by Paul Stewart
Dense clouds of grey smoke billowed up from the broken stockade and shattered steps. Then, in the midst of the smoke, something seemed to coalesce. Something dark. Something massive.
His ears ringing, his mouth full of dust, and the grey cloak covered in chips of wood and pottery shards, Micah looked up. The shelfstacks around him had collapsed. Vats of oil had been crushed, spewing their contents. Grain barrels had been smashed. Earthenware pots lay broken, their ochre shards engulfed in liquid as rockpears in syrup mingled with wyrmehearts in brine. Charred pieces of wood and lance-like splinters from the stockade were strewn across the stone floor.
One of them had skewered the little grey-green wyrme that Micah had befriended. It lay a little way off, outstretched, motionless. Its beady eyes stared blindly up at him.
It looked smaller in death, Micah thought.
He turned.
The dark shape loomed out of the haze, becoming more distinct as the smoke thinned and cleared; the dark-rimmed eyes, the heavy lakewyrmeskin cape, the monstrous face quilted in crisscross scars.
No, it couldn’t be. But it was.
Micah opened his fear-parched mouth. ‘The winter caller.’
Forty-One
Micah stared, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Broken pieces of pottery dug into his chest, his belly. Beside him, Eli was breathing hard.
The winter caller turned his head and his small dead eyes surveyed the chamber.
Light played across the quiltwork of crisscross scars that etched his face. One of his ears hung by a thin twist of skin and flesh. He smiled, and a strand of drool dripped from the corner of his twisted mouth.
Around his shoulders was the lakewyrmeskin cloak, battered and ripped, and as white as the avalanche that had buried him. Beneath its folds, something silver glinted. The eye-gouge. It dangled from his belt alongside other tools. The bone-shears and liver-clamps. Hooks and spikes. Knives with curved serrated blades. He had picked them up from the snow in his massive clawed hands – the same massive clawed hands that had dug him out of the avalanche.
The winter caller had freed himself from his frozen tomb and returned to the winter den, to gather up his precious belongings; to pick up the scent. And he had followed them here, these kith who had killed Redmyrtle, who had escaped punishment – and who had refused to die. Here, to this place that smelled of rich provisions and sulphurous springs.
His gaze fell upon the kith he’d been hunting. Micah and Eli stared back at him. The winter caller took a step forward …
Eli leaped to his feet, seized a stone jar and hurled it at the winter caller, who let out a muffled grunt as it slammed into the side of his head. Micah scrambled up, his feet slipping and sliding on spilt fruit, liquor, oil; tripping over shattered pottery and splintered wood. The winter caller bore down upon Eli. With one arm raised, he swept a row of large green jars from a shelf, then seized one end of the shelfstack and sent the whole lot crashing to the floor.
Micah and Eli jumped back, the toppled stack just missing them, but sending sacks and boxes and jars tumbling about their ears. Eli threw another heavy jar at the winter caller, then retreated, his knife now glinting in his hand. Stumbling over the debris, Micah headed in the opposite direction. Then, dropping to his knees, he gathered a handful of broken shards with one hand and drew his catapult from his back pocket with the other.
The winter caller batted away a third stone jar and, shooting out an arm, seized Eli by the neck and threw him bodily across the store chamber. The cragclimber hit the wall and crumpled to the floor.
His fingers trembling, Micah loaded the catapult with a shard, pulled back the drawstring and fired. The shard spun through the air and embedded itself inthe back of the winter caller’s neck. He didn’t flinch. Instead, he pulled a serrated knife from his belt and advanced on the stricken cragclimber.
Micah fired again. And again. Blood spurted from cuts to the winter caller’s head as, with his back to Micah, he knelt down over Eli and ripped open his jacket. He raised the curve-blade butcher’s knife with its fine-toothed jags, so good for rib-splitting and evisceration, and took aim.
Then stopped …
A shard of pottery whistled past his head. It slammed into the wall and shattered.
The winter caller stared at the medallion hanging from the silver chain around the cragclimber’s neck. It was oval and, engraved on its worn silver surface, were three names. Hiram. Anya. Darius.
‘Darius. Darius …’ His mother’s voice came to him, soft and loving and calling across a summer meadow. The feel of his father’s hand, so warm and strong, leading him home through the rippling grass …
Winter. Bitter winds. Endless tramping through the snow …
Screams and cries and pleas for mercy.
‘Go, son. Save yourself.’ His father’s voice urgent, full of fear.
Brutal hands grabbing him and dragging him away, down, down into the darkness …
‘Come, little one.’ A voice close to his ear, honeyed, soothing. Promises full of menace. ‘I shall teach you the ways of the keld. You will be my special slave.’
Whiplash. Knifecut. Pain …
‘Make it stop! Make it stop!’
Obedience … Reward …
Bloodhoney.
The winter caller reached out and tore the medallion, his medallion, from the cragclimber’s neck. He hesitated. A rich bloodtaint odour was flooding into the store chamber from the tunnel to his right.
It was sweet and rank and pungent. It was the odour of keld.
Forty-Two
Micah shrank back behind a fallen shelfstack as six savage-looking figures burst out of the tunnel and into the store chamber. With a guttural roar, the winter caller pulled away from the prone body of the cragclimber and turned to face them.
The figures spread out and circled the massive bulk of the winter caller warily. They were keld like him, raised in the gloom of deep caverns, trained and goaded in the keld way to fight and kill with chilling brutality.
Four of them wore bone masks, their eyes glinting out of black sockets. The other two were bare-faced, openly displaying their hideous disfigurements; a lipless mouth stitched into a permanent snarl, and a face pocked with black-ringed burns from a whitehot poker.
All six of them wore heavy wyrmeskin boots, wyrmeskin breeks and sleeveless wyrmeskin jerkins. On their arms and legs they wore plated armour of wyrmebone ivory, crudely scored with arcane designs. In their hands they clutched their weapons of choice: a heavy harpoon crossbow, a rock-weighted catchnet, a spiked cudgel, a gutting-sabre and a bone-wrench, and long-handled headclamps with zigzag teeth …
The winter caller sprang up from the stone floor, his powerful legs propelling him through the air in a headlong leap. Crashing into the keld with the gutting-sabre, the winter caller knocked him from his feet, embedding his serrated curve-blade knife in the eyesocket of the keld’s mask as he did so.
The winter caller jerked his knife free and leaped to his feet, swinging his arm in a wide arc as he rose. The curved blade of the knife sliced through the thick wyrmeskin jerkin of the keld with the long-handled clamps. The keld’s pockmarked face registered puzzlement for a brief moment, before he fell to his knees and slumped to the floor at the winter caller’s feet.
The four remaining keld fell back with snarls and high-pitched stuttering shrieks, widening the circle. In the centre of the chamber, the winter caller dropped on one knee and, wrenching the clamps from the dead keld’s hands, sent them spiralling across the floor at knee height.
The keld with the lipless snarl screamed as the razor-sharp teeth of the headclamps sliced through his shins. Dropping his spiked cudgel, he collapsed in a heap, flailing wildly about amid the broken jars and spilt provisions, the stumps of his legs spraying blood in a wide arc across the floor.
The winter caller lunged a
t the three remaining keld, who darted back beyond reach of his massive arm and flashing knife. Grunting with frustration, the winter caller flung his curve-blade knife at the keld with the bone-wrench.
It was the opportunity the other two had been waiting for. As the knife found its target, thudding into the third keld’s neck, the keld with the rock-weighted catchnet flung it into the air and his companion raised his heavy harpoon crossbow and took aim.
Too late, the winter caller reached to his belt to draw a hatchet, only for the coils of the net to snag his throwing arm. At the same moment, the crossbow leaped in the keld’s hands, sending the harpoon spinning through the air, trailing a length of rope behind it. It struck the winter caller hard, low in the back, penetrating the lakewyrmeskin cloak and emerging out through his chest on the other side.
The winter caller staggered, staring down at the barbed point of the harpoon and at the blood spreading out across his wyrmeskin jerkin. He rocked on his heels, his dark-ringed eyes glazing over. His nostrils flared.
He could smell the rich dark odour of blood. His own blood. Fresh and pungent. It was the odour of death.
The keld pulled sharply on the rope and the winter caller gave a low groan and toppled backwards, then crashed to the floor. His massive body convulsed for a few moments more before the life left it, and one huge fist uncurled to reveal the silver medallion it had been clasping.
The medallion clattered to the floor.
The two remaining keld closed in on the lifeless body already framed in a growing pool of blood. Their eyes glittered behind the bone masks as they stooped over the corpse and sniffed.
From the shadows behind the fallen shelfstack, Micah rose and crept over to where Eli lay. He knelt down over the cragclimber, who had a deep gash to the side of his head. Micah held a finger to his neck, checking for a pulse.
Eli opened his eyes.
‘Brother Eli, brother Micah.’ It was Kilian the prophet’s voice.
Micah looked up.
Kilian was standing by the entrance to the store chamber. As Micah watched, he picked his way through the splintered wood, broken pots and dead bodies. He clapped his hands and, from behind him, more keld trooped into the store chamber. The prophet was clearly in command. The two surviving keld were dragging the winter caller’s body across the floor and into the tunnel.
In the distance, the muffled voices of the Deephomers could be heard, raised in song.
‘I’m sorry you had to witness this,’ said Kilian, shaking his head sadly. ‘But since you have, you leave me no choice.’ He clicked his fingers and keld in bone masks stepped forward and seized Micah and Eli. ‘Take them to your mistress,’ he said.
Forty-Three
The choke collar the keld had fastened round Micah’s neck tightened as the leash was tugged viciously. Micah stumbled forwards and almost lost his balance as he gasped for breath. He reached up and clawed at the chain at his throat, only for a heavy cudgel to knock his hands away.
‘Keep moving,’ a wheezing voice hissed close by his ear.
Micah gagged at the foul odour of the keld’s breath. It stank of rust and rotten meat and masked, for a moment, the pervasive stench of unwashed skin. The cudgel slammed into his back as the keld urged him on down the dim-lit tunnel.
Beside Micah, Eli struggled to catch his breath as the choke collar round his neck bit deep into the skin. Blood trickled from the wound at the side of his head.
Behind them the sound of the singing in the great chamber grew fainter as Micah and Eli were driven down deeper into the tunnel. In front and behind them, the keld pressed in closer as the tunnel narrowed. Beneath their feet, the rough stone floor steepened. It was slippery with blood from the bodies of the winter caller and the four dead keld that had been dragged down the tunnel ahead of them. Micah skidded and fell, and the choke collar pulled tight as his keld handler yanked him back to his feet.
They came to a door.
Micah recognized it all too well. It was the door that he’d been told led to the old equipment store; the cobwebbed door that had so unnerved him when he’d ventured down this tunnel before.
It was open.
With snarling curses, the keld dragged and prodded Micah and Eli through the doorway. Behind them, the door slammed shut. The air was hot and humid and fetid with unfamiliar fumes. Micah looked up, and struggled to make sense of the scene before him.
They were in a large cavern, about the same size as the great chamber of Deephome above. But the great chamber, with its glowing carpet of straw and magnificent rock formations, had exuded an atmosphere of calm and tranquillity. This cavern was different. The walls were stained a deep red and glistened with condensation. A dozen or so stooped dead-eyed figures, their sweat-covered torsos gleaming, shambled about like sleepwalkers. The wyrmeskin breeches they wore were little more than soiled rags and most were barefoot, though some wore tattered boots.
Kith boots, Micah recognized. Like his own.
In among them, several hulking bone-masked keld screeched commands and lashed out with whips and cudgels as the shambling figures tended to a large apparatus at the centre of the cavern. A pot-bellied vessel of blackened copper was being heated over a roaring fire set in a pit beneath it. At the top of the vessel was an elbow-shaped pipe that was attached to a long snake-like coil of piping, which was immersed in a vat of ice-cold snowmelt, dripping from a thin crack in the cave ceiling. Emerging from the bottom of the vat, the tapered end of the pipe dripped a deep, dark red liquid into a flagon placed under it.
Micah had seen apparatus like this before. It was a still. Back in the winter den, Eli had used one exactly like this to brew his green liquor from a mash of barleygrain, water and yeast. But this was no green liquor that the keld were distilling, not judging by the mash they were using.
As the keld dragged Micah and Eli across the chamber by their choke collars, Micah saw a gaunt kith slave pick up a brimming bowl and carefully pour its contents into a red-stained barrel. It was blood. Deephomers’ blood.
Maybe even Cara’s blood.
And that was not all. In a recess gouged out of the cavern wall to his left were three large redwing wyrmes, their savage muzzles bound shut; they were shackled by their necks, their tails and all four of their legs. Two kith slaves were crouched over one of the wyrmes. They had made a small incision and were draining the precious flameoil from the glands at the base of its neck into a small pot. Just like the Deephomers, these wyrmes were being used, Micah realized. Farmed by the keld. As he and Eli were dragged past, Micah saw the kith take the pot of flameoil, add it to the blood in the barrel and mix the two together in readiness for distillation in the copper still.
No, this was not green liquor. It was that stuff that Eli had taken from the winter caller’s backpack and that they had both drunk when their strength had given out. Micah could still recollect the taste, the smell, the red stain it had left on their lips – and the way it had made him feel …
Bloodhoney, Eli had called it.
At the far side of the cavern, they stopped in front of a wyrmeskin curtain hanging from a rod. One of the keld pulled it aside to reveal an opening in the wall of rock.
‘Two kith, mistress,’ he announced.
‘Bring them to me,’ came a voice that was soft and honey-sweet, and as he was shoved into this second chamber, Micah was astonished to hear the sound of the Deephomers’ singing once more.
He looked up. At the centre of the lamplit cavern, seated on a bone chair slung with tattooed skin, was a woman. She had long auburn hair, flecked with silvery grey, and penetrating turquoise eyes. Cara’s eyes. Micah flinched. It was as though he was looking at an older version of Cara herself. But where Cara’s face was open and trusting, the face before him was hard and arrogant, yet still beautiful.
‘Kneel!’ barked the keld.
Micah dropped to hi
s knees. Beside him, the second keld pressed down hard on Eli’s shoulders till the cragclimber’s legs buckled. He landed heavily, then crumpled and sprawled forward. Micah instinctively reached across to his friend, only to receive a vicious stroke of the lash across his shoulders. Helooked up to see that the woman had a whip in her hand.
‘Leave him,’ she said sweetly. ‘A little bloodhoney will soon revive him, and the two of you will be put to work.’
Just then, the wyrmeskin curtain was pulled aside. The woman turned and smiled.
‘Ah, husband,’ she said. ‘Join us.’
Micah looked round. Kilian the prophet was standing in the doorway.
Forty-Four
Kilian looked down at Micah and Eli, who were kneeling on the floor in front of the woman. The two keld guards stood behind them, gripping the ends of the leashes.
‘Oh, Carafine,’ he said. ‘Not the whip. Please …’ Kilian reached out a hand to Eli and helped him to his feet. Then did the same for Micah. ‘I’m so sorry it had to come to this,’ he began, his eyes full of sorrow and compassion, ‘but you left me no choice …’
‘Keld,’ said Eli quietly. ‘You are in league with the keld.’ His voice was bitter and tinged with contempt. ‘I should have expected no less from a stone prophet.’
Micah looked down at his feet. He had been so wrong about the prophet, about Deephome, about everything. He couldn’t look at Eli. He felt foolish and ashamed.
The woman who looked so like Cara stepped forward and struck the cragclimber a vicious blow across the face with her whip. She raised the whip again, but the prophet stayed her hand.
‘Please, Carafine!’ he insisted. ‘You must let me explain …’
Carafine’s face softened. ‘You’re too tenderhearted for your own good, husband,’ she said gently, but her turquoise eyes were bright with suppressed anger. She returned to the bone chair and sat down. ‘Well?’ she said, and crossed her arms.
