The Black Shriving (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 2)

by Phil Tucker

  He held the blade before him. Runes of fire burned down the sword's length, demonic twins to those that smoldered along the gauntlet's edge. He knew nothing about swordplay. He would be likely to cut off his own leg should he swing the wicked thing, but that was not his goal, not his purpose.

  Fly, he commanded the demon, and felt its power envelop him like a cocoon. His feet left the ledge as he rose into the air. Heart pounding, sweating liberally, he clutched at the sword like a drowning man might a branch. Aedelbert leaped into the air as well and began to circle him with powerful beats of his wings, clearly astounded.

  A fierce joy arose within Audsley. This was the stuff of his childhood dreams. He gazed at the wonders that surrounded him, the impossibilities that he held, and gazed out over the edge and down at the distant ground. Did he dare? Grinning like a fool, terrified and exhilarated, he pointed the sword and flew out into nothingness.

  It was like nothing he could have dreamed. He flew slowly, in fits and starts, recalling that as a child he'd grown adept at reading books while walking to classes or back home, navigating streets with his nose between pages, stepping adroitly over obstacles and climbing up stairs without looking. This felt similar. Each time the bars of light around a demon began to grow vague, he would turn his attention to it and snap the bars back into vivid clarity. His hope was that with time and practice this would become an autonomous process, but for now, during his virgin voyage, he wasn't taking any chances.

  Aedelbert swooped past him, flew below, then came up on the other side, clearly enjoying himself tremendously. Audsley grinned again. The insanity of what he was doing kept broadsiding him. He was flying with his firecat – a dream come true.

  "Now I know why you've always felt so superior!" he called out. "At long last!"

  Aedelbert flew in a tight corkscrew, spinning as he tumbled down twenty yards, then flared his wings out to catch himself in a glide. Throat constricting, Audsley pointed the blade down and immediately dropped. His stomach lurched, his gorge rose, and he swung the blade back up, fighting back a scream. The bars of the cages nearly vanished, and he stopped flying, came to a hover, and established them once more. Breathing deeply, he hung in the void, terribly aware of the space beneath him.

  All Noussians learned to swim before they could walk, diving off balconies into the surging waves, exploring the sunken rooms, leaping off the sides of boats. The ocean was as much their element as the white towers. And yet Audsley had always felt a sense of awe and fear at the hidden depths that lurked beneath the waves. One of his favorite pastimes had been to swim down and then simply drift, gazing into the blackness that hid who knew what monsters and wonders in its depths. Champion divers would swim and crawl down the outside of the towers, descending hundreds of feet into the gloom, but Audsley had never dared. That darkness had seemed sanctified by mystery, inviolate. He would gaze into the abyss, but never venture down.

  Flying high above the floor below, he felt again that tightening of his stomach, that sense of being a speck of dust above the vastness of creation. It didn't matter that he could descend to the bottom now without fear. There was something still about the distances involved, the nature of flight and the magic of his ability to do so that imbued a sense of reverence in him... and fear. Pointing the sword at the far entrance tunnel, he resumed his flight. He would leave the corkscrew dives to Aedelbert.

  He had spent hours pondering how best to hunt a demon. If that calcified statue had been the demon in some state of slumber, then it stood to reason that it had chosen the top floor as its place to rest for a reason. The visuals, perhaps? The sense of superiority that came from being where it had never been allowed before to rest? But something told Audsley that the demon would not return to that great chamber of windows and rushing streams, not while it still had prey to hunt. It was possible that the demon was shadowing him, that it had remained close to their group all this time, but that didn't seem likely to Audsley; these demons were sentient, intelligent and cruel. How interested could they be in their prey while they read books for hours or slept?

  No, most likely the demon had indulged itself in other pastimes and had returned to terrorize their group when the fancy had seized it. Thus it was mostly likely out there somewhere in the remote vastness of Starkadr, engaged in demonic activity of some kind.

  What did demons do with their free time? Audsley thought of asking the three demons trapped within his mind, but shied away from engaging them in conversation; familiarity led to a lessening of fear, which in turn would lead to disaster. He would ask them when he was out of alternatives.

  Instead, he decided to visit the bowels of Starkadr, where he had read the demons were imprisoned, the engines that flew the stonecloud. If this demon had been trapped below for who knew how long before being freed, and if legions of its brothers were still trapped down there, then perhaps it would seek their company, or the company of its bitterness over how it had been treated by the Sin Casters. That, and Audsley was curious. Just what, exactly, was down there?

  He flew into the tunnel, the moaning cry of the airshaft growing stronger, and with trepidation proceeded out into its great verticality. The winds buffeted him, smacked him from side to side, and he almost panicked, almost fled back into the safety of the passage. Instead he pointed the sword down, gripping it with the gauntlet as well now, and dropped. Down he flew, feet-first, eyes wide as he swayed and buoyed from side to side, past one great side tunnel and then another. The goggles revealed the details that had been hidden before: he saw that there were massive carved bands along the walls of the airshaft beside each tunnel entrance, something between a mural and language.

  Below, he could make out the bed of cadavers. His mouth filled with a sour taste as he gazed upon them, the bodies growing larger by the second. The memory of sorting through those dead in search of Meffrid caused his gorge to rise again, but he wasted no time in swooping down over them and through the massive tunnel that led away from the air shaft.

  This passage was easily three times larger than the others, hexagonal and vast. Down here he could now hear a deep humming, as if a hundred Sigean monks were praying on the other side of a stone wall. It was a powerful, throbbing sound, textured and almost human, and it grew, if not louder, then more percussive in his chest as he followed the tunnel.

  Aedelbert glided alongside him, and Audsley felt a pang of gratitude for his presence. He'd debated insisting that Aedelbert stay behind, but in the end his own cowardice had won out.

  They flew on through the center of the huge tunnel, and Audsley's goggles allowed him to see another of Starkadr's cavernous rooms up ahead. There were no lights, which made Audsley grateful for his improved vision. Everything was lead-hued, the lack of shadows making everything appear to be without depth. Heart in this throat, he flew right up to the mouth of the tunnel and gazed out.

  Cold, metallic-tasting air swirled within the huge chamber. It was the biggest room Audsley had seen yet, big enough to dwarf all the others. Was it a mile across? Audsley couldn't tell. All of Kyferin Castle could have been housed within its expanse, with room to spare above and beyond it. It was no natural cavern, but carved and geometric, rectangular in shape, its walls segmented by the protrusion of huge columns whose bases extended out into the room like the buttresses of a cathedral. Cubes of stone the size of houses emerged from the cavern's floor in the space between these extensions, blocks of stone without windows, doors, or features.

  Audsley felt as if he'd been punched in the chest. The scope and scale boggled the mind. The moaning hum that he'd heard before was a dirge here, a continuous and plaintive call without words, steeped in sorrow and anger. It was akin to hearing a chorus of giants lamenting the death of a mythical age.

  Aedelbert chirped and landed on Audsley's shoulder, huddling close to his head as Audsley hovered, overcome. Again he found himself asking, what manner of men and women had these Sin Casters been to craft on such a scale? They must have been close to omnipo
tent to carve rock like this; the Ascendant's decision to close the Black Gate so as to cut off their source of power had not been a cunning stratagem, but the only means to even allow him to dream of taking them on.

  Audsley gulped and floated forward. The floor was perhaps a hundred yards beneath him. The stone cubes were perhaps fifty yards tall, the buttresses rising fifty yards above him. The cavern roof must have been two hundred yards above his head. How was he to find a demon in this vastness?

  He directed his flight toward the closest buttress. It was composed of the stonecloud's black rock, ten yards thick, its surface hoary with age, rippled and carved with runes. Audsley flew down and alighted on the slope. It was steep, rising at a forty-five degree angle till it met the column that protruded from the wall. The stone was damp, he saw, the footing treacherous, and he kept a firm grip on the blade in case he should fall.

  Crouching, he stared at the stones. The runes were incised deeply into the rock, the same demonic runes that had been carved above the lintels of the Portals and which decorated the objects he was wearing. Runes of confinement, runes of control. On a hunch, Audsley flew over to the edge and then down the buttress's side. Huge hexagons were carved down the rocky expanse, a honeycomb similar to the labs, but in the center of each hexagon was a lead plug. Audsley hovered in front of one, frowning at the runes carved into the lead. Then it hit him. Inside that lead plug was a demon.

  Audsley blinked and flew backwards rapidly, giving himself enough space to see the entirety of the side of the buttress. There had to be fifty massive hexagons carved into its side. Fifty demons. Heart beginning to race, he flew over and down the far side. Another fifty hexagons or so. A hundred demons per buttress. He rose up in the air and stared down the length of the huge room. Twenty buttresses per side, forty in all.

  Four thousand demons.

  Audsley's throat was parched, and he could barely breathe. The droning lament bruising the air made him want to panic. Were the demons making that sound as they powered the flight of Starkadr?

  How long Audsley hovered there, he didn't know. What a legion of demons! He recalled the journal penned by that dying librarian, the temptation she had mentioned of unleashing every demon in Starkadr so as to sweep the Ascendant's invading forces away in a tide of flame and destruction. Audsley shivered. Thank the Ascendant the Sin Casters had decided that that particular cure was worse than the disease.

  Not knowing what else to do, Audsley flew forward and slowly descended to land on one of the stone cubes. The surface was rough yet continuous, the block a single organic whole. Runes were deeply carved here. Audsley realized that he couldn't take it in this close, so he flew up a little till he could gaze down at the cube's surface in its entirety.

  There was one massive hexagon carved into the rock. A huge lead plug was sunken into its very center, easily five times the size of the ones embedded in the buttresses.

  Audsley laughed, a thin, almost hysterical sound. One demon? This cube held one demon? Oh, by the White Gate and the Seven Virtues! An archdemon, perhaps. A demon prince.

  He looked up. Some twenty cubes lined the length of the cavern. It was too much. Crying out, he turned and fled the chamber, speeding up to the hexagonal passageway and into its depths. He stopped halfway to the air shaft, flew down and alighted on the ground. He was shaking.

  Aedelbert landed on his shoulder again and licked his cheek. Audsley tried to find comfort in that, reached up and hugged his firecat awkwardly. "It's all right, Aedelbert. There's nothing to worry about. There, there. Those - those demons have been imprisoned for centuries. There's nothing to fear. They're not going to spontaneously escape all by themselves now for no reason. It's just a bit of a shock, that's all. Very natural. Very understandable. No, they're safely bound as they have always been."

  He took a deep breath and felt himself settle just a fraction. "There, there. Nothing's going to let them out. We're perfectly safely exploring amongst their - their tombs. Nothing and nobody is going to..."

  He trailed off and stared fixedly straight ahead. "Oh," he said, voice very small.

  The realization had hit him like a brick to the back of the head. Suddenly he knew exactly what the demon was doing, how it was spending its time between its bouts of terror.

  "Oh no," he whispered.

  And there was no one here to stop it but himself. No heroes, no knights, no brave and bold men of action. Just him. Audsley.

  "Oh, no," he whispered again. "Oh, no."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Tharok placed the circlet in a small chest and bound it in chain. Nok watched dubiously as Tharok placed the chest in the bottom of his pack. Shaya, grown stronger with good food and exercise, sat and watched as well, though Tharok gave her little thought.

  The next day the two tribes marched, and Tharok walked in their midst, subdued and deep in thought. Gone was the lucidity that had allowed him to leap from conclusion to conclusion like a mountain goat scaling and mastering the most formidable peaks. Gone was his ability to hold all of the disparate elements of his plans together in his mind, to rank them in order of importance and draw patterns from how they were arrayed. Instead, he felt as if he were gazing out over a sea of fog out of which arose the occasional high peak. Their bases, though, their connections, were obscured.

  The morning sunlight illuminated but did not warm. It caused the stones to glitter as if they were gems. They climbed ever higher into the narrowing Chasm Walk, attempting to reach the apex of the pass by the end of the day. There the Walk insinuated itself between two sheer cliffs before widening and dropping down toward the northern plains. Just shy of the pass was where they would break from the path and head higher yet, climbing toward the higher valleys until they finally arrived at the Shattered Temple. It was there that Tharok sent his thoughts, to that deep pocket canyon where in ancient times fires had burned without end and countless kragh had been given to the dark appetites of the medusa. He'd gazed down into the heart of the Temple once from the edge of the canyon, but not dared to descend. Tharok tried to imagine himself emerging triumphant, and failed.

  Nakrok sensed a shift in his attitude and threw some barbs in his direction. Tharok, too morose to answer, remained silent. The Crokuk warlord laughed and rode off with loud predictions of Tharok's imminent demise. The Red River kragh around Tharok looked to him for a loud and gruff rebuttal, but none was forthcoming.

  Golden Crow rode alongside him for much of the morning. They traveled together in silence, neither addressing the other, but the old shaman's presence was a tacit blessing that sent waves of reassurance throughout the Red River. All of the kragh – the warriors, the women, the children – saw Golden Crow riding his albino goat alongside their warlord, and all understood that some rift had been healed. At one point the tribes stopped to refill their supplies from a slender thread of water that cascaded roughly down the cliff face, the rock darkened by spray. Golden Crow and Tharok stood aside, watching as one by one the kragh stepped forward to refill their water skins.

  "I have not heard of the human following us," said Golden Crow at last.

  "Good," said Tharok, his voice little more than a low rumble. "I threatened his death if he did."

  "Why not kill him last night? Your kragh would have done so gladly."

  "I thought of it," said Tharok, and then he sighed, "But he had dealt honorably with me. All he did and said, he did at my request. It did not seem right to kill him for doing so."

  Golden Crow snorted. "His kind do not deserve to be treated with honor. When you find an insect in your furs, do you treat it with honor? No. You crush it."

  "Ah, well," said Tharok. "The moment has passed. I have put him behind me. Now I must find another way to win through the Grand Convocation."

  They subsided into silence again, each watching in his own way the manner in which the kragh organized themselves, jostling for rank and power even amongst the smallest clans. Tharok prodded at the problem. He couldn't cancel the Grand Co
nvocation after announcing that he would hold it. At the moment, there was no reason for anybody to attend. If anything, he would have to struggle to keep his own tribe by his side. He needed to do something incredible to draw the highland tribes, but what? It was there that his mind drew a blank.

  Golden Crow clucked his goat forward, moving into the mass of kragh with the blind assurance of a respected shaman. The kragh parted before him, and then he was gone. So much for the assistance of the spirits, thought Tharok. He turned his gaze toward the heights. One way or another, his fate would be sealed up above.

  For the first time Tharok wondered why he had discovered Ogri's body. With the circlet upon his brow, there had been no time to question; merely the next step, the next logical execution of his plan for mastery. Had he been led to Ogri's body by some fate or guiding spirit? Was he meant to be doing what he was doing now? Did that mean he was fated to succeed? He tried to derive comfort from that idea, but failed. He had been too callous in his manipulations to take comfort from it now.

  The tribes moved forward once more. Farther and farther into the heights they ascended, leaving behind the lush green trees for the scrawny pines and firs, the rocky slopes growing increasingly bare and lichen-covered. Finally Nakrok gave the signal that they stop for the evening. Tharok had been too preoccupied to think of doing so himself; it was another slight against his authority, another wasted opportunity to assert himself.

  Nok oversaw the erection of Tharok's tent, and when he was finished Shaya hurried inside. Tharok remained without, perched on a rock, chin resting on the heel of his hand, and when finally the human woman emerged and gestured for him to enter, he arose with a grunt and walked inside. It was clear that she had spent some effort in arranging his sheepskins, cushions and braziers to pleasing effect. She watched him anxiously for a sign of approval, and when he gave none but sat to haul off his boots, he noticed her shoulders slump.