“Horrible faces.”
“You’re both deluded,” said Eurilda. “Keep going. The doorway is around the corner.”
As Khyte’s eyes were growing accustomed to the catacombs, its monotonous gray was now a nuanced spectrum of grays, blacks, and whites revealing more than it concealed. Stalagmites rose gracefully from the floor, as if trapped in a glacial dance, and the the glinting stalactites above seemed a chandelier. The radiant dust shadowing the passage walls disclosed patterns that suggested ethereal dwellings and markets, as if they walked not a long passageway, but an avenue of a ghostly city. While what he had seen so far might have been an accidental formation of the Goblin World, the crypt-like quietness convinced him these were no meandering caves, but ancient tunnels marking a forgotten path. Now it felt like a dwelling place for oblivion, as if it were not dimmed but inhabited by the oppressing gray.
When Eurilda turned the corner, a shifting ray momentarily translated her figure into those mottled gray tones as she stepped into the room from where the arc of gray light streamed.
When Khyte saw the inverted cone of gray light gyrating in the wall, emanating tendrils of charcoal gray smoke and vapors of slate gray steam, the inconceivable tear in reality tore a hole in his thoughts. A profound emptiness welled up in him, as if his soul had already escaped through the gap to another world. His first seamless thought thereafter was that It was too inorganic to be a furrow, too active to be a doorway: there was no honest name for the thing. It was like a wound, or the crack in his sword; it offended not only the wall, but his mind, and he strongly desired it not to be there. Then he saw the gleaming inscriptions, scrawled every square inch from floor to ceiling. Though he could only read hundreds of words in his native Drydanan and a smattering of Nahurian and Alfyrian, all of these unusual letters spoke to him.
When Eurilda called out “Behind you!” Khyte turned in the flickering light to see only that the shadows now roiled in the dagger’s surface. Though he seemed alone, the flickering portal mobbed him with dozens of shadows; not only were there too many for one person to cast, but they seemed taller, wider, and clawed.
“Khyte!” Inglefras was pulled toward the gyrating light and vanished within ten feet of the furrow. The barbarian’s piercing, ugly man-scream might have brought tears of sympathy from Eurilda’s atheist god-king. When Khyte staggered forward and fell to his knees, this brought him closer to the furrow’s otherworldly light, which played along the enchanted blade until its shadows fused into grotesque faces fringed with white manes, eyebrows, and beards; their noses were cruel, their mouths were fanged, and their ears were like white-furred bat’s wings. And if the dagger was true, they were all around him.
From his knees, Khyte rocked into a crouch, then lunged toward the furrow. Once immersed in the unearthly light, the creatures rippled into view. They were a head taller, with blue veins that popped through bulging muscles and thin white fur; their webbed vests and leggings bristled with knives, short swords, and javelins, and they gripped staves studded with iron rivets.
As he took in the albino creatures and the illuminated glyphs, he nearly tripped over Inglefras, who shrieked as Eurilda dragged her toward the furrow. When the dryad went limp and clawed at the floor, the stubborn giantess yelled, “There he is! Get up!” Inglefras obeyed, but grabbed Khyte’s sword arm.
Though his first instinct was to shake her off before they were overrun, her body pressed to his its intoxicating aroma of gardenia and jasmine, and in that moment he lusted more than he lived. Though the giantess thought to pass to Ielnarona without him, the dryad had fought her; moreover, when both women could see the creatures, Inglefras risked her life not to be separated from him. When the young barbarian’s heart melted, its molten metal stiffened the steel in his spine.
How long had they been in danger? he wondered; had the creatures been able to do violence to them before?
“Trespassers shall suffer, then die,” said one of the creatures. As an iron circlet rested on its brow, and dull iron breastplate, vambraces, gauntlets, and greaves creased its white fur. This one was the creatures’ speaker or master.
“This is our world,” Khyte lied.
“Stop it, Khyte,” said Inglefras. “You’re scaring me.”
“Yes, don’t growl when the monster snarls,” agreed Eurilda.
“We are the Ebotu, the eldest of the Noble Races. This is not your world, nor your city-grave.” The armored chieftain turned to the other Ebotu. “What is the fate of liars that do not speak the One True Tongue?”
“They shall die.” Though Khyte understood, their response was such a bestial chorus of gnashing, snarling fangs that he shuddered along with Eurilda and Inglefras.
Khyte turned to Inglefras and Eurilda and put one finger on his lips, not daring to be heard speaking a “liar’s tongue.” He didn’t know why only he could speak their language, but if he wasn’t a total idiot, this strange gift might save their lives.
“I’ll prove this is my world, and that you are the interlopers,” said Khyte, taking a step nearer the inscriptions, and, settling on the most ornate—silver filled the etched letters—he read aloud, doing his best to intone with solemnity:
In Eternity, the One gazed on the All-Thing’s infinite beauty, and the unending moment between Creator and Creation was seamless being—until the schism, when the shards fell, each glittering with the image of the One in their fragmented nature, so that five divine motes attracted the desire of the Spider-God, Lyspera, and she wove them into the Web of the Abyss. And the constant hunger, thirst, and desire of mortal men and beasts is the ongoing cry of the Five Worlds to the One they never knew, and the desolation and unease heard between seconds, minutes and hours echoes in the Five Worlds ripped from the stars.
When most of the Ebotu knelt, their chieftain, seeing his followers submit to a higher power than his, grew angry. Though their faces were naturally twisted into a hideously angry mask, rage cracked and contorted his visage even further, and Inglefras fainted away at the sight of it.
“You lie!”
“That is what it says,” said Khyte.
“You read without understanding!”
“No. My tribe sings of this.” Though Kuilea’s nursery rhyme had been an earworm for days, Khyte was glad he hadn’t been able to get rid of it, and recited the sing-song verse with as much dignity as he could bring to bear:
The spider saw unending string,
and stole five children, singing.
She took them in her web, a ring
of dark gems, a crown for a king.
In seeing the worlds on her string,
she awakened the All-Thing,
and the anger of the string.
“What does it mean?” asked an Ebotu.
“Do not speak to it,” shouted the leader. “It lies!”
Though the glowing script named hundreds of destinations in the Five Worlds, and the furrow was surely not as unidirectional as Eurilda claimed, with the captain drying up Khyte’s influence on the Ebotu, there was only one course left. He pushed Inglefras aside with a piercing pang that set his heart stammering.
“Though you call me liar,” he said, “it is your word against mine.” The clamor of the bloodthirsty and jubilant Ebotu drowned him out, for Khyte had by accident uttered the phrase most likely to incite a duel.
When one cried, “It challenges Kwraz by word, law, and sword!” Khyte then heard, in tandem with the intelligible words, the untranslated growling, yapping. and snarling that had frightened Inglefras and Eurilda, for whatever enchantment elucidated the warrior’s understanding, it was not comprehensive of the roaring echoes that shook the chamber.
“Do you accept my challenge?” asked Khyte.
Though the captain could rely on claws, fangs, and larger muscles to fight the much smaller Khyte, he also bristled with weaponry and armor; by comparison, Khyte b
ore only Azuri’s weighty cleaver, and his only concession to armor, other than his red woolen cloak to turn away the cold, were demi-gauntlets, to ward off blood-wet blades that skipped down a parry to his knuckles.
“You are an outsider …” Kwraz’s speech was drowned out by his warriors begging his assent. When their dissenting din died down, the leader added, “… but I will knock our words from your head, so you can’t tell them from your teeth.” Armor plates swayed and clanked when Kwraz sprang, swinging his riveted staff at Khyte’s head.
While Khyte didn’t trust the crude Alfyrian blade to do the tricks he coaxed from his old sword, let alone cut or stab, he had hoped it might serve as a cruelly dull bludgeon that rent limbs by tearing flesh and crushing bone, or as an awkward shield. As it turned out, it would serve first as a more primitive tool, for any length of sturdy steel made an admirable lever.
When the staff met the sword, Khyte pushed through the parry, twisting his legs so that the torque of his whole body moved through Kwraz, slamming him flat on his back.
Khyte ran up on the dazed chieftain, hoping to push his advantage and lop off its head, and the Ebotu crushed inward as one, circling the combatants in a white-furred arena. When they howled, waving javelins and staves, Kwraz lurched to his feet and shouted, “Mine is the honor!”
This suited Khyte, as in that one pass he knew he was a better fighter. He only needed to keep it a game of tag, because if the creature lost his mind and jumped on Khyte, the creature’s raw mass and muscle might make Khyte lose his grip on the contest. No one knew better than Khyte how easy it was to slide from life into death … or how precariously one might cling while teetering over the abyss. You hung onto this life by your scrap of flesh and the tattered breath that animated it.
When Khyte was fourteen, raiding Ilifians descended upon the Drydanan’s first ramshackle shantytown. Formerly roving brigands themselves, the Drydanans were ill-prepared for the feral albinos whose wild red eyes seemed as bloodstained as their swords, and by the time Khyte’s uncles had seized their swords and waded into the gore, half the huts were ablaze, their chieftain Lord Ryggion was face down in a pool of his own blood, and Khyte, quivering, had fallen to the floor and wrapped himself in his father’s bearskin. When the Ilifians fell back before the enraged Drydanans, and the din of battle subsided, Khyte crawled out of the furs to peer through the door flap at the pierced body of his chieftain. If he could not face swords, Khyte reasoned, then he was a coward, and he would no doubt have to face death sooner rather than later. He would have a look at it now. What could it hurt? It wouldn’t bother Ryggion.
Creeping towards the dead lord, Khyte heaved him onto his broad back, then backpedaled, flung his hands up to block the awful sight of sputtering, choking, the long squeal of an agonized breath, the sudden crimson rising in waxy skin, and Ryggion sitting up, clutching his gashed belly—oozing with a gory juice of mud and blood—and howling. Not by prowess, nor by might, nor the power of a chief, but by luck alone had Lord Ryggion lived, saved by a craven youth who had escaped death while better men, including his own uncles, had died. Had Khyte not turned the dying lord, Lord Ryggion would have choked to death in his own blood. If Khyte had been less curious, many would have been spared, for as Lord Ryggion’s headsman, Khyte slaughtered hundreds. In saving his benefactor, Khyte found himself on the right side of the blade. And as he had a loud mouth, in another set of circumstances he could have easily been on the other end of the headsman’s axe.
By hiding from his first battle, Khyte had lived to look on the corpse-ridden aftermath. Learning that all battles made meat, since then he had not only honed his body and swordsmanship but rubbed off the tricky corners of his moral compass, so that he might forever after conspire to be on the right side of the bloody grinder, or, at the very least to wait for luck’s timing. If fear still struck him occasionally, he was now a more competent coward, having learned how to become a terror himself, at least with sword in hand. To this end, in his left hand, Khyte held the dagger close to his chest to discourage Kwraz from closing. When Kwraz instead trusted armor and his greater reach, swinging a flurry of blows to deny Khyte a single opportunity to close, Khyte nimbly timed his steps to the booming sweep of the staff and stepped in and out, scoring welts and lesions sometimes in the top of a second, and sometimes the bottom of a moment, for he had studied not only how to section an opponent, but to carve the space between them, to strike not on his foe’s time, but in his own felt rhythm of breaths and blood.
As Kwraz swung again, Khyte sidestepped, then rocked back to his starting foot and slashed the creature’s flank. When this knocked it headfirst into the wall, blood obscured the inscribed white sigils. But when Khyte stepped forward to deliver the killing blow, three Ebotu stood between him and their leader.
Khyte waited. As their perimeter stood between him and the furrow, it was up to them whether he lived or died. Defeating one ungainly, over-muscled monster was one thing, but defeating the pack was beyond Eurilda at full size. “Is this not a duel to the death?”
“The unclean may not deliver the death blow,” one said.
“He’s not getting up,” said Khyte. “Stand aside.”
“You were not supposed to win.”
“Are you losing money on this fight?”
“His soul must find its way.”
“Can a proxy deliver the death blow?”
“Yes, but none will take on this honor, as he was a good chief.”
“You mean you made some bad bets,” sneered Khyte, believing his only hope was to shame these honorbound monsters into acknowledging his victory.
“We would permit the tree-mother, if she has not taken her vows.”
Inglefras flinched when the creature pointed. Khyte knew that even if Inglefras wished Kwraz dead, she would prefer someone else swing the flyswatter, so he stepped back to whisper into Eurilda’s ear.
When the sorceress pulled a cringing, shrieking doll from her pouch, set it on the floor, and spoke a quiet word, Azuri the Alfyrian sprouted to his full self, shielding his eyes from the doorway’s pale light. Though Azuri was a whole elf again, his spirit was broken by the sorcerous pouch. Sweat plastered his hair to his head, his thin breard was bedraggled, and he stank of sweat, piss, and worse. His stench was so foul even the Ebotu gagged and complained. The proud elf had no doubt kept his bowels in check for most of the past day, and only recently given in to nature. Still, as the Alfyrian was both taller and broader than the rangy, hunchbacked Ebotu, they were sufficiently impressed by the appearance of what seemed a formidable warrior—whether or not his armor was soiled—from the inside of a pouch.
Azuri stammered, but stopped short of uttering anything coherent, as after so long in a knotted pouch, he seemed dumbstruck by the bright doorway, the magical inscriptions, and the gray spectrum of the catacombs.
“What of him?” asked Khyte.
“Though we hate Alfyrians the most, they are one of the Noble Races. If you cannot persuade the tree-woman, he will do as your proxy.”
Coming as close to Azuri as he dared, Khyte whispered, “Though we have done you ill, you must cut off that creature’s head, or we will all die.”
“Give me water. And food,” said the elf. In their dash from the gallery, none had thought to take Huiln’s pack, which had most of the food. Khyte only had odds and ends from his trip through the Oases.
“The Alfyrian agrees, but we need a moment. Feel free to refresh yourselves as well,” said Khyte. Though the Ebotu groaned, hissed, and glowered, and some set to pacing, others to sparring with their brutal staves, and the rest to muttering, they did not deny this respite.
Khyte handed the backpack to the elf, who rummaged around and pulled out a lone pondira seed, a stale butt of bread, a wedge of rubbery cheese that had lost most of its piquancy, and two unpalatably stiff slices of jerky; moreover, these foodstuffs had bits of lint on them from rolling
around in the barbarian’s backpack. The elf chewed the tasteless food with gusto. “You’re much luckier than I am,” murmured Khyte. “I would never have found that pondira seed, and that’s my own pack.”
“Khyte,” whispered Inglefras. “What comes after?”
“After what?”
“What do you think?” When Khyte still showed no recognition, she rolled her eyes. “What happens after their chieftain is dead? These people ‘do what is written,’ like amateur cooks following recipes, and while they’re waiting for this rite to be executed with the right kind of eggbeater, we have no idea what the next ingredient is. What if ‘what is written’ demands vengeance?”
“That’s a thought,” said Khyte, taking back his backpack from Azuri. It was now much lighter. How much food had he been carrying in there?
“We need to go,” she hissed. “Now.”
“They’re resting,” he said, “as I bade them.” The Ebotu were anything but content with their respite, in the main bickering or sharpening their teeth with stones from their pouches.
“Why do you try my patience? I have half a mind to make you worm food and tree fertilizer.” When her voice moved downscale, Khyte thought it might be a trick of the catacombs’ acoustics.
“You’d never lift a finger against me,” he said. But the combination of Inglefras’s vocal transition from soprano to alto, and the Ebotu, who were as intimidating at rest as they were when looming overhead, made him feel that his victory over their chieftain may only have forestalled the inevitable.
“You think of me as if I were a human woman, a princess of your kind,” she said. “If I were a tiger princess, you’d respect me. Trees are just as wild as tigers, you know.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “What’s your plan?”
Eurilda, who had listened closely, finally said, “the doorway is undoubtedly anchored to their world. My people were wrong to think it unidirectional.”
Khyte declined to confirm Eurilda’s suspicions, as he didn’t want her more interested in the dagger than she already was. “So by using the doorway, we could end up where they live. Probably an uncharted region of Nymerea.”
A Spell Takes Root Page 17
