Margaret Weis - Fire Sea

“Can you open the damn door?” Haplo repeated, teeth and hands clenched, keeping a tight grip on himself.

Alfred nodded, in an abstract manner.

“Then do it,” Haplo spoke quietly to keep from shouting.

Alfred turned to face him, the Sartan’s expression unhappy. “I’m not sure I should.”

“You’re not sure you should?” Haplo stared at him, disbelieving. “Why? Is there something so formidable written on that door? More runes of warding?”

“No,” admitted Alfred, swallowing nervously. “Runes of ... sanctity. This place is sacred, holy. Can’t you feel it?”

“No!” Haplo lied, fuming. “All I can feel is Kleitus, breathing down my neck! Open the damn door!”

“Holy . . . sanctified. You’re right,” Jonathan whispered in awe. He had regained some color in his face, looked about in reluctant astonishment. “I wonder what this place was? Why no one ever knew it was down here?”

“The sigla are ancient, dating back almost to the Sundering. The runes of warding would have kept everyone away and, over the centuries, I imagine people forgot it was here.”

Those runes of warding had been put up to stop whatever was beyond that door from going farther. Haplo shoved the unwelcome thought out of his mind.

The dog barked again. Turning tail, it dashed back to its master and stood at his feet, body tense, panting.

“Kleitus is coming. Open the door,” Haplo said again. “Or stand here and die.”

Alfred glanced fearfully behind, looked fearfully ahead. Sighing, he ran his hands over the wall, tracing rune patterns, chanting them beneath his breath. The stone began to dissolve beneath his fingers and, faster than the eye could capture, an opening in the wall appeared, outlined by the blue guide-runes.

“Get back!” Haplo ordered. He flattened himself against the wall, peered into the darkness beyond, prepared to meet slavering jaws, slashing fangs, or worse.

Nothing, except more dust. The dog sniffed, sneezed.

Haplo straightened, lunged through the door and into the darkness. He almost hoped something would leap out at him, something solid and real that he could see and fight.

His foot encountered an obstacle on the floor. He shoved against it gently. It gave way with a clatter.

“I need light!” Haplo snapped, looking back at Alfred and Jonathan, who stood huddled in the doorway.

Alfred hastened forward, stooping his tall body to duck beneath the arch. His hands fluttered, he recited the runes in a singsong tone that set Haplo’s teeth on edge. Light, soft and white, began to beam out of a sigla-etched globe that hung suspended from the center of a high, domed ceiling.

Beneath the globe stood an oblong table carved of pure, white wood—a table that had not come from this world. Seven sealed doorways in the walls undoubtedly led to seven other tunnels, similar to the one down which they’d passed, all of them leading to the same place—this room. And all of them, undoubtedly, marked with the deadly runes of warding.

Chairs that must have once stood around the table lay scattered over the floor, upended, overturned. And amid the wreckage...

“Merciful Sartan!” Alfred gasped, clasping his hands together.

Haplo looked down. The object his foot had disturbed was a skull.

The skull lay where he had nudged it, sending it rolling onto a pile of dry bones. More bones, and more skulls—almost too numerous to count—filled the chamber. The floor was carpeted with bones. Well preserved in the sealed atmosphere, undisturbed through the centuries, the dead lay where they had fallen, limbs twisted grotesquely.

“How did they die? What killed them?” Alfred glanced this way and that, expecting to see the killer emerge at any moment.

“You can relax,” said Haplo. “Nothing killed them. They killed each other. And some of them weren’t even armed. Look at these two, for example.”

A bony hand held the hilt of a sword, its bright metal had not rusted in the dry, hot atmosphere. The notched blade lay beside a head that had been severed from its shoulders.

“One weapon, two bodies.”

“But then, who killed the killer?” Alfred asked.

“Good question,” Haplo admitted.

He knelt down to examine one of the bodies more closely. The skeletal hands were wrapped around the hilt of a dagger. The dagger’s blade was lodged firmly in the skeleton’s own rib cage.

“It seems the killer killed himself,” said Haplo.

Alfred drew back in horror. Haplo looked quickly about, saw evidence that more than one had fallen by his or her own hand.

“Mass murder.” He stood up. “Mass suicide.”

Alfred stared, aghast. “That’s impossible! We Sartan revere life! We would never—”

“Just as you never practiced necromancy?” Haplo interrupted curtly.

Alfred closed his eyes, his shoulders sagged, he buried his face in his hands. Jonathan stepped gingerly inside, stared dazedly around the room. Prince Edmund’s cadaver stood stolidly against one wall, evincing no interest. These were not his people. The lazar glided among the skeletal remains, its dead-living eyes quick and darting.

Haplo kept one of his own eyes on Jera. He walked over to Alfred, slumped dispiritedly against the wall.

“Get a grip on yourself, Sartan. Can you shut that door?”

Alfred lifted an anguished face. “What?”

“Shut the door! Can you shut the door?”

“It won’t stop Kleitus. He came through the warding runes.”

“It’ll slow him down. What the hell’s the matter?”

“Are you sure you want me to? Do we want to be ... locked in here?”

Haplo gestured impatiently at the six other doors in the chamber.

“Oh, yes, well, I see,” Alfred mumbled. “I suppose it will be all right...”

“Suppose all you want. Just shut the damn door!” Haplo turned, surveying the exits. “Now, there must be some way to figure out where these lead. They must be marked—”

A grating sound interrupted him; the door starting to slide shut.

Why, thank you, Haplo was about to comment sarcastically, when he caught a glimpse of Alfred’s face.

“I didn’t do it!” the Sartan protested, staring wide-eyed at the stone door that was grinding its way inexorably across the opening.

Suddenly, irrationally, Haplo didn’t want to be trapped in this place. He leapt forward, interposed his body between the door and the wall.

The massive stone door bore down on him.

He pushed against it with all his might. Alfred grabbed wildly at the door with his hands, fingers scrabbling at the stone.

“Use magic!” Haplo commanded.

Desperately, Alfred shouted a rune. The door continued to shut. The dog barked at it frantically. Haplo made an attempt to stop it using his own magic, hands trying to trace runes on the door that near to squeezing the life from him.

“It won’t work!” Alfred cried, ending his attempt to stop the door. “Nothing will work. The magic’s too powerful!”

Haplo was forced to agree. Near being crushed between the door and the wall, he lunged sideways, pulled himself free. The door shut with a dull boom that sent dust into the air, rattled the bones of the skeletons.

So the door shut. It’s what I wanted. Why did I panic like that? Haplo demanded of himself angrily. It’s this place, a feeling about this place. What drove these people to kill each other? To kill themselves? And why those warding runes, preventing anyone from coming, anyone from leaving?...

A soft blue-white light began to illuminate the chamber. Haplo looked up swiftly, saw runes appear, running in a circle around the upper portion of the chamber walls.