They left the Marble Roost behind and ducked back into the ruined streets leading deeper into the dead city. Hulbard's movements were slow and sluggish, between the added weight of gold dragging against his shoulders and sheer, bone deep exhaustion. More aches were blooming through his legs, neck and shoulders with every step he took but it didn't take him long to find a narrow alleyway running between two wider roads that was just far enough from the Roost to act as a comfortable place for them to rest. He slipped into it and the others followed without comment. Each and every one of them needed a chance to look their wounds over and gather their bearings after the morning they'd had.
There, Quintus soaked a fresh bandage in a healing poultice and wound it around Hulbard's forehead to cover the split flesh there. At the same time, Trasthor slumped onto the ground nearby with a growl of discomfort and sat up straight, waiting patiently while Knox dug out a needle and thread. He hadn't uttered a word of complaint about the gash looping over one shoulder, but his chest and gut were streaked with bright crimson trails. The hunter set to work sewing the wound shut without a word, his own face ashen with the pain in his ankle.
"Skye," Quintus muttered once he was done with Hulbard, "Were you wounded?"
"Huh?" her eyes were dazed as she dragged them away from Trastgor's shoulder.
"Are you bleeding," Quintus asked her, "Are you in pain?"
"No more than usual for this time of the month," she flashed a shaky smile.
"Oh…" Quintus seemed to muse on that for a second before shrugging, "You'll have to tend to that yourself".
"I suppose I will," she nodded and Hulbard couldn't help chuckling at the exchange.
Pressing his back against the alley wall, the giant slid slowly to the ground with a weary sigh. He rubbed at his tired eyes with the cold, iron fingertips of one hand while Quintus snapped his fingers and called for rations. Skye slowly dished out a cold selection of salted pork and slices of bruised, sour apples; a meagre lunch but welcome all the same.
Hulbard chewed the meat over noisily as he looked to the fresh dents pock marking the face of his heavy shield. It would need some work done on it soon to keep it as finely balanced as he liked, but just then, he didn't have the heart to set to work on it. Knox finished up his work, half heartedly wiped his bloody hands on his leather jerkin and sank cross legged onto the pavement opposite Hulbard with a wince to eat his own lunch.
"Alright," Shankhill spoke for the first time since their confrontation on the Roost, "I think it's about time we started listening to Quintus' ghostly friend and keep our explorations to a minimum moving forward. I don't see any point in poking around this place anymore than we have to now that we've found enough gold to start our own bank. I say we focus on getting this crystal and getting out of here as fast as we can".
"Agreed," Knox muttered, "But has anyone actually given any thought about how we're actually going to get out of this city? Considering how we got here, I'm guessin' walkin' won't be an option".
"That is a problem for Quintus," Shankhill beamed as if he'd just offered them the perfect solution to all their troubles, "And I'm sure he's been hard at work figuring it out ever since we got here".
All eyes turned to Quintus, who was hunkered down nearby with his back against the alley wall, massaging the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He looked up at the mention of his name and spared Shankhill a withering glance but little else. At his shoulder, Skye looked uncertainly at her Master; if he knew a way out of Dalághast, he clearly hadn't felt the need to share it with her yet.
"Well, that's promising," Trastgor growled.
"And yet I have nothing but confidence in the fact that he will provide for us," Shankhill told them all brightly, his cheerful voice already starting to grind against Hulbard's nerves again.
He briefly allowed himself to imagine punching the smaller man, down to the most minute detail, before heaving a sigh. Wishful thinking had never gotten him anywhere in the past and he didn't expect it to start now.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before exhaling slowly, consciously allowing his taut muscles to relax and began cataloguing the multitude of aches and pains coursing through his entire body. From the deep, burning sting of overexertion in his legs to a pounding headache lodged deep in the back of his skull, he felt fit for nothing but sleep. A lack of it, mixed with the aftereffects of so much adrenaline, made him feel light headed and dizzy, but it was nothing he hadn't experienced a thousand times before. The riot of colours blooming across the insides of his eyelids was new, but he couldn't summon the energy to care just then.
Focusing on them only made him feel nauseous, so he began working on his battered shield instead with a heavy hammer slung from his backpack. Hulbard spent several minutes beating some semblance of shape back into the rim of the shield with slow, sluggish strokes of the hammer, beating out the deeper gouges in its face.
As he worked, Hulbard let his mind wander and it chose to revisit the morning's events. He saw the statue shudder into gruesome life, felt the weight of it land on the temple floor, stared into the beady, hate filled eyes of the Blessed, felt fresh terror as he saw the ground falling away beneath him to reveal nothing but empty space below. He let them flow through him and, as always, the memories passed after a few moments, leaving him feeling strangely hollow and empty inside.
Hulbard traded the hammer for a file and began to work out the scuffed edges of his shield, filling the alleyway with the grating scrape of metal against metal. An anvil would have gone a long way towards restoring the shield to its former glory a lot faster, but lamenting the fact did nothing to change the reality of it.
As it was, Hulbard knew it would need to be stripped of its citrine core and scrapped sooner rather than later; the rivets holding the handle on place were starting to come loose and the metal face had begun to buckle in three different places, which meant it would buckle again in the future no matter how he haphazardly repaired. Still, the thought of getting rid of the shield left him with a weary sense of melancholia.
The shield had seen plenty of hard use throughout the last four years and never once failed him. This was the shield his brother had forged just before Hulbard fell in with Shankhill and there had been many similar ones before it that he'd used throughout eight long years as he'd slogged his way from one war to the next. Working alongside the rogue-ish traveller had meant less wars to wade through, but it also meant more dangerous opponents, like outcast witches hidden away in backwater swamps.
Once it was gone, he'd need to commission a blacksmith to make another one, which was always expensive and time consuming, but it was still better than buying an iron shield and trying to carve out a groove for the citrine himself. Quintus merely supplied to power to keep them active, but none of them were armourers. He cleaned the shield up as beat he could while his companions rested or tended to their own small tasks and once they were done, they set their sights on the sapphire tower of Sorcery thrusting towards the clouds in the distance.
After the chaos of their morning so far, the silence of a dead city was a welcome change of pace. North of the Roost, the roadways were wide, winding and flanked by large buildings that Hulbard could only assume had once been extravagant dwellings. Now, most of them had collapsed under their own weight until little remained of the original structure besides their foundations and a lone, freestanding wall or two. The avenues they traversed were frequently lined with tall, ancient trees whose roots had run rampant and ended up swarming across the paving stones underfoot. Beneath them, overgrown bushes with grey leaves and blackened flowers rustled gently in the raking, cool breeze.
All in all, ominous though the place felt, it was preferable to most of their time in Dalághast so far. The roadways made progress towards their destination a breeze, especially when it was impossible to miss. The Blue Tower had been a fixture of Dalaghast's skyline ever since they'd first set foot in the city and now that they were finally drawing closer to it, Hulbard began to feel a certain sense of awe at the sheer immensity of it. For one thing, he could have sworn it was taller than even the Roost had been.
For another, no matter how much he tried to keep his gaze roaming over their immediate surroundings in search of anything out of place, Hulbard's eyes were always drawn inexorably back to the vast monument of blue stone pointing straight as an arrow towards the overcast sky. He had no idea what kind of stone had been used in its construction, but it vaguely reminded him of the arched bridge they'd passed so long ago in the wilds of Volyumenth, only on a much grander scale. Then again, everything in Dalághast seemed to have been built on a grand scale. Still, the colossal tower drawing closer with every step he took seemed to demand nothing less than a captive audience from everyone who saw it.
It soared into the sky, impossible to miss and bedecked with all sorts of architectural flourishes Hulbard could only barely make out from where he stood, but he thought he could pick out crenulated balconies and statues with wings outflung to the sky dotting the tower's immense walls. Their shadowy guide, Ailasin, had called it a library but it was hard to imagine enough books in the world to fill the building ahead of them now and it seemed he wasn't the only one thinking about them either.
Quintus walked by his shoulder and, for once, the man made no running commentary on the buildings they passed. Instead, his gaze was riveted to their destination. Despite how his shoulders sagged and his feet dragged, the old Sorcerer's eyes were alight with a near desperate, ravenous hunger Hulbard had only rarely ever seen in them before. Instead of his incessant mutterings droning on, he only added to the silence surrounding their lonely march through those long, empty and eerily quiet streets. Even the emerald eyes of his long suffering Apprentice, for all her physical fatigue, held a hint of the same excitement that animated her Master's.
They continued on in silence for what felt like days, though Hulbard knew it must have only been a matter of hours, before the buildings fell away to either side and he plodded into a wide thoroughfare running from left to right. Ahead of him, a wall of the same deep blue stone rose thirty feet into the air and stretched away to either side before curving gently from view. The wall itself had been constructed from large blocks of the odd hued stone and it was marked every forty or so feet along its length by a taller, squat watch tower complete with arrow slits. It reminded the warrior of the inner curtain wall's of keeps he'd seen in the distant past, and the memories left him feeling strangely detached from the ancient city.
"So!" Shankhill huffed, setting his hands on his hips and surveying the scene wearily, "What are the odds that this wall only encloses a park between here and that fancy tower?"
"Not good," Hulbard muttered, eyeing the stretch of road to either side, "Considering the size of that wall".
"And the fact that it's made out of the same blue stone as the Library," Quintus added.
The silence of the city fell around them once more and standing beneath that fortified wall, in all that emptiness, sent a cold shiver up Hulbard's spine. His eyes reflexively began to seek out the arrow slits on the towers bearing down on them before they moved on to the crenulations, searching for any hint of movement. He noticed Trastgor doing the same with his long ears cocked in opposite directions to catch any unusual sounds ahead of them with one hand perched over the khukri at his hip. The sound of Knox shrugging off his backpack made them all start.
"There's only one sure way to find out," the archer said, dragging out a long coil of rope with a heavy iron hook tied to one end.
His companions edged outwards as Knox stood and turned his eye towards the crenulations overhead. Unwinding the rope, he began to swing the grappling hook in a tight, controlled arc by his side. The archer sent it sailing upwards with a practiced flick of his wrist and Hulbard watched as it arched over the battlements and clattered into place against the stone beyond. Knox dragged against the rope until it pulled taut and gave it a few firm tugs to make sure it was anchored securely in place. Without another word, he began to climb. Hand over hand, Knox dragged himself higher with surprising speed for someone his age. Despite the greying hair at his temples, the hunter moved with more agility than Hulbard knew he could ever have mustered and just watching him go was enough to make the warrior wince.
"Does anyone know how hard it is to climb a rope in a suit of armour?" he asked quietly.
"The real question should be if anyone cares?" Shankhill asked with a smirk and Hulbard scoffed at the comment.
"Why is this tower even surrounded by a wall in the first place?" he muttered sourly.
"Because the Library houses powerful Magical artefacts," Quintus snapped a little impatiently, squinting up after Knox, "Defending such a place from the general population seems like a smart idea".
"For you, perhaps," Trastgor growled irritably, "Sorcerer's shroud themselves in secrecy and horde their trinkets while the common folk toil and starve below".
"Ah, the ingrate speaks," Quintus said archly, "Whatever you believe, our Conclaves house powerful artefacts and tomes that no one without our gifts would be able to understand or wield without disastrous consequences. The untrained mind is not prepared to deal with the knowledge contained within such places".
"Since we are all so dense…" the Kurgal drawled in that thick accent of his, "Then perhaps we should let you proceed alone".
"Then I would wish you luck on finding a way out of this city," Quintus snapped, "Besides, I'll need someone to carry my things and you seem to fit that role so well it would be a shame to leave you behind here. You'd probably just found your own nation and have a war declared with the neighbours in an hour anyway, left to your own devices. I hear your breed is fond of that sort of thing".
"Childish, Quin, childish," Shankhill gently reprimanded him.
"For once, I agree with him," Skye murmured just as Hulbard was about to add his irritation to the fray, rubbing at her tired eyes, "This is getting us nowhere".
Hulbard grunted his agreement and left it at that, firmly reminding himself that they were all exhausted, all suffering from days of hard travel and irregular combat. His head was pounding and their blathering had been starting to grate on what little patience he still had left, so he turned his eyes skywards in time to see Knox slip over the stone wall. For a long second, there was nothing but silence and he found his eyes tearing up as he looked up at the lead grey sky overhead. Despite the gloom, the clouds seemed suddenly too bright. They burned his eyes until he felt warm tears trickling down his cheeks and he blinked them away as an unfamiliar nausea slithered through his guts. Hunger, he told himself dismissively before Knox leaned back out over the parapet above.
"There's a gatehouse about fifty yards along the wall," he called down, "Looks like it's open. I'll check up here and meet you there but the view isn't too good from where I'm standing. The place is pretty badly overgrown".
"Got it," Hulbard gave him a thumbs up and stepped back, giving him all the room he needed to dislodge the grappling hook from its anchor and drop it to the stones below.
The weary warrior picked it and Knox's backpack up off the ground and fell into step with the others as they made their way along the wide avenue. Knox was already waiting for them by the gate house when they reached it and, just like the walls, it looked more suited to a fortress than any library he'd ever seen before. It's tall, iron bound gates stood ajar to reveal a small plaza of white stone beyond, hemmed in on all sides by a riot of vegetation. Even at a glance, Hulbard saw that there was something unusual about them; the trees were low and warped, with dark grey trunks and patches of dull grey leaves scattered across their winding, snakelike limbs. Beneath, thorny bushes crowded the sickly looking undergrowth. Hulbard felt his irritation flare up again at the sight of that wilderness. Of all the things he'd wanted to finish that day off, a hard trek through a dark and forbidding forest hadn't been one of them.
Still, he followed the others through the ancient gates, beneath that glowering gatehouse and out into the weed choking clearing of cracked stone beyond. Hulbard cast a glance over his shoulder at the weathered wood in passing and his eyes were drawn to deep gouges carved into its face It looked like axes had been brought to bear against it, which would have made perfect sense in light of Dalághasts' last days, if not for the fact that they were on the inside.
Quintus walked up front, striding now with purpose and leaving the others to spread out around the plaza in his wake. Knox had been standing next to an empty doorway leading back into the gatehouse, peering into the trees, but he turned at their approach.
"The towers along the way were all empty," he reported softly, "And from up there...this forest goes on for quite a while before that tower. Looks like tough going too".
"Well, we wouldn't be doing it if it were easy now, would we?" Shankhill lamented.
"The open gates bode ill," Trastgor voiced what Hulbard had just been considering.
"What do you mean?" Shankhill asked.
"Anything could have passed through them just as easily as we have," the Kurgal snorted with a dismissive flick of one ear, his eyes already roaming the deep shadows ahead, "Anything could have made a home for itself in this cursed place".
"These gates have always stood open...," her familiar voice came from behind, "They do so even now, when all else has collapsed around them".
Shankhill's shoulders sagged and he looked to Hulbard with an explosive sigh before saying, quite loudly, "Not her again".
Only then did he swivel on his heel to address her directly. Ailasin stood between those ancient gates, her hands clasped before her in a picture of demure patience.
"Look," he told her with a more theatrical sigh now, "I've had my fair share of ill advised sexual encounters with any number of people and things in my past. That, I'll freely admit. But now that my opportunity to add some kind of spectre to that list is finally here, I'm not sure I'm up to the task. Fret not though! Perhaps another day when I haven't nearly fallen to my doom? All things going according to plan, that should mean any other day for the rest of my life".
Despite himself, in spite of their differences and their clashes, Hulbard couldn't help chuckling at Shankhill's fanciful ramble and it felt good to smile again. Ailasin simply waited patiently until he'd finished speaking before replying in that soft, airy voice of hers.
"As unforgettable as I'm sure the experience would be, I prefer my partners to be a little less…," her emerald eyes looked him up and down, "Scrawny".
That got a fresh round of laughter from everyone except Shankhill, who was glaring at her sourly. It wasn't often he'd seen his handsome companion spurned and, for once, it seemed to have left at a loss for words. It wasn't a particularly devastating reply, but it was one they could all appreciate anyway.
"Regardless of your fragile ego, to continue my explana-" she began, before Shankhill leapt at the opportunity to cut her off.
"Let me guess!" he declared, throwing his arms wide to encompass the woods, "This place was once glorious and it's such a shame that now it's a rotting heap of mulch, right?"
"More or less," their ethereal guided nodded sombrely now, "But to refute your Sorcerer's dire warnings, this Library had been open to all. Gifted or not, the only requirement to walk these once fabled gardens was a keen mind in search of knowledge and the courage to seek it".
"Aha!" Shankhill barked, rounding on Quintus with a smug grin.
"I think that more proves my point than yours," the Sorcerer told him evenly, "This Library opens its doors to anyone who wanted to poke around and look how it turned out, hm?"
When Shankhill had no ready response for that observation, he returned his cold, grey gaze to their guide.
"My companion's ignorance aside, I feel like you're going to have some pretty valuable information for us moving forward," Quintus said, "But please, spare us the flowery prose. It's been quite eventful since we last talked".
"So I saw," Ailasin arched an eyebrow, "Does this mean that you are finally ready to listen to me?"
"We've been following your lead ever since we first met," Quintus snapped, "And I can't say it's lead us anywhere good so far".
"Really?" she asked with an incredulous smile, "You have been following my lead, have you? And when exactly did you do that?"
"We're here, aren't we?" the old man mumbled.
"Indeed you are," she said with a hint of iron to her tone now, "But no thanks to your own efforts. From our first meeting, you have consistently gone against every piece of advice I have offered you. I warned you to keep your wanderings to a minimum in the District of Arts and you ended up facing down Lady Gale, but only after you already met a skinless abomination. I specifically told you to ignore the treasures atop the Marble Roost and yet again, you decided to ignore my counsel. That decision nearly resulted in all your deaths a dozen times over. You are here, as you say, but only because I devised a plan to get you into the Skullborn keep, so I ask again, are you finally prepared to listen to what I have to say?"
"I am," Quintus bit out past grit teeth and Hulbard could almost picture a physical wound in the old man's pride, "But this time, maybe you could mention the dangers lurking around this place instead of baiting us".
"Excuse me?" Ailasin's eyes widened slightly in something close to disbelief.
"You told us plenty about the Roost," Quintus snapped, "About all the gold. The riches. A very specific necklace that, when picked up, brought a statue to life! You lay the blame for our misfortunes at our feet, but you neglected to mention all the dangers waiting for us up there".
"I did not know that statue would leap to life," she told him with an exasperated roll of her eyes, "Nor did I know that the swordsman had taken up residence there atop that windswept archway. I can see certain things, but I am no soothsayer. I cannot predict the future, but the choice is yours. You are either willing to listen or you are not. Which is it?"
"I'm listening," Quintus grumbled unenthusiastically.
Like Shankhill, Hulbard had never seen such scorn heaped upon the Sorcerer before; Ailasin had just spoken to him like a particularly disobedient and slow child. She gave a heavy sigh, smoothed down the front of her dress and continued in a more measured tone.
"Then let me tell you about the Library," she spoke softly, "And I shall, as requested, keep my 'prose' to a minimum. Though this was a place of tutelage for all, as I have said, it was not without its limitations and rules for those entering these halls. Scholars of the Mystic Arts were permitted access to the floors within that tower in accordance with their expertise. Those unskilled in the arcane were permitted no further than the first floor".
"How many floors are there?" Quintus asked in a guarded tone.
"Thirty four," Ailasin told him serenely, "Of which I would strongly advise you to enter none. Skilled though you believe yourself to be, this is by far my most dire warning; you must not seek knowledge in this place. The knowledge contained within those blue walls was dangerous back at the height of Dalághast's power, but it has become a thousandfold more threatening in the centuries since its collapse. There are those that still haunt those halls that would not take kindly to trespassers and they are well equipped to defend their dominion. You seek guidance that will keep you free of danger and it is this. Do not seek to enter the libraries. Touch nothing within that place".
"Advice noted," Quintus told her icily and Hulbard almost groaned at that tone; he'd heard it often enough in the past to know that the old man had no intention of listening to Ailasin's dire warning.
"The now overgrown forest between you and your destination was once a garden where medicinal herbs gathered from every corner of the world once grew," she told them in a measured voice, peering past them and into the undergrowth, "You will find many breeds of plant here now extinct in the outside world. Dangerous, malformed things are sure to lurk within this garden so I would advise both as much haste as you can muster passing through it alongside touching nothing".
"Noted," Quintus grunted.
"Once you reach the tower itself…" he paused, as if searching for the right words and Hulbard saw her eyes drift higher, to the edifice of blue stone still perhaps two hundred feet distant, "It will have to be you who pries open its doors. Only one familiar with the Arts can accomplish such a feat. The locks are sorcerous in nature. Whether through diffusion or destruction, only a Sorcerer can open those doors".
"What kind of locks?" the old man asked and this time, his eyes were narrowed shrewdly.
"A combination of both stone and Sorcery woven together into a single mechanism," Ailasin replied garvely, "It is an intricate thing, not easily taken apart in haste".
"I'm not overly familiar with locks of that kind, but I'll see what I can do," he told her.
"The Conclave of Sorcerer's you seek will be within the Library's basement," she continued, "You must find them and convince them that you are here to help them. Until you do this, I can travel no further in this place".
"You mean we won't have to worry about you lurking around every corner anymore?" Shankhill asked with a wistful smirk, "We should just call it a day and set up a village or something right here".
"Indeed," she told him with a distasteful twist of her lips before her eyes lifted to the tower once more, "Whatever you choose to do, thread with caution. I can feel their gaze upon us already. I will return once you have spoken with the Conclave".
Without wasting another word, Ailasin turned and walked back through the gates. She faded from view between steps, leaving them all standing there in an unseasy, eerie silence for a long moment.
"I'm not sure I like the sound of that," Shankhill ventured with a wince, "Makes me wonder what we've just attracted the attention of".
"Makes no difference to me," Hulbard growled, "Let's get moving".