Darkblade Guardian

by Andy Peloquin

  “You saw what they did to Neroth,” Taiana protested. She glanced at the now empty street, then stepped back. “Their Scorchslayers can kill us far faster than iron.”

  The Hunter’s eyebrows rose. Is that fear in her eyes? Taiana hadn’t shown any hesitation or fear when taking on the two Elivasti fighting Neroth, and she’d dispatched them with impressive ferocity. The two of them had killed six of the blue-armored men, including one with that strange weapon she’d called a Scorchslayer.

  Her gaze drilled into him. “They outnumber us a hundred to one. Only a fool would confront them before the time is right.”

  “Fine, then call me a fool.” The Hunter ground his teeth and pushed himself off the wall. “I’m not going to let the boy—”

  Taiana’s hand snapped out at his chest and thrust him backward against the wall with jarring force. “I will not let you ruin everything we’ve worked for, Drayvin.”

  The vehemence in her words and the flash of anger in her eyes took the Hunter by surprise. More surprising, however, was her strength. It proved nearly a match for the Warmaster’s or Tane’s, both powerfully-built Abiarazi.

  For the first time, he noticed her height. In his memories, he’d always been the taller, yet now he realized that he looked up to meet her eyes. Had she used their shape-shifting abilities to become taller? She showed no sign of straining to hold her form. So when had she outgrown him?

  “Listen, you have my word that I will help you,” Taiana said, her words firm, “but you will not risk our mission. Once we are safe, I will do everything in my power to find this boy you seek.”

  For the first time, she seemed to realize that she was holding him against the wall. She pulled her hand back, hesitant, almost nervous, and her tone softened. “Can you trust me, Drayvin, as you did all those years ago?”

  Her words brought back the familiar pang in his heart. He’d come all this way to find her, so how could he want to be apart from her? She was the only link to his past, the only person on Einan who knew the truth of who he was.

  Going with her makes sense, he finally told himself. She knew her way around, so it would be more prudent to get her help than to stumble around the Lost City in an aimless search. I’ll be useless to Hailen if I’m killed or captured.

  He didn’t truly know if the Elivasti had the boy, or where they’d taken him if they did. All he knew was that Taiana had promised to help him once they were safe. That had to be enough, for now.

  “I will go with you,” he said. “But you cannot begin to understand how important this child is.”

  A shadow flashed in her eyes, and she nodded. “I believe you,” she said in a quiet voice.

  For an instant, he caught a glimpse of the woman from his memories. The woman that had stared at him with eyes full of love, had shared moments of tenderness with him. The woman he’d married and that had borne their child.

  Then her expression hardened, and he saw a glimpse of the woman that had stabbed him and turned him over to the Illusionist Clerics in the name of protecting that same child.

  The more he looked at her, the more he realized he didn’t truly know her. She had been a thing of his past, the driving force that kept him moving forward and brought him to Enarium against impossible odds. He wanted to get to know her, to find out if any of the Taiana from his memories remained. His desire to be reunited with her warred with his need to protect Hailen.

  Taiana glanced out from their hiding place. “Let’s move,” she said, once again composed and in command of herself.

  The Hunter hesitated a moment. He needed to find Hailen, but he desperately wanted to follow Taiana. Right now, he had nothing to go on, no leads to help him hunt down the boy. The smart play was to go with the woman.

  I’ll find you, lad, he promised in his mind as he slipped out into the street behind Taiana. Come fiery or frozen hell, I will come for you.

  Taiana led them along the lowest level of the city, following the circular streets toward the north. She moved cautiously, her eyes wary as she scanned every adjoining and parallel street they encountered. It was the caution developed over years of war, not the sort of paranoia common among thieves and assassins. Kalil, however, had the look of a thief about him. Though he wore the bronze armor comfortably, his darting eyes never stopped moving.

  It was strange to think of these two people beside him as Bucelarii. They had lived as long as he, perhaps had as many different lives. How many of those lives do they remember? What did they endure in their years roaming Einan? What sort of hardships, losses, and suffering did they survive?

  For the first time, he had found people who could understand what it meant to live centuries, millennia. The realization struck him as incredibly odd.

  The vibrations running beneath the Hunter’s feet grew louder as they drew near the blue gemstone tower in the north of the city. Instead of passing it, however, Taiana ducked through a narrow gap between a pair of three-story houses made of red and grey mountain stone, then into an open side door.

  The interior of the house seemed to have been suspended in time. Simple furniture of wood, cloth, and stone adorned living and sleeping areas, and the house had the colorful decorations—paintings, hand-woven tapestries, even carved wooden effigies—that marked it as occupied. Everything was perfectly in place, precisely organized, as if the owners would return at any moment. Even though the Hunter knew the house had been abandoned centuries ago, there was not a speck of dust in sight. Almost as if the magick of Enarium preserved everything in the city.

  The Hunter followed Taiana into the cellar, where he caught his first glimpse of dust. Dirt, piled in a heap off to one side of the darkened room. Taiana strode toward the far end of the basement, where the shadows were thickest. She drew a fist-sized glass orb from a pouch and shook it. The liquid swirling within flared to life, releasing a soft golden glow that illuminated the basement in a five-pace radius around her.

  “Right this way,” she said with a grin.

  In the faint light of the glowing globe, the Hunter saw the mouth of a passage carved from the upper layers of earth upon which the house was built. The passage ran straight for thirty paces before curving to the right and disappearing from sight. The walls and ceiling were hard-packed earth shored up by thick stone pillars.

  “The Serenii and their secret passages,” the Hunter said, snorting.

  Taiana shook her head. “These were built by human hands, though why, I cannot fathom.”

  There were many reasons for secret passages like this to exist, most of them deceitful and underhanded. Perhaps the humans of Enarium wanted to avoid their Serenii minders seeing everything that went on in the city. Or maybe they simply sought to hide their actions from their fellows.

  “The Elivasti do not know they exist,” Taiana explained, “and thus they provide us a safe way to move around unseen.” She strode through the tunnels ahead of him, and Kalil brought up the rear.

  “Where do they lead?”

  “All around Enarium,” she said over her shoulder. “These passages run just beneath the surface of the city, and they connect the lower two Echelons of Enarium—Base and Medial—to each other.” At that moment, the tunnel they strode down intersected with another. This side passage ran to the left, and the faint light of the glowing globe revealed a gentle incline.

  “And what about the top Echelon?” the Hunter asked. “If I wanted to get to the huge tower in the center of the city, could I get there underground like this?”

  “No.” Taiana shook her head. “The Prime Echelon was reserved for the Serenii only. To reach the Illumina, you must travel the streets.” She glanced over her shoulder, and her brow furrowed. “But I doubt your boy is being kept there.”

  “Why do you say that?” the Hunter asked.

  “The Elivasti have made their home in Hellsgate, and that is where they take all the prisoners they bring to Enarium.”

  The words “all the prisoners” sounded strange.

 
“What do you mean?” The Hunter’s brow furrowed. “The Elivasti bring prisoners to Enarium?”

  “Yes. Mostly from Vothmot, but many from around Einan.”

  “What for?”

  Taiana hesitated, then shook her head. “I cannot truly say. We have not yet ventured to enter Hellsgate. Our mission is too important to risk.”

  “That’s the second time you mentioned mission,” the Hunter said. “What is it?”

  “I will show you,” was all Taiana would say.

  The Hunter shot a questioning glance over his shoulder at Kalil, but the smaller Bucelarii’s expression was unreadable. His dark eyes, however, strayed time and again to Soulhunger’s sheath on the Hunter’s hip.

  He’d noticed that neither Taiana nor Kalil carried a weapon like Soulhunger, at least none he could see. Indeed, they had only the crossbow-looking weapon and spikestaffs they’d taken from the dead Elivasti. He couldn’t help wondering what had happened to the weapons they’d received from their Abiarazi ancestors. Both Bucelarii had looked at Soulhunger with the same hungry eagerness that had burned in the eyes of the demons he’d encountered.

  A nagging fear echoed in the back of his mind. Will they try to take Soulhunger from me? Taiana had returned the blade, but there had been a moment of hesitation. What would he do if they tried? Would he kill them like he had all the others? He could only hope he wouldn’t have to find out.

  They rounded a bend in the passages, which ended in a blank wall. “We’re here,” Taiana said.

  The Hunter cocked an eyebrow as the glowing globe shone on a waist-high hole set into the hard-packed earth. Piles of dirt bordered both sides of the hole, and it had the look of a freshly dug opening.

  Taiana motioned for him to go first. After a moment of hesitation, he crouched and crawled into the hole. His ears caught the muffled sounds of someone—Taiana, he guessed—following him. The tight space pressed close beside his shoulders, and he had to duck his head to avoid bumping it on the ceiling of the shaft. It ran for about twenty paces, slanted sharply upward for another five paces up a steep incline, then opened into a larger chamber.

  A soft blue glow filled the room at the end of the tunnel. The Hunter could feel the humming in his hands and feet as he crawled out, then stood. He found himself in what looked like another basement, but with walls that emanated the same blue light as the Serenii towers.

  In that moment, a rough hand seized him, dragged him into the room, and slammed him against the wall. Cold metal pressed against his throat as a man—who reeked of mud mixed with leather, citrus oil, hops, and pine oil—growled into his face. “You’ve got two seconds to tell me who in the bloody hell you are, else I gut you like a pig.”

  Chapter Three

  The Hunter’s instincts kicked in, and his hand dropped to Soulhunger’s hilt. He whipped the dagger free in a single smooth motion and lashed out with a quick disemboweling stroke. The razor tip was a finger’s breadth from slitting the man’s gut when Taiana’s curse halted him.

  “Damn it, Cerran!” Taiana, who had emerged behind the Hunter, imposed herself between them and shoved the man away. “He’s with us.”

  The Hunter glared at Cerran. The man had no idea how damned lucky he was; Taiana had just saved him from an agonizing death.

  Cerran was nearly as tall as the Hunter and visibly broader in the chest and shoulders. His bushy red beard matched the fiery hue of his hair, which he wore in the long leather-bound braids common among the Fehlan clansmen across the Frozen Sea. In his hand, he held one of the Elivasti spikestaffs, though far duller and more worn than the ones Taiana and Kalil had collected.

  “Warn a fellow next time, then,” Cerran mumbled and shot a scowl at the Hunter and Taiana both.

  The threat passed, the Hunter sheathed Soulhunger and straightened his clothing. He tried to place the man’s accent. It reminded him of the Malandrians, but had the harsh edge of someone that had spent time among the clans of Fehl. How he’d gotten all the way from the far south here to Enarium was as much a mystery as the presence of Kalil, Taiana, and Neroth.

  Taiana glared at the man. “You’re supposed to be working on the Chamber of Sustenance. Tell me you’ve gotten it open.”

  The Hunter froze at her words. Sir Danna had mentioned “Chambers of Furtherance” with her dying breath. Was this something related?

  “Just about,” Cerran said with a nod. “Just waiting for you to get here to open it, as you insisted.”

  The redheaded Bucelarii treated Taiana with the deference shown a commanding officer. Clearly there was a hierarchy among them, and Taiana was at the pinnacle.

  Cerran raised an eyebrow and shot a glance at the Hunter. “I take it he’s the reason you’re late?”

  Taiana nodded. “This is Drayvin. Drayvin, Cerran.”

  “Drayvin, eh?” The bearded man’s bushy red eyebrows shot up and a small smile played at his lips. “The Drayvin?”

  “One and the same.” Taiana fixed the redheaded man with a hard glare. “But we’ll discuss him later. At this moment, we’ve more important matters to deal with.”

  “Right you are.” Cerran turned and strode across the room. “If you’d do the honors?”

  For the first time, the Hunter saw the object that provided the blue glow that filled the room. Shaped like a casket, it was as tall as his chest and five paces long, with a base of white stone and a lid of the same blue, glowing glass as the walls of the towers. Long tubes as thick as the Hunter’s wrist and made of a strange soft, flexible, transparent material ran from the far end of the blocky object into the floor. Even from this distance, he could feel the power thrumming from what Taiana had called the Chamber of Sustenance.

  Taiana gestured around. “This is our mission, Drayvin. This is why we cannot confront the Elivasti yet.”

  She inserted the tip of a spikestaff into the crack between base and lid, took a deep breath, and pushed hard. Something gave a loud crack and the lid opened slowly with a loud hiss, like steam released from the mountain vents in Kara-ket. A tremor ran through Taiana’s hand as she pushed the lid open.

  The white stone base of the Chamber of Sustenance had been carved into what the Hunter could only picture as a bed or cradle, but sized for an abnormally tall human. Strange strands of metal, glass, and more of that flexible, transparent material coiled in the depression where the occupant’s head would have rested.

  Where the occupant’s head had rested before it was turned into a charred, withered corpse.

  The Hunter grimaced at the sight of the desiccated flesh, yellowed teeth, and white bones. It could have once been human, though man or woman, he couldn’t tell. The stench of rot wafted up from the Chamber, twisting his stomach.

  “Damn.” Taiana let out her breath slowly, and her shoulders drooped.

  Her reaction surprised the Hunter. Who had she hoped to find?

  The redheaded man rattled off a stream of words in a language the Hunter didn’t recognize. By the way the color of his florid face deepened and his midnight-colored eyes blazed, they had to be curses.

  Taiana turned to Cerran. “Have you gotten any of the others open?”

  “No.” He shook his head, which set his long red braid flying. “We’ve gone through nearly thirty spikestaffs just to get the tunnel dug here and get this open. I wasted another spikestaff trying to get through the door, but those Serenii bastards knew how to build.”

  The Hunter’s brow furrowed as he took in the details around him. “Where are we?”

  He’d never seen any human construction with this precision and elegance. Three of the walls were smooth, unbroken, made of the same blue glass as the Serenii towers. The fourth wall had two unique features: a tall, rectangular-shaped pane of glass that had to be a door, and a fist-sized square of what looked like a transparent gemstone set at his chest-level. By the light of the glowing Chamber, the Hunter could see a few faint scratch marks on the door as well as on the wall beside it. Three dulled, cracked, and bent spikestaff
s lay abandoned on the floor.

  “The Northwest Keep,” Taiana replied. “Base Echelon.” Her voice was heavy, her lips pressed into a tight line. The discovery of the empty Chamber seemed to bother her a great deal, though why, the Hunter couldn’t understand.

  Her words took a moment to register. “Wait, we’re inside those huge towers?”

  She nodded.

  “And you dug your way in?” he asked. “Surely there’s an easier way.”

  “There certainly is.” Cerran gave him a too-sweet smile. “You can just walk in the main door right from the street. But, oh wait, that’s right, you need the right bloody resonator stone to open the bloody thing.”

  The Lectern in the Vault of Stars in Vothmot had spoken of resonator stones—stones that vibrated at specific frequencies. When two such stones came in contact, they harmonized and triggered a reaction.

  “If only we had thought of trying to find another way in, rather than wasting our time digging through hard-packed earth and stone.” Cerran slapped his forehead in mock incredulity. “How foolish we’ve been. It’s good you’re here to solve all our problems for us.”

  The Hunter scowled at the man’s tone. If all Bucelarii were like Cerran, no wonder the humans had hunted them down.

  “We’ve tried,” Taiana said with a sigh. “We’ve done everything we could think of, but we’ve found nothing else. Digging under these towers is the only way we can get into the Chambers of Sustenance.”

  “Which are what, exactly? I have heard mention of the Chambers of Furtherance, though I don’t know what they are. I have never heard of the Chambers of Sustenance.” The Hunter raised an eyebrow. The fact that they bore blue-glowing runes meant Serenii magick powered them, but their purpose wasn’t evident at first glance. The only thing he knew they could do was turn bodies into charred husks.

  “They are one and the same. Only a select few of the Cambionari insist on calling them the Chambers of Furtherance, though no one understands why. Their purpose is two-fold. They are designed to sustain life while at the same time feeding off the energy of their occupants.” A shadow flashed in Taiana’s eyes. “They are the final resting places of many of our fellow Bucelarii.”