Shadow Blizzard

by Alexey Pehov

  I crawled along about as fast as a caterpillar. But I moved! And it was better to move slowly but surely, without any fear of falling. Well … almost without any fear. I tried not to look down; below me there was nothing but blackness.

  When I’d covered a quarter of the distance, I decided I deserved a little break and I stopped, hugging the bridge with my arms and legs as if it was the most precious thing in my life. Faint currents of warm air rose up from somewhere below me, bringing the aroma of a cesspit, and the stench made my eyes water.

  I crawled forward, holding my breath until finally, I reached the opposite bank.

  * * *

  I gave another wide yawn and splashed water on my face from the flask in an attempt to drive away sleep. It didn’t help. But that was hardly surprising. More than twenty hours on my feet, virtually without any rest at all. My fatigue was making itself felt, remorselessly demanding rest and refusing to back down.

  I closed my eyes, but told myself I wouldn’t sleep … not for anything.…

  7

  THE DANCE OF THE SUNLIGHT

  I don’t know how much time went by, but I woke up suddenly, as if someone had jabbed their elbow into my side.

  The maps called the place I had reached the Eighty-Sixth Northeastern Hall of Stairways. It was a hall of onyx, and the black stone greedily devoured the light of the magic lamp, so that visibility was lousy. I couldn’t risk increasing the brightness; at this stage I had to be careful with every new light and make it last for as long as possible, so that I’d be able to reach the way out.

  I tried not to think about the fix I was in. Up on the outside, in the old life, I used to think that going down into Hrad Spein would make me part of the greatest and most dangerous adventure of the century. Only now I realized it was something far more serious than that. I couldn’t find the words to describe the way I felt about the present situation.

  Alone. Completely alone. In almost pitch darkness, going deeper and deeper, with my remaining supplies vanishing at catastrophic speed, without the Key, without any hope of getting back out through the Doors.

  What was I hoping for? Probably nothing more or less than a miracle. A Great Big Divine Miracle. Of course, the gods were just desperate to save a certain Harold; they were queuing up for the chance.

  My mood could hardly have been worse.

  Dozens of black staircases running upward or winding downward like corkscrews. No difference between the staircases at all, as if the architects had followed some strict system that I didn’t understand.

  I walked past them for a long, long time, sometimes touching the cold stone with my fingers and listening to the silence. The onyx devoured every sound. At least, that’s what I thought until I heard the scream. Although I didn’t really hear it so much as feel it. The scream didn’t last long, it broke off a second after I heard it, and it was very far away.

  I stopped and listened. Silence. After walking right through the Hall of Stairways and tramping through a few small vestibules, I reached the entrance to a hall where there was light, and quickly put out my little magical lamp.

  The entrance was every bit as tall and wide as the Doors, and once again there were two statues waiting to greet me, just like at the Hall of the Slumbering Echo. An orc on the right, an elf on the left. The orc’s double-handed sword was broken, and the Firstborn was using a stiletto to poke out his own right eye with an impassive look on his face. There was already a gaping socket where his left eye should have been. I shuddered—the huge statue, five times the height of a man, seemed alive. The sculptor had certainly been granted talent from the gods.

  The elf’s sword was still in one piece, but the weapon was lying on the floor, with its handle toward me. I chuckled—it wasn’t every day you could see an elf voluntarily discarding his weapon. But the elf had decided to keep his eyes and not stick any sharp objects into them. He had simply covered them with his hands.

  How could I possibly understand what the builders had tried to say with these statues! There was writing on the floor. I was about to walk on past, but the letters impressed into the stone slabs flared up with a gray pearly light, forcing me to take notice of them.

  At first they were orcish squiggles, then they trembled, diffused, and gathered back together as the squares, circles, and triangles used for writing by the gnomes and dwarves. A few moments later in some incredible way the gnomish scrawl rearranged itself into human letters that froze, glinting like pearls.

  Here lie the sixty-nine rulers of the House of the White Leaf, sleeping their eternal sleep. If you are a gnome, a dwarf, a man, or the child of another race and you can read these lines, we adjure you not to disturb those who guard the peace of the dead and to seek another path.

  But if you are a contemptible orc or are stubborn and refuse to listen to the voice of reason, or simply ignorant and cannot read—enter and accept the fate predetermined for you by the gods, and do not complain that you were not warned.

  The letters gleamed for a few seconds, then re-formed into orcish squiggles and faded. This was probably the first moment in Hrad Spein that I thought about just giving up and trying to find another way to the sixth level.

  I’m one of those people who usually listen to the inner voice of reason. And after all, the elves wouldn’t go and warn a traveler about danger for no particular reason, especially if you bore in mind that there hadn’t been any warning notices before any of the other traps I’d met. It would be better to err on the side of caution and not go blundering into a nest of vipers.

  To reach the main route leading to the descent to the sixth level I only had to go through a few more halls, walking straight ahead without turning off (if the maps were telling the truth, of course).

  A detour would cost me an extra day and a half of wandering through stairways, corridors, and halls, and I simply didn’t have a day and a half to spare. I was far enough behind schedule already, and the time estimates I’d given Milord Alistan weren’t worth a demon’s belch anymore.

  My stay in the Palaces of Bone really was having a very bad effect on my brain. I’d started rating the value of time above my own life. Anyway, the result was a kind of momentary blackout inside my head, and I only came round when I’d already taken twenty paces across the hall that I’d been categorically advised not to enter.

  That’s the way the most stupid mistakes in the universe are made. I didn’t do it, I didn’t want to, it just happened.

  The fear was churning inside me like the geysers on Dragon Island. And it was about to spill over at any moment.

  “Calm down, don’t panic!” an inner voice whispered to me. “Nothing terrible has happened, you can still go back. Try to keep calm. Look around!”

  At long last Valder had given me a piece of useful advice! I took several deep breaths, trying to control my breathing and the thundering drums of my heart. It was true, I had already taken twenty paces across the forbidden hall and I was still alive and well, despite the ominous warnings at the entrance. Had the elves just been trying to give me a fright? I should just take a look around and decide whether to go back or go forward.

  The hall wasn’t large (for Hrad Spein). Only the size of a jousting field. The walls were made of huge blocks of stone, each the size of a smallish carriage. The architecture was rather basic, especially bearing in mind that there were sixty-nine rulers of one of the light elves’ houses lying here.

  This hall couldn’t compare with the beauty I’d seen on the earlier levels. It was strange. Were elfin kings really buried here, or was that just another fairy tale for the gullible? There was no way to check now—the niches between the stone blocks had been walled over ages ago, and there was no way to tell just from the bones if someone was a member of a royal house or some plain, boorish peasant.

  The arrangement of the columns was totally chaotic. Three here, one there, and eight over that way. They were eight-sided, tall, and very slim—you couldn’t really hide behind one of them. But the stran
gest thing was the patches of light slowly wandering chaotically around the floor. As if there were rays of sunlight falling from the ceiling; but, naturally, there weren’t any rays and there wasn’t any sun, either.

  This was a rather strange sight, and somehow ominous, too. The hall was in semidarkness, lit only by the pale light radiating from the walls, but every column threw a dense, inky shadow, and creeping around entirely at random were about forty patches of sunlight, each one a good yard and a half across. There weren’t any bright patches to be seen where I was standing, but up ahead …

  You could call it an assembly, or a swarm. I turned toward the way out. Eight patches of sunlight had appeared out of nowhere and were blocking my way: If I wanted to leave the hall now, I would have to walk straight through them.

  I didn’t have the slightest desire to tread on something when I didn’t even know what it was, and the only thing left for me to do now was jump through them—fortunately for me there were small black areas of floor between the patches that had lined up in front of me. As if they could read my thoughts, the patches started moving and fused together into a single large blob.

  “Bastards!” I exclaimed.

  There was something about these patches of sunlight and the way they wandered about that bothered me. I even shot a crossbow bolt at one, but it just clanged against the floor and nothing happened.

  “I won’t walk on you, and that’s it. Slit my throat, but I won’t do it,” I muttered, and turned away from the door.

  I’d have to get across the hall. There had to be some pathway through!

  I stopped right at the edge of the patches and stood there. There had to be some system to this aimless wandering, some principle behind this movement, but I just couldn’t grasp it.

  They crept around with all the speed of a paralyzed mammoth. Whatever they were, they were in no hurry and they moved at their own leisure.

  Some patches decided it would be a good idea to go right, others decided to go left, some followed a diagonal from corner to corner, some went round in circles or spirals, and some followed jagged lines that only they could understand. Sometimes they crawled onto each other and for a moment fused into one big patch, then they separated again and went their own ways. But there were always fairly large gaps left between them, so if I was agile enough, I could simply run around these sluggish creepers. Here at the edge of the hall there weren’t very many of them, but the closer to the center, the more of them there were. And there was an especially large number beside some kind of heap lying about eighty yards ahead of me.

  I strained my eyes hard, but I couldn’t make out what it was lying on the floor. And then I saw something I hadn’t noticed before—the places where the patches absolutely refused to crawl.

  The shadows from the columns! They lay across the floor in long dark lines, and not a single bright patch dared to cross them.

  The shadows were little islands in the pattern of movement that covered the floor. So I had a good chance of getting through the hall if I followed them and avoided the patches of light.

  I stepped in just as soon as the next patch of light had crept past me. A long leap! Then another, and another! A halt. Two patches started moving toward me and I jumped back, almost stepping on a third one. Jump left! Jump right! Straight ahead! In three leaps I covered the distance between me and the first shadow and, once I was safe, I sighed in relief and caught my breath. Basically, it wasn’t all that complicated, the main thing was to keep your wits about you and make sure you didn’t step on a patch of light by accident.

  The eight yards of space between me and the next shadow were empty. Forward! I ran like a hare, hoping to confuse my pursuers and avoid a long chase. Sometimes I had to stop to let a patch go by, jump over two patches at once, or run in the opposite direction. My arm began to throb with pain; I couldn’t understand why.

  Either the patches realized I was skipping around between them like a drunken Doralissian, or they simply decided to have a bit of fun, but they started creeping a lot faster and more randomly, so I reached the fifth island of shadow puffing and panting. And apart from that, three times I almost blundered and only avoided stepping on a patch of “sunlight” by some miracle.

  The pain in my left arm had started systematically gnawing into my bones. I had to lean back against a column, sit down on the floor, and rummage in my little bag to find the appropriate magical elixir. During the game of leapfrog across the hall everything in the section of the bag where I kept the vials had got jumbled up.

  I swore and started sorting out the confusion. I had to stuff several unimportant vials in the pockets of my jacket—they could lie there until I found a free slot for them. It took me about two minutes to put everything back in order, and all that time the patches kept on stepping up the pace.

  The patches seemed to have gone wild, and in one place my way was blocked by an unbroken stream of them. The pain in my arm was becoming unbearable now and I had to grit my teeth. My improvised route had come to an end. From here to the middle of the hall it was only ten yards at the most, but the next haven of shadow was thirty yards away. And the space between me and it was filled with creeping patches, so many of them that I could see virtually no black areas between them. This was a real challenge! How could I get across a space like that without touching a patch of “sunlight”?

  Then I finally paid some attention to the heap lying about fifteen paces away from me. What I hadn’t been able to make out from a distance, turned out close up to be nothing other than a pile of human bodies. Balistan Pargaid’s men.

  Of course, Lafresa and Paleface didn’t happen to be among the dead. There were seven corpses lying on the floor in poses that no normal person could possibly have imagined. “Grotesque” and “unnatural” are probably the most respectful words to describe what I saw. It looked as if the dead men had all been born without any bones in their bodies. One’s neck was twisted so that the back of his head looked forward and his face looked backward. And as well as that, his elbows and knees were bent in completely the wrong directions, not at all the way that Mother Nature intended, so that he looked like a strange parody of a spider. Another dead man had simply been tied in a knot and a third had his legs woven together in a way that looked very frightening. Lots of bloody streaks across the floor indicated that death had overtaken the unfortunate fellows at different points in the hall, and then the bodies had been dragged into a single heap.

  This was bad. Very bad. As usual, Harold had got involved with something very, very nasty. The main thing now was to find out what this nasty thing was before it snipped my head off. Any information at all about the enemy would be a step toward victory.

  And then it hit me …

  “Why, you thickhead, brother Harold!” I swore, smacking myself on the forehead in annoyance.

  That was the secret of it! May the darkness crush me—those words at the entrance: “Do not disturb those who guard the peace of the dead,” meant exactly what they said. And the statues weren’t watching, they were pretending to be eyeless or blind. Blind guards, eternally watching over the peace of the elfin lords! The rhyme riddle had a line about it, but I’d managed to forget it at just the wrong moment. And it was no accident that my arm was hurting, either—I was wearing the red copper bracelet that Egrassa had given me! It was protecting me against the guards of this hall, even if the protection was painful.

  All these thoughts went rushing through my head like a storm wind. But now I didn’t know what to do—feel afraid of what might happen or feel happy that I was still alive.

  I glanced sideways at the bodies of the unfortunate men (which did nothing to raise my spirits or inspire me with optimism). Eventually I plucked up my courage, consigned the world and its mother to the Nameless One, and went dashing through the middle of the hall without even a glance at the dead bodies. I flew off to the side to avoid a patch creeping up silently from behind me, and performed a mind-boggling somersault as I tried to avoid
three patches that were advancing on me at once. The shadow stretching across the floor was only five paces away now, and I was just figuring out how to move on from there, when … When I finally I failed to spot one patch of “sunlight” and stepped on it with the very edge of the sole of my boot.

  To say that I was on a safe island in a single heartbeat is to say nothing at all. What heartbeat, may a h’san’kor take me. It was five, ten, a hundred times faster than that!

  The crossbow jumped into my hands of its own accord, the pain from the copper bracelet started smarting really badly, but I never even thought of taking off the dark elves’ amulet. It was my only defense now, the only thing that could save me from the guards watching over the remains of the dead lying in this hall. The patches of light all over the floor stopped moving, and then little golden sparks started appearing above the patch that I’d stepped into so clumsily. First one, then a dozen, then a hundred …

  The sparks appeared, hanging in the air, flashed for an instant with a blinding golden light, and then started to pulse in time with the beating of my heart! There were more and more of them, until I could already make out a vague silhouette. An instant later and there standing in front of me was a creature of gleaming gold, made up of millions of tiny little sparks.

  A Kaiyu.

  One of the elves’ greatest myths, one of the orcs’ greatest horrors.

  Two thousand years earlier, when the elves went for the orcs’ throats in the Palaces of Bone and the blood of the feuding relatives flowed like a river in the burial chambers, something happened that should never have happened.

  The orcs took their revenge by despoiling the graves of the elves, and they chose the graves of only the very noblest houses of the Black Forest, scattering the remains of the dead across the halls and leaving their bones to be mocked by the darkness. The Firstborn attacked the thing that was most important to any elf—the honor of his house and the memory of his ancestors. The elves tried to fight back by leaving guards beside the graves, they set traps and whispered spells.… But there’s an effective response to every attack, every guard gets tired sometimes, any trap can be disarmed, and any spell can be overcome with another spell.