§123 The Haunt (Patreon)

Blake, Cook, Kasper, and Chambers unpacked and cleaned while Taylor completed his survey of the grounds. They wouldn't get through the entire house, but they could make a few rooms fit for habitation. Chambers kept a running log of everything the mansion required, including minor repairs. They would call Bona from Mourne to lead the interior decorating, subject to his availability. Until then, they would get by on minimal furniture in the rooms they used, and enjoy the extra space that came from not cluttering things up with seldom-used pieces.

Taylor sent them to the hotel after noon, in the carriage pulled by Tristan. Kasper was reluctant to go before he had a chance to drop a line into the river, but, as Taylor was about to dig up an old menace, he wanted the wolfkin somewhere safe.

Alone on the expansive property, he stood over the haunt. It was a pleasant spot near the river's south shore, somewhat overgrown with a shrub that bloomed beautifully in high summer. Later in the year, it would bear a spiky fruit that was hard to prepare but was good to eat. From there, the ground dropped gradually toward the river. The extra elevation and wider channel were protections against future flooding, and the result of hard lessons learned repeatedly and at great cost. Landowners were forbidden to narrow the channel, nor could they build habitable structures directly on the river. Taylor knew that some of his neighbors considered the rules onerous, but in his opinion, they had the added effect of keeping the banks green and beautiful. A few small pleasure craft plied the river, as did a barge loaded with sacks and crates. The barge was likely bound for one of the townships on the far side of Lake Nivermere.

The ghost, or whatever it was, had been quiet so far, lurking inside the makeshift magic jail Taylor had drawn around it. Perhaps it knew Taylor hunted it and was afraid.

He began by summoning the Army of Lightness. He called them from Twilight, the place where spirits dwelled, with a multitoned chord and a brief light show. His four adventuring companions emerged from a dramatic mist. Spirits liked a bit of show when they were summoned. The so-called army had four members: Saria, a water spirit who appeared as an elf with purplish hair; Tanya, who looked like a bear with blue and white stripes but walked upright; Premi, who was a giant pelican in her natural form but took the shape of a dwarf with feathers; and Jalil, the hare in a vibrant vest. From where they stood, they had an excellent view of the rear of the main house, on its higher ground, as if presiding over the river.

"Welcome to my new city estate."

"Can we go inside?" asked Tanya, always the most enthusiastic one.

"You can live there full-time if you like. There's enough room for everyone. But first, we need to handle a monster." He stomped on the ground. "I got a deal because the place is haunted. There's an ancient burial chamber beneath our feet, and I'm pretty sure that's where the problem is. But the chamber seems bigger than a single coffin, so there might be interesting artifacts, too."

Premi eyed him suspiciously. "Are they shiny artifacts? Is that why you're digging them up?"

"We're getting rid of a monster. Any treasure is a bonus."

He started in a clear area, free of any plant with deep roots, offset from his target, where he removed the grass and other plants, leaving several inches of soil still attached. Then he moved aside the topsoil and put it in a mound. Beyond that point, the work was more difficult. Digging a tunnel was very different from building a road. With a road, he had to shape the ground, change its density and texture, and compact it in a certain way. It was a lot of work, even using magic, but it was more about reshaping the ground than moving it. When digging a tunnel, large quantities of soil had to be moved entirely away from the work area.

Rather than do all the work himself, he called on spirits from the Army of Darkness and let Magmemo and the Hot Lava Gang, a group of lava sprites, take over. Instead of using his class system and selecting them from his extensive roster, Taylor focused on the bond he shared with all one hundred and twenty-five spirits of the army, found Magmemo's presence, and impressed on him that there was an opportunity to be summoned. The Knexenk class system was impressive, but relying on it for everything made a person lazy. Too many classed people had high-ranking skills they did not understand and could not properly control. Magmemo and his crew were happy to accept a summons and a personal commission.

The Hot Lava Gang didn't dig a mere shaft for him, as he requested. They added stairs, shored up the walls, and arched the ceiling. A grown human would have to crouch, but Taylor and most arcaics could pass through comfortably. The shaft was wide enough for Premi in her dwarf form, although just barely. Magmemo's crew heaped the spoil nearby, on a span of canvas tarp that Taylor laid out for them.

The entire project was finished in under an hour. To reward them, Taylor channeled extra mana into his bond with the lava sprites before disbanding them. The mana became literal currency when they returned to Twilight. There were many reasons why spirits agreed to bond to summoners, simple friendship not the least of them, but every spirit knew Taylor paid generously, a fact that burnished his reputation as Dux Twilight, a general of spirit armies.

"We don't know what's in the burial chamber," Taylor told his little adventuring group, "so we'll look before we enter."

The stairway ended at a sheer stone wall. Magmemo and his crew had dug a little way to each side, enough to establish that the wall was a monolith of granite. The stone wasn't native to the area and had to have come from the Hunaphu mountains. Taylor had no reason to doubt them: if there was one thing a magma sprite could be depended on to know, it was igneous rock. The lava sprites claimed the walls of the chamber were made of six such planes of rock, three feet thick, fitted to each other tongue-and-groove, to form a cubic chamber within, ten feet to each side. They couldn't see past the walls to the interior, due to some repelling magic.

As Taylor put his hand against the chamber wall, he felt again that current of cold fear, like he was wading in an icy stream, neck-deep, against the current.

"There's magic on all six sides," observed Saria. "But it's weak. There is runework on the other side of this."

"Can you make it out?"

"Probably." Saria was the oldest one among them, and the most likely person to recognize a dead language. But even she didn't know everything. For much of her existence, she had been limited to her stream, or the corresponding area in Twilight. For several minutes, she examined the stone closely and sketched the spellwork structure on the other side. As an enchantress, she had the delicate touch required for that kind of work.

"This is all I can see from here. Keep in mind, we're looking at it backward. I'm pretty sure the symbols face inward." She passed around her handiwork. "It's older than anything I know. Prearcaic for sure."

Taylor didn't recognize it either, but that wasn't a surprise. He'd only been in Aarden for a few years. But he recognized primitive wardwork when he saw it. The glyphs were made of straight lines, easy to carve into wood or stone. The symbols were complex and looked idiosyncratic to him, as if the author had imbued each one with special meaning without attempting to systematize the whole. Parts of the meaning were clear to him, especially the lines and squiggles meant to carry mana between the major glyphs. There were parts that he could guess at, and much that was a mystery. They were only looking at a small segment of the whole, but he could see the beginnings of a pattern.

As a bit of magic archaeology, it was an excellent discovery.

"We should hang onto this, since we're about to ruin a section of it." He tucked the paper into his satchel. "I think the wards started failing a couple of centuries ago. That's when whatever was inside started getting out."

Premi asked, "Do you think they sealed in something evil? Maybe we shouldn't open it."

"No, that's not what happened. If you bury something dangerous like that, you tell people to stay away. You put up signs. We'd see warnings carved onto the outside of the tomb, and pictograms of people dying. No. This is some rich guy who couldn't bear to be parted from his stuff in death. He sealed the tomb so tightly against robbers that he ended up trapping himself here. The same wards might be what's keeping the exorcism from working."

It took him a while to open a section of the wall. He chose to use a shattering spell to break it into hard, irregular shards, working in small sections. It would have been easier to reshape the stone, but by breaking it clean, the substance would better remember its previous shape. A repair spell of sufficient power could reassemble the wall and preserve the wards. As he worked, his companions swept aside the debris.

The haunt made its first move while Taylor was breaking through. Tanya screamed and swung her mithril-tipped claws at a spectral form that appeared behind her. The spectre grinned and dissipated. From that point on, the haunt tried one thing after another. They felt an icy hand of fear on their backs, saw visions of emaciated children, hideously deformed, clinging to the walls, stretching forth clawed hands to rend them. The sun suffered an eclipse, darkening their stairwell. Black, stinking water rose up from their feet and almost drowned them. Again and again, Saria dismissed the terrifying visions with a wave.

"I can see why people were so frightened," said Saria. "There's more than illusion here. It feeds on fear."

"So, it's snacking on us right now?" Jalil tried not to let his voice shake.

"Some," she admitted. "Even I'm a little afraid, and I know better. But don't worry. We'll finish it off soon."

When Taylor had made an opening large enough for them to walk through, he lit the interior with motes of light that hovered near the ceiling. An impressive sight greeted them from the other side of the room: Strife, the god of war and struggle, stood in bloody glory with his arms spread wide, a weapon in each hand. He was clothed and painted into greater realism, preserved by the room's stone walls and magic wards. At Strife's feet lay mounds of treasure: golden artifacts, alabaster jars, ivory trinkets, figures carved from jade and amber, and a pair of cabinets with many drawers that Taylor could only assume held more treasures.

In the center of the room lay a large sarcophagus carved from a blueish stone. Ancient writing graced the top and sides, but the stone had cracked so badly, and the writing itself was so strange, that it was impossible to read.

"Not what I expected." Taylor's bemused gaze wandered over the treasure. "Does anyone recognize the period?"

Tanya huffed. "Do we look like scholars to you? All I see is shiny stuff!"

A movement caught their eye, a crumbling of stone, the shift of the sarcophagus lid. Heavy bits of broken stone tumbled onto the heaps of treasure. A figure stirred within, too small for the container. It rose to all fours with sudden, jerky motions that would have abused the joints of any living thing. It was an arc woman, too whole and hale to have been buried there for centuries, dressed in fine linen with an embroidered bodice. Her neck turned sharply, and she cast hazy eyes of the recently dead at Taylor and his party. Strands of gold wove through her hair, and an iron collar weighed on her neck. The dead thing was a slave, posted here for eternity to protect its master's wealth.

"Nope." Tanya disappeared.

Jalil put three arrows into the moving corpse.

Premi took a position to shield Saria, who wove protections around the party.

Taylor filled himself with holy magic and waited.

The slave corpse scrabbled at the arrows in its chest, more annoyed than hurt.

Tanya appeared behind their enemy and drove her mithril claws into either side of its head. That gave the corpse pause, but didn't kill it. For some undead, destroying the brain was enough. Others required more extreme measures. When the corpse tried to grab Tanya's claws, she pulled them out and dug them both into the corpse's back, and ripped out its heart.

She sprang back with the mangled organ still pulsing on her claws, and Taylor used Pillar of Sacred Light. It was an overtly pretty spell designed to look like beams of sunshine, but what it did was cancel any arcane animating force at work inside dead tissue.

The corpse turned its head again to look directly at him and smiled too wide for a living face.

He realized his mistake at once: He was up against old magic, woven by someone skilled enough to carve runes using pure intent. Modern Spellscript counters were designed to work against modern Spellscript spells. Against a magic effect that wasn't derived from Spellscript, counters were a hit-and-miss proposition at best.

Most people were dimly aware that Spellscript wasn't the only way to perform spells, but Taylor specialized in non-systematized magic. After learning how to duplicate more spells than he could easily count, imitating one he knew passingly well wasn't that hard, as long as he was willing to pay a higher mana price for the same effect. Taylor did the same thing again, this time with raw mana handling and a great deal more power. Instead of a column of sunlight, a blazing coronet settled on the corpse's brow.

The creature dropped into its stone bed, its animating string cut. Hands gripped the edges in panic as the magic that held it together for so many centuries burned away in licks of white and blue flame. Flesh thinned, skin shriveled and dried, bones and dusty joints strained and popped. At last, the flame went out, and the hands ceased their struggle.

They approached the sarcophagus in hesitant half-steps until they could peer inside. There were two corpses inside. One was a tall skeleton, a beastkin from the shape of his skull, dressed in bronze armor with a great mace in his hands. Curled at his feet, as small as a child, was the linen-clad remains of their haunt. The body was fragile enough to disintegrate at a touch, but her iron collar was only slightly rusted. The collar was carved deep with runes, so focused in their intent that Taylor caught their meaning thousands of years later. They were meant to enslave someone past the point of death. And the runes were still working.

"Well, that was horrible," Tanya said.

Taylor felt a presence behind him and turned to meet it. It wasn't mana, and he didn't see anything. Too late, he realized it was a soul.

A pain he had never felt before consumed him. His world was full of white fire, and no other thought was possible. In his agony, Taylor heard his own howls of pain as if from a great distance. He thought he would die from pain alone, until it receded partway. A voice spoke to him from the in-between.

"You can call me Ripper."