Arcanum - Of Steamwork and Magic Ch. 19

We stepped forward carefully and quietly, with Maggie flanking me to the left and Sally flanking me to the right. Virginia was in the center of the formation, and Gillian stood behind us all, holding one of the spare revolvers. I wasn't sure how well bullets would manage against, say, a fire elemental. But I was more than willing to try, and to try liberally. Virginia held up her hand, and the small bob of light she had summoned came to a stop beside her. "Do you hear that?" she whispered.

We all did. It was a growling, crackling, hungry sound. Like a bonfire in miniature. Light glowed from around the corner of the cave and I lifted my accelerator pistol, drawing back on the hammer as the watch in my pocket began to click with a stuttering, irregular pattern. The light grew deeper and Maggie's grip grew tighter on the Harrower, Virginia's stance deepened as she held her sword in two hands. Even Sally twirled her battle-ax with some nerves. The light grew deeper still -- shaded with reds and oranges and flares of white. Then a hand the size of a small door gripped onto the edge of the corridor -- a hand made entirely of coherent flames. The shape that stepped around the corner was human in shape, but irregular and distorted. The head was tall and almost cylindrical, while the arms were short stumps on a pair of pivots. Its legs were freakishly long, and all of them were made of fire, fire contained by magick and willpower.

"Fire elemental!" Virginia shouted. "Don't let it touch you."

"Let me restrain my shock at this advice," I said, then fired. Gillian joined me in the shooting, while Dogmeat -- quite sensibly -- cowered behind us. I had to admit, I was glad of that. The last thing I wanted was our canine companion to get immolated by getting too close to the creatures legs. My bullets and Gillian's bullets struck the creature's chest, but the fire parted as if it was water, rippling but leaving no gaping holes or gigantic wounds. Sally bellowed in excitement and swung her ax. It parted the creature's arm from its body with a cleaving of flames and searing sound -- but when Sally stepped backwards, she began to hop up and down on one foot. The reason why became apparent shortly: Her ax had been melted down to the handle, and the dripping, molten metal spattered along the ground, a single red hot droplet falling upon her boot. She hopped backwards, then let out a loud oof as the fire elemental backhanded her with its remaining arm. Sally tumbled away, then started to slap at her chest, quickly putting out the flames that threatened to catch on her armor.

"Need a new ax!" She bellowed.

I fired another two shots, but the fire elemental continued to advance. It lifted the remaining arm it possessed and brought it whistling down to smash onto Virginia's head. Only that Virginia was no longer there. She had vanished, appearing behind the creature with a flare of purple light. She swung her sword, then cried out in pain as she got too close to the fire elemental for her to bear the temperature. She hadn't even managed to strike it's leg!

The fire elemental fanned its arm and shoulder outwards, exposing its chest to us. A glowing red bead flung itself from the flaming skin.

"Bloody hell!" I whispered.

Boom.

The concussion sent me sprawling on the ground and tore my suit jacket terribly, while Maggie was flung down to her belly before the fire elemental, her back smoking. Flames tried to catch in her wavy hair, and the dwarf looked up at the fire elemental, her face slack in shock. Harrower was near my feet. I scrambled, trying to pick the ax up to fling it to Maggie. My fingers touched the handle and burning pain shot through my hand. I screamed in shock, jerking backwards and looking at my fingertips -- they looked charred to the bloody bone!

"Maggie!" Gillian shouted, stepping up and beginning to fire at the elemental. Bullets ripped through its chest and head, showing no effect.

The fire elemental lifted its arm above its head, ready to bring it crashing down on Maggie's head.

Maggie lifted her arm, her palm opening. The Harrower flung itself from the floor, as f compelled by a powerful magnetic field. The edge of the handle clocked my ankle and sent me sprawling onto my back as the Harrower struck Maggie's palm, handle first. She brought her arm swinging up and as she parried the down-rushing blow, lightning crackled along the Harrower's blade. The fire elemental reared backwards, roaring like a forest fire. It was now missing two arms, the merest touch of the Harrower being enough to dismember it once more.

I looked, half expecting to see the ancient ax reduced to bubbling slag.

Instead, the blade looked wreathed in its own fire. But this fire was the cold, spiderweb crackling of electrical current! My watch continued to click in an irregular pattern as the magickal fields of the ax and the elemental waxed and waned about me. Maggie dragged herself to her feet, then swung the Harrower as hard as she could. The blow had more of the woodcutter than the warrior about it, but it still drove into the side of the elemental with a ferocious strength. Flames roared, shooting up towards the ceiling and burying themselves down into the ground, chased away by strands of lightning that exploded off Harrower, following it and castigating it the whole way. Maggie staggered and fell to one knee, her face streaked with soot as she gasped heavily.

"Can I -hic- have that ax?" Sally whispered in the quiet that fell afterwards.

I shook my hand, the sharp throbbing of my fingertips wavering between unbearable to utterly agonizing. "Absolutely not, Sally."

Virginia clasped my hand, her brow furrowing as she worked her magick on me. It was a hard, agonizing effort for her, but well worth it as she soothed my burns and made my fingers work properly again. I smiled shakily at her, while the whole of our party rounded the corner and found that the fire elemental had been protecting an ancient shrine. I was not sure who had built it. Dwarves? Elves? The elementals themselves? Whoever had constructed it, the shrine remained a clear testament to the craft and the skill of the inhabitants of Arcanum. It looked like an anvil made of pure, solidified lava, situated on a rock of pure midnight black -- an obsidian boulder, sitting in a small lake of fire like a black island. The only way to reach the anvil was to walk across a narrow bridge of stones that floated in the fire like the path in a well to do garden.

But upon that anvil was the blade. It was unmistakable: A narrow, black blade coming to roughly the length of my forearm, with a thick blood groove and hideously sharp tines along the hilt, creating a hand-guard that was nearly flower shaped. I adjusted my torn suit jacket, frowning. "So," I said. "I believe one of us with the better fire resistance should head across. I'm sure it'll require a bit of quick footwork." I rubbed my chin. "Or maybe we could make some kind of long pole to try and knock it closer to us...what do-"

Virginia lifted her hand, her palm flaring. Purple light glowed around her fingers and the blade literally flew from the anvil to her palm. She beamed at me, twiddling the knife side by side.

I smiled. "I love you," I said.

Sally hiccuped. Maggie harrumphed. Gillian rolled her eyes.

Only Dogmeat, loyal Dogmeat, wagged his tail. Virginia punched my shoulder, turning and beginning to head towards the cave entrance. Sally punched my other shoulder -- and only by quickly grabbing my arm did she prevent me from falling into the pit of fire myself.

***

Once more, we set off across Arcanum. The trip across the wilderness to Tarant was uneventful, beyond it raining nearly every other day. We arrived in Tarant at the beginning of February, and were able to book passage down the Hadrian on a wallowing tub of a boat called the Enterprise. Unfortunately, the passengers were numerous and the conditions were cramped, even if we had Gilbert Bates money to spend on better cabins. This meant that Virginia and I needed to be quite chaste as we rounded the southern edge of Arcanum and set sail for Caladon itself. I worried somewhat, worried that Virginia's nightmares might have returned. She did seem more wan and concerned as, on the 8^th of February, we arrived at Caladon's docks.

Chief Inspector Henderson eyed the Blade of Xerxes as we set it upon his desk, then looked back at us, eyeing each of us from the long trip. I wondered if we still showed any signs of our adventures in the Pits of Fire. I smiled, somewhat sheepishly: "Okay, I must admit, Chief Inspector, finding this blade was as irritating and time consuming as you predicted."

"Hah!" Henderson laughed, then handed the knife back to me. "Now," he said. "The good news is the Royal Wizards have sealed the sewers up. We haven't had a murder for months -- well, not one by this Whytechapel chap." He shook his head, clearly intent on not trotting out the demons full name. I couldn't blame him. I could barely remember it -- I'd need to check in my journal to get more than the first syllable out without reducing the rest into a wild jumble of incoherent letters and errant apostrophes. "But they tell me that their wards are weakening over time. We don't have long before he manages to slip out to kill once more."

"Well, then," I said, adjusting my collar. I had not had time in Tarant to get a new suit jacket, leaving me feeling somewhat under dressed. "I suppose that I and my comrades should head down there to sort this out, no?"

"Capital!"

My boots were not yet into the muck before Virginia brought up an obvious complaint: "So, why isn't Henderson and his bully boys handling this?" She asked, darkly, as she dropped from the ladder into the narrow line of sewage that ran along the wrought iron tunnel that we were entering. Sally groaned as she came down the ladder next, having to hunch nearly in half. 'Magnus', who was soaked up to her knees, while we merely had to be concerned about our shins, grumbled into her beard.

"Well," I said, quietly. "The last thing I want are some barely competent beat cops to come down in here and get themselves butchered by a demon."

"Fair," Virginia grumbled, drawing the knife. She looked at the blade, then firmed her jaw, and we set out into the sewers, ready for a fight.

What we found was far different. It took the better part of an hour to move through the sewers before we, at last, came to an area that had been converted into a living arrangement. Though living arrangement was being a mite generous: There was a patch of dry ground on the tunnel's edge that had a bedroll on it, a small barrel with a lamp set on it for light, and a few rats strung up by their tails on a crude spit. Sitting on the bedroll, with his knees drawn close to his chest, was a tall, lanky looking elf. His hair had come undone in great matted clumps, and his eyes were sunken into his skull-like head. He shivered and as we entered the room, he looked up at us, pain crossing his face.

"No, no, no!" He hissed. "Don't kill me. If you do, the demon-"

I held up my hand. "Wait! Sir!" I said, quietly. "We have a blade, it can kill the demon?"

"T-The blade of Xerxes?" The elf's face went slack. Then he snarled. His eyes flared red and a deep, bass growl escaped his lips. "I will flay t...the..." He clenched his jaw, his eyes closing tight. He hung his head forward, his body trembling. "N-No! This nightmare...must end! Please!" He grabbed at the tattered remains of his clothing -- which I recognized as being a much debased and ill used and ill repaired doctor's uniform. He tore at the frock, revealing his chest, which looked like parchment drawn across a xylophone. He hissed. "Do it!"

Virginia gripped the blade. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but she did not hesitate. She stepped forward and the blade sank into the elf's heart without a moments resistance. Blood flowed and the elf sagged, like a puppet whose strings had all be cut. His head fell against Virginia's shoulder -- and before my eyes, a glowing light swelled between their bodies. The elf fell backwards and the blade slipped free, and I saw it was the source of the glow. Virginia gritted her teeth, then gasped as the light from the blade changed in hue. It started as a hideous, ugly red...but in a single heart beat, it had transformed from red to blue! A pure blue, that reminded me of the color of Virginia's magickal healing. It flowed into her body and she smiled, slightly.

"The demon's dead...I used the knife's energies and power to purify the magickal essence from it." She said, then blinked as the blade dissolved into ash and crumbled away.

"Well," Gillia said, dryly. "There goes the ten thousand gold reward."

Virginia smiled, looking very sheepish.

***

I sprawled in bed at the Toadstool Inn, Virginia's sweating body pressing up against my side. Her hair sprawled against her head and she chuckled softly. "Well," she murmured. "It seems that corn oil works just as well..."

"Insatiable slattern!" I groaned, closing my eyes, lifting my arms over my head to stretch and pop out my spine a bit. I felt a faint twinge from the fingernail marks that Virginia had left on my back.

"I simply wanted to feel alive..." Virginia sighed. "That poor elf." She rolled herself so that she was laid across my chest, her breasts mashing to my body. Her eyes closed. "I hated it -- but it was the right thing to do. To stop that demon..."

"I assure you," I murmured, caressing her head. "I believe you were doing him a favor."

Virginia remained silent for a time. "There's something else, Resh."

I admit, it still gave me a tiny thrill to hear my real name on Virginia's lips. I lifted my head, looking down at her face as my finger lazily drew circles in her hair, winding the long strands around my pointer finger. "What is it, Virginia?" I murmured.

Virginia buried her face against my chest. "Oh. Nothing. I mean. No, it's not nothing." She kissed my chest, then licked a bead of sweat from my green skin. "The demon? When I slew it, I felt the magickal energy flow into me..." She paused. "I believe that seeing that energy has shown me the last bit of a clue I needed." She kissed around my nipple, then looked back at me. "I've been studying Conveyance for some time, and the ultimate spell of that school? It is teleportation."

"You..." My brow furrowed. "I could have sworn you've already teleported. Quite a lot."

"Oh, no," she said, shaking her head. "I am speaking of teleporting, not merely vanishing in one place and appearing in another a few yards away. From what I have learned, once you can overcome the hurdle of going further than you can see, the rest of the transit is...relatively easy. But seeing the flows of energy really underlined the..." She shook her head, chuckling. "W-What I mean is I think that I can do it. I think I can teleport us across Arcanum." She paused. "T-To anywhere we've already visited, at least. I need to be able to visualize the place."

My eyes widened. "Truly?" I whispered. "I...I thought this kind of magick hadn't existed since the Age of Legends!"

"Bite your tongue!" Virginia said, slapping my chest. "No. No. It is not that rare." Her cheeks flushed. "T-Though, uh, I admit, the term usually applies to, um, archmages." She mumbled that last word into my chest, but my ears were more than sharp enough to hear it. I sat up, and Virginia slid down onto my belly, laughing as her slide nearly planted her face against my soft member. She squirmed as I put my hands on her shoulders, rolling her onto her back so that I might look into her eyes.

"Virginia the Archmage?" I asked. "I like the sound of that."

"S-Stop!" Her cheeks flushed. "Next, you'll be wanting me to call you Doctor Cog."

"I do technically have a doctorate," I said, grinning. "...two, actually, considering my work on electrical theory."

Virginia weakly slapped at my chest. "Oh Doctor..." she cooed the word as if she was an actress in a vaudeville. "I have heard that educated men are the finest in bed..."

I grinned. "Is that a challenge, Archmage?"

Virginia chuckled, then stuck her tongue out at me. I grabbed her by the hair and kissed her. She melted into me, and it transpired that there was more than enough in me for a round two. This one was far more gentle than the first, but it still left us sweating and smiling. I cuddled her to me, feeling the warm drip of her sex and my seed on my thigh. My hand caressed her back and when I slept, I felt sure that she would not have nightmares. But I did not know for sure, for when I woke, she was gone. When I hurried down the stairs, dressed hastily, the halfling owner of the inn said that 'Miss Virginia? She said she was off to see an old friend.'

An old friend?

I frowned and started through the city streets, wondering where Virginia might have gone. Who she might have been seeing? I had never heard her talk about any old friends. If anything, her life before her entering the Panarii had seemed to be a closed book. That struck me! I asked a few passers by if there was any Panarii temple in Caladon -- and was shook to my bones when I learned that it held the first Panarii temple. Finding it took only a few minutes of jogging through the city streets. It looked like many Panarii temples did -- save that it was nearly three times the size. The walls were adorned with murals and decorations of Nasrudin, and the front doors were wide and open. I looked through them, but saw no sign of Virginia in the pews, or among the alters at the far end of the temple, where I could see several robed priests. I hesitated for a moment -- wondering if maybe Johanna, Virginia's mentor, was somewhere among those robed Panarii.

But then...

I turned.

Something had tugged upon strands in my subconscious and I saw what it was as I turned. The Panarii temple was across from the graveyard -- the very graveyard that Virginia had visited the last time we were in Caladon. She had gone to recover the book from Mr. Misk's grave. And as I stepped up to the gate leading into the graveyard, I could see Virginia standing before a tombstone. She had placed her hands upon it and was hanging her head forward, her palms taking most of her weight. Her shoulders shook.

I started forward. "Virginia?"

She spun to face me. "Resh!?" She exclaimed, her eyes wide, her cheeks flushed. "W-What are you doing here?" She asked, her voice thick -- and angry. Her hands clenched. "I...go away!"

"Who is that?" I asked.

"No one!" Virginia snapped, then started forward. She shoved past me. "I...no one!"

She hurried away. My heart tore in half -- part of me wished to immediately run after her, to gather her into my arms, to hold her. But I needed to know. I looked back to the tombstone and saw the name and the dates upon it:

Here lies Laurence Brummond.

Born: April 4^th, 1866

Died: December 9^th, 1884

Survived by his sister, Beatrice and his wife...

The rest of the headstone was worn away by time and neglect. "Dead two years..." I muttered, quietly. Then my head snapped back. "Wife?" I blinked, my eyes wide. Virginia was a young lass, nearer to twenty then thirty. But the poor often married young. I knew that most orcs did, when they could legally marry at all. My mouth opened in shock. Was...had...

Had Virginia been named...Virginia Brummond?

Had she joined the Panarii out of grief for the loss of her husband? My hand went to my mouth as I thought through the implications. No wonder she was so raw -- and no wonder our closeness must have been gnawing at her. It was one thing to have a fling with a half-orc. Another entire to fall...in love with one. And so soon after the death of her husband. I turned and hurried to the gate -- but Virginia was already gone. Lost among the crowds.