Scholar of Decay

by Tanya Huff

  The pain in his hand became nothing to the pain in his heart as a howl of despair clawed its way free.

  The blood-scent had drawn the hunters from their dens. The sound of despair quickened their pace.

  Louise listened, head cocked, as the goblin she’d been hunting scurried down a narrow side passage it obviously believed too small for her to negotiate. Idiot, she thought. They never seemed to learn that size could be misleading, and the family could maneuver through areas too small for goblins. Of course goblins, she added silently, are notoriously thickheaded.

  As she was hunting for fun, she allowed her prey to gain a little distance while she groomed a flank and wondered what was taking Aurek Nuikin so long. Although she’d slept earlier, she didn’t enjoy being up in the day, nor did she enjoy being kept waiting; both made her irritable.

  If the delay was a result of something as simple as an inability to find the entrance to the catacombs, Aurek obviously wasn’t powerful enough to be of any use to her. If the delay meant that he’d run into an inhabitant in the Narrows he couldn’t handle, the same conclusion applied. If he was just taking his time, he was extremely fortunate that she needed to test him or, when he finally appeared, the guardian in the workshop would be the least of his worries.

  She’d wait for him until she finished with the goblin. If he hadn’t appeared by then, he’d better be dead in the Narrows—or he was going to wish he were.

  Mangy fur plastered to near-skeletal bodies, the pack of feral dogs followed the blood-scent to the edge of the portico. In the Narrows they were as often prey as predator and so approached with caution. Although the rain had washed away the smoke, hackles rose at the lingering scent of power.

  Had it not been for the blood drawing them forward …

  On his knees, his body curled around his misery, Aurek rocked back and forth, unable to go on. To have come so close and then have hope snatched away by cruel fate—to have himself destroyed his love’s best chance. The sense he so prided himself upon had melted in the conflagration with the amulet, had, like the golden artifact, dribbled away and left nothing behind but empty hopelessness.

  The pack leader, its hide an intricate pattern of scars, snarled as it attacked, hunger finally overwhelming fear.

  Instinct flung Aurek’s arm up over his throat. Teeth closed around wet oilskin and the heavy sweater beneath it rather than soft flesh. The weight of the dog threw him back against the building, and the pack could come at him from only three sides. Clothing intended as protection against the cold and damp delayed the inevitable as Aurek’s world collapsed to tooth and claw.

  He kicked out. An animal yelped. Another instantly replaced it.

  All at once he realized he didn’t want to die. Not here. Not like this. Not ripped apart by wild dogs like some common wanderer too weak to go on.

  With a sudden surge of strength, he slammed the dog gnawing at his right arm against the wall, loosening its hold. As satisfying as it was to hear it yelp and feel it fall away, brute force could not be the answer. There were too many for his meager fighting skills. The pack leader’s teeth pressed dull points of pain into his forearm—the animal either too stupid or too hungry to release its initial hold—and another dog tore at the coat by his elbow. Once the protection of the thick oilskin was gone …

  Thrusting his good hand into his pocket, shoulder raised to protect his face, he frantically searched for an answer. It would have to be fast, and it would have to be easy, for focus would be more difficult to achieve than usual.

  His fingers passed over the wrapped lump of phosphorus, a tangle of copper wire, a piece of thick chalk, a leather loop, a small silk bag filled with fine sand.… Of course! It was the first spell he’d ever learned and, while he hadn’t used it in some years, he knew it so well he doubted he’d get it wrong even with something trying to eat his arm.

  Hot breath washed against the side of his head.

  He jerked back in time to save most of his ear.

  Working his thumb through the drawstring of the silk bag, he spilled the contents awkwardly into his palm. Some of the sand fell to the bottom of his pocket, but he thought he still had enough. Rolling to the left, using his weight to dislodge a dog worrying at his oilskin, he yanked his hand free and threw the sand into the air. Praying it would cover a wide enough area, he clutched at the minimal focus he needed and shouted out the simple one-word component of the spell: “Sleep.” He could hear the rain again.

  Prying the jaws of the pack leader loose, for it hung on even in its sleep, Aurek got slowly, painfully, to his feet. Five dogs lay breathing heavily on the pavement around him, and one small bitch was backing warily away—lip curled off her teeth but self-preservation overwhelming hunger.

  Swiping at the blood dribbling down from his torn ear and soaking into his collar, Aurek waved his injured hand in her direction. “Go,” he panted, “away.”

  She growled. When he took a step toward her, she backed out into the rain and disappeared around a pillar of the portico.

  Leaning, exhausted, against the wall, he bound his finger more thoroughly but, as he could do nothing about it, he ignored the damage done to his ear. The pain of the bite, compared to the pain of having a fingernail ripped out, was nothing. With luck, Edik would get a chance to clean it before infection set in. His arm felt badly bruised but, though there were tooth marks indenting the sleeve, the fabric had held.

  “Now what?” he asked himself. Logic suggested that if he intended to continue searching in the Narrows, he kill the dogs while they slept; mercy would only result in further attacks. Unfortunately for logic, as inbred and vicious as they were, they were still dogs, and Aurek couldn’t do it. Not in cold blood.

  “So that’s that.” He would use the remaining daylight, such as it was, to concentrate on finding the workshop. While it wouldn’t be easy without the amulet to guide him …

  It’ll be impossible, a hateful voice scoffed gleefully in his head.

  Aurek set his teeth and pretended not to have heard. If he couldn’t find the workshop, perhaps he could find the shielding. The power required to hide the amulet should surely leave some signature of its own. He would quarter the Narrows until he found it.

  Disregarding the protest of abused muscles, he straightened, then paused. He’d used the only fireball he’d prepared. Would it be wiser to return home and rearm himself in case there were more of undead wandering about?

  Except the zombies he’d destroyed weren’t merely wandering. They’d snatched the amulet from him, and then headed purposefully away. Almost as if they were returning it to someone.

  Aurek’s heart began to pound. Could they be returning it to the workshop? A workshop that might not, after all, be abandoned? Was that the trap Louise Renier had set? Was he to walk blindly in and come face-to-face with disaster?

  The trio of zombies were ancient, dried and desiccated. If they’d been created by the wizard who’d created the amulet, then the wizard couldn’t possibly still be alive. Actually, Aurek could think of a number of ways the wizard could have survived—none he’d have tried himself, but as he already seemed to be dealing with a necromancer, he couldn’t rule them out.

  “But that’s not important.” He sagged back against the wall, unwilling to use energy on standing that he might use on reasoning. If the wizard was alive—or at least undead—he’d deal with that in its own time. His immediate problem remained finding the workshop.

  His studies had indicated that zombies were often used as guards. They were cheap to sustain and, though not very bright, they followed simple orders to the letter. If the zombies he’d destroyed had been left to guard the workshop and its contents, it would explain why they’d been interested only in the amulet.

  Unless another wizard had sensed the artifact once it had been taken out from the shielding and sent the zombies after it.

  Aurek sighed. There was a simple way to find out. If the same wizard who had created the amulet also created the zombie
s, the power signature would show it. The power signature of the amulet had been burned into his brain by a delirious hope but unfortunately, the zombies had been merely burned. Not enough ash remained for him to use in even the simplest of identification spells.

  All at once, he threw back his head and laughed. The conscious feral dog, who’d been creeping closer to her pack, leaped back into the shadows. Blood and bruises forgotten, Aurek ran out into the rain.

  He found what he was looking for halfway up a pile of crumbling masonry. The arm he’d torn from the zombie lay palm-up, unable to turn over, gray fingers flexing uselessly in the air. Holding it carefully just above the elbow, Aurek concentrated.

  The amulet and the zombies had been created by the same power source.

  Smiling broadly, though it hurt his face, Aurek laid the arm carefully on the pavement and stomped it into little pieces. A disgruntled beetle, narrowly avoiding oblivion, scurried for safety under a block of stone. Scooping up a finger bone, Aurek pulled three hairs from the crown of his head and rapidly braided them into a slender thong. Dmitri had been whining at him to get his hair cut, complaining that long hair was no longer in fashion for men. Good thing he hadn’t listened.

  Then he cast the same spell on the bone as he’d cast on the amulet.

  It spun in place, then slowly rose to point northeast.

  Exactly the direction in which the zombies had been traveling.

  As the human strode away, the raven watched from its perch on the roof of the portico. Too wise to get involved with wizards, it had come, as its kind always did, to feed on the carrion that remained after battle. That this battle had left not exactly carrion behind mattered not in the slightest.

  The dogs were sleeping, not dead.

  The dogs were helpless. That was all that was important to the raven.

  It launched itself into a swooping dive and landed by the head of a heavy-boned mutt of dubious parentage. A bit of a snob, like most of its kind, the raven cocked its glossy black head but decided a meal was a meal. It hopped up onto a scarred shoulder and aimed its beak at the rounded promise of an eye.

  A heartbeat later, it was dead.

  Not long after, all that remained were a few feathers and a pleasantly full dog who had a long scratch and sat down out of the rain to wait for the rest of her pack to wake.

  The Pull on the Finger Bone Was Now Straight down, the thong of braided hairs stretched taut, the loop beginning to dimple the skin of his finger.

  Aurek scowled at the cobblestones, but they were solid enough that even the rain ran off them into the gutter in the center of the street. He turned, slowly, and looked up at the semicircle of town-houses leaning drunkenly toward what once had been a private park.

  Below the houses were cellars, and below the cellars—as he had so nearly discovered firsthand—were sewers. And somewhere down below the Narrows was the workshop he needed to find.

  Slipping the finger bone into his pocket, he looked at the nearest house. Once, its tiny below-street-level courtyard had provided an entrance to the kitchens for servants and tradespeople. Now that approach was blocked by rubble and provided no entry at all. He’d have to go in the front door—or more specifically, through the gaping hole where the front door had been—and hopefully find a functional set of stairs.

  The edges of the front steps had been broken off, as though something heavy had bounced down them. Aurek studied the leering gargoyle that remained tucked under the eaves of the house, decided it likely would not fall in the next few moments, and hurried as quickly as the slick, uneven footing allowed up to the entrance. Once inside, out of the rain, on what appeared to be a reasonably solid floor, he took a moment to braid his hair. Wincing as he dragged it across his injured ear, he managed to get it more or less neatly back and out of his way. The last thing he needed was a hank of wet, bloody hair obscuring his vision.

  The entrance hall evoked a not entirely pleasant sensation of dèjá vu, as it was nearly identical to the house he currently lived in. The moldings, the paneling, even the black roses on the wallpaper were the same, only in a much more advanced state of decay. Rodent droppings were everywhere, and a hole the size of his fist had been gnawed through the wainscoting.

  Rats ruled the Narrows after dark.

  Although disconcerting, the similarities had one obvious advantage: he knew where everything was. The stairs down to the kitchens should be just behind the dining room.

  Stepping over the dining room threshold, his foot continued to drop after it should’ve touched the floor. Aurek bit off a yell, grabbed for something—anything—to stop his fall, and ended up dangling over a pit of indeterminate depth, clutching a heavy wooden door. Below him, he could see nothing but darkness within the missing circle of floor.

  The one hinge remaining attached to the doorframe began to pull loose.

  If he could get his right hand into his pocket and the leather loop …

  … but that would entail supporting his entire weight on his injured hand. He couldn’t risk it. He would have to save himself the hard way. Inch by torturous inch he crept back, barely daring to breathe until both feet were planted firmly on solid wood.

  “I’m an idiot,” he muttered, pulling out the phosphorus. “Saving power will do me little good if I splatter my brains over some long-abandoned wine cellar.”

  A moment later, the clean white light of the three globes illuminating the gutted interior of the house with depressing clarity, he successfully made his way around the damaged piece of floor and found the stairs leading down to the kitchens. Two of the risers had rotted out and collapsed under the weight of the treads but, surprisingly, he’d seen worse in other parts of the city.

  The air in the kitchen tasted of rust and other, less savory things. Fungus grew in a thick, oblong pile along the base of one wall, but Aurek had no interest in what lay rotting beneath it. He had to go deeper still.

  Constructed of stone, the stairs to the cellars had survived remarkably intact. Keeping a wary eye out for webs, Aurek began a careful descent. About halfway to the bottom, he paused. A trail of slime, glistening in the wizard-light, began at a rat hole gnawed through the outer wall, slid down each subsequent step, and continued across the cellar floor to a closed door at the back of the subterranean room. After thoroughly inspecting the ceiling, Aurek followed the trail, crouching to study the passage under the door. By reading the pattern of the slime, he was fairly certain the creature secreting it had spread out enough to move through a space no more than an inch high.

  “Fascinating.” Shaking his head in amazement, he straightened. “I thought they were extinct,” he told the silence. There’d been no reported attacks by black puddings in decades. In fact, a number of the younger scholars and adventurers he’d been in contact with had expressed scornful doubts that such a creature ever existed. Once he freed Natalia, there were obviously a number of things worth studying in the ruins of Pont-a-Museau. For now, however, he needed to head toward the front of the house, toward the street. The opportunities for scholarship lurking behind that door would have to wait.

  Bringing out the zombie’s finger bone, he followed its pull to an open trapdoor beside a pile of decaying furniture, crushed and broken fungus clearly indicating it had recently been moved. It makes sense, Aurek mused, relieved he wouldn’t have to dig his way through the foundations of the house. The zombies could no more walk through stone than he could. In order to follow the amulet out of the sewers, they needed to find an actual exit.

  A rattling noise behind him spun Aurek around, thumbs together, fingers spread, trying desperately to remember the words of his last truly offensive spell.

  In the far corner, a pile of human bones stirred. A kneecap, pale green with mold, rolled off the top of the pile and bounced to a halt some three feet away. Eyes squinted nearly shut in the unaccustomed light, a rat heaved itself up and out of its nest, glared at Aurek, and disappeared through a crack in the wall.

  Aurek let his h
ands fall back to his sides. Rats, he thought, releasing a breath he couldn’t remember holding. I can cope with rats, but I’m not sure I’m up to another encounter with the undead.

  Well aware that one rat could easily mean hundreds more lurking in the shadows, and that numbers could more than make up for lack of size, he sent one of his three lights through the trapdoor so he could see his way. Rusty steel rungs had been set into the damp stone of the sewer wall. In spite of the rust, they seemed solid.

  Seemed solid.

  There was only one way to be certain.

  Sitting on the edge of the hole, Aurek felt for the first rung with the toe of his boot. As much as caution seemed to be called for, he had to move quickly. He’d seen nothing waiting for him below, but that could as easily mean he’d seen nothing as that there was nothing there to see. While he climbed to the lower level, he’d be as vulnerable as he’d been at any time since he’d entered the Narrows.

  His mind focused on freeing Natalia—leaving no room for fear—he trusted his weight to the ancient ladder. It protested but held. The curve of the sewer wall forced him to descend at an awkward angle, pack dragging at his shoulders, sharp flakes of rust chewing into his palms. It wasn’t a pleasant climb, but as he’d foolishly forgotten to bring a rope, he was glad to be making it. The ledge running just below the widest point of the curve was slick when he finally reached it, and the stink coming up from the brown, turgid water nearly made him sick.

  The bone continued to drag at his finger.

  Apparently the sewers of Pont-a-Museau had more than one level.

  He took one last look up at the circle of darkness that marked the open trapdoor in the arc of the ceiling—locking its location in memory, for to be lost in these sewers was to die in these sewers—then began to search for the way down. It was a surprisingly short search.