Wraithblade Keep

Synopsis

Under a stall floor in Ridh lay everything the slain explorer band had thought worth hiding: two clasped books, a crate of two dozen sealed vials, an armored alchemist’s coat, a signet ring with a sealed letter, and some five hundred gold in scrip drawn on regions that will not honor it much longer. Aldo forced the plainer book’s clasp and found a mercenary ledger. The outfit is Ebon Ink, which hires out research and exploration; the contract was called Grove-bound, the client an undisclosed private sponsor annotated in a clerk’s hand as possibly Arcane Congress, and the objective simply to determine whether the Twisted Grove is a true post-Mól ruin. Older entries named a caravan sabotage in Vala and an agent gone missing in the Dale lands. The finer book proved an alchemist’s formula book sealed with two reagents that would ruin it if forced, so they left it for Ashanti.

On the road the three of them squared their accounts. Koa gave Mikhail and Aldo the whole of what had happened at The Crack: that the Slumbering Queen has been sharing Gwen’s body and carries hundreds of souls’ worth of power in it, that she put the camp down in a breath, and that Rheem went through the ice to get the vial back. Only two others at the camp know it, and Leon has them both in cells. Aldo told Koa, plainly and out of some old wound of his own, not to lose himself chasing a cure the way Gwen’s father had. Mikhail laid out what Vigil gave him: the Mól used alchemy to accelerate a soul’s passage into an element, that the emperor’s own clan did the meddling which made the Haudh-Gwenn ooze (so alchemy should unmake it), and that the Wraithblade has been physically broken exactly once, by a hundred men who hammered until it gave and they died of it.

Wraithblade Keep came into view four days up the river: four battered walls still standing, four corner towers, and the river itself running straight into a grated water-gate. They left the horses on a hill with Nightstorm set to guard them, and went in at midnight. The approach was clumsy (a sentry threw stones into the dark, a lute knocked the wall), so Mikhail shaped a smear of light into the figure of a specter, which the goblins of this keep fear above anything, and the whole watch went howling west after it. Aldo put a rope over the low south-west drop and all three went over.

Inside they took the keep quietly and mostly without killing. Three goblins in the river-gate room had readied an ambush and were beaten down and trussed; two hounds came in behind them and were put to sleep, muzzled and tied, and the door jammed shut. What struck all three afterwards was the fighting itself. The goblins moved in concert, covered each other, gave ground together: the sword’s work, still on them years after the sword left. A lit stone dropped at the water-gate showed the grate running to the river bottom and a second grate behind it; swimming in would have drowned them. In the north-east tower, a filthy den with a carcass torn open in it, another handful went down, one for good.

The last door had a well-made lock of no Mól make, added within the last century, and behind it a shrine in the Peren style with furniture older than anyone living. The altar at the far end carries no god’s marks at all, only a clean ring in the dust the shape of a sword. This is where the Wraithblade rests when it is at home, and someone took it, locked the room behind them, and walked out. Under a pew Koa found a pair of Mól calipers, finely made, which he described as reaching for him, not compelling, only asking, the way a good tool asks a craftsman. He kept them. The altar stone itself rang hollow and proved not to be Mól stone at all but a decoy cube; Koa put his shoulder to it and tipped it over, and underneath, built into the living rock with electrum threaded through the stone and into the metal, was a Mól anvil. A forge, and very probably the forge. And if a thing can be made in a place it can usually be unmade there. Beyond it stood a door the twin of the ones that open onto the map rooms in every other keep, and behind that a tunnel with another door at its end.