Written in Blood

by Span, Ryan A.

  “Sit,” she said. I did. As usual, I couldn't help but notice the way her body curved and rippled. I also felt distinctly awkward with my nose red and swollen like an over-ripe pear glued to the middle of my face.

  Clearing my throat, I tried, “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “You want me to help you escape.” She glanced up from her work for a brief moment. “Contrary to what the Listener thinks, I am not stupid.”

  I couldn't help but smile at her forthrightness. “I never thought you were.”

  “You believe you can convince me with flattery or romance?” There was a twinkle in her eye. Taking a cloth, she wiped the last bits of ink from the pen, and replaced it in a delicately-carved ivory box. Then she stoppered her ink jar and gave me her full attention for the first time. “Do not think I enjoy seeing you penned like animals, my Easterner. Do not think the Dargha are here by choice. Not any longer.”

  “The honeymoon is over?” I asked, with just a little bit of a sting. I saw her twitch. She took a deep breath and let it out between her teeth.

  “We were captured on our way back to the steppe. Many of my men were killed fighting, or trying to escape, or simply for sport. Then the Listener came and ordered our release, in exchange for service to him.” It pained her to admit. “Arravis, at least, was a man who could be reasoned with. He paid us in silver and gold. This eunuch...” She turned her head and spat on the ground.

  I gave her a shrewd look. “Then why are you still here?”

  “There is a debt. And a lot of enemy territory to cross between here and our home.”

  “The Kingdom could‒”

  “There is a lot of enemy territory between here and your Kingdom, too, my Easterner. You have nothing to bargain with.”

  “We'll die if you don't help us.”

  Lytziri stood up, slowly, and turned to look at the stars through the gap in the tent's roof. “Nothing would please me more than to see him suffer. All of them. But as your phrase goes, my hands are tied. My men and I would be risking too much.”

  She called something in Harari, and the man from before returned to escort me out. I shook off his hands, preferring to go with some kind of dignity. Just before I stepped out, I said, “At least Yazizi is no longer the only slave around.”

  It was a discouraging walk back to my prison, under the sullen glares of the Dargha and the mocking laughter of Grenoke warriors. My fingers ached for a sword. It'd be worth it just to see how many of them I could take with me to Hell.

  The door rattled shut behind me. I kept a tight lid on my disappointment and hopelessness. Lytziri might still change her mind. Maybe with the right incentive, if I could make Penn push her a little too far...

  Before he tortured me to death, of course.

  My turn came sooner than I expected. Lytziri and two of her men escorted me up the pyramid, together with Yazizi. We were thrown to the ground at Penn Saldette's feet. To one side, the woman sat quietly, keeping her composure with iron-hard will. Sir Erroll knelt in a corner, richer by a few nasty cuts, bruises and a split lip. He stared defiance at the Listener even after what must've been hours of tender care.

  The soft, flickering lamplight made Penn look like a one-armed demon from the depths of Hell. He grinned and waited by an open trap-door where the mat with the knives used to be. Two Grenokes had their heads down it, carrying on a shouted conversation with someone inside. I heard a voice drifting up from deep inside the pyramid, faint and grunting with effort.

  “I'm glad you accepted my invitation, Byren,” Penn said pleasantly, and kicked me in the stomach. I doubled over retching. “Fascinating bit of architecture you found here. It's giving these barbarians some trouble, I can tell you. We've lost two so far. They're starting to get cautious.”

  As if to add emphasis, the faint echoing voice from below abruptly cut off, and no amount of prompting could get the man to respond again.

  “You could always go down yourself and save me the trouble,” I told him. So he kicked me again.

  “Quite the opposite, old boy. I've decided that you're going to go down for me. Either you bring back the bronze, or I start slitting throats.” He took out the bronze sword ‒ my sword ‒ and grabbed Yazizi by her long black hair, placing the blade against her neck. Close enough to draw a tiny trickle of blood. “Who should I do first? The girl? 'Sir Erroll'? Or maybe I'll give the little mountain bitch back to Nevick for a while. He's been looking forward to that. Understood?”

  I worked my mouth and spat on the floor. “I'm disappointed in you, Penn. I thought you wanted to take your time with me.”

  He scraped off a little more of Yazizi's skin, making her hiss. “If there's one thing I've learned, it's that you are hard to kill, Byren. You're like a cockroach that always manages to avoid the boot. I have every confidence in your ability to return and give me my satisfaction.”

  “You're going to kill them all anyway.”

  “Perhaps, but then it'll be on my head, not yours.”

  Gritting my teeth, I pushed myself up to my feet. I was always going to go. The bastard had my conscience over a barrel and we both knew it.

  I walked to the pitch-black hole and descended the steps. My bare feet landed on cool, solid masonry. It was untouched by thousands of years of time and weather, free of dust or cobwebs. A few shallow spirals were carved into the wall, and I saw the old man again, leaning on his cane. I could swear he was laughing his head off.

  The rest of the passage was utterly lightless. No matter how much I peered and squinted, my eyes couldn't penetrate that inky veil. Annoyed, I called up, “At least give me a torch!”

  To my astonishment, they did. Maybe chivalry wasn't dead after all.

  Penn appeared at the top of the stairs. His expression was beatific. Clenching the torch in my hand, I started back up the steps, ready to throw everything away on the odds that I could club him to death before the Grenokes got me.

  If only. I couldn't let them execute everyone. I was sworn to protect my companions, all of them, to my dying breath.

  “You have four hours, Byren,” said Penn. “Don't make me wait. It will get bloody.”

  With an ear-splitting boom, the Grenokes dropped the heavy stone slab that served as the trap-door. I reached up experimentally to see if I could move it. It didn't budge. I put my shoulder into it, but only ended up hurting myself. That slab wasn't about to shift without a team of men hauling at it.

  Only one path left to take. I held out my torch and set off down the passage, to explore the Brass Men's greatest wonder.

  From the outside, the great pyramid dwarfed any single structure in the Kingdom. Inside, none of that showed through. The walls were cramped and claustrophobic, allowing two people to walk abreast only if they hadn't eaten anything in a while. They always curved faintly to the right. The stones were green and smooth as polished glass. Every few paces I had to stop and climb down a large drop, at least four feet high, sometimes more.

  At the bottom of the third I found some blood. It was spattered in a circle on the floor, as if sprayed out with some force, but the walls were spotless and I couldn't see a body anywhere. The scene made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I put my back against the wall and shuffled past, careful not to place my feet anywhere near the carnage.

  “There's no such thing as magic,” I hissed under my breath. “Shite.”

  The second Grenoke lay not forty yards away, gently smouldering atop a little pile of ashes. His clothes were as black as his skin. I didn't know how long he'd been dead, but the smell of cooked meat still hung around this part of the corridor. He gave off just enough light to see the contraption that had killed him, wood and string and an empty cloth bladder, driven into the stone with great bronze nails. It seemed the old man had been 'guarding' this place in a more literal sense than I first thought.

  Shuddering, I shut my eyes and hurried on, stopping only to take the dead man's boots. They were a little singed around the edges, but much better th
an nothing.

  The passage stretched on. I began to wonder how far down I was, and kept count of the number of drop-offs I'd shimmied down. Shortly after the eighth, I accidentally kicked a discarded piece of wood. On closer inspection, I saw it was a torch, burnt-out and discarded. Nothing useful. I started to move on...

  And froze in place when I heard a noise. It was faint, human, like someone moaning further down the hall. I crept forward an inch at a time, heart hammering like a drum. I'd been in field battles which unnerved me less than this place did.

  My light revealed part of a man ‒ arms, shoulders, neck, head, a few ribs. At first I thought he'd been cut in half, the rest of him nowhere to be found, but there was no blood. Instead, his body simply melded into the floor at the height of his breastbone. There was no gap between him and the stone underneath.

  Another tiny moan filled the hallway. Another laboured breath. He became aware of my presence then, and his arms twitched. He tried to turn his head but didn't have the strength. Mumbled words in his unintelligible mountain dialect. I didn't need to speak his language to understand a plea for help.

  “Sorry, mate,” I told him, “I think you're done for.”

  I placed my hands on either side of his head and twisted, giving him the only mercy I could.

  Staring into the darkness ahead, I found my feet unwilling to move. I'd passed three corpses, and you could bet each one had been more careful than the last. Now I was out of meat shields and choices. I had to push on.

  I calculated every movement. I prodded the floor with my toes before committing to a step. I waited and searched for as long as I dared, with my torch slowly burning down. I wished I had my breastplate wrapped around me instead of walking around naked from the waist up. Somehow I was convinced it would protect me against this place.

  I advanced, step by step, round and round the gently curving passage. I could swear the bend was getting lighter the further down I went, widening the spiral. In truth, my mind had long since given up trying to make any sense of how this place was built. It would've driven the King's best architects round the bend.

  The floor became alternately sticky, as if sucking at my boots, or slick as black ice. When I bent down to look, though, it was as plain as ordinary rock. It left no residue on my fingers when I touched it.

  I descended several more drops, feeling the musty air get even closer. Did this place have a bottom at all? Fear-sweat dripped down my back. Any second now I expected another death-trap to take me off into the care of God and His Saints... But I kept surviving.

  My torch sputtered. It was on its last legs, and although I didn't worry too much about tight spaces or the dark, I felt like I could go screaming insane trapped in this hell-hole without a light. I tried to keep it going by sheer force of will.

  I almost didn't notice the change in the sound of my own footfalls. Rather than echoing endlessly off the narrow tunnel walls, their scuffing faded away in all directions, as though in a large, open space. I edged forward to look for an explanation.

  I'd reached the end of the tunnel.

  The chamber that opened around me was cavernously vast, shaped like a cone hundreds of feet wide at the base, so tall the torchlight simply vanished in its rafters. The walls were carved into a coil, decorated with intricate patterns of scales which vaguely resembled snake-skin. Up high, at the very limit of my vision, I could see great wooden support beams holding the place up. They took the shape of crosses, one above the other, each one angled a few degrees further around the compass.

  As big as the space was, the Brass Men had packed it solid. An incredible variety of stuff covered almost every inch of floor space. I saw sheets of hammered bronze art, depicting what I assumed were interesting scenes of immense historical significance. I saw pots, cauldrons, bowls, vases and gourds. Weapons and armour in situ upon solid bronze mannequins. Horses in full armour, some mounted to chariots still bearing bronze bowmen. I could see the painstaking quality, the sheer loving detail put into every inch of these pieces. The delicately engraved blades and breastplates on display put mine to shame.

  By weight, there was more bronze in this room than in the whole of Kingsport, and all of it was as pristine as the Armaments. Immune to the passage of time.

  The biggest, most impressive piece was a small domed pavilion atop a podium several dozen feet tall. In theory, you could get up there by way of a long, shallow stairway winding around the podium. Unfortunately, the stairway was completely choked with yet more sculpture.

  Possessed by curiosity, I reached out to touch a nearby bronze man's arm. It felt like old paper against my skin. Even the faintest brush made him turn green, then black. I watched the entire statue crumble to dust before my eyes and felt a sharp twinge of guilt for destroying that priceless work of art.

  I tried a different piece, a solid-looking urn or cauldron held up in a six-legged cradle. Its solidity didn't seem to matter. It disintegrated at the slightest touch, cradle and all. I stopped experimenting.

  Everything they touched would be tainted, the Brunoke storyteller had said, and all the work of their hands would wither and die.

  Picking my way through the fragile maze, I caused a swathe of accidental destruction on my way to the podium. A trail of flaky black dust showed where I'd blundered my way through. In my defence, a professional contortionist couldn't have done much better at this ridiculous obstacle course.

  Shuffling along the edge of the ramp, I found a place where I could climb up, and repeated the process with the next tier. Each time I got another glimpse of the domed bronze roof, polished to a mirror shine. It looked like the kind of place where you might keep an ancient relic of strange and unknown power.

  My heart fluttered when I saw the shrine was within clambering distance. I finally hauled myself over the lip and emerged under the bronze roof, supported by thin bronze pillars, fluted all the way up and inlaid with the most delicate kind of scrollwork. At the heart of the shrine stood a small bronze pedestal bearing a cushion made of what I assumed was cloth-of-bronze. A small, shiny coin rested atop the cushion, its face stamped with a single dense spiral. There was a strange intensity to the air around it, a greasy quality which I'd come to associate with the Armaments. This was what I wanted, no doubt.

  I reached for it without thinking, only to pull myself up short. What was I going to do with it? Even bound by my contract, could I really allow it to fall into Penn Saldette's hands?

  Then again, what choice did I have? If I didn't come back, he'd kill everyone, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  The little bronze-weave cushion disintegrated at my touch. The coin felt warm, glowing against my palm, and when I looked at it now, I felt an unnatural urge to place it in my mouth and swallow. It called to me, gnawed at the corners of my will, and I hid it in a clenched fist.

  What are you waiting for? it seemed to say. I could practically feel the power thrumming through it like a heartbeat. Real, tangible magic, unlike anything this world had seen in thousands of years. I can give you everything you need. Victory over all your enemies, forever.

  It sang the same intoxicating song as the other Armaments, only ten times stronger. I wanted to do what it wanted. The only thing holding me back was cold dread in the pit of my stomach at the idea of having one of those things inside me. God only knew what it could do.

  That very moment, my torch gave up the ghost. Darkness crowded in around me, choking, crushing, in every direction ‒ except for the coin, which gave off a warm, comforting glow of its own. Just enough to see by if you held it up as a lantern.

  I took one last look at the underground vault in all its ancient splendour, then started back up the winding passage to the surface.

  The coin kept whispering in my head. We'll kill them all, together. You know you need me. You know what you have to do.

  I took another look at it. Despite the simplicity of its face and back, the sides of the coin were etched with mad patterns. More detail revealed itself the lon
ger you stared at it, spirals upon spirals, lines within lines, regressing infinitely towards smaller and smaller components. Each of the endless numbers of layers was somehow still expressed with perfect clarity and individuality. Hypnotic. The eye tried in vain to follow them all.

  A yawn forced itself out of me without warning. I'd been fit as a fiddle a minute ago, but now I felt tired, and vaguely dizzy. It became hard to think. All kinds of temptations presented themselves, to sit down, put my feet up, to close my eyes for a few minutes. It would be so nice to get off my feet. I stopped, hesitated, beheld the cool floor which seemed so inviting. And while I was there, I might as well put that coin in my mouth for safekeeping...

  Then I remembered the others, and how little time I had left, and I forced myself onwards. The Contractor's third rule flapped around in my head and swooped down like a hunting hawk on my disloyal urges. The client's life is paramount, even at the cost of your own.

  I climbed the first of the great steps without a hint of dignity, scrambling and kicking to get myself up. I swore under my breath at the effects of age and complacency. Once I had my breath back, I jogged to the next step and repeated the process.

  I began to sweat at the second step. The third left my armpits soaked. The fourth had me streaming all down my forehead, and my back, and other uncomfortable places. My creaky old bones weren't used to this kind of work anymore.

  On the fifth, I accidentally dropped the coin over the ledge, and had to climb back down to fetch it. It was a nightmare. Every muscle in my body ached. I pulled all of them on my way up the second time, and couldn't remember how many more steps I had left to go.

  Let me help you, wheedled the coin, silently. None of this would be a problem. You'll never have problems again.

  I thought about Humber, about the way his ghost had entered my life and stayed, nattering away. Until now I'd dismissed him as a lingering touch of fever. Now, querying the delirium-fogged parts of my memory, I began to notice a few coincidences. The ghost only showed up after I took Adar's sword, and I hadn't heard him at all since I lost it. Could that really be coincidence?