“The young master is quite correct.” Ghelreis nodded slowly with his usual stern face.
“Yeah,” said Reystov. “Nothing new there. Anyway, if I know you, you’re planning on going right now. I packed already.”
Reystov understood my pattern of behavior. I was grateful for that.
“What? Right… now?”
“Yes. Can you show us the way to the nearest underground path? Oh, we’ll be abandoning the boat, so please do what you want with the cargo and food we can’t carry with us. We’ve also left a simple map.”
If I’d just said, “You can have these,” there was a chance that the elves wouldn’t accept them, so I was going to leave it all behind to give them no choice. If one of the elves used our boat to go upstream, return to the lake, and head towards the city by the lakeside, Gus would probably attend to the rest as he saw fit. My grandpa was proficient in Elvish and also knew that our city was located downriver.
Dine still hadn’t replied.
“If we’ve been noticed by the enemy, speed will be of the essence,” I prompted. “So please make it quick.”
“Alright.” Dine nodded and looked around at the other elves behind her as if to check something with them. Then she turned back to us. “I’ll send one of us back to the village to inform everyone. So please, take us with you. We should at least be good as decoys or shields.”
They all wore the same expression of steadfast resolve. Menel opened his mouth to reply, but I forestalled him. “We don’t want you,” I said, dismissing their resolve out of hand. “You’re too weak.”
I thought I heard them quietly gasp. Though I’d called them “recovered,” that only meant that I’d removed the toxins and miasma inside their bodies. The physical strength lost by being poisoned for so long couldn’t be recovered by benediction. Even these, the finest fighters among them, didn’t look well in the face.
“We can’t afford dead weight.” I was firm about it.
Dine scrunched up her face. “You’ve done so much for us, and you want us simply to show you the way into a death trap?”
“Yes.”
“This is so humiliating,” Dine muttered, furrowing her brow and looking as though she had just taken a bite of something terribly bitter. “But… alright… fine.
We’ll abide by your decision.”
The elves behind her began to protest.
“But Dinelind…”
“Don’t you think this is rather…”
But Dine turned back to them and said, “Surely you don’t think we should turn our eyes from our own powerlessness and compound our shame?” Those words silenced them. “Right now, we can’t do anything to change the fact that we’re weaklings in poor health. We’re weaklings…” It sounded as though she was trying to convince herself.
“It’s this way,” she said, and started walking. “Follow me.”
I got a slight glimpse of her violet eyes. She was fighting back tears of frustration.
Menel whispered to me. “Hey, Will… you know I could’ve…”
“No. I was the right one to say it.” Menel had probably been intending to take that unenviable job and make himself the bad guy, but I thought that would probably be far too cruel.
It was a set of strange metal doors fitted into an enormous stone arch. A mixture of dwarven construction and elven ornamentation, the doors had countless Signs engraved upon them in an ancient style of writing. Toxic miasma seeped out of small gaps around their edges.
“The West Gate… I never thought the day would come when I would come here again,” Ghelreis murmured with feeling.
“So this is the entrance to the Iron Country…” Al gazed at the doors and spent a while in silence with his lips drawn together. No one said anything for a while.
Ghelreis hadn’t been back home in two hundred years, and for Al, this was the first time.
“You’re really going through here?”
“Yes.” I placed poison-resistance magic and blessings on each of us. Menel added to that by summoning some assistance from the elementals of air, gathering clean and fresh air into our surroundings. Reystov cast his eyes around cautiously, while Ghelreis and Al gave their undivided attention to a final inspection of their gear.
As they worked, I gave the doors a look-over. They had a large door knocker made of metal that was fashioned after a flower. Several large Signs that were engraved near it were now quite worn away. I read them carefully.
“Pulsate et aperietur vobis. ”
On a closer look, the doors were made of an evil-warding metal that no one knew how to smelt any longer, and not only that, multiple blessings had also been placed upon them. They were the kind of doors that would inflict serious damage upon the minions of the evil gods if they so much as carelessly approached them, let alone knocked. They were doors made with the advanced technology of the Union Age, which were impossible to recreate with the world’s current level of technology.
“Al, knock,” I said to my gentle, black-haired friend. “That’s the sign.”
“Sir Will, umm, you want me to be the one to do it?”
“Who better?” He was the true successor to the lost Iron Country; there could be no one with the right to open these doors other than him. “This job should be yours.”
“Okay…” Al went quiet as if hesitating for a while. Eventually, he pushed his lips into a thin line, and made his way towards the doors. He was tall for a dwarf, but standing next to the enormous doors, he looked very small. He took a single deep breath, took hold of the door knocker, and with a serious manner, he struck the doors twice, producing two deep, resonant sounds.
The Words engraved upon the doors shone, and the structure enclosing the doors rumbled. Slowly, weightily, as though welcoming us in with both arms spread wide, the huge doors opened—
That instant, a powerful chill ran down my spine. My entire body stiffened, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. A single image was thrust into my mind.
A gold reptilian eye staring at us.
Pierced by its glare, I felt my heart tighten as though it were being slowly squeezed. My legs trembled. I felt like I was going to fall to my knees. My breathing grew ragged and heavy. Instinct grabbed reason’s collar with all its strength and screamed madly into its face: Run. Run, run, run! Abandoneverything and run right now! You can’t win!
Then I noticed the others. They were on their knees, clutching their chests. It looked as though several of the elves had already passed out. The golden eye in my mind narrowed as its stare grew more murderous. The pressure increased further. My mind was scrambled by worry and fear. My knees started to buckle.
I clenched my teeth. Tensing up all the muscles in my body, I opened my eyes wide and dug both my feet into the ground. I calmed the stormy sea inside my heart and forced my ragged breathing under control.
“Fortia!! ”
I shouted out the Word that meant bravery and strength. At the same time as the influence of the Word spread like a wave through the space surrounding me, there was a sudden release of pressure inside my head, and the image of the golden eye vanished without a trace. I breathed heavily. It was gone. I could sense nothing.
But I knew he was grinning.
“So we were noticed…”
This wasn’t the work of demons. Even a demon with the rank of Commander, no, even a King probably couldn’t perform a feat like that. I hadn’t felt such a sense of despair and pressure since the god of undeath’s Echo. And it had taken no more than a look. Without a doubt, this was the work of the dragon. It was the foul-dragon from the age of the gods, whose power even the gods recognized and whom Stagnate had predicted would be my death.