by T. O. Munro
The trio of interlopers skulked unsteadily along the Southern side of the plaza heading for the steeply rising avenue which led towards the heights of the capital.
“Where you going?” an orc challenged them. “Digging is over there.” The lime hued monster waved an arm towards the mined opening in the middle of the plaza.
“The temple,” Tordil in Thomelator’s form hastily assured him.
“No-one goes up there, not without escort,” the orc grunted.
“You escort us then,” Tordil commanded. “Or you can answer to Marwella as to why you have delayed her servants. You know how many orc bodies walk with the undead, denied pleasure in the feasting halls of the afterlife? Do you want to be one of them?”
The orc glowered uncertainly.
“Vos amici mei mandabo, Orcus!” At Tordil’s declamation, his hand twirling in a subtle incantation, the orc’s grimace softened into a lopsided grin. “You will escort us then?”
“Yes, little master, Borok escort you,” the orc agreed slapping an arm against his leather breastplate in salute.
So the quartet of enchanted orc, faux zombies, and disguised elf trod and shuffled along the cobbles of the regal avenue to the summit of Morwencairn. A score or more of orcs and outlanders patrolled the open space between temple and citadel. They spared an interested glance at the arrival of a wizard and two zombies, but the presence of Borok and the group’s self-assured walk towards the temple steps quickly stifled their curiosity.
The two ersatz zombies faltered as they crossed the steps. The polished marble was obscured by countless splattered red brown stains. A testament to the bloody tragedy which had recently unfolded at the temple’s entrance. The steps gave them some excuse for the stumbling to mask the nauseated dismay which had shaken their composure.
The temple itself was deserted. A great slaughter had been wrought in here as outside, but the dead were evident only in the trails and splashes of their life’s blood across the ruin of broken pews and sundered altar. This holiest of the chapels of the Goddess still held some terror for the orcs and outlanders for her ire burned into the consciences of the infidels and betrayers alike. It was not a tangible sense of threat, more a deeply nauseating sense of foreboding. Borok bobbed unhappily the chains of Tordil’s enchantment loosened by the intrusive atmosphere.
“What you want in this place anyway?” he demanded querulously.
“The Master himself commanded it,” Tordil replied in a soothing voice. The two zombies walked, a little too smoothly, down the nave gazing up and around at the devastation. Then the smaller one gasped. Hanging over the altar was a bloodied rag of a man. Ropes from the body’s wrists slung over sconces in the wall pulled him into a crucifix. Blood from a hundred wounds of varying depths had dripped, dribbled and spurted in a wide radius over the inlaid floor. His white hair was torn, shorn and plastered in blood across his face. The beard of which he had, in life been so proud, had formed a makeshift gag to stifle his final screams.
“By the Goddess,” the smaller zombie exclaimed. “It is Archbishop Forven.”
The last vestiges of Tordil’s charm spell evaporated at this unfeasibly articulate zombie. Instead the orc’s face twisted in a fury as fierce as battle rage. “You not zombies,” he howled. “You tricked me, wizardspawn.” Borok slid his broad sword from its scabbard, making the small zombie the first focus for his wrath. His target ducked with a squeak and fled along the nave. The pursuing orc was blind to the danger as the other zombie and the wizard mumbled hasty incantations. The wizard’s struck first and the unfortunate Borok erupted in flame. Screaming in rage and pain he spun round. The sword flailed still as the howling orcish torch blundered towards the temple entrance.
The taller zombie seized a broken strut from the floor and swung it like a club, catching the incandescent orc behind the knees. Still alive despite the flames that consumed his leathery hide, Borok swung wildly with his sword at ankle height. The zombie leapt lightly over the blade and clubbed the orc again across the head. The wizard drew a fine elven blade from concealement beneath the robes on his back and, with a precise thrust, silenced the unfortunate Borok permanently.
“Check the door, Hepdida,” the taller zombie commanded, exchanging a scowl with the wizard. The smaller zombie scurried to the temple entrance while her companions exchanged a few heated words. “There’s only three of us, Tordil. This had to be subtle and unobtrusive, not drawing attention to ourselves. Where in the name of the Goddess does an immolation spell fit with that?”
“Twas the first one that sprang to mind, my Lady,” the wizard replied.
“There’s a couple of orcs coming this way.” The smaller one had taken a peek through a crack in the door. “They just look curious now, but they’ll be more than that when they see the Captain’s latest roast.”
“See it,” the leader snorted. “They’ll smell it in a moment. Quick, through the sacistry to the Archbishop’s palace.”
The others needed no encouragement. The storming of the temple had sundered all the bars and bolts that might have secured the doorways and bought them some time. There was no option but to run, to run and find somewhere to hide. They disappeared down the passageway at the Eastern end of the chancel just as the two orcs pushed their way in through the Western entrance. There was a clamour of guttural grunts when they espied the smouldering remnants of Borok followed by barked orders to summon reinforcements from the plaza.
In the corridor, hidden from view, there was a shimmer of dis-spelled energy as the interlopers abandoned their magical disguises and took on once more the form of elf captain, red headed priestess and scarred servant girl. Only the borrowed rags and faded robes remained of their masquerade.
“You’d better be right about this hidden gateway, girl,” Niarmit said. “Right and quick. Which way is it?”
Hepdida led them swiftly through a warren of corridors. The Archbishop’s palace adjoined the temple and had been home not just to the leading prelate but sundry other notables in the church of the Goddess. The quarters of sexton and canon and under-bishop together with their myriad assistants and servants ensured that the archbishop’s residence was nearly as capacious a complex as the citadel itself. All around were the signs of the sacking. Corridors strewn with torn papers and ripped cloth, doors caved in and blood scrawls on the walls. Hepdida led the way up a back stairway to an upper landing. She stopped outside a double doorway imprinted with the sigil of the Archbishop. “It’s here,” she announced, pointing at the wall opposite the doorway.
Tordil set to work, fingers tracing the smooth surface in search of some hidden seam where the stone might slide open. “I can find nothing,” he announced in exasperation. Echoing down the corridors came the shouts and grunts of pursuit. “You must be mistaken girl. Truly there is nothing here.”
“Are you quite sure, Hepdida?” Niarmit probed with one eye in the stairway they had emerged from, whence the shouts of orc and outlander were drawing rapidly closer. “Could you have mis-remembered it?”
The girl sniffed at this fresh doubt and pushed the elf to one side. “Of course I am sure.” Her hands stroked the stone and at their touch a fine line of light lit up which stretched and spread into the outline of a portal. As elf and priestess watched in stunned silence, the light faded leaving only the dark bevelled edges to the dressed stone door. Hepdida gave the centre of the doorway a firm push and it pivoted noiselessly upwards to reveal steps spiralling down within the thick palace wall.
The clatter of mailed feet on the stairs they had ascended gave the trio all the encouragement they needed to duck through the opening. The stone door swung shut behind them and, with the briefest flare of magic, sealed itself once more invisible. The darkness was absolute for a few seconds but then Niarmit found herself able to discern the shadowy forms of her companions. At first she had thought it was simply her eyes growing accustomed to the darkness, but then she saw the light emanating from small gemstones set in niches on the wall,
glowing with faint magical illumination.
“I would swear there was nothing there,” Tordil was muttering, still rueing his failure to discover the opening
“I told you it was,” Hepdida riposted.
“How did you know?” Niarmit asked looking around at the walls of well formed masonry. “How could a servant girl know and uncover a secret that could remain hidden from an elven sorcerer?”
Hepdida shrugged at Niarmit’s enquiry. “When I was a girl, my mother served in the Archbishop’s palace l lived in the servant’s quarters. An observant child could learn a lot.”
“We should move,” Tordil hissed as a commotion of shouts dimly penetrated the sealed stone door. “The alert will spread to the citadel soon enough. Let us get there before their vigilance is fully roused.”
Niarmit nodded her consent and Hepdida led the way down the winding spiral. The priestess estimated they had descended full four flights. That took them well below not just the basement kitchens but the under-cellars of the prelate’s palace, before the staircase ended in a low ceilinged simple passageway. More of the enchanted gems warmed to cast their magical light along its length revealing an even corridor lined with dressed stone. It led away in an arrow straight line inclined gently downwards.
“Is this heading West?” Niarmit queried, her mental compass disorientated by the spiralling descent.
Hepdida nodded with a gulp. “Come on.”
“Methinks you’re an unusually observant servant girl to know of this passageway.” Tordil observed sourly as he followed.
They passed an opening to the left and then another to the right, but Hepdida walked past both of them, albeit with a slight shudder. “Are you all right?” Niarmit asked.
“Old memories. I got lost here once as a child. My mother found me crying.”
The floor had flattened out between the two openings and now it began to rise again. Niarmit reckoned they had gone about four hundred yards when the corridor ended at the foot of another spiral staircase.
“You know where this comes out?” Niarmit asked.
Hepdida shrugged. “Inside the citadel, that’s all my mother told me.”
“If you and your mother knew of this, mere servants, what chance is there that others have not discovered it also?” Tordil bristled. “What’s to say there isn’t a troop of orcs and outlanders waiting for us at the top of this stairway?”
“You couldn’t discover it,” Hepdida simply reminded the elf.
“Enough bickering,” Niarmit snapped at them both. “Tordil’s spell of disguise and Hepdida’s local knowledge have already got us far deeper into an enemy occupied fortress than we had any right to expect. If the Goddess has smiled thus far on our venture, then I think we may trust to her favour a little while longer.” So saying she began to climb, followed by the chastened elf and servant girl.
The stairway ended in another blank stone wall which proved inpenetrable to Tordil’s craft. They looked at Hepdida but the girl replied “I never came this far before. I don’t know how this one works.”
With a sigh, Niarmit leant against the wall and immediately the thin glowing tracery outlining a door began to appear. “Hah,” the priestess announced. “It seems these doorways need a woman’s touch?”
“Or maybe it was enchanted by some elf hater of Thren the eighth’s time,” Tordil suggested, resigned to his failure.
They held their collective breath as the door swung open around its ceiling pivot, but there was no clash of steel or shouts of alarm from any sentry. Carefully they stepped from their hiding place into the heart of the captured fortress. “Do you recognise it?” Tordil asked as they surveyed the broad corridor they had just entered. It stretched to left and right and opposite them was a pair of ancient double doors decorated with ornate carvings of the crest of Eadran the Vanquisher.
Niarmit shook her head. “I never saw much of the citadel and then only the public receiving rooms. I would say we are in the king’s private chambers.”
“Where now then?”
“And where are the orcs and outlanders?” Hepdida asked the obvious question.
Straining to hear, Niarmit caught the sound of distant shouts, muffled by walls and doors. “I think Tordil’s diversion in the temple may be working to our advantage. It seems to have drawn some attention across the plaza. As to direction, well?” She clasped her hand around the Ankh still hanging on its chain from her neck. There was an unaccustomed warmth to it and, on an impulse she declared, “We go this way.”
As they rounded the corner at the end, they ran straight into two burly outlanders engaged in an agitated conversation about false alarms and idiot orcs and wizards. Surprise was on the intruders’ side as Tordil skewered one and Niarmit spun a spell of holding that immobilised the other. Another swing of Tordil’s sword and the guards had been finished off without a sound. Still there was no place to conceal the bodies nor time to wait for others to happen upon them. Niarmit seized a mace and shield from one corpse, while Hepdida grabbed a dagger from the other. Reassured at having a weapon in her hands, Niarmit leapt on, guided by the growing heat within the ankh. It was not that sharp burst of fire when her unknown heir had died, but a more comforting glow of reassurance.
The passageways were becoming more familiar as they reached the public areas. They jinked through an empty antechamber where once petitioners had waited for an audience with the King. A solitary orc was ambling along the corridor between throne room and antechamber when the trio fell upon him. Tordil’s sword missed its first thrust and Niarmit’s spell gripped too late to silence the cry of alarm from the creature’s throat. It was but seconds to rectify the fault and send the orc spinning in its own ichor to the floor, but the damage was done. Two grey green faces poked out of a side passage and quickly took in the scene. They took the precaution of raising the alarm before charging down on the hostile trio.
“In here, now.” Niarmit commanded, pushing Hepdida ahead of her into the throne room. Tordil followed, spinning round to bar the door behind them, just as the orcs hammered into it. The bar bowed before the impact but still held. Niarmit glanced around the great throne room. It was a place she had not seen since her ill-fated petition to King Bulveld seeking assistance for her hard pressed father. It was empty now, inhabited by shades and shadows. Tordil and Hepdida sprinted along the side walls barring the other entrances as Niarmit paced down the centre aisle towards the pillar on which sat the object of their quest. There was an ugly sprawling stain of red and brown on the floor before the pillar and the defilement of this place was tangible in the foul ordure that orcs had thrown or smeared across floor and walls and the stench of their waste. But the Helm gleamed inviolate atop its pedestal. There was renewed shouting at the door and now the other entrances were subjected to some external assault.
“We’re trapped,” Hepdida cried.
“If that is indeed a weapon, my lady,” Tordil called as Niarmit drew level with the gleaming artefact. “Then now would be a good time to try it out.”
Niarmit picked up the Helm two handed and felt a longing throb from the ankh about her neck. It was a simple smooth basinet of untarnished steel. Its surface was unmarked, unpitted by blow or corrosion. A solid piece of beaten metal with a face plate that covered eyes and nose but not the mouth. She turned it over in her hands, looked inside for any clue as to its power.
There was a crack from the bar at the double doored main entrance. It would not hold for long. “Now my lady?” Tordil called.
Niarmit spun round to face the danger and lifted the Helm above her head. She shut her eyes, muttered her father’s name in prayer, and brought the ancient helmet firmly down upon her head.
There was an explosion of light in her eyes, a burning sensation at her temple and then everything went black.
***
Niarmit could not at first understand why she was blind, then she remembered how the helm covered the eyes with solid metal plate, and then she realised her eyes were st
ill shut and she opened them and she could see and what she saw made no sense at all.
She was still clad in the stinking stolen rags of the zombie that she had been impersonating, but the Helm was not on her head and she was not in the throne room of the citadel.
She was in a garden looking up at a palace, a great sprawling palace that stretched in diverse wings to left and right, each element of it reminiscent of a different architectural era and all clashing in an unholy melange of styles. Though it had been near evening on a grey cloudy autumn day when she had put on the Helm, the noon sun shone brightly summer high in a clear blue sky. Somewhere a bell was ringing, like a call to prayer, and then there was a figure, a man running from the palace down angled steps to the garden in which she waited, bemused and worried for her absent friends.
The man was thin with sandled feet and a toga of white cloth edged in purple wrapped around his body and over his shoulder. The tight garb seemed to restrict his movements for he took short fast steps as he descended to Niarmit’s level. “So sorry,” he was saying. “So very sorry.”
Niarmit frowned as he stopped and bowed low. “Where is this? Why are you sorry? Am I dead? Is this some kind of heaven?”
“Oh no, Majesty,” he said while maintaining his supplicant’s pose. “I’m sorry I was not here to welcome you. We have been waiting so long and we were not sure when to expect you.”
“Expect me?”
“Come please,” he held out his hand. “Come with me, there is much to explain and we don’t have much time.”
She pulled away from him. “We have no time at all. My friends are in danger. I was in the throne room when I was magicked away to this place. I must get back to them.”
