“I think it’s got potential, yes,” he replied, mustering as casual a tone as he could. The inventor looked drawn, afraid.
“You d- didn’t have to do this,” he went on. Raythen ignored him. He was too busy trying to look unconcerned. His stomach was in knots and his mind was turning over in suppressed panic. He looked to his father, but there was no relief there, no comfort, only the chill indifference he’d grown up seeing every day.
The drumbeats and their accompanying chants were still ringing out. Ragnarson raised his voice to shout the appointed words over the din.
“The accused have called to be tried under the Law of the Mountain, and so have been brought to the base of the Judgement Stone. They will now bear up the weight of the mountain, rock by rock, until one admits to his crimes and recants, or one perishes. If either happens, the other shall be absolved of his transgression. We let the mountain decide!”
The chanting rose to a thundering crescendo. Mavarin and Raythen had their shackles removed and were marched by Bradha up the dais steps and onto the stone slab. Up close it was possible to see that the entire pieces were covered in Dunwarr runic script, as were the blocks on the platforms to their left and right. It spoke of the ancient rites of the Trial of the Mountain, a Dunwarr custom stretching back as far as the founding of Thelgrim itself. When two were accused and both protested their innocence, one could call upon the mountain to judge them both.
Nowadays it was considered a barbaric practice, and was rarely ever called upon. It was considered better to face a jury, or imprisonment, than risk so torturous an end. In Thelgrim, Raythen knew of a single trial involving it that had taken place when he had been growing up. Two thieves, accused of stealing the ancient and sacred recipes of the Brewers’ Guild, had turned on one another. In desperation one had called upon the mountain. The other had eventually confessed, but it was too late to save either of them. Nevertheless, it seemed the law had not been struck entirely. Raythen had been hoping as much.
“Lie,” Bradha instructed. Raythen did so, on one side of the dais, while Mavarin hesitated on the other, still standing. The drumming and the chanting had blended into one continuous thunder, a wall of sound that vibrated through him via the cold, unyielding stone at his back.
Two Dunwarr, faces covered by grim, black lacquered ancestor masks, stepped off the neighboring platforms carrying a square, flat stone slab. The drumming cut off, followed immediately by the chants. It took a long time for the last echoes to fade away. The sudden silence was as painful as the anticipation churning up inside Raythen. He forced himself to look at Mavarin, who was still standing, refusing to lie upon the grim stone. He seemed to have frozen in the midst of that awful silence, shackled as surely by terror as he was by the irons he’d worn.
He said something, though even in the stillness it wasn’t audible. Ragnarson had raised a hand to command that the trial begin, but he paused, looking pointedly at the prisoner.
“What did you just say?” he demanded.
Mavarin looked up, eyes darting from the king, to the nearer Dunwarr, then briefly looking over at Raythen who realized there were tears in the inventor’s eyes, as he spoke again, louder than before.
“I said, I was the one who stole the Hydra Shard.”
•••
The tunnels took them down into the Deeps.
From what Astarra could gather, the elves of the Aethyn clan called the passages and caves they inhabited the denwal far. They seemed to migrate between them, but according to Shiver they rarely ventured this far down. These were the deepest and least hospitable parts of the southern Dunwarrs, ancient crevasses in the mountain’s roots. They ran beneath the vast cavern where Thelgrim sat, undiscovered even by the dwarfs, known only to the elves in their legends and songs.
Maelwich was taking them into those legends, into the spaces between the rocks where no creature of flesh and blood should tread. The Aethyn had, it seemed, decided to trust their prisoners. That, or Maelwich wanted them where she could keep an eye on them. They were to accompany a daggerband to the deepest reaches of the mountains.
Astarra had made no complaint. She couldn’t deny that there was something festering in the tunnels around Thelgrim. Even unattuned to the Empyrean, she’d seen it herself, and had felt it growing ever since. She believed in Shiver’s desire to stop it. She had come too far anyway. What could she have done, begged the Aethyn to guide her back to the surface? She was too deep now, in every sense.
The party had set out from the cavern where the Aethyn had made their camp – herself, Shiver, Maelwich and fourteen warriors lead by the hatchet-faced Talarin. Most of them were carrying torches made from the fibers of the jaela root bound around the heads of long sticks. The sight of them surprised her.
“Why do you need torches when you can see well enough in the dark?” she had asked. Shiver had murmured his response as they’d started to descend through the narrow tunnels.
“What better way to fight a shadow?”
The arduous journey seemed to last an age. Astarra had to force herself along cracks in the rock barely wide enough for her to fit side-on, then crawl on all fours through tunnels she could barely fit her head and shoulders through. The elves didn’t appear to be phased by any of it, their long, lean bodies seemingly ideal for finding passage through the tightest rock formations. On several occasions she began to panic, convinced she was going to be trapped in a narrow shaft and crushed to death or left to starve. Shiver stayed with her throughout though, murmuring words of advice and encouragement to her whenever she faltered.
The memory of his stand in the upper tunnels had stayed with her. The experience of the lock had been so visceral, so immediate. She’d felt his thoughts as much as witnessed his actions – pain, anger, an overwhelming, miserable shame. For a moment she’d shared in all of them. They’d been her feelings as much as his.
She wondered whether he had felt the same. Had he experienced the frustration, rage and embarrassment that had overtaken her the night she had left Greyhaven? Now that he’d experienced it firsthand, did he know the need that drove her, the determination to prove herself?
“Wait,” Shiver whispered. Astarra came to a halt behind him, half-crouched in a low, narrow passage draped with mold lichens. She felt a spike of panic, recalling how they had stopped while first on the way to the Aethyn encampment. The fear then had been a palpable force, almost more than she could bear. Shiver seemed to sense her thoughts.
“The scout is just getting his bearings,” he murmured.
She said nothing. She couldn’t tell if he was speaking the truth, or trying to spare her.
They moved off again soon after, dropping down through a steep sloping shaft and then along a crevasse that was painfully narrow, but stretched up so far that the torchlight of the elves couldn’t pick out its roof.
As they went, she found herself thinking about Raythen. The Dunwarr should still be with them. He’d sacrificed himself so they could get away. It was the last thing she would have expected from him, but just a few days ago she couldn’t have imagined trusting Shiver either, let alone feeling empathy with him. It seemed as though she’d misjudged them both, believed in her own prejudices, or let herself be lulled by the personas they projected to guard their true selves. In that sense, she’d been as thoughtless and unthinking as Runemaster Loach when he’d scoffed at her own upbringing. The realization pained her.
What had become of Raythen? Was he even still alive? She had thought about going back to him, but she didn’t even know how she’d reach Thelgrim, let alone find and free him from the heart of the city. She hoped the fact that he was a Dunwarr would see him treated fairly, with honor. A king’s son no less. It was little wonder he’d played the careless, petty thief with them. Had he really come for the reward they’d initially been offered? Had he sensed they were walking into a trap?
Find the Shard. That
was what he’d shouted as he’d been taken. Yet here she was, delving into the deepest, darkest corner of Mennara, hunting shadows. Shiver seemed to have forgotten the Hydra. She doubted he’d ever really cared about it. He’d been following visions and hunting memories. The Shard was just a convenient excuse.
They came to another abrupt stop. She looked at Shiver, who called out softly to Maelwich and the elf at the head of the group. She didn’t understand the exchange, but she could hear the dismay in the scout’s voice.
“He has trod these paths before,” Shiver informed her. “But he does not remember this obstruction. The passage should not end here.”
“You know what that sounds like to me?” Astarra asked quietly. Shiver nodded.
“A trap,” he said.
He spoke to Maelwich again. They were ordered back along the narrow tunnel and up the rock slope, to an intersection they had taken earlier. The scout took them down another path. Astarra felt the hairs of her forearms and along the nape of her neck rise as they came to a stop once again.
“He says the tunnels have changed,” Shiver murmured to her as he listened in on a terse conversation between the scout and Maelwich. “That they have… reformed since he was last down here.”
“How is that possible?” Astarra hissed.
“It isn’t,” Shiver responded. She felt a chill come over her, and her heart began to race faster. This was almost exactly what she feared. To be trapped down in the dark, at a dead end, and shadows all around.
Before she could respond, one of the other elves standing near the head of the group cried out and pointed with his torch. Astarra followed his signal in time to see something emerging from a hairline crack in the rock face obstructing them. At first, she thought it was a serpent or some sort of great earthworm, but as it twisted and writhed, growing larger by the second, she realized it wasn’t corporeal. It was a shadow, and it did not fear the light of the jaela.
It lunged before anyone else could react, snagging around the wrist of the scout next to Maelwich. He tried to haul against it, but was dragged off balance and pulled up against the rock wall.
“Ulthar,” Maelwich shouted, a blade in each hand. She slashed at the coil of darkness snaring her kinsman, but the wicked, curved knives slipped straight through to strike off the uneven stone, drawing sparks.
Ulthar was shouting something. Astarra brought up her staff, drawing on the life-giving force of the Viridis, just as she felt Shiver tapping into his own powers, causing the temperature to plummet. Maelwich, however, was blocking the space between them and the hapless scout. She was striking in vain at the hairline split in the rock face where the darkness was pouring forth.
It billowed and surged, more exploding from cracks all along the stone. As Astarra watched, frozen with fear and horror, it took on the shape of clawed, black hands that gripped the screaming Ulthar, hauling him up off the tunnel floor and fully pinning him back on the stone.
He managed to rip one hand free, reaching out in desperation. Astarra reacted instinctively, lunging past Maelwich. She snatched hold of the elf, and found herself staring into his black eyes. They were wide with panic and terror, the whites showing.
He said a single word to her.
“Daewyl.”
Then the darkness took him. The shadow hands closed over his mouth, then his whole face. His entire body was swallowed up, his hand torn from hers with such force she thought she heard his fingers break.
And then he was gone. The darkness disappeared back into the cracks it had bled from. There was simply no sign of the elf. The rock face stared back at them blankly, solid and immutable. Even the splits the shadows had bled from seemed to have disappeared.
Astarra stared in shock. It took Shiver’s cold touch to bring her back.
“Step away from it,” he whispered urgently.
She did the opposite. She raised her staff and snarled a channeling word, lunging out with the power of the Viridis. Its essence entered the rock face, seeking the life-force it could use to tear it down, either the shoots of rock moss and weeds or the stolid spirit of the stones themselves.
Instead, all she found was darkness. It engulfed her, trapping her in a void, invading her senses. It tasted bitter, and stank of burning rock. It was full of whispers and hatred and hunger. She tried to cry out, to scream, but it choked her.
“Astarra!”
The aching cold allowed her to resurface. She gasped, stumbling, and realized she was leaning into Shiver for support. After a second, he embraced her.
“Ulthar is gone,” he murmured. “There’s nothing beyond that wall but the shadow. You were right. It’s a trap.”
Astarra prised herself from Shiver. She was shaking. The darkness had released her, but its hunger lingered, inhuman and ravenous.
“It’s down here,” she managed to say. “It’s down here, and it wants to consume us all.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Raythen and Mavarin were brought down from the dais, flanked by guards, as it was disassembled into its constituent blocks. The jury was summoned forth from the chattering crowd, and Ragnarson took up his hammer once more. If there had been any hint of relief when the stones had been hauled off earlier, there was no sign of it now.
“The council notes that the accused, Kayl Mavarin, has confessed to the crime of stealing the Hydra Shard from the Hall of the Ancestors,” he declared. “He will now submit himself to further questioning. I call upon Haldar of the Masons’ Guild.”
Haldar stepped forward from where the jury had assembled on one side of the throne. She was as stocky and square-looking as the blocks of stone she so famously fashioned. She stayed silent for a moment, clearly enjoying the attention given to her by the now-silent council, before addressing Mavarin.
“Describe how you went about stealing the Hydra Shard.”
Mavarin had gone deathly pale. Raythen had no doubt that he was regretting blurting out his confession. For his own part, it was proving difficult to keep his expression neutral. He’d been certain since meeting him that Mavarin hadn’t been telling them everything there was to know about the Hydra’s disappearance. To have actually stolen it himself though – Raythen didn’t think the beardless inventor had it in him. A part of him wondered if it was a false confession, a moment of raw panic brought on by the threat of the Trial. Fortuna knew, by the end he’d been considering it himself.
Mavarin looked from Haldar to Ragnarson, who met his gaze fiercely. He dropped his eyes and started to speak.
“I tunneled into the t- third undercroft, the family tomb of the Svenbaldars,” he murmured.
“Speak up,” Ragnarson snapped, his voice ringing back from the ceiling. A flash of anger crossed Mavarin’s face, and he looked up at Haldar, his voice raised.
“I tunneled into the Svenbaldar crypt. The third undercroft hasn’t been entered in decades. I waited there until the Hall of the Ancestors was empty, and went directly to the tomb of Holburg, where the Shard lay. I took it.”
Voices surged among the crowd – shock, outrage, denial. Raythen tried to keep his expression guarded, to not let his dismay show through, but it was difficult. He’d considered the possibility that Mavarin was as much a thief and a con-artist as he was, and dismissed it. In a way, he’d been right. Perhaps Mavarin was more of a trickster than him.
Ragnarson was beating at the anvil once more, trying to quieten the guilds as Haldar shouted over it all.
“Every part of the Hall was searched afterwards, including the undercrofts! No evidence of tunnelling was found.”
Mavarin shrugged. “I did my best to seal up the wall after me. Whoever was looking, perhaps they didn’t look very hard.”
“Are we really to believe you simply walked into the final resting place of Deeplord Holburg and plucked the Hydra from her treasure casket?” Fellin demanded. Haldar looked askance towards Ragn
arson, angry that her line of questioning was being subverted, but the king was too busy bellowing for order from the rest of the council to reprimand the errant silversmith.
“There were n-no guards,” Mavarin said. “The Hall of the Ancestors is not some musty, dead place of locked tombs. You know as well as I, Master Fellin, that the Dunwarr are free to visit the final resting places of their ancestors, to pay homage, seek guidance and hear the stories of yore. Or you would know that, if you honored the ancestors as I do. As all Dunwarr should!”
More outrage. Raythen was almost impressed. He still couldn’t tell whether anything Mavarin was saying was the truth, but he’d certainly worked his crowd. Ragnarson had actually given up with his hammer and anvil and was sitting on his throne, glaring with unblinking, withering intensity at the inventor. The hall reverberated with the Guild Council’s tumult, and Fellin had to be physically restrained by the rest of the jury.
Korri, standing amidst the accusers alongside his brother, made a curt gesture to the two captains, Svensson and Svensdottir, flanking the Throne of Tanngnoster. They began to beat their weapons against the rims of their shields, a battering rhythm that was taken up by the guards ringing the top level of the amphitheater. Slowly the uproar began to abate, until only the threat of sword and shield remained. That too was stilled by a sharp gesture by Ragnarson.
“Mistress Haldar has the floor,” he growled. “And if any of you wish this trial to continue uninterrupted, she will keep it until I say otherwise. Continue.”
Haldar, ruddy with anger, took a moment to compose herself before speaking again.
“Will the accused confirm he encountered no resistance during the perpetration of his heinous crime? While the Hall of the Ancestors is typically open to all, can he account for the absence of the Hall’s wardens or the Tomb Master who oversees it?”
“I saw n-neither,” Mavarin said. “And no, I cannot account for their absence at that particular time.”
The Gates of Thelgrim Page 21
