There was no other word for it – within the dead greatness all around them, people had built small homes for themselves. Huts made from scraps of wood and chunks of old, vine-carved stone huddled around tiny cookfires. The air moved and the fires burned well, which meant there had to be numerous ventilation shafts somewhere. I took deep breaths and schooled myself away from the feeling that the roof would collapse.
‘Thanks, Ren, I’ll take it from here,’ Lorican said, when we arrived at the outskirts of the village. Our guide, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, trotted off, lantern swinging jauntily through the dark. Lorican let go of me, but kept looking back every few steps as though he was afraid I would wander off. He moved through the town, anxiety in the slant of his shoulders.
I did not release Brix’s hand as we followed him, and I had no desire to wander. The people we passed were not the sort of folk you would have seen in a village on the surface, and not the sort to appreciate strangers poking around. As we made our way through the ragtag town, the paths – or I suppose they were really streets – changed from slick, bare stone to sand, sharp with pale, gritty gravel and tiny broken seashells. The huts and tents and campfires followed the curls of the streets, spiralling out from the middle of the cavern. Earth and salt hung heavy in the air, as well as a fruity, low-simmering odour that I eventually identified as sassafras tea.
‘Why do they live down here?’ Brix said.
‘To survive,’ Lorican said. ‘This is Deeptown, the closest thing to a permanent home that Erranter will ever have. Ri Dana is one of the only places we can remain – the sea means that it’s not the same as staying in one place, not an insult to the Lady of Change. Nobody owns the sea, and it’s always shifting. The caves don’t stay the same, either, as the water works on them. Deeptown is where we bring the old people, the sick, babies. Anybody who can’t run on the road or the waves. That’s why I had to promise not to let you hurt them.’ He slowed and smiled at Brix. ‘But you’re not going to hurt them, lass.’
I did see a lot of children, dashing here and there in the dark and playing some game I didn’t recognise. Now and then, high whistles burst from the adults beside the fires, and the children went quiet, scampering to stand beside their grandmothers and older siblings.
Under this uncomfortable layer of observation, we made our way to the heart of the town, where a large red pavilion stood like an empress, hung with many-coloured silk lanterns. Two armed men lounged negligently at its doorway.
‘Lorican! What’re you doing in Deeptown, then?’ said one, grinning as we approached. ‘If you’re looking for trouble, I’ve got some you could get into.’
Lorican smiled, but it was taut and didn’t quite match the guard’s easy flirtation. He pulled a small waxed parchment packet from his pocket. ‘I’m here to leave my offering for the goddess and the Lady Mother. Cinnamon from Genereth.’
‘Going mushroom hunting?’ The guard took the cinnamon and sniffed at it. ‘The tavern must be doing well. Expensive offering.’
‘The old temple,’ Lorican said, shortly.
The smile dropped from the guard’s face. ‘We haven’t even been letting people down the tunnel since you came back so bashed-up the last time. What in the hells is past the damn arch that’s worth going back for?’ The guard’s eyes fell on me, hostile. ‘I hope the outsiders are paying you enough if you’re going to push your luck like this.’
Lorican put a hand on the guard’s shoulder. ‘I’ll be all right, Cenn. This is something I have to do. See to my offering for me?’
Cenn didn’t take his eyes off me, but he put a hand over Lorican’s. ‘Aye,’ he said, gruffly. ‘Be careful.’
Lorican motioned to me and led us past the pavilion, winding between smaller tents. The lights and noise of the village faded behind us and the dark pressed close, soft, velvety, smothering. Ahead of us, a lone silhouette stood beside a single pale flame. I kept my eyes fixed on it and tried not to think about the weight of the rock above me, and how simple it would be for someone to lose the light and wander in circles while their hunger and thirst grew, forever.
I turned my head, but Brix still had a hold on me.
‘Don’t let go,’ I said, although she’d shown no signs of wanting to, yet.
The walls were narrowing down again. We stopped near the last brazier, where, rather ominously, a youth with a spear stood watching the mouth of a dank tunnel. Lorican went to a notch carved into the tunnel. A row of blackened, ancient lamps waited.
‘Don’t let anything follow you, if you come back.’ It took me a moment to place the laconic voice, but it came from the boy standing by the brazier. He looked no older than the youths I had traded spells with on the surface, but at the same time there was a weary knowledge in his face that sat on him like a weight of years.
‘I didn’t before,’ Lorican muttered. He picked up two lamps.
‘Lorican,’ I said, and had to clear my throat to get the fear out of my voice. ‘Why is everyone acting like we’re going to hunt draclings? What happened to you last time?’
He extracted lamp oil from a notch in front of him and spoke as he filled the lamps. ‘Look, what do you know about Ri Dana? The history, I mean?’
I shrugged. History has never been my strongest point; Acarius felt it was generally a litany of political events, and politics is boring. ‘I know it was built by the Daine during the conquest, seven hundred years ago,’ I said. ‘And I know it’s been destroyed and rebuilt a few times.’
‘Enough to be going on with.’ Lorican handed Brix one full lamp and kept the other, patting at his pockets as though making sure he was carrying something. ‘Ri Dana was built over a complex of caves. Apparently in olden times, they built Jaern-temples underground, made you undertake pilgrimages if you wanted to get the god’s favour, that sort of thing.’ He took a flint and steel from his pocket and lit the lamps. It required a couple of tries.
‘So I take it we are going to an antique temple in a cave,’ I said. ‘Only, you’re shaky enough that there must be some kind of peril involved.’
Brix knocked her elbow sharply into my ribs. Never have I been so clearly told to shut up. ‘What are we looking at?’ she asked Lorican.
He turned from me to her, a glint of disturbing shrewdness passing over his features. ‘It’s dark. There’s a pilgrim’s path you have to keep to. Last time I didn’t pay enough attention to that – stepped off, lost my bearings, slipped and broke my wrist. I ended up lost in the dark for two hours before Acarius found me again. And even then he didn’t get to me until the other things did. I was cut to bloody ribbons.’
‘What other things?’ I said, annoyed, massaging the place where Brix’s elbow had probably left a bruise.
Lorican avoided my eyes. ‘I don’t know the fancy wizard’s name for them. Maybe you can tell me when we see them. Come on.’
Brix said nothing as we followed Lorican. The passage was just broad enough to allow me to walk abreast of her. ‘You shouldn’t put his back up.’ Brix spoke in little more than a whisper, without moving her lips much. ‘You need him.’
‘How was I putting his back up?’ I said.
She shot me a sideways glance. ‘He’s taking a risk to help you, Gray, and you respond by implying he’s a coward. How is he supposed to feel, when you do something as childish and petty as that?’
I halted long enough to let her get between me and Lorican. She’d be safest in the middle if there was any sort of creature to worry about in this stupid tunnel, but that wasn’t really the reason. I didn’t want her to be able to see me, not even my outline. Brix didn’t know me, not really. It shouldn’t have mattered what she thought about my behaviour. She had no right to make me feel like this – mean, small, careless. Petty.
The walls of the passage looked like those of a natural cave, shaped here and there with tools. Soon the flicker of the lamps revealed ancient, flaking paintings on the stone – men standing with a silver star, a repeating image of a crystal vial full o
f red liquid and symbols in some language I didn’t understand. I wanted to stop and look at them more closely, but Lorican didn’t slow down. And then there were the glimpses of shapes at the edges of things, weird skulls on bodies with too many arms and legs.
That picture of the vial bothered me. Necromancers are the kind of folk who save blood in vials. Hells, Keir’s notes in the judge’s diary I’d stolen said that they claimed to catch souls in vials.
Which was ridiculous, of course: nobody can put their soul in a vial. Necromancers are very mortal, proved by the fact that Keir had been able to hang some twenty of them in the last year. Still, I wasn’t the Examiner General, with a troop of wizards at my back. I was just someone foolish enough to follow a bartender into the dark on the word of an old man.
For that matter, I was someone foolish enough to walk into the dark without any spells scribed.
A shiver caressed me with obscene fingers, as cold as graveyard earth. I pulled my grease pencil out of my bag and began writing on my arms as we moved.
‘What is it?’ Brix’s voice sounded loud and flat at the same time, bouncing back at us off the stone ceiling. Apparently walking in front of me didn’t hinder her from watching me. ‘What are you worried about?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, because the unlikely possibility of lingering underground death-magic would have sounded crazy. ‘No sense in being unprepared.’
She frowned back at me. Apparently, the determined cheer in my voice wasn’t better than paranoia would have been.
The light ahead of us dipped; Lorican’s hand must have been shaking again. He was standing in front of a masonry arch covered in symbols. The tunnel had ended; beyond it whispered the cool, moving air of a much larger cavern.
‘Well, brat,’ he said. ‘What do you make of this?’
I moved past him and stared at the arch. I touched one of the symbols, letting the analysis save me from the abrupt anxiety that pumped through my veins. ‘They’re archaic.’ I swallowed, and was able to push the fear out of my voice. ‘Elaborate. Decorative. But effective enough, if they were intact.’
‘Wards,’ Brix said, surprised. ‘They look like the ones in the Fenwydd temple.’
‘Right, except this one’s been chipped off, so we’ll be able to slip through.’ The remains of the symbol under my fingers had been carved by a master. It should have been pretty, but it had an unpleasant, malicious twist to it. It was hard to read. ‘It’s the kind of thing you’d use to keep people away from secrets. Or from something dangerous.’ I looked at Lorican. ‘I’m guessing it’s not anything so mundane as wyverns.’
His face was taut. ‘This is almost as far as I’ve been, and no one from Deeptown goes even this far. Beyond the arch is the main chamber, and at its centre is the temple. In places there are phosphorescent plants that give enough light to see by, but mostly it’s pitch dark. And there are things I saw when I took Acarius here that I never want to see again. Spiders and lizards made of men’s bones, stinking like death and as big as panthers.’
The hair rose on my arms. ‘You didn’t think this was worth mentioning earlier?’
He smiled, humourlessly. ‘Without the arch as proof, would you have believed me? Nobody else did, when I came back last time, covered head to toe in cuts where the creatures had clawed me. Acarius carried me out on his back. He managed to keep the worst of the creatures away from us, control them somehow. Can you do the same?’
Something cold hardened in the pit of my stomach. ‘Yes.’ I wasn’t lying and I wasn’t boasting. This was just going to be . . . complex. ‘I need a bit of time, to get the runes scribed.’ It would have to be offensive magic written on me, different than the spells I had just written on my arms.
In the darkness on the other side of the arch, something scraped against the rock.
‘Gray,’ Brix said. ‘What in the hells was that?’
A sudden burst of clicks echoed around us, as though hundreds of toenails were rasping across a stone floor.
But I knew that sound, and I knew it wasn’t toenails.
Damnation. I wasn’t going to have any time. I took a step backwards.
‘Stay behind me,’ I said.
Ten
A puff of decay wafted past me as the creature, about the size of a goat, came into view.
I had been correct; the clicking sound hadn’t come from toenails, per se. The thing’s seven legs, constructed from dry femurs and jointed like a spider’s, ended in a delicate, pointed filigree of human finger-bones. Whoever had built it was both creative and precise.
‘What is it?’ Brix wasn’t shouting, but revulsion rattled in her voice.
It was a creatlach, a necromantic bone-construct, not that I had the words to waste on explanations. A splay of ribs from multiple species formed the body, fused around a knot of vertebrae that undulated atop a ball of dull orange light. It had three skulls – one seemed to be from some kind of carnivore, a big cat, maybe – but they all had empty eye sockets. So it couldn’t see, which probably meant it navigated by sensing vibrations. If I spoke, it could find me.
I waved a hand at Brix, in what I hoped was a logical gesture for ‘silence’. I had to make the first words I said an incantation, and it had to be the correct one. Knives wouldn’t hurt this fleshless thing.
But where was the wizard? These things didn’t stay animate on their own. The creatlach’s creator had to be somewhere close in order to control it.
I glanced at Lorican, but he was digging through his pockets like a terrier after a rat. Unlikely he was the necromancer, then. Running a construct that size should have taken enough concentration to require him to at least look at the thing. Besides, I hadn’t heard him cast, and I didn’t think the story he had told me was a lie.
Maybe the thing was sentient enough to fight on its own? There’s no way to make constructs think, exactly, but the more complex ones can carry out a set of orders even when their masters aren’t near to give telepathic commands.
Brix’s foot scraped against the grit on the floor of the tunnel as she moved to stand beside me.
The creatlach skittered towards her. In a split second it was almost on top of her, two of its legs raised, stroking the air. When Brix stepped backwards, the legs snapped shut around her waist, like a shackle. She screamed and tugged at the joints, but I knew it would be of no use. Bone constructs are strong – ridiculously strong.
This one was also fast. Before I could gather myself for a leap, it yanked Brix through the gate and into the darkness.
Thank the gods that she kept screaming, because she had dropped the lamp. I moved through the gate after her as quickly as I could, pausing only long enough to scoop up the lamp, and followed the noise. The scrabble of Lorican’s boots on the stone told me he was running behind me.
My options didn’t look promising. The only incantations I had ready on my arms were lightning and flame. Both of them had to be aimed, which meant that if I used them against the creatlach, I risked hitting Brix.
A grinding crunch echoed through the cave.
I came up on the creatlach in time to see Brix kick it again, sending the lower portion of one leg flying.
I jumped. My intent was to tackle the creature, but I wound up more or less riding on top of it. I pushed myself forwards, trying to flatten it on the ground.
It tangled in its own legs, catching mine. Brix, the creatlach and I all went down together – just as I saw the creature’s nameplate: a flat piece of bone floating at the centre of the orange light, scribed with the runes that controlled it. I worked one hand towards the plate.
The thing, with whatever semblance of intelligence it possessed, had realised a second person was wrestling with it. Its skulls rotated, and the carnivorous jaws opened and snapped, inches from my face.
Brix’s fist slammed down on top of the skull, but this time her blow wasn’t so lucky. She gritted her teeth and hit it again, and the skull rotated away from me for a moment.
I scrambled
to get an arm around a couple of the legs. How in the hells could something without muscles be so strong?
One of the legs got free and jerked towards me, joints cracking. The pointed tip left a long, hot gash down my arm.
Brix was still pinned, wriggling against the limbs that circled her waist. She wasn’t screaming anymore, but her motions carried the speed of panic.
‘Help.’ I couldn’t make the word anything but a staccato burst, while the creatlach bucked under me. ‘Lorican.’ I twisted my head away from the jaws, which were still snapping towards me. Thank the gods the thing didn’t have an articulated neck. ‘Help!’
The leg tore another cut, this one across my back. I needed to kill the creatlach before the thing stabbed me. But I couldn’t let go of the legs I already had.
‘Hang on.’ Lorican circled me and the creatlach. A rain of something like pebbles flew around me.
The creatlach’s skulls rotated again as it skittered to one side, as though it was trying to chase the pebbles. I managed to grab the nameplate from beneath the skulls, wrap my fingers around it and yank.
It came away in my hand. The creatlach held together for a moment before collapsing.
I sat, panting, in the pile of disconnected bones and looked at Brix. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m not hurt,’ she said. But there was a shake in her breathing, and she kept brushing at her clothes where the monster had held her. ‘How did you kill it?’
‘I took its name away.’ I picked through the pile until I found one of the things Lorican had thrown: a largish glass bead. I held it up. ‘Vibration?’
He nodded. ‘Confuses them, or at least it did last time. Why didn’t you cast?’
‘I was busy.’ I got to my feet and turned to Brix, holding out one hand. She stared at it for a moment before grasping it and allowing me to help her to her feet.
‘Thanks, Gray.’ Her fingers lingered on mine for a split second.
Lord of Secrets Page 10
