“This castle,” Roni said.
“By now giant bolts of lightning are running up and down the wall of the funnel cloud. As we watch, the lightning sparks begin to light up a ghostly image of a castle. At first all it looks likes is an image, a mirage or some strange optical effect, since it’s transparent and parts of the castle don’t appear to be there at all. The lightning keeps flashing, and as the image of the castle gets more distinct, we can see that it’s rotating slowly in the same direction as the funnel, hanging in mid-air a couple hundred feet off the ground. Then we get a really sharp bolt on the far side, and before I finish squinting from the flash the castle starts to solidify in earnest and drop down toward the ground at the same time. The wind starts to die. The castle drops faster, still turning, and then it hits the ground. Everything shakes again and the earth jumps all over the place, about what you’d expect if a small mountain suddenly came out of nowhere and fell in your backyard, one last bolt of lightning strikes one of the towers, and then the lightning’s gone. The castle digs itself into the ground like a corkscrew, slows, and stops. The funnel pulls up into the air, the wind dying, and all of a sudden it’s gone, too. Everything’s quiet and peaceful. Just like it was about thirty seconds before, except the only difference is that now there’s this castle sitting at the edge of the beach, chunks of dirt torn up all around it, what’s left of a grove of trees sticking out from under the right side, and a small cloud turning slowly overhead and pouffing out in little streams of vapor.”
“So of course,” said Max, “the first thing you did was run right over.”
“You’d have done the same thing,” said Karlini.
“Yeah, well, maybe,” Max allowed.
“So I ran some scans on the castle from the house, but as far as I could tell, it was inert. Given the nature of the manifestation we’d just seen, it was certainly a surprising result, but it held up on cross-check. From everything I could find out, the castle was nothing more than a pile of rocks and mortar and the usual construction stuff. Roni wanted to leave it alone,” said Karlini, glancing at her and then quickly looking away to study the ceiling again, “but I couldn’t, you know, just let it sit there, looming away, not explaining itself at all. In the back of my mind was the thought that the owner might be about to come out and decide to conquer the neighborhood, or maybe that somebody had stolen the place and dumped the evidence on us – anyway, with things looking the way they did, I thought it would be safest to check it out further and at least try to figure out what we were dealing with.
“I picked out a few supplies -”
“He emptied out half the lab and piled the stuff on poor Haddo,” Roni put in.
“- some relevant equipment - things I knew we might need - and we strolled over.
“A good portion of the structure is under water at the moment, so you couldn’t get the full impact on your way in, Max, but this place is big. Seen up close, right from the base, it just hung there in the sky, massive and craggy, all these towers and battlements and hulking escarpments holding who the hell knew what kind of nastiness. Black stone, and gray, scarcely a touch of color in the whole place, except for some lichens and some singed-looking moss on the walls. And absolutely silent, not a sound, the kind of quiet you hear in the forest when some serious creature has just chased most everything out and anybody’s who’s left is just holding their breath and trying not to move, hoping the thing doesn’t notice them and goes away. But every test I ran, even standing next to it, was negative. As far as I could tell, the castle had never been near a spell in its life.
“It was cold, though, cold enough so frost was condensing on the walls and the air was getting chilly just from standing next to it. There hadn’t been any snow or ice on it when it arrived, so I made the tentative assumption that whatever process had landed it there had also sucked the heat out. Now, I’m not sure that’s the whole truth, but I don’t know if it matters.
“We decided to take a walk around and see if there was anything different about the back. There was no obvious way in on our side, you see, and I wasn’t sending anyone up a sixty-foot sheer rock wall unless I had to. If the ground had been perfectly flat, a brisk stroll around the castle back to the place we’d started would have taken at least twenty minutes, maybe half-an-hour. Of course, as I’ve said, the terrain was really a mess from the castle trying to screw itself into the ground. Right up next to the wall the earth dropped down ten to twenty feet where the thing had dug itself its own earthen moat. Cracks and pits and snaky crevasses were running all over the place, and mounds and rough hills were piled up between them. The smell of churned dirt hung everywhere.
“The castle didn’t exactly stay quiet, either, as it turned out. As we clambered along, every so often we’d hear it give a creak or a rasp or a giant groan as it settled, and the ground would quiver a bit all over again. The thing that was starting to worry me more than anything else, in fact, was the idea that the castle had dropped in for a visit, and was getting ready to take off again, probably with the same wind and storm and generally messing up the neighborhood it had arrived with. As it turned out, of course, I was right, but it wasn’t imminent at that point.
“So on the side of the castle facing away from the house, we finally found something helpful. The rock base the castle was resting on looked like the top of a mountain that had been sheared away. Parts of it had been filled in or built up with additional rock, you know the way that sort of construction goes, but the area we were facing was solid cliff. About thirty feet up, where the cliff seemed to end and the rock wall began, we could see a gateway. A roadbed extended out from this gate over our heads. Since we were looking from underneath, we could see a set of big buttresses springing from the cliff wall to support the bottom of this roadbed. Where the buttresses ended, about ten feet out from the wall, the roadbed also ended in a ripped-off edge where the rest of the span had apparently been torn away. So we backed up for a better look and spotted a portcullis in the gate, partly raised - an entrance, sure enough, but it was still thirty feet up. By the time we had finished our walk around the castle, though, it was apparent that that was the best-looking way in.
“I didn’t want to use any active magic around the castle, at least until I had a better idea of what was going on, so that meant anything dramatic like levitation was out. We all know how much energy levitation takes, too, and I didn’t want to incapacitate myself for a week just to get into a position where the trouble might really start. Instead, Haddo managed to get an arrow with a trailing line up through the portcullis. We pulled through a rope and I climbed up the wall.
“The place still looked deserted from the top of the roadbed. Beyond the metal spikes of the portcullis, the road made an abrupt turn to the right and rapidly ascended, so my view of the inside was limited. I could see a few burned-out torches set in sockets in the walls, and a niche for a guard station, but that was about it. Roni thought it was a perfect setup for a trap, and frankly I thought so too, so I ran a few more probes – everything I could think of, in fact. Again, nothing. I checked the portcullis and the gateway itself. Nothing. I even pushed a mirror through the entrance to inspect the inside surfaces of the gateway. Nothing, nothing, nothing. So I walked in. And, of course,” Karlini said, holding his head and looking disgusted, “there was something, and it got me.”
He took a drink of water.
“I walked through the entrance and the most powerful field spell I’ve ever felt jumped out of nowhere. Whoever set it up had power to burn, power that would have put any of us in a coma for a year. Roni told me they saw a burst of light, mostly reds and purples. All I know is that my aura suddenly went visible. Whenever I’ve looked at it, it manifests as a solid shell standing about a foot out from my body. The shell has a slightly fuzzy edge, and the space is filled with blocks of shifting color. Since I’d restored my personal defenses before starting out, I should have seen an unbroken surface with a dull metallic, slightly reflective sheen. Instead, when this field hit its surface the aura rippled, irregular patches all over the place turned yellow and started to glow, and then these glowing yellow patches began to peel up, like scales lifting off the skin of a snake. You’d have thought I was molting, if you can believe that. Small globules of writhing tendrils darted in through the gaps under these scales and spread out. The tendrils shot around like flying worms, diving through the floating blocks of aura and down into my skin. I could feel my consciousness being cataloged.” Karlini shuddered. “It wasn’t fun. It was like having each piece of my mind turned into a fingernail and drawn slowly down a long slate wall.