Bolldhe glanced at the two priests questioningly. Both, however, merely shrugged.
‘Tivor,’ Nibulus whispered harshly, ‘you’ve been this way before – any ideas?’
There followed a pause, a long pause. Nibulus was about to jab their guide in the ribs when the soldier of fortune Kuthy finally replied, ‘There was something like this happened last time – something I didn’t understand. But I plugged my ears with oiled cloth and pressed on as swiftly as I might.’ His voice was low and held none of its customary assurance.
Bolldhe’s eyes widened in awe. ‘You mean you heard . . . that, and still you went on? Alone?’
Kuthy’s voice dropped even lower. ‘It is best to ignore the illusions of fey. Those who let themselves be waylaid by the huldre are rarely seen again.’
‘So at last!’ Paulus hissed; clearly he at least was more than ready to be waylaid. Wodeman, though, wrinkled his nose and spat on the ground. Appa, possibly the most intuitive among them, was wary but surprisingly not alarmed.
Still unsure, Nibulus tarried a moment. He strained his ears and squinted further into the void beyond the lantern’s beam. But, in the total absence of any clue, he resigned himself to following what Kuthy recommended, and ordered them onward.
Before them lay many different exits from the cavern, but Kuthy knew exactly which one to take. They tried to quicken their pace, eager to get free of this place, even if that did mean heading towards the source of the strange sounds they had heard earlier. But the tunnel now took on an entirely different character. Gone were the flights of steps, the half-level floors, the regularity of the tunnel’s dimensions. This new passage was almost entirely natural: it twisted and turned, rose and fell, widened unexpectedly into chambers or narrowed so tightly that their claustrophobic beast of burden had to be dragged or pushed forward. All around them now could be seen lumps of grey limestone that squatted like malignant, petrified trolls. Their moving shadows danced in the lamplight, like witches capering in a cave of beasts. Bolldhe glanced back as he passed by, and saw with horror that these shadows began sprouting long, spindly arms with cruel, claw-like hands. He was sure he could even hear them sniggering.
‘Don’t look around you, Bolldhe!’ came a warning voice immediately to his rear. ‘Or behind.’ It was Kuthy. Bolldhe instantly snapped his head back to face in front of him, from now on his eyes fixed dead ahead.
Sometimes the clash of ancient battles seemed to echo down the passage straight ahead, or resonate from the rock all around them. Occasionally the ringing of blades was replaced by a sound like the dull thud and crunch of wood or stone, and the voices were altogether more grunting and animal. At these sounds the cave walls sprang to life with primeval dancing, shadows that cavorted in the sanguine light of their torches, yet it was difficult to identify their source. The company shook their heads in exasperation and pressed on, their weapons dangling uselessly from their belts.
A while later Wodeman grasped the Peladane by the arm, halting the party.
‘Do you hear it?’ he murmured.
They listened and, after a moment, they did: a soft sobbing, as of a child, far off but distressingly plaintive. It soon resounded all about, and filled them with a dread that sickened every one of them. They shuddered to their very souls.
Then came the footsteps: knok-knok-knok. Two legs. Cloven hooves. Stealthy, purposeful. Suddenly a scream of terror and agony rang out, and filled every crevice and bounced off every stony surface within the caves. The travellers froze. Then, as the scream trailed off with a wail of damnation and despair, it was followed by a sick little laugh, not quite human, laden with malice.
‘Illusions, right?’ Nibulus hissed at Kuthy in barely constrained fury. The old campaigner nodded vigorously and fumbled in one of the little leather pouches at his belt. He extracted two little plugs of pitch-scented cloth and thrust them into his ears.
‘Just keep looking ahead,’ he instructed them, ‘and ignore anything you might see out of the corner of your eye. Believe me, it isn’t there.’
Everyone stared at him. If only half the stories about him were true, they knew that in his lifetime he had seen things that they could not imagine, and had enough experience to gauge whether danger was genuine or not. He took the torch from Nibulus and for once led the way.
Paulus followed without hesitation, the only one among them still holding his weapon out ready. But Bolldhe and the three cultists would not budge an inch. Not one of them believed for a second that such phantasms as they had just witnessed had also been visited upon Kuthy the last time he had ventured this way. No one, not even he, could suffer such terror alone and still retain the courage to go on.
If, as he claimed, he had been alone.
Nibulus hesitated. This was all more than a little beyond his experience. But then he recalled Eorcenwold’s commanding tone and the fact that the thief-sergeant must surely have got his men through this ordeal already. He gritted his teeth and, like all soldiers, pushed his fear deep down inside. He had stared death in the face too many times throughout his life to fear such impish bewitchment now.
‘Come on, men,’ he commanded levelly. ‘Forget this bullshit. I have no intention of spending the night in this hole.’
The way after that became somewhat easier. Random noises and visions flitted by them, trying hard to get their attention, but were always stoically ignored. Kuthy led the company on too swiftly to allow them the chance to falter in either speed or resolve. By degrees they felt that they were regaining control of their situation, and with that control came confidence.
About half an hour later Kuthy halted. ‘If my reckoning is right,’ he informed them, ‘we should be out of this tunnel very soon.’
‘And where will we be then?’ asked Nibulus.
‘High up in the mountains. But for this last stretch we will need to be quick. There is a place up ahead where the enchantment is . . . considerable, and I don’t wish to give it a chance to do its work.’
The others looked at each other doubtfully.
‘Just keep on as you have been going, and we’ll be out very soon, I promise you.’
Various moans. That was probably the worst thing Kuthy could have said. Even now, in certain lands the expression ‘as sure as a Tivor promise’ was popularly used to denote situations that were anything but sure. He had the reputation of being as slippery as a skip-load of jellied eels on a frozen pond. But had Kuthy heard this adage, he probably would have smiled approvingly; it took most heroes centuries after their deaths to achieve the repute that he possessed while still alive.
Sure enough, within minutes they could detect a sickly greenish-purple light glowing from the tunnel ahead. As they drew nearer they saw that it came from a series of torches set along the walls. They would puff into light as the travellers approached and gave off a stink of burnt meat. Despite Kuthy’s strict admonishment not to look upon such manifestations, all eyes were drawn, by irresistible, morbid compulsion, to behold these lych-candles as they passed.
They were bones, human bones jammed into cracks in the rock and surrounded by haloes of light the same hue as a dying moon’s reflection upon the surface of a weed-pool. Behind them, lines of garish violet pulsated in the corpse-pale stone, like the varicose veins of a marsh-drowned vagrant.
On they marched while the lych-candles continued to sputter into huldre-light at their approach then flutter out behind them once they had passed. After a while, a subsonic tremor could be felt in the stone all around them, and before long it waxed into a deep rumbling.
Kuthy urged them on to greater speed. ‘We’re not far now,’ he called back anxiously. They followed as best they could, though the way was steeper, each one of them soaked through with sweat.
Minutes later they arrived at a crudely built archway. Of disturbingly alien design, it looked every bit as ancient as the mountains themselves, and had clearly not been fashioned by any of the mortal races. It had the air of a barrier, a boundary gate, almo
st as if it were the doorway to another world. Immediately beyond, the passage rose even more steeply up a narrow stairway. What lay up there, though, they could not tell, for there were no lamps along its lightless length. Even when Bolldhe directed his narrowed lantern-beam up into it, the light could not penetrate the damp blackness. The rumbling sound, too, was much louder, and could now be discerned as a cascade, thundering powerfully through the stony hollows.
‘Up!’ Kuthy ordered, and everyone followed him.
Upward through the terrible darkness they climbed, like rats scrambling up a chimney. Within moments they began to sense that greenish light ahead of them once again. Nibulus and Paulus now took the lead so were the first to emerge from the dark stairway into the grotto that lay beyond. They both stopped and stared at what lay therein.
One by one, the rest of the company joined them. They stood there without speaking, shivering in the clamminess of their sweat-soaked clothes and trembling with the fear that was beginning to get dangerously close to its limits.
The grotto was entirely natural. Slender pillars of fused stalactite-stalagmites honeycombed the cave, and the walls glistened green and purple with crystal and quartz. To their right a cascade roared down from a vent high above, hurtling down a slope and out through another hole. Long icicles of sapphire blue rimed the roof immediately above it. And right in the centre of the cave a low mound of stones had been placed to form what looked like a crude cairn or barrow. The hub of all the weirdness in this cavern, the focus of all their fear, it squatted there ominously, and radiated an awful sense of ‘wrongness’.
‘What the bloody hell is that supposed to be?’ the Peladane breathed, eloquently summing up what the rest of the company felt at that moment.
There also did not appear to be any exit.
‘Well, this is a nice surprise, Kuthy,’ Wodeman said. He was by his very nature unused to sarcasm, but then he had never readily relished being buried alive either and, after all they had been through today, he felt he was fast approaching that stage where things happen to the mind.
That familiar edge to his voice did not go unnoticed by Nibulus either. As a captain of thousands, it was nothing new to him. ‘Come,’ he commanded without hesitation, and strode briskly towards the mound. The others followed closely.
With hissing torches held aloft, they peered down at the pile of rocks. Immediately they saw the large hole that cratered the top of the mound and the many loose stones that lay scattered about the cave floor.
‘It’s been plundered,’ Nibulus stated.
‘Not by me,’ Kuthy said impatiently. ‘It was already like this the last time I was here. Come on, let’s go. You really don’t want to tarry here of all places.’
‘Go where, exactly?’
‘Away,’ Wodeman stammered, ‘anywhere. We need to get out of here right now.’ He almost leapt after their departing guide, who was already striding towards the cascade.
The others were about to join him when Nibulus called out, ‘Wait! I want to find out whose grave this is.’
‘Who cares? It’ll be ours if we don’t get a move on!’ Kuthy retorted with increasing agitation.
But the Peladane ignored him. He reached down and picked up a thin, slate-like piece of stone. He squinted at it hard, then read out what was carved onto its surface.
‘Gwyllch.’
Kuthy tutted and rolled his eyes as he headed on out.
‘Gwyllch?’ Bolldhe repeated. ‘The Gwyllch?’
‘The very same,’ Kuthy admitted. ‘Didn’t I say earlier you might eventually find out what became of him? Now, can we please just get out of here?!’
They all did so, swiftly, and Nibulus the swiftest of all. He caught up with their guide in a few strides and grabbed him by the arm.
‘All these years you actually knew the location of the burial place of our greatest hero, and you never thought to tell anyone?’ the Peladane snarled accusingly.
‘It’s a secret tunnel,’ Kuthy retorted, refusing to be detained, ‘a secret land, remember? All the bards say is that he was ‘intered as dhe tryumfante hoest didde wende its way hoem’, and I am quite happy to see it remain that way; the last thing Eotunlandt needs is a pilgrimage site to attract all your lot here.’
He continued on his way, and the others followed him anxiously. All except Nibulus. Bolldhe looked back at him standing all alone in the cavern, gazing back at the plundered grave of his venerated idol. Their leader appeared quite at a loss.
‘He’ll want to do something . . . holy, I suppose,’ Bolldhe said. ‘Can’t we give him a few minutes?’
‘That’s exactly why I said we needed to be quick,’ Kuthy called back irritably. ‘Now the young idiot will be here for ages, trying to collect all the bones, and – I don’t know – exorcise them or something.’
‘The bone lanterns?’
‘Yes. But they’re not real. They aren’t even here, really – haven’t been for five hundred years. Like I said, fey illusions. The huldre would’ve robbed that grave the instant the Peladanes left; used the bones as playthings, or worse.’
‘We require vengeance,’ Paulus announced darkly, ‘and we’re not leaving before we get it.’
‘I know what you require,’ Kuthy muttered under his breath, then called out, ‘Nibulus!’
By now he had led them from the grotto by way of a steep ledge running along the side of the cascade. Stars could be seen through fissures in the roof, and the smell of fresh, snowy mountain air began to finally ease their dread. A few minutes later, Nibulus caught up with them. He looked grim and said not a word. In his hand he still held the small slate-like headstone.
So, shattering their way through the curtain of icicles that screened a cave mouth, the seven of them emerged at last from the tunnel. As if just reborn from the womb of the earth, they breathed real air deep into grateful lungs, and stood blinking around at this new world they had come to. Where they were, even when they were, they were not sure, for both distance and time had become so confused inside there.
It was dark. The night sky was filled with the crepuscular sheen of a billion stars whose light was caught up in the virgin snow that lay all about. Mountain peaks soared to celestial heights above, and yet other peaks they could also discern so far below them. A living wind sang about them, spangling their outer cloaks with cobaltite brilliance, and great black oceans of forest could be heard murmuring in the night with the soft sibilance of sea foam upon a shingly shore.
‘There are no tracks,’ Wodeman was the first to note. It was true: of the Tyvenborg thieves there was not a trace. It was as if they too had been as much an illusion as the lych-candles, as phantasmal as the giants. Perhaps they had never existed, even before entering the tunnel; were no more than chimeras evoked by the company’s collective imagination on encountering the two corpses in the entry tunnel ten days earlier. For who could tell what was real or not in Eotunlandt?
Eotunlandt, it was a fey place, for sure. But had they fully left it yet? The return to snow and a climate more realistic for this northern part of the world suggested that they had. Certainly the cold was no illusion. Yet at the back of their minds they could all sense still a hint of enchantment in the air.
Down a snowy slope from the cave mouth Kuthy led them. Even as they went, they could hear behind them the tiny chinking, shimmering sounds of the icicles reforming, sealing up once again the secret entrance into Eotunlandt. They did not dare turn round to observe the process but instead resolutely followed Kuthy, trailing him some distance until he brought them to the shelter of a cave he had used before. Bolldhe noted that he kept looking about expectantly, scanning the landscape as if he were waiting for something to appear.
The cave was small but easily large enough to accommodate them all, and it had the added advantage of being roughly L-shaped, so that tucked around its corner they were well out of the worst of the wind. The company struck up a fire there and settled down for the night, more exhausted now than they coul
d ever have believed possible.
There were, however, things that some among them felt needed to be said before they gave in to sleep. Nibulus was still staring at the little memorial stone in his hands, but his eyes were far away. At length he spoke, in a tone of voice they had not heard up till now.
‘I know what people say about me back in Nordwas; I know I haven’t exactly lived the life of a model Peladane . . . but this,’ he brandished the stone, ‘this just isn’t right. Gwyllch was one of the greatest champions of our people. He was there at the siege of Melhus. He alone stood by the High Warlord Arturus Bloodnose as he fell, slaying the Firedrake that wouldst immolate his master.’
Careful, Nibulus, Finwald thought. You start using words like wouldst, and you’ll end up saying things like “unto’ and “behold’, too.
But this was no fleeting effusion of an overtired mind: Nibulus needed to say his piece. He, the son of a Warlord, had today backed down from a fight with a foe he could have defeated, run from a foe he couldn’t fight, spent hours tormented by a foe he could not see, and finally been insulted by a foe he would never be able to reach. So much dammed-up adrenalin and no release for it whatsoever. He was simply supposed to go to sleep on top of all this? He felt as though he were being torn apart by an entire battalion of internal struggle, and was barely able to hold himself together. The first part of him to break was his voice, and the first leakage, his eyes.
‘I don’t call many men great, but Gwyllch was a great man. And for those . . .’ Nibulus searched for words sufficiently acerbic to vent his bile, ‘for those thieving little testi-grubs to desecrate his tomb . . .’ He tailed off, unable to conclude either the sentence or his thoughts.
The fire grew higher, and the travellers tried to relax. Then, utterly out of the blue, Bolldhe spoke: ‘Gwyllch was a butcher and a rapist. He was just one of hundreds who fought the Drake and only then for the reward he expected.’
A Fire in the North Page 3
