Lord of Secrets

by Breanna Teintze

  ‘No.’ She rose to her feet. ‘There’s got to be a lever or a counterspell for that. It’s usually in the sanctuary.’

  ‘That’s it, then. You’ll have to get to the sanctuary without us, open the gates and then come back to get us.’ Lorican sounded like he was trying to reassure himself more than me. ‘Acarius thought you could do it.’

  ‘No.’ The word burst out, scalding in my mouth. ‘I’m not leaving you both here.’

  Lorican’s head came up. Real fear glittered in his eyes. After all, he’d only known me for a single day, and all I’d done was insult him and get him trapped.

  ‘If you don’t,’ he said, ‘then all of us are going to die here, Gray. If the air doesn’t run out, it’ll be thirst that kills us. I don’t want to die like that.’ He swallowed, and gave a forced laugh. ‘Frankly, I always planned on dying with a knife in my guts.’

  I hated this, hated failing like this.

  ‘Lorican is right.’ Brix reached up and touched my hand, where I was still holding on to the gate. Her fingertips were cold, and dusty, and they made a sudden, intoxicating pool of calm in the middle of my head as the poison throbbing in my blood leached away.

  ‘Don’t do that.’ I jerked my hand away. My heart clattered against my breastbone in a way that didn’t make sense. ‘I didn’t ask you to do that.’

  ‘Just take the help, Corcoran.’ She put her forehead against the steel, so she could see both of my eyes. ‘Go, get it done and get back to us. I’ll buy you a drink when it’s over.’ She smiled. It was false, but it helped, a little. ‘Maybe I’ll even throw in dinner.’

  Lorican was lighting a lamp – just one, I noticed. The light fluttered across the walls, as uncertain as everything else around us. ‘And hurry it up, brat,’ he said. ‘There’s not a lot of oil left.’

  ‘Right.’ I took a step back. ‘I won’t be long. And I’ll expect that drink.’

  Drink. Thirst.

  I halted beside the statues, with their shrieking, open mouths.

  ‘I’m so stupid.’ I didn’t realise I had said it out loud until I heard Lorican make an interrogative noise. I dug through my satchel until I found the partial vial of yavad. ‘Thirst. Not us, them. The yavadis. It’s an alchemical puzzle. Like letting the Empty One taste fire. Stupid, stupid.’ I uncorked the vial and poured half of the contents into the nearest statue’s mouth.

  The green liquid trickled slowly into the hole between her stone teeth and disappeared. A few seconds later, a beam of light shot out from her blank eyes, striking the rock above the left-hand passage door.

  ‘There,’ Brix said. ‘Next time, don’t rush. Figure it out. You had better stop mooning around and get moving.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, again.

  ‘Shut up.’ But she wasn’t smiling anymore. ‘Go. And gods damn you if you look back.’

  I didn’t. I knew, as I limped past the blank-eyed statues, that this would be one of the memories I couldn’t blot out. It would go in a box in my head, along with the time I’d spent under the woodshed and the moment when I’d pushed open the door of Acarius’ cabin and seen the blood on the floor. I would never be able to forget Lorican’s white face and Brix’s fake smile.

  But I didn’t look back. I could do that much for them.

  *

  The walls of the labyrinth changed and narrowed, once I was a decent distance down the passage. The black stone abruptly sprouted more pictographs, richly coloured under the layer of dust. I couldn’t make much of them. They seemed to be merely repetitions of the same religious scene – a gilded figure that I assumed was Jaern resurrecting dead bodies, again and again, surrounded by feverish throngs of worshippers.

  Stop it.

  I hauled myself upright and forced myself to keep going. If I halted to look at the pictures, I might not be able to get moving again.

  The light from the illumination spell was bothering my eyes, although, thanks to Brix, the translation spell behind my ear didn’t hurt anymore. I still wished she hadn’t done it. I would rather have kept my pain private.

  I had to be almost to the centre. If you were going to build a temple inside a cave, with rock that you had to haul from somewhere else, how big could you possibly make it?

  The passage widened abruptly. I sent the light ahead of me.

  There were three arched doorways, set into a wall pocked with small alcoves. The alcoves weren’t in any pattern that I recognised, although there had to be one because they were connected by lines of silver paint. In every alcove sat a grinning skull. At the top of the wall, near the ceiling, silver letters shone:

  Night births me without living, day kills me without murder.

  I had found an ossuary, and my third puzzle.

  Gods help me.

  Twelve

  It finally occurred to me that I could sit. I sank down into the dust, easing my sore knee around in front of me. I fiddled with the useless straps of my brace, taking the few intact ones out of their buckles to tie around my leg like a rough splint.

  Between that and a second numbing spell, maybe I would be able to stand up without crawling over to the wall. I scribed the runes on the leg of my trousers, at the thigh, which normally would have been a stupid thing to do. I had an idea that I was damaging my knee further with every step I took. But I probably wasn’t going to get out of there, anyway, so there was no use in being smart.

  And then there was nothing for it but to look up at the damn ossuary again.

  The little niches full of skeletal bits pocked the blue-painted wall randomly. The longer I stared, trying to find the pattern, the more confused they seemed.

  All right, the riddle first. I shut my eyes; looking at all those skulls was unnerving. I kept expecting them to come towards me, which was foolish. If they had been creatlaches they would have moved already.

  Come on, Cricket. Think.

  Acarius. It wasn’t really his voice, but the memory was comforting. What sort of questions would he make me answer? How would he dissect the riddle?

  Hells, boy, it isn’t that hard. Think through the words. Night and day. What exists during the night but not during the day?

  Sleep? The moon? Darkness?

  None of those worked. You could take naps during the day, or find darkness in a cellar. You could even see the moon during the day, sometimes. Apart from imaginary creatures, the only thing I could think of that was present at night but not in daylight was—

  Stars.

  My eyes snapped open. That was it. That was the pattern. The ossuary was a map of the constellations.

  I crawled forwards a bit, then put all my weight on my hands and hopped to get my good leg under me. It worked, sort of. I got up to standing and tested my numb knee. There wasn’t a lot of pain, but there wasn’t a lot of dexterity, either.

  Fine, start over. I limped to the leftmost portion of the ossuary. Even though the ceilings were ten feet high or so, the alcoves only went up about seven feet – within easy reach of a man standing on the floor. There was more than one constellation, with all of the major star pictures represented. The Lady, nearest me. The Lion. The Dancers. The King. There were more, but my eyes refused to move on.

  The Dancers.

  ‘Something’s wrong with you,’ I murmured.

  As I recalled, the Dancers was a useful constellation precisely because it had eight stars, forming a rough diamond-shape that pointed north.

  Only this representation of the Dancers had nine stars. There was an extra skull at the base of the diamond shape. I dragged myself to the niche, hollowed into the wall at about the same level as my shoulders, between two of the arched doorways.

  Nothing special, this bit of bone, covered in dirt like everything else. I couldn’t see any wires or runes on it.

  Which, my mind insisted on repeating, doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything there.

  Last time I had made a mistake, a mistake that had got Brix and Lorican trapped. The fact held me where I was, while I
searched through everything Acarius had taught me. I knew so many things – too many things. So why didn’t I have anything that could help me? Why didn’t I know what to do?

  I forced myself to take four long, slow breaths. Then I gritted my teeth, reached out and put my hand on the skull.

  It moved.

  I jerked backwards. The eyes of the skull lit orange, and as it rolled out of its niche, I saw the nameplate floating where the brain once was.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  But it didn’t continue to come towards me. It clattered to the floor, and then rolled itself merrily down the centre passageway.

  You couldn’t get much more obvious than that. I settled the strap of my satchel and saw that I was trembling again. When I could get my hands steady, I limped through the middle door.

  The ceiling of the passage was low. I could follow the trail the skull had left in the dust plainly enough, and it was easier watching it than it was speculating about what fiendish puzzle might be ahead.

  Of course, I also had to watch the repetitive smirk on the face of that skull. Eventually the jawbone fell off. I skirted it, and kept following the weird track in the dust.

  And so I saw the broken shards of skeletons before I stepped on them. The tunnel was abruptly carpeted with them, one long mausoleum.

  Ahead of me was the end of the passage, yet another dark doorway into yet another room. The skull crunched through the litter on the floor, whizzing away into the darkness.

  I did have to step on the bones, though.

  I was expecting the sound it made – like scrubbing a tile floor – but I wasn’t expecting the feel, like teeth grinding under the arches of my feet. I made it almost to the door before nausea rocketed through me, ripping away my concentration.

  The light winked out.

  I scrabbled for my satchel. The air moved around me, hinting at a bigger room than any of the others I had been through so far. In a room that size there could be anything – creatlaches, pits, poisoned spikes. I needed to scribe the illumination spell again.

  I froze. The crunching sound from the rolling skull had stopped.

  ‘Greetings,’ said a deep voice in the dark. ‘Shall we have a little light?’

  *

  Witchlights flared into being, one after the other, in a ring of fire with the door I stood in as the base. Each light sat in a brazier held by a statue, about four times the size of a man, rainbow-hued flames dancing between their bronze-coated palms.

  The statues portrayed the nine major gods, crusted with gilding and precious stones. In front of each god was a trough that must have once been a reflecting pool. All of them faced the dais at the centre of the room, which was nothing more or less than a runic prison circle, its edges covered with sigils in red paint, layer upon layer.

  The dais held the remains of seven coffins, arranged around one elaborately decorated stone sarcophagus that was so large it had steps ascending to it. All stood open.

  And then there was the man.

  Standing inside the circle was the palest and most perfectly symmetrical human being I had ever seen. His silver hair touched the tips of his ears, irises gleaming black. His clothes looked as antique as everything else in the temple, a faded green tunic over a black shirt and trousers, with strange, pointy-toed boots. Around his neck hung a pendant on a silver chain, a teardrop-shaped black gem.

  ‘Greetings,’ he said, again, as though I hadn’t heard.

  I gave him a nod, but didn’t move towards him. The spell behind my ear burned, which meant he was speaking in the same old dialect as the writing on the walls of the maze. His word had been accented in some way I couldn’t place – even my translation spell wasn’t smoothing that out. That, combined with his clothes, gave me a bad feeling. Who goes temple-raiding wearing a costume?

  ‘Thank the gods you’ve come.’ And now the accent was gone. His face had changed from being as immobile as marble to open and vulnerable, like a child’s. ‘I thought I was never going to get out of here. It’s been . . . days, I think, but it’s difficult to tell the passage of time down here. What’s your name?’ The black eyes fixed on mine.

  ‘What?’ I blinked. ‘Gray.’ My name slid out without my permission, as though someone had pulled it with a string. A deep part of my mind was screaming with alarm. He was running a spell, and I had no idea which one. ‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘You see before you an unlucky thief.’ He moved towards the open sarcophagus and sat on its steps, muscular and lithe as a cat. ‘I cracked this coffin and then the runes there on the floor lit up, and now I can’t get past them without passing out. If I’d thought to bring a wizard with me, maybe they could have done something.’ He shrugged. ‘Foolish of me, I suppose. But I don’t like sharing.’

  ‘And you got past all the traps and the bone creatures outside, without leaving tracks in the dust or any trace of your presence,’ I said. ‘I see. Makes perfect sense.’

  He watched me, a smile spreading over his face, slowly. ‘What’s your explanation of me, then?’

  I couldn’t rid myself of the memory of the shoulder blade I’d pulled out of the creatlach that had attacked Brix. ‘I think someone had to build Spindlejoint,’ I said, and then had to face the fact of the builder’s name. I wondered, briefly, whether I’d walked into some kind of spell, cracked my skull and was hallucinating while I died in a corner. ‘You’re not the god Jaern, though, even if you took his name.’ Saying the words out loud helped, a little. ‘The god isn’t real. At best he’s an idea. A philosophy of secret-keeping.’

  ‘The god Jaern. So they still call me that. I didn’t think it would last so long.’ He rested his chin on one hand, the elbow on his knee, and examined me. ‘You know, most people would have believed me, about being a thief. I was implying there is treasure here – they would have started bargaining for a piece of it.’

  ‘Most people are idiots,’ I said.

  ‘True.’ He didn’t move. ‘You’re not, I take it.’ He tilted his head sideways. ‘But a bit reckless, aren’t you? Still talking to me.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ I had the spells scribed on my arms, but I was suddenly doubtful that my flame incantation would impress him much. What did I know about Jaern? What did anybody know about Jaern? I had only been forced to attend Temples prayers a few times in the years before I went to live with Acarius, and I couldn’t remember anything about it except spending the whole time seething. The old anger and fear bubbled up my throat. ‘I don’t see a reason to be afraid of you,’ I said.

  ‘Well, the obvious one would be that I crawled out of that coffin.’ Jaern looked at the sarcophagus with distaste. It could have held three of him. ‘Which is alarming, in itself. When I last saw the sky, people believed in all sorts of unholy creatures that aren’t quite dead. Of course, as you noted, even then they were idiots.’ He ran a finger along the carved coffin edge. A string of the swirling runes cut into it lit under his touch. ‘I’m not dead. I am old, however, and I’m curious as to how old. Who’s king these days, in the daylight world?’

  I made my way deeper into the room, trying frantically to think. Acarius wouldn’t have sent me to face an opponent this strange without warning me. So what, then? Lorican had said that Acarius hadn’t gone very deep into the maze. Did that mean that Jaern hadn’t been here when Acarius was, or only that Acarius hadn’t come this far?

  Gods, was I actually considering this? It wasn’t possible for a man to survive underground, in a prison circle, without food or water, for longer than a couple of days. Building the creatlaches would have taken months. I needed time to work out what he really was.

  ‘You look my age,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’ He stood and stalked to the edge of the runes, not two feet from me. If anything, he looked younger – and slightly taller – than me. ‘You’re what, twenty-five? Twenty-six? It’s an attractive age. It’s why I made this body.’ He stretched out a pastel hand and looked at it with sa
tisfaction. ‘Better than limping around as an old man.’

  ‘Made,’ I said. The word was wrong. Necromancers don’t really make anything, they just rearrange – and this whole place reeked with death. He hadn’t made the body he was wearing any more than I had made mine.

  But then, I was beginning to think he hadn’t exactly been born into it, either.

  His eyes flickered up. ‘Good.’ He sounded pleased, almost startled. ‘Only twenty-six. An infant, practically, yet you caught that distinction.’ He was back to examining me now, eyes narrowed. ‘So you’re a bit of a prodigy, too, along with being reckless. I think I like you.’ He scanned me, from the top of my head to my toes and back again. ‘You’re right, of course,’ he murmured. ‘Made isn’t the best word for it. Took, maybe, would be more accurate. A prodigy, and you’re . . .’ He smiled again. ‘It’s definitely an attractive age, even with the gimp leg. Anyway, you’re a wizard. I wonder if you’ll get something for me.’

  I stepped backwards. The statues in the room all suddenly seemed too close. There were too many eyes. ‘Listen, I’m sure a god is used to people jumping to his whims, but—’

  ‘Don’t pretend to be stupid,’ he interrupted. ‘You’ve guessed by now I’m not a god. And I’m not under any illusion that I can trick you into helping me – but I rather think you’ll get what I want anyway.’

  ‘Get what?’ I snapped.

  ‘My soul.’ He swept a hand towards the statue of Neyar. ‘A fitting insult, wasn’t it? To put my soul in that bitch’s necklace. My apprentice always had a sense of humour.’ His jaw hardened as he stared at the dog-goddess. ‘I don’t. Every day for a year I’ve looked at my soul and reflected on my absent sense of humour.’

  ‘You’ve been down here longer than a year,’ I said.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘I told you to stop pretending to be stupid. How am I supposed to know exactly how many years I’ve been down here if you won’t tell me who the king is? Judging by the very odd way you talk, it’s probably been some centuries. I woke up a year ago, infant. An entire year with nothing to do but pace and count the hours and read and find new ways to put dry bones together, a year with nothing to work on.’ He kicked the edge of the coffin nearest him, which I saw was filled with books, papers and rags of what could have once been clothing.