When the grey-garbed rivenshade came within reach he attacked with arm extended, using his sword's length to best effect. Mazaret, though, was ready and with his free hand swaddled in layers of coat he grabbed the other's sword by the blade, then leaped forward and drove his own weapon into his foe's chest, running him through.
The rivenshade let out an ear-shattering wail of torment, released his sword and staggered back. Mazaret pulled his own back out of the enemy's chest, saw pale wisps drifting off the long, tapered blade then noticed something glowing near the hilt, the small hooked rune …
The rivenshade's breathing rattled and wheezed, then with a white, misty sigh, he sank to his knees by the wall, keeled over and began to dissolve.
"So you are Ikarno Mazaret," said a silky, mocking voice.
It was one of the Suviel rivenshades, garbed like one of the mask soldiers except that silver glyphs adorned every item of her clothing. She regarded the collapsing rivenshade with amusement as she walked up to Mazaret.
"I would expect nothing less than complete victory from the real Mazaret," she said, laying a hand on his arm. "If you come with me, I'll help you kill the others, then we can rule Keshada together. And you can love me as you loved her…"
Mazaret felt as transfixed by her as he was by his returning memories. And Suviel's words came back to him through his confused thoughts - "It is not necessary to slay them for my sake."
He shook off her hand and stepped back from the sudden rage in her features.
"No!" he cried and turned to run.
But her screamed words came after him as he fled.
"The Prince of Dusk is coming, Ikarno Mazaret and when he triumphs you will be mine!"
* * *
It had taken Keren several hours and a night of sleep before reluctantly agreeing to accompany the two Daemonkind renegades down into the depths of Jagreag. But by the time they and Domas appeared at her chamber door with armour and weapons for her, the Jefren forces down in the rocky valleys were mounting a determined assault. Her chamber was one of several that honeycombed a tall crag high up the mountainside, and she saw several family quarters, a nursery and a scullery as she was taken along to a square, curtained doorway leading outside. Beyond was a walled shelf open to the skies and whipped by winds so cold Keren almost cried out.
From there a long stairway of cracked and worn steps snaked down the mountainside. Most of the steps had been brushed clear of snow but some had ice patches that made Keren careful with her footing as she followed Domas. On the way down they passed landings where children played on the threshold of open doors and others where no doors were visible to the eye. Keren's attention was drawn more to the conflict going on below- from this height she could look down into the gorges and ravines that gashed the Druandags' scree and boulder foothills. Troops, horses, cart and lines of bound prisoners swarmed through them and over the hills in their thousands.
"They're not sparing any effort," she said to Domas through chattering teeth.
"What you should say is that they don't mind wasting lives," Domas said. "You'll see soon."
Several minutes of downward trudging brought her nearer to the focus of the siege and she began to understand. The main battlements of Untollan were hewn all along the south western face of Mount Harang, which was less a mountain and more a series of sheer, slope ramparts surmounted by a snow-blasted fist of rock. The battlements were unassailable except for one place where a broad ridge shouldered out from Harang's flank and sloped down into the rocky vale. Past owners of the citadel had reinforced that point with walls and towers and it was against them that the Jefren generals threw their might. But at a terrible cost - corpses and their blood darkened the ground all around the jutting fortification, and yet more bodies lay scattered all down the side of the mountain's shoulder along with broken weapons and shattered scaling ladders.
The long staircase ended at the entrance to a long, open gallery cut into the face of Mount Harang about a hundred feet above the main battlements. The gallery's inner wall, crowded with chipped, weather-ravaged carvings, was broken by several heavily draped doors which Domas off-handedly referred to as 'quarters and training rooms'. Before long he brought them to a halt at a part of the gallery which projected from the rock face, a tapering shelf sitting atop a natural outcropping which ran like a narrow tower right down into the roots of the mountain. When Keren joined Domas out on the small balcony the icy wind cut like a knife through her leather armour and troos, adding to the chill in her flesh. But nothing could detract from the magnificent, panoramic view, the grey and white foothills, the shadowy ravines, with the uneven, snow-streaked lands of south west Anghatan stretching away towards the Sea of Birrdaelin. Keren took it all in, the wide vastness, the rushing broken clouds, the birds wheeling overhead, the paleness of distant uplands, even this sharp, biting cold. She wanted to fix it forever in her mind for she knew she was about to vanish into the darkness below ground and face an unknowable fate.
A small bird fluttered down to land on the shelf's low wall, a greenwing which eyed her and her companions for an instant or two then sprang away on blurred wings, uttering a piercing cluster of notes as it did so. Keren watched it dart away up into the air above Untollan and wished she could do the same.
"Keren Asherol," came the voice of Rakrotherangisal. "The time is at hand."
She turned and nodded. Domas put a hand on her shoulder.
"I wish I were the one," he said with a rueful smile. "Even if only to get away from the Jefren and their slaves." He bowed formally to her and the Daemonkind. "May you walk in the way of the Light."
The Daemonkind both gravely returned his bow. "May your wings never fail," said Orgraaleshenoth.
Keren following the two Daemonkind a few paces along to a draped entrance through which they ducked. She paused on the threshold to glance back at Domas, who raised his hand in farewell. She did the same and slipped past the heavy curtains.
It was warm and dark inside, a narrow corridor stuffy with the odours of hot candle tallow, leather and a certain aged mustiness. She had just realised that it smelled like an old library when they turned a corner and emerged in...an old library. An one-armed man in battered rider's leathers looked up from an open book, gave a single, unsmiling nod and went back to the page he was on. By the few wavering candles, the library seemed small and cramped but as she followed the Daemonkind across to a large door, she saw that a shadowy gap between shelves in the diagonally opposite corner was actually a passageway through to more shelves stacked with a jumble of books and scrolls.
Beyond the large door was a walkway which ran as a shelf along and above a torchlit main corridor busy with archers and spearmen hurrying out to the ramparts, and stretcher parties bearing the wounded into the healers. At the end of the walkway were stairs leading downwards, a feature that Keren was to become more than familiar with over the next hour or so as the Daemonkind took her down into the dark, decayed labyrinth of Jagreag.
They were passing through lightless areas now, and the Daemonkind produced a pale, illuminating glow from the crystals atop their staffs. It was bright enough to see where they were going, and for Keren to catch glimpses on either side of the irresistible devastation of time. Corridors so old that they were like bent and rounded tunnels, muddy underfoot and bearded with ash-grey mosses populated by tiny, white spiders. Chambers that were decrepit caves where unseen things scurried. Stairways worn by running water into slippery, uneven slopes, and everywhere the smell of stagnant dankness.
Once, their route took them out onto a narrow ledge passing across the vertical face of a crack in the mountain itself. Halfway along Keren looked up to see a long, pale jagged shard of sky and a few bright droplets of ice-melt falling from above. It was gloomy where they carefully walked while an icy, swallowing blackness gaped below.
In fitful silence they travelled, with one or other of the Daemonkind warning her of unstable walls or dangerous areas of floor, and the deeper they w
ent the quieter their voices. When they came to a long, wide stairway, the Daemonkind dimmed their staff-mounted crystals to a glimmer, just enough to see by.
“We must make as little noise as possible,” said Rakrotherangisal. “There are creatures at this depth who should not be disturbed.”
Chilled by his words, Keren followed him down the crumbling, debris-strewn steps. After several minutes the wall on the left became marred by large jagged gaps beyond which was a black emptiness. It both intrigued and unnerved her, like a looming, faceless presence. Then, a short while later, she was negotiating a section of steps worn near smooth by water trickling from a crack further up when her foot slipped and she lurched towards one of the open gaps. Her hand shot out to stop her fall and struck a layer of dust and rock fragments, which cascaded out into the black. For a long moment there was silence… then the faint clatter of the fragments hitting the bottom. The Daemonkind stared at her.
“I’m sorry…” she began to say in a strangled whisper but stopped when a light flared in the blackness, far off in the blackness. She glimpsed the merest outlines of an immense chamber with an upward curving ceiling broken by several giant shards of rock thrusting down…
Orgraaleshenoth grabbed her by the arm and in a moment all three of them were rushing down the rotting stairs. After much slipping and stumbling they reached a landing where without hesitation Rakrotherangisal turned right, and as they hurried along Keren could hear an eerie, high pitched piping far behind.
“Who are they?” Keren said, gasping.
“The Issusk,” Rakrotherangisal said shortly, then glanced at Orgraaleshenoth. “We should make for the sundered bridge.”
The elder Daemonkind nodded. “They know we are here now, so the longer route is pointless.”
From the landing they dashed through a circular room half-choked with strange spiral vines to a corridor that sloped downwards. At its end it curved to the right and Keren was the first to run out and find herself staring across a massive, chain supported bridge. The high piping sounds were louder and a faint radiance was coming from below, but what held her attention was the large empty gap near the middle of the bridge. Gauging it by eye, she guessed that nearly twenty feet separated the sagging, ragged edges.
“We may have to take that longer route,” she said over her shoulder. “This is… hey, what are you – “
The Daemonkind were suddenly on either side of her, lifting her by her arms as they rushed out onto the bridge. Fear choked her throat and for a long, terrifying moment she believed that it was an elaborate trap until they reached the gap in the bridge at a hurtling sprint and, still carrying her, jumped…
Her own legs and body were trailing as they soared through the air, and she was able to stare down into a long, sheer-sided canyon. A huge mob of creatures, some upright on two feet, some carrying blazing brands, were surging along it and some pointed upwards at the Daemonkind and Keren. Hooting voices rose in anger above the morass of wails, clicks and barks.
Then they landed on the other side, Keren held higher until her bearers slowed enough for her to be set down safely. She wanted to be angry at them for throwing such a scare into her, but realised that there was no time for such tantrums.
Further downward they went, another stairwell, and another wrecked, muddy corridor at the end of which was a wall of compact rubble worn into solidity by time, water and millennia of lichen and questing vines. It was a heavy curtain of these that Rakrotherangisal pulled aside to reveal a low, dark tunnel through the ancient debris. Squeezing and scrambling through it left them streaked with black mud but Keren forgot that as she got to her feet and saw the huge, sloping door which filled most of a high, enclosed chamber. By the glow of the Daemonkind staffs, it seemed to have been made of a single, imposing slab of striated grey granite, its surface covered in spiralling panels of carved men and beasts.
Keren felt a wave of weary hunger pass through her, so she sat on a mossy boulder and dug into her harness pouches for pieces of dried meat. She had just started on her second mouthful when Orgraaleshenoth said ‘Here’ and rapped the tip of his staff on one of the carven panels. There was a responding knock, then a deep grinding sound as the upper edge of the carved door began to tilt inwards. Pivoting on a central horizontal axis the bottom half slowly swung out and up. Seeing this, Keren swiftly uncapped her leather water bottle and downed half the contents, then stood and hurried after the Daemonkind who were already striding through. She had just joined them when the door began to swing slowly back and she paused to watch it close with a solid, reverberating thud, followed by a series of quiet muffled taps from within.
When she looked round she almost cursed in surprise – the two Daemonkind had shrugged off human form to return to their own. Orgraaleshenoth was as she remembered, nearly twice her height, his head hairless and reptilian, his torso broad and muscular while his hide was rough and pebbled, black and emerald, and folded wings jutted above his shoulders. Rakrotherangisal was shorter by a head and his hide was black and red but his amber eyes were as steady and unfathomable as Orgraaleshenoth’s.
He turned to the older Daemonkind. “Nighthunters have arrived to fight for the Jefren Theocracy. Untollan will soon fall.”
Orgraaleshenoth nodded. “With Byrnak gone, the Acolytes know that the remaining Shadowkings are incapable of regaining control. Grazaan is paralysed by his own fragment of the Lord of Twilight and Kodel has gone into hiding –”
“Ystregul is no more and Thraelor has stirred himself…”
Their words were tinged with a wry amusement, but Keren was appalled. “But what will happened to Domas and his people, his families…”
“There are many hiding places, and several escape tunnels have been prepared,” said Rakrotherangisal. “But not, unfortunately, for us. Come, the Processional awaits.”
Together they strode along the plain stone passageway. Both the Daemonkind still had their glowing staffs but they seemed oddly shrunken in those big, taloned hands. Up ahead Keren could see a pale, misty radiance which gradually diffused as they drew near. Through the haze she began to make out the details on a sloping wall beyond the end of the passage, intricate patterns that snared the eye. But it was the scale of the stonework which came to dominate her field of view and when at last the passage opened out, Keren found her footsteps slowing as she stared about her.
Rakrotherangisal had referred to it as the Processional while Domas called it ‘a vast, sloping tunnel’, yet such words could not begin to describe its gaping immensity. By eye alone, she guessed it to be perhaps 200 yards wide and some 300 high. Every surface was burdened with carven images, the sheer walls reaching up to the massive, sloping ceiling, all covered in depictions of semi-naked figures struggling or fighting or marching in triumph. All of it was in a leaden grey stone cracked and streaked by yawning gulfs of time, lit by a strange, sourceless radiance as pallid as light cast through tainted ice.
Beyond the passage a flat shelf extended for several yards to the head of a rack of stairs wide enough to accommodate an army. Although the steps looked freshly cut and unworn, they were littered with chips and fragments of masonry no larger than her hand. Ahead of her, the Daemonkind were already descending with their hulking yet lithe gait and as she hastened to join them she noticed another feature of the colossal shaft. Towering alcoves, dark and empty, were hewn into the walls at regular intervals on either side, twin rows of shadowy openings marching down into the hazy, faintly glowing depths. She also noticed that each one had a platform jutting from its base, a wide slab of stone as thick as one of the Daemonkind was tall.
“Once, every one of these alcoves had an enormous statute of the Lord of Twilight standing before it,” Orgraaleshenoth said. “But when Jagreag fell, they were all hauled up to the surface and destroyed, then the fragments were taken out onto the Sea of Birrdaelin and thrown into the waters.”
“He was known to imbue some likenesses of himself with a kind of life,“ Rakrotherangisal sai
d. “So the victors made sure that none were left standing.”
Keren nodded in silent understanding. As she walked down the steps, she stared at the empty alcoves and found herself imagining a fifty-yard high stature of Byrnak standing in one of them, grinning, watching her…
She shivered. This is a place of ghosts.
Even the air smelled deathly, cold and harsh with the odour of the fine stone dust that their feet disturbed. There was also a musty staleness, the faintest hint of immemorial corruption with Keren tried not to be too conscious of as she carried on beside the two Daemonkind.
“What manner of guardians or wards shall we be facing?” she asked.
“That is not an easy question to answer,” said Rakrotherangisal. “The ancient spells protecting this place seem to respond differently to each intrusion.”
She stared at him, surprised. “So others have been here before us?”
“The records in Untollan’s library speak of more than a score such attempts since the fortress was first occupied during the Othazreg clan migrations five thousand years ago. Most were groups of fortune hunters following local legends and mountain stories, or fugitives from pursuit, but one was a small army led by the chieftain who ruled Untollan a few generations after the Othazreg migration. Although not one member of that army returned, a few others did and each had a different story to tell.
“One claimed that they were attacked by wave after wave of glass-like spiders and insects which burrowed into the flesh and killed from within. Another said that grotesque, leathery white creatures had come flying out of the alcoves and snatched his companions up into the air before tearing them apart. Yet another emerged from the Processional broken in mind and spirit and would only talk of fog creatures that sucked blood from their victims.”
Keren stared ahead of her, down the long, receding rake of stairs to the pale, misty blur far below. In the wake of the Daemonkind’s account, the great shaft took on the aspect of a tomb-like throat into which they were descending…
Shadowgod Page 43
