Thaumaturgical Fracas

by Michael Hanson

“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” — Niccolo Machiavelli

Pain.

Burning, throbbing, stabbing pain! For the briefest of moments Berrick almost passed out. He instinctively reached into the largest fold of his knee-length ebony robe, pulled out the single remaining pinch of his precious supply of Kreel dust and tossed it haphazardly into the air. The whirlwind of sparkling purple fire that had enveloped him upon entering the ancient chamber instantly dispersed.

The incredible pain quickly subsided into a barely endurable burning rash. A disorienting second of vertigo. Berrick found that he could once again think with rational clarity. The magical ambush had given him neither the time nor the opportunity for such luxury, and so he was now short his most powerful defense. One more handicap to take into account upon reaching his destination.

“Axiom. No plan survives contact with the enemy,” his ancient though still aggressively burly History Master had said with a bright smile. “Do not rely too heavily on pre-planned and outside resources. Field improvisational skills are all that distinguishes an accomplished spear carrier from an officer. Don’t ever forget this.”

Berrick bent over in the darkness and quickly found the small Felthfin lamp he’d dropped during the magical attack. The aged lamp’s sturdy Bleythien construction had proven true. There wasn’t as much as a scratch on its smooth, lacquered wooden sides. He lit it with a small sparking stone and trudged wearily to a small alcove on the far side of the empty and dusty chamber.

Berrick let a stray thought slip out of his well-ordered concentration for a moment and briefly wished he could have summoned the Aulumbra Flame. The magical illuminant would have been much more dependable than the lamp. “Wishes are for lovers and Faeries!” he chided himself by rote. “Expect the inevitable, embrace the unexpected, befriend your enemy.”

The mantra had a calming effect on the young mage and he quickly reevaluated his Thaumic reserves. All twenty -four of them had drawn nearly lethal draughts of raw power from the large Leasthil crystal before entering those horrid pipes so many hours ago. The heavy press of traps and natural obstacles, though, were causing a steady drain on his reserves. He would have to discipline his expulsions to a smaller degree. For now he must suffer the weak light of his lamp.

Berrick quickly examined his pale, slender body to find the only damage was a small, circular first-degree burn scar centered on his broad forehead. He quickly sorted out some medicinal salve amongst his meager supplies and rubbed it gently into the wound. He grimaced for a moment and then pushed the pain to some dark corner of his mind. There was no time for such weakness.

He estimated that there were still around two miles left to traverse amidst this maze of ancient, crumbling corridors and long-abandoned trap spells. He glanced down at the school’s talisman that hung from a worn leather thong looped around his wrist. It was a six-inch long cylinder composed of overlapping layers of sky iron, silver and pyrite. It was imbedded with one hundred shiny sand-grain sized rubies around its lower base. The talisman displayed the Amaethon school’s ivory falcon outline and sported a large diamond that jutted out of the opposing end. Right now the diamond was glowing a bright yellow.

“Sunrise,” he assessed. “I’ve less than a day.”

Berrick sucked on a small strip of jerky, gulped down the last of his water ration and quickly strode out of the ancient chamber, his mind flooding all the while with dozens of attack scenarios. A small, unheeded thought in the back of his mind briefly flicked across his consciousness: “How many of the others are still alive?”

Janeel sucked the last drop of resin from the Leece pod before spitting it out and walking towards the carved stone archway at the other end of the dark hallway. The walls were covered with a thick fungus that radiated a pale, phosphorescent glow that Janeel’s Leece-enhanced physiology found more that sufficient to see with. She took scant notice of the skeletal remains of animals and humans that lay strewn upon the floor like so much dust and litter. The crumbling parchment of the catacomb map that Berrick had so painstakingly deciphered for them had led her to this series of halls. The doorway and the stairwell up ahead were the only ways forward in this maze.

The long, slow, ever-present boil of Janeel’s anger experienced a quick rumble of turbulence at the effrontery of this obstacle. She visibly struggled for a second before making a decision: “The doorway,” she fumed and arrogantly strode forward.

The added sensitivity and speeded-up reflexes afforded by the rare drug she had been ingesting began to stream through her consciousness as soon as she entered the pitch-dark cavern. An incredibly fine breeze told her the size and shape of the room, and her hypersensitive olfactory organs warned her of the impending danger in a total darkness that would have left others blind and helpless. A feral grin graced Janeel’s face as a strange tearing sound announced the attack. She ducked and rolled under the outflung mesh.

The Leece resin was flowing freely through her arteries, and her heart beat like a huge iron hammer inside her chest. Berrick had warned her several times about the long-term cardiovascular drawbacks in using the drug.

“But hot damn I’m doing just fine!” she exulted.

Janeel spun out a brief glyph in the air with her left hand and the telltale white flash of the Aulumbra Flame briefly illuminated the huge cavern. For the longest of seconds Janeel’s burning anger turned to ice. A giant spider, almost ten feet in diameter, was rapidly climbing down a patchwork of webs the size of tree trunks. Its eyes were a luminous green and as large as a pair of full-grown Mara fruit. Its mandibles were the size of Janeel’s arms, and it was covered with a rancid, grey fuzz. With a wince of disgust Janeel saw that it had six articulated legs that each ended in a deadly looking set of pincer claws. For a moment she wondered if she had finally met her match. This monster was deadlier than anything she had thus far come upon. A brief image of Zenael, her deceased Sensei, flashed before her eyes.

“No“ she thought, “I’m not done yet.”

With twin eyes of jagged ice she greeted the onrushing juggernaut. Without another moment’s notice she acted.

“Krasschtokkth!” Janeel grunted harshly. Instantly her skin began to rupture all over the surface of her body. Thick, cylindrical branches exploded out of her shoulders and hips. Her skull split in half and gave birth to a long, green stalk. By some miracle none of this mutilation shed a single drop of blood. A moment later it was finished.

The giant spider stopped moving when it reached the floor of the chamber and it commenced to trap Janeel in a storm of thick, steely webbing. As quick as it would spin out these deadly threads Janeel ripped them off her body with her long, sharp forelimbs and devoured them.

Janeel’s hunger was all-consuming, and she began to eat the webbing at a faster rate than the spider could produce it. Too late in realizing its doom, the spider turned around to escape. It was halfway up the latticework of webs when Janeel closed in. The spider turned one final time and attacked Janeel’s eyes with venom-dripping mandibles. It was no contest.

Janeel leaned back on her powerful hind legs, snatched up the giant spider in her barbed forelimbs, and ate it in a matter of seconds. She quelled a strong instinctive desire to hunt down and devour the spider’s offspring and climbed back down the webbing to the floor.

Upon completion of a successful retransformation Janeel strode out of the cavern and immediately threw up. A few gut-wrenching heaves later, she collapsed against the glowing corridor wall and tried to concentrate on her mission. The school Talisman told her it was getting near midmorning.

“I’ve less than a day,” she chided herself with newborn anger, “and I’ve got to try to conserve more power!” The Necromantic Surgery had drained over half of her Thaumic reserves. Janeel rubbed her upset stomach and gritted her teeth with dark emotion. She knew she had no choice in this contest. It had required a physical solution to defeat the blasphemous creature, and she had acted in kind. A Preying Mantis seemed the best idea. Janeel rubbed the Talisman against the rocklike calluses on her hands.

“If only one of us can get close enough,” Janeel thought to herself and grinned savagely. “Then maybe Derth’s cunning smith work and Berrick’s genius can be put to the test. Devlon must pay for his crimes!”

Janeel slowly stood up. She wondered briefly if the plan would actually work. She knew only one answer to this.

“Duty!” her mind hissed fiercely. The Masters’ murder was an unforgivable sin. Honor demanded retribution. The King of Gwydionn and his cowardly court hand turned their backs on the whole matter.

“More worried about potential peasant uprisings and new ways to spend the tax levies than anything else!” Janeel had raged to the others after the funeral.

She had been the first to enter the Masters’ sacred and off-limits bedchambers that morning so long ago. The screams of terror and pain had awakened the entire school. Though her student bunkhouse was nearly a third of a league away, Janeel sprinted ahead of all the others to answer the death cries. Her strong, powerful legs covered the distance in a matter of moments. Hundreds of hours of training with the combat Sensei had given her a body unequaled in stamina and skill. Upon entering the first set of rooms it was impossible for her to differentiate one piece of ripped, shredded flesh from another. All of them. All fifty Masters and Sensei were dead. Janeel had run rampant through all of the chambers but could not a trace of the assassins.

For a week the school was like some giant dragon whose head had been cut off but whose body wouldn’t die. A mass burial was held in the campus courtyard. Berrick, the oldest and most experienced student in what was to have been the next graduating class, personally led the digging party that uprooted the dozens of exotic flowers and plants that had once been the Masters’ pride and joy. The thousand and more students, disciples and mages mourned openly.

Janeel remembered King Dagda personally promising that the murderers would be quickly brought to justice. Promises! The king cared little for the Amaethon School. Its potential to undermine his authority with free, open education for the masses had made it a most unpopular topic in court. Janeel and the other mages knew that the king’s promises were the stuff of wishful daydreams. Substanceless. It would be up to the school to exact retribution.

Janeel stumbled toward the stairway directly across from the room she had just battled in. The Massacre of the Masters had given her a purpose, a calling like no other. The flame of selfish, and unfulfilled revenge flared brilliantly in her mind and sustained an exhausted psyche that in any other would have signaled total and unmitigated defeat. She had a date with a Master Sorcerer.

Derth stretched his thick arms and instantly dozens of corded muscles snapped with unbridled tension along his broad shoulders.

“Thank you, sinews,” Derth’s voice boomed out in a barely suppressed chuckle. “It would shame me to think you had all fallen asleep!” This he followed with a deep roar of laughter which echoed unanswered back and forth between the walls. For a few seconds it seemed the catacomb was full of laughing, cheering Derths, and this thought brought a wide, cheerful grin to the big man’s face. He walked around another of the endless turns under this level of Devlon’s home fortress.

Ever the craftsman, Derth carried a small mirrored candle lamp of his own construction before him. By an ingenious trick of the two dozen fingernail-size mirrors placed strategically around the inner side of the small, hand-sized lamp, the candle’s luminosity was increased twelve fold!

“So I can brighten up these dreary walls with more than my exceptional wit and exceeding goodwill,” Derth thought smugly before bellowing out another round of laughter.

The thought that someone or something might hear his voice and so discover and possibly even ambush him never entered his mind. Or rather, Derth’s confidence in his own abilities to counteract any such attack was even more inflated than his broad sense of humor. Besides, his laughing, innocent voice had drawn out more than its share of blasphemous and gullible assassins since he entered the tubes. Who would fear attacking a fool who so openly announces his presence?

Derth raised his left hand and wiped the sweaty palm on his light, red tunic (the only thing he wore over his short but incredibly muscular dark brown body).

For a moment Derth frowned. “I wonder if many have made it this far,” he thought. “The law of averages must certainly be against it.” Suddenly his trademark grin returned with vigor. “But if all has gone according to plan,” Derth laughed out to the air, “no one up there is even aware of us!”

His laughter echoed for several minutes this time before dying out. The long-abandoned and untended castle sewage system had served its purpose well. The only drawbacks were the sickening stench and large rats. Derth had just accepted these problems as one more obstacle in the circus of life. Derth drowned out his doubts with reams of laughter. He felt everything had to work out in the end.

He remembered when the surviving two score searchers had made it to the base of Mount Bran. Mixed tears of sorrow and accomplished joy streamed down Derth’s eyes as he hugged his classmates and companions for possibly the last time. The main sewer tunnel branched off from nearly two hundred separate man-made channels. Berrick decided that every searcher would traverse an individual tube alone. Each of the mages would be on their own until the final moment of attack.

Derth turned another corner along the endless corridor and found himself entering a large, damp, empty hall. The dank, musky walls seemed to reach up to infinity as they lost themselves in shadow. A sharp pain on his ankle made him look down quickly. He picked the tiny creature off of his leg for a cursory inspection. It was an inch and a half long and constructed of transparent Quartz.

It closely resembled an ant. Derth tilted his head back to laugh at the ridiculousness of such an obviously underqualified guardian monster when a slight scratching sound caught his ear. Fighting down a sudden intuitive panic he lifted his lamp above his head and quickly scanned the room. Hundreds of the quartz ants were pouring from the walls to surround him. Their razor-sharp mandibles would butcher him in seconds!

To be continued...