Blood Gate Boxed Set

by K L Reinhart

  The rest was trying to get what you want without anyone knowing about it, Reticula thought. She started to raise one hand—the one not holding her shortsword—very carefully indeed.

  “Ghrek!” The second largest beastial hadn’t seen Reticula’s movement. But the smaller one on the window ledge had and gave a high-pitched, warning grunt, immediately making the larger snort and bounce one step toward Reticula, its tusks lowered.

  “Osma Duplis, Duplis Osma . . .” Reticula breathed, drawing small circles in the air with one index finger, hoping that she could remember exactly what it was that the Chief Arcanum had taught her.

  She was not strong in magic, and she couldn’t wrangle her mind around the heavier, larger incantations and spells, but she was one of the small cohorts that had more than two aptitudes for the different schools of magic:

  Reticula was gifted with Healing, Battle, and Illusions.

  “GHRAKH!” The second largest beastial snarled again, taking another bounding step and punching at the floor, an obvious display that it was about to attack her.

  “Osma Duplis! Osma Duplis Beastial!” Reticula gasped out the words, her eyes glazing a little as she recalled the shape of the very living beastial before it had died. She could see how large it was in her mind, and the way it moved. She could recall its smell and feel its brute arrogance.

  And suddenly, the dead beastial coughed, shook its snout, and sprang to its clawed feet.

  Or the illusion of it did, anyway.

  The illusion of the dead beastial was perfect in every detail. It had already skittered around on its giant claw-fists to thump strongly at the flagstone floor, back at its fellows.

  “Ghruk!?” The second largest beastial skittered back a few steps, huffing and snuffing in blatant panic.

  “GHRAAARK!” The illusion-beastial roared, rocking backwards before it launched itself forward at the second.

  And in that instant, Reticula moved, rolling away from the still very dead body of the real beastial, bounding to her feet, and crossing with three long strides to the rear doors at the back.

  “Avouna!” she hissed for the doors to bang open, before Reticula spoke a simple warding charm that everyone with any hint of battle-magic knew. The Journeywoman didn’t stop running as she flung the blue, rippling circle behind her to slam the doors to the lesser gallery shut and hold them there for a fraction of a moment before the blue shield very slowly started to fade.

  By now, Reticula was running down the lower wall atop one of the internal courtyards, the very one that abutted the outer walls and ended in a narrow iron wood door—straight into the tower-column of the Northern Wheelhouse. She slammed the door open and again shut behind her, in time to hear the growls and gasps of beastials as they emerged from the lesser gallery. They sounded confused about why their dead challenger had faded out of existence, leaving a still very dead beastial behind it.

  I made it! She congratulated herself, taking three deep breaths as she had been taught to do, before looking around to see precisely where she had made it to.

  The tower column of the Northern Wheelhouse was really just an ancient metal staircase encircling the walls, with the thick lines of many steel chains hanging down the inner column.

  Reticula ran up the tight steps quickly, with thick cobwebs fraying on her face and arms. This place clearly hadn’t been used for a long time, and the Journeywoman could clearly see why. There were few routes that ran up through the North of the world. The Black Keep itself was the last stop for many of them. A lack of traders and caravans meant less of a need for the external chain-pulleys and lifts on the mountain side of the Keep to be used.

  The sounds of the battles raging outside grew thinner, before eventually stopping altogether.

  “Lumis,” Reticula threw one of the small glowing balls of were-light ahead of her, to keep pace a few feet in front of her right shoulder.

  “What was it that Father Jacques said?” She tried to remember what her mission even was. Second storage locker, back wall, third brick down and four across, she remembered.

  She had no idea what it was that she would find when she got there, of course, but she could guess from the Chief External’s directions that it would be a secret passage or similar.

  “Pull the red-wrapped levers,” Reticula murmured to herself as she kept on running. When she dared to look past her right shoulder, the level where she had entered the columnar tower looked a long way down already.

  The Journeywoman hissed in frustration to herself before setting that irritation aside, as any good Enclave External student would do. It was infuriating being constantly surrounded by secrets and never knowing what the intended outcome of her actions must be—but that was another part of life here at the Black Keep, wasn’t it?

  But now they were under attack, with the wild beastials running rampant seemingly everywhere now that the Magister’s magical shield was down, and the Blood Gate opening, and the Chief Arcanum betraying them . . .

  Who is to say what is normal anymore?

  She panted to a stop as the stairs led to a platform that jutted a third out into the empty tower. There was a door opposite her, leading up to the wheelhouse proper.

  “Avouna,” she said, hoping that this wasn’t one of the many rooms and halls inside the Keep that was deemed restricted access.

  It wasn’t, and the ancient iron wood door swung toward her on creaking protesting hinges. This revealed more stone steps, but they were few. They led up to the large square room that straddled the high crook between battlements. As her little were-light flew in ahead of her, Reticula saw that the middle of this place—the area that hung over the hollow tower below—was filled with a gigantic machine.

  Reticula could see brass or bronze cog wheels, for the moment stilled, alongside cantilevers and what appeared to be pumps and pulleys. Metal chains that were almost as wide as the Journeywoman was herself extended toward wheels at the northern end of the room, where the floor and walls ended. These wheels would allow the chains to be lowered to the frozen ground outside, should they be needed.

  “Second storage locker, second storage locker . . .” Reticula murmured as she turned around the machine to examine the walls. With the opening at the far end of the wheelhouse, the Journeywoman could hear the distant screams, grunts, snarls, and phwaps of battle-magic as her comrade Brothers and Sisters fought for their lives.

  How many beastials are there out there?! she thought. She saw large iron wood cabinets set on the floor of the walls, plus large wooden shutters, which she presumed allowed the wheelhouse operators to look down to judge their work.

  Perhaps out of some sick fascination, she moved to the nearest of these wooden shutters, threw the bolts, and shoved them open—to see a vision of horror.

  The mountain-facing wall sections of the Black Keep stretched a little below and on either side of her. And she could see that they were scattered with desperate stand-offs and battles between the humans and the monsters. In several places, there were sections of the battlements that had been lost completely and were being held by writhing, snarling, and growling gaggles of beastials. They attempted to force their way right and left, but were just barely being contained by knots of black-robed Brothers and Sisters.

  As Reticula watched, she saw purple curse-bolts flash and flare in the night, striking beastials and flinging one or two of the smaller ones off the walls. Others were large enough to just be bowled over and return to fight again, their brindle fur singed and burning.

  But the Enclave had magic. And it had people who could turn off pain, Reticula thought, as she cast her gaze outwards toward the fog of unnatural darkness.

  There she saw the reflected sheen of fur and talons and teeth, illuminated by every flaming arrow or burst of battle magic.

  “Holy Stars!” Reticula breathed. It was hard to see how many more of the creatures were out there, but when she leaned out, she could see that every illumination revealed a sea of brindle-colored flesh.


  That was how they had climbed the walls, the Journeywoman realized. There had be hundreds of the creatures down there—as many as there were human Brothers and Sisters left in the Black Keep after the ravages of the Blood Plague. They are massing at the base of the walls, forming gigantic piles of bodies . . . They were using each other as climbing platforms to force their way up the outer battlements.

  Reticula turned quickly back to the insides of the wheelhouse as the screams and shouts echoed behind her. Her quick eyes searched the array of wooden cabinets, hunting out the small brass tags that read I, II, III, IV . . .

  “Two.” She moved to II, undoing the simple latch and pulling the doors open, to be hit by the smell of damp canvas and the tang of linseed oil. In here were piles of heavy waxed canvases that presumably turned into hoists or lifts, alongside giant coils of ropes and stranger wooden struts and pegs. The Journeywoman ignored all of this, shoving and heaving the heavy equipment out of the way. Her hand slapped against the cold and slightly damp back wall.

  “Third brick down—” Her fingers traced the lines of the individual bricks. “And four across.” Her hands found the right course and moved inwards, counting and following each brick in a row until she came to one that appeared exactly the same as any other in the rear wall.

  “So, is there an inner wall running inside the wheelhouse?” Reticula guessed. The presence of a secret latch was, in her experience of the Chief External’s secretive inner school of assassins, a sure sign that there was some secret compartment or passageway hidden here.

  The fourth brick across and three down had no especial indentations or markings on it. Reticula gestured for her little were-light to fly over her shoulder. With a small shrug, she did the only obvious thing, which was to push.

  Ssss!

  There were puffs of stone-dust and dried-out mortar as a section of the brick wall beside her suddenly popped inwards, swinging on gigantic iron hinges. It was a fake section of wall, with the bricks there really only being slivers of their fellows, mortared and set onto a wooden frame that fit perfectly to the rest of the wall.

  And inside that hidden compartment, when the were-light hovered closer, Reticula saw a set of five iron handles like the holding end of giant ladles. The two on the extreme left had grips that were wrapped in crisscrossing white cord, whilst the three nearer to Reticula were wrapped in red.

  “This place isn’t just protected by magic,” Reticula remembered Father Jacques saying—the man who was, even now, down there in the Healing Halls and struggling to recover from the worst of the Chief Arcanum’s curses.

  The Reticula hesitated, though. She didn’t know what these levers would do, or how, or why. She also didn’t know if it was “the time” to do it—as Father Jacques had indicated.

  “He just said that I would know that it’s time, when it’s time!” Reticula glowered at the levers, then made a decision. The Chief External was trusting her instincts on something—and that was a lesson of the Book of Corrections as well, wasn’t it?

  To know one’s own strengths and capacity for judgement, Reticula thought. Still—she was certain it would have helped if she had known just what it was these levers would do.

  She crossed to the open shutter, looking down on her beleaguered colleagues. She could see that on both walls, there appeared to be more knots of beastials, and the entire middle section of one of the walls was covered in their furred and clawed morass.

  And still with hundreds below, Reticula thought. She was going to do it. How bad, after all, did she want it to get before she would decide to trust Father Jacques’s commands?

  She bounded back to the second storage locker, jumping bodily on top of the ancient canvas stacks, grabbed at two of the red-wrapped levers, and pulled. For one agonizing moment, nothing happened, but then, with a protesting squeal of metal, they released and shot down toward her.

  “Now the last—” she hissed, grabbing the final red handle with both hands and heaving it down to join its fellows, before running back to the open shutters—

  To see that absolutely nothing had happened.

  “What!?” She cursed. Had Father Jacques been mistaken? No, that was almost unthinkable. The Chief External might not have the dominating intelligence of the Chief Arcanum—and no one had the fierce wits of the Magister, a woman that Reticula had been sure could read the future, such was her uncanny ability to always say the right thing and be at the exact right place to say it.

  But Father Jacques had cunning, and bags of it, Reticula knew. He wouldn’t have just forgotten something or been wrong over an important fact.

  “Maybe this mechanism doesn’t work anymore?” Reticula wondered. How long had it been since anyone had opened that secret compartment behind the second storage locker up here, anyway?

  Reticula looked out once again across the battlements to see that the exact same war was being waged below with no apparent change—but then her nose picked up something. A rising smell of . . .

  Lamp oil?

  And, following this discovery, Reticula heard a distant whine and chug. She almost discounted it as important, as it sounded precisely like the old heating pipes that snaked under and through the Black Keep, where cog-wheel billows pumped and moved hot air from the kitchens to the communal places to stop the Brothers and Sisters freezing to death up here at the top of the world.

  The chug and the whine grew a little louder, as did the smell of lamp oil, and then Reticula’s eyes could see what was happening. At various points halfway down the battlement walls, there were thick glistening streams of lamp oil being pumped out of tiny outlet holes that she had never noticed before.

  She watched as they spattered and splashed over the bodies of the beastials below, before—

  WHOOOSH! Some of the wall guards must have seen and smelled the same thing as Reticula, as several of them had seized up torches and oil lanterns to throw down on the waiting lamp oil. All it had needed was one spark, and suddenly racing lines of fire were rippling down the walls and hitting the backs of the soaked beastials.

  “Ghrek! Ghraaaak!” Their grunts and squawks were awful. Reticula saw a river of fire spreading along the northern base of the walls, with some of the heavy crimson flames leaping as high as she was tall.

  There must have been other outlets lower down, Reticula realized, seeing how the inferno formed a burning moat at the base of the battlement walls between the Black Keep and the darkness.

  “Hurrah! Hurrah!” She heard the victorious shouts and cries as the morale of the defenders suddenly picked up. There were still many beastials on the walls—but now they were cut off from their burning colleagues. Several of them were even wrapped in fiery cloaks themselves as they tottered and struggled to stay on the wall-tops.

  “To me! The Black Keep lives!” Reticula heard a voice that was as cold as the frozen Lake of Mourn itself and made unnaturally loud with magic. She raised her head to see the Magister was at the forefront of a wedge of Brothers and Sisters, hurling purple and white curse bolts left and right as she drove into the largest remaining group of beastials on her walls. It was like watching one of the stories of old, unfolding right before her eyes.

  I did it. I saved the Black Keep, Reticula thought, panting with excitement and exertion.

  Her eyes lifted back upwards to the Plague of Darkness that completely obscured the Tartaruk Mountains. The thought struck her, and with it came sobriety: they had almost lost the Black Keep in one night, and that was before the Blood Gate was opened properly.

  “How many tricks like this do you have up your sleeves, Jacques?” Reticula thought with a sudden sick apprehension.

  12

  Of the First Times, the First Creatures, and the Elder Beings

  “Let me a tell you a tale of the First Times. But first, let me tell you a tale of how this tale came to me.”

  The figure of the bird-faced Kol stood entirely straight, not a movement disturbing his composure, so that only the human�
�s voice was animate. It was a dancing and rich voice for a human, Terak the assassin thought, able to swoop into baritone expanses or to trip lightly along a cascade of suppositions.

  “As many amongst you know, I am Kol, and Kol is me.” The man’s repose was broken by a singular sweep of one bird-feather cloaked arm.

  “And my teacher was Jakob, who was taught by Freya, who was taught by Yalda, and then Dinar, Montperrey, Vond, Mari, and Edar—and it was Edar who heard this tale from the lips of the Elder Beings themselves. Back then, it was the First Times, and the races of man were few, but the world was still very, very large.”

  The crowd of listeners assembled had grown still, the elf realized. Even the children amongst their number had chosen to sit down or sit on laps as Kol’s voice carried easily across the ruins. It’s a trick, Terak realized, although he instantly felt it might be a little unfair to call it a trick, as if Kol had the intention of deceiving them.

  But still, Terak’s training under Father Jacques in the Enclave External had given him a few clues as to how different tones of speech alone can be used to sway and influence a crowd or an individual, just through the use of meter, pattern, and repetition.

  But this is unlike any skill that even Father Jacques had possessed . . . Terak realized, as he felt even his own awareness changing subtly. The details of the ruins and the open gallery room around him were starting to fade away, and only the words of the Emarii Kol remained.

  “Edar was one of the first Emarii, of course. He was one of those humans who had always found their natural home to be in the woods and the fields and the wild places of this world. Edar felt at home out there amongst the wild things, far more so than down in the villages and townships of man.

  “And so, Edar was walking out before the first light of dawn, high up onto the Fells that you see if you look eastwards, and past that, down to the deep Honheim Forest on the other side, which is only now a fraction of that great Forest of Hon that used to blanket the East of the world.