11: The Tower of Vane

Orban and his club for fighting (cult?) wasted no time in attacking us. Marband looked on, confused for a moment. We called to her for help, and she seemed to decide that we were the lesser of her imaginary evils, and she joined our side in the melee.

The club for fighting fought well as you might expect, but a couple of them fell and then Gulgad confronted Orban. It was lucky, I was thinking, to have Gulgad around. I do not approve of violence, at all, but the number of times we have found ourselves in situations where violence was directed against us, and the number of times we seemed to have fighting back as our only recourse, made me think that despite him being a violent braggart, he may also have a role in life on the side of good. Seeing a couple of their number fall, the rest of the club for fighting fled. I bet they didn’t talk about flight club.

Gudrun had been involved in the fight, too, and although Gulgad had told him to stay behind him and stay safe the young dwarf had got stuck in. He had a strange look in his eyes at the end of the fight. It was the first time he had seen death, no doubt, and I could not tell whether he had enjoyed it or it sickened him. I hoped Gulgad knew what he was doing.

Strangely, during the fight, Solvej could not seem to miss when using her new bow. Why had she wasted so much time with her sling if she was such a talented archer? It didn’t make sense. Maybe as an outlaw poacher from Nordland, she was infamous for her archery skills, and so as part of lying low in the Reikland, she had pretending to be an inept slinger. It was certainly convincing cover.

We arranged with some of the villagers to dispose of the bodies in a respectful and Morr-fearing way and then made our tentative way towards the Tower of Vane. It was ridiculously tall and thin, piercing the glacial ice like a refutation of the elements. The great doors were broken and entering the hall at its base we could look up and see the whole of the tower. It was hollow going all the way up to the top, with a series of steps and landings lining the walls.

The floor was covered with odd metal plates that looked like they may have fallen from above, but they were actually fused to the floor. The walls were made of some odd metal and were etched with unfathomable lines which seemed to follow a pattern but one that was unintelligible to me. The whole place felt like it could not have been made by humans or maybe it was made by wizards. I expected Erhardt to know something of the place or at least understand some of it, but he seemed only slightly less bemused than the rest of us.

So we began to climb the tower. At every landing there was a strange theme to the décor, briars, spiders’ webs, spirals, what have you. The place looked like it was designed by a madman, but I suspect that these were some sort of magical metaphor that would make sense to a wizard in the same way that Shallyan allegories made sense to me. I tried not to dwell on it.

At the top of the tower we discovered a strange looking device that Erhardt called a luminarch. It looked like a convoluted telescope with many different lenses. This was where, we could see, Heske Glazer’s work had ended up. Looking through the device we couldn’t make out much of a target, but we estimated that it must be pointing roughly in the direction of Ubersreik. We knew that this must be how Vielfras was killed, but it was incredible that such a device could have pin-pointed him over such a huge distance.

Scattered around the place were many hand-written pages that seemed to be experiment notes, theoretical discourses, and other writings on magic that only Erhardt could begin to understand, and it seemed to me that most of it was even too clever for him. One long piece was a grand theory on the winds of magic. Written beside the luminarch was the short, conspicuous message, ‘Why did it misfire?’ Perhaps Vielfras had not been the intended target, after all? We decided that these papers were important, and so Solvej and Kurtis went about roughly stuffing them into their clothes.

There were a number of astrological instruments, measuring devices, boxes of equipment, and other stores around. There was a winch that had clearly been used to get all this stuff up here. All this equipment looked out of place in the tower, it seemed however fantastical this was the work of human crafting, whereas the tower itself was more alien. Perhaps the wizards had moved in and commandeered an existing structure.

We heard some sort of noise coming from one of the boxes and after a bit of a search opened one to discover a wizard. This was strange and I don’t suppose many wizards are found in boxes, but there you go. She introduced herself as Sibylle Hagerdorn and explained that she had been imprisoned in the box by a rival wizard called Carolus Entschlafen who was out to sabotage her work. I think she may have been a Blue Wizard as her clothes were blue and she was adorned with stars and moons, and the like.

Hagerdorn noticed that many of her notes were missing and not well hidden under Solvej’s and Kurtis’ coats, and as she seemed like a pleasant enough wizard, they sheepishly returned them to her. We explained that her luminarch had killed a man the last time she had fired it, and she agreed that that was likely, and she guessed that he might have attracted the magical if he was tainted by the Dark Gods. So we decided that Hagerdorn was a good wizard who had accidentally but fortuitously killed a leading cultist of S_____. Our investigation was complete and we could return to Ubersreik and get our reward from Nacht.

Just then, another wizard appeared and blasted magic at the luminarch, damaging it, and covering it in some sort of energy. This was obviously Entschlafen, who seemed to be a White Wizard. He cast another spell and began to float down towards the glacier. Hagerdorn urged us to go after him and stop him and explained that the luminarch was now unstable and if we stayed we would die, but she would stay and try to contain the energies. She gave an amulet to Erhardt saying it could protect him from Entschlafen’s magic.

We decided that using the winch would be the quickest way down. Kurtis wanted to winch us all down, as he was still injured from the earlier fight, but concerned by Hagerdorn’s warning about the unstable luminarch I didn’t want to leave him on his own. He is still a boy, really, who needs looking after. So we winched the other four down and then made our way down the stairs as quickly as we could.

When we got to the base of the tower Gulgad was already running towards the wizard with Gudrun running after rather enjoying himself. Solvej was trying to shoot the wizard and Erhardt was doing his magic, but he must have felt pretty inadequate facing the master wizard. His magic was bouncing off a protective shield the wizard had created, and so were Solvej’s arrows.

As Gulgad approached Entschlafen the wizard called down a massive ball of power from the skies. It seemed to be heading straight for them. Erhardt attempted to dispel the thing, using his new amulet, and whether it was deflected by this effort or not, the magical comet crashed into the glacier, missing them but smashing it into a million shards and revealing the frigid water beneath. Entschlafen fell into the water, and so did Gulgad and Gudrun. Gulgad managed to clamber out and then grab Gudrun and haul him to safety. We saw Entschlafen disappear beneath the ice never to be seen again. Or perhaps that sort of thing doesn’t kill wizards.

We went back up to the top of the tower but Hagerdorn had gone. I was confused by the whole business, but Erhardt seemed to have a grasp on things. Perhaps you need to be a wizard to understand the strange behaviour of other wizards. He seemed to think that Entschlafen and Hagerdorn had been in it together and had been trying to channel vast magical powers through the tower and perhaps even using it to wield many winds at once. Vielfras had just been unlucky and not the subject of any assassination. His nature, his worship of the Dark Gods had attracted the unpredictable magical power to him. Then, seeing us arrive, Entschlafen had sacrificed himself to give Hagerdorn time to escape. I didn’t really understand any of it.