Chapter Seventeen
It had taken a few hours, but Lucan and his warriors found the Temple of Amatahns. Personally, Janir was beginning to think this Amatahns character rather pompous. Who would name both a Key to nearly limitless power and the temple holding that power after himself?
Tucked away amid the cedar and spruce, the temple was an imposing square pyramid with smaller levels receding to the top. It had been out of view from the beach, but now it loomed above them like a force of nature unto itself.
Lucan kicked away the cobwebs at the door and marched inside, leading the way with a torch provided by one of his men. Inside, the temple was stark and flat and achingly empty. Lucan kept his chin up, acting as if he were fearless, but Janir didn’t see how that was possible. There was something about the sheer emptiness of the place that sent pinpricks along her spine.
Shuffled along by the Argetallam warriors, Janir and the others followed for an untold time within the walls. The enchanter awakened after a while and Lucan kept on demanding information of him. It seemed the young enchanter had a great deal more pertinent knowledge than Janir had realized.
Karile would tell Lucan whatever it was the Argetallam wanted to know after a bit of prompting. As they passed a curious mosaic of a flaxen haired girl for the third time, Lucan had become suspicious and threatened to use the karkaton on Karile if he didn’t stop stalling. For all his bravado, Karile did not take much convincing after that.
One of Lucan’s warriors shoved Janir forward as Lucan again commanded them to press on. Into the temple they went with Saoven under careful watch from two of the Argetallams while the fourth trailed behind, guarding their flank from who knew what.
At first Janir thought she was imagining it, but the deeper they went, more greenish white lights glowed from between the cracks in the stone. It was a sickly green, like the color of a pond’s floor.
Janir remembered all too well what had been inside the last cavern she blundered into and her imagination was hard at work, seeming to conjure a thousand new ideas with every step.
Maybe there was nothing bad in this cave, she told herself. Perhaps she had just been unlucky that day and entered the only cave in all of Brevia that had monsters in it. Perhaps today they would be more fortunate.
Then she glanced toward the front of their little column and her brother rigidly holding a karkaton just below Karile’s ear. On second thought, the luckiest thing that could happen right then and there would have been for a fiend with huge teeth to spring from the stone and gobble down Lucan and the other Argetallams.
As they rounded yet another bend, they came to a place where the ground dropped into a shallow staircase. No lights glowed from the passage and even Lucan hesitated a moment before striding into the shadows with Karile still in his grasp. The stairs were so long that Janir had to take several steps before she arrived at the next drop. The Argetallams marched wordlessly behind her. Saoven wore a grim face.
“What’s wrong? I mean, besides the obvious,” Janir whispered in an undertone.
“I know what this place is.” His sober nature was doing nothing to improve her morale.
The Argetallams scowled and one of them shoved her shoulder. “No talking.”
Saoven graciously caught and steadied her again. “It is a fortress,” he said as their heads came closer together.
Janir swallowed. “Then what happened the guards?” She remembered the mazag caverns all too well. What if a horror such as that lurked in these halls?
Lucan stopped abruptly and Janir plowed into him. He shoved her to the floor, but she scrambled up as quickly as she could without remark. Truth be told, she was embarrassed at how often Saoven kept helping her.
Lucan stood still as the stone walls around them, staring straight ahead. With the caution earned by the past few weeks, Janir carefully peered around Lucan’s shoulder.
“Damn it,” muttered one of the Argetallams and several others added more profane words to the mix.
They had reached a place where the shallow stairs finally stopped and gave way to a flat surface of stone. Before them, a shaft of white light had penetrated the darkness and was shining on the most alarming sight Janir had seen since entering the temple.
Standing just behind a rounded arch without moving, was a knight, fully armored in the obsolete style of overlarge, massive pieces. Rather than make use of chainmail for better mobility, the armor was all plates and buckles. Not even the slightest trace of a surcoat or leather jerkin was to be seen—just steel and iron.
His visor was sealed shut like the gate to a forbidden realm. Looking closely, Janir couldn’t discern even the slightest trace of eye slits on the helm. That wasn’t likely, she must have missed them.
A lone sentinel, the knight stood with his legs spread apart in battle position and a huge halberd clenched in his gauntlets. The axe was nearly the same size as its wielder and styled a wicked spike on the back that reminded Janir of a giant steel thorn. Like the knight’s armor, it glittered with polishing, waiting thirstily for its next victim’s blood.
Lucan stared at the knight with as much bewilderment as she did. “Who are you?” Lucan demanded in his haughtiest tone.
Not a word. Even the slight draft that had been in the stairway seemed to have frozen.
Viciously, Lucan shoved Karile in the direction of one of the warriors. The Argetallam caught Karile in an iron grasp, eyeing the suit of armor with as much suspicion as the rest of them.
Lucan carefully approached the motionless knight. Flicking out the other karkaton from his belt, her brother did not let his guard down for a second. The knight didn’t move as Lucan eased up to his right side, the side opposite the huge axe blade. Standing so close that he could have heard the knight breathing, Lucan gingerly raised one of the karkaton and tapped on the helmet.
The echo was hollow, empty. Just a suit of armor with no knight inside.
Lucan malignantly kicked one of the massive greaves and the whole suit went crashing to the ground. Smaller pieces clattered away and the larger ones just lay there in a miniature cloud of dust, still as they had been before.
One by one, their company stepped around the heap of armor, into the passage that the empty armor knight had been so faithfully guarding. Down they went into the stuffy shadows—deeper and deeper into wherever the passages took them—the heart of a mountain? Under the sea by now?
They were lost. There was no doubt about it. Lucan hadn’t cursed for the space of several minutes and was glancing around each part in the tunnels with a desperation he was trying very hard to hide.
Finally, Lucan noticed everyone else’s dragging feet. Or maybe he felt that his point was made and he could let them rest. Whatever the case, when the tunnels widened out a little, he ordered a halt.
They lit a fire in the middle of the corridor. It seemed that the Argetallams had brought the tools and fuel to make bright, slow burning blazes with them.
Starting a fire that far underground might not have been Lucan’s most brilliant idea, but no one questioned him. The Argetallams held their tongues because after the skiff they knew better than to do otherwise and the others because they were afraid of losing theirs.
Janir curled on the stone, leaning against the wall with Karile on one side and Saoven on the other. It was becoming their usual arrangement. The fire danced and played with shadows on the stone. These walls probably hadn’t seen such light for ages and now seemed to make the most of it.
Lucan posted a sentinel at either end of their makeshift camp, one to guard each opening into the tunnels. For the first time, Lucan seemed confused and lost from his place on the other side of the fire. Things must not be going quite as planned.
Clattering echoed from the passages where they had come from. Every head snapped in that direction as the sound faded and the tunnels fell silent.
“It’s nothing,” Lucan snapped, when he spotted the uneasy expressions of his companions. “It’s just a dra
ft rattling that suit of armor.” If he was unsettled by the noise, he gave no sign. By all appearances, he couldn’t have cared less as he lounged easily on the ground. For all his cruelty, Janir’s brother had nerves of steel.
Janir stared into the soothing fire and huddled closer between Saoven and Karile. Out of the corner of her eye, the patterns of the fire glinted off Lucan’s dagger—the one he had used to cut the sailor’s throat. It was actually quite pretty in the firelight. The light also glinted off several odds and ends lying about—the buckles on Lucan’s boots, the knives at the belt of an Argetallam, the armor of one of the posted guards.
But…the guards didn’t have that kind of armor.
Janir wanted to scream as she spotted the knight, or rather the supposedly empty suit of armor, standing there before them where the guard had been only two seconds ago. Now the Argetallam lay in a red heap, soundlessly murdered. The axe was bloody and the knight or whatever it was, seemed to be staring at Lucan.
“Son of a…” Lucan sprang to his feet like a startled wolf and his warriors leapt to attention.
Before Janir and the enchanter could jump up, Saoven caught them and pulled them back down, holding a finger to his lips. She didn’t realize she’d clutched Saoven’s shoulder until the cloth of his tunic was digging into her hand.
Now she fully understood the phrase “frozen in terror.” She couldn’t move, couldn’t even squeak. Lucan jutted out his jaw with a defiant air.
“You were a fool to come alone.” Lucan flicked out one of Janir’s karkaton, jaw tightening with menace. He truly did seem unable to show anything but confidence and anger. “Not only for coming, but for annoying me. I am going to take immense pleasure in killing you.”
A voice emitted from the helmet. A low, tortured voice, a voice of ages, a voice of war, of suffering. “Unfortunately for you,” the voice said. “I died eons ago.”
“Wh—” Lucan never got to finish his question.
“Many have entered, none shall leave!” that horrible voice passionately shouted. He—it—charged the Argetallams.
There was shouting, the shriek of karkaton, and the clash as karkaton met axe and axe struck stone. Saoven grabbed Janir and Karile, pulling them toward him and shielding them as best he could.
Everything was chaos and confusion and then there was a deafening wail and everything went silent.
Lucan had managed somehow to cram one of the karkaton between the creature’s visor and helmet. As the creature collapsed, there was no scream, no flash of light, no roar of earsplitting sound. The suit of armor simply crumpled to the ground and fell apart as it had before, a soft golden glow emitting from the scattered parts.
The golden glow grew brighter and wafted up from the heap of armor like smoke from a fire. Expecting something horrible to happen, Janir braced herself for the inevitable. Her imagination said it might possess all of them and turn them into suits of armor like itself or something along those lines, but it just drifted into the air and dissipated.
Lucan checked his three remaining warriors. With brusque efficiency, he had them cover the body of their fallen comrade.
Janir threw her gaze away from the gore of the fourth. Even though she could feel Lucan’s disapproval at her squeamishness, she couldn’t bring herself to care what he thought. Though he might have been her enemy and one of her captors, she couldn’t believe the mortahn had deserved to die like that.