chapter twenty-three
Newfallen snow crunched beneath Anilya’s boots. The dead lay scattered around the wall—acceptable and well-planned losses in exchange for what she sought. Even the Nar had performed their duties well, buying into her tale of the risen prince and a newfound Narfell. Only the Creel had such ambition, and she had approached them fully confidant that they would believe her tale. They had followed her across plain and Cold Road to the gates of Shandaular, fearless zealots in search of destiny.
“Pity the entire tribe wasn’t as foolish,” she muttered and recalled the destruction of the wychlaren wards, how well it had reminded the unwitting hathrans of the true nature of the city they had chosen to entrap themselves within. As Rashemi magic failed, the Shield resumed its nightly course with a vengeance through once protected halls. Outnumbered and unprepared for the curse within the walls, all had gone mostly as expected. Except for Ohriman. She sighed, missing the tiefling’s company with a passing fondness. The Breath flashed pulses of cold up her arm as she neared the entrance to the northwest tower, making her forget the fallen assassin completely.
Howls and cries still reached her from within the guard tower—the actual battle unseen for the raving wraiths’ dark forms. The vremyonni, exile or not, had resisted her far more than she had expected, but his presence, and the company that it had brought, had proven a boon beyond measure. Her foray into Rashemen, posing as a traveling hathran to infiltrate the Running Rocks, had yielded more than she had hoped for and yet far less than what she needed. Finding the Breath without one of the hathrans’ pet wizards was not a task she had looked forward to, but then Bastun had appeared and performed admirably.
His voice and that of Thaena’s could be heard above the din behind her, hurling spells at the restless dead. The Rashemi fervor for battle was curious to her in light of their inaction against the enemies that surrounded them. Only when faced by the threats they feared did they do something other than watch and wait for the next invasion of their precious homeland. Shaking her head, she ignored the end of her convenient allies and looked instead to the task at hand.
She studied the blade of the Breath, marveling at the intricate patterns entwined along its length. Ilythiiri runes dominated much of the pattern, the long-forgotten elves’ brand of magic as of yet unfamiliar to her, but its effects on the history of the world unmistakable. By magic and ambition their nation was thrown into ruin, forced into the deep of the Underdark. The origins of the drow echoed in some small part of the blade she carried and no doubt thundered through the folly of King Arkaius in the sealed chamber above.
A hoarse whispering caught her attention, and she paused on the threshold of the tower. With a wave and a word she struck the vibrating chords of the Weave and felt magic sing through the air around her. Snowflakes pulled together, gathering in clumps, compressing themselves into shards of ice that hovered and waited by her command. At a single nod she hurled them through the doorway and heard them shatter and crack.
A sharp smell of death on a winter wind wafted from within and spoke of the silence and relative peace that awaited her. Satisfied that she would remain unmolested by any remaining Creel or the self-important shamans that led them, she entered the tower and instantly felt a charge in the air. Gooseflesh rose on her skin, and the Breath tugged at her wrist like an excited child. The first steps of a frost-shrouded stairway on her left led upward into a forbidding dark. The sword begged to be taken to its place, to the lock upon the door to which it alone was the key. Peering intently at the crossguard, she sensed a sentience inside the weapon, hidden thoughts slipping beyond her scrutiny.
Giving the sword its lead, she followed, holding on to its cold as she took the first step and breathed in a scent of power.
Bastun could number them now, counting as he did through the sweat and pain, desperately seeking the energy to keep moving. A dagger in his hand glowed a dull red as it slashed through the twisting face of a diving wraith. It felt solid only for a moment, like stabbing into loose sand being washed away by a strong tide.
“Six,” he muttered, then, “Five.”
Syrolf took another, his blade trailing shreds of shadow as shrieks faded to whistling on the wind. The remaining Rashemi numbered five as well, a handful of berserkers panting and heaving with each weary swing. Their famed bloodlust was cut short by the cold touch of the howling spirits. Bastun staggered along the wall, intent on following the durthan. The wraiths moved to stop his escape, the fighting Rashemi in their wake.
He slumped against the stone, catching his breath and reaching within for the strength to cast another spell. More bodies littered the floor, now visible as the wraiths’ ranks dwindled. From across the chamber, heart-wrenching sobs reached his ears and he tried not to see her falling over the prone form.
Thaena had found her guardian and had broken. Her mask flung to the ground, her tears fell over Duras’s face, streaming down his cheeks. The sorrow in her eyes bordered on madness. She paid no mind to the wraiths or her fallen fang. She had not seen the return and escape of the durthan. Nothing mattered to her save the love lost and all that had lain unresolved between them.
Bastun saw himself, saw the body of Keffrass, and felt the grief of that passing. He imagined his own body lying in the several places he should have died in his long path to this stretch of wall. There were no tears to pave his way into the afterlife. The empty well within him, the void he felt himself becoming, surged with something as he felt himself disgusted with the mere notion of self-pity.
He pushed away from the wall, slashing and cutting at spirits that flew too near, his other hand tracing intricate symbols in quick graceful movements as he chanted.
Four, he thought as a wraith was spitted on the blade of a berserker.
The young man’s face was yet another familiar stranger, his name a mystery, though Bastun was sure he’d heard it spoken once or twice. It was a trait that he loathed finding in himself, but he did not dwell on the shortcoming.
His pulled a fistful of dust from within his robes. Scattering it on the ground in a rough circle he willed the words of his spell into each particle. Dust became a brown mist, darkening to a deep umber and rising with a crackling noise. The spinning storm of magic lashed out at the wraiths, pulling them in and tearing at their forms. It grew and spread, hiding them all within its folds. The Rashemi watched suspiciously, backing away from the thundering magic.
As it consumed the undead and tore them apart, Bastun heard a quiet scratching at the floor. One warrior, one of the first to fall when darkness had claimed the chamber, lay pale and drained nearby. The vremyonni watched in horror as the body’s fingers twitched and splayed. He felt sick as a similar noise arose behind him and then again far to his left.
The dying breath of a fallen warrior nearby hissed away slowly, steaming in the cold air for a moment before ceasing. Within an arm’s length of the dead man, ice shattered and popped as the ancient prince of Narfell clenched a clawed fist.
Bile rose in Bastun’s throat and he swayed away from the thinning cloud, its shrieking burden destroyed and leaving only the scent of decay. His eyes rolled as he turned from one corpse to the next, noting signs of movement or growing shadow.
“The dead are defeated,” he mumbled, recalling passages from the notes of Keffrass concerning the Shield’s peculiar curse. Only now did the obscure ideas and discoveries he had studied fully make sense as he added, “And long live the dead.”
He met the blank stare of Thaena from across the room. The light of her eyes was gone, and for a moment he feared that she too had joined the ranks of the walking dead. Faint puffs of steam still escaped her parted lips. Duras lay cradled in her arms, thankfully peaceful for the quiet death that ordinary steel had given him.
Finding his balance, Bastun shook his head and picked up a discarded sword.
A groan rang in the air. Dark translucent hands peeled away from one of the bodies followed by a thin arm and the wispy trappi
ngs of a desecrated soul. Movement forced stale air from the lungs of another wraith still trapped in flesh, its horrid wail of grisly birth echoing through the short-lived silence. As newborn wraiths crawled from Rashemi corpses, Bastun realized not all of their previous adversaries had been of the Creel—some had likely been of the Rashemi, of those fallen far below in the entrance hall and left to rot.
Familiar strangers, the faces without names, shuffled off the coils of death to haunt him anew. The point of his sword raised slowly, ready to end himself for fallen friends and with acquaintances never made. A hand pushed against the center of his chest, and he started as Syrolf appeared in front of him, looking over his shoulder.
“Go,” the warrior said, his grumbling voice now even more so. “Stop the durthan.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “It’s too late, I—”
“It’s only too late if you’ve decided to quit,” Syrolf said. “I don’t know what she’s planning, but I’d rather not die knowing she succeeded.”
Bastun took a step backward, staring at the rising dead, at the weary warriors that hacked at writhing bodies and insubstantial spirits. Their ethran stirred slowly, her attention torn between Duras and her duty. She took up her discarded mask loosely in her hand and stared at it as if betrayed. The bones beneath Serevan’s white armor cracked as he tried to rise, straining at the ice that had frozen him to the stone.
The vremyonni’s boot crunched on snow. Flakes fell on his shoulders and hair. He realized that despite all, he was leaving. Logic drifted to the surface of his thoughts, and reluctantly he latched himself to it, filling his willpower with what must be done. He would leave his comrades to die and commit himself to the duty of a vremyonni.
As he turned away, the image of Anilya, gripping the Breath and walking toward the northwest tower, burned itself into his mind.
Each step upward felt like a step backward. Anilya almost glanced over her shoulder, imagining reflections of herself walking away, staring up, her own eyes fixed on her back. Though she progressed forward, time seemed to move in reverse. The ice grew thicker, each stair more dangerous and misshapen than the last. Man-made walls disappeared beneath a frozen façade, a wintry cavern likely un-tread by the living since its creation. Blurry faces rested just beneath the surface, their mouths open in quiet screams, their weapons dropped in pursuit of escape and caught before hitting the stone. Soldiers of old Narfell, perhaps trusted officers or supporters of Serevan’s ambition, had been the first to realize their mistake.
The farther she ascended, the less human these faces appeared. Hideous sculptures spanned clawed arms from one wall to the other. Insectile mandibles framed open jaws teeming with needle-sharp fangs. Long, barbed tails rose to the ceiling, hovering over fleeing prey. There was no flesh beneath these images; the trapped fiends seemed frozen only in spirit or presence.
The Breath trembled in her grip, pulling her faster. Its blade gleamed with a white torrent, the image of a blinding blizzard in waves of steel. She shivered as what little light behind her was swallowed in a slow, hesitant darkness. Stone and ice bruised as the ghostly children kept pace with her, but they did not approach the sword in her hand. Bright eyes darted in and out of those shadows, fearful to see and unable to look away.
Cautiously she turned sideways, pointing the Breath at them as she continued climbing. They slowed but maintained their morbid vigil. The stairway grew colder, the ice more jagged, and the children stopped. Their shadows retreated. Anilya felt as though she stood over an immense gulf. Shaking, she turned and stared briefly into the heart of a limitless abyss.
She averted her eyes, doubling over as the wind was stolen from her lungs. Gasping for air, she focused her eyes on the edges of the black doorway. Carved into an arch, it was a likeness of the city’s shattered portal in shape only. The runes here were like those upon the Breath—Ilythiiri and human magic merged by the hands of King Arkaius. The elven symbols, once laid separate from the human ones, now locked themselves in crude knots. They seemed to writhe in the stone, wrestling one another for dominance of the pattern. Neither could win the arcane contest, but the magic stored in that struggle pulsed outward, threatening to stop the durthan’s heart completely.
Regaining control of herself, she straightened her back and shifted her eyes to the doorway itself. It was not black nor any shade of any color. It was a lack of light, a nothingness that looked back at her with a hungry, dark eye. She sensed the Weave bending and warping through the doorway, but not breaking, only changing as it rippled outward through the Shield and across to the edges of the city. Such was the disturbance she had detected in Shandaular’s streets, the curse that had made the City of Weeping Ghosts.
Her arm rose of its own accord. Though she willed the action, the Breath at that moment wielded her as much as she wielded it. Flashes of pain and anger tore through her thoughts, as if a second mind were supplanting her intentions with its own. The Breath, the key to the Word, pierced the black veil and sank into its limitless depth. The steel was swallowed to the hilt, and her fingers brushed against the terrible dark. Countless words, screams, cries, whispers, and deaths flooded her senses, blinding her and leaving her deaf for several moments.
Spots of brightness pocked her vision as it returned. A faltering step echoed in her ears like thunder in the sudden silence. The Breath lay heavy and inert at her side, its prodding and trembling gone. Its point lay upon the floor, though she had no recollection of lowering the sword. The door stood open, its breathtaking darkness now replaced by rusted black iron. Gazing beyond, she stepped forward, the spent Breath dragging behind her, and entered the Word.
Bastun followed the footsteps of the durthan, past the dead, through churned snow, toward the northwest tower. The unnatural fever lessened a bit, the ring on his finger cooling as he left Serevan behind him, but it throbbed as he neared the source of Shandaular’s woe. Weakness and fatigue clung to the hem of his robes, staggering his step slightly. His legs ached, his injuries screamed for rest, yet the path of Anilya drew him on. He needed to look upon her with eyes that knew what she had done—what she would soon do.
He fell against the door frame, wincing as the ring renewed its aura of heat. He fought the urge to throw off his cloak and cool himself. The death that hid in winter’s grip was a trickster, fooling the mind into an irrational fever. Though heat radiated from him and the ring, distorting all he saw through a filter of undulating mirage, he would not risk the dangers of exposure. He contemplated the ring itself, sensing its importance but unsure of its true purpose. It was a secret neither Athumrani nor Arkaius—or even Keffrass—had written of, and he feared bringing it too close to the Word.
Something slippery caught his boot, and he lost his balance, sliding down to his hands. He swore and rose carefully to his feet. Gleaming in the half-light of stars and the burning embers of dying torches, his hands were covered in something dark and sticky. Nearby lay the source. Bent double and surrounded by a pool of blood, the corpse of a Creel shaman had been left tangled within shredded robes. His gray hair was matted to the floor, one dry bone charm crushed into the stones.
Leading away from the scene, with nary a quickened pace nor sign of struggle, were the bloody footprints of his quarry.
Another old man in her path, he thought, cut down and left for dead.
His eyes widened as the air was pulled from his lungs. As he struggled to breathe, the ring flared with energy. Pain shot through his arm, covering his body and causing him to fall upon the steps. Darkness rolled past him from the stairway, devouring sight, breath, and all sense of time or place. His squeezed his eyes shut. Unbearable waves of heat churned in his gut like molten iron. He feared opening his eyes, afraid to find his hands charred and bleeding, his flesh sizzling and steaming against the icy stone beneath him. He knew, without having to see for himself, that the Breath had been used and the seal upon the Word had been broken.
The dark passed and the pain faded. Air flowed b
ack into his chest, bitingly cold, and his teeth chattered as he opened his eyes. His skin was unharmed. The flames he imagined were invisible, the ash and char only in his mind. He sensed eyes upon him and turned his head toward the top of the next flight of stairs.
She stood quietly, a blank expression on her face. Sorrow had left, leaving only deep emptiness and resignation. Athumrani’s daughter stared down upon him with eyes that matched the misery of her cursed existence. Her ghostly brothers and sister swirled around her frantically, though she remained unaffected by their madness. Ashen chains smashed and crumbled against the walls, crawling toward him as slow and shaking tendrils. Staring into her bright eyes, he knew she could see the spark of madness that resided within him. He could not blame her for not stopping her cursed siblings.
As the chains neared, brushing against his fingers, the little girl wavered. Her body shook horribly, blinking in and out of sight. The children wailed as they were drawn into her strange fit, and the shadowy chains receded. With a final glance, he saw in her eyes a hint of hope, a tenuous trust that he could only attribute to her familiarity with the mask he wore. The shadows faded into the walls, soaking into stone and ice until all trace was gone. Taking a deep breath, he crawled upward on hands and knees. He cursed Serevan for the pains he had inflicted upon the children, the Seven of the Firedawn Cycle.
As if summoned, the ancient song flitted through his thoughts, and he wondered at the words that came to mind.
The Nentyarch’s son, by sword and curse, to tower-tall he strides,
At morning light, for Breath and Word, still there his fury came;
Though cold he found among the fire, he mourned forgotten Flame.
Ice melted at his touch as he crawled up the stairs. The walls dripped as he passed and froze again when he was gone. The Firedawn Cycle, the last passages of Shandaular’s fall and the beginning of Narfell’s epic rise to power and destructive war with Raumathar, sang over and over again in his head. There were many hidden bits of wisdom in the old song, such that even the oldest living othlors did not fully understand them all. Secrets of Rashemen’s past were said to be revealed only to those who were ready to know.
The Shield of Weeping Ghosts Page 26