by Dan Abnett
He stopped, his feet resting on the rock lip overlooking the abyssal vault of the immense chamber. Above, below and around him, the numberless blocks drifted in the cold, crisp darkness. He saw the miserable figures chained to each one, the living, the dead. He heard the moans and distant wails of the captives. Far away, through the litter of drifting blocks, he saw the pale flicker of the altar.
‘Niobe!’ he screamed. There was no echo. The space was dead air.
The smell had gone. The filthy stench of corruption was completely missing in this vast space. There was no smell at all. Every ounce of power was extracted from the magic slaves; nothing escaped the tethers, no smell, no energy, nothing at all.
Gilead stood hopelessly at the edge of the gulf. Fithvael came up behind him.
‘By all the gods of Ulthuan…’ stammered Fithvael. His voice was deadened too.
‘She’s here somewhere,’ Gilead stammered.
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t hear her any more.’
Gilead feared the worst. He strained to catch some trace of her. Nothing. Niobe’s voice and heartbeat had fallen silent five full minutes earlier.
‘We have to find her…’ he began.
Fithvael looked out into the space beyond them. It had no colour, no tone and no shade. There seemed to be no light sources and no shadows. He could see no walls, only sensing that they must be there beyond the thousands stacks of floating plinths that surrounded him on all sides. He looked down.
There was no floor.
‘Then we find her!’ he snarled, and leaped from the lip of the threshold onto the nearest block. It wobbled slightly as he landed. The wasted, emaciated human-thing chained to it groaned.
Fithvael bounded across to the next, casting his gaze around at the floating plinths and the beings shackled upon them. There were species and races here that he had never seen or heard of, even in legends. Each stood or knelt or crouched or lay dead on a perfect disk of floating rock. Castaways, imprisoned on tiny islands in the darkness. He had never seen so many varied sentient beings in one place, nor had he ever been in one place that was so vast, and yet so claustrophobic - and so cruel.
Filled with a sudden, consuming rage, Fithvael began to move again, leaping from one block to the next, oblivious to the drop below. He started tugging and tearing at the beings, trying to wake them. None stirred, or even seemed aware of him. When he couldn’t wake them, the old elf tried to free them. He drew his sword in a grasp that whitened his gnarled but slender knuckles and bared his teeth as he went into a frenzy of hacking and slashing at the delicate threads. He could not break a single one of them.
The sight of his friend moving from block to block galvanised Gilead Lothain. He leaped out too, over to the nearest platform, where a tethered dwarf lay curled in a foetal ball. He tried to shut out the thought in his mind.
She was already lost.
In a bound, he moved on, then again and again. Fithvael was far below him now, almost out of sight.
‘Niobe!’
Something made him look over at the body on the block below him, to the right. It was slumped and curled up tight. Long hair draped over the side of the plinth and a hand rested down one side of it. The face was grey, but he recognised it from the images in his mind.
Gilead jumped into space. He almost missed his target, but clawed at the lip and pulled himself up onto the block next to her.
Niobe took two short, gasping breaths, several seconds apart, and stirred slightly. He could hear her inner voice, distant and frail, right at the back of his mind.
Gilead bent to lift the elf maiden. She was light, almost insubstantial. He could raise her only three feet above the plinth before the tethers tightened and would not give. Gilead looked at the tiny silver threads that tied Niobe’s slender wrists together then disappeared into the plinth she had been placed upon. He took them in both of his hands in order to tear them. They felt like nothing in his hands and he looked at his open palm to reassure himself that they were there. He made a snapping motion between his hands, but the threads did not break.
‘You won’t do it,’ said Fithvael’s voice. He was perched on a block that floated above and to the left of Niobe’s. He was sharing the block with the tethered form of a young human male who sat silent and unresponsive. ‘Nothing can free these poor creatures,’ he said, gesturing around the vast space. ‘Nothing will cut those cursed tethers.’
‘No! That cannot be true!’ Gilead declared. ‘She’s alive! Very weak but alive!’
He drew his sword and wrapped the slender chords around it twice. He then flicked his weapon hard into the air, but it stopped abruptly before it had formed the elegant arc he had expected. The threads did not break.
‘I said-‘ Fithvael said, his voice dulled by the deadened space.
‘Hush!’ Gilead tried to think. There had to be a way to break the physical thread that held her mind and siphoned her magic away.
Niobe’s voice, broken and fragile, spoke in his mind. ‘Do not… cut the threads,’ it said. ‘Destroy the block.’
Gilead planted his feet squarely, shoulder width apart, and taking his sword in a two handed hold he plunged it down into the rock.
‘What are you doing?’ Fithvael called.
The blue steel of the blade bit into the block in a flurry of cold, white sparks. Gilead thrust it again. The blade began to take on the same colourless darkness as everything else in the space, and he looked down at himself for a moment. His cloak bore no red colour and the hilt of his sword was no longer gold and gleaming. The vault was draining them too.
Gilead drew a deep, sustaining breath, and Niobe’s chest rose and fell in sympathy. He struck again, and a fissure cracked across the face of the block. Shards fell away into the void.
‘In the name of Ulthuan, Gilead! You’ll fall to your death!’
‘If that’s all you can say, keep it to yourself.’
With a despairing curse, Fithvael stood up and unwound the long skein of elven cord that he carried around his waist. His practiced hands lashed it twice around his own block, moving around the motionless boy. Then he called out to Gilead and threw the loose end across to him.
Gilead caught it, nodded a curt thanks, and tied it around Niobe’s body, under her arms. Then he resumed his rock-shattering blows.
In his hands, Galeth’s blade began to take on a hint of its old colour. Gilead was weakening the power. Just here, just in this tiny place, he was cutting through the leeching cold and sparking life and colour back.
His blows became more rapid. As he became shadowfast, the blue steel of his blade shone out and the gold of its hilt became bright and iridescent.
Fithvael watched in mounting alarm, his hands around the lashed cord ready to take up the strain. Even from his vantage point, he could see Niobe’s chest fluttering and heaving like the wings of a butterfly. She convulsed in agonising spasms as her heart palpitated at a rate beyond anything Fithvael had ever witnessed. Much more and the strain would kill her.
Scraps of rock began detaching from Niobe’s splintering block and became skeins of mist, which floated away into the dead atmosphere of the chamber.
The block shattered. Niobe’s limp form pitched off the breaking rock and dropped sharply, her tethers freed from the anchor point. With a guttural cry of effort, Fithvael dug his heels in and dragged at the rope, arresting her fall in an abrupt jerk so that she swung like a pendulum beneath the block that supported him. Teeth gritted, he nearly slithered off the rock himself.
Gilead fell. He spread his arms and tumbled in the cold air, turning like a leaping salmon. He half-landed on a block forty feet below, but the impact twisted it around like an ice floe in fast moving water and he fell again.
Darkness rushed up. Then he landed, square and hard, on a blackened platform, crushing the mouldering bones tethered there.
Fithvael hauled Niobe up and onto his own block and then peered down.
‘Gilead! G
ilead!’
A moment’s silence, then Gilead’s voice floated up.
‘I’m alive. Take the maiden. Make for the doorway.’
Sparks of light flickered in the icy darkness of the vault. In freeing Niobe, they had broken a link in the magical chain, disrupting the workings of the vast arcane mechanism Lord Ire had constructed.
There was a low rumbling. Screams shuddered across the vastness as some of the enslaved beings woke up and realised their nightmares were real.
With Niobe over his shoulder, Fithvael crossed back from rocking plinth to rocking plinth, towards the doorway. He could almost smell magic now, torn, broken magic. He was breathing hard. Each leap was an effort.
He reached the solidity of the threshold and set Niobe down. She moaned softly in her sickly slumber. Fithvael looked back across the chamber. There was no sign of Gilead. The lights were still sparking in the darkness, and incandescent vapours were pouring from the altar far away.
‘Gilead?’
‘Your hand!’
Fithvael looked down and saw Gilead scaling the bruised rock face below the threshold, clinging to every scrap of purchase. He reached down and hauled Gilead up over the lip.
SWORDS DRAWN, THE old comrades made their way back through the impossible halls of the fortress. Gilead carried Niobe. Hearts in their mouths, they expected discovery at any moment, but the place seemed empty. No one barred their way.
OUTSIDE, A STORM raged, lashing the ancient forest. The elves could not deduce whether it was day or night, but the sky was mirrored black, seething with curls and blooms of cloud. Spears of lighting jabbed down at the high walls of Lord Ire’s bastion. The rain was like a veil. They staggered through it, boots mired in the filthy mud, until they found their terrified horses, tied up in the glade beyond the limits of the stronghold.
Gilead cradled the slender form of Niobe against his chest while Fithvael prepared a bed for her in the shelter of the trees. When it was done, he sought fresh herbs with which to treat her. He could find none; plants of health and healing could not grow in this place, and so he had to make do with the dried provisions he had packed some months before.
After some hours, the rain began to ease off. A pale greyness filled the sky. Fithvael lit a fire and revived the dried herbs in a little of the elven wine they kept in the single wineskin that remained from the stocks they had packed at Tor Anrok.
‘You may have killed her,’ said Fithvael.
‘Not I,’ retorted Gilead. ‘That terrible place maybe.’ He spat in disgust, the taste and smell of Lord Ire’s residence returning sharply to his mouth.
‘Indeed, Gilead te tuin,’ Fithvael placated. ‘She surely would have perished if she had stayed in that place, but I fear I should warn you that we might have… have hastened her end anyway.’
‘How so?’ asked Gilead, watching Fithvael prepare his potions in the pestle and mortar that he always kept with him.
‘The Lady Niobe sought you out and drew you to her. Her voice, you said. Like a hook in a fish’s mouth. She pulled you in, first through this miserable forest and then through the insane architecture of that palace.’
Fithvael rinsed clean rags in a little more wine and wrapped his herbal potion in them to form a poultice for Niobe’s chest before setting water to boil for a reviving infusion. He looked up at his companion. ‘You and she have become one in a profound way. Because of the link she wrought with you, your hearts beat in time, your souls overlap. What she feels you feel, and vice versa. Your actions affect her life force.’
‘And that would kill her?’ Gilead asked.
‘She’s weak, and yet her body had no choice but to mirror yours when you were shadowfast,’ answered Fithvael. ‘It may have been too much for her. I don’t know if she can survive so fierce an assault on her body.’
Gilead slumped to the ground, heedless of where he sat, and dropped his head into his hands. ‘Am I so cursed,’ he said, ‘that I lose one twin and then kill another who twins herself to me?’
Then he looked up sharply. Fithvael was amazed to see a smile on his rain-streaked face. ‘No,’ Gilead answered himself, ‘if my bond with her is so great that my strength injures her… then she has that strength to heal her too!’
Fithvael nodded at the logic. ‘Maybe-‘
‘Damn your ”maybe”, Fithvael! You know I have it right! If I am calm, restful, if I gather my strength, then by our bond she has no choice but to recover too.’
‘No choice?’ Fithvael smiled. ‘You’re going to order her back to health?’
Gilead told Fithvael what he thought of that in no uncertain terms. He rose and walked slowly and surely through the forest, making circles around the camp that Fithvael had built. He breathed steadily, made no sharp moves, and focussed upon the heart of himself. He felt strong. He was strong. He held on to that feeling and watched the day grow dim as he cast his thoughts on Niobe and tried to walk her back to health.
FITHVAEL TENDED THE limp form of the elf maiden for three days, watching over her. Gilead amazed him with his determination to play his part in the healing process. Fithvael found his old friend more eager to take sustenance regularly and exercise gently, although he could not convince the elf warrior to sleep.
By the end of the three days Gilead had almost walked himself into a trance. He tried not to think about the place they had been in or what had been done there lest it affect Niobe.
He tried to think only of Tor Anrok when it was alive with his family, when Galeth had been by his side, and his father had ruled their estate. When Fithvael had been a youthful and faithful guard. When the chamberlain Taladryel had advised and coached the twin heirs of Lothain. When Nithrom, that great elven warrior, had played at sparring with him in the courtyard. He retold the old family stories in his head, letting Niobe into the best parts of his past. He could feel her deep in some recess of his mind, listening.
As they ate by the fire at the end of the third day, Gilead suddenly heard a soft voice in his head again. He pushed away his plate and went across to where Niobe lay on a bed of bracken under his red cloak.
When she awoke, Gilead was standing guard over her. She looked up at him and smiled.
‘I know you, Gilead te tuin Lothain, last lord of Tor Anrok,’ she said and closed her eyes again.
Gilead slept that night as he had not slept in years. He slept as he had once done after a long day playing and fighting with his brother. He slept like a tired, happy boy.
It was five full days after the rescue before Niobe woke for any length of time. She ate a little, said less, and slumbered a lot, accepting the ministrations of Fithvael with grace and gratitude while watching Gilead’s every move with tired, delighted eyes.
TEN DAYS AND ten bleak nights passed without incident. Fithvael became concerned; their good fortune could not last much longer. They were in the dark heart of the Drakwald, the most dangerous and unpredictable region of the lands the humans called their Empire. Why had there been no beastmen? Why had there been no vengeful attack from the Chaos lord? The veteran elf was eager to move on and began to break camp on the morning of the eleventh day.
‘She is well enough to travel with us,’ Fithvael explained to Gilead. ‘And in this place, to travel is safer than to rest in one place for too long.’
‘Of what do you speak?’ They both glanced around in surprise at the lilting, feminine tones. Niobe was sitting up, regarding them.
‘Of leaving this place for another,’ said Fithvael. ‘It is no longer safe here for us. We have stayed as long as we should.’
‘Then it is done,’ she said, smiling and lying back. ‘Lord Ire is destroyed.’
Fithvael looked to Gilead, and Gilead shook his head and walked away. The older elf made Niobe comfortable and then followed his friend a little distance into the forest. Gilead would not say what he needed to say in front of the elf maiden.
‘Niobe called me, and I answered her call. She is released from that disgusting place and we w
ill not return.’
‘Then you will deceive her,’ answered Fithvael. ‘But she knows you, Gilead te tuin. She’s in there,’ he added, tapping Gilead’s brow. ‘If she knows you then she will find this deception out.’
Gilead shook his head. ‘If her purpose was to destroy this Lord Ire then she will be disappointed.’
‘Where are your wits, friend?’ Fithvael scoffed. ‘I thought you said you knew this maid, knew her by that intimate bond she fashioned. She did not call you for her own selfish reasons, nor would have put our lives in danger simply for the sake of her own.’
‘Meaning?’
‘She thinks you are a great hero, fool. She called you to put an end to Lord Ire for the good of all those he has enslaved! It’s as plain as a rune on a white stone! Rescuing her - only her - was not the point of this.’
THEY RODE THROUGH the morning and stopped by the shores of a dank woodland mere where bottle-green dragonflies shivered between the bone-white reeds. Niobe sat on the salt-grass, twisting old twigs into a bare garland wreath, and told her story to them at last.
Gilead barely needed to listen. The images she shared with his mind had already told the tale so vividly. Gilead felt her revulsion of Lord Ire as though it were his own; he felt her pain as she exposed the fell lord’s dark design.
‘Lord Ire, who rose to power in some unnameable domain lost to Chaos, where he rules as a demi-god over the subhuman spawn that lurk there, has long looked on this warm, lit world with envy. I think he may have been human once, many ages ago before he meddled with sorcery and forbidden necromantic lore and was cast out into the pitiless wastes of Chaos far north of here. Some vestige of that humanity remains, and it makes him yearn to possess this he left behind. He has but one purpose.’
As she spoke, pictures of the tall man with the mane of glossy hair and the grey garb came clearly into focus in Gilead’s mind. He shuddered.
‘Ire means to invade this warm world. He has marshalled great forces of destruction in his forsaken domain, raised up engines of war. He has made pacts, I believe, with the true lords of ruin, the foul daemons who fill the outer voids with their insane howling. He is their instrument. His plan pleases them and they have given him power to fashion a gateway, a gateway between this mortal world and his own diseased kingdom. But to keep the gateway open takes power, vast resources of magic.’
