VII
As time passed, Tyrus shifted his weight to keep his legs limber. Standing and watching Marah draw runes became boring. Tyrus fought to keep his mind focused. He had not stood guard for so long in many years, and listening to priests talk about runes and creation without falling asleep was challenging. His mind wandered, and he chastised himself for not paying attention to Marah. Tyrus didn’t think any of the priests posed a threat, but he had to stay sharp.
Marah asked questions about runes. She wanted to know more about gates and wards for the shadows. Silas told her each temple had a collection of certain scrolls, but the biggest and most complete collection was kept in the Great Vault of Ros Mardua.
Marah asked, “And where is that?”
“Many miles deeper into the Ward.”
Tyrus furrowed his brow. Silas had his full attention, and Tyrus had a bad feeling, an old memory, of Azmon’s obsession with finding forgotten runes.
Silas said, “We’ve lost contact with Mardua, but some of the scrolls in the Vault were priceless. The runes came from the prophets themselves.”
“You have scrolls written by prophets?”
“Copies. The originals turned to dust ages ago.”
“They shared runes with you?”
“Most of the prophets, and many of the Reborn, have come here to oppose the Black Gate. We keep detailed records of them all. Each city has some copies, but the Great Vault has them all. Even a few originals.”
“Did they write about the Riddle of Runes?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“But they might have?”
“There are other orders who study such things. I dedicated my life to the Stone Song. The record keepers would be the ones to consult.”
“I want to see the Great Vault.”
Tyrus said, “An army marches on this city, Marah. We must fight one battle at a time.”
“I know.”
Her words spread to the dwarves, though. The priests whispered and talked among themselves, in their own language, as an eagerness spread throughout the room. They wanted to reclaim their city, but Tyrus wasn’t sure if Marah understood what she was inspiring. He worried that Silas might be more devious than he appeared. He dangled the bait, and she jumped for it. Tyrus found himself glaring at the dwarf, and when they made eye contact Silas seemed confused.
Tyrus couldn’t tell if that was an act.
Marah asked Tyrus, “Do you want to learn runes?”
Tyrus blinked and then laughed. “I’m no sorcerer.”
Marah stepped up to the sand with a wand and looked at Tyrus as though he should join her. He couldn’t tell if he was being mocked or not, but he knew sorcery involved more than making a few marks.
He waved her off. “Azmon tried to teach me once. I sat and imagined the burning gate for hours. Never actually saw the thing.”
“Do you want to try again?”
“I have the runes I need,” Tyrus said. “I was built for swords, not spells.”
Silas smiled at him. “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”
“I’ve tried dying. Several times. I keep coming back.”
Silas asked, “You’ve been dead?”
“Closer to it than anyone should get.”
Silas’s brow wrinkled in confusion.
“I was once known as the Damned because I had to recover from things that would kill most men. I’ve been stabbed. And I’ve been burned. And I can tell you the sword is cleaner than sorcery.”
“The Damned… We’ve heard this name. You betrayed Moloch.”
“I assumed you knew.”
“I didn’t put it together until just now. The others call you Dark Walker.”
“Do we have a problem?”
Marah said, “No. We don’t.”
Silas seemed torn between the two of them. He accepted what Marah said, but he never looked at Tyrus the same way again. Tyrus wondered if the dwarf had viewed him as just another Norsil warrior.
Either way, Tyrus diverted his attention. “Have you heard anything about the tribes?”
“Not yet, but they are coming. They found a path to the surface.”
“Will they ignore this place, go around it?”
“We are the bottleneck. They won’t let us harass their flanks. They’ll try to gut us and use this place as a staging ground.”
Tyrus wondered how the dwarves monitored movement in the Deep Ward. He was about to ask, but Silas kept giving him a strange look, acting as though he had found a rat in his sacred temple.
Marah said, “I want to see the Norsil.”
The dwarves accommodated her, leading her to the main floor and the temple doors. Tyrus followed. Outside, they found the thanes camped in the street before the temple. They knelt on their cloaks with bare blades resting at their knees, and the rest of the space was taken up by elven sentinels and dwarven wardens. The elves watched from the sidelines while a score of wardens stood between the Norsil and the temple.
As Marah approached the thanes, they stood to greet her. Tyrus stayed by her side, and his hand drifted to his knife hilt. He gestured at Klay, who stood with the elves, to come to him.
Tyrus asked, “What is the meaning of this?”
“Well, there is a bit of language barrier,” Klay said, “between their Jakan and the dwarven gimirr. To be honest, we assumed Marah knew what was going on and would come settle things. When she didn’t show, the Norsil became very concerned about the temple.”
Tyrus asked, “They thought the priests stole her?”
“Look at that thing. It’s just a door in a wall of stone. How are we supposed to know if it leads to a room or a tunnel to another city? You could have gone a few feet or a few miles. No one out here would know.”
“Why not send a messenger?”
“The Wardens did not want to disturb the priests.”
Tyrus scratched his head and sighed. “Did anything happen?”
“Just a lot of glaring.”
Tyrus checked on Marah. He was worried the thanes might have swarmed around her, but they kept their distance and put away their weapons. Then he saw Marah’s face. She looked as though she had been slapped. Her eyes were vacant, and her mouth was open as though about to cry.
Tyrus knelt beside her. “What is wrong?”
“There’s so many…”
“Should I take you back to the temple?”
Marah shook her head.
“How can I help?”
“Are the thoughts mine, Tyrus?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s hard to hear… myself. They’re drowning me out.”
Tyrus picked her up and headed to the temple.
She pounded on his shoulders. “Wait. Let me try.”
He held her, and she closed her eyes. She was listening to something he couldn’t see, and that made him nervous. He looked over his shoulder at the dwarves, wondering how Marah’s strange world could exist all around him without him knowing it. He couldn’t fight things he didn’t see.
Marah said, “The tribes are coming.”
Silas asked, “From where?”
Marah pointed away from the temple, at the ground near a larger section of the city. “They’re tunneling.”
The wardens spoke to the priest. They’d had no reports of tunneling, and no one had heard anything. Silas told them to plan for a breach and to evacuate the lower sections of the city into the upper eastern sections.
Tyrus kept holding Marah. “Do you want a break?”
“Take me over there.”
“You said they were coming from there.”
“Not yet. The wardens will hear them when they are close.”
“Why do you want to go over there?”
“The voices are strange. There’s too many. I need to get closer.”
“To what?”
&nb
sp; “I don’t know. But it’s over there.”
Tyrus bit back his anger. The child vexed him and treated him more like a horse than he thought proper. She was small and needed help getting around, but he had trouble adjusting to the shifts in her mood. She made it sound as though they were about to fight, and she wanted to take a tour of the city before it started. Marah directed him down the streets and stairs. She had her reasons, he reminded himself. He hadn’t been a guardian in a long time, and following a person around felt odd.
Tyrus asked, “What are we looking for?”
“I’ll know it when I find it.”
They kept walking, and no one knew what to do with either of them, so they had a trail of thanes and wardens and elves who were all curious about where they were going. If Tyrus focused on the carved stone before him, the city resembled any other city, but if he looked beyond the buildings, he saw giant sheets of stone in the distance and a great vault above their heads.
Marah asked, “Who was the first person you killed?”
“Excuse me?”
“I want to know.”
“Why would you ask me that?”
“I need to hear you. A real person. It helps me stay centered.”
“So you ask me that?”
Marah shrugged, and Tyrus didn’t talk for a while. They kept walking, and he became aware of the audience following them.
He said, “It was an accident when I was a boy. I was training with the sword masters of Rosh, and I didn’t know my own strength. I caved in a boy’s head.”
Marah didn’t appear to be listening. Her eyes seldom blinked and seemed to be lost in their own world.
She asked, “It was an accident?”
“We were sparring. Pads and wooden swords. I broke mine on him. He died a few days later.”
Marah nodded. She pointed down a street, and Tyrus kept walking. He found himself lost in old memories and wondered if she did that to him on purpose. He couldn’t tell if she wanted to confuse him or if they were the inappropriate questions of a child.
Marah asked, “When was the first time you meant it?”
“That was my father.”
“You killed your own father?”
“That is not a story I’m going to tell.”
“I want to know.”
“Ask the ghosts.”
“I did, but they told me I had to go to Sornum.”
Tyrus’s skin crawled. He wanted to set her down or take her away from the people following them through the city and talk to her about respect and honor. One did not ask such things. If Klay had been that rude, he might have hit him. He wasn’t sure if she was testing him or not.
Then the full extent of what she had said struck him. She used the voices to dig into his past.
Tyrus asked, “What do the ghosts say about me?”
“Many things. They don’t like you.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because it distracts them.” Tyrus stopped walking, confused, and Marah explained herself. “If they are all talking about you, it makes it easier to hear the ones who aren’t. Kind of. I can sift through the voices a little.”
“You shouldn’t be asking me such things.”
“I needed an old story that most of them didn’t know.”
“But some of them did?”
Marah nodded.
“And what did they say?”
“You use anger to hide your sadness. And you will die badly because you refuse to surrender.”
“What did they say about my father?”
“They said he almost killed you.”
Tyrus clenched his jaw. “Which ghosts know that story? Who exactly are you talking to?”
“Be quiet.” Marah pointed down the street. “Over there.”
Tyrus didn’t move.
Marah scowled at him. “Over there. We’re closer.”
“I want to know who is telling stories about me.”
“I don’t know.” Marah hugged him. “I like you no matter what the dead say.” She pointed again. “Over there.”
Tyrus kept moving, and Marah was glad. She didn’t understand how she had offended him, and she didn’t care either. The teeming dead panicked and screamed and moaned at her. Armies of demon spawn were marching on the city, and thousands of voices wanted to warn her. Many of the others enjoyed mocking her and threatening her. She could still hear some of the dead from the surface, and they despised Tyrus.
One voice was different, however.
She listened hard for him, as though he was an echo of an echo. His voice was like the faintest of echoes, the one last whisper before the echo silenced. The mob of ghosts drowned him out, but she had heard the voice before. She knew it was the dead prophet, Kennet.
Marah called to him. Where is the tomb?
It was lost… long ago.
Marah directed Tyrus down another street. They needed to be closer to the far end of the city, but Marah wasn’t sure how much good it would do. She began to sense the size of the Underworld. Kennet was hundreds of miles away, maybe thousands. The way the warrens twisted deeper into the world made the distance harder to judge.
A voice laughed at her. You think walking around here is going to help you find something near the Black Gate?
Marah whispered back, Is Kennet by the Black Gate?
The Tomb is nowhere near Skogul. Why didn’t you talk to the priests about that?
Marah liked that idea and reminded herself to ask Silas for a map. Tyrus kept carrying her, and she was thankful to have him. Her faithful fortress minded the crowds and the streets for her, which let her retreat into her mind and navigate a world of dead things.
The voices raged around her, but she caught the sound once more, a soft whisper of one voice that sounded different from the others. It had a quality like the dragons and angels, a hint of strength, power—a voice that understood the world between worlds.
But it was too far away.
Marah called to it. Where are you?
Kennet answered, This is only the beginning of your ordeal.
Marah whispered, I am ready.
First, you must survive the Ward. The demon spawn surround me. Please… help…
Marah lost him again. Voices warned her against calling out to the creatures of the Deep, and other voices shouted over them. The noise grew worse whenever Kennet talked, and Marah pinched the bridge of her nose. All the noise was making her head throb.
She said, “This isn’t going to work.”
Tyrus asked, “What are we doing?”
“We need to go deeper.”
“You said an army is tunneling into the city.”
“I’ll burn them, and they’ll run. We’ll follow them down the tunnels.”
Tyrus muttered to himself, “This is not good.”
Marah called out again, Where is the tomb of Prophets?
Kennet said, Abandon the tomb.
Marah paused. The voice was different, more insistent. But I need my grandmother.
What’s dead should stay dead.
But—
Be quiet, you fool. Overlords stalk the Deep.
Marah listened that time, and many of the voices confirmed that the overlords were marching on the Ward. Some of the voices told her to run from them, and they insisted that the Deep Ward was lost. Others gleefully told her she would be skinned alive, and the ones who didn’t speak to her directly could be heard trembling at the thought of the shedim legions. Marah pieced together the truth by listening to hundreds of versions of the story. Some feared them while others celebrated them, but the dead agreed that the overlords marched to war.
DARK LEGIONS
I
Three days later, they heard the first whispers of the burrowers. Klay dragged himself from bed, feeling groggy, as though he were ill. The rangers were housed in a barrac
ks for wardens, and the stone beds were better than the tunnels. A strange sound filled the air, like a dry leaf rubbing against his ear, a soft crinkle, and it had woken him early. He yawned and cleaned his ears, but the sound didn’t stop. Then he noticed he could block it out by covering his ears. The other rangers had the same problem, and they left their lodging to explore the city.
Teams of dwarves were moving about quickly. Most of what they said was lost on the rangers because none of them spoke the dwarven tongue, but it became clear that wardens were moving toward the noise as everyone else abandoned part of the city.
Klay found Silas, who was overseeing teams of dwarves. They had steel scaffolding over tunnels and moved large sections of stone from the floor of the city. Klay didn’t understand at first, but then he realized they were building their own tunnels.
“Why are you digging toward them?”
Silas said, “We’re sapping their sappers—four tunnels, around theirs, so we can hit it from all sides and push them back down.” Silas gestured at other teams, hundreds of yards away. “We intercept them, and we keep the high ground. So we roll weights over them before we charge.”
Lord Nemuel found them and asked Silas, “How long until they tunnel through?”
“Days yet. You’ll hear it when they are closer.”
Nemuel said, “They are like locusts.”
“That’s it,” Klay said. “I couldn’t place it at first, but they do sound like locusts.”
Silas shrugged, and Klay wondered if they had locusts in the Deep. He imagined they had worse things, like long bugs with too many feet. They stood and watched as teams of dwarves removed large sections of rock from the tunnel, and the sight of the work reminded Klay of the Siege of Shinar. The dwarven engineers had built things in weeks that the siege masters of Ironwall would have spent months constructing. He began to understand why. They lived in a world of siege warfare—it was as common to them as bears were to rangers.
The dwarves suddenly cursed and shouted in their language. Klay only understood the sharp voices and the loudness. Something angered them. Silas said nothing but hurried into the tunnel.
Klay asked Nemuel, “What happened?”
“It’s hard to explain. The words don’t translate well, but the tribes altered course. So now, the dwarves have to alter course.” Nemuel seemed frustrated as he struggled to describe it. “They are circling each other. The tunnels corkscrew around each other—like ships in the sea, trying to ram each other.”
Dance of Battle: A Dark Fantasy (Shedim Rebellion Book 4) Page 32
