Shadow Chaser tcos-2

by Алексей Пехов

  “You were always fond of foul jokes, slave!” the woman replied contemptuously.

  Now I felt delighted that I hadn’t tried to save their lives. Anyone who talked with the Messenger on equal terms was no companion for me.

  “And for all your short life you have been distinguished by tremendous conceit,” the Messenger parried mockingly. “You took too much upon yourself, my dear Leta, as did the lovely Lafresa here, and you have paid for it.”

  “I have always been faithful and carried out all the Master’s orders!” Leta retorted furiously.

  “Always? Come now, Leta! Don’t try to deceive an old friend. There’s only you, me, and Lafresa here; you can feel free to tell me how you managed to bungle such a simple task.”

  “We did everything just as the Master ordered! For the good of—”

  “Don’t give me any speeches about the good of the cause! Leave that for the priests and those tawdry peacocks who call themselves noblemen. Come on, tell me why your purple cloud didn’t work!” the Messenger barked. “Why does the Master still not have the Key?”

  A purple cloud! Was the Master’s faithful dog talking about the shamanic storm? It certainly sounded as if he meant the abomination that had almost wiped out our group in Hargan’s Wasteland.

  “I don’t understand how it happened,” the woman said in a tired voice. “You know I did everything carefully and correctly, just as I was told. The servants killed all of the Nameless One’s shamans—they were hunting the travelers, too—then we used the brew they had prepared and concealed the spell with a storm so that, darkness forbid, the Order would not get wind of anything, and we sent the magic off on the right wind. Everything was carefully calculated, and no one should have survived. Neither the elves nor the elfess had enough knowledge to oppose me. They couldn’t have destroyed the cloud!”

  “But they did!” the Messenger retorted implacably.

  “It wasn’t them,” Leta argued. “You can smell the shamanism of the dark elves and the Firstborn a league away, and there was nothing.”

  “Don’t make excuses!” Lafresa exclaimed shrilly. “He’s nothing but a servant.”

  “It wasn’t them,” the other woman insisted stubbornly, taking no notice of what Lafresa had said.

  “Not them? Then who? In the name of the Font of Bloody Dew, tell me who!” the Messenger hissed.

  “I don’t know. Someone powerful. And probably a magician, because we couldn’t sense anything. Someone you didn’t take into account.”

  And his name was Valder. It was my acquaintance who had shattered the purple cloud into a million tiny shreds and saved our group.

  “Stop lying! You’re walking a knife edge as it is. Everything was taken into account. Everything! Or do you expect me to believe that there’s a magician hiding among those ants? Player from Avendoom didn’t say anything about any powerful magician. Nobody from the Order went with the group, he made sure of that!”

  “I don’t trust Player,” Leta muttered. “He’s a fox who could mess up our plans at any moment.”

  “Immortality and knowledge make a magnificent incentive for loyalty.”

  “If he’s so loyal to our cause, then why is the thief still alive?”

  “The plans have changed.”

  “That’s stupid!”

  This woman would have done better to follow Lafresa’s example and say nothing, if she wanted to live a bit longer.

  “Just a little more and I’ll rip your tongue out, girl! It’s not for you to discuss the will of the Master.”

  “No threats, please, Messenger! I knew you in another life, servant of the Master, so save your eloquence for the sheep. You’ll find them much easier to frighten than me!”

  “Oh, yes, they’re much more compliant than you are. But you’re no different from them. You’re just as mortal, although you can remember all your previous lives. But we’re not talking about the servants, we’re talking about you and your friend here. You made a mistake, you failed to justify the Master’s trust, and that’s why you’re here, waiting to pay the penalty.”

  “Is that why you came? How low the one they now call the Messenger has fallen! Well, I’m ready to die,” Lafresa declared proudly.

  “Have you any last words you would like to say?”

  “No.”

  Leta laughed hoarsely and hysterically: “Unlike you I can always return to the House of Love. But you, my dear J—”

  The man suddenly started wheezing. Now that was something we’d seen before. When this character got upset, he liked to grab the nearest person within reach round the neck.

  “Ne-ver,” he hissed quietly. “Do you hear me? Never dare to speak my real name! Yes, thanks to Lafresa I was born in the House of Pain and the House of Fear, and I can never even touch Love, but now I am in the House of Power, and it is not for a little louse like you to speak my name!” The wheezing gradually became a gurgling, and then I heard the soft thud of a falling body—our messenger was a very affable fellow.

  “If I had my way, you would never leave this cell, Lafresa. I haven’t forgotten. So when you meet the Master you can thank him in person for sparing your life! You’re lucky, there’s a job for you to do.”

  “What can I do for my lord?” The surviving woman’s voice didn’t even tremble. She wasn’t saddened in the least by the death of her friend.

  “You are one of only a few who can be trusted with the Key. You will take it and bring it here.”

  “The Key?”

  “Have you become hard of hearing? The artifact is in the hands of one of the servants. You will bring it back, or is that too difficult for you?”

  “No … it’s not difficult. But why me?”

  “You ask the right question. Leta could have been in your place. And any feeble human, even without your abilities, could have brought this thing to the Master, but the problem is that … the Key has been attached. The elfess has already worked her shamanism and now the bonds will have to be broken. Apart from you there are only five others who are capable of that. And to anticipate your question, the reason you have been chosen instead of them is as follows: Player is too busy in Avendoom and the others are too far away. And they would require a lot of time to prepare before they could even begin.… Knowing your natural gift for Kronk-a-Mor, I make bold to presume that you won’t need any preparation. Or almost none…”

  “When does the Master need the Key?”

  “In two weeks at the most.”

  “It will take me four months to get to Ranneng from here.”

  “You will be there the day after tomorrow. Collect the artifact, break the bond, bring it to the Master, and then, perhaps, our lord will forget your annoying blunder. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “I shall need time. I have to wait for a propitious conjunction of the stars, otherwise the bonds will not break.”

  “You have no time. Try not to make a mess of this.”

  “Take off my chains.”

  I heard a quiet clicking sound.

  “Take the lantern and get out of here.”

  “Gladly,” the woman responded.

  “Remember, this time you’d better not make any mistakes, or it will be a long time before you see the House of Love again.”

  “I shall remember your words, Messenger.”

  I saw that the woman was short, with bare feet, but I couldn’t get a look at the features of her face. If this Lafresa was going to turn up out of the blue at the Nightingales’ mansion to collect the Key, somehow or other I had to get there in time to stop her. She walked off with the Messenger following her.

  I waited for the sound of their footsteps to fade away.

  “Harold, now you’ve stopped thinking altogether,” Valder remarked sulkily.

  “Well, you’re a real chatterbox today,” I replied to the archmagician. “What’s the problem?”

  “Did you hear what he said? It takes four months to get to R
anneng, but she’ll be there the day after tomorrow.” Then Valder disappeared again.

  Ah, darkness! By the time I got to the city, the Key would probably already be gone! And I couldn’t warn Miralissa or Markauz, either. The only thing I could do—much as I loathed the idea—was follow those two and …

  And what? Stop them? Or ask them to take me along?

  Sagot, show me the way! I walked out of the cell and then, keeping one hand on the wall, set off toward the staircase, in the same direction the Messenger and the woman had gone earlier.

  I tried to walk quickly and silently—as far as that was possible in the pitch-black darkness.

  The pair I was following were fifteen yards ahead of me. I didn’t dare move any closer to the Master’s servants because I was afraid of being noticed, and I judged how far away they were by sound. As soon as their steps sounded quieter, I sped up and moved closer to the pair in front of me. If I overdid it and the sound started getting louder, I stopped and waited before carrying on.

  We walked on like that until they came to the stairway. Then I had to wait for Lafresa and the Messenger to walk up before I could follow them.

  It took me a long time to climb the stairs. In the first place, it was just as dark as ever, the steps were completely different sizes, and I had to feel my way along, so I could only move at a snail’s pace. In the second place, the stairway itself was very long: At first it went upward, then it started spiraling round and round, and it went on and on and on.

  I felt as if I was going to offer up my soul to Sagot right there on that accursed stairway and, naturally, I lost sight of the pair I’d been following all this time.

  When the steps finally ended, I peeped out cautiously into a corridor illuminated by widely spaced smoking torches. No one. No Messenger and no Lafresa. The massive stone-block walls were almost completely covered in soot, and the arched ceiling was far from clean, too. Here and there it still bore traces of genuine whitewash, but to my inexperienced eye they looked decades old. No doors in the walls, nothing but inscriptions in some language that I didn’t know—either ogric or the language of the Firstborn, I don’t have a clue about the writing of either race.

  I hadn’t walked very far, perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty paces, when the corridor ended at another stairway, but this time there were only twenty steps at most. At the top of the steps the thick darkness started again. I put my foot on the first step, and my nose was immediately assailed by a faint, moldy odor of dust and decay.

  “Oh, no,” I muttered to myself. I walked back a little way along the corridor and took a torch down off the wall.

  The flame trembled and spat sparks in the draft that somehow managed to find its way into the underground maze. Then I walked up the steps into a small hall and swore out loud—I didn’t like what I saw one little bit.

  There was a skeleton lying stretched out on a crudely built wooden table. I could tell straightaway that it wasn’t human. To judge from the fangs, it had probably been an orc or an elf. And it had a rusty hatchet stuck in the top of its skull.

  I’m not afraid of dead men, especially the kind that lie still and keep their mouths shut. I’m not even really worried by the wretches that members of the Order call “the arisen” and the simple folk call “wanderers” or simply “the living dead.” They’re fairly clumsy creatures, harmless as long as you keep away from their hands and teeth. And try not to get under their feet in general.

  The living dead do exist, that’s a fact. But I’d never heard of living skeletons before. How can bones move if they have no muscles, tendons, pads of cartilage, and all the rest to connect them?

  Two answers immediately came to mind: Either some idiot was jerking the bones about on strings, or the shamanism of the ogres was responsible—and that, of course, was entirely possible.

  Anyway, I had no time to figure out why the skeleton lying on the table was jerking its legs about rather friskily and apparently trying to get up. I was concerned with a different question: Would it be able to do what it wanted and would that be dangerous for me?

  The skeleton jerked its legs and tried to stand up. But it was getting nowhere, because some kind soul had pinned its spine to the table with huge iron staples.

  I have to admit that curiosity is a failing of mine. I walked a little bit closer. The creature immediately turned its head in my direction and hissed. I swear by Sagot that it hissed, even though it had no lungs or tongue or any of the other things that decent people are supposed to have in order to make sounds.

  The black holes of the eye sockets, with a myriad of crimson sparks swirling in them, were trained on me. “Free me, mortal!”

  I was dumbfounded for a moment. If skeletons had learned to speak, it was time for me to move into the cemetery—the end of the world had to be near.

  “Not in this life,” I replied grimly, and backed as far away as possible.

  The dead creature lowered its head onto the table and hissed in fury, like oil poured onto a red-hot skillet, then started writhing and jerking about. It really put its heart into it (except, of course, that it didn’t have one), and the table started shifting across the floor.

  “I shall free my-self an-y-way!”

  Every syllable was accompanied by a sharp jerk that set the table shuddering. The staple at the dead creature’s waist started to yield ever so slightly.

  I decided it would be better to go on my way and not tempt fate. The creature’s spine was pinned down along its entire length, and it would have to jerk for at least a week. But the most important thing was to make a start. The first restraint had already yielded, and the others would follow. Water wears away stone, as they say. I wasn’t going to hang about to observe what would happen when this thing broke free.

  For the next few minutes after that, nothing strange, let alone unpleasant, happened, for which Sagot be praised and glorified forever! The floor rose up a very slight incline and the torch lit up the dreary gray blocks of stone gleaming with the underground damp, and the inscriptions scrawled on the walls by someone’s careless hand. The ceiling retreated to a great height, so that the flame of the torch could no longer pick it out of the gloom. A slight echo appeared, doubling the sound of every step I took, and I had to walk almost on tiptoe.

  The Messenger and the woman had dissolved into the darkness, and now there was no way that I could possibly catch up with them.

  “Start with the Lower South Level,” said the Messenger’s voice, spreading along the corridor. I dropped the torch on the floor and stamped it out with my foot. “The Master has no more need of them.”

  “Can I…?” asked Blag, his voice trembling with excitement.

  “I don’t care what you do, Lost Soul,” the Messenger replied, and every word was full of contempt. “If you want to eat them, then eat them; if you want to carve trinkets out of their bones, then do it; but first do as I have told you.”

  “Of course, my lord! Old Blag will take care of their bones. Oh, yes! He’ll take care of them.”

  The voices seemed to come from all around me. They enveloped me, so that I couldn’t tell where the speakers were. I was sure that the Messenger and the old man weren’t in the corridor, or they would definitely have seen the light of my torch. It sounded as if they were talking somewhere behind the wall, but I hadn’t seen any door while the torch was still alight.

  “Permit me to say, my lord … Please forgive me if it is none of my business … but you shouldn’t have let that girl go.”

  The sound of Blag’s voice was coming from right above my head now. Were they walking on the ceiling, or what?

  “Just do as I told you!” the Messenger snapped. “Otherwise you’ll find yourself back in the place the Master found you, feeding the worms again!”

  Blag started muttering in fright and the section of wall directly in front of me slid to one side, revealing a room that was lit by a lantern. I didn’t even have time to jump aside; the secret door opened so suddenly that I
was caught in the circle of light. Blag was coming out into the corridor and he saw me.

  I swear on Kli-Kli’s head that I saw a momentary flash of amazement in those black pools of eyes. The old man grinned, baring his rotten teeth, and I flung his own weapon—the bone—at him without bothering to think.

  I must say that I’m no great master at throwing ordinary knives, let alone bones. But this time someone must have guided my hand.

  I didn’t hit the old man, but I did hit the oil lamp in his hand. It exploded, and the flame threw itself on Blag like a polecat crazed with hunger. The old man howled, dropped onto the floor, and started rolling around, trying to put out the fire. The flames enveloped him completely, devouring his clothes and his flesh. I stood there, completely spellbound by this terrible sight, and only noticed the frenzied gleam of a pair of amber-yellow eyes at the very last moment.

  A black shadow sprang at me, I instinctively jumped back, and the clawed hand extended to tear out my heart missed.

  Almost missed.

  The claws ripped open my shirt, and then a clump of pain exploded somewhere in the region of my stomach. I think I just had time to yell before the world splintered into a thousand excruciating shards.

  6

  Friends And Enemies

  The black night of the universe and the icy fire of magic. A world within a world, a dream within a dream, a drop within a drop, a mirror within a mirror …

  I’ve been here once before.

  When was that? An eternity earlier or an eternity later?

  Ah yes! I think I remember—it was in the distant future, on that day when Miralissa bound the Key of the Doors of Hrad Spein to my consciousness. On that memorable evening I fell through into the black night of Nothingness, into a dream of a dream, filled with fiery flakes of the crimson flame of Kronk-a-Mor.