Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon (4 page)

The norn reached out and pried the gem from the door. She considered it for a moment, then squeezed it in her bare hand as if it were an overripe nut. It crunched between her fingers, and a moment later she opened her fist to let a handful of pink dust cascade from it.

“A fake,” she said with a dismissive sigh. “To have found such a grand treasure so easily would have shown a real lack of imagination on the part of your Blimm.”

Clagg scoffed. “You really think that an asura like Blimm would be foolish enough to leave the Golem’s Eye mounted on the outside of the door?”

Dougal barely stifled a laugh at the scorn dripping from Clagg’s lips. It was good to see someone else at the end of Clagg’s verbal lash.

“I have seen things far more foolish in my own lands,” Gyda said.

“Or in any mirror you passed,” Dougal muttered as he stepped forward to examine the writing scrawled over the door and frame.

“Hold! What did you—”

Dougal cut the norn off with a wave of his hand. “Shush. Reading.”

“You can read this?” said Clagg, with mild surprise.

“You did bring me here for my mind,” said Dougal, a little sharper than he had intended.

He stared for a moment at the words carved into the surface of the door. They were written in asuran script but used an archaic dialect popular before the subterranean asura had been forced to the surface more than 250 years earlier. It was a half-mathematical, half-structured sentence, and the syntax would make a human scribe take to the bottle. Many asura could no longer even read it. According to Dougal’s research, Blimm’s paranoia had driven him to write his notes in this script for that exact reason.

Dougal ran his fingers along the text as if he could peel the meaning from it with his fingernails. “It’s very old, but I think I can make it out.” He cleared his throat and began to read aloud: “ ‘Here lies Blimm, the greatest of the golemancers, favored counselor of Livia, apprentice to Oola, whose brilliance he has surpassed, the finest mind to grace Tyria in his or any other generation—’ ”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Clagg said impatiently. “Blah, blah, blah. Get on to the promises of curses on any who would disturb his rest. There may be something useful there.”

Dougal shrugged and skipped over the next several words. “Here we go: ‘Let those who would dare to disturb his rest be cursed for eternity by the bones that line these tombs. Let the earth rise up against them and their remains serve as a testament of his greatness. Let their remains join those that surround him.’ It goes on like that for a while.”

“How absolutely human of Blimm. He must have spent far too much time in the sun,” said Clagg. “Sounds like standard-issue warnings, though. All those tomb-door epitaphs read the same. ‘Look on me and know fear,’ ‘Leave me be lest I haunt your nights,’ and so on and so on. Toothless. ”

“That doesn’t mean they’re not true.” Dougal scowled.

“Please,” said Clagg. “If these people had the power to do what they claimed, they’d still be wandering the world in one form or another. Those are just words.”

Gyda laughed at this, a low rumbling under which
lay a note of malice. “If this Blimm of yours is beneath your notice, then why are we bothering to rob his grave?”

“Blimm was one of the most impressive golemancers ever,” said Clagg. He patted Breaker’s stone chest. “Most of the time, you need several arcanic motivators to move a golem’s exo-frame about at a reasonable speed: at least one for each joint, plus another for the senses. And you need to arrange them in a very particular way or it all falls apart.

“Blimm, though, figured out a way to imbue a fist-sized ruby with the same amount of power as you see in Breaker here. His secret died with him, but legend has it that it was buried with him too. Once I get my hands on the Golem’s Eye, I should be able to reverse engineer the process and establish myself as the greatest golemancer of
this
age.”

Gyda held up a large hand, her brow furrowed in what Dougal thought was confusion. “For someone so small, you talk a great deal. Let’s find this ruby of yours and be gone. I would like to quit this place.” She stared hard at the double doors, and Dougal knew what she was considering.

“Hold on,” he said, holding up his bag of tools. “Let’s try this the easy way first.”

Dougal stepped up to the hole left in the golem’s forehead. The bas-relief was hollow, and beyond it was a maze of thin wires and interlocking gears, some of them glowing softly of their own light. Dougal opened his moleskin pouch, selected a thin flat tool with an end that looked like an asuran summation sign, and slipped
it into the gap. He twisted it, and the great double doors rumbled outward. Gyda and Clagg had to step back down the broad steps.

The room within was circular, its walls and domed ceiling jutting with the bones that adorned the rest of the crypt. The granite floor was set with a pattern like slices of a pie, forming a series of concentric circles centered on the bier in the middle of the room.

The bier at the center of the pattern was a pile of skulls, although from the doorway Dougal was hard-pressed to say if they were real skulls or just carved stonework. Probably the former, he decided, to instill fear into would-be robbers. Atop the bier squatted a large marble box, its sides etched with the swirling script of the asura. Dominating the lid of the sarcophagus was a larger-than-life effigy of the deceased, dressed in ornate stone robes gilded with precious metals, its arms crossed over its chest.

And hovering over the forehead of the reclining stone form floated a red gem the size of Clagg’s fist. It turned and glimmered in the light from the door.

Clagg had Breaker nudge Dougal forward. “Do your job,” said Clagg.

Dougal pushed back. “My job is to spring locks and locate traps.”

Clagg sniffed. “You are guaranteeing that there are no further traps and that that gem floating there is free for the taking?”

Dougal did not respond, but Gyda clapped him on the back. “Get in there,” she growled. “Get the ruby for us—or I’ll toss you on top of the coffin from here.”

She reached for him, intent on carrying out her threat, and Dougal stepped into the room. Safe from his companions for the moment, he pulled a length of thin rope from his pack, uncoiled it, and tossed an end to Clagg. The asura made the rope fast around his golem’s waist. Dougal held the rope with one hand, wrapping it over his wrist and letting it play out behind him as he advanced. The stonework felt spongy beneath his feet, like a road after a soaking spring rain. It looked solid enough, but Dougal chose his steps carefully as he moved toward the center of the room.

On nearing the coffin, Dougal could clearly make out the asuran script that he’d seen on the door. From what he could read, it repeated many of the same warnings found on the doorplate, only in more strident and emphatic tones.

Dougal dropped the remaining few loops of rope at his feet and stood on his toes, leaning over the sarcophagus perched atop its bier of bones. Above Blimm’s forehead, the gem danced in the doorway’s light, its facets catching and reflecting the glow. This was no paste-work fake.

“It’s the real one,” Dougal said.

“Bring it to me. Now.” Clagg’s voice betrayed a clear eagerness.

Dougal considered the gem for a moment. A faint glow swirled deep inside it, something that had lain dormant for untold years, hidden in this buried room.

“It’s sure to be trapped,” Dougal said.

“Do you
see
a trap?” Clagg asked.

Dougal scanned the gem from every angle. There
were no wires, no gears, no hidden plates or moving panels in the coffin. It was magic. Asuran magic. He really hated asuran magic.

“No,” he said finally, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

“Bear’s blood!” Gyda said. “You are the most worthless burglar I’ve ever met. I could have
not
spotted a trap myself!”

Dougal ignored the norn and spoke to Clagg. “Do you detect anything?”

The asura checked the row of glowing gems in his harness, then shook his head. “It appears safe.”

Dougal snorted at that. He’d heard those exact words at such moments before. They never turned out to be true.

He gritted his teeth and reached for the gem. The glow inside it gained strength and swirled faster as if something within it meant to meet his touch. As he brought his fingers closer to its sharp-cut facets, the floor beneath his feet seemed to vibrate softly, although he wondered if that was just his nerves betraying him.

He drew his hand back.

“Get Killeen out of here,” Dougal said. “This isn’t going to go well.”

“You spineless coward,” Gyda said. “It’s just a rock! Take it and be done with it.”

“This requires care and precision,” said Dougal sharply, “not brute force!”

“You know nothing of force! Cowardice holds your hand!” thundered Gyda. “I should come in there and show you!”

“You’d just make a mess of it,” said Dougal automatically. “When I need a lumbering ox, I’ll call for you!”

Dougal regretted his words the moment he said them. Sputtering in rage, the norn slung her hammer over her shoulder and stomped into the chamber, the floor shaking beneath her massive boots.

As she lumbered forward, Gyda snarled, “I came down to this filthy land of civilized cowards to make a name for myself, and despite working in the shadow of my legendary cousin Gullik, I have done a damned fine job of it. This is only the start of my saga, tales of which will be sung around norn campfires for centuries to come! And you, human, will be no more than an aside in it!”

Dougal dropped the rope and put the coffin between himself and the now-furious Gyda. She lunged at him. Dougal ducked around the bier, keeping the mound of bones between them. From the doorway, he could hear Clagg laughing at his predicament.

Calming the bullying norn was not an option, Dougal realized. He would have to make the best of his situation.

The norn, her eyes burning with fury, lunged at him again, but he danced around the end of the sarcophagus. He did this to her twice more, eluding Gyda’s grip. On her final lunge, she launched herself at him over the top of the stone effigy, hoping to snare him between her massive hands, but she missed and wound up sprawled across the lid of the sarcophagus instead.

That’s when Dougal snatched up the free end of
the rope he’d dropped, reached out, and plucked the Golem’s Eye from its place at the head of Blimm’s stone form.

Gyda’s bright blue eyes flew so wide that Dougal could see the whites all the way around them. Dougal grinned at her as he took three quick steps back. If something bad was going to happen, he was going to face it alongside a crazed norn. The gem glowed in Dougal’s fist like caged fire.

The first warning of “something bad” was when the floor buckled and warped like the deck of a ship that had just run aground. Dougal was knocked from his feet. Gyda clutched the top of the sarcophagus with all four of her mighty limbs. Dougal looked about, and the floor appeared to ripple around him.

Clagg yowled, “Don’t drop it, you fumble-fingered bookah! Toss it to me!”

Scrambling back from the bier, Dougal hefted the gem in his fist. If he threw it to the asura, he was sure that Clagg would cut the rope and leave them both to their fates. Instead, Dougal dramatically dropped the gem into a shirt pocket and buttoned it shut. Then he grabbed the rope with both hands and started to pull himself back across the undulating floor.

Before Dougal could start for the door, the walls shuddered as much as the floor. Dougal glanced all around the room and saw that the bier was coming apart.

The bones peeled away from the sarcophagus’s stand one by one, hovered in midair for a moment, then came together in a cluster collecting at the head
of the coffin like a swarm of skeletal bees. Within moments the sarcophagus slipped to the floor, crushing the remaining bits of the bier beneath it. Still clutching Blimm’s gilded form atop the coffin’s lid, Gyda roared in a mixture of terror and enthusiasm as the flying bones thrummed about her.

Dougal struggled to his feet and made for the exit in a running crouch, working his way along the rope that still hung from Breaker’s waist. He saw Killeen prop her head up over the golem’s shoulder and goggle at him with her bright green eyes, her arms flailing as she tried to untie herself from the back of the golem.

Now the bones had begun to tear themselves from the walls as well. They raced from all angles toward the thing forming at the head of the sarcophagus.

Dougal shouldered his way through the tornado of skeletal hail toward the door. After a few more steps, he lost his footing on a spinning skull and hit the floor hard, knocking the wind from him. Taking a moment to catch his breath, he realized he’d fallen below the worst part of the sideways rain of bones. Glancing back at the sarcophagus, he saw Gyda standing there before the coalescing creature, roaring and swinging her massive hammer at it with double-handed force.

The creature was roughly human in shape, but far more than that: It stood three times the height of a man, and each of its body parts formed from fragments and clusters of similar bones. Where its legs should have been, it had a serpentine bundle of femurs and tibias encrusted with random shards of bone and bound together with magic. Its skull was formed from at least
a dozen broken heads smashed into pieces and plaited back together to form a human shape. It towered over the norn.

Gyda raged with determination and delight as she brought the battle to the newly formed bone beast. “At last!” she said. “A fight worthy of me! I will show you how a norn handles this!”

Gyda’s hammer smashed the bones to bits over and over again, churning them from fragments to pieces to dust. It seemed as if the norn might gain the upper hand over Blimm’s construct, and for a moment hope rose in Dougal’s heart. Still keeping beneath the buzzing bits of bone, he wrapped the rope tight around his wrist to keep it secure.

“Tomb guardian!” he heard Clagg say, excited now. “It’s forming a massive tomb guardian from the bones! A self-replicating, ambient thaumaturgic construct! I never realized that Blimm had solved that problem!”