O
ne of the first things Tesni had learned about Elethay Ardoc was that she was, at any given time, either outdoors or wishing she were. Ellie was perfectly capable of stepping out any one of Kaer Maga’s many doorways, disappearing into the grasslands and chaparral of the Storval Plains, with or without Tesni by her side, not showing her face in the city again for a month or more. Her hair, originally glossy black, had become scoured to a much lighter hue by life out in the sun, wind and dust.Knowing that, it always amazed Tesni how easily this girl of the open country could always shut out the world to concentrate on her precious journal, even in the midst of the noisiest and most boisterous of crowds.
And The Country Round was certainly noisy and crowded this evening. It was one of the best taverns in Bis District, as well as the biggest, and certainly the loudest.
The circular common room measured nearly a hundred feet across, and its painted scenes of green hills, meadows and woods—things most people in this roofed city on an arid plain had never seen up close in real life—looked cheerily down on several hundred night-lifers in various stages of inebriation and mirth. Many of them, Tesni was happy to say, had come to hear her recently-completed performance. Halfling singers were much in vogue right now in the city, and Tesni Larkwood was one of the most popular. In addition to the generous pay, she wouldn’t have to buy any of her own drinks tonight, and neither would Ellie. Not that the ranger-lass really needed to buy her own drinks. Her family—the male members of it, at least—ruled this particular district of the city with a literal iron fist.
Tesni sat daintily perched atop one of the high stools The Country Round provided for its more diminutive guests, careful to keep her knees tight together on account of the short blue dress she’d worn for her performance. She stared patiently across the table at Ellie, who was once again miles deep in that damned journal of hers—the one that was the size of a small chapbook when closed, but expanded into a huge and weighty tome when opened, with seemingly thousands of blank pages awaiting Ellie’s careful notes, well-rendered sketches, and the occasional pasted-in example of local flora and fauna.
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“Ahem,” Tesni ventured hopefully, “I sang The Stag Girl tonight just for you because it’s your favorite. Did you notice?”
“I noticed.” Ellie didn’t look up from her book.
“I thought it went over pretty well. I hit the vibrato on the high notes right this time. I’m never sure about it, with that song.”
Ellie looked up at her this time, and smiled fondly. “Tes, I noticed.” She flipped the journal back a couple of pages, and turned it round to show her. Ellie had filled an entire page with a fine charcoal sketch of Tesni on stage, holding her hands over the top of her head to make comic pantomime antlers, while the crowd roared with laughter.
“You did notice,” Tesni beamed.
“I notice everything. Be dead if I didn’t.”
Tesni knew from personal experience that was true—at least outside on the wild plains, where Ellie no doubt wished she were right now, and where she would be again, by midday tomorrow.
The ranger was already engrossed in her notes again. Tes craned her neck to see.
“What are you reading now?” The colorful beads in her waist-length hair-braids clacked softly together as she leaned.
Ellie looked up. “You don’t think I’d take us to a place called The Hated Halls without studying up on everything I’ve found out about it, do you?”
“I don’t think you’d take us to a place called The Hated Halls at all, unless you were as crazy as a drunken troll in a rainstorm.”
Ellie gave her a sour look.
“Elethay,” Tesni said to her in her reasonable voice, “how long have you known me?”“Almost a year.”
“See? You’re one of my oldest friends, and all that time, I’ve been telling you how pointless it is to try and prove yourself to those uncles and cousins and brothers of yours. You have breasts and you bleed every month, so you’ll never be one of them.
That’s the way it is. Why would you even want to be? So you can carry a chisel on your belt and break finger bones like they do? I mean, you don’t even live here in Bis. Not really. You stop here every so often for a change of clothes, a hot bath and a warm snuggle, and then you’re off again. More often than not, I go with you. I’ll go this time, but I want to know why, apart from a point of pride that you know doesn’t matter.”
“It’s different this time,” Ellie shrugged. “It’s a matter of family honor. I may not be a very good Ardoc, but I am one. And a soul is at stake—my great-grandfather’s.
Perhaps others as well.”
Tesni sighed, resigned. “It’s going to be dangerous, isn’t it?”
Ellie smirked at her. “The place is called The Hated Halls, Tes—not The Cuddly Halls. What do you think?”
“Just checking.”
Ellie closed her book at last, and slipped it into her tunic. “It’s getting late, you’ve had a long and tiring sing, and we need to get started by mid-morning tomorrow if we’re to reach the Halls by nightfall. I believe you mentioned a hot bath and a warm snuggle.”
“And so I did,” Tes smiled. “But Grey sleeps on the floor tonight.” She looked down under the table to where a mechanical animal-thing sat at Elethay’s feet. It
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was a golem, one given to every Ardoc girl-child as a lifelong protector and sign of status. Each girl got a unique one, and Ellie’s looked like some sort of sleek quadruped—canine or feline, or both—made of finely carved and beautifully etched metallic scales that allowed it to move with all the agility and speed of a living predator. It was made of enchanted silver and had originally shone brilliantly in the light, but Ellie had deliberately burnished and tarnished its surface to a pewter-like patina, so that it wouldn’t glint in the sunlight out on the plains and attract the notice of unwelcome things. Hence its name, Grey.
“All right,” Ellie shrugged, “but you know very well it doesn’t actually sleep at all.”
“That’s what bothers me,” Tesni said, giving Grey the stink-eye. “I don’t like him watching us.”
“He knows you, and he knows when I’m being attacked and when I’m not.”
“All the same,” Tes insisted, “on the floor he goes.” She tried to put her foot down, and nearly slipped off her high stool.
Ellie shook her head fondly, and stood up to help Tes down. She knew the tab would be taken care of. It always was.
o~O~o
The journey took most of the next day, and the hot sun would have been quite oppressive if Tesni hadn’t cast one of her “little spells,” Pinya’s parasol, which caused a bit of starry night sky to appear overhead and follow them where they walked, keeping always between them and the sun, and thus always in shade. Tes
passed the time by quietly singing road songs, which Ellie even joined in with sometimes, now that no one was around to hear. Grey ran along silently beside
them, or behind them, or sometimes ahead.
Ellie stopped them just as the sun was setting, at a thick stand of brush with a barren clearing on the other side.
As they peered through, Tes could make out a small building on the far side of the clearing. There sat a thatched cottage, looking quite abandoned but hardly sinister, shaded by a tall outcropping of rock and a small stand of dark evergreen trees.
“That’s The Hated Halls?” Tes whispered. “Looks more like The Hated Hut to me.”“That’s only the entryway,” Ellie whispered back. “and it’s not undefended. Look closer.”
Tesni looked closer, letting her eyes slowly adjust to the deepening dusk. It took her a moment to see that what she had initially taken for a bare tree, swaying in the wind behind the cottage, was in fact a long, gaunt arm protruding from the center of the building’s peaked roof.
It was as tall and as thick as any tree, and swayed about aimlessly in the air above the house. Twenty feet from its end, the arm split off into three long claw-like fingers, which wriggled and clacked together.
“That thing can and will reach anywhere in the clearing,” Ellie said in a low voice.
“I was here watching when a jackrabbit tried to cross in front of the cottage. It didn’t get three hops into the clearing before that arm speared it with one claw, then held it straight up in the air and let its blood trickle down the finger. I think it has some sort of mouth where they all join the main arm.”
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“Lovely,” said Tes sourly. “And this thing is only a day’s walk from Kaer Maga?”
“It’s not always here,” Ellie replied with a shrug.
“So, how do we get in? And more to the point, why do we get in?”
“We get in with this,” Ellie replied, and pulled a small metallic object out of the blouse of her green-and-brown travelling outfit. Tesni recognized it as one of the Ardoc family’s mechanical homing pigeons—more reliable than the real things, and one of the clan’s best-selling and most affordable items.
“I’ve filled the watertight message chamber inside it with my blood,” Ellie explained. “I’ll send it flying off towards that guardian claw. It’ll take it for a living animal and catch it to drink the blood. While it’s distracted, we’ll slip in the front door. I already did a test run, so I’m sure it will work… reasonably.”
“You bled yourself into that thing,” Tes said, shaking her head. “You’re a crazy, crazy, crazy girl.”
“Better to bleed a little down here than a lot up there,” Ellie noted, pointing up at the huge thing waving tentacle-like above the cottage. “Now, the stories I’ve heard say there’s a huge fireplace inside that house... big enough for a grown human to stand up in without bending over. In it burns a green fire with no logs, coals or fuel of any kind. To get to the Hated Halls, you step into that fire.”
“I see. So the flames act as some kind of teleportation portal into the dungeon.”
“No, the flames act as flames, which burn you alive and turn you into ashes. Quite exquisitely painful, I’m told. Then you re-form a new body somewhere in the Halls.
But with none of your equipment. Or weapons. Or... you know... clothes. If you’re lucky and resourceful enough, you can find your way back here again by gentler means, after you’ve traversed the Halls.”
Tesni’s glower had grown darker and darker as Ellie spoke. Then she sighed heavily.
“Okay,” she said matter-of-factly, “I’m not doing that.”
Ellie grinned at her. “Good, because I wouldn’t fancy having to come after you.
What we’re looking for is in the cottage itself, not in the Halls.”
“And that is...?”
“My great-grandfather’s tombstone.”
Tesni affixed Ellie with dagger-eyes. “A rock?” she said flintily. “We’re running past that thing into a house full of naked-making demon fire and Desna knows what else, so you can bring home a rock?”
“Well, my great-grandfather’s soul happens to be trapped inside it. The magic of the portal into the Halls is powered by the souls of several great men and women trapped inside their own tombstones, and placed around the inside of that hut. We’ll fetch my great-grandfather out of there, bring him back to Kaer Maga, and turn him over to Uncle Merriman and the Brothers. And then we’ll see who’s worthy of full membership in the family.”
Tesni gave a growl of resignation and sent an exasperated look up into the now star-filled sky. “It’s a good thing I like you so much, or I’d be charging you more for my time than you could afford. I wish I’d brought more throwing stars.” She reached back to check the braids of her long hair, which had been tied together into a single long plait, with dozens of tiny razor-sharp disks wedged in between the strands. “I must be crazy.”
“Of course you are,” Ellie agreed. “You’re a bard.”
“Why did you wait until now to tell me all this stuff?”
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“So it would all be fresh in your mind. It wouldn’t do to forget any of this.”
“I never forget anything, Ellie. You know that.”
“You’re in an awfully sour mood tonight,” Ellie told her. “Tell you what. When we get back home, I’ll buy you a heaping bowl of fruit-ice. Any flavor you want.”
Tes had to turn away to hide her grin. “Better have lots of whipped cream. And a cherry—three cherries—on top.”
“Deal,” said Ellie, then spat in her hand and held it out for Tes to shake.
“Ewwww,” said Tes, looking at it and wrinkling her nose. “Just send up your bloody bird and let’s get to it already.”
o~O~o
They made it into the cottage with seconds to spare. It was so close, Elethay and Tesni could hear the claws slam uselessly into the ground outside, just as they slammed the door on it.
The interior of the little cottage looked surprisingly like... the interior of a little cottage. Simple shelves and tables were scattered around the perimeter, holding an unremarkable assortment of jars and odd items. Only three things stood out. A giant fireplace occupied the far corner, taller than Ellie and filled entirely with a greenish fire that billowed but did not roar. It seemed to give off cold rather than heat. In front of it sat a perfectly normal-looking young girl, perhaps twelve years old, spinning at a spinning wheel and looking impassively at her two sudden visitors. But of most interest to Ellie were the uprooted gravestones, in a variety of shapes and sizes and conditions, that stood propped up at irregular intervals against the wainscot.
The young girl kept her eyes on Ellie and Tes, not pausing in her spinning. Her expression was entirely inscrutable.
“Dongleman’s Rules of Dungeon Delving, number fourteen,” Tesni said to Ellie in a low voice. “Once you’ve gotten past the first death trap, all cute children should be viewed with a great deal of suspicion.”
“Oh, I agree completely,” Ellie replied. “I’m thinking the spinning wheel provides power to the fire-portal. There’s no fuel in that fireplace.”
“Then we should just smash the spinning wheel, and everything’s tea and crumpets?”
“No, if you touch that spinning wheel, I’d say it’s likely to suck your soul out, and wrap it around the distaff to add to its power.”
Tes looked up at her incredulously. “How do you know that?”
Ellie shrugged. “It’s what I would do if I were an evil magic spinning wheel.
Anyway, the wheel is probably just a tool. Take away its power source and it’s useless.” She gestured at the gravestones lined up along the walls.
“You’re making an awful lot of assumptions here,” Tes told her skeptically.
“Informed assumptions. I read a lot. Didn’t you notice? Anyway, closing that portal isn’t our main purpose here. Great-grandpa Armiger’s tombstone is.”
The little girl at the spinning wheel grinned at them malevolently. “You won’t want to be here when Papa gets home,” she said in a little girl voice.
“Don’t worry,” Ellie said to her. “We’re not interested in any of your fine cutlery or quaint folk carvings. I’ll just collect my great-grandsire’s stone, and we’ll be gone from here.”
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“If your great-grandsire had been a good man, his stone wouldn’t be here,” the girl told her.
“Maybe not. But you know what they say... you can’t choose your family.”
“But you can choose your fiends,” Tes appended. “Speaking of which, I’d like to go home before Mistress Mary’s papa gets here, whatever he is.”
“Just look for a stone with the name Armiger Ardoch on it... with a ‘ch’ at the end.”
“The inscribed sides are all turned toward the wall.”
Ellie sighed heavily. “Well, crap.”
The little girl gave a wicked little laugh, and suddenly from the green fire burst a swarm of tiny winged creatures, screaming in high-pitched agony as they burned through the air.
The creatures looked like fairies, winged human-like beings the size of dragonflies, and they continued to burn with the misty green flames as they shot frantically around the room, bouncing off walls, floor, furniture and ceiling as they hysterically tried to smother the flames that hurt them so. Fortunately, those magical flames seemed
The creatures looked like fairies, winged human-like beings the size of dragonflies, and they continued to burn with the misty green flames as they shot frantically around the room, bouncing off walls, floor, furniture and ceiling as they hysterically tried to smother the flames that hurt them so. Fortunately, those magical flames seemed