Was the place a watchpost of some kind? he wondered.
They made their way through an empty archway in the intact wall to another room, this one a large rectangular hall or banquet room, also brightly lit by the dazzling sunlight on the snow. Most of the roof was absent, lying in piles of rubble and debris on the floor of the chamber. Deep snowdrifts clung to the corners of the room.
It could have been a watchtower, Araevin decided. The elves of ancient Eaerlann would have wanted to keep an eye on the Spine of the World for dragon flights or armies of orcs and giants.
“What a miserable post this must have been,” he muttered.
“Yes, but the view would have been worth it,” Ilsevele replied. A gust of wind slammed into the stonework hall, kicking up high plumes of blowing ice and snow. She shivered and pulled her cloak as tight as she could. “For an hour, anyway.”
At the far end of the hall, they found a stairway leading down into a dim chamber below. Filsaelene spoke a brief prayer to Corellon and imbued a slender wooden rod with magical light, and they followed her down into the rooms below. There they found a set of chambers with thicker, sturdier walls, broken only by a couple of thin arrow slits less than a handspan wide. The roar of the ever-present wind diminished to an eerie moaning as they descended into the shelter of the lower floor.
Filsaelene raised her light rod higher then took a step back.
“There’s a body,” she said.
“Undead?” Starbrow demanded, unsheathing Keryvian. The sun elf cleric hesitated then replied, “No, simply dead.”
Araevin and Ilsevele moved up to stand on either side of Filsaelene, looking down on the corpse. The fellow had died sitting with his back to the wall, and had remained more or less in that position, his chin slumped down to his chest as if he had dozed off. The cold or the dry air had preserved him remarkably. He was human, dressed in the robes of a wizard, with a wooden staff clasped in his icy fingers. His eyes, dark and half-lidded, stared blankly into his lap.
“He just froze like that?” Ilsevele asked. “Who was he? How did he get here? Did the daemonfey kill him?”
Starbrow glanced at the dead mage and said, “Look at him. He might have been here for a hundred years, just like that. I doubt the daemonfey had much to do with it.”
“I can try to question his spirit,” Filsaelene said. “But I must prepare the proper invocations to Corellon Larethian first, and that I cannot do until moonrise tonight.” The sun elf girl frowned then added, “On the other hand, if he’s been here for a long time, this husk will hold no memory of the spirit. He might have been dead too long for my spell to work.”
“We’ll try to question him if we find nothing else here,” Araevin decided. “He isn’t going anywhere for now.”
From the chamber at the bottom of the stairs, an archway led into a long, barrel-vaulted gallery or redoubt of some kind that was illuminated by a row of shuttered arrow slits looking out over the steep mountainside. Araevin wondered who the builders regarded as enemies. The place was in such a lofty locale that it seemed hard to believe that any conventional army, the sort of enemy who might be stopped by stonework and arrow slits, would be able to reach the watchpost, let alone attack it. Then, along the back wall of the room, they discovered no less than five portals, each framed in its own stone archway, the lintels worked in the designs of various flowering plants and vines. Araevin recognized felsul and holly; the others he could not name.
“What is this place?” Ilsevele asked as the wind moaned eerily in the ruins above them.
“A portal nexus,” Araevin said. “Many portals are simple two-way devices, but sometimes portal builders wanted to link several destinations together in a network of portals. This is clearly such a place. You could step through one of those portals, and in a few moments use any of the others, choosing from a number of destinations.”
“In other words, the daemonfey could be behind any of those doors,” Starbrow said. He frowned. “Damnation. What if they lead us into a whole daisy-chain of magical doorways? We might be at this for days.”
“Or longer,” Araevin answered. “This explains the dead mage outside the room. He was probably a portal explorer, who used one of the doors leading into the nexus but then lacked the key to open another door to leave by. Without the right key, any or all of these doors would be nothing more than empty stone arches.”
Maresa shuddered. “Gods, what a lonely way to die. It just goes to show you that you should never break into a place you can’t break out of.”
“Well, I anticipated that I might have to decipher several portals today, so I have prepared a few of the right sort of spells,” Araevin said. “Give me a few moments, and I’ll see what I can divine about these doorways.”
The rest of the company stood watch, while Araevin chose the first portal on his left and spoke the words of his seeing spell. He realized at once that at least that one was damaged beyond repair. Only a fraying remnant of its magic remained, not even enough to guess at where it might have once led. He suspected that simple time and decay had been enough to ruin it. The second portal was still working and he divined its key-a small token of wood, marked with a few Elvish letters. Anyone who carried or wore such a token could use the portal, but no one else could.
I’ll wait on that one, he decided. If he needed to, he could attempt to manufacture a proper token to awake it, but first he wanted to examine the other possibilities.
The third portal was functional. Its key was a simple spell-inscribing an arcane mark on the door would open it for a short time. Many, if not most sorcerers or wizards knew that particular spell. But perhaps the dead mage in the other room hadn’t known it, or had been caught without the right spell ready. Araevin moved on to the fourth portal, and he found that this one had something close to the same key that the portal beneath Myth Glaurach had used, a rellana-blossom and a short phrase in Elvish.
He turned his attention to the last of the portals in the gallery, and he recoiled at once. It was an insidious trap. It was keyed to a simple pass phrase that was actually carved in the stone lintel above the arch, but Araevin observed that its magical strands were designed to unravel after conveying the user to some unknown destination.
“Stay away from the portal on the right,” he warned his companions. “Don’t say the word that’s carved there, and don’t touch the stone. I don’t know where it leads, but it is designed to strand you there for a tenday or more.”
Maresa happened to be nearest the trapped portal. She glanced at it suspiciously, and carefully stepped away from the device.
“Not that one, then,” she said. “Which door did the daemonfey use?”
“The third or the fourth, I think-maybe the second, but I doubt it,” Araevin answered. “Take your pick.”
“One moment, then,” Filsaelene said. She pressed her hands together before her chest, and looked up at the blank stone overhead, murmuring the words of a prayer to Corellon Larethian. “Which door did the daemonfey use?” she asked.
The others watched as the slender sun elf waited for a long moment, eyes closed. Then Filsaelene shook herself with a small start.
“Go left,” she said. “The third door is the one the daemonfey passed through.”
“Very well,” Araevin said. “Everybody, be ready to pass through the portal quickly after I activate it. Portals opened by spells normally remain open for only a few moments, so you will have to hurry after me.”
His companions gathered close around the portal. Araevin checked to make sure they were ready, and he whispered the word to the spell and traced on the stone surface the mark he used as his own sigil. Blue fire awoke in the ancient gate, rippling around its perimeter, and Araevin was snatched away to somewhere else.