“If that’s what it takes,” she agreed finally. She’d taken a life once already. And she knew she could do so again, if the situation called for it.
Quin seemed mollified. “Good. But I’m still going first. Count to twenty then follow me. At the first sign of any trouble, don’t wait. Just run.”
Naia nodded as a creeping white fog stole over them. Quin turned and walked into the thickening mist and was quickly shrouded from sight. The fog swallowed him whole, just as it gobbled up the rest of the world. Naia could see nothing but ubiquitous, unrelieved white. She heard his footsteps moving away from her, the sounds seeming more distant than they should.
She waited in the wan yellow glow of lamplight, counting, “One. Two. Three….” The lamp itself made the slightest hissing noise, almost inaudible, like the final gasp from a dying throat.
On twenty, Naia started after him. Her feet crunched on crispy snow that yielded beneath her weight, the noise strangely muffled by the fog. She couldn’t see the cottage up ahead, so she walked to where she imagined it would be. When the wooden planks of steps appeared in front of her, she felt relieved.
Across a porch made of roughly hewn boards, the cottage door was cracked open already. Naia pushed it open the rest of the way and slipped within. The interior was musty and dark. It had a dusty, abandoned feel. The floorboards creaked beneath her weight. The chill of winter lingered even here inside the cabin. The cold was relentless, going on forever.
Naia glanced around and saw Quin standing in a liquid pool of magelight. There was no one else in the one-room hovel. Only a bed and a table with a bench. A cupboard stuffed with plates and bowls was shoved into a corner. But no people.
A lantern sat on the table, uncorrupted by rust. Quin lit the wick with the power of his mind. By its faltering glow, he started rifling through the cupboard. He stooped down, leaning far into the cabinet as Naia approached behind, surveying the goings-on.
“Is there food?”
“A little,” he said, shutting the doors and rising to his feet. He turned around, scanning the stark confines of the room. “Not much. Unless it’s stored somewhere else.” He walked over to the bed and picked up what looked like a nightshirt, holding it up in front of his face. The covers had been tidied, a patterned coverlet folded neatly at the foot. Naia ran a hand over the linen sheets. The straw of the mattress was fresh, not mildewed.
“Whoever lived here left in a hurry. They left everything behind.” He tossed the nightshirt down in the corner.
“How long ago?” Naia asked. The cottage looked like it was dozing, waiting for its family to return home. Plates and cups were set out on the table beneath a thin layer of dust.
Quin took his glove off and ran his finger along the surface of a shelf beside the bed. He held it up before his face, rubbing the dust off with his thumb.
“A couple years, I’d say.”
A spot of color caught Naia’s attention. Bending down, she retrieved a comb from off the floor. It was made of bone and painted red. Long blonde hairs wove between the teeth.
“I wonder what happened,” she whispered, setting the comb down on the table.
Quin moved behind the bed, inspecting the far corner. There, he hunkered down, prodding at something on the floor. With a grunt, he wedged open a door built right into the floorboards, exposing a flight of rickety steps leading down beneath the cottage.
Naia moved quickly to his side, bending over to see where the steps led.
“What do you see?” Quin asked.
“A root cellar, I think,” she said, taking a step down.
“Stop. Let me go first,” he insisted, moving around the opening in the floor. “I’m far more dark and rotten than anything that could possibly be lurking down there.”
Naia didn’t argue. She withdrew, letting him go ahead down the steps, following right behind. The stairs creaked and grumbled under her weight. Quin’s magelight erupted into view like hot magma spilling down. He stepped off the last stair onto the straw-strewn floor of the cellar. Drawing to a halt, he raised his hand.
It was the look on his face, more than the gesture, that stopped her short. Naia turned slowly in the direction he was looking, toward the far wall of the cellar.
Two corpses sat frozen in the corner.
Naia gasped. Not because they were dead; that didn’t bother her. What bothered her was how they had died. The agony frozen on their faces was horrific.
Naia moved past Quin, her mind already working. She knew that muscles relaxed upon death. Sometimes rigor mortis would produce facial expressions that were disturbing, but that was transient. Nothing like this. These people had died in agony and had frozen that way. The terror of their final moments was perfectly captured, perfectly preserved, never-ending.
A man and a woman, curled up in the corner, clutched tight in each other’s arms. The man’s hand was raised before his face, as if warding something off. His other arm cradled the woman against his chest. Her mouth looked stretched, her scream silent and eternal.
There were chains on both their wrists.
Naia turned away, filled with a bone-numbing sadness. She was used to the dead. There were times she preferred them to the living. But this was not such a case. Something awful had occurred here. Something hideous.
“What happened to them?” Quin asked, bending down to take a closer look at the dead man’s face. His magelight cast his shadow on the wall, long and distorted in the blood-red light.
“Hard to say,” Naia whispered. “I will need to examine them.”
With his help, they laid the stiffened cadavers out on the cellar’s earthen floor. She knelt over them, first the man, then the woman. Unbuttoning shirts, probing tissues with her mind and fingertips. There was no physical damage that she could find; all their vital organs were intact, just frozen.
Only their brains had melted.
Melted was the right word for it, she felt certain. It was as if their heads had been heated until everything inside had turned to liquid.
She tried pushing the man’s up-thrust arm back down to his side, but it refused to budge. She knew some tricks that would tame an uncooperative limb, but she was hesitant to use them. These corpses were not destined for the hereafter. She left the arm as it was and stood up, dusting off her skirt.
She said, “I can only guess it was some type of regional surge of the magic field. What’s strange is, the decomposition is not nearly as progressed as it should be. It’s as if they’ve been frozen here since death.”
“Maybe they have been,” Quin said.
Naia frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. They must have died years ago. They would have thawed out over the summers.”
“Unless summer never came.” Quin rubbed the back of his neck, his gaunt face shadowed in thought.
Naia gazed at him, mouth open. “Are you saying the winter never lifted?”
“Look around.” Quin spread his hands. “It’s supposed to be the middle of spring. I don’t see any signs of it. No thaw. No birds. No animals. It’s still the depths of winter here.”
Naia had to agree. Even here, this far to the south, spring should have taken hold by now. But the trees were still clad in white, the snow still fresh upon the ground. He was right; spring had never come to the island.
“How is that possible?”
Quin shrugged. “I don’t know. How is it possible that Malikar has no sunlight?”
“That’s different, though.”
“Not if they’re related.”
Naia supposed she’d have to give some thought to that. As Quin moved off into a corner of the cellar, she turned back to the corpses on the ground. She wished she could do something about the faces. She supposed she could. Kneeling down beside them, she rested her palm against the ghastly face of the woman. She reached out with her mind and massaged the tissues into submission. She closed their eyes, eased their gaping jaws, smoothed dead lips over teeth. With a little effort of will, she returned th
e man’s outstretched arm back to his side.
Then she left them to each other.
Quin rose from the corner of the cellar, arms laden with roots. From somewhere, he managed to work up a half-hearted grin. “At least these tubers are still good.”
Naia nodded without speaking.
“I’m in the mood for curried yams,” he called over his shoulder. “What about you?”
The meal was enjoyable, despite Naia’s reservations. The tubers, like the corpses, hadn’t gone to everlasting rot. She was even starting to grow accustomed to Quin’s peculiar style of cooking. The spices he used were good at disguising ingredients that had lasted long past their time.
After supper, Quin grew quiet, his face going solemn. He raked out the ashes in the hearth and built a fire without a word. Naia stretched out, basking in warmth and savoring the scent of wood smoke. Quin sat at the table, gazing at the lantern’s glass chimney, hands clasped on the splintery wood. She thought she knew what was troubling him. It was troubling her too.
Naia got up from the floor and moved to sit beside him on the bench. When he turned to look at her, she said, “I’m sorry about your brother. I can’t imagine what you must feel. I wish I could do more.”
Quin bowed his head.
“Braden’s dead,” he said simply. “Just like we’ll all be soon.” He shrugged. “He actually has it better than the rest of us. He’ll never have to face the repercussions of what he brought about. I suppose I spared him that.”
“You spared him?”
Quin nodded, grimacing. The lines around his eyes looked like furrows in a droughted field. “The artifact they used to execute him was my own creation. A medallion I called the Soulstone. I didn’t create it with that purpose in mind … but nevertheless…” He rose from the table and crossed the floor toward the hearth. He settled down there next to the fire, kicking off his shoes.
“You can have the bed,” he said, then said no more.
Naia reached into the pocket of her cloak, fingering the medallion on its silver band. Her mind and heart spun slowly in dizzying circles.
Naia awoke to the sound of shifting dirt.
She pushed the covers off, scrambling into her shoes and fastening her cloak. She paused long enough to look around the empty cabin. There was no sign of Quin. Only a constant scraping coming from outside. She moved to the door and, opening it, walked out into a heavy white mist that clung like sorrow over the woodland. The silence of the forest was expansive. Another grating noise came from behind her.
She turned to find Quin standing over two dark graves that looked to have been ripped right out of the snow, patting at a mound of wet earth with the blade of a shovel. He wiped his brow and looked up at her, thrusting the shovel into the ground.
Naia moved to stand beside him, staring down at the freshly turned soil. The two graves made her feel almost heartbroken. But the sight of Quin disturbed her more. He had arisen well before dawn to care for the deceased. She had neglected her duty, so he’d done her work for her. Apparently, the demon had managed to scrounge up more compassion for the dead than she’d been able to herself.
He turned toward her with eyes darkened by remorse. He even had the courtesy to remove his hat. “You’re the priestess. Why don’t you say some words?”
Naia bowed her head, thinking herself unqualified. Nevertheless, she closed her eyes and raised her hands, palms spread as if beseeching. “May these souls know the peace and blessings of the goddess.” It was a simple prayer said over simple graves. She opened her eyes and gazed down at the black scars in the snow.
“That’s it?” Quin said. “I was expecting something a bit more profound.”
Already moving away, Naia said, “I’m not a priestess anymore. And, even if I were, my temple would never condone planting the dead in the ground. There is no prayer for such a burial.”
The darkmage looked perplexed. He tugged on his hat and wrenched the shovel out of the ground. “Why bother with the Catacombs? I’ve never understood that. My people always just covered our dead in a pile of dirt. Then they used the occasion as an excuse to drink and fuck.”
“That sounds like a pagan custom,” she said dismissively, ignoring his language. Such a practice sounded blasphemous. “Such burials were never endorsed by the temple, not even a thousand years ago. The Catacombs are necessary because we believe in the resurrection of the dead at the end of times. It is our temple’s sacred duty to preserve the remains of those who are worthy.”
That got his attention. “What resurrection? How?”
Naia shrugged, knowing that she’d said too much already. “It is one of the most holy mysteries. The Book of the Dead says only that we must prepare. It does not specify why.”
Quin’s lips curled into a sneer. “Sounds like a load of mystic horseshit to me.”
Naia frowned at him. “Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it’s not going to.”
“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t happen today. We have a very long road ahead of us.” He snatched the shovel up and pitched it away from him. It speared into the snow, quivering at an angle.
They returned to the cottage and salvaged what they could. Blankets and warmer clothes were high on Naia’s list. She found a wool coat that had once belonged to the dead woman. Quin provisioned himself with a scarf and mittens, along with fur-lined boots only slightly too big for his feet. They filled their packs with provisions from the cupboards and the root cellar.
Then they started out toward the mountains, which seemed to loom much larger than they had the previous day. They walked a straight path, keeping the ice-clad forest to their right. The fog eventually burned off, the sky turning a fierce azure blue, but the sun burned cold. The isle clung tenaciously to its winter cloak, refusing to yield.
A breeze blew through the branches overhead, which swayed and crackled, showering ice crystals all around. Naia glanced at Quin. He shook the ice off his hat and squared his shoulders under his pack. A gray fog rolled in.
They walked for hours in a world silenced by gloom and powdered by white. Eventually, they reached another forlorn lamppost surrounded by a yellowed glow of light. Naia reached out, running her hand down its frozen surface, wondering at its murky glow.
“Please say it’s not just me who finds this curious?” she said to Quin. “We’re on an island where everything is either frozen or dead. So who’s left to employ a lamplighter?”
Quin gazed up at the mysterious fixture. He raised a gloved hand to his face, rubbing his eyes wearily. “Well, now that you mention it, yes, it is curious. But I’m not gullible enough to believe that these lamps are tended by anything other than magic.”
With that, the lamp guttered and went out. Then it sprang back to life.
“They’re artifacts,” he explained. “No tending required. They sense the gloom and react accordingly. It’s magelight. Not lamplight.”
Naia saw it now, the subtle difference in the quality of the light. He was right; the lamp was artificial, manufactured. He was further correct in labeling her gullible. She felt chagrinned.
“This lamppost is here for a reason,” Quin said. “It’s a marker. I think we should turn this way.”
He scraped at the snow with his boot, exposing a path that wandered away in the direction of the mountains. Naia hadn’t realized they’d walked all the way across the valley and were now so near the foothills. Towering cliffs rose before them in granite majesty, cloaked in frost and crowned by fog.
They started down a path through a grove of white-barked trees that grew in perfect rows, casting long shadows at odd angles across the snow. At last they came to a wall of precipitous cliffs. The trail they followed led toward a split in the rock face, more like a deep crack than anything else. A narrow stair led up into the crack, continuing upward hundreds of steps before disappearing in the fog.
Another lamppost marked the entrance to the jagged stair.
Quin looked at Naia and gestured at th
e marker. “It appears we’re supposed to climb.”
And climb they did. The stairs were steep and unforgiving, rising with the mountainside as the walls of the crack narrowed overhead, becoming more like a chimney. The smell of wet rock and mold lingered heavy in the air. Naia let Quin toil ahead of her, his back bent under the weight of his pack. She placed her feet carefully, nervous about her footing. The stairs were, in places, slick with ice.
Naia slipped and caught herself with her hands. Fortunately, she didn’t tumble down the mountainside. In a short span of time, the stairs were proving themselves the enemy she’d feared. Her knees ached, her lungs burned, and her back strained under the weight she carried. Still, the stairs continued relentlessly.
Ahead of her, Quin stopped and cast his pack down at his side. He planted his rear on the step ahead of her. He was breathing hard, his face flushed and beaded with sweat.
“Time to eat,” he announced.
They ate right there on the steps. Above, a frozen waterfall glistened in the shadows, made of thousands of slender icicles. When they finally started moving again, the stair seemed somehow more precipitous. More fog drew over them, darker and colder than the last.
“How much longer, do you think?” Naia asked, shivering.
“I don’t know.” Quin sighed, gazing upward with a hand on his hat.
The stairs eventually had an end. They came at last to a place where the crack in the mountain twisted around then finally wore itself out. They had reached the top of the monolith. Ahead was a sprawling display of rolling white peaks that tumbled into the distance. An imposing castle loomed before them on the crest of a hill, rich walls reflecting the sun’s rays. Light spilled from dozens of windows with a promise of welcome and warmth.
Naia felt a surge of relief upon sensing the end of their journey. She rushed toward the castle’s drawbridge, but was jerked immediately to a halt by Quin. She whirled around, trying to pry her arm out of his iron grasp.
The Complete Rhenwars Saga: An Epic Fantasy Pentalogy Page 99
