Dark Forge

by Miles Cameron

  The sniper fired again. And then again. So there were at least two—maybe four.

  The tower door was locked. But the second key, the browned iron one, fitted it well enough.

  The keys made noise, and night is silent. Far out in the desert, he heard a hyaena, and then another.

  He waited.

  The carabin fired again.

  He turned the key. It grated, and squealed, and he burst into the tower with a puffer in one hand and his katir drawn, to find the ground floor empty, a single room with a set of steps leading up.

  He ran for the steps.

  A black-kilted Masran shot at him from the head of the stairs, and missed, the smoke from his discharge hanging in the thick warm air.

  The steps seemed to go on forever. But Val al-Dun had stormed a building before, and he knew he needed his puffer for the second man.

  The musketeer swung his heavy weapon at Val al-Dun and he covered the blow, his sabre braced by the pistol in his left hand. The blade flexed under the heavy musket butt, but the sword didn’t break. Then Val al-Dun was in close, the curved blade flaying the half-naked man until the point found his adversary’s throat.

  Even as the man fell off his sword, Val al-Dun shot the second sniper with the puffer. It was a hasty shot, under the dying man’s outstretched arms. The wounded man’s return shot with the carabin only finished Val al-Dun’s work, striking the musketeer in the middle of the back. The Safian dragged himself past his victim, pushing the dying man to the floor with his puffer, and already trying to engage the third man.

  There were too many of them.

  Their swords were short, and broad, and the hand guards on their short stabbing swords were not sufficient to protect their hands from his expert cuts, and they weren’t very well trained. That, and the brilliant sihr light that illuminated the second storey, was all that kept him alive. He cut and cut and covered and cut, and it was ugly, but he put both men down, hacking their hands until their fingers failed and then cutting… wrestling…

  He stood and bled, and panted.

  One of the men he’d killed was a mere boy.

  He spat.

  Outside, there was a dramatic change in the light. Val al-Dun moved to one of the riverside firing slits, carefully avoiding the ones that faced his own friends. He could hear that they were still shooting at the well-lit embrasures. He thought that it would be stupid to get hit with one of Draivash’s rifle balls.

  He looked out.

  Al-Khaire, the great city of Masr, was on fire.

  He almost choked. There were sheets of flame. He’d never seen anything like the fire, as if it was a live thing, feeding off the darkness. Tongues and banners of flame leapt hundreds of feet into the air, as if fire elementals were dancing on the wreckage of the works of man.

  The flames lit the waterfront below him, and he could see loyal Thera standing patiently, a little further along the stone road. Then, out of the back loopholes, he could see the mighty pyramids. The black one thrust up like a mountain, its front side firelit and still utterly black, so that the ground around it and the sides of the four guardian pyramids reflected the death of Al-Khaire, but the great pyramid was… black.

  He went slowly past his corpses, and down the steep steps to the lower floor, and then out into the firelit darkness. He noted another door in the back of the tower, and he opened it.

  In a night full of astonishing sights, he saw another. A flat plain ran from the door to the base of the Black Pyramid, but it was dotted irregularly with stelae of stone, some black, some white, some veined or marble or even iron. One was bronze. They were different heights and sizes and they were unevenly placed, but the ground between the stelae was gravelled in white marble, and as flat as the maidan where he played polo at home.

  But almost every stele was surrounded by a nimbus of light—red or blue or green, sometimes pure gold. Some of the magelights were very bright; a few were very dim. It was all eversher, deep magik, to him. He made the sign of the Lady, and backed into the tower and then went to the door.

  Draivash almost killed him. The scarred bandit with the crooked nose was just slipping in, dagger high.

  The two men faced each other for one heartbeat. Val al-Dun hoped his comrade never noticed that his finger had pulled the trigger of his empty puffer.

  “You live! You were born to be hanged, you bastard,” Draivash said, and embraced him.

  “More lives than the Peacock of Shahinshah,” muttered Mikal, who, despite his age, was the second man in the storming party.

  “Where are the Agha?” Val al-Dun asked.

  His men, and some of the tribal levy, were already climbing the stairs.

  “Gold!” shouted Draivash.

  Nothing could stop the frenzy of looting, nor did Val al-Dun have any interest in trying. He slipped out into the orange night and found the palanquin at the very foot of the stone road, the great white camels standing silently, their strange eyes glowing with the reflection of the holocaust across the river.

  Two of the Agha stood, scarlet robes whispering in the wind. The city was burning so fiercely that a cross-river wind had come up, feeding the rising column of fire and smoke.

  “Exalted Ones, I have found a door into—”

  Yes. You have done very well. Hide your eyes. Turn and go, and we will follow you.

  “Exalted One, there is… magik.” He shrugged.

  Fear no baraka. I am here.

  A great blast of heat reached them across the river, and the sound of screams—thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of screams.

  Only minutes remain. Go!

  He had no choice now, but to go. He managed to find the sense to order Kati and a dozen other of the smallest and youngest of his troopers to hold the horses. He went back through the tower, and then, without much conscious thought, he went through the back door and into the gardens of stone and metal. Tens of thousands of grave markers, rolling away in perfect disharmony to the south and to the west.

  Every one of them guarded by a spell.

  There were perhaps sixty of his people still following. He was pleased that he was leaving most of his own band of robbers in the tower, looting, and all his kin. Draivash might survive to work his evil on the world—a safe, petty evil that harmed only a few people at a time.

  Unlike the blaze of living light behind him, now illuminating the fields of stone. Because in the death of Al-Khaire across the river, Val al-Dun read the future, and the intention of his lords and masters.

  With the courage of absolute despair, he walked across the gravel, and through the spheres of coloured light that marked the charms and cantrips and watchful curses of a thousand generations. He had very little contact with the hermetical world, but the power of these old spells touched his mind like the brush of skeletal fingers on a living man’s skin.

  Dyar, one of the jezzailis, turned and began to scream, his high-pitched screams short and terrible. He tottered a few steps and fell, his mouth, ears, nose vomiting maggots. Then his screams became choked sobs, and then he was gone, and there was only a heaving, man-shaped mass of larvae writhing…

  Another man, one of the Zand, paused, puzzled. Then he seemed to bend down, and in one horrible moment realisation dawned that his bones were melting. He collapsed like a deflated water bag, unable to draw breath or scream. His last sounds were liquid, and lacked even the resonance of human despair.

  Val al-Dun forced his eyes to look to the front. He found a door along a wall to his right, and he made for it. It was the only entrance he could see. The Black Pyramid, half a thousand paces away, gave his eyes nothing—no door, no recess, no shadow or reflection.

  He found himself running. He was detached by terror and by despair—and above both, a sort of anger that his people were dying, and his masters were so remote, so alien, that he couldn’t understand their goals. But the flames of the city across the water told him something that he, a hardened killer, had not wanted to know. A prince’s greed
was different from a bandit’s in order of magnitude, but the Disciple and his Agha were…

  His mind closed around the word. Evil. A word bandits generally shunned.

  He shook his head as if to clear it.

  The gate was of old wood, black with age. A low altar stood to one side: white marble, deeply stained an old brown on top.

  The golden key fitted in the keyhole, and he turned it. He was not acting on his own volition—he was the tool of another consciousness—and that relieved him of anxiety and yet filled him with violation, dread, and bitter rage.

  His hands were swift and sure.

  The gates opened.

  A long corridor stretched to his right and left, running north back towards the river, as could be seen by the light of burning Al-Khaire in the distance, and to his left, magelight and running figures. The magelight was too bright and too white and it seemed harsh.

  Forward.

  He turned to the left and began to walk forward like an old farmer walking into a storm. His people came with him, weapons in hand.

  The corridor was huge—wide enough for ten abreast, with a stone roof of the same veined dark basalt from which the tower and waterfront had been built, but inside the corridor, everything was carved in fine bas-relief. Some of it was painted or gilded; red, ivory, black and gold were the only colours, lit with the harsh white of the distant magelights. The carvings were very strange: eagles and daemons and ravens and bulls seemed to make war with armies of men without heads.

  He felt the moment when the Disciple followed into the magnificent corridor. The supernatural white light of the Disciple’s presence warred with the brilliant white of the magelight. Where the two whites met and fought, stone cracked and paint boiled, and more of his people died, their skin flayed away or desiccated or burst asunder from inside.

  He stopped moving forward. The grip on his mind was gone.

  He looked up.

  Ahead of him, perhaps fifty paces away, were men and women—perhaps twenty of them, or even fewer. He knew that they were Souliotes because he had seen Souliote caravan guards.

  “Stop!” commanded a bearded badmash with two gold earrings and a long rifle like a Safian jezzail.

  Val al-Dun stopped. But one of the Agha brushed by him, flowing down the overlit corridor with the grace of a nautch dancer.

  The Agha stopped and raised its arms.

  “Run,” it said, its voice sibilant. “We are here to save the world, and you are in our way. Stay, and you will all die.”

  “Fire!” roared the badmash, and his band of Souliote mercenaries vanished in a cloud of powder smoke.

  Val al-Dun watched, unbelieving, as the Agha was ripped to shreds by thirty muskets. It fell, and thrashed. And stopped moving.

  The Souliotes had vanished behind a veil of golden light.

  Val al-Dun had not known, until that moment, that the Agha could be killed so easily.

  No! I am too close to fail!

  The unbearable light passed him. He fell on his face, at least in part because he expected another lethal volley of musketry. But the Disciple went forward, and stood like a pillar of perfected light.

  The golden veil pulsed through a series of colours.

  And went black.

  And fell.

  The man revealed by the collapse of his shields turned to ash before Val al-Dun could fully recognise what he was looking at. But the Souliote and his companions were gone.

  The Disciple went on down the corridor.

  Val al-Dun lay on his arms for a while longer, until the spots in front of his eyes died away and he could see in the now-darkened corridor.

  He looked back, and saw his people, watching him.

  “I…” he began, and his will was taken. Again.

  I need you it said. The voice was no longer inside his head. Now it was his voice. It had seized his being.

  He fought this time, for a while, but it dragged him through the litter of charred and broken corpses and up a long set of steps—wide, magnificent black steps, under a great golden roof with images of eagles and ravens worked in repoussé, over and over, the ravens enamelled in black glass. He had lots of time to look at them, and at the glyphs of spells set into the gold, because he paid no other attention to his mortal frame. It was a puppet, and he was like a passenger in a chariot, carried by runaway horses.

  He climbed. At the top of the steps, set between two pillars of jet-black marble as big around as two men are tall. Towering above him into the darkness was a great gate—the entrance of the Black Pyramid.

  He might have paused, but he was not controlling the horse, his body, and he went forward.

  To his right and left came his surviving troopers. And he couldn’t open his lips to tell them to go back.

  He took a candle-flicker’s worth of comfort that he had left his best friends looting the tower.

  And then he began to climb the winding stair.

  He went up.

  Up.

  Up.

  It was a nightmare—black stone, the very heart of darkness, the very absence of light—and he was not able to control anything. He watched, and there was nothing to see. He listened, and the only sounds were his own footsteps, his laboured breathing, and his people on the steps behind him, and he had not one iota of control over any of it.

  His sweat rolled down his chest, down his face; he climbed and climbed, his feet sure in a stygian black.

  At his back, Fama, one of the veteran women of the Tufenchis, spoke to him, long and low, and again. He couldn’t understand her words; perhaps he was losing control even of hearing. Or he was fading in and out, as the WILL driving him rode over his own…

  “Are you insane?” she screamed. Her voice rang and echoed in the winding stair.

  He turned, and in perfect darkness, he felt his sword cut her neck. Fama fell away with a gurgle and he was climbing again, climbing forever into the dark.

  Yes. Come.

  Now there was a faint light ahead. Gradually, as the stair wound, it went from a glimmer to a palpable light, and eventually resolved into the brightness of his lord, standing in a pillar of white fire.

  He couldn’t even turn his eyes away.

  They were in the very top of the pyramid, in a room that dwarfed them, the walls joining into the ceiling above them.

  The Disciple stood by a plinth of black rock. The rock was covered in deep cut runes and glyphs, and the whole of the inward sloping walls, and all of it was lit, if black can be a colour of light. It was not a scene that Val al-Dun could ever remember accurately.

  And the Disciple seemed to speak from within him, even though it was no longer in him.

  Where is it? screamed the Disciple.

  Its anger was palpable; heat flowed off it, and Val al-Dun threw himself to the floor, his tie to the Disciple’s will broken by the instant requirements of self-preservation.

  Val al-Dun peered from under his crossed arms, through the veil of his turban, and saw another Masran priest, his feather-cloak charred, standing revealed, unbowed. He was tall and very thin, with skin the colour of old wood. He wore a black linen kilt criss-crossed with esoteric patterns, and was muscled like an Ellene statue despite his age.

  “It is not here, blasphemer. It is gone.” The priest spoke flawless Safiri.

  YOU LIE! roared the Disciple, and his rage exploded.

  Light, fire, ice and earth passed through the air; waves of heat and cold reached Val al-Dun.

  Stand aside. You have failed.

  “I will never surrender my charge,” the priest said. “If you continue on this path, you will destroy the world.”

  I will save the world.

  “Any fool can say as much,” the priest said.

  His staff whirled through the air so fast that it seemed to make a perfect wheel, and the Disciple’s torrent of sorcery fell into that wheel and vanished.

  If you continue to resist, I will release all of them. You hear me? All of them!

&nb
sp; The priest was silent.

  You know I am right.

  “I know that you have destroyed my city and everyone I love,” the priest said. “And I know what you came for. It is gone.”

  The whirling staff stopped. A great pulse of blue, like a gout of ball lightning, formed at the tip and then rolled down the room with the slow inevitability of the rising moon.

  The column of white was outlined in blue fire.

  And then the priest and his blue fire were gone.

  NOW. WE WILL HAVE IT NOW.

  An arm of white fire came from the Disciple. It took Yeshua, a Zand Tufenchis, and put him across the plinth, and smashed in his skull.

  There was a scream, as if a human child had seen her mother murdered. A tender, despairing scream from the stone itself.

  Where is it? Where is it?

  The black plinth shattered. Shards and flakes of stone blew throughout the chamber, flaying flesh and wrecking the chests and boxes of scrolls and treasures.

  Too late, the Disciple whispered in his head. It had gone from anger to fear.

  A breeze began to blow from above. When Val al-Dun looked up, he realised that the top of the pyramid was gone, and that he was in full control of his body.

  Unearthly laughter rang in his ears, and a voice speaking in Masri. And another voice, deep and malevolent, and wicked in its amusement.

  The Disciple lashed the room with power.

  What have you done? Where is it? Give it to me!

  Val al-Dun’s left side was lacerated by the plinth’s detonation, and his ears rang. The moment he understood that he was again the captain of his own ship, he rolled for the head of the stairs, stumbling to his feet when he’d put one of the huge altars between his frail body and the white light of the Disciple.

  He looked back. A dozen of his people were with him. The rest seemed frozen, and the white arm of fire had taken another, dragging the unresponsive victim towards yet another black plinth.

  Take this.

  The rage of the Disciple was so vast that it drowned his own. And as he started down the steps, he saw the arm of white fire seize the last of the Agha, where it stood, two white-fire swords in its two hands.