She stumbled a second time. Geth and Chetiin both glanced at her, but she ignored them. Suddenly her stomach was twisting in knots. “The name on the inscription is Tasaam Draet?”
“Yes.” She heard Tenquis mumble as he skimmed the text on the stela, then he read aloud in Goblin, “Tasaam Draet, who found atcha in this time when muut has been shattered is embraced as a brother to the emperor. The name of Draet will be inherited by his line. He is further rewarded with the fortress of Suud Anshaar and given the care of the symbols of muut forfeited by those lords whose treachery he has ended.”
“Khaavolaar,” Ekhaas said, half to herself. Geth raised his eyebrows in curiosity.
“Who was Tasaam Draet?” he asked.
“A butcher,” said Ekhaas. “An avenging spirit. Children of the Dhakaani clans are told to obey their muut, or Tasaam Draet will come in the night and drag them down to the depths of Khyber. As we age, we learn to see him as something of a folk hero. According to more reliable stories, he was a real person, a commoner raised to the rank of a lord by the emperor and empowered to bring down any noble who dared rise against the imperial throne in the last days of the empire. He’s reputed to have exterminated at least three noble lines—maybe more. The stories say that the wails of those dying in his fortress of Suud Anshaar could be heard a night’s journey away.”
Geth wrinkled his nose. “And you call him a folk hero?”
“You invoke a trickster rat as a folk hero. The dar invoke a devoted warrior.” Ekhaas shrugged and continued. “Tasaam Draet was so powerful, so full of atcha in his service to Dhakaan, that the last forces of the daelkyr made a target of him. One day travelers to Suud Anshaar found it utterly empty of life, with only a lingering taint of madness to hint at what had happened. Suud Anshaar was abandoned as cursed, and Tasaam Draet became a legend. It’s said that the ruins of Suud Anshaar still stand deep in what’s now the Khraal Jungle, the cries of those who died by Tasaam Draet’s hand still echoing in the night. Raat shan gath’kal dor—the story stops but never ends.”
“That doesn’t shed any new light on the shattering of the Shield of Nobles, though,” said Chetiin somberly. “Or on whether the inscription refers to muut as the shield or as the duty of nobles.”
“Or maybe it does,” said Tenquis, still on the other side of the stela, “Ekhaas, come look at this.”
She went around the hollow, Geth and Chetiin following her. Tenquis looked up at the stela. He pointed and said, “There’s the inscription.” His hand moved lower. “What’s that below it?”
Symbols carved into the stone ended the text in praise of Tasaam Draet—three rings with stretched slashes along the outside, like a sword blade bent into a circle with the notched edge out. Ekhaas knew them. In fact, she had recreated them on a battle standard for Dagii’s army before the Battle of Zarrthec. “They’re shaari’mal,” she said. “The tearing wheels. They’re an ancient symbol of Dhakaan.”
“There’s something written under them,” said Tenquis.
Ekhaas squinted. There was something written there, the letters smaller than the surrounding text, almost too small to read from a distance. She thought she could make out one word though. Shield.
“We need to get closer,” she said. “Chetiin, can you climb it?”
He looked at the stela and shook his head. Geth growled. “Then we stand on each others’ shoulders,” the shifter said. He rolled his shoulders, then climbed down into the hollow and put his back to the stela. “Tenquis first.”
“Wait.” Tenquis dug into one of the pockets of his vest and produced a piece of fine folded paper and a stick of charcoal. He gave them to Chetiin. “Lay the paper over the inscription, then rub the charcoal over it. It will make an impression of the inscription that we can take with us.”
“I know how to make a rubbing,” the old goblin said. “Try not to fall out from under me.”
Geth crouched down. Tenquis stepped onto the shifter’s bent knee, then carefully up onto his shoulders, facing the pillar so that he could brace himself against it with his hands. Geth gripped Tenquis’s ankles and stood up slowly, breath hissing out between his teeth. When he stood straight, he paused for a moment to let Tenquis adjust his balance, then let go of him and reached down to make a stirrup of his hands for Ekhaas.
She put one foot into it and pushed off from the ground with the other. For a perilous moment her feet joined Tenquis’s on Geth’s shoulders. Then she grasped the tiefling’s shoulders, wrapped one leg around his waist, and climbed up over his back. He groaned and breathed even harder than Geth had.
“Easy,” Ekhaas whispered. “You can do it.” She got one knee on his shoulder, then the other. His horns made the maneuver difficult.
“Just hurry,” he wheezed.
She put her palms against the cool stone of the stela, digging her fingertips into the shallow grooves of the carved letters—Muurazh who led the defense of the dungeons is rewarded with two swords from the emperor’s hand and land before the walls of Zaal Piik—before drawing up one foot …
At the bottom of their pile, Geth lurched suddenly. Ekhaas grabbed onto the stela, as did Tenquis below her. Geth gasped as he tried to recover, and without thinking, Ekhaas sang.
It was a reflexive action, with less magic about it than inspiration. She sang strength and steadiness, focus and will. Geth sucked in a great breath and managed to stand straight once more. So did Tenquis—she could feel him grow steadier under her, and she seized the opportunity to climb all the way up onto his shoulders.
But with the song came the echo, and this time it was distinctly louder and more insistent. And when she stopped singing, it persisted as if it had taken on a life of its own.
“Ekhaas!” said Geth through his teeth.
“I know.” She ducked her head and peered under one arm at Chetiin. “Up!”
The goblin swarmed over Geth, then Tenquis as easily as if he were climbing a tree. When he passed over Ekhaas, she barely felt it. Then he was on her shoulders—and cursing.
“This is worse than from below,” he said. “The angle is wrong.”
The haunting song had drawn closer in just a few moments. It had changed, too, Ekhaas realized. It wasn’t just one voice singing anymore. It was several, blended into an eerie chorus. It took all of her will not to turn her head and look around. “Chetiin,” she said, fighting to stay calm, “can you climb from—”
Before she could finish, the summoned light that had lit the vault flickered and vanished. Darkness cloaked the cavern beyond the glow of her drifting orbs. The chorus seemed to grow stronger, and even the orbs flickered briefly. Tenquis hissed between his teeth.
“Don’t move!” Ekhaas snapped. “Chetiin, how much farther?”
“A dagger’s length. Hold still.” One foot left her shoulder and planted itself on top of her head. Ekhaas stiffened her neck as Chetiin changed his perch as easily as if he were a bird. Ekhaas heard paper slapped onto stone and a rapid rubbing sound.
“Hurry,” said Geth, his voiced strained. She felt him shift, trying to hold their weight.
“I almost have it,” said Chetiin. Ekhaas counted heartbeats. One. Two. Three. Four—
“Done!” Chetiin said.
“Jump!” Geth gasped, and an instant later his support dropped out from under them. Ekhaas felt Chetiin’s weight leave her head. She heard Tenquis yelp again and the unseen chorus rise as if in excitement. Guessing at where the edge of the hollow had been, she tried to push off from Tenquis’s shoulders, from the stela, from anything that would push her away from the collapse.
It almost worked. Her back slammed into the slope of the hollow, driving the wind out of her. Her legs came down across someone else’s back. For a moment, all Ekhaas could do was lie still, staring at sparks of light that had nothing to do with her floating globes and everything to do with a hard impact.
At least it was quiet. The haunting chorus was gone. The vault was silent.
A small shadow hovered over
her. It touched her face and then—none too gently—slapped her. Ekhaas blinked and sucked in air. She rolled over—all of her limbs obeyed her and there was no sharp pain, which was a good sign—and glared briefly at Chetiin before looking down at the body under her legs. It was Tenquis. She felt a surge of relief to see that he was also rolling over. She looked for Geth and found him on his hands and knees at the base of the stela, chest heaving from exertion. She started to rise and go to him, but Chetiin grabbed her.
“No,” he said. “Look!” He spun her around so that she faced up and out of the hollow.
It took her an instant to recognize what she saw. Six figures stood looking down at them. Six hobgoblin women wrapped in tattered lengths of linen. Six hobgoblin women as thin as bones, their flesh translucent and shimmering with its own cold light.
One of them raised a skeletal hand and pointed at her. “Trespasser,” she said in Goblin, in a voice that seemed like an echo of a song. “Thief. Defiler!”
CHAPTER
SIX
16 Aryth
“No!” Ekhaas staggered to her feet. What were they? Some kind of spirits, but she’d heard no stories of ghosts in the vaults. “We’re not thieves. I’m not a trespasser. I’m Kech Volaar.” She thrust a hand back at Geth—Chetiin was urging him and Tenquis to their feet. “He bears Aram, the Sword of Heroes. He is worthy—”
“Defilers,” said the ghost again, and this time the others echoed her in a hiss like a bow drawn across the strings of some otherworldly instrument. “Defilers! Defilers!”
The word rose into a crashing wave of song so powerful it almost drove Ekhaas back down to her knees. With it came a wave of shame and despair. She was a thief and a violator of these sacred vaults. She was a traitor to her clan. To her race. To all of the dar.
Somewhere behind her, Tenquis cried out, and Geth shouted her name. Ekhaas squeezed her hands into fists and ground her teeth together. No, she was neither thief nor traitor; none of them were. Face down as if she were walking into a blizzard, she breathed in through her teeth, then raised her head, and sang back at the ghosts.
She chose an anthem of Dhakaan, a song that spoke of need and valor. Her voice clashed with the chorus of the ghosts like a lone warrior taking on a squad of swordsmen. For a moment, the two songs struggled against each other, then the song of the ghosts rose in strength and volume, pushing Ekhaas back. She staggered under the power of it. The glowing figures drifted forward, shrouded feet not quite touching the ground. Ekhaas clenched her fists, laid her ears back, and focused both her will and her voice.
Her song rose over the ghosts’, hung in the air, then slashed down.
The ghosts’ song vanished into silence. The spirits went with it, like a candle snuffed out or a chime muffled. The Vault of the Eye was still and—except for the heaving of her breath—silent once more.
It was so sudden that Ekhaas almost stumbled. Could she really have defeated the phantoms so easily?
Then, far off, she heard their song rise again. The ghosts had been dispersed but not destroyed.
“Horns of Ohr Kaluun,” said Tenquis. “What are they?”
An idea had sprung into Ekhaas’s head as she sang against the ghosts. “Duur’kala,” she said, her voice rough from the effort she’d put into her song. “Long ago, we were buried in the vaults. But I had no idea …” She turned. “Chetiin—the inscription?”
The goblin was helping Geth to his feet, but one hand dipped into the front of his shirt and produced a piece of paper that was dark with charcoal. Ekhaas slid back down the slope of the hollow and snatched it from him. The paper was badly creased and the charcoal had been rubbed over it in haste, but it carried a clear imprint: part of the description of the reward given to Tasaam Draet, two of the three notched rings, half of another, and the words that had been inscribed beneath them.
THE NOBLES OF DHAKAAN NO LONGER HAVE A SHIELD TO HIDE BEHIND, FOR MUUT IS IN THE KEEPING OF TASAAM DRAET.
Her heart leaped. References to the shattering of muut and to a shield for nobles couldn’t be a coincidence.
“What does it say?” demanded Geth.
Ekhaas read the inscription aloud. The shifter looked confused, then understanding flashed in his eyes. “The shattered pieces of the Shield of Nobles,” he said. “Tasaam Draet had them. His fortress—you said the ruins still stood. It could still be there.”
Ekhaas nodded. “It’s the best hope we’ve had so far!” Her ears twitched with the desire to climb back up the stela and see if anything else was recorded on it—
Another voice joined the ghostly chorus, this time from a different direction in the darkness. Far more than six ancient duur’kala had been buried in the vaults. Ekhaas swallowed her curiosity, roughly folded the paper once more, and stuffed it into a pouch on her belt. “We have to go.”
They circled the stela and climbed up the side of the hollow closest to the path through the Vault of the Eye. Ekhaas paused briefly on the edge, watching and listening, then gestured for the others to follow. The echoing chorus of the ghosts was drawing slowly closer, and, she suspected, in greater numbers than they’d initially confronted. Would the ghosts follow them? She hoped not—they’d seemed attracted to her songs, which meant that their best weapon against the spirits would only draw more of them. If she didn’t sing, maybe they would converge on the stela, and she and the others could slip away.
She moved as fast as she dared, trying to reverse the way back to the great shaft and the precarious stairs up to the Vault of the Night-Sun. Artifacts she’d made a point of marking in her mind looked strange from the other direction and under the thin light of the drifting globes. More than once, she had to turn around and walk backward to render them familiar. And always she was alert for the unnatural shimmer or approaching song of a ghostly presence. A dim glow appeared ahead, and her first instinct was to press herself into the shadow of a statue in case she could hide from the spirit. It took her a moment to realize that it was the ghostlight rod that Tenquis had dropped.
They’d made it back to the stairs. Ekhaas stepped out into the open, scanned the area one last time, then gestured for the others to go up the stairs ahead of her.
The chorus of the ghosts, muted, remained distant. As they reached the spot where the stairs met the ceiling of the vault, she looked back out onto the darkness, searching for the glowing forms, but there were none.
“Ekhaas!” rasped Chetiin. She whipped around. The others stood just below a narrow landing in the stairs, the first of the switchbacks as the stairs ascended. Ekhaas leaped up the last few stairs to join them.
Ahead of them was the arch over the stairs that marked the Vault of the Eye. Floating in silence beneath the arch was another duur’kala ghost. It watched them like a sentinel. Slowly a skeletal hand rose to point at them. A shroud-wrapped jaw opened—
“No,” said Tenquis. “Not this time.” His hands vanished into pockets on his long vest. One drew forth a slim wand. The other emerged with a pinch of silvery dust squeezed between his fingers. Taking a quick step forward, Tenquis flicked the dust at the ghost as his wand wove an arcane pattern.
For an instant Ekhaas smelled a sharp tang on the air, then the pinch of dust blossomed into a cloud around the ghost. Tiny flashes of lightning erupted in a miniature storm that lit up the ghost’s translucent form from within.
It didn’t even give the phantom pause. As song emerged from its gaping mouth, it swooped forward and stroked a hand along Tenquis’s face in a gesture that seemed almost gentle.
There was nothing gentle in Tenquis’s reaction, though. The tiefling staggered as if he’d been struck hard. He might have collapsed backward down the stairs if Geth hadn’t been there to catch him. As the ghost pressed forward, Chetiin slipped past them, a dagger in his hand. Ekhaas caught the flash of the blue-black crystal embedded in the weapon’s gray blade. It was the dagger he kept sheathed on his right forearm, the one called Witness that would trap a creature’s soul when it struck a kil
ling blow. But could it affect something that was already dead? The ghost swiped at Chetiin. He moved aside with graceful ease. The dagger darted out.
And passed through the spirit with no more effect than Tenquis’s spell. Chetiin’s face tightened, and he slid away from another blow. “Ekhaas …” he said.
There was no choice. Ekhaas reached into herself and sang a counterpoint to the ghost’s song. Ekhaas thought she saw a look of surprise on the ghost’s withered face. It struggled, trying to match Ekhaas’s song, but alone its hollow voice was no match for hers. The spirit twisted in on itself and vanished like a wisp of smoke.
But down in the vault, the chorus surged with renewed energy, a pack of spectral hounds on the trail. Ekhaas grabbed Tenquis’s arm and helped haul him to his feet. His skin was cool to the touch, and his golden eyes were wide.
“Can you climb?” she asked him. He nodded. “Then do it.”
The descent of the stairs along the shaft had been unnerving. The climb back up was grim, step after step, staying ahead of the song that pursued them. At first they raced, taking the stairs as quickly as they could. It couldn’t last. Chetiin ran lightly, and Geth bounded on, his stamina extended by shifter-granted toughness, but Ekhaas and Tenquis tired. Every step became a cliff to be scaled. Ekhaas’s legs and throat burned. After a time, Geth looked over the stair rail and back down the shaft.
“They’re coming,” he said.
“I can tell,” said Ekhaas. The ghosts’ song had swelled until it echoed in the shaft. “How fast?”
“Slow.” He grimaced. “But they won’t get tired.”
“At least they’re not flying,” said Tenquis.
Geth dropped back to climb with them. “You’ve used magic to help us march faster before,” he said to her.
She’d thought of the spell, too, and dismissed it. “They’re drawn to my songs. We’d only have to fight more of them.”
The Tyranny of Ghosts: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 3 Page 9
