The Gates of Thelgrim

by Robbie MacNiven

  “Then perhaps you need this,” Maelwich said. She reached into a pouch at her side and drew out a small object, carved from bone. It was a lock.

  He felt an unexpected rush of fear. It was the same every time he found a new one. Yes, they were what he sought, a means to channel his memories. But he was never sure quite what the memories would be. All he was confident of was that they wouldn’t be good.

  “I was cautioned against giving you this,” she said. “I am no sorceress, but I can feel its power. In the stories, you use locks like these to regain your memories of the Shadow Tear and the times surrounding it.”

  She hadn’t moved to hand the lock to Shiver. He nodded. The time of the Shadow Tear had been the darkest for the deep elves, when the power of the Ynfernael had run rampant. It was the period of his enslavement, when he had been bound to the terrible will of his mistress. Just how much of a part he had played in the devastation was something he was still, tentatively piecing together. Those were the memories he sought most keenly, and also with greatest trepidation, for they revealed the darkest depths to which he had sunk.

  “The memory is not contained within the lock itself, but the magical symbolism of it is vital. Echoes of my past are contained in the Empyrean, and the lock centers me, allows me to draw them back. That is what I believe, anyway.”

  “Who forges them, and why?” Maelwich asked, turning it over in her hand.

  “That, I have not yet discovered,” Shiver admitted. “It could be the spirits themselves.”

  “Or something worse,” Maelwich said.

  “Perhaps.”

  He had considered many different possibilities down the centuries. Perhaps they were conjured by his very own conscious­ness. Regardless, they were the surest means to discovering his past. They showed him all that he had done, and that knowledge, though repulsive, was precious. He had long ago decided that the only way he could absolve himself of the evil he had enabled, would be to piece together every vile misdeed.

  “Where did you find this one?” he went on.

  “It was discovered in one of the deepling tunnels beneath the Dunwarr city, not long after the shadow had started to grow. I felt its significance, and Kalwen, our storyteller, recalled the tales about you and the arcane locks of memory. I suspected there was a connection.”

  “This shadow, you have seen it too?” Shiver asked. Maelwich still hadn’t given him the lock. He did his best not to focus on it, instead looking her in the eyes and silently repeating his mantra.

  “I have,” Maelwich said. “And it is more than just a shadow. It is death. The shadow-that-hungers. It has taken lives. Entire dagge­rbands. I fear it is stalking the clan. It means to consume us all.”

  “That is why the Aethyn are abroad?” Shiver wondered. Everything Maelwich had said seemed to have confirmed his own fears. The Ynfernael was at work here, beyond a doubt. That was bad enough, but he was now almost certain he was somehow bound to its presence as well. It filled him with fear and self-loathing, but that same self-loathing forced him to carry on. He would not falter, not when fate or the gods had delivered him into the heart of this struggle.

  “The Dunwarr know you have been more active than normal,” he went on. “Encroaching into their tunnels. They view it as an act of aggression.”

  “We are hunting,” Maelwich said. “Hunting the shadow, and being hunted by it in turn. Some believe we have tracked it down to the caverns beneath the city itself. If that is the case, no tunnel-treaty or territorial claim will stop us from seeking it out.”

  “How do you know it has spawned from under Thelgrim?”

  “That is where it is strongest, most impenetrable,” Maelwich said. “That is where I saw it myself. The tunnels there are… not as they should be.”

  Shiver was silent for a while, considering Maelwich’s words. He had thought the shadow hailed from somewhere unknown, had crawled up from a lonely crack in the bowels of the earth or had slithered down from the far north. He had not anticipated its presence beneath Thelgrim itself.

  “Why did you come here, Shiver?” Maelwich asked. The question was simple and honest, yet he found himself struggling to face it with an answer.

  “We were seeking the Hydra,” he said. “A Star of Timmoran.”

  “A fine prize for your human companion, no doubt,” Maelwich said, her eyes discerning in the half light. “But not for you. What were you promised?”

  “The locks,” Shiver admitted, gesturing to the one in Maelwich’s grasp.

  “Were you lied to?” she asked.

  “It seems so.”

  “Well, perhaps fortune wanted you to still have one,” she said. She looked down, considering the device for a moment more, then stretched out her hand over the cold flame of the jaela. Shiver hesitated, then reached out and received it.

  He felt the power as soon as it touched his palm, the redolent potency of the Empyrean confined into the carefully carved bone. He felt the fear he’d known before redouble, but twinned now with desire. It was always the same when he held one. The allure of the unknown would grow and grow, like an addiction, until he couldn’t resist sliding in the key and seeing for himself what tortured fragment of his past had been dredged up from the ether.

  “What made you stay?” Maelwich asked, watching him carefully as he stared down at the unassuming item. “When you realized your benefactor could not pay in the way you wanted. Why are you still here, wandering the denwal far?”

  “The shadow,” Shiver said. “I have… felt it before. I know its essence.”

  “I fear we all do,” Maelwich said.

  “It must be excised,” Shiver continued. “Burned away, before it can grow any stronger. Before it can spread further.”

  “I will tell the council as much,” Maelwich said. “They are not yet in agreement about what should be done with you.”

  “Does that matter?” Shiver asked. “As you said, it is your clan to lead.”

  “I said there are times to lead, and times to heed advice. I am not yet done listening.”

  Shiver inclined his head, looked for a moment more at the lock in his hand, and stood. He brushed his fingers over his eyes, an Aethyn parting gesture.

  “How will finding your memories help?” Maelwich asked, returning the gesture, but not rising.

  “They may contain knowledge about this darkness under the city,” Shiver said. “A way to fight it.”

  “I didn’t mean the shadow,” Maelwich said, looking up into his eyes. “I meant you. The stories say you seek absolution for the crimes you were forced to commit. How does reclaiming your memories help your penance? How are you atoning by collecting them?”

  Shiver smiled, a sorrowful expression.

  “I’m not. But I cannot do penance before I first know everything that I need to be penitent for.”

  •••

  Shiver returned, without a guard, to the cave that lay off from the cavern. In the darkness within he found Astarra waking, her staff scraping against the bare stone floor as she remembered where she was. There was a hiss as the flames of her runestone ignited, illuminating her drawn, worried face.

  “Rest easy,” Shiver murmured. “I am here, and no one else.”

  “You left?” she asked hoarsely, sitting up.

  “I needed to find where we stand,” Shiver said, making no effort to conceal the lock in his hand. “I ended up with more than I anticipated.”

  “They had one of your locks?” Astarra wondered. “What did they want in exchange?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Shiver admitted. “But hopefully, my help.”

  Astarra grunted something and fumbled in her pouch, drawing out her water skin and drinking from it heavily.

  “You should change the runestone,” Shiver suggested. “It is singeing our souls. The way you wield it, the power you dredge from it, y
ou have borne its fire for too long.”

  He gestured at her staff, at the cracks that were visibly starting to split the dry bone.

  “I need its light,” she said between gulps, the flame atop her staff flickering every time she drank.

  “Let us see if we can find a less costly source,” Shiver said. He crossed the cave to the far corner, where a cluster of jaela were growing.

  “Bring your fire here,” he suggested. “And touch it to the top of the jaela.”

  “You’d have me burn a cave root?” Astarra wondered, as she found her feet and joined him.

  “It is not the fungus itself that burns, only its spores,” Shiver said. “See?”

  He laid a hand on Astarra’s staff and gently guided it down to the fluted crest of the largest of the fungi. There was a small hiss as the flame took, igniting not the plant itself but the air just above it. The greenish flame flickered and danced as it took.

  Shiver felt the draining heat of the energies being given off by Astarra’s runestone. He reached up and carefully removed the channeling focal, a share of igneous rock. It burned to the touch, its runebound fire-magics anathema to his own chill abilities. It made him want to snatch his hand away, but he made himself show no reaction, giving Astarra time to remove the runebound shard itself and, after the slightest hesitation, deposit it in her pouch. Only then did he hand her the rock.

  “Are you going to open it?” Astarra said, glancing at the lock still in Shiver’s other hand.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I want to see what you see,” she replied as she removed another of her shards from her pouch. Shiver frowned despite himself.

  “I do not know if that is possible.”

  “Have you ever tried with someone else?”

  He hadn’t. He’d never even considered it.

  “Why?” he asked. “What could my memories mean to you?”

  “They would let me see the world the way you do, if only for a moment,” she said. “You speak often of trust. When we first met, my instincts told me that you were a creature of darkness.”

  “There are many kinds of darkness,” Shiver said. “And not all of them evil.”

  “I know,” Astarra continued. “And now I realize that my instincts towards you are telling me the opposite of what they did before. You have felt the touch of darkness, but you are no longer controlled by it. You walk in shadow no more. But instincts are one thing. Certain knowledge is another. I want to see.”

  Shiver held Astarra’s gaze. His immediate reaction was to deny her, to lie about it being impossible or too dangerous. Both were valid reasons, but he knew they weren’t the truth. He didn’t want her to see his past. He didn’t know what the lock would show them, and he was too afraid it would show the darkness that marred his soul.

  She looked back at him unflinchingly. She had come far with him, further than most others. There was still distrust there, fear even, but it was now twinned with a stronger curiosity. He realized there was little he could do to deny it.

  “You will have to relinquish your staff for the time being,” he said. “I do not know what variance it could create.”

  Astarra considered the proposal, then removed another of her runestones, the Viridis, and slotted it home on the cracked staff’s head. Then she moved to the wall of the cave, and propped it up, beside the smoldering jaela root.

  “Is there an incantation?” she asked as she rejoined him.

  “Not as such,” Shiver said. “Empyrean magic often doesn’t require any. It is more of an… instinctual matter. But this one does require a degree of physical contact to trigger it.”

  “You hold the key,” Astarra surmised. Shiver nodded, raising the ornate key that hung about his waist.

  “If we use it together, you may be able to experience the power of the lock second hand,” Shiver said. “This acts similarly to when you channel using your staff. Clear your mind, and use whatever incantation you normally would to bring forth the Verto Magica.”

  He held the key before the lock. Astarra grasped his hand with hers. It was warm on his icy skin. He hesitated, then fitted the key home, and turned it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Raythen looked up as the door to the Dunwol Keg creaked open. The jailer made way for not one figure, but two, the torchlight glinting in their dark eyes. They stepped in, watching Raythen the way wild beast tamers in the traveling carnival might watch an animal they suspected hadn’t yet been fully broken. Raythen grinned up at them.

  “Well, if it isn’t my father’s favorites,” he said.

  Neither Korri nor Zorri returned the expression. There was a shuddering thud as the cell door was closed and locked behind them.

  “You are choosing death,” Zorri said, his hands clasped over his long, white beard.

  “Correction,” Raythen said. “Death has already been chosen for me, by the Guild Council and, I suspect, by your good selves.”

  “That outcome is not set in stone,” Korri said. He shifted to the left as he spoke, unconsciously almost squashing Raythen’s mound of slop underfoot. He forced himself not to look at it as the advisor continued.

  “All the king desires is the return of the Hydra. He does not wish to punish you, beyond formalizing your exile.”

  “A matter we advised him to make official decades ago,” Zorri added, shifting to the other side of the cell, so that Raythen was forced to look from one to the other as they spoke, unable to keep them both in his vision at once. He realized he was instinctively glad that he had his back to the wall – he wouldn’t have been able to concentrate with even the thought of one of them behind him. He’d known plenty of criminals he wouldn’t turn his back to, but none came close to the feeling the twins gave him.

  “I find it difficult to believe my dear father doesn’t want to see me pulverized during the trial,” he said, trying to keep a hold on the conversation. “If anything, the Hydra’s loss is just a convenient excuse.”

  “The Hydra’s loss vexes every soul in this city,” Korri clarified. “But its safe recovery would go some way to healing the wounds caused by so heinous a crime.”

  Raythen scoffed. “You really think the guilds will forgive and forget if it turns up tomorrow in some Cragwarren gutter-channel? Once a full council has been removed from its box, it isn’t easily put back in. My father knows that, yet still he allowed it. Hydra Shard or not, they will want blood for this. Nothing less will sate them.”

  “That much is true,” Zorri said, the agreement catching Raythen by surprise. “But it doesn’t have to be your blood.”

  “Your accomplice, the fool named Mavarin,” Korri went on. “He has long plagued the guilds with his antics and accusations.”

  “If you were to tell us the Hydra’s location, and swear upon all the ancestors that it was Mavarin who first stole it, we have no doubt the council would commute your own death sentence,” Zorri said.

  Raythen laughed dryly, not deigning to look at either of the advisors anymore, staring straight ahead instead. He was going to show them he wasn’t afraid, of them or the Trial, even if that wasn’t true. Those were the best odds, and he always played the odds.

  “You two should know this isn’t the first time I’ve sat in some dungeon cell, awaiting judgement,” he said. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked to turn in an accomplice. Do you really think I don’t know you’ve been offering the same to Mavarin? Telling him the council would do anything to see King Ragnarson’s son on the executioner’s block? Offering to pardon him?”

  “True enough,” Korri said, seemingly unfazed by Raythen’s confidence. “But there is an important difference. Mavarin doesn’t know where the Hydra is. He is, at best, an average liar. You, however, are a far more likely candidate when it comes to locating that Star of Timmoran.”

  “Mavarin has nothing to negotiate
with,” Zorri said, taking up his brother’s words. “You do. Tell us where the Hydra Shard is, and your life will be spared.”

  “My life isn’t in danger,” Raythen said defiantly. “I will win the Trial of the Mountain.”

  That was a bluff, and a fairly obvious one. The Trial of the Mountain hadn’t been seen in Thelgrim for decades for a good reason. It consisted of a series of progressively heavier weights being laid on top of the two suspects, until one confessed or was crushed to death. If either happened, the other was immediately absolved. To call upon it was usually a last act of desperation. Raythen just hoped he was better at bluffing than Mavarin.

  “You know your survival is far from certain,” Korri said. “Even if Mavarin breaks before you, you may not survive. The mountain is indifferent when it comes to mercy, or restraint.”

  “I’ve no doubt he’s content to see me executed in a more traditional manner,” Raythen said. “Anything I can do to upset him is merely a bonus.”

  “Woe that our noble king bore so spiteful a child,” Zorri snarled. Raythen merely smiled again. Inside he was quaking with fury. All his life, the twins had been at his father’s elbow, poisoning him against his only son. They were devious creatures, the offspring of one of the old, noble houses who had fallen into disrepute and ruination when the guilds had risen to prominence and supplanted the ancient rulership of the Dunwarrs. They seemed to carry that bitterness in everything they did. His father, for whatever reason, never appeared to have realized that.

  “Tell us the location of the Shard, and you will not have to risk the grim fate that awaits you,” Korri insisted. Raythen fixed him with a glare.

  “If I learned one thing growing up, it’s that whatever you suggest, honest folk should probably do the opposite,” he said. “You are two tips of the same forked tongue.”

  “Fortunate that you are not one of those honest folk then, isn’t it, Raythen?” Zorri said, this time returning his smile. He laughed.