The Path of Flames (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 1)

by Phil Tucker

  Sighing, he blew out the candle and stored it and his disc back in his pack. “Come on, Aedelbert. We can’t sulk all morning.”

  Aedelbert chirped and snuggled down deeper beneath the blanket.

  “Fine, you’re not sulking, but all the same. Don’t force me to play the role of cruel taskmaster. Come along.”

  He pulled the blanket off his firecat and scooped him up. Aedelbert glared up at him and snorted out a small tongue of flame in annoyance.

  “None of that. Here. Have a little breakfast.” He squatted before the fire and scooped up a coal with one of Elon’s misappropriated tongs. He held the glowing rose stone before Aedelbert’s nose; the firecat sniffed it and then set to licking it cold. When he was done, Audsley dropped the ashen coal back in the fire and set Aedelbert on his shoulders. He gathered his cloak about his frame and drifted out of the great hall.

  Audsley walked around the ash saplings, stepping absentmindedly over rusted weapons and armor as he went. What use was a learned man during a time of action? This was a time for swords and derring-do, not perusing ancient scrolls. Audsley fought back a sigh. Everybody had been given a task, save him. He was superfluous, really.

  Audsley froze. What was that? He’d just walked past the entrance to a small room they were using to store their food supplies. He’d seen something. Movement. He stood still and listened. Aedelbert had tensed as well. Was that a subtle scuff on the ground? He gulped. One step was all it would take for him to return to the archway and peer inside.

  Audsley hesitated. Naugrim? The sensible thing to do would be to call for others to join him. Some of Brocuff’s men. Audsley frowned. Surely a quick peek couldn’t hurt. He turned and peered into the room. Aedelbert peered around him in turn.

  There, in the back, by the barrel of apples. Audsley pushed his spectacles up and peered intently into the gloom. A creature was barely visible behind the sacks of turnips. Too robust for a Bythian, but its pale skin and white hair gave it away. Naugrim. Audsley felt his heart pounding in his chest like a hammer. This was it. His first encounter with the supernatural. There, right before him, was a creature from myth and legend.

  He couldn’t let it get away. “Excuse me? Hello?”

  The naugrim froze, then whipped a glance over its shoulder, lank white hair flaring around a hideous face. Bad idea, thought Audsley, eyes going wide. The anger in its eyes was shocking. Bad idea! He saw a massive nose, tiny gold eyes, and a slit of a mouth filled with sharp teeth and chunks of apple. Its frame was not just robust, but muscled, and its eyes were lit with a malevolent cunning. Before Audsley could react, it grabbed another apple and ran through the wall.

  Aedelbert hissed and flew into the room to land on a tall stack of crates, fur puffed out, wings slowly beating. Audsley reached out to steady himself against the archway and turned his head from one side to the other in a vain attempt to catch sight of the—the thing. It was gone.

  Audsley gulped and took a step into the storeroom. Never had a collection of bags and barrels looked so ominous. The room was damp, its ceiling low and made of rotten beams of wood. He took another tiny step. Silence surrounded him. He rounded the turnips and stared at where the creature had stood. He had seen it. He knew he had. Right there, eating an apple. He waited a full minute, listening and watching, and finally walked up to the barrel and examined the wall. Plain stone, like the rest of the Hold. He ran his fingers over the blocks. Not even a rat could get through. And yet the creature had done exactly that. Crouching, he picked up a chewed-up chunk of apple and felt a wave of pride wash through him. Evidence!

  He reached into his pouch, drew forth his nub of candle and held it out to Aedelbert, who lit it with a fiery breath. “Thank you,” he murmured, and scrutinized the dirt floor, where he found bare footprints, long-toed, with little dimples at the end to indicate claw tips. Audsley quickly sketched the sign of the Ascendant and tried to track the prints. They led right to the wall. Holding his candle aloft, he couldn’t help but smile. So it was true: they really could pass through stone.

  Then he stopped. Was that a vertical seam? He traced it with his fingertips. It was so subtle he wouldn’t have spotted it without being this close. “How strange,” he said to Aedelbert, who leaped onto his shoulder. “A hidden door?” He tapped his chin. A small wedge of stone was inserted between two larger blocks as if to fill a gap at about the height of a door handle. Audsley pressed it. The stone sank inward, he heard a muted click, and a section of the wall swung inward, revealing a dark space beyond.

  “Oh, my,” said Audsley. He stood, hand outstretched, straining to hear or detect anything, but heard only silence. Had the naugrim run through the closed door and into the passage beyond?

  Before he could change his mind, he gave the door a firm push, and it swung in all the way, the light of his candle revealing a small landing at the top of a flight of stone steps. Moving forward, he peered into the darkness below. Exhilarated, curious, and trying not to think about how afraid he was, he stepped through the narrow portal onto the landing. The door was actually made of wood, he saw, with a facade of stone stuck to the front to cunningly emulate the wall. The little stone triggered a simple bolt; pushing it in caused the bolt to recede. “Very nice,” said Audsley, working the bolt two or three times. There was no actual lock; from within, he saw, one simply moved the bolt back manually and the door would open.

  “All right, now’s the time to go tell the others. Enough of this foolishness, Aedelbert! We are not cut from the same cloth as heroes. We’re common men, you and I.” He looked down the steps. The darkness into which they descended was terrifyingly inky and absolute. It reminded him of the sunken stairwells in Nous that led to the flooded levels below. Audsley shivered, goose bumps breaking out across his skin. “Yes, indeed. Time to go tell Lady Kyferin. And Brocuff. Right now. We’ve done our part. This is an amazing discovery, but we’ll let someone with a sword finish the exploring.”

  Aedelbert rubbed his head against Audsley’s cheek and purred.

  “What? Go down there? You and I? You can’t be serious.” He stared down into the darkness, mesmerized. His candle flame stood tall and still. No draft. It was probably a contained chamber down there, then. “Hello?” His voice echoed faintly, but no response came. “Hello? We might very possibly be coming down.”

  He hesitated. What would he do if they saw that pale little monster again? Well, it had run from him. He swallowed again and looked back out into the storeroom. Fetch someone else, he thought. Don’t be a silly fool. Let someone else have this adventure. Let someone else play the hero, while genial and boring Magister Audsley and his firecat stood at the back, anxiously watching over someone else’s shoulder.

  Audsley tugged his vest down and smoothed its front. “Feel free to convince me to do otherwise at any moment,” he whispered to Aedelbert—then he began to descend the steps.

  “Hello?” His voice was muted, as if absorbed by the darkness. “We really shouldn’t be doing this, you know. Coming down here. Just give the word if you don’t want us to come down, and we’ll happily run back upstairs, screaming the whole way.”

  His mouth was dry. His little candle wavered as he took step after step. A complete rotation, and then another. Aedelbert perched tensely on his shoulder, claws digging through the fabric of his cloak. He imagined returning upstairs after making some fabulous discovery, finding Lady Kyferin and Ser Tiron together, and recounting his adventures coolly and carelessly. Lady Kyferin would gaze at him admiringly, and Ser Tiron’s surprise would turn into grudging admiration. I didn’t think you had it in you, Magister, but by the Ascendant, I see now that I was wrong!

  The stairs turned once more and then opened up into a small chamber. A single Gate stood in the room’s center, a desiccated corpse lying stretched out on the floor before it. Audsley covered his mouth with his hand. Half a corpse. Whoever had passed through the Gate had been killed when it had closed, cutting them neatly in half. The floor around the body was still
dark with the ancient shadow of dried blood. The Gate was clearly closed now, for he could see right through it.

  “Oh, my,” whispered Audsley. “Aedelbert, perhaps you shouldn’t be seeing this.”

  There were three further rooms off this central chamber, which seemed to act as a central hub. Audsley craned and tried to peer into each room, but his candle’s faint radiance failed to penetrate their gloom.

  How long had the body lain there? It had been a warrior of some kind, he saw; it was wearing dusty black plate armor. A vicious-looking sword lay beside it, the lower half of one side serrated, the upper half curved into a wicked point. The corpse was holding a scabbard in the other hand.

  The silence served only to heighten the pounding beat of Audsley’s heart. He took a final step down into the chamber proper and looked at his candle flame. It burned steadily. There was still no draft.

  “Hello? Ser naugrim? Are you down here?” There was no response. Audsley bit his lower lip. “What do you think, Aedelbert? Should we press on in pursuit of further glory, or allow discretion to bludgeon valor into submission?” Aedelbert leaped from his shoulder and glided down to land beside the body, where the firecat lowered its head to sniff at the dried blood. “Ah. Very well.”

  Audsley approached the Gate. It was beautifully carved from freestanding obsidian, its surface catching the candlelight in a thousand small planes and sharp edges. Where did it go? What had this stranger fled in such haste that he had risked leaping through just as the Gate closed?

  Audsley squatted beside the body. The face was little more than mummified skin stretched taut over the skull. He reached out to touch the sword and snatched his hand back as Aedelbert suddenly hissed loudly at him.

  “No? Don’t touch it? All right.” He rubbed his hand as if he’d been burned and rose to inspect the Gate more closely. The Gate glass contained enough sand for a one-minute opening. A great distance, then. There’d been no mention of this Gate in Alastair’s Lunar Almanac. He felt a frisson of excitement. A new discovery! Wait till his old masters in Nous heard of this!

  Aedelbert suddenly wheeled and hissed. Audsley spun and nearly jumped as a pale form darted back into one of the rooms, disappearing from sight. He stood frozen, staring, waiting for it to emerge. A minute passed in silence, and finally he exhaled. “Perhaps we should explore a different room first. Stay in that one, ser naugrim, if you will!”

  He approached the first archway and peered into the room beyond. He stopped, eyes wide, breath caught in his chest, and felt a giddy sense of excitement rush through him. The walls of the small chamber within were covered with shelves groaning with a huge collection of books. A desk was placed front and center, with a number of candlestick holders lining its edge. Audsley didn’t know where to begin, what to look at first. There was no sign of the pale little monster, but even if he’d seen it lurking in the corner he wouldn’t have paid it much attention. Hesitantly, not quite daring to believe what he was seeing, he stepped up to the desk and peered down at a large map that was pinned to its surface by several books. He’d never seen its like. It depicted no Ascendant city, or any of the lands he’d seen before. Audsley lit several of the candles set about the table, and as their pale golden light bloomed he blew out his own and shoved it into his pocket. Aedelbert hopped up onto the table just as Audsley walked around it so as to study the map properly.

  “No title or key. Shoddy work, that. But here we have a scale. All right, so a relatively small area. Mountains. A lot of them. Nice sense of elevation, nice ink work. Not complete, I see. And—ah. Oh, my.” His finger hovered just above a diamond-shaped lake, in whose center a small island was drawn, the words Mythgræfen Hold elegantly lettered beside it.

  “Extraordinary,” he whispered.

  He traced the course of the Erenthil down to where the name Hrething was marked beside a small ‘X’. Excited, he lowered his gaze to the bottom of the map, cast around, and then sighed contentedly. A small town was marked with a fortress beside it. The Talon. Checking the scale, he tried to estimate the distance. Forty miles? There was a faint dotted line rising from the Talon to Hrething. A path?

  Suddenly lightheaded, he straightened and combed his hair away from his face. This was amazing, far more detailed and accurate than his own shoddy little map. He wanted to do a little dance, to imitate that Aletheian waltz once more. But he was too anxious to see more. What else was there? A few villages were marked higher in the mountains. Ostwald. Thestin. Former mining towns? Would they be ruins today?

  The land around the Hold was terrible. The elevations were incredibly steep and composed of an endless series of tiny valleys, waterfalls, blinds, ridges, escarpments and cliffs. It must have taken years to explore and map. Marveling, Audsley let his eye wander over the spines of the books being used as paperweights. A slender black volume was entitled The Chaos Years. A fat little red leather book chased in gold was entitled Agathanasius, the First of His Name: A Biography. A large brown tome that was falling apart bore the faint title of The Age of Wonders. The fourth corner was held down by an elegant green book, its wooden covers wrapped with muslin. The Cleansing and the Shaping: A Primer.

  “Oh, my,” whispered Audsley. He’d never even heard of these books, yet he had thought himself erudite. Blinking rapidly, he walked over to a shelf. One wonder after another greeted his eyes. A Bestiary of Zoe. The Song of Alstarus. The Battle of the Souls. The Sealing of the Black Gate. The Diseases of Will Workers. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.

  Audsley stopped and closed his eyes and stood perfectly still. If this banishment to Mythgræfen Hold were to last ten lifetimes, it would still end too soon. He counted ten beats of his heart and opened his eyes once more. Works of history. Biographies. Philosophical texts. Travelogues. Spiritual tracts. Allegories. Fables. Poetry collections. He felt dizzy. He recognized one name in ten. He had thought the Great Library at Nous to be complete, but it lacked most of these volumes. Where had these books come from? Were they forbidden texts? Might he find copies of them in the Black Vaults in Bythos?

  Audsley laughed weakly. Had he thought himself learned? Had he? He didn’t know where to begin.

  He drew down a slender black book, The Path of Flames. He opened it at random and held the book up so that he could make out the text by candlelight. The script was strange, curiously elongated, and barely legible. “For wisdom, both absolutely and in relation to what is known, lies in seeking the greatest good at the cost of the least corruption. Thus one who walks the Path of Flames, while dealing with great forces, must learn to pay attention to the subtlest of signs, so as to avert the encroachment of darkness. As corruption gains a foothold, so does our ability to discern the truth become warped, resulting in an inability to diagnose the very malady against which we must guard—”

  Audsley dropped the book as if it had turned into a snake and stepped back, wiping his hands on his tunic. Aedelbert leaped up in surprise and flew to the top of a bookcase. Sin Casting. A primer? What had gone on here in the Hold so many centuries ago? Had it been a hotbed of sin? Audsley took a breath and restrained the urge to simply flee upstairs. No, there were answers to be had here. Answers to the many questions that had been bubbling through his mind ever since he’d passed through the Raven’s Gate. Everybody upstairs had their duties: shoring up walls, watching the causeway, cooking the meals. Well, this room was his own personal battlefield, a realm of hidden knowledge across which he would lead his armies of enlightenment!

  Audsley smoothed down his tunic. He would not turn tail and flee like an ignorant Zoeian. He was a magister, trained in the finest of arts in the city of Nous itself, and by the Ascendant, he would wrest the secrets from this mysterious Hold with zeal and determination!

  He bent down, picked up the book, and quickly replaced it on the shelf. “Now, we need a plan, don’t we, Aedelbert? An orderly series of objectives that I must seek to accomplish, a road to guide my feet.”

  He tapped his lips and walked back to the map
. The Hold was clearly marked. If his earlier speculations were correct, then the Hold predated Kyferin Castle, which meant it had been built here ages ago for a singular purpose. What purpose was that? The Talon’s location was suggestive. A supporting role? It had remained, after all, within the Kyferin family.

  Audsley leaned down and studied the steep valley in which the Hold was situated. Why here? Why on this tiny island? A protective feature, to be sure, but terribly awkward and isolated. He studied the contours and high passes, the peaks and ravines. The Hold was situated, so it seemed, almost equidistantly from each of the high mountain villages or mining towns. Just as the Talon supported the Hold, did Mythgræfen support those towns? Was it a center of operations? No, its presence was clearly military in function. Was it the highest location at which a castle of this size could be built?

  Audsley straightened and rubbed his head, then took up the candle and stepped back outside to the mysterious Gate. A score of naugrim fled into the walls, gone so quickly Audsley nearly screamed. There had been, what, five of them? Seven? He stood shaking, candle flame wavering. How many were there here in the bowels of the Hold?

  He took a deep breath. They still seemed more afraid of him than anything else, and his curiosity was too strong. He’d take a quick look at the other rooms, then report upstairs immediately.

  He moved to the next archway and peered inside. Aedelbert moved ahead of him into the smaller chamber, similar to the first in that it contained a desk and shelving on which numerous old scrolls were laid. Had they run out of space in the first room?

  Audsley stepped inside and moved up to the desk to find no map, but rather a heavy ledger. He blew off the thick coating of dust, set down his candle with care, and after wiggling his fingers to make them limber turned the heavy wooden cover.

  The words were terribly faded and written in an elegant hand. Leaning down, he read the cover text slowly.