by Mel Odom
“Master.”
Startled from his musings but recovering in short order, Cholik turned. He tucked his shaking hands out of sight inside his robes. “What is it, Nullat?”
“Forgive me for interrupting your solitude, Master Cholik.” Nullat bowed. He was in his early twenties, dark-haired and dark-eyed. Dirt and dust stained his robes, and scratches adorned his smooth face and one arm from an accident during the excavation only a few days ago that had claimed the lives of two other acolytes.
Cholik nodded. “You know better than to interrupt unless it was something important.”
“Yes. Brother Altharin asked me to come get you.”
Inside his withered chest, Cholik’s heart beat faster. Still, he maintained the control he had over himself and his emotions. All of the acolytes he’d bent to his own ends feared him, and feared his power, but they remained hungry for the gifts they believed he would bestow. He intended to keep it that way. He kept silent, refusing to ask the question that Nullat had left hanging in the air.
“Altharin believes we have reached the final gate,” Nullat said.
“And has Altharin halted his work?” Cholik asked.
“Of course, master. Everything has gone as you have ordered. The seals were not broken.” Nullat’s face creased with worry.
“Is something wrong?”
Hesitation held Nullat mute for a moment. The pirates’ voices and the clangor of ships’ lines and rigging against yardarms and masts continued unabated from below.
“Altharin thinks he has heard voices on the other side of the gate,” Nullat said. His eyes broke from Cholik’s.
“Voices?” Cholik repeated, feeling more excited. The sudden rush of adrenaline caused his hands to shake more. “What kind of voices?”
“Evil voices.”
Cholik stared at the young acolyte. “Did you expect any other kind?”
“I don’t know, master.”
“The Black Road is not a way found by those faint of heart.” In fact, Cholik had inferred from the sacred Vizjerei texts that the tiles themselves had been shaped from the bones of men and women who had been raised in a village free of evil and strife. They’d never known need or want until the population had grown large enough to serve the demons’ needs. “What do these voices say?”
Nullat shook his head. “I cannot say, master. I do not understand them.”
“Does Altharin?”
“If he does, master, he did not tell me. He commanded only that I come get you.”
“And what does the final gate look like?” Cholik asked.
“As you told us it would, master. Immense and fearful.” Nullat’s eyes widened. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Nor has anyone else in hundreds of years, Cholik thought. “Get a fresh torch, Nullat. We’ll go have a look at what Brother Altharin has discovered.” And pray that the sacred texts were right. Otherwise, the evil that we release from behind that gate will kill us all.
Pressed into the side of the mist-covered cliff, holding himself on his boot toes and the fingers of one hand, Darrick Lang reached for the next handhold. He was conscious of the rope tied around his waist and loins. He’d tacked the rope to a ship’s spike he’d driven into the cliffside five feet below, leaving a trail of them behind him for the others to use. If he slipped and everything worked right, the rope would keep him from plunging to his death or into the river sixty feet below. If it worked wrong, he might yank the two men anchoring him to the side of the cliff down after him. The fog was so thick below that he could no longer see the longboat.
I should have brought Caron along, Darrick thought as he curled his fingers around the rocky outcrop that looked safe enough to hold his weight. Caron was only a boy, though, and not one to bring into a hostile situation. Aboard Lonesome Star, Caron was ruling king of the rigging. Even when he wasn’t assigned aloft, the boy was often found there. Caron had a natural penchant for high places.
Resting for just a moment, feeling the trembling muscles in his back and neck, Darrick breathed out and inhaled the wet, musty smell of rock and hard-packed earth. It smelled, he couldn’t help thinking, like a newly opened grave. His clothing was wet from the immersion in the river, and he was cold, but his body still found enough heat to break out in perspiration. It surprised him.
“You aren’t planning on camping out up there, are you?” Mat called up. He sounded good-natured about it, but someone who knew him well could have detected the small tension in his voice.
“It’s the view, you know,” Darrick called down. And it amused him that they acted as if they were there for a lark instead of serious business. But it had always been that way between them.
They were twenty-three years old, Darrick being seven months the elder, and they’d spent most of those years as friends growing up in Hillsfar. They’d lived among the hill people, loaded freight in the river port, and learned to kill when barbarian tribes had come down from the north hoping to loot and pillage. When they’d turned fifteen, they’d journeyed to Westmarch and pledged loyalty in the king’s navy. Darrick had gone to escape his father, but Mat had left behind a good family and prospects at the family mill. If Darrick had not left, Mat might not ever have left, and some days Darrick felt guilty about that. Dispatches from home always made Mat talk of the family he missed.
Focusing himself again, Darrick stared out across the broken land at the harbor less than two hundred yards away. Another pirate sentry was encamped on the cliff along the way. The man had built a small, yellow-tongued fire that couldn’t be seen from the river.
Beyond, three tall-masted cogs, round-bodied ships built for river travel as well as coastal waters rather than the deep sea, lay at anchor in a dish-shaped natural harbor fronting the ruins of a city. Captain Tollifer’s maps had listed the city as Tauruk’s Port, but not much was known about it except that it had been deserted years ago.
Lanterns and torches moved along the ships, but a few also roved through the city, carried by pirates, Darrick felt certain. Though why they should be so industrious this early in the morning was beyond him. The swirling fog laced with condensation made seeing across the distance hard, but Darrick could make out that much.
The longboat held fifteen men, including Darrick. He figured that they were outnumbered at least eight to one by the pirates. Staying for a prolonged engagement was out of the question, but perhaps spiriting the king’s nephew away and costing the pirates a few ships were possible. Darrick had volunteered for such work before, and he’d come through it alive.
So far, bucko, Darrick told himself with grim realization.
Although he was afraid, part of him was excited at the challenge. He clung to the wall, lifted a boot, and shoved himself upward again. The top of the cliff ledge was less than ten feet away. From there, it looked as if he could gain safe ground and walk toward the city ruins and the hidden port. His fingers and toes ached from the climb, but he put the discomfort out of his mind and kept moving.
When he reached the clifftop, he had to restrain a cry of triumph. He turned and looked back down at Mat, curling his hand into a fist.
Even at the distance, Darrick saw the look of horror that filled Mat’s face. “Look out!”
Whipping his head back up, some inner sense warning him of the movement, Darrick caught a glimpse of moonlight-silvered steel sweeping toward him. He pulled his head down and released his hold on the cliff as he grabbed for another along the cliff’s edge.
The sword chopped into the stone cliff, striking sparks from the high iron ore content just as Darrick’s hands closed around the small ledge he’d pushed up from last. His body slammed hard against the mountainside.
“I told you I saw somebody out here,” a man said as he drew his sword back again and stepped with care along the cliff’s edge. His hobnailed boots scraped stone.
“Yeah,” the second man agreed, joining the first in the pursuit of Darrick.
Scrambling, holding tight to the edge
of the cliff, Darrick pressed his boots against the stone and tried in vain to find suitable purchase to allow him to push himself up. He gave thanks to the Light that the pirates were almost as challenged by the terrain as he was. His boot soles scraped and slid as he tried to pull himself up.
“Cut his fingers off, Lon,” the man in back urged. He was a short, weasel-faced man with an ale belly pressing against his frayed shirt. Maniacal lights gleamed in his eyes. “Cut his fingers off, and watch him fall on the others down there. Before they can make it up, we can nip on down to the bonfire and warn Captain Raithen they’s coming.”
Darrick filed the name away. During his years as part of the Westmarch Navy, he’d heard of Raithen. In fact, Captain Tollifer had said that the Captain’s Table, the quarterly meeting of chosen ships’ captains in Westmarch, had suggested Raithen as a possible candidate for the guilty party in the matter of the pirate raids. It was good to know, but staying alive to relate the news might prove difficult.
“Stand back, Orphik,” Lon growled. “You keep abuzzing around me like a bee, and I’m gonna stick you myself.”
“Shove off, Lon. I’ll do for him.” The little man’s voice tittered with naked excitement.
“Damn you,” Lon cursed. “Get out of the way.”
Quick as a fox in a henhouse, Orphik ducked under his companion’s outstretched free arm and dashed at Darrick with long-bladed knives that were almost short swords in their own right. He laughed. “I’ve got him, Lon. I’ve got him. Just sit you back and watch. I bet he screams the whole way down.”
Keeping his weight distributed as evenly as possible, going with the renewed strength that flowed through his body from the adrenaline surge, Darrick swung from hand to hand, dodging the chopping blows Orphik delivered. Still, one of the pirate’s attempts slashed across the knuckle of his left hand’s little finger. Pain shot up Darrick’s arm, but he was more afraid of how the blood flow would turn his grip slippery.
“Damn you!” Orphik swore, striking sparks from the stone again. “Just stay still, and this will be over with in a trice.”
Lon reeled back away from the smaller man. “Look out, Orphik! Someone down there has a bow!” The bigger pirate held up a sleeve and displayed the arrow that had caught on its fletchings and still hung there.
Distracted by the presence of the arrow and aware that another could be joining it at any moment, Orphik stepped back a little. He drew up a boot and lashed out at his intended victim’s head.
Darrick swung to one side and grabbed for the little man’s leg with his bloody hand, not wanting to trade it for the certain grip of his right. He knotted his fingers in the pirate’s breeches. Even though the breeches were tucked into the hobnailed boots, there was plenty of slack to seize. Balancing his weight from one hand on the cliff, Darrick yanked hard with the other.
“Damn him! Lon, give me your hand before this bilge rat yanks me off the cliff!” Orphik reached for the other man, who caught his hand in his own. Another arrow fired from below clattered against the cliff wall behind them and caused them both to duck.
Taking advantage of the confusion, knowing he’d never get a better chance, Darrick swung his weight to the side and up. He pushed his feet ahead of him, throwing his body behind, hoping to clear the cliff’s edge or he would fall. Maybe the rope tied around his loins would hold him, or maybe Mat and the other men below had forgotten it in the mad rush of events.
Arching his body and rolling toward the ledge, Darrick hit hard. He started to fall, then threw an arm forward in desperation, praying it would be enough. For a gut-wrenching moment, he teetered on the edge, then the point of balance shifted, and he sprawled facedown on the ledge.
THREE
Buyard Cholik followed Nullat down through the twisting bowels of Tauruk’s Port into the pockets of pestilence that remained of Ransim. Enclosed in the rock and strata that were the younger city’s foundation, the harbor seemed a million miles away, but the chill that had followed the fog into the valley remained with the old priest. Aches and pains he’d managed to keep warm in his rooms now returned with a vengeance as he made his way through the tunnels. The acolyte carried an oil torch, and the ceiling was so low that the writhing flames left immediate traces of lampblack along the granite surfaces. Filled with nervous anxiety, Nullat glanced from left to right, his head moving like a fast metronome.
Cholik ignored the acolyte’s apprehensions. In the beginning, when the digging had begun in earnest all those months ago, Tauruk’s Port had been plagued with rats. Captain Raithen had suggested that the rats had infested the place while trailing after the camp lines of the barbarians who came down out of the frozen north. During hard winters, and last year’s was just such a one, the barbarians found warmer climes farther south.
But there was something else the rats had fed on as well after they’d reached Tauruk’s Port. It wasn’t until after the excavation had begun that Cholik realized the horrible truth of it.
During the Sin War, when Vheran constructed the mighty gate and let Kabraxis back into the worlds of men, spells had been cast over Tauruk’s Port to protect it and hide it from the war to the east. Or maybe the city had been called Ransim at that time. Cholik hadn’t yet found a solid indication of which city had been ensorcelled.
The spells that had been cast over the city had raised the dead, giving them a semblance of life to carry out the orders of the demons who had raised them. Necromancy was not unknown to most practitioners of the Arts, but few did more than dabble in them. Most people believed necromancy often linked the users to the demons such as Diablo, Baal, and Mephisto, collectively called the Prime Evils. However, necromancers from the cult of Rathma in the eastern jungles fought for the balance between the Light and the Burning Hells. They were warriors pure of heart even though most feared and hated them.
The first party of excavators to punch down through the bottom layer of Tauruk’s Port had discovered the undead creatures that yet lurked in the ruins of the city below. Cholik guessed that whatever demon had razed Ransim had been sloppy with its spellwork or had been in a hurry. Ransim had been invaded, the burned husks of buildings and carnage left behind offered mute testimony to that, and all among them had been slain. Then someone with considerable power had come into the city and raised the dead.
Zombies rose from where fresh corpses lay, and even skeletons in the graveyards had clawed their way free of their earthen tombs. But not all of them had made the recovery to unlife in time to go with whatever master had summoned them. Perhaps, Cholik had thought on occasion, it had taken years or decades for the rest of the populace to rise.
But those dead had risen, their flesh frozen somehow in a nether point short of death. Their limbs had atrophied, but their flesh had only withered without returning to the earth. And when the rats had come, they’d funneled down through the cracks and the crevices of Tauruk’s Port to get to the city below. Since that day, the rats had feasted, and their population had reached prodigious numbers.
Of course, when presented with prey that could still fight even though a limb was gnawed off or a human with fresh blood that would lie down and die if dealt enough injury, the rats had chosen to stalk the excavation parties. For a time, the attrition rate among the diggers had been staggering. The rats had proven a resilient and resourceful enemy over the long months.
Captain Raithen had been kept busy raiding Westmarch ships, then buying slaves with Cholik’s share of the gold. More gold had gone to the mercenaries whom the priest employed to keep the slaves in line.
“Step carefully, master,” Nullat said, raising the torch so the light showed the yawning black pit ahead. “There’s an abyss here.”
“There was an abyss there the last time I came this way,” Cholik snapped.
“Of course, master. I just thought perhaps you’d forgotten because it has been so long since you were down here.”
Cholik made his voice cold and hard. “I don’t forget.”
Nullat’
s face blanched, and he cut his eyes away from the priest’s. “Of course you don’t, master. I only—”
“Quiet, Nullat. Your voice echoes in these chambers, and it wearies me.” Cholik walked on, watching as Nullat flinched from a sudden advance of a red-eyed rat pack streaming along the pile of broken boulders to their left.
As long as a man’s arm from elbow to fingertips, the rats raced over the boulders and one another as they fought to get a closer view of the two travelers. They chattered and squeaked, creating an undercurrent of noise that pealed throughout the chamber. Sleek black fur covered them from their wet noses to their plump rumps, but their tails remained hairless. Piles of old bones, and perhaps some new ones as well, adorned the heaps of broken stone, crumbled mortise work, and splintered debris left from dwellings.
Nullat stopped and, trembling, held the torch out toward the rat pack. “Master, perhaps we should turn back. I’ve not seen such a gathering of rats in weeks. There are enough of them to bring us down.”
“Be calm,” Cholik ordered. “Let me have your torch.” The last thing he wanted was for Nullat’s ravings to begin talk of an omen again. There had been far too much of that.
Hesitating a moment as if worried Cholik might take the torch from him and leave him in the darkness with the rats, Nullat extended the torch.
Cholik gripped the torch, steadying it with his hand. He whispered words of prayer, then breathed on the torch. His breath blew through the torch and became a wave of flame that blasted across the piles of stones and debris like a blacksmith’s furnace as he turned his head from one side to the other across the line of rats.
Crying out, Nullat dropped and covered his face, turning away from the heat and knocking the torch from Cholik’s grasp. The torch licked at the hem of Cholik’s robes.
Yanking his robes away, the priest said, “Damn you for a fool, Nullat. You’ve very nearly set me on fire.”
