The Citadel’s portal hub is oriented directly in the center of the of the inner-sanctum. Without a guide powering it, you could walk right through it without ever knowing. I realized, absorbing the sweeping stone arches and bronze sculptures of lions and wolves and dragons that I had done exactly that.
In the center of the arches, a round, iron dais is embedded intro the cobblestone. From there, iron bands extend in sixteen directions around it, reaching to sixteen arches around the grounds. The hidden door to the headmaster’s office was nearby, but somehow stood outside of this network. How much of this design is actually based on function?
Bastilion withdrew his caged-ring from his coat’s inner pocket and slotted it onto his middle finger, then handed me and Marta each a slim glass flask. “Drink this,” he said. “The elixir should prevent most averse side-effects of long distance travel. Stay close to me while we’re traversing the In Between… it’s not always a uneventful journey to the Golden City.”
Marta and I exchanged glances, then nodded to our professor.
Bastilion called out in a language I didn’t understand. A rent opened above the dais and a masked mage dressed in white flowing robes emerged. I couldn’t tell who the mage was, nor could I determine their sex. Their uniform matched the black-robes’ exactly, only taking on the hue of the opposite side of the color spectrum.
“Who is that?” I whispered to Bastilion.
As if irritated by the question, the professor barked: “I’ll explain later. Now, save your breath!”
The white-robe guide raised their dominant hand in fist, extended their index finger, and swayed their hand side-to-side the wrist three times. Crimson words in the Valentine trader language appeared above their head, as if etched into the air itself.
To where?
Bastilion placed his index finger on his cheek, swirling his hand as he folded his index finger and extended his pinky and thumb. He finished the gesture by pressing his finger tips together so his hands resembled a roof. “Valencia,” he said aloud. “The Golden City.”
The guide raised their fist to their temple, then extended their index finger, nodding in affirmation. The crimson letters shifted: Understood.
The guide raised both their arms and began to dance in a series of hand signs and spinning arm movements. The letters above their head flashed in a series of arcane symbols and formulae that would usually be written or spoken. In this case, the guide signed a complex string of arcane commands meant to open a gate, a tunnel through the In Between that would take us nearly one-thousand miles across sea and vast wilderness to the jewel of the Old Empire.
When the guide’s danced reached its crescendo, the ground shook and an arch directly to the west ignited with crimson energy. Blooming and blossoming, the energy ebbed and flowed like waves pressing against glass before consuming the entire opening with void much like the portal to the headmaster’s office.
Marta and I downed our elixirs. The spicy fluid rolled in my stomach like so many pints of stale ale, and I stumbled and fell to my knees as we approached the portal. Bastilion and Marta pulled me back to my feet. I could see Bastilion’s lips moving but heard nothing save for the billowing of wind, which much have been in my imagination—the trees around us were still, so were my robes.
My companions each laced their fingers in mine and together we stepped through the gate into the bleak dark of the In Between.
Haslow of the Sparrow Clan shivered with cold sweats in the cellar he’d been hiding in for nearly two weeks. The Living Flames called for blood and when he refused, they stole his heat away, besetting him feverish chills known only to lepers and pestilence bearers.
I’m fucked—in every way. Ain’t no way they’ll let me leave this godsforsaken place alive… That was what he thought to himself every hour since fleeing the Masquerade. Goldenscale was his last chance at freedom—at his people’s freedom—and that skinny twat had dashed any hope of aide.
That was, until a letter slid under the door. Haslow waited for Colover’s footsteps to amble off, then he scrambled for the envelope. Nerves bristled as he beheld the red waxen seal of Grahtzildahn. From his time in the Burning City, Haslow knew the seal was just a facsimile of the real sigil used by the Hellish Lords. This, my friends, is what he’d been waiting for.
Take the yellow ship with the red flag at dawn. Wear a cloak and present yourself as an Ionian dockhand and the captain will take you below. After the ship has set sail, decode the encrypted arcane commands on the next sheet. Combined with your existing capabilities, you will have all you need to ensure your people succeed.
-G.
He had to force himself not to laugh. The gods are good! Thank Bridget—even thank Morgana! Haslow’s grin spread across his face like a fault in the earth’s crust, splitting apart his arid, thirst stricken lips. Yes, the good people of Valencia would need all the prayers to Morgana they could muster—the Goddess of the underworld was hungry this night.
The Flames would see her fed.
Traveling the In Between is akin to walking through a forest where the dead trees are fed only by apathetic soil. Everywhere I looked there was naught by gray ashes, collapsed buildings, and a straight dusty road heading for Valencia as the crow flies. I saw the jagged spires in the distance, the sharp sprawl of towers and warehouses, or townhouses and tenements. There was no horizon—the In Between is not subjected to gravity, nor to the laws of physics. There were no physical forces compressing the plane into a sphere and thus it went on an infinite line with no foreseeable end.
The Guides had developed a portal network to simplify the traversal of perilous and eldritch landscape. Even now, we know little of the In Between. Really, most of our preconceptions about the plane are based in assumption. Many a reckless sorcerer has ventured out into the murk, never to return to the waking world. At least—not within recorded history… or within charted geography. That’s the strange thing about the In Between; though Marta, Bastilion, and I experience only ten hours of overland travel, our physical transposition takes much longer.
Gifted Sorcerers, who are no stranger to transposition and the commute between the Citadel and their assignments, can make the journey with ease and with inhuman haste. Given that Marta and I are not Gifted as of yet—and the fact we can only survive in the thick, heady atmosphere due to a single dose of a strange elixir—we’re set to arrive in Valencia in about forty days from the day we departed from Phrygia.
Should Haslow successfully charter a ship headed to the Golden City, he would arrive in about twenty-eight days. He’ll have ample time to establish himself in the Valentine underbelly. Compared to Phrygia, where he’s likely been holed up in a covered ditch to avoid detection, he’ll be near invisible just walking among the packed city streets. Phrygia’s population consists chiefly of students and professors and their families. Consequently, this means that Phrygia has the lowest population of any of the Great Kaldean Cities by a ludicrous degree.
We walked single file down the trail, Bastilion taking point, me behind him, and Marta behind me. Apparently this was some twisted form of courtesy—something about leaving room for those bloody space-wizards zipping from coast to coast in mere seconds. Veering from the path, even by a few meters, was not inherently dangerous, but still posed a risk best avoided.
“Keep looking forward,” Bastilion reminded us for the umpteenth time.
He’d already explained that we should never look over our shoulders. If retracing our steps was necessary—like, for instance, in the event a raging pit field emerged from a fault off the side of the path—we were only to fully turn around without interrupting stride.
The In Between was an uncomfortable place; existentially so. Where Citadel Mages were studied and calculated in all things, the In Between remained so esoteric that even in the presence of a centured archmage, we adhered to an arbitrary, draconian code of conduct because something about conducting oneself in such a way—keeping one’s head starting ever forward, for instance!—for some reason resulted in high rates of success.
We don’t know why any of it works, it just does. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back and all that.
What disturbed me most was the utterly physical nature of the whole experience, paired with the knowledge that my body didn’t actually exist for the ten hours I walked (don’t even get me started on the real world forty-days my physical avatar was absent). Essentially, we were naught but ghosts, roaming a wasteland, praying we make it to the other side.
It is only natural that, troubled as I was, that we should be waylaid by all manner of absurd madness. By comparison, the first encounter was rather benign. It began when we saw dots in the distance at the beginning of our second hour, within the hour, those dots grew into three shambling bodies—corpses, zombies, whatever you wish to call them we saw three of them.
All three undead appeared to have once been mummified, their ochre flesh paper thin, their hair reduced to wisps along with any shape their bodies might have boasted in life. They were genderless, devoid of features.
Bastilion was unbothered that these people were dead, more so that their unhurried scuttling nearly amounted to loitering. “Step aside, please! Thank you!” He stressed the ‘you’ with a great huffing sound, as if the words were an action to simultaneously establish his superiority as a living person and accentuate his disregard for their presence of dead people.
The undead did not argue as they politely scooted to the side, adhering to the wizardly rule of never looking behind. As we passed, the middle undead grasped my wrist and hissed a ghastly moan.
“My ring, my ring! You’ve found it!”
Marta gasped behind me. I sensed she wanted to say something. I’m sure I was thinking the same thing she was. Camilla, that can’t be you… can it?
The undead (woman?) did not relent her iron grip until I acquiesced, allowing her to slide the silver ring of chameleon off my finger. “Oh how I’ve missed it! Thank you! Thank you!” her ranting went on and on for another hour, as it took some time to escape earshot as we walked the same direction in a place with no air.
“In all my years,” Bastilion swooned once the raspy cries echoed only in my memory. “I’ve never seen someone robbed by a zombie!”
The word scraped my ears like a sword on a grindstone. He’d said it with such ferocious hatred, he might as well have been uttering some horrible slur. I’d never seen an undead (to my knowledge), but it seemed they weren’t strange or rare in the obscure world of wizarding. Just another lesson in the syllabus, I suppose. Or rather, a drop in a festering sea.
Another thing to hate. The thought put me in a foul mood.
“What business do unattended undead have in Valencia?” Marta asked, her voice tinged with worry. I’d never met her friend Camilla, but with Marta’s attention to detail—especially regarding people—I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d recognized something in those sallow, decomposed features. “I can assure you that I’ve never once seen such a creature roaming the streets.”
“Clearly you didn’t go out much at night.” Bastilion said, unenthused. “They are likely following their master’s summons. It’s not unheard of to leave minions behind at the lab and call upon them when the need for more hands arises.”
“Could they belong to the Court Wizard?” I asked.
“Nothing’s impossible, but last I spoke with Richter Benegaz, he was still just as wide-eyed and idealistic as you, Lafey. Perhaps worse.”
“Thanks…”
If my professor noticed my sarcasm, he offered no indication. He went on: “No, probably a renegade necromancer. A number of Gifted Sorcerers who can’t find work flock to the Golden City’s black market—highly sought after in the world, our ilk are, even if the Citadel rejects us. But that’s why the Citadel stands, to keep all this nasty business under as much moderation as humanly possible.”
We were nearing the city when the real hiccup occured. It began with gentle tremors, ripples through the ground. In the waking world, such a thing would be inconsequential—in the In Between, where there was no air nor gravity nor anything that reacts in such a predictable way to minor stimuli, such an event was always cause for alarm. We may as well have been right outside the walls, as the Golden City’s dreary facsimile towered over us a great wall of angry shadow. The ground shook again. A pulse, in truth, it bore the rhythm of a beating heart, speeding up as we carried on or so we thought….
At Bastilion’s behest, we advanced our march to jog, then to a run. As a great ululating cry rang out above our heads, it turned into a sprint.
“Don’t look back!” Bastilion hollered. “Just run!”
I heard nothing save for the great tremors of wings, sending waves through the atmosphere like a great whale kicking down its tail in the ocean. I felt eldritch force pushing at my back, forcing my stride to go faster. My heart rose and surpassed the heartbeat at my feet. I thrust back my hand and felt Marta’s firm grasp.
In the chaos, I could not hear much, but I felt her words resonate from her mouth through the arm into mine. She was channeling potential, breathing masterfully through her nose and expelling sorcerous exhaust between commands.
Bastilion rose his dominant hand, the ruby of his cage-ring catalyst alight with a sorcerous glow. I joined in Marta’s chant, still unhearing, reciting the most common commands used by engines. Together, as our legs burned with strain and our lungs heaved, we wove a tapestry of arcane power, granting it Bastilion’s masterful, subtle pull.
How kind and considerate a real siege mage can be, I reflected in an instant of clarity amidst panic. Even now, as unseen death pursues us, he meekly requests our stores and takes only what is given…
“Ahd Terrium!” roared Bastilion, his usually flabby arms contracted into tight, bulging cords as he held his crimson spell in both hands. “Reydias!”
I did not know the words he spake. Nor did I expect a rent to tear open in front of us. What I had expected was a massive storm cloud to take shape above us and sunder the flying hulk behind us to ashes. Instead, we all tumbled into the rent and careened through a black hole of unreality until our disassembled cells converged in a marble throne room.
We appeared from a cloud of dust, stealing through an open window and appeared mid air where all three of us fell crashing to the hard, polished floor.
“Is everyone alright?” Bastilion panted. “Perry! Marta! Was there anyone else? Argh!” He palmed his temples, as if something in his head had come loose. For all I knew, perhaps it had. “Remember Torloon—only two, this time.” He looked up, his panic fleeting for relief. “And look at that—they’re both here.”
I scrambled to my feet, and offered my hand to help Marta. There were dark rings around her eyes, a disparate, crazed mask affixed to her face.
We’re okay. We’re okay…
I wanted to ask Bastilion what in the hell had been pursuing us but I had no time. The throne (and the room holding it) was empty, but doors swung open all around us as armored knights in black and crimson gambesons and full-face armet helms surrounded us, halberds lowered and pointed at us.
“What is the meaning of this interruption?” A shrill voice raged down the hall, until its bearer strode across the threshold and stopped in his tracks upon seeing us. “Torloon? Gods in hell and up above, what the fuck are you doing here?”
A thin man in crimson collared robes hurried past the knights and stood in front of us. His face was sharp, already tan skin darkened by years beneath the sun. Despite the ornery tone of his voice, he looked no older than I.
“Apologies, Archmage Benegaz,” Bastilion bowed. “It seems you have not received our messages. There is a dissenter in your city—he means to kill the king.”
“I’ve received the bloody messages! That doesn’t explain why you’ve come bursting into the damned throne room during a war.”
“An accident, archmage, I assure you. We experienced a last minute obstacle during our transposition. Surely, you felt the disturbance as the creature passed.”
Valencia’s archmage looked up thoughtfully. “Yes—I think I know the beast you speak of… Very well, you should come with me,” he swung about, flinging a dismissive hand towards me and Marta. “And your whelps. Come now! I haven’t all day.”
I raised my eyebrows, searching for a sardonic glance to share with Marta. But she only stared at the wall, where the rent that spit us out had just been.
“Marta?”
She shushed me. “Listen.”
I did. I could still hear the heartbeat—subtle, slower now that we were in the waking world. But it was there, undeniable.