by Dan Abnett
Nagaira led the cowled procession quickly and assuredly through a series of courtyards and execution grounds, swiftly leaving the more-populated precincts of the fortress behind for a region that showed signs of progressive abandonment. The farther they went, the more desolate and decrepit the surroundings appeared. They crossed over cracked, vine-covered flagstones and under leaning piles of rock that used to be walls or spires. At one point they were forced to climb over a pile of broken stone that was all that remained of a span linking two old towers. Small creatures scuttled through the shadows around them. At one point, traversing a larger, overgrown courtyard, something large hissed a warning at them from a pile of vine-covered rubbish. The druchii levelled their crossbows, but Nagaira waved impatiently for them to continue.
After a time, the raiders reached a section of the fortress that had clearly been abandoned for many decades. Crossing through a doorway stained with mould, Malus found himself in a large, rectangular space dominated by what appeared to be a huge hearth. After a moment he realised that he was standing in an old forge — the bellows and other wooden tools had long since rotted away.
Suddenly there was a flare of blue-green light; one of Nagaira’s retainers handed her a shuttered lantern burning with pale witchfire. She held it aloft and turned in a quick circle, gaining her bearings. “There,”
she said, pointing to a corner of the room. “Shift the rubbish aside. You’ll find a trap door.”
For a moment, no one moved. Nagaira and her rogues eyed Malus and his band.
“Tired already?” Malus sneered, impatient at the petty contest of wills. “Very well. Virhan, Eirus — open the trapdoor.” The men moved at once, throwing black looks at their erstwhile allies. Aided by Nagaira’s lantern, the two retainers quickly located a pair of iron rings set into the floor. After several minutes’ effort, they managed to heave one of the doors open with a shriek of rusted hinges. Below was a nearly perfect circular tunnel that sank like a well deep into the earth.
According to legend, the burrows had been made several hundred years after the Hag was first built. One winter the earth trembled beneath the castle from sundown to sunrise each night. Flagstones heaved and sank and towers swayed beneath the moon. Nobles and slaves brave enough to venture into the castle cellars claimed to have heard a slow, deep groaning reverberating through soil and stone, and sometimes clouds of noxious fumes seeped through cracks in the ground and poisoned the unwary.
The strange episode ended as abruptly as it had begun on the first day of spring later that summer a work crew rebuilding a collapsed tower discovered the first of the tunnels. Nearly perfectly round and bored through solid rock, the passages ran for miles, turning back on themselves again and again as though formed by a monstrous worm. No one ever found the creature — or creatures — that had formed the tunnels, though over the centuries a multitude of vermin had made the labyrinth their home.
There were small, crescent-shaped iron rungs bolted to one side of the tunnel wall. “Remember: stay close,” she said, then stepped to the edge of the hole and started descending the rungs, holding the lantern below her as she went. Dalvar stepped quickly up behind her, but Malus froze him in his tracks with a forbidding look and went next instead, crossbow held ready.
After about twenty feet the passage began to curve back towards the surface, until finally the rungs came to an end and Malus could stand upright. He stood beside Nagaira as they waited for the rest of the band to make their way down. The only sounds in the echoing space were the scuffing of boot heels on iron and the distant echo of dripping water. At one point he stole a glance at his half-sister, but he could see nothing of her expression in the shadowy depths of her cowl — only the tip of her chin and a flash of her pale throat. The edges of her spiral tattoo now crept up the side of her neck — in the unsteady light it seemed to pulse and shift with a life all its own.
As the raiding party sorted itself out, Malus organised his retainers with subtle nods and gestures to intermingle themselves with Nagaira’s men. If the two sides couldn’t extricate themselves from one another very easily, they couldn’t sacrifice the other at the first sign of trouble.
It was clear to Malus that the burrows were not made by a thinking being — or at least, not a sane one. They were rarely level, plunging and ascending, curving, intersecting and re-intersecting themselves again and again to no evident purpose. Progress was slow, though Nagaira seemed to know exactly where she was going. If there were clues or markers that pointed the way, Malus could not fathom them. A slow tide of unease began to eat at the edges of his steely resolve, but he fought it back with a surge of black hatred. I will prevail, he thought angrily. So long as I have my sword and my wits about me I will not fail.
The raiding party worked their way through the tunnels in silence, their nerves taut and their senses sharp. The air was musty and damp, and a gelid slime covered many of the curved walls. Frequently their booted feet crunched over piles of old, brittle bones. Malus bared his teeth at every sound, wondering what creatures might be drawn to investigate the noise.
There were numerous points where the burrows rose towards the surface and encountered the foundations of the fortress above. Sometimes the tunnel passed through an abandoned cellar or dungeon — in such cases Malus saw the remains of crates, tables and ironwork crushed flat along the burrower’s passage. They crossed through several such chambers, each one as deserted as the one before, and the highborn began to relax a little. That was when they nearly stumbled into a deadly trap.
The raiding party had stumbled onto yet another large chamber — it was so wide Malus thought at first that the burrow had intersected a natural cavern, until he noticed the fitted paving stones underneath his boots. The flare of Nagaira’s witchlight could not reach the walls or ceiling of the huge space. The parts of the floor Malus could see were strewn with refuse almost ankle deep. He saw bits of bone and old clothes, rusted tools, leather goods and scraps of what might have been withered flesh, plus many more less recognisable items.
Nagaira led the party deeper into the chamber, stepping carefully through the piled debris. She paused to get her bearings, which was when Malus heard the rustling. It was very quiet, almost like the patter of many small feet, but there was something very strange about the sound that the highborn couldn’t place. He raised his hand in warning. “No one move,” he whispered. “There’s something here.”
The druchii paused, their heads turning this way and that as they strained to detect the slightest movement in the darkness surrounding them. The rustling came again — a rapid patter of tiny feet somewhere ahead of them. A pile of refuse was knocked over, scattering what sounded like bits of crockery and loose rock across the chamber. Small feet but a large body, Malus thought. And it’s trying to circle behind us. Then the pattering sounds came again — but from the other side of the group. More than one, the highborn realised. But how many?
Now the druchii were shifting uneasily, the wary looks on their ghostly faces suggesting that they were thinking along much the same lines as Malus. Lhunara edged slightly closer to the highborn, her twin swords held ready.
Malus heard the rustling again, much louder and quicker this time — only it came from directly overhead.
Nagaira let out a cry, and her globe of witchlight suddenly flared like a bonfire, driving back the darkness. Malus’ eyes narrowed against the glare, and he saw that they were standing in an expansive cellar nearly twenty yards to a side, piled with the rotting remains of casks, crates and shelves. Pale, hairy cave spiders the size of ponies scuttled amongst the refuse or reared up aggressively at the sudden burst of light. Their eyes were the colour of fresh blood, and dark fangs as long as daggers dripped with venom as the scent of fresh meat drove them wild with hunger.
Shouts of alarm went up from the druchii, and Malus tried to look in every direction at once as he struggled to get a sense of how many spiders there were. Five? Six? They were moving too fast, and there were
too many pools of shadow to keep track of them all. The highborn raised his crossbow and sighted on the nearest one — but the shot went wild as Lhunara knocked him forwards and out of the path of the spider who pounced from the chamber’s high ceiling.
Malus rolled onto his back as the rest of the spider pack charged the druchii. Lhunara had gone down beneath the body of the falling spider, and the highborn watched as the creature’s mandibles jabbed again and again at the retainer’s armoured form, looking for a weak spot to inject its load of venom. He dropped the crossbow and drew his sword just as the point of one of Lhunara’s blade’s punched through the back of the spider’s thorax. The second sword flashed in a short arc, severing one of the creature’s fangs in a spurt of greenish poison. The spider seemed to constrict into a ball, its legs closing around its prey, but Malus leapt forward, severing three of the limbs with a single, sweeping cut. Lhunara’s swords flickered again in the witchlight, and the body of the spider, now missing the rest of its limbs, fell off to one side.
The highborn reached down and grabbed his retainer by her forearm, pulling her roughly to her feet. “Are you wounded?”
“No,” Lhunara said, shaking her head. Blobs of venom ran down the front of her breastplate. “It was close, though.”
Malus looked about wildly, searching for the other spiders. Once the druchii had recovered from their initial surprise, they had reacted with customary savagery. Two of the spiders had fallen prey to the short spears of Nagaira’s warriors, pierced through and through in their headlong charge. Two others had been surrounded and hacked to pieces, their soft bodies no match for steel blades. The fifth spider lay at Nagaira’s feet, slowly dissolving into a steaming pile of mush as Malus’ half-sister stoppered a now-empty flask and returned it to a pouch at her belt.
The encounter had lasted less than a minute, and none of the druchii had been injured, but had it not been for Nagaira’s flare, things might have turned out very differently indeed. She turned away from the dissolving spider and sought the tunnel leading out of the chamber. “That way,” she said, pointing across the room, and set off as though nothing untoward had happened.
Malus retrieved his crossbow and reloaded it. “Everyone stick close,” he said to the assembled druchii. “And don’t forget to look up.”
They walked on for nearly an hour more, cautiously traversing several more dark and abandoned cellars and storerooms. Finally, at the opening to one such chamber Nagaira stopped, her hand raised in warning. “We are here,” she said quietly.
Malus drew back his hood and shrugged the cloak over both shoulders. The rest of the raiders did the same, exchanging stealth for visibility and ease of movement. Swords hissed from their scabbards.
Nagaira extended her hand, palm out, towards the opening, moving in a widening circle as if getting the sense of the shape of an invisible structure. Slowly, as if pushing against a strong wind, she crossed the threshold into the room. Malus turned back to the raiders. “Remember, touch nothing. Kill silently, and leave no witnesses behind.” Then he stepped across the threshold.
The highborn fought down a gasp at the shock of cold — and the sense of profound unease — that washed over him as he stepped through the portal. It was like pushing through a caul of living flesh, a barrier that yielded to his will yet somehow seemed alive and aware.
When he came to his senses, he was standing in a room that must have once been a cellar. Like the other chambers, there was a path of crushed furniture and masonry outlining the course of the maddened burrower, but otherwise the room was bare. A spiral stair wound around the perimeter of the room, ending at a small landing and a door of dark iron.
There was something wrong about the room. Malus couldn’t quite place it at first. Then, as the next druchii stepped into the room with an audible cry of surprise, he realised — there were no echoes in the stone room. The sound was simply swallowed up, as if they stood at the verge of an endless abyss. When he studied the walls, formed of huge stone blocks, he could not shake the sense that they were somehow porous — as if he could poke through them with his finger into something just beyond. He could not shake the sensation, no matter how solid the stones appeared to his eyes.
One by one the raiders crossed into the room; each one was affected in the same fashion. Only Nagaira seemed untouched. “We are through the tower’s first set of wards,” she whispered as she began to climb the stairs, “I expect there will be one or two others as we near Urial’s sanctum. Beyond each threshold things will be more… unsettled… than the one before.”
Nagaira reached the iron door. Centuries of disuse had turned the door handle and hinges to barely recognisable lumps of rust. The druchii pulled a small vial from a pouch at her belt and scattered droplets of a silvery liquid across the door’s surface. Where they struck, stains of crimson bloomed, spreading rapidly like great wounds across the pitted metal. There was a brittle tinkling sound, and all at once the door collapsed in a darkening pile of rust.
As she was returning the vial to her pouch, Malus moved nimbly past his sister and took the lead on the stair that rose beyond the doorway. Nagaira’s head came up, a sharp rebuke on her lips, but Malus shook his head. “We can’t afford to have you walk into an ambush,” he said gravely. “Better you keep to the centre of the group.” And leave me to issue the commands, Malus thought smugly. “Dalvar, look to your mistress.”
Before she or Dalvar could reply, Malus turned and crept up the stairs. The climb lasted more than a minute, passing several landings along the way — if Nagaira was any indication, he expected Urial’s sanctum to be at the top of his spire — until the stairway ended in another door. This one was in far better condition than its companion in the lower cellar.
Just as he was reaching for the door’s iron ring, it swung open from the other side.
A human slave, his emaciated face covered in scars and open sores, saw Malus and opened his mouth to scream. The highborn moved without thinking, raising his crossbow and firing a bolt point-blank through the startled “O” of the man’s scabbed lips.
There was a crunch as the steel head of the bolt punched through the man’s spine and part of his skull, and he collapsed without a sound. There was a gasp just beyond the dead slave, and Malus caught a glimpse of a female slave raising a trembling hand to the spatters of blood and brain covering her face. Without hesitation Malus worked the steel lever that drew back the crossbow’s powerful string and loaded another bolt into the track. Just as the slave overcame her shock and turned to run, a scream bubbling from her lips, Malus took aim and buried a black-fletched bolt between her shoulder blades. The highborn was readying another shot even as he leapt past her fallen body into the space beyond the door.
He was in a small, dimly lit chamber, with a stone floor incised with carvings of skulls and intricate, sharp-edged runes. What illumination there was seemed to seep from the walls themselves — a dark, crimson glow like banked embers that plucked at the corners of his eyes and seemed to ebb and flow like the surge of blood in some great heart. Silhouetted in the bloody light were smooth-featured faces shaped of some silvery metal inset into the walls. Some snarled, others leered, still others exuded a soulless calm. Their eyes were nothing more than black pits, yet Malus could feel the weight of their stares against his skin. The feeling sent a chill down his spine and set his teeth on edge.
There were three sets of double doors, all closed, and another flight of stairs leading higher up the spire. Malus suspected that they were at the ground floor of the tower, but he was disturbed to discover that his sense of direction had failed him. He could not tell where he was in relation to the rest of the fortress, something he’d never experienced before.
Nagaira stepped over the bodies of the slaves and dashed across the room. “Did they see you?”
Malus frowned. “Who?”
“The faces! Did they see you kill the slaves?”
“Did they see me? How should I know, woman?” Damned sorcery!
He’d already had his fill of the place.
Nagaira eyed the silvery faces warily. Her eyes shifted from one to the other, almost as though she were following something that moved behind the wall, peering out at them through the black eye sockets. “We must be very careful how we spill blood in this place,” she whispered. “The wards here are very potent. If we draw attention to ourselves the tower’s guardians may see through my protective talismans.”
Malus hissed in aggravation. Two of the raiding party were rolling the bodies of the slaves down the spiral staircase, but there was no way to know how quickly they would be missed. An alarm could be raised at any time. I wonder if Urial would feel such a thing, all the way over at the temple? He bit back a curse. No time to worry about that now. Malus reloaded his crossbow and hurried for the stairs.
The stairs curved upwards into darkness. Malus pressed his back to the inside wall of the staircase and moved stealthily ahead, his ears straining for the sounds of movement. The stone at his back was warm, like a living body. He could feel it seeping through his cloak and the back plate of his armour. The highborn continued his ascent, past two landings with dark, ironbound doors.
Between the second and third landings Malus heard a door open and the sound of footsteps descending the stairs. He shifted the crossbow to his left hand and froze, raising his right hand to warn the column. Moments later, a slave came around the bend of the staircase, hurrying on some errand. Quick as a snake, Malus grabbed the slave’s right sleeve and pulled, dragging the human off his feet. The slave’s body tumbled down the stairs past him, bouncing off the stones. The highborn heard the sounds of steel against flesh, and then silence. After a moment, Malus pressed on.
The staircase ended at the third landing. Malus saw that the doorway here was more ornate than the ones he’d seen before, carved with numerous sigils and inset with three of the silvery faces along the arch. He felt their empty gaze upon him as he took the door’s iron ring in his hand and pulled it open. The space beyond was even more dimly lit than the landing itself. Holding the crossbow ready, he eased through the doorway — and passed through another protective ward.