Explore the Mountain Church

A new wizard arrived at camp with a curious lead — a small church-like structure built into the side of a mountain north of the Great Tree. Animals he had thought long dead were walking again, and a wailing sound seemed to come from inside his head whenever he drew near. Surely, Ahmed Noke said, that was just the wind.

Recap

The camp had grown again. The beached ship that had carried the first wave across the strait was now a kitchen, a barracks, and a roof for the wizards' library; battlements were rising along the perimeter; smoke from the ovens curled steadily into the morning air. Two newcomers walked into this hum of new construction along the same road — Gryph, a dwarven bard with his drums slung over one shoulder, and Nu Fainguld, a man in his middle thirties whose robes were trimmed in what looked like gold satin and was not quite gold satin, with a young man named Garreth a few steps behind him carrying his luggage. Nu kept a leather-bound book under one arm and the bearing of someone who had been working seriously with magic for a long time. Garreth, it turned out, was a grad student — a condition of the crown grant that had funded Nu's voyage out here.

At the firepit, Madam Helena was already mid-tour, walking Ahmed Noke through camp with the casual hospitality of someone who had been the welcoming committee one too many times. Werrin Khevos stood beside them — a half-orc wizard with a tusked underbite and an unobtrusive air that, on closer inspection, looked altogether too well-read to be unobtrusive. Belongs in a museum, someone muttered, though it was unclear whether they meant the man or his spellbook.

Noke admired the way the four of them had already arranged themselves into something that looked like a party. He had been speaking with Kouzlo about a structure he wanted to discuss — something he had encountered in the months he had spent in the Wildermarch before N.O.D.E. came across the water. He had been building near the wizards' tower in those days, he said, and a wailing sound had started up over those months. Animals he had been certain were dead had begun walking. The wail had not always seemed to come from outside his head.

Nu wanted assurance that he was not, in fact, going to die today. A canvas tent across the firepit chose that moment to commotion violently from the inside, and three healing potions rolled out from under its bottom edge as if of their own accord. Professor Fiddlesticks, presumably, was busy. The potions were quickly retrieved.

Werrin asked about the building itself. Noke described what he had seen from a distance: a small structure built into the flank of a mountain to the north, the facade carved with symbols he had not been able to read but had recognized as holy. The whole thing had felt ancient even by the time he had stumbled across it. He could not say to which order.

The Walking Stags

The road ran north for the better part of a day. Gryph kept a soft tap on the head of one of his drums — a rhythm that doubled, in his hands, as a kind of tremorsense, a craft he had picked up somewhere along the way. Nu chatted distractedly; Garreth, behind them, kept up with the cheerful long-suffering of grad students everywhere. By midafternoon, Gryph stopped them.

There were two stags ahead. Large, even for elk — broad-shouldered, broad-antlered, summer racks still mossy. They were not grazing. They were walking. Walking in the wrong way: jerky, aimless, each step seemingly remembered separately, as if they had forgotten the order of them.

Nu's nature lore told him only that something was wrong. Werrin reached out with detect magic and found nothing magical at all. Helena, transfixed, took one step forward without quite intending to. Her boot scuffed a stone.

Both stags' heads turned, in the same motion, at the same instant.

Their eye sockets were empty. Hollow. Pale white strings hung from the orbits, feathering out around the rims, and the same fibers ran in fine lines down their faces from old wounds the hide had grown over but the strands had not. Their mouths hung half-open. Their nostrils did not move.

They charged.

The green-furred stag struck Helena like a freight train and bowled into Werrin behind her, knocking both prone. The orange-furred stag drove its antlers into Gryph and laid Nu out beside him. Nu, more impressed by the velocity than the damage, rolled to a knee and shouted out a roiling cascade of ice — a snowball storm that punched into both creatures simultaneously, freezing their fur in patches and slicing through their hides. Neither stag made any sound at all. No grunt. No bellow. The hides simply opened around the ice and kept moving.

Helena pushed up to one elbow and looked at the green stag's flank, and saw the thing growing there — a delicate, glistening film of mycelium threading the fur in and out of the wounds, weaving the hide back together where the antlers' mate had torn it. She rolled to a crouch and laid a hand on the creature and spoke a sharp word of inflict wounds. Its body was ice cold. Slick. Wet. Where her hand had touched it, the flesh began to decompose in patches the mycelium hurriedly closed over.

Gryph drummed once, hard. The green stag stumbled — unsettling words riding the beat. He followed with a wash of color, and the green stag, blinded, lost the line of the room.

Werrin spoke into the air. Speak with animals, threaded with the fey accent he had begun to lay over his words. What afflicts you? The reply was a wall of static, a roar of white noise like a badly tuned radio. He tuned, slowly, with the patience of someone who had spent a lot of time around equipment that needed coaxing, and behind the static he found the faintest possible scrap of a voice.

Away, it said. Don't kill me. I'll spread it. From distance. Send me home, from away.

He pushed past it, just for a moment, into the static itself — to see what stood behind. Something on the other side reached back. Werrin's own hand twitched toward the knife at his belt of its own accord. He clenched his fist around the urge and held it. And from the static, a single phrase rose clear, in a voice that was not the stag's:

MY COLLECTION GROWS.

Werrin pulled out of the spell and shared what he had heard with the others, low and fast. We need to fight them at distance. Whatever this is — it wants us close.

Both stags shook their racks. A puff of spores rolled off the antlers in a fine pale cloud. Helena caught a lungful and felt the poison settle in her chest. Werrin, by luck or instinct, was already out of the cone. Gryph, dwarven by birth and stubborn by training, refused the spores with the irritated reflex of someone whose constitution had told him it did not have time for this. Nu took the worst of the second cloud and, deciding very quickly that the close-quarters lesson had been received, turned to run.

The orange stag's antlers caught him in the chest on the way past and lifted him bodily off the ground and slammed him down at its feet. Nu lay still.

Helena dropped beside him in a half-roll and called cure wounds back into his ribs. Nu coughed once and sat up. Gryph drummed a short, vicious phrase under his breath — submit — and the dissonant whispers met the green stag like a trash compactor, folding it down into itself. The mycelium peeled off the corpse the instant the body stopped moving, lifted itself in a ropy, deliberate way across the ground, and crawled up the orange stag's legs to thicken the weave already running through its hide.

Werrin pitched a suggestion at the orange stag in the most disarming voice he had. Lead us to the source of your affliction. Stay where we can see you. The stag stopped where it stood. Its head jerked, once — the mycelium dragging the body toward Werrin — and then, with a tremor in the legs that was almost recognizable as a creature deciding for itself, the stag turned away from him. It began to walk.

It was, Werrin said, going home. They would follow it.

The Monastery of the Vale

The stag walked half a day north. The forest thinned, then climbed. By late afternoon the mountainside rose in front of them — a single tall peak crowning a broken ridge — and on its flank, set into the stone as if grown there, stood a small building. It was exactly what Noke had described. The stag plodded up the steps and through the doorway, folded its legs beneath itself in the center of the sanctuary, and stopped moving.

The party did not yet follow. They took a short rest under the eaves and let their wounds knit and studied the shape of the building. Werrin set a candle on the ground and conjured a familiar from it — a small white goat with a curious face, which thereafter trotted at his heel.

Gryph took the time to look at the masonry. He had grown up near work like this, and he knew it on sight: monastery construction, of a kind he had heard described in his grandmother's stories as belonging to the Monks of the Vale, who had once lived in the mountains. Werrin and Helena compared notes on the symbols carved into the lintel and door frame. The pattern was specific. It belonged, both said at the same time, to the Order of the Long Death — a death-cult monastic line that had served Jergul and his kind. Gryph, hearing the name, nodded slowly. The Order had died out, his grandmother had said, after one of its houses made contact with something from below.

He did not need to say what below meant. The others looked at the doorway. The stag did not move.

The Sanctuary

Nu put his head through the door first. The interior was a single sanctuary chamber and a low corridor leading deeper into the mountain. The walls and floor and ceiling were glossy — an oil-slick sheen that caught the light wrong. The mycelium was everywhere. It lay on the stone like a thin, wet film, and shone the same purple-green as a bruise where the angle was right.

The stag, in the center of the room, lifted its head and watched him. It did not move.

Nu studied the room from the threshold. At the far end of the sanctuary, behind the stag, a hallway dropped into the mountain. Halfway down the hallway he could see the front of a stone door — carved across its face with points of light like the night sky cut into rock. The stag was watching that door. It had been watching that door, perhaps, for some time.

Nu lit a bonfire in the middle of the floor. The stag took a single, careful step away from the flame. The mycelium around the fire withered visibly and curled back from the heat.

Werrin held a torch low to the wall and watched the film bunch and dry under it in a slow ripple, like grease backing away from a hot pan. He tested the flame at different angles. A torch held roughly toward the floor, he confirmed, would be enough. They did not have to burn the place down to walk through it. They only had to make the mycelium uncomfortable to stand near.

They lit torches all around. They went in.

The Star Door

The door at the end of the hallway was carved across its face with twenty-three stars. Above the carving, the inscription read:

We who kept the darkness below looked always to the light above. What cannot be held in the hand, only in the eye.

Of the twenty-three stars, eight were drilled all the way through the stone — small holes opening into the chamber beyond. A thin gap ran under the door. The party crouched along it.

Gryph slipped a small polished mirror from his pack and angled it carefully under the door, tilting it until he could see the room beyond. Beyond the door there was light — a faint, mortal light, not torchlight, coming from somewhere overhead. Through three of the eight star-holes, and only three, that light made it all the way through the door. The other five were dark. The three that lit were so faint they had been invisible to the naked eye. Gryph squinted at the mirror until he had their relative positions. They formed a triangle.

Nu held his book against the door and walked it slowly along the face, watching for the points of light to fall across the page. The first one he caught was low and to the left — about forty percent up the door's height. Gryph, watching him work, remembered something he had once read on a stray newspaper page pressed into the back of a hymnal: a story about the Order of the Long Death, and how closing the Eye of Heaven had been part of the rite their houses kept. The second point of the triangle would be at the very top — the apex star, the eye. He looked. It was there.

He went back under the door for the third. With the first two known, the third was easy. Six o'clock on the door's face.

Nu set the flat of one palm over the bottom-left star. The goat — without being asked, with the small dignity that familiars sometimes acquire when they realize the world expects something of them — set a hoof against the upper right. Gryph, after a moment, covered the topmost star with the heel of his thumb.

The door rolled inward, as if on stone wheels.

The stag, still patient in the sanctuary, rose to its feet. Clop. Clop. Clop. It walked past them and down the corridor beyond the door, hooves echoing softly in the stone, and they followed with torches low.

The Iron Door

The corridor narrowed quickly. By the time it ended at a heavy iron door, it was barely six feet across, and the air had taken on a thickness that was almost a taste. The mycelium here was no longer a sheen. It was a coating — pale gray, fibrous, lying across the walls like spiderweb that had been allowed to mat into something denser. It parted, very slightly, where the torches passed. It did not retreat far. It did not retreat fast.

The iron door had a keyhole, but no growth on the keyhole, and when Helena tested it, the door was unlocked. She did not open it. She stooped to the keyhole and looked through.

The chamber beyond was bright with the soft light of something biological. At the center of it stood a great pale mass — a biomass the size of a horse, white with small purple dots threaded through it. Two figures stood in front of the mass, facing each other, very close to the iron door. One was a man in monk's robes, hood thrown back, mouth open and locked open with mycelium spilling out of it in a slow, ropy plume. The other was a woman in leather armor with a sword at her hip — an adventurer, or what had been one. She was the nearer of the two. She also was not breathing.

Helena did not open the door.

The Whisper

The party drew back into the corridor and conferred in low voices.

While they conferred, the corridor began, in different ways, to take from each of them.

Helena heard a voice. It was a voice she loved. It was Shadow, and he was screaming — not the way she had ever heard him scream, but the way she had not ever wanted to hear him scream. On fire, perhaps. Buried alive, perhaps. Somewhere very far away and in a great deal of trouble. The scream filled the inside of her head and would not leave.

Werrin, who had been keeping count, noticed the static. He had been hearing it faintly for the last twenty minutes — the same static he had tuned through to find the stag. It had been growing. It was now, he estimated with the meticulous calm of someone who refused to panic on schedule, at about twenty percent of his thoughts.

Nu reached for the name of his grad student and found that the name was not there. He knew that there was a name. He knew the young man's face. He knew, even, what the name had begun with. He did not have it. He tried again. He did not have it.

Gryph heard a drum line in his head — his favorite song, the ballad about his homeland he had written as a young man and had been playing since. He played it through under his breath. At the climax, the bar he had played ten thousand times, his memory simply ended. He stared at his hands. The tipper dropped from between his fingers.

It clattered on the stone.

In the next room, beyond the iron door, the woman in leather armor turned her head and looked, slowly, directly at the keyhole.

To be continued.