Shifting Stars, page 19
IN LOV G ME RY F ALYCIA
But it was still legible enough to deduce the intent.
“Surely, ‘In Loving Memory of Alycia,’ yes?” Cat whispered, reverently. “That’s not just the half-Faery druid in me talking, is it? That’s what it says, right?”
“That’s what it looks like to me,” Jett agreed.
Blessed Alycia, Mother of Nature, was a revered figure to Faery, wielders of nature magic and just nature lovers in general.
There was another line underneath, in a smaller script that had suffered even more erosion over time, such that only a single portion was still legible and then just barely.
E L ST W
The rest was lost to the passage of time and guessing the meaning was futile. There simply wasn’t enough to go on.
Logically, the next step was to open the door, but that proved to be easier said than done. Jett and Cat lent all their weight to the task, but the door would not budge an inch. Catriona tried her woodshaper magic, but the door remained untouched. She switched to stoneshaper magic to try and create a gap around the door, but it seemed whoever built this had thought of that, so it failed.
Jett had been reluctant to try anything with his wizard magic, not wanting to risk causing damage, but they seemed to have run out of alternatives.
“I won’t blast it,” he said, “but I will try a focussed fire spell. That should burn through the wood, but I’m not much of a multi-tasker, so would you mind taking over with the light?”
“Alright,” Cat agreed, and took her Crystal Mage Staff out of her pocket dimension, causing it to cast a blue light over the door.
Jett cancelled his own light spell and cast out a thin jet of intense flames. He sustained it in one spot for two or three minutes, but the wood didn’t even begin to char.
“Fireproof wood?” he breathed in wonder, as he cancelled the spell.
“I don’t think it even warmed up!” Catriona marvelled, stepping forward to carefully place her free hand on the door. “I guess this is why Ulvarius couldn’t get in.” The instant her hand touched the wood, however, some kind of mechanism on the other side clicked and the door swung open. “What the—” she cried, jumping back.
“Maybe it likes you?” Jett suggested.
“Maybe,” Cat allowed, “or maybe it’s this,” she said, holding up her staff.
“Your staff?”
Cat nodded, “Or perhaps the combination of magic and higher planar energy within it.”
“Why would that work?” Jett wondered.
“It’s just a guess,” she shrugged.
She supposed all that mattered was that they had gained entry. The how and why weren’t really important.
Stepping through the now open doorway, Cat found her breath taken away by the sight of a cavernous space carved into the bedrock of Quernhow. Carved with magic, druid magic like hers. She recognised the signs. Inside, were rows upon rows of shelves filled with books, scrolls and other documents. It wasn’t just one room, either, but many adjoining ones. Despite this, however, those ancient people had run out of space and had been forced to stack yet more volumes on the floor. Many of those stacks towered above their heads. She could see why Ulvarius had referred to it as a ‘repository of knowledge’ – calling it a library wouldn’t do it justice.
Into the silence, Jett whispered, “Well, Cat, you promised me the archaeological find of a lifetime.”
Cat raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Disappointed?”
He answered her clearly facetious question with an entirely serious, “Yes.”
Cat frowned, incredulously.
“I’m disappointed that I have only a single human lifetime,” he clarified, with tears in his eyes, “because I doubt that’s enough time to even catalogue what’s down here, let alone study the contents!”
Cat moved over to him and embraced him. “I know what you mean,” she said. “At best, I hoped to find a small hidey-hole, maybe a few dozen books if I was lucky. I never imagined all this!”
Jett gently broke the hug, stepping away to try and come to terms with what he was seeing.
Catriona, too, began to wander around, stepping carefully around the stacks, not knowing where to begin. After a few moments, though, something caught her attention: a book of star charts. It was sitting apart from everything else, propped up on the floor with its content on display, as if somebody long ago wanted this to be the first thing any future visitor would see.
“Well, whoever you were, it worked,” the druidess said softly, as if the spirit of that long dead individual might hear her, if only she were quiet enough.
Not wanting to even risk handling it, she called Jett over and asked him to use some of his levitation magic on the book.
“Good idea,” he approved. “The less we touch things, the better.”
The star charts contained within those pages were astonishingly detailed, putting current efforts to shame. Even more extraordinary was that the charts all seemed to be in pairs, like before and after images.
Before and after what, was abundantly clear, for the left-hand page was completely free of void storms. They didn’t exist before, only after what the title referred to as:
THE GREAT STAR SHIFT
The two companions began to risk touching a few other volumes at random. It turned out there was nothing at all fragile about them. This time, it was preservation magic, just as Jett had suggested earlier. Enough to protect the books from just about anything short of wilful damage, fire or flood.
They adopted the policy of flicking through a few pages to try and gain an essence of what the book was about, before returning each one to the place they found it, just in case there was some kind of system in place that currently eluded them.
Ulvarius, evil tyrant though he was, had been right about this repository of knowledge. These books were definitely from a time more than a thousand years ago, before Year Zero, and it was obvious that they were describing a world that was very different to the one they knew.
“Lost world!” Cat blurted out, suddenly.
“Random,” Jett remarked.
“No, it’s not,” she refuted. “It’s the inscription on the door – The Lost World.”
“The world that was lost when the void storms began,” Jett realised. “The time of this Great Star Shift. I think you’re right.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” he continued. “That book of star charts is obviously from shortly after it happened, which, relatively speaking, probably makes it the most modern thing in this whole place!”
Catriona’s jaw dropped. She hadn’t thought of it like that. Calin’s Tower, overseas, was the foremost public library of knowledge in the whole world. It was about a hundred and fifty years old. Some of the books in the Black Tower’s library dated back four centuries. But this book of thousand-year-old star charts, was probably the most modern thing here. Overcome by the enormity of it, she had to sit down for a moment to catch her breath, cradling the precious book of star charts in her hands.
Some of the books they opened had hastily written notes on the inside cover. The meaning wasn’t always clear, but the tone was one of urgency.
While Catriona puzzled over that, Jett explored further until he came across another door, identical to the one through which they had entered.
According to Ulvarius’ map there was only one entrance, but then, he supposed, having found one, since he couldn’t get in, what would have been the point of searching any further?
“I wonder if it needs your staff to unlock it from the inside?” he said.
Cat heard him open it, which she supposed answered his question, but as he did so, he immediately screamed for help.
Thrusting the book into her pocket dimension, she rushed to his side, where she saw him frantically pushing against the door with all his strength, trying in vain to shut it while through the gap were half a dozen skeletal limbs, pushing back. She added her own weight to the door, desperate to get it to shut, while using woodshaper and stoneshaper in concert to try and seal the doorway shut. It wasn’t working, but it did buy time.
“The passage!” Jett gasped. “It’s full of undead creatures!” and by the looks of what was trying to squeeze through, it wasn’t just undead people, but animals, too.
All at once, Cat put it together. More than three hundred years ago, Ulvarius had come here, found the repository and tried to gain entry. He probably tried for a long time but ultimately, he was forced to give up. He laid waste to the entire town, not only in revenge, but also to prevent knowledge of either the repository itself or his failure, from spreading. But, having a penchant for creating undead creatures, he hadn’t wasted the living resources. He had kept them here on guard, just in case anybody else ever found the place. Until now, Cat and Jett had got lucky – because the maps weren’t entirely clear, they had found a second entrance that Ulvarius didn’t know about. But as soon as Jett opened the door they had been left to guard, all the undead had reanimated almost immediately, and set about following their three-hundred-year-old instructions to kill anyone they saw.
But there was no way that passage was large enough to accommodate the entire human and animal population of a town. So where were all the rest?
“The lake!” Cat cried out in realisation.
“Dear gods!” Jett caught on. “The Lake of Tears is full of the remains of people and animals from Ulvarius’ time. An undead army lying dormant…until now!”
“And we’ve woken them up! They’ll kill everyone up there! It’ll be a massacre, just like before!”
“What can we do?” Jett asked, desperately.
“How do people usually destroy the True Undead en masse?” Cat returned. “Holy Water!”
Clerics used it all the time. It wouldn’t destroy them by itself, but normally, it would weaken them to the point where conventional magic or steel could finish them off. But these weren’t just any undead, they were created by Ulvarius for the single-minded purpose of guarding this place for eternity. He would have made them to last. When Dreya took the Black Tower, she managed to wrest control of the undead guards from Ulvarius’ magic, but she didn’t destroy them.
In the years since, she had experimented on a few of them to find the best method of destroying them, should it ever be necessary and she had confirmed that Holy Water was the best way, although it took a long time.
“Exactly!” Jett shot back. “Know any clerics you can call on, quickly?”
“Not anymore,” Cat answered, sadly, thinking of Mandalee. Still, that thought triggered a memory. “But if I’m lucky,” she said. “If I’m really, really lucky…”
She opened her pocket dimension, closed her eyes and made a wish. If she was right, salvation would come to hand. If she was wrong, well, she supposed she could call Dreya. She might be able to get here in time to rescue her – she might even save Jett – but that wouldn’t help everyone else.
“Please let me be right!” she prayed.
She felt something fly into her hand, a small glass vial, and quickly closed her fingers around it. It was cold to the touch, she thought as she closed her pocket dimension, but she’d never felt anything more beautiful.
Catriona opened her eyes, daring to look.
“Yes!” she cried. She was right: she still had a single vial of water Blessed by Mandalee. Tears in her eyes, she brought it to her lips and kissed it. “Oh, Mandalee. Even now, you’re here for me. In spite of everything.”
“How’s that little thing going to help?” Jett demanded, trying to force the undead limbs back with his magic.
He was right. Time for sentiment later. Now the people of New Quernhow needed her to act.
“I have a ridiculous radical plan,” she told him, “and you’re going to hate me for it.”
“Why?”
“Because I already hate myself for thinking it!”
Even as she spoke, the door finally gave way, and undead by the dozen, the score, came pouring into the chamber. Jett fought them off with his magic as best he could, as they retreated through the alcove into the previous chamber, which Cat tried to block with an ice wall.
Knowing that wouldn’t hold them back for long, Cat’s mind was racing, trying to fill in the details. She needed to do something that had never been done before. Something clerics would say was blasphemy: replicate Holy Water. She could replicate regular water in her sleep, but Holy Water had to be Blessed by clerics. Or so they said. Cat didn’t believe it. There had to be a way.
“How does Holy Water work?” she pondered, mostly to herself. “Strip away the religion, and how does it physically work?”
Well, she considered, druid healing sometimes used water. For some infections, or for healing multiple patients at once. The magic was suspended in the water, so as the water penetrated the skin, so did the magic. Then that magic could draw the infection out of the body. Holy Water must do the same.
“The undead absorb the water, then the magic can get to work on them from the inside! You can call it a Blessing; you can call it anything you like. But it’s just magic at a particular frequency, to which the animation magic is susceptible.”
It was the same phenomenon that meant Mandalee’s magic caused Dreya pain. It wasn’t a matter of good magic versus evil magic. Magic wasn’t good or evil. Magic, like all power, like all knowledge, was neutral. It was the application that made it good or evil.
Dreya wasn’t evil, either, just because she was aligned with the Dark. The idea that Light was good, and Dark was evil was lazy thinking. There were many good deeds done in the shadows, and much evil done in the light of day.
The reason White-aligned cleric magic was painful to a Dark-aligned wizard was nothing more than a clash of incompatible frequencies. Like music that was full of discordant notes. Disharmonious.
“So? How does that help?” Jett demanded.
“It helps because now I know I can definitely do it and I hate myself even more!”
Her ice wall shattered under the relentless assault.
“Give them one last push with magic and then run out the door we came in!” Cat ordered. “On three…One…Two…Three!”
With their different magics, they created a powerful gust of wind that pushed the undead back about twenty feet. It also knocked over whole piles of books and papers that had stood undisturbed for a millennium. The companions ran for the door as fast as they could.
As Cat ushered Jett out, he cried out in warning, “Look out!”
Cat yelped as she felt something grab her ankle: it was a disembodied skeletal hand. She tried to strike it with her staff, but it wasn’t enough to make it let go. “Get ready to close the door!” she yelled. She had an idea, but they needed to be fast.
The druidess quickly shifted to falcon form, leaving the hand nothing to hold onto, and flew out before it could try again. Jett slammed the door shut as she shifted back, staff in hand. Pressing her palm against the wooden door, she closed her eyes and spoke softly to the spirits of that place.
“You recognised me, or my staff, or something, before. Please recognise it again and seal this door.” To her relief, the mechanism clicked into place. “Thank you, and I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Jett was distraught at the thought of the undead on the rampage in there, tearing all that ancient knowledge to shreds. “You’re right, I hate this plan,” he told Cat.
The druidess shook her head. “Haven’t even started yet!”
“But you’ve got a way to get them out, right?” She didn’t reply. “Right?” he tried again, desperately.
She couldn’t even look him in the eye as she said, “I’m sorry.”
Chapter 23
Without another word, Catriona shifted to falcon form and flew away. Jett could levitate himself out the way they came, but she didn’t have time to wait for him. As she flew up and over the lake, she could see how the water was already churning as the undead stirred and began to rise from their aquatic bed. The people of the village, seeing what was happening, began screaming and running away from the lake. Now that they been awakened, the undead would kill every last person, just as Ulvarius ordered three centuries ago. Others would come; other settlers, friends and relatives, and the undead would kill them, too.
More than likely, some people would escape, but the undead could be very literal when it came to following orders. If they had been told to kill anyone with knowledge of this place, they would hunt down those who escaped. When the undead reached the next town, they would have no way of knowing who the escapees might have told, so they would slaughter the whole town, just in case, and use their innate magic to turn many of those people into True Undead, like them. Thus, their numbers would swell as they spread like a plague to overrun more and more settlements.
And Catriona knew all those deaths would be her fault because she woke them up. Jett may have opened the door, but he never would have been there if not for her. She couldn’t let this happen. She had to stop it here and now.
Staying in her falcon form, then, she caused the water around the edge of the lake to rise up into a cylinder of ice that would hopefully keep the village safe for a few moments, while she did what she had to do. Underground, the undead would try to escape the passage they were in, and no doubt, given time and their numbers, they would tunnel their way out. She wasn’t going to give them that time.
Coming to a halt, high above the Lake of Tears, she shifted back, standing on one of her Windy Steps. The undead were hacking at her ice wall and cracks were beginning to form. Given the size of the lake, there could be hundreds of undead down there, maybe thousands, and no wall of ice or even rock could stand against that for long, so she needed to hurry.
She focussed her magical senses on the vial of Holy Water in her hand, probing, analysing.
“Now, Blessed Alycia,” she said aloud, “I really need your help to save all these people. I need you to take my analysis of the water in this vial, and when I pour it into the lake down there, I need you to make all that water like this. This has to work. It will work.”
