The pale-skinned wizard said Eined was dead. Even after the funeral, he couldn't grasp it.
Ususi said his sister perished nobly. Nobly or shamefully, the horrifying, dawning realization that his sister was gone occluded everything else. A gasping emptiness inhabited Warian's chest. It was an echoing hollow nothing could fill, but his thoughts swirled around it like water circling an abyss.
He clenched his crystal fist, ready to vent his sudden fury.
Violet light leaped dangerously in his prosthesis. What would he smash? He saw nothing but the path below his feet. No railway or embankment separated him from the gulfs of darkness that Ususi and Iahn's ancestors had constructed.
With a strangled sob, Warian dropped to his knees and struck the path with his flashing prosthetic. His fist punched a small crater, and cracks in the stone raced ahead and behind him. The path shuddered, and he heard his uncle cry out behind him.
A hand touched his shoulder. He turned his head, saw Zel. "Why?"
Warian asked. "Why'd she have to die?"
His uncle squeezed his shoulder and said, "More than your sister is dead this day, Nephew."
Warian realized Zel's own sister had also died, Sevaera. And perhaps Zel's own father was, if not dead, compromised to such an extreme degree that he might as well have perished.
"I'm sorry, Uncle. I just…"
"You'll have your chance to exact vengeance when we get into that tower, if the Imaskari are right. Unless you exhaust yourself out here battering the stone, or send us all screaming into the dark."
Warian nodded and allowed the lavender radiance flickering in his arm to lapse. Zel helped him to his feet as he weathered the momentary wave of faintness following his arm's surge. The weakness was not nearly as bad as before, since he'd started to practice accessing the arm's strength in controlled bursts. It was a triumph he would have enjoyed sharing with Eined.
Up the path, Iahn paused where he walked with Ususi. The wizard looked ahead to the wavering walls of the tower, now only a few hundred paces ahead. The vengeance taker turned and fixed Warian with his ice-cold eyes. He said, "The paths are not indestructible."
Warian nodded, blood rushing to his cheeks. Damn. He briefly felt much younger than his twenty-two years.
Iahn turned and conferred with the wizard, who was pointing ahead.
Feeling the pressure of Zel's hands on his shoulders encouraging him to proceed, Warian walked ahead.
"… some sort of broad interface with the Celestial Nadir and the world," Ususi was saying. The wizard had her keystone out and was studying the wavering facade of the tower through it.
"Yes," she continued. "It's a magical mechanism the Imaskari put in place in case the Purple Palace ever returned to the world. This path maintains a connection with some chamber inside the palace. If we walk the path to its end, through the interface, we should be injected back into our world, safely inside the tower."
"And not far from the weapons cache?" asked the vengeance taker.
"Only a floor or two below, from what I remember of the floor plans."
Iahn nodded and increased his pace. He threw over his back, "Time is precious."
Ususi turned to Warian and Zel. "Once we get into the palace, we could go up against Pandorym, plus whatever else Pandorym has released from the weapons cache to defend it. Be ready for anything." She looked dubiously at Zel, then turned and moved quickly to catch up with Iahn.
"Do you think that look implied something?" wondered Zel.
"She wants you to be careful, Uncle."
"And you?
"I've got my arm. You've got… a pickaxe."
Zel chuckled and slung the haft of the pickaxe over his shoulder.
Stepping through the wavering interface was like walking beneath a waterfall-icy, and just as shocking.
Warian stiffened, but the cold faded. He wasn't actually wet. And the gulfs of the Celestial Nadir were gone. Instead, the glimmer of Ususi's head-orbiting light revealed the confines of a cylindrical stone corridor. Inscribed glyphs spiraled endlessly around the passageway. He jumped when the glyphs pulsed, sending a whirl of white light corkscrewing down the passage a hundred paces or more. Zel suddenly blinked into the space next to Warian.
The wizard said, "We stand at the endpoint of a more sophisticated version of the stone circles, which are the usual means to access the Celestial Nadir. This is probably one of the twenty gates."
"Twenty… are you saying there are twenty gates into the Celestial Nadir?" asked Warian.
"Yes. Prior to this journey, it was my goal to find and catalogue all of them. I suspected the Purple Palace contained at least one gate, but figured it would be years before I learned whether I was right or wrong. Funny. Until recently, this gate wasn't even accessible from our world."
"You're sure we're back in the world?" asked Zel. He cast a suspicious gaze down the narrow, circular corridor.
"If not the world, then at least the Purple Palace," said the wizard. "Soon, we'll encounter Pandorym."
"And defeat it," added Iahn. The vengeance taker muttered a few words in a language unknown to Warian and trudged ahead.
Ususi nodded, apparently agreeing with Iahn's statement, and followed.
Warian and Zel brought up the rear.
The long, spiraling corridor opened into a wider space. Iahn and Ususi entered, and Warian moved just inside the new chamber. The wizard's light flickered around, revealing a wide, empty room with a single exit opposite the corridor. It was shuttered by a rusted slab of iron.
"If I recall correctly…" Ususi began, then a shudder rumbled below Warian's feet. He tried to retreat the way he'd come, but he bumped against his uncle.
"Get back!" Warian cried.
The floor dropped away. He fell, as did Zel and Ususi. The vengeance taker performed a desperate and impressive leap toward the far door, where an iron handle glinted invitingly, but he came up several feet short and plunged like the rest of them. He tumbled through a series of braking maneuvers against the wall.
Warian smashed hard onto stone. Thuds, cries, and gasps peppered the darkness around him, and he knew he wasn't alone. Ususi's light flicked back on.
The stone pit that enclosed them was perhaps fifteen paces across.
Putrid, slimy water pooled in the corners. Disintegrating bones lay scattered across the room. The walls rose on all sides about twenty or thirty paces, to a ceiling of rusted iron.
"It closed?" groaned Zel, who lay next to Warian. "It closed us in!"
Iahn, who'd somehow managed to land on his feet, helped Ususi to stand.
Breathing hard, the wizard said, "An automatic trap, meant to apprehend intruders. How stupid of me not to foresee such a possibility. I know better."
"Then you should have warned us," accused Zel. A thin line of blood trickled from the older man's brow.
"Cease!" snapped Iahn. "Is anyone hurt badly?"
"I think my leg's broke," grimaced Zel. "I can't move it, and it hurts like a devil's got his teeth in me."
Ususi said, "I'll be fine when I get my breath back. Tend them, please, Iahn?" The wizard rooted around in her satchel and withdrew a vial she pressed into the vengeance taker's hand.
Iahn inspected Warian first and helped him to his feet. Other than having his breath knocked out of him, Warian was healthier than he expected after falling such a distance. He'd sport some terrific bruises later, though.
Next, Iahn knelt at Zel's side and probed Zel's left leg, which was splayed too far to one side just below the knee.
"Fractured," Iahn concluded. The vengeance taker unstopped the vial Ususi had given him and administered a portion of it to Zel.
Zel attempted to drink down all the fizzing fluid, but Iahn drew back. "Not all at once. We must conserve. Your leg should be mending already."
As Warian watched, his uncle's leg slowly straightened to true, and the lines of pain in his face eased. "I do feel better," Zel said.