Darkvision

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Warian couldn't sleep. His mind kept returning to Uncle Zel revealing himself as a stowaway. His uncle's words buzzed and rattled around his brain, enhancing his anxiety the longer he considered them.

His uncle's terrific snores weren't helping. Only Warian knew Zel rode Stormsailer, so of course, his uncle stayed hidden in his cabin. The snores had been light and breathy at first, soundless enough that Warian could almost ignore them. Before long, the snores began to thunder. On more than one occasion, Warian rose from his bed to glare down at his uncle who lay on his back, mouth ajar. When he pushed Zel onto his side, the snoring eased. But the relief was temporary. A short time later, a snorting cough woke Warian from a drowse. Zel had rolled back to his preferred position. It was no wonder the man had never taken a wife. Eventually, Warian constructed a tent of three pillows across his head. With two standing on edge on either side of his head, and one lying across the pair, the down stuffing helped deaden the noise of Zel's obstructed breathing. By the time he found himself staring up into the underside of a pillow, sleep's promise had wholly deserted him. What if Shaddon was contaminated with the same strange presence Zel noticed plaguing Xaemar? Warian couldn't laugh off the possibility-he'd noted something strange at the family meeting, that was sure. And the change in his own arm must be somehow connected. What if Shaddon was the actual source of the contamination?

It seemed a reasonable guess. Shaddon was a Datharathi, and that meant finding opportunities for business and advancement whenever possible.

And his arm-would he, too, fall under the influence of the contamination? Would he find that his wishes were being suborned by a will not his own? And most disturbingly-would he even know it? His relatives gave no sign of being aware that their personalities were under assault. Either they didn't know, didn't care, or didn't remember. Or Zel was wrong. Either way, Warian cared. Maybe he was stupid for not immediately taking the drastic step that would safeguard him from potential influence. Maybe he should chop off the arm and be done with it. The trauma he'd experienced upon first losing his natural arm came and sat on his chest. Or, the influence that potentially controlled him tugged on those memories-what was free will? Bugger. Warian turned onto his side, but his movement upset the balance of his pillow dolmen, and two pillows toppled to the floor.

"Damn it all!" Warian sat up and looked to the porthole. Orange and pink hues highlighted the dark line of the horizon below. Dawn wasn't far off. Warian rose from his bed and stood directly before the porthole. At least the view he had so admired last night had returned.

Sometime toward morning, the ship had broken through the storm and ominous cloud cover. Now the sky-ship pressed ahead, just below fantastic masses of white and gray. Looking out the window, Warian felt like a minnow swimming in an unbounded ocean among leviathans of mist. A fluke thrash of any of these mythical swimmers could smash Stormsailer and send the debris flittering down into the sea. Another sawing snore pierced through Warian's imagery. He reminded himself once again that Zel, as an apparent ally, probably shouldn't be choked awake.

The skyship reached Adama's Tooth right after dawn. Warian watched from the upper deck as the flying craft made its approach. Zel remained in the cabin. With luck, no one would find the stowaway until after Warian and Sevaera disembarked. But Zel had other plans-he began preparing a disguise. Warian left him to his task. Adama's Tooth was a nearly vertical natural monolith with deeply cleft, striated sides.

Warian knew it rose at least two thousand feet above the meandering coastline of the Golden Water. Many stories circulated about Adama's Tooth-according to some accounts, the spire was not natural at all, but artificially raised by the effort of a great wizard, long dead, though Warian couldn't recall the supposed wizard's name. The less civilized Durpari tribes of the region called the spire Dragon Lodge.

In fact, it had been a sacred site of worship for many locals before the Datharathis had bought the rights to open a mine in the tower's side. Those same locals had launched a number of raids against the mine over the years. The first few times, the mining equipment, brought in at great expense, had been destroyed. Datharathi Minerals learned its lesson, and radically increased security. One of their first efforts was to cut off road traffic. Most access into and out of Adama's Tooth was changed to airship traffic. Gates and other security measures were installed along the slender, steep road that spiraled up the outer skin of Adama's Tooth. Stormsailer made for the skydock set deep in one of the shadowy vertical canyons near the summit of the spire. The floating ship slid gracefully between the bulwarks of stone on either side, and halted in midair. A stone pier jutted from one side of the inner cleft, resembling half of an arched bridge. An overhang blocked direct morning sun. The dimness was brightened by brilliant magical torches set along the pier and along a carved platform. As soon as a crewman tied the skyship with stays and guy ropes, Sevaera appeared at Warian's side. His aunt touched his shoulder and said, "We're expected. Don't dawdle, Nephew." "But I need my bag…" Warian trailed off when he saw a uniformed porter wheeling Aunt Sevaera's luggage, with Warian's own traveling bag atop the pile, after his aunt. Trust her to be efficient. His aunt and the porter moved down the gangway and confidently onto the pier. Warian followed, more cautiously. He looked down as he traveled along the gangway. Vertigo clawed his spine as his eyes traced the vertical side of the tooth all the way down to the rocky ground far below. Once they reached the sturdy stone ledge, they quickly moved into the main tunnel, heading toward the heart of Datharathi Minerals's enterprise in Adama's Tooth. The porter paused, allowing Warian to precede him.

As Warian passed the man, the porter winked. A heartbeat's confusion gave way to recognition. Zel's really was a master of disguise. The corridor walls were smooth and polished. Redstone squares tiled the floor. Smokeless torches alternated on either side, about every ten paces. Nothing but the finest for the Datharathis. Of course, this was the executive entrance to the mining headquarters-the lower shafts sunk through Adama's Tooth were as rough and crude, but workable, as might be found in any mine. They reached the nexus, where several wide, well-lit passages met. Warian expected his aunt to take the passage that led toward family quarters, but she turned toward the lift tunnel. "We're going down into the mine?" Warian questioned.

"Yes. Shaddon has moved his staging area closer to the location where the crystal is extracted. He's waiting for us." Warian scratched his nose and said, "Porter, come with us, please. I have some items in my bag that I may want to ask my uncle about." "Yes, sir," said the porter, his accent and tone completely unlike Zel's normal speech.

Sevaera cocked her head, but wasn't curious enough to say anything.

Instead, she moved to the edge of the lift and addressed the lift operator, a burly half-orc. "Drop us to the Fifth Deep." The lift operator nodded and grasped a great wheel set into the wall. Warian knew the lift was raised and lowered through a series of counterweighted chains, and that the wheel didn't require much strength to turn. Those who traveled up and down the mine shafts were heartened to see a burly lift operator, nonetheless. As the shaft's gray walls flowed past on all sides, to the accompaniment of clanking chains and creaking pulleys, Warian asked, "Fifth Deep? I thought there were only four-and the lowest was where Shaddon first found the crystal we're all so happy with." Warian pumped his prosthesis to demonstrate. "We opened a new face on the dig." "Really? I don't know how that's possible, unless you're actually digging below the base of Adama's Tooth. If that's the case, wouldn't it be easier to sink a new shaft from outside?" "You'll see, Nephew. The Fifth Deep doesn't obey all the rules you're accustomed to." "What?" Sevaera merely smirked.

She was too smug by half. The long descent ended. A wide tunnel through the naked rock beckoned. They moved forward and, almost immediately, the nature of the tunnel changed. The lift shaft and all the tunnels above shared traits of recently excavated stone, with sharp edges, exposed facets, scratches, and blast marks. But the tunnel they now traversed was smooth, as if worn by extreme age or perhaps the passage of water. Stalactites reached down from above, white with calcite, and the left wall was thick with delicate boxwork, something normally found only in unworked caves. "You've found a natural cavity!" exclaimed Warian. "True, as far as it goes," replied Sevaera. The passage opened into a wide, domed cavern. "What's this?

Is that a building?" asked Warian. Ancient structures, half excavated, stood revealed in the light of brilliant mining torches. The ruins were so ancient, they nearly seemed natural formations of the cavern.

Worn and skewed by unknown ages, half walls emerged from the grasp of the stone. The visible structures were composed of purple stones, but they reached up from the detritus of millennia, tracing a broken, unknowable floor plan below the earth. The recent excavation ranged over the entire cavern, but even to Warian's inexpert eye, it was clear that more still lay buried than had been pried free by the work of pickaxe and rock knife. Several natural passages meandered off the wide cavern, some lit, others dark. "We think this was an old Imaskaran compound," said Sevaera, "hidden here for thousands of years." Warian nodded, studying the cavern. He could see small outcrops of the very crystal from which his arm was fashioned, and from which all the plangents drew their greater-than-human abilities.

The bits of raw crystal he could see from where he stood had to be worth a fortune. "Seems kind of wasteful to let all this crystal lie about, unless…" Sevaera nodded. "Yes, we've found a much purer, concentrated source. Shaddon says we no longer need to sift through the dirt and blast through rock-we have access to as much pure crystal as we'll ever need. This pure vein was what allowed the plangent project to move forward." "Hmm." Warian cocked his head sharply toward one of the darkened tunnels. Had that been a scream? His aunt hadn't reacted-but the porter also looked curiously at the dark tunnel entrance. "Aunt, did you hear that?" "Nothing for you to worry about-we're late, and Shaddon is waiting." So saying, the woman moved purposefully toward another tunnel. Warian shrugged and followed. The porter brought up the rear, still hauling the baggage. They passed a few dozen side passages, heard a few more worrying noises, and once passed through a mass of air so putrid that Warian had to pull his shirt up across his nose and mouth to filter it. Eventually, they reached another chamber. Unlike the previous excavation, this one was divided into two areas. One section had been extended by miners, or his grandfather's magic. The newly carved space was expansive and contained numerous wooden workbenches. About half the benches were neatly arrayed with tools of various types that resembled jeweler's and sculptor's adzes, hammers, and carving tools. The other benches contained the same, plus chunks of crystal mounted in vises, each partly carved to resemble some portion of human anatomy. Warian saw a preponderance of hands, arms, and legs, but also strangely sinuous crystal sculptures. These seemed uncomfortably organic, like something one might confine inside a human body. Looking at them made him feel faintly sick, because he knew that they were probably meant to replace natural organs. It struck him as insanely dangerous now that he saw these raw, unfinished prostheses. A doorway stood open at the far end of the work area. Warian turned to look at his aunt. How many of these internal implants did Sevaera carry? How much living tissue had she sacrificed to become a plangent? His aunt, watching him, misinterpreted his stare and said, "Soon you'll be updated, Warian, and become fully plangent, like me." Her smile was absolutely predatory. He swung around and looked at the natural portion of the cavern. It was bare but for a ring of ancient standing stones. Each menhir rose between ten and fifteen feet in height. A gap of perhaps five to ten feet between stones allowed access to the interior, which was empty. But… Dimness inhabited the ring's center, despite several brightly burning torches mounted just beyond its periphery. It was as if the light were having trouble reaching past the stones to illuminate the center. "Is that some sort of ongoing spell?" Warian asked. Several steel carts with wide metal wheels stood lined up along one wall. Ruts in the floor revealed that the carts had entered and exited the ring many times. But there was just enough room for one cart inside the ring. Most of the carts were coated with crystalline dust. Sevaera said, "I suppose it's a spell of a sort. It's a permanent source of magic that opens a door to somewhere else! The portal is a trade secret of Datharathi Minerals. We're mining extraplanar material, crafting it into prostheses of various types, and selling it in Vaelan to rich nobles and merchants. We're making a fortune, and we've only just started." "Where does it lead?" asked Warian. "Where do you think?" snorted Sevaera. "Somewhere strange, somewhere odd-someplace no one else has access to. We've cornered the market on the crystal." Warian squinted at the stone circle, trying to catch some hint of the realm beyond it. "Not now," said his aunt.

"We're late for a meeting." She turned to the right and walked past the workbenches and the prostheses, toward an open door. Warian wondered where all the miners had gone, as well as all the artisans that must have been diligently carving the crystal displayed on the workbenches. Perhaps the mine was between shifts. Through the doorway was a small corridor that emptied into a decorated chamber.

Book-filled cases, leather stools, warm magical lamps, and wall hangings concealed the fact that the room was far below the earth. But a thick coating of webs covered most of the ceiling and the corners of the room. This feature seemed ominously out of place to Warian. A high-backed leather chair commanded the room's center, facing away from the door but toward a great, multifaceted orb. The orb was carved of crystal, and it hung suspended on an iron chain. Warian gasped when he saw that each facet glowed with a separate image, as if from a different viewpoint. It was a riot of moving pictures, impossible for him to look at for long. "What is that?" he asked. The chair turned from the orb, and a figure rose from where it had been seated. It was his grandfather, Shaddon Datharathi, of course. But a much-altered Shaddon since Warian had seen him last. Warian gaped at the changes, unable to take his eyes from the glittering crystal facets of his uncle's new flesh. "Welcome, Warian," said Shaddon. "You and I have much to discuss."