He didn’t seem quite sure how to take that.
I said, “What are you going to do?”
“About you?”
“About it.”
“That isn’t my decision to make. I think what we have been doing all along: keeping it alive, and keeping it safe.”
“Necromancy,” I said.
“Hmmm? No, no. I just used—”
“No. Necromancy. You’ve studied it, haven’t you?”
“It’s not a specialty, but yes, certainly. Why?”
“I’m trying to figure out how to get out of here, which means figuring out how this place works, and I’m starting to think figuring out necromancy has something to do with that. I’ve been doing a lot of figuring.”
“Well, yes, of course.”
“So I was thinking about asking you some questions about how necromancy is used in this, uh, ‘platform.’”
He stared at me. “Where did you hear that term?”
“Platform?”
He nodded.
“Well, that’s what it is, isn’t it?”
He took a step back. “Why have you come?”
“Why do you think?”
“Don’t—” He cut himself off. There’s a limit to how forcefully you can give orders to someone who’s just shown you a Great Weapon. He tried again. “I don’t know. But I’m curious.”
“Okay,” I said. “Short version: I’m here by accident, and I’d like to leave.”
Yeah, I was lying. I do that sometimes. The idea was to keep him talking. What I’d have done if he’d shown me, say, a secret way out that worked, I don’t know. But he didn’t. “I could teleport you out,” he said.
“No, you couldn’t.”
He frowned and studied me. “Oh. Yes. I see. Well, if you remove—”
“I can’t do that.”
“All right,” he said.
“I just need to figure out how this platform works.”
“If you don’t know how it works, how do you know it’s a platform?”
“Uh, I guessed?”
He waited. I suppose I could have intimidated him. I mean, I had the means. But he’d just finished solving a problem for me, and threatening him seemed like bad form. I suppose carrying Lady Teldra around for so long has had an effect on me.
“So,” I said. “A trade, then? I answer your question, you answer mine?”
He barely hesitated. “Answer mine first.”
“All right. Tethia told me.”
“Who?”
Had there been a flicker of shock at the name that he’d covered up like a professional? I wasn’t sure, so for now I played it straight. “She called herself Tethia. Obviously a Vallista.”
“I don’t know her.”
“She seemed to be a ghost.”
“A ghost of whom? No, sorry, stupid question. Where did you see her?”
“No, no. My turn. What do the mirrors do?”
“They reflect necromantic energy and redirect it.”
“What does that mean?”
“My turn. Where did you see this ghost?”
“I walked in the front door, and on my right was a small antechamber that let into a room that had a great view of the ocean-sea that should have been on the other side. She was there.”
“When you were in the room, did you experience—”
“I think it’s my turn now.”
He closed his mouth, then nodded. “What do you want to know, exactly?”
“How does this place exist? Why do doors go where they can’t go and take me to places they shouldn’t? How was it built? And why is the kitchen empty?”
“That’s a lot of questions.”
I shrugged. “Pick one.”
He nodded. “Maybe we should find a more comfortable place to talk.”
“Sure,” I said.
He led me back toward the stairs.
“As you have surmised,” he said. “It has to do with necromancy.”
“Yeah.”
“And my Lord Zhayin said that the breakthrough came when he was able to reach the Halls of Judgment.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
Discaru shrugged. “If you want a guess, because the Halls are a nexus of worlds.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Actually, sarcasm aside, I had a pretty good idea what it meant. I said, “I need to check something. This goal—a building that permits one to reach other worlds—has been around for a long time, and Zhayin was the first to achieve it, right?”
We stopped in front of the left-hand door. He turned the handle and nodded. “How did you know that? The ghost again?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a mystery here.”
“Hey, you think?”
He opened the door, stepped through the doorway, and vanished.
I couldn’t see much of anything through the door; it was black, except for what I can only describe as a few vague shapes that could have been rocks, trees, mountains, clouds, animals, or people. I stood there for maybe five seconds, trying to decide what to do, when Discaru appeared again.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess that might have caught you off guard. Did you want to come along?”
“Where are we going?”
“The Paths of the Dead, of course. Or, rather, the Halls of Judgment.”
“Of course,” I said. “So, you were just kidding about going somewhere we could sit?”
“Oh, no. We can sit there. By the fountains. It’s quite comfortable, actually.”
“But your point isn’t the comfort, it’s bringing me to the Paths.”
“You said you wanted to understand the manor, and how it works. Well, the entrance to the Halls is the key.”
I had Lady Teldra, Loiosh, Rocza, and a few other sharp things. Sorcery couldn’t affect me. So, how bad could the trap be? Plenty.
“Um. All right. Sure. Lead the way.”
“Boss—”
“Got a better way to get answers?”
“But—”
“And it isn’t like I haven’t been there before.”
“Yeah, I remember. That’s not an argument for going.”
“Probably not,” I said, and followed Discaru through the door.
Like I told Loiosh, we’d been here before.
There’s this mountain located, I don’t know, somewhere way north and a bit east of Adrilankha, where there’s a stream or a river that goes over a cliff, which is where Dragaerans, if they’re considered worthy by some standard I couldn’t even guess at, are sent over because Dragaerans think that sending a corpse down a waterfall to go smashing itself at the bottom of a cliff shows respect. Don’t ask me. Not my custom, not my waterfall.
Point being, the place is full of dead people, most of them trying to find their way to the Halls of Judgment, or wandering around aimlessly after failing to do so. From things Sethra Lavode and the Necromancer have said, I get the feeling that the region full of dead people has about the same relationship to the strange area around the Halls as some bucket of water pulled out of the ocean-sea has to do with the whole.
I’d been there once years before, when I’d been too stupid to know better. Now I was much more clever and sophisticated, so everything would be fine. Right?
Having run a good number of Shereba games, and played in many, I can tell you that there’s a certain type of player who makes a careful study of the strategy of the game, and then as soon as he sits down, thinks to himself, I know so much more about the game than these people. Like, I know why sloughing the low trump here is a stupid play, and because I know that, it gives me an edge over people who do it out of stupidity, so in my case it’s a smart play. Then they slough the low trump just like the stupid player and lose their money. I’m not kidding. There’s one of those guys in every game you sit down at. If you can’t find him, it’s probably you.