HIDDEN WEAPONS
“There are only two forces that unite men: fear, and interest.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
It wasn’t raining outside the Silver Palace, and the lack of it startled Jarrod.
The sun hammered him, beating his eyeballs in as he stood, a little disoriented from the teleport and sick to his stomach. It gleamed off a stripe of silver up the middle of the tower where it jutted out of the massif of black rock like an obelisk, five hundred feet above the valley floor. Damned thing could signal the mothership, he thought.
Grand steps, fifty feet wide, led up three stories to a titanic set of stone doors flung wide, and Jarrod had to wonder how anyone would ever close them. A twelve-foot tall obsidian gargoyle stood on each side of the doorway, crouched to spring, and they were detailed
