by J L Forrest
Then the twin ghost-fires blazed straight at her, only an arm’s length away, and Nyahri jumped away.
“Light!” she commanded.
A female Templari stood before her, arms crossed inside her heavy sackcloth robes. Her hazel eyes widened, and her mouth twisted into a scowl. Long, plain, brassy hair fell to her shoulders. A faint web-work of veins, translucent as aquamarine, crisscrossed her flesh.
“What are you doing in the corridors, human?”
“I could not sleep,” Nyahri said.
“Insomnia? That is your excuse?” The Templari shook her head. “Go back to your bed or go outside. Kepler has told you not to pry.”
“So he did.”
“Come,” the Templari said, grabbing Nyahri’s wrist, tugging her in the direction of the outer halls.
Nyahri dropped the witch-light and it bounced, its light wobbling throughout the hall. She punched the Templari full in the face, her knuckles cracking the librarian’s nose and throwing her off balance.
Nyahri spit. “Never touch me.”
The Templari rushed her. Nyahri’s serape crumpled in the woman’s hand, the other fist closing on Nyahri’s shoulder. The flesh walker lifted her, Nyahri kicking wildly until her shoulders met stone, the impact knocking the wind from her. Nyahri gulped air, stars filling her eyes.
“We have had enough of you,” the Templari said, her voice distorted by her broken nose. “Your stinking horses, your oily hands touching our books, your prying and snooping, and your false mistress.”
A faint high-pitched whine sounded through the corridor, emanating from deep within the Templari. As Nyahri recovered her breath, the flesh walker threw her. A disconcerting weightlessness lasted a mere second before Nyahri struck the opposite wall and careened to the floor. Again her breath left her, and she gritted in pain.
“I’m going to bury you,” the librarian said, stepping toward her, “deep in the guts of S’Eret. No one, least of all Sultah yw Sabi, will ever find you.”
The Templari grabbed Nyahri’s hair, lifting her. Nyahri kicked impotently, her toes above the floor.
“I’ll make this quick,” the flesh walker said, pulling back her other hand, “I promise.”
Nyahri drew her longknife, cutting in one graceful arc. She severed the hand which held her and fell once more to the floor. The Templari uttered no screams or curses, looking blankly at the stump of her arm, at the ooze darkening the wound.
She reached forward with the other hand.
Nyahri pushed up with both legs, thrusting the longknife through the woman’s chest, from her sternum through her back. The blow hefted the Templari from her heels. That one good fist struck Nyahri’s ribs, and Nyahri wheezed.
The librarian’s hazel and witch-blue eyes yet burned.
Nyahri withdrew the blade and, before the Templari could hit her again, angled it between the flesh walker’s neck and jaw. Sparks flew and a rending agony shot through Nyahri’s arm, her muscles spasming and her teeth aching. She let go of the knife and leapt away.
The Templari’s head burst, black ichor spraying from her mouth, then the monster lay still.
Gods, Nyahri wanted to scream, gods, gods, gods!
She curled into a ball, resting in the glow of the witch-light. Slowly her breath returned, the numbing shock departing her limbs, nothing left but the pain of two cracked ribs.
Nyahri touched the longknife. It gave her no jolt, and she yanked it from the flesh walker’s neck. She dragged the body into the furthest twisted corner, shoved it behind a pile of loose stones, and hurried on her way, taking the witch-light with her.
How long before the librarians discover that corpse?
The alienness of its death, the strength with which it fought: these things shook Nyahri. Yet she cleared her mind and, with a better understanding of the fortress’s organization, she navigated inward. At each juncture she chose the doorway leading to the smallest chamber, and to the next smaller, and so on. A few times she reached a dead end, obliged to retrace her steps.
Yea, but I am closer, she thought. The center cannot be far.
She took only one rest that hour, sitting in a volume filled with clay urns, their lids sealed with wax. She drank a good portion of her water, and she ate before moving on again. Soon after, the doorways shrank to mere apertures, forcing her to duck her head between rooms. Nyahri remembered Abswyn, how it had rested in the earth, the location of the door in relation to the pillar.
That entry will be buried too deeply here. We need the higher door, at the pillar’s base, a portal only, small and round. Such a portal must be here at Sojourn too.
At Abswyn, no one ever knew how to open it.
Yw Sabi will know.
The way tightened again, forcing Nyahri to crawl on hands and knees. The walls contracted, made her lightheaded. Her lungs aching, the stale air soured in her throat.
She coughed.
Startled by the echo, Nyahri waited and listened, but the corridors and hollows returned to silence. She pushed onward, standing during the short distances between thresholds, until a larger chamber opened. Defying her expectations, the ceiling arched thirty hands overhead.
She raised the witch-light. “Brighter.”
Nyahri gave a brief cry.
Tens of thousands of skulls lined the cavern, their vacant eyes turned inward. They formed the walls, the arches, even the floor. She took a few steps onto the long-dead faces, imagining their spirits, their unhappy gazes on her, the uninvited living.
Nyahri wondered if, perhaps, the Templarii constructed such surfaces to scare away the superstitious. To frighten humans, like her.
The corridor ended at a wall of matte-gray metal, unmarred and unstained. As she drew closer to it, its glassy surface refracted the light. A single small door marked its center, its rounded edges free of any marking or device or lock, an eyelid closed to the dark.
Sojourn Temple.
Nyahri smiled and turned back, working her way outward again. Now she moved with confidence, much more quickly than on her approach. Soon the way opened, the openings between chambers growing larger, the rooms stretching into hallways—
Ghost-fires! Many!
She ducked aside, dousing the witch-light. A gathering of Templarii edged through the dark, lighting their way only with the cold glimmer of their eyes. Nyahri crouched, hiding herself, taking no chances.
Four carried a stretcher between them. Upon it lay a white-shrouded corpse. Two more flesh walkers trailed behind, and they held receptacles of Atreian glass. Following another route through the labyrinth, the Templarii disappeared through a doorway into a larger chamber. After a few heartbeats, a green ghost-light spread from within.
Listening as the Templarii laid the body upon some surface, Nyahri hunkered by the door. They unsealed the boxes, which chimed like glass. As if ringing delicate bells, the librarians shuffled strange tools in their hands. Their heavy robes rustled.
Nyahri realized she could slip onward, could avoid the Templarii altogether. She could return, unseen, all the way to the library. Yet she waited.
Leave, she told herself, moments slipping by.
Instead, Nyahri crept forward, craning her neck, and she peered around the corner. Green ghost-fires illuminated a long chamber. Glass cylinders lined it, clear smooth containers as large around as ancient oaks. In them floated tumorous growths, big as a man’s outspread hand, their fleshy tendrils spiraling through some viscous fluid. They twitched.
Glossy oven-fired tiles covered the floor. The expanse of glass and tile connected with yet another enclosure, which contained the Templarii, who faced away from Nyahri.
Ay! Now you idiot, Nyahri told herself, turn around, you have seen enough.
Curiosity won, bringing her step by step into the hall. Celadon-hued ghost-fires lit her way, as she walked between the cylinders, her gaze fixed on the far end, at the backs of the Templarii. The flesh walkers’ began their work: a wet sound, a cutting which Nyahri had heard many
times before, each time she gutted an animal.
As she crossed the tile floor, a peripheral movement caught her eye, and she turned. Her breath trembled as she approached a cloudy green vat. A body floated inside it.
Gods!
Skin like wax, hair tangled, swollen salt-pale flesh, its limbs wriggled in a current. Tubes pierced its chest, ears, and hands. Strange orifices perforated its neck and groin. Nyahri drew closer, clasping her hand over her mouth. Its half-open eyes flickered, hourglass eyes of red and violet, and Nyahri stifled a cry.
A screech sounded from the Templarii’s chamber, snapping Nyahri’s attention from the tank. A hot, mechanical sound dissolved into a sticky grinding. Nyahri crouched lower, her heart thumping in her throat. The grinding stopped, followed by the pulpy crunch of splitting bone.
She stepped to the side of the doorway, no more than a few paces from the flesh walkers. Slowly, she looked around the corner.
Eight librarians watched while two worked. Blood covered their forearms, the air filled with its scent. The Templarii focused upon a young woman’s body, a corpse stretched on a stone table. They cleaved her skull from the back, her blood and tissue stringing between the bone. Her brains lay in a dish on the floor, and one Templari reached into the skull cavity to extract the last of the cerebellum.
The second surgeon held in his hands a black-carapaced obscenity, a hell-horror, the size of a common cat. Its spider legs splayed, its obscene tail arching, and it sought the cadaver’s opened skull. Its shell crawled, as if formed from a million tiny versions of itself, a monster comprised of a thousand smaller monsters. It clambered into the gore, yanking its mass into the seat of the brainpan, and it disappeared beneath a swell of black fluid. A fatty ichor slurped from the opening and slopped to the floor.
A lifeless carcass the second before, the woman now coughed, her mouth erupting with blood. She turned onto her side, a clot bursting from her nose, and her eyes scrunched. The new Templari drew a ragged breath, opened her eyes, and looked straight at Nyahri—
—who screamed, all sense of stealth forgotten, her voice echoing through the darkness.
{27}
Kepler led her from the deep chambers, one arm around her waist, his other hand on her shoulder. At one point he waited while she vomited.
“Get away from me,” she told him.
“You will not go unattended, through our halls, again.”
Ay! All I want is to be rid of him!
Nyahri carried the witch-light and kept it shining, never taking her attention from Kepler, not even as she emptied her stomach. As he pulled her further from the fortress’s center, she tried to free herself from his grasp, envisioning the thing she now knew lived behind his eyes. She understood, as well, why the librarian she fought had finally died: she had struck its true self, not merely the flesh it wore. Her knees buckled once more, and he dragged her to her feet.
“You, little foal, shouldn’t wander S’Eret. This is the second time I’ve told you. Stay in your room or the library or with your horses till your mistress makes up her annoyingly slow mind, and she must decide soon. We’re losing patience.”
“Let go of me!”
His voice deepened. “Were you not a prominent Atreiani’s favorite, this would not have ended well for you, I promise, but I’d like Sultah yw Sabi to look upon us reasonably, should she regain a place among her wakened brethren.”
“You are a horrible little monster.”
“I’m a machine,” he said, “and it was your mistress’s brother who created us.”
Bile burned Nyahri’s throat as she and Kepler reached the outer corridor. He escorted her to the bedchamber.
“Stay here,” he said.
He left her, and Nyahri remained on the bed until yw Sabi arrived. The Atreiani closed the door, locked it, and sat beside Nyahri. She took the coronal from Nyahri’s head and pulled aside the wide serape, drawing her fingers along Nyahri’s naked back, her fingertips soft but strong.
“Kepler told me,” said yw Sabi, “you wandered into a rehousing. That was not something I expected you’d witness. You weren’t prepared for it.”
Nyahri reached across her shoulder to take yw Sabi’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” yw Sabi said.
“Demons should not live in the bodies of the dead.”
“They’re not demons, just tinker toys. Try to forget what you saw.” She swept Nyahri’s hair behind her ear, leaning over to kiss her temple. “I won’t ask you to search again. I’ll do it myself.”
“Nay, mistress,” Nyahri said. “I found the door.”
“You did?” The Atreiani sat straighter.
“Yea.”
Yw Sabi lay next to Nyahri, forehead to forehead on the pillow. Nyahri’s heartbeat slowed, her horror subsiding.
“The Templarii don’t know?” yw Sabi asked.
“Nay.”
“Would you remember the way?”
“Yea, but our problems multiply.”
“What?”
Nyahri told her of the destroyed Templari, of her attempt to hide the body. Yw Sabi exhaled slowly, then nodded.
“It won’t take them long,” she said, “to realize the cockroach is missing, nor long to find it.”
“I am sorry, mistress. I should have kept a cooler head.”
Yw Sabi smirked. “I like your hotheadedness.”
Nyahri’s eyes glinted at that. She lay silently a few moments, then asked, “How can machines—the Templarii—be so complex? So alive?”
“Think of puppets, but imagine the puppet is also the puppeteer. Under all their meat bags, they’re nothing more than automatons.”
“They do steal the flesh of the dead.”
“They’re parasites—they use human hosts, husks for locomotion. They hijack the nervous system from the spinal chord.”
Nyahri blinked nervously at their chamber door. “What of the men and women they occupy?” she asked, though she figured the answer, had seen that woman’s brain scooped into a pan.
“Only cadavers, artificially sustained. Surprisingly efficient though—” Yw Sabi shrugged. “—given the turns of our technology at the time. Of course, we improved on the design.”
“I admit, mistress, Atreian witchcraft still frightens me.”
“You’ll be steeped in it soon,” yw Sabi said, “and it’ll make sense one day.”
Nyahri nibbled her lip, unsure what to think, less confident than she had been of late. Exhaustion fell over her, the weight of a long day and terrible events. She leaned against yw Sabi’s shoulder, and the Atreiani pulled the blankets over them. Together their warmth in each other grew, and Nyahri drifted into sleep.
◆◆◆
Before dawn, Nyahri awoke. A fading impression of Dhaos slipped from her dreams, gone before she could recover it, leaving behind only a tease of his naked skin against hers. She sat, finding yw Sabi wrapped in a robe, organizing gear, enough for a day’s excursion outside the fortress. The first slivers of sunrise cut through the high windows, pouring a dusty glow throughout the bedchamber.
Nyahri rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “What is your plan?”
“I sent word to Dhaos. We’ll take his offer and play tourist for the day.”
A groan escaped Nyahri’s throat, the sensations of her dream still with her. “I admit, Dhaos confuses me.”
“Why?” yw Sabi asked, glancing over her shoulder. “Because you’re attracted to him?”
“Nay—” Horrified, Nyahri stammered, “I am not—”
“I’ve seen the looks between you.” Yw Sabi smiled, and her next words carried not one hint of envy or anger. “You have some intention of forsaking me now, running off with him?”
Nyahri curled her lip. “Nay, mistress, never.”
“I thought not.” Yw Sabi’s smile broadened. “You’ll find I have my jealousies, Nyahri, but they’re few and far between. I’ve my allowances too.”
“I—” Nyahri rubbed her forehead, screwing her eyes s
hut. “What are you saying, mistress?”
Unhurried, the Atreiani packed a small bag with devices Nyahri did not recognize. “I’d tell you to sleep with the boy, if you fancied him that much, but perhaps I should caution you against frolicking with people whose cities you’re about to destroy?”
This distressed Nyahri, most of all because talk of bedding Dhaos unnerved her more than talk of destroying cities. “You mean it?”
Yw Sabi lifted a shoulder. “I always mean what I say, though you should do what you can to get Dhaos off your mind.”
“How am I to do that? We are riding out with him today?”
“Yes.” Yw Sabi sealed the small bag. “Would like a bath?”
“I would love one.”
“Good, because I requested hot water, soap, and oils. They should be up soon.”
Not long after yw Sabi said so, as the sunshine burst crisply through the windows, a librarian knocked upon their door. Yw Sabi arose and unlocked it. Not one Templari, but two, bowed and entered. The first laid clean linens, then delivered four large buckets of steaming water, which he emptied into a tub.
“Be quick,” she told him.
The second poured tea and left a tray of cold pumpkin soup, sourdough, and sliced apples. The Atreiani tasted these before the Templarii departed, and she closed the door and bolted it again. Nyahri sat up in bed, back to the corner, the sheets tucked beneath her neck until the Templari’s footsteps faded to silence.
“You all right?” yw Sabi asked her.
“I do not like them.” The E’cwni nodded in the direction the Templarii had gone.
Yw Sabi chuckled. “I never liked them.”
They ate, washed, and dressed. Afterward, they returned to the library. In it, several Templarii hunkered around a table, copying their most common books, those meant for sale to distant powers, or primers intended for the children of Oudwn nobility.
“Get out!” yw Sabi said. When one hesitated, she kicked his chair from under him. “Get out! And close the door behind you.”
After they left, yw Sabi righted the chair, sat on it, and patted the seat beside her. Nyahri joined her.
