Umber

Umber

Old Worlds and New

January 5th, 2011

“Then this Dragon and Avangion aren’t fictions,” Hanen sighed as he sipped at a sweet drink he and Klavicus called “port.” As before the beverage quickly made Mahlanda light-headed, but though he out drank her perhaps three glasses to one he merely seemed somewhat more relaxed than before.What are they, then?”

Klavicus waved a hand at her. “Explain. I have something to attend to for a moment.” Then he rose and moved to the altars, displaying something she could not see or hear.

The bard received her recitation calmly enough; Mahlanda was astonished at the stabilizing influence Klavicus had on him. The very aspects of the Preserver’s personality – his arrogance, his coldness, his peremptory manner – that kept her feeling perpetually off-balance seemed a balm to Hanen’s fevered brain.

When he first saw the Avangion, and the Avangion spoke of the Dragon, the viewing altars abruptly fell dark and silent as he scrabbled backward away from them like some oversized, demented cockroach. Days passed in which he alternated between mania and catatonia, babbling in languages Mahlanda did not understand or perhaps in no language at all. Afraid to leave him alone lest he damage Klavicus’ library, she spent long, weary hours keeping him confined to the space in which the daimon found him or, when the manic episodes subsided, trying to coax him to take a little food.

Tonight he ate like the starving man he was, the meal’s alien ingredients familiar to him and apparently cementing Klavicus’ identity in his mind. The daimon’s liberality with the wine, she supposed, wasn’t hurting matters any. He looked bemused at her description of defilers and preservers, and sometimes she thought she caught a flicker of hysteria in his eyes, but either self-discipline or the port kept it dampened.

She was just cataloging the extent of the desert wastes when Klavicus returned. “I need you to go to Urik,” he said, holding out a folded piece of paper. “Contact the Jura Dai and tell them to send a scout to this location immediately. If the dwarf in residence there appears to be having an impromptu party within the next few days, the scout should offer his assistance.”

Mahlanda rose immediately, accepted the paper and bowed her head. “Of course, Preserver.”

* * *

Hanen took a smug, unapologetic pleasure at the distress on Mahlanda’s face when Klavicus packed her off; it was nice to see someone else unbalanced for a change. He felt pleasantly full from familiar food, pleasantly relaxed from familiar wine, and if he didn’t think about it too hard he could almost imagine himself living in a familiar time, a familiar world. “Crushed by the deprivation of your company?” he asked.

Klavicus grunted. “The Urikite authorities have never been friendly to the organization of which she is a part, and after the little interrupted interlude you spied on persecution has reached a quietly fevered pitch. Never do that again, by the way.”

“Klavicus Starton the Third: wizard, scholar, staunch defender of the right to be left alone, dispatching minions like a commander, or a liege lord.” The world spun with pleasant gentleness around the bard and made him reckless. “Daimon, Preserver, Great One – what –?”

The daimon picked up an empty wine bottle and looked for a moment as if he meant to hit Hanen over the head with it. “I’d drop that line of inquiry if I were you.”

Hanen was drunk, but not suicidal. “All right then. Who’s the dwarf?”

“His name is Wrong.” Klavicus returned to the air altar, and with only a little more concentration on putting one foot correctly in front of the other than usual Hanen joined him.

“Ah, the Last Paladins,” he said as seven familiar young forms shimmered like smoke and then solidified in the view.

“The First, technically,” the Preserver corrected him, “of this age.”

Of this age. Hanen didn’t want to think very hard about that. “And the dwarf?”

“An engineer.”

“Engineer?” The bard laughed and then pressed his fingertips against a chair to steady himself. Had enough wine, maybe. “When did the gnomes decide to share the trade?”

“There are no gnomes.”

Hanen looked for signs that the old balor was joking. Failing to find them, he gripped the chair back more tightly, a little of the wine-fortified sanguinity bleeding away. He watched as the youths unpacked a number of strange items that the dwarf received with obvious delight. He held up something that looked like a cross between an animal skin and an insect carapace and stretched it between his hands. “Perfect, just perfect!” he exclaimed. “I couldn’t ask for a better wing skin.”

He carried the materials with something close to reverence to a back chamber that opened out into a space wider than Klavicus’ capacious residence. Cabinets lined the walls and wheeled work tables cluttered with strange tools were scattered throughout the area but a large concentration of them were clustered around an object bearing some resemblance to the skeleton of a massive bird. “Wing skin?” Hanen said. “What is he doing?”

“Building a flying machine.”

“A flying –?” Again the alcohol let him push the thought away, but he was beginning to wonder if he would ever be able to face this world sober.

The young people were paying scant attention to the machine and instead were staring with wonder at the empty air. “How can it be so cool in here?” Kerac wondered, tracing a path to the back of the cavern where an unnaturally circular darkness yawned in the floor. Air from the shaft blew past Kerac strongly enough to disturb his hair. Wrong came and stood beside him. “What’s down there?”

The dwarf’s shoulders sagged and his gaze grew mournful. “I don’t know. I’ve never found a rope to go deep enough. Isn’t it strange, that we have become the Eloi,” he murmured.

“The what?” Hanen said.

Klavicus leaned forward intently, pulling the dwarf’s face into closer relief. “I think,” he murmured, “that you and I need to have a chat, little man.”

“A piece of history that still eludes you?” The bard failed to keep a certain bitterness out of his voice.

“Fiction. A novel –” Hanen saw the balor’s recognition of his ignorance of the word, “a story, of two post-human races. The Morlocks live in subterranean caverns, tending machinery and seeing to the physical well-being of the aboveground Eloi. The childlike Eloi appear to have a carefree, idyllic existence – save for its ending, on the Morlock dinner table.”

Hanen’s lip curled in disgust. “That’s horrible. Why would anyone tell such a tale?”

“Dystopia was quite the fashion during certain ages of mankind.” He grew distracted again. “I knew of the dwarf, of course, but I didn’t realize he was old enough to have read Wells.”

“How old is that?” the bard asked wearily. The comfort of good food, good wine and familiar company was fading, black depression creeping like mist to take its place.

Klavicus told him.

“I think – ” Hanen suddenly felt the walls, or the weight of lost millennia, closing in on him, “I need to – how in the Nine Hells does one go outside here?”

* * *

Klavicus kept half an eye on Hanen, making certain he didn’t wander away, as he cleared the table and then returned to his reading. The bard kicked at the sand, found stones to throw, intermittently threw himself on the ground howling with a high-pitched ferocity that would have done coyotes proud if any still lived to hear. With fatigue and returning sobriety he eventually settled down, and he had been staring at the night sky for several hours before Klavicus joined him. He stared for nearly an hour longer before he spoke. “How did it happen? The moon?”

Klavicus sighed. He knew this conversation was inevitable – the moon had been a single whole when Hanen was last alive – but he still didn’t relish it. “Tenser broke it, when he fell.”

The bard turned toward him now, eyes as wide and round as the moon before its breaking. “Fell? Tenser is gone?”

The daimon nodded reluctantly. “Fighting the Dragon at its creation.”

“He lost?” Klavicus nodded again. “What about the rest of the Circle?”

“Otiluke was never accounted for after the battle, but neither has he been seen since.” He looked out across the desert. “I’d be very surprised if Rary wasn’t out there – somewhere – but I have had no word of him, only – signs.”

“Signs?”

“When the desiccating effect of defiler magic became known, the Bright Desert suddenly expanded very, very rapidly.”

Hanen pursed his lips. “Rary anointing himself best of breed.”

“That was the common belief, but I’ve always wondered.” Klavicus was silent for a time. “If I wanted a hidden enclave, a small bastion of normality, I might do something not dissimilar.”

“I think you’re projecting more benign motives on Rary than he deserves.” The bard fingered a brilliant white flower that had burst into bloom shortly after Klavicus emerged. “Based on what you yourself have done.”

* * *

Hanen expected any number of responses for painting Klavicus in a more benign light than Rary: petulance, irritation, outright annoyance. Instead, the old balor’s face was what on anyone else he would have called mournful, and his voice was soft and sad. “No, that is not what I have done.” He rose abruptly. “We’re going inside.”

“I’ll be in –”

“Now,” Klavicus informed him.

The bard stood and dutifully followed him. In many ways – enough for sanity’s sake – the demon was the same as Hanen remembered him. But there were subtle and mildly disturbing differences as well: aloofness become melancholy, imperiousness become authority, curiosity become purpose. He had refused to show his balor form. And the flowers…something about the blossoming flowers disturbed Hanen. In the past he would have found a way to wheedle, trick, or tease out answers to his many questions, but now Klavicus seemed…different. Or perhaps Hanen himself was. Dusting the sand from his trousers, he followed the demon through the cleverly hidden door.

It was several days and several bouts of drinking later before he joined Klavicus at the elemental altars. That, at least, was another familiar scene. It had been like this before, during the other sundering of the multiverse. As part of that bargain with the elements the balor had sold Hanen into a sort of bardic servitude. What am I alive for now? With an effort of will he pushed the thought away; he was neither drunk enough to meet the question with equanimity nor sober enough to consider it rationally. And so he sat quietly as images drifted by on the altar of Air: the seven youths fitting an ornate silver key into an elaborate door, on the other side a skeletal figure greeting them, missing its left hand and eye. “The Aspect of Vecna?” he said in surprise.

“Curious,” Klavicus murmured.

The Aspect was speaking now. “The secrets of the tower come at a price: lore, power, your souls.”

“I doubt if the souls will be forthcoming,” the daimon remarked, and indeed the more studious among the young paladins began searching their memories for obscure bits of history, theology or arcana that might be of interest; judging from a moment’s collective disorientation before the Aspect dismissed them, they were not entirely successful, but successful enough to gain entrance to the inner sanctum. Klavicus shook his head and frowned.

“What?” Hanen asked.

“A defiler with the patronage of Vecna, and…” he trailed off. The bard looked at him expectantly. “Suppositions, hypotheses,” he finally said. “Skarp’s sudden interventionist interest, what has sustained the Seven Pillared Hall and its extinct magics for all of these millennia…even if this goes well, it could go badly, and if Paldemar indeed stands at a certain crossroads of powers, it could go not well at all.”

“You know I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the bard said irritably.

Abandoning his preoccupations Klavicus turned to him and smiled, a familiar condescending grin within that unfamiliar face. “That, at least, remains unchanged from the past.”

They watched as the youths descended to an antechamber then murmured about which of its doors to open first. Most heads nodded toward the right, but no sooner had Saphira crept to the door and silently opened it than a servant of Paldemar greeted them. “The Master will see you,” he said. Casting worried looks among themselves and exhaling a collective breath, they followed.

Klavicus shook his head at the scene that confronted them. Paldemar stood in a room filled with crystal pillars, facing a large idol of Vecna with something glittering in its eye. Power surged between the renegade wizard and the idol, and he was enclosed in a glittering shield of force. He paid virtually no attention to their arrival.

“He seems confident,” Hanen said.

“He should. That’s a piece of the World Seed in the idol’s eye.”

“A piece of the –” Hanen stuttered to a halt. “Then it was ruined in the struggle to possess it, this time?”

“The Dragon didn’t want to possess it, he wanted it broken beyond repair. That’s why his grip on the world has been so successful, so sustained. And the defilers in turn learned his lesson well: that it’s easier to destroy a thing than to keep it.”

Hanen’s heart sank anew. “But if there is no hope –”

Easier, I said,” Klavicus cut him off sternly. “And though the Dragon may believe the Seed broken beyond repair, he is wrong. We have found a way.”

In his still partly drunken distress Hanen only barely registered the we, like a misplayed note in a complex song. And now that Paldemar’s offer of leniency in return for surrender had been soundly rejected, battle began with a vengeance, with the defiler an island of eerie calm in the midst of the storm. Regan and Reign locked down the guards while the others at Kerac’s urging tried to reach the eye. Columns erupted if the young people drew too near, eliciting a peculiar smile from Klavicus when Sugar Primrose cried out in frustration, “I hate pillars!” Every enemy they killed served only to strengthen Paldemar, and their every attempt to reach the Seed fragment was repulsed with a lazy flick of his hand whose effect was yet sufficient to slam them into the back wall.

Kerac was lying dazed when Opa Skarp appeared, absorbing a blow that would have killed the young cleric. “Paldemar knows what he has,” Klavicus observed. “And now he knows that Kerac knows too.”

“How can they possibly stand against him?” Hanen asked as Paldemar, still showing no signs of strain, redoubled his attack.

“Skarp is not someone to be trifled with. Still,” he muttered the last nearly under his breath as Zane and Po flew unwilling across the room, “I should have gone.”

At Skarp’s instruction he and Kerac stood together, hands linked, as Paldemar continued his assault with no sign of slowing. “We are not paper to be crumpled and tossed aside,” the old priest intoned. “We are not wood to be burned.”

For every blow that landed Skarp took the brunt; he was strong, but clearly weakening when Sugar Primrose finally found her opening and wrenched the Seed from the idol’s eye. She started to leap back down but Skarp ordered her to hold, then throw the Seed directly at Paldemar. It tore through both shield and Paldemar himself as if they were paper, but when it reached Kerac’s outstretched hand it flowed into him and vanished. “His arm!” Hanen gasped. “It’s turned to stone.”

“That is the way,” the daimon said. “Skarp, as you can see, has a similar appearance. He has been tracking and absorbing Seed fragments for some time. So far as we know the Dragon and his minions have lacked the imagination to conceive of such a restoration process.”

“How did anyone think of it?” Hanen leaned forward as ground on which Skarp and the young paladins stood began to shake with some violence. “And what’s happening there?”

“It took no great theoretical acumen to recognize it as a viable possibility. As you might recall, Ammet’s brute overdrawing on the Seed to fuel his wretched power created a number of stress fractures reparable only with blood. We thought perhaps a suitably prepared elemental priest could take the fragments into himself and serve as a kind of host until all could be assembled. It was decided more recently that, in case the Dragon gains awareness of the process, an additional host would be prudent.”

“But if –” he broke off as the youths stumbled as the floor rolled and lurched beneath their feet. “The tremors are growing rapidly worse.”

“Yes, they are. It appears to be an unavoidable side effect of the absorption process – localized disruptions in atmospheric or tectonic stability. In this case –”

“You must flee this place,” Skarp was saying. “The magma will be rising.” He began to sink into the earth. “I will join you when I may. Beware the shadar-kai!” he called as he disappeared.

“– the magma is likely to rise,” Klavicus concluded.

“We have to warn the Hall,” Regan said as they ran from Paldemar’s stronghold, retracing their path through the Underdark’s depths, broken ground spewing lava close upon their heels. “There might still be time.”

“There is not,” the daimon said softly, remaining in his seat to watch as Skarp’s brood at last reached the high ground above the Seven Pillared Hall and saw only a crater rapidly filling with lava. Halfmoon’s Inn, Gendar’s store, Orontor and all the mages and the extravagant flow of water through the center of the town were swallowed by liquid fire. Only the Temple of Erathis stood above the devastation, and it too would be consumed soon enough.

Regan stared bleakly at the waste. “They’re all gone.”

“That was our way out,” Kerac said. “Now what?”

Sugar Primrose looked around then pointed. “We go up. The way we were never supposed to go.”

“Because of the shadar-kai,” Zane said.

* * *

Klavicus had seen enough; it was all over but the fleeing, and if he felt inclined he could observe that later at his leisure. He had some research to do and then, he thought with no small resentment, he would need to sleep. He left the vision running hoping it would keep Hanen occupied, but the bard rose and followed him. “I have a question,” he said. The daimon picked up a book, settled into a chair and began to read. “Regarding these – hosts.”

Sighing, he laid the book aside. “You want to know what will happen when all of the fragments have been gathered and the Seed must be reconstructed.”

Hanen ran a hand through his hair. “Well, yes. Can both of them survive the process? Can either?”

The old balor shrugged. “It’s never been tried before. Perhaps it won’t even work.”

“I don’t suppose,” the bard scowled, “that you bothered to warn that young man of the risks.”

I, as I have recently been reminded,” he snapped with some testiness, “am not responsible for the execution of that particular plan or for its participants, willing and cognizant or no.” He snatched up his book and opened it. “Take it up with the Galeb Duhr and the Avangion if it offends your delicate sensibilities.”

“I thought this Avangion was supposed to be some sort of paragon of goodness and light.”

Klavicus snorted. “That’s Mahlanda and her ilk talking. Simple, desperate people need simple, simpering saviors.”

“He sounds ruthless. I’m not sure I’d like him if I met him.”

“I’m not sure why you would. You never did before.” The daimon took no little perverse satisfaction in the open-mouthed stare Hanen gave him, but before the bard could say anything waved him away. “I’m busy. Go find yourself some other entertainment.”

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