A Lady in Crystal

by Toby Bennett

  Akna thought briefly of Nishgul, the great lake held many dark, unwanted dreams. Was this water equally haunted? The other initiates told stories of the things that stole out from people’s dreams and from failed summoning, things that took on substance in the dark. Akna’s recent experience had driven him to a state beyond fear but the feral determination to survive at all costs did not make him impervious to the very real need to consider the dangers that might await him, once he let go of the wall. Without really thinking , Akna found himself fiddling with the pouch on his belt, it took his weary mind a few seconds to register what he was actually doing. The gem was not just valuable because it contained some part of him that Lothar had stolen, it produced a light of its own.

  A pale yellow glow spilled into his hand as he opened the pouch. The stone was not very bright but to eyes that had become accustomed to the pitch blackness of the passageway, it seemed almost painful for a second. He rolled the crystal into his hand and held it high, it barely gave off more light than a candle flame but it allowed him to see the small waves lapping against his shins. The darkness pressed down on his little nimbus of light and he strained to see the anything beyond the expanse of undulating, stagnant water. He couldn’t even see more than a suggestion of the vaulted stone ceiling above, the water might as well stretch on forever. As he raised the light, Akna heard a splash and he watched a larger wave sweep into his small oasis of light. The wave reached almost to his knees and rushed out back down the corridor from where he had come.

  Akna drew the sabre from his belt and eyed the darkness warily; he tensed his body to run but there was no further movement from the pool in front of him. Akna reminded himself that the wave might have meant nothing, perhaps inflow from another pipe had caused the disturbance; with every moment in the chill water robbing him of strength, he had to move. He looped the crystal’s silver chain around his wrist then took a tentative step forward. In the dim light he could just see a lip of stone that dropped off just ahead of him. He couldn’t know how deep the water was but he was glad that he had not tried to walk ahead in the dark. Swimming blind could have been fatally disorientating. Fortunately the lip of stone seemed to run around the deeper pool, if he trod carefully Akna would be able to wade around the room without having to risk swimming. He couldn’t see them yet but Akna was familiar enough with such places to be sure that there would be several pipes and passages allowing water in and out of such a large collection point.

  He set off, his back pressed against the wall and his toes hanging over the narrow lip; every so often his sabre would scrape noisily against the brickwork but he kept the weapon in his hand. Small waves continued to radiate out from the darkness and he kept the sword in his hand in case something more substantial joined them. The sounds of sloshing water and the stench were almost comforting, since they gave him an explanation for the disturbance in the water but the disturbances were not always accompanied by sounds from the pipes above or splashes from the surface. He imagined something moving deep beneath the water; something large enough that its passage caused the water shift. If there were something there, he reasoned that it did not have to be aware of him. Life in perpetual darkness might well make anything that dwelt here blind. A blind monster only made each step he took more terrifying because if it were oblivious to light, the thing he imagined would no doubt be highly sensitive to his every disturbance of the water.

  At last he made it around the curving lip of the pool and stool at the entrance to a passage that led up into the darkness at quite a steep angle. He paused for a moment to gather his last few reserves for the climb ahead. Akna was looking up the angled passage, when the water behind him rose up his thighs as a large wave rolled between his legs; he spun in time to see a pallid head break the water at the edge of the pool. It was impossible to gauge whether the pearlescent compound eyes that topped the nightmarish head of the thing rising from the water registered any discomfort from the light shed by the gem in Akna’s hand but something had definitely roused it from the depths of the pool. Its body was segmented and long allowing it to rise out of the water like a serpent, narrow slits beneath the bulbous compound eyes released a blue luminescence that allowed Akna to track the grizzly head once it had risen beyond the reach of his small circle of light.

  In an instant the beast had reared up to the distant ceiling of the chamber and those two half moons of blue light were streaking back down towards its intended victim. The images that had filled Akna’s head as he had circled the pool did not do justice to the thing descending on him; its whip like body was reminiscent of a maggot with claws and fins protruding, apparently randomly, at various angles. Akna had only had a minute to take in the jaws of his attacker but its insectoid nature had been belied by the rows of yellowed teeth that crowded from its long jaw. The thought of fighting such a creature seemed madness itself but he doubted that he would be able to escape up the tunnel behind him. The walls were slick and the angle was steep if he tried to move too fast he risked sliding back down. Back to where he now stood, waiting to be dismembered by the pool’s grizzly inhabitant.

  It was possible that the creature would not be willing to follow him too far beyond the water. Perhaps, if it were wounded, he could get enough of a head start to make it up the tunnel. He rolled to the side, coming dangerously close to falling over the stone lip and sinking into the pool proper. If he had any hope, it was in staying out of the deeper water, where the monster would have him trapped in its own element.

  For a moment Akna’s dive forced his head under the stinking water and he felt the foul stuff filling his ears and nostrils. He also felt the monster’s jaws closing on the water inches away from where he had fetched up. The head glided after him rather than rearing up again but Akna answered this advance with a firm chop of his blade. Yellow blood pumped in to the dark water and the hunter reared back; she was not used to resistance of this kind, on the rare occasion that she had encountered living humans, she had always had the advantage of their blindness; Akna’s mystical light source allowed him to anticipate her moves far better than she was used to. Pain was an unfamiliar thing and something else was nagging at her simple mind. Blood in the water was never a good thing but she is too incensed to heed instinctive warnings. The warm blooded thing that has dared to disturb her sanctuary must die. He is hers, like everything else that flows down into her great pool.

  Another close lunge and another line of yellow gore oozed from between the pale plates. Akna couldn’t ever remember striking with such precision in daylight, let alone in the darkness of the sewers. He had definitely draw first blood but with his strength and speed almost gone, his small victory would soon mean very little. The pale hunter threw herself towards her prey, hoping to sweep him off of the relative safety of the stone ledge and out into the open water but he managed to slip back into the steep tunnel at the last minute. However, the manoeuvre had forced Akna to jump backward over the sweeping body of the monster, it had cost him several scratches and the last of his strength. He lay panting on his back at the lip of the tunnel with the water lapping over his newly scarred feet. At least the wounds the torturer had inflicted had been cauterized, the new cuts stung in the foul water. The monster hissed in fury and Akna reflexively began to back up the tunnel. He did not dare waste the time to turn over nor did he want to turn his back on his opponent so he simply braced his hands against the walls of the passage and frantically pulled himself backwards. The yellow crystal hung from its chain as he heaved himself back, so that what little light still reached the entrance to the passage flickered and threw strange shadows against the filthy walls. At first the slickness of the passage made it easy to move but as he got higher, he found himself struggling to maintain the momentum; he had only been moving for seconds but already gravity threatened to snatch him and throw him back down to the waiting maw of the monster below. Ignoring the pain, he tried to bring his tortured feet to bear on the floor of the passage and it was then that he realised that th
e pain in his foot came from more than the cuts that he had sustained avoiding the last attack.

  There was something latched onto the side of his ankle. The cold water and the numbness brought on by all, he had suffered had prevented him from feeling it as it crawled onto him. The creature was pale, just like the angry creature that thrashed at the entrance of the passage and shared its insectoid aspect but was significantly smaller. The claws and pincers that had looked so useless on the larger version, had allowed it to attach itself to him at several points and the narrow maw was fixed firmly in the side of his foot. Akna gave a cry and thrashed at the thing with his sabre, it was only as he did so that he realised his mistake. His blow, though ill judged, was well aimed and his unwelcome passenger was sheered from his flesh with a satisfying spray of yellow blood but without the pressure of the sabre’s hilt on the passage wall, he lost his balance and slid helplessly back down the passage towards the waiting monster.

  Akna clawed at the slippery stones in a bid to slow himself but he knew it was already too late. He did not know what had stopped the larger monster from following him up the passage but he was sure it would be ready and able to strike at him, when he finished his slide back down into the stinking water beneath. Akna kept expecting his light to reveal the white scales and yellowed jaws of the beast that must be waiting for him. He didn’t dare let go of his sabre, much as it might have helped him slow his slide, since, in the confined space, it represented his only chance of fending off an attack. He thrust the guard into the wall, drawing small sparks and metallic shrieks from the stones. It was this noise and his own panic that stopped him from hearing the commotion below him until he was nearly back in the water.

  The liquid just beyond his feet looked as though it was boiling. Instead of the yellowed teeth he had expected to greet him, there was the froth of yellow blood in the churning water. The body of the thing he had cut from his foot or one of its cousins, floated in the shallows at the edge of the passageway and beyond that the monster, which had first attacked him, thrashed in agony as its smaller fellows burrowed beneath its waxy armour. Headless of the pain to his tortured flesh, Akna ground his feet into the stones as well. He had no wish to put even a toe in the water, not with so much blood. Blood was the answer, it was what had fed and nurtured the denizens of this pool; blood that slicked down from the torture chambers above. Akna had little doubt that Lothar was not the only priest in high office to keep his own torture facilities, there was always a lot of blood when there was power and the Asylum was washed clean regularly. All that was spilt found its way down to places like this and here things grew. Things spawned from dreams or the haunted water of the lake that would eventually embrace what was left of the filth and bring forth its nutrients to things that waited in deeper places, where it was men that were the dream. When blood was scarce, these creatures had learned to feast on each other indiscriminately so when they had been drawn by the taste of Akna’s blood in the water, they had no compunction in feasting on their own.

  The creature that had first attacked Akna was the biggest in that pool, whether it had spawned the rest or had simply survived longest it was impossible to tell but there was no familial sentiment in the way that the smaller creatures forced their way into the long gashes, which Akna had inflicted on it. With its armour whole it had been invulnerable but now it was being eaten from within and any attempt to dislodge the invaders equated to an attack on itself. From his vantage point Akna could only get glimpses of the titanic struggle but it was enough. He knew that he had no intention of allowing himself to touch the frothing water. The immediate danger of being attacked was gone, enabling him to release his grip on his sword and shift his focus on trying to get a grip on the wall next to him. The sword slid down into the morass of stagnant water and blood beneath him, joining many pale bodies as they shot back and forth in frenzied hunger.

  Akna began to climb again. Each inch required inhuman effort but he was already beyond pain or exhaustion; he moved like one of the clockwork golems made by the alchemists of Harport. Indeed there were many similarities between a golem and the wounded fugitive who crawled back from the depths of the Asylum, towards the brightness of her many lights. Both were possessed of only fragments of some soul, animated for some purpose, of which they were only dimly aware. Both were unfeeling and single minded.

  The prayers that they had taught him, came in murmured fragments from his lips. Pleas to a dead god, spoken in the shadows that were Niskaan’s to control, yet there was no relief, only more blackness. What other blessing could be expected from the Lord of Shade and Darkness? Tunnel followed pipe, twisting like the gut of some great beast that had engulfed him; at each turn weariness coaxed him to lie down and allow himself to be swallowed up by the darkness but Akna climbed following the light of a dream, a fragment of what he had lost caught like a fly in amber.

  Chapter 4:

  “On black breath lived and in your empty spaces dwelled,

  Walked the shadows where your heart’s blood welled.

  Death is short and darkness long

  Niskaan wake and hear my song”

  Novice prayer to the Shadow Lord

  The Asylum was asleep again when Akna finally escaped her subterranean expanse. He emerged into a sweet smelling garden. Moonhorn flowers spilled their dim silver radiance out from the wall and Akna could detect the acidic overtones of their presence but the anaemic flowers were some of the few that could actually survive in Niskar’s constant darkness. The brighter flowers that grew in every corner of the courtyard could have no natural source. Akna had never seen a garden grown in sunlight so he did not know if the orchid-like blossoms had been born of memory or fantasy but the variations in the colour of the petals suggested that the wondrous flowers were more likely to be product of the imagination than anything that could be found in reality. Then again, for all Akna knew, they could be some primal memory of a time long before the rise of human civilisations that some master had stolen from beyond the steps to fill some aesthetic need. The possibilities ran through Akna’s mind but they barely seemed to mean anything to him, no more than the relief of having escaped the tunnels below.

  The smell of ripe fruit reached him a few seconds after the initial relief. Akna’s olfactory senses had all but shut down but now he was in the fresh air they returned with unnatural vigour. He took another drag on the air of the garden, not even a hint of the sewer’s stench remained. There could only be one explanation for that, the positioning of the garden was not accidental, it had been put here to ensure that any odour from the grate was quickly eliminated. Such a blatant display of wealth told him he was still in the inner grounds of the Asylum. If he were discovered, this could mean more trouble, which he was in no condition to deal with.

  No matter what the danger in trying to make his way back to the outer wards without being seen, Akna had no intention of going back down into the pipes. He would make his way back carefully and if he was stopped by any of the guards that patrolled the gardens, he would play the part of one of the ragged inmates that occasionally wandered where they shouldn’t. If that failed, he still had his dagger. He paused briefly to slip on the boots that still hung around his neck. He’d tried to keep them as dry as he could but in the end they were no more comfortable to wear than the fouled tunic. The smell of fruit on the nearby tree tugged at him again and it was all he could do to walk over to the locked, iron gate that protected the garden. The very desirability of the fruit was not to be trusted, besides what kind of sustenance could you get from a dream?

  To Akna’s relief, he still had enough strength to make it over the high wall and into the street that ran past it. The Asylum was a small city in itself and some of the corridors of the outer wards ran as wide as highways; impromptu houses had even been built within the huge outer structure. The inner wards that crowned the tip of Graven Hill were more like a series of connected palaces than part of the outer ring of construction and there was a ring of unroofed wal
ls that surrounded the fastness of Niskaan’s shepherds. The ring that had been left open to the sky, might once have been open ground, signifying the gap between the public buildings and the inner sanctum, where it was rumoured Niskaan’s body still lay. Even if the space had once been open, favoured priests or even valuable inmates of the asylum, had spilled out from the main building and filled the space with narrow streets and thin houses. It was often joked that unless he took the official lanes up to the palaces on the top of the hill, a merchant who owned a donkey, might never find his way out of the narrows, since he would never find anywhere with enough space to allow him to back up or turn around. The confined space made patrolling the approach to the inner wards a nightmare and Akna readily took advantage of that fact.

  House Asemutt maintained a compound over looking the narrows. The order made much of the fact that, though they were technically now one of the most powerful sects within Niskaan’s church, their masters had not joined the more established leaders in their palaces at the centre of the Asylum. The loyal said that this showed their humility and devotion to the poor souls in the greater Asylum, whom the upper echelons of the priesthood had forgotten. The jealous said that Asemutt’s position was indicative of their posturing, for all the influence they claimed on the running of the Asylum and the city at large, their failure to find a place at the heart of things was surely a sign that they were only a trumped up, second rate order. The wise, who knew that Asemutt’s true power lay in her ability to work unseen, whispered that the choice of position was a strategy, allowing them to watch over the mighty, while at the same time maintaining their connections in the lower parts of the Asylum. This was true but there was more to it than that. Gilash and his brothers ensured that the order of Asemutt kept itself removed from the epicentre of power because they had found that power could be wielded for longer if you were the hand behind the puppet. Let the other orders fight for supremacy, Asemutt would aid each in turn, accruing favours and secrets as it went; they were close to the heart of events but careful never to be their focus.