[game-notes version here]

VI.

Frostmere 16, Hearthday, Year 731.

“So you know there’s scrolls down there, but not the layout?” Maelen asked, rubbing her chin and studying the stone stairs into darkness. There was something unnatural about the shadows, like they had substance. Something like black fog, she decided.

“That’s right,” the lad swallowed. His voice was unexpectedly deep and resonant.

“Alright, well. You follow me, Vessa in back. We stick close, but don’t bump me from behind if you want to keep your head attached to your shoulders, understand?” She threw a hard glare at him. The kid nodded, wide-eyed intimidation taking over the hungry, eager look she’d seen a few heartbeats before. Good. The last thing they needed was him setting off traps in a vault or stumbling off to another room on his own. She and Vessa didn’t want a repeat of the debacle that landed them in debt to the Latchkey Circle in the first place.

For just a moment, the horror of that day filled her mind. There had been ten of them in the Larkhands, their band of thieves, and Maelen was their second-in-command. They’d been planning the break-in at a sealed vault beneath the Argenoak’s root foundations for weeks. When they’d breached the vault, however, instead of a mountain of coins they’d found glyph-marked relics and an ancient warding seal. Maelen could still remember their little thief Grale reaching for the seal… Maelen’s shout of warning, unheard. Vessa had been the only Larkhand within reach, so Maelen had tackled her and taken cover beneath a slab of stone. When the seal cracked and the screams began, she and Vessa had been spared. Those tortured screams, though, took a long time to stop. And their twisted bodies when the dust had settled…  

Maelen shook her head, banishing the images. She unshouldered her pack with a grunt and tugged free one of the torches lashed to its side, a rough shaft of pinewood, about as long as her forearm, wrapped tightly at one end with resin-soaked cloth. The wrapping was stained dark with pitch, a homemade mix of pine tar, lard, and scrap linen meant to burn hot and slow. It smelled faintly of smoke and tallow, even unlit.

From a leather pouch on her belt, she retrieved her tinderbox. It was a small, square tin with a hinged lid, scratched and blackened with use. She crouched by the edge of the stone doorway, opened the box, and struck flint to steel. Sparks danced, catching the charcloth with a faint red glow. She leaned close, coaxed the ember with a steady breath, then pressed the cloth into a small bundle of dry moss and bark scrap. The kindling flared. Maelen touched the flame to the cloth-wrapped end of the torch. It caught with a hungry whoosh, casting flickering orange light over the carved stone and the gaping stairwell below.

She gave the torch a testing shake, nodded, and said, “Alright, let’s go see what’s so secret that the Inkbinders locked it away out here.” There was a light scrabbling sound as Tatter scampered from one shoulder to the next. Tatter squeaked once, an unusual amount of noise from the mouse. Maelen grinned, her scar tugging. Vessa gave her a nod.

She turned her back on them, torch held out front, and descended the stairs.

Though the shadows had an opaque appearance, they were just shadows, and retreated from her torchlight, revealing a well-hewn set of narrow stairs, twenty in all, and an otherwise undecorated corridor. Orange light flickered and smoke pooled on the low ceiling of the corridor as she squinted and looked around.

Vessa was an expert in trap-finding, but Maelen’s practiced eye could spot them well enough. She spied no tripwires, pressure plates, or loose stones that might spell danger. She stepped forward cautiously, toe-to-heel, one foot after another, through undisturbed dust. The scribes who guarded this place already trapped the door, she reasoned, why trap the corridor as well? It all depended on how often they walked these halls back when Thornmere Hold was active and how forbidden the knowledge. Maelen admitted to herself that she was more than a little curious as to what they’d find down here.

As she suspected, they reached the simple door at the end of the short corridor without incident. Tatter squeaked again, tightening Maelen’s jaw muscles. Did the little critter know something she didn’t? But that was stupid, she scolded herself.

“Shh, mouse,” she lightly scolded.

Maelen examined the door carefully, but it wasn’t trapped either as far as she could see. Some faded script had been carved in an archway over the door frame. She held the torch at head height so the lad could see.

“What does it say?” she asked in a low whisper.

“It… hm. It’s an old script, but I can read it. ‘The Vigil Endures, Though the World Forgets,’” he said in reverent awe.

She could hear the excitement in his voice, so she hissed, “Don’t bloody touch anything until we know it’s safe.”

“Of course,” he said defensively as she turned to face the door, but once her back was to him, she grinned. What sort of knowledge is dangerous enough to lock in a hidden vault out in the wilds?

The door was a thick slab of hardwood, copper-banded and hanging on rusted iron hinges set in the stone wall. The iron had rusted and copper corroded, but was otherwise in decent repair.

“You okay, Mae? Need me to look it over?” Vessa asked in a low voice from the back.

“I got it,” she said, and pushed the door open. It groaned like something in pain, its hinges frozen and wood bloated from the moisture down here, but she leaned her shoulder into it, grunting.

Maelen faced a small square room, maybe five strides across. Two decorative iron wall sconces sat empty on the walls, one hanging askew, and a broken oil lamp lay discarded on the floor. Directly across from her was a shattered door, fragments of rotting wood lying both within the room and beyond. Her torchlight didn’t reach far enough to see much beyond, but she wouldn’t have been able to focus on the next room anyway. Instead, her eyes snapped to the figure near the doorway.

At first, she thought it was an armored corpse, its copper plates dulled to verdigris. As she brought her torch forward, however, she could see that its helmet-like head bore a single circle of black glass, like the lens of the dead lantern on the floor. Its limbs did not end in fingers, but instead one a three-pronged claw and the other a heavy, fingerless club. Arcane runes, worn nearly smooth, had been etched along the chest plate, shoulder joints, and encircling the clubbed hand.

She knew there wasn’t anyone in the copper armor because a blackened steel spear had been driven deep into its chest and the stone wall beyond, pinning it upright. A thin trail of scorching marked the wall behind it, as though fire had erupted from the blow. Hanging from the cracked chest and back were broken gears and empty beakers. No skeleton or body lay within, only metal and glass.

“Lad,” she whispered urgently. “What is this?”

“I– I… I don’t… Oh! It’s an automaton! Crafted by guild artificers, a dying skill indeed! I’ve never seen one, only read about them. It must have been Thornmere Hold’s guardian. Amazing!”

“But what killed it?” Vessa asked warily, and Maelen could hear her unsheathing her shortsword.

Maelen had the same question. “Hold the light,” she offered to the lad, and he took it, staff in one hand and torch in the other. Maelen pulled her blade from the scabbard across her back, settling her grip two-handed, sword pointed at the shattered, open doorway. She listened, but could hear nothing but the flickering torch and the scribe’s excited mumbling as he examined the copper guardian. Tatter squeaked and ran from one shoulder to a pouch across Maelen’s chest, seeking safety. Smart mouse.

The darkness beyond the shattered door pulsed like a held breath.

Something shuffled in the gloom beyond the shattered doorway, like slow, dragging steps. Then more, slightly further away. Maelen set her mouth and exhaled through her nose, bringing her immense sword to guard.

“What in the seven unshacklings was that?” Vessa cursed behind her.

“Keep that bloody torch up!” Maelen hissed at the scribe over her shoulder. “We can’t fight if we can’t see!”

The first figure lurched into the doorway. It was a lightly armored man, with pauldrons and bracers of steel over a leather cuirass and sturdy shirt and padded pants. Even at a glance, Maelen could see that everything he wore was of the highest quality, like a nobleman dressed for a formal duel, but old and even tattered in places. He wore no helmet, which allowed her to see that his skin was gray and sagging like melted wax. His mouth hung open and toothless, a dark maw …but no sound came out. Yet by far the most disturbing were the sunken black pits where his eyes should have been. It was as if the man’s eyes had turned black and burst, running in thick rivulets down his cheeks.

A second figure shambled behind the man, this one a woman, dressed similarly, with the same empty, weeping eyes and gaping mouth. Her thin black hair clung to her head and neck as if she’d recently taken a bath, wet and stringy, almost oily.

As he stepped into the room, the man raised his gray gnarled hands towards Maelen, the skin hanging loose at his thin wrists.

The move startled her, and the eyeless man lunged at the last moment. He made no sound—no breath, no snarl, no voice—just the soft scrape of boots on stone. Maelen stepped sideways and pushed him away with the flat of her blade, shouting in surprise. Unfortunately, the move sent the man stumbling directly towards the scribe, who, to his credit, swung that walking stick of his in response and kept the armored thing at arm’s length. Damned if she wasn’t more and more impressed with the lad.

The other figure lurched forward in a burst of speed, and Maelen saw that she wielded a spear identical to the one pinning the copper guardian to the wall in her two hands. Silently—and Maelen just now realized that the things made absolutely no noise except for their shuffling steps—the woman thrust the spear forward awkwardly. The blow had power but no grace, and Maelen parried and, on the backswing, scored a hit on her arm. The fabric of her sleeve tore under Maelen’s blade, but no blood spilled. Whatever these things were, they weren’t human. At least not anymore.

With a roar, Maelen gave her no chance to recover. She’d seen one of those spears driven through the breastplate of the automaton and into the stone wall. These things may not be fast or skilled, but they were strong. She swung her longsword in a horizontal arc, cleanly lopping off the woman’s head. The head rolled with a wet flop, the oily hair clinging to the stone like seaweed.

Maelen allowed the momentum of her attack to spin her towards the armored man. Without pausing the swing or her battle cry, the blade sunk into man’s leather-clad side with a thunk. It turned its eyeless head towards her, mouth gaping horribly and silently. It began to reach out towards her with gray, withered hands.

A flicker of motion at the edge of her vision, and then Vessa was there, her short blade buried into the back of the thing’s neck. The tip of her blade erupted from the man’s throat, again bloodlessly. Without a sound, it slumped to the stone floor and did not move.

The three of them panted and Maelen pulled her sword free of the cuirass to point at the shattered doorway. She stood, stance wide and ready, for several heartbeats. Nothing else emerged from the darkness.

“Torch,” she barked at the scribe, empty hand outstretched. He blinked at her in the firelight and then nodded quickly, handing it over. Maelen stepped forward, light in front of her, into the doorway. Shards of old, rotting wood crunched beneath her boot.

“Did you see their faces?” the lad was saying behind her. “Black tears, like the Lanternless! What does that mean?”

“There’s no blood,” Vessa’s voice added. Maelen could almost hear the frown in her voice. “And look at the scrollwork on this armor, Alric, and the tower emblem. These were humans once, I think. Worshippers of the Herald. But why would they lock their own down here and seal the door? What did they become?”

“Shut it, both of you,” Maelen said, moving her torch around in the shadows. “Come here. We’ve found your secret knowledge, lad. Let’s find out what they were guarding, eh?”

She stepped into the dark, and the dark seemed to lean closer to embrace her.

Next: Vault of the Sightless God [with game notes]