As she had done several times on the hike up the stairs that curved between the cone and its parent mountain, she closed her eyes and held out her arms, elbows at her sides and palms up. She inhaled deeply, and Gareth heard a gentle humming, although she didn’t seem to be producing the sound herself.
Jandi opened her eyes. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Possibly an echo in the depths. It’s hard to avoid any trace of magic. Creatures magical by nature pass by, and always leave some kind of trail, no matter how faint. I would be more suspicious of a place completely clean of magic-it takes an effort to burn an area clear. There’s nothing here that would interfere with my overlay.”
“Well, then, what’s stopping you?”
The young mage glared at the grinning ex-pirate and reached into the bag slung across her shoulder. “Nothing,” she said. “But you’ll need to give me the Key.”
Gareth pulled the torque from his upper arm, where it had nested the night before. Jandi had found a spot clear of rocks and sat cross-legged.
Jandi placed the Key cautiously on her lap and took a clean glass vial from her pack. She held it in her right hand and drew her small blade with her left.
“Give me your hand. I’ll need some of your blood. Oh, please!” She laughed as he flinched back. “I know you’ve had worse fighting. You’ve shed more blood while shaving!”
“That was due to ill-intentioned folk, or an accident,” he said. “I’m not accustomed to having those who are supposed to be working for my benefit stabbing me with their little knives.”
Imperiously she gestured with bottle and knife, and he sighed.
“Which hand?” he said.
“The one you would hold a key with, if you were unlocking a door.”
He kneeled and extended his right hand. She held the bottle close alongside while she sliced deeply across the pad of his forefinger. Thick blood welled, and she filled the small bottle quickly.
“Sorry,” she said, giving him a sympathetic smile.
He stood and wrapped the small wound in the tail of his shirt. “It is what it must be,” he said.
She sheathed the knife and took the Key in one hand, the glass vial filled with scarlet in the other. Her eyes closed, and the sigil on her cheek glowed briefly with the strange green light associated with her Art.
He retreated to sit on a nearby rock and reached in his own pack for a skin of ale. He watched as Jandi’s breathing slowed, the time between her inhaling and exhaling uncomfortably long. Minutes stretched to an hour and he finished the skin, wishing he’d brought another and wondering if anything was going to happen.
Then he saw the tiny green sparks hovering around her body like fireflies. Thicker and brighter they grew, coalescing into a ring around her. The circle of green light moved down her form, spreading as it met the rock. It was followed by another, and another. They moved across the surface of the Fist like slow-moving ripples.
On and on it went. As dusk came on, the glow became brighter. He watched, fascinated, and wondered what it looked like to the watchers below.
Down at the base, Ivor watched the Giant’s Fist turn from black to chartreuse, waves of green light drenching it like a strange tide. Although the outside temperature wasn’t particularly cold, he leaned against the donkey’s neck and shivered.
The walls of the oubliette flared suddenly, red-hot, and the walls of Fandour’s prison constricted. Fandour screamed, startled out of a deep state of meditation, and rolled away from the hot metallic surface, trying to be as small as possible. It didn’t work; the walls seared Fandour’s flesh. The glowing walls sprouted thick iron thorns, and they pierced Fandour’s tough hide, sharp pinpricks of pain in the midst of the dull agony as the sullen orange wall pressed, relentless.
Let me die, thought Fandour, struggling to send a clear tendril of thought through the pain. If I can’t be free, if I must be tormented, let me die and seek release no more.
And in answer to the acute mental cry, he heard a whisper, from a long way off. It was hard to understand, like a message read in an uncouth voice by someone who didn’t know the language and was guessing at the sound of the letters; like the language of the gith, muttered by an Aboleth, or an orc with a mouthful of pebbles.
Give, give, the voice cried, greedy as a baby bird. Give a morsel of yourself, a piece of your Power, a handful of light and stone torn by strong hands from the core of your essence. Give!
Fandour flung a thought back through the planes: Stop this, or kill me now. He flinched farther into himself as the hot walls constricted once more.
Kill you? Never. You will live forever, pressed on all sides by red metal and thorns. Give what I ask for!
Was the voice that of the Rhythanko? Could his bound avatar turn against him so? Or was his tormentor the alien mind that possessed the long-sundered key to his prison?
Fandour could bear no more. Take, he shouted, opening up and exposing a soft underbelly, going against every instinct to do so. Take, and stop this torment.
Ah, the voice gloated as something, not another entity but a thought and will made material and animate scooped out a part of Fandour, twisted, and escaped like a small savage fish nipping a chunk of flesh from bigger prey and darting away.
The thorns retracted, the searing heat was gone. Exhausted and quivering with remembered pain, Fandour sprawled on the floor of the oubliette and strove to understand what had happened.
Someone had used the Rhythanko to tear away a little of Fandour’s Power, to mold it and forge it into something of use.
Eagerly, ignoring the waves of pain that still rippled through his essence, Fandour sent tiny thought tendrils along the fragile and ephemeral ley lines that still connected the Rhythanko and the oubliette. Someone was out there, sitting on a great mass of stone, stone from the flaming heart of a mountain, cool and hard now and honeycombed with tunnels. Two people: one had the knowledge of the nature of all manner of locks and keys, magic, mundane and mechanical, in her head and held the Rhythanko in her hand; the other was harder to see, having little magic in him. He reached out, and the other, the mistress of things locked and unlocked, put the Rhythanko in his hand. A jolt of Power struck Fandour’s thought tendril, sending it back into him like a blow.
Fandour curled up inside the oubliette, clinging to the memory. The man reaching with tentative fingers for the Rythanko was bound to it by blood. The Rhythanko, inturn, was bound to him by the Power the woman had ripped from Fandour. That small essence Fandour had lost forever, but in that brief contact, Fandour had sniffed out the dark one’s blood, a nexus between him, Fandour, and the Rhythanko.
Time was long and until Fandour healed, there was little else to be done. He coiled about the memory of the blood, the nature, the taste, the smell, the tiny components of it.
Fandour would not forget anything to do with that blood.
A troubled expression on her face, Jandi sat silent as the green light of her Art faded. She turned the bracelet round and round between her fingers.
“You’d impress them back in Mulmaster,” said Gareth. “Why the glum look?”
She looked up at him, ignoring the hand he’d stretched out to help her up.
“I wish I knew more about how the Key was made, and the exact nature of the Power it taps into,” she said.