Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago: Tales of the Lost Isles

by JOSEPH A. MCCULLOUGH

  Tomms sighed. ‘And this is the only route...’

  ‘To where?’ Gurbin asked.

  ‘To where we’re going.’ Tomms turned to his soldiers. ‘Did you see the top from those branches?’ One of them nodded. ‘How thick is this wall, do you think?’

  ‘As thick as the average man is tall, I reckon.’

  Tomms smiled, and patted Gurbin on the back. ‘If you were quick enough...’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘I’ve seen you do it before.’

  ‘When a wall is much thinner, and I knew there was open space on the other side. The top edge might be only the width of a man’s height at the top but there’s no way to tell what’s on the other side at ground level. A wall that high has to be thicker at the base than at the top.’

  Tomms nodded thoughtfully, then looked up. A colourful bird jinked between the branches, and swooped overhead. Tomms reached into a leather tube on his belt, and drew out a couple of feathers. He spread them into a fan between finger and thumb, and began to incant. The trees were a green carpet below, and the wall thick but crumbling. It seemed to encircle the entire centre of the island, and beyond, at the heart of it, was a lush, verdant dome. Cracked steps and ledges were visible through tiny gaps in the trees, pale spots like pinpoint stars in the night sky.

  The winds shifted, and he slid down the edge of a thermal, skimming the thicker air in search of the inner wall. It was buttressed at regular intervals with towers long fallen to ruin, their staircases and guardrooms spilled like a serpent’s entrails. At one point a section of the wall’s facing had crumbled, and sand, stones and coral were splayed out from it. Then he rose once more, and rode the thermal waft heavenwards.

  * * *

  Tomms opened his eyes. ‘The wall is about three times as thick at the base. Here, it’s layers of stone filled with rock and sand, maybe coral. No spaces.’ He walked over to the wall, Gurbin following in spite of himself, and patted the rough, ancient surface. ‘I trust that doesn’t pose any problems?’

  ‘It shouldn’t,’ Gurbin admitted.

  ‘Good; I’d have regretted bringing you into our partnership otherwise.’

  ‘A partnership that won’t last, unless there’s a gate somewhere in this wall. Otherwise you’re going to be stuck on this side.’

  ‘There’s a tower with a staircase against the inner wall a few hundred yards in that direction. We all head that way, you climb the stairs and lower a rope for us to climb.’

  Gurbin nodded slowly. ‘You’d better be right.’ Something rustled in the undergrowth, and everyone turned at the sound of a strange huffing. Gurbin’s eyes widened; it was one of Tlanti’s stalkers. The soldiers, already re-armoured, drew their weapons, while Gurbin froze. If he ran, would they chase him? Or could he outrun them?

  ‘Go,’ Tomms snapped. ‘We’ll hold them off.’ His eyes narrowed as he turned to face the stalker, ready to fight. Gurbin found himself running. His blood heated, and he risked a glance in the stalker’s direction, half-expecting to see it following. It flicked itself around its own tail, and shot off into the forest, but it was too late for Gurbin to stop, and he hit the wall full-tilt.

  Everything went dark, but he could feel himself still moving. There were strange tensions in his torso and limbs that came and went; buzzing sensations and tickles, and the sense of swimming through treacle. Then his blood sang, light burst into his eyes, and he stumbled to a halt amidst a small clearing. He turned slowly, catching his breath, and looked at the crumbling wall behind him. As he oriented himself, he started through the trees in the direction of the tower that Tomms had mentioned.

  * * *

  The stalker ran, homing in on its mistress’s enemy. If it was surprised to find itself facing Tomms again, it didn’t show it. He approached it carefully, his soldiers keeping their distance this time. The stalker watched him, attuned to the stink of his fear, and the allure of warm blood in his veins. It was tensed to spring, because it was always tensed to spring, yet it didn’t.

  Tomms stopped a few yards away, making a noise under his breath, not unlike the way in which its mistress did. It could almost taste his blood already, but somehow couldn’t move. He motioned with his hand, and the armoured soldiers began to shuffle to either side of it. ‘Oh, my little friend,’ Tomms said, ‘you surely don’t want to leave us so soon?’ He risked a couple of steps closer, his hand trembling. ‘There are a lot of lizards in the world. Tlanti can always find another to replace you.’

  * * *

  Tlanti had stopped walking, and was focused entirely on incantation. ‘Trouble?’ Wolfram asked.

  ‘One of the stalkers has found Tomms, but he’s... He’s trying to steal it.’

  ‘Steal it?’ Ironhand echoed. ‘How—’

  ‘He’s a Beast Warden, as I am. He doesn’t have the talismans that I do, but he has skill. Klegg, take your bow, and run five hundred yards that way.’ She pointed. ‘Take a shot at Tomms. Doesn’t matter if you kill him or not, so long as he notices.’

  * * *

  Gurbin had gathered up some long vines, looped into thick, natural ropes, to add to the rope he had brought through the wall with him. Now he pulled himself up one of the broken tower staircases, and clambered on to the wide walkway at the top of the wall.

  As he tied the ends of his ropes to suitable pieces of stone, he found himself wondering who had built this wall. Serpent Men? Dricheans? The Empire of the Blue? Who and why, he wondered; was this a treasure trove or a garrison, uncounted years ago? Either way, there was no sign of any men having visited it recently.

  The thought led him to another, more pressing, question: Why wasn’t Tomms already below, haranguing him to help them ascend? After all, Tomms and his soldiers hadn’t needed to collect ropes on the way, so they should have got there first.

  * * *

  Tomms was within five paces of the stalker, and it hadn’t run or attacked. It remained under his power, which suggested that Tlanti was still pretty far away. That would be her loss shortly, he decided. She had a much better connection with her stalkers than he ever would, so he had no illusions about being able to control it in the long term.

  All he had to do was keep it where it was until it could be killed, and his soldiers were just about close enough to do it now—

  With a thunk, an arrow appeared out of nowhere, and buried itself in a tree bole next to his thigh. Startled, he looked round for the archer, his concentration broken for an instant. What felt like a solid log slammed into his ribs, pitching him to the ground. The stalker’s tail had done him a favour, as a second arrow shot past his head, the fletching cutting a nick in his ear.

  He rolled flat, and saw the stalker disappear into the foliage, while the soldiers took cover, both from the archer and in case the stalker came in again to attack.

  No more arrows came, and nor did the stalker return. A furious Tomms gathered the soldiers around him, and set off for their rendezvous with Gurbin and his ropes.

  * * *

  The stalker came into view a couple of minutes before a panting Klegg. Tlanti nodded her thanks to him, while applying a healing ointment from a pouch to a couple of small cuts on the stalker’s sides. ‘Tomms?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Klegg admitted. ‘First shot was a near-miss, the second might have got him. He went down, but the lizard there had hit him at the same time. I couldn’t tell.’

  ‘Doesn’t really matter, I suppose. The important thing is we didn’t lose my friend here, who heard all about the plan to have Gurbin lower ropes from the wall to carry them over it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Wolfram, ‘assuming that Tomms and/or his soldiers are continuing with that plan, how do we get through that wall? They’re not going to leave the ropes for us to follow.’

  ‘We swim.’

  ‘Swim?’

  ‘There’s an underground channel that Tomms doesn’t know about.’

  ‘How do you know about it, if we’re only following them wi
thout knowing where they’re going?’

  ‘The stalkers always know where to find fresh water. They can scent the path of the channel. We’ll follow them to an entrance.’

  ‘And if the channel is filled to the ceiling, with no air?’

  Tlanti didn’t answer.

  * * *

  Captain Wolfram was the first to surface, after the longest minute of their lives. He guided Tlanti upwards as Ironhand and Klegg surfaced behind them, and she saw that they were in a low, dark cave. Only a hint of phosphorescent lichen cast any light, but it was enough to see that slope of shingle led from the pool up into a narrow, winding passage. One of the stalkers was there, its eyes glinting in the dark.

  The roof was too low for them to stand up straight, so they crouched as Klegg and Ironhand manoeuvred the sealed barrel onto the shingle. Wolfram prised it open, and they availed themselves of dry clothes and weapons, the darkness preserving their modesty.

  The tunnels and crevices were narrow, with painful and sometimes jagged obstructions, but somehow the four of them, plus the two stalkers, squeezed and crawled past all of them, until a glimmer of sunlight cut through the gloom and stabbed painfully at their vision. Blinking like newborns, they emerged into a narrow, overgrown gulley, which widened into a game trail of some kind. They straightened their backs with clicks and groans, and looked back to see that the gulley had emerged from under the foundations of a thick section of the wall. The line of a broken stone staircase showed that they were inside rather than outside the wall.

  ‘We’ll have to work our way around to where they’re crossing,’ Tlanti said. ‘Hiking time!’

  * * *

  The clearing was more than just a clearing. A mere few yards away, the far side of it wasn’t bounded by vegetation, but simply dropped away into endless depths. The edge curved away to either side, forming the rim of a gigantic pit at least a thousand yards across. Streams and pools here and there had caused channels to crumble away, while in the centre of the pit, a towering column of rock, a couple of hundred yards across, stood only slightly higher than the level of the clearing.

  Below, in the uncountable depths, there was only mist and darkness. ‘Is this what they were looking for?’ Ironhand asked.

  ‘It’s definitely what that wall was meant to protect,’ Captain Wolfram said. ‘Still, this is probably a good place to camp down if need be. We don’t have to worry about anything coming up that cliff, so fewer approaches to watch out for, but less of a bottleneck than the tunnel.’

  ‘I completely agree,’ Tlanti said with a nod. ‘Now we just need to find that elusive little pixie who can walk through walls.’

  * * *

  They hadn’t been moving long, when a soft, gravelly clinking came through the undergrowth, and Tlanti held up a hand. They froze in place, as best they could; the sound couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a group of men with weapons, marching in unison. ‘Tomms’s men?’ Wolfram whispered.

  Tlanti shrugged as one of the stalkers crept forward and out of sight. Then she shook her head. ‘Men in bronze armour, with round shields.’

  ‘Dricheans,’ Klegg muttered. The nearer stalker turned its head towards him, its beady gaze emotionless. Tlanti nodded, without looking round, and the stalker echoed the gesture. It bared a quarter inch of teeth, a grim and cruel parody of Tlanti’s smile. Klegg shivered.

  * * *

  Gurbin didn’t envy the mail-clad soldiers in this heat and humidity, but they showed no sign of being any more weary then Tomms or himself. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘Nowhere in particular,’ Tomms admitted blandly. ‘We’re marking time until a rendezvous I—’ Without warning, several men leapt out of the undergrowth, two blocking Tomms’s and Gurbin’s path, others knocking the unprepared soldiers to the ground and kicking their weapons aside. A handful of other men stepped out and arrayed themselves in a loose perimeter around the group.

  The newcomers all wore bronze breastplates, helmets and greaves, and carried round shields and a mixture of short swords and javelins. ‘Dricheans,’ Gurbin exclaimed. One of them, whose helmet sported a bristling red plume, stepped forward. ‘Why have you infiltrated our patrol area?’ he demanded, his accent peculiar and archaic.

  Tomms smiled broadly. ‘Isn’t it obvious? To meet you.’

  ‘You are no Dricheans; you can have no legitimate business with us.’

  ‘That’s sort of true,’ Tomms admitted. ‘But I do have business with your orders.’

  ‘Our orders?’ the leader echoed, in spite of himself.

  ‘The last sealed orders you – or more likely your ancestors – received before you ended up stuck behind this wall.’

  ‘Our orders do not concern you. Apart from the sections about killing our enemies.’

  ‘Who am I talking to?’

  The Drichean with the tallest plume on his helmet looked Tomms up and down, as if debating with himself whether he owed a foreign civilian any introduction. ‘You may address me as Lochagos.’

  ‘Lochagos,’ Tomms said slowly, ‘we were sent to ascertain that you had followed your orders, and were carrying them out properly. When we report back to our and your superiors—’

  ‘Your soldiers are not Dricheans, and our superiors would never send others to inspect us.’ He raised a hand, and said, ‘Kill the soldiers, and capture the runner and the Warden! They have questions to answer...’

  The two soldiers with the javelins drew back their arms, and threw.

  Gurbin didn’t see the throws, but heard the rasp of leather and metal as the men moved. The focus came instinctively, as reactions had to, and suddenly the world quietened, branches no longer slapping at him or tugging at his robes. First one metal shaft flew under his field of vision and dug into the ground, then another. He darted left to avoid running into the quivering javelins that had just passed harmlessly through him, and then jinked right. He knew he couldn’t keep himself insubstantial for much longer, not while running full-pelt, and he certainly didn’t want to stop running while he was in range of the Dricheans’ bronze-tipped arrows and javelins.

  He had only the slightest moment to register movement out of the corner of his eye, before another Drichean pushed with his javelin instead of throwing it, slamming the wood into Gurbin’s face. Everything went black.

  * * *

  ‘This is our chance,’ Tlanti shouted, rushing forward. The Dricheans were expecting an attack from the flanks even less than Tomms was, and two of them were down and being rent by stalkers before anyone could react to their presence.

  Wolfram and Tlanti darted for three Dricheans who were carrying a bundle, tied up in a couple of cloaks. The Dricheans were struggling with the bundle, which was struggling as much against them. Wolfram’s paired swords took the forearm off one, and impaled the other’s skull. Tlanti punched out with the polished stalker claws in her hands, blinding the last and opening up his throat.

  Klegg and Ironhand took on the others, but of Tomms and the last of his soldiers, there was no sign. Swords clashed, and blood sprayed, and after a few moments, there was a sudden silence, broken only by distant rustling, heading away from the fight.

  Tlanti knew that would be Tomms, protected by whichever soldiers had survived. She directed one stalker to follow the sound, and called the other. Klegg and Ironhand returned too, and picked up the bundle, which had stopped struggling.

  They carried it back to the clearing they had found at the edge of the bottomless moat, and then relaxed a little. ‘Gently,’ Tlanti snapped, and one of the stalkers stepped closer to the men. They laid the bundle down, and Klegg cut the leather bindings with a dagger. The oilskin flapped open, and Gurbin rolled out, thrashing around for a moment until he realised that he was no longer constrained by the oilcloth.

  He pushed himself to his feet, eyes wide, and looked around the camp.

  ‘What have you done?’ he demanded.

  ‘What I had to do.’

  ‘You fool!’r />
  ‘What?!’ Tlanti scowled. ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘Bringing me here was a big mistake. Tomms will be coming.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on telling him where you are. Were you?’

  ‘I don’t have to. He already knows.’ Gurbin looked around, searching for any sign that they understood the seriousness of their situation. He saw none. ‘As I said, bringing me here was a mistake. Tomms always knows where I am.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How do you think?’

  ‘Imagine I don’t know, and tell me.’

  Gurbin opened his mouth as if he was going to say something, but then his face froze into a rictus. His eyes looked apologetic to Tlanti, but his lips closed, his teeth gritted.

  ‘He means this was a trap,’ Ironhand said suspiciously. ‘This witch has betrayed us!’

  ‘Impossible!’ Wolfram snapped.

  ‘No one has betrayed you,’ Tlanti said.

  Klegg nodded. ‘Aye, she has the right of it there. This fancy-pants was our enemies’ leader to start with. He can’t betray us if he was fighting us from the get-go.’

  Tlanti led Captain Wolfram a few paces away. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘About how Tomms might always know where Gurbin is?’ Tlanti nodded. ‘He communes with the beasts, as you do. If there’s so much as a louse in the Heritor’s robes... Is that enough of a beast?’

  ‘For some Wardens, yes. A louse, every leech or mosquito in any stinking swamp... Something else bothers me, though. I’m sure Gurbin was going to tell us... something. But then he—’

  ‘Thought better of it?’ Wolfram shrugged. ‘Fear of the lash or blade are as good as iron chains and the stocks for most men.’

  ‘Heritors aren’t most men, and I’ve never seen Gurbin show much fear of anything.’

  ‘Showing fear and feeling it aren’t the same thing. I’ve never known man nor woman that didn’t have a fear of something, but I’ve known plenty that would only show laughter or rage to hide it.’

  Tlanti nodded, and walked back to Gurbin and the others. ‘Damn you, Gurbin, how long have we worked together? Do you really think I would just let Tomms kidnap you, or force you into working for him?’