by Alec Hutson
“Do you know why she left?”
The hairless man shook his smooth head. “I do not. But there were rumors… whisperings at the time all over the island about strangers appearing at night at many doors to ask questions about a girl. I was there when Vera heard about these things, and I remember her face. She was frightened.”
“Strangers? What did they look like?”
He shrugged. “I could not tell you. I never saw them. But others who did said they wore cloaks and went cowled, never showing their faces. And they vanished when she did, and were never seen again.”
“Perhaps… perhaps someone else on the island will remember something about my mother, or these strangers who might have been searching for her.”
The hairless man nodded. “Perhaps. And you may stay here, in this house, while you ask these questions.”
That surprised Keilan. “Truly? I thought your captain was angry with me?”
“He is more sad than angry, I think. It is an old sorrow he never truly set aside. He will want you here, and when he calms down he will have questions about your mother’s life after she fled the island. She was a great mystery to him, one he has never forgotten.”
Demian had been right about the dream-like quality of life beneath the mountain. Sometimes when Alyanna awoke on her bed of moss in her tiny grotto she could only lay there, unable to move, her limbs heavy as stone, unsure whether she was still asleep or not. Above her, pale blue worms would crawl inside the crystal sphere hanging from the ceiling, their movements sketching patterns that would mean something to her if only she could concentrate a little harder… if only the tingling in her head would abate for a while and she could think clearly again.
Darkness. Silence. Meals were piles of insects that looked to have been ground by mortar and pestle, but not so fine that she couldn’t find the odd antennae or mandible still whole within the mash, all served on broad flat mushrooms that smelled like spoiled meat. Young acolytes emerged from the blackness at what seemed like irregular intervals, set down her supper or breakfast, and retreated again without saying a word. Some would keep their eyes closed, as if they did not wish to see her; others would squint or blink against the radiance that spilled from her. Alyanna wondered if these children had ever encountered a woman before—there were no girls among their number, that she had seen, and she could remember no women when she had previously dealt with the kith’ketan in the imperial gardens, before the assault on Saltstone.
What would compel these people to live beneath the mountain, and to devote their lives to darkness and murder?
She spent some of her waking time with Demian as he recovered. The swordsinger drifted in and out of consciousness, and even when he was awake he often seemed unaware of where he was or what had happened. On several occasions he spoke to her as if they were still students at the Arcanum, where she had first met him over a thousand years ago. He had been damaged back then, an orphan boy raised with his twin in the pleasure houses of Kashkana, desperate to develop his power so he could earn the influence to set his brother free. Alyanna had come from an equally humble background, the daughter of a violent and poor sharecropper on the hardscrabble plains outside Mahlbion. Their tremendous natural Talent could not be denied, though, and it had brought them to the foremost of the creches, where they had been surrounded by the children of the Imperium’s elite. During those early years they had remained outsiders, reviled for how their abilities had allowed them to rise up into a higher caste and claim positions above their peers. Over time they had become both allies and rivals, two of the greatest Talents the Mosaic Cities had produced in generations. Eventually, though, they had drifted apart after finally earning their colored robes, but when Alyanna had gone searching for others who might share her dreams of immortality, Demian had been the first to answer and pledge himself to her cause.
Despite their long history and, at times, close partnership, they had never been lovers. Alyanna had never known Demian to take a partner of any sort, in fact, and she had come to think of him as lacking that most basic of passions—perhaps it had been excised by whatever horrors he had experienced as a child. But now she wasn’t so sure. Watching him sleep, his untroubled face and the gentle rise and fall of his chest, she began to wonder… He had come for her, into the place most dangerous to sorcerers in the entire world, when he must have known he would likely find her broken or dead. Could friendship be enough to justify these actions? Was it possible that the last swordsinger of the Imperium loved her?
These thoughts and more consumed Alyanna as she wandered the mountain’s halls. Twisting passageways that seemed so familiar and yet so different, spilling into chambers where the remnants of the sanctuary she had constructed here could still be found, if she looked carefully enough. Scraps of copper that once had formed the twisting frames of the furniture she had imported from the cities of the Imperium a thousand years ago; shards of glass from shattered mistglobes, still slightly infused with the glow of sorcery; bits of metal and ceramic. A large swathe of the fastness seemed to have been abandoned, but the majority of what she had renovated long ago was simply closed off to her—including her old quarters. Those sections were guarded by solemn-faced acolytes slightly older than the ones who brought her meals, and they shook their heads and moved to bar her way when she tried to walk past them.
Alyanna was surprised to discover, however, that one area was outside of the inner sanctum claimed by the kith’ketan. She stumbled upon it quite by accident as she explored deeper and deeper into the corridors open to her. It began as a crawling sensation that made her shiver, and as she pushed on further the feeling strengthened, until her heart was beating fast and her breathing became labored.
When she finally entered the chamber, she nearly retched; the miasma of sorcery still clung to the walls and the table that filled the space a thousand years on. The soul jewel she had forged in the black kiln was gone, and she wondered to where it had been moved. At the culmination of the ceremony that had rendered Alyanna and the others immortal, its core had cracked, so it could never be used again for such a purpose, but still vestiges of the sorcery had lingered in its facets. It was why they had fled these halls with such haste afterwards—the scraps of souls still adhering to the jewel had been leaking some fell poison into the air, and a few members of her cabal had even sickened before they’d managed to escape.
But now the jewel was missing, and only faint traces of it lingered. Still, those sorcerous reverberations were enough to make her nauseous, and so she hurriedly left the room where she had claimed immortality all those years ago.
She returned to Demian’s chamber and found him awake and lucid, being attended to by the strange kith’ketan physicker.
“I’ve been in the ceremony room,” she told Demian as the man with the withered arms changed the moss encrusting his wounds. He was healing well, Alyanna noticed, the flesh underneath pink and glistening, with no hint of corruption that she could see.
Demian grimaced as the physicker used his gnarled fingers to pack the moss tight. “And so you’re wondering where the jewel has gone.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen it,” he said, swinging his legs over the edge of the dais as the physicker stepped away. “It’s still here, under the mountain. Or what’s left of it.”
“The kith’ketan have claimed it?”
Demian shook his head, then paused, as if considering her question further. “They may have been the ones who moved it,” he said slowly. “I’m not sure.”
“If not them, who?”
He prodded the moss bandage on his side, then sucked in his breath, wincing. “Not who,” he gasped, his face pale from the pain. “What.”
Anger drove her those first few days as she chased Jan north, an indignant rage that he would betray her trust. She had rescued him, shown herself willing to die for his freedom, and this was how he repaid her? By s
neaking away while she slept, like a thief in the night? Surely he must have some understanding of the importance of her task. He had told her he had seen what the Betrayers were capable of doing, that he had tracked them down after they murdered someone he knew.
So as the barren moorland gradually gave way to frozen tundra and she began the treacherous ascent into the ice-sheathed Bones of the World, she considered all this. Cho Lin did not think he was simply trying to be free of her and the promise he had made. After all, why would he head north, into the Frostlands, which the Shan knew to be the wild and forsaken edge of the world? There must be a reason he had ridden this way—some justification for his betrayal. In the shadow of the white-hot flame of her anger a small ember of curiosity began to smolder.
It took her four days to pass through the mountains. The path she followed was not a road in the traditional sense—there were no distance markers that she could see, or furrows to suggest that wagons or horses had regularly churned the earth. But there did seem to be a route that wended between the stony skirts of the Bones, clear of any impassable rivers or cliffs that might have forced her to try and climb higher into the range. Even in these lower reaches, though, as she passed through the valleys and the frozen river beds, the cold was almost unbearable. She had bought as many furs as the innkeeper back in the moors would sell to her, but no matter how many layers she huddled beneath every night she still woke with ice in her hair and numb fingers and toes.
At least she knew she was going in the right direction. Almost as soon as she had started after Jan, along the way the innkeep had claimed he was seen riding, the Sword of Cho had begun to quiver again. Just as it had when it first led her to Jan’s prison in the fortress of the Crimson Queen, and so she at least could be certain that he had not doubled back or tried to mislead her. He truly was journeying into the Frostlands, as mad as that seemed.
Cho Lin emerged from the Bones onto a wide snowy plain bounded far to the east and west by dark forests. The sky here seemed to be a deeper shade of blue than in the south, and though the sun did little to warm her, it was so bright she had trouble staring into the distance, the glare reflecting upon the snow making her eyes water. If she squinted, though, she could see mountains far ahead, soaring and ice-capped, even more formidable than what she had just passed through, their peaks draped with ragged streamers of clouds like silken prayer flags.
The landscape was so monotonous that at first she thought the corpses were a mirage. She glimpsed them as she crested a small rise, a speckling of dark shapes sprawled in the snow below. From this distance she couldn’t see exactly how many, but as she approached, her horse carefully picking its way down the broken scree of the slope, the scale of the slaughter became apparent. There were dozens of bodies, perhaps as many as fifty, and it looked to her from where they had fallen that they had been cut down while trying to flee. A few had made it some distance from where most of the others had been killed, and Cho Lin’s eyes were drawn to a young woman lying face down in the snow. Her long yellow hair was matted with blood, and she clutched the hand of a small boy who was half-buried in the snow.
Cho Lin slid from her saddle and approached the dead woman and the child. A cold wind gusted, rippling the furs that swaddled the bodies. She crouched beside the corpses, noticing the ragged cut in the woman’s cloak—someone had stabbed her from behind before bashing in her head. Cho Lin didn’t want to examine the boy to see how he had died—the mere fact that someone had murdered a helpless child was sickening enough. In Shan, conflicts between the great houses were settled by armies of professional soldiers, and retribution was never taken upon commoners, even if their village or town had supported a rival lord. A massacre of innocents like this would certainly incur the displeasure of Heaven.
The wind gradually faded as she knelt there, the feel of it prickling her exposed skin subsiding… but to her surprise, its mournful cry persisted. It even seemed to strengthen. She glanced up in confusion—that sound was not the wind. As she did this, she saw a shape that had been hunched among the corpses rise, turning towards her. Cho Lin cried out, scrambling to her feet. Her horse seemed to notice her alarm, or perhaps it suddenly scented something strange, as it whickered uneasily and stamped its feet in the snow.
For a brief moment Cho Lin thought the scavenger was a man clad in some strange pebbled hides, but she quickly realized her error as the thing began to lope in her direction. It moved with the fluid grace of a predator despite its stunted legs, its arms so long and knobby that its taloned hands nearly brushed the snow. Its skin was scabrous, a mottled gray that was almost lizard-like, and stretched so taut over its bones that she could see its ribs clearly.
She had heard of these creatures, though like most in Shan she’d thought them to be myth. Gaitunpan—ghost apes of the snow. Cho Lin shrugged out of her heavy furs so that she could move more easily and drew her butterfly swords. She cut the air in a quick pattern, trying to warm her stiff arms and wrists, and breathed deep, reaching towards the Nothing.
The creature rushing at her made a harsh keening sound, and behind it, among the scattered corpses, another half-dozen monstrous heads suddenly rose. By the Four Winds, Cho Lin thought, her jaw clenching, trying to calm the flutter of her heart and stay focused on the Nothing. Of course it couldn’t only be the one.
The ghost ape flowed across the tundra towards her, barely breaking the surface of the snow despite its height—it would have towered over any man, she realized, yet it was so gaunt it almost seemed to bend inward, its sunken chest devoid of muscle. From the quickness with which it moved and the length of its blue talons Cho Lin was certain it could still tear her apart if it caught her.
She lifted her swords and waited as it rushed closer.
It keened again, its breath ghosting the frigid air. She glimpsed jagged fangs jutting at odd angles and red slitted eyes.
Then it struck. Talons curved like raptor claws lashed out, seeking her throat. It was fast, but time itself seemed to congeal around her as Cho Lin grasped tight to the Nothing. She snapped her head back and twisted away, the talons carving the air less than a span from her neck. With one of her swords she slashed the ghost ape’s side, leaving a line of black ichor across its ribs, and with the other she cut at the creature’s extended arm. Flesh and bone parted, split, and the monster reeled away clutching a stump that ended just above where its hand had been.
Black blood spurted; Cho Lin felt it speckle her face in hot droplets as the ghost ape stumbled back. The taste was bitter on her lips. She followed the creature, swords flickering, opening up more wounds. It fell to one knee in the snow, cradling the ruin of its arm, and managed to raise its face to the sky and begin a miserable crooning just before she severed its head.
As it toppled to the side, six more of the monsters were revealed behind it, rushing across the snow, only moments from reaching her.
She gave in to instinct. This was not a swordfight, so much of her training was useless. She could not parry or block or use the momentum of her enemies to her advantage. Despite long sessions learning how to fight multiple foes, nothing she had done had prepared her for this.
They came at her from several angles, claws flashing. Cho Lin whirled closer to one of the creatures and slashed its throat, then slipped behind it in one quick motion as it sank to its knees. She tried to use the dying creature as a shield, keeping it between her and the rest of the pack, and the ghost apes hesitated, hissing in confusion. Two of the monsters apparently decided they wanted no part of her and instead swarmed her horse. Why hadn’t it bolted? The poor thing must have been frozen with fright. Her horse’s death cry was high and piercing and mercifully ended quickly as they tore into its flesh.
The remaining three edged closer, trying to circle around the dying ghost ape, which was clutching its ravaged neck as blood leaked from between its talons to stain the snow. Then, as if an unspoken agreement had passed between them, the
ghost apes rushed at her screeching with talons outstretched. Cho Lin backpedaled furiously, her boot slipping on the snow, and she had to drop one of her swords and throw her hand out to catch herself so she wouldn’t land on her back.
Blue death arced towards her. Cho Lin rolled to the side and back to her feet as the talons gouged the snow where she had been a moment before. The ghost ape followed her and she lashed out wildly, trying to keep it from coming so close that she couldn’t dodge when next it tried to grab her with its claws. Her sword caught its hand and several of the curving raptor claws were sliced away; the monster reeled back, shrieking in pain, more black blood jetting from the wounds.
She sensed movement behind her and a weight slammed into her, sending her sprawling forward, lines of fire opening up across her back. Her remaining sword was jarred from her hand and as she fell she focused on the carvings in the tumbling handle, straining for them, trying to pluck it out of the air as time moved honey-slow around her… Her fingers brushed ivory and then the sword was beyond her reach and the monsters were closing on her, incensed, a shifting mass of gray hide and blue talons and red tongues lolling between yellowed fangs.
Cho Lin struck the ground and rolled, throwing out her arms in a desperate bid to ward off the creatures. She screamed, not in fear but in rage that this was how the end would come, reduced to food for these monstrous things. Distended slavering jaws would close around her outstretched hand in moments; she would thrust her fingers so far down its throat it would either choke or she’d grab its heart and squeeze until it burst…
No teeth or talons ripped into her. The closest ghost ape stood over her swaying, staring at a tapering black point that had emerged from its chest. Its slitted red eyes blinked in confusion, and then another arrow took it in the neck in a spray of black blood. The monster fell over.