Mages path 3, p.23
Mage's Path 3, page 23
This dungeon was accessed by a doorway of white stone, cut into the side of a low hill. Jack had to duck his head to keep from banging it on the lintel as he entered.
“Greetings, Aetherborn!” the dungeon said to him as he stepped within the threshold. “Welcome and well met again!”
This dungeon was unusual in that it was made of white, chalky stone. The walls and floor were elegantly carved from the white stone, and since the stone was soft, there was a light patina of chalky dust all over everything. The central chamber had a domed ceiling and a flat, open floor, and the dungeon pedestal stood proudly in the center, with the crystal on top glowing with a faint white light.
“Most dungeons are so dark,” Melinda said. “But this one is bright and pleasant!”
“Look,” Jack said, nudging her and pointing. “See the new chamber at the back there? The dungeon has created a new area with the energy it’s gotten from recent adventurers.”
He spoke again, addressing the dungeon. “You’ve already had some adventurers paying you attention then, I see?” he asked.
“Indeed,” the dungeon replied with satisfaction. “A group of guardsmen entered yesterday. They were delighted to find that I was full of monsters! They did well, and only one of them was wounded in the ensuing battle. They went away rich men, and promised to tell all their friends.”
“There will a be a new dungeon adventurers’ guild appearing soon in Yillin,” Jack predicted.
“Oh, I’m sure there will,” the dungeon replied. “Do you wish to use the portal?”
“Please,” Jack replied.
There was a rumbling noise from the back of the chamber and a section of the back wall retracted down toward the floor in a cloud of white rock-dust. Beyond, Jack saw the glow of a Golden portal.
The Golden portals were different from the Grand portals. Grand portals—such as the one on the island that they had just left—were red, and they transported the user directly through to another Grand portal in the other world, Nightvale.
Golden portals were smaller. They were shaped like a doorway and they gleamed with rippling gold light as if they were actually made from liquid gold. They transported the user to another Golden portal, housed in a different dungeon somewhere within the Noonlands. They had the great advantage that a user could pick his exit portal.
“Ready?” Jack asked Melinda as they stood in the back chamber of the dungeon, facing the tall golden doorway that would lead them wherever they wanted to go.
“Ready,” Melinda said. She reached out and took his hand. The golden light streaming from the portal lit their faces as they stepped up and were drawn into the magical gateway of the portal.
Instantly, they found themselves in the place that they called the ‘map chamber.’ Here, they had no bodies. They could feel each other’s presence, and Jack could feel Melinda’s hand in his. They could even hear each other’s voices, but they had no physical form. At first, this had been a disconcerting sensation, but Jack had gotten used to it.
They gazed down at the extensive bird’s eye view of the Noonlands that was shown to them here. It was not exactly a realistic view—they were looking at a map, not at the real Noonlands themselves.
But what a map!
It was as if someone had made an enormous model of the continent on a tabletop, lovingly filling out every detail, every tree and road and river with the most painstaking detail. Smoke came from the chimneys in the little villages, and a phantom sun gleamed on the water of the lakes.
Scattered across the map were symbols representing dungeons.
Most of them were black, a matte black like wet charcoal. These were scattered all across the continent of Noonlands, and there were even a few out in the barren area that the Noonlanders called the Wildlands. Each symbol was a circle with a cross contained in it, the points of the cross sticking out a little over the edge of the circle. They looked like the symbol on a map that would represent a compass.
But now, straggled across the top of the map in a line roughly following the road there were nearly forty dungeon symbols that were bright and gleaming gold in color. Each one of these represented a dungeon that had been reawakened by Jack in his recent journey, and each one held a Golden portal which he could now choose to step through.
And there was something new now, too, something Jack had not experienced in this place before—an awareness of each of the awakened dungeons.
“Melinda!” he gasped, shocked at the vivid flood of images that suddenly assaulted his senses. “I can see what’s happening in each dungeon! I can feel them all, and there is no barrier between me and them. It’s… overwhelming!”
Jack felt himself being swamped by the sensation, and suddenly he realized he was coming undone—his mind was being pulled in all different directions by the power of his connection to the dungeons.
“Hold steady, Jack!” Melinda said. He felt her reach out and grab the parts of his being that were at risk of being drowned in the flood of dungeon power. “Hold steady!”
It was like a hand gripping his as he was drowning. He gripped, pulled, and came back to himself, gasping. The dungeon presences receded immediately, and with that, the position was reversed. Instead of him being dragged toward the dungeons, he felt their power flowing to him, much as it had when he had drawn on their power in his fight with the Devourer.
“Thanks, Melinda,” he said, and felt her acknowledgment flowing to him. Though they had no physical bodies here, he could feel her presence strongly and he knew she could feel his too.
“My pleasure, Jack,” she said, and he felt a smile coming from her through his mind.
He reached out and touched the symbol that represented the dungeon at Fordwatch, the dungeon closest to the Shadow Tower.
“Let’s go home,” he said.
Chapter 16
As soon as Jack touched the golden symbol, there was a rushing sound in his ears and a tugging sensation at his soul. The symbol dimmed for a moment then grew immensely bright, and the map chamber faded. As it did, Jack felt his connection to the dungeons fade as well and he breathed out a sigh, half of relief and half of loss.
Then there was a golden glow and he and Melinda stepped into the familiar portal chamber of the Fordwatch dungeon, hand in hand.
The chamber was elaborate and lustrously decorated, with a mosaic tiled floor and beautifully carved pillars on each wall. The portal itself stood on a rectangular stone table that was accessed by a set of stone steps. Together, the two travelers walked down these, then climbed to the narrow corridor that led back to the surface.
There was a special private exit from the portal chamber, known only to Jack and Melinda. This allowed them to avoid the main dungeon chamber, and that was no bad thing. As one of the first dungeons to be reactivated, the Fordwatch dungeon had quickly become a focus for dungeon adventurers of all classes. Fordwatch, the small village that was nearby, gained financially from charging the adventurers a tithe of their dungeon loot. The nearby large town of Trader’s Crossing had sprouted an adventurer’s guild and a number of shops and inns that catered to the traveling fighters and fortune seekers who were inexorably drawn to the riches and adventure that a fully active dungeon promised.
Even as Melinda and Jack passed the turn off that led to the main chamber, they heard the clash of arms, the roar of monsters, and the whoops and cheers of fighters busy at their favorite task—fighting monsters for loot.
“It seems that one goal of awakening the dungeons has well and truly been achieved,” Melinda said, as they glanced in through the door and saw a team of mail-clad warriors fighting giant spiders while avoiding great swinging hammers that menaced them from the ceiling above. “Adventurers have truly returned to the world. The Noonlands will likely never be the same again.”
“It’s true,” Jack said as they approached the outer door and pushed it open. “And that’s no bad thing. There were too many fighters about with no use for their time. The existence of real and true dungeons will give them something to do, and a steady stream of income, too. I never thought that awakening the dungeons would raise the standard of living in the Noonlands, and yet that seems a likely unintended consequence.”
“Certainly no bad thing,” Melinda said thoughtfully, and Jack glanced at her.
He remembered a conversation they’d had about her origins. She was the daughter of Lord Mauve of Wardlake, but he was a poor man and his lands had fallen into disrepair. Year upon year, Melinda’s father had grown poorer and poorer, but there was no way for him to make new money to invest in his lands. He was a knight whose position in life was as a warrior. Without fighting to do, he had no source of income or prestige.
Life had been hard for professional warriors—men like Melinda’s father—in the Noonlands in the recent years, and the advent of dungeons might change that.
Jack pushed the door open and gasped in pleasure at the sweet scent of the woods in springtime and the warmth of the air.
“Ah,” he said, “this is so nice! We’ve been so long in the north that I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to have the sun on my face!”
“And the woods are just bursting with life!” Melinda added. “Springtime in a forest is such a special thing.”
They stood together for a long moment, just enjoying the feeling of the sun and the sound of the birds singing and the insects buzzing in the tall grass.
“Come on,” Jack said. “We’ve still got a lot to do. I want to see Lachlan without delay!”
They set off again together, and it was at that moment that they realized they had not let go of each other’s hands. It was a necessity when stepping into the portal, but they were all the way out of the dungeon now.
They awkwardly broke the grip, and Jack laughed. “Sorry,” he said after a moment.
She looked at him and smiled. “I don’t think I mind, Jack,” she said. For a moment, she seemed about to say more, but then she frowned and shook her head. “But we’ve too much to do now. Let’s…”
She paused, then reached out and took his hand again impulsively. She stepped a little closer and spoke haltingly. “Jack, I… that is, I know we have an important mission to accomplish. We must travel to Nightvale and defeat King Bain and his minions, and we must rescue the people there, and find some way to destroy the source of evil magic. And we have to find some way to free Azhoth as well! It’s… I mean… We can’t really do what we might desire at the moment, Jack, not yet. Not until the job is done. Do you understand?”
Jack felt a smile growing on his face. “I do understand, Melinda,” he said. “I’m glad to hear you speak it so clearly. You’re right. But once we complete the mission…?”
She nodded, and suddenly she blushed, her fair skin reddening in a way that had nothing to do with the warlock markings hidden by her glamor. “Once the mission is complete, we will be able to do… what we want to do,” she said, sounding more shy than he had ever heard her before.
He grinned, then swiftly drew her to him in a quick hug. He risked a kiss on her brow, and heard her soft indrawn breath as his lips met the skin at her hairline. “Then let’s get on and finish the job, Melinda!”
“Let’s do it,” she agreed. She took his hand again and didn’t pull away this time, and together they marched up through the woods toward the Shadow Tower.
Lachlan and Ivan met them at the gate. The old warlock was so pleased to see them that he embraced them one after the other. Ivan the goblin watched with a twinkle in his eye, then took himself off to the kitchen.
“You’ll be hungry,” the ever helpful goblin called over his shoulder with a smile as he left.
“After a winter away from your cooking, Ivan, you can bet we are!” Jack said.
“Well, well,” Lachlan said as they settled themselves in chairs in the sun in the little kitchen courtyard outside the dining hall. “I guess you have a lot to tell me, and I have some interesting news for you as well.”
“We do have a lot to tell,” Jack said, “but we also don’t have a great deal of time, as you’ll see. Lachlan, we found the portal through to Nightvale. We’ve locked it so that only I can use it, but still I guess that the sooner we return and head through, the less time they’ll have to prepare for our arrival on the other side.”
With that, Melinda and Jack plunged into their tale. Ivan brought cakes and meat pastries, chopped fruit with cream and a pot of hot tea, and then unobtrusively drew up a chair to listen to the story for himself. Though Jack and Melinda spoke as quickly as they could, the sun climbed in the sky and the morning was passing by the time they were finished.
Lachlan sat in silence for a few minutes, pondering what he had been told, before he finally spoke.
“This is amazing news about the machine they’ve used to create the portal,” he said. “And the Devourer, too, the strange shape he has taken seems to me to be connected with the blue sand in some way. Can you show me the crystal that you drained power into?”
Jack took it from his pocket and laid it on the table where it gleamed with a blue radiance. Lachlan picked it up and examined it closely.
“Amazing,” he said. “In the old days, there were many mages who dreamed of being able to create something like this, an item in which raw power could be stored. Now, I can see that they discovered it. Whatever the origin of the substance, they found that they could create these crystals and use them as mana stores. Perhaps they found some other uses for the stuff too? It seems to have lots of potential. The sword you created, joining an object to a spell, and the line of communication that the sand can open—it’s possible that this stuff has almost unlimited potential as a magical tool. It’s not surprising that the mages of Nightvale coveted it, and did all they could to bring lots of it through to their land for their use.”
“What gets me about it,” Jack said, “is just how much power it can store. This is only a small thing, and yet I emptied my mana pool into it five times before it was even approaching full. If you had something bigger, something more refined or better made, there’s no telling how much raw mana could be stored in it.”
“And the question I want to have answered,” Melinda put in, “is why? What are they using it for?”
“I think I might be able to answer that,” a voice said from behind them. It was Hannah Dwimmer, the rebel of Nightvale. She had come up to them quietly. Her hair was damp and matted as if with sweat, and there was dust and a spattering of blood on her face. Her clothes were dusty, too, and her boots were caked with mud. She had a large sack over one shoulder, which she dropped with a clank as she fell into a chair.
“You look like you’ve been in a fight,” Jack said.
Hannah snagged a pastry from the table in front of her. “I have been making use of the local dungeon,” she said through a mouthful.
She patted the sack by her side. “This is the result of several runs. I’ve also been north along the road a bit—not far, but far enough to run the closest new dungeons nearby.” She looked at Jack, and she looked impressed. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “You created all these dungeons?”
“Not exactly,” Jack said. “I just woke them up. But I’m sure we’ll get a chance to fill you in on the details some other time—right now, the most important thing to tell you is that we found a Grand portal through to Nightvale.”
Hannah leaped to her feet, her face a picture of amazement. “You did?” she cried. “That’s amazing! Where is it? How do I get there?”
“You don’t,” Jack said firmly. “Not without me and Melinda. The portal is locked to my use for the moment, and there’s no doubt that the other side is going to be guarded. We’ll have to fight our way through gods only know what on the other side, but once we do—if we do—then we’ll be in Nightvale and able to move toward doing… whatever it is we need to do there.”
“You don’t know what that is?”
“Not for sure. But I’m confident that fate will take a hand. It’s my destiny to go through to Nightvale, just as it was my destiny to awaken the dungeons. I’m the Aetherborn, and fulfilling this destiny is my mage’s path.”
Melinda looked thoughtful for a moment. “It will almost certainly involve destroying the Devourer, for starters,” she said. “And finding out who he is and why he was created.”
“And who or what created him, too,” Jack added.
“You seem to be putting a lot of reliance on fate,” Hannah said doubtfully.
Lachlan spoke up. “Jack is right,” he said. “He is the Aetherborn, and there’s more going on here than our informed planning. You will have to trust to fate, I’m sure. It’s good that you recognize that, Jack.”
Hannah subsided, but still looked doubtful. Melinda grinned at Hannah and Jack glanced between them. When Hannah first arrived at the Shadow Tower there had been a bit of rivalry between the two women—Jack had realized only later that it had been rivalry for his affection. But Melinda had nothing to worry about there, and she knew it now. Still, Jack thought that Melinda did not particularly like Hannah, and for his own part he did find the Nightvale woman a bit stiff and quick to take offense.
But none of that mattered. They were all allies now.
“Enough of this,” Jack said, taking command of the situation before anyone could say anything more. “Let’s not forget that our time may be limited. Yes, the portal is locked to my use and we destroyed their messengers, but we don’t know what’s on the other side and every moment we delay increases the chance that we will face stiff resistance when we come through. I want to gather my allies and go. Who is coming with me?”
He looked around.
Melinda nodded. “I will,” she said.
“And I will too,” Hannah added. “I must go back and save my people if I can. I have found the true Aetherborn, so my task is fulfilled. I’ll go back and do what I can.”
“Lachlan?” Jack asked.
To his surprise, Lachlan shook his head no. “I cannot,” he said. “I’ve come to realize this while you were away. Nightvale is closed to me, at least for now.”
