Barbara Hambly - [Darwath 08] - Elsewhere

by Hambly

  “Here.” The Icefalcon, one of the several Guards who had accompanied them, handed him the end of a long piece of rope. “Tie that around your belt.”

  Feeling a little foolish for not having through of this himself, Rudy complied. “You got another rope?”

  The Guard nodded, and knotted another cord around his own waist.

  “The rest of you,” ordered Rudy, “stand outside in the corridor.”

  He had the impression everybody was only too happy to comply. Melantrys gathered up all but one of the glowstones from around the outer door, put them into a netting bag such as the Keep women dried herbs in, and handed them to the Icefalcon.

  The fountain chamber ended in another pair of crystal pillars, which flanked a door so narrow that only one person could go through at a time. The small, square room beyond opened into another still smaller. Rudy had to take a deep breath and a firm grip on his staff to force himself to go in, though he could see that the black, slick stone wall at its other side was exactly that.

  A black, slick stone wall.

  He tapped it, first with the head of his staff and then with his fingers. It was solid.

  But the thick, green odor of decaying vegetation drifted on the air.

  He glanced back at the Icefalcon, who was studying the floor. That, too, was black, smooth stone, unmarked by tracks or slime-trails or droplets of water or blood. Rudy passed his hands along the side-walls of the chamber, sinking his mind into the stone, listening – mentally scenting – for any who had passed that way recently. Who had touched the walls.

  Ingold.

  Gil.

  Lord Sketh.

  ??? The fourth person he sensed was Sisa, one of Lady Sketh’s maids-in-waiting. He recalled for a moment, as he’d passed through that third chamber, the faintest echo of sweetgrass perfume, such as some of the women down on the Second Level would make in the summertime.

  What the hell was she doing in here? A cute little fox, seventeen years old, dark-haired like Minalde but with green eyes. If Alde weren’t the love of my life I’d sure think about making a pass at that one…

  Rudy could almost feel the hair on his nape prickle as enlightenment smote him.

  Jesus H. Frakking Christ on a bicycle… You stupid, STUPID…

  He didn’t know if he were addressing Lord Sketh, Lady Sketh, or cute little green-eyed Sisa.

  Without a word he strode back the length of the four deadly rooms, the Icefalcon – sword still drawn – trailing quizzically behind him.

  *

  “We’re going to die!” sobbed Lord Sketh. “I know it! We’re all going to die!”

  Gil Patterson whacked the head off the last of the snake-necked red critters – like miniature allosauri with eyes on stalks at the apex of their football-shaped bodies – and stepped back from the ensuing gush of blood (or whatever it was: molasses-thick and gleaming in the pale witchlight from Ingold’s staff). “We’re sure as hell gonna die if you keep yelling like that.”

  Or YOU’RE going to die because I’m going to frakking KILL YOU…

  Ingold gestured them silent.

  Sisa stuffed the trailing end of the sleeve of her shift against her mouth and huddled against Sketh, shuddering like a chihuahua on cold linoleum but mercifully without a sound. It was Lord Sketh who kept up a terrified keening. Gil wanted to garrote him.

  Ingold wiped the gore from his own sword on the broad, dark leaves of the vines that choked the ruins around them – Gil could see little in the greenish moonlight save the fact that the place to which they’d come was in ruins – but didn’t sheathe the weapon. “That seems to be all of them,” he whispered. “Sisa, you should probably get dressed.” At a finger-flick, the pale witchlight with which he had surrounded them when those glowing eye-clusters had glimmered from the jungle faded.

  The girl whispered, “Where are we, sir?”

  Gil looked up at the sky, seeking familiar constellations.

  “A long damn way from the Keep,” she said.

  There were two moons.

  Oh, boy.

  *

  A sigil, exactly similar to that which had appeared in the outermost of the transporter chambers, glowed on the wall of the long cell which Rudy calculated lay directly above it, a cell that almost nobody entered because it lay in the heart of the “haunted zone” on Four Back.

  Certainly nobody had entered it for at least two years that he knew about.

  Yet the place stank of fresh smoke, burnt straw…

  Burnt herbs. Salvia, juniper, the harsh, leafy smell of mugwort…

  …and guano.

  Chicken dung.

  His eyes met the Icefalcon’s and he didn’t even have to say, Find them, before the pale-haired White Raider – with a gesture to Bors and Melantrys – turned to leave the cell.

  Lady Sketh stepped in front of the door to stop them. “Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded. “This portion of the Keep has been apportioned to House Sketh.” At her gesture, four of her own white-clothed guards – who had joined the party the moment Rudy and the Icefalcon had come striding out of the transporter room – formed up a line in front of the door. “Any matters concerning its security are properly the concern of my own guards—”

  “And any matters concerning the security of the entire Keep are the concern of the Keep Guards,” retorted Rudy. “And activating a sigil like this – which none of us knows what it can do or is going to do – qualifies… So do matters concerning the hoarding of food in wintertime.”

  Lady Sketh’s mouth popped open in furious protest but her eyes held no innocence at all. Minalde startled and cried, “Chickens! That’s what I smell—!”

  The previous winter – which had been long and brutal and whose first snow-storm had arrived fully three weeks later than the blizzard currently raging outside the Keep’s black walls – chickens and doves had been, as Gil put it, nationalized. Food in the Keep was potentially too scarce to deny it to those who had nothing wherewith to pay for it. The result was – again, as Gil had forseen during several long bull-sessions in the Guards’ chambers – holdouts, a black market, and thriving enclaves of illegal poultry and bunny-rabbits in all the back corners of the Keep, for those who considered themselves above such things as the common good, community laws, or the survival of humankind.

  “You never mentioned that showing up—“ Rudy jabbed his finger at the glowing sigil on the wall, “—because it happened to be in one of your illegal chicken-ranches—”

  “That’s a lie!” Lady Sketh whirled on Minalde. “But I suppose it is useless to protest, against a wizard who has enslaved our Queen’s mind with his lust-spells! No, she’ll let him—”

  “What’s that?” There was a note in Melantrys’ voice Rudy seldom heard from the scrappy little Guard.

  Shock.

  And fear.

  At the same moment the Icefalcon said, “Soul-hunters,” and the four Sketh guardsman, standing in the cell doorway, whirled to face the things shimmering in the dark of the corridor.

  Even as Rudy tried to identify them – Ingold had taught him something about the demon manifestations that the White Raiders called Soul-hunters, but that had been a year and a half ago – one of the faceless, eyeless shapes lunged at the guards in the doorway. What looked like a short sword wrought of ice flickered in its hand. The nearest guard ducked. The one beside her wasn’t so quick, and gave a choked gasp as the blade sliced flesh (Ghosts don’t do that and White Raider Soul-hunters sure as hell don’t…). Melantrys would have sprung into the fray but the Icefalcon grabbed her arm.

  “Run!”

  The cell was of double length, with a second door at the far end. Rudy had learned a long time ago not to argue with any combat decision made by the Icefalcon. It did cross his mind that there might be more of these Soul-hunters – whatever the hell they actually were – outside that door as well, but he shoved Minalde in that direction and yelled “Go!” Then lashed at them with his staff as they adva
nced on Lady Sketh, and felt the shock of it, all the way up his arms, when one of them parried the blow on its gleaming weapon.

  Breathless cold seized his chest, and for a terrifying moment he felt his heart spasm in his chest. Melantrys, chalk-white in the light of the few glowstones, slashed at the shadowy attackers at random, disoriented, blood darkening her sleeve.

  Lady Sketh shouted to Tarpaeis, “Send them away, you fool—!”

  Rudy didn’t let himself pause to consider what the hell that remark meant, but heard the younger mage shout the spell to turn aside malevolent spirits – which quite obviously didn’t do jack shit. Another Sketh guard fell, bleeding, silent, as if in a faint at the touch of the alien weapons, and Rudy, backing with the Icefalcon and Bors before the attack, half-closed his eyes and called to being the strongest spell of illusion he could remember.

  The illusion of ten more Guards out in the hallway behind the ghosts.

  Hey, look over there, your shoe is untied…

  The ghosts turned, flung themselves back through the door at these new “attackers.”

  The Icefalcon slammed the door, shot its bolts, scooped up Melantrys as her knees gave way, and without a word the whole party dashed the length of the cell to the other door.

  It was closed – and bolted – but a trap-door was open in the ceiling above it, a precarious stack of boxes (which suspiciously resembled – and smelled like – nesting-boxes) just below.

  Minalde had clearly gone that way. She’d thrown down her thick woolen shawl just outside the cell above the trap-door, showing them that she’d headed for the Church Stair, which communicated with all levels, straight down to the first. She was waiting at the bottom, with a dozen black-clothed Guards and the Keep’s two other novice wizards, Brother Wend and Ilae, in a blaze of witchlight that lit up the vaulted stairwell like the Vegas Strip. Running toward the Church Stair on the Fifth Level, Rudy had seen the “Soul-hunters” (or whatever they were) twice: faintly glowing, hard to focus one’s eyes upon. A glint of ice-blades here, the smoky shadow as heads turned in their direction…

  The tangle of Fifth Level corridors and cells had fumed with the aura of peril, like some terrible, icy fog. It was not the aura of ghosts, nor of any being that Rudy had encountered before, even in the haunted portions of the Keep. Not like anything he had seen or felt in eight years of Ingold’s training in this alien world. Once he thought he’d seen another sigil, small and pulsing with orange light, on a wall where none had been the last time he and Ingold had patrolled this part of the Keep nearly a year ago.

  When they reached the bottom of the stair, Melantrys and the more lightly-wounded of the Sketh guards were unconscious, and could not be wakened.

  The other Sketh guard was dead.

  *

  “Show me where you came through.” Ingold rested his hands on Lord Sketh’s trembling shoulders and looked into his eyes. His voice was patient and re-assuring; His Lordship’s hysterical sobs gradually subsided to hiccups. Gil wanted to bitch-slap him.

  Since this world (Wherever the HELL we are) was clammily warm despite it being in the middle of the night (and how long do nights last here?) Gil had stripped off her outer tabard and gave it to the girl Sisa, who wore only the filmiest of under-shifts. (And now we know why SOMEBODY activated the transporter room – which Lord Sketh was obviously using as a motel-room…). After her first screams of terror – which had brought Gil running to her side – Sisa had been pretty good about keeping her mouth shut, though Gil suspected the screaming had brought the snake-headed Crimson Carnivores which had attacked them. Before pelting to Sisa’s rescue Gil had yanked her gloves from her belt and dropped them, to mark her own arrival-point. (Not for nothing was she friends with the Icefalcon). Sisa, the prettiest and youngest of Lady Sketh’s maids, had of course run back and forth among the broken, vine-choked walls of the ruins in which Gil had, with a gasp of sickened giddiness, suddenly found herself, so the girl hadn’t the slightest idea where she herself had appeared.

  If Sisa had appeared here at the same moment she herself had, Gil estimated it was about fifty feet from her own entry-point. Ingold, who’d come dashing up moments later as the first carnivores had slithered and gallumphed from the surrounding jungle, would undoubtedly have marked the place where he first found himself.

  Just as undoubtedly, Lord Sketh had done nothing of the kind.

  Without relaxing her watch on the moonlit tangle of foliage around them, Gil asked, “You figure this was Lady Sketh who did this?”

  “I can’t—“ The girl came up beside her. Pearls still clinging in her unbound hair, she carried the biggest stick she could find, in case – Gil smiled – Gil should need help.

  “It must have been,” Sisa whispered after a moment. “But Dasson—“ That was Lord Sketh’s given name: Dasson Peltirian, “—said Her Ladyship didn’t know about us. That we were perfectly safe.”

  “In the Keep?” Eight years had taught Gil just how quickly even the smallest rumor flashed through that tiny community.

  “We didn’t meet in the Keep!” Sisa kept her voice to barely a breath. There was a smell, thought Gil, abroad in the night. A cold breath that came and went through the sultry pong of standing water and rotting vegetation…

  “We’d meet in the woods, all the summer. Or in one of the hay-barns down at the end of the Vale. Then when the blizzard came, Dasson – my lord—“ she corrected herself, probably blushing though the moonlight made it hard to tell, “—said he’d find us a place in the Keep where we could be together. Gil-Shalos,” went on the girl earnestly, “he… he loves me. He needs someone. He is so very alone.”

  “He’s alone enough to take up with Amyssa Pnakarion last year,” pointed out Gil, as gently as she could. “And Marinia Troop, two years…”

  Gil wasn’t looking at her, but by the sound of her voice, tears had collected in Sisa’s eyes at the mention of those old rounds of Keep gossip.

  “Don’t judge him. Please don’t judge him.”

  Amyssa Pnakarion and Marinia Troop, guessed Gil, (not to speak of at least four others), were the reason that Lady Sketh would be keeping an eye on all her husband’s usual trysting-spots. And keeping an eye on whoever His Lordship lingered with in conversation.

  Her graduate advisor at UCLA, she recalled, had also had the habit of taking up with young ladies in his classes. His wife – who had at one time been one of his students – had driven herself crazy for the two years that Gil had worked with the man, obsessively attempting to “catch him at it,” presumably in order to leverage a better divorce settlement. And the girls he boffed in the unused offices of his colleagues – or in library carrels late at night – all said, Don’t judge him. He needs someone.

  “The Chamber of the Door was the only place safe to meet, he said, safe from her spies.” Sisa spoke as if she hesitated to break into Gil’s wry silence. “He was making arrangements for us to meet elsewhere, but he couldn’t let us be seen together, ever. The Chamber of the Door is guarded, but he said he could get the Guards to go away for a time...”

  “There’s a reason it’s guarded,” Gil pointed out. “I take it His Lordship got Tarpaeis to rig the screaming-and-spooks special effects that got Melantrys and me to leave our post?”

  The girl nodded. “He slipped in as soon as you were gone. I followed a few moments later...”

  And Lady Sketh must have seen YOU go in, but not him.

  Something stirred in the darkness, beyond the moonlight that lay over the ruins. Gil’s eyes followed the sound, her heart hammering. Something – it sounded like a small pig – squealed in the trees, and there was a hissing sound, and for a moment a deep, sweetish stink, like the reptile house in a zoo. Behind her, Gil thought from Sisa’s silence that the girl was blushing again.

  As well she might. When Gil and Ingold had entered the transporter room – presumably after Her Ladyship had seen Sisa go in and run off to do whatever she’d done to activate the room (And how the hell did sh
e manage THAT?) – they’d found Sisa with her gown around her feet and Lord Sketh in his night-robe slobbering passionately over her bosom. Ingold had said, “My lord, the affairs of your household are your own business – and that of Lady Sketh – but we cannot have this room unwatched even for a moment! And to use magic to send the guards away—”

  And that was as far as he’d gotten.

  She now heard behind her Lord Sketh’s shaky sobbing, and the rustle of his clothes. Of Ingold, nothing, but the wizard’s deep voice murmured in her ear, “Anything?”

  “There.” She nodded in the direction of the sound, and the smell, of moments ago. “And something spooked a bird or whatever it was in a tree there—”

  Another rustle in the boscage around them, and a moment later, the winged, skeletal shape of something resembling a pterodactyl silhouetted across the larger of the two moons.

  “Daylight feels about five hours off,” breathed Ingold. “It is… difficult to tell, here, and I’m not sure we’d be safer by day than we are now. Moreover I have no idea how long the mechanism of that sigil in the transporter room remains active. His Lordship informs me that an identical sigil appeared in a chamber immediately above the transporter room on the same day that the one appeared on the transporter room wall.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  The wizard solemnly crossed his heart. “Honest Injun,” he said in English. “I shit you not.”

  “And he didn’t think to mention this—”

  “I have already,” said Ingold, “brought His Lordship to the understanding of his transgression, and there is little use in belaboring the point.”

  “That must be how – it’s got to have been Tarpaeis – activated the transporter.” Gil glanced at Lord Sketh, clutching Sisa like a four-year-old reunited with his mother, face buried in her shoulder. Catch Lady Sketh comforting anybody that way…