“How much longer are we going to stand here?” he asked me again, as he had every five to ten minutes for the past three quarters of an hour.
I ground my teeth, “I don’t understand these enchantments. The structure is twisted somehow… askew in a way that should make them non-functional.”
“Well if they don’t work then they should be safe, right?”
I shook my head, “No, if they didn’t work they’d have faded by now. These things look just as fresh as the day they were made, which means that the alignment is properly balanced… I just don’t understand how.”
“So… are we going to stand here all day, or try that door over there? We could take some of these things back if you want to study them later,” said Dorian pragmatically.
“Let’s just move on. There’s something like a vault a short distance past that door. Whatever they were protecting down here is probably in there,” I told him. “We should skirt the edges of this room though, just in case… and don’t touch anything.” Double checking my shield, I gave him a pat on the back, indicating he should start moving forward.
Everything went fine, until he reached the side of the room and we began edging toward the far door. A sharp surge of magical energy was my only warning before my eyes were greeted with the improbable sight of a chair grinning at me. That’s right, the goddamned thing grinned at me. The chair back twisted and changed, revealing two grotesque eyes and a mouth full of what appeared to be razor sharp teeth.
Before I could react, it stood and lunged at me. The back and seat rose, becoming the main body of what appeared to be an oddly shaped wooden stick-man, while the arms stretched out and showed enchanted claws, as if they were cat paws. It struck with breathtaking speed, ripping through my shield and almost reaching my suddenly vulnerable throat. I might have died then, but for the fortuitous presence of Dorian Thornbear.
I hadn’t seen him move, so focused was I upon the wooden monstrosity that had attacked me, but his sword struck with blinding speed, cutting through the wooden arms of the chair and sending a rainbow cascade of magical energies flying through the air. I doubted he could see the chaotic and colorful spray of aythar as his sword devastated the magical construct, but it hardly mattered… his sword still did its work.
Things would have been simple if it had just been the chair, for Dorian’s second and third cuts rendered it rapidly into antique kindling, but the chair was not alone. It came with a full set of chair friends as well as two brutes that had previously been perfectly civilized tables. As the first chair had already shown, my magical shield was virtually worthless against the enchanted claws and teeth that each former piece of furniture came equipped with, but Dorian’s armor was more than sufficient.
Reaching into my pouches, I started to bring forth another stone disk, similar in appearance to the one that served as my magical flying construct, but with a different function. I was interrupted by a massive table leg stabbing toward me with a gleaming spike on its foot. Dodging sideways, I was almost too slow getting out of its path, but fortunately I tripped over the remains of the first chair, and my fall helped me to avoid the deadly attack.
I wish I could say I planned the fall, but I hadn’t. I was just clumsy.
Meanwhile, Dorian had gone on a rampage. That’s the best way I could think to describe it. The man was an unbreakable, unforgiving, and utterly unstoppable engine of destruction. If other furniture items could see his actions that day, and if that same furniture then had dreams… well they’d have been horrific nightmares of wooden destruction at the hands of a metal clad monster, i.e. Dorian Thornbear.
He moved in a perfect rhythm of violence; graceful and terrible at one and the same time. He had somehow noticed my fall, and he stepped back and to the side to cover me, even as his sword clove through another barbarously deformed chair.
The smaller side table caught his sword as it recovered from the swing and sought to trap his arm. Given Dorian’s incredible strength and the nature of his magical blade, it was a futile maneuver… but it kept him off-balance and cost him a precious second as he ripped the blade free of his wooden opponent. During that time the larger table rushed him, slamming into him like an animated battering ram.
I tried to brace him with a hastily erected shield but the enchanted construct’s wooden arms tore through it as if it were tissue paper, and Dorian wound up being slammed against the wall, while I served unwittingly as a block to trip his legs as he fell backward. Scrambling forward, I hastily got out of the way, casting about with my senses to find my staff which I had dropped during my initial fall.
The enchantment that powers these things seems to be impervious to normal magic, I noted silently. As I had seen before, magic bound within permanent rune structures was virtually impossible to alter or destroy, unless you used something similar against it. Enchanted swords easily cut through my shields, as had the strangely fluid magic of the shiggreth leader, Timothy. His magic had seemed very similar to an enchantment, even though he created it spontaneously with nothing more than will and words. Spell-weaving, came an unbidden memory, the true difference between a civilized race and animals. Somehow I knew that the speaker had meant human kind when he had said ‘animals’.
Even while these thoughts raced through my mind, my hand reached my staff and I brought it up to bear on the swarming wooden chaos of the room before me. Dorian had recovered from his fall and was now grappling the larger table from his disadvantageous position on the floor. It hardly mattered though, as I watched, his greater strength prevailed, and he began ripping the heavily timbered opponent limb from limb, or leg from tabletop, in this instance.
Focusing my power along the channel of my staff, I burned through the remaining chairs with a white hot beam of pure aythar. Within moments the fight was over, and we were left standing amid the wreckage of the most vicious furniture I had ever encountered. I began chuckling at the thought.
“What are you laughing about?” asked Dorian as he rose from the floor.
“We finished the furnishings,” I snickered.
Dorian groaned, “Not again.”
That only made me laugh harder, “You smashed the sideboard and broke the buffet while I charred the chairs.”
“Alliteration?” said my friend bleakly, “I think I preferred your bad puns.”
“Wait,” I protested with a grin, “I think I can do better.”
“Better is worse,” said Dorian.
“You terminated the table’s tortuous tumult.”
“Even if the gods are false, there has to be a special hell for people like you,” he replied.
“A literal hell,” I said before pausing, “… or ‘alliteral’ hell. Is that what you mean?”
“Goddammit stop!” he cried before adding, “alliteral isn’t even a word.”
“Well it should be,” I said smugly and then I was forced to dodge a wide swing of Dorian’s arm. I knew he was only playing though… if he had meant to hit me, I’d never have had time to move.
Chapter 38
The door leading from the room we had just wrecked opened into a small hallway with walls faced in smooth marble. The hall ended in a heavy steel door marked with a single inscription in Lycian, ‘Shraybet gib Aystrylin’.