by James Erich
Nothing much did happen for a very long time. The Taaweh had assured them there would be a sentry coming along the path at the edge of the chasm during the night. There was always a sentry. On most nights, there would be only one. After a thousand years, the Stronni no longer saw the need to guard the area heavily, and they relied upon the Eye of Druma to raise the alarm.
On the nights when the Eye was closed, there were two sentries spaced equidistant from one another. If Sael and Koreh waited until one of the sentries had passed, they would have the greatest amount of time possible for what they needed to do before the next sentry reached this spot.
As the hour of Manduccot drew near, Sael heard the sound of footsteps slowly plodding along the dirt-and-stone path. Koreh must have heard it too, because he quickly pressed a finger to Sael’s lips as if to silence him. That was irritating, since Sael hadn’t made a sound, but he was too frightened—and fascinated—by the man coming along the path to give Koreh’s overprotectiveness more than a passing thought.
The man striding toward them was enormous. Not corpulent, but muscular, and at least a head taller than any man Sael had ever seen. And he was completely naked. With his enhanced vision, Sael could see every muscle, every tendon, perfectly defined and rippling as the man walked. His every movement was smooth and graceful, filling Sael with awe. Here was Man, elevated to perfection, elevated to godhood—face flawlessly handsome, arms and legs and torso powerful and intensely erotic, genitals massive and perfectly formed. Sael hadn’t known it was possible for a man to be so beautiful that the mere sight of him would bring tears to the eyes. Yet here he was.
But of course this was no mortal man, Sael knew. He was looking at a god.
The Stronni’s head was cleanshaven, as was his jaw, and there were shimmering gold tattoos over much of his naked body from head to toe. The tattoos resembled the ones worn by caedan and vönan, but were much more elaborate and extensive.
Sael and Koreh remained absolutely motionless, not even daring to breathe as the Stronni walked by. It wasn’t until long after he’d gone out of sight that Koreh moved.
He took Sael by the hand and led him to the edge of the chasm, where they could look down into a darkness so deep not even their Taaweh vision could see the bottom. The wind blowing up from those depths was surprisingly cold as it brushed their faces and whipped their hair around their heads.
Sael shivered, not only from the chill of the wind, but also the thought of leaping out over that chasm and the terrifying possibility he might drop Koreh when he did so. That thought terrified him even more than the idea of them both falling short of the mark and plummeting into the chasm together. But he forced all that out of his mind, gripping his wooden staff firmly. It wouldn’t help them to focus on what could go wrong.
He looked up at the Great Hall sitting unsupported above the chasm, motionless, as if that were a perfectly natural place for a large building made out of stone. From here, Sael could make out little detail. It was simply a black silhouette in the gray sky. It seemed farther away than he’d expected, but it was hard to estimate the distance with nothing near it to give him a sense of the building’s true scale.
Koreh had brought a sort of harness with him, cobbled together from tightly knotted leather straps. He stepped into it with both legs so he was more or less sitting in it. And then he looped the remaining straps around Sael’s shoulders and fastened them together behind his back. This forced their hips together in a way that might have been erotic if Sael had been able to think of anything but whether or not he’d stored up enough energy to carry them up to the hall. And would he be able to get them back again?
It didn’t matter. He had to get them up there first. Then they could worry about the rest.
Once Koreh was secured to him, there was a brief moment when their eyes met. Sael could feel Koreh’s breath brush against his lips, as he looked deep into Koreh’s clear blue eyes and saw his own fear and determination reflected back at him. Then without a word, Koreh leaned close and they kissed, knowing it might be the last time.
When he pulled away, Koreh gave Sael a quick, sharp nod. Sael raised his staff over their heads and gripped it with both hands. Koreh wrapped his arms around Sael’s chest and held on tightly.
It was impossible to cast a spell as a vönan without chanting, but Sael kept his voice to a whisper as he closed his eyes and recited the incantation. Then suddenly they were jerked upward and out over the precipice.
It took all his concentration not to scream, or at the very least interrupt his chanting while they hurled out into space. Sael had never been so terrified. He’d never been particularly afraid of heights, but this was vastly different. He couldn’t even see the ground. They were arcing through the air above what seemed to be a black, bottomless pit, the edge of the chasm fading rapidly into the distance behind them.
He could tell Koreh was terrified too as he clung to Sael, his arms nearly crushing Sael’s chest in their tight grip. But Sael kept his eyes fixed on the hall floating above the void, not daring to look away for fear of losing his bearings in the darkness. If he missed the hall, he might not have enough energy left to reach the other side of the chasm. Certainly it was unlikely he’d be able to spend much time searching for the hall if he went too far astray.
As they approached the hall, Sael suddenly realized he was flying too fast. He’d been aiming for the doorway—a gaping black hole on the front of the building, devoid of doors since the Iinu Shavi had wrenched them off their hinges a thousand years ago. But he couldn’t slow them down in time to adjust his aim. They were about to slam into the stone face of the building, and he could visualize them bouncing off and losing control, tumbling down into the pit. So at the last moment, he lifted them upward.
They shot up and over the edge of the shale roof, but he’d miscalculated. Koreh’s feet were hanging lower than his were, and they struck the eave of the roof and “tripped” them. Koreh swore as he struck and slammed backward onto the slate, Sael sprawling forward on top of him. Instinctively Sael put his hands out to break his fall, scraping his palms on the stone. His staff bounced out of his hands and Sael watched in horror as it skittered down the sloping tiles and disappeared over the edge.
“You were supposed to aim for the door!” Koreh scolded, his angry voice muffled by the fact that his face was pressed into the tunic at Sael’s chest. There was little need for silence up here, since the Stronni didn’t post guards in the hall itself, or so the Taaweh had told them.
“I was! I told you I wasn’t very good at this.”
Koreh merely grunted in response. Sael knew a fully trained vönan could fly without a staff, but he’d always depended upon one and wasn’t sure if he could manage to get them down from here without it. But at the moment they had more pressing concerns, such as getting off the roof and inside the hall without the two of them plummeting to their deaths.
They were lying on the edge of a sloping rooftop as large as the courtyard in front of Harleh Keep, Koreh’s legs dangling off the roof from the knees down and Sael lying only slightly farther forward with Koreh’s face pressed into his chest. To Sael’s right, about fifty feet away, was the front right corner of the building. The slope wasn’t too treacherous, as long as they moved cautiously.
“We need to get to that statue,” Koreh told him. The corner of the roof had a statue of a winged naked man mounted on it, with wings outstretched as if he were about to take flight. It would provide a more secure handhold, certainly. Sael wasn’t sure if it would also provide a way down, but he didn’t have a better idea.
“All right.” Working together, they cautiously edged sideways along the eave of the roof until they reached the statue. Clinging to it, they were able to find a position where both young men could sit up and look at their surroundings despite the leather straps that still held them together.
The view over the side was terrifying, showing nothing but a drop straight down into blackness. But the view towards the fron
t was a bit more hopeful, if still frightening. There were steps leading up to the shattered door of the Great Hall, and these might provide a platform that Sael and Koreh could drop down onto, though the drop was formidable—at least thirty feet—and the steps hung precariously off the front of the building after having been ripped from the ground. Whether they would hold much weight remained to be seen.
Koreh ordered Sael, “Hold onto this thing,” indicating the stone statue at the roof’s corner, while he began to extricate them from the leather harness. Sael did as he was instructed, watching Koreh anxiously and picturing the strong winds that buffeted them knocking the young man off his perch.
Koreh left one of the loops intact, but undid some of the other knots so he could stretch the rest of the harness out into a long strip. Then he leaned over Sael’s lap and hooked the loop over the statue’s head and wings. It slipped down and settled in what looked like a secure position around the statue’s base. Koreh let the long leather strap fall. It swung freely in the wind, its end perhaps fifteen feet from the highest step. It would be possible to dangle from it and then drop down onto the steps without breaking their legs. The bigger danger was the fact that what remained of the steps wasn’t very broad, and they could easily land and tumble off it or miss it altogether. Or they might slip and fall straight down, where there was nothing at all to catch them.
They exchanged a grim look before Koreh climbed over Sael and began to lower himself down the strap. Sael watched the statue for any sign it might give way under the weight—not that Sael could do anything if that happened —but it appeared to be secure.
When Koreh was near the end of the strap, swinging gently back and forth. He dangled there for a while, sensing the angle and timing of his pendulum swing. Then in moment that nearly stopped Sael’s heart, Koreh let go.
He’d judged well and landed on one of the upper steps near the doorway. There was little room to roll when he landed, so he simply sprawled forward onto the stone. But he didn’t appear to be hurt. He pushed himself into a seated position and looked up at Sael, waiting.
Taking a breath to steady himself, Sael gripped the leather strap tightly in both hands and allowed himself to slip forward off the eave. He experienced a brief moment of panic as he fell about a foot before the strap went taut. He gave himself a moment to calm his heartbeat before beginning a cautious descent.
At the end of the strap with just a foot or so of it left, he held on tightly, doing as Koreh had done—sensing the way he was swinging. Whenever the arc of the swing took him out over dark nothingness, Sael could hear his breathing growing panicked, completely beyond his control. Even when he swung close to the doorway, the thought of letting go of the strap terrified him. But he could feel the muscles in his hands cramping up and knew he would eventually slip off, one way or the other, if he didn’t make the decision.
Finally, as he swung out over the chasm again, he resolved to let go on the next approach to the steps. He focused on his intended landing spot, and just before he sensed he would reach the end of the arc and start to swing back again, he let go.
He landed hard on the stone steps with one foot on a lower step than the other. He stumbled backward, realizing too late that he’d miscalculated. He tipped back on his heels, his hands flailing in the air for something to grab onto. But there was nothing.
As a desperate cry rose up in Sael’s throat, Koreh’s strong hands suddenly grabbed the front of his tunic and yanked him down and forward. Sael felt the change in direction painfully in his neck, and then he fell forward on top of the young man who had saved his life so many times in the past… and had just managed to save it again.
They lay together for a long moment, panting with the terror of what might have happened. Koreh’s arms wrapped around Sael’s body and held him tightly.
KOREHheld Sael for a long time, until his own body stopped shaking. He kept seeing Sael tumbling off those fragmented steps over and over again in his mind. Damn it! Why hadn’t he been able to think of a way of keeping Sael out of this?
Eventually he had to let go of Sael and get back to their main purpose— rescuing the Iinu Shavi. But he still kept a hold of Sael’s hand until they had safely entered the hall through the shattered door. They were both limping a bit, their legs and feet sore from the landing on hard marble. Koreh had skinned one knee, though he did his best to ignore it.
The inside of the hall was almost completely dark. There were windows built into the side walls, massive ones at least two stories tall, open to the air but with heavy iron lattices set into them. On this dark night, little light spilled into the room through them. Still, Koreh and Sael had no difficulty seeing.
Koreh had seen this chamber in his dreams, but dark and empty like this, it seemed far larger. Everywhere, as they moved down the length of massive columns, he could see charring and scorch marks from that day a thousand years ago when the Stronni had attempted to incinerate the Iinu Shavi, but there was no trace of the piled bodies he’d seen. It was possible, of course, they had rotted and decayed to dust by now. But Koreh suspected they’d simply been removed. Had they eventually awoken? Or were they still in some kind of enchanted sleep? He’d thought them dead when he first had the vision, but he knew now the Taaweh disliked killing if another way could be found.
Koreh realized he’d never let go of Sael’s hand as they walked. He turned to look at the young man and saw Sael’s eyes were wide with wonder and awe. Not surprising—he was seeing what had once been the Great Hall of his gods. Even if the chamber hadn’t been enormous and impressive in and of itself, that knowledge would certainly fill someone with awe. It meant little to Koreh. He’d turned his back on these “gods” long ago. They were to be feared, as anything powerful and dangerous should be feared. But nothing more than that.
The pillars that had guided them this far ceased when they approached the end of the building that held the throne. Here the ceiling was molded into a dome, across which a magical night sky, bright with stars, still slowly moved.
“The Great Order,” Sael whispered as he gazed up at it. But Koreh’s attention was drawn instead to what lay underneath the dome, on the floor before the massive gold throne. It was a sarcophagus made of white marble but with a lid made of the clearest glass he’d ever seen, from inside of which a golden light emanated. As he approached the sarcophagus, drawing Sael along with him, he saw the light wasn’t coming from a flame or any other natural source of light. It was caused by the body laid out in the sarcophagus—the woman herself was shimmering with light.
It was the Iinu Shavi.
She was the most beautiful woman Koreh had ever seen. Her face appeared to be older than Koreh and Sael, though still youthful, and though she wore no makeup, her lips were full and red and her cheeks flushed. Her golden hair billowed around her head like a pillow and covered the white silk cushion she lay upon down past her waist. Unlike the Iinu Shaa, everything about his queen spoke of life and youthful beauty. Even in this deathlike pose, her breath stilled, it was clear she was still alive.
Koreh heard Sael gasp at the sight of the goddess and then say in a whisper, “I dreamed about her!”
“When?” This was the first Koreh had heard of this and he felt inexplicably jealous, as if the dreams should have been for him alone. He quickly pushed that notion out of his head.
“A couple of days ago,” Sael said. “She’s the Iinu Shavi.”
“I guessed as much,” Sael said, rolling his eyes at him. “But what do we do now? How do we get her out of there?”
Koreh knew that after the Stronni had succeeded in rendering the Iinu Shavi unconscious, they had tried everything they could think of to kill her permanently. They had tried to burn her and cut her, but nothing had succeeded. It had even proven impossible to cut a single strand of her flaxen hair.
So he replied flatly, “We break the glass.”
It seemed as good an idea as any. Koreh swung his arm over his head and brought his fist down on
the center of the glass lid with all his might. To his surprise, his hand merely bounced painfully off the glass, leaving it unharmed.
“Or perhaps not,” Sael said, failing to suppress a smile as Koreh rubbed his sore wrist with his left hand.
But Koreh was undeterred. “Is there a loose stone or something we could break it with?”
They searched but came up empty. The chamber was barren of anything that wasn’t firmly attached to the floor or walls.
“Was that part of the Taaweh plan?” Sael asked him. “‘Break the glass’?”
Koreh frowned at him. “No. But it would have made things a lot easier if we could have just lifted her out of this thing and thrown her out the door.” Seeing Sael’s shocked expression, he added, “It wouldn’t have hurt her. She can’t be harmed or killed. The moment she came into contact with the ground, she’d be free of her… trance, or whatever it is.”
“Well, obviously we can’t do that.”
Koreh was unable to look Sael in the eye when he said, “I know. I’d been hoping…. But there’s only one way. I have to transfer my life energy into her.”
He’d expected Sael to protest. The danger must be obvious. But when he looked up into Sael’s face, Sael had an expression of grim determination. “I know,” he said. “They told me that it would be the only way.”
There was long silence while they looked into each other’s eyes, their fear and need for each other laid bare. Then Sael said in a small, unsteady voice, “They also told me that it might kill you.”
“Maybe not,” Koreh said, though he didn’t believe it any more than Sael did. Sael looked back into his eyes, but neither of them could think of anything more to say. Koreh reached out a hand and silently placed it on the glass of the sarcophagus. Then he closed his eyes.