by Hambly
“Dork,” she added. The next instant a rustling scrunch in the jungle snatched her attention back; she shifted her sword in her hand.
“I suggest,” continued Ingold, “that we return to the spots where each of us appeared here, and take a closer look at them. They may give us a clue as to how to reverse the process.”
They may. Sword in hand, she followed the wizard, His Lordship, and the lovely Sisa back into the shadowy tangle of vine-choked ruins on whose edge they stood. But by the gleam of the single feather of witchlight that Ingold called to the end of his staff, Gil could see that these massive walls, with their oddly scallopped courses of stone, had been broken a long time ago. Whatever magic had once been in them – and there must have been, for the Keep transporter to send us here – was probably all but gone.
Five hours is a long time. She whirled to look behind her as they entered the ruins, and the same cold, directionless wind stirred her hair. The vines around them whispered, and a moment later something cried out in the jungle again, a squeal of terror and pain.
Five hours is a long time. And God only knows what’s here with us in the dark.
*
“How do we get rid of them?” As the Guards pushed past them into the gloom of the Aisle, Rudy caught Tarpaeis’ arm and slammed the younger man up against the corridor wall.
“I – I don’t—”
“And don’t tell me you don’t know what the frak I’m talking about because you summoned these guys, didn’t you?”
The novice’s dark eyes pleaded with him and Rudy had to summon up all the meditative patience that Ingold was slowly teaching him, in order not to punch Tarpaeis’ teeth through the back of his head. “I – no… Not exactly…”
“Then why don’t you tell me what you did do, exactly?” Back in his days of painting motorcycles at Wild David Wilde’s body-shop in Riverside, California, Rudy would have already been stepping over his body on his way out the door to get a beer…
Which wouldn’t, he had to admit, have solved anything. But it would have made me FEEL a whole lot better…
In the vast cavern of the Aisle someone was screaming, someone else shouting inchoate words of terror. A drift of echoes carried other screams, other panicky shouts to him down the steep sounding-tube of the Church Stair.
Shit chingate god-frikkin-dam…
“Rudy!” Ilae’s thin shape silhouetted against the torchlight in the Aisle doors. “What do we do? They’re coming – the ghosts—”
Rudy dragged Tarpaeis out into the Aisle. Sure enough, people were streaming out of the many doors that led into that immense space, nearly a hundred feet high and running two-thirds of the length of the Keep: torchlight, lamplight, glowstones bobbing and dipping wildly. First Level people were running out of their cells to find out what the commotion was and adding their voices to the din. Rudy could see the second and third level dwellers on the galleries, leaning over the railings, shouting down, shouting up. The noise was like cubic miles of loose rocks being poured down a tin pipe a thousand feet long. With the volume cranked up to Eleven.
And on the Fourth Level galleries, glowing shapes moved.
The Soul-hunters.
Who weren’t – Rudy was pretty sure – really ghosts.
“Ghost-wards don’t stop them—“ Ilae panted.
There were – Ingold had said – about fifteen different types of ghost-wards, of which he’d taught his pupils only six or seven, the ones that worked (most of the time) on the Keep’s ghosts. Part of being a wizard, Rudy had discovered, was learning tons of spells that you never used. Part of being a wizard was being old enough to have memorized those tons of spells…
And not cursing yourself black in the face under stress. He hadn’t learned that part yet.
“Which ones have you tried?”
They were, of course, the ones he himself was most familiar with, including two that used the spellcaster’s blood. Ilae had a kerchief wrapped around her hand. Another used pig’s blood – Thank God somebody volunteered an animal…
And there’s always the chance that she or Wend didn’t do them right…
“Let’s go. You too, Tarpy.”
Tarpaeis dug in his heels, looked swiftly around. For a moment Rudy thought he was searching for Lady Sketh to object to the wizard (If you can call him that!) belonging to her Household being hauled off… Though to do him justice Rudy had never found the young man to be a coward. “My family…”
Rudy jabbed a finger at him: “You shoulda thought about your frakking family before you went screwing around with transporter-room spells, pal. If we save the Keep from these bastards we’ll save your family as well. You know what they are?”
Tarpaeis shook his head.
Frak. Now how did that really scary spell go…?
They stopped in Ingold’s workshop long enough for Rudy to scoop up a satchel and shove it full of whatever he could remember of the more arcane ingredients. Though the place was a maze of crucibles, alembics, and half-constructed machines, Ingold had a very precise system of storing things and Rudy had no trouble finding silver, salt, rainwater and the powders of various charcoals and bones. One of the Keep shepherds beside the door handed him a bottle of lamb’s blood, and he glimpsed the swine-herd putting a plaster on one of his charges as well.
He was running wards and sigils in his head as he dashed at Ilae’s heels up two long flights of stairs. Panic voices echoed all around him in the twisting corridors, and now and then, like the moving breath of wind, he sensed drifts of heart-chilling dread. As quickly as she could, Ilae outlined the ward-spells they’d tried that hadn’t worked. Brother Wend had also been smart enough to fling a distraction that had drawn the ghosts aside.
“But it only works for a minute or two, until the ghosts reach the illusion. Then they come back, and the wards don’t stop them.”
“Where are they?”
“Fourth Level. Third Level. They attack whoever they see—”
“Damn. They didn’t used to.” Rudy stopped, panting, at the top of St. Prool’s Stair. The aura of the ghosts hung like freezing smoke in the five corridors that converged on the place. Though he could see in the dark, Rudy found the utterly lightless hallways disturbing – everyone had stripped whatever glowstones and lamps they could before fleeing for safety. If anyplace in the Keep IS safe…
The thought that he should send Ilae back down to care for Melantrys and the comatose Sketh guard – and whoever else the things had slashed – vanished within a nano-second of inception. I need another mage here…
The main corridor into which the stair debouched retained, for a good fifty feet, most of its original character from the building of the Keep. It was straight for that distance, though it had been narrowed from the builders’ standard width of about twelve feet to less than eight – in one place to about four, where somebody had got greedy about moving a cell wall. Rudy strode to where it dog-legged, and laid down the strongest of the spells he remembered. For eight years he’d trained in meditation and mental focus, and it was still almost impossible to push from his mind all thought – any thought – of what might be coming at him from beyond the jog in the corridor. The very air seemed to scream and shift from the presence of the ghosts.
That done (And I hope to Christ I didn’t forget something!) he retreated twenty feet, closed his eyes (Will that first spell hold?) and made another ward-spell, sigils drawn in the ash of burned hellebore, in salt mixed with pig’s blood.
Screaming still echoed in the lightless corridors. Others besides Melantrys and Lady Sketh’s guard would be lying in the infirmary, sinking into cold death from the touch of wounds that shouldn’t have harmed them… How come ghosts can draw blood?
Crap. The spell shivered to nothing with the distraction of his mind. Start again – How much more of that pig-blood do I got?
In the twisting corridor behind them he laid down more spells, the strength to do so seeming to come from the marrow of his bones and the fina
l ward-line bringing on a headache worse than the time he’d mixed ethanol and Gatorade at a party back in Fontana, California… C’mon, man, keep it up! We’ve got to at least see if this’ll stop them. He was halfway through the last spell in a third corridor when Ilae called his name with panic in her voice.
“They’re coming—”
Shock and dread broke his concentration (How the hell does Ingold DO these things in an emergency?) and the spell crumbled. Cursing all the way, Rudy raced back to where Tarpaeis and Ilae stood together by the stair. As he passed the mouth of a small passway that someone had cut through the maze of cells to the next main corridor, he glimpsed something, a glowing smudge of light on a wall, such as he’d seen up on Five. Dammit….
He ran to the place, summoning to mind the pattern of interlocking grids and triangles whose appearance in the transporter room – and in Lady Sketh’s illegal chicken-ranch – had started all this trouble. Don’t tell me these marks are appearing all over the Keep now…
And PLEASE don’t tell me I’ll have to make those ward-spells in this corridor too…
But the mark didn’t look the same.
It glowed on the wall, the same dull, slightly changeable orange, but even at a little distance Rudy thought it looked like the scribbles of light that wizards sometimes drew with their fingertips on walls, rocks, trees in the woods, to guide them…
When he got closer, he saw that this was precisely what it was.
The mark was Ingold’s.
*
“Here.” Gil bent and picked up her gloves, turned sharply again. No doubt about it, there was something else in the ruins – a couple of somethings. One of them at least was large enough for her to hear the scratch and click of its claws on the overgrown stone underfoot, the crackle of vegetation. Ingold passed his hands swiftly along the walls to their left, the ruinous heap of stone to their right, while Lord Sketh whimpered.
“I sent Tarpaeis to keep the Guards away,” he keened. “He didn’t see me enter – Sisa came in soon after. My lady is jealous of even a word, a smile…”
Gil refrained from pointing out that the interaction she’d seen in the vestibule of the transporter room had been considerably more than a word or a smile. “You figure she saw Sissy go in and got Tarpy to to activate the transporter room by means of this other sigil?”
Greenish moonlight slipped along the slick curve of His Lordship’s retreating hairline as he nodded. “The boy would not have dared refuse her order. His sister is crippled from birth, and their mother stripped of her mind by the Dark Ones during the flight from the cities of the valley up to the Keep. It is only our patronage which keeps them from destitution. We—”
“Merlacks!” a male voice shouted, and whirling, Gil saw three men emerge from the inky shadows of the ruins. They wore dark jumpsuits – moonlight glinted on multiple zipper-tags – and held short swords that gleamed like ice. Hoods were pulled down close around their faces and what she at first thought was simply darkness within them she saw on second glance to be matte, non-reflective goggles and dark filter-masks over their mouths and noses.
All this she took in within half a second as they attacked, and one of them yelled “Keep the girl for questioning—“ in a language that only Ingold’s Spell of Tongues, laid on her long ago, let her comprehend. Sketh wailed in terror and would have bolted into the labyrinth had not Ingold grabbed him by the back of his night-shirt. With his free hand the wizard raised his staff and summoned a blinding bolt of witch-light that seemed to go straight through Gil’s eyelids – she had learned to shut her eyes when Ingold raised his staff like that. When she opened them the three black-clothed soldiers were falling back in confusion.
Ingold shouted, “We are here in peace—“ but the men were already fleeing. Gil wondered if they heard. One had dropped his sword, and it lay gleaming, and smoking very slightly, on the cracked pavement. “Don’t,” cautioned the wizard, as Gil reached for it. “It has spells of some kind on it, magic unfamiliar to me—”
He turned his head, listening. Not far away, among the ruins – the night seemed ten times blacker, after that lightning-flash – Gil heard one of the men scream. Another yelled in their alien tongue, “What the fuck is—?” and another gasped, “Oh, God—oh God—”
“Medic!” someone bellowed frantically.
Gil said, “They’re as lost as we are.”
“Stay close.” Ingold marked the shattered pillar beside him with a quick sigil, then strode into the darkness in the direction the men had taken. Gil caught Sketh’s wrist (he looked ready to try to hide in the matted vines) and followed, Sisa clinging to the back of her belt. In the doubled moon-shadows it was difficult to see the wizard in the maze of broken walls and nearly impossible to see much else, and the two non-combattants tripped and stumbled every step of the way. But Gil knew they couldn’t be left behind. Nor, she knew, would Ingold abandon even enemies in this unknown place.
And if they attack us when we try to help them I’m gonna be TRULY pissed…
She needn’t have worried. She smelled the blood when they were still quite a distance away, and heard the gobbling croak of creatures feeding. Ingold touched her arm to stop her, then crept forward, a cautious step at a time, to look over a pile of vine-swathed rubble into a clearing among the ruins.
All three jump-suited soldiers were there. All dead, in the center of a cluster of Crimson Carnivores and two or three other species of equally grotesque monstrosities – tentacled, hammer-headed, covered with strange warts and gleaming eyes – that were feeding on the corpses. One monstrosity – like a bloated chicken the size of a grizzly bear – lay gasping, though the wound on its side looked fairly superficial. A glowing sword lay a short distance away. As Gil watched its breathing stopped.
Almost without thinking she clapped one hand over Lord Sketh’s mouth – she could hear him take in his breath for another wail of terror – and after one quick look she retreated. Soundlessly, Ingold stepped back also, led them unerringly toward the place where Gil had first appeared here, and his own smudged sigil on the broken pillar. “I wonder who or what Merlacks are?” His voice was barely a murmur, once they were well away from the clearing. “Their enemies, presumably, poor souls…”
He glanced back, frowned, then knelt beside the sword which the men had first dropped, careful not to touch it. After a moment he spread out one hand and held it a few inches over the blade, his eyes half-shut as if listening for some distant sound. Lord Sketh, meanwhile, crumpled to his knees, hand pressed to his mouth (If he throws up the smell of organic matter’s going to bring every critter in ten square miles and I really WILL kill him…).
But he didn’t. A moment later he turned his face heavenward, and clutched Sisa’s hand. “In God’s name where are we?” he sobbed – quietly, because Gil was glaring at him. “What world is this? To be stranded here forever… What greater misfortune could befall two lovers who want only to be together—?”
Gil swung around as chill, directionless wind caught her hair, and for a moment she smelled a metallic, acrid scent wholly unlike that of the reptiles which had attacked them before.
A scent she knew.
It had been eight years…
For a moment, in the blackness of the ruins, she caught a flicker of a glistening shape – crab-like, squid-like, but again like neither – and a long whip of tentacles as it disappeared again.
She answered Lord Sketh, “Guess.”
It had been only a glimpse, but she was pretty sure that what she’d seen was a Dark One.
*
“Ingold?” Rudy flattened his palm, then his forehead, against the dimly-glowing orange rune. “Ingold, can you hear me? Where the hell are you, man? God damn, I’m glad—”
“No gladder than I, to hear your voice.” As when he used the scrying-crystal, Rudy heard the old man’s deep, velvet voice somewhere in the back of his mind. It was no more than the thread of a whisper now, like a trace of smoke in a pitch-black room
when a candle has been blown out, but he almost wept with relief.
He’s not dead…
“Gil informs me that we’re on another world; at least there seem to be two moons in the sky. Quite pretty, actually. No, listen – I have no idea how long this connection will last. Gil says we’re in some kind of transporter facility, but it’s in ruins. We’ve seen two parties of soldiers come through, but they seem to be disoriented, lost…”
“Soldiers here, too,” said Rudy. “The ghosts from Fourth Level Back. They’re all over the Keep. Icefalcon calls them Soul-hunters, but they don’t respond to ghost-spells. They do respond to regular illusions. They’ll go after them… They’re not really material, except for their swords—”
“Like ice-blades? Don’t touch them. There’s a spell of some kind, paralysis and cold—”
“That’s them.”
A pause. “Gil says it sounds like a ‘transporter malfunction’ of some kind. She says where we are could be a relay-point, which makes sense, if the magic upon which it is based is similar enough to that used in the transporter system among the Keeps. But we’ll have to search through the ruins here to find the locator-sigils. I have no idea where you are.”
“Would me making a sigil of some kind in the transporter room help? Or would that just bring more ghost-troops here?”
“I have no idea. Nor what else it might draw to you. And there are Dark Ones here—”
Frakkety goddam hell…
Ilae screamed “Rudy!” and he swivelled on his heels, leaped back as four ghostly shapes plunged down the narrow corridor at him, swords flickering in the blackness. Rudy flung a blast of light – the first spell he could think of – and dashed back to where Ilae and Tarpaeis waited.
“We can’t—“ he began, and they caught his arms and ran him back with them to the stair. Other Soul-hunters came down the corridor, (DAMN it!) straight across every ghost-ward…
