Warsinger by James Baldwin (most important books of all time txt) 📕

“Cheers,” Suri said flatly.

“Z… Q…” I sounded out the letters, but I actually had more of a problem with individual letters than I did with whole words. These letters had serifs, too, which made it even harder to work out what shape I was looking at. “H?”

“K,” Rin corrected me fussily. “Okay, let’s see… based on what I’m seeing from the Tlaxik lines, I don’t think it’s a cipher. The phrases for each language are different, and when I tally up the letters, the same letters are missing from each alphabet. B, E, H, I, S, U, Y.”

“Behisuy?” I tried saying it aloud like a Word of Power, but nothing happened. “Do we need mana for this thing?”

“The pipes suggest there’s a storage tank somewhere,” Rin said. “Let’s see… I think maybe these do scramble out into some Words of Power, though they don’t really make a lot of sense. Try ‘Bey, Su, Hi!’”

“‘Bey, Su, Hi!” I waved my hands like a magician. The portal didn’t even hum.

Suri sucked a tooth. “Bugger.”

“Okay, that’s not it.” Rin hummed to herself over the voice chat. We could hear her scribbling for a couple of minutes, and then she drew a sharp breath. “Oh! I’ve got it! If you remove the missing letters from the phrase, you get the sentence: ‘Command word ORPAR.’”

“Remove the missing letters and divide by zero, right.” I turned to the portal, flung my arms up like a muppet, and yelled: “Orpar!”

The ancient pipes creaked as mana gas surged into the portal and converged in the center before blooming out into a crackling blue haze.

“You first, brat.” Suri kicked Karalti in the leg.

Karalti made a face at her, clambering to her feet.

“I’ll go,” I said. “Hang back. One way or another, I’ll see you on the other side.”

Chapter 49

The portal dumped me into a room so hot it felt like being punched in the lungs.

Warping via portal was much faster than teleporting with Karalti. On stepping through, I almost felt the difference in air-temperature from the rooms behind and ahead of me. The portal deposited me on a disturbingly narrow ledge above a sea of lava. Everything glowed a baleful orange from the molten stone, which glooped and plopped and patiently waited for us to fall in and die.

“Well, I did wish for lava before,” I muttered to myself. “Versus like… larvae.”

[New location discovered: The Rose Vault]

Suri followed behind me, with Karalti last. Both of them winced as they walked into the wall of heat.

“Oof.” Suri groaned, shielding her face. “Great.”

“Look! Over there!” Karalti leaned her torso forward with her hands drawn up against her chest, just like she would in dragon form. “There's a gate on the other side!”

There was: a heavy black steel gate that wouldn't have been out of place in a bank vault. Between us and the gate was a series of gently swinging platforms suspended by chains from the ceiling. Four of them led from the ledge to the gate, but three more led down almost to the surface of the lava. There, my eyes picked out a large pull-style handle inset into the wall.

“Wow. These platform dungeon puzzles take on a whole new level of 'yeesh' when you're not behind a headset or a console.” I clicked my tongue. “Looks like we have to pull that to open the gate.”

“You don't say?” Suri was looking out over the platforms with trepidation.

“I can get down there, no sweat. My Path was made for this kind of platformer shit.” I shook out my shoulders and puffed a short blast of scalding hot air. “You guys focus on getting over to the other side.”

“Right!” Karalti pumped a fist. “Come on, Suri! It's easy! Just watch Hector.”

“Be careful, guys!” Rin said. “Unless you’re like… a Fire Elemental, lava in Archemi is an instadeath.”

With that in mind, I set myself into position, did some mental calculations, and then sprung up. The platform shook and swung to the right as I landed on the left side of it, and I used the momentum to Jump and spring all the way down to the first descending platform.

“Oh, yeah. Look at that. Super fuckin' easy,” I heard Suri say from behind me.

I landed lightly, caught the chain to slow my skid, and hung on until the platform stopped swaying before hopping down two more. It was lung-blisteringly hot. The air swirled and shimmered, and I felt the leather of my armor start to sweat as I reached for the handle. From overhead, it had looked like it was able to be reached by hand from the last hanging platform, but up close, it was clear that it was not. The thing was about three feet beyond the reach of my arm, even as I held onto the chain and grasped out over the seething lava barely five feet below. I was going to have to trapeze it.

[Warning! You are dangerously overheated!]

I heard a crash and thump from overhead, and looked up to see Suri using the chain of the first platform to get to her feet. She unequipped her armor all the way down to her underwear before trying the next platform.

“Okay...” I grasped the chains to either side of me, slid a foot back, and started to rock my weight. The platform barely seemed to swing at all, jerking a little up and down before it began to move more smoothly. I bunched down and pulled the way I had when I was a kid standing on a swing at the playground. Inch by inch, it began to move, and the more it moved, the more momentum I could build. Soon, I was riding the damn thing like a pendulum. I let go of one chain, hung on to the other, and groped forward, reaching for the handle as Suri THUMP'd onto the next platform along.

“Two more!” Karalti sang.

On the arc of the next swing, I caught the hot metal