Xanthippe (Chapter 12)

Template:Xanthippe nav "There are WHAT in the palace?!"

Jerhyn stammered, "Please, do not shout!"

"You want me to WHAT?! There are DEMONS in the palace!!" Xanthippe wasn't shouting. She was shrieking at the top of her lungs. And she was very good at it.

"It all started when a Vizjerei mage came to visit. He asked for a tour of the palace, which I granted. When we came to the old portal in the basement --"

"A WHAT in the WHERE!?!"

"A sealed portal, in a basement chamber. No one had ever been able to open it, though many tried, for centuries. I had nearly forgotten it was there, and when he asked to examine it alone, I thought nothing of it... it had always been harmless..."

A small crowd of frightened-looking people was gathering around the palace steps. Two palace guards tried to keep the crowd away, but you could probably have heard Xanthippe down by the docks. "THERE... IS... A MAGIC PORTAL... IN... THE... PALACE?!?!?"

Pale and quivering, Jerhyn tried to shush her. "We did not see the Vizjerei after that, but one night, my guards and I awoke to find hordes of demons rampaging through the palace! They were slaughtering the poor girls from the harems --"

When she heard that, Xanthippe went as pale as Jerhyn. "Slaughtering? Harems?"

"Yes, the harems, my whole staff, all of my servants, even old Jabeeb, my father's vizier. My brave guardsmen tried to push them back through the portal, and we have been fighting a losing battle ever since. I had to hire Greiz's men to guard the walls and keep the peace!"

Xanthippe's voice dropped to a whisper. "Where is my mom?"

"I... beg your pardon?"

"Where... is... my... mom?! I want to know where my mom is!"

Now Jerhyn just looked confused. "I..."

"You... YOU... stupid... incompetent... nimrodish... dumb... utter... you... AAAGGGHHH!! Get out of the way!" Xanthippe charged into the palace, with Kasim on her heels.

While Xanthippe's mother and grandmother often went to the palace on business, she had never been there. It was a luxurious building, covered with gilt and enamel work, low divans and inviting pillows beckoning from every corner. The upper floor looked exactly like the paintings Debi liked so much, except that they were empty. They checked the rooms; one was being used as the guardsmen's headquarters, but there were no guards, just a few old wanted posters and paperwork. One was strange:

WANTED: Mizor

Height: Very tall

Weight: Very heavy

Eyes: Yes

Hair: Brown; ubiquitous

Sex: No, what a disgusting thought

Distinguishing features: Oh my, yes

On charges of:

Failure to procure appropriate pet licenses

Harboring and transporting fleas

Necromancer abuse

Conduct unbecoming to a woodland creature

Reward! Call LGPD for more information. Keep our city clean.

No time to pay attention to stuff like that now; Xanthippe found the stairs down to the lower levels. The first sight to greet them was a dead guardsmen. The butt-end of his own spear had been rammed back through his chest, into the stone wall behind him. He'd been wearing a breastplate, too; it did him no good. The moved forward cautiously.

The palace was a chamber of horrors. Every gilded, painted, silken, satiny, luxurious surface was spattered, splattered, or drenched in gore. Harem girls, household servants, and guards were everywhere, tied to the columns and grillwork, then slowly torn to bits. Hanging plants were smashed on the floor, and bloody heads swung in their places. Everywhere on the floor were lumps and gobbets of flesh, arranged in strange patterns or just thrown around. At every woman's body, Xanthippe stopped to look at the face. Many didn't have faces anymore. Others were so mutilated, you couldn't tell if they were men or women.

Of course, the demons who had done this hadn't left. Some were different and frightful; ape-like things that might have come from some jungle, and pin-headed giants swinging the bodies of dead guardsmen as weapons. Others were familiar; skeletons, with bones that looked suspiciously fresh and bloody. Many of the bodies on the floor were partially defleshed, and there was all that shredded meat lying around with no bones...

At the lowest level of the cellars, they found the portal. Chopping at it did nothing; it was made of some strange metal and just reeked of enchantment. Staring at it, Xanthippe wondered what was on the other side. Some demonic realm? If that Vizjerei got through, he'd be right at home, damned demon summoners.

"Uh... boss? Why were you asking Jerhyn about your mom?"

Kasim was staring at her, as she stared at the gate. Xanthippe thought for a while longer. Kasim cleared his throat. "I don't want to pry or anything..."

"Then don't," Xanthippe snapped.

Kasim looked away, leaned on his poleaxe, and whistled a bit.

"Stop whistling, dammit! I'm trying to think!"

Rolling his eyes, Kasim mumbled, "If she was in here, she's a grease spot by now..."

Her speed surprised her; she punched Kasim right in the nose before he could block it. It didn't knock him down, though it drew blood. "I KNOW THAT!! Do you think I could not know that?! Just SHUT UP AND LET ME THINK!!"

Quietly, they both stared at the gate. "All right," Xanthippe finally said. "We have a gate. It will not close from this side. So we go through the gate and close it from the other side. Or we kill every last thing that moves in there. No, we do both. Close the gate, slaughter every living thing, every dead thing, every thing that can't make up its mind. Sound like a simple enough plan?"

Kasim nodded, and wiped his nose one last time. "Sure. Real simple."

"Then what are we waiting for?"

For you, Kasim didn't say. But he led the way through the portal; the bodyguard always goes into danger first, that's his job. On the other side was... hell? Heaven? Neither of them had ever even heard of a place like this. Marble causeways were suspended in empty space, with tiny stars rocketing past, far away in endless night. Bronze braziers held pure elemental fire, never to be extinguished, lighting and warming the emptiness. With a shock, Xanthippe realized that this was a place of awesome power: an actual pocket world, a tiny duplicate of reality itself, separate from the world except at one point, the portal. Making such a place would take legendary knowledge, skill, and more raw power than anyone alive wielded... this could only be Horazon's Arcane Fortress.

The causeways made up a maze of paths, designed to confuse the mind. While going through the place, killing everything they met, what little Xanthippe knew of Horazon came back to her. The ancient Vizjerei summoned demons, thinking they could control them and use them without danger. Some rift in the clan ended up as a fight between two factions, one headed by Horazon. Each tried to use their demonic "servants" on the others. The demons did not fight each other; they ignored the binding spells their masters thought were constraining them, and killed most of the clan in one huge blood bath. Horazon went missing, presumed dead, but his body was never found. The remaining Vizjerei turned to elemental magic, and supposedly founded some group of mage-killers to police the mage clans.

Horazon's Fortress was easy enough to move in, but it took some concentration to figure out where you were going. Figures a sorcerer would make a fortress like this; no walls, you have to think your way through it. Finally, on the last little platform, they saw Horazon. Or maybe it was that Vizjerei, wearing an antique robe. Either way, he was summoning more demons. And laughing. There was a lot of laughing. Xanthippe charged, slashing her way through a crowd of blood goat demons, and buried her bardiche in his brain.

She and Kasim were now the last living things in the Fortress. On the little platform, there was a dusting of very old bones, swept to one side. Someone who had been in here had died long, long ago. Floating above the platform was a journal; Xanthippe started reading at random.

"-- others know nothing of the ways of power. My brother Bartuc is such a fool. To imagine that Demons might be befriended, traded with fairly, secrets given and received in exchange, is the height of absurdity. These creatures can only be dominated, their wills crushed and forced to serve their masters."

Yech, sorcerous garbage. She skipped on a bit.

"-- responsibility only to himself. As demonkind is unfairly maligned by the 'heavenly' hosts, who persuade fools with their talk of 'evil' and 'wrong', so are the true masters of the world misunderstood by those they rule. Is there any fool so foolish as he who believes himself the wisest of all humanity? Those with vision and the will to grasp --"

You can always tell a book written by a mage. They use the word "fool" so damn much. She skipped a bit further.

"My fortress is complete. Let Bartuc challenge me, if he dares. My slaves are more than his match. I hope he does come, that I may laugh in his face as his pitiful forces are wiped out and his spells fail. I wonder if he even has the wit to thread the maze? Surely not --"

Sounds like things were heating up. A few pages ahead, the handwriting got shaky.

"My injuries are severe. But I will live. The demons - my slaves - cast aside the chains I bound them with. They had been fooling me, fooling us all, all along. I think Bartuc is dead, I truly regret it. Though I think I was less wrong than he. It does not matter. My servants did not serve me, I served their purposes. Now I know why they did not always respond to my summons, why they did not follow the letter of my instructions. There were no flaws in the spells. It did not always suit their purpose to respond to me. Their purposes... I have no idea what they truly wanted."

Xanthippe smiled coldly. Never trust someone who has their own agenda. How long did Horazon live after that? There was about half an inch of pages yet.

"My fortress is as perfect and as empty as ever. A grand folly, a fortress built where there is no one to attack it. My final monument, and a fitting one. Perhaps I ought to make journal entries only on my birthday. Nothing happens to write down anymore."

Humility suits him well, too. Xanthippe went through the last few pages, looking for a capital H. Here, an entry with 'Horadrim':

"The demon battles have continued across the desert. A new order of young battle-mages, the Horadrim, are pursuing one of the great demon lords. I should do something, but I know nothing of real magic.

"The demon lord was captured today, and imprisoned in an odd crystal. I have not seen the like; maybe it is something that works. The young fellows did not believe their crystal, which seemed to be damaged, could hold the demon, so one of their number volunteered himself as a repository for both crystal and demon. This seems foolish to me, but perhaps wisdom would seem so. They will entomb the man, Tal Rasha, in an empty tomb in the Canyon of the Magi, then block the entrances to the canyon. That's all right, no one goes out there anyway.

"The man was entombed in the empty tomb, the square one. The tomb is buried, the canyon blocked off, all is sealed. That demon couldn't be more secure if you put him in here with me. Heh heh! Must go to Lut Gholein tomorrow for more tea. I'm running out."

That was it. Nothing about where the canyon was. Of course not. Why bother to write it down when you know where it is? He could go whenever he wanted. Wait, if he wanted to go someplace, Horazon must have had some kind of gate, some way of getting there easily. No mage worth his wand of fireballs would walk when he didn't have to. And since mages are so fond of their puzzles... there, on the columns! Little buttons, set cunningly into the stone, almost invisible. Shine the light on them right, and you could see silvery writing. The language was archaic (wizards love showing off their mastery of archaic languages) but Xanthippe could make out the world for "canyon", and pressed the appropriate button. A reddish portal appeared, and they took it.