Anthology: The Realms of the Elves

He felt queasy with helplessness, then an idea struck him. It was reckless, mad, but perhaps that was what the situation required.

"No," he said, "not yet."

"What do you mean?"

"For the time being, it's better you don't know, lest you succumb to an urge to tell Orchtrien. It's better if you don't even recall I was here." He twirled his hand through a mystic pass, touched her forehead, and caught her as she fainted. "Forget, and endure a little longer."

Like Orchtrien's personal residence, the sanctum where he and the princes practiced their sorcery was a tower with gardens growing all around. Over time, the forces leaking from behind the thick granite walls had warped the blossoms and shrubs into growths unknown to nature. As Rhespen prowled along, making his reconnaissance, a pine tree writhed, and the needles clashed softly, as if they were made of metal. Pale, fleshy flowers with lidless eyes at their centers twisted to watch as he passed.

Before the high iron door stood the semblance of a dragon shaped from the same metal. Though motionless at the moment, Rhespen was sure it would spring to life if anyone approached too close, and that when it did, it would take more than a spell of friendship and a halfway plausible excuse to make it step aside. He also suspected that a simple charm of invisibility wouldn't deceive it.

Best to avoid it entirely, then. The only way to accomplish that was to shift himself through space and into the spire blind, with no foreknowledge of exactly where he'd end up. He might appear right in front of a second sentinel. He might even materialize in a space already occupied by another solid object, and thereby injure himself.

Still, it seemed the best option, so he whispered the proper words and sketched a mystic sign. For a moment, his fingertip left a shimmering trail in the air.

The world shattered into scraps of light and dark, and the fragments leaped at him, or at least that was how it seemed. Then he stood on a stone floor in a shadowy chamber.

He turned, looking for threats, and saw nothing but walls, doorways, and the iron portal with, presumably, the dragon statue still oblivious and inert on the other side.

The absence of immediate danger was only marginally reassuring. Confident of their prowess, Orchtrien and his progeny used only warriors and walls, commonplace measures, to protect their residences and thus their persons. Indeed, one could almost surmise that the golds only bothered with bodyguards and such because they comprised part of the customary pomp and display of a royal court. But they'd taken greater care to preserve the arcane secrets of dragonkind, and Rhespen suspected the iron wyrm wasn't the only guardian-or guardian enchantment-they'd emplaced to foil intruders.

Could he cope? He supposed he'd find out soon enough.

He veiled himself in invisibility-it might help and likely wouldn't hurt-and quickened his eyes with the ability to perceive mystical forces. He'd hoped the enhancement to his vision would enable him to avoid magical snares and likewise help guide him to his goal, and so it might, but only if he peered carefully. Over the centuries, arcane power had so permeated the very substance of the keep that every surface and stone seemed to shimmer. It would be difficult to pick out particular patterns of energy from the overall glow.

He stalked onward, through a succession of conjuration chambers, where artisans or magic had inlaid complex pentacles in gold, silver, jade, onyx, agate, and lapis lazuli on the floors. Many of the forms, and the symbols inscribed along the arcs and angles, were strange to him. He could have gleaned a great deal from them, but only if he'd had the leisure to study them for months or years. As matters stood, he needed a more readily accessible source of knowledge.

It didn't appear to exist on the ground floor, but he explored the area thoroughly without discovering a ready means of ascending to the levels above. Squinting, he scrutinized the ceilings with his magesight, and finally found a hanging whirlpool of phosphorescence that indicated the presence of an illusion. Appearances to the contrary, that particular patch of ceiling didn't exist. Rather, it was an opening, the first of a series positioned one above the other. A creature as huge and agile as a wyrm could easily employ them to scramble up and down.

Rhespen used a spell of levitation to accomplish the same thing. He explored the second story, where kilns, alembics, shelves of jars and bottles, and mazes of glass tubing attested to studies in alchemy, then started floating up to the third. He was partway there when he heard a soft dragging overhead. From long experience, he recognized the whisper of a dragon's tail sweeping across a floor.

A heartbeat later, the darkness above Rhespen changed. It had shape and solidity, and it plunged at him. The gold couldn't spread its wings and fly through what were, for a creature of its immensity, relatively narrow openings, but it was too impatient to climb or float down. So, confident that it could weather the shock of impact, it had simply jumped.

That meant Rhespen had only an instant left to haul himself out of the way. No handhold was in reach, and the charm of levitation could only carry him straight up or down. He bade it jerk him upward fast as it could, until he could plant his hands on the alchemical level's ceiling and pull himself along it like a fly crawling upside down.

As soon as he cleared the opening, the dragon plummeted by, so close he could have reached out and touched it. He only saw it for an instant before it plunged on out of sight, but even so, he recognized Prince Bexendral.

The important question, of course, was whether Bexendral had noticed him. It was entirely possible, his invisibility notwithstanding. A dragon's nose was sharp enough to catch his scent, and its ears, to register the pounding of his heart. He waited motionless, scarcely daring to breathe, until he heard the iron door groan open and clang shut. Evidently the prince hadn't detected him. Perhaps Bexendral had been preoccupied, or maybe he'd simply hurtled by too quickly.

Rhespen struggled to calm his jangled nerves, then ventured onward until, nearly to the top of the keep, he found the library.

One great chamber occupied the entire floor. Some of the books and scrolls were of conventional size. Any elf or human scholar could have managed them conveniently, and Rhespen inferred that drakes capable of changing shape must have written them. Most of the volumes, however, were huge, and composed of substances more durable than parchment, ink, and leather. One wyrm had etched its lore on copper plates stitched together with a silver chain. Another had scratched glyphs onto octagons of teak, while a third had employed oblong sandstone tablets resembling the lids of sarcophagi. When Rhespen examined the collection with his magesight, it shined as though aflame.

He took an eager stride forward, and only then noticed the shifting stripes of crimson light masked by the general blaze, at the same moment that a gate between worlds yawned open. He couldn't see it, but he felt it as a gnawing, nauseating wound in the fabric of reality. Then something surged through.

For an instant, he mistook it for a dragon, simply by virtue of its size, for it was big enough that no smaller chamber could easily have contained it. But its shape was altogether different, with nothing of a drake's grace or beauty. It was a towering, bipedal mound of a thing, with a lashing prehensile tail terminating in a coal-black stinger, a dozen mismatched, many-jointed arms sporting one or more talons, and a head that was virtually all mouth lined with row upon row of tusks. Despite Rhespen's invisibility, it oriented on him immediately.

He'd never encountered such a horror before, but from his studies recognized it as a ghargatula, which was to say, a sort of devil. Evidence that Orchtrien, for all his pretensions to being nobler than the chromatic wyrms, wasn't above trafficking with infernal powers.