Blood in the Vex Caves

The talking was over. "Worm, we're past this now," Ghent said. "There's no getting along. We'll help you and the rest of your friends understand that you need to stay out of our way."

There were five of them. Ghent, who did the talking, with a scimitar. Bill, the big one, with a greatsword and the boy still riding his shoulders. Moxie, the woman in the robe, who turned out to be the dangerous one. Calvin, another heavy fighter who said almost nothing. And a rogue called Urkle, with a poisoned crossbow.

Bill opened by putting Randy on the floor — two swings of the greatsword, both of them landing hard, the boy on his shoulders holding onto his head and being swung around with him. Biz got Randy back up. Moxie, without moving, conjured a spectral axe out of the air beside Aelion and left it swinging at him. Urkle made the tactical decision to dive into the waist-deep water to hide, was informed at volume by Ghent that nobody can hide in water and that a sword is no use down there either, and surfaced apologising.

Flint took the shape of a dire wolf, leapt through the water and bit into Bill — who twisted as he did it, so that the wolf got him and not the child on his back.

Worm tried, one more time, to talk. "We were family."

"Till we thought you were dead, Worm. We saw a kid who needed help. We took you in off the streets, we fed you, we employed you, and then we got lost from each other. Now — we're friendly with each other. But we're not family."

Then Ghent picked out Biz and stayed on him for the rest of the fight.

Moxie did not stay for any of it. She had come for one thing, and once the lines were drawn she simply walked — across the room, past the fighting, through the only open door and on toward the workshop and the pedestal at the centre of it. Aelion threw fire after her and mostly missed.

Flint knocked Bill flat; the boy came off his shoulders and stood up in the water, which was not deep enough to hurt him. Urkle got a crossbow bolt clean through one of Biz's illusions and swore. Calvin waded in and started swinging at whoever seemed most dangerous, which was usually Randy or the wolf.

And Worm ran. Eighty feet in one go, so fast he was half skimming the water, and caught up with Moxie in the room with the throttle. She turned around in shock. "You've certainly grown up. I didn't think you would." He hit her.

She tried to hold him where he stood and he shook it off. She tried to back out of his reach and he hit her again on the way past, and shouted back over her shoulder for Urkle to take the shot. Then Worm hit her twice more, and she went down at the foot of the pedestal with her hand still short of the thing she had come for.

"Worm — no. Stop." She died there against it.

Bill came through the door behind him at a run. "No. Worm. What did you do? You killed her. You killed Moxie." He did not attack. He knelt and tried to stop the bleeding, and could not; there was a fist-sized hole through her stomach. Then he picked her up.

Back in the tide-lock room, Ghent finally put Biz down — "it's been an honour duelling with you" — and wiped the blade on his sleeve. Biz did not stay down. He came back up and killed Ghent with a knife driven into his ear, and the blood went everywhere.

That took the fight out of them. Bill went for the shaft with Moxie's body over one shoulder and the boy on the other. Urkle, casting around for a way out, found the tunnel the party had already uncovered and shouted that he had one. Calvin, badly hurt and out of interest, picked up Ghent's body, took a long look at the party, and climbed after them. Aelion burned Urkle on his way past; Flint put a lungful of poison into Calvin. Nobody stopped them.

Halfway up the rungs, before he climbed out of sight, Bill turned and shouted back down at Worm.

"We should have come back for you. I told her. I told her we should have come back for you."

Then they were gone — the crew, their two dead, and the boy.

Aelion went to the pedestal. The lens in his pocket had been thrumming since he entered the room and now it was loud. Looking through it, he was in the field of lavender again with the six points around him — one directly across, two to either side — and the thing on the pedestal sitting at the centre of them all. His own hand was reaching for it. So was another. And where the hand across from him reached, his own grasp of magic dulled and thinned; where he reached, the dulling receded and the world came back brighter than normal. Whatever this was, the lens had decided it mattered, and it belonged to the same set.

He picked it up.

Three things happened at once. The sealed brass door with no handles ground slowly open onto a room they had never seen. The tide came in hard and the water climbed their legs. And the lens threw off a blinding white light that left half of them unable to see for a minute — which, they all understood immediately, would have been a catastrophe had it happened ten minutes earlier.

They had somewhere between half an hour and an hour before the sea took the place.

Beyond the brass door was another long room lined with those same resonating channels, but more open, and with a pedestal of its own. Walking it, they worked out where they were: back around on the far side of the tide-lock room. There had been a hidden brass door in the first channelled corridor all along.

Aelion raised the lens at the new pedestal and got a vision of the room in use. An elven woman stood in it, taking notes, glancing over her shoulder as though she had heard something moving elsewhere in the caves. She set the artifact onto the pedestal in a particular way, and a geometry of shimmering energy came up in the room and moved through it in slow waves, running off toward the southwest. She wrote down what she saw.

That was what the room was for. Every brass channel in the cave converged here so that the flow of the weave could be made visible and measured. And the artifact had to be seated just so — set properly it could be read or made inert; carried loose, outside a strongly magical place, it interacted with whatever magic was near it in ways nobody could predict.

His first attempt to seat it was wrong — upside down. A wail went through the whole cave system, and the thing threw off another blinding flash as it did something nobody had asked it to do. They spent a few minutes gathering whatever else in the room looked valuable. Then he tried again, and this time set it exactly as he had seen it done.

The lattice came up. In the vision its lines had been faint and wispy, barely there, drifting steadily southwest. Now the strands were thick and strong and going nowhere at all — swelling and settling in place, healthy, still, if anything leaning very slightly the other way.

They lifted the artifact off the pedestal and the waves went out.

The water was at their ribs by then. They waded back the way they had come and went up the shaft. At the top there was no sign of Bill, Calvin or Urkle, and no sign of the two bodies either; they had carried their dead out with them. Far below at the foot of the cliff, the fisherman they had hired that morning was rowing in toward the cave mouth to collect them — and there was no way down to him from where they stood.

So they walked back to town.