by Nathan Hawke
He was still looking at the Lhosir when Achista and the other Marroc came jogging up the trail. Some were dressed in freshly scavenged mail, others carrying new swords and shields. They stripped the man at Oribas’s feet with the speed of jackals. Achista pressed a sword into his hand. She was dressed in mail now, a hauberk that was too long for her and far too wide and made her look ridiculous, but it also made him want to take her and hold her long and tight because she was going into battle now and the death he’d seen made him realise that it was all horribly real. Before the day was out, it wouldn’t only be Lhosir who were dead.
23
THE DRAGON’S CAVES
The Marroc pushed quickly through the forest and onto the slopes beneath Witches’ Reach. Achista didn’t lead them towards the saddle between the two mountains; instead she took them across the craggy snowbound slopes, picking a way between them until she reached a crack in the mountainside, a slit of a cave only a few feet wide but as tall as a house. A trickle of water ran out the bottom. Oribas bent to sniff at it and recoiled. Achista laughed. ‘Where do you think the cess from the tower ends up?’
Inside the cave, far enough to be out of sight, a handful of wooden brands wrapped in cloth lay beside coils of rope and two small kegs of fish oil. The Marroc broke the seals on one of the kegs and dipped their torches. One of them got a tiny fire going and lit the first, then they lit one from another until every other Marroc had a burning brand. Through the orange flicker of the flames Oribas saw a path worn in the floor of the cave.
‘This cave leads up into the tower?’ he asked with a wry smile. ‘Surely the Lhosir will have barred any such tunnel?’
‘You Aulians built this tower.’ Her eyes gleamed in the firelight.
‘We do like to dig.’ That old fascination with reaching down into the earth, to the shades that dwelt there. The last emperor might have dug the furthest, but Aulians had been delving into the soil and rock since before the empire was anything more than a town with grand aspirations.
‘When the Aulians left they barred the tunnel with two seals. One was opened a long time ago. No one ever found a way to open the other. The forkbeards think they’re safe.’
‘But you’ve found a way?’ Her eyes bored into him and he understood. He shook his head. ‘I’m not a wizard, Achista.’
‘Addic said you’d know how to open the seals.’
Oribas laughed. ‘Even if I did, how long ago were these tunnels closed? How many hundreds of years? Metal rusts, Achista. Stone crumbles. I will try but I very much hope you have another way.’
The passage rose into the heart of the mountain, the crack in the stone petering out into a tunnel, roughly hewn and so narrow that even Oribas was forced to hunch his head into his shoulders. The Marroc shuffled along in the feeble near-dark of their torches, creeping like spiders in the night through puddles and rivulets of foul-smelling water. The walls glistened with damp slime and the stink got worse the deeper they went. After an hour of climbing into the mountain’s heart, the Marroc stopped. The passage opened into a round shaft twenty paces across that rose towards the mountain’s peak and delved to its root. Below where they stood, the shaft was filled with scummy water. A narrow ledge circled it.
‘This part is slippery.’
Achista sent one Marroc around the walkway to the far side. Metal rungs bolted into the stone rose into the darkness of the shaft. Oribas stared at them in horror. ‘And how old are those?’
‘Addic and I climbed them months ago. We marked the loose ones.’
They brought more torches. Oribas looked up. The shaft disappeared into darkness. ‘How far does it go?’
‘As far as the tallest tree in the forest.’
Oribas shrugged. Some of the trees in the Varyxhun valley were as tall as fifty men. He followed her around the walkway and started to climb behind her. He wasn’t sure why he was suddenly at the front of the Marroc, but it seemed natural to be at Achista’s side. ‘Where’s your brother?’ he asked. ‘Shouldn’t he be leading this?’
They were twenty feet above the water now. ‘I found this, Oribas, not Addic. If anyone should be here to lead ahead of me then it’s Rannic, but he’s with Modris now, casting his shield over us.’ She tapped the rung just above her feet. ‘This one’s loose. Make sure you tell whoever comes behind you.’
They climbed only another few feet when there was a howl from below. Oribas turned his head in time to see a Marroc splash into the water, fallen from the treacherous stone walkway. The Marroc cried out once more and then sank like a stone. A second man fell after him as he crouched to try and reach his friend. He scrabbled at the wall of the shaft and managed to grab another Marroc around the ankle, but his hands kept slipping and there was no way anyone standing on the walkway could bend down to help him without pitching themselves into the water as well. He fell back and then lunged again. His fingers clawed at the stone.
One man already drowned, just like that, out of nothing. The pointlessness of it made Oribas angry. ‘You have ropes!’ he shouted at them. ‘Use them! Pull him out!’
It took three Marroc to haul the second man out. It was as though the foetid water in the shaft clung to him, trying to drag him down.
They climbed on. Oribas didn’t know how far. He counted the rungs for a while when his arms started to tire and got up to somewhere close to a hundred before he lost count because it now took all the will he could muster just to keep going. He’d climbed ladders and stairs aplenty in his time but none like this; and when they finally reached the top, his arms and his shoulders felt like lead. Achista held her torch out over the edge and waved it so that those below could see the end was in sight, then, when there were a half-dozen of them safely up, she pulled Oribas to his feet and led him on. They were in another passage now, wider and made with more care, typical Aulian work lined with bricks and tiles, though the floor was still rough bare rock. Oribas looked for inscriptions or engravings or murals but everything was crusted in filth. When he stopped to scrape some off, Achista pulled him on again. She dragged him to a wall with a circular stone door in the centre. To the right of the door four bronze wheels dark with verdigris stuck out of the stone, each engraved with symbols that had almost disappeared over time. Oribas took her torch and inspected them. There were six signs on each wheel, animals, the totems for each of the six Ascendants who’d once stood guard over the empire. A chill ran over his skin right to his feet and back again and wouldn’t leave him alone. He’d been to places like this before. He brushed a little of the dirt aside, nodded to himself and then walked away. ‘And now we turn back,’ he said to Achista as he passed her.
‘You can’t open it?’ Her look was tragic.
‘I probably can but I certainly shouldn’t. I’ll tell the others. No need for the ones still climbing to come up all this way for nothing.’
Achista darted in front of him, stopping him with a hand pressed to his chest. ‘Please.’ He opened his mouth, but before he could even begin to tell her why he shouldn’t, why none of them should even go near a place like this, why the Lhosir in the tower were taking their lives to the edge of the abyss simply by being here, she put her other hand on his cheek and stared at him with such wide, hopeful eyes that she killed his words dead. He stood agape. ‘Please,’ she said again. ‘It’s the only way in. We have to! We have to try. If we don’t try, what are we?’
Gallow would have said the same. And if Gallow had been here and told him to open it then he would have done so even while he was explaining exactly why no man alive should ever enter a place that had been closed with a seal of the Ascendants. ‘This isn’t a seal to keep us out, Achista. It’s a seal to keep something in.’
‘Whatever was inside has been dead and gone for hundreds of years now.’
‘Yes,’ said Oribas, turning back to the door. ‘It has. And it should stay that way.’
She took his hand and held it tight. ‘After the Aulians left, they say the Reach became the home of a Marroc
prince. They say that beneath it he found an Aulian treasure vault. For twenty years he tried to open it until at last he solved its puzzle. They say he found the answer written on a nearby rock. The day after, he left with all his men and headed north and was never seen again. After that, no one lived in Witches’ Reach until the forkbeards came.’
Oribas shook his head. ‘I have another story for you. A long story for another time, of the Rakshasa that killed my home, my town, my people, my family and many others besides. I prayed and the gods sent Gallow Truesword and together we destroyed the creature.’ He turned to face her and looked her hard in the eye. ‘But before Gallow, I tracked the Rakshasa back to the place from which it came. I found a seal like this that had been opened. Thousands of lives, Achista.’ He went back to the wheels beside the door and gave one an experimental tug, half hoping that it wouldn’t move, that the mechanism inside had corroded solid. And the wheel didn’t turn, but even as he shrugged his shoulders ready to walk away again, Achista had an unlit torch pushed through the wheel to make a lever and was pulling on it with all her weight, and with a jerk it shifted. The sound of grinding stone and metal echoed through the passage. She looked pleased with herself and started to push at the round stone door. Oribas pulled her away. ‘The seals are held closed by a riddle, Achista.’ He brushed dirt from the stonework on the other side of the door. ‘There are four mechanisms inside the stone. Each wheel must be set to the sign of the correct Ascendant to move the bars that prevent the door from opening. When all four are set correctly, the stone can slide aside. They are not easily made and so are not made lightly. Something on the other side of this seal was not meant to be found. And to be sealed here, in a place so remote from the heart of the empire . . .’ He shook himself. ‘If I open this for you, Achista, you must promise me: no one will touch anything on the other side unless I say it is safe.’
Achista set to work on the other wheels, loosening each until she could turn all four. Oribas finished clearing the dirt from the inscription beside the door. The words carved into the stone were old and worn but still deep enough to read: ‘Here buried under the mountain lies the iron witch, drowned in the river and laid out in salt where the wind and the sun shall be guardians amid this place of snow and ice.’
Achista squinted at the wheels. The other Marroc were crowding close now, drawn in by their curiosity. ‘But these are just animals.’
‘The six Ascendants are the Earth, the Sun, the Fire, the Sky, the River and the Night. Each has its totem.’ Oribas frowned. ‘Buried under the mountain. A statement of fact, but the mountain is also the Earth.’ He skipped to the other side of the door and turned the top wheel to the sign of the bear, the totem animal of the Earth. Without a torch for a lever it took the two of them to make the wheel move, Achista’s hands pressed onto his. ‘The iron witch?’ He shrugged. ‘Laid out in salt? Not sure. Drowned in the river is obvious, and the wind and the sun are simple enough too. Guardians in this place of snow and ice. Cold could be the earth again but it’s always four different Ascendants. Winter is the season of Night, so maybe that.’
‘There are only four wheels, Oribas.’
‘I don’t think Night is right, not for a place like this. Earth, River, Sky, Sun. Those are the clearest. Bear, fish, bird, dragon. We’ll try that first.’
They wrestled with the wheels. As the final one ground into place, the stone groaned and shifted. The wall shook and a deep rumble echoed through the passageway. Oribas backed away. ‘If you can move it, I think the door will open now. Have a care, Achista. I have no idea what lies beyond.’
‘I know.’ She nodded at several of the Marroc, who started to lever the stone aside. Her smile was a weak one.
The Marroc pulled the stone back far enough for someone to squeeze through. They all looked at Oribas expectantly. He shook his head. ‘Did any of you bring salt? No? Thought not. Well don’t expect me to go ah—’ But Achista was already worming her way through and so he didn’t have any choice but to follow her. ‘The old Aulian priests made these seals to keep the very worst of their demons locked away,’ he hissed. ‘Things worse than any shadewalker. Believe me when I say I know what sort of creatures they were. If there’s a way into the tower, it may have another seal like this one, one that can’t be opened at all from the inside.’ Whatever they’d put here, there would be other wards though, surely. Laid out in salt, and salt was a ward to those creatures. Perhaps they could creep through and creep out the other side and . . .
‘It’s the only way to the forkbeards, Oribas.’ She held up her torch. ‘Besides, look!’
His skin was a-prickle from head to toe but at last he saw what Achista was trying to show him: the tomb wasn’t a tomb at all. It was a Lhosir storeroom. They were in the cellars of the tower.
‘I told you there was another door, one already opened,’ said Achista. ‘Some say the Marroc prince who lived here took the treasure he found and went north, and others that something terrible came out and everyone died. And there’s some who say he wasn’t a Marroc at all. But it was all hundreds of years ago, and whatever was here is long gone. Today there are only forkbeards.’
24
THE ROAD TO MIDDISLET
Gallow didn’t look back. Not once. He walked away in stolen boots from the Marroc victory and from the last friend he had left to him after three years of searching for his home. He wore the furs of a dead kinsman and the mail and helm that the Screambreaker had given him outside Andhun. He carried a spear and a sword and an axe and a shield all scavenged from battlefields, and three years of longing in his heart.
The Marroc farmers’ trail was marked by cairns of stones that rose from the snow so that even in the winter a traveller wouldn’t lose his way. As the light fell he sought shelter where he could find it. A woodsman’s hut the first night, the next at a farm among the animals where frightened Marroc stared wide-eyed at his steel, prayed to their gods that in the morning he’d be gone and then thanked them when he was. The only tracks he saw in the snow were of animals crossing from the shelter of one stand of trees to another. The path wound down a sharp-sided valley through stands of giant Varyxhun pine that towered over everything, around boulders strewn about a stream that danced through its heart. Twice he had to wade through snow as deep as a house, cutting a path through a great broken swathe of it that had tumbled down from the slopes above. He had nothing he could use to make any fire and so when twilight fell and there was no shelter to be found he simply walked on through the darkness, guided by the stars and the moon, the only way to keep warm. The cold nipped and bit at him like an angry puppy but it held no fear. He’d crossed the Aulian Way after all, higher and colder and longer than this.
The sides of the valley broke apart. The slopes became more gentle. The stands of pine became a great forest of lesser trees and the stream beside him swelled to a river as other waters joined it. The air grew warmer, the snow under his feet thinner and more broken. He reckoned on being a day away from Hrodicslet when he came to a camp beside the road where the embers of a fire were still warm under his fingers. He sat down beside it and rubbed his hands and blew at the ash but it was too old to glow and light into flames again. There was nothing else to see save for a few marks in the snow where men had sat not long ago and a simple shelter made of branches, a place for a man to sleep out of the wind and the snow. He felt eyes watching him but nothing more. He didn’t go looking.
Cold and exhausted and hungry, he reached Hrodicslet. Now at every farm Marroc slammed their doors in his face. They were hospitable folk to their own kind, or so the carter Fenaric had once said, but no one had shelter for a forkbeard.
‘I’ll pay you! I’ll work for you!’ he shouted at their doors, but none of them opened again. When the sun began to set and yet another barrage of curses turned him away, he kicked the door open again before the Marroc inside could bar it. There were three of them, an old man and a younger one and another who was little more than a boy. ‘What Marroc turns
a starving freezing man from their door?’ The words sounded hollow even as he spat them to the floor. Any Marroc, that was the answer, if the starving man was a forkbeard.
The men backed away from him. Animals milled around, pigs and goats and chickens all driven inside for warmth and shelter. The young one snatched up a lump of firewood. The old one yelled a curse through gritted teeth, never taking his eyes off Gallow. ‘What do you want, forkbeard?’
A dog like a wolf padded out from between the hanging furs that separated the night room from the rest of the house, sending the chickens squawking and flapping away. It bared its teeth and growled at Gallow.
‘Make your dog be still or I’ll kill it!’ But the Marroc didn’t move. The dog snarled and drew back to its haunches and still the Marroc did nothing, and then the dog sprang. Gallow lifted his shield. The dog scrabbled for purchase, bit at the wood and then fell. It crouched, glowering and snarling, and then launched itself again, this time at Gallow’s arm. Gallow raised his axe out of the dog’s reach and twisted to let it fly past. It snapped at him, seizing his furs in its jaws and almost spinning him around.
He brought the axe down on the back of its head and the dog fell dead. The Marroc boy screamed and threw himself at Gallow, swinging his lump of wood. Gallow bashed him away with his shield and there was his hatchet again, singing through the air straight at the boy’s head. He pulled the blow at the last but for a moment he’d meant it. For a moment he’d happily have killed the lot of them.
He shoved the boy away. They all stared at him in hatred.
‘Damn you, Marroc!’
‘Damn you too, forkbeard,’ hissed the old man. ‘Take what you want and be gone.’
‘I’ll do that. Where are the women and children?’
The old man glanced at the night room. The younger one clenched his fists and shook his head. So that’s what they thought of forkbeards, was it? And then he thought of the way it had been with the Screambreaker’s army and wondered how he could possibly blame them. ‘Make sure they stay there. You two go and be with them.’ He pointed his axe at the old man. ‘Not you. You stay.’