Death After Death

Chapter 89: In Over Your Head

The dank cavern was just as he left it the last few times he’d been here. There was no way that anything he’d done the last time he’d been through would have counted as “beating it” in his mind, so he wasn’t surprised to see it. The real question in his mind was whether he wanted to beat it yet.

Rivenwood was probably gone after his decisive victory over the orcs, and he’d stayed there long enough last time to be fairly sure that they hadn’t been the vanguard of a much larger force. That meant that finding a place to study the book was going to be dicey.

While he let his eyes adjust to the darkness, he considered the layout of the next few levels. With the orcs defeated, that meant that the next level was the ice level and then the plague level. While he hoped that the ice level was defeated because he certainly wasn’t prepared for it again in what he was wearing, it was a shame that he wouldn’t be visiting Hurag again any time soon. Despite the stench, it would have made the perfect spot to study an evil tome for reasons related to the quiet as much as the hideous decor. Plus, if he did some experiments, no one but him would get hurt.

After that came which level exactly? He wondered. Simon had to start counting them off on his fingers because it had been so long. Two more levels, what could it... oh, lizards, twice in a row. That’s right.

First came the swamp, which had been completed for a long time even though he’d barely done anything, and then the Basilisk, which he was fairly certain was behind him for good. The last thing he wanted to do was risk being turned to stone again.

Which meant he had no idea what came after that. If he cleared this level and then died to something crazy, then the opportunity to study the tome would be lost to him forever. Well, probably forever, he thought to himself in annoyance. He’d thought the same thing about Schwarzenbruck, but now he was forced to deal with it all over again.

Simon had almost convinced himself that he shouldn’t try to clear this level when he heard the apprentice-cum-warlock ranting to his evil deity and promising to torture the children in the village above in their name. In return for more power. That did it. Even if it cost him the opportunity to read a book he’d already read and reread several times, it would be worth it. There was no way this scum was going to be allowed to go around one more time on this insane merry-go-round.

“You called, and I have come!” Simon said, feeling a little theatrical as he stepped into the circle behind the warlock. As he did so, he whispered a word for lesser light to give himself a malevolent glow.

The golem rumbled to life immediately, but since Simon was so near to its master now, all it could do was stand there menacingly while the warlock turned around in surprise.

“Call off your toy Andronican, lest I break it by accident when I play with it,” Simon bluffed.

“Y-you know my name?” the warlock said, raising a hand to the golem to stop it in its tracks. “Who are you?”

“You know my name,” Simon said, not sure exactly which evil god he was pretending to be, “but you are afraid to speak it.”

Andronican considered these words and then nodded vigorously instead of speaking. Then he bowed as low as his arthritic form would allow before he finally continued. “So you’ve come to grant my boon? Have I done enough to finally earn your favor?”

“Why else would I be here, for a student of Festauvian?” Simon said, trying his best to speak like an over-the-top, mustache-twirling villain. “But first, I have some questions. Do you recall how old you are, Andronican?”

“Of course, dark one,” the warlock smiled with a crooked, yellowed grin. “At the equinox, I will have lived for nineteen summers.”

“Nineteen summers of life, and yet you’ve spent nearly seventy,” Simon chided, though that was mostly because he’d been taken aback and was playing for time. He’d put together the pieces on his last trip through here. “If I gave you seven, or even seventy more, how would you spend them?”

Not only was the warlock unable to read his own grimoire, but he obviously didn’t understand the words he used to command his golem. Andronican might as well have been saying abracadabra when he commanded it to kill Simon. It would have been laughable if it weren’t so tragic. The one lingering question that Simon still had was whether he’d killed his master or whether he’d gone wild once his master had died some other way.

It was a tense moment. Simon realized the thing would really just have to fall backward to crush him, but that didn’t happen. Instead, it simply stood there now that its spell was broken. Simon looked up at the damaged runes, but before he could do much more than determine that most of them were still legible, he heard the warlock shouting the word for fire.

Simon responded almost instinctively, moving closer to cover as he whispered, “Karesh Meiren,” to protect himself from the gout of flame that shot out of both sides of the pillar-like stone leg he was sheltering behind.

When Simon saw he was uninjured, he laughed and said, “Is that all you got there, Andy?” as he bolted for the stalagmites on the floor that would offer more cover and drew his sword.

Simon knew that the right move was to blast this guy instead of taunting him, but he couldn’t help it. Besides the goblins, which didn’t really count, he’d never faced another mage before, and that made this a valuable experience. He would have probably let this fight linger just to get that perspective, but something about this guy just got under his skin, which was enough all on its own.

“When I am done with you, there will be naught left but ashes!” Andronican screamed.

Simon didn’t have to wait long. The apprentice was hardly imaginative, and he followed fire up with greater fire.

The blast that followed was intense, and Simon noted, substantially different from the way it looked when he used it. When Simon used greater fire, it looked like some kind of superhero beam attack, but when Andronican cast it at him, it was like a wave of liquid fire crashing toward his target. Simon thought it was almost pretty, but he quickly hunkered down behind the rocks and let the wave pass over him.

This time, and distance better cover did as much as the lingering effects of his protection spell and dissipated the heat harmlessly around him. Simon smiled as he popped his head back up. This dude was definitely no fire elemental.

“You wasted a year of your life for that?” he said with a laugh. “No wonder you’re down to scraps. Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead!”

“Never!” The warlock screamed before yelling, the last thing that Simon would have expected. “Gervuul Gervuul Meiren!”

Simon had only a moment to ponder those words. Greater, greater fire? Does that double or multiply the effect? Would it take two years or—

That was as far as he got before the room was awash in flame. This time, it wasn’t like a wave of flame. It was like the beginning of a powerful explosion, but that only lasted for an instant. Then, instead of blowing everything apart and burying him under tons of stone, it just stopped.

While dust continued to rain down on him, Simon stood cautiously and surveyed the dark, dusty room. He couldn’t see shit until he used a word of lesser light and advanced on the place where the warlock had stood.

Simon didn’t know what to expect. His gut told him the body would be burned to a crisp, or that it would have been blown apart so thoroughly that there was nothing left. Instead, he found the warlock curled up in a fetal position. Not only was he the only thing in the area that was unscorched, but he was practically mummified.

Simon couldn’t say exactly how much a spell like that took out of the man, but looking at him, it was hard to say just ten years. The corpse in front of him appeared to age decades in the final moments of its life.

“And that, kids, is why you never play with matches,” he said to himself as he turned away and went to check on the book. It was an interesting experiment, but it would still be terribly ironic if he’d done all this only to lose his shot to do some more light reading.