by Hal Emerson
“Wait here until I call,” Raven said to them. They all looked ready to argue, but none of them did, for which he was grateful.
He turned and edged his way through the opening.
The immediate impression was of a huge space, but Raven could actually see none of it. The air was freezing, and the scrape of his boot against the stone floor echoed over and over, both above and to the sides. He laid a hand against the wall and traced it to the side, where he was out of the way of the stone door; his hand hit a metal bracket, and he realized there was a torch there, only half used. He felt around more and found below it a small pouch, with flint and steel inside. He quickly struck the two together, showering sparks on the still-oiled torch, which caught quickly. He turned, holding the flame high in the air, and looked around him.
Chambers and paths led off both left and right, to a number of openings honeycombing a cavernous space. The light from the torch didn’t even reach high enough to touch the ceiling, but it did illuminate racks of candles, rows of seats, and prayer rugs worn by countless penitent knees and hands. He crossed quickly to the candles, and lit them with the torch, adding their light. There were more racks further on, and he lit these too, watching carefully as the light began to build higher and higher. He saw more torches in wall sconces, and lit those as well.
“Okay!” he called out toward the door. “Come in!”
He turned back around, and felt his throat close up as the light suddenly bloomed bright enough to reveal his surroundings.
It was an underground Cathedral, one more splendid even than Banelyn’s. Statues of angels and demons so lifelike Raven almost thought they were living creatures frozen in stone stared down at him from carved rock outcroppings. Water dripped somewhere far off in the distance, and he could see huge stalagmite pillars soaring hundreds of feet into the air, ringing a center area that was still masked in darkness. He stepped forward further, raising his torch high overhead. The light fell on something else, something that at first he couldn’t comprehend. He couldn’t get a good look at it – he stepped forward once more.
As Raven raised the torch high, the light fell over the side of the empty space and shone down on the shores of an underground lake full with an ocean of blood. The torchlight guttered and spit as if the sight sickened even the unfeeling flame. Glints shown around the sides of the huge underground basin, and Raven’s eyes raked over the image of metal holding hooks and channels that had been cut in the bedrock to funnel liquid – blood, it’s blood! – down from higher levels. In the center of the lake, elevated high over the water and connected to its own platform by several long buttressed catwalks, was a stone platform carved with swirling red lines that pulsed dimly in the shadows of the chamber. At the center of the lines – the center of the Bloodmage rune – was a huge hole that looked terribly familiar. It was the hole in which a Soul Catcher would be placed.
Blood … that was the metallic smell, and the sea Leah kept seeing.
And in spite of the terrible sight, there seemed to be something worse at play, something that began to worm its way into Raven’s mind. He felt … dirty. As if he’d been coated in slime. His very presence felt tainted, and he knew suddenly that a thousand years would never wash clean that feeling. No, all he could do, all he had to do, was step forward and let himself be taken by this too. There was no power in him to resist it – he was dirty, he was unclean, he had to offer himself up to the Goddess, the Empress, and know that through her – only through her – was there a path to salvation –
He reached out on instinct and caught at the Raven Talisman, and the thoughts cut off, leaving him in blank, shocked silence.
“STOP!”
Autmaran, who had just made it into the room, froze between the heavy stone doors.
“Go back,” Raven commanded. “No one without a Talisman comes through those doors – there’s some kind of enchantment that’s – ”
Autmaran’s eyes went blank, and he ran toward Raven. No, not toward Raven – toward the waiting lake. Raven stepped forward and rammed his fist into the man’s stomach, then dealt him a blow to the back of the neck that made him go limp. He caught the commander before he hit the ground and hauled him back toward the doors before anyone else could come through, his breathing coming in harsh, sharp pants as he tried to block the enchantment’s thoughts from his mind by clinging to his Talisman.
He reached the entrance just as Leah was making her way through.
“No,” he gasped, “go back!”
She caught sight of him and stared, then quickly pulled back to allow him to haul Autmaran through the doors. He fell to the floor inside, and Lorna immediately caught Autmaran and checked for a pulse, felt to make sure he was breathing. Polim caught Raven’s torch, still grasped loosely in his hand, and lit the others that had been blown out, spreading light through the antechamber.
“What happened?”
“It looks like he’s been hit … Raven – did you do this?”
“Don’t go in,” he said, breathless. “Lorna, take Autmaran – no, he’s fine, he’s just unconscious – take him back up the stairs. Polim and Palum – you guard this door. No one – no one – enters here until I say so. There’s an enchantment that only those with Aspects can avoid.”
He turned to Leah, Davydd, and Tomaz.
“Grab onto your Talismans and don’t let them go,” he said, trying to stress the importance of what he was saying. “No matter what happens, no matter what you see –”
– Oh shadows and light, what they’re going to see –
“– don’t let go of them. Hold them. Do it – now.”
“What about Lorna?” Davydd asked.
“No one without a Talisman,” he said.
“She’d have one if you’d done what’s right,” he snarled. “She’s coming – she goes where I go.”
“Then you’re not coming,” Raven said flatly, turning to face Davydd, his voice cold and hard, without anger. Shock had driven any thoughts of anger too far from his mind; he was surprised he was still functioning.
How many people need to be drained to fill such a space?
Davydd caught Raven’s gaze and went silent, no doubt sensing the shock written all over him. The Ranger’s own anger disappeared, and he took a step forward.
“Your hands are shaking,” Leah said quietly, reaching out to grab hold of them, a rare moment of public contact that showed him just how frightened he must look. “What’s going on? What happened?”
“What’s beyond those doors?” Tomaz rumbled, the words shaking Raven’s bones as much as the thought of what was behind him, of what had been done here.
Raven swallowed and held onto his Talisman with all his might, willing his mind to be still.
“The answer to a lot of questions,” he said quietly.
They didn’t challenge him, but Davydd didn’t back down either.
“Fine – then I stay here with Lorna. Polim and Palum can take Autmaran back – we’re not leaving until you return.”
Raven grimaced, but nodded, though Polim and Palum both raised their voices.
“Fine!” Raven shouted. “You can stay – but you sit on those steps and you go nowhere else. One of you at least go back up – tell the others not to come down. No one enters. Understood?”
They nodded as one, and then Palum took off running up the stairs, her silver hair glinting in the torch light. Polim grabbed Autmaran and positioned him on the stairs, trying to make him as comfortable as possible; the bald man’s head lolled about on his shoulders, and Raven hoped he would be all right when he woke.
Please let the enchantment be weakening. Please let it be only confined to the chamber now.
“Hold on tight,” Raven said to Leah and Tomaz, as they grabbed their Aspects, Leah’s eyes flickering blue and holding, for once, while Tomaz’s body glowed a deep scarlet beneath his armor. “Don’t let go.”
Raven turned back and led them in, forcing himself to walk even though his bo
dy was moving in barely controllable jerks and shakes. When they came close enough for the light of the torch to reach out and once more strike the surface of the underground lake, both Tomaz and Leah gasped. There was a thudding sound, and Raven realized Tomaz had fallen to his knees.
“What … what would have happened if we weren’t holding the Talismans?” Leah asked. Her voice was hoarse and choked, but she forced it out anyway. Raven could see eyes, but the blue in them was lost. They had turned purple in the light of the torch and the reflection of the blood.
“You’d have tried to throw yourself in,” Raven said, talking in a monotone that didn’t waver, afraid that if he stopped he’d be unable to start again. “It’s an old trap. It was used often in the early days of the Empire, back before Bloodmagic was widely known. Bloodmages would go into an enemy town, inscribe the words on the most important stone of the city, and perform the ritual in the dead of night when no one was watching. By the next day … the whole population, men, women, and children, would have been drawn to the stone. They would kill themselves on it … and the Bloodmages would pull power from the deaths, storing life in their Soul Catchers.”
“The whole population … you mean all of Lerne.”
“I do. I think … I think that it might go even further. It might be Whitestone too, and maybe cities to the south, and north …”
He fell silent, and turned away. His stomach roiled, and he bent over, his hands on his knees, and vomited across the carefully laid stones of the Cathedral. He coughed and gagged, and through it all he could hear Leah doing the same not far away.
Hundreds of thousands of people … that’s how much blood is down there. That’s what it takes to make a sea of blood.
When he managed to stop, when there was nothing else to empty, he wiped his mouth, and turned back, forcing himself to look at it.
This is what we’re fighting. This is the measure of their resolve.
He strode forward, toward the form of Tomaz, who still sat fallen to his knees, staring out at the sea. Silent tears were flowing down his face, and grief had etched itself into every line of his face.
Raven walked past him, toward the walkway that joined the edge of the pool with the tall, elevated island in the center.
“Where are you going?” Leah asked behind him.
Raven didn’t respond. Where Tomaz had gone from shock to grief, he had gone from shock to anger. It built up inside him, burning all other thoughts away. He strode forward, straightening his back as he went, defying what they had done here, defying the emptiness he felt. The room shifted oddly about him, and he dismissed it as a trick of the light. The oblique something that had been wrong with Lerne was centered here, in this enormous room, and his anger, with nowhere to go, could only come out at what was left.
“How could you do this?” he whispered to the Cathedral at large. He was halfway toward the middle island now, and he realized he was almost running.
This was like the Kindred Odeon – it was an amphitheater. That island was the pulpit, where the head Seeker would come to preach to the gathered masses below. This whole pool … it used to be filled with seats where Seekers sat to listen to the homily.
“How could you do this?” he repeated, louder; loud enough that the words echoed back to him from the corners of the huge, silent chamber.
He reached the center and saw the gaping hole where the enormous Soul Catcher had been, a crystal that must have been half the size of Tomaz, and around it a ring of stones inscribed with the words of the Affirmations.
This is where the Seeker would stand to preach the glories of the Empress. This is where the Bloodmages inscribed their enchantment.
And even as he thought the words, black script blossomed and began to scroll along the edges of the stones, line after line of runes that he couldn’t read.
“HOW COULD YOU DO THIS?!”
The room shouted the words back down at him, turning his scream into a screeching cry of despair, as if the stones themselves were shouting back at him, turning back his accusation with a protestation of their own innocence.
He pulled Aemon’s Blade from its sheath at his side and raised it high overhead, then brought it slicing down on the stone in front of him. The Valerium sword bit deeply into the rock, throwing sparks off into the air and cutting the line of scrolling runes in half.
The enchantment froze, shivered, and then evaporated.
There was a long instant of silence, during which Raven could only hear himself breathing, the sound of it echoed over and over by the acoustics of the cavern. And then the world began to shift.
It was slight at first, only a distant rumble, but it began to build. One of the various honeycombed entrances in the huge underground cathedral exploded in a huge plume of dust. Two more followed on the opposite side, and then pieces of the ceiling cracked apart and fell, spiraling past Raven to land with a sickening splash in the blood below him.
He pulled Aemon’s Blade from the stone, and ran. He saw Leah pulling Tomaz to his feet, forcing him to move, but the big man still seemed in a daze, unable to understand what was happening around him, unable to comprehend anything at all. Raven heard his own blood pounding in his ears, and he knew they didn’t have much time.
He reached the shore just as Tomaz came back to his feet, and Leah shouted for him to follow them. More of the cavern collapsed, and as it did something strange happened in Raven’s mind. The world began to shift in a way he couldn’t understand. As he watched, the doors closed in and broke under the strain of the mountain, blocking their way and ensuring their death.
But through his anger and fear, Raven refused to believe it. He chose for the doors to be whole again – he chose for them to remain unbroken.
The world shifted, and became the way he wanted it.
Rocks fell from above him, crashing into where he’d been not a second before. Leah and Tomaz dove through the now-open doors, and Raven followed them himself, ducking beneath the sagging lintel. On the other side, the whole staircase was shifting and moving as well, and Polim, Davydd and Lorna were looking at them with wide eyes.
“What in the name of the seven hells did you do in there?!”
“Just run!”
Lorna caught up Autmaran in her arms, still unconscious, and they all took the stairs as fast as they could manage them.
The ascent took barely half the time it had taken to go down, but to Raven’s mind it was much, much longer. Rocks fell all around them, and the torch he’d managed to light had been knocked from hand and left behind them. Only the light of the Talismans guided them now – Davydd out in front and Tomaz bringing up the rear.
“Faster, faster, go faster!” he shouted.
“Almost there!”
And then they were out. They burst from the staircase into the open air in a huge rush of dirt and flying stone. Cries sounded from all around them as the other Rogues shot to their feet, coming to their aid, but Raven pushed them all away.
“Don’t stop,” he said, his voice raspy, throat clogged with dirt and grime and a thousand conflicting emotions. “Not yet – it’s not over!”
He pushed past them toward the stairs they’d taken into the audience chamber and throne room. He felt the other Rogues pause behind him, but Lorna, Davydd, Leah, and Tomaz followed him without question.
And as soon as they were halfway across the room, the entire cliff wall behind them began to rumble and shake.
“Run, run, run, run, run,” Raven repeated over and over again, both to himself and to the others following. They couldn’t stop – they had to get out of the palace. They had to get out of the city.
Far away – as far away as possible – away from all of it.
“RAVEN!”
He shot a glance over his shoulder but didn’t slow. It was Leah – her eyes flashing blue, illuminating their path momentarily; she was frantically motioning for him to move right.
Without question, he did. An enormous chunk of rock fell from the
ceiling the next second and crashed into the space where he would have been. He ran on, and as a group they descended the stairs and raced for the entrance hall.
The walls here began to shiver too, as if they had caught a cold and were in the throes of a violent fever that wouldn’t break. And then the wood paneling that lined the corridor in front of them began to explode outward in huge sprays of splintered wood and ripped tapestries. The beautiful statues crumbled, split, and exploded. Raven felt his arm pierced by a sliver of wood bigger than an arrow, and a huge piece of marble crashed into his leg, leaving him limping. But still he ran, even as pain coursed up his leg and blood ran down his arm, the wounds healing even as he watched. The others ran with him, every single one pausing for nothing, Leah shouting out orders every other second, saving all their lives multiple times over.
They exploded through the front doors just as the roof fell in behind them. Raven tripped and rolled down the steps that led to the door, only managing to catch himself once he’d already bruised every part of his body he could have thought possible. The others came with him, some tripping themselves, and they were again racing, this time through the city itself.
At first it looked as though they had managed to escape the onslaught, that they had managed to get to safety. And then a crack sounded behind them so loud it was as though the skies themselves had been broken apart. Raven turned back to look and saw the entire cliff side under which Lerne was built now riddled with spider-web fissures from bottom to top.
The whole thing was about to come crashing down, wiping out the city.
“DON’T STOP, PRINCELING!”
At the sound of Leah’s scream he realized he’d frozen, and the others were rushing past him. He turned and ran with them, now bringing up the rear. The ground buckled beneath them as the first of the stones rained down. Raven, unable to keep from watching, looked over his shoulder as the palace disappeared in a wave of mountainous rock that rolled forward like an avalanche. A huge cloud of dust preceded it, racing toward them, blowing out windows and staving in doors.