“It must have taken a long time to build this,” said Talbert, marvelling at the craftsmanship of the grotto.
“A lot of it would have been carved by hand,” added Haggart.
“Amazing.”
They reached the bottom to where it became clear where the machines would have been hitched up on ropes and pulled up the ramp to the surface. Not even the ropes or pulleys had been left behind - only the grooves the wheels had made in the ice. Nothing more.
“There's clearly been work done here, but everything's gone,” said the Captain, running his gloved hands over ice tables and archways.
“Cages,” said Talbert, pointing down a cavern that shot off to the right. “Down here! There looks like cages built into the walls.”
The Captain went and investigated but Haggart remained in the central chamber looking for any clue, any hint at what lay ahead, what Jurgenbraw's plans might have been. He came up with nothing.
“Haggart, these cages...” said the Captain but Haggart shook his head.
“I know. I knew before we came down,” he said. “Where do you think the people ended up?”
They looked at each other until the Captain cursed. “Of course,” he said very quietly. “I should have guessed. They needed feeding...”
They stood there in silence as if waiting for the ice to form around them, to make them part of the thousands of years of time that were locked inside every single crystal of glassy winter. They said nothing but each of them knew what a terrible crime must have been committed deep below the watching skies. Eventually it was Talbert who broke the deathly silence.
“We should go,” he said.
“For once I think he's right,” said the Captain. “There's nothing here for us. It tells us nothing we didn't already know.”
“Then why did Dagna send us here?” asked Haggart. “Why send us all this way to find an empty cave?”
“Who knows?” said the Captain.
“He does - and he's not for telling,” added Talbert. He made his way to the steps. Haggart took one last look around him and shook his head before taking the steps himself.
When they reached the surface their horses were the first thing they saw. The second was the blood. It ran across the snow like a crimson river, its source - the lifeless bodies of their faithful mounts - now maimed and butchered and scattered all around the entrance of the cave, their panniers untouched and lying half-buried in the snow. The Captain pushed past Talbert and drew his axe immediately.
“You should not have come,” boomed a voice from across the carnage of flesh and blood. There, stood with the dying light settling on their plated armour, were five towering monsters of men whose weapons still glistened with fresh blood and whose faces were hidden behind the steel they wore. Grotesque paints and ornaments adorned their war gear and two of them bore the same markings that had been seen on the ship that had pursued them across the sea.
“Who are you and who do you work for?” shouted Haggart, shrugging out of his furs. Talbert was doing the same but there was a tremor in his hands as he worked his bow that had nothing to do with the cold.
“We are those who were and will be again,” said the leader, the tallest of the five and whose armour glistened like wet midnight. “You have seen us before, Summoner.”
“This cannot be!” he roared. “This is not possible!”
“Words fail where my blade will succeed. By the time we have finished with you, you will believe.”
They began to advance. The Captain braced himself. Haggart, the stupefying effect of the truth now wearing off, gripped the shield of Alfred Dern tightly and drew his sword. Talbert took a pace back and aimed his bow.
“You get one shot, then you run,” said the Captain. “You won't get a chance to reload. Do you understand?”
“No!” said Talbert yet he was fumbling with his quiver of bolts, his fingers becoming useless in his terror.
“There is no shame in fear, boy. Run. Run and get word to John and Lorrie.”
“No, I can't leave you...”
“RUN YOU USELESS IDIOT!” he bellowed.
Talbert loosed a bolt but it was poorly aimed and glanced across the armour instead of penetrating it. He dropped the bow and began running across the snow in horror and without looking back. The effect on Haggart was devastating. His heart fell and it took all he had to summon up courage enough not to join him. Yet it had to be done. Talbert had no chance against five in plate armour. No training. No experience. No hope.
“You stay with me, Haggart!” yelled the Captain, his chest drawing in deep calming breaths. “We've slain worse than these goat shaggers.”
Renewed in strength and drawn to thoughts of home and his son, Haggart kicked the snow beneath his heels and took his stance alongside his friend. Talbert had disappeared over the lip of the hill, hopefully to safety and with a message for their friends.
There was no ceremony, no formality that might have been seen on any battlefield of their day. The five attacked at once without hesitation as soon as they'd crossed the bloody crust of snow and the first barrage struck Haggart's shield like hail. Three concentrated their attacks upon him, the other two, including the leader, charged the Captain who fought them back with deadly swings of his weapon that gathered momentum with each rotation.
Within minutes he was panting heavily and sweating and it took all his concentration to keep moving, to keep them at a range where they couldn't surround him. His sword was little more than useless against the hammered steel plating of their slow clanking armour and he longed for a hammer or a mace, anything solid to use to stove it in around them. The Captain was a little better advantaged as the axe was heavy enough to do both cutting and blunt trauma yet even he was struggling as they dodged his slow swings.
For a moment they danced in the snow, a grim slow dance of death as Haggart moved to avoid the three implacable warriors. They hemmed him in at every opportunity, a triangle of horror and it seemed that he could feel them, underneath their horrific helms, mocking him, laughing as he stumbled in the snow and caught the edge of a long sword across his forearm.
There was a loud roar from the Captain, then a crash as one of the knights fell and his axe made an enormous dent in his helmet, crushing his skull. The leader was still standing though and whilst the Captain finished the knight on the floor he struck, slicing open his scalp and spraying the snow with his blood.
Haggart felt he had no choice but to use the power he carefully metered out in combat, risking deadly exhaustion that could give them the chance to finish him off. His blade crackled with black energy as he deflected a mailed fist aimed for his skull and he brought it down with a terrifying yell of anger, severing the arm at its elbow. The charged sword cleaved the steel in two and a spurt of dark liquid splattered across his shield. The knight fell to his knees and Haggart drove the tip of his sword through the eye slits, bursting out through the back of the helm.
Haggart stumbled, his energy sapped and the world spinning in his head. The other two advanced upon him once they saw what was happening yet somewhere deep within himself he felt a surge, a pulse of brilliant power that pushed him back onto a steady footing and he struck back almost immediately. The next knight fell as he stormed forward, mace raised above his head and Haggart hacked away his leg at the knee. Metal and leather parted. So did bone and sinew and muscle. The monster fell but the mace tore the armour and flesh from his shoulder as it dropped, driving him sideways and into the snow.
The Captain reeled from several heavy strikes that he attempted to block with the shaft of the axe, only to see it split and splinter in his hands. Blood ran down his face and he dived to the left as the great and terrible weapon of his enemy came crashing down where he once stood.
“Haggart!” he called as he moved, his breath coming in spasmodic gasps.
Haggart had rolled to his right as the armoured fiend tried to stamp upon his head, then managed to clamber back onto his feet, the pain in his arm
causing his vision to swim and his body to beg for relief. His sword arm was useless and it hung limp at his side. Only his shield remained and the knight began to circle him, mocking him with its glare, slapping his wounds with the flat of his blade where he could. He was toying with him before he struck and Haggart realised he was at his mercy if he didn't act.
The knight surged forward with a shout, the tip of his blade aiming to pass by his shield arm and into his chest. Haggart drew upon his last vestiges of power and swung the shield edge-ways. The sword shattered and the knight stumbled, falling forward into the snow. Haggart was on top of him then, caving in the back of his helmet with the steel edging on his gifted shield and summoning as much force behind it as he could. The metal crumpled and flattened and the head within was soon pulverised and leaking out through the eye slit and into the crisp white snow.
The leader roared his dismay in a foul, guttural cry and renewed his attack upon the Captain with vicious ferocity. Haggart was too weak to do anything other than watch as he fended off the assault with the broken shaft in one hand and his axe head in the other. The leader of the knights pressed his attack until he drove the Captain towards the mouth of the cave, slipping over the remains of the horses and threatening to fall. But the Captain grinned as the knight stumbled on the compacted ice, slipping in his leather soled boots and struggling to remain standing.
When the leader reached his most unstable footing, the Captain pounced. He barged into his chest plate and knocked him off his feet so that he landed with a clatter on his back, dropping his sword. The Captain fell on top of him, struck his clawing hands away from his throat and drove the splintered shaft straight through the eye slit and into the hard ice beneath. The knight spasmed and kicked, thrashing as his brain was smashed into pulp by the repeated blows of the axe that had long since blunted and now became a hammer with which the Captain forged his victory.
When the body stopped struggling, the Captain rolled off it and fell flat onto the wet, red snow and began sucking air into his torn lungs. Haggart had managed to get to his feet and he stumbled towards him, collapsing beside him, watching his hot breath form steam clouds in the still cold air.
“We...” he said but couldn't finish.
They laid there for too long and soon the cold threatened to take them. Life ebbed away from them and they felt that to lie there, to surrender to the icy embrace of death was more preferable to getting up onto feet that moaned their agonies in hot pulses up their legs and down their spines.
It was Haggart who first moved to stand.
“We... must... move...” he mumbled. His lips were dry and cracked and his voice sound distant to him, like it was coming from the cave somehow. “The cave...”
“Piss off,” said the Captain, yet even he seemed to see the sense of it. He turned in the snow and put a hand onto the cold body of the knight leader. Then he thrust himself upwards and rose to his knees.
Haggart was limping towards the cave entrance and already he could see the stars peaking through the thinning veil of the evening sky. He heard the Captain follow but he couldn't turn. His arm was dead to him. Numb. Lifeless. He dragged his shield, still strapped to his other arm by a single leather cord, across the snow until he was inside. He fell and half crawled, have dragged himself into a corner.
The Captain came in and fell down next to him.
They slept...
*
“We haven't much time, Haggart. You must run.”
Fire... Heat... Screams...
“Dagna...” he replied.
“Listen to me, Haggart. I’ve sent them away. I’ve sent them north.”
“Who?”
“I had to send you away - don't you see.”
“You're not making any sense, Dagna!”
The city was burning. Haggart realised he was stood in the pub, the Helm, just like it was the last time he met Dagna. But it wasn't the same. The place was burning, the timbers were falling down around him. The stench of burning flesh and the cries of the dying threatened to drive him mad.
“You went north... They couldn't find you here... Too late by a day... Haggart, I haven't got long, I’ve never drawn this much power before... The city has fallen. Lorrie and John are fleeing north. You must find them, you must find Lorrie and protect her. She's the only hope you have left.”
“What happened?”
“It's too late. It was always too late. I didn't see. I was blind.”
Haggart turned and there, amongst the ashes, was a shrivelled mass of grey flesh that looked up at him, naked save for a thin cloth wrap. It had sunken black eyes that were dry and lifeless and its mouth was framed with pale broken lips. Its limbs were twisted back upon themselves and Haggart suddenly realised why he'd never seen Dagna outside of his dreams. This was Dagna. This was the price of his power.
“I will end soon. You must continue. Lorrie must continue. She holds the key.”
“The key to what?”
The vision faded and the pain returned. Real pain. And cold. And darkness.
12.
“Perhaps this is all we have. Perhaps only our love can survive us. But survive what? Is it not just an illusion, a vision created to let us feel what it means to be alive? Or is it all a dream, one from which we all wake up one day. I long to wake up and see the truth. I fear that day is soon.”
- Robert Dagna “Musings on the art of Summoning”
Haggart woke with a start. He was cold and it was pitch black and he could see nothing, not even his hand in front of his face. His body was numb save for the agony of his right arm where the flesh had been torn away.
“Captain?” he called out.
“I'm here,” said a voice within the void. “We're still alive... barely.”
A flint was struck and for a moment the sparks illuminated the entire chamber in a brilliant white glow. Then it vanished. Several more strikes across the stone finally sent a hot spark into a handful of kindling and suddenly the narrow passageway was alive with icy blue colour.
“It's nearly dawn,” said the Captain as he climbed onto his feet. “We can't stay here, we need to get back to the Inn as soon as we can.”
“My arm...” The Captain wrapped the kindling around the end of the broken axe shaft with a strip of cloth until it became a flaming brand to light the darkness. He held it near him, examining the torn strips of flesh that hung down from his shoulder.
“It's not broken,” he said. “But it needs treatment. We won't get that here.”
He extended a hand to him and pulled him up to his feet. “This way,” he said and in a minute or two they were outside again in the early dawn light. It was pale and eerie as the first blasts of cold wind hit them. It might have been passed off as a bad dream if it hadn't been for the twisted corpses outside the cave that were gathering snow.
Haggart dug about with his working arm and found his furs. Then he found his panniers and dragged them out of the deep drift. The Captain was doing the same with slow deliberate movements. He gestured to go back inside and led the way again with his torch - the only form of heat they had.
“Best warm up and melt the snow a bit,” he said, indicating his furs that began to drip with moisture. “Then we'll have something to eat before setting out.”
“It will take a bit,” said Haggart, shivering. “No horses.”
“Hmm.”
They sat in silence as the dawn came and its light refracted along the carved ice walls to splash against the descending steps at the far end and guide them back to the surface. It was Haggart who managed to shuffle into his furs first, despite the pain coming from his arm, and search for some water to drink. There was a skin in his pack and he drank greedily from its neck before passing it to the Captain.
“We certainly nailed those lot, didn't we?” he said.
“Aye, I think we did,” said Haggart. “We just need to survive it now.”
“Who were they, do you think?”
Haggart rooted around fo
r some cuts of cured meat and biscuit. “My suspicion is they were once dead warriors. Somehow those machines create enough Summoning power to raise the dead. Gods be damned, how is it even possible?”
“Still an unanswered question in my mind,” he said and got to his feet. “We know they were made here. They were... fed here... Still.”
They chewed and drank and thought whilst the sun rose further outside the cave and spread its golden arms across the dead still lying in the snow not far from them. It was only then that Haggart suddenly remembered the dream.
“Dagna,” he cried. “I saw Dagna.”
“What?” said the Captain.
“He spoke to me. He said that the city had fallen, that Lorrie and John had fled north. That Lorrie was the key somehow.” He looked at the Captain. “He's dead.”
“Who is?”
“Dagna. He drew on everything he had to send us the message this far. It killed him. They've taken the city. I saw it burning.”
“If they've done that then...”
They left the cave and set to searching the bodies of the knights for answers though Haggart suspected that even in his damaged state, the Captain was still thinking along the lines of what loot he might find. As it turned out, he found nothing and neither did Haggart.
“I can't get any of their helmets off,” said Haggart. “But their skin looks well enough for dead soldiers.”
“I expect they were restored to an almost perfect form of who they once were otherwise they'd be useless.”
“True,” said the Captain. “Now what?”
Haggart pulled his arm from his furs with a delicacy only the truly injured can ever understand and he tried to wrap a clean piece of cloth around it. The Captain helped until the whole of his arm from the shoulder to his forearm was firmly bound in linen. Then a sling was made that fastened to his wrist and hung around his neck.
Haggart's Dawn Page 24