by Rob May
Kal wasn’t a structural engineer, but she had a horrible premonition of what that effect might be. She pounded her fists on Dogwood’s back to urge him to move faster as he stumbled around in the smoke. They came to the bottom of a staircase, but the room above was full of raging flames. Kal could sense a hint of fresh night air beyond though.
‘Run, Dogwood!’ she said. ‘Run through it! As fast as you can!’
Dogwood slumped in despair. He was carrying both Kal and eighty pounds of excess fat. Kal knew, though, that his weak mind would let him down before his body ever did. So she tried appealing to the part of him that was used to taking orders.
‘Move, Captain!’ she shouted hoarsely. ‘What the hell are you doing down here when there’s a killer out there somewhere?! You’ve got the wrong girl! The city still needs you tonight!’
Dogwood shot up the stairs like a cannonball. The flames whipped them as they crashed through the blazing room—a shop floor of some kind—and fell into the street. People were all around: passers-by, theatre-goers, night watchmen, prostitutes, their patrons and the Cathouse guards. Kal felt herself being lifted off Dogwood’s back by a pair of strong arms.
‘You were only supposed to go in and open a door,’ Will said, holding Kal close and stroking her hair. ‘You didn’t have to bring the whole bloody place down!’
The Bower—an entire city block, six storey’s high; four acres of prime real-estate—seemed to ripple in the still night air. Flames made every window glow, turning the night sky orange, then the foundations gave way and the whole block came down, quenching the fire in clouds of dust and smoke.
The crowd turned and fled from the dangerous spectacle. Will gave Kal his shirt, and along with the rest of his gang and Dogwood, they found shelter across the street in the foyer of the Idole Rouge.
‘The good news,’ Kal told Will as he tended to her wounds, ‘is that you don’t have to worry about Witchwood anymore.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘So what’s the bad news?’
‘I’ve still got a killer to catch, and I think I know who it is … a five-hundred-year-old ghost!’
III.ix
Excavation
I can never remember much about history, no matter how much I read or listen to Ben’s stories. I can name every one of the twenty-four gods, and tell you tales of their exploits all day long. But real history? It goes in one ear and out the other. I couldn’t name more than a handful of Amaranthium’s kings or queens, let alone any of the faceless politicians who have run the city throughout the years of the Republic. But there is one name that no one in the city is ignorant of, not least because of the titanic bronze statue that stands in the centre of the Forum.
Feron Firehand.
Five hundred years ago, when the royal family was tearing itself apart, and monsters were tearing the city apart, Firehand rose from the ranks of the legions to quell Amaranthium with might, bravery and cunning. Depending on who you talk to these days, he was either a hero or a villain; a protector or a tyrant; charming or brutal, honest or manipulating. He hammered out the tenets of the Republic … but then decreed that democracy would only begin upon his own death.
When he was alive, Firehand was involved in every facet of city life. He rose at dawn to train with the legions. He would be down at the custom houses overseeing imports and exports while the rest of the city’s ruling elite still slept. All afternoon he would work the palaces and temples, keeping the aristocracy and priesthood in line as they fought for position in the power vacuum left by the old king. By night he would move from society ball to guild hall dinner, from thieves’ hideout to conspirators’ den, making deals and promises, threats and compromises: he towered over the city like an omniscient, omnipotent god.
Firehand ruled Amaranthium for over fifty years. When he was eighty-five years old, he left the city in search of one final challenge: to intercept an ogre that had been seen approaching from the west. Firehand never returned to Amaranthium. But then, no one ever saw the ogre again, either.
Feron Firehand: a modern god for a modern age. It’s telling that his memorial is taller than the statues of any of the ancient gods.
And now, it seems, he’s back.
* * *
Even when Ben and I arrived at the city, seven years ago, we found that there was no part of it that Firehand had left untouched. He had obviously even discovered the tunnels under the city that Ben had thought were known only to his own family. We stood before a locked stone door carved with Firehand’s personal emblem: a fist within a ring of flames.
Actually, we stood with our backs to the door, because something was coming down the tunnel towards us.
We heard it again: a low growl, accompanied by a faint echoing gurgle.
‘What does that sound like to you?’ I asked Ben.
‘I don’t know,’ he snapped. ‘Reading about monsters isn’t the same thing as meeting them!’ He put down his lantern and drew his sword. ‘Here,’ he said, offering the blade to me. ‘Deal with it?’
I took the Blade of Banos. There was another grunting growl from down the dark tunnel. Nearer, this time though. I thought I could hear a faint sucking and blowing noise … like waves on a pebble beach … like breathing.
‘Sea troll, I reckon,’ Ben said in a frightened voice. ‘They’re big, Kal.’
I nodded. I had seen pictures. Alright, so they had been drawn on a classroom chalkboard by the man standing next to me, but still …
I handed Ben back his sword. ‘Put your lantern out,’ I told him.
‘Kal,’ he said, ‘those things come from the deepest caves in the ocean! They can see us in the dark!’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Trust me, Ben.’
Ben did as he was told. He understood that his job was thinking long-term, while mine was coming up with ideas in the moment. He planned ahead, and I got him out of fixes along the way. That’s how it worked back then, in the days when we trusted each other completely. I closed the shutters on my own lantern at the same time Ben shut his; the darkness that closed in around us was absolute.
As the creature got closer, and our ears pricked up to do the work of our lost senses, the deep growl sounded louder and nearer than ever. There was a smell too: a fishy musk laced with brine. And then we felt it: hot wet breath on our faces. Whatever the creature was, it was almost directly in front of us.
Ben was doing a remarkable job of keeping still by my side. I could feel him trembling. I waited, though—waited until I felt the air in front of me move as the creature reached out to grab us …
… and then I struck, flipping open the front shutter on my oil lamp. The oxygen flooded in and the flame flared back into life. The polished copper reflectors inside the lantern threw a beam of light right in the troll’s face. I saw the monster clearly as it hopped backwards in surprise: it had a twisted, gnarly body that would probably stretch to twelve feet tall if it had room to stand up, long webbed fingers with curling claws, an oversized head with a wide mouth packed with razor teeth, and two enormous round eyes, the pupils of which shrunk rapidly in the face of my luminous attack.
‘Run!’ I shouted.
Ben went right and I went left—we slipped around the startled troll and dashed back down the tunnel. We got about a mile before I ran out of breath. I wasn’t as fit back then as I am now. I dropped to my knees, and Ben skidded to a halt beside me. ‘Get up!’ he urged.
I waved a hand. ‘It’s alright. He won’t come after us.’
Ben looked back down the tunnel nervously. ‘Are you sure? I’d be pretty angry if someone pulled that trick on me.’
I had to laugh. ‘He’s not you though, is he? He’s just some hungry troll who’s now going to try and catch some other kind of dinner—the kind that doesn’t explode in his face when he approaches it!’
We walked slowly until we came to the crossroads. One tunnel led back to the Field of Bones where we had begun our subterranean adventure. Of the other two, one led to wherever the sea
troll had come from—some caves probably, that opened out to the sea at the foot of the cliffs. The other, hopefully, would take us where we wanted to go: beneath the old palace.
‘You want to get out now, before we get even more lost, or wind up in a trolls’ nest?’ I asked.
‘No, no,’ Ben said. ‘I feel quite safe down here with you. Let’s try this way—that other tunnel smells of fish.’
* * *
Eight hours later, after several more dead ends, and another hairy encounter with the troll, we finally made it underneath what was once the royal palace. The tunnels had gradually been leading upwards, and now we were in a large open cavern. In a centre, a huge column had been formed by a stalactite meeting a stalagmite, and around it had been carved a spiral stair. I waited at the bottom while Ben bounded eagerly up.
He came back down moments later, a glum look on his face. ‘There’s no way through,’ he moaned. ‘The top of the stairs has been concreted over. The secret way into the city has been blocked up … permanently.’
We both sat down on the bottom step to think things over. ‘Is the palace still standing?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘No. At first, when the king died, Firehand ordered that the princess, and all her cousins and kin, remain locked in the palace. My ancestors feared for their lives, of course; anyone with royal blood was a threat to the new order. So they fled the city through this tunnel, treading on this very step that we are sitting on now. When Firehand found out, he was furious and ordered the palace to be pulled down. They built the modern Senate House on the foundations. I was hoping that the tunnel would still be in use, but …’ He spread his hands. ‘I guess that the answer is no. We’ll just have to find another way into the city.’
We sat in the soft glow of the lanterns for a while, eating the last of the food we had brought with us. Somewhere up above, just out of sight and out of reach, was the biggest city in the world. And its walls and defences were keeping us out as if we were as dangerous as trolls and other monsters of the Wild.
Perhaps we were.
Ben was lost in thought, no doubt wondering what other routes into the city were available to us. There were smugglers, he had mentioned, who might have been able to help us … but for a price we couldn’t afford. Without money, the only advantages we had were the old stories and legends in Ben’s head.
I traced patterns in the mud of the cave floor with the toe of my worn travelling boot. Thinking …
Then I had an idea.
‘We don’t have to get into the city at all!’ I told Ben ‘We’re under Arcus Hill, right? Near the top?’
‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘Only the Basilica—the great domed temple we saw—is higher than the Senate buildings.’
‘So the tomb of Arcus must be close by then?’
According to Ben, the old king had hidden a vast fortune in the tomb of the god Banos. The reason we were here was that, according to me, Banos was buried with his lover, Arcus: whose tomb was somewhere under the hill that bore his name.
Ben shook his head. ‘No. I mean, yes, but … hell, Kal, the tomb could be twenty yards in that direction,’—he waved a hand randomly—‘for all the good it would do us. If it was possible to get to it from here, then my family would have found it too, surely, half a millennium ago, when they fled the palace. And Firehand’s been down here as well, we know that now. No way would it have remained hidden all this time.’
I stood up and looked around the cave. ‘Unless it was sealed up,’ I said. I turned to Ben. ‘Back in Refuge, the miners used to block off dangerous or unused seams with heavy rocks held together with clay mortar, remember. If you know what you’re looking for …’
In a shadowy corner of the cave, a large chunk of rock stuck out at an odd angle; it looked like it had been wedged into a three-foot-wide horizontal gash in the cave wall. Sure enough, the gaps around it were filled in with long-dried clay and smaller pieces of rubble.
I grinned and turned to Ben. ‘I’m going to need the help of those kingly muscles!’
* * *
The long crack in the rock was narrow and uneven. There were parts where I could barely squeeze my hips through, and Ben could barely fit his beer gut past, but eventually we made it to a wider tunnel, where we could crawl on our hands and knees. And a few hundred yards later, we found it: the Forgotten Tomb.
The final resting place of Arcus and Banos; laid to rest in a granite cave near the peak of the hill where Arcus met his end battling the Dragon. It was said that his tomb was built by goblins and trolls, the city having fallen to the monsters for the first and only time. There wasn’t a Feron Firehand to save the day that time around.
The floor of the cave was scattered with waist-high stalagmites, and the roof was high and dark. Right in the centre was what looked like a long stone table. Ben made his way over and knelt before it.
I moved around to the other end and gripped the corners of the slab. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s no use praying to them. They’re not likely to help push the lid off from inside.’
Ben gave me a withering look. I guess I had just insulted him and two gods, one of whom was his divine ancestor. ‘I almost can’t bring myself to do it, Kal,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe that it’s going to be this easy. What if Firehand did find his way here … what if—’
I heaved on the lid. With a dull grinding noise, it shifted half an inch. Ben seemed to come to his senses and find his sense of occasion. ‘Arcus and Banos, in the name of the Godsword line of kings and queens, I claim your bones for the city of Amaranthium …’ He put his weight on the other end of the slab and shoved.
When it was halfway off, we could see that the coffin was empty, but still we heaved the lid the rest of the way until it slid off and hit the cave floor, resting at an angle against the tomb.
Ben had broken a sweat in the exertion. He dropped to the floor and wiped his brow with a filthy sleeve. I thought I heard a sob. Was he crying?
‘The story ends here, Kal,’ he said quietly. ‘I bet that bastard Firehand got here centuries ago. I bet his family are still living it up today on the interest off my inheritance!’
‘Don’t think like that,’ I said. ‘Maybe the king knew that this wasn’t a safe place. Maybe he moved the bones and the treasure somewhere else … maybe he even left us a clue!’
Ben snorted. ‘A clue! Oh yes, perhaps my ingenious ancestor wrote a message in the dust at the bottom of the tomb for all to see!’
I had to laugh. ‘Or maybe under the lid, where no one’s likely to check!’
Ben gave me a sharp look. We both pulled the lid away from the tomb until it toppled over onto its back, then we dropped to our knees in stunned silence when we saw the words carved into the stone:
’Cross city streets, ’twixt gate and gate,
’Neath feet of kings, bones of dead gods wait,
On a bed of elemental cold they lie,
In the dark where doomed lovers go to die.
I couldn’t believe it. A riddle!
‘Do you know where it’s referring to?’ I asked Ben.
‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘But you were wrong about one thing at least, Kal: if we are going to find this hiding place, we will have to find a way inside the city after all.
END OF PART THREE
PART FOUR
THE TRIAL
IV.i
The Living Dead
Kal woke up when she sensed a small, soft hand stroking her brow. She surfaced from a dream about Feron Firehand, only to find herself looking into the eyes of his descendant, the white-haired senator, Felix Firehand.
The senator was sitting in an armchair across the room, peering at Kal from under his bushy black eyebrows. The hand that was stroking Kal belonged to his young priest, Gwyn, who was sat on the bed next to her. ‘Kal’s awake!’ he exclaimed.
‘So I see,’ Firehand said in his deep, authoritative voice. ‘Don’t try to move, Moonheart.’
Kal tried to move. She fe
lt a sharp pain at her side as she did so. She looked under the sheets and discovered her torso was wrapped in bandages. They covered the deep wounds that Witchwood’s claw had inflicted.
It was the third time in as many days that Kal had woken up in a bed that wasn’t her own. The room was large, and the furniture old and shabby. Had she somehow ended up at Firehand’s home? Kal was also unbearably hot under the sheets; she could physically feel the pressure of the heatwave crushing the city beneath a miasma of heat. It would take a storm of epic proportions to release Amaranthium from such a grip.
‘Hello Gwyn,’ she said, ignoring his master. ‘What are we doing here, then?’
Gwyn was dressed in a clean white toga and was sporting a laurel wreath among his blonde curls. He looked like a young god. Kal remembered that Firehand had said he believed Gwyn was indeed a god reincarnated. The divine youngster leaned in to Kal and whispered, ‘The bad man made you better.’
Kal gave Firehand a sharp glance. ‘But how did–’
‘You’re in Ben Godsword’s home,’ Firehand said. ‘Captain Dogwood brought you here. Then Godsword sent for me; I was a doctor before I entered politics. Quite a successful one. I’ve applied a garlic poultice to your cuts and made a splint for the broken toe on your right foot.’
‘Oh,’ Kal said. She didn’t even know that she had broken her toe. She was so used to being knocked around these days that she rarely noticed a new pain. It must have been when she had fallen out of the tree. Her skin crawled at the thought of Firehand’s hands all over her body, but at least—she hoped—the man had taken no pleasure in it, unlike Witchwood clearly had. ‘Well thank you, I guess,’ she said. ‘I should be grateful, I suppose, that I didn’t wake up in a prison cell.’