Iyasu shuddered as hot and cold flashes raced up and down his arm, but as he blinked away the paralyzing fear of a moment ago, he realized that Jevad was no longer among them. “He’s gone,” the seer muttered. “I’m sorry.”
“Hush,” Hadara said as she leaned over him. “He doesn’t matter now. Are you all right?”
“I think so.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Rahm slammed his fist into the cold wall behind them. “That djinn killed countless good men. He deserves to die!”
“Then we will kill him later,” Hadara said loudly. “But we wouldn’t have even found him if not for these two, so their well-being is more important.”
The warrior frowned. “Yes. Yes, fine.” He turned away to pace a few steps away. The red flames dancing up and down the opposite wall were beginning to die down, but they still reached far down the passageway in both directions, lighting the way in shades of scarlet and copper.
“I’m fine, really, I’m fine.” Iyasu stood up, and for a moment he clutched Azrael’s hand as much to steady himself as to make himself feel safe in the dark tunnel, with the flames still licking the wall. “Come on. We know where to go now. We’ll be in Ramashad in no time.”
And without waiting for anyone to agree or argue, he led the way into the darkness with the only the light of the Angel of Death to guide him.
Chapter 29
The underground passage from Messenad was straight and level, and seemed to run forever through the dark, silent gloom deep beneath the desert floor. The smell of burnt oil lingered in the still air, stinging Iyasu’s nostrils. But he hurried on.
He wanted to run. He knew he was the smallest, the weakest, and the slowest of their number, and now was a moment that demanded speed if they were to have any hope of catching Jevad. But he continued to merely stride as quickly as he could, ignoring the stinging tingles in his singed right arm and his slashed eye as he went.
Maybe this tunnel will lead us straight to Ramashad.
Maybe it’s exactly what the djinn said it was.
Or maybe…
He shuffled to a halt.
“What’s wrong?” Azrael asked.
“End of the road.” Iyasu pointed where just ahead the smooth stone path broke off and only a jagged blackness remained.
“I’ll take a look,” she said, stepping around him.
“Be careful,” he whispered. “We don’t know how strong they really are, or how many there are.”
“I know.” And she stepped off the end of the road and dropped silently into the darkness, taking her light with her and plunging the rest of them into utter blindness.
Iyasu blinked in the dark and let his mind paint a clear image of the tunnel as he had seen it a moment ago. He could imagine exactly where the walls were, and exactly where the floor gave way. It wasn’t as good as seeing, but it was better than seeing nothing at all.
“Iyasu?” Rahm cleared his throat.
“Mm,” he answered as he squinted at the darkness.
“You’ve fought this djinn before, right?”
“Yes. In Maqari. Two years ago, more or less.”
“What happened exactly?”
“He killed me,” the seer said quietly. “Snapped my neck.”
“What?” Hadara inhaled sharply. “You died?”
“Nearly. But luckily, I had some good friends with me that day.”
“I’d say so,” the princess agreed.
A warm golden glow heralded Azrael’s return to them, and the angel stepped onto the path beside them with a quizzical look. “It’s a sea. A black sea of oil.”
The only way down was on angel wings, so one by one Azrael carried them from the path down through the cracked and broken chasm to the rough, sloping shores of the black sea. Iyasu prodded the oil and peered across its dark waves, but there was nothing to see but the rock walls holding the oil in the belly of the earth. The walls spread out to the north and south, fading into the distant darkness, and the roof soared above them so that only the tips of the stone spires reaching down toward the oil could be seen, like fangs hovering overhead, waiting to plunge down upon some unsuspecting prey.
“There’s no path,” Azrael said. “I looked. The walls lean over the oil. There’s no way to walk around it.”
“Then where did the djinn go?” Rahm asked.
“Over it.” Iyasu pointed west across the black waves. “He ran on the surface.”
“Well, lucky him.” The warrior leaned back against the rock wall. “What now?”
Iyasu continued to peer down at the oil, watching metallic rainbows twist and swirl across its surface by the light of the angel. He shook his head. “No idea.”
A small patter of bubbles rose to the surface about a stone’s throw away from the shore and popped, one by one. Iyasu raised an eyebrow.
“I could cross the sea and find the other side, find the city,” Azrael offered. “If you think you’ll be safe here, in the dark.”
“I don’t see why not,” Hadara said. “There’s nothing here.”
Another handful of iridescent bubbles gathered on the surface of the oil, only half as far as the first ones, and they made soft smacking sounds as they burst open. Iyasu frowned. “Rael?”
“What?”
“Have you ever seen a lake of oil before?”
“No. I have seen pits of tar before, but that’s not quite the same thing.”
“Did anything live in those pits?”
“No. Things only died in them.”
Iyasu nodded. “Right, well, then this is different then, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
He pointed at the lake as a third cluster of bubbles appear even closer than the last. “There’s something alive in there.”
Azrael leaned out over the oil, staring down at its shiny black surface, letting her golden aura set every little wavelet to shimmering. And then she stepped up into the air and floated on her half-seen wings away from the shore, out over the lake, slowly.
White jaws surged straight up from the oil, spread wide and filled with horrid, crooked fangs that lunged at the angel’s feet and snapped shut with an echoing thump, and the angel’s light went out, plunging the cavern into blackness once again, and in the darkness they heard something of monstrous size crash down into the lake, and felt a spray of cold oil on their skin and clothes.
“Rael!” Iyasu staggered back from the shore, confident of where it was but terrified of how large the beast might be and how far onto land it might be able to strike. “Rael!”
“Here. I’m here.” The voice came from above and was followed by the return of the amber light, now high up among the stalactites where the angel hovered on motionless black wings. “I’m all right.”
Iyasu shuddered and exhaled with relief. “Don’t scare me like that.”
“Hush! It may hear you.” Azrael drifted down toward the surface again, this time farther away from the rocky shore. After a moment of scanning the surface, she rose into the air again just as a huge white mass floated to the surface beneath her. The beast’s back was broad and scaled, cover from end to end in rows of small spines like knife blades piercing the air. A long tail tapered away from its back side, and a long snout tapered away from the two large milky eyes that stood atop its skull, and when it opened its jaws to hiss, it displayed long processions of dagger-like teeth that shone in the soft angel light.
“A crocodile.” Iyasu smiled and pointed. “It’s a crocodile. A very, very, very large albino crocodile.” He paused to stare at it, to take in the little marks and scales and discolorations, the shape of the eyes and nostrils, and the length of the fangs. “How did something like that end up down here? It shouldn’t be able to live in this muck. What on earth could it be eating down here?”
“That’s a worrisome question,” Hadara said. “Crocodiles eat large animals. And this crocodile is, as you said, very large itself.”
They watched as Azrael slowly glided across the sea of oil, taking her lig
ht with her from one side of the cavern to the other, and all the while the huge white beast swam beneath her, swishing its massive tail in long, lazy strokes.
“It’s hunting her.” Rahm snorted.
“Maybe, maybe not.” Iyasu ran his hand through his hair. “Maybe it’s attracted by the light. Even entranced by the light. I thought at first it was blind, but maybe it’s not, not entirely. It can sense light. It’s drawn to it, following some ancient instinct, longing for the sun. To bask in the sun like other crocodiles.” He grinned. “I think I we just found our way across.”
It took a bit of convincing before Azrael led the albino crocodile to the shore so the others could leap onto the beast’s scaly back, gripping each other for balance, and then kneeling for safety. And then the angel glided out across the sea of oil, and the crocodile followed her.
“This is insane,” Hadara whispered.
“I know.” Iyasu smiled. “Isn’t it?”
They passed beneath a vast forest of stone spires stabbing down at them from above, and from time to time a wall of ragged white stone would loom out of the darkness on one side or the other, often studded with the crumbling remains of a gigantic rib cage, a cyclopean skull, or some less identifiable bone of an even less familiar creature. Iyasu stared up at them all, mouth agape, speechless.
Time passed, but without a sun or stars to reckon by, Iyasu had only his own breathing and his own heart beat to mark the hours. The cavern stretched on and on, sometimes curving slightly to one side or the other, but mostly striking westward. But eventually, as his neck grew stiff and his stomach began to grumble, he spied a change in the dark, a faint scattering of light out beyond the soft glow of his beloved. He pointed to it and whispered, “There. Something in the distance.”
“Is it Ramashad?” Hadara whispered back.
“We’ll know soon.”
They carried on in silence, with only the soft watery sounds of the crocodile’s tail swishing through the oil behind them. From time to time, the beast raised the roof of its mouth to hiss and growl, but then it closed its jaws and swam on, chasing the angel light.
The distant lights grew larger and brighter, and Azrael stopped in midair. “If we go any closer, they may see us. See me,” she said.
“Yes, but if you stop leading this ugly beast with that light of yours, it’ll probably dive down, drown us, and eat us,” Rahm grumbled. “So I say we take the risk and keep going.”
Iyasu frowned. “He has a point. And the smell in here is starting to make me more than a little queasy, so let’s try to find a place to disembark.”
So on they went until the seer spied a narrow ledge of rock that ran above the sea of oil, all the way to the cavern where the lights shone, and he told Azrael so she could turn and bring them to it. They were nearly there when a djinn appeared on the narrow path, a woman with bright flaming hair, dressed in a familiar sleeveless white robe, and peering straight at the dark angel and her strange entourage.
“Well, that’s less than ideal, isn’t it?” Iyasu squinted at her, discovering nothing of note except that she appeared content to wait for the intruders to come to her.
“Do you think we can surprise her?” Rahm touched his sword.
“Well, she’s looking straight at us, so, not really, no.”
“Well, we only have a minute before we get there. What do we do?”
Iyasu glanced up at Azrael. “Play our best card. Again.”
They were nearly to the shore when the djinn woman called out, “Stop where you are. We were told to expect you, holy sister. Please come with me.”
Azrael shone in the darkness. “Let my friends come ashore.”
The djinn shook her head. “No. We have no use for them.” She flicked her fingers through the air and thin trails of cinders and flame shot across the void and struck the oil-soaked snout of the crocodile. The huge beast roared and thrashed, rolling over to plunge its burning flesh under the surface of the oil. Iyasu scrambled to keep his footing as the huge creature rolled beneath his feet, stumbling over the animal’s ribs to stand on its stomach as Rahm swept up Hadara in his arms and ran down the length of the burning beast to leap from its huge jaw, sail through the darkness, and crash to an unsteady landing on the narrow path beside the djinn.
And that was the last thing Iyasu saw before the giant crocodilian dove into the oil lake, and he plunged beneath its black waters.
With only a thin lungful of air in his chest, the seer kicked and paddled and clawed at the slick oil, his eye clenched shut as he tried to stay calm. But no matter how hard he struggled against the oil, it seemed to flow up past him, light and fluid, rising ever upward like steam.
I’m sinking, I’m sinking! Why am I sinking?
He tried to focus, to stay calm, to think through his situation, but his lungs were already burning and the strange sensation of the oil against his skin felt as though he was being embalmed, and there was nothing to grab, nothing to help him, and the growing fear of being torn to pieces by the white crocodile was almost as terrifying as drowning in the oil.
The hand that grabbed his wrist was hot and bony, and it yanked him up from the lake in one sharp, harsh movement that nearly separated his arm from his shoulder. He gasped for air, his eye still clamped shut, ears and nostrils still gummed with oil, and he felt himself smack down again on the surface of the lake, before being dragged through the rolling waves and hauled up onto a rough, rocky surface.
Then there was choking, coughing, wiping, and gasping until his face was clean enough for him to see and hear. Hadara and Azrael knelt beside him, peppering him with questions, trying to get him to say he was all right. Rahm stood behind them, his sword pressed to the throat of the djinn woman, who seemed utterly unconcerned with the warrior and completely distracted with the task of burning away the last traces of oil from her left hand.
The djinn pulled me out?
Iyasu spat the last of the oil from his mouth. “I’m all right, I’m all right. It’s okay.” He sat up straighter and tried to swipe the oil off his arms and from his air, but only succeeded in smoothing the black liquid into straight streaks over his body.
He gave Azrael’s hand a long hard squeeze as the last of the pain faded from his chest. He wanted to hold her, to kiss her, but covered in a heavy layer of oil he didn’t want to really touch anything. The angel felt differently. She wrapped her arms around him and held him close, and then leaned back just enough to kiss him, a long and lingering kiss, the sort that would have led to far more than kissing at any other time, in any other place.
When she pulled back, the oil seemed to just fall away from her hair and skin, and a moment later she looked as clean and perfect as she had before she touched him.
“What happened?” he asked. “Why did she save me?” He jerked his head in the direction of the djinn.
“Because I couldn’t,” Azrael said. “I tried, but I couldn’t sink into the oil any more than I can sink into water. And I couldn’t hold Hadara’s weight while she reached for you. So that only left the djinn.”
“Because she’s so much lighter.” He nodded. “I assume she didn’t agree to help out of the goodness of her heart, did she?”
“You’re a seer, she said,” the djinn interjected. “Magi are not to be harmed.”
“Oh? You have some use for clerics? Something kind and gentle, no doubt,” Iyasu said dryly as he stood up and let more of the oil drip from his hands and clothing.
“You’ll join our ranks,” the djinn said matter-of-factly. “I would turn you myself, but I am only a novice. One of the masters will see to it.”
“Sounds delightful.” Iyasu wiped his hand over his hair again and wrung out a dripping mass of oil. “Then let’s go see the masters.”
“Are you crazy?” Rahm stared at him. “We’re just going to walk in there, like prisoners?”
Iyasu shrugged. “Why not? Unless you think you can outrun this young lady and somehow hide from a city full of angelic djinn?�
�
With many uncomfortable and distrustful frowns and glowers, the group stood and followed the djinn woman along the narrow path against the rock wall, slowly climbing higher above the black sea as they approached the lights on the hill. Iyasu could see the outlines of buildings now, mostly domes, great curving buildings of all sizes that resembled colonies of bubbles pressed together so that some appeared to be buried within others.
They came to a narrow bridge of cleric-sculpted stone that stretched from the rough path over the black lake and onto the island where the city stood. Iyasu peered down at the gap as they passed over it. “So the city fell into the earth, into the oil, and then floated west until it came to rest here?”
Their guide’s only answer was a frown and a curt nod to keep moving.
When they set foot on the city streets, the seer noticed the sudden change in the ground.
Not stone. Not earth. Is it… bone?
The streets meandered slightly, curving left and right along the round walls of the dome-like structures, and from the arched doorways many stern and condescending faces emerged. The djinn of Ramashad wore many hues of dark silk, from crimson to violet to midnight blue, but more than half of them wore the same white robes as Jevad and their guide, and these djinn all had flaming hair, standing out like beacons in the half-light of their city.
Men and women in the street paused and fell silent as the strangers passed, but no one spoke to them or approached them, and after a time, a small wake of curious people began to follow them at a discreet distance.
“I don’t like this,” Rahm muttered.
“You should try to,” Iyasu muttered back. “It’s probably only going to get worse from here.”
The seer noted the singular tower in the distance and assumed it was a place of importance and the place where they were going, and with that mystery temporarily resolved, he focused on their surroundings. He saw colonies of moss clustered around sharp little crystals on the walls of the domes, and both the moss and crystals glowed with a cool azure light. In the corners where any two domes came together, he saw gardens of magnificent mushrooms rising in neatly ordered rows, spotted and striped, and glowing faintly.
Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom Page 29
