He sidled up to the eldest knight. “What was that all about?” he asked.
“I told him we should go first. Just in case,” Abe answered.
“I take it he said no.”
Abe let out a low moan. “He is sure there’s nothing to worry about.”
“What did Asaph say? He’s the one that told us about the guardians.”
Abe’s frown deepened. “He said there’s nothing to worry about.”
“That’s it, then.”
“I suppose.” He looked Shade in the eye, and the depth of his seriousness was worrisome. “I’m not so sure about all this.”
“Neither am I,” Shade said. “But why don’t we talk about it on the way down? We got no way of knowing how big this place is. I don’t wanna get lost.”
Abe shoved his hands in his pockets. “Meesh, come!” he shouted.
Shade looked around for his brother and found him lurking by the corner of one of the sturdy old buildings, with the girl Kamini pressed up against the wall, his hands planted firmly on her hips. “MEESH!” Abe called out again, and this time the long-haired knight pulled away from the girl and ran in an awkward, pained way toward them. His cheeks flushed red.
“Dammit, what?” Meesh said.
“We have work to do,” Abe told him, pointing toward the opened door.
The three knights crossed the threshold into the unknown.
The stairs were steep and seemed to go on forever. Faintly glowing spheres were embedded in the white-gray stone walls on either side. Cooper and his men were so far ahead that Shade couldn’t hear a trace of them. The eerie silence was only interrupted by the hollow clang that sounded each time a foot struck a stair, and the buzzing Shade had noticed once they first arrived at this strange place. He shook his head, banged on his ear, but it wouldn’t go away.
“My brothers,” Abe said, “I need to clear the air with you both.”
“Why, you fart?” Meesh blurted out, earning a glare from Abe.
Shade elbowed his younger brother in the ribs. “Go ahead.”
The eldest knight nodded appreciatively. “There’s something I haven’t told you. I’ve been having visions.”
“What kind of visions?”
“Strange ones. It’s like… snippets of something different. Almost as if reality’s shifting on me. For a few seconds, I’m looking through someone else’s eyes, thinking someone else’s thoughts. Then,” he snapped his fingers, “it’s gone.”
Shade furrowed his brow. “When did they start?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps when we camped outside Ramstable. With that song.”
“What, you’re not sure?” Meesh said, laughing. “Methinks you’re goin’ senile, old man.”
Abe glared at him again.
“Shut up, Meesh,” Shade said.
“Fine. Amble away.”
They finally reached the bottom of the stairwell, which turned at a ninety-degree angle to the right, and Shade took a moment to look back up the way they had come. The doorway was the tiniest pinprick of light to his eyes, at least a hundred feet above. That’s a long way down.
The new corridor they entered was drab, with concrete walls, but Shade couldn’t see how long it went on. The light embedded in the ceiling blazed to life directly over them, and when the brothers stepped forward, the next light clicked on above while the one behind went black. To the left, the slitted helm of another guardian stared out, making the knights jump. Shade fumbled for Rosetta, but it was unnecessary. The upper half of the guardian was bracketed to the wall, and it had no legs. As they caught their breath and moved along, they saw that there were many dismantled guardians to either side of them, each in varying degrees of disrepair, their eye slits black. That’s creepy.
Faintly, Shade heard Cooper and his men up ahead. The knights quickened their pace.
“I’m not sure what the visions mean,” Abe said, picking up where he left off. “If they mean anything at all. I think they might have been put there on purpose, to distract me from the hugest, hairiest monkey in the room.”
“Which is?” asked Meesh, eyebrow raised.
Abe’s frown deepened. “The sudden appearance of the Demon Lord, this Morningstar.”
“What about him? Er, it?”
The eldest knight rubbed his bald head as he walked. “It doesn’t add up. A powerful demon rises from the abyss and attacks Lemsberg. Now, that makes sense if you go by the prophesy Cooper keeps touting, since he’d found this supposed Spear of God and all those other artifacts from the Elders. But then he’s defeated, and he disappears for… what, a whole year? He allows Cooper to build a holy army just to fight him, then obliterates Breighton and turns all those poor people into slaves. Where did they go afterward? How do thirteen thousand walking corpses disappear without a trace?”
Shade’s throat tightened.
Meesh shrugged. “The Wasteland’s a big place.”
“True, but that’s sort of beside the point. Timing is what matters. As in, why did this powerful being, this commander of the undead, choose the point when we’d reached the banks of the Butte to attack us? If he was following us, how did he arrive so quickly? From what we saw, those walking corpses are more than a little ungainly.”
“Well, if Cooper’s prophesy really is about this Morningstar,” said Shade, “then he might’ve known about this place already. He could’ve been waiting for us.”
“Then why linger, why wait? It’s like shooting yourself in the foot just before you start a race, and the penalty for losing the race is you cease to exist. It makes no sense.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Shade replied.
“Good. All of it’s connected somehow.” He looked hard at Shade. “Even Vera coming to visit you must be part of it too.”
Shade swallowed hard. Vera’s face entered his thoughts, sinewy and rotting, teeth clacking. He shoved the image away.
“Wait, what?” Meesh said. “Who’s been coming to visit ol’ grumpy? What’re you guys not telling me?”
Shade kept mum. The light overhead went on, the one behind turned off.
“Bah! You guys suck! Keep your secrets for all I care. I’ll stay focused on the fact you’re making too much outta all this. You think it’s all connected? Well duh, of course it is!”
“How so?” asked Abe.
“Your turn to think on it, brah. Never mind, don’t wanna wait for them rusty gears to start moving.” He patted his vest pocket. “The riddle’s solved. Everything lines up, it’s all in order. We finally know who the collector is, and it’s not Cooper… it’s the guy on the other side of the river with a gazillion animated corpses. All we gotta do now is turn on that Spear thingy, then we can go the hell home.”
“We don’t have all the particulars yet,” Abe said.
Meesh grinned broadly. “Look where we are, brah. I bet your soul against mine we’ll find that eternal light down here somewhere.”
“And what happens when we do?” asked Shade.
Meesh’s lips corkscrewed. “Then we see the show.”
If that’s what we’re supposed to do, Shade thought, but didn’t say.
The brothers fell silent. The corridor they wandered down veered to the left, back to the right. The space became wide enough that the knights could walk abreast with ample space between them. A gap appeared in the ceiling, from which three thick steel pipes descended and ran the full length of the corridor, fastened with brackets, leading the way ever forward.
Shade stopped and cocked his head. Cooper had gone silent again. “Shit. I hope they didn’t turn off somewhere.”
“Well, if all else fails, follow the footprints,” cracked Meesh, gesturing to another boot-shaped marking on the otherwise pristine floor.
Abe grumbled to himself.
There was permanent lighting fifty feet farther up, where the corridor branched to the left and right. The knights stopped at the junction and examined both passageways. They were nearly identical, both made from mo
lded steel, with the exact same sequence of pipes running along the ceiling. A loud whooshing sound could be heard from somewhere overhead, and then came a cool breeze that had the same sort of odd, sweet-sour burning smell that Shade sometimes noticed in the Temple of the Crone.
“Which way?” Abe asked.
Shade squatted down in search of tracks, but of course now there weren’t any. He then noticed another certain lack of something and ran his finger along the floor, cold and smooth beneath his fingertips. He lifted his hand, inspected his pale finger pad. “Weird,” he said. “I thought this place was abandoned.”
“It’s supposed to be,” said Abe. “Why?”
“No dust.” He remained hunkered down, propped his elbows on his knees. “Why isn’t there any dust?”
“Maybe some dust-eating demon lives down here,” Meesh said, his voice echoing along both corridors.
“I wouldn’t discount it,” Shade said.
Abe stepped onto the right passage, then the left, his head cocked. “There are no prints, and I still don’t hear them,” he said. “I wonder if something happened.”
Shade stood up, closed his eyes, took a deep breath. A part of him expected Vera’s ghostly form to be standing before him when he opened them again, but all he saw was the same drab gray walls and lengths of running pipe. Vera, show me the right way. Give me a sign. If you want me to avenge you, I need your help.
Maybe we’re not supposed to be here at all…
A shrill scream cracked through the restricted confines, giving Shade a jolt. He looked frantically to his brothers, who both stared with wide eyes down the right passage.
“Oh no,” Abe muttered.
“’Course they got into trouble,” said Meesh.
Shade took a step to the side. “It might’ve been—”
The scream came again, and the knights took off at a run, Shade in the lead. The sound of their rapid footfalls was like the ricochet of Abe’s railgun. The passageway bent to the right, then plunged downward fast. Shade had to press his hand to the wall to keep from falling on his face; his palm burned from the friction.
The passage evened out, and things got stranger. Just like the area beneath the Great Pine where he had found Asaph, the floor was grated. Unlike those catwalks, however, there was no steep drop, but rooms separated by glass and steel beams on either side. The knights slowed their pace, and despite the urgency of the scream they’d heard, they gawked.
There were great banks of flashing lights in each of those rooms, along with large metal boxes containing levers and switches, some with spinning silver disks. A few rooms had chairs on wheels lined up in front of low counters. Continuous beeps and clicks created a cacophony of sound. The air was cool down here, but sweat poured down Shade’s face and saturated his beard nonetheless.
An exposed pipe above their heads bathed them in a geyser of steam. Shade waved a hand in front of his face to rid his nose of the foul stench. The steam hissed as it billowed, and then came that scream again, this time deafening. Shade backed into a railing and covered his ears with his hands. The scream had come from the pipe. The damn pipe!
“This place gets weirder and weirder,” Meesh said.
The knights moved hastily away from the noisy pipe, shaking wits back into their heads. “This is frustrating,” Abe said. The rooms and blinking lights on either side of them continued.
“I agree,” Shade said. “Just be thankful this passage hasn’t had any more turn-offs.”
“Don’t say it out loud!” Meesh cackled. “It’s bound to happen now!”
Abe rolled his eyes. “Let’s just go. Maybe they’re just up ahead.”
“If so, why can’t we hear them?”
“I haven’t a clue, brother.”
The grated floor descended once more, ending at a ten-foot-tall steel door that was so thick it felt like knocking on a boulder when Shade rapped his knuckles on it. There was barely even an echo. An iron wheel protruded from the door, and Shade grabbed it. Just like everything else down here, it was cold. He tried to spin the wheel but met resistance.
“It won’t turn,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Do we even have to?” asked Meesh.
“What’s that mean?”
The long-haired knight stepped up beside him, gently moved his hands off the wheel. “I mean, is it even locked?”
“Don’t know.”
Meesh yanked the door, neck muscles straining, and it inched open with the high-pitched whine of metal on metal. Shade stepped back, shocked at how thick the door was. It had to be a full foot deep, maybe more. That thing’s gotta be insanely heavy. When Meesh had heaved it halfway open, he huffed and grinned through a new layer of sweat.
“Ta-da,” he said.
There wasn’t a room beyond the doorway, just a vast emptiness containing a bridge that ended at a large cylindrical structure. It all seemingly floated in the middle of space. Glowing lights lined the bridge’s handrails. A brisk, cold wind blew. Shade peered up and down as his feet clanked on the grate. Unlike the caverns beneath the Great Pine, where a definitive floor and ceiling could be seen from the catwalks, here there was nothing but darkness. It seemed the bridge, the wall it emerged from, and the structure on the other side were all that existed.
Another door greeted them after they crossed the two-hundred-foot span, the twin of the one on the far side. Shade saw no hinges, assumed it opened inward, and pressed his shoulder against the door with all his might. It inched open. The sudden clamor of raised, excited voices accompanied a rush of warm air, a blinding light shone through the crack, and he heard Abe gasp. Shade squeezed his eyes shut, feet sliding along the grated bridge until the door was opened wide enough to walk through.
The Knights Eternal entered.
“See?” Meesh said. “Where beneath the soil, eternal light does shine.”
“I don’t believe it,” Abe said, slack-jawed.
“Believe it, brah.”
The room was much bigger within than it’d appeared to be from the outside—at least a hundred feet wide and fifty feet tall, the ceiling a giant swirling fan far above their heads. But the most shocking aspect of the room was its contents.
“Cooper was right,” Shade whispered. Situated in the middle of the chamber, each with its own suspended circular platform connected by tubes to the floor, were Heartcubes. There were too many for Shade to count, positioned twenty high in the center of the room, rising on all sides like the steps of a pyramid. The light they gave off was so intense that it might have been the light of creation itself.
Shade peeled his gaze away from the mountain of pulsing light, blinked away the afterimage. The walls of the chamber were lined with tall steel cabinets, huge black mirrors, and banks of blinking lights. He heard Ronan Cooper’s voice and found him off to the right, surrounded by his eight Outriders. Broad smiles painted their faces, and they wildly gesticulated toward the mass of glowing cubes. Asaph was behind them, bent over a steel shelf, his fingers dancing over lighted keys. Mindlessly, Shade walked toward the speaking men, Abe following close behind.
It didn’t seem possible, but Cooper’s smile actually grew wider when he spotted the knights’ approach. The brigand prophet spread his arms out wide. “My fellow defenders of the light!” he sang. “What I promised… has come to pass.”
Shade couldn’t help shying away from the gleaming mound of brilliance behind him. “I…” he began, but couldn’t continue.
“I didn’t think there would be this many,” Abe said for him. “There looks to be more than a thousand Cubes here.”
“Isn’t it miraculous?” Cooper exclaimed. “God has blessed us!”
For the first time since entering the cavernous room, Shade felt a moment of trepidation. He couldn’t explain it, but he couldn’t deny it either. He took a step back, screwed his lips, and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“What do we do now?” Abe asked. “Have we done what’s needed?”
Shade peere
d once again at the numerous Heartcubes. Had they done what’s needed? What had he and his brothers done at all? Other than felling the cumbersome guardians and opening the bunker door, they hadn’t done much.
“Your part’s just beginning,” Asaph stated, as if to answer Shade’s unasked question. The bald man limped away from the keys he’d been fiddling with, his eyes narrowed.
Abe cocked his head at the older man. “How so?”
“Don’t you get it, Abednego?” Asaph clapped the eldest knight on the shoulder. “This is the night we save the world. This is the night we bring tyranny to an end. And you have the largest part in that.”
“Is that right?” Meesh said with a snicker.
He nodded sharply, still looking at Abe. “It is. All you see here, all we’ve accomplished, is useless without you by our side.”
“Why’s that?” asked Shade.
Asaph smiled. “You aren’t called the Unburned without reason.”
“Right,” Cooper said, and turned to address his subordinates. “We’re underway. You eight, get to the surface. Bring the Spear of God down here. It’s time preparations get underway to rid the world of the Lord of Hell.” He faced Asaph. “You know what to do, correct?”
“Yup,” replied the bald man. “This is what I was born to do.”
“Excellent.”
“However, the process is most sensitive,” Asaph said. “I require privacy to put all the particulars in the proper order, to recite the proper incantations to make the Spear work. There can only be two others in here with me…” he pointed toward Abe, “and our good knight here must be one of them.”
“Consider it done,” said the brigand prophet. “The three of us will change the world.”
Asaph shook his head. “Not you, Ronan. Your people need you more than me. To prepare them for the glory to come. You are the messenger of the King of Kings. Is this place not named after you? You must be there to guide them.”
Asaph winked at Abe when he finished speaking. Shade didn’t know what it meant, but it gave him the chills.
“Uh… of course,” Cooper said, seeming torn. “I must be there… to lead my people.”
Soultaker Page 25
