The Warden, page 35
Aelis sniffed. “Invokers think with their staves and cause as many problems as they solve. I have mastered subtler and more refined magics.”
“More refined magics wouldn’t melt snowfall that was threatening to hem you in somewhere to die. A big gout of flame might.”
“And make it just as likely to cause a chain reaction that would bury me anyway. An Abjurer—which I happen to be—can solve the problem much more easily.”
“Of course,” Maurenia said. She seemed to be on the verge of saying more when there was a knock at the tower door. “Expecting anyone?”
Aelis looked up and realized that what light filtered down from the upper levels of her tower had long since faded into gray.
“Probably dinner,” Aelis said. It was, in fact, having been brought up from the village by a farm lad on horseback, his cheeks red and puffing in the cold. He stayed only long enough to see Aelis open the door before retreating, having left behind a large basket from which emanated appetizing smells of bread and mushroom stew.
There wasn’t much cheer while they ate despite Aelis opening two bottles of the precious wine Maurenia had brought with the post. The second bottle followed them into Aelis’s curtained-off bedroom, where it stood, mostly full, on the bedside table.
“You still have a chance not to do this, you know,” Maurenia whispered, after time had passed, and they lay together, sweating, under Aelis’s thinnest blanket.
“Not if I want to stay a warden, I don’t.”
Maurenia rolled onto her back. Unwilling to let go of the contact, Aelis laid her head on the half-elf’s shoulder, felt the brush of silky hair against her forehead, curtaining over her eyes.
“I know. I just don’t like the idea of it.”
“Getting protective?”
“Maybe. That a problem?”
Aelis was silent a moment. She felt Maurenia breathing underneath her, watched the rise and fall of her skin. “It’s not that I mind hearing it. But I don’t need protecting. I do the protecting.”
“Around here, that may be true. Down in a city, that may be true. Out in the wilderness, though? Everyone needs protecting there.”
“I’ve been there already.”
“The worst thing you can be is overconfident.”
“I think I’m just going to be doing reconnaissance, if I’m being honest. Figure out what’s there and what’s to be done about it.”
“What do you expect to find?”
Animated corpses. Probably armed and armored. Some might remember their training. But hopefully no animating intelligence behind them, which makes them a great deal easier to deal with.
“I don’t know,” Aelis said aloud. Then, deciding that answering further questions was likely to be dangerous, she tossed both her and Maurenia’s hair back and considered the expanse of skin before her.
31
THE FORT
They both woke early, before the sun even threatened to rise. The tower was cold and Aelis did not lay a fire, for she wasn’t sure when she’d return. The only step she did take was to put a Third Order Necromantic spell into her orrery, hoping to keep it powered for as long as she might be gone. She and Maurenia, their skin covered in gooseflesh, dressed in silence. Aelis belted on her sword and dagger over her heaviest coat and slung her rucksack over her shoulders.
Aelis could feel Maurenia’s eyes on her as they walked to the door of the tower. She pulled it securely closed, locked it, warded it. She found Maurenia’s hand, warm and callused, with her own, and squeezed. They kissed; there was passion in it, but it was restrained.
“We’ll be here another week, maybe two,” Maurenia murmured, her lips moving against Aelis’s cheek. “I’d better see you again before we go. I’ll start breaking pieces off the wagon if I have to.”
“I’ll try,” Aelis said, and the words felt small and futile to her. Then she hitched at her rucksack, adjusted her belt, and they went their separate ways, the half-elf back to town, the Warden on a hard northerly course.
* * *
Well, Aelis thought four days later, this is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever done. Tun’s map had marked the course well for her and she’d made good time, driven by the twin lashes of misery and loneliness.
If the map was still good—and she’d passed the cave and collapsed palisade she recognized from Nath’s fallen Mahlgren encampment—she had only a few more hours of cold, hungry, boring march.
She found herself reflecting on the long marches and runs Abjurer students were put through, with Vosghez leading them all in effortless, maddening silence. It simply wasn’t right that a dwarf could make five miles around the Lyceum grounds without so much as breathing hard when his stride should’ve put him at a disadvantage. And yet, in that second year—when theory ended and practical study began in earnest—she’d never seen anyone match him, let alone pass him.
“True, five miles along well-paved and even roads, with only light grading, don’t compare to a single mile of hard-frozen fucking wilderness,” Aelis muttered as she swung her stick ahead of her for purchase. She’d amused herself for the days of constant march by imagining how each of her closest professors would’ve managed it. Urizen would’ve Charmed someone into carrying him. Lavanalla would probably have floated above the grass or flitted from tree branch to tree branch. Vosghez would’ve lowered his head and plowed on, covering the entire distance she did in half the time.
Bardun Jacques would’ve reshaped the landscape around him using the sheer force of profanity, which, Aelis reasoned, might actually have been an eighth College in his hands. Duvhalin, on the other hand, would’ve used some of his vast personal wealth to buy a carriage and enough teams of horses to replace the inevitable losses.
“Maybe a sleigh and a string of … whatever animals pull sleighs. Oxen? Who can know,” Aelis murmured. “Maybe a gods-damned elephant.”
The joke was unworthy of her, of her office, power, task, and teacher. But she didn’t feel worthy of much; she was tired, cold, hungry, and increasingly angry.
But when the crumbling wall of stone appeared in her view on a slight rise in the distance, her anger melted away.
“Finally.” Here was the task, the job. “You know, if this turns out to be a pile of rotting bones, I can’t decide if I’ll be relieved or furious.”
She was not in the mood for doing the sensible thing, or for planning. So she went straight at the nearest face of the hill, using her walking stick to pull herself up the fairly steep grade. She was halfway up before her stick dislodged a large rock.
Aelis had just enough reaction time to call up a ward—Hogarth’s Aetherial Greaves—before the rock would strike her and shatter her shin. The rock hit the barrier, sending striating lines of force up the barely visible blue glow and splintering it. But the ward held, and the rock went tumbling away.
Unfortunately, though the ward deflected the rock, she’d let go of her stick in order to cast. Her arms pinwheeled as she felt her balance tilting back, back, until she was looking at the sky and rolling ass over appetite back down the hill.
Aelis decided it was best to remain prone and contemplative for several moments, despite the cold of the ground, to give time for any fractures to report in.
None did. She shook each limb, one by one, lifted her head, wriggled her toes. She was cold and mud-spattered, and would be sore, but she seemed to be intact.
“Better reconnaissance this time,” she muttered as she pulled herself up. The stick still stood halfway up the hill, like a pole stripped of its flag, taunting her. “Damned if I’m going to let it go that easily.”
Aelis spent the next half hour making a circuit of the spur of hill. As far as she could tell, only the northeastern corner of the old fort still stood in any meaningful way.
“Any barracks-crypt is going to be hidden,” she muttered as she eyed a couple of different routes to the top. “Not at ground level.” As she spoke, she began winding her way up the hill. Walking on the angle along the leeward side of the hill wasn’t easy without her stick, and once or twice she had to double over and scramble up on all fours, but it was better than attempting the straight-up approach again only to take the fast route to the bottom.
By the time she’d circled back to where she’d fallen from and snatched her walking stick from the ground, Aelis felt her dignity had largely recovered. She resettled her grip on the good length of ash and muttered a smug fuck you to the wilderness in general and this hill in particular.
Then she went looking for a crypt.
* * *
The grinning skull at the base of the torch sconce mocked her.
“Really, Dalius? Are we going to be this cliché? A skull sconce?”
A few years of exposure to wind and weather hadn’t completely eroded its features, and just as Aelis thought, the teeth were keys, of a kind. She danced her fingers lightly over them, making sure not to exert enough pressure to trigger any of them.
It was, of course, the only sconce to have a skull at the base of its fixture. When people had, in the days before such things were barred, resorted to barracks-crypt full of undead soldiers, they were always hidden. Precisely how to hide them became a question of taste, style, and money spent on builders and wizards who fancied themselves clever.
“One skull sconce in an entire building might as well be a glaring beacon and a bard singing about the undead stored beneath this floor,” Aelis muttered.
There was, of course, the somewhat less easily solved problem: What combination would open the door or hatch or sliding stones?
Aelis set down her rucksack, loosened her coat, and dug out her alchemy lamp. She sparked it to life, adjusted knobs on the side to narrow and tighten the beam, and brought it over to the skull for a closer examination.
“More or less anatomically correct for a human,” she muttered as she looked at the arrangement of the jaw, the lines that showed the meeting of the skull plates. “Impressive, actually.” It was the teeth that interested her most, though. All thirty-two possible teeth, and each one with just enough give to suggest it could be pushed.
“Well. Fuck. Thirty-two possible keys is…” She tried to do the math in her head on the number of potential combinations and was stopped cold. “I can’t just guess. Got to approach it more carefully.”
There were probably traps built into a wrong combination, she reasoned. “Most likely an alarm, summoning living guards. I don’t have to worry over that. But if I give in to blind guessing I’ll be here till I’m buried in a snowdrift.”
She let her mind drift, stopped focusing on the problem and started thinking, loosely, of what she knew that had led her here.
Dalius. Mahlgren. Mahlhewn Keep. Old Ystain. Barracks-crypts were built for wars, but not necessarily the war, the most recent one.
By the time the war between the Three Crowns and the orcs had reached its hottest point, traditional Necromancy—animating the dead—had been officially banned. Here and there, Aelis knew, there had been calls to ease off the ban, or at least turn a blind eye, to provide troops who could fight the orcs at lower risk to themselves. Having been a privileged child growing up hundreds of miles from the nearest battle, Aelis had been only dimly aware of the debate, and by the time she was enrolled in the College of Necromancy, it had been counted among the Things One Didn’t Bring Up.
Aelis pulled herself back from undergraduate reminiscences and tried to concentrate on the problem at hand without focusing on it in such a way that she wouldn’t see the answer. It was a difficult thing to do, like finding the proper mindset to answer a riddle.
Bardun Jacques used to devote entire lectures to proposing impossible riddles. Occasionally someone would shout out the answer immediately, which would make the old Warden nod. Then he’d propose something even more ridiculous and sneer while students ventured haphazard guesses.
“The point of riddling,” he’d say, “is to teach you to think slantways. To get your mind out of books and into the older, barer facts of the world. To teach you to trust your intuition, your gut, the part of you that knows things it can’t quite put voice to.”
Aelis shook her head to clear it, and shifted where she knelt on the cold stones.
“This was designed by a Necromancer. An Anatomist. I’m sure of that. The detail is too perfect. So I can number the teeth.” She dug into her rucksack again, found a small sheaf of loosely bound parchment, and dug out a charcoal stick. She quickly sketched the skull with precise detail, separating it into upper and lower halves, and numbered the teeth as a surgeon would, beginning on the back left Bridegroom tooth and counting forward from one.
“If every tooth is a key, it’s not a random arrangement of numbers,” Aelis muttered. On another sheet of her little notebook, she started taking stock of her flitting thoughts.
What unit housed here? Could be a designation.
Date fort was built.
Date barracks-crypt was finished.
After she’d written that one she frowned. “Damn well better not be that one. Impossible to know unless a miraculous trove of records is somewhere nearby.” She scanned the corner of the largely fallen-down stone building. Unfortunately for her there were no stout chests brimming with wonderfully preserved war diaries and construction records. Just broken rocks, blown leaves, pine needles, and rodents’ nests.
She couldn’t let go of the idea of a date, though.
“I’m still in Mahlgren, or I would be if Mahlgren still existed. Dates that are important to…”
Her mind flashed to Nath’s cave, to the tapestries hanging there depicting the submission of the last king of Mahlgren to the king of Old Ystain. While some people would view such an event as a catastrophic end to an old order, the people of Mahlgren had come to view it as a noble sacrifice. Donnus I had saved thousands of lives from a war he couldn’t have won, or so the historical narrative went. Aelis wasn’t sure how much of that was true or false, as she’d never been interested enough in regional histories to really dig into the primary sources.
But dates, dates she could dredge up.
The Mahlgren surrender stuck in her head. She’d try that first. “Nine-thirty-two,” she muttered, and even as her hands slid along the skull, clicking over the teeth numbered nine, three, and two, she was certain she was right.
And then there was an empty-sounding click, and nothing happened.
“You idiot,” she chided herself. With newfound confidence, certainty surging in her again, she clicked over the ninth tooth—the second of the two front incisors—and then walked her fingertip down to the very back bottom molar and pressed.
She was shocked when the tooth broke open on her fingertip, grazing it with a sharp edge. There was a click of gears turning, another crack. Aelis backed slowly away from the sconce, swinging her alchemy lamp toward her hand to inspect it. There was only a minor abrasion, the skin barely nicked. She squatted close to the sconce again, brought the light to bear on the tooth that had broken off.
Buried beneath the tooth were two vials that had been crushed together by minuscule gears. Two reagents, she guessed, meant to mingle and then release a gas or a contact poison. But the reagents had long since dissipated and the trap had become inert.
As she was cursing her stupidity and rubbing her abraded skin, Aelis suddenly remembered the droning voice of her childhood history tutor explaining the different calendars and dating systems each kingdom had used prior to coming together under the Three Crowns and the Estates House.
“Old Ystain was still on its original calendar, which was…”
She slid her fingers back over the teeth and clicked the ones she numbered seven and twenty-five. They both felt more solid, harder to depress. But when they did, she heard a much louder, grating sound, stone against stone.
She turned around just in time to see her rucksack and walking stick sinking out of sight as the stones they rested upon gave way.
32
THE CRYPT
Aelis’s fear that the stick or her rucksack might have fallen far was quickly allayed when she saw that the stones that gave way only slid back to reveal a narrow underground passage. She fiddled with the settings on her lamp, opening the shutters and increasing the diffusion of the lens, so that instead of a small, tight beam it threw softer light in a small circle around her. She clipped it to her belt and lowered her legs through the open trapdoor.
She let herself down carefully, her boots a foot or so above the drop before she let go, and landed easily. The crumbled remnants of a rope ladder lay in a pile on the uneven dirt floor. The tunnel it revealed curved away to her left and her lamplight showed roughly worked stone walls. She took a moment to lash her walking stick to the rucksack and slung it back over her shoulder.
Aelis tested her sword in its scabbard, drawing the first few inches clear to loosen it. She did the same with her dagger.
I’m either about to die or this is the beginning of my chapter in Lives of the Wardens: The Post-war Years, Aelis thought.
She wrapped her hand around the hilt of her sword again. She drew calm from the willow-leaf blade and from her Abjurer’s litany.
Fear is a response to danger. The Abjurer does not know danger. The properly prepared and ever-vigilant Abjurer is the antithesis of danger. Thus, she cannot fear.
Then she trudged on.
It wasn’t a long walk, and took no more than a few moments, while she did consider practical possibilities: that the tunnel may have caved in or that it could in fact cave in as she traversed its length.
And if it does, I’ll call a ward, wait for it to settle, and deal with whatever comes.
The tunnel graded downward and it wasn’t long till the lamp on her belt was revealing stone that was clearly more worked than the rest of the tunnel.
Aelis turned her lamp to its highest setting; it would burn through its fuel quickly, but she needed to see what she was dealing with.
