Sovereign of the Seven Isles 7: Reishi Adept (51 page)

Chapter
38

Alexander stopped at the door leading from the roof of the black tower to the inner levels. He didn’t have to wait long for his battle sight to warn him of a threat. Moments before it happened in the world of time and substance, Alexander saw the wraithkin appear behind Jataan and stab him in the back.

He
grabbed Jataan, pulling him toward the door while raising his light, unleashing Luminessence in all its brilliance. The wraithkin appeared, screaming before it had even fully formed. The dark shadowy essence behind the wraithkin’s unnatural power was blasted away by Alexander’s light a moment later, the body that remained becoming spontaneously wounded in a number of places, bright red blood spilling onto the stairs before he toppled over into Alexander.

“This place is dangerous,” Alexander said, opening the door. “Stay close to the light.” He raised his staff and held his light bright enough to deter creatures of
the dark without demanding too much of his concentration or will.

He hadn’t taken ten steps down the hall when a wraithkin appeared thirty feet away. Alexander raised his light but the wraithkin vanished
.

“I want to fight them,” Anja said.

“No, you don’t,” Alexander said, reaching a tee in the hall. One way ended in a closed door thirty feet away while the other ran for a hundred feet before turning. He sent his sight through the door into a small room that looked like an empty guard chamber. He motioned for quiet and took the other passage, slowing to look around the corner with magic when he got close.

His battle sight flared, threats appearing from all around, all at once. There was no time to warn anyone—just barely enough time to push his light to its highest radiance, flooding the corridor with pure white light in the same moment that six wraithkin appeared around
them, their long, curved knives drawn and poised to strike.

They froze in the light, their demonic link severed, their past wounds manifesting all at once, killing all six with terrifying brutality.
Alexander lowered his light and continued as soon as their wounds began to show, leaving the wraithkin to bleed out behind him.

A flight of stairs led to several more flights, each turning back under the previous, taking them down into the heart of the black tower level
by level. Alexander stopped between level five and level six.

“Guard room with two sentinels,” he whispered. “Multiple wraithkin are close enough to blink in.”

“So?” Anja said. “We should attack.”

“No, we shouldn’t,” Alexander
whispered emphatically. He drew his sword and slipped the blade into the floor at a slight angle, just beginning to draw a circle in the stone when his battle sight flared again. He dropped the Thinblade, letting it fall into the floor up to the hilt, and poured his will into Luminessence. Two wraithkin appeared as his light came up, both falling a moment later from wounds sustained long ago but unfelt until now.

He focused on his light as he reached for the Thinblade, finishing the
circle he’d begun with several rough cuts, opening a three-foot-diameter, irregularly shaped hole in the floor. He dropped down to the level below, flooding the room with light, revealing a layer of fog a foot deep on the floor.

A scream broke the silence
, filling the chamber with a deafening shriek that seemed to move through the room past them.

Anja drew her sword and pointed
it in the direction the voice had gone.

“I don’t like ghosts.”

Tasia raised an eyebrow, looking to Alexander for confirmation.

“These aren’t ghosts, they’re illusions,”
he said, cutting into the floor again. The next room they dropped into was a laboratory with all of its equipment stored neatly away. Alexander looked through the door before opening it into an empty hallway. They passed several more rooms equipped for all manner of magical research. All of the equipment was packed away into cupboards under the tables and lining the walls.

They reached a staircase
but the doorway was nothing more than the outline of a door filled with stone. It looked a lot like the sealed doors in Blackstone and the Reishi Keep. Alexander cut through it.

They took the circular staircase down
past several levels, each sealed off with a stone doorway. After passing six sealed levels, Alexander stopped in the middle of the staircase. One more turn and the stairs ended in a hallway with a sentinel standing motionless at the midpoint. Magic danced everywhere in the background, obscuring his aura reading.

He sent his vision wider, looking through walls and
into the levels below, searching for a path through the black tower that offered the least resistance. After a few moments, he found what he was looking for—the central air shaft, an unobstructed path to the lower levels of the tower.

Alexander drew the Thinblade and looked at Jataan.

“One sentinel,” he said. “Don’t engage until you have to.”

He bounded down the stairs
, turning quickly around the corner to the final staircase and leapt the distance to the landing. The sentinel woke up, turning toward him, his eyes beginning to glow red. Alexander ignored the guardian and slashed into the wall, cutting a triangle with three quick strokes. He was through before the sentinel had taken five steps.

He pointed to the door across the room. Jataan took up
a position next to it. Once the last of his friends was through the hole in the wall, he raced to the door and through without hesitation, leading them down a narrow service corridor that accessed a number of Phane’s active laboratories and workspaces.

Once they’d passed
several rooms, the service corridor met a main hallway that ran perpendicular to it. Alexander walked down the hall quickly and quietly, stopping at a heavy door. It opened to a small room, six feet to a side, with only a railing for the far wall. Beyond the railing was a ten-foot-by-ten-foot shaft running vertically through most of the black tower.

Alexander opened his Wizard’s Den and retrieved a featherlite potion.

Jack made no move from the railing. “You might want to drop something before you jump,” he said.

Jataan stepped up to the railing with a piece of firewood. He looked to Alexander
, who nodded with a shrug. The log fell for a moment before hitting something strung across the shaft that cut it in two. A moment later a plane of magical energy flared, searing both pieces of wood black. The two pieces continued falling, trailing streamers of smoke until they became entangled in something that Alexander couldn’t see until he sent his sight in closer. An enormous web filled the entire shaft for several levels—hundreds of bright red spiders were crawling all over it.

“Nice call,
Jack,” Alexander said, returning to his chest and trading the featherlite potion for a potion of gaseousness.

“Perhaps an abundance of caution is in order,” Tasia said, leaning slightly
over the railing and sending a torrent of fire raging down the shaft. Alexander backed away, raising his hands to ward off the sudden heat. Tasia poured power into her dragon fire, pushing searing flames into the lowest level of the shaft. She held it for a few moments more and then released it, plunging the world into silence.

“I suspect you’ll encounter fewer surprises this way,” she said, strolling into the Wizard’s Den.

“If by surprises, she meant life of any kind, I think she’s probably right,” Jack said, shielding his face with his hand as he looked over the railing.

Alexander gave it a minute
to cool before closing his friends into his Wizard’s Den and drinking the potion of gaseousness. A few moments passed before he abruptly became insubstantial and incorporeal, nothing but a cloud of vapor shaped like a man. With a thought, he flowed over the railing, falling slowly through a variety of deterrents that had been prepared for anyone attempting to pass through the air shaft.

Several areas had multiple strands of fine wire stretched
taut from side to side. Other sections had magical traps but none were triggered by Alexander’s less-than-substantial passage. Within a few minutes, he was at the bottom of the shaft, a large room with a giant grate for a floor. Beneath was a massive central sewer drain for the entire tower with multiple inflows.

Alexander was momentarily grateful that Phane didn’t trust real people enough to let them into his tower. He drifted under a door and into a musty old storage room filled with ancient
-looking furniture collecting dust. He shifted back into solid form and opened his Wizard’s Den.

Anja wrinkled her nose when she stepped out
, but said nothing.

“This way,” Alexander whispered.

They were in an area of the tower several levels below the surface—it seemed to be reserved for the storage of things that nobody wanted. Alexander hurried through the empty halls. Beneath the sewers was a series of sublevels accessible only through a guarded and warded staircase that was itself only accessible from Phane’s personal quarters in the higher levels of the tower.

Alexander
found the rounded wall that formed the outside of the staircase, cutting into it without hesitation. He headed down, hearing faint echoes of running water as the staircase passed through the sewer levels and descended into the sublevels.

The stairs
ended well beneath the surface in a room fifty feet on a side with a forty-foot arched ceiling. A garden made entirely of stone plants and trees filled the space. Interspersed between the sculpted vegetation were statues of monsters, each of a similar sort—doglike heads with black fangs, brutish bodies with broad shoulders and bat wings, oversized arms ending in claws, and raptor talons for feet; each looked frighteningly real and shone with the colors of magic.

A
single exit stood on the opposite wall. Alexander sent his sight out, searching for a hidden passage or a second door but found nothing. After a more careful look, he realized that the next section was designed with him in mind, or at least with his Thinblade in mind.

T
wenty feet wide and ten feet high, the corridor ran straight through the bedrock for two hundred feet to a set of switchback stairs that went down fifty feet before opening into another corridor at a right angle to the one above. It ran for another two hundred feet before ending in a similar set of stairs and another identical corridor fifty feet deeper. A total of four corridors, each fifty feet beneath the last and each turning at a right angle to the previous made it almost impossible to cut through to the lower levels.

“Those things are going to come to life the moment we step out there,” Alexander said. “Unfortunately, this is the only way, and it
’s going to get worse farther in.”

Anja drew her sword. Jack tossed up his hood. Lita cast her shield spell. Alexander drew the Thinblade, keeping Luminessence in his left hand. Jataan nodded readiness when Alexander looked to him.

“Now!” he said, sprinting toward the nearest gargoyle, slashing it in half as it came to life, its body returning to stone as parts of it hit the floor and shattered. He raised his light, but the gargoyles seemed immune to it.

Jataan reached the next closest as it unfurled its wings. He drove a short spear
into the creature’s neck and broke off its head with a sharp wrenching motion to the side.

One leapt over Alexander and came down on Anja. She stepped aside and swept through its wing and arm with her broadsword, shattering both and causing the unnatural creature to crash into the floor,
smashing into pieces.

Tasia burned the wings off another and Lita knocked
one out of the air with a light-lance.

Alexander dodged as his battle sense took over, narrowly
avoiding an attack from behind, then taking the gargoyle’s foot as it passed overhead. Another gargoyle right behind the first landed on top of him, its raptor talons gripping him by the shoulders, crushing into him.

It launched into the air, carrying Alexander five feet, then ten before Jataan’s spear dr
ove through the place where the creature’s heart should have been. Despite the spear sticking through its chest, the gargoyle carried Alexander another five feet into the air. He slashed wildly at the beast but his range of motion was severely hampered by the crushing grasp of its talons on his shoulders. A light-lance hit its wing, burning a hole through it.

Alexander
felt the world slow to a moment, then flash by all at once, as the creature dropped him to the floor. He heard a crack when he hit, pain shooting up his leg. He tumbled to the ground and rolled into a ball, trying to focus on the battle, but unable to get past the agony radiating from his leg. Once he came to a stop, he looked at his wound, sending his sight into his leg and seeing the bone broken in two places. He winced to himself.

Fire erupted from Tasia’s hands, a jet of orange-red heat leaping to the nearest gargoyle and melting its wings in a matter of seconds. The last one tried to attack Anja but she hacked its legs off before it could land on her, then finished
it by shattering its head and torso with a single, well-placed blow.