‘We have no choice.’ He walked over to the wall where the bats had swarmed through moments earlier. Drawing a dagger, he began probing. A short time later, Torrent joined him, using his hunter’s knife.
To the sounds of scraping and sifting earth, Setoc sat down closer to the lantern. Memories of that white fire haunted her. Her head ached as if the heat had seared parts of her brain, leaving blank patches that pulsed behind her eyes. She could hear no muted howls—the Wolves were lost to her in this place. What world have we found? What waits beyond these stone walls? Does a sun shine out there? Does it blaze with death, or is this a realm for ever dark, lifeless?
Well, someone built this place. But . . . if this is indeed a barrow, where are the bones? She picked up the lantern, wincing at the hot handle which had not been tilted to one side. Gingerly rising, she played the light over the damp, mottled ground at her feet. Guano, a few stones dislodged from above. If there had ever been a body interred in this place, it had long since rotted down to crumbs. And it had not been adorned with jewellery; no buckles nor clasps to evince clothing of any sort. ‘This,’ she ventured, ‘is probably thousands of years old. There’s nothing left of whoever was buried here.’
A muted mutter from Torrent, answered by a grunt from Cafal, who then glanced back at her. ‘Where we’re digging, Setoc—someone has been through this way before. If this is a barrow, it’s been long since looted, emptied out.’
‘Since when does loot include the corpse itself?’
‘The guano is probably acidic,’ Cafal said. ‘It probably dissolved the bones. The point is, we can dig our way out and it’s not likely everything will collapse down on us—’
‘Don’t be so certain of that,’ Torrent said. ‘We need to make a hole big enough to get my horse out. The looters had no need to be so ambitious.’
‘You had best prepare yourself for the notion of killing your mount,’ Cafal said.
‘No. She is an Awl horse. The last Awl horse, and she is mine—no, we belong to each other. Both alone. If she must die, then I will die with her. Let this barrow be our home in the deathworld.’
‘You have a morbid cast of mind,’ Cafal said.
‘He has earned the right,’ Setoc murmured, still scanning the ground as she walked a slow circuit. ‘Ah!’ She bent down, retrieved a small, half-encrusted object. ‘A coin. Copper.’ She scraped the green disk clean and held it close to the lantern. ‘I recognize nothing—not Letherii, nor Bolkando.’
Cafal joined her. ‘Permit me, Setoc. My clan was in the habit of collecting coins to make our armour. It was his damned hauberk of coins that dragged my father to the sea bottom.’
She handed it to him.
He studied it for a long time, one side, then the other, over and over. And finally sighed and handed it back. ‘No. Some empress, I imagine, looking so regal. The crossed swords on the other side could be Seven Cities, but the writing is all wrong. This is not our world, Setoc.’
‘I didn’t think it was.’
‘Done with that, Cafal?’ Torrent asked from where he worked at the wall, impatience giving an edge to his tone.
Cafal offered her a wry smile and then returned to Torrent’s side.
A loud scrape followed by a heavy thud, and cool dew-heavy air flowed into the chamber.
‘Smell that? It’s a damned forest.’
At Cafal’s words, Setoc joined them. She held up the lantern. Night, cool . . . cooler than the Awl’dan. ‘Trees,’ she said, peering at the ragged boles faintly visible in the light.
There was possibly a bog out there—she could hear frogs.
‘If it was night,’ Torrent wondered, ‘what were the bats doing inside here?’
‘Perhaps it was only nearing dusk when we arrived. Or dawn is but moments away.’ Cafal tugged at another stone. ‘Help me with this one,’ he said to Torrent. ‘It’s too heavy for one man—Setoc, please, stand back, give us room.’
As they dragged the huge stone free, other rough-hewn boulders tumbled down. A large lintel stone ground its way loose and both men leapt back as it crashed on to the rubble. Clouds of dust billowed and a terrible grating groan sounded from the barrow’s ceiling.
Coughing, Cafal waved at Setoc. ‘Quickly! Out!’
She scrambled over the stones, eyes stinging, and staggered outside. Three paces and then she turned about. She heard the thump of stones from the ceiling. The horse shrilled in pain. From the gaping entrance Cafal appeared, followed a moment later by Torrent, who had somehow brought his mount down on to its knees. He held the reins and with rapid twitches on them he urged his horse forward. Its head thrust into view, eyes flashing in the reflected lantern light.
Setoc had never before seen a horse crawl—she had not thought it even possible, but here this mare was lurching through the gap, sheathed in dust and streaks of sweat. More rocks tumbled behind the beast and she squealed in pain, lunging, forelimbs scrabbling as she lifted herself up from the front end.
Moments after the animal finally lumbered clear the moss-humped roof of the barrow collapsed in thunder and dust. Decades-old trees that had grown upon it toppled in a thrash of branches and leaves. Wood splintered.
Blood streamed from the mare’s haunches. Torrent had calmed the beast once more and was tending to the gashes. ‘Not so bad,’ he muttered. ‘Had she broken a hip . . .’
Setoc saw that the warrior was trembling. This bond he had forged with his hapless mare stood in place of all those ties that had been so cruelly severed from his young life, and it was fast becoming something monstrous. ‘If she must die, then I will die with her.’ Madness, Torrent. It’s a damned horse, a dumb beast with its spirit broken by bit and rein. If she’d a broken hip or leg, we’d eat well this day.
She watched Cafal observing the Awl for a time, before he turned away and scanned the forest surrounding them. Then he lifted his eyes to the heavens. ‘No moons,’ he said. ‘And the stars seem . . . hazy—there’s not enough of them. No constellations I recognize.’
‘There are no wolves here.’
He faced her.
‘Their ghosts, yes. But . . . none living. They last ran here centuries past. Centuries.’
‘Well, there’s deer scat and trails—so they didn’t starve to death.’
‘No. Hunted.’ She hugged herself. ‘Tell me the mind of those who would kill every last wolf, who would choose to never again hear their mournful howls, or to see—with a shiver—a pack standing proud on a rise. Great Warlock, explain this to me, for I do not understand.’
He shrugged. ‘We hate rivals, Setoc. We hate seeing the knowing burn in their eyes. You have not seen civilized lands. The animals go away. And they never return. They leave silence, and that silence is filled with the chatter of our kind. Given the ability, we kill even the night.’ His eyes fell to the lantern in her hand.
Scowling, she doused it.
In the sudden darkness, Torrent cursed. ‘That does not help, wolf-child. We light fires, but the darkness remains—in our minds. Cast light within and you will not like what you see.’
A part of her wanted to weep. For the ghosts. For herself. ‘We need to find a way home.’
Cafal sighed. ‘There is power here. Unfamiliar. Even so, perhaps I can make use of it. I sense it . . . fragmented, shredded. It has, I think, not been used in a long, long time.’ He looked round. ‘I must clear a space. Sanctify it.’
‘Even without Talamandas?’ Torrent asked.
‘He would have been of little help here,’ Cafal replied. ‘His bindings all severed.’ He glanced at Setoc. ‘You, wolf-child, can help.’
‘How?’
‘Summon the wolf ghosts.’
‘No.’ The thought made her feel wretched. ‘I can give them nothing in return.’
‘Perhaps, a way through. Into another world, even our own, where they will find living kin, where they will run unseen shoulder to shoulder with them, and remember the hunt, old loyalties, sparks of love.’
Sh
e eyed him. ‘Is such a thing possible?’
‘I don’t know. But, let us try. I do not like this world. Even in this forest, the air is tainted. Foul. We have most of the night ahead of us. Let us do what we can to be gone before the sun rises. Before we are discovered.’
‘Sanctify your ground, then,’ Setoc said.
She walked off into the wood, sat down upon the mossy trunk of a fallen tree—no, a tree that had been cut down, cleanly—no axe could have managed such level precision. Why then had it been simply left here? ‘There is madness here,’ she whispered. Closing her eyes, she sought to drive the bleak thoughts away.
Ghosts! Wolves! Listen to my mind’s howl! Hear the sorrow, the anger! Hear my promise—I will guide you from this infernal realm. I will find you kin. Kin of hot blood, warm fur, the cry of newborn pups, the snarl of rival males—I will show you grasslands, my children. Vistas unending!
And she felt them, the beasts that had fallen in pain and grief here in this very forest, so long, long ago. The first to come to her was the last survivor of that time, the last to be cornered and viciously slain. She heard the echo of snarling hounds, the cries of human voices. She felt the wolf’s terror, its despair, its helpless bemusement. She felt, as well, as the beast’s lifeblood spilled into the churned-up soil, its surrender, its understanding—in that final moment—that its terrible loneliness was at last coming to an end.
And her mind howled anew, a silent cry that nevertheless sent rooks thrashing from tree branches in raucous flight. That froze deer and hares in their tracks, as some ancient terror within them was stirred to life.
Howls answered her. Closing from all sides.
Come to me! Gather all that remains of your power!
She could hear thrashing in the brush, as will and memory alone bulled through the bracken. And she sensed, with a shock, more than one species. Some dark, black-furred and low to the ground, eyes blazing yellow; others tall at the shoulders, rangy, with ebon-tipped silver fur. And she saw their ancestors, even larger beasts, short-nosed, massively muscled.
They came in multitudes beyond comprehension, and each bore their death wounds, the shafts of spears jutting from throat and flank, blood-gushing punctures streaming from chest. Snares and traps clanking and dragging from broken limbs. Bloated from poison—she saw, with mounting horror, a legacy of such hateful, spiteful slaughter that she cried out, a shriek tearing at her own throat.
Torrent was shouting, fighting to control his panicked horse as wolf ghosts flooded in, thousands, hundreds of thousands—this was an old world, and here, before her, crowding close with need, was the toll amassed by its insane victors, its triumphant tyrants.
Oh, there were other creatures as well, caught in the rushing tide, beasts long since crumbled to dust. She saw stags, bhederin, large cats. She saw huge furred beasts with broad heads and horns jutting from black snouts—so many, gods, so many—
‘Setoc! Stop! The power—it is too great—it overwhelms!’
But she had lost all control. She had not expected anything like this. The pressure, crushing in from all sides now, threatened to destroy her. She wept like the last child on earth, the last living thing, sole witness to the legacy of all that her kind had achieved. This desolation. This suicidal victory over nature itself.
‘Setoc!’
All at once she saw something glowing before her: a portal, pathetically small, nothing more than a bolt-hole. She raised a trembling hand and pointed towards it. ‘My loved ones,’ she whispered, ‘the way through. Make it bigger.’
They had wandered far beyond the chamber of slaughter, where scores of K’Chain Che’Malle had seemingly been sacrificed. Lanterns cast fitful light against metal entrails embedded in niches along the walls of the corridors, and from the ceiling thick cables sagged, dripping some kind of viscous oil. The air was rank with acidic vapours, making their eyes water. Side passages opened to rooms crowded with strange, incomprehensible machinery, the floor slick with spilled oils.
Taxilian led the others in their exploration, wending ever deeper into the maze of wide, low-ceilinged corridors. Moving a step behind him, Rautos could hear the man muttering, but he could not make out the words—he feared Taxilian might be going mad. This was an alien world, shaped by alien minds. Sense and understanding eluded them all, and from this was born fear.
Behind Rautos, almost on his heels, was Breath, coughing, gasping, as if her endless talk of drowning had thickened the air around her.
‘Tunnels!’ she hissed. ‘I hate tunnels. Pits, caves. Dark—always dark—rooms. Where is he leading us? We’ve passed countless ramps leading to higher levels—what is the fool looking for?’
Rautos had no answers, so he said nothing.
Behind Breath, Sheb and Nappet were bickering. Those two would come to blows soon; they were too much alike. Both vicious, both fundamentally amoral, both born betrayers. Rautos wished they would kill each other—they would not be missed.
‘Ah!’ cried Taxilian. ‘Found it!’
Rautos moved up to the man’s side. They stood at the threshold of a vast eight-walled chamber. A narrow ledge encircled it level with the passage they had just traversed. The actual floor was lost in darkness below. Taxilian edged out to the right, lifting his lantern.
The monstrous mechanism filling the centre of the expanse towered past level after level—only a few with balconies to match the one they were on—until it vanished high overhead. It seemed to be constructed entirely of metal, gleaming like brass and the purest iron, eight cylinders each the size of a city tower. Spigots jutted out from bolted collars that fastened the segments every second level, and attached to these were black, pliant ropes of some sort that reached out like the strands of an abandoned spider’s web, converging on huge boxes of metal affixed to the walls. Peering downward, Rautos could just make out a change in the configuration of the towers, as if each one sat upon a beehive dome.
His gaze caught and held upon one piece of metal, bent so perfectly between two fittings, and he frowned as if silts had been brushed from some deeply submerged memory. He groped towards it, fighting back a whimper, and then the blinding clouds returned, and he was swept away once more. He reeled and would have fallen from the ledge had not Breath roughly pulled him back.
‘Idiot! Do you want to kill yourself?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry. Thank you.’
‘Don’t bother. I acted on instinct. If I’d thought about it, I probably would have let you go. You’re nothing to me, fat old man. Nothing. No one is, not here, not one of you.’
She had raised her voice to make certain everyone else heard her last words.
Sheb snorted. ‘Bitch needs a lesson or two, I think.’
Breath spun to face him. ‘Hungry for a curse, are you? What part of your body do you want to rot off first? Maybe I’ll do the choosing—’
‘Set your magic on me, woman, and I will throttle you.’
She laughed, turned away. ‘Play with Asane if you have the need.’
Rautos, after a few deep, calming breaths, set out after Taxilian, who had begun walking round the ledge, eyes fixed on the edifice.
‘It’s an engine,’ he said when Rautos drew close.
‘A what? As in a mill? But I see nothing like gears or—’
‘Like that, yes. You can hide gears and levers inside, in housings to keep them clean of grit and whatnot. Even more relevantly, you can seal things and make use of alternating pressures, and so move things from one place to another. It’s a common practice in alchemy, especially if one conjures such pressures using heat and cold. I once saw a sorcerous invention that could draw the ether out of a glass jar, thus quenching the lit candle within it. A pump bound in wards was used to draw out the life force that exists in the air.’ He waved one hand at the towers. ‘Heat, cold—I think these are vast pressure chambers of some sort.’
‘For what purpose?’
Taxilian looked at him with glittering eyes. ‘That’s what I
mean to find out.’
There were no ladders or bridges across to the towers. Taxilian led him back to the entranceway. ‘We’re going up now,’ he said.
‘We need food,’ said Last, his expression worried, frightened. ‘We could get lost in here—’
‘Stop whimpering,’ growled Nappet. ‘I could walk us out of here in no time.’
‘None of you,’ cut in Asane, startling everyone, ‘wants to talk about what we found in the first room. That’s what you’re all running from. Those—those monsters—they were all slaughtered.’ She glared at them, diffident, and rushed on. ‘What killed them could still be here! We don’t know anything about any of this—’
‘Those monsters didn’t die in battle,’ said Sheb. ‘That was a ritual killing we saw. Sacrifices, that’s what they were.’
‘Maybe they had no choice.’
Sheb snorted. ‘I can’t think of many beasts choosing to be sacrificed. Of course they had no choice. This place is abandoned—you can feel it. Smell it in the stale air.’
‘When we climb higher,’ said Last, ‘we’ll get out of the wet, and we can see if there’s tracks in the dust.’
‘Gods below, the farmer’s good for something after all,’ said Nappet with a hard grin.
‘Let’s go, then,’ said Taxilian, and he set off. Once more the others fell in behind him.
Drifting between all of them, voiceless, half-blinded with sorrow that swept down like curtains of rain, the ghost yearned to reach through. To Taxilian, Rautos, even stolid, slow-thinking Last. In their journey through the bowels of the Dragon Keep, knowledge had erupted, thunderous, pounding concussions that sent him reeling.
He knew this place. He knew its name. Kalse Rooted. A demesne of the K’Chain Che’Malle, a border keep. A vast body now drained of all life, a corpse standing empty-eyed on the plain. And he knew that a Shi’gal Assassin had slain those K’ell Hunters. To seal the failure of this fortress.
Defeat was approaching. The whispering chant, the song of scales. The great army sent out from here had been annihilated. Naught but a pathetic rearguard left behind. The J’an Sentinels would have taken the Matron away, to the field of the fallen, there to entomb her for evermore.