“Jynn can do this.” Laruna locked gazes with the wizard. “And we need him to.”
“Aye, fine.” Gorm hefted his axe and shield. “Last time I faced… whatever this is, I ran screaming. Knowin’ what we’re up against is the best chance we have not to do that again. We’ll get ye to the archives, and then the rest of us will clear a path to Johan. But ready yourselves.”
Orange light flared and shouts rang out from within the vault. Something inhuman screeched in pain, and the shadows of spindly, hairy appendages waved through the light of the fire.
Gorm nodded to the other heroes as they readied their weapons. “It’s gonna be rough goin’.”
Chapter 29
Gorm’s warning turned out to be the sort of understatement that Jynn Ur’Mayan hated.
The phrase “rough going” implied a trek through brambles, or perhaps climbing over cumbersome rocks. “Rough going” conjured visions of a hike that turned out a bit sweatier than normal. “Rough going” suggested the sort of aches that a good beer and hot meal could ease.
Jynn reflected that, had he been asked to describe their journey into the Great Vault of Andarun, the fabled home of the Heroes’ Guild’s greatest treasures and stockpiles of loot, he would not have used such an innocuously broad term. Wizards prefer precision. Accuracy is a survival skill for those who make a career in magic, where a mispronounced phrase or clumsy gesture can be the difference between levitating a ham sandwich across the room and ripping a hole in space-time. As such, the archmage would have been much more exact when describing their descent into the black marble fortress beneath Andarun’s palace, making liberal use of phrases like “a nightmarish flight through a labyrinth of arachnid horror,” or “a grueling slog under constant assault from spidery abominations,” or even “the most traumatic experience that the gods have yet to curse me with.”
Thick curtains of webbing hung in front of locked doorways and dangled from vaulted ceilings. Gauzy tendrils waved from every glowstone lantern like the limbs of tiny ghosts reaching out for the adventurers. Spiders with the size and temperament of angry terriers leapt from the shadows and dropped from the ceiling, green fluid dribbling from their daggerlike mandibles. Flashes of sorcerous flames and crackling lightning cast baroque, spindly shadows on the black walls. The air rang with the screeches of burning spiders and the cracking of steel hacking through exoskeletons.
Most of the adventurers down here were seasoned enough to handle giant vermin, even if the spiders were unusually numerous and well-coordinated. The lurking arachnids were beat back with grim efficiency. Yet as routine as killing giant spiders was for veterans, being a professional hero is always dangerous. Jynn witnessed an unnamed warrior pulled away from his teammates and carried off by a swarm of rat-sized spiders, and some shouts down a side hallway indicated that another group had lost at least one member.
These other parties split away from Jynn’s party in the front rooms of the vault, drawn by chambers filled with mountains of giltin and piles of arcane artifacts like moths to candles. Soon the archmage could see no sign of any other heroes, save one. Johan had left a clear trail of carnage through the vaults. If the mad king and the spidery denizens of the vault had any relation, it couldn’t be called an alliance. Various chunks of arachnid littered the halls around the Johan-sized holes burned through the webs. The morbid trail left a mess on the boots. On the other hand, Gorm swore he could gauge how close they were to the king by the intensity of the twitches and spasms of the dying spiders in his wake.
They continued along the paladin’s path until Jynn found a door with a small placard indicating the Royal Archives lay beyond.
“I hate to split the party in the middle of a dungeon,” the Dwarf grumbled.
“You’d hate letting Johan get away more. And you’d hate a surprise in a fight with him even more than that,” the archmage reminded him. “I won’t be long.”
“Don’t be,” Gorm said.
Jynn turned to enter the archives, but a hand caught his arm. He turned to find Laruna holding him, but she dropped his sleeve as soon as their eyes met. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “It’s not safe to run solo on a high-level quest.”
“Aye,” said Gorm. “If we’re to split, ye should at least be a pair.”
“B-but what about you?” asked Jynn.
Heraldin and Gorm gave him a quizzical look. “We’ve got Gaist,” the bard said.
Gaist flourished a blade for emphasis.
“We’ll be fine,” said Gorm. “Just find out what Johan’s got down his britches and follow us. We’ll be at the end of the trail of dead spiders.”
Jynn looked back at Laruna. A gust of emotions howled at the windows of his mind, but he closed his eyes and shuttered his mental space with a deep breath. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s be quick.”
The interior of the Royal Archives was organized and opulent. Rows of leather-bound books and neat stacks of scrolls lined mahogany shelves that covered every inch of the walls. A fine desk with a velvet blotter sat at the front of the chamber, marking the line between a reception area and countless rows of free-standing filing cabinets extending back into the darkness. A library with plush reading chairs might have been a welcome sight, were it not for the sticky gray strands woven between the shelves or the spiders swarming over the remains of the unfortunate royal archivists.
The archmage dispatched the closest arachnids with a few threads of elemental death. Another swarm skittered forward, only to be engulfed in orange flames.
As Jynn watched Laruna step over the piles of former spider, it occurred to him that many people would assume a pyromancer was the last type of spell caster one would want in a room full of priceless parchments and books. But now that he saw her at work, there was no better mage to have here with him. The fire was an extension of her will, burning away arachnids and webbing while leaving paper and wood untouched.
Then she caught him staring, and he turned his attention to draining the tiny souls from a nest of spiderlings rushing toward his flank.
“I wanted to talk to you,” said Laruna. “Though I suppose this doesn’t seem like the right time, either.” She sprayed a wave of flames at a bulbous spider dangling from a bookshelf.
“We are a bit preoccupied,” Jynn said, driving the point of the Wyrmwood Staff into a particularly large spider’s eye. It recoiled and melted as his magic liquified its exoskeleton.
“It seems the right time never comes.” Laruna gave a sad smile and hurled a fireball into thick webs heavy with sinister, bulbous silhouettes. They shrieked as she turned to Jynn. “But I’d rather say it at the wrong time than never say it.”
“Laruna, I—”
“I’m sorry,” said the pyromancer. She roasted a spider in its own juices with a wave of her hand. “I’m sorry that it took me so long to thank you for saving my life.” A stream of flame from her fingertip set a massive web alight. Its oversized residents tried in vain to flee the blaze racing along the strands. “I’m sorry that when you gave up your hand for me, I got too wrapped up in judging how you gave it rather than appreciating what you sacrificed.” A lone arachnid escaped the blazing web and, with an uncharacteristic sense of self-preservation, fled for the shadows. It only made it a few steps before erupting in a pillar of flame. “I’m sorry that my judgment frightened you, and most of all I’m sorry that I proved your fears well-founded.”
Jynn listened, his own emotions roiling behind the thin walls that he had erected. He stared at her, his lip quivering, his heart pounding, his hands casually weaving eldritch sigils that melted nearby spiders into puddles of green goo. “Thanks. I forgive… I’d already forgiven you,” he said eventually.
“Thank you,” she said. A charred leg near her twitched and was engulfed in another fireball.
“And… is that all?” Jynn asked as he fried a fleeing spider with a lightning bolt.
“Should there be something else?” she asked him, burning the last of the webs away.
Jynn’s mouth was dry, and his palms damp. He glanced to one side and saw, to his disappointment, that they were near a rather extraordinary filing cabinet. It was covered in bands of metal, huge rivets, and the sort of sigils normally reserved for a demonologist’s basement floor. It had only one drawer, and just above the lone handle a brass plaque bore a familiar etching of a fish with tentacles wrapping up around its tail—the sign of the Leviathan Project.
Laruna followed his gaze. She took a deep breath and forced a grin. “Probably not the right time for this,” she said.
“We did tell Gorm that we would hurry.” Jynn smiled in apology as he turned his attention to the drawers.
There were enchanted locks and wards all over the cabinet, of course; magical wards and locks are best for keeping out skilled thieves and overcurious apprentices. Best practices called for complex spells of both noctomancy and solamancy, so that no one individual could open the spell. This policy operated under the presumption that there were very few powerful omnimancers around anymore, and if there were any it was unlikely that they’d be trying their hand at safecracking.
Jynn noted the Novian irony and filed it away mentally as he swiftly dismantled the spells with his own weave and popped the drawer open. A cloud of dust billowed as it slid out.
