Hinterland g-2

by James Clemens

  Kathryn waved the girl over. “What are you still doing up here?”

  Penni took a scatter of steps toward her, then stopped. “I heard…below…that all was lost up here. So I came in a rush.” She pointed to the servants’ door in back.

  Kathryn realized she should have thought to do the same-it would have been quicker than fighting the tumult of the main stairs. She admonished herself for the narrowness of her vision, constricted by her own sense of place and caste.

  “I knew you’d not want to lose this,” her maid said.

  Penni held up a strap of black linen. Attached to it was a thumb-sized diamond. It was the diadem of the castellan, the symbol of her station. It was not the fake one, the artifice of paste, but the true diadem, the one stolen by Mirra and rescued by Lorr. The masters had already tested and cleared it of any Dark Grace. And despite its former bearer, it was an ancient jewel of Tashijan, the heart of the Citadel.

  It was why Kathryn had come up here.

  She stared gratefully at her maid, realizing how well the girl had come to know her mistress’s heart. Yet, in turn, Kathryn had barely noted her comings and goings. She did note her now: the firm heart in a trembling young girl’s body. Here was what they fought for in Tashijan. Here was what had ultimately made Kathryn turn her back on Ulf’s offer.

  A loud crack shattered through the room.

  One of the shutters at the back window tore away, followed by a tinkle of glass. Shards flew high. Penni turned and ducked, shielding herself with an arm. Kathryn was struck by the smell of burnt wood.

  Gerrod grabbed her elbow.

  Through the shattered gap, a blaze of azure scintillation swept into the room, a fiery globe as wide as her outstretched arms. It struck Penni, picking her off her feet. Her bonnet blew from her head in a wash of fire. Lightning crackled over her skin, burning her livery, arching her back, stretching her mouth in a silent wail.

  Gerrod shoved Kathryn aside and pointed his other arm at the ball of stormfire. From the back of his wrist, a stream of muddy bile jetted and struck the globe. With the touch of the alchemy, the fires were blown out like a spent candle.

  Penni collapsed to the rug. She shivered all over as if cold, despite her smoking skin and fiery-flailed clothes. Then she lay still. Eyes open, but no longer seeing.

  The diadem she had come to rescue lay between them, flung as she was struck and consumed.

  “I’ll get it,” Gerrod said.

  Kathryn brusquely shoved past him. She crossed, stepped over the diadem, and knelt down beside Penni. She scooped the girl up in her arms. She was so very light, as if all substance had escaped with her life. Kathryn felt the heat of the char through her cloak. The maid’s small head hung slack over her arm, neck stretched as if baring her throat.

  And so she had…to come here, to risk all.

  Kathryn shifted her arms and rocked her small body closer, so Penni’s head came to rest against her shoulder. Kathryn cradled her.

  “I have you,” she whispered.

  Turning, she headed for the door.

  Gerrod bent and collected the diadem from the floor and followed. But in her arms, Kathryn already carried the true jewel, the true heart of Tashijan.

  Far below, Laurelle sat in a moldy chair, its ticking puffing out. It smelled of mouse bile and mustiness. But she had sunk gratefully into it a bell ago, as if it were the finest velvet and down.

  To one side, Kytt rested cross-legged on the stone floor, leaning his back against a plank bed strewn with old hay. Delia sat atop the bed, supported by the wall. Her eyes were open, but her gaze looked far away. Her head had been bandaged deftly by Kytt, who was experienced with such minor care, since all wyld trackers were trained to attend injuries on the trail.

  They had found the refuge, a room with a stout door, deep within the level where they’d been trapped. Their attempt to push into well-lit and-populated regions had turned into a mad flight from things hidden in the dark and shadow. Between the senses of Orquell’s crimson eye and Kytt’s sharp ears and nose, they found all their ways blocked.

  They were forced to delve deeper into the abandoned sections of the aged tower. Until they were all but lost. Recognizing the futility, Orquell had finally pulled them into this room. He sat in the room’s center. He had raised a small fire in each corner, kindled from the beetle-riddled legs of a broken table and alchemical powder.

  Warding pyres, he claimed.

  He now seemed lost in his flames, eyes closed. He had remained like that for the past bell. Occasionally one of the pyres would spit with flame, hissing. And behind the sparks, Laurelle swore she heard thin whispers.

  But more often she heard screams.

  From above.

  What was happening?

  If she had been in her own rooms, she probably would’ve been locked up, shoulder to shoulder with other Hands of the realms, equally blind to the true state of the war. Still, she wished she was up there. Here she was truly in the dark, in more ways than mere shadowy halls. Her imagination filled in the gaps of the story above with a whirl of horrors. Even if the truth were more terrifying than any of her imagined scenarios, she’d still prefer to know. At least then she could focus on one tangible fear, rather than the multitude of phantom perils that swam through her head.

  “She waits,” Orquell finally muttered, his eyes still closed.

  “Who?” Delia asked, focusing back on the room along with the rest of them.

  Laurelle felt a thrill of fear, knowing that their short respite was about to end. She sat straighter.

  “The witch,” he said. “The flames chitter with her dark delight. She waits for the war above to tear and weaken. Then she will rise and sweep through what remains, consuming all in her path.”

  “Then we must get word above,” Delia said, scooting to the edge of the bed. “Light more fires.”

  “Too late. The warden has set plentiful flames, but he has forgotten the fundamental nature of fire.”

  “What’s that?” Laurelle asked.

  “Every flame casts a shadow.” He opened his eyes and stretched his shoulders, like a cat waking by a fire. “You can’t have light without darkness. And Mirra takes advantage of that. Just as she has slunk and lurked in secret passages wormed throughout Tashijan’s cellars, so she does now in the shadows cast by the warden’s pyres.”

  “But the gates below were all closed,” Kytt said. “Sealed with iron and wyrmwood. All else bricked tight.”

  “Bricks, iron, and wood. All cast their shadows when raised against the flame. And the more fires that are stoked, the darker those shadows become, and the more likely those dark paths will open for her legion. For Mirra does not move her legion through mere shadows. She moves her ghawls through places darker, through those trickles of Gloom found hidden in shadowy places.”

  Laurelle pictured the many fires throughout Tashijan. They had been set to ward against the storm’s cold, but if the master here was correct, those same pyres had cast deep enough shadows for some Dark Grace to tease open a passage into their midst.

  And now the witch waited.

  Like them.

  In the darkness.

  Only unlike them, with every passing bell, she saw her position grow stronger, while theirs sapped weaker.

  “She is about to strike. I sense it in the stanching of the pyres-a smothering swell of darkness.”

  Laurelle perhaps felt it, too. A weight to the air. Or maybe it was simply her own terror.

  “What are we to do, then?” Delia asked. “We’re buried among her forces here, trapped in the very shadows cast by those flames we need to reach.”

  Orquell slowly stretched to his feet with a creak of his bones. “Since we’re already here, we might as well be of use to Tashijan.”

  “How so?” Laurelle asked. Her hand drifted to her throat. She knew she wasn’t going to like his answer. And she was right.

  “We might as well call the witch to us.”

  “What?” Kytt s
queaked.

  “We’ll draw her eye here. Away from the others.”

  He stepped to one of his pyres, the one set before the door. Powders appeared in his fingers, as if out of the very air. He cast the alchemy into the fire. Flames flared brighter, chasing sparks high. He leaned down and whispered into the fire. But whatever he said was consumed by the flames.

  Then he straightened and rested his fists on his hips.

  “Now we’ll see if she answers.”

  “When?” Delia asked.

  “It may take a while.”

  Delia stood up, eyes glancing over the four pyres. “Who are you truly?” Her eyes settled back to him. “You are rub-aki. That I understand. But you come here with your crimson eye painted over, and I suspect you’ve equally hidden your true purpose for arriving at Tashijan in so timely a manner.”

  Orquell ran a hand over his bald pate. “I am a master,” he said. “These tattoos were hard-earned. But my crimson eye-that I earned through a decade of toil and flame, long before I was ever tattooed in my disciplines.”

  He crossed to the bed and sat down upon it. He tapped a finger on the crimson thumbprint. “Do you know how this inner eye is ultimately opened?”

  Delia folded her arms, still suspicious, but Laurelle shifted in her chair to hear better.

  “The eye is opened in darkness.”

  “But I thought the sacred flames of the rub-aki were the source of your enlightenment,” Delia said flatly. “A Grace gifted by the god Takaminara.”

  “There is much speculation about the ways of the Blood-eyed-clouded further by those charlatans who fake a crimson eye. Very little of it is the truth. Takaminara prefers to keep her ways secret. The true rub-aki respect that and do not speak of such matters.”

  “Then why tell us?” Delia asked. Her eyes kept shifting to the pyre before the door.

  “Because what I must ask will require great trust.”

  Delia merely shrugged, noncommittal. “Tell us about the opening of your inner eye.”

  “Like I mentioned, it requires darkness. Takaminara is well versed in the relationship between flame and shadow. She has buried herself in her mountain, never stepping under the sun or stars. Yet she is more knowledgeable of this world than any other god. She stands amid the molten flows that run beneath all. Her world is neither flame nor darkness, but the space between. In that fracture, she can see into the deep past and the trails into the future.”

  This last was said with great reverence.

  “And for those who earn her mark, who serve her, she lets us share the smallest fraction of her sight. But to that we must open our eye. And here is a truth that only a handful of people know.” He stared at each in turn. “There is no Grace involved.”

  Delia straightened, loosening her arms, then tightening them again. “Impossible. I’ve heard stories of the rub-aki, great feats of fire and prediction. True stories, not charlatan tales.”

  Orquell nodded. “Yet it requires no Grace. Some communing and pryre casting require Grace and blessings from Takaminara. But at its most basic, down deep, every man and woman has this eye, awaiting to be woken.”

  “How does one open it?” Laurelle asked “How does darkness open it?”

  “It is not just any darkness. Once properly trained, an acolyte descends deep beneath the volcanic peak of Takaminara. Into caverns of black rock, long gone cold, where sunlight has never touched. A darkness so deep that it strains the eye and blinds it, like staring directly at the sun. That alone is a lesson worth noting. That purest darkness and the brightest flame blind equally.” He stopped and his gaze seemed to drift for a moment. Then he began again. “And in that darkness, with the regular eye blinded, the inner eye can open with proper initiation.”

  Delia stirred. “But how does this make us trust you? Why did you come to Tashijan during such a dire moment as this?”

  He shrugged. “No mystery there. Master Hesharian requested my services to seek a cure for the stone-cursed knight. That is the truth.” He turned to Delia. “But it was Takaminara that sent me to Ghazal, to study the ways of the Clerics of Naeth. It was those same studies that drew the attention of Hesharian. And eventually drew me here.”

  “So Takaminara knew you’d end up here? Why? Did she foresee what has befallen us?”

  Orquell shrugged. “I do not know. We are her servants, submitting to her will as much as any Hand of a god. We go where the flame directs. Perhaps she saw it, but more likely she cast us out like petals on a flowing river. She can sense the current, but even she can’t tell where each petal will land. Portending is much different than the charlatans make it seem. More powerful in some ways, less in others.”

  He must have read the disappointment in Laurelle and the doubt in Delia. Kytt just gaped at the revelations.

  “Takaminara once described what portending was truly like. It was like seeing flames in the dark. Fiery pools of illumination, disconnected to everything around it. To place too much significance on what is revealed, without knowing what remains hidden in the dark, is a fool’s paradise. You’d might as well see nothing at all.”

  “So then what do you see with your open eye?” Laurelle asked.

  Before he could answer, the pyre by the door suddenly burst up with a flare of flame.

  Orquell stood. “It seems someone’s come knocking.”

  Kathryn faced the pair of wraiths in the room.

  A dozen bodies of young boys were strewn among the stacked beds and floor like scattered dolls, broken and ripped. The far window, high on the wall, no more than a slit, seemed too small for any wraith to enter. The iron shutter was peeled back and teetered on a broken hinge, weakened by rust. Such was the sorry state of Tashijan: fallen into disrepair over the centuries as numbers dwindled and the space grew too large.

  It shouldn’t have happened. For lack of a solid hinge, twelve boys had died.

  One of the wraiths straddled a lad, his chest raked, throat torn. A fistful of claw was buried in his belly. It tore free, yanking out the most tender parts. The wraith’s face was covered in blood and gore as it spit at her, hissing and baring its teeth, protecting its meal.

  The other was perched on the top of the stacked beds, also straddling something, but it was not slaking its hunger. It was satisfying another lust. It leaped up to the bed railing, claws digging into the wood. Its manhood swollen and bloody. Wings spread.

  Kathryn held her sword up and gathered the room’s shadows to her cloak. She remembered Lord Ulf’s cold words, how he controlled his wind wraiths through seersong and will. Her lips hardened. Was this the manner in which he controlled them?

  Behind her, fighting continued out on the stair. Screams, wails, and frantic orders echoed up and down the main spiral. Slowly they were losing levels, one after the other. Blood was spent in order to clear floors. Stormwatch was slowly being driven into ever smaller quarters.

  The only advantage: The knights had less territory to guard, and the wraiths had fewer ways to strike them.

  As a result, a balance was establishing. They had held this level for an entire half bell. The line was even firming. A glimmer of hope had started to sound in the growl and shout of the knights and masters.

  It was such a feat that also allowed Kathryn to hear a scream behind this door. A squire’s lodging. She had opened the door to find this horror. How many other places in Tashijan suffered similarly?

  The one atop the bed attacked first, screeching and diving at her, its wings wide. Kathryn shifted shadows in the room and vanished to its left flank. Her blade darted out, lightning out of darkness, blessed with dire alchemies.

  The wraith noted her thrust for its heart. Though ilked, it was Grace-born, a creature of air. With the speed of a swirling gust, it ripped around, lashing out with a clawed foot.

  Kathryn ducked between its legs, never dropping her sword. She shoved straight up, slicing open its belly, and rolled aside. It wailed and spun, spilling entrails and blood. It struck the wall, writhi
ng, unable to gain its footing, wracked in pain, legs tangled in its own entrails. The more it fought, the more it gutted itself.

  From the corner of her eye, movement stirred.

  Kathryn swirled darkness and vanished away. The creature atop the table searched with one eye cocked, then the other. But it didn’t hunt on sight alone. Its head swung around, scenting her. It was ready when she folded out of darkness, sword swinging.

  It lunged off the table-away from her, craven with the death cries of its partner. Kathryn chopped with her sword before it could fully escape. Her blade sliced through its leathery wing and bony shoulder, cleaving all away.

  Now it was its turn to screech as it rolled off the table, off the boy, one wing flapping like a sail in a storm.

  Kathryn vaulted the table and landed on the wing, pinning the wraith to the floor. Two-handed, she swung her sword low, cutting off its scream.

  And its head.

  The body convulsed once, then lay still.

  Its head kept rolling.

  Kathryn dropped her shadows. Her cloak fell about her shoulders like a death’s shroud, heavy with blood. She stepped back, stumbled away, over to the door.

  A knight appeared at the entrance. His eyes above the masklin widened at the slaughter found inside. She pushed past him, sword still out. She clenched her fist on its hilt to control her trembling.

  “Seal the door,” she ordered as she passed. “Bar it tight.”

  Then she was out on the stairs. More calls and shouts echoed down from the main line. She ran the opposite way. Before hearing the scream from the room, she had been headed down to meet Argent. Now she had another reason to run below.

  To escape the horrors of that room.

  Around and around, she fled.

  Finally she stopped, leaned a palm against the wall, and emptied her stomach on the stair. Her belly heaved again, sour and empty. She gasped for air. Her eyes ached with tears that refused to flow.

  Not now…

  She spat on the stone and wiped her mouth.

  Not yet…

  Straightening, she sheathed her sword and stumbled a step, caught herself, and continued down leadenly, a hundred stone heavier than when she had gone up to her hermitage.