The Gates of Thelgrim

by Robbie MacNiven

  “You risked your life so Shiver and I could escape from Thelgrim,” she said. The Dunwarr scoffed.

  “Only because it gave me the best odds at the time. If all of us had been taken I’d have been the first on the executioner’s block.”

  “If the odds matter so much, then think about them here,” Astarra pressed on, refusing to give up in the face of the dwarf’s obstinacy. “The evil in this place has complete control. It can even shift and reshape the tunnels to its will. If you want to go back then fine, but you’ll be going alone, and without my runefire.”

  Raythen did his best to appear unconcerned, but the fear was visible in his eye.

  “And just what are you planning when you get back up to the fortress?” Astarra added. “You really think you’re going to get out with the whole city on a war footing? What sort of odds would you get for that?”

  Raythen glared at Astarra, then looked at Shiver, and finally, Maelwich.

  “I want a weapon,” he said.

  “You have one,” Maelwich replied, pointing to his commandeered axe.

  “A dagger suits me just as well,” he said. “Especially when it’s of elvish make, and we’re hunting demons. You seem to have plenty to spare.”

  Maelwich considered it for a moment, then issued a series of orders to her kin. Two daggers were reluctantly surrendered, one to Raythen and one to a relieved-looking Mavarin.

  “Watch your backs with that one,” Raythen added, giving the inventor a dark look. He glared back defiantly.

  “I didn’t know about any of this,” he insisted. “And it’s a mistake I’m willing to give my life to right.”

  “We’ll see,” Raythen said.

  “Enough,” Maelwich interjected, gesturing at one of her elves. “Plant the jaela here to guide us back.”

  The elf in question drew a jaela root from a pouch and knelt, burying it in the soil of the tunnel. He removed a flint and stone after, striking at it until it caught light.

  “Now,” Maelwich said, looking at Shiver. “Which way?”

  He’d been afraid she was going to ask that. He didn’t want to reach out into the dark, to seek it with the Empyrean. He took a breath and did so, tentatively. The response was immediate, a surge of hunger, a skin-crawling sense of wrongness. It permeated everything around them, but it was welling up strongest from a small tunnel directly across from the one they had entered through. The blackness there was absolute.

  “That one,” Shiver said, pointing it out. Maelwich nodded.

  “I will lead the way.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Raythen kept a tight grip on his commandeered elvish blade as Shiver led them down into the darkness. He was used to shadows – they were a thief’s friend after all – but this was different somehow. It made him feel nauseous one moment, and squirming the next, like something cold was slithering along his skin, something he couldn’t quite snatch at. There was something vile and wrong about the whole place.

  This hadn’t been part of the plan, not even close. Initially, when he had heard the alarm being sounded in the Dunwol Kenn Karnin, he’d feared his escape had already been discovered. That was when he’d run head-first into Shiver and Astarra, and a pack of deep elves no less. Being dragged into the depths with them was literally the opposite of what he wanted, especially as they had Mavarin with them. But Astarra had been persuasive – right now, he couldn’t think of an alternative. He was damned if he was going to try and work his way through some Ynfernael-tainted labyrinth alone.

  “This is unwise,” one of the elves said as they went on, a little too loudly for Raythen’s comfort. “We do not know for sure that this tunnel is taking us beneath the Black Well. The evil there could be confounding us. Or it could take us the way it took Ulthar.”

  “He’s right,” Raythen added, wondering who Ulthar was. “We don’t even know what we’re going to find down here. It could be an infestation.”

  “Those are risks we must take, Talarin,” the elven leader said to her kinsman, ignoring Raythen. “We were not expecting this opportunity, but the gods have provided. The Ynfernael must be purged wherever it is discovered, torn up like the vile cancer it is.”

  “We are with you,” Astarra said firmly. There were murmurs of agreement from the rest of the daggerband, seemingly impressed by the human’s resolve. Like all deep elves, they lived to combat the Ynfernael. It seemed Shiver wasn’t the only one who could sense its presence, nor the only one repulsed by it.

  They delved lower, the sound of their passage painfully loud in the confined space. He was sure he could hear whispers at the edge of his hearing, but whenever he focused on them they were swallowed by the dull scrape of his armor and the scuff of his boots. He cursed quietly, his heart racing. This really wasn’t what he had left Frostgate for.

  He realized the tunnel came to an end just ahead. Shiver had paused.

  “It’s here,” he murmured back to the rest of the unlikely band, his voice tight with fear and pain. “Just ahead. The shadow.”

  Raythen found himself looking at Astarra, lit by the wavering light of her runefire. Her expression was set, determined. There was a dull scrape as the elven leader drew her twin daggers.

  “Then we kill it,” she said, and without another word advanced into the cavern.

  •••

  Astarra could feel the horror of the space beyond the tunnel even before she’d fully stepped into it. It was wide but low, the jagged ceiling seeming to close like a fang-filled jaw over them. It should have comprised of simple rock and dirt, like the myriad of other subterranean caves and passages she’d passed through, but there was something off about it, something not quite right. The stone seemed to twist and writhe at the corners of her vision, as though something foul and squirming had infested it just below the surface. When she tried to focus on it though it appeared sold and unmoving. Only around the edges of her consciousness was the vileness of the Ynfernael readily visible. It made her feel ill.

  Even worse were the things already occupying the cavern, several dozen in number. Were it not for the skin-crawling unnaturalness surrounding them, she might have first mistaken some for feral animals. They were hunched over on all fours, their bodies a mixture of ridged, gleaming bone and red-raw musculature. The heads of many were distended like hellish canines, their thick jaws filled with row after row of fangs and a forked, barbed tongue.

  Others among the bestial gathering were far larger. They looked like a nightmarish meld of some massive insect and a brute-armed southern simian. Like the hound-beasts, they were skinless, composed of horrific, bare musculature and jagged, bony spines that ran like a forest of blades along their backs and forearms. Their limbs ended in vast, snapping claws, with what appeared to be distended, slavering secondary jaws set within them. No two were exactly alike, each of them twisted and mishappen in their own way.

  Everything about the gathering was loathsome and warped. They stank of fresh blood and burned stone, and the snarling of their throats and the scrape of their claws on the rock underneath filled the cavern with a cursed susurration. It almost sounded like a voice, whispering. It shook Astarra to her core. More than ever, she wanted to turn tail and run, to simply get as far from the cursed chamber and its diabolic denizens as possible. The nightmarish beasts were unlike anything she had seen before, unlike anything she’d even dared to imagine. All the stories told of the Ynfernael, in hushed tones around an Aymhelin campfire or whispered between the bunks in Greyhaven’s dorms, had done nothing to prepare her for the creatures in person.

  None of the twisted terrors were looking towards her or the daggerband as they stepped out into the cavern and illuminated its corners with her runelight. Their attention was on its center. There, a sphere of energy appeared to have split the air apart. It cascaded, about the size of a doorway, in the space just above a large mound that Astarra realized wa
s comprised of piled bones. Light spilled from it, unwholesome and sickly, its colors alternating between purple, black and red. It seemed to vibrate the very air of the cavern, its shifting hues mesmerizing the swarm of monstrosities before it.

  “Demons,” Maelwich hissed beside her. “There is already a Ynfernael portal open!”

  “Only partly open,” Shiver said as he joined them. No sooner had he done so, than he doubled over with a hiss.

  “No, not now,” Astarra pleaded, grabbing the deep elf around the shoulders. This was the worst possible scenario, to lose him to a vision right on the cusp of a chamber filled with Ynfernael beasts. She tried not to panic, but she lost her grip on him as he threw her off. When he looked up at her, his eyes were burning with copresence.

  “Get back,” Astarra advised the others, just before Shiver’s back arched, and ethereal chains blazed in to being around his throat and wrists.

  He screamed.

  •••

  “Welcome back, Shiver.”

  The voice twisted in his ear like a dagger, its ache running right through his entire body.

  “I knew you’d come back. I knew you’d want to finish what you started for me, so long ago.”

  He was walking, walking towards the sphere of pulsating, foul luminescence. The cavern had receded into nothing. She was at his side, guiding him, her bittersweet words in his ear.

  “Just a little further. A little more to give. Then it will all be over, I promise.”

  Memory or present? He couldn’t tell. It was both, and neither. He tried to fight it, tried to throw off the cloying darkness, but it hurt to do so. He knew it was too late anyway. It had stained his soul when he’d been here last, sullied it forever. No amount of penance would be enough to make him clean again, not with the blood of thousands ingrained into his every pore. There was no point in going through the pain of resistance.

  There were creatures ahead. Demons of the Ynfernael, a swarm in the making. He knew their kind, could tell their breeds apart, from snarling fleshrippers to the hulking spined threshers. All of them were filled with monstrous, insatiable hunger. All turned as he approached, the un-light of the portal rendering them as jagged, predatory silhouettes and leaving their crimson eyes glowing balefully in the darkness.

  He was aware of a presence beside him. Astarra. He could sense her life-force rather than see her directly, attuned now to her essence after the trying weeks they’d spent together. She was attempting to drag him back. Crying out in a voice that didn’t belong in his past.

  “Shiver, stop! Come back to us!”

  He couldn’t. Doing so would be a betrayal of his very self. He had been born to do this, fated to serve the Ynfernael, to serve her. The darkness had always been there, gnawing away inside him. He had to accept that.

  “The end is close, dear, sweet Shiver,” murmured the voice.

  The demons parted for him, just as they always did, slavering maws and eyes like burning coals averted. It was not reverence. It was the distain a lord would feel for his servant, a master for his slave. He did not merit their attention. He was a means to their hungry ends, nothing more.

  But Astarra, they didn’t ignore. As she tried desperately to reach out to Shiver, they rounded towards her, towards the unlikely band that had invaded the cavern. A howl went up from dozens of deformed, twisted throats.

  Shiver didn’t look back, even as he felt the stinking, chitin-plated bulk of the creatures leap into motion around him, surging past. His eyes were on the portal ahead, on the iridescent power bleeding from it. It was a raw wound, an opening into the Ynfernael, a gateway. It sang to him, reminding him of every foul deed and base killing he had overseen.

  “Just a little further,” she crooned, right beside him. “And it will all be over.”

  •••

  The demons came for them.

  “Ingatus!” Astarra roared, summoning up the flames of her runestone, balling her fury and determination into a roiling burst of fire. It engulfed the leading creatures as they leapt past Shiver, who had started to walk blindly towards the center of the cavern, bound by ethereal energies and seemingly entranced by the portal pulsating there.

  To Astarra’s horror, her runefire seemed to wash over the oncoming monsters, doing nothing to slow their loping, gibbering charge.

  “Not all fires can harm them,” Maelwich shouted to her as the daggerband darted forwards to meet the surge. That was all she had time to say – with a crash the elves met the avalanche of bony claws and fangs, the impact clapping back from the cavern’s low ceiling. The writhing of the stone had grown worse, driven into a frenzy as the bloodshed began.

  Astarra stumbled back, cursing as she reached up and tried to switch the runes in her staff. Too slow. One of the skittering hound-demons had bypassed the elves who’d swept past her and was lunging for her, letting out a keening, hungry chitter.

  With a bellow, Raythen launched her aside and met the thing’s leap. Too late to change course, the demon’s momentum carried it onto the dwarf’s borrowed dagger, the wicked point of elf-forged steel punching through its open maw and up into whatever passed for its brain, driven home by its own momentum.

  The thing let out an ugly shriek, spurting black ichor, and Astarra had to yank Raythen back in turn as she regained her own balance, the dwarf barely avoiding its thrashing, wicked claws. As it writhed, Mavarin came in from Astarra’s other side and, with a courage and litheness she hadn’t anticipated, darted in close and plunged his own dagger down vertically into the top of the thing’s elongated skull, the two blades impaling its head from front and behind. It went abruptly still.

  “Thanks,” Astarra panted, not caring that the volcanic shard atop her staff singed her hand as she unslotted it.

  “Why in Fortuna’s name is Shiver just walking in amongst them?” Raythen demanded as he planted a boot on the demon’s ridged back and, with a grunt of effort, twisted his knife free.

  “His memories,” Astarra said. “He must have been here before. He’s lost control.”

  “Why aren’t these things attacking him though?” Raythen went on, pointing after the elf. The demonic tide had parted for him as it swept past, the hulking, warped beasts closer to the rear of their charge making him seem small and frail next to them. He was still making for the portal, its iridescent energies seeming to drag him on, step by step.

  “Perhaps he’s betrayed us?” Mavarin suggested as he freed his dagger. “Maybe this was his plan all along? Lead us here as a sacrifice.”

  “I don’t think he’s the one orchestrating this,” Astarra said, pointing past Shiver. She wanted desperately to reach him, to help him wrestle through whatever dark nightmare had taken hold of him. That would be impossible while he was surrounded by the Ynfernael however, and there were more threats materializing. The last of the demons had moved from around the portal’s base, revealing two figures standing at the mound of bones it shimmered above. The twins.

  “I told you!” Mavarin exclaimed. “I told you Korri and Zorri had the shadow.”

  “That’s about the only truth you’ve spoken,” Raythen said darkly, as he ripped his dagger free and glanced at Astarra. “Ready?”

  She nodded, pushing home the smooth tanzanite atop the Deeprune. Its oceanic might filled her, the still, crushing power of the depths a counterpoint to the writhing madness of the cavern.

  Together, they threw themselves into the melee.

  •••

  Korri and Zorri stepped aside for Shiver as he made the final approach to the portal. He was only half aware of their presence. Their souls were like blots on the Empyrean, cancerous with Ynfernael energies. Their eyes were pits of impenetrable darkness. When they spoke, it was together, and more than two voices issued forth from their sneering lips.

  “She has sent you as a gift.”

  Before him, the portal ign
ited, its multi-hued energies flaring like fire. Thick wisps of what Shiver first thought was smoke ran from the flickering colors, dark and coiling. It was the shadow, he realized, bleeding from the edges of the rift. It had seeped up from this point, infecting the darkness beneath the mountain, filling it with the hunger of the Ynfernael.

  He felt that hunger now, dragging him on. It needed to be fed. It needed him.

  He began to mount the bones piled thick beneath the tear, the remains of Dunwarr and Aethyn claimed by the insidious shadows. They were a sacrifice, an offering to draw the attention of those beyond the rift. He could feel them, close now, their sickening essence so familiar.

  How many times had he done this before?

  “She has sent you as a gift,” the twins repeated from either side of him, though now it seemed as though their words issued from the portal itself, the bruised light pulsing with each syllable.

  “A thousand and one souls it would have taken, but not with you. Not with one who has tread so long upon the Aenlong, who was once a master of the Sphere of Dreams.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Raythen never liked going against the odds, and right now that seemed to be exactly what was happening.

  Maelwich’s band of deep elves were outnumbered, but they’d met the demonic guardians of the twisted cavern head-on. And Raythen found himself in the thick of it. He went low for one of the hounds as it locked its multiple jaws around the arm of a Aethyn, grappling with the elf. His commandeered dagger found its throat, hissing black ichor jetting from the wound.

  Even as it perished, it still savaged the screaming elf, bringing them both down. Raythen didn’t have a chance to drag it off – there was another coming at him.

  This time it was Mavarin who met it, grappling with it as its claws scraped the stone underfoot, drawing sparks. Raythen went for one of its three sets of eyes, punching the steel through its skull while fending off its snarling maw with the rim of his shield.

  All around them was carnage. Almost half of Maelwich’s band seemed to have fallen already, their slender armor little match for the wicked talons and jaws of the chittering demons. Maelwich herself was like a force of nature, darting from one beast to the next, her daggers like quicksilver slashing through the air, leaving a mist of ichor behind them. She seemed to be the only thing holding back the tide.