Artefact Hunters: Draikfang

     Just as Hanso had predicted, the team was up bright and early the next morning in an effort to reach Heru’s tomb as soon as possible. They couldn’t say for sure when General Magdi had or would discover his prisoner missing. Once he did, though, it was only a question of how long it would take before he gave up on the false lead to Nuria’s monument and started sniffing out their real destination.

     Hanso still firmly believed that getting Brynn back was worth it.

     The sun was just breaking over the horizon when the little party arrived at the Seven Tombs. Quite unlike the famous pyramidal Gebmids near Sakhmet, these were low, squat buildings of rough-hewn stone that seemed to just peer up over the sands that concealed their deepest depths. Their entrances, carved in what must have once been ornate reliefs and patterns but now worn down and dulled by sand and time, seemed as well cleared and maintained as they could be. Other than that, the tombs lacked any real signs of modern encroachment.

     “Okay,” Gamal said as they trekked around the first of the tombs. “Once we get to Heru’s tomb, we need to be cautious. All of the traps and wards should be dismantled, at least until we find wherever Draikfang is hiding. But the building is still extremely old and probably home to a few beasties there to feed on its ambient magic or keep out of the desert sun. I also doubt that we’ll be able to bring Oasis in safely,” he added, patting his Apis on the neck.

     “I’ll stay outside with your Apis,” Rallon volunteered. “We’ll want a lookout in case General Magdi’s forces come around while we’re here.”

     Gamal nodded. He tugged on a slender leather cord worn around his neck to pull up a flat polished disk of rune-inscribed, gem-studded clear crystal from where it had been hidden beneath his tunic.

     “You all have a communication crystal, right?” he asked. “You can connect it with mine to keep in touch while we’re split up.”

     “I have one,” Brynn replied. “Just let me sync it with yours, and then I can pass that one on to Rallon since it has a cord.”

     While Gamal passed his communicator to her, Hanso took a nervous look back behind the group. Gamal had said there was enough wind today to cover their tracks with the loose sand of the dunes, but he couldn’t do much more than hope the explorer was right. As it was, they’d run out of time to throw Magdi any more off their trail or try to obscure their tracks themselves.

     When he turned back around, he realised with a start that the building they were now approaching was noticeably larger than the others. It was still squat like the surrounding tombs, but as they got closer, he could see thick round pillars dotted around the entrance. Just by the opening of the tomb stood a weathered stone statue of an Eyrie, garbed in the dress of some ancient king or pharaoh and looming more than twice Hanso’s height.

     “King Heru, I presume?” he asked, eyeing the statue as the party drew to a halt not far from the entryway it guarded.

     “I guess being a great, evil-smiting king comes with more perks than a powerful fire sword,” Laelia added, ruffling her wings a little.

     The three riders dismounted, and Rallon ushered Oasis the Apis off to a shadowed corner beneath the tomb’s pillared overhang.

     “Be careful in there,” he stressed before following after the Petpet. “I’ll be keeping watch out here, but contact me if anything goes wrong and you need assistance.”

     Meanwhile, Gamal was fishing a scroll and a couple of torches out of his pack. The scroll looked significantly newer than the one he’d found with details on Draikfang. From the glimpses Hanso caught, it seemed to be a map of the known chambers of Heru’s tomb. The torches Gamal lit with a deft hand, and Hanso took one to join him at the front while Brynn accepted the other and took the rear.

     The three of them and Laelia descended into the tomb in near silence, stepping through the yawning entryway under the silent stone gaze of Heru’s figure with an almost reverent air. Torchlight danced across hieroglyphics painted onto the walls just within the entrance, making the stylized figures of the pictographic writing spring to life with seeming movement.

     “What do they say?” Laelia asked, her voice a near whisper as they continued down the entrance hall and the lone doorway to the outside world receded behind them.

     Gamal’s eyes roved over the hieroglyphics. “Nothing too out of the ordinary. A basic description of who this tomb belongs to. Warnings about the dangers that await all who seek to disturb its sanctity and pilfer its treasures.”

     He sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what the spirits of those interred in these places think when scholars come though. I haven’t been on many archaeological expeditions myself, but I’ve heard of a few whose explorers managed to meet the ghosts of the tombs’ inhabitants. From what I understand, most tend to be friendly enough to those who respect them, but exact results vary.

     “Still, I’ve never heard of the spirit of King Heru contacting anyone. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I can’t say, but I have to imagine he’d at least approve of our quest.”

     Hanso grimaced and turned away from the warnings on the walls, but he couldn’t really say why. He’d spent the past several years stealing goods outright from living folk without a care in the world. Why should he suddenly worry what a bunch of dead guys who couldn’t use their stuff anymore thought?

     As the four of them continued on, the straight entry hall gave way to a series of splits and turns and its hieroglyphics to bare walls or ones lined with strange carved symbols that seemed to glow faintly with yellow-orange light. They hadn’t seen any big chambers yet, so Hanso guessed those must be further in. He swept his torch in careful arcs to check for any traps that previous expeditions may have missed. But all the tripwires had been cut, all the trap mechanisms spent, disabled, or jammed. So far, the only thing that worried him was the idea of monsters or aggressive petpets taking shelter from the desert extremes in the claustrophobic tunnels of the tomb.

     Or maybe it was the claustrophobic tunnels themselves. He cleared his throat.

     “So, Gamal,” he piped up to break the stillness of the musty air. “Jazan said that there aren’t a lot of people he’d trust with this artefact. How’d you manage to get on that short list?”

     Gamal paused at a hallway intersection and took a moment to check his map before answering.

     “I’d imagine there are a couple reasons for that,” he finally replied, leading the others down the hall on their right. “For one thing, King Jazan and Queen Nabile couldn’t exactly keep the Draikfang scroll a secret from me when I’m the one who found it. They didn’t have much of a choice but to trust me, especially after I went to them with the information and agreed to work with them.”

     He paused again as the group finally came to an open chamber, one situated over a gaping chasm with a single stone bridge going across and a natural ledge leading to doorways on either side of the one they’d come from. More of the strange carved markings – some looking like the hieroglyphs from the entrance, others more like mystical runes – ringed the chamber. With the torchlight barely reaching the most distant ones, Hanso was certain now that they were glowing with their own magical light.

     Gamal ignored the inviting-looking bridge and took the path left along the ledge. “Of course, there’s a reason I was able to approach them in the first place,” he went on. “My home is in Sakhmet, but I was away on an expedition when the main city disappeared. Tell me, how much do you know about that incident?”

     Hanso blinked at the sudden question. “Oh, you know, just the basics. Jazan shows up in Sakhmet and asks the princess to marry him, she says no, he throws a Hissi fit and sticks the whole city in some freaky curse dimension. A bunch of people try to figure out what’s happening by using some weird scrolls, but it takes a plucky Ixi thief to figure out that Jazan’s own kingdom is under a curse and calm him down with the power of love or whatever.”

     He shrugged. “Personally, I prefer the power of a quick wit, but to each her own I guess.”

     Behind him, Laelia snorted. “Says the saviour of Faerieland who only joined the quest to help the faeries because his improbable guard crush was there,” she said.

     Hanso raised a pointer finger. “Hey, that’s only half true.” He turned to look back at the girls and grinned. “I also saw an opportunity to make some good money as an informant, at least until Brynn shot me down. But by then it was too late to back out.”

     Brynn raised an eyebrow. “You gave false testimony that was almost immediately found out,” she said flatly. “I was the only reason the others were willing to listen to you at all after that. Or before, for that matter. You were [italic_a]never[i_z] going to get paid for that information.”

     By this point, the four of them had made it through the doorway and were walking down another hall. The hieroglyphic-rune-whatever inscriptions were still there, and Hanso could only guess at what grand tales from the life of King Heru they were relaying. Or what curses they had long since failed to cast, maybe. He also noted that the floor had begun sloping sharply downwards. It had to be taking them underground, beneath the broad building that housed the tomb’s entrance.

     Gamal was giving the others a bemused look. “Well, I can’t say my past adventures have been quite as exciting as yours,” he said. “But getting back to your question, they have taken me through enough ruins that I know a thing or two about curses. I could recognise that the same set of curses that put the then-prince and his citizens in their living dead state would also have addled their minds to make them more aggressive. Between that and the fact that I hadn’t personally had to deal with said aggression during Sakhmet’s disappearance, it was easier for me to accept when Qasala returned to our world peacefully than it was for some of my peers.

     “So, when Nabile returned to Sakhmet later to find a way to break the remainder of Qasala’s curse, I put a great deal of effort into helping her.” He shrugged. “That’s it, really. You help people out in times of crisis, and it makes connections. Trust them when they need it, and they’re more willing to trust you back.”

     Hanso frowned thoughtfully. “Huh. Guess that makes sense.”

     Gamal nodded and forged on ahead, and Brynn took the opportunity to come up beside Hanso. Leaning in, she whispered to him, “Not to undermine what Gamal just said about trust, but I saw that look you got when he asked you what you knew about the Qasala incident. What aren’t you telling us?”

     Hanso raised his free hand in a gesture of innocence. “Nothing relevant to the stuff he was talking about. I… may have been in the area with a couple other Thieves Guild kids when the city disappeared. We never set foot in Sakhmet proper, and Kanrik made us quit and pack up before Qasala showed up. But there may or may not have been a very stupid thieving prank involved.”

     Brynn gave him a Look, and his ears pinned back nervously. “I promise I’ll return my share of the loot,” he muttered. “I could never get rid of it anyway. Nobody really wants to buy dumb stone furniture.”

     Brynn opened her mouth to respond, paused, evidently decided she did not want to know after all, and then simply nodded and said, “See that you do.”

     Just ahead of them, Gamal suddenly stopped. “Uh-oh.”

     Hanso grimaced. “Uh-oh? What’s uh-oh?”

     He got his answer a second later by peeking around the Moehog. They’d come to another chamber with a stone bridge over a drop. This one was smaller than the first and lacked any other visible exits aside from the one straight ahead. But a huge heap of transparent purple goop, jiggling like some gargantuan Blobikins, sprawled right in the centre of the bridge. Its jellylike mass managed to take up the only pathway’s entire width, because of course it did.

     “Gelatinous Non-Cube.” Gamal identified the thing with a distasteful twist to his mouth. “I was afraid we’d run into one of these things. They like to hunt vermin in tight underground spaces like this and they can be near impossible to budge.”

     Brynn drew her sword warily. “I’ve heard of these things. Aren’t they dangerous?”

     Gamal made a so-so gesture. “Only when they’re hungry, and this one isn’t or it would have attacked us by now.”

     He beckoned for Hanso’s torch, and upon receiving it leaned out over the bridge with a thoughtful frown. “Actually, we’re almost at the treasure chamber, and we don’t even need to cross the entire bridge. There’s a hidden side path that leads down from this bridge to another doorway underneath. Problem is, it starts further into this chamber and the Non-Cube is still blocking it. We could get through if that creature moved back just a few feet, but this path is too narrow to force it back.”

     Hanso frowned as well, and he sidled around the narrow space as much as he could to get a better look at the creature. He could not for the life of him tell whether the thing was awake or asleep, but either way it didn’t seem particularly interested in moving.

     His eyes roved over to the torch now in Gamal’s hand. “What about fire?” he asked. “Most creatures don’t like fire, and it doesn’t take a lot of moving around to shove a torch in its face… jelly… thing.”

     Brynn squeezed around him. “It’s worth a shot,” she said. Keeping her sword at the ready, she edged forward and brought her own torch as close to the Non-Cube as she dared.

     At first, the Non-Cube didn’t seem to especially care about the torch. But as Hanso looked closer, he could see that it had begun faintly vibrating and heard it making an odd squelching sound. Glancing down, he noted that it was starting to inch away from Brynn and the fire.

     “I think it’s working!” he said.

     Laelia lifted into the air with a flutter of wings. “Here, let me use the other one,” she said, taking the other torch in the crook of a hoof. From there, she flew up into the open chamber above Brynn’s head and started waving the torch just a few inches from the Non-Cube’s upper half.

     The creature’s retreat picked up noticeably at this second assault. As Brynn and Laelia advanced on it, it let out a sound like a cross between a low keening and something Hanso could only describe as a glorp, and then all at once it took off down the far end of the room in a jiggly shuffle.

     Gamal hummed in thought. “Well, that worked better than I would have thought.”

     Brynn shrugged. “As long as that thing’s appetite hasn’t returned when we come back this way, I can’t say I mind.”

     The group descended quickly toward the hidden treasure chamber, through a doorway that was now kept open but that Hanso could tell had once blended seamlessly into the wall. He bent for a moment to study what he could discern of its design, running his fingers along the grit at the edges of the doorjamb.

     “So, Draikfang’s in a more hidden part of the hidden chamber?” he asked Galmal.

     “It must be. The scroll speaks of it among several other treasures that were stored here, and they were all uncovered and documented when this chamber was first discovered.”

     Within the chamber, the glowing inscriptions finally gave way to grand murals depicting King Heru in several scenes that must have been from important events in his rule. The ancient Eyrie king stuck an imposing figure, which was somewhat undercut by the fact that the chamber was mostly empty. Broad stone platforms that must once have held Heru’s treasures dotted the room, but their contents had been cleared by the archaeologists looking to study them and keep them away from looters.

     Hanso let out a low whistle as he swept the torch Laelia had returned to him across the walls. “You know, I’m starting to get the sense that this guy was kind of a big deal,” he joked.

     In the mural he was looking at now, King Heru stood on a high dais and addressed a sea of pets whose varied clothing suggested they came from several Lost Desert nations. In the one next to it, the king supervised the construction of some grand building, the purpose of which Hanso could only guess at.

     One mural on the next wall over, in the very back of the chamber, caught his eye. Hanso raised his torch high as he approached to find an image of Heru leading a charge of desert soldiers in battle.

     “No way,” he half whispered as he got a better look at the enemy figures. These were no mere soldiers or ordinary monsters, but entities wreathed in a writhing mass of purple-tinged shadow. Heru’s drawn sword clashed against that of the largest such creature, a hulking monstrosity of ill-defined shadow and organic looking armour.

     “Brynn?” Hanso called out, his voice a few notes higher than he cared to admit. “Do these things look like wraiths to you?”

     Brynn came up beside him with a low gasp. Brushing her fingers over the image of the lead monster, she said, “They could be. There have been reports of other kinds of shadow monsters in the past, but the armour on this one… The Fall can’t be the first time that wraiths had to be fought. And if this is the battle that earned Heru the Draikfang, wraiths could explain why he got a faerie’s attention...”

     Hanso frowned, the gears in his head turning as she trailed off. “Wait, say that again.”

     Brynn looked over at him. “What, about Draikfang or the connection between wraiths and faeries?”

     “The first one.” Hanso stepped back and took a sweeping look around the room. The far corners were dim with the light of both torches concentrated in one spot, but at a glance it looked like this mural was the only one with monsters on it.

     “Well, it would match up with the legend,” Brynn said, echoing his thoughts. “King Heru was granted Draikfang for defeating a great evil. That could have been a neighbouring tyrant or would-be usurper or something, but for a powerful magic sword it feels like a horde of shadow monsters would… I don’t know, make more sense? Especially if the evil was supposed to be ‘ancient.’ Gamal, does your information go into detail about what the evil was?”

     “Not much,” Gamal replied, joining them. “And the surviving stories are too fragmented to trust the details on their word. But some versions mention a ‘great shadow falling over his domain.’ That was always thought to be metaphorical, but maybe the storytellers meant it literally.”

     By now, Hanso had moved back to the wall. Passing his torch to Gamal, he started to feel along the mural’s length for thin seams or other tactile clues to a hidden door. He couldn’t find any, but that didn’t really surprise or dissuade him. Next, he put an ear up against the wall, first in the centre of the mural and then on either side, and knocked. It was almost impossible to tell behind the thick stone, but his finely tuned thief’s ears picked up a faint hollow sound from behind the mural.

     “Draikfang’s hidden behind here,” he announced, stepping back. “What better door than one that honours the event that earned Heru the sword? Now we just gotta figure out how to open it.”

     “If I remember right, the door that led into this chamber was first opened by placing a magically-charged gemstone into a small coloured divot hidden near its base,” Gamal said. “Perhaps this one opens the same way?”

     Hanso shook his head. “No divots, I already checked.” He looked again at the mural. “Maybe something similar, though? What here would make a good lock for –”

     “The sword,” Brynn interrupted suddenly, pointing out the scimitar clutched in Heru’s painted paw. “It’s not Draikfang, but it’s the same kind of item, used for the same purpose, and it’s right in the middle of the mural.” Drawing her own sword and gesturing with it toward the mural, she gave him a questioning look.

     Hanso nodded. “Yeah, yeah! I bet that’s it! Try it,” he said, stepping back to give her room.

     Gamal and Laelia huddled in close, and the group seemed to collectively hold its breath as Brynn pressed her sword up against the one on the mural. The Brightvalean longsword wasn’t quite a match for the desert sabre, and for half a second Hanso worried that it wouldn’t be enough. But whatever mechanism the hidden door used must have recognised its fellow weapon, because all at once a creaking sound heralded ancient gears springing to life. The quartet of adventurers had to step back as the mural split down the middle, then swung open to reveal a much smaller chamber just beyond.

     “By Fyora,” Gamal whispered, stepping forward to inspect a crimson-handled scimitar whose blade seemed to shimmer with a faint golden hue. Draikfang was aptly named, its elegant single curve evoking the image of a massive fang while its aura practically radiated fire.

     Brynn took a shaky step back. She quickly sheathed her sword so she could grab her communication gem. She spoke Fyora’s name clearly and with no small degree of triumph in her voice. After taking a moment for the faerie in question to answer, she said, “Queen Fyora… we’ve found it.”

     Hanso could not quite make out Fyora’s response, but he did hear the sudden crackle of interfering magic that followed.

     “Captain Brynn?” Rallon’s voice faintly warbled through. “Captain, can you hear me?”

     All eyes turned in alarm toward Brynn and the gem in her hand.

     Keeping her voice as quiet as she could, Brynn replied, “What is it, Lieutenant?”

     “General Magdi is here,” Rallon said, and as his voice became clearer Hanso could tell he was keeping it low. “He hasn’t seen me or the Apis yet, but he has Mentuan guards swarming the Seven Tombs looking for us. We’re out of time.”

     To be continued…