We stepped down the old tunnel of Ulcaster, a dingy and ruined place, Imoen leading the way through her magic. She stopped halfway down dusty, ragged stairs, muttering to herself. "Threads," I heard her saying, "I c'n sense the magic thisaways—also some hanging traps, nothing much but just to test students—" She pressed her right hand to the wall and said some arcane words; a stone set there had the signs in the black gaps around it that meant some sort of magical trap to be disarmed. The stone glowed pink for a second, and then she moved on.
The air was stale and damp, the ground empty of visible footprints or human signs. None had come here for a long time, I supposed. The shadows moved in the corners of our eyes. I thought that I saw a—a ghost, perhaps, a swirl of grey mage robes rising too high above the ground for a walking human, floating across a hole in the floor; but one blink and it was gone.
Shelves bearing broken glass lined the walls as we stepped further down; potions unstopped, spilled and long spoiled. What had once been books were scattered on the floor. I picked up a dark red cover that lay face-down in front of my feet, and below it only scraps of yellowed paper fluttered to the ground.
"Look," Imoen said, pointing to a door that lay open, hinges rusted red. In the room beyond were dusty sinks hollowed out next to tables, more shelves piled with broken bottles, fragments of glass on the ground, small metal retorts fallen to their sides. "Alchemy lab," she said, and we heard something gurgling in one of those old sinks.
It was a jelly creature. We'd fought some in Durlag's tower, killed them by flames. This was no different; Imoen aimed an arrow, and I helped Shar-Teel slice down at it. It did not seem the sort of monster that could have destroyed an entire school.
Viconia raised her head from the hood of her cloak, sniffing the air. "I promise worse than this, rivvin. Spiders."
We passed into a hall that must have once been brightly painted, fragments of red and blue peeling from the walls. A dais stood at one end, old chairs overturned upon it. Stars had risen through a red mist in the old designs, shot through with portions of magical runes. It was stained by dark stripes down upon the walls, by a greyness that teemed and seethed above us...
The spiders came down from the ceiling. The Burning Earth shining on them turned them black and green-spotted; fangs and sharp legs and poisons. We took up positions, knowing how to fight these: Shar-Teel ahead, Ajantis at her right and me at her left, Faldorn and Imoen and Viconia making castings behind, standing at the doorframe and away from the spiders' territory.
"Khaless nau!" Viconia called, a negation; "For Shar!" A long black ribbon grew between her hands; she widened her arms as if to stretch it out, and flung it as a cloud of darkness that swept across the bodies of the spiders. I saw carapaces cracking, the flow of creatures briefly halted in their way.
"I stand in Shar's favour..." Viconia huskily whispered, and drew the crossbow from the tower. She hit the crowd of spiders—one could hardly have failed to, Imoen likewise made each arrow she shot reach a target—and at least five fell by her hand.
Faldorn scattered seeds in the air, and then stamped a foot; her vines grew from her chanting, straining to grasp legs and shells, holding spiders in place for their deaths. I saw Varscona in Ajantis' right hand send cold into the spiders' bodies, splinter them by ice; perhaps not so differently to the Burning Earth's fire. He cried out when a spider hit him, spinning down from the ceiling by its web; but it seemed it did not cut through his armour. His left arm was stiff, but he stopped at least one spider's fangs by that buckler; at the end of the battle he was still standing, Varscona covered by the icy remains of creatures. He did not immediately move to clean the blade.
"This was pointless," Viconia sneered, "this room leads nowhere." Shar-Teel stepped forward, through the spiders' bodies; near the dais there was some piled-up rubble. Not rubble: mage robes, dusty and old. She shook them out for gold, though they did not seem to have belonged to wealthy mages, silver and coppers falling out.
"Students," Imoen said, staring around the room; she was more curious than frightened, I thought. "Poor sods. C'mon, let's keep moving."
The school was a labyrinth to us, but I could see that once it might have been considered well-organised. The corners of the walls were relatively sharp even now, the passages wide and easy to go through, the rooms all carefully rectangular. We found old corpses: three bodies, also in the remains of old robes, these ones with still fragments of flesh over their bones, like old mummies in the dryness down here. Their tight-stretched skin grinned horribly over their skulls, and I wanted to move quickly past them.
Imoen frowned, looking carefully down and even nudging the remains with her boots. "Sorry," she said, "but I'd really like to find what did it to you. Y' don't have many marks... Tome of knowledge. Hope," she said to herself. "If'n they keep the book that explains why it happened."
Viconia smiled in the darkness, her teeth bright and white. "Is it not obvious what, wael?"
Imoen folded her arms, offended. "Go ahead, Vic. Try to be helpful."
"Did that first man perish of Icharyd the wearer of flesh?" Viconia said, very slowly; Imoen and I looked at each other.
"—So if he died of the other monsters in here," Imoen said, "it's something that hurts you like an energy-drain... Necromancy's nasty," she said, "but it's not the worst fear of a mage, if that ghost was right." She frowned. "Have to find it." She reached toward an old set of shelves; there were the remains of books' covers, but the paper within was ruined. "Y' know one thing? These books here weren't magical in themselves," she said. "Really good wizards stick preservation spells on books, and books with spells in 'em usually last for ages anyway because of the magic. Back at Candlekeep all the books had the preservation spells, but they still clouted you and made you sweep out stables if'n you accidentally spilled cherry juice on them or something." She sighed, remembering. "Off we go."
Shar-Teel led us along the left wall of the complex; the standard case when you didn't want to get lost. Unless it was one of those magical mazes, where walls and passageways shifted behind you as you walked, and the only reliable solution was to use a ball of yarn and tie it to the entrance to follow back to the exit. But this magic school had been dead for centuries, and there were no signs that the stones on the floor moved and changed.
More mage robes and remains lay in our path. They seemed in no particular pattern, dead in groups of one or two or three. Some had the appearance of bodies already eaten by spiders or jellies that lurked here, leaving only the cloth and perhaps a touch of dried bones, and some did not. If I'd seen this before any adventures, it would have kept me away for good... But I could look at dead people now. Perhaps I should have felt worse about it, but I didn't know them and Imoen wanted this, and at least I could feel better for feeling that I should have felt worse... A touch too complicated. We walked past the dust of long-ago mages.
Imoen rubbed dust from another set of shelves with her forefinger, stained by ruined potions. "Spells here once," she said, "but I'd have to cast to know exactly what and I don't want to use up everything in my head. Think it'd be protections, for spell ingredients...stopped working when people died." By the shelves stood what looked like a wide fireplace; a nest of small spiders lived in the remains of a set of leather bellows. Its interior was coal-black with dust, unused for all this time. I bothered to look carefully into it in case of secrets hidden; and got only dust and spiderwebs in my hair.
"Poor things," Aquerna said from Imoen's back, her mouth stained blue with the berries that Faldorn gave to her. "A good cause to discover the terrible fate of these young ones. One would think that the rooms of the higher mages must be near, if this room is so well-appointed and protected."
"Nice one," Imoen said, flicking a candied nut from one of her pouches backwards to the squirrel. "Maybe we're close. But I'm a mage..."
The bodies we had come across were in small groups. We'd protect Imoen. Shar-Teel pointed grimly along the left wall again, and we passed through the stale air and dusted floors.
Then we came to a dead end. A blank wall. But, I thought, looking at it, and Imoen gazed at it too; it was a wall not in the direction of the earth surrounding, but an interior wall; and from what we have walked past there may be more space than that; and somehow it reminds me of...
Down in the Cloakwood, Davaeorn had placed guards about a disguised wall, where the stones were of slightly different composition and one brick was loosely mortared to serve as a trigger within. A common technique for designing secret passages. (This was nothing like the Cloakwood; no torture chamber, nobody alive to start with.) Imoen stepped closer to this stone wall, examining it with care. Then below the dirt, I saw the familiar silvery gleam of a pipe that Imoen's hands were moving closer towards...
"Down! Run!" I called.
The fireball swept through the air. Imoen was well down and out of its path, having flung herself in a long leap despite her robes. It burned long and hot enough to scorch our skin even at a distance.
"...Well," Imoen said shakily, beckoning Faldorn to cast protections on her, "I guess we've found something. Magic that still goes. Someone must've really wanted to keep that part of it safe."
We worked together on the wall, slowly uncovering the fire traps and redirecting them to burn themselves, or to break into and neutralise their ingredients with water and a liquid Imoen summoned from a cantrip. Then Imoen sketched something on the door with a finger dipped in charcoal, and pressed her hand over it, summoning a pink-coloured magelight across her fingers. "I'm a journeywoman mage," she whispered. "I could've been a student like 'em..."
The door opened for her. There was a long black table coated only lightly by dust. At its head sat a tall sharp-faced figure in mage's robes, slumped forward upon it; such a realistic pose that for the first moment I stared at him thinking that he somehow lived. There were other shapes about the table, dark-robed, in poses seated and fallen to the ground both. This wide sanctuary was far better preserved than the others in the way of dust and creatures; but the things in it that had been human were not. It was a horror to notice that the sharpness of the mage's face was no face but a white skull grinning above black flesh. The table was black because it had been burned. The other corpses seemed to have also died of flame. By the pattern of scorchmarks the fire had spread centred upon the leading figure, and then to the outer reaches of the room. What had likely once been bookcases had been blown to pieces...but at least here there were books.
Seventeen people, I counted, in burned robes on the ground and charred flesh still lying on their bones. We had opened the door and the decay would spread with whatever underground air could flow in here. Imoen looked as shocked as I felt. We'd seen dead people before...
"Books," she said with determination, and plucked one relatively intact from the debris. The books were scattered upon the blackened floor, and the shelves were badly damaged. That meant that the books had somehow survived the fireball when the people did not: enchantment, on the truly valued tomes.
"Phaelgrim's Necromantic Theory. No," Imoen said, "Ulcaster of the mage school ought to know a transmuter wouldn't help him if it needed necromancy." She laid that book aside. "Augher's Travels in the South." She flicked through it. "'S about journeying, practical magic stuff. We can't carry all these..." She looked stricken; I could understand it though she was the one from Candlekeep. A good book is a great treasure. I helped her, handing her the ones with mage runes only she could read.
"Here's a History of Prospero the Mage-Duke," I said—now that was interesting, by Kallahan, and I knew his History of the Smiling Queen Tirythtrene and his theories on her disappearance is a rare collector's item. But there wasn't really time; it wasn't the right place. "This one's about alchemical properties of bezoars. And this one here's on rare poisons."
"I will assist you," Ajantis said. He's not as fast a reader as Imoen, but he's educated, of course. "This tome appears to be about divinations that predict weather. This upon sorcery—by far the most troublesome and least respectable of the magical arts." His squirrel chirped something. "Well, Aquerna, it is undeniably uncontrolled and the source of some great evil in the lands, but I do not blame those who do their best to make responsible use of accidents of heritage. This one upon...different acids and their effects, so I do not see how it would be of use to you, my lady Imoen. This one must be in arcane script, for I cannot read it. A theological treatise. This one...the introduction makes mention of toadstools, so it is a herbalist's tome..."
We skimmed through the tomes; they must have been Ulcaster's treasures, those kept most securely. There was no recognisable order to their arrangement, after they had been thrown from their shelves and confused. A slim volume with Larloch's name on the cover. Two of the Mordenkainen series. Elminster's Ackologies. Laws governing mages from Calimshan to Waterdeep and the writer's criticism thereof, outdated. Astronomical textbook on the motions of Mystra's Spray in the sky. A treatise on fire spells, that one very ironically scorched so little of it could be read. Enchantments and the Human Psyche, lightly smoked at the corners. Thesis on Nineteen New Uses for Lemon Pepper in Alchemy, burned from page forty-nine onward. Imoen studied the ones in arcane script, her hair tucked into the neckline of her robes and absently tugging on her earlobe with her left hand, her pink magelight bobbing up and down in the centre of the room.
"There's so much," she said. Shar-Teel grunted impatiently. "Well, you try reading through a small library in a couple hours. A spell that... Maybe it's in one of the evocation textbooks if it killed these like that."
Ajantis reached for a book badly damaged that he had placed at the bottom of his piles, expecting that it would contain nothing useful. The contents were handwritten, and had been burned almost as badly as the treatise on fire spells. "Imoen," he said, "look at this one."
"Another year; another lot of cabbage-heads in which to pour the fertiliser of instruction. I do not mean to be so horticultural in my metaphors, and in truth I have hopes that some will turn out more extraordinary than I could expect. Young Pfernia in her interview quite challenged me upon the transference equation for unconventional transmutations; the Formoran boy strikes me as rather keen and clever. And I have yet to conclude my talks with each of our new pupils..." A long, burned-out section. Imoen paged through it. "Notes on personal experiment: NEVER use hedgehog quills in a summoning incantation!" she read. "If I ever manage to pu..." More scorchings. "This is Ulcaster!" she exclaimed. "Got to be. That's part of the name, signing a spell—"
The ghost, tall and thin. His own notes in this room. I had an awful suspicion, looking once more at that ghoulish figure at the head of the table I'd been trying to ignore, and Imoen shivered.Her fingers flew more swiftly through the work. Some of the tattered fragments that remained were perfectly mundane: "...Strawberry cobbler at lunch dry. Robes have persistent acridine stain, consult laundry." They'd been alive and normal, once, until...
"...Malady of second-year Gis..." Imoen continued to read from the fragments that remained, turning over the pages in order. "Then there's...Heard third-year elementary conjuration, Lady Stele's teaching very... Then, My aractorium growing by eight eggs hatched, components for... This isn't useful! First-year Amad brought to infirmary by s..." She went further into the burned remains. "Again today, another, surely no... In the alchemy corridor post-curf... I fear... Life continues; third-year alchemy curriculum review." Then Imoen continued, flicking desperately through the last pages. These were badly burned, only a few fragments of writing readable upon them. "Another...everything a mage fears...I cannot...now Poull...taken to infirmary...Again, they don't leave the halls...too l...last chance; preservation...no knowledge...to my study and sanctum as the last we can...nothing...better that...not that...desperate t..." The only pages beyond that were blank. Imoen stared at me, her eyes glittering.
"It's wrong," she said; but she slowly stood and walked to the dead man at the head of the table. Grimacing, she reached for his right hand, which was curled into a claw at the corpse's side. She brought it up to rest on the table, bending the elbow bones with a creaking sound. Though the arm itself was burned black, I could see that the skin of the hand was not, leathery and preserved by the closed space of this room. Imoen, gagging, pressed back the clawed fingers with great difficulty; and she pointed to a dark yellow residue on the palm of the hand.
"He cast the fire," she said, her voice shaking; "he cast that last spell when they were all in here and he was desperate enough to want to die rather than it—"
Shar-Teel's eyes searched the room. But there was nothing in here, surely, though behind us the wall still hung open.
"I think the references to the infirmary mean it didn't kill people outright," Imoen said, glancing around herself like a hunted animal. "Gods, what's a mage's worst fear? No magic? But they'd expel you, not drag you to the hospice, and you'd be able to tell them exactly what took it from you. Maybe it's coming here again, maybe it's going to find me here—" She drew ingredients into her hands, standing wildly with spells poised. My own hands waited on the hilts of my weapons.
Viconia sat comfortably in the corner of the room, reading the theological treatise that Ajantis had set aside, tilting the book to catch Imoen's magelight. The History of the Sisters of Light and Darkness, I read from the spine, in black lettering over a grey calfhide. Selune and Shar, then, moon and night; the eternal rivals. "Never follow hope," she said to Imoen, her voice smooth; "believe no promises. The night will take you sooner or later."
"I dreamed," Imoen said, ignoring Viconia, "that I couldn't read magic. You can't read or follow chains of thinking in dreams, that's normal and then you start dreaming of blo—you start dreaming of other things or you wake up. If you lost it—if you couldn't think any more, if you didn't have any words inside you, it could turn you into less than a slug, something that's got a body but not a mind any more—"
Viconia stood, and it seemed small threads of pure black crackled along her skin. Her eyes were very bright in the shadows of the room. "Forgetfulness," she said. "The Lady of Loss will take those with nothing else left."
Thin air that takes.
Imoen's eyes widened. "Oh, hells," she said. "You know it's here. It's come for me. Please," she said, "please help me."
Then she screamed. I'd sword drawn, Shar-Teel too, but there was nothing—nothing around her head. Imoen knelt on the ground, panting, and her face was slack and her mouth hung open. She did nothing.
"Imoen?" I shook her shoulder. She only stared. A soft, incoherent noise came from her mouth. "Imoen!" Invisible—I swept the sword through the air around her—nothing caught on it—
The squirrel was running away, far out of the room. Shar-Teel was ready but had nothing to hit; and Imoen—
She was moving her hands. She's casting—she has to be still in there— A jet of flame came from her; I moved out of the way and brought down the blade where she'd aimed, she had to know what was doing this to her, but there was still only blank air— The fire had sprung to Imoen's eyes. They glowed the same fierce yellow as her spell. "Imoen!"
There was no reply. She sat there, staring; silently accusing Viconia—
But Shar-Teel was there. "Sharran, talk!" she ordered; Viconia spoke—
"Athiyk'caluss—how should I know the term in your common surfacer speech?" she cried, fiercely—but her feelings didn't matter at all when Imoen was in danger— "A thing that eats beyond the flesh of a person. The Mistress of the Night would that all use the Shadow Weave, by this book; to lose oneself is a punishment—"
"Against spirits that take," croaked Imoen's voice; but her eyes were yellow and unfocused, her face in loose despair. "The worst fear of a mage is to have no words—"
"Cast and turn it!" Shar-Teel spat. Imoen enclosed her arms around her body, and spoke again. "But the essence needs no words."
Her body itself shifted; a shade of dark red swept along her neck, as if she was trying to transmute her own shape in magic. "Drowned. Donwannabe—"
Viconia raised her holy symbol. "Shar," she said, coldly and calmly, "I ask only for the guidance of your will." But nothing happened.
"Imoen," I said—the skin of her throat was raw by the polymorphing she or her body was trying, swept by the red material and inflamed at the edge of its spreading, and I touched it—"you might be the only one who can—" I tried to heal her, and that sorcery escaped from my right hand. She looked at me, then, the yellow in her eyes the colour of a dying sun rather than honest fire, sickening and inhuman.
"Trying," she whispered, the voice from her throat strange and hoarse and strangled, "ways against spirits..." she added, as if quoting another. She raised her hands, and I saw her make signals we knew from each other: Above my head. Four inches. "Saw the mirror," she said in words, "—make it not orthogonal to it—I...don't know quite why I'm holding it—"
That made sense. Saw the mirror. Sheath blade. Step back three. Draw bow. The red arrow was like the hands that froze people, it had to hurt them—four inches up—
Ajantis rushed forward to stop me, but the arrow flew in the direction of Imoen's head; four inches above her. He fell on me, his armour pinning me to the ground and blocking sight. All that I could see in that short moment was a grey thing, shaped like an unformed baby, wrinkled skin with one single gnarled eye and a mouth with no teeth, three mouths that sucked in anything near, curled into the air and then fallen to the ground at the arrow's piercing—
Imoen rolled aside, stood up, and called fire upon it with a ringing voice until it was dead.
—
"Here's yer stupid books." The Sisters of Light and Darkness she pitched through the ghost's transparent head; its own diary through its chest. Both very good shots. "Found it. Got rid of it. Suicidal riffraff."
"...then knowledge preserved..." The ghost nodded its translucent head in the direction of Imoen's backpack, which carried six books that it hadn't before. Mine had five. "...done what I asked...would never have asked...if none of you could have...but two at least with potential..."
"You risked the very soul of Lady Imoen," Ajantis said, his sword drawn in his right hand; "and you refused to tell her that you died by a honourless act that murdered others. Justice would demand more than that from you, undead thing."
"...not only her soul..." the ghost whispered. "...I feared that...I killed own students against it...thought I saved..."
"You deserve to be smote down," Ajantis said, unwavering, but the ghost did nothing.
"Fear not, lad...at the next dawn I teach below other skies..." I thought that I could see translucent tears upon its cheeks. He was an old, dead man. Once more he looked toward Imoen.
"...come, student...teach all I can for bargain. You will all be safe here, now..."
"All right," Imoen said, a grim half-smile on her face. She raised two of her fingers in the Baldurian sign for luck. "Yeah. Teach me everything you've got, beardy."
—