by Phil Tucker
Unable to stay back, Audsley stepped delicately over one of the bodies and approached, wishing there was better lighting. The metal was rent and twisted outward in violent strands and clots. Something had burst out, he decided, not in. He reached out to touch the block, then thought better of it and instead leaned forward and peered inside.
There was a mold within it. Shaped in a vaguely humanoid way, it was smoothly contoured like clay after a hand mark has been imprinted in it. Audsley frowned. Had the block been a container? What had escaped? What could have survived being interred within such a massive block of lead?
A demon, he thought, and felt his blood run cold.
"Let's, ah, let's return to our quarters," he said, turning back to Temyl. "I've much to ponder. I'll collect some of these notes to read, and that should suffice for now."
"I should bloody well think so," said Temyl, his face gone pale. He turned and began to walk back toward the front. "Bogs! Get ready. The magister's returned to his senses and it's time for us to have a drink. Bogs?"
Audsley's heart skipped a beat, a surprisingly sharp sensation.
Temyl ran the last dozen yards to the doorway in the glass wall and peered out onto the ledge, frantic, searching the open, blank expanse of space. "Bogusch!"
Audsley passed a hand over his face, taking off his spectacles. His knees felt weak as Aedelbert swooped in from a high shelf to land on his shoulder.
"Oh, dear," he said to himself, hands shaking, unable to catch his breath. "Oh, dear."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Asho slid and fell down the obliquely angled crack, scraping and banging his elbows as he dropped, till the slope fell away and he plummeted into the darkness, falling for several heart-wrenching seconds before he landed roughly on a rock floor.
He had enough presence of mind to roll aside just before Mæva landed where he'd been with a rush of wind and a light thud. Then came a cry and Kethe clattered down, hitting the ground hard on her side. Asho scrambled over to her and clamped his hand over her mouth, gazing up at the bright crack above them. Waiting. Watching. Seeing if the demon would follow.
It didn't. After a few more seconds he released Kethe, suddenly aware of the pressure of her lips against his callused palm, and helped her to her feet. It wasn't pitch-black, as he'd first thought, because some light filtered down from the surface, enough to see that they were standing in a grotto of some kind, the walls raw, unworked rock.
Asho's eyes adjusted quickly, finding comfort in the soft, velvety gloom. It always felt good to be underground. Relaxing a fraction, he peered ahead and behind them.
"There," he whispered. "The crack widens a little ahead. Maybe it's a passage?"
Kethe reached out and took hold of his arm. "You can see in this murk?"
"Enough." He smiled bitterly at her, knowing she'd not be able to make out his expression. "The benefits to being Bythian are few, but this is one of them. Come on."
"No," said Mæva, her voice rippling with panic. Astride her shoulder, Ashurina was fanning her wings in alarm. "We wait here for a few hours, then climb back out and continue getting out of here."
Asho disengaged his arm from Kethe and stepped up in front of the witch. "You don't understand, do you? We've been guided here. I don't necessarily mean by the demons, though perhaps them too. Fate, luck, whatever you want to call it – we've entered the true heart of Skarpheðinn. We're in. We've got a chance to really learn something, to get at the truth of this place. We're not turning back now."
"You'll die here," whispered Mæva. "You're going to your death."
"Perhaps," said Asho. "But I'm going to risk it. Kethe?"
She stepped up beside him. "I'm with you."
"Youth," said Mæva. "That must be the reason behind your madness. Or your rank stupidity. When I agreed to lead you up here -"
"Enough, Mæva. We need you now more than ever. I've seen enough to know that we'll never be able to assault the Black Gate with a band of Hrethings or knights or whoever else we might bring up here. We'd get picked off and torn apart long before we reached this point. No, this is how it must be done. This is the only way. Three individuals with unique talents, slipping in unnoticed, unseen, to learn the truth and perhaps strike a telling blow against the enemy."
Asho felt a strange power rising within him, a new authority, almost as if a greater voice were speaking through him. He felt his skin prickle, felt disconnected from himself, felt lethal and fey and illimitable.
"Be careful, boy." Mæva's voice was coiled and cold. "You drink deep of the magic in the air. It sinks into you like spilt blood into a rug. Don't lose your head."
"Fair enough." She was right. He felt feverish, almost manic. He could take off at a dead sprint and never get tired. "But you don't deny my claim."
Mæva spat, "You are mad, but the situation is what it is. I would never have come here willingly. But being here... All right. We shall proceed. Your madness has infected us all."
Ashurina reared up again and hissed in anger, then flew from Mæva's shoulder to land on a ridge of rock. Mæva turned, following the passage of her flight. "We must. Don't you see? I - I won't leave them."
Kethe leaned in close to Asho. "Why is she reasoning with her firecat?"
"I don't know," Asho whispered back. "Audsley talks to his. It's harmless."
Ashurina's eyes sparked with yellow flame, and she suddenly uttered a spate of caustic, sharp syllables that hurt Asho's ears. He startled, feeling Kethe's grip again on his upper arm, but before he could interject, Mæva took a step toward Ashurina, her fists clenched.
"Not yet, it isn't. Until then, you are sworn to obey me. So descend. Exert yourself, or break our compact and lose all that you have waited so patiently for."
Ashurina hissed and lashed her tail from side to side, and then the caustic fires in her eyes died down and she leaped onto Mæva's shoulder once more. Mæva turned and stared with flat hostility at Asho and Kethe.
"What?"
"Your firecat." It felt surreal to speak the words. "It spoke."
Mæva exhaled, her shoulders slumping. "Yes. It was Ashurina that saved me when I came to Skarpheðinn as a child." Her words had lost all animation, all verve and personality. Her voice had become leaden. "She found me on the verge of death and made me an offer. I accepted. Because of her... I live."
Asho stiffened. "This gift you have been offering me. It was Ashurina."
Mæva couldn't meet his eyes. "Yes. And if you wish it, she can still be yours. Even now I would give her to you, though it mean my death. At least I would die clean, my body my own, my soul -"
"No," said Kethe. "He doesn't want it."
Mæva stepped forward, a hand reached out as if imploring. "Kethe, it would benefit you as well, would save your soul, prolong your life -"
"No," said Asho. He felt a strange mixture of horror and disgust. "Kethe's right. I don't want your 'gift'."
Kethe's voice grew hard. "What is she? That's no firecat."
"Yes and no," agreed Mæva, turning away from them. She reached up to caress Ashurina's head. "Ashurina wears the firecat as we might wear a suit of clothing. At heart, though, she is a demon. That is how she was able to teach me to cast the taint of my magic into others."
"A demon," whispered Asho. He felt nauseated. How close had he come to taking her for his own? The firecat looked over its shoulder at him with its customary inscrutable expression. "What - how? What does it want?"
"If you had accepted her, I would explain all. But now it is no concern of yours. I came up here in the hopes - I helped all of you, in the stupid, vain hope that I might - but never mind. It hasn't come to pass."
Mæva dropped her hand and stared down at the rock floor. "And - perhaps I'm glad. She's my burden to bear. Nothing between us changed. I am still willing to guide you. Will you follow?"
Asho's horror had become something akin to pity. Mæva was a slender shadow. Still she refused to look up at them. For how long has she been alone? For
how long had she bourn this burden? "Yes. All right. Lead on."
"Now is not the time or place. Come!"
Mæva's eyes glowed with the same yellow fire that had haunted the firecat a moment ago. "Good. Now let us see what we can find down here in the depths. Let's see what it is that scares Ashurina so. Come!"
She pushed past Asho and strode confidently into the dark. Asho held onto Kethe's arm, guiding her in the gloom, and followed. The ground beneath his feet had suddenly become treacherous. Had all her help been for this? An attempt to discharge her curse? Asho couldn't help but shiver. Had she locked on him as a target from the very first moment they'd met? And if so, could he trust her, even now?
The walls squeezed in around them before widening once more. The passageway sloped down sharply, wound to the left, and then fragmented into a fork. Mæva hesitated.
"Left," whispered Asho. He could feel the magic pouring from that direction, a warm and sultry flood that stirred his loins and sped his heart. He flared his fingers open around the hilt of his sword, then clenched them tight. It was hard to breathe. His clothing and armor felt constraining. The urge to open his mind to the magic and drink deep was overwhelming, but he fought it back. He could sense the peril.
They hurried down the passageway, and then Mæva drew back against the wall, motioning urgently for Asho and Kethe to do likewise. Asho dragged Kethe alongside him, shrinking back just as a creature shambled around the corner, a fragment of boiling shadows and gray tendons, milky white eyes and elongated teeth. Asho could almost see the black soul that coiled in its center, the animus that propelled this ruined corpse on. It passed them by without glancing at them, leaving behind it a fetid, rank smell like rotting leather.
They pressed on, with Asho guiding Mæva each time the passage split. They walked through a warren where the ceiling was low, the walls sharp and flinty. Asho could barely make out the contours of the walls, and realized that there was a dim ambient light down here, without source but ever-present. The farther they went, the more pronounced it became, until he realized that there was an actual glow coming from the ceiling, where a luminous mist flickered in iridescent shades of blue and green.
Kethe noticed it at the same time and stopped, her hand still locked on his arm. "What is that?"
Asho could feel the magic pulsing within the mist. This wasn't the first time he'd seen it - it was as familiar to him as his oldest childhood memories.
"The aurora," he whispered. "In Bythos. It covers the cavern ceiling, providing the light by which we see. I'd always heard that it had grown faint after the Black Gate was closed, but still it shone. This must be a miniature version, coming from the smaller Black Gate we've come to find. The aurora infernalis, it was called."
He reached up and raked his fingers though the mist, causing it to ripple as if it were a stream of water. Hot prickles flowed across his palm.
Kethe let go of him and tentatively reached up to touch the aurora, which immediately began to swirl around her fingers, forming a funnel into which the glowing mist streamed, descending to her palm and vanishing there. Asho felt the magic being drained from the air, and saw sweat spring up on Kethe's brow as she gritted her jaw, lost in the moment.
Mæva strode up and yanked Kethe's arm down. "What are you doing?"
"I - I don't know. It was an impulse -"
"No impulses. Do you want to summon every demon within a square mile? Have them come running to see what disturbs the flow of magic so rudely?" Mæva glared at her. "Foolish girl. You'll be the death of us yet."
Kethe stepped up beside Asho and walked alongside him. "It felt like I was trying to drink the ocean dry," she whispered. "And the madness of it was that I thought I could. I thought I had a chance..."
She shook her head, and he saw real fear in her eyes. "This is how my kind die," she whispered. "Those of us who are attuned to the White Gate. I know it now. We drink too much. We burn out." She shuddered and looked away.
He wanted to wrap his arm around her shoulders, but instead simply grimaced and walked alongside her, sword at the ready. She'd made it amply clear that she didn't want his sympathy. You are no Ennoian knight. Conflicted, his own concern for her making him feel the fool, he probed ahead into the darkness, watching for their next obstacle. He knew there would be one. No, not one - many. It was a miracle that they had made it this far.
"Slow," said Mæva, then lowered herself into a crouch as the tunnel ahead of them rose and opened to a kind of ridge.
Asho and Kethe followed suit, and together they crept up and peered down into a cavern whose floor was covered in long stalagmites on whose tips were impaled all manner of corpses. Asho's stomach tightened at the sight. He saw everything from ravens to deer to people, all in various states of decomposition, eyes sunken, flesh ripe, skin and pelts crawling with bugs, lit by the aurora that swirled across the ceiling like a risen tide. His throat clenched, and he averted his gaze from the faces. The staring eyes, the bared teeth.
Kethe covered her nose with the back of her wrist. "What is this?"
"Demons cannot enter our world without a host," whispered Mæva. "You recall the one we fought at the cliff's edge? How after we killed it there was nothing left but a mountain goat? Each demon needs an anchor to keep it in this realm. The more powerful the demon, the larger the host."
A bird the size of a large dog fluttered into the chamber, wings of shadow beating as fast as a hummingbird's so that its flight was precise, but stilted. A massive, curved beak gleamed wetly in the light of the aurora, and in its claws it carried the limp remains of a fox. It hovered over a sharp-tipped stalagmite, then darted down to impale the fox before turning to fly away.
"So, this is - what - a larder? A repository for demons who wish to enter our world?"
Mæva shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. But perhaps."
Kethe grimaced and lowered her hand. "There was a little bird that lived in the bushes along the path to the village below Kyferin Castle. A shrike, it was called, a butcher bird. It would impale little lizards, large insects, those kinds of things, on thorns to eat later."
Asho looked past the bodies and saw the mouth of a tunnel across from them on the cavern floor. Magic welled up from there like a geyser.
"There," he said. "Come on."
Excitement, euphoria, confidence, all of these were growing within him as the magic increasingly saturated the air. Not waiting, he hopped over the ridge and slid down the steep slope, blade in hand, and hit the cavern floor running. The stalagmites were spindly and tall, so that the bodies were raised above the height of his head. As he darted between them he saw the corpse of a Hrething man, stone spike lancing up through his back.
Should he cut the man down? Prevent the demons from using him as a host? No, there was no time.
He heard the slide and crunch of the other two following him. Then he heard a buzzing sound, and looking to his left he saw a bird demon - a shrike - flying in with a young mountain goat in its claws.
He panicked. He was right out in the open.
Holding his blade in both hands, he turned to face it, preparing to leap up so as to cut it in mid-air - only to feel Kethe's hand close around his arm. He glanced at her, surprised, and she shook her head urgently. Seeing his confusion, she pointed at the shrike, then at her eyes, then shook her head again.
Oh. Right. He'd forgotten. Asho nodded, feeling like a fool, and jogged after Kethe into the far tunnel. Mæva followed on their heels, and he put on more speed, needing to burn off the energy that suffused him, the mad and delirious need to fight, to exert himself, to vent this pent-up power that was driving him mad.
"Asho!" Kethe's warning hiss was meaningless. "Slow down!" Her footsteps were akin to a light patter of rain behind him, and he heard Mæva's growl as she put on more speed too, sprinting to keep up. He didn't care. Couldn't care. He had to run, had to find some kind of release. His thoughts were a maelstrom as he dove ever deeper into the demon tunnels, ever closer to the
Black Gate, whose magic was as terrible as it was glorious, and threatened to burn him from the core out.
He saw movement up ahead. Something was fleeing them. Narrowing his eyes, he leaned forward as he ran. He could almost make them out: a small knot of people. Humans, running as fast as he was. They looked familiar, he thought. Then it hit him. Two women and a man? He was chasing their own group.
Asho skidded to a stop, nearly tripping. Kethe and Mæva ran past him, confused, then looked back, and he saw their eyes widen. Ahead, at the edge of his vision, he saw the two women turn to stare back at him as well. Mind spinning, he turned again and saw another three people behind them, all of then turning around to stare into the darkness behind them.
Asho felt his mind strain as it sought to hold on to something, anything, that might make sense of this.
He raised his arm. The Asho he was staring at, at the far reach of the tunnel, raised his arm as well.
Reflexively he reached out and connected with Kethe. He sensed her burning presence behind him, a white, incandescent flame. She accepted him, and immediately he felt magic sluice out of his body through their conduit, even without his using it. He felt the pressure within his head lessen, and his fever grow tempered.
The mirrored group faded away into the darkness. Asho looked ahead. That group was gone as well.
He turned to Kethe. "What in the White Gate...?"
She could only shake her head, panic flickering beneath a façade of control, her eyes wide like those of a startled horse.
"We're close to the Gate," Mæva said. "That's all we need to know. Expect more."
Asho wanted to laugh. With each beat of his heart, he could feel magic pass from him into Kethe. What would have happened to him if she hadn't been here? Nothing good, he was sure. "All right." He moved his sword to his left hand, then shook out his right. His fingers were stiff from clenching the hilt so hard. That's when he saw Ashurina.
The firecat had grown. No longer the size of a house cat, the demon creature was now the size of a badger, with great wings that beat the air silently, her eyes blazing piss yellow. She hovered above them, beating her wings slowly, gazing down at them inscrutably, malevolently.