Will Power wh-2

by A. J. Hartley

  “Even so,” said the officer, a little sheepishly, “I really must insist that. .”

  “Mr. Hawthorne has a rare blood disorder,” said Renthrette, to everyone’s surprise. “He must eat on the hour, or he is likely to collapse.”

  I nearly did. My mouth fell open and I began to burble something, but she kept going:

  “His feeding time is long overdue, and the only way to keep him awake is to keep him moving. Come on, William, stir yourself up and down a little.”

  I gave her a wide-eyed look. She stared at me and said, “You must keep your blood flowing, William. Keep those legs moving.”

  She slapped at my thighs and, in slow disbelief, I began to hop lightly from one foot to the other as she seemed to be suggesting.

  “That’s right,” she commended. “A little higher. Now,” she said to the soldiers, “I promise I’ll take him back as soon as he is fed, all right?”

  The officer hesitated and glanced awkwardly at his men. I continued to dance about, executing some bizarre form of jig, while trying to look as if this was perfectly normal. I flicked my heels up behind me, now humming to give myself something to cavort to. The soldier watched me for another moment and then nodded silently. We set off immediately down the passage, Renthrette marching swiftly, I reeling off some lunatic country dance.

  As soon as we were round the corner I began walking normally. I growled at Renthrette, “And what the hell was that supposed to be?”

  “I thought that was rather good,” she remarked, without looking at me. “You know, inventive.” She shot me a sly smile and I frowned at her.

  “ ‘His feeding time’?” I muttered. “What am I, some kind of sideshow ape?”

  “William Hawthorne in a sideshow?” she remarked archly. “No, you’re strictly a main stage attraction.”

  “But still an ape,” I added.

  “A pretty smart one,” she said, grudgingly.

  “Thanks. Where are these bloody kitchens?” I muttered.

  We rounded a corner, chose a door, moved quickly down a narrower passage that ran around a small, cloistered herb garden where the air was cold and fragrant, and passed through an arch into a broad room floored with ceramic tile and dry with the heat of ovens. In one vast hearth a woman was stewing cabbage, and the scent, sour and slightly metallic, hit us like a large animal. Several others went on with their chopping and skinning and whatever else they did in this hellish place to ruin whatever food came near them. No one paid any attention to us at all.

  It didn’t take us long to find the cellars. There was a narrow flight of steps down into a bricked arch with a heavy door whose paint was black and flaking. There was no keyhole and the bolt was clumsy and ill-fitting. We opened it and descended.

  I had been shown a plan of the palace cellarage, but it was several generations out of date and no one knew exactly what it would look like today. The Stehnites were pretty sure their enemy didn’t know about the secret means of egress from the city, but pretty sure wasn’t absolutely sure, so we would have to be alert for guards, though we hadn’t seen any in the kitchens or the lower chambers so far.

  The area below the kitchen had once held an extensive wine store, but the wine had long since been used or thrown away. The Arak Drül did not replenish, I had been assured; they merely consumed. There were a few shelves of salted pork, some bags of white flour, and several barrels of the thin, flavorless yellow beer they made, but otherwise the place seemed empty. There were alcoves and cupboards with shelves, stone cold chests, and a meat locker with hooks, but little of it looked used. You could imagine the place fragrant with cheeses, hanging with sausages, and piled high with bottles of rich and flavorful wines and barrels of hearty ale, but the palace’s new inhabitants apparently ate merely to stay alive. With me, I thought dryly, it was rather the other way round.

  Renthrette watched me as I paced around the dank and freezing cellar. “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?”

  “Where is this passage?”

  “I’m looking for it, aren’t I?”

  “It looks to me like you’re thinking about food.”

  I gave her a shocked look. “You misjudge me,” I lied. “Give me a hand with this. My ape strength seems to be failing me.”

  Between us we shifted a large-but empty and partly rotten-cabinet. One of its doors flapped open as we lifted it, twisting its corroded hinges till it was barely hanging on. Setting the piece of furniture down we found a large hatchway where it had stood. This was latched but not locked, and it opened upward with a long, high-pitched creak. Renthrette lit her lamp and the cellar flared with leaping orange tongues before settling down to an amber glow.

  “It’s just a stone cistern for cold storage,” Renthrette whispered, beginning to lose patience. It had, after all, been minutes since she’d killed anything.

  I climbed in and looked around, stretching to take the lamp from her. By its light, a rusted iron grill shone dully in the corner of the floor. The shaft beneath it looked like a drain of some sort, but it was quite dry.

  “I think this is it,” I said.

  “You think?” said Renthrette, dropping easily in through the hatch and peering at the grate.

  “See any other possibilities?”

  “Not here.”

  “Then this must be it.”

  The grill was held in place by heavy nails driven into a timber frame. We hadn’t brought tools, so I squatted down beside it, wondering how we were going to move it and smelling the cold, damp air that drifted out of the shaft. Renthrette nudged me aside and planted her boot squarely in the center of the grate. She pushed and it bent noticeably, scattering red flakes of iron into the hole beneath. Leaning on my shoulder she stomped at it twice more, until I hushed her, sure that someone would be attracted to the noise. We waited, holding our breath and looking at each other. Then, without warning, she did it again, and this time her foot went straight through.

  Two bars of the thin metal had snapped clean out, and several more had buckled enough that they could be bent out of the way. Renthrette went first and I lowered myself awkwardly into the shaft after her, her hands closing about my waist, drawing me down toward her in ways far less erotic than they sound.

  “Drop,” she said. “It’s only a couple of feet.”

  I did so and she braced me against the impact embarrassingly.

  “I’m fine,” I spluttered. “You don’t have to heave me around like a child, you know.”

  “I was just trying to help,” she said, affronted.

  “Don’t. Now where the hell are we?”

  We were in a passage. The shaft we had just dropped through had been alarmingly narrow and I had had visions of crawling, as we had done through the cistern drain at the Falcon’s Nest. But this was quite different. Once in the tunnel proper, we were able to walk upright and side by side. The lamp showed the same carved buttresses and gargoyle ornaments that we had seen elsewhere in the city, but here you could see the goblin heads that had been smashed elsewhere. The ancient kings or tribe leaders of Stehnmarch stood proud, though strange to our eyes, and noble. Renthrette lifted the lamp and gazed at them.

  “So it’s true,” she said, her voice hushed. “They were here first. The ‘fair folk,’ Sorrail. . It’s all been a lie.”

  “I hate to say I told you so but. .”

  “No, you don’t,” said Renthrette. “You love it. And to be precise you never told me so at all.”

  “I implied it,” I said. “I was skeptical.”

  “You always are.”

  “Thank you,” I said, smiling and bowing slightly as if she had paid me the highest compliment. Renthrette was moving off down the passage, however, staring at everything except me, and didn’t notice.

  The passage was straight and there were no doors or corridors leading off it, so we made rapid progress in what felt like a slow turning and descending spiral. The flint underfoot seemed newly cut and showed little sign of wear, but patch
es of dark moss clung to all the surfaces and water dropped from the arched ceiling in places and coursed in rivulets down the walls. It seemed to be getting colder as we progressed, and in minutes I was catching sight of tiny icicles gleaming in the lamplight like quartz.

  Then came a staircase, broad and steep, and at its foot, a round chamber, with relief carvings on its walls showing the Stehnites laying out their dead. There was a single door leading out of this chamber and I stopped Renthrette before she opened it.

  She gave me an impatiently inquiring look.

  “Did you look at the carvings?” I said.

  “No. This is hardly the time for artistic appreciation.”

  “They’re funeral engravings,” I said.

  “So?”

  “This is a burial chamber.”

  “I thought you said this was an escape route from the city,” she said.

  “That was its secondary function, yes, but it was also where they brought the bodies of their rulers and dignitaries.”

  “So?” she parroted.

  “So we are about to enter an underground graveyard, a mausoleum. I thought you should know.”

  “You said,” she said, unmoved, and in truth I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. I suppose I thought we should somehow feel a sense of respect for those who had died, but since we had recently been doing our best to kill their successors, that didn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe I wanted her to feel guilty like me.

  She pressed the handle until it clicked dully, then she pulled the heavy door, its timbers dragging, wide open. Inside, though the tunnel was about the same size as the one we’d just come through, it seemed tighter, more restricted. The air had a dusty staleness that you could smell through the damp, and where the walls had formerly been plain, they were now lined with doors, each no more than a few feet square and set at waist height. They were made of some hard, reddish lumber designed to resist decay, though few had after all these centuries. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of them, and where the portal timbers had crumbled or been eaten away by worms, you could see the black, arched hollows where the corpses lay.

  The place smelled of death. Not death like in a butcher’s shop, all caked blood and internal organs, or the stench of decay like a rat left out in the sun, but ancient and forgotten like the world the people buried here had inhabited. It smelled of age and all the time that had gone by since their passing. Some of the bodies had monuments carved into their sepulchers and the corridor around them swelled into a kind of vault, others were marked only by a line of indecipherable script. We inched along the passage, Renthrette, for all her earlier casualness, slowing as if awed by a sense of dread or sadness. And around us, stacked and arrayed in their decayed finery, lay the dead.

  The tunnel ended abruptly in a tight spiral staircase that wound upward.

  “We must have missed it,” I said, suddenly afraid for reasons I couldn’t say. I began to bustle about in the low and shifting lamplight, scanning the various tombs with growing alarm. “It must be here,” I muttered into the stillness. “We must have passed it.”

  “What are we looking for?” said Renthrette, calm and quiet.

  “A mausoleum with a figure of a warrior carved into a pillar: life-size. Tough to miss, you’d think.”

  “We’ve seen a lot of tombs.”

  “But have we seen that tomb?” I hissed, my patience beginning to strain. The place-the silent and forgotten passage with its corpses arranged rank upon rank-was beginning to get to me.

  “How would I know?” she returned.

  “Brilliant,” I remarked. “So we’re stuck here.”

  “If worse comes to worst we’ll go back the way we came,” Renthrette answered with a reasonableness that sounded labored. It was getting to her, too, however much she pretended otherwise.

  “What if we can’t?” I barked. It suddenly seemed more likely that we would be locked in, that we would be entombed here forever. The idea chilled me to the bone.

  “We have to get out,” said Renthrette, urgent.

  “We can’t,” I replied, suddenly quite sure. “We’re going to be walled up with the dead. We’ll never get out. . ”

  “Stop it, Will,” said Renthrette, slapping her hands over her ears. “Don’t say that. There’s something trying to stop us, distracting us. The dead are confusing us.”

  For a moment I thought she was right, but then it hit me.

  “No,” I said, suddenly clear and moving away from her. “It’s not the dead. But something is trying to stop us. We must keep looking.”

  “Why must you?” said a voice.

  I turned hurriedly and found myself looking at Garnet. He was coming down the corridor toward us, armed for battle. Renthrette ran to meet him.

  “Garnet! Thank God,” she cried. “We have to let Lisha and the others in. I’ll explain it all later.”

  “I already know,” he said, smiling. “I have spoken to them and they sent me to you. Come back this way.”

  He started to move back the way we had come, and Renthrette took a step toward him.

  “No!” I shouted. “Renthrette, wait. That’s not your brother.”

  She shot him a quick look and then called back to me, half laughing as she did so. “Of course it is. Who else could it be?”

  “Look at him closely,” I answered, walking quickly toward them. “Make sure.”

  She glanced at him, but only for a second. “Of course it’s him,” she said.

  “Come,” he said, extending his hand to her.

  “No!” I bellowed, breaking into a run.

  She took his offered hand and he began to draw her back and up. She moved with him, easily, and as she turned from me, I had the distinct impression that she had forgotten my presence utterly. I called after them, but they did not turn or answer. I ran and, rounding a corner, saw where a black hollow had appeared in the rock wall: a tomb door, gaping open. Only yards from it, Garnet and Renthrette paced arm in arm. The oil lamp lay shattered and sputtering on the ground and Renthrette’s posture seemed limp, as if she were drunk.

  The tomb they now stood before was little more than a vertical coffin carved into the rock. To my horror, Garnet slid his back against the wall and into the recess, drawing Renthrette after him. I shouted and flung myself at them. Garnet’s free hand caught my wrist, but now I saw it for what it was: a fleshless, bony claw.

  It began to pull me in.

  I tried to tear it away but some greater strength was guiding it, giving power to its dusty, fleshless bones, and in moments we were all three pulled in a horrible embrace into the tomb. The corpse which had taken on Garnet’s form released Renthrette, whose eyes were cloudy and sightless, and used that free hand to reach for the stone slab which was the sarcophagus lid. I kicked and flailed as best I could but the skeleton hand now had me firmly by the shoulder and its grip was like a vise. Renthrette was muttering to herself like one on the edge of sleep, and the door, the great stone slab that would entomb us, was shutting out the light. I stopped fighting, knowing that since Renthrette’s illusion was giving the thing power, only she could stop it.

  I called her name. “Look at him, Renthrette!” I cried. “Look at your brother.”

  Her eyelids flickered and opened for a second. They rested on the skull beside her face and she smiled.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Garnet. Now rest.”

  “No,” I shouted, as the tomb door inched further across the opening, “it isn’t him. He’s different.”

  “No,” she murmured, her eyes still shut. “No.”

  “How did he find us?” I tried, desperate now. “How did he know we were here? He says he spoke to Lisha: Where? When? How could he have found them and why would he have gone looking? He didn’t know they were here. Lisha is outside the city and couldn’t have come to him. He must be lying. Renthrette, it’s not your brother. Look.”

  Her eyelids rippled again and confusion crossed her forehead as the last of the lamplight was close
d out of the tomb. In the last second before the darkness took us, her eyes opened all the way; she saw the hollow eye sockets, yellow and gnawed by rats; and she screamed.

  In that instant the grip which seized me broke, the finger bones shattered, and the tomb door quavered and fell slowly into the passageway, crashing full length and breaking upon the flint floor with a deafening roar that seemed to resound through the earth. I staggered out after it, gasping the air, and Renthrette followed, shrieking and brushing at the torn limb which had encircled her. The rest of the corpse seemed to stand for a second and then tumbled in pieces, many of the bones turning to powder before they hit the ground.

  Renthrette sank back against the opposite wall, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth and her eyes fixed on the empty tomb. She was wheezing, rather than sobbing.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It wasn’t him.”

  For a while she said nothing, so I sat down beside her and slipped my arm around her shoulders. I had, after all, seen this little trick before. She didn’t rebuff me, or react at all, for that matter. She just sat there, breathing heavily and biting into the back of her wrist till the print of her teeth showed bone white.

  “What was it doing?” she asked.

  There were lots of possible answers to this, some of which I preferred not to consider, so I kept it simple. “Trying to stop us.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re about to fulfill a prophecy,” I said. “But we’d better be quick. If he, whatever that thing in the library is, has sensed us here, he’ll be sending troops. We have to find that passage.”

  I helped her up. She could have rested a while longer, but I dared not risk it. We moved back down the passage to where the largest tombs were. The lamp oil was still burning in a pool on the floor, but we couldn’t carry it with us and visibility at the far end was almost nil.

  “This is impossible,” I said. “How could we have missed it?”

  “What’s that?” said Renthrette.

  I followed her gaze steeply upward and my heart stopped. High above the other tombs was a figure, armored and crouching, ready to pounce. I took a step back, but the warrior didn’t move and, now that I got a second look at it, it seemed unlikely that it would.