by Alexey Pehov
I ignored the whispers, gritted my teeth, and kept dashing on as fast as I could, constantly leaping over the bones that lay in my way.
I came across another two of Balistan Pargaid’s men, but where were the others? Had Lafresa managed to fight off the whispers?
The voices sensed a moment of weakness and moved in, whispering and threatening every possible kind of nightmare and all the pain in the world. It was really hard for me not to stop, and to keep on running. The bitter taste on my tongue was gradually fading, and the whispering was coming back.
I covered the last five yards of the gallery in three huge bounds, without any magical protection. The voices howled in triumph, thrusting their talons into my brain, but I was already covering the final yard and it was too late for the whispering to bind my reason with the nets of insanity.
I flew out of the gallery and the hall, and suddenly everything went quiet. Kli-Kli’s medallion scalded my skin with a cold flame and, before I could even understand what had happened to me, I went crashing headlong into Count Balistan Pargaid.
I had to lie there for a little while, gasping for breath and waiting for the sparks in front of my eyes to fade away. The collision had completely winded me and knocked me to the ground. Damn Balistan Pargaid, for getting under my feet at just the wrong moment.
His Grace and one of his soldiers were standing there, transformed into frozen statues. They looked as if they had been carved out of cloudy ice and then sprinkled generously with hoarfrost.
I walked up to them and carefully touched a hand. The cold fingers scalded my palm. It really was ice. Some kind-hearted soul had turned the servants of the Master into statues of ice just for the fun of it. A ludicrous, but entirely appropriate end for one of the most powerful lords of Valiostr and servants of the Master.
Following the encounter with Balistan, it took me a few moments to spot the spiral stairway leading down through the floor toward the fifth level. Well, then, that was one more landmark passed.
6
THE MASTERS OF GLOOM
Counting steps in Hrad Spein had become a habit. It helped distract me from my gloomy thoughts. Only this time the counting wasn’t really helping much. At 573 all the black thoughts came down on me so hard that I lost count and gave up.
Lafresa was still ahead of me in the race for the Rainbow Horn, and she still had the Key—I’d never get out of the Palaces without that. She found her way unerringly through the labyrinth of dead halls, moving on as if she was strolling along Parade Street, taking no notice of the menaces lurking on every side, and paying for her safe passage with the late Balistan Pargaid’s men.
By my calculation there were no more than twelve of them left. Probably not even that many. Who knew which path the blue-eyed witch had led her little detachment along and how many bodies I hadn’t noticed? In fact it was quite likely that now the Master’s woman-servant was continuing on her way alone.
The first of the main dangers—the Halls of the Slumbering Whisper foretold in the verse riddle—was behind me now, but the fun was only just beginning. How did it go on in the scroll …
Through the halls of the Slumbering Echo and Darkness
Past the blind, unseeing Kaiyu guards,
’Neath the gaze of Giants who burn all to ash,
To the graves of the Great Ones who died in battle …
Encouraging lines, weren’t they?
* * *
I woke from a nightmare, although I couldn’t remember what horrors I’d been dreaming of. All that was left of the dream was a stabbing pain in my chest and an immense weariness, as if I hadn’t slept at all.
The rest I had allowed myself on the final turn of the staircase hadn’t brought the relief I’d been hoping for, and I set off in a depressed mood.
The fatigue of the last week weighed on my shoulders like a heavy burden, pressing me down. I was only just starting to realize that the journey through Hrad Spein wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. The constant tension, the constant anticipation of danger, were having an even worse effect on my health than all the distance I’d tramped from the entrance of the Palaces to the entrance to the fifth level.
I got up with a groan (unfortunately, stone steps are not the most comfortable place to sleep) and stretched my numb arms and legs. Hundreds of tiny needles started wandering over my body, pricking me first in one place, then another. But strangely enough, this minor discomfort pepped me up better than anything else could have done, and I reached the fifth level in a perfectly cheerful state of mind.
The fifth level. The very first hall—and once again an unexpected change in the decor. Where was the gold, where was the subtle elegance, where was the charm of the statues and the delightful visual beauty of the walls? All of that had been left behind on the third and fourth levels of the underground Palaces. Here there were only monotonous stone walls with mediocre paintings, and the floor was made of flagstones about two square yards in size, carelessly aligned with each other.
I noticed that all the slabs on the floor had different colors and markings, and not all of them would have met with aesthetic approval from a decent artist. Most likely someone had laid the slabs out in a huge mosaic, but because it was so immense, there was no way I could see what it showed. Every hall had its own mosaic, its own set of colors on the floor, but by the meager light of my little magical lamp it was impossible for me to make out the overall picture.
I didn’t know why these halls were called the Halls of the Slumbering Darkness; as far as I could tell, this honorary title could easily have been awarded to any of the unlit spaces from the third level on.
I tramped through the underground labyrinth for half a day, only occasionally checking the maps and starting a new light—the number of those was dwindling rapidly. I tried not to think about the time when I would have to grope my way along by touch.
It was a lot cooler down here than on the upper levels. Essentially I was wandering through huge natural caves with graves in the roughly worked walls, mosaic floors, and stalactites and stalagmites that had grown together to form fantastical fairy-tale columns.
The fifth level seemed to go on forever, and the cave-halls seemed boundless. The farther I walked, the more I felt enveloped in the dead cobweb of decline from the former majesty of the Palaces of Bone.
The columns were covered in lumps and bulges and in some places water dripped from the ceiling and the first signs of future columns had appeared on the mosaic floor. I couldn’t see the walls, they were a very long way off, and I tramped on and on, taking my bearings from the path laid out in red slabs.
Sometimes it branched into two, three, four, or even eight new paths, and I had to leaf through the papers for a long time, straining my eyes and my brain as I tried to compare the orcish squiggles on the maps and on the flagstones of the floor.
The constant darkness was enough to drive anyone crazy! I would have sold my soul for a helping of well-roasted meat, a pint of beer, and a ray of sunshine. The gods be praised, at least I wasn’t short of water. There was more than enough of that here. Once I even crossed a little hump-backed bridge over a small lake of black water as smooth as a mirror.
The underground caves came to an end and the gloomy halls of the Palaces of Bone began again. It got warmer, water stopped dripping down the walls, and the smell of damp disappeared, giving way to a faint smell of decomposition.
I didn’t like that smell at all. Why was there still a stink, if the age of the burial sites on this level was measured in centuries and everything that could rot ought to have rotted away, leaving mostly bones? That aroma of old death made me feel vaguely anxious, but a smell is just a smell, and so far nothing worse had happened.
There was a light breeze blowing in the Halls of the Slumbering Darkness. It sang somewhere up under the ceiling, making a constant eerie hmmmmmm. When I first heard the sound, I thought it was the terrible whispering coming back, but after what seemed like an age drenched in cold sweat, with my
knees trembling, I realized that it was only the wind.
I walked on until I came up against a wall. It was slightly concave for some reason, and I was surprised by this, so I allowed myself the luxury of ordering the light to burn at full brightness.
The magical light picked an immense column out of the darkness—it was so big that it would have taken forty men holding hands to put their arms round it (assuming they joined hands first, of course). Mmm, yes … many of the trees in Zagraba could have envied the thickness and height of this stone monster. And there were hundreds of these columns in the hall. I walked past the stone giants, feeling like a pitiful little bug. The morose gray monsters soared upward out of the light, hanging silently over the uninvited guest and threatening to drop the distant vault of the ceiling on his head.
A vague sense of alarm stayed with me all the way through this place, with its constantly howling wind—hmmmmm—dismal grayness, and faint smell of decomposition.… At one point, when cold shivers suddenly started running down my back for the hundredth time, I decided, for some reason that I didn’t understand, that I ought to look round as quickly as possible. I don’t know if it was my impulse or Valder’s. A single fleeting glance was enough to make me hide the light under my jacket and order it to go out.
Far, far away, at the very beginning of the columned hall, there was a faint sprinkling of orange dots. There could be no doubt that they were torches. I could see several dozen of the bright blinking points. They would disappear behind a column and then reappear again, advancing slowly but surely in my direction.
I would have wagered my soul that the torch-bearers couldn’t be Balistan Pargaid’s men. There couldn’t be many left from the group that had come down into the Palaces of Bone with Lafresa.… But this group numbered fifty or sixty. So it was someone else parading through the hall.
Hoping that I’d managed to hide the light in time and the strangers hadn’t noticed it, I darted behind a column close to the wall and as far as possible from the center of the hall. Were the strangers actually looking for me or was this their regular daily stroll around the local sights? Just to be on the safe side I got the crossbow ready, pulled my hood up over my head, and pressed myself back against the wall.
Hmmmmmmm.
The wind of the ancient halls sang a lullaby to the slumbering gloom of eternity. The sound of the wind was a faint dreary note in my ears and the only thing I could hear above it was the desperate pounding of my heart. For a long time there was no other sound but my heartbeat and the lullaby of the wind. And then the Halls of the Slumbering Darkness shuddered and the night awoke.
The steps came closer and closer.… First an orange glow appeared on the distant columns, and then I could hear the strangers’ heavy snuffling as they breathed. On the one hand that was good—if they snuffled, it meant they were alive. But on the other hand …
I didn’t finish what I was thinking, because at last I saw them, and I immediately wanted to be ten leagues away. It’s not every day you get to see the images on walls come to life. Somehow I hadn’t been expecting to see living examples of the creatures that the makers of the Palaces of Bone had depicted with such obsessive accuracy in their statues, paintings, and mosaics.
Half birds, half bears that even the Order didn’t know about (I was sure of that!). The creatures walked past me—tall, about the same height as an ogre, massively built, almost square, with thick arms and legs and bare clawed feet. Large, elongated heads rather like a bear’s, with little ears, round birdlike eyes, and small curved beaks that gleamed like steel in the light of the torches.
These strange, in fact absurd creatures were dressed in loose violet robes. The shapeless tunics almost completely covered their bodies, leaving only the hands, feet, and heads exposed to view, all covered with reddish fur. Or perhaps it wasn’t fur, but feathers. From that distance it was hard for me to tell.
No jewelry and no weapons. I could sense that the creatures were strong, confident, and … old. Not even old, but ancient—their age could rival eternity itself.
“They are the world,” Valder suddenly whispered. “They came to Siala at the moment of its birth. The firstborn were not the ogres and certainly not the orcs.… These beings lived at the very beginning of the Dark Era. A race that was once mighty, and alien even to the ogres, now condemned to live here. Quite different from us. Absolutely alien … Look, Harold, there they are—the firstborn of this world.”
I didn’t know how the archmagician knew about the half bird, half bears, but I literally gaped wide-eyed at the beasts.
They were walking past, only fifteen yards away from me. Walking in single file, snuffling loudly, and waddling from one foot to the other. Every third one was carrying what at first I had taken for torches. In fact they were knobbly black wooden staffs, polished until they shone, and set on the top of every one was a skull. Skulls of elves, orcs, men, and even ogres—they gave out an orange light very similar to the light of an ordinary flame.
One figure followed another until it seemed the procession would never end. The sound of snuffling, footsteps, claws scraping on the stone slabs of the floor. They drifted past me, these ships of ancient, bygone glory that had sunk to the bottom of the centuries, and their huge shadows slid ominously across the bodies of the columns. Finally the last of them, the eighty-sixth wayfarer, walked past me, and darkness fell.
Where had these creatures come from, what obscure depths of the Palaces of Bone had they lived in for all the millennia of Siala’s existence, what did they want, what did they aspire to? I didn’t know if they were dangerous, but, Sagot be praised, they had missed me. Darkness only knew how the firstborn (the genuine firstborn!) would react to an uninvited guest. Perhaps they’d greet him with open arms and lead him along a safe route straight to Grok’s grave and the Rainbow Horn, or perhaps they’d simply turn my skull into a new lamp without thinking twice about it. Something told me the second alternative was far more likely than the first.
But even so, I couldn’t just stay where I was. The column of creatures was moving in the direction I had to go in, and so I set out very quietly, scarcely even breathing, after the Ancient Ones.
I kept my distance so that—Sagot forbid—I wouldn’t be heard or, even worse, get caught in the circle of light from the skull-lamps. I crossed the entire gigantic hall, running from column to column. The string of lights ahead of me trembled and divided into three parts that flowed off into the labyrinthine corridors, and the hall went dark.
In all this time I didn’t hear a single word from the creatures. Where had the bird-bears gone, what goals were they pursuing, what did they want? Naturally, I didn’t go chasing after them to ask stupid questions. Wherever the creatures had gone, they weren’t going my way. In the literal or the figurative sense. My path led into a barely noticeable narrow corridor that began between the last two columns of the hall, but the three bands of Ancient Ones had taken other roads.
I felt a strong temptation to take out the maps and see where these creatures could be heading, but I ruthlessly suppressed this impulse of treacherous curiosity. The less you know, the better you sleep. I had no doubt that the bird-bears who had just walked through the columned hall had come to it from the depths of the levels without names, where no one had dared to go for the last seven thousand years.
“What do they want, Valder?” I blurted out.
Surprisingly enough, this time the archmagician condescended to answer me.
“They’re waiting, Harold.”
“Waiting? What for?”
He said nothing for a long time. A very long time. I thought I was never going to get an answer.
“A chance. A chance to come back to our world. They are a mistake of the gods, or perhaps of the one they call the Dancer in the Shadows. They were created as … as an experiment, as the first creatures, and they almost destroyed Siala, and were punished for it.… They are waiting for someone to smash the fetters that hold them in the bowels of the earth.
Waiting and dreaming of their world being as it used to be. With no orcs, ogres, elves, and, of course, no men. They are waiting for the Holders of the Chain, those we are used to calling the Gray Ones, to bungle things, and the thread of equilibrium to snap, as it almost did on a fierce winter night many years ago.”
The dead archmagician’s words struck me like a physical blow.
I realized what he was hinting at.
“The Rainbow Horn?”
“Most likely. They were the ones who awoke the evil that was sleeping here. Their own evil. They can sense that the time is near.…”
“But how do you know all this?”
No reply. Valder disappeared, leaving me to my questions and doubts.
* * *
A meager supper, sleep that brought almost no relief, and back to the journey. The corridor led me into a cave where at last I could stop wasting lights and banging my nose against the wall.
It was every bit as large as the hall with the columns. Reddish orange walls, a ceiling with light beaming down from it and lighting up the whole place magnificently. And I could have sworn it wasn’t magical light, but absolutely genuine sunlight.
For the first two minutes my eyes, which had grown completely unused to anything like this, simply couldn’t see a thing. I squinted and tried to blink away the involuntary tears. But it cost me a lot of pain before I finally got used to it and could look at the world normally.
The light streaming from the ceiling more than sixty yards above my head was like the light of the evening sun shining through the leaves of a dense forest. It was something warm, gentle, not too bright, and, of course (after the gloom of the catacombs), unbelievably beautiful. This was probably the first time in a week of strolling through the Palaces of Bone that I felt grateful to the architects and magicians who had created such a miracle in one of the deep caverns.
The cave was so large that someone had even built a little fortress in it.