“Agreed,” Trajan said.
The place was surprisingly large and Trajan did indeed know it well. He led them through an exhaustive search of the entire fortress, which proved to be a heart-wrenching experience for both him and Ayela. Hundreds of Trajan’s soldiers were dead, killed in pitched battles that took place in the halls and barracks. Soldiers fought without full armor, sometimes even without boots because the attack had been so sudden, the enemy had breached the gates so quickly and poured into the fortress in such force that the defenders didn’t have time to mount anything but the most hasty of defenses.
From the carnage, it was clear that the Regency soldiers had been ordered to leave no one alive. The dead had suffered various types of wounds, but each and every one of the fallen had another wound, a narrow-bladed dagger puncture to the heart. Even their own dead had been stabbed in the heart and left to rot.
The corpses were piled highest near the outer door of the king’s chambers. Isabel had to watch her footing as she climbed over the four-foot pile of bodies. Within, they found more dead, including one of the Sin’Rath who had fallen just inside the king’s door and died from a cut to her throat.
The king’s chambers were large, cold, and dark. It took nearly an hour of searching to discover the three hidden doors leading out. They would have stopped long before finding the first one, were it not for Trajan’s insistence that they keep looking.
“I know my father well enough to know that he has at least two hidden passages,” he said. “Keep looking until you find them.”
The first passage they found led to a series of more passages that seemed to permeate the entire fortress, shadowing the main passages and allowing access or a view into many important rooms. As well as Ayela knew the secret passages in the fortress, she had to admit she’d never been in these passages.
The second hidden door led to a long tunnel leading into the dark, a cool breeze picking up the moment they opened the door.
The third passage was locked from the inside, an oddity that made Isabel wonder. Further inspection revealed a peephole looking into the room from the hidden passage beyond.
“We should see what’s behind there,” she said.
“Agreed,” Trajan said, motioning to two of his men. They picked up a table and used it as a battering ram to break the door open, thunderous echoes rolling away into the passages of the fortress with each strike. It took some effort, but they eventually succeeded, breaching the door and pulling it apart.
Beyond was a passage that led deeper into the mountain. After a few hundred feet, they came to a wide spot with a fifty-foot-deep pit barring their way. On the far side was a drawbridge operated by a winch with a hand crank.
“If you and Prince Trajan would stand back, I can cross and lower the bridge,” Hector said.
Trajan frowned but followed Isabel back the way they’d come far enough for Hector’s magic to work. By the time they returned, the bridge was in place. The corridor, roughly hewn from the mountain and having only rudimentary supports, continued for another hundred feet, opening into a small round cave with three hallways leading out. Two led back toward the part of the fortress occupied by the House of Karth, but the one directly across from them led farther into the mountain.
Another fifty feet and they entered a large irregular cavern lit by a vein of naturally luminescent crystals running through the ceiling. The place was a scene of squalor and filth. At least a dozen creatures had lived here, sharing this single living space, wallowing in each other’s excrement. The stench was nauseating. The flies, revolting.
“This is where the Sin’Rath slept,” Ayela said.
Trajan turned away from the room. Two of his men vomited.
“I’ve seen enough,” Isabel said, covering her mouth and nose.
“There may still be a witch here,” Trajan said. “We must search these chambers, no matter how distasteful it is.”
“Well then, let’s be quick about it,” Isabel said, drawing her sword and heading to one of the exits, with Hector falling in behind her.
They searched for over an hour, covering an extensive network of passages and rooms, some locked, some open, others without doors. From this network, the Sin’Rath could view and hear most of the important rooms in the fortress and had access to many of the more important areas via secret passages that connected with the other networks of passages but that locked from the inside.
Isabel was especially interested in one room they found. It opened onto a balcony encircling a pit below. On one wall of the pit was a stout door locked from the outside. A hole in the ceiling of the cave allowed a stream of daylight to fill the well of the pit while plunging the rest of the room into shadow. It looked very different from here, Isabel thought.
They found a few passages leading to the surface but they were all still locked and barred from within, so they decided to keep looking, reasoning that the Sin’Rath had escaped by some other route.
While the search revealed nothing new, it did serve to reinforce the absolute nature of the Sin’Rath’s treachery. For Trajan and Ayela, it felt like mockery. The Sin’Rath had been in control of everything … for their whole lives. They’d been watching, waiting … planning how they would use each member of the Karth line in their schemes.
Having completely searched the fortress, they left through the secret escape tunnel from Severine’s chamber, walking into the cool breeze toward the surface. It opened behind a boulder inside a cave with a natural underground river surfacing in a rushing torrent and cascading out of the cave mouth and down the hillside.
Isabel knelt down, Trajan right beside her, examining footprints in the soft riverbank soil.
“Many people came this way,” Trajan said.
“They’ll be easy enough to follow,” Isabel said. “The hard part will be spotting when the witches break away from the refugees.”
“Not with all of us looking,” Trajan said, motioning for one of his men to take point. They followed the trail from the cave and into the jungle for several hours before they came to a clearing littered with bodies, some were fallen soldiers from both the Regency and Karth, others were just people fleeing the Regency; some died by the blade, others were killed with magic.
The many paths leading from the clearing were all filled with carnage as if the refugees fleeing the fortress had scattered into the jungle the moment the Regency soldiers ambushed them. Trajan and his men began the painstaking process of following each path for a small distance and discovered that they all circled around to the same place, behind and to the left of the spot where they got ambushed. From there, the survivors of the ambush circled around and continued on into the jungle.
Their path took them over a small mountain pass and down to a major road that intersected two other major roads within a few leagues in each direction. Those who had escaped the fortress had camped by the road for the night and then gone in different directions, melting away into the jungle. Isabel looked at the trampled roadside where several dozen people had camped along it all at the same time and shook her head.
“Any idea how we can track the Sin’Rath from here?” she asked. “They could be anywhere by now.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Trajan said, then smiling suddenly and pointing before taking off at a dead run down the road. Some distance away, another man scrambled out of the jungle, running away from Trajan down the middle of the road. Trajan stopped and returned, smiling and schooling his breath.
“Now we have something to track,” he said.
“Who was that?”
“One of my father’s men, a watcher assigned to wait here and see if anyone showed up. He will run back to my father and report our arrival.”
“So the witches will know we’re still tracking them,” Isabel said. “We might not want to just follow that guy blindly back to them.”
Trajan hefted his club. “The witches have no power.”
“Maybe not,” Isabel said, “but they can
always give bows to the hundred men they have working for them. A hundred arrows may not be magic, but they will kill you just the same, club or not.”
“I’ll send two men ahead to scout,” Trajan said.
“Fair enough,” Isabel said. “Let’s go … but carefully.” It was becoming painfully clear that Trajan was going to do what he was going to do, regardless of Isabel’s suggestions. She turned her thoughts to figuring out how she was going to get close to Phane, and exactly what she was going to do once she did.
The man’s tracks doubled back and looped around the other direction, meeting up with a set of almost forty older tracks marching two by two along a narrow jungle path away from the road. The scouts continued to range out ahead of them, searching out the path taken by the watcher, marking the trail and pressing forward.
After several hours of steady movement, the scouts were waiting alongside the path for them. They were in a rough part of the jungle. Cliffs, sudden steep hills and rocky outcroppings were the norm, with all manner of vegetation clinging to every surface possible. Travel was treacherous and slow.
“They left the trail up ahead,” Trajan whispered, as his scouts followed the trail farther. Everyone was quiet, waiting for word from the two men, but time passed and they didn’t return.
While they waited, Isabel started to worry that the Sin’Rath had captured them and were sending soldiers. Her idle worry seemed to take on a life of its own within her mind, expanding into fear and full-blown panic within the space of a few moments. She crouched with the rest of Trajan’s men, shivering in fear of some imagined threat. Ayela noticed something was wrong and touched her arm with an inquiring look.
Isabel nearly leapt out of her skin at the sudden contact, her panic breaking and fading away like water. She shook her head to Ayela and went back to her own thoughts. Never before had she experienced such sudden and irrational fear. It couldn’t be Azugorath, or the darkness, or anything else magical.
That left two possibilities: either she was becoming a coward … or it was the bone.
Chapter 46
After it had become painfully clear that something had happened to the scouts, Trajan led everyone along the path they’d taken and were relieved to meet them returning to make their report. They’d found a cave with a door at the back of it about ten minutes away. Had the Sin’Rath and House of Karth not left so many footprints, the cave would have remained completely hidden.
“So that’s one way in,” Trajan said.
“You think there might be another?” Isabel asked.
“I’m certain of it. There will be at least one escape passage and probably another entrance as well.”
“If we could find the escape tunnel, I bet it would lead straight to the king’s chambers. We could get behind them,” Isabel said, “and avoid fighting your men altogether.”
“That may be more difficult than you imagine,” Trajan said. “Escape tunnels are often deliberately unfinished, with three or four feet left to dig so the exit point can’t be easily found.”
The rear guard raced up, low and quiet, and whispered something to Trajan, then returned to his post.
“Regency soldiers are coming this way,” Trajan said. “They’re about ten minutes out.”
“We could always hide and let them fight it out,” Isabel said.
“If my father weren’t inside, I would agree with you. As it stands, we have little choice.” He signaled to his point man and they started toward the cave.
The entrance was covered over with hanging vines. Once inside, they found a small cave, measuring ten feet deep, four feet wide, and almost five feet high. The back wall was occupied by a large, stout door. Trajan tried to open it, nodding to himself when it didn’t budge.
“If you give me the space I need to use my magic, I can open that door,” Hector said.
His tone was monotonous, void of passion or feeling, simply conveying information. Isabel made a mental note of his mood. She’d been worried about him since Horace died, but things had really changed with him after he woke the ghidora. His mood was dark, devoid of passion or humor or desire, as if some essential part of him had gone missing.
Trajan and Isabel withdrew about forty feet from the cave and waited for one of his men to signal. They returned to find the door open and two freshly killed men on the floor—both of them Karth house guard. Hector was cleaning one of his swords.
“What have you done?” Trajan said. “These men were of my house. Why did you kill them?”
“So they wouldn’t raise the alarm,” Hector said slowly without looking up from cleaning his sword.
Trajan started to take a step toward him, but Ayela stopped him with a hand on his arm.
Isabel went to Hector and stood in front of him, waiting until he looked up at her. She saw so much desolation in his eyes … it worried her.
“Don’t kill any more of the Karth guards if you can help it,” she said quietly but intently.
He nodded and went back to his sword, checking the sheen by looking along the length of the blade, then carefully, deliberately, sheathing it.
They filed inside, bolting the door behind them, and moved deeper into the underground stronghold with Trajan in the lead. He stopped at a corner, peering around momentarily before quickly pulling his head back.
With hand signals, he indicated three targets, one witch and two house guards. He selected two of his men to attack with him. Then he motioned for everyone else to remain where they were.
Isabel looked around the corner a moment after they moved, watching them race toward the trio without saying a word, weapons up and at the ready. They got within twelve feet before the three turned around. The witch tried to throw some kind of spell at Trajan. The expression on her demonically contorted face transformed from confusion to horror as his club whistled through the air, catching her on the side of the head just above the ear and caving her skull in with one stroke. She slumped to the ground. Trajan’s men grappled with the house guard until they could be shown the truth of the Sin’Rath. Once they saw her true form, they both agreed to work with Trajan to kill the rest.
He questioned the two guards intensely for several minutes, gaining a basic understanding of the stronghold’s layout and learning where his father and the Sin’Rath were likely to be, then assigned them to lead the way.
They quietly passed many doors, some with muffled sounds of snoring behind them. These people had just fled the Regency in the dead of night, narrowly escaping with their lives. Isabel suspected they were all exhausted; the emptiness of the corridors bore that out. The two guards led them ever deeper, winding through some levels and bypassing others entirely. Where they saw guards, they were able to pass without arousing suspicion because of their uniforms and bearing … until they got close to the witches and Severine.
They came upon two guards at the bottom of several flights of stairs. The guards seemed willing to hear them out, waiting patiently as they approached, until they saw Trajan and Ayela and immediately cried out an alarm, drawing weapons. Their two fellow guards that had joined Trajan attacked them with clubs, knocking their swords aside and lunging into them, followed by two of Trajan’s men who took their weapons when they went down.
Isabel smiled as she approached the two men. They stood, held from behind, and looked past her like she wasn’t even there. She casually tossed a pinch of sleeping powder into each guard’s face. They fell in turn.
Trajan nodded his approval. Isabel knew it was about to become much more difficult to survive without killing. At least a dozen men were coming, footfalls in the distance, but getting closer, and quickly. Trajan deployed his men in a line, each loading a dart into his blowtube and facing the end of the hall. They waited patiently until ten soldiers and two witches stormed around the corner into the wide hallway.
Five blowdarts found five men, each of them toppling to the ground moments later from the potent paralysis poison coating the darts. Both witches raised their hands to
cast spells over the fallen van of their guard force, but nothing happened.
“Look at what you serve,” Trajan said, pointing his club at the witches. “See the truth of them and strike them down!”
One glimpse of the true form of the Sin’Rath, coupled with the elimination of their magical charms, and the five men bringing up the rear of the witches’ guard set upon them with a kind of frenzied ferocity, as if killing them quickly might bring some measure of atonement for ever serving such loathsome creatures.
Two more of the Sin’Rath Coven fell screaming and cursing. That left seven.
After a brief conversation, the guards swore loyalty to Trajan and agreed to help locate Severine Karth and kill the remaining Sin’Rath. He sent one man to the upper levels to warn of the Regency’s approach, and instructed another to attend to the seven men left sleeping in the hall. He took the remaining three men with him, expanding the number of soldiers under his command to eight.
The wide corridor turned right without any change in size, then ran straight for fifty feet, ending at a large set of stoutly banded doors, closed and barred from the inside.
“Can you open those doors?” Trajan asked Hector.
“Not if the witches are on the other side.”
“They are, I’m certain of it,” said one of the guards.
They started to hear the muted sounds of fighting coming from levels above. Isabel felt helpless. Alexander would be able to see through the door, then open it with ease, but then, he wouldn’t be able to do anything without his magic. She was helpless because of the Goiri bone. With magic, she could burn a hole through the door.
“Hold this, Ayela,” Isabel said, handing her the Goiri bone. Ayela took it, nodding ever so slightly.
Isabel marched off toward the door … and then it hit her. When she stepped out of the null magic field, Azugorath slammed back into her mind. Isabel crumpled to her knees with a scream that filtered through the entire subterranean complex. Azugorath pushed harder and in several different ways than ever before, trying to capitalize on the first few moments of the attack to overwhelm Isabel … and it was working. She felt her control slipping. Azugorath was making inroads, moment by moment, worming her way into Isabel’s mind.
Cursed Bones (Sovereign of the Seven Isles: Book Five) Page 41
