Hoard

At least the invisibility thing involved getting his shadow back, just in time for it to disappear again. Still, knowing it would be there once he was visible again was a comfort; for all that a shadow provided him no actual benefit, its absence felt wrong. Also, having it properly attached was evidence that the Entity had departed to…wherever it spent its time when not visiting Kaln. With that little matter settled, Kaln was free to concentrate on his next problem: climbing down a mountainside while unable to see his own limbs.

That was the shortest part of the climb, fortunately. It was an alarmingly steep slope from the ridge to the staircase. He managed not to actually fall off the mountain, but twice in picking his way down, lost his footing and went skidding down the loose scree. The first time he managed to grab a scraggly bush on his way past, and the second came to a stop through no credit to himself by slamming into a boulder. Bruised and somewhat abraded, Kaln finally made it onto the steps where he paused to catch his breath.

Well, it had only been about ten minutes. Ten frightening, intermittently painful minutes, but it was over. The rest of the climb might be physically up again, but it was metaphorically downhill. Now, though it was rubble-strewn and overgrown, he just had to walk up a staircase.

Immediately he realized why these obviously long-abandoned steps were in such good condition. All the signs were there: the subtle glossiness of the stone, the characteristic geometric patterns engraved into them. There were even patches of Timeglass set into the vertical faces of each step, inert now with the afternoon sunlight beaming directly onto them, but once dark fell each step would be helpfully illuminated. This was Timekeeper architecture. Unfathomably ancient, crafted using superior technology which had long since vanished, and likely to outlast the civilizations that existed here now.

It also made this ascent laughably easy, even in the dark, which would have made the neglected condition of this path extremely ominous if Kaln didn’t already know exactly the kind of horror he was walking blithely into.

Dragons. Why had he agreed to this? Vague promises of power? Of revenge?

Revenge, it was definitely the revenge.

If he got eaten by a dragon, well… At least he wouldn’t be plagued with nightmares about Haktria anymore. And if not, if there was anything at all to the Entity’s promises? They’d see who had the nightmares.

He steeled himself, stood up, brushed off his clothes as best he could without being able to see them or his hands, and began picking his way carefully up.

Truly, this was without doubt the easiest leg of his entire journey. After hiking all around Rhivaak and then the great desert plateau he was in much better physical shape than at any point in his life prior. Walking up a staircase was nothing—even a staircase that wound all the way up a mountain, even without being able to see his own feet, even having to navigate around crawling overgrowth and fallen rocks. There was nothing to it but time.

The old Kaln of just a year ago would have been exhausted to the point of collapse, but now he was barely out of breath when, half an hour later, he had ascended to a level that was actually higher in altitude than the ridge he’d so awkwardly stumbled down, where a titanic rockfall had buried most of the ancient steps.

From a distance it sure looked like the end of the line, but up close he could see what the Entity had referred to. There was a gap between two of the largest boulders, easily big enough for a person to slip into. He had to duck a few feet in, but then the passage opened up into a little roofless space amid the fallen stone, with another gap ahead. A smaller one, but Kaln was still able to squeeze in with no trouble. And just like that, he was home free. Ahead was nothing but more stairs—except now, he could see the destination.

He was pretty sure just at a glance from the rockfall, but as he ascended and more of it came into view, the conclusion was unmistakable. This was no mere cave at the peak of the mountain. Minutes later, Kaln warily crested the last step and came to a stop, taking in the spectacle of one of the most incredible things he’d ever seen.

The entire thing was a Timekeeper edifice.

Before him yawned a vast opening into the face of the mountain, easily four stories tall and less than half that wide—a sensible choice of residence for dragons, as they would have no trouble squeezing in and out. Like nearly all Timekeeper artifacts, everything was amazingly intact, from the glossy, decorative stonework of the great door’s setting, to the paved plaza before the doorway, which was set in an abstract mural of multicolored Timestone with inset pieces that looked like Timeglass. He could even see the doors themselves, retracted into the sides of the aperture and leaving visible only the thin (relatively; they looked half as thick as he was tall) lip of metal, the characteristic bronze-gold color of Timesteel. Like all examples of its kind, it wasn’t scratched or even rusted after eons of standing open to the elements like this. From within came the characteristic sounds of a fully intact Timekeeper ruin: distant, muffled ticking and hissing as ancient gears and pipes resolutely carried out their inscrutable work.

What an absolutely lucky find for the dragons. Well, for anyone, but an indestructible citadel built to a scale they could comfortably use must have been priceless. Why had the Timekeepers even built something this large atop a mountain? It was a pointless question; no one knew why they had done anything. Besides, they had been gone for so long there was no telling how the landscape had changed in the interim. Part of the mountain had fallen onto their staircase, just for starters.

Kaln drew a deep breath, glancing down at his lack of visible hands to reassure himself. He was invisible; it would be fine. Previous experience had taught him that the Entity’s protection eliminated sounds and smells. It was impossible to detect him.

Except by magic. For example, the kind of powerful magic wielded by dragons that the Entity itself was unwilling to go near. This was such a terrible idea.

All around him the light changed. The afternoon sun finally fell low enough that the Timeglass set into the huge door frame and the surrounding stonework began to glow softly in the increasing dimness.

Kaln began putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward because he was more afraid to run away now than he was of the ignominious death toward which he was probably heading, and the only other alternative was to dither about in the door of a dragon’s lair like an even bigger fool than the kind who’d go in there.

The mechanisms which controlled the doors were visible inside, an arrangement of gears and towering metal shafts whose purpose he only understood because they were visibly connected to the door frame. On both sides were spoked wheels of a reasonable size for a person to turn by hand. Kaln didn’t touch them, of course, but he knew they would function as smoothly as if freshly built, despite the intervening millennia without maintenance. The only Timekeeper artifacts he had previously seen up close were smaller gadgets of now-inscrutable purpose on display in Rhivkabat, but his work in the Royal Archives had enabled him to read up on all that was known of them. Everything the Timekeepers had made still worked, though nobody could figure out what most of it did.

He was now in a corridor which towered above him like a cathedral. Paradoxically, its huge dimensions made it seem shorter than it was; Kaln had a good fifty steps to traverse before reaching the main part of this ancient…facility. Fifty steps wasn’t much relative length for a hallway this wide and tall, though. Already it was a study of contrasts in here: the Timekeeper architecture was of course immaculate, but under a coating of evidence that this place was now a dragons’ lair. Animal bones were strewn about, most thankfully long since free of meat, and the flawless, decorative stonework was obscured by moss and mildew climbing the walls. It should be brighter in here thanks to the inset panels of glowing Timeglass, but they were also partially covered by both that and general dust, not to mention hanging cobwebs of truly incredible proportions.

Reaching the far end, Kaln crept very carefully into the main cavern, and had to pause again there just to take it all in.

His inner monologue was running out of synonyms for “big.” Actually, the Royal Palace in Rhivkabat was probably larger than this—in fact, its grandiose Serpent Hall, which he had been graced to visit several times, might be both bigger and more majestic in design than the huge open space into which he now emerged. But that was the beating heart of the continent’s greatest empire. For a dragon-infested ruin, this was…incredible. It was much like the access hall in that the flawless architecture of the Timekeepers, while perfectly intact, was intact under what looked like centuries of accumulated dragon refuse. More moss and mold, dust and cobwebs, and in this chamber a much deeper accumulation of old bones. They were piled higher than he was tall against the walls and up to three times that in some of the corners. It was likewise dim, the Timeglass similarly obscured by neglect and filth. This space was too large and too open to the elements outside to get properly musty, but the combination of damp and decomposition left an acrid smell hanging in the air, with a perhaps unsurprising undercurrent of smoke.

Oh, that was what those odd stains on the upper walls were, Kaln realized. Soot and smoke, accumulated over who knew how long.

The air resonated with the fairly soft but pervasive sound of ticking, and intermittent hissing of escaping steam. He could see, along the upper part of the grand chamber’s walls, exposed machinery; ancient gears and pistons and pipes of unfathomable purpose stolidly going about their eternal work. More, softer counterpoints came from the collection of Timekeeper gadgets which had been strewn about the floor of the main chamber, these priceless artifacts interspersed with gnawed bones. There was also the sound of water, both running and dripping, though he couldn’t see the source. Altogether the noise was relatively gentle, even soothing; Kaln much preferred it to an ominous silence.

And yet, even all of this he took in with a sweeping glance and a fragment of his attention, most of his focus going right to his first sight of a dragon.

The beast was asleep, thankfully. Along the left and right walls were four more towering doorways just like that of the access hall through which Kaln had stepped, two to a side, and the dragon was snoozing in the middle of one of these paths, half its body stretched out into the main area and the rest taking up space in the hallway. It had scales of pale blue and understated horns lining its skull. He froze like a rabbit, staring in petrified silence for a few moments and just watching the creature’s prone torso, what he could see of it, rising and falling slowly with its sleeping breath.

It wasn’t as large as some accounts he’d read of dragons, but still big enough to easily bite him in half.

As his heart rate settled again, Kaln began picking his way across the floor. There was ample room to walk, but mostly down the middle through the open space where the dragons had apparently made paths through their own rubbish. Invisible or not, it felt awfully exposed to walk there, but he ultimately decided it was less risky than attempting to grope through the bones and old machinery; he’d never manage that without making some kind of noise.

Partway across the chamber he had another bad start as he discovered that, previously hidden from view by perspective and intervening junk, another of the doorways on the other side of the room had a sleeping dragon sprawled in it. This one looked to be about the same size as the blue, though its scales were black with red edges that gave it an almost iridescent look, and its horns were slightly larger. It was also deeply asleep, though, and without the shelter of the doorway to linger in, Kaln didn’t pause to stare this time. Instead he picked up his pace, pushing on to the stairs.

These occupied the entire width of the huge room, rising nearly two full stories to another level. Upon reaching the top of this he found…more of the same, really. There were side doors along the walls up here, too, but unlike the immense portals below these looked more reasonably person-sized. Also, they were all firmly shut, blocked by doors of distinctive golden-bronze Timesteel. A broad cleared path led the way to another door directly opposite the stairs, the same size as the towering entrance tunnels down below; to either side of this were strewn old bones and detritus.

Kaln counted his blessings as he crept carefully toward the central door. The bones were all large, from what he could see; aurochs, urgoats, and mammoths, probably. Nothing that looked human. Also, there were no signs of fewmets, and the unpleasant smell lacked the acrid tang of ammonia. Well, dragons were known to be highly intelligent creatures, and even if this group were slobs, even the simplest animals knew better than to defecate in their own nests.

Across the upper ledge and then down another vaulted tunnel, he finally reached his goal. There, he came as close as he had been in this entire adventure to abandoning it and turning around.

The huge chamber beyond was a true dragon’s hoard, though not as Kaln would have envisioned one based on the stories. Rather than piles of gold and miscellaneous riches carpeting the floor and drifting high in corners like the bones outside, this was laid out more like a museum. Orderly and spotlessly clean, well-lit thanks to the inset Timeglass panels being free of the dust, cobwebs, and creeping moss that obscured those in the central nexus. Display cases stood in neat rows and climbed the walls, containing treasures with neat labels behind glass, and a whole row of heavy vaults covered the rear of the room. Near the door there was even a huge map of the chamber with detailed notes describing the position of everything, pressed against the wall and also securely under glass. Kaln hardly noticed the unimaginable riches around him, barely registering the seeming peculiarity of their display.

He stood all but nose-to-nose with a dragon. A dragon at least twice the size of those he had seen below, though sleeping as soundly as they were—which was the only reason he did not instantly turn and flee, or possibly die of heart failure. This wasn’t just a dragon. The sheer size of it, those rare crimson scales…

In all these weeks, in all his conversations with the Entity… He’d never bothered to bring it up, when the shadowy being began talking about a dragon’s lair in the Evervales. He hadn’t wanted to sound foolish by stating the obvious, and besides, it hadn’t seemed entirely real to him until this moment. But no matter how many dragons were in this lair or who the other six were, there was only one name that mattered. The dragon. The destroyer of the old Valereld Empire, and the chief reason the Vales had remained a disordered patchwork of kingdoms for the six centuries since—the cause of cataclysmic destruction from the sky if any in the territory he had claimed began to grow toward a degree of power that might one day challenge him. The Beast of Blood himself.

Atraximos the Dread.

Right now, Kaln could take two steps, reach out one hand, and pat his nose.

He decided not to.

Standing there, invisible and silent, staring at the monster and feeling the hot wind of his slow, slumbering breath, Kaln found himself oddly preoccupied with the intrusive thought that it was weird the Dread’s lair was here, on the very southern edge of the Evervales. He was probably closer to Rhivaak than the northern reaches of the territory he claimed as his own. That had been another point of uncertainty that kept Kaln’s mouth shut about his target’s identity when the Entity had talked about him; he would have expected Atraximos to roost somewhere near the middle of the Vales. What kept him from flying south over the plateau to despoil the wealthy empire beyond?

But that was him thinking like a scribe, which he wasn’t anymore. He was an adventurer—well, a thief at least. And the admittedly foolish pawn of an otherworldly being of uncertain motivations. That being’s power remained in evidence, at least. Neither the senses of the great dragon nor the magical wards and protections he had to have laid over his hoard seemed to register the presence of an interloper. Kaln was truly invisible, in a way that went beyond the merely physical.

He could probably walk right up to Atraximos and saunter past him within arm’s length all the way around.

He decided not to do that, either. After this day’s work, Kaln might never again be able to insist he wasn’t an idiot, but that didn’t mean he was suicidally reckless.

Quietly, then, for his peace of mind if not for practical benefit. Kaln took a deeply cautious step into the hoard chamber, casting his eyes around the astonishingly neat display cases. Now the question was how to find his target…

His gaze strayed to his right, to the enormous chamber map with its precise notation.

There’s no way it’s that easy.

And indeed it wasn’t, not quite. It was too much to hope that Atraximos the Dread had, on top of being some kind of neat freak, labeled his hoard’s directory in modern Nourid or Vhii, or even Filvallin. The map’s notations were in Old Valeron, which he did not speak or read…exactly. However, the grammar was similar to modern Filvallin, which had descended from it, and the vocabulary likewise. It also used the same proto-Nourid script he’d needed to learn to parse the oldest Foundational Texts in the Royal Archives, which were still engraved on stone tablets for complex political reasons that he found very annoying. In fact, the specific reason Kaln had never troubled to study Valeron, either classical or liturgical, was because a court scribe of Rhivkabat knew enough to struggle through it anyway, and he didn’t encounter it often enough that being able to read it quickly was much of an asset.

Now, his education did not fail him. The words for “Timekeeper” and “artifact” were among those he had scrupulously prepared to recognize in any language with which he was even passingly familiar, which narrowed the search immediately. Unfortunately, according to the map, Atraximos had a rather impressive collection of those.

Kaln edged over to the far side of the map and carefully positioned himself such that he could see all of it peripherally while keeping the slumbering dragon fully in his direct field of view.

Priorities.

In the end, this additional study availed him little, aside from quickly memorizing “of unknown purpose” in Old Valeron. No great shock; most of the Timekeeper artifacts in any collection would be labeled thus. Luckily it didn’t end up mattering much, as by far the majority of Atraximos’s Timekeeper collection were neatly displayed together in one quadrant of the vast chamber. Even more luckily, that location was as far from the dragon himself as it was possible to get in here.

Kaln set off as eagerly and quietly as he could, skirting the edge of the room and finding his goal far more easily than he could have anticipated. The section of Timekeeper devices were immediately recognizable; though Timesteel could be mistaken for bronze at a casual glance, the style of workmanship and aesthetic touches were so standardized that anyone who’d seen a few would recognize the handiwork of the Timekeepers. That such a clearly powerful culture had been so unimaginative—or perhaps merely single-minded—was the least of the mysteries about them. In this part of the hoard, free-standing sculptures and mechanical devices (most inert, a few whirring inscrutably away) stood interspersed with display cases and racks of shelves upon which smaller artifacts were displayed. Kaln spotted his target from most of the way across the room and made a beeline toward it.

An archway made of grandfather clocks. Okay, not exactly, but now that the thing was in front of him, the description made sense. Upon a free-standing dais of Timestone roughly the height of an average stair step there stood two pillars, square in shape and inset with panels of luminous Timeglass, each topped by a cube slightly wider than themselves. From the cube sides facing each other there extended a single matching beam, from the center of which hung a trapezoidal Timeglass compartment—the “keystone” from Kaln’s instructions, no doubt. Each of the other six faces held a circular inset piece of glass, with the customary long and short hands of clock—all set to different times.

Kaln paused, looking nervously back at Atraximos and waiting for the beast’s enormous chest to rise and fall twice in the steady rhythm of sleep, before daring to direct his full attention to the artifact.

Of all the gadgets left behind by the Timekeepers, the most consistently comprehensible were their clocks. All these countless centuries later, every one still ticked gamely away, crafted of seemingly impervious materials that resisted all damage, decay, or attempts at tampering—just like everything they’d left, but while many contraptions of endlessly ticking Timesteel gears remained inscrutable, if you had a Timekeeper clock you would always know what time it was down to the precise second, synced perfectly to the very rotation of the world. Many would even adjust themselves if carried to a different latitude. It was thus ironic for Kaln to find himself confronted by six Timekeeper clock faces which were clearly not telling the time.

Those weren’t numbers on the edges of the faces, first of all. Timekeeper clocks never had numbers; that entire culture had seemingly never written anything down in any medium, not even the twelve hours a clock would count. This one did have symbols all around its perimeter, and for a moment Kaln was terribly excited to have discovered possibly the only Timekeeper artifact in existence with something written on it, but no; upon a moment’s inspection, he realized they were recognizable star constellations.

Timekeepers. Who knew why they had done anything?

He glanced compulsively at the sleeping dragon before reaching out to the “clock” faces.

Those rotated easily when touched; they were not moving under their own power and didn’t resist or react to being rearranged. None of them were pointing in a consistent direction. Whatever this thing was, it seemed the use of clocks as its control interface was just some kind of metaphor. Moving carefully around the contraption and sneaking peeks over at Atraximos with every other breath, Kaln delicately shifted the short and long hands of each of the six faces, one at a time, till all pointed straight up.

Midnight. They clicked satisfyingly into place at each hour position, leaving him confident in having positioned each correctly.

The dragon still slept. Kaln was still pursuing this damn fool errand.

In a second, equally tense and meticulous circuit around the dais, he pulled all twelve hands straight out on their convenient little hinges, so they all stood perpendicular to their clock faces. Then, grimacing, he got down to the last part.

The shadow crystal was exactly where it belonged, carefully wrapped up in scraps of leather and cloth in his belt pouch. He extracted the thing, as usual disliking the touch of it. Oh, it didn’t hurt him or really feel like much of anything other than a piece of smooth rock in his hand, but it looked so very wrong. Even more obviously out of place in reality than when the Entity borrowed his shadow. It had no visible aura, yet when Kaln looked at it he could tell, somehow, he was seeing in its faces the energy they put off rather than the faces themselves. It was of an indescribable color, too, somehow simultaneously gold and white and pink, but also…dark. He was obviously holding and staring at something alien to this reality, which his brain was not equipped to parse.

Uncomfortable.

The dragon’s snort reverberated through the room, making Kaln freeze like a rabbit. As the soft rasping of scales continued, he dared to peek over his shoulder at Atraximos, who was slowly, subtly beginning to move.

Could he sense the crystal? The Entity had said it didn’t dare enter here under any amount of magical stealth, because the dragons would detect its presence. What kind of senses did they have?!

Atraximos snorted again, finishing adjusting his position with his chin resting upon his crossed forelegs, resuming his deep, somnolent breathing.

Kaln barely dared to breathe himself, staring in petrified silence at the dragon for almost two full minutes. Or so he estimated. Ironically, he was not in the presence of an actual clock.

When he finally dared to move again, it was even more slowly than before. Reaching up, he found that the Timeglass panels of the hanging “keystone” were also on tiny hinges and held in place by neat little latches, crafted as meticulously at the handiwork of any master goldsmith into minuscule mechanisms that he knew would withstand a direct blow from the nearby dragon.

Opening the container, inserting the shadow crystal, and closing it felt like performing heart surgery. He didn’t even try to count the passing seconds as he moved with exacting slowness and the greatest silence he could manage, but then all at once, it was done.

All of the clock hands snapped back into place in unison, each pointing to midnight. With the softest whisper of air, a momentary obstruction seemed to form in the archway, like a panel of clouded glass, and then it was gone. The only visible difference was that the keystone compartment was glowing visibly now, clearly lit from within by something stronger than the normal passive luminescence of Timeglass.

This time, the dragon did not stir.

Kaln wiped sweaty palms on his pants, staring at the apparent nothingness right in front of his nose.

This…was it. The culmination, the point of this entire escapade. And he still had no idea what it was going to do. Proceeding any further would be profoundly foolish.

Not really any more foolish than having proceeded this far, though. He’d already made his decision, fool that he was.

Kaln took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, glanced for the umpteenth time to verify that the dragon was still asleep, and stepped forward into his destiny.