Queen of the Dead Fortress

Author's note:

This is a classic example of how characters have a bigger say in writing the story than the author does. This did not go the way I expected.

On the other hand, I rather like the outcome I got.

I intend to continue this universe, if enough people like it.

Remember, dear readers, if you want more from any author, vote, and leave comments. Emails are also acceptable.

#

The way up the mountain was torturous and long, and their leader insisted they move fast during daylight hours and be established in camp well before sundown.

This gave Nathaniel a lot of time each evening to study, either as the sun was going down or by the waning light coaxed out of the old suncloth covering his hat.

The ancient tome he reverently unwrapped and rewrapped each evening was the last known book of The Wizards' Malefitorium, and was the main reason he was this expedition's healer/scribe.

The other fourteen members of the party, hunters and fighters and hardened rangers and temple looters, viewed him with an undisguised mixture of dismissive contempt and amused tolerance, most of them only accepting his presence because their employer demanded a written record of the journey.

The four fighters, members of the cockily swaggering hero class which had arisen since the time of the Wizards, treated him as a combination of weak younger brother and personal saga writer.

The only one who viewed him as a dangerous inconvenience, and made no secret of the fact, was Avisha, the notorious thief-assassin whose form-fitting, light-absorbing suede and rough silk clothes held more knives than a smithy and whose overt and violent femininity made everyone unbalanced and wary save her lover Borrum, a flint-faced warrior-tactician who was, as far as it was possible with such a disparate group of strong-willed individuals, their leader.

In truth, Nathaniel cared little for any of their opinions.

He was employed to do a job, and he conscientiously kept the expedition log every day, but he had accepted the position - in fact, secretly stacked the cards in his favour - because when they reached the long-abandoned fortress Graskan, he had to be there.

He had read and re-read the Wizards' Malefitorium many times already since inheriting it from his grandfather but he pored over its vellum pages with fresh interest now, looking for any clue, any hint of promise, that he hadn't already seen.

His luggage also contained scrolls and books which contained the common myths, stories and histories (and few enough clues to tell one from the other) about the fortress Graskan but it was the arcane Wizards' Malefitorium, written in an almost lost script, in a tongue nobody living knew how to pronounce, which their financier, and Nathaniel himself, believed to hold the best clues to the ancient stronghold of evil magic and worse men.

The fighters gave him a wide birth when he was studying it, the rangers made warding signs to his face and Avisha's normal cold contempt flared into hot hostility.

Only the rigidly disciplined Borrum made no sign that he distrusted the last remaining remnant of the lore which had lain waste to the land centuries ago.

Even common peasant tricks like Nathaniel's suncloth hat, and even his healing arts, were viewed askance in the book's company.

A week into the journey, Borrum had drawn Nathaniel aside one night and quietly requested that he do his studying in his tent from then on.

Nathaniel had, mostly, complied.

It suited him to be by himself anyway, away from the illiterate, muscle-bound or professionally cruel men and woman of action. Lying in his tent, alone with the book, he could ignore them and even drown out the rhythmic grunting and slapping sounds of Borrum and Avisha having sex in their tent and the nightly token and cautious ribald comment from one of the heroes.

When they had climbed far enough for the trees to be thinning out, they were attacked as the dark closed in.

The invaders were the short, stunted and ugly but strong remnants of the mountain orcs who had served the old masters of fortress Graskan, and had not the wit to fashion bows or throw their spears.

Facing the experience of the expedition and Borrum's organisation, half of them had fallen to ranger arrows and two even to Avisha's thrown knives before they came within striking distance. The heroes, finally showing the skill they were hired for, made short work of any who came through the ranger's arrows and close to the fires.

Borrum and the others, standing as the second line, didn't even need to raise their swords and the only wound sustained by a member of the group was a nasty gash on the upper arm of the hero Doman, who fought with a wickedly curved blade in each hand and had dispatched five of the orcs.

Crouching behind the fighters, grasping his staff in one white-knuckled hand and praying that he would not need it, Nathaniel had unconsciously clasped the Wizards' Malefitorium in his other hand and been shocked to his core when it seemed to move, squirming as though waking up and sending a pulse up his arm that left it tingling several moments after he had snatched his hand away.

He was still staring in disbelief at his hand when the heroes bellowed for healing. Shaking himself violently, he bundled the Wizards' Malefitorium in it's wrappings as he hurried to give aid.

The wound on Doman's arm had not impeded his ability to behead the orc who gave it to him and would heal well enough with a rough bandage, but Nathaniel had been better trained than that. He set about cleaning it with boiled water and a splash of quatro-distilled Vodka that made Doman's jaw clench hard enough to make the veins in his neck stand out.

The hero refused to let Nathaniel sew the edges of the wound together, so he used a small amount of a very precious powder which fused the two halves.

Borrum let him finish with Doman and then ordered the company into a guarded circle.

"Cleric," he said bluntly. "Start talking."

"Orcs," Nathaniel started, equally bluntly. "They have survived the centuries, but they are diminished. In the days of the Wizards, they were larger, smarter, faster.

"It has always been known that remnants survived around all the old fortresses, and philosophers have argued about what this means about the nature of magic. We still have a week's march to get to the fortress Graskan. We may encounter larger and more deadly orcs before we reach it."

There was a brief moment's silence before the ranger Cilar slowly asked "There is more magic, near the fortress?"

"That is what we think," Nathaniel replied. "Before us, nobody has ever visited an intact fortress, but we know that all the destroyed fortresses have orcs and other magical beings inhabiting the upper slopes of their mountains."

"Cleric," Doman said, in a careful voice, "my arm is nearly healed."

It took several seconds for the implications of this to seep into the other's minds and when it did, Borrum almost had to restrain Avisha from killing the cleric where he sat.

Clerics know many charms of healing, of cleansing and of reviving, but although they do make wounds heal faster and bones knit straighter, they are not so effective that the poor suffer from not being able to afford a cleric's services.

To have a deep wound almost healed meant magic, and none of them could entirely restrain the impulse to skewer a suspected wizard upon whatever weapon they held in their hand. Even Borrum had to exercise a great effort of will to prevent himself half drawing his sword.

Nathaniel simply sat and watched them calmly. He had been hoping fervently, since the expedition began, that he would begin to feel the magic as they ascended and had worked hard to ensure they viewed his knowledge and the Wizards' Malefitorium as vital to the success of their expedition.

None of them would turn back - greed and personal pride would see to that.

Finally, Borrum broke the tense silence. "Cleric," he said in a low growl. "I suspect you were expecting this. We need you, and so far you haven't shown me any cause to distrust you. But I will cut out your tongue if I need to.

"Now, everyone get to bed or on guard, and quick about it. We will need to be doubly alert from here on in."

Nathaniel went quietly to his tent, and wisely chose to read by the light of a candle.

The next day was hard. Swords were kept loose and bows were carried in hand. The rangers moved in a loose cloud about the body of the travellers, visible briefly on either side or ahead or sometimes behind but never seen. The heroes, used to charging at vaguely seen shapes among the trees, became jumpy and short-tempered until Borrum ran ahead and had a low word with one of the rangers.

From then on, they moved further out and were not seen.

They made camp before sundown and nobody was in a friendly mood - the heroes were grumpy and sullen, the rangers were withdrawn and kept apart, and the thieves and explorers were twitchy and nervous.

Nathaniel retired to his tent early and for once did not read the Wizards' Malefitorium before sleeping. He did, however, rest his head on it.

The next day he began to see flashes of familiarity in the land around them.

That day had set the standard for the days that followed. The second day, the trees thinned towards scrub and the rangers gave up hiding and spaced themselves around the party, within easy shouting range.

Nathaniel stopped reading the Wizards' Malefitorium each night, but he still slept with his head on it and each day the terrain became more and more familiar. As the nights passed, he began to dream but not to remember.

They were not attacked again, at night or during the day, but Nathaniel started seeing mounds of strange-shaped rock that he was almost sure were trolls that had lost their life as the magic faded.

Nobody relaxed their vigilance and nobody failed to react when, as they approached an overhanging cliff that hid the mountain above them from view, Nathaniel suddenly stopped and shouted a warning.

There was a very intense and very still moment before Borrum, very evenly, said "Cleric?"

Nathaniel had reacted from a feeling of sudden panic and could still feel a mixture of fear and helplessness that would have opened his bowels if it were not so faint.

He glanced around, not seeing a confirmation on anyone else's face - no surprise, no consternation, no superstitious fear of magic.

If there was magic here, only he could feel it.

Slowly, the answer began to shape itself in his head.

"We're near an old guard post," he said cautiously, feeling the hard certainty of personal knowledge where there should be only supposition.

"It may be inhabited and it may contain treasure."

That decided it for Borrum. "Where?" he asked bluntly.

Nathaniel turned, seeing the clues in the landscape slotting into place, knowledge that made his blood run cold.

Where had he read this? The Wizard's Malefitorium said nothing about guard posts with magical aura traps, and neither did any other record!

Nonetheless, the knowledge drew him and he headed off along the cliff face.

"This way," he said, only half sensing the rest of the party fan out around him.

The guard posts of the fortress Graskan were not made to be obvious and the keen eye of a ranger spotted the door almost before Nathaniel did.

He approached it as if in a dream, as the rest of the party divided their attention between the rocks and scraggly bushes around them and the height of the cliff face above them.

Nathaniel pressed on the rock around the door, finding ancient yet not eroded depressions in the rock, awakening ancient and faded magic.

The door started ponderously breaking open but stopped before it had cleared the lintel, the magic spent.

Now the entire party felt the excitement of incipient discovery mingled with the fear of ancient horrors, and blades were drawn and arrows nocked as the raiders, with pry bars and brute strength, forced the door open.

No light could be seen through the door, so torches were made and passed around. The station was not occupied and at first nobody could see any other door, until the entrance to a staircase was found hiding around a corner.

There were several rooms extending back into the cliff and one obvious common room. The stone was unnaturally smooth, prompting most of the party to make surreptitious peasant warding signs, but there was little left of any cloth and only a few wooden items, a table and several chairs, survived.

There was no armour and the only thing of interest was a scroll discovered in a stone alcove in one room. It was given to Nathaniel, but he absent-mindedly put it in his pouch for later study.

The cleric was feeling strange, a faint tingling in his hands and feet and a sense of dislocation which had started when he first felt the guard station's guarding wards and which seemed to be growing slowly stronger.

The staircase went steeply upwards and culminated in another stone door which was, thankfully, easier to open.

When they passed through they could see, looming on the horizon, growing from the mountain less than half a day's march away, the fortress Graskan.

They stood and stared at it in a mixture of awe and anger until Borrum quietly said "We sleep in the guard station tonight, and enter the fortress tomorrow. Get a move on, everyone."

They divided up the rooms among them, spacing themselves out for protection as well as for their first real taste of privacy since reaching the lower slopes of the mountain, and it was then Nathaniel remembered the scroll.

From the outside it simply looked like vellum that has survived longer than it should, with an ancient and cracking leather thong tied around it.

He untied it carefully, managing to keep it intact, and unrolled the vellum with gentle fingers.

Wrapped inside it there was a necklace consisting of a small ruby, cut without facets, mounted in silver and strung on a thin silver chain.

Nathaniel picked it up vaguely, his attention already on what was written on the single sheet of vellum.

His heart skipped a beat as he saw, written in the same dead script and tongue as the Wizards' Malefitorium, a spell to reveal the secrets of the fortress Graskan.

He picked up the sheet in shaking hands, forgetting that one of them was still holding the necklace, and read it through, his lips moving slightly as he almost sounded out the syllables.

Hidden behind the parchment, the ruby on the necklace began to glow softly but it is doubtful he would have noticed were it in plain view.

The sense of dislocation deepened, the tingling in his hands and feet growing to an itch through his entire body.

He raised his eyes, staring almost sightlessly at the far wall, looking, although he did not realise it, straight at the throne room of the Fortress Graskan.

The tingling became an identifiable sense of restlessness which centred on his belly and his hips and made him feel twitchy and impatient without knowing for what.

The wall he was staring at began to seem vaguely translucent and he caught fleeting glimpses as of shadows moving in its depths.

As he stared, transfixed, it seemed he could recognise shapes in the shifting play of light and shade and saw orcs over-running human armies and devouring the bodies.

He saw great mages unleashing fire and lightning upon their enemies, and foot-soldiers perishing in agony as the marrow in their bones turned to hot lead.

He saw slaves carrying huge dishes at lavish banquets and dancing girls in startling clarity as they writhed, dressed only in veils or in chains or in lengths of gossamer silk, their long legs and full, heavy breasts stirring passions he had rigidly controlled through all his years of study and left him aching for consummation.

At the head of the table he saw a mighty throne, and in the throne he saw a figure almost lost in the shadows, despite fire-light and torch-light shining on long calves, glinting off the angle of a naked thigh and caressing the slopes of richly curved breasts.

He saw the figure, whose head was lost in darkness, look directly at him from the depths of the stone and the spans of centuries, and catch and hold him with eyes glinting vivid green.

She raised one arm, long and slender, and beckoned, and in his mind he heard her say "Come to me,little boy, and be my slave."

He shuddered violently as he came inside his britches, and was asleep before he had finished shaking.

The morning was bright and the mountain air was clear and crisp, but Nathaniel's mind was none of those things.

He felt as though he had not slept at all and was troubled by vague recollections of dreams of warfare, of feasting and of frantic orgies, dreams which, no matter how hard he tried, yielded up no more details to his recollection.

Nonetheless, even he found it easy to maintain the brisk jog which Borrum set as they approached the fortress Graskan.

All but him moved in a semi-crouch, the rangers with arrows nocked to strings, the fighters with swords drawn and the thieves and explorers with staffs held ready or knives in hands.

They saw no movement, however, before they reached the sheer walls of the fortress - not even the scuttling of a lizard or fleeting shadow of a bird.

They stood a stone's throw from the fortress walls and stared up and about, momentarily at a loss.

"Well, cleric?" Borrum asked.

Nathaniel shook himself and stepped closer, eyes scanning, trying to dredge up every clue he had ever encountered.

The walls were nearly a bow-shot high and although they looked like rough-hewn granite they were smoother than glass, giving almost no resistance to the touch, and no seams visible anywhere.

As hard as he thought, his mind drew a blank on an entrance. Finally, he turned around.

"We look for a door," he said. "Then we try the grapples."

In the end, they did not need to debate how to get a grapple over the battlements. When they found the huge gates, stone banded with blackened iron, they found a small gate set into them. When Nathaniel tried the latch, it moved as though made yesterday.

The hero E'layor pulled him back so sharply his feet almost left the ground and the party scattered in a circle around the black opening into the fortress Graskan.

For a tense moment, there was no movement except the air.

"Torches," Borrum ordered, and the thief-explorer Carak sidled forwards along the wall, lit two torches quickly using flint and steel, and hurled one inside, waiting five heartbeats before hurling the other.

They all stared intently into the darkness, the rangers sighting along drawn arrows, before Borrum nodded curtly to the hero G'mor, who approached the door obliquely, slid inside with the door itself to his back and slid around it like a striking python, reporting quickly that no movement was visible.

The others entered in order of martial ability, those with spare hands carrying torches, and rapidly fanned out inside what turned out to be a huge, roofed-over space, the roof high above them and the walls disappearing into the gloom.

After terse words from Borrum the party split up, four groups each with one hero, one ranger and one thief headed out, leaving Borrum and Nathaniel alone by the doorway.

Nathaniel would much prefer to have been left alone.

Thinking was becoming difficult - despite the fact he had never been here, there was an air of familiarity overlaying everything and he was certain that whatever they discovered, he would already know.

His hand almost strayed to the necklace around his neck and he experienced a wrenching second of dislocation as his mind tried to think why he had put it on and, at the same time, tried to prevent him from realising that he had.