Shackles of Light

by Christopher A. Nooner

  The area to the right opened to what must have been double the size of the hall.

  To the north was a door that cut diagonally into the space to the middle of the walkway. Past that, to the right, was another door that would lead to the city’s food storage area. There was nothing else for a hundred feet or so, but the door to the training grounds at the opposite end stood open.

  He crept the ten feet to the left edge and looked around it. Two hundred feet of emptiness stared back at him.

  He closed his eyes to recall the map.

  There should be a secret door directly in front of him that entered the back room of a spice merchant’s store. He could pass through and out the front onto the main street of Kwanokasha and then turn west toward the citadel, or he could take the hallway to the left and enter the promenade on the south side of the citadel. The hall was the more protected choice but it doubled the amount of exposure he would have around the citadel and the Ogress’s nest.

  The main street was apparently the favorite hunting ground of the Dagwanoenyent.

  After he retrieved the relics he would have to make his way to the gates of the city where Tomtum promised to meet him and take him back to the Way Hut.

  He pursed his lips. Why can’t things be easy? Just once? he asked himself.

  Eli rubbed his head again, absently, and turned the corner to head west down the long hall.

  The whistle was unsettling. He looked over his shoulder and shuffled as close to the outer wall as he could without brushing against it.

  The hall terminated in another diagonal that ran north to south and created a small alcove on the southeastern end past the door.

  The door itself was plain, save for the ring set in the middle at the conjunction of two wide straps of iron. It was an antiquated pull, set low to accommodate the tiny Kwanokashins. It was, he guessed, big enough for them to place both their hands inside to gain the required leverage to turn it and release the latch. Eli grabbed it like a knob and turned carefully until he heard the mechanism disengage.

  He stepped close and pulled it open just enough to peer beyond it to the promenade walkway.

  A door slammed hard behind him. He cursed and spun, his reflexes slow, his leg and shoulder screeched at his audacity to move so quickly.

  It was still empty. He was glad of that. The far door was closed. The change in air pressure must have caused it to slam. That hadn’t even crossed his mind. That was going to get him killed. He prayed that the noise hadn’t been heard in whatever part of the city the Dagwanoenyent and the Ogress were.

  He stuck his head beyond the doorway and turned to both sides to make sure the way was clear before he slipped through the entry. He eased the door closed behind him, wincing at the click as it settled into place.

  The promenade went southwest to his left for a bit before it turned true west and sloped northeast to his right where it connected with Kwanokasha’s main street. Past the street it ran northeast to the door out of the promenade. That was his goal.

  This was where he would be most vulnerable. He had to pass the gate to the citadel and the entrance to the street. On one side the Ogress nested, on the other was the hunting grounds of the Dagwanoenyent.

  He turned to the right and hugged the wall as he walked toward this juxtaposition of peril.

  He stopped as the whistling grew louder. The suddenness of his stop sent tiny waves of pain up his legs into his gut.

  Though he had never seen Kwanokasha alive and vibrant, the silence felt unnatural, the spaces too empty, too devoid of life. He could imagine the slaughter that had taken place here. Or remember something just like it.

  He felt himself snarl. The sheer disregard for life dismayed and infuriated him. The Mahan cared for nothing but the accumulation of power. He and those that worked for him cared nothing about destroying other’s property or lives.

  Life was strange in its fluidity. A year ago, all he wanted was to die. He wanted nothing to do with people or duty or life.

  Now?

  Well, he wasn’t going to think about that, not yet, at any rate.

  The strength and urgency of the whistle faded into white noise.

  Eli forced his jaw to loosen, and his shoulders to relax. It would be impossible to finish his task if he used his energy up tensed from stress.

  There are things that sober a man’s soul. Experiences that imprint themselves into the heart and mind, whether you want them to or not. You might go years without thinking of them, but they are there. Mounds in the landscape of what makes you who you are. They are immovable and change you indelibly, no matter what you plant on top of them. Eli was living proof of that. He wondered what kind of man he would have been without those external forces. He refused to explore the depths of those mounds to see what kept their shape.

  He drew a breath and continued his slow walk. His senses were dim and lifeless. Dull where they once were vibrant. It was like walking through a room in the middle of the night after waking from a heavy sleep.

  The open gate crept into view. It hung precariously by its bottom hinge. The top of the once beautiful wrought iron was misshapen. He marveled at the force it must have taken to mangle it so badly.

  Every step was cautious and intentional. There was too much to compensate for in his current state to take anything lightly.

  Eli decided to cross the corridor so he could see the main street and the gate area simultaneously. The gate was thick enough that it would be hard to see behind, and it would offer a better vantage point than trying to peek around the corner at the street.

  He hurried his pace just enough to minimize his exposure and grimaced as he tried to slow his breathing. It wasn’t a good thing that his lungs struggled so hard to feed oxygen to his body.

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked east down the long street.

  It was remarkably straight, a feature that allowed him to see down the whole of it to the only way into or out of the city. His breath pushed from his lungs in relief. Nothing stalked the area. There was nothing to come at him from that direction.

  He swiveled to peer into the citadel’s courtyard. The center was dominated by an enormous nest. What it was made of under the surface was anyone’s guess, but the top looked as though it was covered with every piece of fabric, sheet, and carpet the city once contained.

  He scoured the rest of the yard and hunted for signs of the Ogress.

  There was only random debris. Nothing to indicate that the creature had been there recently; except maybe the nest.

  He chewed his lip, his eyes narrowed as he searched. He worried that if she wasn’t here, then there was no place he could really expect to find her. That made his job more dangerous and much more terrifying.

  Eli looked back down the street to make sure the Dagwanoenyent hadn’t snuck up behind him while he studied the courtyard.

  There was nothing.

  It was quiet, not even the whistle broke the stillness. Quiet was dangerous. With no background noise to obscure his footfalls and breath, each movement could be as loud and telling as the screams of a dying rabbit. He really hoped he wasn’t the rabbit today.

  This was as certain as it was going to get. He lowered into a crouch, hoping to create as small a profile as he could while he moved into the open, and stepped into the widest part of the street.

  He panicked when something grabbed his leg. He stumbled and shot his arms out for balance. His left hand smashed into the cold metal of the gate and closed around it instinctively.

  The metal groaned as his weight pushed it against the rock floor and increased the pressure on the over stressed hinge.

  The gate almost pulled him over.

  Eli cringed as the sound of the hinge shattering rent the air, followed by the clear compound ring of the gate as it crashed, bounced, and settled on the hard floor.

  He crouched, his hands out, as the echoes of the clang dissipated, and silence reclaimed the city. He inhaled and closed his eyes to listen
for any new sound at all.

  Movement to his left caught his eye. Something in the courtyard fluttered. The fabric on the nest jerked and swayed. A head appeared, followed by a huge hand and gnarled foot.

  The nest cracked and popped. It wasn’t a nest at all, he realized.

  The Ogress removed her massive body from the blanket of cloth. She was naked, her saggy skin like waves of melted wax on a misused candle.

  She swung her head from side to side, confused and angry. Her beady eyes clearly missed Eli even though he was directly in front of her.

  She stretched and yawned, the foulness of her breath washed over him. The warm, moist stench made him shudder and fight to keep the food in his belly.

  He held his breath, waited, and hoped.

  She sniffed the air, much like a hound. She pulled it into her nostrils and blew it out before sniffing again.

  Only a handful passed her olfactory senses when she stopped and squinted her tiny eyes at Eli.

  Her bellow shook the gate, rattling it again on the stone and bouncing back and forth on the bare walls.

  He had to run. It was the only choice.

  He took off across the street just as the whistle began again, a banshee wail, somewhere in the depths of the lonely rock.

  The timing chilled him. He had a growing suspicion on its origin, and it was not one that would be to his advantage.

  His body ignored his plea to run. It settled, instead, on a gait that resembled Quasimodo’s lurch.

  Step, drag. Step, drag, groan.

  Something boomed behind him. Each thunderous step shook dust and debris from the ceiling of the enormous cavern.

  Eli’s throat constricted as the heaviness of his pulse pushed up into his esophagus.

  He didn’t dare look back, just that slight pause in his flight might be the difference between escape and death.

  Sixty feet. That was all he had to cross. Sixty feet.

  Stone screamed as the Ogress’ weight on the gate dug grooves in the smooth surface of the floor. He heard her slide and recover.

  He wasn’t far enough away. She was too fast, and he was too slow. He could see the door maybe forty feet ahead. If he could get through, it would slow her down, at least for the moment it would take her to break it down and smash the wall enough to squeeze her mammoth body through.

  He begged his legs to move faster, to push harder. They tried valiantly, but there was nothing they could give that they weren’t already giving.

  The crash of each step was closer.

  He lowered his head and plodded on with vanishing hope.

  When she roared again, he felt her spittle on his neck and head, followed by the overwhelming stench of her wretched breath.

  The door was close. He reached his hand toward the latch with the budding hope he could just slip through.

  It would be close, regardless.

  Her hot breath caressed Eli’s neck just before she snatched him from his feet. The pressure of her grasp woke every pain his body had been trying to hide from him. His vision swam and darkened.

  This seems a little too familiar, he mused as his vision cleared.

  She shook him like a child swung a doll. She whipped him around heedless of his pain and held him high in the air.

  He tried desperately to clear his mind. He needed to see, to think. Her movement was sporadic and jerky.

  Wind rushed across his face simultaneous with the boom of her stomp.

  The pressure behind his eyes was enormous. He drew as deep a breath as possible and focused on clearing his vision. He fought against the darkness until a small sliver of light was visible.

  That sliver was enough to fill the gaps in his information.

  The Ogress held him, her prize, high with one hand and swung wildly with the other hand. She aimed a kick at the Dagwanoenyent just keeping its gnashing teeth at bay.

  The Dagwanoenyent was a horror. Long stringy hair clung to patches of sporadic flesh hanging on a giant rotten skull floating, autonomously, in the air. Fire raged in its otherwise empty sockets and blood dripped from the stump of nerves and muscle that descended from the base along two rigid vertebrae.

  It snapped sharp teeth at the Ogress, its lower jaw completely removed from the upper.

  The Ogress screamed as the monster’s teeth clamped onto her fat fingers, and then Eli fell; forgotten, to the ground.

  His armor may not have any power to aid him, but at least the metal was sound and strong.

  He wasted no time and scooted his body to the door. He reveled in his luck that the two were more concerned about each other than him. He reached the latch and pulled the door quietly open then slipped inside.

  He sighed and rolled onto his back. He let the cold stone rejuvenate his tired body. He didn’t dare close his eyes, afraid that he might lose consciousness, so he stared into the darkness that obscured the high ceiling of the city.

  He listened to the battle through the door. Its ebb and flow drew it closer, then pushed it further away. It was like the erratic quarrel among the dogs he remembered from the villages of his childhood.

  He grunted as he rolled to his stomach and pushed himself up on bruised elbows.

  The hallway was maybe thirty feet long with a door on the north side and a door on the east side.

  The east door into the library was the one he wanted.

  He used the wall to push himself up and held for a moment before he opened the library door.

  It swung a quarter way open before it rebounded off something and jammed his fingers, leaving just enough room to slip inside.

  Inside was dim. Only two stones still waged their war against the darkness.

  Books, shelves, and rubble covered the floor, each a discarded piece of shadow in the blue light. One tumbled down shelf lay in the door’s path and was the cause of his jammed fingers.

  Most of the detritus was piled in the middle of the room forming an enormous mountain that covered the door into the oracle’s chambers.

  Tomtum told him the pile was there but had made it seem inconsequential.

  It was not.

  He assessed his chances of scaling it. He wasn’t convinced he could.

  Chairs and books, shelves and rocks vied for space in the pile. He shook the protruding leg of something and shuffled backward as books tumbled down the face like an avalanche of scree.

  Supposedly, there was an opening at the very top of the pile that would be big enough for him to squeeze through. The veracity of that seemed more and more in question.

  He wasn’t sure what was more irritating, the little man’s propensity to stretch the truth, or his obvious similarities to Mamat. They were so infuriating Eli wasn’t sure how they had lasted without being hunted to extinction. Maybe it was why they kept mostly to themselves.

  He sighed, looked at the mound again, and began his ascent.

  His climb was slow and careful. His first try sent him sliding down before he crossed the halfway point. The second was slower still. He hunted for handholds that were solid and tested each placement of his feet to be certain they could handle his weight.

  Sweat poured from his face and body, further complicating his climb with slippery hands and stinging eyes.

  He stopped at what he thought was halfway to wipe the salty moisture from his eyes, when the room shook. Only a desperate grab and flattening his body to the uneven curve of the mound saved him from cascading down to the base.

  He closed his eyes and listened. The city was quiet and further muffled by the walls of the library, but there was an undertone he couldn’t identify. He slowed his breath and willed his heartbeat to calm and listened again.

  He heard it then. The crash of heavy feet. Thump. Thump. They grew louder with each step. He braced himself just before the Ogress crashed through the doorway. The wooden missile, that had been the door, barely missed the pile and shattered to splinters as it detonated along with the bookshelf it struck.

  She stood in the room and shook d
ust and small bits of stone from herself. She wobbled and tossed her head back and forth to clear the brain fog caused by the impact.

  Terrified, Eli scampered up the pile as fast as his body and the terrain would allow.

  Behind him he felt her sniff the air for his scent. He winced as her roar battered his ears. She had her bearings again and smashed leaning shelves as she stomped toward him.

  The top was near. He scrambled over a chair and cursed as the opening came into view.

  There was barely enough room for Tomtum, and absolutely no way he could fit without removing more junk.

  The pile wobbled unsteadily the closer his massive pursuer came. He knew his only chance was to get through before her meat hammers found the Everest of discard he had summited.

  There were places only beasts like him could go. Slithery places hidden in this world and sometimes on the edges of others.

  He liked Mal’Ak’s name for him. It was fitting.

  Usok. Smoke.

  He was very like that. Not just in color, but in habit and design. Smoke. A faint wisp in the sky that twirled and spun and spoke of roasting meat and warm fire with friends, or a dark cloud that filled tight spaces choking and killing, but too elusive to catch or destroy.

  He was a warning of the all-consuming fire behind him but deadly in his own right.

  He stopped to test the air, such as it was, in this slippery place between worlds. He could feel Mal’Ak pull at him, guide him.

  He could sense the others as well, but they would have to manage on their own for the time being; it was his charge that he was worried about. He was changed and would need Usok’s help if he was to complete the metamorphosis and become the Mal’Ak.

  The great hound bounded away, re-centered and certain of his direction.

  Traveling the slippery places was quicker, but there was danger. Danger from the things that slunk in the darkness and waited to slide into other worlds or catch unsuspecting prey in the in-between.

  They stayed mostly clear. They knew he was a predator. Even so, there were some that would test his strength and skill if they thought they could catch him unaware.

  The scent was strong, but intermittent. He had to re-adjust his direction at steady intervals. It cost him time, but less than if he overshot or drifted off course.