The Poison Princess (30 page)

“You said the source was weak, right?” Her
eyes continued to uselessly search for light in front of her.

“Yes, I said that, but… I’m thinking weak
wasn’t quite the right word.”

Ruby stubbed a numb toe on a rock but kept
moving forward. “Ow… What do you mean?”

“It feels… old. It’s subdued and suppressed.
I almost think it’s in hibernation.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“It feels ominous, my princess.”

“But then where is the Glow’s monastery?
Surely it would have a magic aura as well.”

“This old energy is all I feel up here. You,
me, and it. There is nothing else unless something is disguising or
hiding the monks from my sight.”

“Is that possible?”

Scarlett thought about it for a moment. She
wondered if she could shield her own magical energy from detection.
The horned demon suspected that if given enough practice it should
be possible, but that it would still be quite difficult. “I think
so.”

“Do you think that’s what the monks have
done?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it is possible.
Either way, this path seems to be the one the monks took, so we
might as well see where it takes us.”

Ruby nodded, but when she realized no one
would have seen that, replied, “Right.”

They went on through the dark like that for
some time. Scarlett felt the energy getting closer, but she no more
understood what it was or what it meant. She knew enough to have
her reservations about it. There was something ahead that she
didn’t want to learn more about. Regardless, the horned demon
pushed forward into the darkness, pulling her princess along behind
her.

The utter absence of light slowly began to
recede after some immeasurable scrap of time had faded. Ruby still
couldn’t make out the difference, but Scarlett’s enhanced demon
eyes caught the slight change. She focused those red eyes forward
through the darkness until she could spot a light at the end of the
tunnel. They were almost there.

“Not much farther,” Scarlett said.

“Truly?” the princess replied. “Can you sense
something?”

“Nothing new, no. I can just see a
light.”

“Really?” Ruby squinted her eyes. “I see
nothing.”

“It’s there, my princess, but it is quite dim
still. A few more minutes and we’ll be through.”

Ruby was impatient. She tried to wait, but
she found her feet moving faster than Scarlett was guiding her
through the darkness. Two times she kicked the back of her demon’s
feet with the toes of her boots, apologizing with each. She cocked
her head to the side, trying to peer around where she imagined
Scarlett’s head to be, but for what felt like the longest time
imaginable, she saw nothing. Ruby was tired of the darkness. She’d
had enough of places like that tunnel when she was eating the toxic
blissroot and living an idle dream life. She wanted out in the real
world, where the light was.

Eventually, the princess’ desire was
satisfied, and she could make out a very dim light like what
Scarlett had described. With it, she was able to make out the
contours of the horned demon at her front, guiding her steps. Ruby
noted that Scarlett seemed to walk more quickly now, apparently
able to see quite well with the additional light. Soon, the
princess could see well enough to walk on her own. Her eagerness to
leave the dark overtook her, and she moved ahead of Scarlett,
releasing her grip on her demon’s hand. She was almost running by
the end of the tunnel, and when she got close enough, she saw that
the light was from several torches placed in sconces at either side
of the cave wall. They didn’t burn with normal fire. Even with
Ruby’s inaptitude for magic, she could see the torches burned from
some sorcerous spell. It was when she got closer that the princess
stopped to take in the scene.

Standing between the torches, Ruby stared
into a wide-open chamber built into the side of the mountain. The
floor looked to be of marble or some similar resource, checkered in
alternately black and white. Tall, thick pillars colored pearl
white stretched to the vast ceiling overhead. A set of steps rose
up to a second level further in. Doors were on the right, left, and
even forward to either side of the steps, looking to lead down to
what constituted a basement level. The second floor had a sort of
balcony overhanging the first and lead off to additional rooms.
Similarly enchanted torches in the walls illuminated the whole
chamber, giving off an artificial light that was different enough
from daylight or fire light to be an irritation to the senses. The
ceiling was the only proof that this room had ever been a cave. The
strange light of the torches just barely lit the rocky ceiling
enough to see the stalactites hanging down and casting shadows
among themselves.

The strangest part about the room, though,
was that it was entirely empty of life. No soul was in sight. All
of this elaborate architecture, and they were completely alone in
there. Scarlett, however, had her reservations about that point due
to the strange magical energy emanating from deeper within.
Whatever the case, they had arrived in the Glow’s compound at the
Roof of the World.

“Where do we start?” Scarlett asked her
princess.

“We certainly have options,” Ruby replied,
looking out over the dozens of doors from the main chamber. “Can
you still sense that old magic?”

The horned demon frowned. “Unfortunately, I
can.”

“Should we head in that direction?”

Scarlett shook her head. “I think that is the
one thing we should not do. Let’s avoid that if possible.”

Ruby shrugged. “If you say so. I guess we can
just look around then. Though, I’d have expected we would have seen
somebody by now.”

“Yes. There is that.” The horned demon’s eyes
drifted around the massive room. “I have a very bad feeling about
this place, Ruby.”

“Well, we don’t have much choice. If we want
these bracelets, we have to keep going.”

Scarlett bit her lip. “I know, but… just be
careful.”

Ruby continued forward, the leather of her
wet boots squeaking against the tiled marble floor, while her demon
followed unenthusiastically along behind her. The princess picked a
door almost at random and proceeded through it. The hinges of the
old wooden door creaked, as she pushed it forward, and she peered
down a narrow hallway. There were yet more closed doors lining the
hall alternating with the same magically lit torches in sconces
along the wall. The smaller nature of this area of the monastery
led to some revelations. Cobwebs appeared in many of the corners
and dust was prevalent on most of the surfaces. The sight would
lead you to imagine no one had been there in quite some time, and
you would be close to correct.

The princess continued forward, grabbing and
twisting the handle of the first door on her left before pushing it
with the same creaking accompaniment as before. Rather than a
hallway, this door led to a small office type of area. Most of it
was rather banal. There was a desk covered in the same layer of
dust with musty papers scattered across its surface. A bookshelf
sat in the back of the room with cobwebs covering entire shelves.
There was a wooden bench with an old robe thrown over the back.
This was all well and fine, but it was the various bones of a human
stretched across the floor that seemed the most noteworthy. The
bones were not simply laid out in one human shaped pile either.
These were in two distinct sections. The head and upper torso were
on one side of the room in a heap, while the hips and legs were all
the way across, on the other side of the desk.

“What happened to him?” Scarlett asked
rhetorically.

Ruby walked forward, until she stood at the
very center point between the two sections of bone piles. She
looked back and forth from one to the other, until she came to the
realization. “I think they were ripped in half and tossed in either
direction.” She mimed the action to help solidify the impossible
feat in her head.

Despite the horned demon’s impressive magical
power, she was afraid of something that could do that. She gulped
noticeably.

The princess looked closer at the ground
below her feet and the surrounding area. Beneath her feet was a
layer of dried blood in a scattered section of drops. The small
dribbles went in either direction, and the same kind of pooling
effect was there, against the walls where the body would have
landed and beneath the bones, where it decayed. A part of her, like
her demon servant, was certainly afraid of something that could rip
a human in two, but if she were honest with herself, she was more
curious. The poison and her bond with Scarlett had made her
powerful, but seeing the craggy hand demon in person had made her
recognize how weak she truly was. Whatever the dark monks of the
Glow were doing there, they had clearly found something powerful
and dangerous. She wanted such strength for herself. The bracelets
came first though.

Ruby turned back and exited the door, walking
past her demon. “Let’s keep looking.”

The pair of women proceeded down the hallway,
moving from door to door and inspecting whatever was inside. They
quickly found a pattern. Offices, like the first room they
encountered were along the left side of the wall, while small
bedrooms set up for a single person lined the right. The
configuration seemed to indicate that the monks would sleep in one
room and study in the other. Some of the work areas were more
elaborate than the first, containing artifacts or ancient scrolls
of wisdom, but most were more mundane. In almost all of the pairs
of rooms, they found at least one dead body, ripped, broken, or
otherwise slain in equally horrific methods.

The path offered no additional hallways
beyond its own, so, once each of the pairs of rooms had been
searched, Ruby and Scarlett left back for the main chamber. There
were similar doors on either side of the great hall, so rather than
move to one of those and find similar settings, the princess
decided to move to something new. On the first floor, there was a
large, green, metal door with a padlock placed across a latch above
the knob. Whoever had been there last had left it locked, as she
tried pulling the top bit of metal out with no luck. That wouldn’t
stop a woman capable of creating metal-melting acid, however. The
princess spit out a mouthful of her venom onto the metal latch,
causing it to hiss in defiance.

“I think you like doing that,” Scarlett
pointed out.

Ruby just smiled at her demon, wiping the
purple from her lips. After the poison had worked through the metal
of the lock, the princess pulled what remained of the latch and
swung the door open. The same blue burning magical torches jutting
diagonally out from the wall lit this hallway too. This new area,
though, was a bit different than the bedroom and work area hallway.
There were steps leading down almost immediately upon breaching the
doorway. The path went forward and down for probably a good twenty
feet before coming to another door. This one was made of simple
wood and was not latched or locked in anyway. She swung it open to
reveal a wide room of treasures and artifacts.

The monks of the Glow had kept a horde of
items down in these vaults, the women discovered. Their stockpile
of magical relics was not limited merely to the bracelets and the
eponymous orb. Concealed within these nearly unreachable walls were
all manner of wondrous and terrible artifacts.

There was a pair of crossed swords hanging on
the wall that were glowing in an eerie black light. A simple
gauntlet sat displayed on a pillar, its fingers pointing up to the
ceiling, with a ring of magic power situated on each digit. A
series of cups ranging from simple clay to the most extravagant
gold design with gems encrusted into its exterior were filling two
rows of a glass display case at the back of the room. There were a
number of unspeakable tomes concerning unfathomable beings lining a
bookcase to the side. Leaning against the wall in the corner were a
number of walking sticks - some gnarled wood and others intricately
shaped metal. Another shelf of the display case held a series of
wands of varying lengths and materials. Some seemed to have
feathers numbering in their components, while others were made of a
scaly material. Each one was unique from the rest, seeming to give
off their own aura of energy. There was a strange painting of a
dashing young man hanging from the wall. His malevolent eyes
followed the viewer wherever they went. Hanging from a pair of
chains in the ceiling was an enormous red horn or fang that looked
to have been broken off some large beast or demon.

All of these items were amazing and
impressive to behold, but they weren’t what Ruby was after. She was
there for the rune-covered bracelets placed on the bottom shelf of
the glass display case.

The princess moved at a quickened pace toward
them, eager to get her hands on what she had come so far to find.
She pushed the sliding glass of the display case to the side,
kneeled down, and grabbed both the bracelets. Each of the runes
inscribed in the cold metal glowed with an eerie blue luminance
that shifted, as she moved the hoops about. The ashy grey compound
the bracelets were made from was entirely unfamiliar to her. It was
lighter than she thought it should be, and it was coarse to the
touch, actually porous. Little caverns burrowed through the almost
stone-like metal but were not large enough to jeopardize the
stability of the bracelets, but were visible and quite noticeable.
The glowing runes themselves were nothing that she recognized
either. Among her various tutoring lessons, she had learned a set
of runic letters from an ancient and long since vanished culture,
but these were a far different thing altogether.

“So that’s them?” Scarlett asked from behind
Ruby, twisting the ball of her foot into the ground and biting her
lip.