by Dave Smeds
“You will need to light your torches at the stairs. At the top, you will find another antechamber. Beyond it lie a series of large rooms. These are the chambers within which the ken are tested. To become a Bo-no-ken, one must enter the first and return. The Hab-no-ken must penetrate the second room, as I once did.” For a moment, his voice quavered. “The Zee-no-ken must survive the third."
Gast searched their faces. “If what you seek is truly within the citadel, it must be past the third chamber. Some of the Zee-no-ken have reported seeing a portal at the end of that room. If any have entered, they have never emerged to tell the story."
Suddenly he reached out and clasped Alemar's hand. “I don't want to lose you, my son."
Alemar stepped forward and hugged the old man. “We have to try, master."
“I am not an old fool,” Gast said as they separated. “The danger is literal. Only one out of every two who venture into the third room survive as whole human beings. Even the first claims victims. What guarantee have you that your quest is true?"
“Only the word of a ghost,” Alemar said, his throat sore. “But you still haven't said what is in the rooms."
“All the fears you have ever felt,” Gast said. “And nothing else. Remember that: Whatever happens inside, it is nothing more than fear."
“We have company,” Elenya said.
They turned toward the mouth of the valley. They heard echoes of many hoofbeats and saw a night-lit shroud of dust.
Gast said, “If they are Po-no-pha, they must leave their weapons and wait for permission of the High Scholar to approach the citadel. But now the ken will know you are here. Go in now, or lose your chance. Take off your clothes."
The twins blinked.
“Take them off,” Gast insisted. “You don't want clothes in there. Leave your weapons as well."
They stared at him skeptically.
“Trust me,” he implored. “I have been inside. You haven't."
Elenya toyed with the fastenings at her collar. “You can't expect us to leave our weapons here. What happens when we come back out?"
Gast was adamant. “What good will two swordplayers do against many Po-no-pha? And in there, weapons will only be your ruin. You will be undone by your fears.” He groaned. “I wish there were more time to prepare you."
The intensity of his plea eventually persuaded the twins to strip, but neither would disarm. They stood ready, naked except for their belts and the weapons hanging from them.
“I feel like an imbecile,” Elenya said.
“You look like one, too,” Alemar said.
Elenya shot him a backhand swipe. He ducked it. “I see you haven't changed a bit.” She smiled.
They needed the humor. One look at Gast's expression was enough to dismay the stoutest heart.
“Choose separate routes,” the healer said. “And God be with you.” In Zyraii, the phrase meant a permanent farewell.
“And with you,” Alemar said. The noises from the far side of the valley were stronger. They took deep breaths and stepped into the dark passageway.
Full of bitter thoughts, Gast gathered their clothing into neat piles and began to prepare the proper eulogies.
* * *
XLI
THE CORRIDOR WAS LIT with cerulean light. It seemed to come from the stone walls themselves, and though this should have dispelled any shadows, the impression was of shadows everywhere. Alemar peered ahead, half expecting something to come shambling toward him, but all that appeared were forks and curves, steps and intersections of halls long lost to sepulchral dust and the mephitis of ancient sorceries. The dread of the wight reawakened, an almost forgotten memory given an unwelcome resurrection.
The passageways contained no artifacts, no designs, nothing to indicate that they may have served some purpose other than the one to which they were now being put. It awed him to think of the man-hours it must have taken to build this place. Who was this ancestor, that he should construct so laboriously a site he meant to abandon?
He turned a corner and saw a stairwell on his left, sinking into the depths of the citadel. Remembering Gast's instructions, he ignored it and soon found another ahead to his right. The path he had followed led up the steps, marked by channels in the dust. He paused at the base.
Laughter rebounded down the stair, deep baritone cackles that froze him where he stood.
* * * *
Goose pimples rose on Elenya's flesh. No human voice had produced that laugh. She looked behind and farther down her corridor and wished that she and Alemar had not separated. The source of the mirth lay upward, where, until a few moments before, she had planned to go.
She understood why searchers of ancient times had passed by the climb and found their fates deeper within the maze.
She struck her flint, igniting the torch. A cheerful glow dispelled the somber blue of the werelight, momentarily buoying up her spirits. The desert people knew how to make their lamps and torches. This one, from the stack in the anteroom, burned almost without smoke, consuming the brand very gradually.
She found it hard to think of herself as an Elandri princess and of the relic as her ancestor's work. She was Po-no-pha. What was she doing intruding on chambers meant only for the ken?
"Elandri tu,” she murmured, trying to convince herself the words were important to her. For Elandris, for the empire, for her father's people. For duty.
She placed her foot on the first step. The light of the corridor went out.
She turned but found only darkness beyond the range of her torch. Like the laughter, it bothered her. The magics of this place were far from dead.
She took another step. Something boomed in the distance. A third pace, and the wind sputtered her light, almost extinguishing it. The fourth—
And nothing.
Somehow this frightened her more than the active manifestations. She climbed on into ominous silence.
* * * *
Alemar felt the air, thick with the odor of thaumaturgy, close in with every step. The torchlight never penetrated far enough or strongly enough; there was always something lurking just beyond his vision. He had to concentrate to keep breathing normally, his lungs by now aching from constriction. Doubts began to plague him. Gast was right; he should have waited until he was properly prepared.
The flight of steps was actually quite brief. At the top was an anteroom, just as Gast had described. Like the rest of the citadel, the chamber was empty, its only features the portal leading into it at the top of the stairs and an identical opening in the opposite wall. As he stepped into it, the room seemed to shrink, pressing in from every side. The walls and ceiling, though he could see otherwise, felt as close as the sides of a coffin. He stopped in the center.
A sibilant hissing came from the darkness. Abruptly Alemar's saber was in his hand. He held the torch higher and approached. Something whispered to him. It spoke the High Speech, with a Cilendri accent, but the words were indistinct. Surely he only imagined it?
As he started to walk again, his progress was halted by a stench so foul he almost choked. It smelled like death, like something rotting, maggot-ridden, bloated with gases until the guts had exploded and released the fumes to sear the lungs of those who came near. He shuddered. It seemed so real. Nevertheless, he proceeded. The manifestations disappeared as he reached the entrance to the first of the rooms of the Test, the one the Bo-no-ken were required to enter. He took a deep breath and crossed the threshold.
The first thing that happened was that his torch went out.
* * * *
Elenya screamed aloud as the blackness fell, dropping the torch in her panic. She groped on the floor but couldn't find it; not even a tiny ember remained to guide her. Instead, her fingers touched something soft, slimy, and living. She jerked away, only to back into a group of sticky, thin strands unmistakably like a spider's web. She felt the prickle of tiny feet on her face, her knees, her back. She brushed frantically, but they came on in greater waves. She felt a bulbous,
furry body scurry up her thighs and poke at her womanhood. She squeezed involuntarily, and the creature burst with a sickening splrrrt, hot ooze splattering her labia and perineum. Oh, rythni, it got inside.
She tried to cleanse herself, almost nauseated from the scent, but had her footing swept out from beneath her by the slap of a huge, serpentine object. She hit ignominiously on the side of her hips, landing not on stone pavement, but in a wet and yielding mass. In an instant, she had sunk up to her armpits. It felt and smelled like a cesspool, but it clutched at her, dragging her lower. She went down to her chin, panting. When she did free an arm from the suction, it only made the rest of her sink. In another moment, she submerged entirely.
The morass closed over her head. She could feel its foul texture invade her outer ears. She held her breath, reaching up and failing to feel the open air. There was no solid footing beneath. She was trapped. There was no way out.
She cursed the father who had sent her here. She cursed Alemar for coming here. She cursed the ancestor who had made this place.
And gradually, her thinking became clearer. Her anger had given her the key. She had momentarily quelled a small part of her fear. What was it Gast had said? In a few more moments she would be out of air and perish. There was only one way out.
She opened her mouth and inhaled. Filth flowed down her throat. She let it. She let it fill her lungs. She swallowed it until her stomach threatened to burst. Let it kill her. She dared it.
* * * *
Gone.
Alemar wept in relief. All gone. No more crawling things, no more walls that moved in, no more suffocation, no more sense of falling, no more voices, and no more darkness.
No more darkness. He gawked in surprise. On the floor nearby, his torch sputtered but maintained its flame. It had never gone out. Likewise, the room had been empty all along, merely another bare chamber, though much larger than the anteroom. It contained only a spell, from which all the other creatures and phenomena had sprung, nothing more.
Well, not quite nothing.
Now that he had retrieved the torch and held it up, Alemar could see the mummified remains of human beings at either end, dry skin stretched taut over brittle skeletons: other entrants who had not been so lucky at conquering the magical attack, denied even the token of a comrade who would dare the chamber to drag the corpse out to a decent grave. He grimaced.
He was sitting on the cold floor in a puddle made of his own feces and urine. Gast had advised them well; one should not challenge Setan's rooms of horror wearing clothes. Though it was a small consolation, Alemar was glad to know that he wasn't the first this had happened to, and forgave his master the undetailed warning. He climbed unsteadily to his feet. The terrors may have been phantoms, but his body had reacted to them as if real, and now he ached. He wondered how Elenya was faring, but quickly stifled his apprehension. The room might react to his worry and send him through another round of what it had just given him. Though he knew he could probably deal with it, he needed the energy for the next challenge. The second room, he was certain, would provide it.
He would have liked to rest, but thought better of it. This was not the place. He would rather get it over with quickly—whatever that meant.
He stood up. One of the corpses, somewhat fresher than the others, lay out toward the middle of the room. He shoved it toward the others with his foot. It slid with a rasp. He tried not to look at the pile of bones beyond it. It was no time to be reminded of failure.
He crossed the threshold into the second room.
* * * *
As soon as Elenya entered, the room blazed with light. Behind her, a stone barrier slammed to the floor, blocking off her exit. Her eyes had just enough time to adjust to identify the monstrosity before her.
A dragon virtually filled the huge chamber. It loomed over her, balanced on its tail and rear legs, wings fanned out to either side. She saw the glitter of its scales, the flash of fantastically long teeth, and worst of all, the intelligence behind its indigo pupils. It laughed, Elenya not hearing it but feeling it inside her mind. It knew her. She knew it. This was Gloroc, bane of her forefathers.
The Dragon waited only just long enough so that she would know the source of her doom. Then he lunged for her, jaws spread wide to swallow her whole, fearsome talons extended. There was no place to duck. She felt her skin pop and eyes melt in the blast of dragonflame, and the snapping of her bones as his teeth skewered her—
— Then he was gone.
She sagged to her knees, her torch tumbling out of nerveless fingers. Somehow, uncertainly, her heart remembered how to beat. She was in a room identical to the first. There had been no stone wall dropped behind her; the portal was open. There had been no light, other than her torch. There had been no Gloroc, king of dragons, either.
Fast. So fast, she thought. Just time enough to die. That had been the spell's intention, of course. Pick the thing whose sudden appearance would cause the greatest fear and throw it at the victim so fast that there was no time to be rational. She again saw corpses lying toward the sides of the room, even more than in the previous one, a mummified expression of shock on the individual nearest the torchlight. If the spell had been one iota more intense, she would have joined them. But some part of her had realized in time that there was no sensible reason why Gloroc would be here, deep in a mountain in the Eastern Deserts, in a vault with no passageway through which something as large as a dragon could have entered. Still, it had been a terrible jolt. Had she been older or in poor condition, she wouldn't have survived regardless of how well her mind met the challenge.
She was worried by the sentience of the sorcery. This had been no random set of fears thrown at her, as in the first room. Gloroc was a very specific nightmare, and while being fried and swallowed by a dragon would terrify anyone, she was sure that the spell had concocted the image specifically for her. It knew what would scare her, as a unique individual. She wondered if Alemar would face the same trial; it would be logical.
She decided to gather her composure. Whatever the third room held, it was bound to be sinister.
* * * *
When Alemar had recovered from the vision of Gloroc, he swallowed deeply and crossed into the third room.
No sudden darkness. No blazing menace.
The walls exuded the bluish glow once again. Though he had only seen the person who stood in the center of the room once in his memory, he recognized him immediately. It was his father.
“You have failed me,” Keron said.
The hair on the nape of Alemar's neck rose. “How have I failed? How did you get here?” he asked plaintively.
“I am dead,” Keron said. He walked in front of the remains of men who had perished in the room over the ages. The pile was smaller than that of the second room; not many men had penetrated so far within. Alemar could see their dehydrated forms through the image of his father. He was a ghost.
“You killed me,” Keron continued. “Elandris has fallen to the Dragon. I and all of our relatives have been obliterated. They took me to the torture chamber, where I lingered for days. You are too late. Your quest was our last hope, and now it is for naught."
“No,” Alemar moaned. Go away, go away! The specter couldn't be real, but nevertheless each word bit deeply. They had become more than words; they were weapons against which Alemar had no shield.
“It is true. You are the only one left."
“There is Elenya!” Alemar cried.
“Elenya is dead! She didn't survive the third room. It's your fault!"
“I ... I..."
“Go ahead and babble! I wish you had never been born, you incompetent fool! Elandris is ruined. All the effort of my father and his father and his before that, dragged into the mud by the procrastination and indulgence of my own son. Why did you dally in this wasteland? What has it brought you? Have you found what you came for?"
“Leave me alone!"
“No. I shall haunt you. The only joy left me is that I co
uld come here and confront you with your own ineptitude, with your unforgivable irresponsibility. I shall not leave you until you are twisted from your own guilt—until you beg for death!"
Alemar licked the sudor off his upper lip, burned by its saltiness. Something was happening. Something was crumbling inside. Keron was right. Every word was true. The blood of a nation had stained his hands. He could have acted months sooner. He could have returned to Elandris or Cilendrodel and at least contributed to the fight, even if he never found the wizard's talismans. Better yet, he could have tried to find Setan when he'd first arrived in Zyraii. Had he died, at least it would have been an honorable passing.
“Your mother could never have me,” Keron hissed. “She had to settle for you. She had to love you in all your wretchedness. Was it enough for her? Did it satisfy her? Did she die content?"
Alemar groaned.
“How can you ever atone? What do you have that is worth the suffering you have caused?"
Alemar didn't remember drawing it, but his saber was in his grip, its steel echoing the color of the walls. Take it. Slide it across my throat. End this shame. Make it up to my father. Free myself from this agony.
Gradually, his hand lifted, and set the edge of the sword against his gullet. Be quick. Cut deep.
He paused, feeling the solid contact with the loops of his necklaces. One was the talisman that he and Elenya shared, the other the memento of the grateful mother whose child he had saved only a few days before. They would interfere with a good slice. He began to remove them.
He stalled, the paltry bit of turquoise dangling in front of his eyes. Modest as it was, he was proud to have it. He deserved it.
He had had good reasons for delaying the quest. He had been able to protect a fatherless family, he had learned a beautiful and just art that would give his life meaning throughout his days, and he had saved a little girl scared of dragons. He had made his decision, and though in the end his duty to Elandris had called him back, he could be proud of the road he had followed in the meantime.
