Darkvision - Bruce R. Cordell [113]
CHAPTER THIRTY
Zel watched the naturally pale, dangerous vengeance taker charge ahead. Zel tightened his grip on the pickaxe and whispered, "So much for common sense." Then Zel ran into the Imperial Weapons Cache.
Others barreled ahead of him. The pallid foreigner had gone first, and the wizard woman dashed after her compatriot. The foul-mouthed elf with the burning sword was only a step behind her.
Even his own nephew beat him through the door. Zel's checks flushed, and he asserted, "I'm not afraid!"
He yelped when a great stone hand grabbed him.
The elemental lord pulled him back and turned him around, looking Zel in the eye. "Stay back, and remember what happens here today. And please guard my little friend." The crystal dragonet on Prince Monolith's shoulder hopped from the elemental to Zel. Zel was surprised to find that the creature weighed practically nothing.
The earth lord turned and dashed after the others. The dragonet belled loud and long, but the sounds emerging from the chamber were earsplitting. Zel moved forward tentatively to watch, relieved and ashamed that he had an excuse to remain out of the conflict.
The fabled Imaskaran Imperial Weapons Cache was essentially a fat, egg-shaped cavity seemingly wider than the tower's dimension could contain. Ususi's first impression was a cloud-swaddled sky, but the lines of the floor and curving walls and ceiling quickly resolved. Thousands of circles of every size were set into the floor. All were at least three or four feet in diameter, though many were much larger.
The circles capped thousands of inset storage cylinders sunk below floor level. The capacity of the chamber's thousands of hidden silos took away Ususi's breath.
The caps along the periphery of the great chamber were plain metallic bands, unadorned but for a simple symbol-sword blade, spear, bow, quiver, and so on. The wizard was no tactician, but she supposed there were enough of these mundanely-stamped silos to equip a small army with arms and ammunition, presuming each sunken locker contained what its stamp promised.
Toward the middle, intricate mechanical locks adorned the caps. At the hub of the great chamber, elaborate warding glyphs of inlaid Celestial Nadir crystal inscribed the sunken storage cylinders. Hundreds of protective warding circles were inscribed across the tops of all the innermost silos, some layered over one another, forming a diagram of staggering complexity, not dissimilar to the designs inscribed on the Great Seal back in Deep Imaskar.
But a great swath of the interlocking wards and circles was tangled and uneven. Here and there, cylinders stood raised from their compartments, their contents revealed. The wizard saw glittering black swords, slender steel wands, smooth-stocked crossbows, glassy darts filled with phosphorescent pink liquid, scarlet goggles, beetle-black gauntlets, dragonfly blades like the one Iahn carried, and other equipment that reminded Ususi of scuttling insect limbs and carapaces. But most disturbing were the raised cylinders that resembled sarcophagi more than equipment chests.
The sarcophagi were faced with glass. Creatures hung within, in a pale green briny solution, preserved against the long, slow grind of time. Ususi saw trolls behind the glass windows, demonic hoof-footed humanoids, human-sized eggs the color of flesh, bony shadow efts, mantis-headed insectoids, human-dragon hybrids, and at least one tentacle-faced humanoid with soulless white eyes frozen open in its captivity: a mind flayer of ancient vintage.
Several dozen unjacketed canisters yawned, open and drained. The creatures once contained therein, clustered near the room's center, were decanted and active. Thankfully, the wizard saw no mind flayer lords.
Those freed were bad enough. Some were monstrosities she had faced in the caverns below the world. A few she knew through her studies. She recognized trolls, a dozen or more mantis-men. One figure towered over all the others, human in shape, but at least twenty paces