Gulliver woke up, coughing and choking on seawater, on a cold, hard rock shore, lit a dim, insecure purple by two flickering hypostatick lamps. The Former Baron was leaning over him, still dressed in his diving suit but with the helmet removed, eyes shut tight and mouth open wide as he bent towards the spluttering pirate.
“I’m awake! I’m awake!” Gulliver managed as he pushed the Former Baron out of the way in one direction and rolled himself over in the other to retch water at the rock.
“Oh, well that is helpful,” Franck said, though he sounded a little put out, “resuscitation was never really my strong suit, not since that incident with a trumpet leech in first form.”
Emesha laughed gently, then made her way towards Gulliver, who was still coughing up what felt like most of the ocean.
“You had us worried for a while there, my dear,” she said, “I was very nearly going to pronounce you dead.”
“What ‘appened?” Gulliver asked, feeling lost and confused and so, in a way, oddly at home.
“When you dropped the lantern it got smashed against the hypostatick field causing just the kind of explosion we had hoped to avoid. It created a hole in the barrier which the storm swept you through, but it also broke the glass of your helmet and probably gave you a concussion in the process. Franck and I had to act quickly with our lanters, neutralising the field just long enough for us to follow you through and drag you up here.”
“And where is ‘ere?” Gulliver asked, rubbing the part of his temple where he knocked it against the helmet and looking around at the tide-worn rock walls and stalactites dripping on him from above.
“This is the cave we were aiming for,” the Former Baron explained, having regained his composure and peeled himself out of his diving suit. “It was most fortunate that it wasn’t much further beyond the barrier, or we wouldn’t have been able to carry you here.”
“So, this leads inside the castle?” Gulliver asked, then gulped. “There’s nothin’ between us and the Liches, now, is there?”
Emesha shook her head, slowly.
“So we need to be extremely careful how we proceed.”
“Did you actually ‘ave a plan for what to do once we got inside?”
“Of course, I had a plan, my pirate friend!” the Former Baron replied, puffing himself up as he did so. “What do you take me for?”
“Well… um…”
“We simply have to find a Lich, restrain it and then question it! Simple!”
Even Emesha looked aghast at this last.
“What?” The Former Baron asked, sounding wounded. “It is a perfectly practical plan, with clear, easy steps!”
Gulliver wanted to complain, but realised that it was a waste of time. If they were going to die horribly, they might as well just get on with it.
He rose to stand, but the pain in his head was suddenly a lot worse and he felt a bit dizzy and sick. Emesha steadied him as he wobbled and lay him back down on the ground.
“Oh, no,” she said, “I don’t think you’re going anywhere just yet.”
“But…” Franck began until Emesha gave him a hard (and, Gulliver suspected, well-practised) stare.
“He’s not going anywhere, Franck. You’re going to have to catch a Lich by yourself.”
“Well, of course! That was the plan all along really. I only needed Gulliver to make the journey here less dull. He’s very pleasant company really, all japes and cheerfulness and tomfoolery and suchlike!”
Gulliver rolled his eyes, which, it turned out, also hurt. When he looked back at the Former Baron, however, he caught just a glimmer of fear in the old man’s eyes.
“Can’t you go with ‘im, Emesha?” he asked after a moment.
“You need someone here with you,” the elderly Dhampyr replied. “With a head wound like that – it just wouldn’t be safe to leave you alone!”
“It’s alright, it’s alright!” Franck said, although he sounded more as if he were trying to reassure himself than that he was talking to anyone else. “I’ve faced worse than Liches before. I can do this. I can do this.”
He stretched, put a hand, briefly to his stomach as if something there were bothering him, then tipped his hat and sauntered around the corner.
“Good luck, Franck!” Gulliver called, but the old man was already well on his way.
The Former Baron Von Spektr wandered through the lost and lonely corridors of the cellar of Coldsolace Keep, wondering how his life always seemed to consist of a series of monster-filled halways. That he might have made some poor life choices in the past never normally occurred to him, but as he slipped down the dank tunnels of the keep, evading the fierce purple glows of nearby Liches, feeling the electric hum in the air as he looked for somewhere he could use to capture one, he had begun to consider it.
Occasionally, as he passed the ends of other corridors, or vast, cavernous chambers full of arcane machinery and implements of torture, he could hear the Liches communicating to one another in their strange language. It was not a tongue he had studied much in the past, though he could pick up a few words amidst the whispery, crackly howling. They were angry, hateful words and Franck was glad he didn’t understand any more.
Everywhere he moved, the situation seemed the same: endless corridors and half-empty rooms; Liches wandering through the darkness like lost souls; dead ends and dead ideas as Franck worked through plan after plan in his mind.
And then he came to yet another dead end, this one fitted with a pulley system for hauling something up a narrow shaft into the higher reaches of the keep, and was about to turn around to trace his steps back to the last junction, when the air began to feel charged with electricity once more and the tell-tale purple glow of a Lich could be seen creeping along the wall and round the last corner towards him.
“Oh bother,” Franck said in a very small voice just as the Lich emerged from the corner and turned to look at him. “This hasn’t gone at all the way I wanted it to…”
“So, uh… you’re part Vampire, right?” Gulliver asked in the echoing silence of the cave as Emesha sat nearby, watching him closely.
“My ancestors were. The blood is still strong, though.”
“What does that mean, exac’ly?”
“Well, it manifests differently from one Dhampyr to another really. We usually live a lot longer than normal humans, but some also have mysterious abilities or weaknesses, like extra charm or an aversion to light.”
“And you?”
“I’m nothing special,” she said with a laugh.
The silence returned, stretched, threatened to break.
“I knew a Vampire for a while.”
“Oh, really?”
“’is name was Lord Blood Dragon and-”
“You met the Lord Blood Dragon? What was he like?”
“A bit of a disappointment, really, which, in a Vampire, is somethin’ of a relief.”
“Hmm…”
“You know,” Gulliver said, stretching and yawning, despite the pain, “I’m getting’ quite sleepy, I could-”
“Oh no!” Emesha said, leaping to her feet and rushing to Gulliver’s side. “Don’t sleep, Gulliver, don’t!”
“But I’m so… so sleepy!” he said. “Just a little nap…”
Emesha was shaking him now, but he was so tired that he could barely feel it. Her voice seemed to drifting in and out and her face was a fuzzy blur.
“Stay with me, Gulliver!” she was calling and then, to his complete surprise, she pulled out a vial of something from her pocket and stabbed him with a needle. Then everything went black, again.
“Well, well, little human,” the Lich said as it advanced towards Franck, its voice like the broken whispering of the wind after a storm, “you’re the one whose fear I could taste in the corridors. I wonder how you arrived here.”
“Well, it’s a very interesting story,” Franck began, taking a couple of steps nervously backward, “but a long one and I really don’t think we have time. Besides, you don’t appear to have any tea or biscuits in this establishment and I feel, very much, that they are a necessary part of any discour-”
“You like to go on, don’t you, little human?” the Lich interrupted as it made its steady progress down the corridor.
“Well, I have been known to be quite a talker,” Franck continued, stepping back further still, “Indeed my third cousin on my father’s side, Inga, she was called, once accused me of babbling, but I think she had had a little too much gum wine on that occas-”
“I prefer to keep my words brief,” the Lich said, and its long, skeleton legs brought it ever closer.
“Well then, I reckon you’re missing out on a whole, glorious world of conversational wonders. Think of the topics you might be missing out on: the chance to really get to know your prey; to educate them in turn! Indeed, that was why I came here in the first place as I really think that, once you caught the bug of engaging discussion, you would have so much to tell about all manner of things and I-”
“Silence!” the Lich roared like a hurricane and then, becoming such a storm of ancient bone and purple flame, leapt at the cornered Former Baron.
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