worse fates than a vandalizing Magus.

  Thirty feet ahead was a dead end

  To the left, the path forked.

  This felt familiar.

  I took the fork and found myself staring down fifty feet of hallway to a depression in the ground. Upon approaching, it became clear I’d found the staircase. Another path shot off to the right at a right angle at the top of the stairs.

  I wasn’t going to descend those stairs without my spells being at the ready. They’d keep until tomorrow, or the day after. The ogre waited.

  I still had about a quarter of an hour before I had to return, so I decided to secure our approach by scouting down the other branch of the hallway.

  ***

  Ten minutes of winding hallways finally came out on a fork, still no doorway in sight. I was out of time, but Attart could wait.

  I ordered one of my swords to carve an ‘x’ in the flagstone beneath me so I knew which of the three was my return, then took the path straight ahead.

  After a few more minutes I came out upon an open wooden door leading away from a catwalk.

  I’d gone in a complete circle.

  Confused, I returned to the intersection. If I hadn’t seen the stairs the first time round, and there had only been one other path, it must mean we’d taken the path which was currently on my right. My ‘x’ was straight ahead.

  One path had taken me an hour to find the stairs, the other had been ten minutes of slow and careful exploration with no obstacles.

  I’d just found us a shortcut.

  This time I took the right hand path, both to ensure I ran into Attart and to confirm my series of logic.

  Ten minutes later I was back in the strange bathroom. Attart was sitting on the floor in the centre of the room, watching both doorways.

  “Oh!”

  The changes still caught her by surprise.

  She caught herself as she tipped forward, then looked up at me and smiled, “We saved them. They are free.”

  I returned her smile, it was nice she could smile, “I have some good news also, I’ve found a faster and safer passage to the fourth floor.”

  She began to rise, I waved her down, “Tomorrow. I want to have all my spells at the ready. There is an ogre near the bottom of the stairs. If we encounter him we will need them and more. Last time I faced him I could not defeat him.

  Attart’s eyes grew wide, “Should we be going down?”

  “I have stronger spells now. Less of them, but stronger. I think if I take him by surprise I might have a chance. If we must fight him. I’m hoping to avoid dealing with him altogether. That said, I’ll go down alone until I can secure a safe passage. I will need my full concentration to stand a chance. Once you retrieve your ghosts it might be a different story.”

  Attart scrunched her face into a moue, “Sir is probably right.”

  “Don’t worry. Just a few more days. If we do face the ogre there is a shortcut to your book through their lair. Now, could you please watch the doors. I have preparations to make. And once again, don’t mind the skeleton.”

  ***

  ?Push VIII?. Push IX. Push IX vanished from my spellbook as it was cast. It seemed I was fated to never have enough spells at once. If any future apprentice complained about the difficulties and pace of spell writing in the future I could talk their ear off better than the most curmudgeonly old man. I needed to spend more time protecting those spells I found valuable.

  Push X: Push an object with 30800lbs of force for up to half an hour.

  Even the ogre with all his dark powers should struggle against fifteen tons of force. If he didn’t, well, then the warlocks would have lost control of the Bleak Fort a long time ago. Maybe I could even crush one of those bugs.

  The only question which remained was to create a second in the morning, or protect it so I wouldn’t lose it.

  Creating a second would not grant me a second cast on the day I planned to face the ogre, so unless I wanted to delay finding Tom’s mother another day and digging even further into my supplies, I should protect the spell.

  On the other hand, I’d seen a few creatures dismiss the first castings of my spells. I had three months. If I could afford to delay a day I probably should. Delay a month even until I was truly ready, but for that I didn’t have the food.

  I stood.

  “I’m ready to go, let’s see if Eric hasn’t eaten all our food yet.”

  ***

  The journey was uneventful, which was to say, peaceful. The path was straightforward, the halls were as quiet as they could be, and the goblins, despite my constant misgivings, had kept to their bargain. Even the whispers of dark magic which occasionally invaded my ears were still.

  Still, a weight lifted from my shoulders when we finally passed the threshold to Attart’s house. Sanctuary was welcome in these darkened tunnels, no matter how diminutive they passed off their dangers for the moment.

  I knew the ogre and the toad-dragon both still lived, and lower, I suspected, waited deeper horrors.

  The day was only half over by Cillian’s reckoning when we returned, and so I spent the time in gentle company, relaxing among old friends turned new. Eventually, long conversation turned to sleep, sleep to dreams and dreams to nightmares.

  Trees rose about me on every side, like the dark forest about Blackbridge. Trunks and creaking boughs waged constant war against the sun, both in reality and my dreams. Here the battle was fought in seconds rather than years. Darkness spread and the sun slowly vanished beneath grasping limbs.

  But I was a dryad.

  Wasn’t I?

  The limbs glowed green in the dark. I could see them, reaching, striving. I could see the withering grass at my feet, brown and dry now that their meadow had been turned to shadows.

  I asked the limbs to move aside and they obeyed.

  Green lines twisted, turned dark as the first rays of light blinded me, then brilliant greens and rich browns as my eyes recovered. The grass beneath my feet swelled and twisted, life restored, turned upward to greet the sun.

  A spire rose above me, an ever widening circle as the trees continued to grow upward but leave a path for the sun. The spire pointed not straight up, but directly at the sun, and moved as the sun moved.

  A tower of sunlight.

  And there, in its centre, always in its centre, flew the albatross.