“Why didn’t he burn that one?” Tarron asked, pointing to the dwarven meeting hall.
“How do you know that Fuvos burned down his own home?” Wedver asked.
“We don’t,” Tarron said. “But he’s a flame giant. And his house is now on fire. So I’m going to take a not-huge leap of faith on that one.”
Layla shrugged, thinking about Tarron’s question. “Maybe he needs something in the hall?” It was a wild guess, but it wasn’t like she had a lot of other ideas as to what was going on in Fuvos’s head.
Tarron and Zamek spent a few minutes checking to ensure that there weren’t runes or booby traps in the building. When they gave the all clear, Kase kicked the door in, turning the mass of wood into thousands of splinters in the process.
Once inside, they searched the downstairs thoroughly but found it in the same state as they’d left it earlier. Layla hadn’t expected to find anything, as she doubted that Fuvos would have let them stay there if it had been important to him or whatever he had planned, but it was worth checking, all the same.
Tarron stayed downstairs with Harry, Hyperion, Tego, and the other giant elder while their guards remained outside on their orders. Layla and the rest went upstairs, which they found exactly as Fuvos had described, with a large room, a bathroom that had seen better days, and a locked door that Zamek opened by writing a dwarven rune on the wood and activating it, causing the door to disintegrate.
“Nice trick,” Jidor said to Zamek.
Inside was a small room with large amounts of dwarven runes written all over the walls, floor, and ceiling.
“What does it say?” Tisor asked.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Zamek said, staring at the runes. “It’s using the ancient dwarven runes, which, as far as I was aware, exceptionally few people know.”
“So what do they do?” Layla asked.
“Normally, they’re capable of massive amounts of power, but these ones do nothing,” Zamek said. “It’s gibberish.” He pointed. “These are runes for realm gates, but these are runes for power fluctuations and transfer. And these ones on the floor, they’re just complete nonsense. It’s something to do with merging energy forms. I honestly don’t understand it.”
“Take some time to keep looking,” Layla said. “Hopefully something will jump out.”
“Find Fuvos,” he said. “Maybe he can explain what this all means.”
“Jidor, can Wedver keep Zamek company?” Layla asked. “Just in case he manages to blow up the roof or something.”
“One time,” Zamek said. “That happened one time.”
Layla smiled. “I’ll go see what everyone else is doing.”
“Not going to blow anything up,” Zamek muttered as he was left to his investigation.
“This has all been quite traumatic,” Tisor said as they descended the stairs back to the rest of the group. “A high priest working with Avalon behind our back, trying to kill our guests, doing who knows what in concert with the flame giants. Mimir should have told us this.”
“Mimir doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who likes to talk to people about what he’s seen,” Layla said. “Also, I get the feeling he didn’t think he’d be believed.”
“Fuvos was highly regarded, so . . . maybe not. The vast majority of people had no idea that he was even being investigated, and frankly, Mimir lives down there for a reason.”
“Yeah, he’s a real peach of a personality,” Layla said with a smile. “Did Fuvos come to the elders to ask about your help with this war?”
“He did come to us,” Tisor said as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “He said we should not aid you any further than necessary. He said we should be afraid about what your being here would do, what it would bring to our door.”
“It’s already at your door,” Layla said.
“Hiding in plain sight,” Tisor said. “Whoever was helping him will be found and dealt with.”
“At least two members of his guard were helping him,” Layla said. “They drove the unicorns at us. Both were flame giants, and both were apparently capable of hiding their power for a long time.”
“If flame giants don’t access it, you can’t tell the difference,” Tisor said. “I assume they aren’t alive to question.”
“You assume correctly,” Layla said.
The rest of the team had left the floor and gone through the rear of the building, leaving the door open so Layla could see them searching the grounds.
Tego padded back into the building and purred as Layla stroked her behind the ear. “I assume you haven’t found anything,” she said.
“Something is wrong here,” Tarron said, walking back into the building. “Kase said she can smell Fuvos; he walked up toward the mountain at the north. She doesn’t want to go too far ahead without the rest of us, but I have a feeling that something is wrong here. The property feels off. Like it’s hiding something.”
“Any chance he has something under the floor?” Layla asked.
“It’s possible,” Tarron said. “But we haven’t found—”
“Everyone out of the house, now,” Zamek shouted as he bounded down the oversize stairs with the elder and Jidor following behind.
No one needed to be told twice, and they sprinted out the door to the rear of the property just as the upper floor exploded. Layla used the metal in her arm to create a large shield that kept Tarron, Tego, and her safe from the thousands of bullet-size pieces of wood and metal that were shot over the back of the garden. Tisor had grown in size and run with Jidor—who held Zamek in her arms—and Wedver, getting far enough away from the explosion.
“That was interesting,” Tarron said as the upper floor of the building continued to smoke, and they jogged over to where the others were. “No fire, just an explosion.”
“It was power,” Zamek said before he thanked Jidor for the assistance. The giant blushed a little and nodded her head.
“What do you mean, power?” Harry asked.
“Those runes were gibberish,” Zamek said. “But some of them were there to focus power. They’d been there a long time but only activated a few hours ago. Power built until it reached a limit and exploded. Fuvos didn’t write the runes in the way a dwarf would; he linked ones on one wall with ones on another surface.”
“He made a bomb out of dwarven runes?” Harry asked.
Zamek nodded. “Yeah, but that’s not all he did. There were runes in there that had been altered. It’s why they didn’t mean anything. He was trying to shift a massive amount of power from one realm to another. He used the room to practice getting the runes and power shift right.”
“What does that mean in simple terms?” Layla asked.
“He was trying to create a realm gate that would move one part of a realm to this realm. And I think he managed it.”
Layla couldn’t help but mimic the look of confusion that crossed everyone else’s face. “What?” several of them asked at the same time.
“While you need a gate to move between realms,” Zamek began, “you can, in theory, create something that would let you link two realms in the same space. It would be incredibly dangerous to do, but it’s possible. I think that’s what Fuvos is attempting. I think that’s what burned down the house. I went through that building when putting the fire out, and there was lava in it. You see a lot of lava around here?”