by William King
Rik inspected another body, that of a grizzled oldster, long bearded, lined of face. His eyes and mouth were wide. His tongue protruded. A faint trickle of blood stained the corners of his lips and his nostrils. His skin had an odd pinkish tinge, like that of a man who had spent too long in a very hot bath, except that the discolouration showed no signs of fading. Rik prodded the body with his boot, not wanting to touch it with the flesh of his own hands, in case somehow, death should prove contagious.
The mansion had been filled with armed men. Aside from a few who had survived the massacre on the lower floor not a single one of them remained alive. Most had died by sorcery. The Crimson Shadows had sucked the life out of them. Why had they taken some and not others? There did not seem to be any logic to it.
Revulsion twisted Rik’s stomach as he looked at this evidence of uncanny magic, revulsion and something else. Here was a type of power he had always coveted.
Would he really want power like this? No, shrieked most of his being. But in one small, sick, ambitious corner of his mind, he knew the answer was yes. To have such power, even at peril of his soul, would be an awesome thing.
The squad fell to discussing their spoils. As ever they were not nearly enough for the risks run. A few minutes later, Sardec returned. His face was icy calm, a sure sign that the Terrarch was enraged. The soldiers all shrank away from him, even the Barbarian. Rik fought to stop himself from flinching. He would be the most likely butt of the Lieutenant’s anger.
“No wizard,” he said, giving the guide a glare. “No Zarahel -- just a bunch of stinking tribesmen.”
“He was here, master,” said Vosh. “They both were.”
“You swore they would be here,” said the Lieutenant.
“Maybe they are nearby. Maybe they are in the mine.”
“The mine? Where is it?”
“The shaft in the hillside. The sorcerer had it dug. God only knows why. The place is haunted.”
“Maybe that was why they were interested in it,” said Sardec. “Why did you not mention they could be there before?”
“Why should I have? They were here. They were always here at night.”
“Well, they quite plainly are not now. Maybe they got wind of our coming. How far to this mine?”
“It’s on the hillside above us. I will take you there in the morning.”
“Our friends could be leagues away by then.”
“Aye, master, they could, but in that case tracking them will be easier by daylight.”
Sardec looked as if he might strike the man for a moment, but then took a deep breath and spoke, “Sergeant! Begin clearing these corpses from the house. May as well give the wyrms something to eat. You!” he pointed directly at Rik. “See that they are fed.”
No one complained. It would be easier work than building a pyre.
Rik watched snowflakes fall onto the lake. Nearby the wyrms waited. He wondered whether it was just his imagination or whether they had oddly replete expressions on their faces. The other Foragers were inside wrapped in their blankets against the cold. The Lieutenant was upstairs. He had summoned Weasel to interrogate the prisoners, a task for which the poacher had a talent and which he performed with no particular gentleness.
The screams had made sleep difficult to come by for some time. Rik wondered what Sardec had found out. Doubtless the Lieutenant would choose to share his discoveries in his own sweet time. And if he would not, Weasel would, if he had not figured out some way to profit from the situation.
The groans of the wounded were not conducive to rest. Casualties had been light but still there were some. There always were. And at the moment the dazed looking Master Severin seemed in no condition to heal them.
Some of the few surviving hill-men were wounded too but they either shut up or were put out of their misery. The Foragers did not have a lot of sympathy for the hill tribes. They’d heard too many of the stories of what the mountain men did to soldiers they captured. Woe to the vanquished indeed, thought Rik.
He had volunteered to swap Pigeon this watch because he wanted time to think. He needed less sleep than normal men anyway, and it was a favour Pigeon would owe him.
What he thought about mostly were the Crimson Shadows. It was the first time he had witnessed such a wholesale use of devastating magical power from so close a range.
It showed him how the Terrarchs could dominate a civilisation where men outnumbered them a hundred to one. He thought about the corpses of those who died from the Shadows’ attack, their skins stained a strange red, blood running from their noses and the corners of their mouth. The Shadows were a lesson to those who opposed the Terrarchs as well as a weapon.
What would it be like to wield such power, he wondered? He would most likely never know. The Old Witch had told that such sorceries drove most men mad or warped them physically to the point of death. Human beings were not meant to wield such potent magic. But then, he was only half human. If he tried, which side of his nature would win out? It would be the ultimate test of what he was.
He did not like to dwell on what the results of that test might show, so he tried to shift his thoughts to something else, to their mission.
They had been sent pretty much across the border to find some wizard who was supposed to be holed up here along with a tribal religious leader. They had come armed and equipped to take on much more than they had encountered. They had brought a wizard and enough wyrms to rout a troop of hussars. Clearly someone somewhere thought this was important.
And what had they found? Not a thing so far. Just a ruined city, a bunch of scared hill-men and talk of a haunted mine.
It was stranger yet, he thought. They were along the border with Kharadrea, and more and more Royal troops were being sent to Redtower. There could only be one reason for that. The Kharadreans would not be mad enough to invade the Realm, particularly not while fighting a murderous civil war against each other. Talorea planned some form of intervention, a thing specifically prohibited to both it and the Dark Empire by the Treaty of Oslande. It would mean war, and not just with the Kharadreans if Realm troops marched through Broken Tooth Pass; war on a scale that had not been seen in over a century.
Rik was not sure how he felt about the prospect of war in the East. It would mean plenty of plunder, and that was something of which every soldier dreamed, but it might also mean facing the massive slave armies of the Dark Empire. Those Terrarchs were not kind to humans who dared oppose them. During the schism, they had crucified regiments of men they had defeated, as a lesson to those who thought to resist them.
All manner of tales were told of the vile sorceries of the East. Rik had read about the previous wars. That had been bad enough. This one could only be worse. Alchemy and gunnery had progressed a great deal since then, and who knew what the mad wizards of Askander could do now? There were whispered tales about the necromancy and vampirism practised by the Terrarchs of the forbidden land. All he knew was that the Exalted loathed their estranged kin with a hatred religious in its intensity. What was it drove them to that, he wondered?
He shook his head and stared at the lake once more. Its surface was grey and dappled. He had let his thoughts stray a long way. He flinched. Somewhere on the far side, he thought he saw a light. It flickered and vanished, and he waited for a minute or two to see if it would reappear. When it did not, he decided he had better report the matter.
Sergeant Hef was not best pleased with being dragged from his bed to come and look for a light that was no longer there, but he was a good enough soldier to know that it might be important. He woke Pigeon and sent him off to get Vosh and find out where the mine was. The guide appeared and confirmed that it lay in the general direction in which Rik had seen the light. Unfortunately his presence brought the Lieutenant.
Sardec stared into the lightening gloom through his telescope, trusting to his Terrarch night vision to let him see what the others had not. He found no satisfaction in it though and turned his glance back gloomily towar
ds the men of his command. He glared at Rik.
“Apparently you saw nothing,” he said. There was accusation in his tone and Rik saw another punishment detail coming.
“Perhaps he did, sir, but it’s gone now…” said Sergeant Hef. “Better to be woken by an alert sentry than have our throats slit because he was asleep.”
Not even Sardec could disagree with that. “I will feel happier when we have investigated this mine, Sergeant,” Sardec said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And happier yet when we find this wizard. There is a stink of sorcery about all this that I dislike.”
That was the first thing Rik had heard Sardec say in a long time with which he could unequivocally agree.
“And speaking of wizards, find out if Master Severin has fully recovered yet. We might need his skills before all of this is over.”
“Very good, sir.”
The Sergeant sent Pigeon on his way and followed the Lieutenant back inside. Rik returned to his sentry duties, his greatcoat buttoned tight against the cold. He really wished now that he had time to loot some of those corpses of clothing. Some of it might well have fitted him, and even if it had not, another layer would not have gone amiss in this chill.
Dawn came. Rik marched along with the others. He clutched his rifle and looked out at the lake. In the early morning light there was something about it that made him deeply uneasy; a suggestion of oiliness about the water and stillness and…watchfulness.
He felt like at any moment something might emerge from the depths and attack them, something ancient, evil and inhuman. It was all too easy to imagine strange shapes swimming around through the ruins of those submerged buildings. He told himself that they were too far from the ocean for the squid-like Quan ever to have had a presence here.
He had always feared them more than any other species of demon. There had been one priest at the orphanage, an ex-sailor who had terrified all the children with tales of massive tentacled shapes rising from the moon-lit sea. Those stories had stuck in Rik’s mind.
Foragers moved in dispersed formation all along the slope leading to the mine entrance. They were taking no chance of missing anything or of being easy prey to anybody who might start sniping at them. He wished he had been one of the forty men who had been chosen to remain at the mansion with Corporal Toby and the wyrms but Sardec had ensured he was not. That seemed to be the way of things these days. Come to think of it, it always had.
“Look at that,” said Weasel. Rik followed the direction of his nod. A half-tumbled column lay in the water. Its sides were smooth and covered in strange runes. Some of them suggested heads with masses of tentacles emerging from them, others webs, other spiders. The column was chipped and weather worn. If you looked closely there were others like it visible just beneath the surface of the waters.
Rik wondered what had once been here; a temple of some sorts to the old gods perhaps, to Uran Ultar himself. The material looked like no stone he had ever seen. It was smooth and shiny almost like glass or perhaps the carapace of some large beetle. Just looking at it made him nervous. Those runes seemed to have a hungry life of their own. He told himself it was just his imagination, but couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it.
“That’s Elder World work,” said Leon. Superstitious fear was evident in his voice. Rik nodded and shuffled uneasily upslope. He had no desire to get any closer to those columns than where he was now. They were things from the dark ages before the coming of the Terrarchs. Some of them were older than the human race. Often in the bad old days, such relics had been places of sacrifice.
“Excellent,” Rik said. “Dark wizards, Zarahel the Prophet and now Elder World runes. Why do I feel there is some connection?”
“Maybe it’s just coincidence,” said Leon.
“Let us hope so.”
“I don’t like this at all,” said Leon, rolling the unlit pipe to the far corner of his mouth and making an odd whistling noise through it. His huge eyes stood out in his thin features. Fear was etched there. Master Severin looked at them. He did not seem quite fully recovered from last night. There was a weariness and languidness about him that they had not noticed before. It was as if the magic he had unleashed had drained the strength from him.
“What have you found?” Severin asked. Haughty contempt was evident in every word. Weasel gestured towards the column where it lay in the waters. Rik guessed the scum on its side made it invisible from no great distance. Severin's shining mask reflected the murky water.
“Ultari obelisk,” he said. A thoughtful smile spread across his face. He looked more like a dreamy scholar than a Terrarch officer. “A small one.”
“Ultari, sir?” said Leon.
“One of the Elder Races. The Book of Iskarus claims they were all but exterminated by the Serpent Men in the Dark Millennia and that only decadent remnants survived into this age of the world. Those were wiped out during the Conquest along with the humans foolish enough to worship them. They used humans as food, you know.” The wizard glanced up at them, and then seemed to realise who he had been talking to and clamped his mouth firmly shut. He turned on his heel and gestured for them to move on. The guide paused for a minute, made some sort of obeisance before the column and moved on.
“See that?” said Leon as they moved on. “Looks like the hill-man worships the Old Gods.”
Rik thought it not unlikely. The Terrarch faith had never really taken root up here from what he had heard. Many still followed the old ways. He wondered at the way the mage had spoken. There was so much the Terrarchs kept to themselves. Of course, that was just one of the ways they preserved their power. He felt put down though, as if the wizard had been deliberately showing off the knowledge he had, and they did not.
Ahead of him now he could see the entrance to the mine. It yawned, dark as the mouth of hell in the cold mountainside. Lieutenant Sardec waited there impatiently with the rest of the troops; as ever his gaze seemed fixed on Rik.
Chapter Six
Rik looked through the archway. The tunnel led down into darkness. A strange fusty smell came from it, a mingling of rotten wood, dampness and something else. There were signs that someone had been here recently. He did not need to be able to track as well as Weasel to see that. The prints were there for everyone to see. Almost new wooden props held up the ceiling. Wooden buckets were stacked near the entrance. Here and there lay the hafts of old pickaxes. The heads had been too valuable to leave.
“This looks new,” said Sergeant Hef. He came from Agaline, to the west of the Realm, rough hill country famous for its mines. He had dug coal before he had gone for a soldier. Claimed he was grateful for the Queen’s crown every day it kept him above ground. Rik suspected he was not joking either.
“Somebody went down there,” said Weasel.
“Why?” said Sardec. “What’s down there?”
His eye was fixed on the hill-man. The guide shrugged. “The wizard ordered it dug. It’s haunted.”
There was real fear written on his face, and audible in his voice. “By what?” Sardec asked.
“Ghosts?” suggested Weasel.
“By something. Something that killed miners in the dark. Some said it was a demon. That’s why we started using slaves.”
“And yet this wizard and his friend the Prophet came here. Recently, by the looks of it.”
“Sounds about the right place for them, sir,” said Weasel. “Maybe they came to bind the demons.”
“I suggest you leave the magic to Master Severin.”
“Gladly, sir.”
Sardec smiled sourly. “Do you have any ideas, Master Severin?”
The wizard cocked his head to one side. “There is something very odd here. Spells have been cast deep within this mine. Magic of a type I am not familiar with. And there’s something else at work here, something very subtle. It made my spell go awry last night.”
Sardec’s cold smile widened, as if he thought the wizard was making excuses. “Vosh, anything t
o add?”
“The wizard, the dark wizard, ordered the mine dug here. Our people would not have done it, but they were afraid of him and what he might do. He kept them digging, down into the dark. They opened up old ways. Then he just ordered them to stop. It seemed like he had found what he was looking for. The prisoners were sent down and never came back up. No one ever saw them again. After that the wizard spent many a day down there. Sometimes the Prophet went with him.”
Rik listened carefully. He thought he heard strange groaning sounds deep within the mine. He was not the only one. Sardec looked up.
“It’s just the earth settling and props creaking,” Sergeant Hef said. “Nothing to worry about. Not much.”
Sardec looked troubled, Rik thought. His eyes were fixed on the mine and the low ceiling once more. Rik just knew he was thinking about sending the whole bunch of them down into the dark. He seemed to read Rik’s mind. He looked back at them and swiftly chose ten of them to accompany him. Sergeant Hef was to remain on the surface and stop anybody getting away that might slip by them.
“Sir,” said Leon who was one of the chosen ten. He looked extraordinarily young and nervous. “There is a wizard down there. And maybe a demon too.”
“You can trust in my magic,” said Master Severin.
Sardec unsheathed his truesilver blade. “And if that does not work, this will kill anything — wizard, demon or man,” he said.
“Too bad we don’t all have them then,” muttered Weasel so low that only Rik and the Barbarian could hear. Rik checked the elder signs hanging around his neck. He saw others doing the same; not all of them were men who had been chosen to go below.
The light of Sardec’s lantern pierced the gloom. The Lieutenant slouched low, too tall for corridors that had been built for shorter men. His blade glittered eerily in the light. His eyes were feverishly bright.