He examined the wall, and there was no trigger to open a secret door. His hand went straight through where his eyes told him the wall was. It was set back further. Another illusion. Was it magic or just clever construction? He looked at it from several angles but couldn’t decide.
He stepped forward, into the passage. There was only one way to go, unless he was looking at yet another illusion, and given how many he had encountered to this point he couldn’t dismiss the possibility. He turned, stepped forward, then turned again. The passage opened out and curved around the central well of the tower like the stairwell, but without rising. The outer and inner wall of the passage came together in a high arch. When he had walked nearly a full circuit he saw a light ahead, coming from the inner side of the passage, where there was a large open doorway, or rather a large archway through the stone with no door attached. The light oozing through it had the same characteristics as the light he had seen coming from the tower window when looking from outside. He still felt anger at what he had seen below. He also felt dread, guessing that what would lie beyond that doorway would be even worse, but knowing he couldn’t go back. He was too curious. Or foolish, he corrected himself. He peered around the corner of the archway.
The room was circular, and larger than any of the others he had encountered, encompassing the entirety of the central well circumscribed by the outer circular passage, but in a funnel shape due to the arching of the passage wall. Where the funnel terminated with the arch the wall continued straight up, and roof beams arched across from the walls to support the conical roof, several ordinary house stories above the floor. Impractically high up, beyond the arching of the wall, was a shutter-less, small single window, too small and high to allow much light of sun or moon into the room. A ladder extended up the wall to a small wooden platform a few feet below the window.
A huge crystal hung suspended by, apparently, nothing more than the air in the centre of the chamber, pulsing with that unnatural, terrifying light. On the walls, from manacles, hung men and women and skeletons of indeterminate gender, in various stages of decay; some were only bones, though whole, held together by whatever ligaments and joints remained; others had the withered gaunt look of starvation, the way the peasants looked in the worst years of famine, dark sunken eyes, concave cheeks, ribs thrusting forward through skin that seemed to cling to them, but without the flies buzzing about their lips, or maggots polluting their flesh, for this was a place of death not life, however lowly or repulsive the life; yet others had the skin flayed from them, blood pooled and congealed at their feet, black, dead blood, the threads of exposed muscle on their limbs visible enough to count. He didn’t dare to look into the eyes of the victims. He felt their pain, as if their murders were happening now and he was of their number, hanging from the walls alongside them, horrified at his fate. He felt their rage also, like that of the spirit in the room below, only subdued, as if that had only been an experiment, in which the victim’s spirit had not been fully subordinated to the necromancer’s will. The necromancer murdering and using the life force of his victims in some way Corin couldn’t comprehend. Corin felt the same revulsion he had down below in the raging spirit’s room. He knew without knowing how that if he did look into the eyes of these victims he would be lost, trapped in the world of their torment, an accidental slave to the dark arts here practiced.
Instead of their eyes his eyes saw what they saw, or rather what their dead eyes were turned towards, for he knew without seeing that they all turned those eyes towards the crystal. Energy flowed from their eyes, their bodies twisted in their manacles, terrified, powerless to escape, even by death. The life that had been torn from them, that was somehow still being torn from them, by torture and this sick necromancy, flowed towards the crystal, making it pulse as if with the heartbeat of a cruel god. Corin understood without knowing how that the foul magic was fuelled by their death, by the suspension of their souls between this world and the next, trapped in a space between spaces, tortured in spirit as they had been in body, subjected to worse than indignity, worse than death, made to serve…, who? what terrible purpose? The lines of energy flowed, sickly, like light but shedding no radiance beyond those streams, crossed and recrossed in a tangled web, some loose strands of which flowed to the walls, flowed up them and across them and around them, and at the window flowed out. But most of the strands of that grotesque web flowed towards the huge suspended crystal, seeping into its heart. And from the base of the crystal, more strands emerged and flowed down.
Below the crystal, also suspended in air, was a sword. The streams of energy flowed to its pommel, which was missing a stone. The energy glowed and pulsed where that stone should be, like an illusory ruby, red as blood, blazing like fire. The red energy flowed from there through and along the hilt and further, in tendrils that tightly held the blade, and branched off into shifting, changing runes, which licked the air like fire. It was clearly not an ordinary sword; it was not made of iron or steel, nor even of the bronze Corin had seen some Pectish traders wearing in the great market; but of a bone white substance. It was the size and shape of a normal long-sword. And it trembled where it hung in the air, seeming to struggle against the constraint of that false ruby’s power. The tip was pointing between the breasts of a young woman who lay beneath.
Unlike the victims on the walls, the woman beneath the blade lived. She was naked, and shackled to an altar like stone on which she was stretched spreadeagle by transparent manacles. Lines of some substance as transparent as water flowed from the tip of the sword to the manacles, which were made of the same substance. The woman’s translucent skin was moist, and her long hair, which cascaded over the edge of the altar stone, all the way to the floor, was almost transparently fair. Corin had grown up surrounded by whores and actresses and was not easily impressed by female beauty, but this woman was more beautiful than any he had ever seen, more beautiful than Rose Red-lips of the House of Delights, more beautiful even than the princess Sophie, daughter of queen Rose, who he had seen on state occasions. Only once had he seen a being as beautiful as this. And as he recalled this he remembered why he had come here. This woman’s face was turned towards where he stood in the archway, as if she had waited for him.
Her irises were emerald green. She looked right into his eyes, and now he heard the voice more clearly than ever before. The voice that had drawn him in to the tower despite his reluctance. The voice that had drawn him towards this terrifying tower, through the darkness, through the despair, past traps, and horror, and illusion, to this place. “Are you the greatest thief in Thedra?” he heard in his head, and the woman’s eyes mocked him. The question provoked him. “Yes,” he thought. “Prove it,” the voice replied. The mockery in her eyes was replaced suddenly with pain as she screamed and the scream seemed to be his own. He put a hand to his mouth, but it was closed.
For the first time Corin noticed the necromancer, and the runes which circled the altar on the flagstones of the floor, pulsing with sick light like the crystal above. The man was dressed in the clothes of an aristocrat. Hose and doublet and tunic and ruff, but a smaller ruff than most nobles he had seen in the city. Given that ruffs seemed to get larger year by year, Corin deduced the necromancer must be either very old or indifferent to fashion, though his age was not clear in his face. The necromancer’s face was lined with a frown of concentration and his body swayed, his arms flying out at strange angles, fingers tied for brief moments in patterns that seemed so impossible that Rubbery Roberto would have been amazed. And he muttered, and whispered, and growled, and screamed, and snarled; a language of threat, and cruelty, discordant and harsh, as if a thousand minstrels were being murdered every moment; and each, with no regard for the others, desperately tried to sing one final note.
As if in reply to these utterances, in the translucent flesh of the woman a wound opened. Within her seemed to be no blood or organs, but only water, and the water bled, splashing on the altar and flowing down the side, mingling indistingui
shably with her transparent hair. The woman screamed. She shed a single tear. As the tear formed at the edge of her eye and began to roll down her cheek the necromancer ceased his spells, and quickly moved forward, extracting it with a pipette. He raised the pipette to his eye, and sighed with deep satisfaction. He took it over to a small table, and squeezed the contents into a small glass tube. “Soon we will know, my lord. Soon we will know.”
Then he collapsed as if exhausted into a large, comfortable looking chair. His head hung down, and his breathing became slow and shallow. Corin waited, watching for any sign of danger. The necromancer didn’t move for several minutes. Corin crept across the floor towards the altar stone on which the woman was stretched. As he crossed the outmost circle of runes he lost heart. Dread overcame him and he tried to step back, but he couldn’t move. But then he knew he could. He could fall to his knees, so he did. A terrible weight dragged him down. I can’t do this, he thought. A foul taste was in his mouth, as if all the rottenness of the Obsidian City had been condensed into an essence and poured onto his tongue.
“But you can do it,” the voice said.
He looked up, and into the nymph’s eyes, and the taste was washed away, as if he had drunk from the sweetest mountain spring. And he knew that he could do what had to be done. And he knew what had to be done. He looked up, to the sword. He dropped to his hands, and focussed his eyes back on hers, and he crawled. He lost all sense of time. How many hours passed as he crossed that terrible space? How many years? How many centuries? How many millennia? But he knew millennia were as nothing. This woman looked no older than him. But her eyes carried the wisdom of ages, of the water that washes patiently at stone, wearing away strong castles, turning great stones to pebbles, pebbles to sand, and sand to nothing, and her gaze washed away his doubts, again, and again, and again. She showed him how short a thousand years could be. In time as she knew it great mountains were worn down to become plains or valleys. To climb those mountains was nothing when they had been washed away by the patient, inexorable aeons, and the gentle caress of flowing water, so tender, so loving. And he was climbing to his feet, climbing onto the stone, reaching up and over her, reaching up towards….
“NO!” he heard the scream distantly as his hand closed on the hilt. He almost fell, dragging the sword down. The threads of power that had extended from the crystal to the empty pommel were broken. The transparent threads that extended from the tip of the sword to the manacles evaporated and the manacles splashed away. The woman sat up. She smiled at the now standing necromancer with vindictive sweetness, and from his mouth and nostrils water gushed, first as though he were coughing up a mouthful of water that had gone down the wrong way, then like the gush of a fountain, soon like a waterfall. It seemed impossible that his body could have held so much water or released it so quickly. He had stood up from his chair, but now dropped, to his knees, to his hands, to his belly. The woman climbed off of the altar stone, and walked to the edge of the innermost runic circle and halted. And the water poured out of the necromancer’s mouth and nose. He turned over on his back and desperately tried to inscribe a magical rune on his chest with his finger, but the water from his own lungs washed over its fire, erasing the shape before he could complete it. The water flowed across the flagstones, washing the runic circles away, and when it reached the inner circle the woman stepped forward, walking over to where the necromancer choked and squirmed on the floor in front of his seat, water still gushing from his mouth and nose. She looked down at him with mild curiosity as he flipped about on the floor like a fish out of water. Then, with a final twitch, he was still.
The woman went to the table where the necromancer had squirted her tears into a tube. Lifting the tube she went to the first of the hanging victims. She unstoppered the tube and blew gently across the mouth, then she poured a single drop onto what remained of the man. As she did, all the tension and anguish went out of him. The corpse seemed to sigh, then all hint of unnatural un-living life was gone from it. Though Corin did not understand exactly what had happened he knew the man’s soul was at rest. She walked the entire circuit of the room, doing the same with each of the prisoners. Corin now understood what the flask he had discovered earlier was. He took it out of his pack and handed it to her. She took it, unstoppered it, and blew gently over its mouth. Then she stoppered it again and handed it back to him.
“Your sister sent me,” he said, hesitating to take the phial back now that he understood how its contents had been extracted.
“What is given freely will not pollute,” she reassured him. He looked down at the sword, and offered that to her, sensing that somehow it belonged to her, but she shook her head. “Not yet. The change is soon upon us, and I may not linger.” She smiled again, took his face gently in her hands and tenderly kissed him. He had kissed many girls before, and done many other things besides, but only once before had it felt like this. His heart lifted, and he didn’t have a smart word to say or a cynical thought to think. In that one moment all his cares were washed away, and the fire in his heart and his limbs and his head faded and the confusion that had plagued him in this place cleared.
As she drew back he looked around the room. He had wanted to rob the place, but there didn’t seem to be much of value up here. Except perhaps the crystal. It still floated up there above the stone altar despite the necromancer’s death. He was wary of it though. He could feel it as much as see its light, pulsing, as though it were the heart of the tower. The light was no longer threatening, but it felt obscured, like the sun behind clouds. He decided to leave it there, though the thief in him wondered at its value to a fence.
He looked back to where the woman stood, asking, “What do you mean, not yet?” She was not there though. He looked around. She was nowhere in the room.
He shrugged. He had seen so much strange magic this night, illusions and necromantic horror and he couldn’t say what else, that a goddess disappearing was hardly a surprising event. How many mortals ever get to see any goddess at all? And he had seen two. He wondered for a moment whether they had been real, but he knew he had been thrown bound into the lake and survived and when he looked down he saw he still held the large transparent phial, its contents weightless and sparkling with an inner light. As fantastic as it seemed he had been twice blessed.
He went back down the stairwell, entering the furnished room. In one of the chests was a jewelled necklace. Rose would enjoy that for a while, he thought. Something to complement the perfection of her complexion when she exposed herself for business. The jewels would scintillate like stars hanging between her firm, perfectly formed breasts. A smaller chest was full of gold coins. He took as many as he could carry in his pack. Against the wall was a battered scabbard, and the strange sword slid into it easily. He decided he could leave the rest here. No one but him would be foolish enough to break into this place. He could come back when he needed more.
Descending the stairs he stopped by the door where the angry spirit had earlier forced him out. There was something he knew he had to do. Cautiously he opened the door. Still the skull glared. He steeled himself, took out the flask, and stepped into the room. The spirit raged, and Corin’s hair stood on end, but he knew he had to do this. He felt the air shift, trying to force him out, but he fought against it. He grasped the hilt of the sword, though he was not sure it would do anything to a spirit, and he didn’t want to harm it anyway. But the moment his fingers wrapped around the hilt he felt a surge of strength. In his head he heard one word, “blood,” like a shriek. Every hair on his body rose, and the strength was also something to fear. But the spirit in the room cowered more than he did at this power, which was as threatening as the raging river when the summer thaw pours down the mountain ice in flooding torrents to the plain. He quickly crossed to the skull. He had to release the sword to unstopper the flask, and when he did the raging spirit renewed its assault. He lifted the flask. His every movement seemed slowed, as if his arms were gripped, even his wrists, and his finger
s. He would not be stopped though. He tipped the flask a little way. One drop slowly formed at the lip; slowly formed, stretched, hung; a thread of connecting moisture stretched, thinned, and snapped. Slowly the drop fell, and all around the air of the room assaulted him, burned his lungs, filled his nostrils with the smell of decay, his mouth with the taste of blood, made his eyes sting and his ears ring. It became too bright to bear, every line too sharply drawn, every colour too clear, and unnaturally alive. The drop fell, and fell, and fell. Still it was falling. He lived many lives and died many deaths as it fell. Then it struck the skull. The glare faded from the sockets, and the twisted skeleton on the bed seemed to sigh. The threat faded from the room. It was done. The spirit was at rest. He stoppered the flask.
As he left the tower he felt no threat in the garden. Whatever spells had twisted that place were lifted, perhaps dispelled by the caster’s death. The despair was gone, and the shadows were now natural. The sky was greying as the sun rose in the east. There was a small well off the main path to the gate, and a glade beyond, which he had not been able to see in the night, or rather because of the dark magic, since the moon was full. There was a vegetable patch and an orchard, and barrows and spades and hoes and rakes and sickles and scythes in a small shed beside a great oak tree. Who used these? Surely not the necromancer. And no human gardener would willingly come to the necromancer’s tower. Perhaps, Corin thought, he had made the tools work for him with magic. Corin breathed in the air. Rich and natural, soil and fallen fruit and freshly scythed grass. He looked up at the tower. It carried no threat now.
He had seen from the glade that he could easily climb from the great oak tree to the top of the wall, and left that way, only stopping by the gate to collect his rope and grapple.
Chapter 7: The First Language
Bloodspate Page 8
