A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  ‘A magic blade now beyond any doubt,’ he whispered, then turned to Bolldhe. ‘As I said when you first found it, didn’t I?’

  He proffered it, two-handed, to Bolldhe.

  ‘I tell you, this is destiny. We were meant to find Flametongue. Or else it was meant to find us.’

  ‘What are you going on about?’ Bolldhe asked sickly.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ the mage-priest insisted. ‘That fire – like the voice of a prophet roaring through the halls of kings – it’s as good as announcing to us its purpose is to destroy the Rawgr. Was there ever a surer sign?’

  ‘Well yes, actually,’ Bolldhe replied with a hint of his former scorn. ‘I could think of quite a few.’ And he reached out to take the weapon.

  As soon as he touched the flamberge, a vision flashed into his mind. It was the same vision he had experienced on first touching the sword back in Myst-Hakel: a desolate heath, the cliff and the distant stranger looking out over a troubled sea. This time, however, it held him longer. He drew closer to the figure, closer still, until he was near enough to make out its wind-ruffled clothes, occult-black and swirling like silken banners upon a battlefield . . .

  Bolldhe blinked . . . and his companions stood before him, regarding him intently. He was back at the Maw.

  He drew a weary hand down across his face and breathed in unsteadily.

  ‘To hell with this,’ he muttered in his own language, then in a louder voice said, ‘Don’t just hang around then, Nibulus. Take us in.’

  Over the threshold they stepped, into the darkness of Vaagenfjord Maw, and left the world of light behind them.

  Their torches created a sphere of sickly yellow light around them but illuminated nothing beyond that. Even Bolldhe’s lantern beam revealed only a stone floor, featureless save for the occasional puddle of partially frozen black water silted with the grime of centuries. Just how big was this hall? As the men progressed, they felt ever more timorous, as though they had become a pathetic little globe of weak light floating in an eternity of black space, a lone firefly blown far from its kind deep into the night. One puff of black wind and they would be extinguished, like a candle flame in a gale.

  Six tiny specks of life in a place where no life was meant to be.

  They continued on and on, and still the cavernous hall did not end. It was as if whoever had designed the Maw had decided that its entrance should leave no one in any doubt as to the vast eternity of blackness of Drauglir’s realm. Never had there been, in any of their lives, such a tangible feeling of abandonment. They had cast themselves adrift into the void, where there was nothing, no light, no life, not even time. Just emptiness, and with it an awful desolation that clamped its wet black hands around the windpipes of all and reached down deep inside them, filling them with hopelessness.

  Yet on they went. They could feel the ground beneath them but as if it were not real, just as the frostbitten walker perceives not the firm ground but merely the dull weight of his bones upon insensitive feet. The blackness too was closing in around them ever more intensely, robbing them of more than just their sight. Even sound grew muted, for though they could all sense the vast space around them, still the scrape of their booted feet across the gravelly floor developed a flatness to it reminiscent of the melancholy tramp of pall-bearers.

  Senses, it seemed, were unwelcome intruders here, reminders of life and movement, qualities that belonged outside. Even the air seemed deadened: freezing, but with the close chill of the grave rather than the icy freshness of open tundra. The sepulchral gloom of this vast atrium transmuted everything into a condition which the intruders just knew was not right.

  Eventually their feeble sphere of illumination touched upon a raised lip of stone. It was the first step of a stairway that seemed to span the entire width of the underworld lying before them.

  ‘According to Gwyllch,’ Nibulus whispered, ‘there was indeed a great stairway that led up to the passages of the Great Concourse.’

  Not allowing them to pause, he led them on up. It was not an easy ascent. Each riser was as high as a gravestone and every bit as crumbling. Whereas Paulus had only moderate difficulty with each step, Appa had to use both hands to pull himself up, gripping gecko-like to the stone for dear life. Before even reaching the tenth step, they could sense they had ascended higher than the average house in Nordwas; by the thirtieth, they had left the floor far below. Hearts pounding with the effort, their fear of the Maw was now pushed to one side by the more immediate threat of falling, for if they were to lose their footing here, the only thing to stop their rapid descent would be the unforgiving ground way below.

  ‘Made it,’ Paulus called back, the first to reach the top. ‘Bolldhe, where are you? Bring that lantern up here quick!’

  ‘Wait for me!’ a panicked voice whimpered from below. ‘Shine it down here!’

  As each of them in turn gained the uppermost step, they sat down or squatted, gasping to regain their breath.

  ‘Pel’s bells!’ Bolldhe panted. ‘How could anyone manage to fight their way up here?’

  ‘And in heavy iron plate too,’ Nibulus agreed in a hushed voice. ‘The Peladanes of those days were true heroes, every one. Their faith made them unstoppable.’

  For once Bolldhe could not disagree.

  There was some relief that they had gained the top of the stairs without mishap, but now that sense of panic that Nibulus had warned them about bore down on them from somewhere ahead, from somewhere out there in the crushing darkness beyond their puny light. But there was nothing for it now but to go on. Nibulus would not allow them to stop for a second longer than necessary, not permit them a second to let fear or doubt falter their resolve.

  The next few minutes were spent searching the wide area at the top of the stairs. Several passageways led off, either staying level or sloping up or down. Gwyllch’s Chronicle was detailed, to be sure, but it was primarily heroic in inspiration, and he had never really intended anyone to use it as a guidebook, let alone a map. They had to be sure of taking the correct way from the very start. A mistake here might be disastrous.

  ‘Looks like someone who came here recently ran into a spot of trouble,’ Nibulus commented grimly. He reached down and picked up a metallic object from the floor. ‘Bolldhe? Paulus? Either of you seen one of these before?’

  The company gathered round to inspect his find. It was a Quiravian falchion, a light elegant sword customarily worn by the wealthy merchant types who paraded about town. It had the letters Y, E and N engraved upon its blade in flowing Quiravian script.

  ‘Not at all the sort of blade you’d expect to find in a place like this,’ Paulus commented. ‘Beautiful workmanship, true, but not exactly heavy-duty.’

  ‘Not the sort of blade one leaves behind lightly, either,’ Bolldhe added.

  ‘There’s been fighting here in the last few months,’ Nibulus said. ‘This falchion’s hardly even rusted.’

  Searching around they found other evidence of conflict: broken and discarded weaponry, rags, the tracks of boots skidding upon the flagstones.

  But no bodies. Not even parts of bodies, nor the clothes nor armour they must have worn. It was as if they had discarded everything they carried and simply run away in blind terror. Extreme terror, judging by the fact that they had not only dropped their weapons but also their torches. What could cause such fear that men would drop their only source of light?

  ‘Keep together,’ the Peladane ordered, his voice as steady as he could manage. No one argued.

  Suddenly Wodeman hissed harshly, holding up his hand. ‘Listen,’ he whispered. Everyone froze.

  At first it seemed only the nature priest was able to hear anything. Soon, however, they too could discern it, far off, barely audible, terribly feeble but undeniably there: a sobbing, child-like and horribly forlorn, similar to the voice they had heard in the tunnel leading out of Eotunlandt. It iced the blood in their veins and immobilized them utterly.

  ‘Wind?’ Finwald suggested pl
eadingly.

  No one replied. It could not be the wind, for here there was no breath of air at all. This was a dead place, and movement was against the rules. Still the crying continued, somewhere out there in the dark, rising and falling, sometimes sputtering and failing. Bolldhe felt its wretchedness draining the very life force from him.

  Nibulus, characteristically, set his jaw and gripped his sword firmly with both hands. Steadily he began to advance.

  ‘Nibulus!’ Appa bleated. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘My job,’ the Peladane announced as he proceeded. ‘What we came all this way to do. That is the enemy and this is Unferth, and I believe the time has come for them to get acquainted.’

  ‘But—’ Bolldhe began.

  ‘Remember the heroes of the Fasces, Pendonian,’ Nibulus cut in. ‘Let our faith make us unstoppable too.’ The tone of his voice brooked no dissent; the Peladane was going in to meet the enemy.

  They had no choice. Squeezing the hilts of their weapons, they padded after him.

  Closer, closer. The stifled high-pitched sobs continued – the only sound in that place, for the travellers stole along upon silent feet. And then it stopped, cut off in an instant, as if finally aware of them.

  ‘The light!’ Nibulus hissed. ‘Shine it ahead of me!’

  Bolldhe thrust his lantern out to light their leader’s way, and more swiftly now they proceeded.

  ‘We startled it?’ Finwald whispered. ‘Is . . . D’you think whatever’s there, it’s afraid of us?’

  Nibulus shot the trailing priest a grim look, silencing him. Afraid of us? As if such a thing might be possible in this abyss they were walking through. ‘This way, quick,’ he urged. And with more haste and less stealth they hurried on in the rough direction from which the sobbing had come.

  Here the air seemed closer, with a sealed crypt deadness to it. The beam of the lantern danced over stone walls gradually closing in on either side. They were blotched as if diseased and dank. The floor beneath their feet was littered with the discarded detritus of previous questers to the Maw.

  Then Appa choked, ‘What in the sweet Lord’s name is this?’

  The lantern beam flickered unsurely over walls whose crumbling surface was marked by sharp striations, cutting deep and ragged. When they inspected these more closely they realized with horror that the walls had been scored by monstrous claws. To the mind of every man there the words of the old Peladane from Wrache returned: ‘Great rending sounds as of some terrible talon could we hear upon the door, and a hammering upon all the shutters so strong it was only faith that held them from splintering asunder . . .’

  The beam then trembled in Bolldhe’s hand as it revealed reluctantly hellish images that some demented anti-human mind had daubed on the walls. All around, smeared in some dark, glistening and disturbingly sticky substance, were twisted stick figures of things that could have been human, or rawgr, or some awful fiend from the Pit. A sense of madness hung heavy in the air, and again Bolldhe dredged up memories of black blood boiling inside his brain. Things were definitely starting to happen to him, and he very much doubted that mere faith, should he possess any, would be able to arrest this process.

  ‘Never mind that stuff!’ Nibulus snapped as Appa lingered by the graffiti in morbid fixation. At the same time the Peladane’s harsh command jolted Bolldhe from his strange thoughts.

  Then another voice murmured in his ear, ‘Keep Flametongue ready.’

  It was Finwald, just behind him. Bolldhe felt the priest’s hand fold around his elbow, soft and trembling, its coldness somehow penetrating even his thick garment. Then Finwald moved on ahead of him.

  Bolldhe was confused. Something had just gone dreadfully wrong, and he was desperately struggling to cope with it in his mind. For Finwald was now several paces in front of him, yet his hand still clung to Bolldhe’s elbow.

  He looked down at it and saw that it was not Finwald’s after all. This hand was corpse-thin, with old grey skin that stretched taut over swollen knuckles and bulbous veins. The fingers looked more like claws and ended in blackened broken nails.

  With a liquid whine caught in his throat, Bolldhe turned his head, slowly as if in a reverie. And saw the face at his shoulder. It was the ash-pale visage of something that had emerged from purgatorial pits, streaked with a palette of filth and pitted with the dead eyes of one that had witnessed carnage inconceivable.

  Then it opened its mouth horrendously wide and screamed.

  In that stone-splitting keen could be heard the howling of the torture chamber, the lamentation of the damned, the wailing of women, children, the old and the crippled fleeing before the charge of horsemen, falling beneath spear and hoof, being herded into burning buildings, strung up, pierced through, roasted alive, hacked into pieces like meat on a butcher’s slab.

  Bolldhe was suddenly eight years old again, and screamed with the same dementia as the howling face before him. The graffiti upon the walls leapt out at him, flickered in the lantern’s beam, cavorted before his eyes, and he understood it all so well.

  Then his mind deserted him and he fell into a void where blackness and that awful keening sound were his only companions.

  ‘. . . about Bolldhe . . . for his own good . . . stay with us or do we send him away . . . must decide quickly . . .’

  Voices swimming through the purple vortices of his madness. The smell of polished armour, clean leaf-bright Ulleanhs, sunshine on temple lawns.

  ‘. . . hard world, hard choices . . . burden . . . man, not a boy!’

  Who was it? So hard to think. Voices from a long, long time ago.

  ‘. . . do we stay with him or leave him here? We must decide quickly.’

  Clearer now as Bolldhe’s derangement began to dissipate. Familiar voices. Not his parents – more recent. Blue armour covered in grime, mould-green Ulleanh, the blood-red of a single torch in the cold night.

  ‘Bolldhe, snap out of it,’ a voice hissed urgently right in his face. ‘We’ve got to decide what to do. Is he— What’s the matter with him?’

  Rough hands shook him, and he finally managed to focus on the figure before him. It was Nibulus, his big face silhouetted by the torch he held above him. ‘At last! Come on, old son, it’s time to go. You’ll be all right; she didn’t do anything serious to you.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Probably just the shock. Got to admit that scared the shit out of us all. Even me.’

  Bolldhe lurched forward, grabbed his lantern where it had been set on the floor and snapped the brass-and-silk cylinder up into its leather sleeve, transforming it to focus on narrow beam. He cast the light about, and almost at once it fell on a huddled scarecrow that knelt on the floor surrounded by the rest of the company.

  ‘Who is she?’ The woman – if woman it were – was rocking back and forth, staring ahead vacantly, her claw-like hands making an odd feeble swatting motion before her ravaged face. Both mage-priests and the sorcerer were tending to her, while above her stood Paulus with his sword poised ready.

  ‘Quiravian adventuress, from what we can gather,’ Nibulus replied scornfully. ‘You know the sort: merchants’ daughters, all money and spare time. Hang out with the gangs, run with the dacoits – do anything to shock. Seems this one was shagging a Grell too. A Grell, for Jugg’s sake! Can you believe it?’

  Bolldhe could believe it. On his travels he had encountered many such women in the more affluent cities: rich, bored and squeaky clean. Started every sentence with ‘Actually’ or its equivalent in their tongue. He had even heard of some employing sarcasm tutors. Yes, Bolldhe knew their sort well. Indeed, it was from women such as this that much of his income as an oracle derived.

  ‘What’s she told you so far?’ he asked, listening to the awkward phonemes and dancing intonations of Finwald as the priest tried to communicate with her.

  ‘She hasn’t said much at all yet. Sounds pretty garbled to me, and I’m not sure how much Finwald’s getting out of her either. It’s been a
long time since he’s heard Quiravian spoken.’

  They went over to her, and Bolldhe held the unsheathed lantern closer to her face. He stared into those blank eyes and was struck by how closely they resembled poached oysters. Her skin looked like old parchment, all the youth and elasticity drained from it, its natural deep brown Quiravian tone now yellow and sickly.

  His gaze dropped to her garments, and he pursed his lips. Maybe she had indeed once been a young adventuress, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, loaded to the ears with amethyst and arrogance, up for fun no matter the risk. But now the rich brown leather and luxuriant hyrax and civet fur of her perfectly tailored travelling garb more closely resembled what they really were: the skins of dead animals, grimy and decaying.

  ‘Sure she’s an adventuress?’ Bolldhe asked doubtfully. ‘Looks a bit old to me.’

  ‘Nineteen years of age, so Finwald says.’ Nibulus clicked his tongue. ‘Battle shock, starvation, terror . . . I’ve seen many cases like hers before, but never this bad. Must’ve really been through the mangle, this one.’

  ‘But what’s she doing here?’

  ‘What do any of her sort do here?’ Nibulus scoffed, for a second reverting to his Peladane persona. ‘Same as all the others, those types back home who like to walk around Lower Kettle Bazaar dressed as Olchorian priestesses and—’

  ‘Then they start believing they truly have the Power,’ Appa cut in.

  They all stared down at her in silence. This place was evil and sick, and very very dangerous. Yet none of them could help but feel strangely consoled at seeing the utter devastation of this silly little rich girl before them. They knew this was wrong but there was something perversely reassuring in knowing that they were not the most ridiculous and puny group of questers to have ever entered the Maw. Not anymore.

  ‘Women, eh,’ Nibulus said in his most sagacious tones. ‘Takes all sorts, I suppose . . . Have you found out how long she’s been here, Finwald?’

  ‘And what happened to her companions?’ added Paulus.