by Dan Abnett
‘There is time, old friend,’ Fithvael said in the soothing tone he used when Gilead became moody and obsessive.
‘No!’ Gilead said in a tone that brooked no compromise. ‘My mind is so full of her, so full of the images she places there, I know not what is real and what an illusion. I know only that I must fight for her.’
‘I have fought beside you before, te tuin,’ said Fithvael, ‘and I will no doubt fight beside you again. But if I’m going to follow you, you must tell me what you know.’
‘Only that Niobe needs our help. She is in mortal danger.’
‘The voice, the pictures in your head come from her? But who is she?’
‘My future and my past,’ said Gilead, drawing a trembling hand across his furrowed brow.
‘You know this woman?’
‘I have always known her,’ answered Gilead.
‘From Tor Anrok?’ Fithvael asked, excited.
Gilead dropped his head. ‘I don’t know. Gods of Ulthuan, Fithvael! I don’t know! I only know I have to fight for her!’
Fithvael threw his cloak about himself in resignation. ‘I guess that is good enough for me,’ he said.
GILEAD STOPPED IN his tracks and took a deep breath as he parted the undergrowth in front of him. What stood in the barren space before them was vast. He could see only the facade of the building, and looking to the left and right gave him no idea of its width, since he could not see as far as its corners. He dropped his neck back and the building curved up and away before him, reaching into the sky so far above that he could not see its roof structures, only great granite and flint walls cut off in the distance by black clouds.
Fithvael pulled up abruptly behind Gilead and looked over his friend’s shoulder to see why they had stopped so suddenly. He took two steps back in astonishment, almost falling over a bulging tree root on the ground behind him.
‘How… how did we not see this from a hundred leagues away?’ Fithvael asked.
Gilead did not answer. He stepped through the undergrowth. The massive, grim structure before them was only a hundred yards from where they stood, but the forest halted its growth abruptly at their feet and nothing grew in the shadow of the edifice. They stepped onto a no-man’s-land that looked unnaturally hard, black and level. Gilead lifted one foot suddenly from the liquid surface and Fithvael let out a yelp as his own foot sank into a hot, black swamp.
A dark geyser a thousand feet high suddenly gushed a few hundred yards from them to their right, spraying the elves with hot, murky filth, and the entire wasteland became a bubbling, gurgling quagmire.
Gilead drew his sword and began to wade across the swamp until he was buried in it to his hips, his red cloak wrapped slantwise across his shoulder, clear of the stinking heat and filth of the mire. Fithvael pulled up his boots, tightened his belt, rolled his cloak into the pack on his back and followed Gilead.
‘Arm yourself!’ Gilead warned, turning to his friend. ‘Hurry!’ he screamed, surging his way back toward Fithvael.
Behind Fithvael, rising from the mud as though awakened from deep slumber, rose a monstrous being. Huge horns curled downward on either side of a flat, pitted head, and red eyes blinked open as swamp mud trickled away in runnels down a scarred, green face covered in suppurating sores. The monster flexed its jaws and threw its half-submerged body forward, screaming as its paddle-like upper limbs ripped free of the swamp.
Fithvael turned as Gilead threw his dagger by its tip. It whirred through the air, end over end in a graceful arc, and came to rest in the exposed throat of the great swamp beast.
The creature brought one long, webbed hand up to the dagger hilt, but Fithvael was quicker, though still unarmed. He thrust his entire weight against the dagger, driving it deeper and lower into the monster’s upper chest. Then the elf heaved on the gore-covered hilt, first pulling it free and then embedding it in the monstrous throat again, lower this time.
The huge, slimy paddles of the beast came around Fithvael’s shoulders, embracing him and dragging his feet from the swamp bed. Losing his balance, Fithvael could feel the hilt of Gilead’s dagger digging into his own chest. The monster lifted Fithvael with ease out of the sticky mud on the swamp floor. Fithvael pulled up his feet as quickly as the sucking action of the mud would allow and, drawing his knees into his body, he planted his soggy boots firmly in the beast’s belly and thrust hard.
Fithvael fell heavily onto his back, creating a slow, broken ripple of mud. The vast thing rose up above him.
Gilead had only been able to stand and watch the action as Fithvael blocked his target, but as soon as the animal’s huge bulk emerged, he attacked.
Gilead tore into the lumpy, calloused surface of the beast’s back with his sword, hacking through the thick greenish skin until he exposed a cage of heavily gnarled, brown bones. The creature began to convulse and one of its paddle-limbs came floating slowly to the surface. Gilead reached his left hand down into the swamp, found a handhold on Fithvael’s jerkin and dragged his friend out. Fithvael coughed and spluttered and took long urgent breaths, as he watched the thing they had killed slide back into the waters that would now become its grave.
AS FITHVAEL REGAINED his composure, Gilead sought out Niobe in his mind, latching on to the persistent urge of her call. She had brought them this far and he trusted her to bring them safely to her.
Setting off again in a half-walk, half-swim, their hands paddling the surface of the swamp as it undulated around them, the two warriors made good progress, and soon found themselves within arms reach of the towering, slick walls of the castle.
‘Do you see?’ Fithvael asked, searching the immediate surface of the wall.
‘There are no joins,’ answered Gilead. ‘The walls are solid.’
Gilead splashed back some way and focussed higher up the wall, looking for patterns that might give him some clues about the structure of the impenetrable wall. He could see reflections on the surface of the ooze around him, forming slanting, rectangular shards of light. He looked up the towering wall again and saw that the reflections fell from windows. They were very high up, but huge. The glass in the windows had a heavy gloss like black mirrors, and they were set flush with the stonework; no frames or sills were visible. Gilead was reminded of the impossible building in his dream and closed his eyes to concentrate again on Niobe’s voice.
Fithvael and Gilead sloshed their way along the base of the wall, which seemed to curve gently along its length. Gilead was looking for something, but it was Fithvael who saw it first.
‘There!’ exclaimed Fithvael. ‘Could that be the place?’
Gilead could see nothing ahead of him, though he examined the wall thoroughly.
‘Two feet to your right, a hand’s-breadth above your shoulder,’ Fithvael instructed.
‘I see nothing,’ answered Gilead and backed away toward Fithvael. Gilead took up Fithvael’s old position, and now he too could see the opening in the wall: a kind of grilled storm drain, arched and menacing. The oozing mud of the swamp seemed to lap up to the open slate work of the grille, but did not penetrate it.
This whole thing is an illusion. Remember that! Gilead told himself and then he made his way back to where the storm drain should have been, but again it eluded him. Fithvael was right beside his friend now, but the opening was invisible to him too.
Fithvael turned back and retraced his steps to the position he had been wading in when he had first spotted the drain. It took him several minutes to get the view just right, but he managed it. Following Fithvael’s explicit directions, Gilead pulled himself up by the bars of a grille that was invisible to him.
He tried to look beyond it. There was nothing to see. A rush of cold air around Gilead caught the last son of Tor Anrok off-guard. He shielded his face for a moment and when he opened his eyes again he was back on solid ground. The mud and filth of the swamp had disappeared from his clothes.
‘Fithvael, we’re in!’ Gilead said and turned to look out of the grille, but be
hind him was only a solid wall.
In his mind, Niobe reached out to him, covering his eyes with her hands in a dream tableau that she planted in his waking mind.
Gilead closed his eyes and felt the wall in front of him. It had been hard and shiny to look at, but felt sandy and crumbly to the touch. There was no opening.
Gilead took his cloak from around his body and tore off a narrow length of dense cloth from the hem. He placed this around his face, shielding his eyes in several tightly wrapped layers of cloth. Although effectively blindfold, Gilead closed his eyes once more and reached out his hands.
He could feel the grille before him and passed his hands through it.
FITHVAEL WAS SURE he had not blinked and yet his friend had disappeared through the grille without him seeing it happen. He knew he must make his own way to it now.
He carefully measured the distance along the wall by eye and slowly made his way toward the opening. As soon as he moved it became invisible to him again, but he trusted his mental measuring and carefully walked his hands along the wall, end to end, counting out as he went. Having reached his apparent destination, Fithvael passed his hands tentatively over the solid surface of the wall. He could feel no grille or opening of any kind and he began to despair.
At a distance of only a few yards, the storm drain had seemed overlarge, yet he could not find it even with a hand-search.
Fithvael moved a step to his left and lifted his hand higher on the wall, sweeping across another large area of stone with his open palms.
Nothing.
Fithvael dropped his head for a moment in concentration and then looked hard at the wall, as though he were trying to look into it, or through it.
Fithvael felt the hands on his shoulders before he saw them and tensed in an instant, ready to fight off another foe. Then he caught sight of Gilead’s long slender hands, recognising his companion by the missing finger on the left hand. Gilead’s arms were protruding through a solid rock wall.
In another instant Fithvael was standing next to his friend, clean of swamp filth, but more than a little confused. He sought Gilead’s gaze.
‘You must get used to it,’ said Gilead. ‘I have seen too much of this place already and it is all the same. We are no longer in our world, Fithvael te tuin.’
‘I can feel it,’ said Fithvael. ‘I can smell it and taste it. It crawls across my flesh and penetrates my body. Corruption!’
‘Fight it then,’ answered Gilead, ‘as we have always fought evil… but fight it only for yourself. The evil and the magic of this place are too great for us to fight alone. Our purpose is to release Niobe and then to get out of this vile otherworld.’
Gilead stared hard at his friend, that he might remember the warning, and then strode off down a long, curving corridor, deeper into the alien realm of this huge stone fortress.
NIOBE GUIDED THEM well, yet they were still confused by the architectural deceptions and optical illusions of their surroundings.
Spaces that looked huge at a distance were claustrophobic once they were inside them. Floors and ceilings sloped out and away from each other, lengthening perspective, or simply bulged and flattened, changing shape and dimensions before their eyes. They hit walls they could not see, walked apparently on ceilings, and climbed stairways that seemed flat.
Fithvael peered out from one of the black glass windows that was crystal clear from within. He only did it once. He glimpsed a huge panorama of seething desert with volcanic black sand dunes driven by some abominable sirocco against the horizon. Nothing grew there, but the land was ever-changing. The veteran elf saw a huge sandstorm loom in the distance, turn into a tornado five miles high, and then burn out again in an instant. He had no explanation for what he saw - save that this was truly a realm in which the Ruinous Powers held dominion.
NIOBE COULD FEEL Gilead and see through his eyes. She saw the smaller, older warrior following in his master’s wake and she saw the confusion on Fithvael’s face when confronted with the trials of the unnatural surroundings. Fithvael, his name was Fithvael. She pitied him.
They were so close now that she could almost reach out and touch them. She had touched no other being for so long. She did not know if it was days or years. Time, like the fabric of this place, was twisted and distorted to suit the tastes of Lord Ire, who dwelt in Chaos.
Niobe knelt on her block, for she was too tall to stand and her hands were tethered by a narrow, near-invisible strand of perfect silver chain, light and fragile looking, but with the strength of links wrought by dwarfs. The block was a narrow column no more than a yard across and perfectly round. It floated less than a third of the way up the steep cathedral-like room that housed all the sorcerous slaves that Lord Ire had collected with such relish.
With every day, sometimes with every hour that passed, the configuration of the columns altered. She dreaded those moves. The way her column floated through the great cavity of the endless cathedral made her sick and dizzy… or was it the knowledge that the higher she rose, the nearer she came to her ultimate destiny?
If she reached the top, what would she feel there? How would she die? She had stopped looking at the skeletal forms that still adhered to the uppermost columns. Those columns had ascended bearing living creatures: humans, dwarfs, elves. All races and species were represented and all were alive during the ascent. Not all the columns descended with their cargoes intact. Many simply tumbled back through the other columns, spilling their desiccated bodies from them. The bodies evaporated into dust and then into nothing before they ever reached the bottom again.
Those columns that descended slowly, bearing skeletons and sometimes rotting corpses, did so only because there was some mote of magic left in the bodies after the life breath had been extinguished. These columns hovered and languished, seeming not to move as often as the others, nor as far.
Niobe could not bear the thought that she might soon be one of them. If she was to die here, then let it be a clean and quick end. For her, there could be no magic without consciousness and no consciousness without life.
Niobe had stopped looking at the other magical beings around her, the living and the dead. She had tried to count them when she had first been chained to her block, but they were countless, numbering tens of thousands that she could see, and she knew not how many lay beyond in the upper reaches of the cathedral. She had stopped watching the new arrivals as they were bound to the blocks vacated by the dead, or to new, white marble columns, fresh hewn, that would be as dark and aged as the others in time.
But more than anything else, Niobe had stopped looking at the altar. It had a mesmerising effect on all that cast their eyes upon it.
The altar was a massive block of solid rock covered in shifting black and grey runes, which would fizzle with light periodically and, occasionally, bleed blue-black viscous liquid. It took up the central position in the elliptical space where a floor would have been - had there been any visible floor. Niobe could see nothing below the altar, yet it seemed to hang in the air, as though hovering, much as the columns did.
Between the writhing Chaos runes that swept across the altar, every inch of space was taken up by tiny pinprick sockets into which silver tether strands were located, tens of hundreds of thousands of them. Many of the threads were silver; some few shone out with the shifting colours of an unlikely rainbow; others were copper-coloured or black and eroded with decay.
Upon the altar lived the Cipher, a being that took no sustenance save what it absorbed from the altar itself. It had no features; no limbs, no eyes or ears, and no voice. It was vast and still, pulsing slowly from time to time, or throbbing a fast spasmodic rhythm of its own. It was changeless and ageless and formless, yet Niobe knew it to be the most powerful element of them all. It was the altar that drained the slaves of their magic while sustaining their physical forms. The threadlike tethers that connected the slaves to the altar were like umbilical chords, binding them all to the will of this place and of this dark thing.
>
FITHVAEL AND GILEAD wove their way through the structure that had no structure, aware only that they followed Niobe’s mind patterns. They looked constantly for an enemy: a beastman, a Chaos monster, even the hideously beautiful lord who Gilead had seen in his dream.
They longed to feel a weapon in their hands, something solid, real, unalterable in this nightmare place. They longed to concentrate their minds in the only truly fulfilling way they knew how; they longed to fight, to shed blood and ichor, to slash and tear and rend flesh, any flesh.
‘Where are they?’ asked Fithvael. ‘Where are the enemy hordes?’
‘My sword hand itches too,’ answered Gilead, sharply, his fingers flexing less than an inch from the hilt of his sword.
Every inch of this place reeked of evil corruption, and even taking a breath made the elves tense to screaming point.
‘Where are we?’ Fithvael asked.
‘Just follow,’ retorted Gilead, flexing his sword hand again and glaring at his companion.
WITH EVERY STEP that Gilead took, Niobe’s heart responded with a beat. And as he came closer, his feet beat faster and harder on the floors and steps and ceilings he traversed. She almost filled his mind now. He had forgotten the absent foe that Fithvael still expected at every step, and felt only Niobe. He was moving so fast that Fithvael could hardly keep pace with him without breaking into an aching run.
Niobe’s pounding heart beat ever faster and she gasped for breath, trying to pull her hands up to her chest, but having to drop lower on her knees and let her head fall to her shackled hands. In her desperation to maintain the link to him, she had tied her being to his too closely, and now there was a price to pay. Frantic to find her, Gilead was verging on a state of shadowfast. She was weak, at the limits of her endurance. Her body, her mind and her soul were racing helplessly to the rhythm he set, unable to slow down, unable even to break off the link. The mind-magic she had worked to effect her escape was killing her.
Her heart fluttered, failed. She fell.
THE VOICE FELL silent. Gilead winced at the sudden emptiness. He took a last few steps and entered a room vaster than any cathedral.
