Author's Note: I initially nixed this chapter, too. I think we could comfortably skip it, and it's a little fluffy and lacking in urgency, for me, considering what's coming up for our heroes. Plus, well, for god's sake, we're already up to fifty chapters! Mercy, o muse! My fingers are gonna fall off! :D
But then I thought it would be nice to spend some time absorbing the atmosphere in Undrentide, before we have to leave it behind forever. Also, I've always liked the library. It's such a fun little sidequest. I'd hate to ignore it completely. :)
Anyway, I'm still not sure whether to keep this or give it the axe, but I'm tossing it up here for ya'll to cast your judgement.
51.
The Tower of the Winds was at the center of the city, and the mythal was at the center of the Tower…
"And Heurodis is within the mythal, summoning the power of the mythallar," Xanos said, carefully pocketing the precious little book. "While the mythal is active, the Tower will be warded against entry. According to this, however, there are three artifacts within the city which are keyed to the Tower's ward, to be used to access the mythal in the event of an emergency-"
I stared at him blankly. "Wait, wait. Back up a minute," I said. "What the hell's a mythal?"
He gave me a long-suffering, positively despondent stare. "Black God's Balls, woman. We have just gone over this-"
"Well, I didn't get it the first time. Try again."
Deekin piped up. "It be the magic thingie you put the mythallar into to make the city fly, Boss."
I blinked. "Oh!" I said in sudden comprehension. "Well, why didn't you just say that in the first place?
The sorcerer's palm made an audible smacking sound when it hit his forehead. "I did," he growled, with a kind of manic despair. "Obviously, Xanos should have used shorter words and simpler sentences. Much shorter words," he added in a mutter. "Or perhaps he should have simply drawn a diagram, with numbered parts…"
"Gee, thanks."
"…and beaten you over the head with it. Gods' Eyes, woman, you are a disgrace to your noble blood-"
"Hey! Don't you bring my family into this-"
Deekin cleared his throat. "Uh, guys?" he ventured diffidently. "Can we maybe get on with it? You know…chop-chop? Skedaddle? Vamoose?"
Xanos scowled. "Now even the damned lizard is picking up your incomprehensible speech patterns," he grumbled.
"He's a quick learner," I said blithely. I shared a conspiratorial grin with Deekin. "Well, you heard the boy, my brother. Let's skedaddle."
We moved through the dead streets, Deekin scurrying ahead of us to scout for danger, as had become his habit.
It was surprisingly easy for me to move through the city. There was a rhythm to it, an arterial flow that stemmed from an urban heartbeat, even in these desolate streets. It was familiar to me. All I had to do was stop thinking and follow my gut – and, as Xanos might say, not thinking was an act that came to me as naturally as breathing.
We found the Arcanist's Tower first, a practically origami-like building, all odd angles and strange protrusions, and the only thing stranger than the outside was the inside.
The inside of the Arcanist's Tower reminded me of an Escher painting. There were twisted stairs to nowhere, and hallways that led into a shadowy otherworld and back out again. Xanos said that it used to be a school, and there was a certain classroom-ey component to some of the spaces – as long as you ignored the bottomless drop at the edges of the some of the floors. I wondered if that was where the professors used to dispose of sub-par students. Then I shuddered, and decided not to think about it.
We climbed – carefully - to the top, Deekin's eyes helping us to skirt the things that lurked in the gloom, and we found the Dark Wind wandering in a corridor where the shadows loomed even darker and deeper than all the rest.
I couldn't see very much, though I could hear the telltale howl and hum of the wind, echoing as if trapped in some space that was far too small for it. "Hey, Deeks," I called.
"Yeah, Boss?"
"Let there be light."
And then there was light, in the form of a twinkling blue sphere that shone between the kobold's skinny hands like a beacon. And it was damned helpful.
The Dark Wind was a compact sphere of air above a decayed dais, a tight-spinning cyclone as dense as a black hole.
Xanos and I stood, looking up at it. "Well?" the sorcerer asked. "We have found it. What now?"
"Call the storm, my fierce little falcon," Shaundakul whispered in the vaults of my mind. "It will heed."
I leaned on Silent Partner and lifted my free hand, palm up. Shaundakul's gift fizzed in my veins like a good champagne. "Hey, you," I called to the Dark Wind. "C'mere."
It settled on my palm, not so much like a bird as like a lead bearing. Nevertheless, I had it, and that was what was important.
Deekin wrinkled his snout critically, his quill held almost daintily between his forefinger and thumb. He'd holstered his crossbow, and was balancing a sheaf of papers in his free hand, instead. "That wasn't a very epic quote, Boss," he said disapprovingly. "C'mon. Work with Deekin, here."
"Sorry, Deeks."
He shrugged his scrawny shoulders. "Don't be," he said easily. "Deekin can always make something up later. Er. You not mind if Deekin takes some artistic license, right, Boss?"
Xanos snickered. I'd have flipped him off, but I had my hands full.
We left, climbing back down the way we had come. The Dark Wind whispered along at my heels like a weird, shadowy hound.
Next came the city mausoleum.
Contrary to my expectations, but according to Xanos's and Deekin's, there were still a few residents lingering there.
A ring of skeletons surrounded us before we'd gotten much further than the reception hall. We huddled, back to back, wearing varying expressions of consternation and annoyance.
I sidestepped the swipe of an axe, jammed Silent Partner's butt-end into a skeleton's ribcage, and jerked the other end to the side with both hands. After however-many-thousand years of undeath, the thing's bones were brittle, and they snapped like twigs. It collapsed. "I hate the undead," I muttered.
Xanos snapped his fingers and pointed imperiously. A spark of green fire lit at his fingertips and sped off into an approaching group of zombies, which exploded. "Xanos hates this city," he growled.
Deekin huddled near my leg, scribbling frantically. "Deekin hates this quill," he mumbled, shaking the quill in question vigorously. "It almost be out of ink."
I didn't have the heart to tell him that ink probably wouldn't matter where the three of us were going, anyway. Let him write, if it makes him happy, I thought. Let him think someone's going to remember us when this is done. For my part, I just tried not to think about it. At all. It wasn't as if we had any other options, anyway, aside from sitting down, putting our heads between our knees, and waiting for Heurodis to come down on us like a really ugly hammer.
The Dead Wind was waiting for us, a vortex of sucking emptiness at the heart of the complex.
I studied it with my second sight. It was an ugly thing, but it was still a thing of the wind and air. I thought I knew how to call it.
I beckoned to it. "Come," I said, the pop and fizz of power on my tongue shaping the word into a command.
The Dead Wind drifted to me obediently, settling into my hand with a buzzing like a swarm of hungry flies.
The quaking of the city was getting worse. Now and then, I saw a shaft of light break through from the distant ceiling, motes of dust dancing in the sunlight as if celebrating its long-anticipated return.
The library of Undrentide was a building decorated with listing columns and broken statuary. Most of the carved figures were wearing robes and doing complicated things with wands and scrolls.
Deekin hopped across a growing crack in the street. "You think there gonna be books in there?" he asked eagerly.
"It is a library, you idiot lizard," Xanos growled. His eyes narrowed, and his hand snapped up. A falling chunk of sandstone changed direction by about ninety degrees, bouncing away from him as if thrown. "Why do you persist in irritating Xanos by asking such idiot questions? Of course there will be books!"
There were, in fact, books. Deekin crammed them into his capacious blue rucksack as we went, even though most of them were faded to the point of illegibility and almost none of them were still in their bindings.
We slogged through the dust-choked air until we reached the center, where we found a room that would have been empty if someone hadn't left a pedestal smack in the middle of it.
There was a book on the pedestal. We all leaned over it - at least, Xanos and I did. Deekin had to stand on tiptoe to read it. "Hey, what be this-" he began.
Then the world blurred, and I felt like someone had just sunk a hook into my midsection and yanked me sharply, about three feet and two worlds to the left.
When my vision cleared again, we were in a forest clearing. Owls hooted. Far away, wolves howled.
I looked around, my skin crawling. It was, I thought, a good thing my system had just about gone numb to these kinds of shocks. Otherwise, I'd have already been on the ground, having a noisy bout of hysterics. "Have I mentioned lately how much I hate magic?" I asked meditatively.
Xanos crossed his arms and glared down at the kobold. "If we are trapped here," he said. "Xanos is feeding you to those wolves."
Deekin waved his skinny arms. "Don't worry," he reassured us. "It all under control. Er…sort of."
For lack of anything better to do, we followed a path that had been cleared through the trees.
There was a man waiting in the next clearing. He walked with a limp, and his eyes didn't focus, though his head turned when we approached.
He didn't talk to us, though. Not directly. He seemed to be keeping to some kind of script.
He wrung his hands. "Jendra, sweet Jendra you are gone!" he cried. "Betrayed by kin and clan and I, your William, I can do nothing more for you than weep!" He struck a tragic pose. "O gods, thy names art Cruelty and Injustice!"
The appalled curl of Xanos's lip spoke volumes. "What," he said, "In the nine bloody buggering Hells have we walked into?"
"If I didn't know better, I'd say that we just walked into the middle of a really bad play," I mused.
Deekin tugged urgently at my sleeve. "Psst, Boss! Hey, Boss!" he hissed. "Deekin knows where we are! We're in the story!"
I looked down at him. "What, you mean we're actually in the book?" I asked incredulously.
"Yeah!" he exclaimed, clapping his hands together eagerly. "Deekin read lots of stories like this before. It really sweet. This looks like it about the blind beggar boy and his lady love-"
"Well, that explains the terrible dialogue."
The look Deekin gave me was full of pity. "Pfft," he said, waving a hand dismissively. "You not got a romantic bone in your body, Boss."
It occurred to me to wonder just what a kobold knew about romance. And then, just as quickly as the thought had appeared, I shunted it away again so fast that I probably sprained something in my brain. "Sorry, Deeks," I said weakly. "I guess we'll have to depend on you to get us out of here, then."
"Oh, well, that be easy," the kobold said breezily. "We just got to follow the story to its end. Come on!" he added, with a dramatic sweep of his hand. "Follow Deekin, noble heroes! Huzzah!"
The trail led us to a temple, led us to an altar, led us to a girl who lay sprawled there in a tumble of bloody silks and dying ash.
I knelt by her side. Her eyes were wide and staring. They had been blue, rimmed with ash-gold lashes – pretty eyes, I thought. It was a pity they were dead.
It was also a pity that I was getting so used to seeing corpses that I could look at this one without dry heaving or even freaking out very much. "This ending's not a very happy one, Deeks," I said quietly. I tried to tell myself that the dead girl was just an imaginary person – that all of this was no more than an elaborate illusion. It didn't help.
Deekin fiddled with his quill. "That…that not how it supposed to go," he murmured. He blinked his beady black eyes, dismayed. "That not how it supposed to go at all."
Because there was really nothing we could do, we moved on nervously, searching for a way out of our accidental literary foray.
Behind the altar lay a small, cramped chamber. In it was another book, which led us straight to Hell.
Granted, it was only a little slice of Hell, an island of basalt in a lake of lava. And it wasn't real – I kept having to remind myself of that. We'd stepped into a book, and none of this was real.
There was a man at the island's heart, battered and bloody. His head lifted as we approached, and his eyes burned in his pale face.
"So. More tormentors, is it?" he asked us with a twisted smile. He raised his wrists, as if they bore manacles, but there was nothing on them – at least, nothing that I could see. "Have you come to spit on the once-great Karsus, and write my name in the annals of infamy?"
I looked into his eyes. They were utterly sane, in the way that a man might be if he'd been sunk so far and so long into madness that, underneath all of that pressure, his sanity had crystallized into something as cold and sharp as a diamond. "Why would I want to do that?" I asked him warily.
He looked back at me. "I have caused the deaths of millions," he said. "Is that not enough?"
And then he lifted his hands to the rattle of chains that weren't there, and across his hands there appeared a page, the writing thickly scabbed and red as rust.
"Here it is," said the once-great Karsus. "My confession. Read it, and know the nature of my crime."
I met his eyes. And then, leaning forward, I read it, and I knew where his madness had gone. That was no parchment he held, but skin, still warm to the touch. Karsus had carved his madness into his own flesh.
When I opened my eyes again, I was looking at a ceiling that was, despite the way it groaned and heaved and rained flakes of gilt down on my face, almost blessedly normal by comparison.
Dust crawled up my nose. I sneezed. I sat up, my hair falling into my face. "That," I said. "Was really unpleasant."
Xanos stared down at me. His face was pale and troubled. "So that is why Netheril fell," he whispered.
I looked up at him. "Tou read it, too?" I asked.
Deekin swallowed. "So did Deekin," he said in a very small voice. "Though now he kinda wish he hadn't."
Xanos seemed not to hear us. "Karsus thought himself the equal of the gods," he said, his voice hollow. "And, in his presumption, he cast a spell which disrupted the Weave and brought the whole world to the brink of ruin."
I pushed myself to my feet, tried to brush myself off. "He wrote that he wanted to see the soul of the world," I argued. I didn't like the look in Xanos's eyes. He looked like he'd looked into the soul of the world, and it hadn't been a pretty sight. "He didn't know what would happen."
He was already shaking his head. "No," he said. "Ignorance is never an excuse. And, when one compounds it with hubris…" He turned away, picking an imaginary piece of lint from his sleeve. "Xanos…has sought perfection," he said at last. "In his power, in his art…he sought to eradicate every flaw, every weakness, and yet…"
Ah. I'd been wrong. Xanos hadn't looked into the soul of the world. He'd looked into his own, which I could have told him was never a good idea. "And yet?" I prompted quietly.
He laughed shortly, bitterly. "And yet, it seems that that very ambition was fatally flawed from the start," he replied. "Because Xanos did not consider the pitfalls of pride."
I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair, grimacing at the way the filthy tangles pulled at my fingers. I'd have killed for a bath, but that wasn't forthcoming. The only consolation was that everyone else was as dirty as I was. "Nobody's perfect, Xanos," I told him bluntly. "The world isn't, so we can't be. And anybody who tells you differently is trying to sell you something."
He leveled a long, bleak stare at me. "Why bother to reach, then, if perfection is forever out of my grasp?" he snapped, and spun away. "Bah! This is futile…"
Deekin was sitting with his hands clasped around his bony knees. He was chewing on the edge of his quill. "Deekin not like the way either of those stories end," he complained. "The pretty girl died in the first one, and her peasant boy never got to be a knight, like he wanted. That not right."
I glanced over at the book. The pages were covered with crabbed writing. "So rewrite it," I suggested. "You have a pen…uh, quill. You have ink. You're a bard. What's the problem?"
The kobold blinked and perked up. "You think Deekin can make it better?" he asked hopefully.
I lifted my shoulders in a careless shrug. "I think it can't hurt to try," I said.
The kobold's expression turned thoughtful. He toyed with the quill, flipping it back and forth in his nimble fingers. "Yeah," he said at last, and hopped to his feet, suddenly eager. He hurried over to the book, standing on his tiptoes to see the pages. "Deekin write it the right way, this time," he murmured, to the busy scritch-scritch of his quill. "True love to the rescue!"
When he was done, we read the book again - but this time, the blue-eyed girl was alive, and the peasant with the really bad lines had become a knight in shining armor…with really bad lines.
"She lives!" he crowed, taking the blushing girl's hands in his. "She bears a face more beautiful than I had ever imagined, and I bear the eyes to see it!"
The girl squeezed her lover's hands. Then she turned her glowing eyes to Deekin, and she knelt, with a grace so exquisite that I found myself twitching irritably. "My beloved Sir William says it was by your hand that he was knighted," the girl told the kobold, smiling radiantly. "For that, I shall always thank you. His rescue was most gallant, especially since I thought it was a kindly beggar youth I loved."
Sir William laid a hand over his heart. "A ruse, a lover's ruse, sweet Jendra, that I might win your heart's true affection and not have you simply love the Sir before my name!" he proclaimed. "But now I may be content, for I know that you love me for who I truly am!"
I exchanged glances with Xanos. He looked what I guessed he would refer to as bilious. I knew exactly how he felt. "Deeks," I said, turning to the kobold. "Did you write all of this?"
He beamed. The blue-eyed girl was stroking William's cheek and cooing. "Yeah. He tried to make it sound just like the original, only better! Isn't it great?" the kobold chirped.
A vein in the sorcerer's forehead throbbed. "Great was not the appellation Xanos had in mind," he growled.
I glanced over at William and Jendra. They were gazing soulfully into one another's eyes. "Why don't we give those two lovebirds some privacy," I suggested tactfully. Then I ruined it by adding, "Before I hurl all over the floor."
Xanos glared at them and snorted. "Agreed," he said, and swept away in a rustle of tattered robes.
Deekin followed us. "Aww, c'mon, you guys," he complained. "What's wrong with a little happily ever after?"
I opened my mouth to say, "We're not 'happily ever after' people, Deeks, and sappiness makes us cranky." Then I closed it. The little kobold had big dreams. Who was I to puncture them? "Nothing," I said out loud. "I'm sorry, Deeks. You did good back there."
Kobolds couldn't blush, but Deekin's bashful downwards glance was about as close to it as he could get to it. "Aw," he said. "Thanks, Boss."
"No charge."
Xanos was standing in the chamber behind the altar, staring down at the book that led to Karsus and the arch-mage's little slice of hell.
He didn't turn around, though he must have heard us come in. "Pride brought the flying cities down," he mused. "It destroyed an entire civilization. The arch-mage's punishment was no less than he deserved." But his tone was dubious.
I looked at the half-orc's broad back and wondered when punishment stopped and revenge began, and whether any of it was really necessary. Karsus had constructed his own personal hell, with his guilt as the bricks and his blood as the mortar. Next to that, what could anyone else do to him that was any worse than what he could do to himself? "I think Karsus has been punished long enough," I suggested. "Don't you?"
The sorcerer snorted. "The man nearly tore the fabric of the world in two," he said.
I shrugged. "Not on purpose," I argued. "Besides, he's learned his lesson." I remembered the fractured sanity in the man's eyes, and the way they'd reflected the flames of hell a million times over. My voice softened. "It's about time somebody forgave him for what he did. God knows he never will."
The sorcerer went very still. "Yes," he said, a strange note in his voice. "Forgiveness." He laughed, suddenly. "Yes," he said. "There is a certain…rightness to that."
I looked down at Deekin, who met my eyes briefly and then held up the quill and inkpot, wordless for once. "All right," I said, and took the objects from the kobold's hands. "Then write it in."
The sorcerer half-turned, startled. "Me?" he demanded incredulously.
"Sure," I said easily. "Why not? Here-" I added, and passed over the pen and ink. "You do it. Your handwriting is better than mine."
He turned back to the book, slowly. "Yes," he agreed absent-mindedly, and dipped the quill in ink. "Xanos has met tundra yeti with better penmanship than yours."
I made a face at his back. "Thanks so much," I said drily.
He finished writing, ending his sentence with a crisp jab of the quill. "No charge," he retorted. I could practically hear him smirking.
When we got to hell, there was no one there – but there was a softly spinning ball of wind, its currents as tender as a song.
I wondered if this was the ex-arch-mage's way of saying thanks, or if this whole thing had just been a test, and – without even realizing it - we'd managed to pass.
The other two were looking at me expectantly. "What?" I asked uneasily.
Xanos lifted an eyebrow. "You are the one who knows how to call the wind," he remarked testily. "So stop dawdling, woman, and call it."
"Yeah," Deekin piped up cheerfully. "Mean green man not gonna be of any help. All he can do is pass wind."
Xanos's eyes bulged. He rounded on the kobold, snarling. "Why, you little-"
I sighed and walked up to the Wise Wind, ignoring the squabbling going on behind me. "Well, come on if you're coming," I told it resignedly.
The Wise Wind came to my hand easily, carrying with it a scent like spring flowers.
And then all that remained was to find the tower.
"It will be in the exact center of the city," Xanos said. He pulled a book out of his pockets – like all magely types, he seemed to have an awful lot of pockets on him, hidden all over his robes – and began to leaf through it. "Now," he mused, walking ahead with his eyes glued to the pages. "Given the habits of Netherese construction, we can conclude that the city covers a roughly circular area, equivalent to that of the inverted peak on which it was built. If Xanos is correct, one of these books should contain some reference to the surface area of Undrentide, as it was historically. From that, we may be able to calculate its circumference, and from there we should be able to determine the precise center, and, armed with that, we can locate the Tower of the Winds-"
I stopped in the middle of the street. I leaned on Silent Partner and pointed upwards. "You mean that big-ass tower right over there?" I asked.
Xanos looked up. His eyes followed my pointing finger. He blinked, and opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. "Oh," he said.
I went on innocently. "I mean, it's a little hard to miss – it's only the tallest building in town."
The sorcerer snapped his book shut, flushing. "Shut up," he said shortly.
"That, and it's glowing bright purple, which is kind of a dead giveaway that something's going on." I looked over my shoulder at Deekin, grinning. "What do you say, Deeks? Are my calculations correct?"
Deekin giggled. "Looks good to me, Boss."
Xanos had turned a really striking shade of eggplant. "Oh, would the two of you kindly shut up?" he sighed. Stiffly, he marched ahead, gathering up the tatters of his dignity together with his robes. "Xanos does not know what sins he has committed in his life to be saddled with the likes of you-"
"I don't know," I returned, grinning unrepentantly. "But they must have been doozies."
I was still grinning when we reached the foot of the tower.
It was tall, an octagonal column of glass and metal with its spiraling stair clearly visible through the glass. It was so much like one of the skyscrapers back home that it shocked me. I had to crane my neck to take it in, and even then, I couldn't see all the way to the top.
It occurred to me that Heurodis was probably up there. My grin faded.
Deekin crouched nearby. He peered up at the glowing glass tower alertly, quill and paper in hand. "Deekin be glad he made it here," he said softly. "He never thought he'd see anything like this. Not for real."
The groans and snaps from the heaving city were tortured, now. I had to set my feet wide and hold on to Silent Partner just to stay upright. "Even with all of this?" I asked sourly.
He looked up at me. "Even with all of this," he said. "It be worth it, Boss." His eyes gleamed shrewdly. "So don't worry," he added. "Whatever happens…Deekin be okay with it."
There was a lump in my throat. It was making it hard to speak.
Xanos saved me by filling in the silence. "This is not…a disagreeable end," he said. He crossed his arms over his chest, but his golden eyes were steady on me, if sad. "Heurodis must die…for many reasons. If she should kill Xanos first …you are perhaps the only person whom he would trust to succeed where he has failed."
Great. Now I really couldn't talk. "What'd I do…to deserve you two?" I said roughly.
Xanos blinked. "Something very bad," the sorcerer returned drily. "Obviously."
I looked at him. He blurred. "You sell yourself short, big brother," I said.
He returned the look. "So do you…little sister," he rumbled softly.
The knot in my throat had settled into my chest, right beneath my heart, which was pounding like a drum.
It came as a relief to hear Deekin's businesslike cough. "So," he said. "Uh. Anything you wanna say, Boss? Y'know…for posterity."
I knew damn well that I was neither particularly smart nor particularly eloquent, even at the best of times. Those were talents that belonged to people like Xanos and Deekin.
But…I was what I was, and there was no changing it.
All I could do was be me, just as hard as I could, and hope that that would be enough.
I craned my neck, looking up at the tower's airy, floating metal staircase. It seemed to wind on forever. "Yeah," I said. "As a matter of fact, I do have something to say."
Deekin perked up, holding his pen at the ready. "What be that, Boss?" he asked eagerly.
I glared glumly at the stairs – and boy, were there a lot of them. "They could make the whole damned city fly, but could they install an elevator anywhere?" I muttered. "No. Of course not. That would have made some actual goddamned sense, and now we're going to fucking have to climb all the way up there, and do you think we'll be in any shape to do anything but wheeze on Heurodis once we find her? No? I didn't think so. I tell you, it's enough to make me want to spit. Just let me get my hands on the jackass who spec'd this building, I swear to god, and he'll never want to look at a staircase again in his life. I don't even care if he's already dead... "
And then, still grumbling steadily under my breath, I summoned the winds – the Dark Wind, and the Dead, and the Wise – and opened the way to Heurodis.
