Goldenmark

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  Elyasin stood over Thad’s shoulder, gazing at the paper. “You’ve seen that first glyph three thousand and six times?! Sweet Aeon, and you kept track?”

  “They’re fixed in my mind.” Thad’s gaze was level behind his spectacles as he regarded his Queen. “So are the tableaux each came from. My memory’s even sharper since we’ve been walking these tunnels. This glyph,” he pointed to most common one, like a sickle slicing stalks of wheat beneath a full moon, “I think it means harvest, or reaping, and I believe it’s pronounced kruk-heyya. I see that one in images of battle and destruction – images with a lot of death. It’s the primary glyph of the way-markers for the main tunnel. This glyph,” he pointed to the next one, a curling sigil like whispering wind, “I think means spirit, essence, or wyrria, and is pronounced wyrrdani. I see it in tableaux with people performing incredible feats – things impossible in the normal world.”

  “Like?” Therel interrupted, a thoughtful frown upon his features.

  “Like throwing lances of fire from their bare hands.” Thad glanced at him. “Like moving a mountain by slamming their fists into the ground. Like swimming through an ocean without needing air. Like sculpting ore-veins in stone to form these memory-vaults we’re wandering.”

  “Memory-vaults?” Elysian looked at him.

  “My word for the phrase Heldim Alir. One of the glyphs on the map, here,” Thad retrieved the map of the tunnels and pointed at one that looked like a stylized hand grasping a sinuous thread, “I think this means memory or remember, and is pronounced heldi. This other one, the radiant sun around the hand, this one is pronounced aliri and means light or enlightenment. I saw this upon the rose-crystal door. Memory pictures that show the artist laying down the image, they all have that glyph – heldi aliri, or Heldim Alir, the Place of Enlightened Memory.”

  “Enlightened memory.” Ghrenna’s haunting voice dropped like a stone into a still pool, making Elyasin jump as she emerged from the shadows beside them. “A living hall of memory, to wander at your leisure and become enlightened.”

  “Or a bloody tomb to get depressed in,” Luc grumped sourly, crossing his arms and gazing up at the heights of the tableau above the basin, easily twice as tall as any of them. “All the images are of battle and destruction.”

  Thad nodded. “In this picture, Morvein stands in the same position as the other artists, in the foreground but off to one side. But it’s strange. She’s not as crisp as the image, as if her representation was an after-thought, not laid down by the original artist.”

  “As if the image of Morvein is her own memory. Laid down by her less accomplished wyrria.” Ghrenna blinked, a thoughtful frown upon her face. She reached up, sliding her fingers over the luminous spot that was the ancient Gerunthane.

  “Exactly.” Thad drummed his fingers upon the ground, then rose. “But to mark what? I saw an image of her at the tunnel entrance behind the rose-crystal doorway, though I thought nothing of it at the time. And I’ve seen one a day as we’ve traveled. But this is the first one where I can see her face, and it’s clearly Ghrenna. I mean, Morvein.”

  “One a day.” Ghrenna’s pale brows were drawn into a line, her blue eyes dark. “Morvein marked the walls to count the days it would take to travel here. Why don’t I remember any of this?”

  “There’s something else.” Thad nodded at the portrait. “Each image of her was scribed with her cupping a moon in each hand. But while one progressed through the phases, the other stayed stagnant, a full moon. Until yesterday, where the two were nearly matching. And in this image, there is only one moon – and it’s full. Right above her head.”

  “We’ve arrived at whatever destination Morvein marked.” Elyasin ran one hand along the image, then looked to Ghrenna. “What if this location she marked is behind this wall as Thad surmises, and the portal is obscured by wyrria? Could you work the vibrational music that got us into the tunnels to open this wall?”

  “Perhaps.” Ghrenna stepped forward to examine the alcove. Moving her hands over curling sigils of gold and silver, moonstone and jet, she slipped into trance. Elyasin watched her feel the picture, tracing it. Issuing a hum while lofting his singing-stone, Thad brightened the passage to the fullness of daylight. Ghrenna hummed a low tone, then began to sing: a haunting, lilting melody in the rippling Giannyk language. The mist in the picture began to glow beneath Ghrenna’s fingertips. As if the ores and crystals awakened to her touch and song – simmering with phosphorescence. Ghrenna’s voice echoed in the tunnel, caught in an endless loop inside the alcove. Cascading into the basin, the Giannyk syllables were reflected to the walls behind them and thundered back, amplified, shuddering Elyasin’s bones and pummeling her ears.

  When the sound was so explosive Elyasin thought she’d go mad, the walls behind them illuminated in a vast series of arched porticos. The basin became the focal-point of that luminous power, a searing brightness reflecting off the water into the alcove. A vaulted portico with intricate runes and glyphs was suddenly illuminated within the high alcove, and the image of the hill-city beneath that towering archway brightened a hundredfold. The scorching mist seared Elyasin’s eyes and she held up a hand with a cry, but the darkness in the center of the tableau devoured all light.

  Consuming it – in, and in, and in.

  Elyasin stumbled in. She fell to her hands and knees upon smooth floes of obsidian glass, and realized with a belated vertigo that she had been sucked right through the wall. Therel and Luc had fallen in upon her left, Thad and Ghrenna to her right. The tunnel was gone; a vast underground cavern opening up now before them. Behind them glowed their doorway, though the rock was solid at their backs and the glow of the archway fading. As Elyasin’s eyes adjusted, she spied not one glowing arch but hundreds ringing the gargantuan space, spreading out from their location and continuing far off through a low-lying mist.

  It was the center of the chamber that arrested Elyasin. As Luc and Therel rose to their feet, humming their singing-stones brighter, she could see the flows of obsidian glass upwelling into a low peak in the creeping mist. Dotted up that hill were the strange, squat buildings she had seen in the tableau. Some were spaced far apart, some crowded together as if in family groupings.

  “This is it,” Thaddeus spoke in hushed awe. “This is the place Morvein notated for us. The place we walked all the way around in our loop.”

  “Morvein didn’t tell us anything, kid,” Luc murmured, his eyes narrowed upon the strange city. “She was leaving a message for herself about this place.”

  “A warning.” Therel growled, his hackles as high as Elyasin had ever seen them.

  Luc and Therel exchanged a glance, both men of the same accord. Both had a hand upon the hilts of their weapons, and as Elyasin watched, they drew steel. It was more than a gesture for comfort. Both men expected trouble in this mist-shrouded place, and Elyasin was not going to gainsay their instinct: something about the hillside city wasn’t right. Too strange through the mist, too irregular. Elyasin pulled longknives from her boot-sheaths, and Ghrenna was no less agile, ready with her own weapons as they advanced into the underground vault over the smooth obsidian floes.

  Mist breathed around their ankles, a deep chill that Elyasin couldn’t shake. It held to the ground as they paced forward and began to ascend the gradual incline, stepping upon slick obsidian glass. The mist held a grey opalescence unlike anything Elyasin had ever seen. It curled with currents to lick at their knees, but no higher.

  “Some kind of wyrric vapor...” Thad mused.

  “Keep alert.” Therel growled, eyes narrowed as he skimmed the grey mist.

  Stepping forward in a ready arc, they moved as a group. Elyasin’s sights were fixed upon the nearest building: a long, squat rectangle of carven obsidian looming up out of the mist twenty paces ahead. Covered in sigils of some strange, ghost-white ore, the building was an odd height – not quite as tall as Elyasin and long like a lodge-house. As she neared, Elyasin lifted her fingertips to trace the sigils of odd p
hosphoric ore. They flared with blue light like the sighs of the dead when she touched them, and suddenly she knew what the obsidian vestibule was.

  “These are Giannyk tombs,” Elyasin’s utterance slit the silence.

  “Tombs!” Thaddeus echoed, gazing around the massive chamber at the hundreds of obsidian edifices. Lifting his fingers, he tentatively touched the bier. The blue phosphorescence flared beneath his touch, then died.

  “Makes fucking sense,” Luc commented, stroking the stone also. “Halls of memory, connected to a house of the dead. All the battles on the walls – maybe these are their fallen heroes.”

  “Giannyk were long-lived,” Ghrenna spoke, a hollow note to her voice that was the hallmark of Morvein’s memories. “It was considered normal for a Giannyk to achieve two thousand winters, unless something killed them.”

  “Two thousand years! Aeon’s prick.” Luc whistled low.

  Therel frowned at the obsidian bier, then around the cavern. “The tunnels were full of battle and bloodshed. Are these tombs here because they are heroes, or because they were usurpers cursed to forever remember their atrocities?”

  “It doesn’t seem a friendly place, that’s for sure,” Luc harrumphed.

  “When we entered, the place made my skin crawl.” Therel glanced around. “I expected wyrric warnings against intruders. But there’s been nothing so far. Just this horrible feeling in my gut like we’re being watched.”

  “Perhaps Morvein disarmed any wards when she passed through here,” Thad quipped.

  “Only one way to find out.” Luc jumped up to a natural upwelling of stone next to the massive bier. Perusing the sarcophagus with his fingers, Elyasin saw him smile as he located a seam that distinguished the lid. Leaning in, he shoved at the lid with his shoulder, then grunted when it didn’t budge. “Fucking heavy.”

  “That’s tonnes of stone, healer. You’ll not move it alone.” Therel vaulted up next to Luc. Together, the men set their shoulders to it, but still nothing happened.

  “Maybe it’s like the alcove,” Ghrenna’s fingers began tracing the phosphorescent sigils. Swaying, she deepened into a trance again, singing in Giannyk. But when nothing happened but a pattern of fading light, she ceased, stepping back. It was Thad whose perusing fingers caused a sigil to glow bright white suddenly. Pressing in, there came a click and a hollow groan, and the lid of the massive sarcophagus divided in the center from a complex locking mechanism, then shuffled away from its own parts – a wyrric clockwork. Therel and Luc jumped back upon the obsidian outcropping as the two sides of the lid retracted, exposing the center of the tomb.

  Elyasin glanced at Thad, her eyebrows lifted. He shrugged, pointing at the phosphorescent sigil he’d touched. Elyasin saw now it was the reaping sigil Thad had described earlier, cleverly combined into a seamless unit with the spirit or wyrria sigil.

  “It just made sense,” the lad apologized, though his eyes glowed with eagerness at the discovery.

  “Get your butts up here and come see this!” Luc called down. Elyasin looked up to see that Luc and Therel had leaped to the rim of the obsidian sarcophagus and were viewing the contents. Elyasin vaulted up the outcropping, some part of her eager at the mystery, brushing obsidian shards from her hands. Ghrenna was agile at her side as Thaddeus scrabbled up after, all knees and elbows.

  Gazing down, Elyasin saw a massive person laying within the cradle of the tomb, dressed for battle with hands folded over an enormous longsword. Viewing the body, a sensation of loss engulfed Elyasin, and awe.

  The body of the giant within the obsidian bier was pristine. A myth come to life, and in immaculate condition. Whatever else they had been, the Giannyk had been masters of mummification; the body had not been mutilated. No organs had been cut from its flesh, and the brains had not been rattled from its nose. The skin was hard and lustrous, not pink but a pale blue-grey. A woman, she had thick dark hair braided back from the crown of her head in the Elsthemi fashion, and wore leather battle-armor and furs the twin of Therel’s. But while Therel’s were black leather, this woman had armor of a blue so dark it shone like the midnight sky against the white keshar-pelt slung around her shoulders.

  Her face was haunting. Austere from a life of battle, she had little fat upon her. Proud cheekbones cut high, her thick lips were set in a ready snarl, but her skin was what intrigued Elyasin. Writ upon every inch of her exposed flesh were white tattoos of the same phosphorescent ore as the tomb. Whorls of light shimmered with a slow movement, like sunlight underwater. As Elyasin stared down at those markings, she suddenly recalled where she had seen them before.

  “These markings look exactly like Elohl’s Goldenmarks. Except they aren’t in gold.”

  “Fenrir rakhne, you’re right!” Therel exclaimed. “The pattern is the same, and Merra said Elohl’s markings flared with light when his wyrria interrupted their clan-feud on the road. A light like the sun underwater.”

  “The same hand that created these must have helped design the Rennkavi’s bindings,” Ghrenna’s voice haunted Elyasin, to her very bones. “Bhorlen...”

  “Bhorlen?” Thad perked, taking off his spectacles and lipping at them. “Like the Bhorlen mountain range that borders between Elsthemen and Valenghia?”

  “Actually,” Therel interrupted, “all the mountains that surround Elsthemen were once called the Bhorlen Mountains. More properly, Bhorlen’s Ring. In the oldest tales of the Dremors, they recall the name as Bhorlen’s Barrier. They remember an ancient battle involving a race of giant men who co-existed five thousand years ago with the tundra-tribes. Some say us Elsthemi are descended from interbreeding of the tundra-men with giants.” He shrugged. “I don’t see how anyone would be able to mate with a woman like this, though.”

  “Use your imagination,” Luc murmured, staring in awe at the giantess.

  Elyasin reached out, gently touching the skin of the long-deceased warrior. It was cold as stone, but held a healthy texture: firm and resilient.

  “It’s as if she still lives,” Elyasin commented.

  “Something like that.” Ghrenna frowned, rubbing her chest over her heart. Her collar unbuckled, Elyasin could see the white sigils of Morvein flowing with a ripple of light not unlike Elohl’s Goldenmarks. Elyasin stared and the others glanced over. At last, Ghrenna dredged a deep breath, her gaze flicking to Elyasin. “Morvein bound herself with sigils like these – beyond death, forcing her soul to return when the time of the Rennkavi was nigh. The Rennkavi’s marks and Morvein’s and the ones she gave the Brother Kings – she learned them from a Giannyk named Bhorlen...to bind souls to her purpose.”

  “But these seem to bind the body,” Elyasin touched a whorl upon the giantess’ cheek.

  “Like an enchanted sleep,” Thaddeus spoke eagerly. “Like the story of King Trevius!”

  “King who?” Luc looked over at Thad.

  “King Trevius’ Sleep is an ancient Elsthemi tale,” Therel’s voice ran with legend as he spoke an answer, touching the sleek hair of the giantess. “Even Dremors don’t know how far back that fable goes. A warrior king, Trevius was enchanted by his Helta Wyrrin, or High Magus, to sleep five thousand years after he faced a great evil. The evil that Highland legends call Utrus, a demon with red eyes who destroys heaven and earth. But those tales are old hearth-fable.”

  “What if it’s real?” Thad gazed around at the hundreds of biers in the massive underground space. “What if Bhorlen’s Barrier is this? Tunnels that ring Elsthemen, stocked with King Trevius – not an Elsthemi king but a Giannyk king – and his sleeping warriors. Bound by this Bhorlen fellow, whom the mountains were eventually named after, and whom Morvein met to learn binding-arts. Perhaps these tunnels act as a barrier to contain... something evil. Perhaps this red-eyed demon from Highland legend, the Utrus.”

  “Aeon preserve us.” Luc’s voice slit the mist. “You have a diabolical imagination, kid.”

  “Fables hold truths.” Thad countered, giving Luc a sharp glance. “One just has to dig deep enoug
h, back far enough, to find it.”

  Staring down at the giantess, Ghrenna spoke. “I feel like I have to – like Morvein had to prevent something awful, for which she sacrificed everything. She traveled under these mountains to learn the Rennkavi’s bindings and ritual from Bhorlen. And when the ritual failed, she banished her Brother Kings into Plinths for eons in order to try again. To create a hero who could battle a great foe which she had Seen would rise, renewed from the times of the Giannyk: the Red-Eyed Demon.”

  A shiver passed through Elyasin as Ghrenna’s words rang in her ears like death-knells. Suddenly, the tattoos upon the ancient Giannyk warrior flared. Bright as day, they roiled so furiously that Elyasin had to shield her eyes. The sigils on the sarcophagus flared also, a dazzling diamond that smote the darkness.

  Thaddeus shouted in alarm and jumped off the bier with Luc, back to the outcropping, but Elyasin was riveted, that brightness swallowing her. Like a frigid wind, a presence roared out from the warrior, freezing Elyasin in a vise-like grip. Elyasin heard Therel scream her name. Still upon the bier, he reached for her – when he cried out also, freezing in agony in the diamond-bright mist.

  Elyasin’s body was on fire. Her keshar-claw pendant burned with golden wyrric flames, searing her chest. Eyes clenched, Elyasin screamed in torment and heard an answering scream from Ghrenna and a roar from Therel, both transfixed beside her. Terrible within the bright wind, the presence smashed into Elyasin’s mind, forcing her to open her eyes and behold its glory.

  At the center of the raging mist, she saw a diamond-haloed outline. A woman, black emptiness inside the scorching white – though the corpse inside the bier had moved not at all. Enormous, the wight’s ice-blue gaze was endless, her voice unintelligible inside Elyasin’s mind. Swirling and cold like a thousand stars in the Void, it was a cacophony of discordance. Like the scream of chalk over slate, she spoke languages of death and destruction. The fabric of Elyasin’s essence was shredded by that voice and she screamed, writhing in an agony with no end.