by Paul Collins
‘Your door could withstand a charging bull,’ Zimak pointed out. Nonetheless he eyed the door warily, as though at any moment it would open of its own accord, but he did not move.
Daretor went to the front door and peered through the spy-hole. Something obscured his vision.
‘What do you want at this hour?’ he called out.
‘I wish to talk,’ came a timid voice.
‘Only talk?’
‘Only talk. I will come in alone under the Sign of Peace.’
The Sign of Peace was a system whereby opposing armies or combatants could lay aside their weapons temporarily and parley. It was very ancient, underpinned by an equally ancient magic, and none dared betray it lightly. Daretor hesitated though, before opening the door. Who was to say that the merchantmen did not feel that their cold science in some way made magic – and belief in the dire consequences of contravening it – obsolete?
Nevertheless, he decided not to turn the man away. He had come to talk, not fight – at least for now. It seemed wise to hear him out, but not without caution. Laying aside the charms and unbolting several padlocks, Daretor drew his sword, motioned Zimak to do the same, then positioned himself to one side. Thus covered, he stretched out his arm and jerked the door open.
There was a blinding flash of light. Daretor was dazzled, and lost all sense of up and down. Indeed, within moments, he could feel no bodily sensations at all, nor hear anything except his own breathing. An intense cold swept over him, making him shiver uncontrollably.
A portal, he thought. Dimly he heard Zimak cry out.
As quickly as it had happened, it was over. Feeling flooded back into Daretor’s body. Sound returned with a miniature thunderclap, as though he had just passed through a storm.
He blinked and saw that he was lying on a grassy knoll outside a large, ornate tent. He was alone, except for Zimak, who was equally dazed.
They got to their feet. Their swords were gone.
‘Are we dead?’ Zimak asked nervously.
‘Not yet.’
Daretor turned his attention to the tent. It stood atop a hill surrounded by fir trees. There was no one else in sight.
‘I guess we should go inside,’ said Daretor.
‘You thought we should open the door.’
‘Well, then, you decide our next course of action.’
‘Me?’ said Zimak. He knew they had no choice but to investigate the tent. ‘Fine,’ he said, scowling, and shouldered through the opening flaps of the tent. Daretor followed.
Inside, a man sat on a richly brocaded couch, eating grapes and sipping wine. A near-naked serving girl hovered by his shoulder. Zimak’s eyes lit up.
‘How pleasant of you both to drop in on an old friend,’ said the Archmage Fa’red. Standing behind him were six deadmoon warriors.
Chapter 7
Golgora
Whatever Jelindel expected, the reality was worse.
She found herself in complete darkness and a terrible cold like the frozen empty cold between worlds. It was so bitter it made her gasp; then came a blasting riot of sensation as she landed in some strange room made of raw stone. A cell. There were faces peering at her, reacting. Mouths worked, word fragments came to her. She thought she recognised the Preceptor, but couldn’t be sure. Her spell, or the desperate dregs of it, ripped her from the stone room. She landed unfettered with a painful ooomph! on a hillside of loose scree which was luridly lit by a blood-red glow. She started to slide.
Within seconds, the whole hillside was on the move, a great flood of rock, picking up speed, plunging downhill towards what looked like the edge of a cliff. Jelindel scrabbled for a hold, but nothing was stable. At the same time, she realised she had reverted to her true form – Jelindel, not Jaelin. But she had no time to think on that now.
Below, to her left, trees jutted from the slope, stunted and burnt. She muttered a spell, desperate to get herself nearer to them. But as she finished the spell, she experienced a strange feeling, as if an enormous serpent coiled and uncoiled in her gut. Then a torrent of light, or energy, spewed from her mouth. The light locked onto the trees and immediately she felt herself being dragged towards them. Sharp rocks gouged her flesh, but this was nothing to the pain inside. It was as if she had drunk acid. Her insides were on fire. She would have screamed, but the burning light had locked her jaw open. A moment later she slammed into the nearest tree. She clutched it frantically. The serpent of light shut off, releasing her aching jaw muscles. Jelindel cried out, belatedly, in pain, and perhaps terror too, gasping for breath.
Meanwhile, most of the scree field had rattled down the hillside and poured into what she now saw was a deep chasm, with only darkness at the bottom. She swallowed. Shortly, the scree stopped moving altogether. Silence fell, and she was able to take in her surroundings.
Thick clouds boiled across a purplish sky, obscuring the sun. The chill air was heavy with fumes, mainly sulphur. Looming above her was a great dark mountain, of which the hill she was perched on was a mere outlier; the mountain was cone-shaped, and smoked continuously. As she watched, the ground rumbled, and a stream of lava belched from the cone, crashing and coiling down the mountainside, barely a mile away. The fires within the volcano were responsible for the blood-red glow. And as far as the eye could see, a chain of similar volcanoes stretched away, some spewing forth masses of smoke and cinders, lava streams gleaming on their steep sides like fiery threads of metal.
Above her, lightning jagged across the sky, thunder peaked. The flashing light and roiling noise never stopped.
A thought flitted through her bruised brain: Welcome to Golgora. Place of the Dead. Abode of the Damned.
Jelindel had been paralleling the forest for several hours now. She needed a vantage point, and could see a jagged cliff face through the dense canopy. The trees swayed in the windless air, and beneath them it was disquietingly dark. She did not want to pass beneath those gnarled branches for anything; she did not want to cross the border into the interior darkness. The forest was deeply forbidding; and its constantly moving boughs and leaves set up a whispering sound. She hurried away from the trees, not looking back, shutting her ears to the disturbing whispers that sounded like some language she had once known. Ahead and to her right was the shore of a placid ocean, oily and unmoving. It reflected back the restless clouds from its silvery surface, and the throbbing heart-fire of the volcanoes.
Down here by the ocean, the air took on a new quality; she was bathed in sweat, and her breath came in short bursts. The sulphurous fumes did not help: they made her dizzy and light-headed.
A pack of horse-like creatures darted at her from the forest. They were powerfully muscled, and moved swiftly. As they closed the distance, Jelindel saw that they weren’t quite horses after all – the strange light had fooled her. They had the bodies of horses but the torsos of men and women; and yet their faces were not human. They jutted forth like equine snouts and long, curved incisors overlapped their lips. Jelindel broke into a run, making for a cluster of boulders at the base of the cliff. She didn’t think the ‘centaurs’ would climb very well.
A great jag of lightning ripped across the sky. The thunderclap which followed was so powerful it knocked Jelindel, and several of the centaurs, off their feet. The air stank of ozone. She scrambled back up. Two or three of the creatures were within a hundred yards. She sprinted for the boulders. After her last experience of using magic here, she was scared to try again.
Jelindel reached the base of the boulders with barely ten yards to spare. She scrabbled up the steepest one, throwing herself on top, utterly spent. The centaurs tried to follow her but their hoof-like feet could get no purchase on the rock, and they fell back, baying angrily. This close, the resemblance to human beings was more noticeable, but instead of making the creatures more familiar, it made them even more alien and hideous.
Then she heard their guttural speech, which she had taken for barks and grunts. By all the Odd Gods, the things had language.
Jelindel crawled to the back of the boulders which were piled at the base of the cliff, part of a rock fall no doubt. She started to climb, finding easy handholds. Below her, the centaurs saw their quarry escaping them, and howled like daemons. Jelindel did not look down. Twenty minutes later she stood at the top of the cliff. The centaurs were now silent, watching her. As she moved off, they broke into a trot, following her course. A thought niggled her. Did they know something she didn’t?
This went on for the next hour. She could have struck inland away from the edge of the cliff, but some instinct told her to keep her enemies in sight. A few hundred yards from the cliff was the beginning of a great peat swamp. The stench of it was heavy on the air. Dozens of small streams fuelled the marshlands. They snaked across to the cliff and fell in a spray of waterfalls to the sunken land below. Though thirsty, Jelindel could not bring herself to drink from the brackish water. She had been on Golgora now for nearly ten hours.
Where was she going?
Whatever mage-sense still worked here, in this place where magic was obviously unpredictable, had so far driven her north, as if she were the long arm of a lodestone.
Why north? Was her mage-sense serving her or something else? Rumours abounded about Golgora, none of which could be true, since none ever returned to tell their tales, but all such stories agreed on one thing: magic was different in the Place of the Dead.
Up ahead, a thick band of trees, growing right to the cliff edge, barred her way, and forced her inland. Reluctantly, she moved away from the cliff and from sight of the centaurs, quickly realising that she was being funnelled by trees and swamp into a narrow isthmus of ground that was no longer grassy, but packed earth which had a well-trod look to it.
She paused to consider this. Of course there were people on Golgora. It was the dumping ground for the paraworlds. The unwanted and the unredeemed were sent here on one-way trips. It was a prison world, composed of all those not wanted, or least valued, on their own worlds. Which made them very dangerous folk. The kind who had nothing left to lose.
Jelindel resumed her journey. She was a Golgoran now, like it or not. She was one of the forgotten.
She came out of the narrow band between forest and swamp, and stopped. Ahead on a rise stood a great stone castle, high walls and towers protecting it on all sides. It sat atop a hill like a very old and heavy crown.
A panicked flock of birds was her only warning as the centaurs burst into view to her left. With little option, Jelindel sprinted for the castle. It was several hundred yards away and she did not think she would make it. Barely halfway, the centaur pack broke upon her. One leapt on her back, knocking her to the ground. Another barrelled into her as she tried to get up, and she fell again, hitting her head on a rock. Dizzy, she expected to feel sharp teeth clamping on her limbs, hot breath at her throat.
But neither came. Instead, there were whistles and curses, and the centaurs backed off, forming a half circle about her. Coming into the other half of the circle was a group of men. She stared at them, blinking, and staggered to her feet. Her vision swam.
As the lead man reached her, grinning, she saw that he was not completely normal. He was squat, and broad at the shoulder, with two sets of gnarled arms.
‘Welcome to Hellhole,’ he said. Then something hit her from behind and she fell into darkness.
Jelindel came to slowly. A throbbing ache somewhere behind her eyes quickly spread to her entire body as if she were one big bruise.
‘You’re lucky,’ said a voice.
This was so flagrantly deluded that she opened her eyes to snap a retort, then stopped. The speaker was a girl of about fifteen. She was pretty, dark-haired, and naked except for a loincloth. Four deep scars, like claw marks, stretched from her clavicle, across her left breast, and down to her navel. The girl noticed the direction of Jelindel’s eyes and looked away.
‘I know I’m ugly, you’ve no need to tell me. All the boys do that plenty enough.’
‘What happened?’ Jelindel asked gently.
‘Raver,’ the girl explained. ‘Nearly got took two year back.’ She was grinding something in a mortar and went on with the task as she spoke. ‘You gotta keep peeled for ravers. Most make so much noise you’d be a dead fool to go get took, but some reckon they been gettin’ smarter, if you can believe that. Anyway, how you feelin’?’
‘Like I fell off a cliff and got hit by a four-horse carriage.’
The girl laughed, the high tinkling notes out of place in the cave-like chamber where Jelindel found herself. One roughly hewn window looked out on a dirty courtyard where hogs snuffled and grubby boys played in the dirt.
‘My name’s Marla, what’s yours be?’
Jelindel started to say Jaelin then remembered her magical disguise was gone. She was a woman again, and she was dressed the same as Marla, in a piece of loincloth only. In this fume-ridden heat it made a kind of sense.
‘Jelindel,’ she said after a pause. Then she asked, ‘What did you mean, lucky?’
‘Huh? Oh, that. You was lucky Tow found you. If it’d been another clan, you’d’ve been butchered on the spot, but Tow don’t work like that. He knows you was wanted. Besides, he used to be normal.’
‘Normal?’
‘Like you.’
‘A woman?’
Marla laughed. ‘Nah, normal. Two arms, two legs, smoothie skin. Normal.’
Jelindel thought this over. ‘Something changed him?’
‘Yeah. This place. This place changed him. It’ll change us all, sooner or later. Lookit here.’ She lifted her arms. Two tiny budding breasts, complete with nipples, were growing in her armpits. ‘You’re in Hellhole now, Jelindel.’
‘Is that what you call this place? I know it by another name.’
Marla nodded.
‘Have you heard the name Golgora?’
‘That’s what Before Folk call it. Golgora, the Betrayed.’
The way Marla said it made it sound as if it were the Hellholers who had been betrayed. The original meaning of the word, Jelindel knew, went much deeper. It described an act of betrayal, of heresy, so profound, so wicked, that it could only be described by an event, a memory of abomination, that had occurred in some mythical place five thousand years ago. The details had been lost in history, but Jelindel believed it was connected with the exile of the dragons from Q’zar.
‘What will happen to me?’
Marla averted her gaze.
Not a good sign, thought Jelindel. ‘Am I to die?’
‘Everyone dies, Jelindel. This is Hellhole. They didn’t send you here for your health.’ She laughed as if this were a standard joke. ‘The Boss wants you bad. He’s been lookin’ for you two months now.’
Jelindel thought she knew who the Boss was. ‘Two months? How long was I unconscious?’
‘Couple hours maybe real time. But time don’t work here like it do back home.’
‘Is there no way back?’
‘To where you come from?’ She shook her head. ‘Everybody says the portals are only one way.’
‘Can’t a new portal be opened?’
‘Not from Hellhole. Magic don’t work the same way here. Some things it won’t do, like make portals. Tow says that’s just how it is, and why Hellhole was chosen. You’re from Q’zar, ain’t’cha?’
Jelindel nodded. Marla explained that Jelindel had talked while she had been unconscious.
‘So no one has ever escaped from Golgora?’
Marla shrugged. ‘Only if you believe in fairytales.’
With effort Jelindel sat up. ‘Tell me.’
‘It’s just a story. Even in this place hope don’t die easily.’
‘When?’
Exasperated, as with a child, Marla said that a man and some followers who appeared human but who had green blood had fashioned some kind of device that allowed them to leave Hellhole. But that had been over a thousand years ago.
‘Isn’t it odd how some stories span the centuries while most others
fade as though they’ve never been?’ Jelindel said. She reached out and ran her fingertips over Marla’s scars.
Marla pulled back, glaring at Jelindel, but then she realised that the woman was muttering foreign words as she traced the welts of scarred tissue.
‘Your magic won’t work here, not the way you want it to,’ Marla said gruffly, but when Jelindel finally sat back the scars had already begun to disappear. Marla stared at them, then burst into tears.
‘How’d you do that?’ She kept touching them, as if she couldn’t believe it. ‘How’d you do that?’
Jelindel shrugged. ‘Maybe the bigger the magic is, the more it goes awry. That was a pretty simple spell.’
Marla eyed her, then the fast fading scars. ‘Maybe,’ she said.
The door burst open and Tow shouldered his way in. Behind him were two men dressed in uniforms standing near some kind of cold science vehicle.
‘Boss’s men,’ whispered Marla.
‘You’re goin’ on a trip,’ said Tow, not unpleasantly. Then to Marla: ‘Best you say goodbye to your new friend.’
Ten minutes later, bound hand and foot, with an odd-shaped medallion fixed around her throat like a collar, Jelindel was airborne and moving across the forest of Golgora in the newcomers’ flying craft, heading vaguely north.
The navigator, a young man with almond-shaped eyes, smiled at her, noting her interest in the panoramic view outside. ‘They don’t call it Hellhole for nothing. Life expectancy Outside is about an hour. If you make it through the first hour the old timers figure you’ll live a whole day. If you make it through the day then they give you a week, then a month. But newcomers rarely survive a week, ’less they join one of the settlements. And sometimes that don’t help much neither. My name is Torvid.’
‘You’re full of good cheer, Torvid. I’m –’
‘Jelindel. I know. We’ve been expecting you. Or the Preceptor has.’
‘So he really is here?’
Torvid nodded. ‘He’s waiting for you.’
