by Sean Jones
in Issue 121, February 2022
“Does anyone see the paradox?” asked the black-haired man in the charred, quilted armor, the crossbowman who sat atop the vanquished lich’s white-marble bier. He gestured with his pine-pitch torch, brandishing the only source of illumination in the half-dome of the sepulcher, the floor’s scattered gems winking in reply.
A pile of treasure to shame an emperor, he thought. Baubles and trinkets hardly worth the cost in lives to obtain.
“Here we sit, amidst a grotesque hoard of treasure but locked in the fiend’s underground bower. Do you smell the irony?”
It was the blonde in lavender brigandine and lilac breeches who answered. “Krenthellor, irony is quite the fashionable fragrance these days. It’s nearly as faddish as the scent of staying alive.” She leaned against the alabaster wall in a rare spot unmarred by burn-marks. Glynnys kept her weight off her swollen knee while she sharpened a stiletto with a whetstone. “We should tend to our wounds.”
“I am an excellent tender of wounds, Glynnys,” said Tato-Na, the destiny-shaper, the tiny man bedecked in motley lizards’ skins and a necklace of cats’ skulls. He cleared his throat and half-sang, half-hummed, in reply. “I am excellent and tender.”
“I may accept that offer, Tato,” she said, “in the tall, soft grass on the left bank of the River Rohon under the high bridge at noon on the third day of the High Holy Feast of It Matters Not Because We Will Never Leave This Dungeon Alive,” but she smiled as she said it.
Krenthellor waved his torch in a slow circle. “Tato-Na, is there no thaumaturgy you might fashion to improve our plight?”
“I am depleted. As a sapling dies in the shade of a cleft, my potency will perish in this cave of gloom. With no sun, no moon, no stars to shine upon my brow, my might will wither, as will we all. We must escape this labyrinth and walk below a sky not shaped of stone.” He glanced toward the lady and arched his eyebrows, grimaced at the pain the gesture seemed to cause. The small man crossed the circular room, his bare feet scattering coins of gold, specie of silver, multitudes of bronzes and coppers, the ossified ornaments about his neck clack-clacking in syncopation to the jingle of metals underfoot. He navigated around the singed bodies of the fallen jungle-warrioress and her war-chimp but stumbled over the incinerated body of Waldrin, the axe-wielder.
Hopping across the treasure-littered floor, the blonde in lavender moved swiftly, catching the fortune-forger before he fell.
The ordeals from which she’s saved him have made the Glynnys adopt – perhaps love – him, thought Krenthellor.
Gently, the lady dagger-wielder lowered the destiny-sculptor to a bench. She shook her head and looked at the prone and dead axe-man. “How can we speak glibly of dalliances on the lawn when our comrades in arms lie in this very crypt?”
“Gallows humor is sometimes comforting, Glynnys,” said Krenthellor. He winced and touched his ribs where his quilted armor had been rent by the talons of the lich’s proxy-demons and by the abomination’s own skeletal fingers. “You are right, though. We should tend to our –”
Staring at fallen Waldrin, Glynnys interrupted him. “My mien has changed. We must find a way to flee this cell before it becomes our mausoleum. My fealty will not let me accept defeat. Mistress Malene will grant a boon.”
Krenthellor stifled a chuckle. Faith in concocted deities.
He gestured toward Glynnys with the torch. “Can you find a petard to knock a hole in a wall? Discover some mystical talisman to summon a mattock-wielding colossus to dig us out?” If we fail to escape, he thought, the question is moot, but does the object of my years of questing – does the elixir reside inside this chamber?
“Tame yourself, Kren,” said Glynnys, flipping her blonde pony-tail over her shoulder. “Sarcasm won’t spring us. The lich may have left us an exit. Wouldn’t that be … what’s the word? … ironic?”
Her tongue is more pointed than her daggers, thought Krenthellor.
Tato-Na croaked as he spoke. “The hellion’s bones do not rest alone. We were not the first to pierce the lich-gate. Nor were we the original blasphemers of the villain’s vault. Perhaps the soulless sleeper’s previous visitors were more prepared than we –”
“Unlikely. They’re all dead, Tato,” said Glynnys. She tested her wounded leg and found it unable to bear weight.
The bantam kismet-twister said, “Our predecessors would have anticipated the sealing of the grave’s portal behind them – though it stoppered us. They would have equipped themselves with a means of egress.”
Krenthellor said, “Legends suggest the slayer of a lich will take the place of the slain. Some uncanny enchantment sucks the spirit of the living and imbues it into the skull of the fallen.” I hope to hope it is not the elixir I seek that makes such a fate befall the drinker. “Who can say such has not happened here, through the eerie weird that governs the place?”
“I can say we have food and water for two or three days now that we’re three people,” Glynnys said. “We’ll survive a half-fortnight – perhaps – hungry and thirsty. We could set fire to whatever wood remains in the chamber. We’d have light to witness each other expire.”
Tato-Na spoke. “More gallows humor? If it comes to that, we shall burn what we must. I agree we may be here long. But, perhaps, save one or two barrels for commodes?”
“The funerary box where the lich lies should do as a latrine,” Krenthellor said.
“Hilarious,” said Glynnys, frowning, tightening her purple silk belt, peering at the heaps and mounds of jade and exotically fashioned and carved ingots and jewels and bracelets and pendants aglint, the knife-priestess glancing at the chests and casks, reliquaries and phylacteries, clay jars of unknown contents, piles and stacks of tomes and scrolls, twinkling argent mintage and bits and halves and full-coins of gilt. “I feel the key that opens the lock – physically or metaphorically – may lie here, Malene be praised, Malene be revered. While we wait for another party of fools to trip headlong into this pitfall – however long that may be – let’s be industrious.”
“Will it be fools who come?” asked Krenthellor. “Aren’t you praying for members of your own persuasion to find us?”
“Malene willing.”
“Do you deny you told your prelate about our plan to venture here after we swore secrecy?”
“Consider your words, scholar Krenthellor,” said Tato-Na. “Let us pray – pray to Malene – she did just that.”
Krenthellor eyed the carnage, the aftermath of the conflagration, and thought, this room looks like a pit after a bonfire. The place smells like a broiler. Should I feel ashamed I find the aroma appetizing, the cooked flesh of my fallen friends?
His mouth watering and belly rumbling, he said, “We’ll need more light if we are to divide and sort these riches and to search for an outlet. Flame seems the single element we have in abundance. Though we may foul the air and perish sooner with too many brands alight, shall we make a blaze?”
Hearing no objection, he lit a second torch and a third and set them at the ends of the sarcophagus. For a moment, the three flames’ whispering made the only sounds.
Glynnys said, “Malene willing, we will discover the key. Tato, triage your injuries as best you can.”
While Tato-Na slept, Krenthellor found candles in a pack of leather desiccated and hard as iron, a satchel that out-endured the demise of a previous explorer – though not his bones – a sack filled with the powdered remains of dry rations, with climbing tools, with an oft-caressed stub of ivory tusk sculpted into the shape of a fecund woman and with an actual key of verdigris-pocked brass.
“Malene hears our pleas,” said Glynnys.
When she tried to fit the tarnished key into the lock set into the iron-wood door that entombed them, it became evident the two were not mates.
Krenthellor thought, much like a large priestess and a small destiny-weaver.
Glynnys dismissed the failure. “By this key, Malene has provided a symbol to show she will free us.”
“As you see it, as you see it,” the crossbowman said. Malene is no more fictitious than any counterfeit deity.
After interring into the sarcophagus the bodies of Waldrin and his fellow soldier, Yanfrere, the jungle-huntress, Ayada-Perrinne, and her surprisingly heavy, leather-armored battle-simian, Glynnys and Krenthellor added the bones of the pack-bearer and they piled in the skulls and scapulae, pelvises and femurs and fibulae of no fewer than five other individuals who’d met their demise in the hellish den. Glynnys performed the rites of her sect, during which Krenthellor remained respectful. My comrades, he remembered.
Burning through twenty tapers as they labored, a duration Krenthellor could not calculate – half a day in the sunlit world, a full day? – the pair of venturers sorted and sifted the riches accumulated by the lich over a duration the sage discerned from certain coins’ dates – centuries, certainly – and Krenthellor found himself exhausted.
The piles and heaps now formed stacks and pyramids, neat rows and lines, parcels and batches of embarrassments of wealth, a queen’s ransom of booty for each surviving member.
The sage thought, it amounts to more than any of us could carry in a dozen trips, far exceeding what any could person could spend in a score of lifetimes.
Atop the now-closed lid of the sarcophagus-cum-mass-grave, Glynnys and Krenthellor set the odd items, the unique necklaces and rings, the potions and phials and vials that could not be divided.
To claim these treasures, will we resort to bargaining or dicing – or coercion? Krenthellor wondered. And, where is the verdant philter? To have come all this way ….
And, then, Glynnys set it on the sarcophagus. To Krenthellor’s eyes, to his throbbing heart, the potion gleamed like an emerald beacon, the only green object in the room, obvious in its uniqueness, unique in its obviousness if one only knew what it implied ….
Has Malene shone a blessing on us? I cannot deny it was her servant who discovered it ….
The scholar who’d gathered the band of explorers – grave-robbers if one spoke bluntly – the adventuring sage who’d endured torture and torment from disinterred spirit-beings, who’d suffered stabs and slashes and gashes from sharp stones, edged steel, pointed claws and jagged teeth, who had saved the lives of more than one fellow traveler and had, in turn, been saved by more than one, who’d spent his life’s fortune on the tutors he’d sought out to teach him of runes and the lich’s potency, who’d said goodbye to family and friends a decade-and-a-half ago, who’d heard the news that his island home had been invaded and razed by seaborne conquerors while he was abroad, who’d copied and scribed and done day-labor for years and years in the capital to sustain himself while he sought and solicited a party of seekers intent on piercing the crypt, who’d given everything he’d had and who’d exchanged everything he’d been to find the subterranean chamber and its rumored artifact, he knew no reason to wait for his payment and he reached for the phial.
His hand halted as he heard the hissing.
The hushed murmurs – phantom whispers, Krenthellor first imagined – preceded the grinding of gears inside the iron-wood door and heralded the grating of ancient, iron hoops encircling timeworn, steel hinge-pins. The din awoke Tato-Na but it was Glynnys’s swift thinking and quick movement that saved the interloper from joining the three adventurers as living decorations of the late lich’s tomb; the blonde giantess sprang across the chamber and shoved an ivory scrollcase between the door and jamb, before the portal could spring closed, as the newcomer – a tall man, bushy-bearded, dressed in lilac, carrying a cloth bundle, eyes darting in the candlelight – rushed into the room.
“Glynnys! You survive,” said the Priest of Malene, speaking in a voice bottomlessly deep.
“Malene be praised. Malene be revered,” said the pair of acolytes in unison.
“Jalendree,” you have no inkling how enthused I am to see you. You seem, you seem ….” The large woman could not continue, wracking with sobs. “Malene be merciful,” she choked out.
When pleasantries had passed between the rescuer and the rescued, following sundry recountings of luck and misadventure, after the cleric had applied pungent balms, unctuous salves and soft and aromatic poultices to the wounded – Malene be compassionate – once explanations and revelations and tales of cowardice and bravado had ceased to echo from the sepulcher’s walls, there remained the burden-not-burden of filling pockets and pouches and sacks and satchels.
From around the chamber, Krenthellor heard plans for the loot’s spending.
“A new temple to Malene, several temples. Seminaries. Missionaries. Proliferate the faith.” These were Jalendree’s desires.
“A library of eldritch scrolls and tomes and folios. An alchemical workshop. A watchtower atop a sun-kissed cliff. A solitary watchtower.”
Krenthellor found it surprising Tato-Na sought to become a hermit, as if he were newly enthralled by the promise of arcane study.
When the kismet-weaver said, “And, I will buy the high bridge over the River Rohon; I will buy it outright,” Krenthellor smiled.
“Perhaps I have satisfied my service to Malene,” mused Glynnys. “Ten years’ time and this plenitude of gold. Tato-Na, might you need need a librarian, an assistant? Perhaps you’d appreciate for your tower, I know not … a lookout?”
Jalendree scowled, as if insulted by Glynnys’s temptation away from her faith. He diverted the transgression, asking, “How will you use your wealth, Krenthellor? Travel the world and explore its mysteries? Test the truth of its tales?”
Weighing a dagger in each palm as if to compare their balance, Glynnys answered for him. “Kren will bring the world to him. He’ll pay for story-weavers and fable-makers to come to the capital and indulge him with their sagas.”
“I would venture Krenthellor might invest personal endeavor in a doctrine he finds worthy,” said Jalendree. The look he gave made Krenthellor think the prelate’s words insinuated, “You owe me.”
Toying with the cats’ skulls dependent from his neck, Tato-Na said, “You are most welcome to try your hand with the sister to my trade. A few years spent with teachers of prophecy, with trainers of presage, with tutors of the auguries, and you could become quite the predictor of fortunes, my friend, perhaps an oleomancer, an interpreter of oils cast on water. In you, I sense the talent.”
“Happiness,” Krenthellor replied. He sat in a hollow he’d scooped from piles of copper and bronze coins. “It cannot be bought.”
But – the most profound question I ever will ask myself – can it be bottled?
“Of the things we’ve suggested,” asked Glynnys, discarding, with a clang, one of the two daggers she held, “wouldn’t every one bring you joy?”
“Fleeting,” Krenthellor said. “Transitory and then on to the next whim. I’ll be finding permanent contentment.”
A questioning look from Glynnys.
Krenthellor gouged spots in the coins with the heels of his booted feet. “Enduring bliss,” he said.
The others scoffed.
“Why so vague, Kren?” asked Glynnys but Krenthellor only smiled in reply.
After the hefting of the more precious metals into haversacks and packs, there remained one task.
“The jewelry and the alchemy,” said Krenthellor. “How do we divide them fairly? Draw lots? Cast astragaloi knuckle-bones?”
The circlets and brooches stand alone, each unique, some worth a lifetime’s toil. And, who could assay the value of the cordials and drams, the one, in particular, on which I’ve gambled everything, the one I must beg, must implore, to reward my life’s labor?
“If I may suggest a means,” said Tato-Na, his voice carrying a stronger timbre following the ministrations of Malene’s devotee, “each of us will select an item in accordance with that soul’s entrance into the chamber. Myself first and, then, Glynnys, Krenthellor and Jalendree.”
“You believe that notion fairer than chance, Tato?” asked Glynnys.
Simultaneously, Krenthellor and Glynnys quoted the inscription on the reverse sides of thousands of silver coins they had sorted. “‘Fortune is fickle,’” they said.
Glynnys added the remainder of the slogan: “‘Faith fosters favor.’” She flashed Krenthellor a smug glance.
You think you have convinced me? he thought. The conviction your cult peddles can dwell in many a conceit, can abide countless contradictions, can endure any conundrum. Confront your doctrine with a truth that counters your scripture and you’ll claim the faithless simply fail to understand. The loyalty I keep to my study, to my diligence, fosters whatever fortune – or misfortune – I may find. My devotion – always – is to truth.
The sage quoted the lettering of the coins’ obverse sides, the epitaph undergirding the likenesses of nine successive emperors and empresses. “‘Fidelity to veracity,’” he said.
“Enough repartee,” interrupted Jalendree. “Tato-Na speaks sooth. For us to quibble over barley-kernels when each of us tends a granary, to bicker makes no sense.”
“You quote the one who would choose first.” Glynnys glared a figurative poniard at the destiny-shaper.
“If we were to vote, a certain bloc of worshipers would carry the tally,” said Krenthellor.
Not to mention their overwhelming strength, he thought.
“Malene be generous,” Jalendree said in his deep, deep voice. “We will endorse the circumstance-spinner’s proposal of first-in, first-to-choose. If I might be so bold, gratitude should play a part in the decision.” The priest stared at Krenthellor.
Benevolent allies, deadly enemies.
“I will abide by the decision,” said Tato-Na. Limping, cat-skull-necklace clacking, he walked to the assorted and sparkling loot atop the bier and he selected a diadem of white gold worked in rubies and sapphires and the wizened fate-sculptor placed the tiara about his head and smiled. “Where else might I carry it?” he asked, his belt-purses bulging.
Glynnys, likewise, selected an elegant gemwork.
Krenthellor strode forward and snatched the elixir of emerald-green liquid encased in a gold-flecked vial, the warrior-not-warrior ignoring the precious treasures that remained.
“The potion of bliss,” he said.
Tales forged in antiquity foretell its value exceeds that of all other treasures.
“How can such a brew exist?” asked Tato-Na. “Who could extract rapture?”
“If it contains not what you think?” Jalendree asked. “If the phial holds poison?”
“With certitude, you selected it.” Glynnys was squinting and working to clasp the peacock’s tail of a bejeweled necklace she’d gleaned from the stone casket’s lid. “You took it on faith.”
She insists on convincing me, doesn’t she? Nevertheless, it is faith.
As the others opted for inestimably valuable artifacts, they questioned Krenthellor’s selection. A second round began and the sage’s turn came again. From the trove, he chose a simple stick-pin of sterling silver.
“Modest,” said Glynnys but no one diverted attention from their choices of riches to comment.
On the third round, Krenthellor said, “I will pass.”
“Forego your chance?” asked Jalendree. “Are you bemused? Deranged? Why would you refrain from taking greater reward?”
“There is no ‘greater reward.’ I have everything I could ever want in this flask.”
“How do you know that draught will not blind you?” asked Glynnys. She was admiring the pair of gem-encrusted bracelets of silver filigree encircling her wrists, seemed to have forgotten her pains.
How do I know? Hope?
Tato-Na’s question followed. “Or, perhaps, the elixir might addle your animus so that you seem content in the realm of your mind while your body and its functions desert you and leave you declined and decrepit?”
Possibly.
“When the effects of the libation diffuse, as the warmth of a flagon of mulled wine will cool inside you, what will you feel then, friend Krenthellor?” asked Jalendree. “What of the after-effects?”
I do believe the outcome to be permanent.
Glynnys said, “How do you know your potion is not some devious ploy to extract the lich’s revenge?”
With dirks or with words, she stabs the heart. She may be correct.
As they posed their challenges, they divvied more and more of what Krenthellor deemed ephemeral decorations, mere frippery, and the dungeon-delvers pelted him with a hail of queries. “What if the potion suffocates you? Is your vaunted research trustworthy? Do you think every tonic ever infused carries a tale – false or true – of its essence?”
One legend, two rumors, a few snippets of hearsay suggest the elixir creates the lich anew.
Certain questions came of their own volition to Krenthellor’s mind, ponderings he felt had embarked from his heart many years ago, alighting in his thoughts only at that moment. He met their advent, thinking, <i>if I am to become a lich, how could anyone discern the value of such an experience, of the phenomena I would see and feel and understand, of the impenetrable and esoteric and unaccountable knowledge that would flood my psyche as an undying master of the arcane? If the cordial contains not bliss but despair – no, I cannot be wrong, for I must trust my earnest inquiries, my years of investigations, my ardent intuition. Every moment of my adult life I’ve labored to land here. I will not turn back – for I have arrived.</i>
With a smile, Krenthellor pressed the silver stick-pin through the wax seal, removed it, and handed the humble piece of jewelry to Jalendree. “My donative to your faith.”
I remain true to my conviction. The essence of my being has been distilled into this moment.
“To faith,” he said and upended the bottle’s contents and felt the emerald light of warmth, the verdant warmth of light, pour down his throat and into his belly and swirl around his heart ….
©February 2022, Sean Jones
Sean Jones writes swords and sorcery and sci-fi stories in and around Golden, Colorado. He is a member of the Northern Colorado Writers’ Workshop, the Boy Scouts of America and the Rocky Mountain Porsche Club. Influences on his writing include Ursula K. LeGuin, Glen Cook and Greek mythology. He has created a post-apocalyptic demolition-derby game called Hovercars that you can check out here. His work has appeared previously in Swords & Sorcery.