Dark Forge

by Miles Cameron

  Crossbow came closer. “What do y’say to me, eh? You what killed me.”

  “An’ me!” Thin Man said. “I was alive. No better than I ought, maybe. But fuckin’ alive.”

  “You were going to kill me,” Aranthur said.

  Thin Man shrugged. “I doubt it. Really, I didn’t even know you was there.”

  “Boy, you fuckin’ came back and kilt me. I was lettin’ you run off. You came for me.” Crossbow was angry.

  “You were paid to kill me.” Aranthur wasn’t sure that was even true.

  “So what? You could ha’ just ridden away.’ Crossbow shook his head. “You wanna be a Lightbringer? You like to kill.”

  The other figures behind Crossbow pressed forward.

  There were a great many of them. Including some Safian women, their hair lank, their eyes bright with despair. They spoke in Safiri, and he could understand them perfectly.

  “I never wanted to hurt anyone. They took my children. They tortured me. They made me a thing, a flesh weapon, and you killed me.”

  A Safian cavalryman.

  “You were like a whirlwind of death.”

  A Pindari, who smiled, and spat.

  “Death is the thing that unites us,” he said, and laughed.

  A Tufenchis officer with a bullet in his heart, his khaftan soaked in blood.

  “You shot me yesterday,” he said.

  And behind them, more, and more.

  “You killed me,” they said. “I was alive. You killed me. I had a life, and you took it.”

  You killed me. Y​o​u​k​i​l​l​e​d​m​e​y​o​u​k​i​l​l​e​d​m​e​y​o​u​k​i​l​l​e​d​m​e​y​o​u​k​i​l​l​e​d​m​e y​o​u​k​i​l​l​e​d​m​e​y​o​u​k​i​l​l​e​d​m​e​y​o​u​k​i​l​l​e​d​m​e​y​o​u​k​i​l​l​e​d​m​e​y​o​u​k​i​l​l​e​d​m​e​.

  They came to him, each telling a story, yelling, or just complaining, as if he’d cheated them in the market.

  The real horror came when they passed through him. Each one entered into him, and as they passed into his cowering, shaking body, he felt the death, the moment of separation, the loss…

  When it was over, Aranthur awoke, shaking, damp, lying curled in the corner of his cell. It was absolutely dark, and there were no phantoms, no voices complaining of death, and he was alone. His gut hurt, and his fingers and toes felt as if they were on fire. Every injury and wound he’d sustained in the last year hurt, and he felt an echo of the deaths that had passed through him.

  For a moment, he lay in the darkness and thought he might, in fact, be dead. He heard an odd sound, and he tried to place it. It took him a long time to realise it was his own weeping.

  He tried to pray. He tried to visualise Sophia, or the Eagle—to see them as they appeared in statues—but when he thought of Sophia all he could see was Nenia, and when he thought of the Eagle, he could think of nothing. So he thought of Nenia, and despite the pain, or because of it, eventually Aranthur went to sleep. He was already afraid of a bewildering array of things, from the angry ghosts of his dead, to being executed by his own side, to being captured by the Pure. If the fortress fell now, he’d be taken. He had time to imagine being bound to an Exalted. He understood the process now.

  I would make a particularly effective Exalted.

  But his body was too tired to stay afraid forever. He fell asleep in his sweat-sodden clothes, and woke, freezing cold. There was nothing in his cell to warm him, and he lay, teeth chattering, wondering if he’d contracted a fever. The darkness was total. Fear rose to choke him, and he tried to see anything—Nenia, or Tribane, or Tiy Drako. No faces came to him. He lay and shivered…

  He managed to piss into the hole in the corner of his cell—a particularly foul hole with an ancient, musty smell. Finally he put his sweat-soaked doublet back on, and something crawled on his skin. He had a moment of terrible panic, fell back, and hit his head, and lay moaning, but the pain helped him fight the panic, and he seized on it. Then he recovered from that brink, and realised that he had slept enough to have power. A little.

  He warmed himself, dried his shirt and his doublet. Made a light.

  How long had passed?

  He had no way to know.

  He had no water, and that was going to be a problem. He called a few times, but something of the quality of the silence told him he was absolutely alone. It occurred to him that in the heat of a siege, a prisoner could be completely forgotten. He didn’t even really know where he was: somewhere deep underneath the old Temple complex, he thought. Maybe the citadel. It was all connected underground; they’d walked a long way, the two Black Lobsters silent.

  Yes, a man could be forgotten.

  Aranthur went to the door of his cell. It was ancient oak, thick as his arm and heavily reinforced with iron. He could think of a dozen ways to open it. He couldn’t imagine who would be stupid enough to leave a trained Magos in a normal cell.

  Unless they want me to try and escape.

  That sort of thinking was all very well, but the more he explored the idea, the less likely it seemed. He could sense no one within his range—maybe a hundred paces. Certainly no latent magik.

  He shook his head. It would have to be an elaborate trap arranged in the middle of a siege by tired, angry men and women.

  Didn’t seem likely.

  He lay a while longer, and then he rose from his crouch and lifted the bar with his power and stepped out into the corridor. He was afraid, and he couldn’t put a name on his fear. He pushed his fears about the dead who had come to him down, and moved off to his right. He kicked a wooden bucket, almost fell, and then stood listening to the rattle and clack of the bucket echoing off the walls.

  Is there a way of doing all this without killing?

  He reviewed each of the deaths he could remember as he inched down the corridor. Eventually there was emptiness under his left hand, and he paused for an age, listening.

  Nothing.

  Very cautiously, he went across the corridor and felt carefully.

  Nothing. So the hallway that held his cell was crossed by another, wider corridor. He couldn’t remember which way he’d come.

  He inched back the way he’d come until he found the wooden bucket, which he then carried back.

  “This is stupid,” he said aloud.

  He lit a magelight. Now anyone could see him, and anyone who could detect power could find him, but at least he could see.

  He left the bucket to mark the corridor and turned left, because that was his best guess and the air seemed marginally fresher.

  He counted a hundred steps, and then another hundred. The floor under his feet was smooth, but curiously uneven. On examination, it proved to have been hewn from the rock. Black basalt, by the look of it—the same stone as was used in the oldest parts of the Black Bastion.

  He remembered that they’d walked for a long time. But when he’d counted to two hundred, he lost confidence, and stopped. He breathed for a while and went on. Thirty-seven paces further he came to a cross-corridor at an acute angle.

  He didn’t remember it at all, and he stopped. The corridor to the left turned away at an acute angle and seemed to slope down; the corridor to the right curved.

  He stepped back from the junction and took a deep breath.

  He heard something.

  Instantly he raised his shields and put out his magelight. He ignited his magesight and the power of the thing coming at him down the curving corridor was so great it appeared to light the tunnel.

  Aranthur stepped back. His new shields would not uncoil, and he realised how little power he had.

  The bright thing came on, moving confidently.

  Aranthur tried to back down the corridor but he was too clumsy and his heel caught and down he went. It was all he could do to maintain his red aspides as he fell.

  The brilliant glob of power turned into his corridor and ignited its purple-black s
hields, a dense and terrifying display of power, meshed discs of dark crystal like a scale armour covering the corridor and reflecting Aranthur’s puny red shields like the thousand eyes of a malignant insect.

  Aranthur stumbled to his feet. He had no sword, and no dagger.

  He raised his head.

  “You are a remarkable human,” said Inoques’ voice. “They arrest you, and you escape.”

  He smiled, but he almost slumped to the floor in relief. In those last seconds he’d convinced himself that an Exalted had been sent to kill him.

  “You came for me,” he said.

  She settled gracefully onto the stone floor, folding her labyrinthine shields away like wings beneath her.

  “Let me tell you something. I have my ship loaded—enough water to sail across the whole South Sea, enough powder to fight every pirate in the great green.” She smiled mirthlessly, and the tiny lines of calligraphy that replaced her eyebrows raised. “Haras has wanted to leave for days. I agree—this place is doomed. Even after your fight the other night—you know that Haras and Jalu’d and your Dahlia smashed the enemy’s choir?” She shrugged. “Haras loosed the Apep-Duat he captured on the Azurnil, and it destroyed their casters. And still this place is doomed. I was ready to leave.”

  “And?”

  She laughed. “I am a poor slave. I do not like to have my will balked. And at the same time, you have wakened something in me. I came back for you.”

  Aranthur smiled despite his various misgivings.

  “I suppose I should escape,” he said. “But then I really am a criminal.”

  She shrugged. “The shades of your obedience or disobedience to the laws of people who don’t value you are of little importance to me.”

  “Tell me something, Yasmina?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Perhaps.”

  “If I leave, will the city fall?”

  She shrugged. “You are not so important, and I have never been able to predict the future. I can only tell you that if the Pure take the Black Stone, your… side… is finished.”

  Aranthur sat back. “I believe that General Tribane will get here.”

  She shrugged again. “Perhaps. Not my problem.”

  “Tell me what’s happening out there?”

  She looked at him. “Very well. Almost nothing. The Vicar is hunting these Safian prisoners, and they are nowhere to be found, mostly because Dahlia and Kati are hiding them very effectively in plain sight, and none of the Vicar’s magikal staff would do anything to harm Sasan or Dahlia. The Vicar is very unpopular… The Pure are attempting to rebuild their siege, but they are having difficulties with their slaves, who won’t do any work. The loss of all of his Exalted has left their Disciple with almost no way of commanding his slaves, much less attacking, and Haras and Dahlia have virtually exterminated their casters. Likewise, after your arrest, the combat troops in the city are nearly mutinous. Neither Ippeas nor Kallinikas are doing anything to change that—both treat the Vicar with contempt, and he responds with anger. Your friends are starving—so, to be fair, are the Pure. It is like some black comedy of human frailty and wickedness being played out for my delectation.” She smiled. “I admit I rather enjoy it. But the first force to receive either food or reinforcements will win utterly, and the other side will be destroyed.”

  “I understand the hunger. Food is almost the only thing I can think of.”

  Inoques leant over and kissed him.

  “I might have brought you some food,” she said, “but I knew you’d want to suffer with your friends.”

  “Are you really so wicked? Or is this just a role you play? To keep your distance from me?”

  Suddenly, the two of them were facing each other in the darkness.

  “I am oath-bound to a mortal,” she said softly. “A mortal in a world of mortals, where I am a freak and a weapon.”

  “Yasmina, I have avoided asking you this until now. But, what are you?”

  “You know,” she said bitterly.

  “I don’t. I’m really a third year Academy student pretending to be a Magos, an apprentice pretending to be a military officer, a Souliote pretending to be a Byzas. I know you are bound. Is there still a human woman in there?”

  “No,” his wife said bitterly. “They killed her to give me her body.”

  “And you have been enslaved for three hundred years?”

  “Three hundred years of hunting and trapping and killing my own kind at the bidding of my masters.” More softly, she said, “We fight among ourselves all the time, of course. Like you.” She laughed without mirth. “I cannot even avenge myself on the men who did this to me. Their bones are dust.”

  Aranthur said, carefully, “And yet, you can see through your hatred to know that we need to preserve the Black Stone, even though its breaking would free you.”

  She shrugged. “It would also free a torrent of my kin and my foes and creatures and Apep-Duat as alien to me as I am to you.” She shook her head. “Every malign thing that has ever come through the gates. I would not destroy the world to be free.”

  “You do not seem so alien.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “Three hundred years in these bodies, and I have warped. Or merely bent. I know it. At some point, I began to laugh. And at some point I realised that there were aspects of my life that I enjoyed. Like any slave. I adapt. Listen, husband. I love sailing on the deep water—when the wind rips the surface, and throws the spray in my face—when my ship runs through the waves like a gazelle over the desert.” She smiled. “And when your hands close on me in a certain way, and I know you find me desirable. When you tilt your head and listen, as if I was a person.”

  She stood up. “So. Enough confession. Shall we go?”

  But instead of moving away, she leant close to him, and he kissed her.

  For a long time.

  Aranthur stood. “I confess that I don’t want to make love on this floor.”

  She laughed. “Nor I. You stink. And I’m not precisely choosy.”

  “You really didn’t bring me any food?”

  “Did you enjoy having the shield structure of a god?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It was a great gift.”

  “I could perhaps make it permanent. Come, I imagine there’s food somewhere.”

  Together, they walked out into the corridor, and then, slowly, up out of the darkness. They emerged into a corridor with magelights, and then, after listening at a door, they passed into the nave, where a dozen Imoters were working on wounded men and women. Everyone moved listlessly.

  “You don’t intend to confront the Vicar,” she said.

  “I’d like to find Ippeas,” Aranthur said.

  If any of the Imoters recognised him, none of them called out; the listlessness of deep fatigue and hunger had its effect. Aranthur walked the length of the ancient nave. Even in his own hunger, he looked up at the ancient frescoes and the magnificent mosaics that glittered on the domed ceilings with awe.

  Then he turned to the right, crossed the great square in front of the Temple, and went to the door of the square chapel of the Legate Giorgios.

  A Magdalene stood guard at the entrance, visor closed, in full armour.

  “Aranthur Timos,” the guard said.

  “To see Ippeas,” he said.

  The visored face nodded.

  “The Demon must stay here,” the voice said. “No rudeness is intended, but we do not know you, Apep-Duat.”

  Inoques raised her chin.“I doubt that you could stop me, knight.”

  The visor nodded again. “True. But then, if you attack me, you validate my position that it is unsafe to admit you.”

  Inoques laughed aloud.

  “Oh, well said. Go, husband. Meet this Great Sword. I will wait right here, and exchange barbed witticisms with the gate guard.”

  The outside air made Aranthur fully aware of how dirty he was, but he went into the chapel with as great a show of confidence as he could manage. A squire, one of the young people tra
ining to be a knight, took him to a side chapel where Ippeas sat alone.

  Syr Ippeas looked up.

  “A cup of water for my guest,” he said, as if he was a great lord in a hall.

  Aranthur sat when bidden.

  “I assume you escaped,” the Great Sword said.

  “Yes, syr.”

  “And now you are walking around in broad daylight.”

  “No one was guarding me.”

  Ippeas sighed. “Discipline has all but collapsed. There is no food—that, at least, was fairly allocated. If the enemy could mount an assault, they might break in—or perhaps we’d muster the will to fight.”

  The squire brought a cup of water, and Aranthur drank it thirstily and was refilled from a pitcher.

  “I was thinking of reporting to the Vicar as if nothing had happened,” Aranthur said.

  “Why are you here?”

  Aranthur shrugged. “You have my sword. And you are my ally in this, I think. I guess that you share my outrage.”

  Ippeas smiled. “War is terrible. There is no morality to it but what decent people bring with them, and even that is eroded like a sandbank in a flood. Outrage is too strong. Indeed, but for your protest, I might have been silent.” He shrugged. “I have committed so many sins in this war that I fear I will not have enough life left to do penance. And at this point, I will confess to you that I would do almost anything to keep the rest of my people alive.”

  “Murder prisoners?”

  “No. That’s just stupid. At any rate, I owe you my thanks. Here’s your sword, which, let me add, is an artifact as old as my own sword, or older.”

  He looked up and met Aranthur’s eyes as the squire handed Aranthur the ancient sword.

  “I might have let the massacre happen, occupied with my own cares.” He sighed. “It’s difficult to thank a Lightbringer for anything.”

  Aranthur sat back. “I’m no Lightbringer,” he said.

  Ippeas smiled. “Of course not. Shall we go and see the Vicar?”

  “Is Kallinikas with us?” Aranthur asked.

  “She’s young, and her desire to win outweighs her ethics. Which may just be sensible. I don’t know any more—I haven’t eaten for two days.”