3 – Guards and Wards

The solid wooden door swung open without a sound, and smoothly as well, at the lightest push from Peregrine’s hand, almost as if it had been oiled but recently and was awaiting opening. A look of questioning curiosity passed between the pair, a wondering about the state of the door, just one more mystery about the tower to be added to the growing collection.

Peregrine crept cautiously in through the beckoning portal. The bottom floor of the tower was a circular room, the contents of which were not as pristine as the tower itself. Old, much tattered and frayed tapestries hung from the curved walls, upon each a faded, idyllic scene of everyday life, of gardens and animals and people at work. There were armour stands around the room, some of which still bore tarnished suits of armour, while old helmets were stacked in piles that had rusted together. Weapon racks bore swords and spears that never again would serve their intended purpose, so much that they had corroded, their blades pitted with age.

There were barrels and crates, many of which had fallen apart over the years. Whatever their contents, they had long since succumbed to the ravages of time and were reduced to little more than fine dust and grit. In the centre of the room stood a pair of old tables, on whose dusty, web shrouded surfaces were tarnished plates, bowls and cups. Seated, or slumped, in the chairs at the tables, were skeletons of the long dead, wearing old and battered breastplates and tattered mail.

At the back of the room, a staircase started to wind its way up along the inner wall of the tower, disappearing through the ceiling above to another floor.

“It looks like a guard chamber,” Peregrine stated, her keen eyes growing accustomed to the dim luminance that filtered in through the open door. There were no windows in the room to provide any other form of light. She swept her amber eyes across the room, searching for anything that may have been out of place, any signs of lurking peril. None could be seen.

“No sign of any further traps,” she announced, “Nor signs of any chest that the key might fit.”

Even so they entered the room with caution and began across it, making for where the stairs began to climb their way up to the floors above. Scarcely had Blade followed Peregrine inside than the door whispered silently shit behind them, the only sound being that of the lock as it clicked back into place, sealing them within the chamber.

Blade turned back quickly towards the door as Peregrine dropped into a fighting crouch, her sword held in a steady grip. Senses, keenly honed in the wilds of the hill country that the Aedring called home, were on edge, expectant, ready.

From the tables movement started, a shifting of bones as the seated skeletons began to stir, the dust and webs that coated them shaken free. Creaking, they began to rise from their seats.

“There is devilry at work here,” Peregrine snarled as she leapt forward to meet them. Her heavy broadsword slashed downwards at one of the awakening skeletons, cleaving its skull in twain. The rest of the body tumbled apart, the component bones clattering in a cascade across the floor.

Before the rest could likewise be dealt with, they were up, clutching in their bony hands a variety of rusted weapons. Peregrine worked her way slowly back to where Blade stood, the languid man having drawn his slender rapier. The deathly guards spread out and began closing in on the pair, the only sound that they made being the clicking of skeletal feet upon the stony floor.

“You did say that once a sorcerer dwelt within the tower; his arts were of the blackest kind it does appear,” Peregrine said, studying the approach of the undead guards in close detail.

With a clatter of running feet the deathless creatures surged forward; their utter silence as they ran and the vacant, grinning visages of their lifeless skulls were enough to give any pause, yet that luxury Peregrine and Blade could ill afford. To hesitate was to die. These were foes without pity, without remorse, creatures that felt neither death nor pain, and who would unerringly, and with scant regard to their own safety, strike down the enemy. They had been summoned forth with but one purpose; to slay.

With a fearsome cry of defiance and a flashing blade, Peregrine leapt to meet the challenge offered, taking the fight to the foe as was her way. No thought of defence crossed her mind, only the need to destroy the monsters before they were killed. Her heavy blade fell like a tumbling boulder, crashing exact upon one of the guards, smiting its arm from its body so that the rusty sword it clasped fell away. A formidable kick followed, hurling the rest of the guard back across the room into one of the tables, there shattering apart as it slammed to a halt.

Blade’s slender rapier darted and danced in quicksilver patterns, fending off strokes and deftly replying in kind. As ever, he sought to keep his wild companion safe in a ring of steel as she went on the offensive, yet not even his reflexes could fend off all the blows raining down upon them, swung as they were by dispassionate arms. Soon blood marred Peregrine’s leg, and upon her chin, while Blade’s shirt had been rent where an errant spear thrust had caught him, tearing it open, much to his chagrin.

The hacking blades sent bone fragments shattering, torn asunder by the fearsome whirlwind of violence that Peregrine had unleashed, her blood aflame with the passions of combat that ran deep in her veins, and in her heritage. It was a way of life alien to the people of the cities of the plains, who considered the Aedring barely civilised and saw them as a terrible warlike people, and not without reason. The savage lands of the Aedring provoked a harsh existence, where to survive required being strong, and more, of having to fight for survival.

A last blow smote the final deathless guard to the ground in fragments, its bones rattling across the stone floor. Silence once more returned to the chamber, bar for the sounds of laboured breathing. Imminent violence still lurked within Peregrine’s eyes as she studied the chamber with absolute intensity.

“Let us be finding this chest and be done with this place,” she growled, dashing the blood from her chin with the back of a hand. “This sorcery is most aggrieving.” A daughter of the wild and primitive hill clans, her culture placed merit on strength of sword and arm, and of the deeds of flesh and blood; they looked upon wizardry with distrust and superstition and fear, an imbalance in the natural order of the world. Even around Blade, long her companion, she maintained a wary unease whenever he performed one of the few tricks of the Mysteries that he possessed.

The stairs beckoned to them, and they answered the call, going forward once more. Cautious now as to what lay before them, they were extra watchful in their step, each taken with care aforethought. Peregrine first spotted the next peril, of a hairline crack that ran beneath one of the pavers in the stairs. Her arm blocked Blade’s passage and she nodded to the step in question.

At Peregrine revelation, Blade knelt down, his long face low to the ground so that he could inspect the paver closer, and the crack beneath it. His once sleepy eyes were now wide awake, ardent in their examination. Tentatively he blew at the dust that had accumulated in the gap before, with the tip of a thin dagger that he had drawn, he began to inspect it.

“Mechanical, not magical,” he announced after some long moments in the contemplation of the device. “As of yet I can not say what it does; nothing pleasant I would imagine though.”

He rose back to his feet, dusted off his knees, and made his way back down the stairs, alerting Peregrine to accompany him. From one of the piles of rusted helmets, he prised one free. Taking care, he lobbed it back up onto the step that appeared to trigger the cunningly concealed trap. They heard a faint click as the helmet landed upon it.

Thin stone panels, ingeniously worked so as to appear as simple blocks of stone in the wall, were shattered as blades stabbed violently forth from hidden recesses, both above and below the step that triggered the trap, with such force that any who had been standing in their path would have been brutally impaled upon them.

“Most devious,” Blade noted. Despite the danger before them, he had an appreciation for the shrewd artifice that had gone into the design and construct of the device.

Peregrine set back off up the stairs again without a spoken word. That trap was not the last that they uncovered as their slow progress up through the building continued, and twice more they were thrust into contests with awakened skeleton guardians on higher levels of the tower. Through these perils they battled their way until at last they came to the summit of the tower, the final climb up into the ultimate room barred by a trapdoor in the roof. Of the chest no sign had been seen on their climb.

“This must be the place,” Peregrine said. “Let us finish it.”

On to Chapter Four – The Scroll of Haryxis