Chapter 25 – Inside the Fortress

Shaelith counted how many steps they took. Not for tactical reasons, because Thaelon was better at keeping track of the distances they covered than she was. He simply seemed to have a natural feel for it. No, she counted to calm herself, to give her mind something to do that would distract her from the seven Rynalazel assassins that someone had slaughtered as if it were nothing.

Fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five…

The passageway rose. Slowly at first, then noticeably, and the air became less stuffy. The masonry changed too. It was still the same style of work, but the stones were larger, more massive, as if they were walking right through the foundation of the fortress.

They entered a low room with a vaulted ceiling, where empty cells lined the walls. The raw iron bars were rusted, and in some places nothing remained of them but brown dust. Wooden shelves on the opposite wall were buried under decades, if not centuries, of dust and cobwebs, and everywhere there were boxes whose wood was already completely rotten.

Grimbart knocked on the stone doorframe with his chronosteel hand, and the soft clang echoed through the silence.

“Same type of stone as the hallway. Whoever built this planned the entire complex as a single unit.” He ran his metal fingers over a joint. “This is definitely not the work of goblins. Even if, for some reason, a dwarven master builder had been found to teach goblins, they would never in a million years have had the tools to make this jointing here-”

“Grimbart,” said Benderast.

“What?”

“Maybe we should postpone the architecture lecture until after the dungeon run?”

For once, he has a point.

Shaelith listened. Above them, muffled by stone and earth but unmistakable, were footsteps and the rough clatter of voices speaking in Fufflak. And beneath, a powerful magic vibration that could be felt to the bone, a rhythmic pulsing penetrated the masonry, one that seemed uncomfortably familiar to Shaelith.

“That vibration,” she mumbled. “It must be some kind of magic machination of the Warlock.”

Thaelon had already disappeared up a narrow staircase at the northern end of the room to scout for them. Silently, of course. Sometimes it was easy to forget that even a Sylvyn of his size could move as if he had virtually no physical mass. He was back after two minutes.

“It’s a supply corridor. It seems like it connects this level to the more active areas of the fortress.” His amber gaze shifted to Shaelith. “Not much traffic, though. I only saw a single goblin carrying a bucket. No guards, no patrols that I noticed.”

Looks like we’re actually in.

Shaelith got her bearings. If Mirrsoss’ reconnaissance flights were correct, then the tower lay north and above them.

She looked at Benderast, who already had his hand on the hilt of his sword and had that slightly absent look in his eyes again.

He is staring at his UI.

“What does it show you?” she asked.

“The main quest marker is pointing clearly upwards. The Warlock must be somewhere up there in the tower.” He shrugged. “Let’s keep going in that direction for now.”

If you think I’m just going to forget about Vyriz, you’re dead wrong.

 

~

 

After carefully venturing through the supply corridor, they stood at a fork in the road, and Thaelon had just returned from his second reconnaissance run.

“To the north, it goes up. Three levels, as far as I could see, before the passage opens into an open area. Probably the main wing under the tower. Hard to say what’s waiting up there, but I heard a few goblins.” He pointed to the right. “To the east is an active prison wing. Guarded, but not nearly as heavily as the outer walls. I heard…” He hesitated briefly. “Noises. From the prisoners. It’s not pretty.”

Shaelith didn’t even want to imagine what “not pretty” meant in Thaelon’s limited vocabulary.

“Where is Vyriz?” she asked Benderast. “Where does the marker for Vyriz point?”

Benderast pressed his lips together. For a brief moment, his gaze drifted into the distance, before he answered with visible reluctance. “East. Somewhere in that prison wing.”

“Then let’s go east first,” Shaelith said.

“Wait, no. No, that doesn’t make sense.” Benderast shook his head. “The Warlock is the main target. My quest log literally says that defeating him is the main quest. The longer we sneak around down here, the more likely we are to be discovered, and then any element of surprise we might still have will be lost.”

“You think I’m just going to leave Vyriz here in the dungeon, or what?”

“Listen, I’m not saying we should just leave him there. But if we take out the Warlock, his whole system will collapse, the goblins will lose their leader, his magical support for them will fall apart, and we can easily free all the prisoners. That’s the most efficient solution.”

The most efficient solution, my ass. In Benderast’s world, every problem had an optimal sequence of solutions, and sure, if you didn’t actually care about people, if they meant nothing to you, then that was easy to say. But he wasn’t entirely wrong either.

“And what if the tower collapses, when the Warlock is defeated, huh?” she countered. “What if his magic is the only thing holding these ancient walls together? Then Vyriz will be sitting in a dungeon, buried under a thousand tons of stone.”

Silence.

Grimbart scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Not impossible, I mean, if his rune magic reinforces load-bearing walls-”

“But that’s not certain either,” Benderast interrupted.

“Nothing here is certain, Ben.”

The name slipped out before she could stop it. A tiny moment of silence. Benderast blinked, confused rather than suspicious. He probably thought she just wanted to shorten his name.

Pull yourself together.

“We’ll split up,” Shaelith said, trying to compromise. “Mirrsoss and I will get Vyriz. You take Grimbart and Thaelon and go to the tower to find the Warlock.”

Benderast opened his mouth to protest.

“Think about it! I’m not very useful in combat against him. His rune magic weakens my sorcery, and his armor absorbs almost all of my attacks. I wouldn’t be much help to you up there anyway.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but hopefully the logic was solid enough to convince him. “You need steel and chronosteel to deal with the Warlock, and you need Thaelon’s eyes and ears to scout the way. Mirrsoss’ dust can work as a distraction, and if anything goes wrong, she can escape and get help.”

Benderast looked at her for a long time. He was obviously not happy about splitting up, but then he nodded. “A boss fight with three people is suboptimal. But I guess it’s doable.”

Shaelith turned to Grimbart. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

Grimbart snorted. “That’s a full-time job.”

“Thaelon.” The Sylvyn looked up. “Watch over the two of them, cover their backs.”

“I always do,” he said.

Then she stood in front of Benderast, and for a brief, unexpected moment, she couldn’t find the right words. He looked at her with a piercing gaze from his blue eyes, which seemed so much more confident in his new body than anything Ben Blomquist could ever have achieved.

“Be careful,” she said simply.

Benderast grinned. “What could possibly go wrong?”

Everything, you cocky idiot.

Then they parted ways.

 

~

 

The dungeon smelled of rust, urine, and the sweetish odor of decaying bodies, strong enough that Shaelith and Mirrsoss breathed shallowly through their mouths.

“That’s disgusting,” Shaelith blurted out, her eyes slightly watering.

Mirrsoss made a pained face. “Be glad you don’t have antennae.”

The corridor was wider than the lower passages, with torches at regular intervals, but there were fewer guards than she had expected. The goblins seemed to be concentrating their forces on the outer walls and gates, not the interior of the fortress.

The first guard was a single goblin sitting on a three-legged stool, gnawing on a bone. Shaelith activated an illusion glyph on her left forearm to overlay the image of an empty corridor over herself and Mirrsoss. The goblin glanced in their direction, sniffed in confusion, saw nothing, and returned to his bone.

The second guard consisted of three of them. Mirrsoss solved the problem by sending a barely visible cloud of her wing dust drifting in their direction. Thirty seconds later, all three were sitting against the wall with glazed eyes, grinning blissfully to themselves.

They almost collided with the third guard as they ran around a corner. He was about to cry out and raise the alarm when Shaelith quickly activated a kinesis glyph and hurled him with a powerful thrust against the stone wall, where he slumped down. They then hid him behind a few crates.

So far so good. Things are going well. Are they going too well?

She pushed the thought aside, because what was the alternative?

The cells they passed were occupied. They saw several Shaeravyn, an almost starved Sylvyn who was so thin he could have walked through the bars if not for his head. Two humans, huddled together in a corner. From a cell further back came a rhythmic, mechanical grinding sound, accompanied by screams in Dwarvish, a stifled, hoarse roar interrupted again and again by pleas.

“I’ll tell you everything! Please, ask me something! Anything! Just ask me, I’ll tell you everything you want to know, please, PLEASE, AAAAAAAAARGH.”

But the grinding continued, steady as clockwork, and no one asked him anything.

Shaelith clenched her hands into fists and Mirrsoss had fallen completely silent. Her antennae trembled incessantly and her compound eyes had a moist glint.

We’ll be back. When the offensive is here, we’ll come back and get you all out of here.

Beyond the main wing, the corridor narrowed and the construction improved, with thicker doors and stronger locks. No improvised bars made of simple iron, but solid wrought iron made of good steel.

“Looks like whoever is in here is probably important enough to the Warlock to warrant proper locks.”

While Mirrsoss kept watch, Shaelith used her kinesis to open the lock on the first door, moving, pushing, turning, and shifting the individual bolts of the mechanism until a soft click sounded and the door swung open.

Vyriz was hanging on the wall.

Chains ran up from his wrists, so tight that his feet barely touched the floor. A tightly fastened leather bandage covered his eyes, and a leather gag sealed his mouth. He was thin, much thinner than she remembered him, and his clothes were little more than rags. His left hand was wrapped in dirty bandages, brown with old blood, and where his little finger had been, the fabric ended in a flat stump.

And yet, the relief of seeing him alive hit her so hard that her knees went weak. He was alive. He was breathing. He was here, and she was here, and-

He’s alive.

She was with him before she had even properly noticed the rest of the cell. She tried to loosen his chains, briefly considering simply tearing them apart with kinesis, but she didn’t want him to fall to the floor, so she carefully tried to open the shackles.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a second figure in the cell. A human, from the looks of it, slumped in the back corner, chained to the wall. He was ragged and emaciated, his face covered in bruises and dirt.

We can help him in a moment. First Vyriz.

She got the first shackle off, Vyriz slumped sideways, and Shaelith caught his arm. Behind her, Mirrsoss had taken up position at the entrance, wings half spread, compound eyes fixed on the corridor to keep watch.

“Vyriz, it’s me, Shaelith. I’m getting you out of here.”

Vyriz made noises behind his gag, but they were not sounds of relief or recognition, but panicked, urgent sounds, and his head jerked back and forth as if he were trying to draw her attention to something she did not-

The man in the corner stood up slowly, as if he had simply decided that sitting down had become boring.

Shaelith reacted a heartbeat too late.

Something cold and metallic pressed against her neck, wrapped around her throat, and she felt a click that vibrated through her entire body.

She spun around.

Crimson light flared on her neck, and at that moment, all the glyphs on her body went out at once. Kinesis, Illusion, Emotional Glamour, Shield, the secret Vyrnara glyphs, the emergency options, everything. Everything was dead.

She knew this feeling. Two weeks in the goblin cage, naked, the glyphs roughly scrubbed from her body, manaless and powerless.

“Good evening,” the human said kindly. She recognized the voice.

He was smaller than she had expected. Without the crimson armor, without the glowing maze, and without the theatrical demeanor from the tunnels, he was just… some man. Medium height, narrow face, and short brown hair. The kind of person you would walk past on the street without looking up. Exactly the kind of inconspicuousness she would have admired back when she was still Jacob Williams.

Mirrsoss turned hastily, her antennae twitching violently with fright. Shaelith heard the rustling of her wings, felt the draft, and then the characteristic sweet scent of her released dust as she tried to dust the Warlock with it.

“MIRRSOSS, NO! RUN!”

Mirrsoss froze in the corridor, half in the air, her wings fanned out like glowing sails. Her compound eyes darted back and forth between Shaelith and the Warlock.

“I can’t just leave you-”

“RUN. Now. Get help. GO.”

The Warlock made no move to stop Mirrsoss. He didn’t even look at her. His gaze was fixed solely on Shaelith.

“The moth should go,” he said casually. “Of course the narrative needs a messenger. How utterly predictable. How utterly boring.”

What the fuck? What does he mean by that?

Mirrsoss hesitated for a fraction of a second, then fled, racing down the corridor with a powerful flap of her wings.

Shaelith tried to throw herself at the Warlock, perhaps to push past him. He wasn’t tall or broad, definitely not as muscular as Benderast, but he was still much stronger than her, and he easily pinned her arms behind her back.

He pushed her against the wall next to Vyriz, who was still hanging from his remaining chain, making choking sounds behind his gag as he desperately tried to break free.

The Warlock took a step back and looked her up and down, not lustfully, but rather appraisingly.

“I was wondering,” he said, and there was a hint of burgeoning interest in his voice, “if it would work to catch the bait with the bait.”

And even as he said it, an unpleasant thought occurred to Shaelith.

If the Warlock is here, then what the hell are Benderast and the others after?