A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  Within minutes, however, he had no need to concern himself with informing his companions about the heat, for even to Brecca it became obvious they must all know by now. Rounding a bend in the tunnel, they reeled back as a wave of heat swept over them, filling their lungs with fumes and causing everyone to cough and retch. It was as if someone had just hauled open the doors of a blast furnace.

  Without waiting to be told, the thieves reached into their pockets and pulled forth masks. The topengk was a marvellously well-crafted and wonderfully light mask of silk and voile that entirely covered mouth and nose, filtering all noxious vapours yet allowing the wearer to breathe freely. With these firmly in place, the thieves pulled their hoods tightly about their heads and pressed on.

  The dull red glow ahead brightened to a livid orange, the temperature soared again, and minutes later they emerged from the tunnel onto an unsheltered ledge. Like Khuc before them, they had arrived at Smaulka-Degernerth.

  They didn’t pause; they were not here to admire the view. This was thieving at its most extreme, and the frisson of the situation was like a baluchitherium goad up the behind. They all knew exactly what they had to do and wasted not one second in doing it. Piton hammers, pegs and ropes were produced in a trice, lines were hammered in and secured swiftly and efficiently, rock surfaces were scrutinized, and in a moment, Grini the Boggart was harnessed up and swung bodily over the edge.

  As the lightest, most agile and above all most dispensable member of their party, Grini had been volunteered for the task of locating the ledge at the top of the flue and securing a line to it. What had not been foreseen was that, as the hairiest member of the party, he was also the one most likely to combust. Luckily however it was only a slightly singed (though more than slightly hysterical) Grini who located the handholds that Khuc had painstakingly chronicled five hundred years previously. Growling and salivating profusely, the hirstute little homunculus succeeded in a remarkably short amount of time in scrambling over to the other side.

  A tug on the rope told the others he had fastened it, and one by one the thieves followed him. Scrambling across, they too sweated abundantly, for as they clung to the jagged rock the whole place felt as if it were alive, a gigantic quaking monster that pulsed its heat and hatred in through the trembling stone. Rapidly the entire party reached the ledge where Grini awaited them.

  Not wasting a second, they almost dived into the darkness of the same flue that Scathur had used to escape his pursuers all those centuries ago. And, almost too good to believe, it was all just as Khuc had promised. There were the great stone blocks above them, reset by the Peladanes into their cavities in the tunnel roof. Over there was the ‘crafty mechanism’ by which Scathur had set them in motion. And there, leading down at a slight angle, was the open passageway that would lead them, if their luck continued, to the Chamber of Drauglir itself.

  Along the tunnel they plunged, gratefully gasping in the cooler air within.

  Chink-chink-chink.

  The faint sound of boot upon rung gradually increased within the chamber. It stopped. Voices, hushed but urgent, whispered down the flue. A light flickered erratically, shyly, wanting to discover but not be discovered. Slowly it descended until it could be identified as a lamp dangling at the end of a rope, its beam turning in random circles around the chamber.

  A few dislodged granules of powdered stone drifted down, like a light dusting of snow on a winter’s eve, succeeded by a sparkling bauble-bright mirror of polished silver attached to a long telescopic rod. This stopped by the lamp and followed the beam’s every turn: the Eye of Tyvenborg.

  After a while a hooded head, small as a child’s but wrinkled as an old man’s, appeared upside down, and eyes wide with wonder peered into the chamber.

  ‘No one’s home!’ hissed Brecca.

  Seconds later the much larger head of Eorcenwold appeared beside it, also upside down, followed by the even larger head of Klijjver, the Tusse’s small iron cap still clamped fast to his huge pate. Three inverted Chads coming down the chimney on a frosty night.

  With an adroit twist Eorcenwold landed feet first on the floor, followed quickly by Brecca and then the herd giant. Despite their ungainly appearance, each dropped as lightly as a snowflake. The area immediately around the shaft’s was swiftly scanned by expert eyes and, at a word from their leader, more lights descended from the flue, each in the grip of a thief, and began spreading across the hall. A weapon was held ready in each thief’s other hand.

  A gradually widening area of floor was checked for traps with a speed and efficiency that did not allow time for any fearful thoughts to gain hold. The thieves of Tyvenborg were professionals, here to do a job they would not abandon unless confronted with an extremely persuasive reason. However, each one of them could not suppress the notion that they perhaps should not be so deep within the Maw. The Chamber of Drauglir was not for such as they. Religion hung heavy in the air, reeking of blood and the fires of hell, and every thieving step they took upon its marble floor was sacrilege against both Good and Evil. There was a definite presence: perhaps the Evil that had once dwelt here yet remained, permeated into the stone itself, too potent to ever dissipate. Or perhaps it was the assembled souls of all those who had suffered and died here.

  Dolen was the first to feel it. For her it was strongest. The prescience of her race, the Dhracus, could not be blinkered by the orders of her leader. She stood apart from her companions, her torch limp in her hand, as images and emotions from the past flowed in thick crimson rivulets into her gaping mind.

  There heaped before her were piles of men reduced to slabs of screaming meat. There stood Scathur, offering up this mangled sacrifice of human bodies and minds, his eyes sightless in shuddering rapture as he uttered his words of subjugation to the master. His language was magic-mushroom-flavoured, his musings poppy-wrought, the shower of bursting flesh as sweet as fragrant rain upon his face. To him the ruin of men was an intoxication infernal-divine, their clamorous supplication as sweet as the pipes, beauteous as the harp. Human-stuff (flesh, liquid, sound and soul) he proffered, collapsed onto his knees now, arms outstretched and dripping, gazing glassy-eyed up the marbled ziggurat that pulsed with dark abysmal power.

  Dolen could not bring herself to follow that gaze up, for she knew something lurked at the utmost pinnacle of that altar, something of such monstrous evil that, were she to behold it, it would melt her brain like candlewax.

  Instantly she snapped back to the present.

  ‘Eorcenwold,’ she called out as calmly as she could, ‘I think we’d better leave this place. Right now.’

  Thus, for the first time in five hundred years, was the Chamber of Drauglir breached. And abandoned too with quite surprising haste. The thieves had no need of the Dhracus’s prescience to sense the vestiges of evil that floated like gossamer in the air.

  In any case they had no reason to linger here, for they had finally reached Ymla-Myrrdhain, the inner keep, and had only to find the secret places the Peladanes had missed last time then ransack the sanctum of all its valuables.

  Without further delay, the Tyvenborgers slipped out of the door.

  Out of the fog of late afternoon the longship came drifting. Barely a sound could be heard as it glided down the fjord. Like the half-submerged remains of the vessels locked in their icy graves all around, its simple sail hung limp, and upon its deck not a soul moved, nor from its rowlocks any oar heaved. Less noise even than those creaking wrecks it made and, in the grey half-light, of less substance did it appear. As neatly as a scalpel slices a fish, its dragon-throated prow split the scum of ice that clogged the water, until neatly, almost ceremonially, it slid into anchor beside the wharf.

  At about the same time as Bolldhe and his companions were fleeing the Moghol, Scathur set foot once more upon the rock of Melhus. The merest pressure of his boots splintered the ice beneath them, melting it and turning it yellow with sulphur. Eyes aflame with incendiary malevolence and fingers tight around the haft of his b
ardische, he surveyed the area swiftly, then rapped the pole upon the ground.

  Only then did his silent crew stir to life. Needing no verbal orders, the wire-faces furiously set about unloading the containers of pickled people. Casks, crates, barrels, bunkers, pitchers and puncheons were lowered onto the dock and dragged off towards the hungry mouth of the waiting Maw. The Children of the Keep, squealing and jabbering, swung from ratline and brace or leapt down from the masthead. Some sprang over the gunwales and skittered over the ice to spread out across the dock. Others took up positions guarding the paths that wound up into the cliffs. A few remained on the ship.

  Scathur stood silently by, saying nothing. He was leaving the Children behind to guard this only exit from the Maw, should any humans try to double back and escape. His wire-faces he was taking with him: half to drag the pickled people to the Moghol and then tip them into the Urn, the rest to go with him and hunt the enemy.

  He could probably do it all alone of course, but there was always a chance the enemy had come prepared, might prove too much even for him. If there was one lesson his defeat that last time had taught him, it was always to be prepared for the worst. The wire-faces that he had brought along should be enough, but if they were not, he had his backup in the form of the Dead. There was an entire legion waiting in the Trough already, and there would be even more once the Urn was emptied.

  And if even they were still not enough, there was always Lubang-Nagar and its guardian. No one had ever got past that one.

  Scathur pursed his swollen lips and slid his tongue out to taste the air. There was blood on it, fresh blood . . . but it was not human. He scoured the harbour with his eyes . . .

  And located the storehouse. Its door lay open, swinging in the breeze. He sniffed hard and then smelt it: human sweat, fear-enriched and sweet with promise. Female sweat, too – that would be a novelty: breeders made a different noise altogether, and it was one not unpleasing to his ears.

  Noiselessly he paced over to the little hut and disappeared within.

  TEN

  Disgorg’d ’Pon Our Rankes an Ichor So Foulle

  ‘As the stagges who, inne a lyne, reste thieyr chinns ’pon eche othres’ rumpe to cross the rivver, soe too didde eche of us hav neede to suport hys commrayde for alle to sirvyve. Lernyng allso from the beests that didde huddel togethyr agaynst the eis-stor-mes, we then cam togethyr inne lynes three deepe, the outer lyne holdyng sheeldes agaynst the fyr, while thieyr commraydes maid swyft thieyr way to the iner keep. And wen we were assayl’d from the Hel-Houndes that from the fyr cam, why, those brayve menne on the out-syde simplie felle, and felle in legeons, for littel combat could ther be inne that heet. And inne fallyng they did bild a walle of slayne, a dyk of ded agaynst the flammes . . .’

  ‘So that’s the plan, is it?’ said Bolldhe as Nibulus concluded the latest chapter from the Chronicle. ‘I could be wrong, but I’d hazard a guess that Bloodnose had considerably more men than six. Exactly how many volunteers did you want to fall in legions?’

  Nibulus wiped his face with his Ulleanh and tried to blink the sweat from his eyes. The heat was quite unbelievable; in his armour he felt he was being poached in his own juices, like a lobster in a cauldron.

  The climb from the Moghol had been dreadful, and despite the horse-strength that they unwittingly drew from the slain Zhang, it was with the direst dismay that the company clambered up the last slope of the Trough to approach Smaulka-Degernerth, the great Hall of Fire. From blackness, cold and fear, they had come to the ovens of hell, and panic gripped them as they struggled to breathe.

  Appa had wailed upon beholding the infernal place. A cavern immeasurable it was, a subterranean realm of bewildering god-like proportions, a living tunnel scooped from the earth’s bowels by the ancient wars of leviathans, where cold grey stone had become green-black glass in the heat of the white-hot torrent that had poured through it. The roof was lost somewhere way up there amid a smog of churning gases and fumes. Towering ribbed walls, curving away out of sight into whatever terrible abyss lay beyond, gleamed with a vitreous sheen; melted, fragmented and contorted into shapes that appeared to scream in torment after aeons of fire.

  They stood upon a wide ledge like a road running around the outer rim of the immense cavern-tunnel. It was wide enough to drive three carts, side by side, but the edge furthest from the wall was crumbling and treacherous. Even here at the entrance the ground beneath their feet quaked as if they stood above some entombed god who struggled in perpetual anguish. Geysers of molten rock constantly spouted from the river of fire, clouds of toxic gases spiralled like foul efreets, and flares of orange, red and white light seared their eyeballs.

  ‘Oh come on, Bolldhe,’ Nibulus shouted. ‘At least there are no hell hounds to assail us.’

  So on they went, leaving the Trough of the Dead behind them, to staunchly face whatever fresh peril this hall might hold in store for them. Of all of them only Appa now still wore his bearskin. Steadily they marched, for neither haste nor delay was possible in that heat. They kept as close to the wall as they could, shrinking away from the fiery trough below and hugging what meagre shadow was provided. The rock itself was too hot to touch with a bare hand, though they longed to collapse against it for support.

  Their gear became an increasing burden, and they yearned to cast aside their weapons, which weighed heaviest upon them. But nothing more could safely be left behind now. No one spoke, nor even opened his mouth for fear of swallowing more of those hot gases. Slowly panic began to enfold them and claustrophobia tightened its grasp, but still they trudged on, for it was either continue or die.

  After an hour of this Appa could stand it no longer. He tore off his sodden bearskin and hurled it to the ground. Underneath, his grey cloak was heavy with sweat, which now began to steam. He cried out, in part because his bared arms began to blister but also because it seemed to him that he had willingly walked into the realm of the Evil One and would languish in the agony of burning for all eternity. Hastily he rolled down his sleeves against the furnace-like glare then scurried ahead of them recklessly.

  ‘Leave him!’ ordered Nibulus. ‘He won’t get far.’

  Sure enough, minutes later they caught up with the old man, collapsed face down on the obsidian road, unconscious.

  ‘Any of your blood left, Wodeman?’ Nibulus enquired.

  ‘A little,’ the shaman rasped, ‘though I had hoped to keep it till we reached the final place.’

  ‘We won’t reach anywhere unless we have it now,’ Bolldhe choked. ‘C’mon, just give it here!’

  Wodeman unslung the skin and very carefully measured out a ration of blood for each companion, squeezing it drop by drop into their desperate outstretched palms. They daubed themselves like ravenous beggars, and once again grew calm. Finwald smeared some of his share on Appa’s brow before applying in to his own, and once they had all received the secret blessing of Zhang, Wodeman managed to rip open the skin and wipe a last smear from its inside on the old priest’s mouth.

  Appa, regaining consciousness, was raised to his feet and, after a pause, plodded on ahead of the company.

  This is ridiculous! Gapp fumed as he dragged his aching bones up the stairs. Completely stupid! Can’t they see that? We’re a hundred strong, and yet we follow that . . . thing up into flipp-knows-where! What is he now anyway, other than a shell of dying skin? He shouldn’t by rights be even able to stand up, let alone force his way up these steps!

  After they had sufficiently recovered from Jagt’s little jest, they had felt around and found they were in a sea cave of sorts. There was no light whatsoever, nor did any of them have any means of making any. It was a treacherous place, a black pit of knife-sharp rock, aggressive crustaceans with pincers as powerful as they were toxic, and slippery slopes that might pitch even the most careful walker into the freezing sea. Because of these hazards and the utter strangeness of the place, no one had felt inclined to move, to search for a way out, or do anything but huddle together for
mutual protection.

  The legion of Cyne-Tregva was only now beginning to find out what glorious quests really involved, and they were clearly enjoying this their first adventure as little as Gapp was.

  So once again the entire company was obliged to put its trust in Methuselech. There was, he informed them, only one exit, a flight of steps that wound steeply upward. It would lead them from the freezing blackness of this cave up to a wide hall where light and warmth awaited them. No matter how dubious this all sounded to the young Aescal, the Vetters at least were soon right behind the old spook.

  So up they all went, one hand holding on to the one in front, the other feeling the wall blindly. Gapp deliberately lagged behind, preferring to leave at least a dozen Vetters between himself and their soggy leader. Shlepp remained at his side always, and behind him he could feel the reassuring presence of the Paranduzes. The slippery steps were narrow, uneven, each tread worn almost porcelain smooth in the middle and seemed to run around the sea cavern’s wall, spiralling up higher and higher and higher, till the questers felt as if they were scaling the walls of a giant well.

  On and on they went, yet the blackness showed no sign of lessening, and they were all so cold. Only the sounds reminded them that they were still alive: the drumming of velvet-shod or fleshy feet, the occasional slip or slither, an odd gasp or grunt as a Cervulus horn accidentally pricked the buttocks of whoever was in front. And, gradually dwindling below them, they could still hear the muffled rumbling of the sea.

  The exhausted boy imagined they sometimes passed beneath arches of rock and occasionally over bridges. But no matter how far they climbed, it continued to be unrelentingly cold, dripping and dark. He did not know how much more he could take and dully wondered how long it would be until he lost his footing through sheer exhaustion or disorientation, and toppled over the edge into the void.