2/27/2023 0 Comments Enchanted portals twining![]() ![]() My skill grows, O you stones! A bull’s eye at fifty! “No, it should not,” she continued. She concentrated and let fly, and the arrow found its mark. She’d been practicing, and for a pale poet of Swanisle, she’d a strong arm. It is not, I think, a place for mortals.”īone frowned as he handed her a shortbow. “Yes, exactly,” Gaunt said, “so why does the magma preserve the weapon’s resting place? That pillar is clearly maintained by a powerful and ancient magic. “It seems unrestrained enough to kill us,” Bone observed, touching a vial of black viscous stuff to the clawed tip of the arrow. It should long since have consumed that rocky pillar.” But fluid rock should not behave with such restraint. To the point, the world’s inner heat results from pockets of creation-fire captured at time’s dawn, and from candlewyrms who spawn thence and swim through and drink the fluid rock. “Strange as our Earthe is,” Gaunt persisted, “its oddness has its reasons, like the divinity student who affords tuition by dancing burlesque. ![]() She watched him at work, noting his ferret-like motions, his sandy hair (previously dark but now lightened by months on the road), and the scars upon his face, one left by steel, one by fire. Now I counsel that we return to the fields we know and fulfill our quest in a sensible fashion, such as-oh, who can say-kidnapping the emperor of the Eldshore and convincing him of-Bone, what are you doing?”īone had busied himself threading the end of one of the very fine ropes through an eyelet at the tail of a claw-tipped arrow. “Well, we have beheld it,” Gaunt persisted, “and the demesne of your ‘ultimate weapon’ is surely unreachable. It shouldn’t have taken a hundred angry sorcerers to give me a push.” “This is why I should have left city life years ago. But this-” He waved a hand at all the hellish majesty. I mean honestly, Gaunt, iron strongboxes! Locks with poison needles! Surly thugs with swords! A thief could cry. “-but for the most part, city rich are stingy and unimaginative. Oh, once in a while there were retired war-hydras down to a head or two, senile tentacled horrors disguised as chandeliers, pits of spikes covered with stale cockatrice blood, venomous squirrels–” And yet, truth be told, most of my capers have been highly prosaic, city-bound affairs. “As you are,” Gaunt said on cue, with a slight roll to her eyes. Many a year I’ve thieved a thousand walls have calloused my fingertips, a thousand rooftops have leathered my feet, and I consider myself one of the finest-” “You do not know, Gaunt,” Bone continued, an old, old look in the eyes upon his young face, “how satisfying is this tableau. When we return to the surface I shall compose a trifle called ‘Ode Upon a Fiery Pillar of Doom.’ Shall we turn back now?” “The geology,” Gaunt repeated as Bone busied himself with his pack, unloading ropes and pitons and more exotic objects, “is all wrong. “It’s perfect, Gaunt.”įrom the gap, they peered: Persimmon Gaunt the black-clad poet and Imago Bone the grey-shrouded thief. “The geology is all wrong, Bone.”įrom the same opening (which, it must be said, was also a third the way up from the searing magma) came a rapt voice. The stone finger stopped just short of those spikes, and up there the weapon’s violet glow cast an inverted forest of shadows.įrom a jagged tunnel mouth two-thirds the way down the cavern wall there rose a perplexed voice. Magma flowed around a thin pillar of rock that lanced toward a ceiling as thick with stalactites as a porcupine with quills. Despite the hollow’s depth the space swelled with light. The weapon gleamed in a cavern so deep underground it lay almost nearer the world’s underside than the lands we know. ![]()
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