Darkvision (27 page)

He was at a nexus of three paths. The one he’d first gazed down apparently had no end. The second was long, miles long maybe, and seemed to plunge into a wavering, colored curtain.

But the third path seized his attention. The third stone road ran for only a few hundred paces, then connected to a massive, irregular boulder. Crystal encrusted the third path in a lattice of purplish mineral. Warian was reminded of the inside of a geode. He held out his false arm and compared. It was a match.

The encrustations gradually thickened along the third path as it approached the massive chunk of strangely shaped stone. The path was a gradient leading toward the heart of the lode, he supposed. The encrusted surface of the path had been half cleared, mined away.

The crystal that remained on the road’s surface was scarred, broken, and littered with sparkling dust and debris. A battered wagon was parked a dozen or so paces down the path. Shovels, tamping poles, pickaxes, and other mining tools lay haphazardly scattered on the road.

Where were the miners? Did they fall?

His eyes narrowed as he studied the irregular shape at the path’s end. It looked like a giant egg that someone had cracked. The glint of pure crystal sparkled along the seams.

No doubt about it—this was Shaddon’s new lode.

Screaming, Zel fell out of nowhere and landed on the stone path. His iron pry bar clattered nearby, almost bouncing off the road.

Had Warian been standing, he probably would have fallen from the path. As it was, his heart jolted and doubled its rate.

Zel landed on the path, yelling, and scrabbled along the stone as if he couldn’t figure out which direction was down. Just like Warian had fumbled and groped before he got his bearings.

“Hey! Uncle, calm down!” He suppressed a chuckle and grabbed for one of Zel’s hands. “If you keep this up, you’ll knock us both off. Stop it!”

“Warian!” Zel ceased his mad antics, blinked, then grabbed his nephew by the shoulders. “By the four dooms, I’m glad to see you!”

“What happened? I had your arm. Why didn’t we appear in this crazy place at the same time?

“Don’t know. You were pulling me along against the … the … Sevaera’s whirlwind. Then you disappeared as you passed into the ring. I almost got sucked back into Sevaera’s damned maw. But after you disappeared, she let up. I followed you.”

Warian nodded. “Sorry I left you behind. I’ve never been through one of these before. I don’t really understand it. Speaking of which, I don’t see a way to go back through from this side.”

“Who’d want to? She’s waiting back there. Hey,” Zel looked closely at Warian. “How’re you? You look beat.”

Warian was bone tired, true. But not as exhausted as he’d feared after using his arm. Figuring out how to ration the prosthesis’s energy had saved his life, he was sure. “I’ve been worse.”

Assisting each other, they both stood.

“Why did she stop after I went through the ring?” wondered Warian.

“She, or whatever was in her, doesn’t care one whit about me. You seem to be the prize, Nephew.”

Warian rubbed his forehead. “My arm. It’s immune to the control that Shaddon has over everyone else with Datharathi prosthetics.”

“Shaddon, and that thing that had Sevaera.”

Warian nodded.

“Another thing I don’t understand,” said Zel, “is this place. Isn’t this where the controlling entity comes from? We might have gone from the cauldron straight into the fire, but it really doesn’t seem too bad here. Yet….”

Zel’s eyes widened as he took the time to gaze around the emptiness that stretched without limit in every direction.

The air was sharp and cold, like the air just before dawn, but not damp. A faint odor tickled Warian’s nose, like the smell after a thunderstorm. But mixed in was the smell of something rotten, closer. Something had died near them, and recently.

Warian pointed out floating motes of earth and stone as they drifted all around. Most contained disintegrating constructions.

“Amazing! Isn’t this amazing? I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s incredible!” Zel forgot about their predicament as the floating ruinscapes captured his imagination.

“See that one?” Zel pointed. A perfect cube, each face a mirror, tumbled through the darkness, tracking a path from nowhere to oblivion. “I wonder what’s inside? Treasure of some sort, eh?” Zel chuckled.

“Now that’s an odd one.” Warian’s uncle jabbed his finger into the void. Distant lights reflected on the shimmering, fluctuating surface of a misplaced lake. Lapping, splashing waves on the surface were faintly audible as the globule sailed high overhead and away again.

“Zel—”

“Better not mess with that one!” crowed Zel, his finger finding yet another object. A slab of transparent glass about twenty paces long and half as wide tumbled below them. As it spun, Warian caught a sudden whiff of carrion, different from the rotten odor he’d smelled earlier. Caught in the slab’s center, like a fly in amber, was a monstrous humanoid creature apparently formed of moist earth. Its legs were short and thick, and its arms tapered to bony claws. Teeth, rotting scraps of cloth, and bone shards protruded here and there from the muddy flesh. A dirt-encrusted skull provided the creature with a leering grin. The slab whirled away into the dark.

Warian grabbed his uncle’s shoulder to get his attention. “We should get out of here before Sevaera, or whatever’s riding her, decides to come through.”

“Aye, I suppose. Hey, look!” Zel pointed along the path in the direction of the wavering curtain Warian had seen when he’d first arrived.

“Uncle!” Warian recalled that Zeltaebar’s reputation for exasperating dillydallying was well earned.

Zel said, “No, no … I see something, something important. Sort of looks like a spire. A tower, maybe? But it’s all hazy, like I’m seeing it through water.”

Warian followed his uncle’s gaze down the path. He suddenly realized that the wavering curtain wasn’t completely opaque.

A grand tower wavered and danced as if behind a heat shimmer, as if it were a mirage. The stone road arrowed for miles across the dark, directly into an elegantly arched gallery that protruded from the half-real structure.

Hundreds of secondary spires rose from the enormous, many-windowed edifice. Terraces, outside galleries, open stairs, and sealed doorways studded the structure’s sides, barely visible through the shimmering veil. The base of the tower fell into invisibility far below.

“Do you think that’s where the chief puppeteer lives?” wondered Zel.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe Sevaera didn’t follow because she didn’t have to. Whatever possessed her lives there.” Zel pointed at the shimmering behemoth.

“Possibly.”

They gazed at the vast structure and the narrow path that led toward it.

Warian looked the other way, hoping to spy something that would offer better hope. In one direction, the stone path plunged onward, span after span, narrowing across the leagues to a single point—a point that appeared to promise eternity.

The other route, encrusted with crystal, led only to the nearby blob of dark stone, with its cracks revealing the crystal riches inside.

“Maybe we should check out the jumbo geode first.” Zel rubbed his hands and picked up the iron bar he’d carried with him through the portal. After a moment’s consideration, he dropped the bar and took up an abandoned pickaxe instead.

“This stuff is pretty valuable. We wouldn’t have to make artificial parts out of it,” he said, and walked toward the cart and scattering of tools. “Phew, something really stinks over … oh.”

Warian walked cautiously down the path, across the mined-out crystal.

The source of the rotting odor lay in the mining cart.

A half-orc was stuffed into the cart, obviously dead. The half-orc wore miner’s dungarees, and its hoary skin was filthy with dirt and crystal dust. Warian was startled when he saw a crystal pendant hanging around the orc’s neck. Burn marks scorched the flesh around the crystal, as if it had overheated and cooked the orc completely through. Then Warian realized that the crystal itself seemed charred, and was obviously cracked. He gazed intently at it, but could detect no glimmer of light swimming in the pendant’s depths.

“I can’t figure what killed him,” Zel said, his hands on his hips as he gazed into the open cart.

“His amulet.”

“Aye, that’s obvious. I mean, why?”

Warian shrugged, at a loss. “Maybe the ‘puppeteer,’ as you put it, couldn’t control the miner well enough without a prosthesis, and just killed him with some sort of magical overload.”

“Is that possible?”

“How should I know?” Warian kicked at the cart. “I don’t know how Shaddon—or the puppeteer—is able to control people through Datharathi crystal.” Warian froze for a moment. A worrying thought struck him as his eyes skimmed the fields of mined and virgin crystal that encrusted the stone road.

“Uncle, why aren’t we dead?”

“Because we’re smart, we’re quick, and …”

“No, look! Crystal everywhere—the perfect vessel for controlling minds, right? We’ve seen that it only manifests in this damned stuff.” Warian waved his hand down the stone lane, thickly encrusted with the pernicious material.

Zel rubbed his chin. “Well, you have an arm made of it, and so far you seem to be immune to its influence…”

“Yes. Shaddon made it before he found the portal. I just assumed that all the crystal on this side of the portal was corrupt.”

Zel shook his head. “Maybe only if it’s brought into the real world?”

“I wonder.”

He thought about Shaddon’s claims. “Or, maybe the crystal must be prepared in a particular fashion—and my arm wasn’t. Nor is this raw crystal. It hasn’t been mined and worked by Shaddon, who made it susceptible to outside influence so he could serve his own purposes.”

“Could be. Or perhaps the puppeteer is just toying with us.” Zel peered down the path where the crystal gradually thickened to form the irregular bulb of cracked stone.

Warian looked back and forth between the irregular boulder and the wavering tower. Out of nowhere, a searing flash dazzled his eyes.

“… eretu dmaadar grethalsa od favara!” a loathsome voice broke upon them.

Blinking, Warian looked ahead, behind—and then up.

Sevaera’s head, sans body, floated above them, dripping blood. It was nestled in a penumbra of writhing shadow. The puppeteer had killed Sevaera and was using her head as a malefic vehicle.

“No …” pleaded Zel, his jaw dropping open.

The despicable voice repeated its imperative in a language unfamiliar to Warian, then swooped.

Warian lifted his crystal arm to cover his face. He tried desperately to trigger its latent power. And he failed. He was too drained—he couldn’t forge the link!

The disembodied head swooped and butted Warian in the chest. A sledgehammer couldn’t have struck harder. Warian pitched sideways off the path, his body twisting in midair, his arms flailing for a grip. He caught himself on the edge, the crystal digits on his right hand more hindrance than help. The flesh and blood of his left hand absorbed the cruel sharpness of the ledge. The weight of his body threatened to peel his fingers from their purchase.

He looked up, but the stone path blocked his view of what was happening above him. But he could hear.

Zel cursed, repeating “bastard!” over and over in a crazed voice. He heard the sound of metal on bone—had his uncle connected with his pickaxe?

“Draka ni dornu dmaadar!” screamed the vile voice, just out of sight.

“Bastard!” his uncle yelled again. His pinched, manic tone implied a break with sanity that wouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Warian strained, trying to pull himself up.

A finger slipped. It was all he could do to hold on.

“Zel,” he cried. “Kill it!” And “Help, I’m slipping!”

Another flash dazzled Warian. Something else had come through the portal.

The eternal, mote-littered dark welcomed Ususi after a long absence. The Celestial Nadir once again accepted her into its twilight vastness.

The wizard fell a few paces through an awkwardly defined portal focus. She nearly tripped on Eined’s limp form. Iahn must have dropped her. She saw him streaking toward a small flying creature wreathed in darkness. Another man she didn’t recognize stood near the flying creature, swinging wildly at it with a pickaxe.

She was thankful that the misdirected focus was displaced upward, not left or right, off the path. Otherwise, instead of standing at the center of a three-way nexus, she might be flailing her way through a tour of the abyssal spaces of the Celestial Nadir.

Ususi pulled out the keystone and issued a word of command. It lit with a violet radiance. For the first time in a long time, the wizard smiled.

Here in the Celestial Nadir, keystone in hand, she possessed a measure of authority over the crystal denied her outside the artificial space. This was a good time to measure her control against that flying creature, which had turned its back on the man with the pickaxe to deal with the charging vengeance taker. The flying creature looked like … a severed head! Ususi gasped.

It was the missing head from the woman on the other side of the portal! The head was partly sheathed in Celestial Nadir crystal. Ususi raised the thong on which the keystone dangled, and concentrated.

The keystone pulsed once, twice, thrice. A single flash burst in the crystal sheathing of the head. It screeched and shot straight upward at least fifty paces. In the Imaskaran tongue, it screamed, “Use not the keystone against what I have claimed!”

Ususi called up, “Try to stop me!”

It swooped down at her, leaving a meteor green streak across the dark. A corona like flowing hair, shadows given fell substance, writhed with soul-shearing hunger.

She concentrated again upon the keystone, and gazed with enhanced insight upon her attacker. She blanched. Pandorym’s influence was a slimy tentacle of putrid will that reached from far away to grasp and hold up the head, and empower it. It was a stain of something that should not exist, reaching from somewhere not far along one of the paths of the nearby nexus.