The Sword of Retribution

Fort Battleaxe - Part 2

     Drake wasn’t the only one. “What in the name of Hell is this all about, Resalintas?” demanded Damast, the priest from Samnia. “Don’t you know there’s a war going on? We’re just barely holding them back from storming the city and you drag us all in here for a reunion! There had better be a good reason for this.”

     “I appreciate your concern, Damast, and I wouldn’t have called you all here if it wasn’t of the utmost importance. It won’t take long, and when it’s over you can all go back to your duties. I have to make contact with a priest in a distant part of the world, but I can’t farspeak to him because I don’t know who he is, so I need you to lend me your strength and power in convocation. I won’t waste time giving you all the details, which you don’t need to know anyhow. We’ll just get on with it.

     “Some of you have never taken part in a convocation before, so I’ll just go over what you have to do. I’ll begin the ceremony in a minute, and when I do, just relax and open yourselves to me. Allow the energy I’ll be summoning from you to pass out of your bodies and into mine. It’s quite painless, although you’ll feel a bit weak and unsteady for a while afterwards and may have to rest for a few hours. Any questions?” There were none, and so he began.

     He chanted words in praise of Samnos and, as he did so, he touched each of the assembled priests on the shoulder in turn. As he removed his hand, an invisible strand of spiritual energy was left behind, connecting them with him, and soon all eight of them were connected to him like the spokes of a wheel. Resalintas could feel their energy reserves being opened to him, ready for him to draw as much or as little as he needed.

     When the joining had been accomplished, he began to pray to Samnos, asking Him to put him in communication with the priest holding the Sword of Retribution, whoever it was and wherever he was. The God responded, and Resalintas felt a part of himself, a sort of third eye, detach itself from his head and float around in the room on the end of another strand of energy, like a toy balloon. “I wish to speak to the priest who has the Sword of Retribution,” Resalintas repeated. “Go and find him.”

     The third eye just continued to float there, however, indicating that it had failed to find him. That wasn’t unexpected. Unassisted, a single priest only had enough power to look a few hundred miles abroad. He now had more power at his disposal, though, and began to draw from the other priests, extending the spell’s range. Soon the eye began to respond, drifting slowly eastwards towards the temple’s far wall with its bas reliefs and ornate tapestries depicting priests and battles from centuries past. It sank into the stone and vanished.

     Images now began to come to the old priest as the eye gained speed. Rooms and corridors went past, and then he was out in the open above the city, the tower receding behind him and the smoke of battle before him. The city was soon left behind as well, and he was flying over the countryside of eastern Ilandia, ravaged and destroyed by the invading armies. Great plumes of smoke rose from various points on the horizon, where towns and villages too small to defend had been put to the torch, and Shadowsoldiers scurried everywhere in groups ranging in size from half a dozen to over a hundred, passing openly and fearlessly along roads that had been patrolled by the Beltharan army only a few days before.

     It pained the old priest to see evil in control of the lands he had sworn to defend, and he longed to stop and give vent to his outrage, hurling attack spells through the eye at the perpetrators of this outrage, but revenge would have to wait. He had a task to perform and everything else had to be put aside for the time being. He consoled himself with the thought that there’d be plenty of time to punish the evildoers later. Plenty of time. Years, probably.

     Then the priest noticed something. As the eye got further away from the city, now approaching the forest at the speed of a flying arrow, it was steadily dropping towards the ground. It had started nearly two hundred feet above the ground, but when it reached the first trees it was well within their leafy canopies, and soon it was speeding between the massive treetrunks at just over eye level. It dropped lower and lower, three feet above the ground, then two feet, then one, and then everything went black as the eye actually dropped below ground level, flying effortlessly through loamy soil and roots towards the distant priest. Resalintas was confused. The priest with the Sword must be in an underground cavern somewhere, but he’d never heard of any tunnels or natural cave systems in this part of the world.