by Greg James
“Gods’ bones,” Murtagh hissed. “We two against so many.”
“Frightened, old man?”
“Are you not?”
“No. It has been long since my blade supped of so much blood, and the screams of the dying will resound most pleasantly in my ears. The Barneth clan are to be commended for this much. Without their castle having such a dark design to it, I fear the acoustics of slaughter might not be so pleasing.”
The ghouls were almost upon them. Murtagh could see in his companion’s time-hardened face that a lifetime of butchery would not let him just lie down and die at the hands of these creatures. He would fight. They would fall, not he.
The former Captain set his jaw, took a step forward and parried a grasping hand, severing it and drawing a frustrated snarl and a spurt of blood from his victim.
“For Colm and the King,” Murtagh shouted.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Khale smile wide and let loose a war cry that he did not know. “Faugh a ballagh!”
Then he could not look elsewhere, only into the horde surrounding him. Never before had Murtagh looked into the faces and maws of so many thralls to nightmare. Their fingers snatched and tore at him. Teeth and fangs tried to fasten themselves upon his flesh. What the ravening creatures lacked in skill and honour, they made up for in numbers and ferocity. Khale and Murtagh waded through them. Thrashing limbs were cut away. Heads fell. Torsos split, oozing thick gouts of gore onto the ground. Murtagh felt his lungs stinging and old aches biting at his limbs, so that his slashes and thrusts became unsteady and lacklustre as time went by.
For a moment, here and there, his vision blurred. Only decades of muscle memory kept him from being wounded mortally. He shoved the creatures off balance when he had to and cut their legs out from under them. The fingers of one found his throat from behind, so he drove his head hard into its face, feeling bone and teeth shatter. An elbow to the chest staggered the creature, and his sword found its mark by slicing open the abdomen, and then taking the head off with two swift hacks.
Murtagh knew he was as ripe and stinking as Khale now. As the last of the creatures fell, the two men turned to each other. They were soaked in blood and spilt fluids. They were breathing heavily, tired and aching. How much time had passed they did not know. But there was a watchfulness in Khale’s eyes.
“What ails you now?” Murtagh asked.
“That this was too easy,” Khale said. “These creatures were unfinished. They were too soft, mere fodder for our blades.”
Murtagh gently touched at the cuts and claw-marks bleeding across his face and neck. “I would not call them mere fodder, Khale.”
The Wanderer ignored his words. “They were meant to occupy us. They were a feint of some kind …”
He said no more.
A great change came over the Great Hall.
“What magic is this?” Murtagh cried.
“A powerful kind,” Khale answered. “The kind that needs time to prepare, and we gave it to them.”
Thick layers of frost and ice coated the walls and ceiling . The sound of burning from the torches became the crackle and hiss of Fimbulwinter consuming the space around them. The tables became slabs of white and grey. The corpses fallen here and there withered, turning blue and black from the sudden touch of exposure. Snow fell in silence from above, although no clouds could be seen in the heights of the Great Hall. Murtagh felt a spasm pass through his body as the ungodly cold deepened. A wind was beginning to blow, bringing its own teeth and claws to bear.
“Come on then,” Khale shouted into the ether, his breath creating a small fog. “You want me? I am here. Face me, creature, whoever you might be.”
“Come, Khale,” said Murtagh. “You know well enough who has done this.”
“Barneth?” the Wanderer breathed. “I see him not. If he is so afraid of me, then I will not acknowledge this to be his work.”
“Of course, you are a great warrior. Your prowess is well known. Your strength and knowledge are legend: a man who has trod the ways of the world for centuries uncounted. You are the only survivor of times that have been lost, are you not?”
“Do you mock me, old man?”
“I do not mock you,” Murtagh gasped. “I speak of your pride. It was wounded, and so you set about those creatures in the courtyard. Again, you felt the black-eyed ones were not worthy of you, and n-neither,”—it was so cold—“neither is this illusion of winter. I might die here and you will care not, but what of Cacea? You said yourself that you would preserve her life this night, yet you have all but forgotten about her, so eager are you for another foe and another fight.”
Khale glared at Murtagh. The yellow in his eyes became a baleful light that hurt Murtagh as much as the winter winds hurt his flesh and bones.
“Would that I had not been the man I am,” Murtagh said, “then I might rest in peace. Slay me, Khale. Leave my corpse here as an offering to whoever has raised this unnatural storm, and go find the girl. You said that you would. Let your word mean something this once.”
“Enough,” Khale spat.
Murtagh looked at him, waiting.
The Wanderer raised his two-handed sword. His eyes glowed fiercely with the promise of death, the urge to spill blood and cause pain.
To sleep a dreamless sleep—dark, long and silent—would be good. For that alone, Murtagh was almost tempted to call out again, to make sure the blade fell on him.
Let them all be done with then: Khale, Milanda, Alosse.
Leste ...
The pain of her memory stung at Murtagh’s brain. It brought him back to himself in time to see that, as water stills, Khale’s ravaged face had relaxed itself and the sword fallen back to his side.
Khale reached out a hand and hauled Murtagh to his feet. “Tonight is not the night you die, old man.”
Khale turned away from him, seeing how the air had become thicker with falling snow. Great drifts were forming against the doors. There was no foe here to strike out at, only weather growing fiercer with every moment.
This reckoning had been an error by whoever wove the spell of winter. The cold had numbed their bodies and made their bones ache through and through, but it had also cleared the last dregs of the feast’s wine from their minds.
Murtagh watched Khale’s lips move and his facial muscles twitch as if he were snatching at the spell fragments that spun in chaos through his thoughts.
The spell came together before Murtagh’s eyes.
The matrices of remembered hieroglyphs hummed in his ears as Khale recited them in a lost tongue. He felt the hold of winter come loose, like a parasite torn free. In the back of his mind, he thought he heard a bitter cry of loss and defeat as snow and ice became rivulets of water running down the walls of the Great Hall.
Khale and Murtagh looked at one another.
“That was well done,” the Wanderer said. “We both might have frozen but for your words.”
Murtagh sheathed his sword. “Words have a power, do they not?”
“They do indeed.”
Chapter Fourteen
Cacea awoke from what felt like a long agony; her bones ached, as did her muscles. She took a breath, tasted the air, and felt the steady beat of her heart.
I’m alive, not dead.
But she remembered the gathering darkness, the dissipating hum of voices, and the world turning violently around her like the revolution of a great wheel.
The Red Wheel.
Cacea sat down and stayed put until the spinning in her head came to an end. It was dark all around her, and she didn’t know where she was. She remembered the look on Barneth’s face: the cruelty etched around his lips. She sat in the dark for some time, trying to remember what had happened to her, but she could not; all she knew was that Barneth was the one who did it.
She could hear water dripping, and long, slow, languid moments between each drop, and there was the smell of rat droppings in the air. She was deep beneath the castle—she must be—in a secret place. But w
ho had brought her here, and why?
No answers waited for her in the surrounding dark.
It seemed to stretch on forever; her eyes not adjusting to it.
Cacea Selwen was lost in the night, and the night was a silent, endless universe. She reached out a hand and felt something soft, wet, and loose as pulp. Snatching her hand back, she wiped it on her tunic, already noticing a foul smell emanating from whatever she had disturbed.
She rose to her feet, took a breath and heard the sound echo profoundly. So, there were walls. This lightless space had boundaries. Still, she moved quietly through it as she remembered the horror stories spoken about Castle Barneth and its lords: their pleasures and their particular sadisms. There was the Red Wheel, of course. Then the Iron Spider, the Rose of Anguish, and the Wolf’s Paws.
A fearful idea came to her mind, making her stop. Was this some new torment she was being subjected to? Was this the purpose of everything that had gone before? Would she see Barneth rejoicing again at her suffering before the night was out?
It could well be.
She wished Aarthe were here.
O, my brother, she thought, so far from me in this cold, dark place.
She crept on through the blackness, arms extended, searching for the walls, perspiration running over her body in streams. A thought struck her, and she drew her arms back against her sides.
Could this be it? Could he intend for this to be my tomb?
Would she wander through it until starvation did its work? Would she grope along its walls, searching for a door that was not there until walking was no longer possible? Would she scream until her dry throat cracked and bled blood as a dry sand?
Could this be her fate?
A slow and bitter death that would end with her rotting alongside the corpses of rats and spiders.
No, she thought. No, I say.
Eventually, her fingers touched stone, and she checked that it went on in both directions. It was a wall, damp and very cold. She followed it to the left, stepping with care and distrust, wondering again how vast her prison was and what was its purpose, aside from her slow death. She had passed the doorways to the castle dungeons many times, and she knew that this place was not a part of them.
As she went on, Cacea noticed a curvature to the wall. Though she had no idea of the size, she did at least know that her prison was circular. She stopped and considered what to do. There was no point following the wall; with no corner to find, it would become an endless process unless she left a marker of some kind.
She felt for the hem of her dress, tearing it until she had enough cloth to wedge between the stones. She patted the fabric into place until she was satisfied she would notice it on her return past this part of the wall.
*
Cacea couldn’t judge how far she had come or how long it had been by time or light. She could tell only by the way hunger gnawed more often at her stomach and thirst parched her mouth and throat.
She had not felt the rags under her hands again, so could only assume she had not yet completed a circuit of the prison, or that the rags had been disturbed by vermin, or that someone had removed them—and if they had, how cavernous must her prison be for them to enter and do so, unheard?
Exhausted, she sat down on the moist ground. Lichen grew on the stones, and she had a mind to suckle at it, but it could be poisonous, and what good would that do her? Perhaps she should leave the wall and try to traverse the space itself, from one side to the other.
But what if I were to be turned around in the dark?
With the wall, she had direction—an anchor to reality. Out there, in the dark, she felt sure she could become completely lost and fall prey to imaginings, or to whatever else might lurk down here. The presence of the rats and their nests suggested something else might be here, something that produced waste for the little scavengers to feed on.
She had no wish to find out what, though, unless she had to. Cacea was no warrior, and her body was not hardened by labour. A fight with something that called this darkness home would not be one she could win.
But time passed and nothing changed.
Cacea got to her feet and set off into the dark, hoping she could keep a straight line if she counted and concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other and not changing direction.
After a hundred paces, she felt a change. The damp stones had become very slippery. She crouched, feeling moss and a slick layer of silt under her hands. So that she didn’t fall, she removed her red clogs and went on barefoot. Each step grew colder and wetter, until she felt the unmistakable sensation of water lapping at her toes.
She took a few steps into it, feeling the ground begin to drop steeply down until she knew she was standing on the shore of an underground body of water. It smelled of decayed salt, ripe fungus and something else. Disease. Its waters were clammy and oily on her skin. Where there was water, there was often life – but what kind of life could subsist on water this foul?
Cacea retreated out of the water and kept going until the stone under her feet became somewhat drier and she could put her red clogs back on without fearing a fall.
Could she follow the shore around, perhaps, and see if it would lead her to a way out?
Perhaps, she thought, but what then?
A hand came down hard on her shoulder.
“Not that way,” a soft voice whispered from the nothingness.
Cacea allowed the hand on her shoulder to turn her around. She faced a hooded figure dressed in shabby clothes and worn boots, a veil of dirty cloth drawn over the lower half of its face. The speaker looked frail and unsteady, and Cacea thought she might be able to knock the figure over with one blow.
“Why not that way? Who are you?”
The figure breathed thinly, and Cacea could feel a sudden strength course through the fingers gripping her shoulder.
The hand closed tight as the figure spoke. “I am one who would not see you suffer needlessly.”
“What makes you think that I will?”
“Because something sleeps in these waters, and if you disturb it, you will not live to tell the tale.”
“Why should I believe you?”
Cacea took a step back into the foul water, knowing in her bones that it was a mistake, but doing so anyway. Something about the speaker was not right.
He hissed lightly in his throat. “Do not go that way, Cacea Selwen. Each movement you make disturbs the water. Believe me, what dwells beneath is not a thing you wish to awaken from its slumber.”
A hand in a threadbare glove reached out to her. “Take my hand, allow me to lead you back to shore.”
She was ankle deep now, and she could feel a rough edge with her heels. Another step would mean descent: shallow or deep, she did not know.
“Come, Cacea,” the man said, his voice gentling but sounding only like the last breath of the near dead. “Let me take you from this place, and I will tell you everything. Who I am, and all else you may be wondering.”
The fingers of his glove brushed her skin. Some of the cloth had worn through and she felt the touch of his skin. It was dry as parchment. Dead.
“Get away from me!”
She took a step back, screamed, and fell, and water closed over her head. She heard the answering scream of something colossal in the deep, and felt the water around her surge as whatever had heard her began to move. Thrashing her arms and legs wildly, she burst to the surface, gasping for air, swallowing mouthfuls of sour fluid. Her vision swam as water ran from her eyes, and she looked to the shore and struck out for it, kicking and stroking the water without rhythm. The scream of whatever had awoken echoed around her, piercing the membranes of her waterlogged ears. Waves broke over her head as she groped through the dark waters for the shoreline she had fallen from. She was crying, swallowing more water, and shivering. It was too cold here. Dark as dark gets. She didn’t want to die down here.
A hand grabbed hers.
Thin, hard fingers fastened on her
wrist, hauling her from the water.
Him.
The man with dead skin.
She collapsed into his arms, and he lowered her to the rough ground with care. The light caught his eyes, and she saw they were a soft blue. He drew back his hood to reveal the rest of his face.
“You know my secret, such as it is. There is no purpose hiding it further,” he said.
His skin was wrinkled and gnarled like the bark of an ancient tree. In places, it had peeled away, revealing patches of tan skull beneath. Thin strips of fine black hair clung to his mottled scalp. Cacea could see rotting cords of muscle showing through the taut parchment of his throat. He was not breathing. This man was a corpse. Yet his eyes were blue, moist, and undeniably human. Her mouth worked to utter questions she had, as the shrieks from the black lake continued to howl and resonate around them, but he gestured for her to be silent.
“There is no time,” he said. “Unless you have some arts you can wield, stay low and behind me.”
The lake’s surface erupted, revealing the source of the unearthly shrieks: a mound of porcine flesh, the clefts in its warty hide studded with barnacles and open sores. But its head was the true horror. A conjoined bulbous mass of overripe tissue with deep-set eyes that gleamed hellishly and a tusked mouth that opened to utter its swinish bellows. The waters of the lake chopped and crashed as the swine-daemon lumbered towards the shore, swinging arms which were pale and writhing with nightmare flesh.
The man who had saved her from drowning was all that stood between her and the lumbering beast.
Cacea readied herself to run when he fell before it; such a frail creature could not withstand the tidal force of this lurker from the deep. Still, the man remained where he stood, lashed by the waters displaced by the swine-daemon’s shuddering bulk.
He drew a sword unlike any Cacea had seen before. Its blade was elegant, curved and decorated with intricate sigils and etchings that she could not make out in the dim light. The shimmering hilt was long enough for it to be held with two hands, but it was not so large and cumbersome as the great-swords she had seen wielded before.