There was a titanic rasping breath from within the skull-framed cavity, and Milo felt air drawn across his face toward the awakening gate.
The skulls flexed like scaled horny lips around the yawning mouth of the cavity, while above, the churning pools narrowed to scowl at the ghul before the gate. With a spasm in his mind to make up for the momentarily frozen organ in his chest, Milo realized the entire gate had become the vast simulacrum of a face.
“IMRAH MARID, DAUGHTER OF BASHLEK MARID, YOU ARE KNOWN TO US,” the gate announced in a deep, cavernous voice. “FAZIHR JUBAL, SON OF HAMOTH, YOU ARE ALSO KNOWN TO US.”
The gate then directed its gaze to Milo and Ambrose, turning from one to the other.
“YOU ARE NOT KNOWN TO US,” it declared, cold breath hissing between the fangs of the arrayed skulls. “HOLD FAST, OR YOU SHALL BE CONSUMED.”
Milo and Ambrose exchanged concerned glances, but neither moved.
More skeletal limbs extended from the gate, some emerging from the layers of ribs and vertebrae. They gripped the walls, floor, and ceiling of the tunnel, and with a sound like a thousand splintered fingers raking stone, the gate dragged itself forward. By reflex, both men tensed, and Milo prepared to run, Ambrose unlimbered his rifle. The dark, liquid eyes fixed both of them with a cautionary glance but did not repeat its warning. It didn’t need to.
The ghuls shuffled back to make way for the gate, sliding around Ambrose and Milo.
“If this is some sort of trap,” the bodyguard said in a soft, deadly whisper even as he stood perfectly still, “I will make certain you both are sent to Hell screaming.”
“Peace, Jurhumidon.” Imrah’s words were sharp, but her tone was strikingly sincere. “Rousing the gate’s anger could kill us all.”
Milo didn’t kid himself that he could read ghul body language after having learned of their existence only hours ago, but he did notice that both Imrah and Fazihr seemed to be watching everything with rapt, almost anxious attention. Whether that was because they feared the gate or they feared that the gate would kill them remained to be seen.
It crawled forward until Milo could have stuck his hand into the skull-ringed orifice the gate spoke through. This close, the light showed a space lined with spurs of jagged bone stretching beyond the reach of the lamp. The thought of being drawn into that barbed throat to be pierced and torn filled Milo with a horror so potent he almost broke and ran right then.
“BE STILL,” the gate instructed, and the mass of bones began to writhe and undulate. Skeletal hands composed of bones so long and thick they couldn’t be human reached out of the rattling corpus. Fingers as thick as Milo’s wrist reached up and dipped into the stygian pools that served as eyes. As slowly and solemnly as at any christening, the gate bent its limbs downward and touched Milo and Ambrose gently upon their scalps.
Milo’s entire body shrank as cold the likes of which he’d never known stole over him. Goose flesh covered him, and he felt as though his organs were retracting. A blast of air slipped between his numb lips, coming out a plume of condensing vapor. Desperate, futile shivering wracked his body, and he lost his grip on the horns of the skull lamp.
For the second time that day the light vanished, and for a heartbeat, everything was swallowed by blackness and obliterating cold.
But as suddenly as it had come, the cold left, and a second later, Milo had the horns of the lamp pressed into his hands.
“Thanks,” he muttered as the light rekindled, expecting to see Ambrose’s grin.
Instead, a skeletal hand retracted back into the gate, disappearing with a series of dull clicks.
“MORTAL MAN AND CHILD OF THE FALLEN,” the gate intoned. “NOW YOU ARE KNOWN TO ME. BASHLEK MARID AWAITS YOU.”
The huge skeletal arms reached for the cavernous mouth, gripped its edge, and pulled. There were more awful sounds of bones rasping and scraping, then the cavity widened into a portal just tall enough to accommodate Milo and wide enough to allow Ambrose.
Milo looked at Ambrose.
“It says that we are awaited.” He had done his level best but failed to sound cheerful.
Ambrose grunted and stepped forward, moving through the shadow of the gate with chin thrust forward and eyes roving.
“Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel much better.”
Milo tended to agree, but he felt that saying as much in front of Bashlek Marid’s daughter might not be the best idea. Swallowing as he tucked the skull lamp under his arm, he followed his bodyguard through the tunnel within a tunnel, trying not to think about the thousand needles of bone mere inches from impaling him from hundreds of different angles. The air in the tunnel smelled of dust and old blood.
After emerging out the other side of the gate unscathed, he stood with Ambrose and waited for the ghuls to emerge.
“The gate wasn’t so hard to convince after all,” Ambrose noted, his mustache twitching. “Almost like it knew what was coming before she revealed my identity.”
“Perhaps Imrah has more authority than she understands,” Milo offered with a shrug. He turned to see the glint of the ghuls’ eyes coming through the tunnel.
“Maybe,” the big man conceded, his face expressing anything but concession on the point. “Or maybe our escorts weren’t privy to information their leader has. My point is, careful what you say. Our host might not thank you for being too honest.”
Milo nodded his understanding as Imrah and Fazihr emerged from the gate’s shadow.
“See?” Ambrose called jauntily. “Not nearly as much trouble as you thought it would be, eh?”
The ghuls exchanged glances, then stared blankly at the bodyguard. Milo wondered how a species could look so sinister just standing silently, but then he looked back as he heard the gate close with a wince-inducing chorus. The magical construction of bone returned to its original shape, the back of the gate looking identical to the front when they first came upon it.
“So, that,” Milo said to the ghuls while pointing at the gate. “That’s the kind of magic your people will be teaching me?”
The ghuls exchanged looks again, and Fazihr gave a blood-chilling laugh, his head wagging.
“The creation of a bone homunculus of that order is a matter for the masters,” Imrah explained, her voice curdled with scornful amusement. “You’ve lit a spectral lamp so far. Don’t get ahead of yourself, meat.”
Milo was surprised when he found himself in well-trodden territory with these ghuls. They, and no doubt most of their kind, thought little of Milo and his abilities. He had been underestimated and devalued and was expected to prove himself. The reality of the situation and his familiarity with it awoke an old defiant flame.
“Whatever you’ve got to teach, I’m here to learn,” he declared, crossing his arms. “Just need to give me a chance.”
Imrah stared at Milo, her predatory gaze needling him, but he glared back with cool, practiced indifference. Fazihr was the first to crack as a stalemate set in.
“We'll see,” he hissed, placing a clawed hand gingerly on Imrah’s shoulder. “Right now we are awaited at court, and we’re very late.”
“Story of my life.” Milo sighed and stepped to the side to allow the ghuls to pass. “Please, lead on.”
8
A Shock
The tunnel changed quickly as they moved away from the gate.
The rough-hewn walls gave way to panels of stone worked meticulously to form bas reliefs. Depicted in the carvings was an unsettling combination of language and art where what were clearly symbols and signs of a language looped and twisted to form pictures of creatures and scenes foreign to Milo’s eyes and mind. It was impossible to say what it was about the depictions set into the walls that bothered him, but the more Milo stared at them, the deeper his sense of wrongness became. Eventually, he decided to ignore the subversive artwork.
The ceiling became a vault that Milo appreciated much more than the alien carvings on the wall. The shaped stone arches made the weight of the earth above them
not seem so oppressive. Once after passing beneath one, Milo reached upward, just able to brush a finger over a crenelated buttress. Before the gate, the tunnel had been low enough that he had feared standing on his tiptoes lest he scrape his head.
Soon branches in the tunnels, which now resembled a hall more than anything else, began to appear, and they were at the mercy of the two ghuls once more.
Passages branched off and wound every which way, but like hounds to the scent, Imrah and Fazihr led them on without pause. Once or twice as they neared an intersection, Milo caught sight of other ghuls retreating from the light. They ducked back the way they had come, or darted across intersections, often alone but sometimes in groups of two or three.
“Do you all dwell in one structure?” Milo called to the ghuls. “Like a hive or nest.”
Imrah cocked her head to one side, looking over her hunched shoulder at Milo.
“Do we look like vermin to you, meat?” she asked, with a grimace that displayed all her teeth. “Do you think we live underground because we are some breed of rodent or insect?”
Milo felt it would be rude to say that sometimes the way they moved and looked around did make him think of a hideous amalgam of rat and spider. Instead, he ducked his head apologetically and answered in a contrite tone, “No, I’m sorry that my words have offended you.”
He spoke as calmly and clearly as he could, mindful of the revelation after passing the gate. “There’s just so much about your people that I don’t understand.”
It was hard to win people’s respect if they thought you were picking a fight, even when you had a point. In fact, Milo thought, especially when you had a point.
Again Imrah regarded him with an expression he could not read, but when she replied, the long-toothed sneer was gone, and she seemed to be making some effort to soften her tone.
“It is understandable that this all seems strange to you,” she rasped before turning back to the winding corridor. “Maybe now that you are here to learn, you will one day understand the great debt the world owes us, and how even as you war over our heads, you stamp upon the homes of a great and mighty people. And no, we do not dwell in a single nest or hive.”
Milo had been with her until her declaration about a great and mighty people.
Ghuls were sinister creatures, and that was before one considered their magical abilities, but so far, all he had seen was one bone homunculus and some barren corridors filled with carvings that were probably hundreds if not thousands of years old. Milo guessed the ghuls might have been something great before, but not anymore. He imagined they were like many lingering peoples, clinging to the bones of their ancestors−in this case, literally. The Bashlek Marid’s court was probably a ragged assemblage of his dwindling tribe.
They passed through a small round antechamber whose passages led off like spokes in a wheel. Imrah and Fazihr headed doggedly for the fourth spoke from the portal they had entered, and Milo passed beneath a very ornate arch without noticing.
They stepped out onto the landing that led down to a wider plaza, which was filled with the sights and sound of creatures busy about their commerce. From it sprang a great stone causeway leading to a massive, tiered city that glowed like a poisoned gem over a yawning abyss.
“Behold Ifreedahm,” Fazihr declared with obvious pride. “Jewel of the Stygian Realm.”
That was when Milo realized exactly how wrong he had been.
“Are we under a mountain or something?” Ambrose muttered as they shuffled toward the central citadel. “We have to be under a mountain, right?”
The structure rose like a serrated spike of black tourmaline in the middle of the city, reaching toward the cavernous roof. The azure glow of the vast braziers that kept the city in perpetual cold twilight danced along the jagged edges of the towering structure so that it almost seemed to breathe. The idea of such a vast structure hidden in the depths of the world, much less the city that surrounded it, strained the edges of Milo’s understanding. From the moment his foot struck the causeway, he’d felt like a man caught in a drunkard’s mad dream.
A dream that teetered toward a nightmare.
Flowing up and down the causeway were rivers of ghuls, often with some form of magically animated corpse acting as a porter or a beast of burden. Here and there Milo saw spectral entities, some bearing the shapes they had worn in life, while others were little more than fractured images or vague clouds of darkness or phosphorescence.
Milo felt a shudder of disgust when he looked at the specters, remembering his first encounter with a shade in Room 7. He knew he’d have to contend with the incorporeal eventually, but for the moment, he decided to study the living denizens of Ifreedahm.
Many of the ghuls were similar in form and appearance to Imrah and Fazihr, but there were variations−what might have been deviant strains of the creatures. Some were shrunken, spindly things that looked like pictures Milo had seen of the monkeys and lesser apes that dwelt in southern jungles. A cart whose wheels were rounded blocks of granite drawn by a team of animated ox bones hosted what looked like a family of the goblin-sized ghuls. The smallest of their number peeked over the edge of the cart, staring at Milo with pale, bulbous eyes.
Another deviation was hulking brutes, built along similar lines as Ambrose but the height of giants. Even stooped with their knuckles dragging the ground, Milo would have had trouble touching the monsters’ craggy chins. A pair of the immense horrors stomped by, heads swaying from side to side on their thick necks, and up close, Milo saw they had no eyes. Above their tusk-festooned mouths and snuffling snouts were bony wrinkles where eyes ought to have been.
As they passed, one snorted and swung its barbarous head around to glare sightlessly in Milo’s direction. He wondered what they would do, trapped as they were on the causeway, if the monster took offense at the scent of their party. Milo had a pistol and Ambrose a rifle and a bayonet, but looking at the malformed muscular bulk of the huge ghuls, Milo wasn’t sure those would be enough to stop them. As he felt the weight of their tread shake the causeway, he wasn’t certain an artillery shell could stop them.
Thankfully, the pair went on their way, and the escorted humans continued into the city. In truth, though they received many questioning glances, Milo was amazed that they were not accosted by any of the traveling ghuls. Given that Imrah and Fazihr had said no human had ever been here, it seemed strange that the denizens were so sanguine about their presence.
When he raised this question as they neared the city, Fazihr had twisted his neck back to answer as he continued to follow Imrah’s lead.
“Imrah is known to many,” he stated simply. Seeing the humans' furrowed brows, he added, “And it is unwise to hinder the daughter of Bashlek Marid.”
They entered the city by passing through a wide arch, where ranks of unliving people and beasts stood in burnished baroque armor as silent, unflinching sentinels.
They came to a harbor of sorts among the tall, narrow buildings that comprised most of the city. In this broad space, a sort of market or bazaar had been built. Stalls and blankets and tents littered the area in sporadic rows, creating twisting avenues and alleys between the various merchants hawking their wares. All of them called out in the ghul tongue in a chorus of viperish rasps that set Milo’s teeth on edge. It was just as well that he couldn’t understand them because the assortment of objects they hoisted into the air or displayed for inspection seemed only to have being bizarre and grisly in common.
“Dear God,” Ambrose whispered. He elbowed Milo before pointing at a wide red and black domino blanket. “Would you look at that?”
Spools of what might have been glistening entrails or perhaps immense veiny worms sat on red squares, while assortments of small bones with jewel inlays lay on black squares. The ghul proprietor sat cross-legged, smile proudly displaying gem-studded fangs. Just past that, corroded bells and keys on strings of knotted hair jangled in one stall across from a pavilion where smokeless green flames burned and a
chorus of whispers could be heard every time someone moved within the shadowy canvas.
“The markets of Ifreedahm offer goods and services to rival any in the world,” Fazihr remarked after noticing their gaping. “An absolute necessity when you think about how many ghuls there are, and all the supplies and alchemical reagents they require.”
“Naturally,” Milo commented as they shuffled past a huge ghul looming over several tables, where skins of varying shapes, sizes, and colors were stretched on racks. All were liberally decorated with more of that bizarre writing that made uncomfortable pictures. Milo wasn’t sure which was more disconcerting, the images formed by the script or that some of the skins still bore recognizable features, confirming that they came from humanoids.
Following their ghul guides as close as they dared, Milo and Ambrose passed through the market and into another part of the city. Here buildings lined the broad streets, though all were open-faced so that they resembled roofed stages more than shops. One glance said that these places offered trinkets, materials, and products as strange and macabre as those in the market.
It was here that Milo and Ambrose saw other living humans, or at least some near cousin to their species.
They were on a broad platform under a sharply pitched roof with rows of barbed chains stretched between stony pillars that formed the front of the establishment. Ashen-skinned, bent, and stout rows of them stood in a line with heads drooping so their lank, colorless hair hung over their thick features. A common ghul stood behind them with a whip composed of a spine and red sinew coiled around one hand, while in front of them, one of the smaller simian ghuls cavorted and gestured just inside the chains to other ghuls and stranger creatures who stood pointing and inspecting.
Milo stopped dead in his tracks and called to their escorts, one finger stabbing at the offending shop.
Witchmarked (World's First Wizard Book 1) Page 9