Shadow Prowler

by Alexey Pehov

  The old man began fiddling with a massive bundle of keys and swearing as he opened the squeaky old locks.

  I was thinking hard. Who else has suddenly decided he needs maps of the forbidden district of the city? Has the king hired someone else to do the job as well as me? Doesn’t he trust me? Or are these people working for someone else? The Nameless One, for instance?

  “What’s your name, pops?” I asked amiably, bending down to duck under the ceiling of a gray corridor that led deep under the ground, into darkness.

  “Bolt,” the old-timer muttered, lighting the torch lying ready near at hand. “Crossbow Bolt, that’s my name. Mind you don’t break your legs, the steps are steep. All the forbidden books are kept in an underground depository. Let’s get what you want, then you can go back up to read it, otherwise I’ll freeze to death here.”

  “I heard that the forbidden books couldn’t be taken out of the depository.”

  “Hmm . . . I’d like to tell the Order where to stick their stupid rules. Those fat bloated wizards don’t understand a thing. If they’d ever fought ogres, like me, they’d soon drop all that stupid nonsense. Who needs this old junk? When you’ve read everything you want, I’ll bring them back. Careful, the step’s broken here.”

  Hm. Bolt. I knew that in the Wild Hearts many soldiers were given nicknames to replace their real names. The nickname described the man, and men earned them for the specific quality of their service, actions, knowledge, or character. The Wild Hearts took pride in their new names.

  Crossbow Bolt. So in former times the old man must have been a good shot.

  We walked down into a dark hall that was small, but even so the torchlight was too feeble to illuminate it fully. The old man reached out one hand into the darkness, there was a loud click somewhere up above our heads, and the room was flooded with blinding sunlight. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut in sudden surprise.

  “Aha, frightened, eh?” The old man giggled with delight. “Come on now, don’t be afraid. Come on, open those peepers.”

  I slowly got used to the bright light. Like the large hall up above, this small one was crammed absolutely full of books and scrolls on metal shelves. And hanging from the high ceiling there was a blindingly bright round sphere, like a little sun.

  “The dwarves invented it. Did you think they run around in the dark in those caves of theirs, smashing their foreheads against the walls? Oho noo . . . They put up magic lamps like this. Magic! Our Order’s never even come close to anything like it. The charlatans! But the dwarves put one of these candles in here, and about ten of them in the basements of the royal palace. Of course, I’ve got no idea how much money they took for it. But it’s handy all right.”

  I nodded.

  “Right, then. Stay here, and don’t touch anything or stick your nose into anything. I’ll go and get what you want.” The old man gave me a menacing look to make sure I understood what he’d said.

  As soon as he was gone, I instantly shed my harmless pose and started strolling about, looking at the titles of the old volumes. My eyes slid along until they suddenly came to rest on a small shelf of magic scrolls. The following words were written in immense, ornate letters on the wall beside the shelf: BATTLE SPELLS! RUNE MAGIC. THESE SCROLLS MAY ONLY BE USED BY ARCHMAGICIANS OF THE ORDER, WHEN PERMISSION HAS BEEN GRANTED BY THE COUNCIL!

  I couldn’t understand why rune-magic battle spells would be lying there so openly, entirely unprotected. Any light-fingered rogue—like me, for instance—could easily make off with these rolled-up sheets of parchment.

  Carelessness will destroy the world yet. Just you mark my words!

  I glanced round quickly, grabbed one scroll, with a black ribbon, out of the dusty heap and stuck it inside my shirt. Then I moved away, to wait for the old man. I’d acted like a petty thief, but I thought to myself that no one else was going to need the scroll for a long time, and it might come in handy in Hrad Spein.

  The trouble with scrolls is that you can only use them once. After you’ve chanted the formula and worked the spell, you can simply throw the useless parchment away. The magic destroys the words, erasing them from the scroll and from the reader’s memory. But at least you don’t have to be a magician to work magic that has been written down on paper. You only need to know how to read.

  I heard Bolt coughing somewhere behind the shelves, and then he himself appeared, carrying two books in his hands. One was huge and thick, in a brown buffalo-skin binding with worn gold embossing, the other was small and so old that I thought it would crumble to dust under his fingers.

  “An ogre almost grabbed me back there,” the old man muttered, handing me the books I wanted. “The brute was hiding under the shelves. I had to give it a couple of kicks to frighten it off. Well, why are you just standing there like a block of wood?”

  “Is that all?” I asked Bolt in amazement as I looked at the two books. I’d been expecting more.

  “That’s enough cheek from you. The big one is plans of Avendoom, drawn four hundred years ago, and the little one’s about Hrad Spein. Written quite recently, but it’s in a terrible state. The other books are in orcish. You don’t happen to savvy their spiel, do you. Right! Then quit your moaning.”

  The old man turned out the dwarves’ sun, took the torch out of its bracket, and started climbing up the steps. We walked all the way back in silence. Then, still without speaking, the custodian locked the iron door and showed me to a table, only not in the large hall. It was in a little cubbyhole, surrounded by books. Then he walked off, muttering something to himself.

  I began my research with what was simplest and easiest. Setting aside the little book, I pulled over the weighty tome composed of maps of the city bound together into a single volume.

  The pages of fine parchment rustled quietly under my fingers as I turned them in search of the part of Avendoom that interested me. The maps in the book were astoundingly precise and detailed. It was obvious at first glance that this was the painstaking handiwork of dwarves. Only those large but meticulous hands could possibly have traced the lines so precisely and lovingly.

  As the pages flashed past my eyes, so did the streets of Avendoom and the city’s history. I found what I was looking for quite quickly. The Forbidden Territory. Of course, drawn at a time when the magicians of the Order had not yet combined forces with the Rainbow Horn to transform five whole streets into a cursed spot that was walled off from the rest of the city.

  Well then, getting into the Forbidden Territory would be fairly easy. Only what was waiting for me in there? Three roads left the Port City, running in parallel toward the Artisans’ City: the Street of the Sleepy Cat, the Street of Men, and Graveyard Street. The last of these ran into the old graveyard that was still in use at that time.

  Running at right angles to the Street of the Sleepy Cat was the Street of the Magicians, which opened out into the square where the old Tower of the Order stood. On the other side of the square the Street of the Roofers began. As I had expected, all these streets occupied a substantial chunk of the city, a lot more than I had been counting on, in fact. It was going to be a tricky business. But if I wanted to find Grok’s grave, I would have to get into the old Tower of the Order somehow. I couldn’t understand how the two previous expeditions could have set out for Hrad Spein without knowing where to look for the Horn. What had they been counting on?

  I tried to memorize all the roads, buildings, and side streets. Call me a fool, if you like, but I never copy plans down onto parchment. What do I have a head for?

  Round about midday I leaned back in my chair, exhausted, then slammed the large volume shut and pushed it aside. I stretched and yawned. I would tackle the little book on Hrad Spein next. Hrad Spein, the very worst haunted house ever, filled with the shades of demons, orcs, ogres, and elves. Well, at least we would have an elf with us. What a curious, rare beauty she was, although not a conventional beauty by any means. Not that she was my type—what a match that would be! Ho-ho. Mysterious though, f
ascinating secrets there. She would bear watching.

  My stomach was quite shamelessly reminding me that it was feeling rather hungry. Bolt went by, and I asked him if he could bring me something to eat or go and buy something. The only answer I got was a furious glance and a stern lecture that I should stuff my belly at an inn, not a depository of learning.

  Deciding to try a different approach, I took out a silver coin and set it spinning on the table. Before the coin even came to a stop, Bolt grabbed it and disappeared into the walls of books and scrolls. A little while later he came back with a huge amount of food and four bottles of sour red wine: he’d been generous with my money and bought enough drink for an entire squadron.

  We dined right there, on the table. In half a day not a single other person had come to visit the library building, and as I gnawed on a tough, unappetizing chicken leg, I realized how lonely and miserable the old man must feel here. Meanwhile, Bolt reserved most of his attention for the wine. After my snack, I told the custodian to go away and let me get on with my work, and he picked up the bottles and the remaining food and left.

  I pulled over the little book, which bore a title in black letters: Hrad Spein. A nocturnal mystery, shrouded in death. A history with conjectures. The scholarly work of the magician Dalistus of the Snow, the Order of Avendoom.

  Well, at least it would make interesting reading.

  Ornate letters and engravings, maps, drawings of mysterious, inconceivable creatures. The terrible tale took a grip on me, plunging me into an age of ancient mysteries.

  “Hrad Spein” is a ogric name. Translated into the language of men it means “Palaces of Bone.” But the dark elves say that the human tongue is incapable of expressing the universal horror that the ogres invested in those two words. No one knows who created Hrad Spein, and in which age, whose thought and strength it was that bit so deep into the bones of the earth, creating those immense caves and caverns that were later transformed into the architectural wonders of the northern world and, later still, into a world of darkness and horror.

  The first to discover Hrad Spein were the ogres, before they withdrew into the Desolate Lands. There were no orcs yet then, not to mention human beings. The ogres spent a long time exploring Hrad Spein, a very long time. That was where they solved the mysteries of the Kronk-a-Mor. Nothing is known about the origin of the ogres, but they appeared in Siala a lot later than the time when unknown builders first laid the foundations of the Palaces of Bone. They say that the potency of the ogres’ magic came from ageless catacombs, where they discovered the ancient writings of an unknown race that lived in Siala long before the ogres arrived.

  Deep, deep under the ground the ogres came across gigantic halls and caves. They started using Hrad Spein as their graveyard, leaving their dead and placing terrible curses on the burial sites. Later, when the ogres moved away to the north, it was the bones of orcs and elves that found their final resting place in Hrad Spein. While constantly warring with each other above the ground, they also found time to create magnificent palaces below it, palaces of a beauty that stunned their contemporaries. And thousands of thousands were interred there, in the ancient burial grounds.

  Exquisitely elegant ceilings, columns, frescoes, halls, statues, and corridors—that was Hrad Spein in those times. The orcs and the elves worked together. It was the only place where there was an effective truce between the feuding relatives. Neither side intruded on the lower levels of the ogres. Both races realized that nothing good could be expected from the ogres’ magic, and the upper layers of the palaces provided more than enough space for them.

  But eventually the bloodlust of the orcs and the hatred of the elves had their effect, and blood was spilt in this place that was sacred to both races. Both of them started installing traps in their own territory to catch their enemies. The underground halls crackled with dark shamanic energy and were drowned in blood. In the end, neither orcs nor elves could feel safe in these places any longer. The Palaces of Bone were abandoned and subsequently the secret knowledge of the locations of traps and labyrinths in the lower levels was lost.

  Hrad Spein became like a gigantic underground layer cake tens of leagues deep and wide. The levels of the ogres, the levels of the orcs and the elves. Halls, corridors, and caves. Burial sites, treasure chambers, and magical rooms. Everything in the Palaces of Bone became wound up tight into one gigantic, inextricable tangle. By the time the orcs and elves left the place, men had appeared in the world of Siala and they found their way to Hrad Spein.

  They too did not dare go down to the lower levels. Amazing as it might seem, our race had the wits not to do that. Men took over the upper three levels for burying their warriors. Hrad Spein became legendary as the greatest burial ground in the Northern Lands. Only brave soldiers who had fallen in battle were considered worthy to be buried in Hrad Spein, and, of course, aristocrats.

  But then, something happened. Nobody ever knew what it was exactly, or why it happened. In Hrad Spein the evil of the ogres’ bones awoke, protected by the dark shamanism that had lain dormant all these centuries on the lower levels of the underground regions. It awoke, rousing the dead—and someone else as well. And it rose to the very upper level, but did not emerge from the bounds of Hrad Spein, settling forever in the ancient palaces, and no one dared to go down to those places. Except for the magicians carrying the Horn to Grok’s grave.

  Time went by, and the Forests of Zagraba swallowed up the entrances to this underground country, concealing the horror of night forever beneath the green crowns of their trees. Over the centuries the dreadful tales about Hrad Spein acquired even greater depths of horror and darkness. Only once, about forty years ago, did dark elves venture down into those places to leave there forever the head of the House of the Black Rose, but they were only able to carry the body of the warrior who had fallen in battle with the orcs as far as the fourth level. They abandoned his body there, amid the darkness and the horror, and retreated upward, fighting off the creatures of the night and losing soldiers as they went. In the end only a pitiful remnant of the elves managed to escape back into the sunlight.

  And now I must set out to go to this dark place. With no help to rely on, no precise maps of the levels and the halls, no knowledge of where the traps are positioned, or even how to find Grok’s grave, which was not built by the overzealous magicians on the levels of men, but on the eighth level, one that was used by the elves. I just hope that Artsivus is right and in the old Tower of the Order I’ll be able to find at least some maps and a plan showing the location of the Horn.

  When I was about halfway through studying the work of the magician Dalistus of the Snow, Bolt came back, after having taken on board a full load of wine, and joined me at my table. He started telling me about his life and how he served in the Lonely Giant fortress. About the battles with orcs and svens when he used to fire his trusty crossbow. I didn’t really listen to his drunken tale-telling, just nodded mechanically sometimes as I carried on studying the history of Hrad Spein. It was already evening before the old man, evidently weary already of his own stories and with nothing else left to say, asked if he could look at my crossbow. I tore myself away from the book and looked up at him in amazement.

  “Well, what are you looking at me like that for? Are you afraid I’m drunk and I’ll hurt myself? Why, I was using a crossbow before you were even born, you snot-nose! Give me it, nothing will happen.”

  I hesitated for a moment, then took the miniature weapon out from under my cloak and held it out to Bolt, after first checking that the safety catch was on, so that the metal arrow couldn’t be fired if the trigger was pressed accidentally.

  The old-timer grabbed the crossbow out of my hands, clicked his tongue in satisfaction, weighed the weapon in his hands, and aimed it at something behind my back. He found the safety catch very quickly and immediately released it. I began regretting that I hadn’t disarmed the weapon. Then the custodian, apparently tired of playing with the crossbow, put it down
beside him, poured a fresh glass of wine, and clinked it against the weapon. And now that he had a new and probably more appreciative listener, he went on with the story of his life at the Lonely Giant. I immersed myself in the book again and only emerged from my reverie late in the evening, when Bolt yelled piercingly right in my ear:

  “An ogre!”

  The old man’s howl was so unexpected and so loud, that I fell backward, together with my chair, and struck my head painfully against the wooden floor. Through the flash of pain I saw a heavy arrow bury itself in the table, after punching right through the book about Hrad Spein.

  Bolt grabbed the crossbow and fired upward at something without even taking aim. I heard a cry of pain, fury, and amazement and flung my head back, expecting to see a genuine ogre for the first time in my life. But all I saw was my old friend Paleface standing there, his left hand clutching his right shoulder, which had a crossbow bolt jutting out of it.

  I jumped to my feet, forgetting all about the pain in my head, grabbed the crossbow out of the drunken old-timer’s hands, and dashed across to the steps leading up to the balcony. Reloading the weapon on the run, I thought to myself that Bolt certainly deserved his nickname. Anyone who could hit the target at that distance, even in the shoulder, and without really taking aim, when he was as drunk as a lord, was a real master.

  Meanwhile Paleface went dashing away from me into one of the dimly lit corridors on the second floor. I rushed after him.

  The assassin was gone. One of the second-floor windows was wide open. I reloaded my weapon, walked up to the opening, and cautiously leaned out, ready to pull back at any moment if Paleface hadn’t run away, only hidden. But the night street was deserted, with only a few lamps burning, and I hastily slammed the window frames shut so that nothing else could stick its head in from out of the darkness. After expressing aloud my wish that the son of a bitch Paleface would be eaten by some especially hungry brutish creature that very night, I went back down the steps.