Hoard

It was a surprise to Kaln how much he enjoyed flying; he’d always thought of himself as a bookish type, forced by life circumstances to go out and have physical adventures. But the thrill of it was incredible, something he would clearly have to ask his new family to treat him to regularly.

This was particularly important now, because Pheneraxa was very obviously trying to be as difficult as possible and he wasn’t about to ruin it by telling her she was only making it more fun. She kept banking gratuitously with every passing air current she found, and propelling herself in a series of almost-bounces rather than a steady glide—pumping her wings with particular power to shoot them forward in an arc, and then again only when they started to fall. Of course, it was possible she just wasn’t as good at it as Izayaroa, but Kaln had firm doubts.

Either way, he kept his mouth shut, hung on, and grinned madly for the whole ride.

Until, at least, their destination hove into view; then he made himself focus on the problem at hand. It was barely a few minutes before they rounded a mountain peak and beheld a slender tower perched improbably against the side of the next one over.

Time to get into the right mindset for persuading a cranky wizard, then. Kaln was very curious about this Shadrach fellow. Everyone’s descriptions hinted at a crotchety old man; Emeralaphine had called him “the boy,” but then again to her, practically any human would be little more than a child in age.

He took it as final validation of his hypothesis when Pheneraxa plunged right at the mountainside and slammed into it claws-first with an impact that made the entire thing tremble. Even if she wasn’t as adept a flyer as Izayaroa, that was just too clumsy to have been anything but deliberate.

“Well, I guess that’s as good a way to knock as any,” Kaln said cheerfully.

Pheneraxa snorted, turning her neck to grin back at him. “It’ll do for a start. I guarantee he knew we were coming before I landed, but that doesn’t mean we’re done trying to wheedle our way in.”

“What approach do you recommend to get him to come out?”

“Oh, there’s not a thing you could possibly do to entice him. Me? I usually just default to brute force. It’s all part of the fun of visiting Shadrach! Generally I favor more cerebral methods of achieving my goals, but from time to time it feels quite liberating to just hammer on a problem until it cracks. Like this!”

Seen from up close, this was even more obviously a wizard’s tower than it appeared from a distance. It was too slender to make much architectural sense even without the wider section at its peak which did not look adequately supported. The material looked like purest white marble, though glossy as if lovingly polished, and totally without any visible seams where bricks or stones connected. No stairs or other obvious means of access reached the entrance, there was just a small doorstep jutting out over the side of the mountain, and behind that a door of reddish wood planks heavily supported by an intricate structure of what looked for all the world like hammered silver. Kaln would have hesitated even to knock on that door; it felt as if his fingerprints would tarnish it.

Pheneraxa just folded her huge claw into a fist and pounded it.

Repeatedly.

In fact, this wasn’t knocking according to any convention Kaln knew; she just kept hitting it, over and over, hard enough to make the entire thing rattle in its frame. Unceasingly, for what stretched into over a minute on end, until finally the occupant had enough.

The door burst open hard enough to rebound off the wall.

“Damn your leathery hide, Pheneraxa, what do you want? I am busy!”

“Oh, please, what could you possibly be busy doing? You never do anything!”

“I am in the middle of exercising—”

“You can do that anytime, Shadrach. This is important.”

“If it’s important, it doesn’t involve me!”

“It specifically does, this time. I’ve brought you business!”

The wizard snorted loudly, grabbed the door and yanked it shut. “And that’s goodbye.”

Pheneraxa had grabbed the door frame, however, and it rebounded off her impervious scales.

Kaln, meanwhile, was staring at Shadrach the portal mage in bemusement. He hadn’t known what to expect, but it was not…this.

The wizard wasn’t much older than himself, certainly under thirty. Or rather, that was how he looked; Kaln figured he shouldn’t make assumptions about a wizard powerful enough to give Atraximos the Dread pause. And he clearly had indeed just been exercising: he was stripped to the waist and covered in a light sheen of sweat, which was…unfair. Shadrach was such a physically perfect specimen Kaln might have mistaken him for a dragon if not for the lack of scales and horns. Certainly he was not built like the priests and mages he’d known back in Rhivkabat—nor like the soldiers and workmen who carried dense muscle and often a layer of fat that helped feed it. Shadrach’s body was lean, just brawny enough not to look excessive, and overall appeared sculpted—the physique of a man who wanted to look that way and worked hard at it. He had unfairly perfect features to match, which were so well accentuated by his slightly shaggy, curly black hair and a strategically unkempt short beard that even his sour expression didn’t detract from the effect.

It was just non-stop pretty people in his life lately. Well, Kaln quite liked most of the dragons; hopefully this guy wouldn’t turn out to be more in the vein of Haktria and Atraximos. Though the signs thus far weren’t promising.

“Now, now,” Pheneraxa chided the wizard, grinning maliciously. “You can be neighborly for once in your life, Shadrach. I’d think you would want to meet the new head of our household.”

At that, the wizard paused in trying ineffectually to pry her claws off his doorframe to squint suspiciously up at her, then at Kaln. “The who? What? Wouldn’t that mean—”

“Oh yes indeed,” she said with relish. “Slayer of Atraximos the Dread, and by draconic custom, the heir to all that was his—lair, hoard, and consorts. Ar-Kaln Zelekhir, meet Shadrach Meshabedan.”

“Charmed,” Kaln said with his best smile.

Shadrach scowled at him, then turned back to Pheneraxa. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but that guy is not a dragon.”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed. “There has been discussion on that point. It’s been decided that for all practical purposes, he counts.”

“Is that a fact,” the wizard grunted, once again squinting at Kaln. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was a godling.”

“Wait, you can tell that?” Kaln exclaimed. “Just by looking?”

“Well, I can. It’s not obvious, no, but any advanced practitioner could see at a glance you’re not a normal human. Depending on their specialization… Anyway, as long as you don’t go gadding about in a major city, you’re unlikely to run across anyone who can tell.”

Pheneraxa cackled with glee, and Kaln once again questioned how Izayaroa was an Empress and yet had such a vague and flippant grasp of operational security.

“So,” Shadrach mused, “the old bastard’s dead, then? Well, that’s good enough news I guess I can forgive the disturbance. Hells, this is even worth a celebratory cup of tea. You might as well come in, then, since I’m clearly not going to get rid of you that easily.”

He turned and stalked back into his tower, leaving the door hanging open. Kaln flickered to the doorstep and followed him inside, where he found Shadrach had suddenly turned around and stared back at him through narrowed eyes. Ah, right, that dragon-godling teleportation everybody insisted he should not be able to do so instinctively. What must that have looked like to an actual specialist?

Behind him, the door was pulled shut, and Kaln glanced back to get his first sight of Pheneraxa’s smaller form.

After Tiavathyris and Vadaralshi, this was oddly familiar: she was a dead ringer for Emeralaphine, except younger and slimmer. In fact, now that he thought about it, all three of his wives were quite voluptuous in form, while both the daughters were more willowy; Kaln had to wonder if there was some significance to that, or just Atraximos’s genes. Her hair, of course, was blue, hanging in a simple sheet down her back past the base of her tail. Most amusing was her attire: Pheneraxa wore only a robe in an unpleasant shade between brown and gray that Kaln could only think of as dust-colored. It was loose and fit her poorly, hanging off one shoulder; altogether she was dressed like someone whose interest in clothing began and ended with a begrudging concession to basic modesty, which was pretty funny considering she’d had to remind Emeralaphine of the same.

This was even more obviously a wizard’s tower on the inside; Kaln had never been more unsurprised to see something so uncanny. The round room was significantly bigger than the circumference of the building itself, and seemed to be a plain chamber carved from a single enormous piece of marble, with seven identical doors spaced across its single encircling wall. They were all of the same silver-bound red wood as the front, each neatly labeled in a language Kaln couldn’t read.

Shadrach had already turned away again, stalking across the room to open and step through another door without bothering to address his guests further. There was nothing to do but follow, which they did.

This led into a space which clearly did not exist inside the mountain tower. To Kaln’s surprise, it seemed to be a completely mundane apartment, and rather messy. It was free of the likes of dust and mold, but books, dishes, and clothing were strewn haphazardly across every surface in the sitting area immediately behind the door. This adjoined to an equally unkempt kitchen with a surprisingly rustic-looking dining table in its center. Three more doors to the gods only knew where were positioned along the walls.

Shadrach pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and plopped himself down unceremoniously, leaning it back on two legs to scowl at his guests.

“I guess I’ll get the tea, then,” Pheneraxa said with good humor, her claws clattering on the floorboards as she stepped over to the cabinets.

“You know where everything is,” Shadrach agreed sourly. “And don’t breathe fire at my kettle this time, you lunatic, I have a perfectly good enchanted stove.”

“It’s so much slower—”

“Yeah, it’s much faster when you incinerate my damn dishes! Use the stove!”

“You’re no fun,” she said merrily, already spooning tea leaves into the kettle.

“And yet, for some damned reason, you keep coming back here. Well, you said it was business? I don’t do any business, but you’re here, and I’ve promised tea, so that gives you a few minutes to say your piece. What the hells do you two want?”

Kaln was not about to react to his attitude; he’d dealt with much more unpleasant people who couldn’t teleport him into the ocean.

“Portal magic,” he said, making his tone brisk and just passably pleasant. He knew a guy like this would not respond well to an overly ingratiating approach. “Emeralaphine said you’re the best—or more specifically, she declined to bother with a particular task herself when you are so nearby and specialized in it. We need to create a permanent doorway between my apartments in the lair and another location in the forest of outer Boisverd.”

“Really, a standing portal? That’s all you want?” Shadrach curled his unfairly perfect lips disdainfully. “Why in the uncounted hells is this my problem? Emeralaphine could do that as easily as falling off the mountain.”

“You’ll have to forgive my ignorance—”

“I truly do not.”

“—but my layman’s understanding is that the problem is not the portal itself, but the fact that it has to connect two locations which are behind mutually hostile ward networks.”

“Hm.” The wizard narrowed his eyes, but the expression was as much intrigued as grumpy now, which seemed like good progress. “Again, I don’t see why you felt the need to reach out to me for it. If anything, Emeralaphine would be a better choice to manage that. I am not a specialist in passive defenses, and frankly I don’t fancy tangling with a network that was presumably laid down by Atraximos. He is—was—a defensive specialist.”

“Oh, both ward networks will be under Kaln’s active control,” Pheneraxa said cheerfully from behind him, where she was laying out mismatched crockery while the kettle simmered.

“You’re going to have to explain that further,” Shadrach stated.

“His divine aspect appears to be dragon-related. Among other things, he is able to seize complete control of any magic done by a dragon, and then exercise that control without even understanding how the magic works.”

“That might be the most horrific thing I’ve ever heard of,” Shadrach said flatly. “A bumbling know-nothing layperson, controlling intricate and powerful magics by instinct?”

“Now you’re just being dramatic,” Kaln countered with a smile. “Your whole specialty involves going where no one else can; I’m positive you’ve seen much worse.”

“Well, I suppose I have to grant you that one,” the wizard agreed with a faint smile, which was…something to see, all right. Somehow, the lingering snide antipathy that seemed permanently etched into his face made that smile more breathtaking, not less. “Fine, then, but my point stands. If you can do that, Emeralaphine is still… Oh, wait. I think I see. She’d be the thing Atraximos was most worried about suborning his magical defenses; that ward network must be keyed largely to resist intrusion by her in particular. And you, inept ignoramus that you are, probably wouldn’t be able to control it precisely enough to keep it from going after her long enough for her to make an active alteration.”

“That is her opinion, anyway,” Kaln said agreeably.

“Well, it’s an interesting problem, all right,” the wizard mused, gently rocking his chair. “Could be an entertaining challenge; I do enjoy a bit of technical work. Still, not enough to spend hours or days away from my own research, much less under the prying noses of however many of those dragons are still alive. This one is enough of a pain in my arse and I only have to deal with her on a weekly basis. I don’t know what would be worse, the ancient and masterful ones or the damned drakes. That green nitwit has the mental wherewithal of the wrong half of a squirrel.”

“I look forward to sharing that insight with her,” Pheneraxa cackled.

“So, thanks for stopping by,” Shadrach said curtly, “but good luck with your little problem. You don’t have anything I want badly enough to go to that much effort.”

“Do I have to spell it out?” Kaln replied sweetly, leaning forward to rest his arms on the table and smiling. “Really, I took you for a much smarter man than that. I have the hoard of Atraximos.”

He could see the realization catching up in Shadrach’s eyes, followed by annoyance at having to be reminded. The mage squinted at him for a moment, then snorted and let his chair tip back forward, sitting upright.

“All right, then. You have my…conditional attention. But don’t get your hopes up too high; that old windbag’s taste ran to the tacky and useless, and I have very few needs that I can’t easily meet without help. The last time I bothered to go out of my way to obtain an enchanted artifact for my collection, some damned trading company who saw nothing but tawdry coin in it sniped my spectacles right out from under me at the auction. I’m in a pretty sour mood about enchanted sundries these days.”

“Yes, in contrast to your usual mood,” Pheneraxa said sweetly.

There was no way. What were even the odds…?

Kaln reached into his bag of holding and set the pair of golden eyeglasses on the table. “I don’t suppose you mean these?”

Shadrach’s stare fixed on them, his eyes widening incredulously. “Now how in the enumerated hells—where did you—”

“Easy,” Kaln said, raising his hands peaceably. “I’m not the one who undercut you at auction. I bought those from the trading company that apparently did—at what I’m sure was an enormous markup, if that makes you feel better.”

“Why in the unknown names of the forgotten gods would it?”

“Well, let’s look on the bright side! Now we have something to really discuss.”

The wizard snorted, folding his arms again. “Sorry, but if you actually want to tempt me, you’ll need to produce something useful. Something I can’t get more easily myself. Those are just a curiosity. Collecting exchantments is a hobby, not something I pour a lot of energy into.”

“Exchantments? I’m not familiar with the term.”

“Not being a portal mage, you probably wouldn’t be. An exchantment is an enchantment from another universe—one created using a system of magic which doesn’t exist on this plane of reality, and therefore doesn’t function here. And those aren’t even the rare kind. Hey, Pheneraxa, look at these glasses. Can you hazard a guess at what the enchantment does?”

“No, I can’t,” she said indulgently, “since no one can, that being the entire point of exhantments.”

“Right, but you can see they’re magical?”

The dragon glanced disinterestedly over at them. “Sure, anyone could see that.”

“And there you go,” Shadrach said, outwardly smug now. “That means it’s not actually an artifact from another reality, but an imitation of one created in this universe, probably by one of the trickster gods. As I recall, those were known to be the work of the Jongleur, undoubtedly as a joke.”

“I’ve gotta say, I don’t get it,” Kaln admitted.

“Well, I won’t blame you for that,” the wizard said with the kind of grin that could make an unprepared victim’s breath pause. “Nobody gets his jokes anymore. The Jongleur’s been around since at least before Valereld; can you imagine being a god with a humor-oriented aspect for that long? He’s heard every punchline a literal million times. Nobody’s more gratuitously weird than a bored, jaded humorist.”

Kaln was increasingly getting the measure of this man. Shadrach might actually dislike people and company, but more than that, he wanted to be seen as someone who did. Kaln knew the type, had dealt with more than a few of them over the years. It was familiar enough ground for him to find his feet, and know how to guide this conversation along.

He put the spectacles away, and when he pulled his hand back out of the bag, it was holding a glowing chunk of square crystal in an intricate geometric housing of gold, copper, and iron.

“If you’re more interested in practical applications, then, this is a magical power source that—”

“That is a trivial knickknack,” Shadrach said in an ostentatiously bored tone, once again leaning back in his chair. “The vast majority of spells are fully self-powering, that’s just how most magic works. By the time you’re deep enough in any system to be doing anything that needs an external power source, you’re deep enough to know how to make your own. And you’ll have to, because most such spells require something exceedingly particular that a general-purpose battery can’t do. Those things are made by wizards as practice or proofs of concept, and then left sitting in bags of holding because nobody actually needs them for anything.”

He was smirking now, starting to enjoy this game. Kaln decided to string him along a bit further before pulling out his trump card; the more softened up he was, the better, but he had to be careful not to drag this on too long, lest the unsociable mage get tired of the game and throw them out.

As if to underscore that the clock was ticking, Pheneraxa began setting out mismatched cups and pouring fragrant tea.

“You used my good tea, I see,” Shadrach said sourly.

“Only the best for such esteemed company,” she rejoined, grinning. He sneered at her.

Kaln returned the spell battery to his bag, pulling out another piece of crystal—this one magenta, with a very faint luminescence shifting in its core.

“This is one of the fragments of a soul crystal containing a bound djinn of nearly unmatched power. Anyone who reunites all seventy-four shards will gain complete control over—”

“That’s not just a curiosity, it’s a nuisance,” Shadrach scoffed. “Nobody is ever going to gather all those shards. I guarantee the hoard of Atraximos the Dread isn’t even the most obscure, inaccessible place one is hidden. If you have one, all that means is you get harassed by the worst kind of greedy adventurers trying to steal it. And nobody who has a stake in the status quo wants some random jackass faffing around with all the powers of a legendary djinn; any time somebody puts together more than a handful of them, some god descends on them and scatters them back to the most secure hidey-holes they can find. I’ll thank you to take that damn thing out of my house.”

He sipped his tea, smirking at Kaln. Knowing, fully self-confident and smug. Pheneraxa was also watching him now, with the amused little smile of someone enjoying an entertaining show in which she had no personal stake. Kaln judged this was the moment to strike. Hopefully what he’d selected as a trump card actually was; he had no deep insight into the wants and needs of a portal mage, much less this man in particular, but while browsing through the hoard, one item had jumped out at him, resonating with Emeralaphine’s descriptions of portal magic.

He put away the djinn shard and had a sip of his own tea—which really was excellent, a floral blend entirely unfamiliar to him. Only then did he reach back into the bag of holding.

It was always funny to see something as long as a staff come out of a bag small enough to hang at his belt, but he doubted the sight was anything unfamiliar to the likes of Shadrach. The staff itself, however, immediately seized the man’s attention. The smile vanished from his face and he sat upright hard enough that his chair thumped loudly to the floor.

Pheneraxa raised an eyebrow, smirking.

Kaln carefully laid the staff horizontally in front of him across the table. It was a study of contrasting styles, carved seemingly all of one length of wood, but in a way that made it look like the work of two incompatible design philosophies. The main shaft was rigidly straight and octagonally faceted, but it was carved with what looked like growths of vine irregularly along its length. The root-like embellishments were plain, varnished wood, but the straight lengths had been lacquered black and engraved with intricate patterns of geometric lines that glowed a faint blue. Its head, grasped in a cage of carved wood shaped like actual leaves and flowers, was a perfectly spherical chunk of crystal in which endless fractal patterns slowly shifted.

“Being a portal mage,” Kaln said pleasantly, “I assume you’ll have heard of Archmage Rhadmeistre. And, I’m given to understand, of his personal staff—I gather it’s rather famous in very specific circles. I’m curious how Atraximos came to own it, since he didn’t kill Rhadmeistre himself. If he had, that fact would have been recorded in his notes, that’s exactly the kind of thing he couldn’t resist boasting about, even in places where he expected no one else to see it. Apparently, what it does—”

“Don’t presume to lecture me about this,” Shadrach said ungraciously, his eyes still fixed on the staff. After a second he heaved a deep, irritated sigh and set down his cup so hard the tea sloshed over. “Ugh, balls. Fine, let’s talk details.”