Alexander used his remaining blowtube of sleeping powder to ensure that the two men wouldn’t wake anytime soon, then he and his friends moved into the caves that led down to the forest below the village.
They moved through the darkness for the rest of the night, trying to gain as much distance as possible before the tribe of primitives realized that their guests were gone. Alexander didn’t want to fight them. They weren’t evil. They weren’t even working against him, but they’d chosen to help him in a way that was totally unacceptable.
An hour after dawn Isabel reported that Slyder had seen a hunting party leave the cliff-side village. They were a half a day behind and moving quickly. Alexander picked up the pace. He was tired and his head hurt from the constant concentration of using his all around sight but he pressed on, hoping to reach the hidden fortress before the primitives caught up with them.
As the day wore on, the terrain became more mountainous and the path became steeper. By evening, they were nearing the limits of their endurance, but Alexander didn’t let up. He pushed them until darkness and exhaustion overcame them.
He woke in the middle of the night to Isabel murmuring in her sleep, struggling with something dark in her dreams. He could see her colors darken as she fought with her nightmare. It made his stomach squirm to see her like this. Phane’s hold on her was growing. When he shook her awake, she sat bolt upright with a start, then shuddered with relief as she lay back down in the comfort of Alexander’s arms.
“It’s getting worse,” she whispered. “Maybe Rentu’s right. Maybe you would be better off without me.”
“Not a chance,” Alexander said. “Go back to sleep.”
Exhaustion overpowered his worry for Isabel and he drifted off again within a few minutes.
He woke before dawn, his head still hurting from the day before and the pain was becoming more severe. He started to wonder if Shivini’s attack had actually done more harm than he first thought. His magical vision had saved him from the crippling consequences of being blinded but he was paying a price for constantly using his magic.
Before they set out, Alexander sat down and drew a magic circle in the dirt. He cleared his mind in spite of the pain and focused on finding the state of empty-mindedness that was his passage to the firmament.
It took longer than usual but he eventually found his way into the endless ocean of potential. He started with their current location, rising high into the sky, taking in the surrounding terrain and looking for a path to his destination. At first he couldn’t see the fortress entrance, but when he focused on Jinzeri, he quickly found himself in the cavern where the Nether Gate was hidden. Before the shade could notice his presence, he drifted through the stone of the mountain until he was high above it. From there, he marked his location and worked backward, plotting a course through the increasingly steep and treacherous mountains.
Once he was satisfied that he knew the way, he sent his awareness to the hunting party. There were easily thirty men and they were already on the move. Alexander had no idea what they would do to Isabel if given the chance and he didn’t want to find out. He returned to his body and they set out for the hidden fortress. They were less than a day away.
By midmorning, Isabel reported that the primitives were gaining ground. They moved through the forest quickly, being more familiar with the terrain. Alexander set a fast pace but he feared that they wouldn’t make it to the fortress in time to avoid a fight.
By midafternoon, he could hear the primitives in the forest behind them. Alexander and his friends ran as fast as their fatigue would allow, but they were being outpaced by their hunters. He estimated that they were still an hour from the entrance to the hidden fortress and he knew they wouldn’t be able to keep up their pace for that long.
He stopped in a narrow canyon with steep walls rising on both sides.
“We’ll make our stand here,” he said, breathing hard. “Hopefully, I can scare them off, but if not, then we fight. Make ready for battle. They’ll be here within a few minutes.”
Isabel cast her shield spell, enveloping herself in a bubble of protective magical force. Hector and Horace dropped their packs and drew the pair of short swords they each carried in crossed scabbards on their backs. Jack put up the hood of his cloak and flickered out of sight.
Alexander grasped the hilt of Mindbender and settled his nerves. He was in a fight and he had a sword in his hand. Everything else faded away. Before the primitives arrived, he cleared his mind and visualized an image of the beast that had chased them into the cave the day before. He released it into the sword and the enormous creature materialized in front of them, facing the direction of the approaching hunting party. As they came around a bend in the ravine, Alexander made his illusionary creation roar. The sound was deafening in the confined space, staccato echoes reverberating off the stone walls.
The primitives stopped in their tracks, then turned and fled. Alexander breathed a sigh of relief until he heard another roar from the real beast not too far off. His illusion had just alerted it to their location.
“Just keeps getting better and better,” Jack said with a sardonic smile.
“It’s never easy,” Alexander said. “Let’s get moving.”
They moved as fast as their weariness would allow. The occasional roar of the beast from off in the distance and the threat of the hunting party somewhere behind them spurred them on. In just under an hour, they came to a mountain meadow. One side was bordered by a sheer cliff reaching several hundred feet into the sky. Several ravines led into the meadow through the mountains surrounding the other three sides. A waterfall cascaded down one smaller cliff between two of the ravines and collected in a small mountain lake before meandering off in a burbling little stream flowing out of the meadow and down one of the other ravines.
It was a beautiful setting—or at least it would have been had it not been for the beast standing on the opposite side of the meadow. Alexander quickly scanned the area for cover but found nothing except for the ancient stone archway carved into the base of the sheer cliff. Weather-worn glyphs and runes decorated the entrance to the hidden fortress, giving it an ancient and foreboding look.
The stone door that had once barred entrance was long ago broken and lay in scattered, moss-covered rubble underneath the archway. The entrance was a good hundred feet away and the beast was nearly two hundred feet behind them.
It roared and stamped its feet as if making ready to charge.
“Run!” Alexander shouted as he broke into a sprint with the last bit of his strength.
The beast charged as they raced toward the safety of the entrance passage. Alexander noticed the hunting party peering out from behind a field of boulders littering the mouth of one ravine. They watched as the beast closed the distance, perhaps hoping that the creature would do their work for them.
The beast gained terrifying speed, closing the gap too quickly. Just as Alexander was about to stop and make a stand, Hector broke off from the group, charging toward the beast.
Alexander started to slow to help his bodyguard, but Horace pushed him toward the safety of the cave entrance.
“He’ll be fine, Lord Reishi.”
Alexander didn’t quite understand, but he accepted Horace’s assurances and continued to run for the entrance. Once they reached the threshold, Alexander stopped to catch his breath and turned to see the battle unfolding between Hector and the beast.
The beast was bleeding from the belly along two deep gashes. Hector stood his ground as the beast lunged forward, snapping with its huge jaws. At the last moment, when Alexander was certain that Hector would be killed, he transformed into a vaporous cloud in the shape of a man. The beast’s jaws landed on insubstantial vapor. Hector flowed out between its giant teeth and beneath it, where he became solid once again before driving his twin short swords into the belly of the beast.
It roared in pain and Hector once again transformed into vapor before the beast could kill him. When he noticed that Alexander had made it to safety, he disengaged, drifting toward the cave entrance. The beast roared in frustrated rage, turning away from the prey that had bitten it back.
“Well done, Hector,” Alexander said.
“Thank you, Lord Reishi. I suspect it’ll be back once it’s had a chance to lick its wounds.”
“Hopefully we can get what we came for and be on our way before then,” Alexander said, turning to the darkness of the fortress entrance and holding up his vial of night-wisp dust.
“Stay alert. The hunting party is right behind us and might follow us into the fortress.”
The corridor ran straight for several hundred feet into the stone of the mountain before it came to a large octagonal room with several other corridors radiating away from it. The arched ceiling was thirty feet high with glowing crystals embedded in the stone that cast a pale light into the chamber. Alexander stopped at the threshold, scanning the room.
There were a number of relatively fresh footprints leading into the fortress. It looked like a squad of soldiers had spent some time searching for just the right passage before moving on.
“It seems we aren’t the first ones here,” Jack said.
“I was hoping the things Rentu showed me were just possibilities,” Alexander said.
“What did you see?” Isabel asked.
Alexander saw the trepidation in her colors. She was worried about the prediction that she would betray him, but Alexander suspected he knew which prophecy they were walking into.
“I saw us in a battle with Regency soldiers led by a wraithkin and a wizard in the cavern where the Nether Gate is hidden. Truss was there too, possessed by one of the shades. In the prophecy, we defeated the soldiers and the wizard, but the wraithkin escaped with the keystone, and Truss chased after him.
“These footprints look recent and they’re from boots, not sandals or bare feet. It looks like Phane’s men have beaten us here.”
“Perhaps there is some good news,” Jack said. “The soldiers’ tracks are liable to lead us right to the chamber we want. It’s a good bet that Phane knows the layout of this place and gave his men directions.”
“It’s worth a try,” Alexander said.
“I’ll take point,” Hector said.
The walls were made of large blocks of stone cut with exacting precision and fitted together with virtually no tolerance. Even after thousands of years, the walls were nearly seamless.
Hector moved carefully and quietly down the hallway. Very suddenly, the floor gave out beneath him and he fell into a pit concealed under a trap door. In a blink, he transformed into vapor and drifted back up to the hallway on the opposite side of the trap.
Alexander and Isabel peered down the shaft as the door slowly closed, resetting the trap. Forty feet below was a floor filled with three-foot spikes. A soldier from the Reishi Army Regency was impaled by several of them.
“Well, I guess that confirms it,” Jack said.
“Hopefully, this place will thin them out a bit,” Isabel said.
“Just so long as it doesn’t thin us out, too,” Alexander said.
It took them half an hour, but with the aid of a rope they were able to traverse the pit trap safely. Once on the far side, Alexander marked the floor as a warning for their return trip.
They continued on through the halls of the hidden fortress, following the footprints of the enemy soldiers as they led the way deeper into the bowels of the mountain. At one time, the fortress could have housed thousands, but now it was broken down and dilapidated. The air was still and heavy.
The place made Alexander uneasy. His headache didn’t help.
They had just descended a flight of stairs when Alexander saw a section of the floor glowing with a slight aura.
“Stop,” he said.
Hector stopped midstride and looked back quizzically.
“There’s something wrong with the floor up ahead,” Alexander said.
“If it’s a trap, maybe I can spring it,” Horace said.
Alexander nodded. Horace stepped forward and closed his eyes for a moment. Alexander watched the aura of Horace’s magical servant appear just ahead of them. It was roughly three feet tall and vaguely shaped like a man, or at least its colors were; it was completely invisible to normal vision. It ambled forward until it reached the place in the floor.
Horace looked to Alexander for confirmation.
“That’s the spot,” he said.
The magical servant jumped up and landed with a slight thump. A five-foot-wide section of the floor stretching across the hall glowed intensely for just a moment. Horace staggered back as his magical servant was destroyed.
“It seems to respond to pressure,” he said. “I won’t be able to conjure my servant for another hour or so.”
“Are you injured?” Isabel asked. “I mean, can you be hurt when your magic is dispelled like that?”
“It causes pain for a moment,” Horace said, “but no damage. When my servant is destroyed by violence or magic, I simply can’t call on it again for a while.”
Jack carefully approached the edge of the magical trap. He looked closely at the floor and frowned.
“I suspect there’s a mechanism that deactivates the trap for a time,” he said. “It looks like the soldiers walked right over it without difficulty.”