by Sean Rodden
“And some among them, I would suggest, are quite old and powerful.”
“Two Veins, perhaps three,” Eldurion called quietly from across the chamber. “But they have all gone. Their caskets are empty. None remain.” The iron in his tone was dark and cold. “The Blood Mages bring terrible peril to the Seven Hills.”
“Nonetheless, they are overmatched, Fian,” replied Yllufarr casually. “Prince Thrannien opposes them.”
“Even a Sun Lord cannot stand long against an entire Vein of Blood Mages, Prince Yllufarr. Not alone, at least.”
“Then it is quite fortuitous that Thrannien does not stand alone.”
Eldurion felt the muscles of his grizzled face move, and was somewhat surprised to discover a thin smile upon his lips.
Rundul awaited his companions at the far end of the undercroft. He was leaning on his war-axe, attempting to appear aloof, but the air about him veritably shimmered with impatience – and, oddly enough, discomfort.
“So much for time being short,” the Darad growled. “Just had to stop and smell the coffins, didn’t you?”
Yllufarr glanced to Eldurion. “Our fearless friend remains no great lover of houses of the dead. Is it possible that we have discovered a chink in his armour?”
“The only chink in my armour,” rumbled Rundul, “is my irrational reluctance to punch well-deserving friends in the face.”
The Sun Lord smiled blithely. “Or perhaps it is your failing memory.”
“My memory? Have I forgotten something?”
“Yes, friend Rundul. You discarded your pack at the other end of this place, and there it remains. Sadly, neither the Fian nor I are able to carry it, so you must therefore retrace your steps through this crypt to retrieve it.”
“Ah, that.” The Darad chuckled. “I tossed it into an empty repository on the second level. It should be safe enough there. We don’t need it any more. At least not until… after.”
The aged Fian frowned. “Are we that close, Stone Lord? I cannot go overlong without food and water.”
“I’m not sure, Fian.” Rundul rubbed at his beard. “The rock speaks in strange tongues here, but the voices are loud enough. My heart tells me that we’re drawing near.” Rub became tug. “And I feel the urthvennim like fire on my face.”
“Near or no, friend Eldurion, Grimroth shall sustain you.”
The Eldest of the Fiannar did indeed sense a finespun warmth radiating from the bundle on his back, and had done for some time. And though he had taken no fare since the morning, he was quite aware that his throat was indeed far from parched and that his belly did not growl menacingly. Neither hunger nor thirst plagued him, and he felt truly strong and spry, infused with energy, and the light in eyes was bright. He nodded to the Darad.
“Lead on, Captain.”
The Sun Lord lingered momentarily, his colourless gaze slowly sweeping through the deathly still of the netherearthen necropolis. He sniffed the ashen air, licked the dusting of darkness on his lips. He saw nothing, heard nothing, sensed nothing. Nevertheless, an apparition of apprehension brushed against his soul and traced a cracked yellow nail along his spine. Mindful that remaining there any longer would serve him naught and his companions less, he let Sibryddir slide from the crook of his arm to the palm of his hand and curled his fingers about the shaft.
The Prince of the Neverborn then turned and walked away.
For even he could not outwait the dead.
Dijin Amora did not know what it was. Rather, it could not remember what it had once been. A seeming eternity of peering lovingly upon its own reflection in the mirror nailed to underside of its coffin had brought no revelation, no hint of enlightenment. The widely set eyes, the narrow nose, those voluptuously pouty lips – had they belonged to a man or to a woman in the years that it had, as a living breathing human being, graced the golden court of the last Dragon Emperor of Tur? There was no telling, was there? That which remained of its chest and genitals were amorphous at best. Likewise, its name offered no solution – something about a song of love. Or wind in the trees. Or a singing tree. Something obscure, anyway.
Strange, very strange, that it could not recall what it had been.
But then, what matter was gender to the dead?
An indolent swirl of coal dust and powdered plumbago, and the Blood Mage assumed anthropomorphic form. It paused, patiently plucking fluff from its generous cuffs with long elegant fingers. Tilting its head, it remained momentarily distracted by the pale beauty of its own hands, holding up first one then the other before its appraising garnet gaze. But answers still eluded Dijin Amora – the supple hands could have been an idle nobleman’s, a musician’s perhaps, or they might have belonged to a comely courtesan whose fingertips had known all the secrets of seduction and sweet, sweet pleasure.
Ah, now there was a thought, and a nice one.
Smiling, the Blood Mage then glided leisurely through the crypt, the heel of its long sceptre tapping the tesserae at the hem of its flowing red robe. Somewhere near the heart of the vault, the creature flowed to a halt, slowly turning in a circle, its patrician nose sniffing, its dagger-like tongue protruding, dancing in the dark.
Strangers. Strangers have come this way. Two, I think. Their descent must have wakened me. How very inconsiderate of them.
Dijin Amora had taken its most recent sleep in graphitic form. Deep insouciant slumber, it knew, ably veiled the salacious spoor of its everlasting evil. And it had discovered that the carved anthracite of the stairs disguised the dusty scent of the long dead – for what was coal but the carbonized product of primordial death? The primeval dead become infused with latent energy and the potential for vast power.
Not so unlike myself.
The Blood Mage rapped the heel of its sceptre against the floor. It then stretched and groaned, yawning cavernously – actions resultant of inured habit rather than of any real necessity – and waited.
“Masuta.”
The creature turned. A pair of fully armed Dead Swords in scarlet scale armour had materialized behind it, and were now kneeling upon the lovely mosaic, heads bowed, black hair pulled tight and tied in tidy little buns.
Masuta? Master? So it had been a man, then –
“You called, Masuta Senshi,” the two Dead Swords said in perfect unison. “You called and we have come. What is your command?”
Ah, Masuta Senshi. Master General. The highest ranking officer in the Dragon Emperor’s army – and a position that had been accessible to both men and women of sufficient skill, distinction and wealth, though not exclusively in that particular order. Yes, men and women, both. Of course. Why would it be otherwise? Dijin Amora slowly shook its head, heaved a habitual sigh. Some knots were meant to never be unravelled.
Now where was I? Oh, yes. The strangers.
“Summon your Blades, my good Swords,” the creature instructed as it withdrew a long curved katana from somewhere within the billowing clouds of its crimson kimono. A wide grin stretched its lubricious lips, maniacal and malicious, its elongated canines sheathed in delicately wrought gold. “Both Scabbards, if you please. For we have been trespassed. And we do not forgive those who trespass against us.”
Rundul of the Wandering Guard led his companions across and down, to the left and down, to the right and down. Always down, always descending, delving deeper into the everdark of the under-earth. Through cracks and fissures, along tunnels gnawed through the bones of the world by the forgotten rush of primordial rivers, then down, down. Squeezing into rifts long ripped of the rootrock by an ancient and angry Earth, climbing down clefts, sliding down virtually vertical shafts, and again down, down, down. Constantly lower, deeper. And when it seemed they could prolapse no more, the Darad would find another fracture in the stone, and further down they went.
“Did you not say we were near the place we seek, Stone Lord?”
“Near enough, Fian. All a matter of perspective, I suppose.”
Rundul could feel phantasmal tongues of urthvenn
im wriggling between the bristles of his beard, licking at his face. So many slimy little red worms, the rotting stench of the stuff snaking into his nostrils, causing his skin to crawl, making his eyes sting. He did not react. To respond would have been to concede that the Hag could touch him, truly touch him. And that was an admission he would not, could not make. The antithesis to love, he knew, was not hatred, in sooth, but indifference. Indifference and utter disregard. Care not, feel not, think not of a given thing, and its voice is silenced. Banish the thing from one’s mind, one’s heart, one’s world, and its power is broken. Give the matter no consideration, and it ceases to exist.
Just an itch, the Darad grumbled to himself, grinding his teeth and trudging on and down. Better to ignore an itch than scratch it. It wants to be scratched. Its sole purpose is to be acknowledged. To be made real by hissed discomfort and the attention of dragged nails. But pay the itch no heed, and it’ll eventually go away on its –
“How much longer, Stone Lord?”
Then again, some nits can be rather persistent.
“I can only guess at this point, Fian. Less than a league, more than a mile.”
“Where is our Athain friend?”
Rundul stopped abruptly, turned.
Several paces back, Eldurion had also halted and was peering back into the baffling blackness behind them. The point of the Fian’s sword rested on the stone by his right boot, but the stolidity of his stance and the bunched tautness of his body betrayed that the blade had never been more ready.
The Darad gazed past his companion, ebon eyes ablaze in the nethernight. The steel shaft of his war-axe was hot in one hard fist.
The Prince of the Neverborn was nowhere to be seen.
Growling, Rundul scratched at his beard.
Yllufarr was a shadow of smoke on the stone. Pressed into a rent in the rock where the tunnel jogged off at a hard angle, he watched and waited, his body become a seamless extension of the darkness. The soft glow of his eyes was dimmed, shuttered windows in the nethernight, the thud of his immortal heart slowed to the long slow gush of lava crawling under cool rain.
The Sun Lord’s vantage permitted him to look back upon a section of the passage that ran in straight line for the better part of a mile, broadening in places to nearly twenty paces in width. The rock of the segment was sedimentary limestone, the channel of an ancient river carved through the bed of an even more ancient sea. Mineralized water solutions and millennia immemorial had caused the formation of tapered speleothems, tall stalagmites rising from the floor, reaching up toward corresponding stalactites that depended from the ceiling – and here and there amative spirits of the underworld and receptive deities of the overworld touched fingertips, creating an impressive colonnade.
And through that lithic forest came the dead.
They proceeded swiftly and in absolute silence, gliding along the passage and among the pilasters with grace and ease, a fluid current of crimson capes and black scale armour, bristling with straight-headed yari spears and curved-bladed naginata glaives, ghostly streamers waving in their wake like streaks of fresh blood.
There came two Scabbards of Blades, each troop numbering about one hundred unsouled warriors and led by a Dead Sword, all under the command of a single Blood Mage. The crypt had not housed three Veins of Blood Mages, as Eldurion had suggested, but rather one Vein and two Scabbards. The Vein, Yllufarr knew, had gone to wield the madness of blood magic in the name of the Red Wraith at the Seven Hills. The two Scabbards of soldiers had remained, though not in their caskets, but concealed elsewhere, shielded in an unknown manner from the highly acute senses of the Athain Prince and his capable companions.
The Sun Lord had seen enough. His suspicions had been substantiated, his most discomfiting misgivings confirmed. He peeled himself from the wall and plunged into the darkness, speeding away from the Blood Mage and its Dead Swords and their Scabbards, bringing word and warning and bearing black death in his soul.
The Prince of the Neverborn reappeared as abruptly as he had vanished.
Rundul lowered his hand from his beard. “Where’d you go?”
The Sun Lord ignored the Darad’s question and offered one of his own: “What lies between us and the lair of the Blood King?”
“More of the same, I suppose. I do sense that we draw close to a chasm of some sort, wide and deep and spanned by a stone bridge. After that, another tunnel leading directly to… our destination.” The Captain of the mara Waratur scowled. “Why do you ask? You’re supposed to be the patient one.”
The Ath glanced back down the tunnel, his hooded head slightly cocked.
“We are pursued,” Eldurion deduced quietly, his voice the sound of steely sinew bunching under tight skin. His eyes were mere slivers of captured starsheen in the lightless night of his cowl. “And have been since the crypt.”
“Is there a place advantageous to standing and fighting, friend Rundul?”
Rundul shrugged. “The bridge is as good as any.”
But the Prince of the Neverborn shook his head.
“Not against this foe. A passage is required, sufficiently broad to permit battle, but narrow enough that they cannot flank or fly above in order to assail from behind.”
The Darad’s frown blackened. Fly above? What hunts us… dragons? He tightened his grasp of his war-axe.
“Across the bridge, where the tunnel begins again, the opening feels… close… almost snug. I can’t be absolutely certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s maybe three yards across, the height probably a little less than that… I think.”
“You’re a fountain of conviction, Stone Lord,” the aged Fian murmured beneath his breath.
Yllufarr nodded sharply.
“Take us there. And quickly.”
They raced through the underdark, three dim shapes so very dissimilar in their protocols of motion. The first, huge and hulking, barreling into the blackness like a machine; the next, lithe and light and long of stride, as grey as a ghost, as swift and as silent as a swung sword; the last was less than a shadow, a conception, a perception, no more than a notion that something moved there, a hiss in the night, cold and perilous.
A torrid heat pushed against them as they pressed forward, the temperature mounting, incalescent, more the sweltering weightiness of a soaring desert sun than the calming calefaction of a campfire. They were as three moths flying furiously toward flame, eager for the fire, the promise of immolation compelling them, beckoning them. By the time they achieved the chasm the heat was scorching, a single constant thermal wave assaulting them, a burning wind that knew neither hush nor pause.
“Dragon breath is a thing more frore,” the Sun Lord mused as he peered down. His nostrils flared. “And not nearly as foul.”
A great gorge split the rock of the earth, a gulf in excess of one hundred yards across and at least a thousand deep. A river of fire roared along the floor of the basin, red rapids of molten rock, bubbling bursts capped in black, an infernal rage howling in the heart of the world. Spanning the chasm was a vast bridge of solid stone, quite broad where the threesome had halted in the yawning egress of the tunnel, but tapering significantly as it approached the opening to the passage opposite.
Eldurion turned his back to the bridge, his blade before him, his glittering eyes fixed upon the tunnel along which the company had come. Far beneath the cacophony of the conflagration, whispers of warning brushed against the ridges of the Fian’s ears. Something hummed within the binding leather of the bundle on his back.
“Hurry, Stone Lord. They gain upon us, and swiftly.”
“Let them come, Fian,” growled the Darad from where he had crouched. The palm of one huge hand was flat upon the rock at his knee, rubbing here, pressing there, seeking, sensing. “It’s not like the Blood King doesn’t know we’re here now.” He straightened, hefting his axe almost happily. “We’re good. No glyphs, no wards, and the bridge is sound. No traps or triggers whatsoever. The enemy seems quite sure of himself down here.”
Rundul lumbered onto the span, stout legs pounding the stone. The severe heat of the burning river blasted upward, a single incessant wave of invisible fire. The determined Darad did not so much as flinch as he bolted across.
“Don’t even sneak a look down,” he called back over the howl of flame. “Your eyes will sizzle like fried bacon. And for the love of Mother Earth, don’t slip! Even the Ath’s fancy feather-fall won’t save him here.”
Eldurion and Prince Yllufarr followed with alacrity despite the arcane protection afforded the former by Grimroth and the virtual invulnerability of the latter – the surety of some shields, it was true, should be trusted but never tested. The concentrated heat singed and scorched, but the relatively narrow maw of the tunnel was achieved without incident, and there the trio briefly paused.
Yllufarr peered back across the chasm. “We are on the thresh-hold now, friend Rundul?”
“Right on the Blood King’s doorstep. I hope the red bastard doesn’t expect me to take my boots off.”
“As do we all,” Eldurion added blandly.
“Don’t laugh, Fian – I haven’t removed my boots in almost a hundred years.”
Defeated, the aged warrior could only shake his hooded head.
The Prince of the Athair looked upon his companions, and there was an abstract thing in that colourless gaze that drew them in, brought them close to him. He graced the Darad with a sincere smile, put a hand upon the Fian’s shoulder.
