by Alexey Pehov
Then another one. And another.
“When it breaks, the tower will be no more than a memory. And what went down through its floor will flood out into Avendoom. Come on! Get up! You were never a spineless milksop!”
Valder got to his feet, struggling hard not to fall over.
“I’ll hold the mirror together for as long as I can!”
“I’m already dead, O’Karta. Let’s do it the other way round. You have a chance to save yourself.”
“We’re all dead already. If you stay, it will be over too soon—you’re very weak. I’ll try to hold out for as long as possible.”
O’Karta turned away from Valder, raised his hands, and began directing streams of energy onto the cracked mirror.
That was the other magician’s last memory of him.
Intent and unbowed.
Valder found the winding staircase very difficult. When he reached the ground floor, there was darkness dancing in his eyes and the pain in his chest had expanded to a huge, pulsating sphere. He kept spitting out the blood that constantly appeared in his mouth.
The Tower of the Order was quivering slightly. Inconceivable forces had locked grips with each other in a struggle for liberty, and the archmagician had no doubt that the Kronk-a-Mor, even though Zemmel had not completed it, would be victorious. Valder tried not to think about what would happen after that.
The tower was no longer shaking; it was groaning in a low voice. Massive cracks ran through the walls. The ancient building could feel that its death was near. But the magical door opened gently to let the archmagician out.
The cold air and icy wind stung his face. His hands, firmly clutching the now-dormant Horn, were instantly frozen. Valder staggered away from the tower. Now without a single light burning, it watched him go with a melancholy stare. Every now and then there were flashes of magic at its very top as O’Karta spent his last strength on delaying the mirror’s collapse.
The Street of the Magicians was surprisingly empty. No one came out of their houses to see what was going on, as if everybody had been crushed under the weight of heavy sleep. The pain in Valder’s chest was growing worse, and he could hardly see anything. He walked blindly, setting his feet down one after the other and moaning softly when the torment became unbearable. Blood filled his mouth, running down over his chin and dripping onto his clothes.
The ground shuddered as it tried to expel the hostile magic of the ogres.
O’Karta held out for much longer than could have been expected. Valder got as far as the Street of the Sleepy Cat.
Even from there he heard the jangling sound of the mirror breaking, and then the triumphant howl of power hurtling up out of the earth. A terrible explosion threw the magician into a snowdrift and his face sank into the gentle coolness. The roaring continued as the magic of the ogres went on a rampage. As he lost consciousness, Valder could sense the threads of people’s lives being crumpled and snapped as the dark curse consumed street after street, house after house, inhabitant after inhabitant. . . . They died in terrible torment. This power that was alien to humankind knew no pity or compassion; it took everyone who happened to be in its way.
In only a few minutes the Evil would reach the spot where Valder was lying, and then the Horn would stay there forever.
This thought forced the archmagician to turn over onto his back. He held his snow-covered face up to the falling snowflakes, catching them greedily with his bloody mouth. The wind died down. The world froze in horror at the advancing disaster, anticipating the most terrible blizzard in the city’s entire history. With a superhuman effort, in danger of losing consciousness at any moment, Valder got up off the road and looked in the direction of the tower.
Now, instead of solid ground there was a rapidly swirling black whirlwind. Ordinary people would never have seen it, but Valder’s magical vision, even though it was weakened by his injury, could clearly distinguish the black vortex reaching up into the night sky.
The magician managed to walk a little farther, and then he collapsed at the foot of the statue of Sagot and could not rise again.
The upper part of the god’s face was covered by a layer of fresh snow and Valder could only see the lips. The mentor of thieves was looking at the archmagician with a frank smile of approval.
“I have to save the Horn. Do you hear? I have to. Help me, and I’ll do anything you want.”
Sagot didn’t answer.
Valder felt as if he was engulfed by the delirious visions of fever. He saw dark shadows circling above Avendoom, he imagined he saw a man in a jacket with a hood, running across ruined roofs and hiding. In his agony he no longer understood where he was or who he was. The archmagician was falling asleep. . . . Life was abandoning his body with every beat of his heart, and his reason was already poised above the abyss from which there is no return.
“Master Valder! Wake up! Wake up, teacher!” Someone was shaking the magician relentlessly.
He wanted to brush off this annoying fly. He was enjoying dozing, and quietly humming the children’s song that his mother used to sing to him. But through the drowsiness of approaching death he could hear someone crying.
“Teacher, it’s me. Come back . . .”
With a struggle, Valder parted his leaden eyelids and saw Gani’s wet face.
“Wh-what are you doing here?” the archmagician gasped with a great effort.
“I felt worried. And I came running to find you.”
“You felt . . .” The magician looked up at the statue of Sagot, listened, and nodded. He was suddenly swamped by a new wave of pain and had to grit his teeth to avoid crying out loud. “Here, take this. It’s the Horn. Take it to Artsis. Quickly . . . He can stop this.”
“I won’t go without you!”
“Take it! This is my last order to you, my pupil. Find Artsis and give him the artifact. Tell him that I ask him to take you as his pupil. T-tell . . . tell him that everything went wrong. Tell him we awoke something that is beyond our understanding. A blizzard . . .” The exhausted magician collapsed back onto the snow. “Go on now. Run. Or it will be too late. Save what can still be saved.”
Gani hesitated, then nodded decisively and dashed off, clutching the Horn tightly against himself.
“Run, kid, run,” Valder whispered.
The snow circled gently as it fell on the dead archmagician, covering him in a white blanket of warmth and peace. The snow whispered and sang its song, knowing that soon its most frenzied dance of all would begin.
There was a black blizzard gathering over Avendoom.
11
A CITY OF GRAY DREAMS
I pressed myself back against a dirty wall covered with lichen on the Street of Men and groaned. The pain had appeared somewhere in my chest and now it was slowly receding, taking my terrible dream with it.
I still seemed to be there—on the snow-carpeted Street of the Sleepy Cat, beside the statue of Sagot. And I still could not believe that I was not lying dead in the snow on the street in old Avendooom.
“I am only Harold,” I whispered, “who is known in Avendoom as the Shadow, and not the archmagician Valder, who died centuries ago. . . .”
The immersion in the ghastly web of the cloudy nightmare that had snared me had been instantaneous. It happened as I was walking quickly along the Street of Men and suddenly . . .
I remained myself, but in some strange way I was transformed into Valder at the same time. My consciousness was broken and fragmented like the delicate covering of the young November ice on the river. While still himself, Harold the thief slumped helplessly against a wall in the Forbidden Territory and lived a new life, or rather, a section of someone else’s life that was incredibly real.
With a trembling hand I wiped away the sweat that had sprung out on my forehead and shook my head in an attempt to force out of it the final leaden grains of my nightmare.
It was an unpleasant feeling, but at least now I knew what had actually happened on that terrible night in the old
Tower of the Order and how the legendary curse of Avendoom, the Forbidden Territory, had come to be.
The blame for the appearance of this city of the dead lay with the Master, who had seduced Zemmel with promises of immortality and power.
Who was he? I had heard that title several times already during the last week. This individual was a mystery and a great riddle not only for me, but also for Artsivus, which meant for the Order, too. Although at least I now knew for certain that this Master and the Nameless One were completely different persons.
But right then I wasn’t really concerned with either of them. I had fallen behind schedule again, so I stopped pondering all sorts of unnecessary nonsense and set off on my way.
The Forbidden Territory was certainly strange enough, but nonetheless I must say that I was pleasantly disappointed. There were so many terrible rumors circulating about it in Avendoom, but everything here turned out to be quiet and peaceful. The plans of the old part of the city that had been made by the diligent dwarves and which I obtained in the library had proved to be ideally precise. On clambering over the wall, I had indeed found myself on the broad, twilit Street of Men, beside a low building with its door rotted away. Either a shop or a barber’s salon—it was hard to tell from the rusty, faded sign.
I gathered my courage and appealed to Sagot, just to be on the safe side, and set off, constantly checking with the map in my head.
The street was deserted, just as I had dreamed it. Deserted and it felt . . . absolutely unreal somehow.
Yes, in the faceless breaches of the windows there was a spring breeze snuffling gently in its sleep. Sometimes a sign that was almost rusted right through would squeak and sway on one of the half-ruined shops. There was a rotten winter sled standing in front of one of the houses. The streets were cluttered with heaps of rubbish—mostly from buildings and roofs, which had collapsed with the passage of time. But there were no human remains.
Not a soul, not even the scattered bones of the skeleton of a horse or a dog, let alone a human being. The dull gray light of the streets and the pale silver glow of the full moon created a picture of a dead world, abandoned long ago. And another strange thing was the absence of the mist to which I had become accustomed over the last three weeks.
I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that my magical vision completely stopped working as soon as I had walked about twenty yards along the Street of Men. The colors faded, the world blinked and collapsed into shadows and darkness.
No point in panicking before there was any real need.
I hoped that wouldn’t happen to me in Hrad Spein, or I was a dead man. The most terrible thing that could happen to anyone was to find himself lost in the impenetrable bleakness of those deep underground halls, although I wasn’t exactly delighted with this place, either.
I occasionally glanced round, turning cold inside as I expected to see someone or something following in my footsteps, but everything was calm and quiet. I tried not to make a sound and listened to the summer night with my hearing heightened to the maximum.
But the only noise was the wind. It would die away, like some little wild animal, and then, at the most unexpected moment, suddenly start playing in the black gaps of the dead houses, jumping out of gateways with a mysterious whistle, swaying shutters that had come off their hinges so that they banged against the walls of the houses, teasing the loose sheets of roofing metal and setting them rattling menacingly, then hiding again.
Only once did an incomprehensible and therefore frightening sound set icy shivers running up and down my spine.
As I stole past a once-wealthy house with faded green paint, I heard a faint child’s cry that broke off abruptly. Retreating in shock to the other side of the street, I merged into the shadow and listened in silent terror. The crying had come from the ground floor. The windows were boarded up, but that was definitely where the cry was from.
I waited. My heart was pounding rapidly, like some wild bird begging to be released from a cramped cage. Good old Harold was desperately afraid of hearing that sound again—the angry, desperate crying of a hungry infant abandoned by its mother.
But there was not another sound and, after waiting for a few seconds, I went on my way. I walked hurriedly, glancing round all the time, afraid to believe what I had heard. And the fear gradually released its grip.
I tried not to show myself in the sections of the street that were illuminated by the moon, but at the same time not to press too closely against the walls of the dead houses. They made me feel a kind of instinctive childish horror, with that mournful expression in all their silent, broken window-eyes. These imaginary glances gave me a really horrible feeling, and my overexcited imagination obligingly kept throwing up all sorts of pictures, for the most part quite unpleasant.
At those moments I really felt like sending the king, Hrad Spein, and the map to hell, and simply disappearing from the city. The only thing that stopped me was the fear of breaking a contract.
The fact that Graveyard Street ran just behind the houses, parallel to the Street of Men, did nothing to inspire me with optimism, either. Finally, I caught sight of the judge’s house. I don’t know if a judge actually lived there or the name came about for some incidental reason. But the judge’s house was what this gray, three-story stone block was called in the plans of the city.
Immediately behind the judge’s house, if the plans could be trusted, there was a narrow alley leading to the Street of the Sleepy Cat. Like Graveyard Street, it ran parallel to the Street of Men, but on my left-hand side. In principle I could carry on along the Street of Men and reach the Street of the Sleepy Cat from the broad Oat Avenue, but that was a long, long walk and the Forbidden Territory isn’t the kind of place that encourages long, relaxed nocturnal strolls. I swear to that on the Quiet Times! The sooner I could get out of there, the better. The narrow alleyway would cut down my dangerous journey by at least half, which would be most welcome.
“Well, may a h’san’kor devour me!” I swore in a low voice.
The house beside the judge’s house had collapsed and one of its walls had fallen into the alley, blocking my way to the Street of the Sleepy Cat. Unfortunately I wasn’t a mountain goat, to go scrambling over all that rubble. Even Vukhdjaaz, may his name not be mentioned at night, would break his leg here.
I’d have to go the long way round.
My gaze fell on the point where the walls of the somber houses melted into the night. How far was it to Oat Avenue? I realized that the street was quiet and there was absolutely nobody there, and yet . . . Somehow I wasn’t burning with desire to walk along the Street of Men. Slit my throat, but I wouldn’t, and that was an end to it. The same intuition that saved me the night I crept into the duke’s house had grabbed hold of me by the shoulders and wouldn’t let me go on. But then how was I going to get onto the Street of the Sleepy Cat? The only answer was to go through one of the sinister houses standing on my left. Maybe the one closest to me—the judge’s house.
Standing there in a shadow as thick as rich cream, I hesitated in torment, trying to decide which was the lesser of two evils—to walk along the Street of Men or to poke my nose into a dead house. I didn’t find either option much to my liking, but standing there doing nothing was just as dangerous as continuing my journey.
There was another quiet child’s cry from the house opposite the judge’s house, and I shuddered. The sound had come from the second floor.
The first time I heard the crying, I had put it down to my overexcited imagination, but this time there was no avoiding the fact that I really had heard it. And this discovery was far from filling my heart with peace and delight. Ghosts? The spirits of the dead? The curse of the Rainbow Horn?
I don’t know what it was or what it wanted from me, but I certainly wasn’t going to be fooled by a child’s cry and go running to save the innocent infant, like some idiotic knight in a fairy tale. There aren’t any children here, there haven’t been for two hundred years. At least, not
any live ones.
I carefully unfastened my crossbow and loaded a fire bolt instead of one of the ordinary ones. It looked just like a battle bolt, except for the red notches on its tip that helped distinguish it from its nonmagical brothers. It was a serious weapon that could easily topple a knight clad in full armor.
A few moments passed, during which my heart sank and became entangled in my guts, then the terrible crying stopped as suddenly as it had started. A second’s silence . . . And then I heard quiet chuckling. Malicious laughter. The way a child can laugh when it’s torturing a cat and knows that it will never be punished by the grown-ups. The hair on my head began stirring and my back was suddenly streaming with cold sweat. For almost the first time in my life I wanted to yell out at the top of my voice in sheer animal terror. Nothing had ever frightened me so badly before.
It was time to clear out of there, and quickly—that laugh didn’t make me feel like having a polite, relaxed conversation with its mysterious owner. I no longer had any doubt that this unknown creature had set out to hunt poor Harold. Otherwise how could it have turned up two blocks away from where I’d first heard it?
When I heard the chuckling coming from the ground floor of the house, I abandoned all doubt and hesitation. I hurtled up the steps onto the porch of the judge’s house, pushed open the door, and plunged into the ancient darkness, on the way dragging out of my pocket a disposable magical trinket that gave out a dim light. I could see just well enough to avoid running into the nearest wall or the furniture and to find the old door, warped with age, that led into the inner chambers. There wasn’t even enough time to take out one of the bright magical light sources that I had bought from good old Honchel. I could already hear the laughter in the street, beside the porch.
Anyone else in my place would have fired at this unknown mysterious jolly weeper, but I’m more careful than that—it’s the way For trained me. What if I didn’t kill the weird beast, but only ended up making it even more furious?
