chapter 5
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Cantrip stumbled blindly through the darkness, guided by the feeble light of the lantern. In this choking blackness, the lantern was trying its best to shine, and failing miserably. The darkness closed in from all around like a gigantic black hand, squeezing out all traces of light and happiness from its death-like grip. The lantern managed to produce a half-hearted glow, which stuttered and died after three feet.
He was in a narrow corridor, with stone walls on each side. Cantrip ran his tatooed left hand against the walls. The stone felt damp and slippery, and several generations of green-coloured moss seemed to have made themselves comfortable here. Behind Cantrip, Seraph shuffled along cautiously, occasionally pausing to scrape a mark on the walls.
There was a faint light from ahead.
The corridor opened into a large underground chamber. Right in the middle of the dome-shaped ceiling was a large opening, where faint beams of sunlight were streaming down.
This wasn't real sunlight, of course: they were too far underground for that. This was recycled sunlight, the equivalent of last night's leftovers reheated in a microwave. This was light that had been rejected by everybody else above ground, and had crawled downwards dejectedly until it reached this chamber. There were bits of other lights in there, too: dirty lights from the grimy street lanterns, the pitiful glow of discarded candles, the low-grade light when rubbish is burned. All of them swirled and mixed, and now came streaming down into the chamber that Cantrip and Seraph had just stumbled into.
Strangely enough, someone had taken the trouble to draw a lot of complex runes on the floor. Magical looking alphabets formed a circle around the center of the room, and glowered menacingly like very tiny and squiggly dogs, daring all intruders to step past them. In the middle of the circle was a girl, gagged and tied to what appeared to be, for all intents and purposes, a nondescript looking metal pole that had been impaled into the ground.
Whoever planted the pole there must have really really wanted it to stay planted, because it had been slammed in with such force that large cracks spread from the point of impact, and snaked across the ground for several feet.
Cantrip stepped forward gingerly. The girl appeared to be unconscious. Now, it is a well known fact that fashion and logic do not always go together, but in fantasy worlds, they don't just NOT go together, they appear to reside on opposite ends of a very large planet. In other words, people often dress very insensibly in fantasy settings. Skimpy leather clothes are just the tip of the iceberg: there were the funny wizard robes, all that impossibly heavy platemail, the ridiculously pointy shoes, et cetera, et cetera.
In this case, the girl was dressed in, of course, skimpy leather clothes. Revealing skimpy leather clothes, in fact. So revealing that Seraph was staring in her direction several seconds longer than strictly necessary. Cantrip coughed.
"Erm. Yes?" muttered Seraph, reluctantly drawing his eyes away.
"Shall we go rescue her, or what? Or are you gonna stand here and stare all day?" chided Cantrip.
"Righto. You'd better go first, I have this allergy to menacing-and-possibly-fatal-looking rune circles that just sit there in the dark."
Cantrip grumbled and strode towards the circle.
* * * * *
Nearby and in the darkness, a very unlucky rat scampered across the floor. Something rather bigger than any rodent stirred in the shadows. There was a surprised squeak, and then a wet sound that sounded suspiciously like a rat being stepped on by something really heavy.
Two eyes appeared in the pitch blackness. They glowed red, and burned with hatred.
* * * * *
Cantrip poked the runes suspiciously. They appeared to have no function other than to remain firmly painted to the floor. Also, the words appeared to have been written using either very red and sticky ink, or the blood of some unknown beast (or possibly, some unfortunate person). However, Cantrip remembered stories from the streets of incredibly powerful wards that instantly fried anyone foolish enough to step across them.
To be safe, Cantrip's hand searched the floor for a loose stone. He took a deep breath, then threw the stone a short distance across the runes.
There was a sound like thunder, and rubble started falling like brown rain onto the chamber. The stone landed inside the circle without further incident, but something else appeared to have ripped a hole in one of the chamber walls.
Cantrip turned. Seraph was already moving towards him, daggers drawn.
In the broken masonry stood a figure, with what seemed like very large spikes coming out of its back and shoulders. It also appeared to be made out of metal, with sinews of steel and a face that looked like it had been rather painfully dipped inside a vat of molten iron. The only detail visible through the dust and darkness were the eyes, burning red and staring straight at Cantrip.
The metallic figure moved with impossible speed. It shot forward through the dust, charging straight for Cantrip. The air rippled in his wake, and dust was sucked into the vortex created by the sudden burst of speed. There was a mini sonic boom as sound struggled to catch up with the rapidly accelerating metal monster. In a single second, it had covered almost half the distance to Cantrip...
...Seraph's body slammed into Cantrip, and they rolled past the runes and into the circle...
...as the monster shot past, still accelerating. It was now moving too fast to slow down, and crashed into the wall on the opposite side of the chamber, blowing a crater in solid rock. More rubble rained down from the ceiling, and huge cracks appeared on every wall of the chamber. The ceiling rocked ominously, as chunks of rock were dislodged and crashed onto the chamber floor.
The figure climbed out of the crater and spun to face Seraph. It was murderously silent, quite likely because its mouth appeared to be fused shut. Cantrip grunted in pain on the floor. The creature flexed its muscles, then accelerated forward again.
Seraph twisted his body and hurled the daggers, then in one fluid motion drew his sword and spun into the defensive stance of a baseball batter: in this case, it involved a very large, very fast and very SPIKY ball.
The creature roared and slammed into the circle as time seemed to slow down...
...Seraph swung, and the blade sailed in the air with a funky 'whoooooomph' sound...
...Cantrip shut his eyes as a huge ball of dust that had been trailing behind the creature engulfed the circle...
...more rocks were falling from the ceiling...
...and something snapped.
Cantrip heard something clattering onto the floor nearby. He opened his eyes and saw the upper half of Seraph's blade, significantly missing its lower half. He looked up..
Two daggers lay on the floor some distance behind, where they had bounced harmlessly off the creature upon impact. Inside the circle, Seraph had swung the blade directly at the creature's throat: any normal person would have been instantly decapitated by such a blow, but the creature's metal skin had deflected the blow and snapped the blade in half. However, the blow had been strong enough to stop the creature dead in its tracks and slam it into the floor. A thin drizzle of dust fell on the stunned creature.
Seraph was breathing heavily, clutching half a blade. The creature rose, and hurled one spiky steel fist right into his chest...
...there was a crack of bones breaking, and Seraph flew across the chamber, spinning several times in the air, crashed into the wall and slid motionless onto the floor. The creature turned its maddened eyes to Cantrip, who appeared to be in shock. Cantrip scrambled to his feet, and leapt out of the circle, landing heavily and rolling. He felt a strange sensation of dread, and then the shadows came alive.
Shapes erupted from the darkness: curling tendrils snaked along the walls, a pair of shadows (shaped suspiciously like giant hands) shot across the floor, and other shapes shifted uneasily in the dark, subtly suggesting that pain and suffering is quite likely to be experienced by somebody in the near future. Once again, Cantrip felt like he was falling...
...and falling...
In his distorted vision, everything appeared blurred and tinged with pink. Everything in the chamber appeared to be moving extremely slowly: every particle of dust, every falling rock, turned slowly in the air. Except the purplish shadows, writhing and twisting in his eyes.. these were moving faster than normal, and every shadow was converging on the bluured image of the metallic figure...
...the monster raised one hand and drew a complicated pattern in the air...
... and the runewords lit up, each one sending shafts of light screaming towards the collapsing ceiling. The circle was soon lost from sight in the brilliant columns of pure light, and the shadows screamed and circled, but were unable to pass through...
...larger chunks of the ceiling were falling now, coming apart in slow motion...
...and the light exploded outwards...
Cantrip was hurled across the chamber by the blast, landing in a crumpled heap on the other side. The air smelled like burning solder, and his vision was returning to normal now, as more rocks fell. The chamber was imploding, with an ring of dust rapidly expanding outwards from where the circle used to be. There was no sign of the metallic attacker, and the girl appeared to have vanished as well. The runes were scorched black, wifts of smoke rising from each one.
Cantrip pulled himself up and dashed across the chamber as another boulder made a large dent on the floor. He had to find Seraph.... and THERE, covered by dust and pebbles, he saw a motionless body. Cantrip rushed forward, ducking under more falling stones, hurled Seraph over his frail shoulders, and dashed for the doorway. He was fueled by desperation now, and managed to break into a run with Seraph over his shoulders despite vehement protests from his legs and shoulders.
As he ran down the corridor, the chamber's ceiling came down. There was a sound like tectonic plates colliding, and a loud, dull roar as an explosion of dust rocketed down the narrow corridor. Cantrip ran on and on through the darkness.
He reached the stairs and raced upwards two steps at a time, and came to the closed trapdoor. He desperately slammed into the trapdoor, but it remained stubbornly closed. The walls were shuddering now, and he could see clouds of dust screaming through the corridor and up the stairwell. His eyes flew around desperately, found a lever, and pulled.
The trapdoor burst open, and Cantrip clambered out. The dust exploded out of the opening with a loud whooshing noise, and then Cantrip collapsed, exhausted.
next chapter
Cantrip stumbled blindly through the darkness, guided by the feeble light of the lantern. In this choking blackness, the lantern was trying its best to shine, and failing miserably. The darkness closed in from all around like a gigantic black hand, squeezing out all traces of light and happiness from its death-like grip. The lantern managed to produce a half-hearted glow, which stuttered and died after three feet.
He was in a narrow corridor, with stone walls on each side. Cantrip ran his tatooed left hand against the walls. The stone felt damp and slippery, and several generations of green-coloured moss seemed to have made themselves comfortable here. Behind Cantrip, Seraph shuffled along cautiously, occasionally pausing to scrape a mark on the walls.
There was a faint light from ahead.
The corridor opened into a large underground chamber. Right in the middle of the dome-shaped ceiling was a large opening, where faint beams of sunlight were streaming down.
This wasn't real sunlight, of course: they were too far underground for that. This was recycled sunlight, the equivalent of last night's leftovers reheated in a microwave. This was light that had been rejected by everybody else above ground, and had crawled downwards dejectedly until it reached this chamber. There were bits of other lights in there, too: dirty lights from the grimy street lanterns, the pitiful glow of discarded candles, the low-grade light when rubbish is burned. All of them swirled and mixed, and now came streaming down into the chamber that Cantrip and Seraph had just stumbled into.
Strangely enough, someone had taken the trouble to draw a lot of complex runes on the floor. Magical looking alphabets formed a circle around the center of the room, and glowered menacingly like very tiny and squiggly dogs, daring all intruders to step past them. In the middle of the circle was a girl, gagged and tied to what appeared to be, for all intents and purposes, a nondescript looking metal pole that had been impaled into the ground.
Whoever planted the pole there must have really really wanted it to stay planted, because it had been slammed in with such force that large cracks spread from the point of impact, and snaked across the ground for several feet.
Cantrip stepped forward gingerly. The girl appeared to be unconscious. Now, it is a well known fact that fashion and logic do not always go together, but in fantasy worlds, they don't just NOT go together, they appear to reside on opposite ends of a very large planet. In other words, people often dress very insensibly in fantasy settings. Skimpy leather clothes are just the tip of the iceberg: there were the funny wizard robes, all that impossibly heavy platemail, the ridiculously pointy shoes, et cetera, et cetera.
In this case, the girl was dressed in, of course, skimpy leather clothes. Revealing skimpy leather clothes, in fact. So revealing that Seraph was staring in her direction several seconds longer than strictly necessary. Cantrip coughed.
"Erm. Yes?" muttered Seraph, reluctantly drawing his eyes away.
"Shall we go rescue her, or what? Or are you gonna stand here and stare all day?" chided Cantrip.
"Righto. You'd better go first, I have this allergy to menacing-and-possibly-fatal-looking rune circles that just sit there in the dark."
Cantrip grumbled and strode towards the circle.
* * * * *
Nearby and in the darkness, a very unlucky rat scampered across the floor. Something rather bigger than any rodent stirred in the shadows. There was a surprised squeak, and then a wet sound that sounded suspiciously like a rat being stepped on by something really heavy.
Two eyes appeared in the pitch blackness. They glowed red, and burned with hatred.
* * * * *
Cantrip poked the runes suspiciously. They appeared to have no function other than to remain firmly painted to the floor. Also, the words appeared to have been written using either very red and sticky ink, or the blood of some unknown beast (or possibly, some unfortunate person). However, Cantrip remembered stories from the streets of incredibly powerful wards that instantly fried anyone foolish enough to step across them.
To be safe, Cantrip's hand searched the floor for a loose stone. He took a deep breath, then threw the stone a short distance across the runes.
There was a sound like thunder, and rubble started falling like brown rain onto the chamber. The stone landed inside the circle without further incident, but something else appeared to have ripped a hole in one of the chamber walls.
Cantrip turned. Seraph was already moving towards him, daggers drawn.
In the broken masonry stood a figure, with what seemed like very large spikes coming out of its back and shoulders. It also appeared to be made out of metal, with sinews of steel and a face that looked like it had been rather painfully dipped inside a vat of molten iron. The only detail visible through the dust and darkness were the eyes, burning red and staring straight at Cantrip.
The metallic figure moved with impossible speed. It shot forward through the dust, charging straight for Cantrip. The air rippled in his wake, and dust was sucked into the vortex created by the sudden burst of speed. There was a mini sonic boom as sound struggled to catch up with the rapidly accelerating metal monster. In a single second, it had covered almost half the distance to Cantrip...
...Seraph's body slammed into Cantrip, and they rolled past the runes and into the circle...
...as the monster shot past, still accelerating. It was now moving too fast to slow down, and crashed into the wall on the opposite side of the chamber, blowing a crater in solid rock. More rubble rained down from the ceiling, and huge cracks appeared on every wall of the chamber. The ceiling rocked ominously, as chunks of rock were dislodged and crashed onto the chamber floor.
The figure climbed out of the crater and spun to face Seraph. It was murderously silent, quite likely because its mouth appeared to be fused shut. Cantrip grunted in pain on the floor. The creature flexed its muscles, then accelerated forward again.
Seraph twisted his body and hurled the daggers, then in one fluid motion drew his sword and spun into the defensive stance of a baseball batter: in this case, it involved a very large, very fast and very SPIKY ball.
The creature roared and slammed into the circle as time seemed to slow down...
...Seraph swung, and the blade sailed in the air with a funky 'whoooooomph' sound...
...Cantrip shut his eyes as a huge ball of dust that had been trailing behind the creature engulfed the circle...
...more rocks were falling from the ceiling...
...and something snapped.
Cantrip heard something clattering onto the floor nearby. He opened his eyes and saw the upper half of Seraph's blade, significantly missing its lower half. He looked up..
Two daggers lay on the floor some distance behind, where they had bounced harmlessly off the creature upon impact. Inside the circle, Seraph had swung the blade directly at the creature's throat: any normal person would have been instantly decapitated by such a blow, but the creature's metal skin had deflected the blow and snapped the blade in half. However, the blow had been strong enough to stop the creature dead in its tracks and slam it into the floor. A thin drizzle of dust fell on the stunned creature.
Seraph was breathing heavily, clutching half a blade. The creature rose, and hurled one spiky steel fist right into his chest...
...there was a crack of bones breaking, and Seraph flew across the chamber, spinning several times in the air, crashed into the wall and slid motionless onto the floor. The creature turned its maddened eyes to Cantrip, who appeared to be in shock. Cantrip scrambled to his feet, and leapt out of the circle, landing heavily and rolling. He felt a strange sensation of dread, and then the shadows came alive.
Shapes erupted from the darkness: curling tendrils snaked along the walls, a pair of shadows (shaped suspiciously like giant hands) shot across the floor, and other shapes shifted uneasily in the dark, subtly suggesting that pain and suffering is quite likely to be experienced by somebody in the near future. Once again, Cantrip felt like he was falling...
...and falling...
In his distorted vision, everything appeared blurred and tinged with pink. Everything in the chamber appeared to be moving extremely slowly: every particle of dust, every falling rock, turned slowly in the air. Except the purplish shadows, writhing and twisting in his eyes.. these were moving faster than normal, and every shadow was converging on the bluured image of the metallic figure...
...the monster raised one hand and drew a complicated pattern in the air...
... and the runewords lit up, each one sending shafts of light screaming towards the collapsing ceiling. The circle was soon lost from sight in the brilliant columns of pure light, and the shadows screamed and circled, but were unable to pass through...
...larger chunks of the ceiling were falling now, coming apart in slow motion...
...and the light exploded outwards...
Cantrip was hurled across the chamber by the blast, landing in a crumpled heap on the other side. The air smelled like burning solder, and his vision was returning to normal now, as more rocks fell. The chamber was imploding, with an ring of dust rapidly expanding outwards from where the circle used to be. There was no sign of the metallic attacker, and the girl appeared to have vanished as well. The runes were scorched black, wifts of smoke rising from each one.
Cantrip pulled himself up and dashed across the chamber as another boulder made a large dent on the floor. He had to find Seraph.... and THERE, covered by dust and pebbles, he saw a motionless body. Cantrip rushed forward, ducking under more falling stones, hurled Seraph over his frail shoulders, and dashed for the doorway. He was fueled by desperation now, and managed to break into a run with Seraph over his shoulders despite vehement protests from his legs and shoulders.
As he ran down the corridor, the chamber's ceiling came down. There was a sound like tectonic plates colliding, and a loud, dull roar as an explosion of dust rocketed down the narrow corridor. Cantrip ran on and on through the darkness.
He reached the stairs and raced upwards two steps at a time, and came to the closed trapdoor. He desperately slammed into the trapdoor, but it remained stubbornly closed. The walls were shuddering now, and he could see clouds of dust screaming through the corridor and up the stairwell. His eyes flew around desperately, found a lever, and pulled.
The trapdoor burst open, and Cantrip clambered out. The dust exploded out of the opening with a loud whooshing noise, and then Cantrip collapsed, exhausted.
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