Swords and Saints- The Complete Saga

by Alec Hutson

  Xela leads us away from the main road, until we come to the base of a narrow switchback trail.

  “This is a secret way known only to the acolytes of the Lady,” she explains as she ties her horse to the trunk of a stunted tree. “The main road will lead to the front door of the Umbra, but it is also too dangerous for horses and takes several hours longer.”

  “We are going up that?” Shalloch asks, his face pale as his eyes follow the many twists of the trail, which looks to be little more than a thin ledge hacked from the cliff face.

  “Scared?” Fen Poria sneers, hopping over the shards of black rock littering the entrance to the path.

  “This is why I never wanted to leave the sea,” the pirate mutters. “And I always put someone else up in the crow’s nest.”

  “Stay away from the edge,” Xela says as she follows Fen Poria onto the path, her boots crunching on the fine black sand. “Hug the mountain. Errant gusts of wind have sent many acolytes tumbling into the void.”

  Shalloch looks like he’s about to be sick. As Vesivia passes him she claps him on the shoulder.

  “Don’t be a coward, my love.”

  The way is treacherous, and several times I feel like the sand on the path is slithering beneath my feet, but our ascent is surprisingly quick, and well before noon we emerge onto the same ledge as the Umbra. It squats like a black demon, all bristling spines and strange curves, much of it hanging off the side of the mountain. The section we’ve arrived at has a door incised into the black stone, firmly shut. I’m wondering what we’ll do if no one answers our knock, but Xela strides forward while the rest of us are catching our breath from the climb and places her open palm on the door. She leans forward until her head is almost brushing the stone, and I can see her mouth forming words. Moments later there’s a shuddering crack and the sound of grinding as the door slowly swings open.

  “Thank the saints they haven’t changed the password,” she says, then motions for us to follow her into the darkness.

  Trickles of wan light filter down from slit windows, but these are quickly swallowed by the coiling shadows. There’s just enough illumination to see Xela’s indistinct shape ahead of me as we rush down the corridors, entranceways into larger chambers – all equally black – flashing past. I can hear the hurrying footsteps of the others behind me, but they seem strangely muted, like I’m listening through a thick oaken door. There’s also a strange warmth here that seems to radiate from the walls themselves, as if something hot is flowing just beneath the surface of the stone.

  An irrational panic is building in me, both a sense of being watched and a feeling like the walls are constricting tighter and tighter. My breath is coming in ragged pantings now, and my skin is slick from this unnatural heat. I want to tell Xela to wait, to let me just rest for a moment and calm my racing heart, but my tongue is thick in my mouth. I reach out to steady myself on the walls and my fingers come away wet and sticky. My head whirls . . . darkness is creeping across my vision and I know I’m going to fall soon . . .

  I stumble out of the corridor and into a vast hall, gasping in relief as the sense of being suffocated by the encroaching blackness abruptly vanishes. A pall of acrid smoke is draped here like a funeral shroud, and I struggle to keep my stinging eyes open. It seems to be coming from the smoldering remnants of a great altar, above which hovers a dark jewel nearly as large as a man, its depths veined with pulsing purple light. Bodies are scattered everywhere. Shrouded figures are moving among the devastation, and they pause as we spill from the passage, long curving knives appearing in their hands.

  “Saints,” Bell murmurs as she fumbles for her crossbow. I can hear the scrape of Shalloch’s saber leaving its sheath.

  “Wait!” Xela commands, holding out her hand to stop us from doing anything rash.

  The robed figures seem unmoved by her actions and continue their approach, raising their daggers.

  “Where is Abbess Zaria?” she asks them, and I can see from her twitching hand that she’s tempted to draw her own blade.

  No reply as the shrouded ones glide closer. My hand finds the hilt of my green-glass sword.

  “Abbess Zaria!” Xela barks again, her words laced with desperation. “I know you’re not all so far gone that you’ve forgotten her name. Where is she?”

  “Here, child.” The voice is weary. At first I can’t see where it has come from, but then a small figure detaches from the shadows.

  The encroaching figures hesitate.

  “Enough,” the abbess says. “Tend to the fallen. I will deal with the new intruders.”

  As she steps closer to us, the shrouded shadowdancers recede, some seeming to vanish altogether.

  “Xela,” the abbess says softly. “You have returned to us.”

  “I have, Mistress.”

  “But not from across the veil. It seems the Contessa lied to me.”

  “I begged her to do so. But please, Mistress – what has happened here?”

  The abbess turns slightly to survey the sprawled dead and the ruins of the once-grand altar. “We were attacked in the waning watches of the night. Warriors from Zim burst into the Umbra without warning. Somehow none of our wards were tripped.”

  “Did the Shadow protect you?”

  The abbess’s mouth thins. “We tried to draw upon the Lady’s favor, but something terrible accompanied these raiders. I have never felt its like before. When we attempted to wrap ourselves in darkness it pulled us from the shadows and left us helpless before their blades. I tried to cloud their minds and fill their thoughts with fear, but it was as if my strength was but a puff of wind before a tempest. Instead we found our limbs frozen, our illusions pierced.”

  “The Voice,” I say softly, and the abbess’s penetrating gaze settles on me. Her eyes are simply white, without pupils, but I know she sees me.

  “What was it?” she asks.

  “You . . . you know him as the Stranger. A servant of the Prophet. But I’ve met his kind before. He is a demon from another world, with terrible powers.”

  The abbess is silent for a moment. “Yes,” she finally says slowly, “I know of what you speak. I have seen him, this demon, hovering at the side of the Prophet. One moment he is there, and then he is gone.”

  “Who ambushed you? How many were there?”

  The abbess returns her attention to Xela. “Less than a dozen, but they were all exemplary warriors. Deprived of our abilities to walk through shadow, we could not stand before them. We slew three of their number, and their corpses have already been thrown from the mountain so that their spirits cannot sully this holy place. There was one I recognized, a great alethian with ebony scales that usually guards the Prophet.”

  “And did they get what they came for?” I ask, dreading her answer.

  The abbess dips her head. “They took the refugee with them, the one who came through the doorway beneath the mountain.”

  “Valyra,” I murmur, and the abbess looks at me sharply.

  “You know her.”

  “I have to save her,” I reply. “Please, how long ago did the attack happen? Where did they go?”

  The abbess closes her unsettling eyes. “It is strange, but they did not flee back down the mountain after they seized the girl.”

  “No?” Xela asks in confusion. “Where did they go?”

  “They descended into the mountain, through the tunnels that connect the Umbra with the depths below. I believe they must be going to the doorway.”

  21

  “What is the doorway?” I ask Xela as she leads us once more on a mad dash through the warren-like nest of passages which fill the Umbra.

  “A legend,” the shadowdancer replies as she clatters down a steep flight of stairs that corkscrews deeper into the mountain. I can tell we are descending into the bowels of the monastery, as no longer are there window slits that let in outside light. I’m carrying a glass globe filled with a ghostly radiance, which the abbess produced after Xela told her we would pursue those wh
o kidnapped Valyra.

  “Apparently it’s real,” I reply, turning sidewise slightly to avoid scraping my shoulders on the walls. Everything has grown more constricted the deeper we’ve gone.

  “Well, yes. I always thought it real. Just not that the legends swirling around it were true.”

  “And what are those?”

  “That the doorway was a bridge between realities. The nuns at the Umbra teach that it was through these doorways that the gods fled this world and sought refuge elsewhere. I’ve been down there, once – it just looked like a great stone archway to me.”

  “Is that all there is? The archway?”

  “You’ll see. There’s an ancient ruin buried among the mountain’s roots inside a great cavern. The shadowdancers believe this is where the Lady of Darkness now dwells since she decided not to join her divine siblings in their exodus. What I want to know is where the Swords think they’re going. Why would this Stranger lead them down there when there’s no way out?”

  The Voice thinks it can open the door. The thought chills me. If it only meant to return itself and Valyra to the red wastes of the dying world, that would be a tragedy, but at least what harm was done would be contained. But what if it could keep the door open, and invite the rest of the Shriven through? The stone key weighs heavily in my belt pouch – am I bringing the means of unlocking the doorway to the Stranger? Was it possible this was all some elaborate plot? But that kind of machination seems impossibly complex. Doesn’t it?

  Lower and lower we go, until the smoothly hewn passages of the monastery give way to tunnels gouged from the mountain’s flesh. There are ancient runes incised into the walls here, and elaborate scenes of armies clashing with hordes of monstrous creatures. I can’t stop to examine these carvings, as Xela keeps pushing us faster, but I think some of these twisted beasts resemble the Shriven I encountered in the other world. Monsters with curving hooks for arms, great worms bursting through the ground to swallow entire legions whole.

  The air keeps getting warmer as well, until it is almost uncomfortably hot. I glance behind me at the rest of my companions, and it is clear that they are also struggling with the heat. Deliah’s long violet hair is plastered to her skin, and her skin gleams in the light of the glow globe I carry. Shalloch is breathing heavily, and has already shed the heavy fur cloak and gloves that he was wearing when we left Zim. Only Fen Poria seems to be enjoying herself – the feral is baring her teeth in a wolf-like grin.

  “How much farther?” Bell asks between gasping breaths.

  “We’re here,” Xela calls back as she follows the curve of the passage we’re rushing down. I nearly collide with her as I turn the corner . . . and then I also stop, awed by what is before me.

  We stand on a high ledge overlooking a vast cavern. It’s so big that an entire district of Ysala could fit inside, I think, even the tallest of the city’s towers. Shattered ruins fill much of the space, and mushrooms that range from half the height of a man to the size of mighty trees sprout everywhere. High above the floor of the cavern an enormous twin of the jewel in the great hall of the Umbra slowly rotates. The light veining the gem is much brighter here, and as it slowly rotates it bathes the entirety of the cavern in a purple radiance.

  “By the saints,” whispers Bell, her fingers lacing with my own as we stare awestruck at this buried city. “What is this place?”

  “The home of the Lady, or so the nuns claim,” Xela says. She points at one of the few structures that looks to still be intact, a many-tiered pyramid. “The doorway is atop the ziggurat. That’s where they’ll be.”

  I squint, but the distance is so great I can make out few details. There does seem to be a curving ribbon of stone atop the pyramid, but I can’t see any figures moving.

  “Why are we waiting?” asks Fen Poria. Then she starts on the stairs that go down to the floor of the cavern.

  “Oh, by all the tainted saints,” groans Shalloch. “More stairs.”

  “We must be careful,” Deliah commands as she follows Fen Poria, drawing her glaive from her back. “This is the perfect place for an ambush.”

  With this in mind, I keep my eyes on the ruins as we descend, but nothing moves among the tumbled buildings and stalagmites. We regroup when we reach the bottom, in the shadow cast by the broad brown cap of a soaring mushroom.

  “We need a plan,” I say as the others turn to me. “Xela,” I say to the shadowdancer, “I want you to cloak yourself in shadow and scout ahead. I’ll be next, and if you encounter any trouble I want you to return immediately and tell me. If you can’t for some reason, make a sound so I’ll know you need help.”

  Xela’s brow knits in confusion. “What kind of sound?”

  “I don’t know. The sound of something that lives in these caves.”

  She frowns. “Mushrooms are pretty quiet.”

  I sigh. “Just yell ‘help,’ then. Now, you and you,” I continue, pointing at Shalloch and Deliah, “follow about twenty paces behind me. Bell, you have the middle. Vesivia and Fen, take up the rear.”

  “I want to go ahead and scout, too,” mutters Fen Poria. “I can smell the ones we’re chasing – there’s men, women, an alethian, a brek’nato . . . and something I’ve never smelled before.” She sniffs the air, wrinkling her nose. “Real sharp and bitter, like where someone’s pissed in the snow.”

  “You’re not invisible. Xela is. Stay in the back, and make sure no one sneaks up on us.”

  Fen Poria’s mouth twists in disagreement, but she doesn’t say anything further.

  “All right,” I say, holding each of their gazes in turn. “We go towards that pyramid, quickly and quietly. Our luck holds, maybe we can catch them unawares. Remember, these are all great warriors and trained killers.”

  I wait for nods from everyone, then I motion towards Xela. She scoops some of the shadows that have accreted at the base of the mushroom’s great stalk and quickly slathers herself in darkness. When she’s nothing more than a patch of blackness, she slips into the ruins and is gone.

  I follow behind her, leaping over the tumbled remnants of a statue with the head of a falcon. Something familiar tugs at my memory, and a moment later it comes to me: this statue reminds me of the animal-headed statues that had lined the walls of the ancient temple in the red wastes. Could this place have been built by the same people? The ruins I’m moving through are draped with shadows, both from the teetering piles of stone, and the great mushrooms that strain towards the distant purple jewel. A clatter of falling rocks and a shiver of movement brings my sword from its sheath, but it’s just some six-legged lizard no bigger than a dog scurrying from us.

  The pyramid swells larger as we traverse the cavern, its peak rising over the tops of the tallest mushrooms. While most of the shattered buildings we’re moving through are made of the mountain’s ubiquitous black rock, the ziggurat has a pale luster that glows slightly in the perpetual twilight of the cavern. It reminds me of the nacreous white stone that the other portals I’ve encountered have been fashioned from. The key in my pouch seems to be growing heavier as we approach the ziggurat, but that might be my imagination.

  “There! Right fucking there!” Fen Poria cries suddenly, and I whirl around to try and see what she’s screaming about. Listing ruins, the twisted remains of some great metal device, a colony of mushrooms rising to our left . . . Fen Poria is rushing towards me from her position at the rear of our party, pointing a dagger at one of the mushrooms . . .

  And then I see her, pressed against the stalk just below the lip of the mushroom’s cap, lost mostly in the shadows. Pale green skin and hair, translucent dragonfly wings spreading from her back. The patriarch Belav’s Shield, the woman who seemed to have been pulled from the deepest wilds. She’s holding a bow, a nocked arrow pointed at me.

  “Talin, look out!” cries Bell as she sees the woman. Then she’s beside me, fumbling for the crossbow slung across her back. The green woman adjusts her aim slightly and looses the shaft, and at the same time I thro
w myself to the ground behind a chunk of tumbled masonry.

  But she wasn’t firing at me.

  “Bell!” I cry in horror as the arrow pierces her chest. She stumbles back a step, then catches herself, swaying. The crossbow falls from her slack fingers as she stares in wonder at the shaft protruding from below her collarbone.

  “No!” I cry as she topples over, and from somewhere nearby Deliah screams as well. Fen Poria dashes past me, whipping her three-pointed throwing daggers at the Shield. A moment later the green woman gives a pained cry, clutching at her shoulder as she drops her bow and leaps from her perch. A moment later she has vanished among the mushroom stalks, Fen Poria in close pursuit.

  “Bell, oh Bell,” I moan, rushing over to her and cradling her head. Her breathing is shallow, her eyes glazed in shock. My hands frantically slip beneath her shirt and run along her back, and a wave of relief goes through me as I feel the tip of the arrowhead. The shaft has gone through her completely – terrible, but better than having to dig the head out of her body. “Can you hear me?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer.

  Deliah crouches beside me. With practiced efficiency she grabs Bell’s shirt and rips it wide open, exposing where the arrow has punched into her body. Blood is leaking out around the edges of the wound, slower than I would have expected.

  “Should we push it through?” I ask, though I suspect I know the answer.

  Deliah shakes her head. “No. The arrow is keeping her from bleeding out. If we are unsuccessful in staunching the wound, she’ll die.”

  “She’s dying now!” I cry frantically. In the periphery of my vision I sense that Shalloch and Vesivia have come to hover beside us.

  Deliah looks at me and I can see her frustration. “If I was in a surgeon’s tent, I might be able to save her . . . but down here, with no bandages or thread or arrow-puller . . .” She returns her gaze to Bell.

  “Maybe someone can carry her back to the Umbra,” Shalloch offers, but again Deliah shakes her head.