Sword of Caledor

Chapter FOUR





Warm water tumbled down the sides of the ziggurat and poured over the lip of the entranceway. It ran down the back of Tyrion’s neck and beneath his jerkin as he passed through. He cursed inwardly. It was difficult enough to maintain his gear in these tropical conditions, getting it wet was only going to make that harder.

Inside the gloomy chamber it smelled of mould and rotting leaves and ancient dampness. A snake slithered out of the light of Teclis’s illumination spell. Tyrion reached up and touched the ceiling. It was low enough for him to do so easily.

The stone was chill and wet and blotched in places with some sort of fungal growth. This place had been built for a race shorter than humans or elves. He would have suspected dwarfs had something to do with its building if he had not known better. The stonework had some of the monumental quality he associated with the sons of Grungni. Massive blocks had been placed together with great cunning to make this structure.

It was the carvings in the stone that told a different tale. One look at them and anyone could see that this place had not been built by the dwarfs.

Pictograms had been chiselled into each stone block, depicting oddly square-looking humanoid lizards going about their incomprehensible business. They were of all different sizes. Some were obviously rulers, carried around on palanquins by ones who were obviously slaves.

‘Fascinating,’ Teclis said. For once there was no irony in his tone. He was genuinely interested in this alien artwork.

‘I am just glad to be out of the rain,’ Tyrion said. He spoke in the human tongue. Given their unease, he saw no reason for making the humans any more uncomfortable than they already were.

‘Be grateful you are not in the Old World, yer honours,’ said Leiber. ‘It would be cold there as well and you would most likely take fever.’ He paused for a moment and made a face at his own foolishness. ‘Of course you would not. You are elves. You are immortal.’

‘Not immortal,’ said Teclis. His tone was sour. ‘And some elves suffer from diseases.’

‘I believe you, yer honour, but let’s get on with finding this treasure of yours. None of us is getting any younger.’

Teclis nodded and gestured for the humans to stand back. All of them did so as quickly as they could and all of them wore the worried expressions of humans who knew they were about to be in the presence of sorcery.

Tyrion wondered whether his brother was making a mistake exposing the humans to his magic in this way. They were uneasy enough as it was from the constant expectation of attack. This might push them past the breaking point. He stared hard at Teclis but his brother was already in a world of his own, preparing. He had that inward look that he always wore when getting ready to cast a spell.

Tyrion came to a decision and shepherded the humans out of the chamber and deeper into the pyramid. They looked at him with something between resentment and gratitude and then found their way into another cavernous chamber within the slann structure.

He told them to stay there before returning to where his brother was performing his magic so that he could stand guard. As always, he felt the need to do so. This time in particular, he had a sense of impending danger.

It was just this evil place, he told himself. That was all it was.



Teclis barely noticed that Tyrion had entered the room. His mind had sunk into a trance and he was reaching out with his soul to touch the strange, alien realm from which magic flowed.

He would have liked to have inscribed a pentagram and a mystic circle and all of their associated runes on the floor, but it was too wet and damp for that. And, of course, he had already passed beyond the stage of needing such props in order to work magic. They would have made casting a spell easier but that was all.

He could achieve what was needed simply by uttering the proper incantations and making the correct gestures to bind the winds of magic to his will. Eventually, if he worked at it long enough and practised hard enough, he would be able to work the spell without even needing chants or hand movements.

He spoke the words of power and trailed his fingers through the moist air, flexing them in the way he had been taught by the Loremasters at Hoeth. As he did so sparks flared from his fingertips and his hands left trails of light behind them as they moved.

With those trails of light he sketched out the pentagram and the circle so that they shimmered around him. The mystical structure he had created sculpted the winds of magic around him, adding new layers to the spell, channelling the potent ambient energy. He shaped it with his hands and his voice like a potter shaping clay backing in Lothern. He built something that was like the eye of a daemon.

Once his tool was formed he closed his eyes. He could still see although he now saw from the point of view of the magical eye that he had created and he looked out upon a different world. It was no longer a place of light and darkness illuminated by the blaze of the Sun or the cold glimmer of the Moon. It was not a place where walls blocked vision. It was a place where he saw the patterns of magic, the souls of living things and the flows of magic itself. Stone did not block his sight but other things did – the remains of ancient spells of protection and warding, the static snowflakes created by the winds of magic themselves.

Looking around him he saw the golden glow of Tyrion’s spirit. A little way beyond that he saw the flickering greed and hunger of the humans. All around him small pulses of light represented lizards and birds and stalking jaguars in search of prey.

Somewhere far off in the distance he felt the gigantic, terrifying presence of a monstrous alien intelligence, a thing half-asleep but still vaguely aware of what was going on around it. This would be one of the great slann lords of Hexoatl, slothfully vigilant, watching over its ancient ancestral lands even as it dreamed. He knew he had best do nothing to attract its attention and rouse it to full wakefulness. There was a power in the thing that was close to that of a god.

With an effort of will, he moved his magical eye and his point of view shifted, passing through walls as if they were not there and rising into the sky above the city. He could not move the eye too far from where he was without breaking the connection and ending the spell that he hoped would have leeway enough to get what he needed done. He raised the eye as far into the air as he could and looked down upon the city like a bird would have if it could see the flows of magic.

The city itself channelled magic in the same way as the spell he had created. He saw pulsing lines of light laid out beneath him. He was not sure what the purpose of this vast magical structure had been but he could see that, though it had been intended to fulfil some function, it was no longer capable of doing so.

Parts were dead. The pattern was incomplete. Something had gone wrong. He guessed that the whole city was like one huge rune and parts of that rune had been defaced by the destruction of buildings and the way the city had become overgrown by the jungle.

Whatever it had once been intended to do, the city was no longer capable of it. All that functioned now were the remnants of that vast spell. It still trapped power in pools and he dreaded to think what the effect of that could be. Perhaps it was what was responsible for the riot of growth here. Perhaps it had changed and altered the living things around it, making them angry mutants.

Fascinating as it all was, it was not part of his purpose here to study the magic of the Old Ones. He was looking for a specific object, one not made by the builders of the city but by an elf. It would have a very different magical signature that would stand out against this background like a gem on black velvet.

He made his point of view circle until he saw something that made him hopeful, a glittering pattern of light somewhere in the distance. He moved his magical eye as far in that direction as the tether of the spell would allow.

His heart began to race. He was looking at something that definitely had an aura. It could be only one thing. All they had to do was march in that direction until they found it and one of the greatest works of one of the greatest mages in history would be within their reach.

It was then that he noticed that they were not alone in the city, that other sentient beings were present and that those beings bore no resemblance to either elf or human, but were something monstrous, alien and savage. The servants of the slann were out there, and they were most likely looking for him and his brother.

And there was something else that worried him. All around the place where the elven magic flared there was the glow of other, darker, more sinister sorcery. One of the pools where the magic channelled by the city had collected, had curdled and congealed into something inexpressibly loathsome that made him want to shudder.

He summoned the spell back to him, and opened his eyes. Tyrion raised an eyebrow.

‘I know where we must go,’ said Teclis. ‘Although there may be some slann in our way. And worse – Dark Magic too.’

‘Oh good,’ said Tyrion. ‘We wouldn’t want things to be too easy now, would we?’



Ahead of them, a monstrous ziggurat erupted out of the jungle. It was the largest they had so far seen and it was in somewhat better condition than the rest. It loomed over them like a mountain: gigantic, eternal, indestructible.

The rain had stopped, but water still dripped from the leaves as they pushed them aside. The moisture ran down the face of the humans like tears. Tyrion was soaked with rain as well as with sweat.

‘This is the place. I remember it,’ said Leiber. ‘This is where Argentes vanished and where we were attacked as we waited for him.’

For once Teclis did not mock him. The other humans looked reluctant to continue. There was something about the sheer scale of the place that intimidated them. Leiber sounded angry when he spoke, as much with himself as with them. ‘We’ve not got all day. There’s treasure in there. Don’t you want it?’

Up ahead, Tyrion could see that there had been hundreds of statues on every step of the ziggurat. Most of them were toppled over although he was not sure what had done it. It might have been an earthquake or a war or something else entirely, some magical disaster perhaps.

The main bulk of the structure was completely intact and that was hardly surprising. It was built of blocks of stone, each of which must have weighed tens of tons. The creation of this pyramid must have involved magic or the labour of tens of thousands of slaves.

He tried to imagine putting together this gigantic building in the sweltering heat of the tropical jungle. He tried to imagine it being built by the savage lizardmen who had attacked them earlier. It was difficult to believe that such creatures could have been capable of architecture on such a scale but he knew that such thoughts were deceptive. Once the slann had been the greatest of races, the master magicians of the world, the mightiest scholars, the chosen servants of the Old Ones, or so the most ancient legends claimed.

Look at them now, he thought – degenerate troglodytes barely capable of making stone tools. And yet this same people had once been masters of the world. It was alarming to consider that something similar might happen to his own people one day. Perhaps it had already started, this process of degeneration.

He thought about Lothern, with its empty palaces and its streets deserted by night. It was not so hard to imagine that one day it too would be overgrown and tumbled down, and that strangers might wander through the ruins overcome by a sense of melancholy and loss.

Perhaps one day, all that would be left would be the humans and their enemies, the beastmen of Chaos. Perhaps they would fight wars over the crumbled ruins of metropolises built by people who were by far their superiors. Perhaps all of this was merely a foretaste of the way the world would end.

They began to make their way up a massive staircase in the side of the ziggurat. There were both steps and ramps and it was easier to walk on the ramps because the steps had been placed at distances that were awkward for the human or elf stride.

Eventually they came to a massive arched opening and Teclis stopped, considering. After a moment he nodded and pointed through the archway.

‘We go down here,’ he said. All of them paused. The humans were plainly reluctant to go down into the darkness within the pyramid and Tyrion could not exactly blame them for that.

A strange smell of rot and decay, stronger even than that which brooded over the jungle, emerged from the entrance like the stinking breath of some undead giant. It felt like entering the mouth of a huge monster, a thing that might devour them. The ziggurat had an unearthly, evil, inhuman presence. It seemed to be waiting like some gigantic beast of prey.

‘We have no light,’ one of the men said. It should have sounded pathetic but it did not. They were all afraid and none of them wanted to admit it. They were close to their goal and Tyrion sensed that this in part was what caused their reluctance to proceed. They were as afraid of what they might find as they were of any guardians. They were afraid that they might be disappointed and that their golden dreams might turn out empty. It would be a brutal blow after all the hardships of getting here.

Teclis gestured. A ball of light sprang into being around his clenched hand. He flexed his fingers and the ball of light drifted away, floating around like a will-o’-the-wisp, illuminating the shadowy interior with a dim yet adequate light. He repeated the process until each of them had his own personal floating lantern. This display of magic made the humans even more uneasy. Tyrion could not see what else there was to be done under the circumstances though. It would take some time to collect the right sort of wood to make torches and it would be so wet that getting them lit would involve magic anyway.

‘Ready?’ Teclis asked.

‘I am, brother,’ said Tyrion. The humans nodded reluctantly but still did not move. They needed someone to give them a lead and it looked like he was elected for that duty. He shrugged and moved through the archway.

‘These lights are going to make a stealthy approach impossible,’ he said with a smile, hoping to lighten the situation.

‘I think anything down there would know that we were here anyway. They could probably smell us. It is said that some of the skinks can track like dogs. They use their tongues instead of their noses but the results are the same,’ said Teclis.

‘One of the joys of travelling with you, brother,’ said Tyrion, ‘is that you’re always so full of interesting facts.’

That got a feeble laugh from the humans and warily the party entered the pyramid and descended downwards into the darkness.

The ceilings in the corridors were so low that in some places Tyrion had to stoop. They were wider than he would have expected but lower. He suspected that it had something to do with the way that the lizardmen walked. They kept their heads much lower, even if their bodies would have been longer than those of a human or an elf lying stretched out on the ground.

‘Which way?’ Tyrion asked.

‘Follow me,’ said Teclis. Tyrion would have preferred to take the lead, but this seemed like a wise time to defer to his brother and his magic. He prepared himself to spring forward at the first sign of danger.

He sensed it would not be long before it showed itself.