“Well,” Arkk said, peering into the prison cell he had constructed specifically for the creature. “It still hasn’t moved.”
Zullie hummed to herself as she ran a scrub brush down the horse’s side. Little bits of meat scraped off, leaving the bare white bone beneath. Arkk watched in morbid fascination as the skeletal horse shuffled in place. Its movements didn’t look anything out of the ordinary compared to a regular horse being brushed. If Arkk were to judge, he might even say that the skeletal horse was enjoying it.
The problem was that it was a skeletal horse.
When Zullie had used her spell, the meat turned fetid in minutes. Far faster than normal. The skin frayed apart, the eyes shriveled up, and the stomach, heart, lungs, and everything else in the belly slopped to the ground with a wet, disgusting squelch. The walk back ended up knocking loose most of the remaining bits of hair and flesh and now…
Now Zullie was doing manual labor, clearing away the last scraps of flesh.
No one else would touch the thing so it really was up to her and her alone. The lesser servants looked at it with wary eyes.
Even Vezta stood to the side, eying the risen horse with ill-concealed disgust.
Arkk didn’t want to question her lest she realize what she was doing and stop. The ride back had reeked of stewing, rotten meat. If she intended to keep the skeletal horse around for any length of time, Arkk would feel much better about it if it was just clean white bone. So he couldn’t afford to stop her.
“I said, is it dead?”
Arkk blinked, forcing his gaze away from the empty eye sockets of the horse. “What? No. I don’t think so. The fortress doesn’t think so, at least. It is counting it as a prisoner which, I feel, requires the creature to be alive.” He sighed. “It makes me feel a bit bad. We just charged into this thing’s home and kidnapped it.”
Zullie paused. “It attacked us. I distinctly remember you saying that we came in peace.”
“Yeah. What if it didn’t understand? What would you do if a bunch of heavily armed warriors showed up on your village doorstep and started making strange noises?”
“I didn’t see any others. Bet this thing attacked or otherwise displaced whoever used to live in that village.”
Arkk crossed his arms, thinking while tapping his foot against the ground. With a snap of his fingers, he plucked Lexa from the canteen and dropped her directly in front of him. The gremlin jolted, starting at the sudden relocation. She whirled around only to freeze still as the skeletal horse leaned its skull down toward her.
Perhaps like it was sniffing at her. Except the skeletal horse failed to displace any air as it didn’t actually breathe.
Zullie started chuckling to herself as Lexa took a few stiff-legged steps backward.
“You saw it on the way back,” Arkk said with a frown.
“I didn’t think we were keeping it. I thought it was an emergency situation. Now she’s grooming it?” Lexa made a face. “And what’s all over the floor?”
Arkk glanced down to find strips of desiccated flesh littering the floor.
“The servants will clean it later,” Zullie said. “Got to get all this flesh off so it doesn’t stink.”
Arkk gave a few vehement nods. The sooner the better.
Lexa stared. Glared. Her sharp teeth were framed in a severe mix of a frown and a recoil of disgust. Gathering some of her courage, she stepped forward and grabbed hold of Arkk by his belt. She dragged him away from Zullie and the skeletal horse to the corner of the room. Reaching up, Lexa grabbed his shirt and dragged him down to her level.
“If I ever die,” Lexa said, wide eyes boring into him, “she is not allowed anywhere near my body. Am I understood?”
Arkk glanced back to Zullie as the witch started polishing the horse’s skull. She hummed happily. Probably the happiest he had ever seen her and that included while working on her research projects. It was… eerie. Did using necromancy spells make one more comfortable with… that? He would have to ask Savren and hope he could parse the answer.
For now, he leaned down to Lexa. “I will on the condition that if I die, you don’t let her get near me.”
Vezta leaned over the two, nodding along. “I am not sure if I could be… revived like that. Nevertheless, please keep my corpse well away from any necromancers.”
Lexa stared at Vezta then back to Arkk and firmly nodded her head. “Now, send me back. I was enjoying a nice, cold ale with—”
“First, tell me what you found in the village.”
Lexa winced and took a step back. “Well, I thought it would be good if we had warning in case a second of those things showed up. We couldn’t see into the village from the outside so I went in…”
“I didn’t ask why you went in, although that was going to be on the list, but what you found.”
Shifting her weight from foot to foot, Lexa glanced around.
Arkk tapped a finger against his elbow. “Just spit it out. I’m not going to be mad. Probably. Your motives for ditching the fight are a little suspect—”
“Honest,” Lexa said, snapping back at Arkk. The uncertainty in her stance had vanished, replaced with indignation. “I wanted to make sure we weren’t going to be overwhelmed. I couldn’t say anything because, you know, fight. At first, I was just keeping watch not far from the rest of you. A few of my spells let me see a little better inside that dome—but only while inside it.
“I saw the fight turn in our favor and decided to do a little more forward scouting.”
“Alright. I’ll believe it. Then you started peeking through houses? What did you find?”
Lexa dropped her gaze back to the floor. “I… don’t know.”
“Memory problems? A spell or—”
“No. I remember. It’s just… In one house I saw a family sitting around the table, eating a meal. The family looked humanoid but I couldn’t tell if they were actual humans or some demihuman variant. They were perfectly normal, sitting there. Wouldn’t have seen it as out of place in any town or village in the duchy.”
“I’m sensing a but…”
“It was fake. Like…” Lexa looked around and moved closer to one of the glowstones set into the wall. She held out her hands, linking her thumbs together, and then looked down at her shirt. A shadowy facsimile of a bird flapped its wings over her clothes in time with her moving her fingers.
“Like a shadow puppet,” Arkk said, staring down at her.
“Yeah.” Lexa let her arms drop to her sides. “Every house was the same. Fake people doing fake things to look like they were real. I don’t have any proof. Maybe they’re just weird beings not like anything here—it’s a whole other world, you know?—but… I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something there putting on a show. Whether that show was for it or me, I can’t answer.”
Arkk tapped his fingers against his elbow some more as he turned to Vezta. “Thoughts?”
The pre-Calamity monster shook her head, despondent. “It is strange. The [UNDERWORLD] I knew is nothing like this Underworld. Were it not for the shadowy pillars and that dome around the village, I might have thought we managed to connect to the wrong place. The centuries have clearly not been kind to the land or its inhabitants.
“When I was there last, it was a lush forest with a long river running through the middle. The trees were odd. Similar to those around Darkwood—I wonder if there is any relation—and the river was as black as it is today. There were three primary inhabitants. Gorgon, who were relatively unchanged from those we have in our employ, Dark Knights—who felt relatively similar to orcs but… not quite—and the keth. The latter were devoted servants of the Cloak of Shadows. I suppose a decent analogy would be something like crabs.”
“Crabs?”
Arkk, confused, looked to Lexa. The gremlin shrugged her shoulders, just as confused as he was.
“Aquatic creatures,” Zullie said. She stripped the outer layer of her robes as she approached their group. Probably a good thing given the bits of flesh that had clung to it. “Like giant spiders with these little snappy claw things and hard shells. They’re considered a delicacy in Cliff.”
Deciding to take the Cliff local at her word, Arkk nodded. “Alright. Water spiders with claws. A bit frightening.”
“Giant water spiders,” Zullie corrected.
Arkk shuddered. “Anyway… Moving back to the story. These water… keth lived with orcs and gorgon. What next?”
Vezta shrugged. “Not much else to say. I knew things would have changed over the years, which is why I didn’t lay down exactly what we might find in advance, but I didn’t know how much. I thought we could find more gorgon allies at the very least. It’s… concerning.”
“Question,” Zullie said, adjusting her glasses. “How did each of these species handle magic? Or, focus on the keth. I have a good idea regarding gorgon and orcs, assuming they haven’t changed too much.”
“The keth were the favored of the Cloak of Shadows. They wielded her gifts as easily as you breathe.”
“And there aren’t any in this world because none ever traversed the archways before the Calamity?”
Vezta shook her head. “No. My former master had a whole detachment in his army. Assassins.”
“Then I posit that, upon the Calamity cutting off the other realms, they perished like so many other magical species. Likely because they could no longer access their god’s magic.”
“I cannot argue against that theory,” Vezta said. “From what I’ve learned on our travels, there are no magically dependent species alive today except myself. Or creatures like fairies, who have entirely lost their magic.”
“So,” Arkk said, looking to Zullie. He was fairly sure he knew where she was going with this. “Our prisoner is one of the keth?”
“Impossible,” Vezta said. She cupped her hands and moved them together, stopping before they touched. “They were smaller. Much smaller.” Looking down, she frowned at Lexa. “Even smaller than this one.”
“And yet, a magically sensitive species stuck in a world where the levels of magic just keep going up and up and up wouldn’t change and adapt? Or grow? I’m not an expert on magibiology but I did take the required courses at the academy. I know the theories. I will bet a lot on our captive being a keth. Or a descendant of the species.”
“Okay,” Arkk said. “That… how does knowing that help us?”
“And what about the shadow people?” Lexa asked.
Zullie waved a hand casually as she turned away. “Don’t know. I’m tired and exhausted and I’ve sweat so much today. You guys can figure that out. If you discover that the shadow people are magic, let me know, but I don’t want any part of interacting with some being who can’t be perceived that thinks making shadow people puppets is fun.” She walked off, drawing in a deep breath. Her sudden gag made her stop. “I need a bath,” she grumbled as she stepped out the door.
A silence filled the space Zullie had left behind. Vezta stared off into the distance as if some missing piece in her memories might help out. Lexa just turned her gaze downward, staring at the floor in equally deep thought. Arkk had to wonder if everything hadn’t been one large waste of time. He supposed a desolate wasteland was better for Fortress Al-Mir than a hostile invasion force but…
What really bothered him was the state of the Underworld. If they cracked the dam that was the Calamity and all that magic flooded into the world—his world—would it act like a flooding river? A sweep of magic carrying away trees and lives as surely as any flood. Originally, before the Calamity, it must have flowed in and, somehow, drained out or otherwise wound up consumed. What if they ended up breaking that dam but a stopper on the other end resulted in the world turning just as horrid, stoppered against draining?
Although it seemed they wouldn’t have the promised legions of willing soldiers, they needed to find out more about what happened to the Underworld, what steps the local inhabitants took to try to solve the issue, and what might happen if the Calamity were to end here.
And at the moment, unless they wanted to scour the endless desert, they only had one lead.
With a thought, Savren appeared in their midst. The greasy warlock stumbled slightly. The exact motion someone made when they had been ascending stairs only to suddenly find themselves on flat ground. Aside from an inelegant noise of alarm in the back of his throat, he didn’t react beyond steadying himself. He took one look around the assembled group and wrinkled his nose.
“Necromancy now? Knocking nooks into nether planes not enough for you?”
Arkk shot a scowl at the skeletal horse before teleporting all four of them out into one of the meeting rooms. The sudden breath of fresh air only served to enforce how foul that room had smelled. He quickly set a lesser servant to clean up the flesh shavings as he looked to Savren.
“How adept are you at reading minds?”
“To a master of mind magic such as myself, amassing memories is most manageable.”
“Magnificent. Come along,” Arkk said before teleporting the group once again.
This time, they appeared within the prison chamber. A large room with a deep oubliette. Thick metal bars crisscrossed over the top, preventing even the most adept of climbers from reaching the top. A narrow catwalk allowed guards or, in this case, Arkk and the others to stand over the pit and look down.
The glowstones in the walls grew dimmer and dimmer the deeper the pit went. Ten gems, each spaced apart by about the same length as the average orc was tall, descended downward. The very bottom one barely provided any light at all, casting the prone form of their carapace-covered captive in a fitting shadow with only its edges highlighted in the violet light.
It hadn’t moved since falling at the shadowy village but the prisoner link said it was still alive.
“That thing,” Arkk said, pointing a finger downward. “Can you read its mind?”
Savren stooped over the railing, peering down into the depths with squinted eyes. “Ah, the being brought back from beyond the barrier?” He hummed to himself, not expecting an answer to the rhetorical question. “I shall scribe a circle suited to this species, though it may take a try or two to tune.”
“How long will that take.”
Looking up to the ceiling, Savren nonverbally counted something on his fingertips. Looking back down, he shrugged. “Morning.”
Arkk’s eyebrows popped up his forehead in surprise. He wasn’t quite sure why he was surprised. The few magical rituals that didn’t involve calling down the god of barriers, such as that inferno spell he had used on the slavers and Zullie’s cooling ritual, hardly took any time at all to develop. He supposed he anticipated some long, involved process. “Good,” he said. “I’m counting on you.”
“A moment,” Savren said, holding up his finger. “Meandering through memories without minding the material might get you what you want. Were you to whittle down the whys and wherefores, we’ll sooner wrap up.”
Arkk narrowed his eyes. That one took an extra second or two to parse. Savren, for all that Arkk wasn’t fond of the man, had come through in the research and development department. He had no real reason to try to get rid of the man at the moment. Finding a solution to his curse of alliteration would help not just him but everyone who had to communicate with him.
Of course, the man had been studying his curse and mind magics for the last year or so. Zullie had already said that curses were outside her area of expertise. Arkk wasn’t sure what he was going to do about it and, with the war on, it wasn’t like he could stop by the Cliff Academy seeking help. All capable spellcasters were enrolled in the Duke’s Grand Guard.
He would have to figure it out later. Maybe old magic could help if the creature in the oubliette below could read those old books in the library.
“You think it will go better if I know what I want in advance?”
“Correct.”
Arkk nodded. He was inferring, but memories were vast and widespread. Doubly so if the creature was long-lived. If Savren had to randomly stumble through those memories to find what they wanted, they could be here all week.
“In that case,” Arkk said, “focus on three topics. The history of that other world, what they did to combat the Calamity on their end, and—most importantly—whether or not this creature is an unthinking beast or something that could be reasoned with.” He looked around to Lexa and Vezta. “Anything else?”
“The thing fought with a sword and its limbs,” Lexa said, looking down below. “Might not know anything about magic or the Calamity.”
“If that’s the case, then oh well. Nothing we can do about it. Guess the mind reading will be quick.”
Vezta looked at Savren with most of her eyes. She didn’t often engage directly with the man—except on the occasions where they had to work together for the purposes of the ritual—so seeing her turn to address him directly made Arkk pay attention. “If you could, it would be wise to discover whether this is a solitary creature or if it has a group that will be missing it. Also knowledge of any other inhabited areas it knows of.”
Arkk gave Vezta an affirming smile. That was a good point. Even if it couldn’t be reasoned with, if it knew where others who might be reasoned with lived, that would save them the trouble of searching that entire wasteland.
“One other thing,” Arkk added. “Is the entire other world a wasteland or only the area in the vicinity of the portal? We might have just gotten unlucky.”
“The gateway used to connect to a variety of locations depending on the configuration of sigils around the crystalline structure. I believe I remember a few alternatives.”
Arkk shook his head. “Nope. Don’t touch it. The portal being opened at all is a boon from a god. If we turn it off and find out we can’t turn it back on, we’re stuck. We’re not running that ritual again to get it open.”
“A notable concern. We’ll—”
“Excuse me.” Lexa marched directly between Vezta and Arkk, looking between them. “What was that you just said?”
“Not to turn off the portal?”
“Wrong,” Lexa said, smacking him in the stomach. “The portal is a gift from a god? Like the Light?”
Arkk looked to Savren and then to Vezta before dropping his gaze to the startled gremlin. He cleared his throat. “Yes? Like healing magic is a miracle from the Light. So is this door. Nothing more to it than that.”
“You’re protesting too much.”
A shudder ran through Arkk’s back as memories of that being holding him in the palm of its hand surfaced in his mind. “It’s nothing. Don’t think about it.”
“But—”
Arkk teleported her away, sending her off to her quarters.
“Her suspicions won’t be alleviated like this,” Vezta said.
“Doesn’t matter. She can think whatever she wants to think. I don’t want to discuss… that.”
“Shame I hadn’t seen…” Savren said in a wistful tone.
“Trust me. Not a sight I wish to see again anytime soon. The weight of being there was crushing.” Arkk shook his head. “Just focus on your mind-reading ritual. I…”
Arkk frowned. If they weren’t going to get unlimited reinforcements from the other side of the portal, they were in more dire straits than he had feared.
“I need to figure out what to do about this war.”