Pale Blank Skin XXI.

            Afrax brought his khopesh down through the rotten skull of the dead thing.  It kept moving, gushing chemical ink as he hacked it into quivering pieces. Another took its place, and there would be more.

            They had been in Ruin only a few short hours.  Dawn had come an indeterminate and cloudy white, revealing burnt tenements and survivors.  Their contact, an innkeep, took their money and prepared rooms, but Afrax noticed the wily man tuck the silver into his own pockets rather than the safe box. 

            Unable to sleep he had gone out to get the lay of the town.  People everywhere were paying what they had to various armed and armored toughs.  This was the north quarter, far from the troubles to the east, and still the palace-tribes felt the need to pay for safety. 

            Few were leaving.  Ruin had a certain gravity, a permanence which had deep roots even though the founding mages were long gone.  The nature of a ruin seemed to be the memories it held, and for these memories people were content to pay, even with their lives.

            He found some word of the two travelers, the enchanted sword, the silver trumpet.  Where they had gone was a matter of debate but most pinned the current troubles on a tribal dispute caused by their murderous actions.  Rumors of baby-eating massacres and unnecessary decapitations followed the outlanders.  These horrors provided an easy excuse which permitted collective forgetting concerning the unknown nightmares plaguing Ruin.  These troubles may have no reason.

            Hell revealed itself at noon.  When the sun should be brightest the various pits and gaps and tunnels swelled with liquid night, the smell of harsh chemical salts coming with it.  From this sea rose a tide of dead things and never-been, walking corpses, floating corpses, molded flesh weeping acid, bone entities and shadows narrow and hungry.    

            The tension of the previous hour broke into madness.  He now fought his way through the liquescent dead, back to the inn where already a terrible fight was underway.  Three of his men were dead and he arrived in time to see a shadow slip into the wide gash along the innkeep’s corpse. 

            Upstairs his fellow conspirators had done the smart thing and were bottling the creatures on the stairs.  For a second Afrax considered fighting his way up to them, but his sword needed more clearance to be effective.  So he went outside and found the lean-to where the firewood was kept.  He clambered up, followed by some of the thronging dead in their unhurried, inhuman way. 

            Just then something corpulent and bloated fell upon him.  Filthy, brackish blood spilled over his polished scale mail.  Flabby hands grasped him and suddenly Afrax felt light as a feather.  He fell upwards, struggling with the dead man who clawed after his throat.  Just being near it he felt slowed.  The world and sky beyond changed places and toppled end-over-end. 

            It bit down on his right arm while its claws held him fast, but with his left he freed a dagger from his belt.  Everyone seemed too slow, as if time itself died near this creature.  As he was taught he focused on the silver.  The dark swordsman drove the blade into the corpse’s lower belly and slowly pulled upwards, against unnatural fatigue, splitting up to the thing’s sternum. 

            Now the world spun out of control as whatever force buoying up his attacker escaped with a gasp.  They fell, and as they fell its grip loosened enough that he was able to draw his sickle-blade and bring it up against the thing’s arms, neatly severing them both. 

            The hideous corpse fell away in a spinning froth of black ichor.  To his surprise Afrax fell only a short way, enough that the air was forced out of his lungs.  He gaped in the cold afternoon air, watching more of the floating dead play about the sky.

            Recovering at last he discovered he had landed on the inn.  Quickly he climbed down to a window and rejoined his men.  Some were dead, some were turned, but the remaining held fast, strengthened by the dream of their master.  It was just in time as they looked out the upper window, which was taller than the low shanties in this district, and saw a whitish figure appear upon a tall ruin.  The air around the Necromancer went into gloom as he directed a negative energy with a hand passionate for the work.  And men died and the sound of shadows threatened to overwhelm them all while the sky went to ink without stars.

            Now they knew the Necromancer’s power for what it was, a broad spectrum energy to which hate and fear and pain and loss descended but never quite reached.  This emotion was the metallic salt they smelled on the black crystals, and the ink pouring from the veins of the dead.  It was the silhouette which slipped into the living and made them mad corpses bent on chaos and the power behind the null field surrounding the marrowmere.  Fueled by this madness the creature in the Lake of Blood and Bone, the Ossus had been grown as an engine of expression.  Ultimately it was the consequence which lay beyond the dark door of mystery, the risk of the negative unknown, biased entropy without name, and yet it was familiar to all who felt it.

            The emotion hung heavy in the air, which was illuminated by the dark crystals.  A sort of radiance outlined their form here, as if the air itself died on those surfaces and in that death light was released through some metaphysical proportion.

            In this light the travelers saw the room, a cavern formed not by the natural action of water but through an ancient upheaval such as an earthquake.  From this break in the crust an outcropping of the Lattice emerged in rare physical form, a splay of crystals humming with power.

            The room had long ago been found by a now lost people, carvings and pictographs revealed this.  It was roughly ten meters wide and perhaps a bit more in height.  The dark runoff of the city leaked in from many tiny fissures and pooled at the base of the crystal, becoming the ink, glistening and concentrated.   

            This was the source which haunted Ruin.  The reason the things so empowered committed reasonless violence was that they were filled the feeling held within the black fluid, that nameless woe which they shared with those they caught.      

            Each living being there suddenly realized this anathema.  Even Lumnos, with his lost memories, felt it, though perhaps amnesia lessened the horror. They readied their weapons to destroy the thing.  The Lattice and the black magic were just the ink, it needed a pen to wield it.

            Zeklos appeared, and before the wordseller could say a word the Fencer was off at him and the Trumpeter raised his instrument.  Blots moved across the boy’s form and he smiled at the coming violence.

            The Fencer sprang forward with his glassy barb but with a single arcane gesture a languid bolt of glistening obsidian caught the swordsman in the belly and hurled him against the far wall near the carven door.  The flood of energies continued and the outlander cried out as the stuff covered him eagerly.

            Then the Trumpeter began to take a breath but the boy spilled more of the hideous energy into the instrument which acted like a funnel.  The musician fell coughing out great gouts of darkness.

            The Phyox twisted after combat but Lumnos held firm, trying to read the situation.  That others might die bit deep into his heart, but there was also another value he was working with, a strange one.

            Zeklos turned towards Lumnos next, but just then his eyes cleared, and the ink faded from his form.  He stood as a pale, unwritten parchment man. 

            “I know you,” he said with wonder growing.  “You sent down the books.”

            “What?” began the wordseller out of fear.  “Oh yes, that was me.”

            “I kept the ones I could,” said the boy.  “The others just wished to eat them, but I kept it for the shapes.  In them there was a sense of things lost like memories.”

            In the darkness it seemed that they were alone.  At the edges, in the shadows, the Fencer and the Trumpeter may have lived or died, but there were glimpses of those with naked steel circling around.

            “I can’t remember,” said Lumnos.  This was the first time he had told anyone.

            “The memories were small at first,” explained the boy, speaking of his own experiences as if they pained him.  “In time they grew and grew.  I remembered large houses, carved for no other reason than the pleasure of the art, and time in the shape of an enormous room, and power.  They were just fragments, bits of something crystalizing within me.”

            Then a change went over the pale features, a darkening of the pores as the ink of the Black Lattice welled up again.  Yet his face was still innocent, like an open book.

            “I stood at the height of my power and yet with all my peers we fell.  It was Theb’s weakness or Sysyn’s disharmonious energies.  The red mage was singular in his command of the nous and though we tried to turn his power against him he worked his Art in such a play that even combined we were destroyed, our souls sent hurtling into the Lattice once more.  Except me, I had a contingency.”

            Zeklos looked again and a further bloom of realization played out on his face.

            “I remember you.”

            “As you have said,” began Lumnos but he was interrupted

            “I remember you from before, my memories remember.  You kept our words, my books in that huge room.”  The boy’s voice fought through years of chaos and ignorance, past the gulfs which lie beyond death.  “It is all in the Palimpsest.  You don’t remember, do you?  I hate that, all that ignorance, blotting out the eons, making us all animals against the cold and ice.  But worse still I loathe where the fates have taken me, a ruined city full of squatters and opportunists where once the grandest dreams were forged.”

            The boy seethed with the Black now and it longed to do violence, as it did above in the city proper.  His will was the inky stuff boiling up.  To call it revenge was too weak a word.

            Now Lumnos saw him, both of him, the boy and the magician, the Rottie and the soul within.  He was a creature divided, doubled, a painted compromise between blank space and pigment.  In looking he almost knew the whole ream of drama at whose source he now stood.

            The women chose that moment to strike from the shadows where they had been plotting in fear.  They raced each other, Laxa wishing to best the Fencer’s bravery while Belleneix wanted to be like the swordsman in prowess and deed.

            A narrow blade shot through the Inky Child, one of Laxa’s longswords.  He turned, slowly comprehending, just in time for Belleneix to stick him in the heart with one of her bits of steel.  No blood came forth, and no death.

            The boy exalted his hands upwards and with a look of mad joy on his face spoke a word which became an inky cloud while the air burned at the touch of his magics.

            The black spell caught Laxa full on and her scream was that of a burn victim.  But the spell didn’t take hold.  From beneath her clothes a symbol ignited, from one shoulder to the opposing hip, where it then coiled down her leg.  Hideous magic seared painfully away from the warding brand.  She lay at the edge of two opposing energies, the strain and radiations thrilling through her until she collapsed, breathing smoke.

            Belleneix didn’t fare so well, the same cloud of Black consumed her.  Lumnos heard her stumble back into a shadowed recess in the room.  There was the sound of weapons dropping to clatter on the stone.

            “Please!” demanded Lumnos, struggling to restrain the Phyox, eager for its command.  “Please stop.  I wish to know the why of these things.  What value is there in this program of madness and death?”

            “What proportion do you demand?” smiled the child thing as it turned from its recent sport.  “Moral, ethical, reasonable, logical, I can find a rhetoric for each of these, for they are but air on a cold, uncaring realm.  I have been shown the beauty of this twice, once by magic, once by life.  For all my wonder I was cut down by crimson Sol for the vice of my freedom, and then below, born again, I had no power.  For this crime was cast into the festering pit, where the worst things from above, from a whole city, trickled down to me.  My only knowledge was filth, and if not for the reclaimed soul I would be as dead as any other Rottie.”

            Lumnos’s talent took hold and he knew.  Through the words he saw the life of a child of the Rot, forced to live in squalor while those more fit played games for the sake of colored bits of silk.  Reincarnated from a mage lost in the Uplifting he was reborn as a parchment man, blank and new, but soon lost to the rapacity of Ruin.  On him was written the word which encapsulated the wholeness of this experience, which lurked in the fluid and empowered the unsettled dead.  In him was a bottled feeling waiting to be expressed through the hideous ink.

            “But what of Summer?” the wordseller asked.

            “What is that?”  In this the boy was true in his ignorance.  He felt over the word as a strange and unique thing.

            At the edges of his sight something moved, but his attentions were focused, working at the problem before him.  The vaulted hegemonies of Black and White crowded him on either side.  He couldn’t see clearly in the gloom, his eyes were getting old.  Just then a light arrived.  It stalked through the ancient carved portal.  Contrasting against this brilliance the dead and the living showed in stark relief.

Pale Blank Skin XX.

            Loce’s light was diminished but the dark held its own wisdom.  He was coming to understand that not everything profited by illumination.  As he stood, having fled vast leagues from his altercation with the swarming things of the Black Room, he stood and watched as those rays his form emitted faded along a gradual scale of time.  There was a doorway in front of him and he watched it slowly grow in darkness, the frame widening, stretching, the mystery opening.

            Contrast provided what the past fifteen years had failed.  Up in Summer, gilded, warm, other, he had honed his magic to a pure ray, but it was only a honing of an edge which was already atom-fine.  The White became all.  But in recent troubles his mind expanded into a larger world of Winter spaces, violence, death, and the boiling presence of the Black.  The result, this realization, took the place of his hand.

            Magic infuriated the Icebound because it lacked reason of a broad, common sort.  Too each mage the methods and expressions of the Art were fickle, perplexing, or downright inconsistent.  This was true, yet there was a genius to Magic as it stretched in unseen light up from the core of the planet and into the cold dark between the stars.  Forces sublime react to the same and so there was no agreement of power between those who wielded it and the thing itself.  There were arguments for dedication, blood, calamity, and myth, and with each of these instruments a magician mingled with the Lattice for the sake of changing the all. 

            Loce reached out through the darkened door with his maimed arm and found something on the other side, a glistening mirror of dark reflection.  He had no fear for his soul, as his being was written over and over with wards and mystic seals.  Pulling back he had a hand again, one of darkness, though not unwelcome.  Already there were tiny pinpoints of light within.

            A moaning disturbed the air behind him and with it came a voice full of someone else’s hate.

            “Another one,” said the child at the edge of the light.  He glistened, his skin covered in broken souls. 

            “Confrontation is pointless,” noted Loce.  “You are confused, consumed, but I can show you the sky.  There is a place for our moods and abilities.”

            The Inky Child hesitated and it seemed that his countenance brightened as he brought his malformed body into Loce’s light.  It seemed that whatever force possessed him was unprepared for mercy.  But, just as quickly, his mood went black.  “I don’t wish a cure, I merely want to share.  Where these shadows go so does my heart.  From the past I dream of night without stars.”

            A black dream spilled from his hands and bled across the air as quick lightning.  Loce drew on what power he had left and a bulwark of shapes interposed, but it wasn’t enough.  Ripping through the ward like a spear, the spell struck the Abjurist in the side as he spoke desperate countermagics.  He fell and writhed with another’s pain.

            The spell boiled inside him, overwhelming and colonizing.  His thoughts became another’s, emotions and impressions, all of dejection, loss, negativity and death, flickers of lye-caked bodies and a hole of sky punched through a broken, ruined world.  Loce squirmed on the ground clutching his broken side.

            Wet footsteps approached on the cold stone floor.  There would be no escape this time and he hoped through the pain that his actions might give the icebound time to find the heart of this trouble, for the boy was just a vessel. 

            Something glimmered close and he went to it, deep down and inside.  Loce walked a path down and into the mystery which lay at the threshold of dissolution. 

            The boy found the body and it was already dead.  He looked around, like a predator or a child searching for their friends, and what he saw were his forces arrayed and ebullient, ready to reach upwards, to Ruin, to whatever might be in the light of day, to let them all know.

            A chorus of metal sounding on metal rang through the travelers.  The far edge of the room, from which the heralding noise arrived, lay in darkness, out of their taper light and beyond the wide basin of acid.

            “We should maybe be going,” said the Trumpeter, leaning away from the impending thing.  To go back would be to become lost in the ever-shifting maze of silver tunnels which the Palace of Chimes wore like a mask. 

            “No,” said the Fencer with weapon drawn to meet whatever came their way.  He had no reason, but Lumnos did.

            “Might be a challenge,” reasoned the wordseller as he tried to read their next moves.  “And with challenge comes the promise of reward.”

            “Fictions,” smiled the Trumpeter.

            “It is one of those metal creatures, full of the Black,” noted Laxa, choosing her heaviest blade to use against the thing’s armor.

            Belleneix said nothing as she sought a place of calm to face the terror from the depths of Ruin.

            From the dark came a thing which moved like a wave, rippling and dull in the light.  Fast as a shot it charged on its thousand legs, of a design similar to the Idosa, yet more functional and brutish.  It was a millipede, standing about a meter in height, but it stretched off and down into shadow. 

            Racing towards them they thought it would fall into the acid, but its paddle-legs moved with such speed and precision that it bolted across the surface with a wave or ripples.  Before anyone was ready it was on them and where it moved black ink dripped from whatever it carried inside its armored plates. 

            The Idosa was the only one ready for this feat.  It met the millipede fully unraveled, mercury tentacles and slicing legs.  Silver eyes faced dead, unfeeling metal.  They fought to grinding sounds, occasionally punctuated by chiming rings when a strike glanced off, or twisting crunches when their armor was breached.  They chittered, feelers waving frantically, all so quick before the living could do no more than blink.

            The Fencer charged in first, but by chance the automatons tumbled just then in their death dance, smashing into the swordsman and sending him flying.  Laxa and Belleneix laughed and followed in, searching for a chink in the thing’s armor, their blades finding done.  Lumnos was with them and though he brought down the Phyox on the dark grey creature there was only the sound of ringing metal. 

            The Idosa was outmatched.  Its body was simply unable to compete with the attacker’s shear mass.  Though it had ground up much of the millipede’s front, the automaton gained full purchase on the silver pill bug and with a twisting, sickening pop ripped the servitor apart.  Silver shards and mercury flew everywhere and without pause the thing moved on to the living.

            As the Fencer scrambled to his feet the machine swung its body across the floor, sending Laxa dodging away while Belleneix took this opportunity to leap on its shell.  Lumnos found himself backed against the acid pool by the action, hemmed in by the thing. 

            Now it rose upwards, spiraling after Belleneix and the wordseller had no choice but to scramble onto the machine, his hand soaking up the ink.  While it sought to crush the girl against the ceiling Laxa charged into the workings exposed by the Idosa.  Its height gave her an unfavorable angle, but still she stove her blade deep into its whirring organs, which groaned and twisted.  Immediately legs by the dozen descended on the girl. 

            Lumnos felt himself slipping.  He didn’t need to look, he knew the acid lay behind, so clear and yet so unwelcoming.  In response the Phyox twisted and changed, becoming a short, stabbing blade much like a short lance.  With the last second of his grip sliding away he lifted the weapon and drove it against a heavy armor segment.

            The automaton heaved as it was impaled by the white weapon and in that moment of distraction the Fencer pushed Dhala deep into its innards.  There was a high tone and a shiver and suddenly frost lay across the ground and over their clothes.  The monster heaved and fell and only by holding onto the Phyox did Lumnos not end up in the acid. 

            “Excellent!” exclaimed the Trumpeter who had been taking notes on the battle form the safety of the doorway.  As the others sorted out the nasty cuts received he sprang up, onto the millipede thing and ran across, nodding to the wordseller as he did.  The automaton’s body still stretched off into darkness and when he was safe on the far side he called back, “We have a bridge!”       

            Carefully the group crawled along the machine creature to the other side.  The exit there bent downwards, which was meaningless in this maze of passages as they had lost all bearing of depth.  Still they hoped this was the way, but each of them was divided whether to return to the upper works where they might face the Necromancer or to delve deeper, to whatever mystery lay behind the Palace of Chimes. 

            The way grew bright, the walls polished, reflecting their tired, hardened faces, clothes plastered with bloody wounds, weapons ready.  Entering a large, half-circle chamber an array of choices fanned out before them.  Huge paintings alternated with each doorway, landscapes of warmer times, fictions.  In the center of the room stood a single chair, ornate and delicate.

            As the others pondered Laxa walked up and sat in the seat, mocking the poise of a landed lady as shown on the many works of art filling Ruin’s market after the Uplifting. 

            “What now?” she asked.

            The Fencer shook his head at the choices and said, “I just don’t know.”

            While the Trumpeter and Belleneix checked each door, sniffing for smells, listening for sounds, Lumnos noticed something about the wall. 

            Looking close he saw a pattern to the silver of the palace, which, he realized was all cut from a natural vein, a single crystal. 

            “I think I know a way,” realized the wordseller out loud.

            “The way back?” specified the Fencer, sharp and exacting.

            “Yes,” Lumnos replied evenly.

            “How is this you suddenly know?” Laxa asked with a bit of suspicion in her voice.

            “We have not been in the most stable of situations since, well, since my shop window was smashed,” explained Lumnos.  “And memory isn’t a pool of ink one just pulls knowledgeable from at a moment’s notice.  Sometimes you have instant recall, and sometimes you walk into a room and forget your intentions.”

            “I’m very interested in becoming lost, so I say we follow his lead,” grinned the Trumpeter as he stood next to a landscape showing a path leading to an ancient, flower-covered shrine.  Green stuff reached up out of the painted ground, and beyond all this was a city of high towers.

            “Lead on then,” said the Fencer.

            Crystals grew in certain ways, each material having its own pattern and formation.  Silver had its own crystallography and on the walls it showed to one with a trained eye.  Through this method Lumnos took a certain passage and led on. 

            Many of the palace rooms had those same baroque qualities the builders of ancient Ruin found so fashionable.  It seemed, at first, that the palace was all jumbled together, disjointed placement sat a silver pool and pleasure area next to a featureless cube, but in time they noted discrete areas.  There were those relegated to living and comfort, those meant for research and study, and then there were foundries and workshops where the Idosa and other things were made.  These last showed much sign of recent use, as if the forgotten automatons had simply put themselves back together and went to work.  Through all these places there lay many chambers devoid of obvious function, and these alien spaces constituted a fourth and unknown variety, hidden by the passage of time and as inscrutable as the face behind the Argent Lord’s mask.

            “Now that doesn’t make much sense,” noted the Trumpeter to the air.

            “What?  What doesn’t make much sense?” demanded Lumnos with sudden worry.

            “Just the division of labor,” yawned the musician.

            “Oh,” said the wordseller, relieved.  “Oh…I see your meaning.  The Idosa follow Ecul, and the automatons are filled with the power of the Necromancer, but why?”

            “Madness, magic, that sort of thing,” sighed the Fencer, waving off the conflict.

            “How is it that the Inky Child doesn’t control the palace and its inhabitants so thoroughly?  That is the question.  Damned it all, why didn’t I think to ask that very question when we were with Ecul?”

            “Because there’s really only one place where we might truly gain such insight and it lies with the boy’s heart,” said the Fencer, driving them all on down the silver corridors.

            Noises of combat, the metal on metal of Idosa rending down the Necromancer’s automatons, had long faded at this point and the group fell into a sort of fugue where they traversed the infinite gleam towards unknown ends.  A hush and a fall, and Lumnos was swallowed up by a blink in the floor.  This unseen opening revealed a sort of metallic organ, inside of which a whole man might fall into mystery.  An array of rending limbs whirred in hungry anticipation. 

            His fall lasted but a second.  Something else swallowed part of him. With cries of alarm from his companions echoing he realized the Phyox had acted.  His whole left side was in the device, no longer a sword, but a sort of half-suit or brace, which had anchored itself to the ceiling, leaving him scarcely a meter above the death machine.

            Belleneix was the first to help and together with the Phyox pulled the man back up into the hall.  Just as Lumnos was about to panic about the device of his salvation it reconstituted itself as a sword once more. 

            Circling the death trap the group became more careful about their footsteps.  They descended past the last of the workshops, into a tangle of tunnels.  Many were the dead ends, strange plugs sealing the realms beyond.  By the look of them these flasks were used in sorcerous work, containing various emanations the nature of which was lost on the icebound.  In legends the first settling magicians came to the plateau which would house the future Ruin for the treasures mined up from the underworld.   

            Noises came and their course aimed for these sounds, which were screams and shudders.  The smell of the black crystal arrived, salty and metallic.

            Entering into a huge room a massive battle between Idosa and automaton raged, more proof that this was a house divided.  This may have been the staging area for the Necromancer’s mining machines for the place was vast, a good hundred meters on a side and full of half-made things. 

            Engines roaring with strength a huge metallic beast thrashed, covered in silver Idosa.  Many more devices roamed about, attending logical and unnatural functions, reacting to threats in predetermined ways.  Idosa felt about for prey and trundled quick and eager when their antennae touched something interesting.  Machine things continued to do their master’s bidding, and a great amount of black crystal lay about, waiting to be processed and transported, poured over the dead to make them move or fed to the thing in the Lake of Blood and Bone, but the incessant silver creatures kept the war going.  Broken pill bugs, pools of silver, twitching, whirring machines, these lay strewn about as combat waged between two intractable sides.   

            The Fencer and the women raced to draw their blades.  They were so eager to join the fight against the tide of machines without end.

            “Are you mad?” rasped Lumnos as he grabbed the swordsman’s shoulder.

            “Through this difficulty our path lies,” said the man with a grin.  “You said it yourself, rewards and such.”

            “That’s not reasonable,” said Lumnos and he pointed down a tunnel close by.  “There, we have a means out while these things sort through their differences.”

            “Don’t listen to the coward,” said Laxa.  “We can bend the battle our way and be done with the foul devices.”

            The Fencer’s eyes told of quick, brutal calculations as he weighed and measured each option.  Trust was at stake, the prestige which forms in small groups, of band and tribe.  This obviously made him uncomfortable, deciding for a group did that.  He was used to his own way and little else.

            “We should save our arms for the confrontation with the Necromancer,” he decided.

            They left, Belleneix and Laxa grumbling, flitting from one shadow to the next, allowing the metal war to determine its own course.  Lumnos felt only worry as they descended further into mystery.

            They joined a larger tunnel, which soon was joined by more and more.  He hoped the others failed to notice their descent, which was gradual.  No more rooms opened up, and it seemed that the various paths through the Palace of Chimes winnowed down to this single concourse.  A bit of liquid turned their even mood into a storm.

            Lumnos watched it unfold and bit his tongue.  The Trumpeter was the first to notice, but he didn’t say anything as he wrapped his scarf about him a few times so it wouldn’t drag.  Then Belleneix, though she didn’t seem to quite know what it was that she saw.  Her mouth opened and it was over.

            “What is this foul black stream?” she cried and it echoed through the tunnel.

            There was little time between the Fencer’s realization and the blade being placed at the wordseller’s throat.  Laxa’s breath showed in the cold, deep air.  The shimmer of the silver walls was much diminished in these ancient recesses.

            “I’ll give you a single chance to explain how we are heading to the entrance when no such stream flowed towards that honeycomb of doors,” said the swordsman.

            “I…” began the wordseller, but then the blade flashed.  He shut his eyes, feeling the cold, feeling those red eyes look upon him from the depths of indigo and black.  No pain came and the cold diminished. 

            Opening, he saw that the Trumpeter had smacked the Fencer’s weapon arm away and now had the attentions of all three warriors for his trouble. 

            “Just not reasonable to put the pressure on a friend like that,” he said, fearless for once.

            “You said it was my choice, this plan, well I am keeping with it,” declared Lumnos.  “The growth of these silver crystals tends in a certain way, revealing the path down, as well as up, if you must ask.  Down is where the Necromancer’s place of strength lies, where the black crystal comes from, where the Alabaster Palimpsest must be.”

            The Fencer eyed him coldly.

            “It was the only way, not telling you,” continued the wordseller.  “Now we are at the wellspring.  We can’t turn back.”

            “What are you waiting for?” frowned Laxa.  “I’ve been eager to spit this useless merchant for a day now.  He is all full of words but none of them will do us any good.  They certainly didn’t help all those dead mages.”

            “No,” said the Fencer, no less harshly.  “We are not bound to the cruelties we grew up with.  I can change my mind.  Show me the wisdom of your deception wordseller.”

            Accepting a smile from the Trumpeter Lumnos moved on.  The flow of dark fluid continued.  It wasn’t, as he realized, of the Black, but instead seemed to be run-off form the city above.  Traveling further through the silver cave that metal gave way and deep bedrock took its place.  Ancient carvings from a forgotten culture lay scrawled across the walls, much like the lithographs strewn about the sewers by the Rotties.  Cracks brought in more of the effluvia, and soon they followed a stream of concentrated waste, smelling of lye, ash and more nameless things.

            They reached an arch.  This had once been a crossroads, but cave-ins long ago had sealed off the other possibilities.  The portal was high and wide and primitive, cut from the rock by uneven hands giving it a wobbly, uncertain appearance.  Through this the dark stream flowed.  Strangely the air was light and he had no need of a taper.  The source would soon become clear.

            Through the gate a vast opening, like an amphitheater stretched.  They entered and saw it.  Down below, past cataract steps, a massive protrusion of crystals so black that to look on it was to become lost in a glistening void.  The Phyox vibrated and kept their souls in place.  The air around the structures gave off a dead pale radiance, the same which they had often encountered in the underworld.  The source was clear but not the reason: this was the Black Lattice.