The City Under the Mountain (The Seven Signs Book 4)

by D. W. Hawkins

  The song departed, leaving the noise of the river to fill the night.

  Dormael relaxed the hold over his Kai. His head continued to hurt, which made him clench his jaw against the pain. He coaxed heat back into the blanket of needles, keeping the spell going until his taxed body grew too tired to continue using magic. The night was silent for a long while, and Dormael again found himself drifting.

  His last waking thoughts were of Bethany.

  ***

  “What grand spectacle is the struggle of life.”

  Dormael woke to the sound of the voice. He was still packed into the crude hollow he’d constructed, itching at the touch of a thousand pine needles. He smelled the wet dirt and loamy decay of the forest peppered with the stench rising from his quickly-dried clothing. Dormael scrambled from the hollow, wincing as his muscles seized with fatigue.

  Tamasis greeted him with one of his inscrutable, glowing-eyed looks, cocking his head at Dormael’s alarmed attitude. He—it, whatever he was—crouched beside the crude shelter, his dark robe falling around his knees. He reached a hand out to help Dormael to his feet. Dormael scowled at the entity as he took the offered hand and allowed Tamasis to help him stand.

  Dormael was shocked by a subtle vibration in the man’s hand, like a constant hum of gentle power.

  “I’m dreaming.” Relief flooded Dormael’s body, loosening the anxious muscles in his legs.

  “True.” Tamasis dusted at Dormael’s clothing with an odd smile on his face. “And what a wonderful thing it is.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Dormael swatted at Tamasis’s hands. “What’s gotten into you? Where have you been?”

  Tamasis sighed, turning back to examine the wall of brambles beside the shelter. “This. I confess to some feeling of…awe, perhaps…at the scope of it. At the implication.”

  “The briar patch?”

  “Not just the briar patch,” Tamasis said, gesturing at the forest. “At everything.”

  “It is beautiful.” Dormael’s mind had recreated the scene as he remembered it. Tall pines reaching toward a cold, starry sky, filling the air with the tang of their sap. The river roaring just beyond the trees, dampened to a whisper by the forest. Rocks and underbrush covered with all types of fungi, some that Dormael had never seen.

  Is that real, or is my dream creating fanciful images to satisfy me?

  “Beautiful and terrible,” Tamasis said. “Both, and even worse when you consider the scope.”

  “If you say so.” Dormael picked a pine needle from his armor. “Where have you been? I’ve been wanting to speak with you. Since Orm, I’ve—”

  “I am always in the place where I am.” Tamasis turned to look at Dormael. “My prison is one of shattered moments, enclosed space. Some moments I am free, others I am not. But I am healing now, remembering. It will not be long.”

  “You’re remembering?” Dormael felt the echoes of anger through the bond he shared with the alien presence. Tamasis’s words had been delivered with an implied threat, a promise of reckoning. “Remembering what?”

  “What was lost.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I am still trying to find a way to explain it to you.” Tamasis walked to the briar patch and plucked at one of the thorns. “In the moments I am imprisoned, I no longer sleep as I did before. I stir, questing outward from the cracks in my cage. Pieces of me are missing, wide swaths of memory and self torn away. When I search there, I find nothing. Nothing but longing.”

  “Why are you here now?”

  Tamasis looked to him, his eyes a pair of glowing holes into eternity. “It is as I said—my prison is one of shattered moments. It cracks, and I am able to slip part of my being outside, into a time which is not barred to my entry. Our bond strengthens and my shackles loosen as a result.”

  Dormael felt a moment of realization. “So that’s what you mean—your cage keeps you suspended in certain times, but not in others.”

  “That is still too simplistic.” Tamasis closed his eyes. Dormael felt a vibration deep in his being, as if his entire sense of reality were ringing with a low tone. “My captors constructed a warped hole in the fabric of the firmament. It is complex, folded upon itself. My existence is trapped in a cascade of repeating moments, inescapable and confusing. When we are together, Dormael Harlun, I find myself here much as you do—abruptly.”

  “You’re not controlling this any more than I am.” For some reason, the thought made Dormael feel better about the situation. He had wondered on many sleepless nights at whether Tamasis was an ancient, vengeful entity who wanted to use Dormael for its own ends. Indalvian’s words to him in the bowels of the temple at Orm hadn’t helped with his reluctance to trust Tamasis. Could Indalvian have been wrong?

  That thing in your head, boy—don’t trust it!

  “Who are they? Your captors, I mean. Why did they imprison you?”

  Tamasis looked to the ground, an expression of loss painting his features. Dormael felt a deep sense of mourning and braced himself against the emotional bleed of the bond. He felt a strange urge to comfort Tamasis, to offer him a hand on the shoulder. Dormael’s hand made to rise, but Tamasis turned to him before he could complete the gesture.

  “When I contemplate that question, I am confronted with the same memory. Beyond it, there is only darkness.”

  “What memory?”

  Tamasis paused, turning his gaze to the expanse of the starry sky. “Perhaps showing you would be appropriate.”

  “Showing me?”

  Before Dormael could take a breath, Tamasis grabbed him by the arm. The ground shot away from his feet with blinding speed. Dormael lurched, his free arm windmilling, but realized he was still standing on something substantial, though it wasn’t visible beneath him. Tamasis steadied Dormael and gave him a chiding expression.

  The stars twisted around them, leaving trails of blue and yellow in the vast darkness beyond. Dormael stared at the swirling colors, marveling at the beauty that confronted his eyes. Tamasis smiled, his expression full of childlike wonder.

  “Is this really what it looks like?” Dormael said. “Is this the Void?”

  “The Void.” Tamasis shook his head. “I suppose a being such as you would describe it that way, though it is not accurate.”

  “What is it, then?” Dormael had never been able to accept the teachings of the Church Victorious. He believed in the gods—everyone believed in the gods—but Dormael thought of them as manifestations of different forces rather than actual beings who lived in a mythical city at the edge of the Void. Religious teachings were metaphors for morality—they weren’t meant to be taken literally.

  But these stars—this is beauty beyond anything I could imagine. Another part of his mind registered how similar it was to the sky above the burning valley—the one the Silver Lady had shown him in her dream. The beauty in Tamasis’s vision was more subtle, less fanciful, but it was undeniable to Dormael that they were showing him the same thing.

  “The Void,” Tamasis said, “is not an accurate description because it is not a Void. It has substance, there are forces that act upon its form. It sings, Dormael, and marches toward an unknown eternity.”

  “Unknown even to a being like you?”

  “Unknowable to me.” Tamasis nodded. “Your Void is more like an ocean—an ocean within which swim a myriad of mysterious things.”

  “Things?”

  “Many things, Dormael. More than I could know. The possibilities may as well be infinite. Creatures like yourself, made of bone and sinew. Beings which you would not recognize as conscious. Worlds, Dormael—entire worlds that know nothing of your existence. All these things and more you could find in the darkness.”

  “Fuck the gods.” Dormael felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. “How is such a thing possible? Other worlds? Other men living on them?”

  “You fail to understand the vastness of your Void.” Tamasis gestured to the moving stars. “Worlds are created much the w
ay your kind was created—not created, as such, but the result of other processes.”

  “Processes? Like the Song of All Things?” Dormael recalled his conversation with Tamasis before the events at Orm.

  “You might say that.” Tamasis placed a hand on Dormael’s shoulder. “That is a conversation for another time. We have arrived.”

  The stars grew still, and Dormael grew dizzy at the abrupt change in motion. Tamasis touched him on the arm with an absent-minded gesture, and the feeling disappeared in an instant. Dormael marveled at the sensation’s disappearance until his eyes fell on the scene Tamasis had conjured.

  Dormael and Tamasis stood amidst a blanket of color. Vast clouds of red and yellow floated in the Void, illuminated by points of burning light. Dormael looked in all directions, finding details he hadn’t noticed upon taking in the entire scene. In one vivid section, iridescent points of light sparkled against the reflection of a bright, blue star. In another, red lightning fizzled over a blanket of gold, though Dormael could see no storm to give it life. Stars twinkled all around him, and Dormael had trouble discerning whether they were inside the clouds or behind them.

  “What is this place?”

  “It is no more.” Tamasis stared at a place somewhere in the center of the swirling clouds. “This is the farthest I can reach within my memories. The instant before it happens.”

  “Before what happens?”

  “The Sundering.”

  Twin flashes of light assaulted Dormael’s eyes, coming from either end of the vast, black expanse. They happened so fast that Dormael might have missed them, though he felt Tamasis guiding his attention to things as they occurred. Another flash of light exploded from the center of the clouds, pushing a wave of fire and lightning through the shifting colors. Iridescent particles rippled outward from the explosion, burning with their own flickering bands of light.

  There was no sound to the memory, but there was rumbling in Dormael’s chest. A ripping sensation tore at the roots of his existence, as if he was being unmade from within. He gasped, but could do little else as the cataclysm spiraled into the clouds, igniting everything in its path.

  The center of the explosion grew dark and sank inward. The colorful bands of light twisted in place, pulled toward the crux of that terrible explosion. Lightning flickered outward from the eye of the storm, running over the clouds of gas like greedy, evil fingers. Dormael felt himself being drawn toward the darkness with everything else, and he grabbed Tamasis’s arm with a frightful hand.

  “Be still,” Tamasis said. “This memory is already written.”

  The dark eye pulled at them until they were rushing toward its shadowy depths. As they grew closer, Dormael could see more of what lay at the center of the explosion. It was a dark mass, a tiny globe of liquid darkness, visible only because of the energy flickering at its edges. Another wave of power blew outward from the eye, carrying a sense of pain, as if the clouds themselves were screaming in agony. A ray of bright, red light shot into the darkness, speeding toward an unknown point in the Void.

  The eye grew to terrible proportions, pulling everything toward its center. Dormael panicked as he and Tamasis were caught in its power, regardless of what Tamasis said about the memory. His heart pounded as they screamed downward, and Dormael could feel an odd stretching sensation as time seemed to slow. The darkness came for them, dragging them ever deeper toward its liquid surface. They slipped through like falling into silent, black oil, and Dormael held his breath on reflex. He felt agony ripping through every part of his being, a white-hot flash of pure flame.

  When it was over, there was nothing but the darkness.

  “What was that?” Dormael’s labored breathing echoed in the smothering darkness.

  “The moment I became what I am,” Tamasis said.

  “And this…this dark eye—that’s your prison? And before that, you lived in those clouds?”

  “I didn’t live in the clouds.” Tamasis regarded him with swirling eyes of green light. “I am not a creature such as you, not a being of bone and sinew. I am—I was—something else. Something for which you do not have the words to explain, nor the capacity to understand.”

  So we’re back to this. I’m the fish, and he’s explaining the sky to me.

  “Try,” Dormael said. “Otherwise, why show me any of this?”

  Tamasis gave him an irritated glance. “Because you asked to see it.”

  “I didn’t think that mastering my language would make you harder to communicate with,” Dormael said. “I was wrong.”

  “Well, what sort of creature are you?”

  “What?”

  “What sort of creature are you?” Tamasis tapped him on the chest. “Are you a being of thought? Are you an animal like the Garthorin that have so plagued your journey through the mountains? You have the same mechanisms as those creatures you regard as beneath you, so what separates you from them? Explain to me your existence.”

  “I—well…” Dormael trailed off. He was about to default to the religious mythology he’d been taught since his childhood. Evmir created the world, the other gods participating. Devla, Goddess of Beasts and the Eternal Mother, was said to have created all living things after Eindor blessed the world with magic. Looking into Tamasis’s glowing eyes, though, made Dormael feel ridiculous for having thought of it.

  “I don’t know,” Dormael said.

  “And I am little different from you in that regard.” Tamasis shrugged, another childish smile cracking his face. “I cannot explain my existence to you any more than you can explain your own. I know that I am, and it is enough. I am less than I was, though—that is something I can feel. There are wounds in me, tears through the very fabric of my being.”

  “What does that feel like?” Dormael peered at Tamasis. “Can you explain that to me, at least?”

  “You should know the feeling,” Tamasis said. “There is a similar darkness in you, Dormael Harlun, something tearing at the fabric of your being. I can feel it much as I feel my own wounds.”

  “Say that again?” Dormael stepped toward him. “There are wounds in me like your own?”

  “Not exactly like mine, but similar. There is a feeling at the edge of my senses when I search out those places inside me, a resonance of emotion that echoes with memory. It calls to me, draws my attention when I think on it, much like the darkness that pulled me into its grasp.”

  Dormael was chilled by Tamasis’s words. He’d never felt any voids in his mind, never contemplated whether he had some ethereal injury plaguing the fabric of his soul. Was he going mad? Was he losing memories by some unknown process, something altering his perception without his knowledge?

  Could it be an effect of the bond I share with Tamasis?

  “Can you show me?” Dormael said.

  “I can try. Brace yourself, this might be uncomfortable.”

  “Uncomfortable?”

  Images rushed through the darkness, fleeting ghosts chattering unintelligible words. Dormael’s head crawled with sensation, as if something had reached into his skull and stretched out his brain like a scroll to be read. It wasn’t painful, but Dormael clutched his head nonetheless.

  “Here,” Tamasis said.

  They stood in the courtyard of Orm’s temple, looking as it had before Dormael burned it to oblivion. The necromancer was there, throttling a bloodied representation of Dormael himself. Tamasis watched the scene play out with detachment, but Dormael winced at the brutality of the fight. He had lived this experience first-hand, and seeing it through the eyes of Tamasis’s vision made him wince in sympathy for himself.

  Gods in the Void, you truly are going mad.

  The vilth trapped Dormael’s hand to the ground and began prying his fingers from the sinuous bands of the armlet. Dormael remembered this part of the confrontation as scattered noises and the taste of dirt. He remembered blood in his throat, and the triumphant song of the Nar’doroc as Dormael accepted its offer of power. The press of the silver bands a
gainst his palm and the insistent beating of his heart—that’s what this memory was like for Dormael.

  Tamasis’s vision showed Dormael lying on the dirt, swatting at the necromancer as the pale man pried the armlet from his hand. Dormael’s fingers clutched the Nar’doroc, his eyes rolling back in his head. Dormael’s feet kicked and scraped at the dirt as his body was wracked with a violent seizure. The armlet came alive, whipping sharp tendrils of silver at the necromancer’s prying hands. It crawled up Dormael’s shoulder, reaching toward his throat like it intended to choke him.

  The vision went dark.

  “This,” Tamasis said, “is the same as when I seek the missing parts of myself. Can you feel it? Listen.”

  Dormael bent his ears to the darkness. He tried opening his Kai, but even with his magical senses, he could near nothing. The darkness returned only silence.

  “I can’t hear it, whatever it is.”

  “Strange. For me it is a persistent vibration—something I feel I should know. I am barred from seeking beyond its interference. When I make the attempt, I am rewarded only with this resonance.”

  “But I can remember this—what happened, I mean. I remember the vision you showed me and what happened after. There are no holes in my recollection.” Dormael gestured at the blackness and shrugged. “I don’t hear any resonance, either.”

  “I had hoped you could feel it.” Tamasis furrowed his brow and stared into the distance. “I should not be surprised. There is much to reality which you cannot sense.”

  “The problems of being a fish?”

  “Indeed.”

  Dormael scowled at the dark-robed man. Tamasis could read his mind and feel his irritation through the bond. Whatever sort of being Tamasis was, he pretended to need verbal communication to put Dormael at ease. The longer they were together, though, the more emotive Tamasis became. It was as if his exposure to Dormael was making him more human.

  “You know I get angry when you condescend to me like that.”

  “I know.” Tamasis smirked at him and shook his head. “It feels nice, as useless as it is. Anger is a crude motivator. These small doses of the emotion only serve to weaken your dying shell by tiny degrees. You should work to silence your anger until you need it—say, for running from a predator or using your magic.”