“I’d sense them. Or you would. I mean, there’s nothing. A great void, as if we’re the only things in this space that even exist, much less live.”
“All the more reason, Drumheller, for making a speedy exit, don’t you think?”
“Would you pick the lock, please? The manacle’s too tight, I can’t manage it myself.”
There were no rude comments from the brownies, in itself a stark measure of their distress, as they set quickly to work; Rool handled the lock picks while Franjean watched his back. They chose the most rusted piece first, saturating the joints with a mixture of oil and graphite before applying shoulders and pry bars to move the inner mechanism. It was a very simple lock, the difficulty came from it not having been used in a good long time. After a struggle, however, it creaked open.
The effort cost Rool, he was trembling with fatigue. Thorn had been watching through the brownie’s own eyes, so he knew now precisely how the device worked. The other manacle wasn’t in quite so poor a state, and he made a fast job of it and then the leg irons.
“I remember,” Thorn said softly while he worked, as though they were in the road, sitting about their campfire, only this time it was him telling the ghost stories to while away the evening and not the brownies, “old Spanyo Duguay, he said he’d met a Demon once.”
“And lived to tell the tale,” scoffed Franjean. “I don’t think so.”
“Like watching a potter work clay on the wheel, was what he told folks at the Ram’s Head Inn, back in Nelwyn Vale, only much faster. Couldn’t hold the same shape for more’n a heartbeat. Compared it to mercury maybe, or melting wax. Great globs of stuff, bubbling and flowing in the air before him.”
“If this is meant to be reassuring…” Rool prompted.
“Just passing the moment—aha!” There was a welcome click. “That’s the last.”
“Shall we run?”
“Not much use, Franjean, if we can’t see where we’re going. My MageSight can make out basic shapes and forms, but my depth perception’s not to be trusted. Can either of you see any better?” Silence. Evidently not. “If we aren’t alone here, whatever’s with us has had its chance and more to attack.”
“As if it couldn’t change its mind?”
“We’ll have to take that risk. It’s a better alternative than cracking our own skulls slipping on those steps, or worse yet, finding a pitfall or another trap.”
Unspoken between them from the start was the charge, If you’d only listened on the damn boat, we wouldn’t even be in this fix! And banging up against that, smashed and twisted together like dray wagons after a crossroads collision, the brownie’s mocking recitation of the Aldwyn’s charge to those who desired to be his apprentices. Thorn remembered wanting that post more than almost anything. And realizing when he’d ridden home after his first adventure that he already wielded greater Power than the Old Nelwyn had ever possessed. A bittersweet insight because even then he’d had an inkling of the eventual cost demanded of him. In the happiness of victory, the joy of homecoming, he’d refused to face it. As he had the destruction of Tir Asleen.
So easy, so tempting, to yield to the tiredness in his soul. To let himself be overwhelmed by the devastation he’d seen, those great wounds of the world. If Elora was the Light, past time she began to shine, so she could take the burden of responsibility from his shoulders. Not so long ago, that dirge of misery and self-pity would have been all he heard. Now, strangely, the feelings made him smile.
Strange, he thought, to burn so hot and cold. To set myself as the sword of Justice on the one hand, the better to avenge my friends, and yet desire just as strongly to pass the blade on to another.
Nelwyn nature was to be like Geryn’s da, place family, hearth, and home above all, let the rest of the world follow its own road. There was a comfort in knowing your place in the scheme of things, a security in the ordinary. It was a tug-of-war within Thorn’s soul that never seemed to end, and often felt like it would tear him apart. The problem was, for Thorn—and this had nothing to do with his being a sorcerer, this was part of his essential nature, that had always set him painfully apart from his friends and neighbors —what use legs, if not to take him down the road? What use eyes, if not to see what lay beyond the horizon? What use hands, if not to open doors?
He looked past the doorway. The radiance of his stones reached most of the way up the entry stairs and he found his OutSight more than sufficient to compensate for the darkness beyond. Looking back the other way, however, showed him only a gloom so deep and absolute he might as well be blind. It left him with the unassailable feeling that if he put his back to the wall and slid beyond the range of light, the rock would vanish from his touch as well as view.
He crouched down to gather his stones, then thought better of it. A sudden flash of inspiration, he had no idea what prompted it; the notion came from deep within that part of himself where his own Talent interacted with the Great Powers of the World and Worlds Beyond.
The light they cast was a small thing, against the oppressive mass of darkness, like a sapling at the foot of a glacier, with no hope or fate but to be overwhelmed. Yet it was a friendly glow, bringing a measure of warmth to a place that had known none in as long as the castle’s stones themselves had memory. (And he couldn’t help a shudder at the thought of how long that must be.)
He wished them well and then, to his surprise…
“And fair fortune to you, too,” aloud, to the dark, as though it was real.
“Are you demented?” Franjean whispered—a rhetorical question because from the way he asked, it was abundantly clear the answer had to be, “Absolutely!”
“Can we go!” from Rool.
“A courtesy, is all,” Thorn began as he started up the steps, but Franjean cut him off.
“Please!” Thorn had to marvel how such a little voice could project so much acid contempt, and in a single word. “Next you’ll be thanking the headsman for a clean cut as you go bouncing off the execution block!”
“If he’s good at his job, the compliment’s well earned.”
There was no reply, because Thorn misplaced his foot on the last step, landing on the tiptoe of his boot instead of the ball of the foot. There was a scummy dampness coating the stone, in the hollow worn by countless footfalls over equally countless generations. The surface was both slick and brittle. A portion crumbled under his weight, and when he automatically shifted his balance to compensate, he found himself skidding as though he was on ice. His foot went sideways, his hands went out hard to catch himself before he could crack his face. All this happened in a few split seconds.
When his bare palms slapped the stone, they burned.
A flush of heat, raw and uncontainable, his blood transformed to dry prairie grass that some fool had set alight, the conflagration racing up his arms like a runaway wildfire, consuming him from fingers to toes in a single heartbeat.
Someone had died here, a long, long time ago. Proud and angry, defiant to the end, facing hopeless odds yet determined to fight on regardless. With such a force of spirit that time hadn’t faded the imprint of her personality one whit.
A javelin butt to the jaw had stunned her, a whiplash curling about her ankle upending her. She’d done a demi-cartwheel, her head striking the outer lip of the stairs with that unique, awful, fatal crack. The body had tumbled to the floor below.
Thorn followed, back down the steps and along the dimly lit curve of the staircase until he was directly below the doorway.
“Here’s where she landed,” he spoke aloud.
“An old moment, Drumheller,” Rool said, thin-voiced with the struggle to master his terror. The brownies had felt the vision as strongly as he.
“Even scavengers would have left something.”
“So old the body’s long since crumbled to dust.”
“Not the slightest residue, Rool, not physical, not psychic. The imprint of her so
ul is burned into the very stone up above, but this spot’s totally empty. As though it had been wiped clean.”
“Fine,” snarled Franjean, “the ‘Demon’ took it. Can we perhaps make just a tiny effort not to be next?”
“It was a noble soul,” Thorn told them both as he retraced his path, taking care this time to step around the spot where he’d fallen. There was anger to his voice, not so much at the death itself—she was a warrior, that came through most strongly, this was a fate she’d long before accepted—but at the betrayal that led to it.
As suspected, the warders hadn’t bolted the door, and while the hall itself was mostly night, he found his vision far more effective here than below.
“What now?” asked Franjean. “Elora?”
“Need I state the obvious, and say something’s very wrong here?”
“No more than we need compound the felony by noting you just did.”
He smiled. If Franjean could banter, the brownies’ spirits were on the rise as well.
“Interesting,” he mused as they went, “these references to her protector.”
“What a concept, Rool,” Franjean exclaimed to his companion, “a world not big enough for two Nelwyn!”
“Saw the circular on the captain’s desk,” was Rool’s low-voiced response, combat tones for a combat stalk, without a trace of his companion’s humor. “Fair likeness of a Nelwyn. They’ve been looking hard and long. Find ’em, bring ’em in. Saving grace was our being beyond imperial territory, and staying among friends since we arrived.”
“Some friends,” groused Franjean, “not to warn us.”
“Read like the search was kept quiet.”
“All the more reason to turn our questions into answers,” said Thorn.
Franjean made a snort of derision.
“I beg your pardon,” Thorn couldn’t help challenging, afraid they were about to pick up their previous fight but unable to let the provocation slide.
“You forget, Drumheller,” was the serious reply, “the one defines the other. And perhaps invalidates it.”
“If you know something, Franjean…!”
“I wish it were that easy, believe you me! But it’s what you know that matters. You’re the Magus, remember?”
As if, he rumbled to himself, you ever let me forget.
Near the top of the steps, once more at the doorway to the cell, he took a moment to pull a Cloak about himself and the brownies. A passive charm, as had been most of what he’d used thus far, it made him blend with the background. Any who saw him from here on would fit him within the context of the moment; in a very real sense, he’d simply blend with the background and they’d never give him a second thought.
Looking back into the cell, Thorn was struck by a surge of disorientation. Intellect, his common sense, told him where he was and what he was looking at; yet he couldn’t shake the sense, almost a certainty, that he beheld the night sky. An all-encompassing blackness that went on forever. He saw no sense of shape or boundary below him; his scattering of stones had no fixed place in that ebony void, they floated like stars and seemed almost as remote.
With a shudder, Thorn stepped across the threshold, once more into the comfortingly familiar realm where shadows were caused by the absence of light, and not of life itself.
Rool took the point, and the three of them made their wary way up the spiral staircase.
“I have an observation,” Franjean offered, all business, without any of the poses struck for effect during normal conversation.
“I’ve noticed, too. This is a surprisingly clean dungeon.”
Thorn heard a dismissive sniff. “With all due respect”—which, the brownie’s tone made plain, had dropped to less than none—“it would make life easier if you’d not jump to conclusions. Especially when they’re erroneous.”
“I stand corrected.”
“Far too often, if you ask me. Would have thought you’d have learned by now.”
“There’s nobody else here,” hissed Rool from up ahead, having hopped down the worn slabs to meet them.
“The warders are gone?”
“No. They’re grumbling over their beer. But they’re it. Every level, every cell, all empty!”
“My observation precisely,” echoed Franjean with an appropriate and well-deserved air of triumph. Thorn smiled a tigerish smile, hoping it wouldn’t be seen by his companions, and repressed a sudden urge to murder.
“Any idea since when?” he asked.
“Long time. Long time. I can’t smell a soul, past or present, ’cept for those two sluggos up top.”
“Nor can I.” Thorn nodded thoughtfully.
“Demon,” said Franjean.
“How so?”
“Eaters of souls, that’s what they’re called, yes? Obviously this one’s been having itself a feast.”
Thorn said nothing. That made the brownies even more nervous.
“What?” prompted Rool. “I don’t much like it, Drumheller, when you go all silent.”
“A SoulEater is by nature evil.”
“A creature of Shadow, absolutely spot on.” Franjean, using the all-encompassing term for the Dark Realms and Forces. “And what do we have below us but a chamber of absolute shadow. The one betokens the other.”
“I’m not so sure….”
“Do we care? Under the circumstances, I don’t think so.”
They all kept silent as they slipped past the guardroom. Rool was right about the warders. Beer was their truest friend and their appreciation for what had to be the cushiest berth in the empire vied with an equally strong apprehension about what they believed lived deep below. In all their days here, this was the first time they’d been to those catacombs and they weren’t happy about it. Or the prospect that, sooner or later, they’d have to return. They were praying, in fact, that it be on someone else’s shift.
“Afraid, they are,” said Rool, “of what they might have stirred up.”
“Poor bunnies,” said Thorn without sympathy.
“But not you, Drumheller?”
“I’m still not sure, Rool. I’m sorry. Evil has a taste to it….”
“Perhaps it’s hidden. Perhaps you’re not sensitive enough to notice.”
“Perhaps.”
“What’s our favorite saying? ‘When in doubt, err on the side of caution’?”
“You talk like a Nelwyn.”
Franjean, a sudden, sharp interruption: “And you’re starting to act too much like a Daikini.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Franjean chose not to answer, and Thorn not to press the point. This keep was easily the oldest structure on the palace grounds, standing alone on a neighboring hill, separated from the main buildings by a clutch of horse barns and carriage houses, with a dramatically commanding view of the city and Bay beyond, so solidly constructed that its walls appeared to be a natural extension of the hill itself. The foreslope was steep and high enough to exhaust any force making a frontal assault. The back side of the hill was much gentler and led originally to a smaller summit beyond. However, over the generations, nature had been much improved on. The hollow between two knolls had been filled in and considerably enlarged, until an artificial rise had been created half again as high as the hill on which stood the original citadel. The one had been a fortress, this was a true palace, a place of gaiety and light. It looked formidable, but just the one glance told Thorn the battlements were mostly for show. The walls were too tall and delicate, broken by far too many windows. The views were spectacular, and on a clear evening, the sight of the palace all lit from within commanding the skyline had to be breathtaking.
“Oi!” came a sudden bellow, catching them all by surprise. In that first moment Thorn thought it was one of the warders and nearly made a reflexive dash for the gate. But experience overrode instinct and he made himself take another couple of seconds to
establish the situation before reacting.
“You!” The Daikini was cut from similar cloth as the warders, big in every dimension, though with far more of a belly. Thorn decided to play dumb, with a look over his shoulder as though the man were yelling for someone else, and then a querying thumb pointed at himself.
“Yes,” the man cried in exasperation, “you! Short fella! Here! Now! Hop to it!” he finished with a roar, when Thorn didn’t cross the courtyard with sufficient alacrity. He was a man for whom instant, unquestioning obedience was a state of nature. Given the way his body was constructed, Thorn felt like he was standing close by an avalanche waiting to happen.
“Godstrewth,” the man complained, to every Deity worth the name, “how I’m ’spected to manage a proper celebration with the kind of help I’ve got I don’t know I’m sure! Keep lollygagging like that, my little lad, the Sacred Princess Elora’ll be croaked of old age before we’re ready.”
“Sorry,” was all Thorn hazarded in reply as he clambered up onto the wagon seat.
“I hope you’re stronger’n you look, I got no patience with shirkers, especially today.”
“I’ll pull my fair weight,” Thorn assured him.
The look he got in return wasn’t encouraging.
The wagon was the tail end of a convoy of goods that wound its way from the Old Keep—where the supplies came in, as opposed to the far more ornate Monarch’s Mount Gate, which was for guests—to the rear of the palace. The basic lines of the overall design had been kept through this wing as well, but they were far more simplified and functional. This was the section of the palace that none but staff were ever meant to see. It had to work because they had to; adornments only got in the way. The windows weren’t as big, nor were there as many; the mason stones were square and solid, lacking any of the gingerbread carvings that decorated the public facade. A triple set of doors led off the loading dock, not so tall as the main entrance around front but considerably wider; the one a function of aesthetics, to usher visitors into the palace’s towering and most impressive atrium, these a matter of practicality. Made clear as the drover expertly backed his wagon into place and Thorn saw servants unrolling huge barrels of wine and beer from another in the next stall over. Obviously not the day’s first delivery and he suspected the haulers were a long way from done. No one looked their best, not even close, surcoats removed and set aside, shirts unlaced and sleeves rolled up, lines of fatigue etched about eyes and mouths, bodies moving gracelessly, flat-footed and stiff-limbed. When the driver turned on his seat to look for him, Thorn stepped behind a page—still mostly boy and only half a head taller than the Nelwyn, though much lighter in the build—and wrapped his Cloak a little more tightly about himself. As far as the driver was concerned, the page was the “short fella” who’d ridden up with him; fact was, he had too much to do to waste even a thought on it. He gave orders, the boy obeyed, that was satisfaction.
Shadow Moon Page 16
