A Shattered Empire

by Mitchell Hogan

  Felice looked askance at him, but he kept his expression neutral. They still had no idea if their plan would work.

  Into the darkness they walked, and this time Aidan, cel Rau, Caitlyn, Caldan, and Quiss were at the fore, trailed by Felice and Selbourne, then Quiss’s sorcerers surrounded by mercenaries. Mold and his Protectors came next, scarcely speaking as they took in the wonders of this ancient place. The emperor guarded their rear with his warlocks and the two Touched—strangely silent, though he should know more about this place than anyone. A few times, he had stopped, eyes unfocused, as though struggling to remember something . . .

  Minutes passed as they followed the disturbed dust trail. Numerous openings appeared at either side, but they hurried past, as if exploring the passages would bring some unknown calamity down upon them. The darkness and the unknown was oppressive, an insubstantial presence that nevertheless weighed each of them down, almost like it had an otherworldly substance, which could only be sensed, never touched or seen.

  Ahead of them, a set of burnished gates resolved out of the shadows, and they halted. At least three times their height and just as wide, the gates were polished to a mirror brightness, unblemished by age. Across their surface was an intricate mosaic of connecting symbols, etched into the metal with unerring accuracy. Tiny runes at the top of the gates merged to create other, larger patterns underneath, which themselves merged into even greater symbols below them. The complexity was bewildering, almost mesmerizing. Caldan blinked and had to look away to steady himself as the symbols began to swim before his eyes.

  “It’s not sorcerous,” Quiss said, breaking the stunned silence.

  Caldan opened his well and checked. Quiss was right, as far as he could tell. But so many of the runes and symbols were familiar to him, from what he knew of crafting. Like, and yet unlike—as if the shapes he’d been taught were crude approximations, a child’s drawing compared to a master’s painting. The gates themselves might not be sorcerous in nature, but they were an example of the complexity sorcery had ascended to thousands of years ago.

  Quiss stretched out a hand and placed it on the metal. Several of the mercenaries gasped as he touched it, as if they feared some sort of reaction from the inanimate object.

  Caldan narrowed his eyes. He brought his sorcerous globe close to the ground and examined the bottom of the gates. Illustrations of manlike figures lined the base. On both ends, they were hunched and crude. Closer in they changed into a second type, smaller, more detailed, each one with a sunlike symbol on its chest, a circle with radiating lines. Then, in the center, stood the tallest of the figures. Only some of these had the sun symbol, but—

  They each had four arms.

  The intricate geometries and runes on the gates dissolved into curves and spirals, all still descending until they coalesced around the figures.

  Felice crouched at Caldan’s side and placed a hand on his shoulder. She pointed to the figures on the farthest edges.

  “Jukari,” she said.

  Her finger moved to the smaller shapes.

  “Vormag.”

  Then she touched one of the four-armed figures, her finger leaving a shiny smear.

  “Talon,” she whispered.

  And with that, he understood what the pictures meant.

  The patterns etched into the alloy of the gates weren’t just decoration. There were symbols and script, and pictograms. A few words Caldan could translate, and what he could, combined with the other details, filled him with dread. They were part memorial to the ancestors’ triumph, imbuing the metal with their knowledge as a way of making their discovery immortal, and part instruction manual, information and details on how they’d achieved their goal. They’d conceived and spawned creatures through sorcery, servants to do their bidding.

  They’d created life, of a sort, and then enslaved it.

  And after they’d perished in a devastating war of their own creation, their monstrosities were free, left to roam, to do as they willed. The doors were part history, part schematic, and part warning.

  Caldan shook himself, found his gaze continually drawn to the details of the gates.

  He’d known, as they all had, that the jukari, vormag, and talons were constructed creatures. But now they were part of this world like any other. For thousands of years, they’d existed without the masters who’d created them. They could be pushed and prodded, but never again truly controlled.

  For the first time, he believed he truly understood the entirety of Kelhak’s horrific plan, his purpose in choosing Anasoma.

  Beneath the city, in the ancient passages and rooms long unused, abandoned, forgotten, were the means to enslave the world. With its overpowering sorcery, its innumerable wells, its lack of morality, what monsters would the lich create?

  “It’s a schematic,” Felice said, and the fact that she had figured it out didn’t surprise him. “Can you decipher it? Would you be able to follow the instructions?”

  Caldan shook his head, a heavy sense of doom settling over him, preventing him from speaking. The future was laid out before him, myriad possibilities narrowed down to hardly more than a few. If they failed, then months, perhaps years after they were killed, hordes of jukari and vormag would be unleashed on the empire. Not directionless tribes like those that existed in the Desolate Lands, but well-equipped masses under the control of one leader: Kelhak.

  This time, the Shattering wouldn’t be one of sorcery destroying civilization, but one of murder and enslavement. The lich had burned Gazija and Quiss’s world and learned from its mistakes. A dead world was useless.

  It was far better to have one you controlled.

  CHAPTER 55

  After passing through the gates they walked along abandoned passageways, through the bowels of the earth, some winding, and some straight. Dust and chalky bones littered the ground, crumbling with age underfoot. Sometimes there were rust stains impregnating the stone, metal bruising the ground as it eroded to nothing.

  A place where sorcerers worked and lived, so long ago. A place where sorcery was combined with lost arts of flesh crafting, gnawing at the boundary of what separated the inanimate from the animate, death from life.

  They trudged through halls and corridors, a maze of passageways and galleries. Dust stirred with every step, swirling to their knees and caking their boots and legs. The air was lifeless, entombed here for so long it had taken on the stone taste of the walls and floor.

  Selbourne constantly spoke with his mercenaries, words pitched low, barely heard over the slap of footfalls. From the look of some of them—wide eyed and jittery—Caldan thought he was reassuring them, calming their nerves. The weight of stone pressed down on them, along with the weight of ages. It wasn’t an easy thing to dismiss.

  But then again, he didn’t have the time to think about it; his mind churned with other matters: Kelhak. Sorcery. What it meant to be a lich. The nature of wells, and trinkets.

  Muffled words and curses filled the corridor. Caldan looked up, aware he’d not been concentrating on what was ahead.

  He lifted his sorcerous globe in his gauntleted hand, but its light couldn’t penetrate the darkness around them for very far.

  “Bloody ancestors,” cursed Felice.

  “We must go this way,” the talon said from right behind Caldan, making him flinch.

  There was a long pause. The conversation of mercenaries and warlocks and Protectors murmured in the background.

  Untarnished metallic doors had appeared in front of them, out of the darkness. Torches and sorcerous lights banished shadows, throwing the doors’ surface into sharp relief. An intricate pattern was etched into their bronzelike metal, one seemingly without rhyme or reason.

  The doors stood open on massive hinges, solid metal as thick as Caldan’s extended hand.

  “It’s a maze,” Aidan said, wonder on his face.

  Caldan stepped back and peered at the etched pattern. He was right. At the center of each door was a blank circle, joined to t
he pattern by a single line. He followed the contour until he lost it among many others.

  The emperor called them all, wanting to take the lead. Leather creaked and armor clanked as the mercenaries separated to make a path for him to the front.

  Felice frowned, pulling again on her earring. “Can’t Kelhak just . . . travel?” she asked Caldan, waving a hand. “And disappear? He’s done that before. So have we.”

  The talon’s hood moved from side to side slightly, as if the creature shook its head.

  Before it said anything, the emperor’s voice came from ahead of them. “Not without using a great deal of stored power. The lich won’t want to do that. It cannot conceive of anything that will harm it, so it will not flee from us. When we fight it, by the time it realizes it’s in trouble, it will be too late. Its sorcerous reserves will be depleted.”

  Caldan found himself nodding. It made sense. Quiss’s craftings, based on the Protectors’ trinket sword, would block as many of Kelhak’s wells as they could, while others, based on both Felice’s trinket dagger and Quiss’s knowledge, would drain as many more from the lich as possible. With so many craftings aimed at blocking and absorbing its wells, the lich would die from a hundred tiny cuts.

  But few things in life, as Caldan knew well, went according to design. As in Dominion, opponents usually had extra moves they could make.

  AIDAN AND CAITLYN followed the emperor through the doors. The injured warlocks and mercenaries trailed behind the rest of the group as they marched down the tunnel and entered a vast chamber. There was a stillness to the room, more profound than anything else Aidan had felt since they left sunlight behind. Behind him, the company filed in through the open doorway. Holes in the stone revealed there had once been a door, but no more. Age had done to it what it did to everything: devoured and destroyed.

  Sorcerous globes threw shadows, revealing ancient stones swirling with sections far darker than those they had been walking so far. Blackened, as if by great heat. But the patches were too inconsistent for that. Aidan scraped at the uneven rock with his boot. The very stones were stained with something.

  “What do you think caused it?” Caitlyn said.

  “Blood,” the talon said from behind Aidan.

  He turned. “What did you say?”

  The towering, scruffy-looking thing turned this way and that, as if sniffing the air.

  “The blood of generations,” it said. “This is a womb. A slave pit. And a cemetery.”

  Aidan exchanged glances with Caitlyn, and they moved away, not wanting to be near the creature. Once this is over, he vowed, I’ll see it dead. Such evil cannot be allowed to exist.

  In the center of the immense chamber lay great slabs, dozens of them, rising from the floor as if carved from rock where they stood. He could not fathom their purpose. The walls to both sides and in front of him were tiered. Steps rose from one level to the next. Aidan left Caitlyn behind and ascended to the first tier.

  Crumbling metal covered the ground, and he confirmed the next tier was the same. Iron would have corroded many years ago, but this brighter metal still endured, to a point. He bent and picked up a portion, squeezed until it disintegrated in his grasp. Flakes and splinters fell from his hand.

  “It’s an alloy of some kind,” said Caldan.

  The young man had followed him up, and now stood on the first tier.

  “The ancients knew more of metallurgy than we do. They created marvels—”

  “And horrors,” Aidan said. “Don’t forget that.”

  Caldan nodded. “What do you think this place was?”

  Aidan’s boot scuffed metal fragments. “The talon said it was . . . a womb. Among other things.”

  “A womb? What did it mean?” Suddenly, Caldan rushed back down the steps and hurtled toward one of the slabs.

  Aidan followed, but at a slower pace. When he reached him, Caldan was kneeling, hands running over the side of the slab.

  “There are patterns here,” Caldan was saying to himself. His hands became gray as he brushed away dust. He grunted, then moved his attention to the top surface of the slab. More dust clouded the air as he wiped the stone. Taking a breath, he blew close to it, revealing intricate patterns and runic symbols.

  More evil. “Sorcery,” Aidan said.

  “Yes,” replied Caldan. “The gates we came across before—the ones with pictures of jukari, vormag, and talons—this is where the creatures were made.”

  “How long has Kelhak had access to this place? When did he find his way down here?”

  Caldan sighed. “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it’s seen recent use, but if there are more, and the lich has started making more jukari—”

  A cry from across the room interrupted them. Horrified murmurs broke the silence following it.

  Aidan ran to a far corner, where a group of mercenaries and warlocks had gathered. He was aware of Caitlyn and cel Rau following his every move, but he didn’t care. Lying on one of the slabs was a desiccated corpse. Though its gray, mottled skin was shrunken and wrinkled, its arms and legs were still bigger than a human’s. A jukari.

  More of the mummified corpses lay on slabs in the shadows. The same bright crumbling metal trailed from bands around their wrists and ankles.

  “These things are almost worse like this than when they’re alive,” Aidan said. “It’s good this place has remained buried for thousands of years.”

  “Well, it’s been rediscovered now,” said Felice. “What need does he have for people, if he controls his own army of monstrosities?”

  “He learned his lesson before,” Caldan said, “with Gazija’s world. A completely shattered world is useless to the lich. It wants wells. It needs wells to make sure it’s more powerful than everyone else, in order to survive.”

  “We already know this,” Aidan said. “But only vormag have wells, not jukari.”

  Caldan met his eyes, a grim look on his face. “But their wells are inserted in them . . . having basically been ripped out of a sorcerer to create them. So he’s not after more vormag, but jukari. Jukari who will obey him without question, who he can then, in turn, use to enslave us all. Or, at least, the sorcerers. That’s what he cares about: a steady supply of sorcerers and their wells. The jukari will herd them like cattle. Then their wells will be stripped from them for whatever purpose the lich desires. Either to add to its own, or create vormag, or trinkets. Or even sustenance. An endless, compliant source.”

  “But they’ll be sorcerers. Why wouldn’t they rise up against the jukari?”

  “Do you think the lich will let any sorcerer reach adulthood?”

  “A well is there from birth,” Felice breathed. “Possibly before. Bloody ancestors . . .”

  Fear and revulsion flushed through Aidan. As the pregnant women he’d rescued had been used for their babies, so would humans be harvested for their wells.

  And now that the idea had been planted, there was no reason that only Kelhak would be interested in such a plan . . .

  He kept his head lowered but glanced toward the emperor, who was urging everyone to hurry and gather together before they resumed their march.

  Such abhorrent knowledge couldn’t be allowed to be used again.

  CHAPTER 56

  Another new chamber. Far in the distance shone a light. It flickered briefly, as if something had passed in front of it, then continued shining. Their sorcerous globes banished darkness, revealing tarnished vats in rows, not unlike the distillery where they entered this catacomb. Massive circular vessels made from copper-tinged metal stained with green patina. Except copper would have corroded long ago.

  Another alloy, thought Caldan, calling his wolf to his side. Gazija had relinquished control as soon as the fight with the Silent Companions was over. He didn’t want there to be any chance Kelhak could sense his sorcery.

  Caldan turned to regard the warlocks and mercenaries as they entered behind him.

  Felice held a hand to her nose. “It’s rank in here.”r />
  The pinprick of light went out.

  “Hush!” Felice hissed at them all, and after a few moments, shuffling feet, metal clanks, and creaking leather trailed into silence. The emperor moved quietly to the side, Alasdair and Florian flanking him.

  “Something’s up ahead,” Caldan whispered to Felice.

  She nodded. “I saw it. And that’s why I said ‘hush’ . . .”

  Selbourne left his men and approached. He smelled of his metal cuirass and sweat. And slightly behind him, the talon also moved closer, its mustiness seeming to invade their space.

  The talon stirred, and Caldan felt a flicker of sorcery, but whether from the made creature or a trinket, he couldn’t tell. Rags moved as it raised its arms, two clawed hands emerging from the tatters. In each it held a dagger identical to the ones Caldan had seen Felice and Izak carrying when they’d appeared outside Riversedge.

  Selbourne whispered orders to the mercenaries, as did the emperor to the warlocks and Touched. They fanned out, weapons drawn and ready, sorcerers clutching craftings and trinkets. Wells were opened and wards spread over as many as possible. To Caldan’s sorcerous senses, trinkets shone like stars on fingers and from around necks. Felice stayed behind Caldan, where Aidan and Caitlyn and cel Rau and Felice gathered in nervous readiness.

  From the darkness ahead, dozens of tiny sparkles glittered, floating and whirling like fireflies. Up and up they circled, until they reached the ceiling—where each erupted into a powerful sorcerous globe, casting harsh, cold light over the chamber.

  Ages-old detritus and workings were revealed: smooth metal containers twice the height of a man and as shiny as if they were forged yesterday. Pipes protruded from them, some ending at guttering in the floor, while others snaked upward to smaller vessels. And bones were littered around them—knee-high piles of thicker, longer black bones mixed with human-sized chalky white. Metal glinted among them—weapons and armor and buckles—all made from the same corrosion-resistant alloy. Glass urns and jugs lay shattered and whole, whatever alchemical liquids they held drained and evaporated.