Princess of Blood

by Tom Lloyd

  Bade pulled the brim of his hat down as low as he could, screwed his eyes up tight and pulled the trigger. A crash hammered out around the upper chamber as a streak of white lanced across his vision, even through closed eyelids. Blinking furiously he watched the blurry line of white race through the darkness, arcing downwards. As Bug, somewhere further down the stair, screeched and chattered in protest, Chotel squatted beside Bade and immediately gasped in wonder.

  The light-bolt continued to fall, finally striking further than he’d expected and casting its noon light across the unknown dark. It stayed there for just a few seconds, sputtering quietly in the darkness, but long enough for Bade to make sense of the view. He gasped too, lurching forward and forced to clutch Chotel’s arm for balance as his mind boggled.

  Below them was a gigantic near-cylindrical cavern as large as any he had seen before. The light-bolt could not illuminate much of it despite the intense brightness, but Bade’s experienced eye estimated it was half a mile across and more deep. The shape suggested it had been carved by mages or at least enlarged and made regular – an astonishing amount of work. The narrow walkways swept down to form huge arches, a hundred yards tall and supported by a lattice of rock projections from the walls and central column. But that wasn’t the astonishing part – that much old hands were used to seeing. The astonishing part was what the column stood on.

  ‘I, ah …’ Chotel whispered. ‘That’s …’

  ‘Fucking amazing,’ Bade finished.

  He shook his head. He had no other words for it and for once the pair just stood and stared as the darkness returned and they were looking at nothing other than the image in their minds. No quip or joke escaped either. Both knew that in their long careers, they had seen nothing like that before.

  ‘What?’ hissed Torril. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s, um. It’s not exactly a labyrinth.’

  ‘Eh? How do you mean?’

  ‘Gods-in-shards, Torril,’ Chotel moaned. ‘You should’ve seen it. I … I never seen a ruin like that. I never seen anything like that.’

  ‘Stop yanking my dick and tell me!’

  Bade and his lieutenant looked at each other, a big stupid grin crossing the face of each. The mission be damned, cracking this really would carve their names into history.

  ‘It’s a puzzlebox,’ Bade croaked. ‘A cube by the looks of it, made up of smaller cubes.’

  ‘A box? Are you shitting me?’ Torril spluttered. ‘We came all this way and started a gods-crapping war because of some bastard box?’

  Chotel laughed. ‘It’s, ah, it’s a big box, Torril. How many cubes down each side you make out? I saw five.’

  ‘At least six, I think more.’

  ‘Yeah, so maybe seven or eight.’

  ‘Don’t sound like Hopper,’ Torril broke in.

  ‘You’re right,’ Bade agreed. ‘It’ll be nine on each side, liked his numbers all neat that way. That’s what, eighty-one cubes in all? Torril, each cube had to be fifty yards long!’

  There was slight cough from above the ceiling as Torril digested the information.

  ‘Okay, that’s a pretty big box. So how do we get in?’

  Bade looked down the stair he was on. They were typical Duegar steps, shallow and long. They had no rail or anything on the outer edge, just a sudden drop into the darkness, but there was a groove down the inside wall that could be gripped. The steps themselves were a good three yards wide, however, more than enough to make him feel secure descending.

  ‘We follow this stair. Kastelian, send my crew down now – keep the soldiers up until we know what space we’ve got down there. Leave what we can’t carry for the time being.’

  ‘Done,’ came Kastelian’s slightly muffled voice from above. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Aye, we could do with some.’

  Bade set off down the stairway, lamp held high and mage-gun prodding at the steps as he went. Chotel followed silently behind, keeping a careful distance, while up ahead he could hear the skitter of Bug’s spear-like feet on the smooth stone racing back to whatever awaited them at the bottom.

  Chapter 24

  As dawn began to reveal the churned horror overlaying Jarrazir’s broken wall, a bearded man emerged from a street to survey what remained. The crater dominated everything, looking nothing less than a gods-inflicted punishment on sinful man. Commander Vigilance Deshar scratched his cheek and lifted his head to look beyond the city to the fields outside. Truth be told there was no difference between the two now. Furrowed and cratered mud, darkened smears of ground where blood tinted it, crumpled bodies and tattered cloth.

  Makeshift barricades had been raised between the two broken ends of city wall – piecemeal, staggered obstacles that served more as shooting platforms and targets than any great defence. Behind those huddled knots of men and two small catapults. The fighting had waxed and waned throughout the early part of the night, one renewed burst an hour earlier, but now they waited. As Vigilance watched, several companies of grey-coated troops hurried forward to relieve the shocked and battered defenders. Bands of brown-jackets roamed the wasteland like jackals, hauling away the dead or carrying food and water to the stations.

  ‘Next wave won’t be much fun,’ commented the woman beside Vigilance.

  He turned and frowned at his cadaverous lieutenant, a woman of grey hairs and hollow, lined cheeks called Ulith.

  ‘Compared to this playground?’

  Her pale cheeks crinkled into a ghastly grin. ‘It’ll get worse.’

  Vigilance nodded. It would, he knew. For all this scene of utter devastation, it would get worse. The ruin was at its worst beyond the line of the walls, where the defenders had desperately fired everything they had at the advancing Charnelers.

  ‘How many dead do you think?’

  ‘Can never tell on a battlefield.’ Ulith gave a wave of dismissal. ‘They always look worse’n they are,’ she added, ‘’cept for the times they ain’t and the ordnance hasn’t left enough bits o’ the dead to count.’

  ‘But you don’t try to exploit that unless you throw hundreds into the breach,’ Vigilance said, ‘and I doubt many came back out of that.’

  ‘That they didn’t. When’s our turn then?’

  Ulith didn’t sound daunted by the prospect of defending this patch of mud, but then Vigilance had rarely known her to be surprised by anything, let alone worried.

  ‘I’ve had no word. Might be they don’t want to trust recently hired mercs to their vital defence.’

  ‘More fool them then.’ She tugged on the faded red scarf around her neck that Vigilance also wore. ‘Our reputation should be enough, but if the Monarch wants her own men to die in our place, I ain’t complaining.’

  ‘After the next wave, it’ll change,’ Vigilance said. ‘The Red Scarves will be mustered and armed by then. They’ll find a use for our guns quick enough.’

  ‘What if the city don’t last that long?’

  ‘Then we have our orders.’

  He let the words hang in the air for a little while, lingering like smoke on the breeze before the inevitable explosion from Ulith.

  ‘Shitting gods, from her?! I ain’t letting your mad bitch sister drag us inta the deepest black. Since when does she give orders to the Red Scarves? She ain’t you, she ain’t your dad – she’s nothing to us.’

  Vigilance raised a hand. ‘Easy now, she is my sister, and she’s as much my father’s child as I am. Toil needs only speak one word and she’ll get command of a regiment.’

  ‘You’d have a damn revolt on your hands!’ Ulith spat. ‘She’d get her throat cut by the next morning.’

  Vigilance laughed, the sound drawing startled looks from the soldiers nearby. ‘That would be her problem to deal with,’ he said softly, ‘but anyone trying to cut Toil’s throat might not have everything their own way.’

  ‘You can only hang a killer if you catch one.’

  ‘That wasn’t the problem I was anticipating.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s almost w
orth doing. Toil’s got my father’s temperament; it might be good to remind the men how nasty the company discipline could be.’

  Ulith opened her mouth to reply then thought better of it. ‘You mentioned orders?’

  Vigilance nodded. The woman might be a cold-hearted, fearless monster of a mercenary and one who’d only soured as the years passed, but she was no fool. Family was family.

  ‘Establish our principal camp in Prophet’s Square,’ he said. ‘Have food and ammunition stored there, encompass the neighbouring buildings and make preparations to seal off the streets if the city falls.’

  ‘Box ourselves in?’ Ulith queried. ‘Why there?’

  ‘Because my sister has an excellent sense of direction underground and will need to come up for air sometime.’

  ‘There’s an entrance to the labyrinth there?’

  ‘There is. Any entrance that sits on ground we need to concede gets an earthshaker dropped down it first. The poetry of that might prove lost on Sotorian Bade, but it’ll cheer my sister up.’

  ‘Then what? If the Charnelers push into the city, it’s lost whatever defence we mount. They’ll burn it down around us if they have to.’

  ‘There’ll be no heroic last stand for the Red Scarves,’ Vigilance confirmed, ‘but if the city falls, best we have Toil with us. She’s a girl for surprises and those might come in handy.’

  ‘You know? This really isn’t what I was expecting.’

  Lynx glanced back at Deern, who stood in the middle of a knot of mercenaries. There wasn’t much of his expression visible in the weak light of a single lamp, but Deern’s bored tone told enough.

  ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘More labyrinth, less …’ Deern waved around at his companions, all keeping tight together on the narrow strip of paved ground that had been marked as safe. ‘Less shuffling around,’ he said at last. ‘An’ trying not to fall through the floor. Glad I passed on Shadows Deep if it was like this.’

  ‘We’re all glad you passed on Shadows Deep,’ Sitain muttered from Lynx’s side. ‘The maspid packs were great fun compared to your moaning.’

  ‘Ah, I’ve barely got started on moaning,’ Deern said, ‘it’s all been helpful observations up till now.’

  ‘In that case,’ broke in one of the Monarch’s agents, Suth, ‘when you get really going on it, I’m going to shoot you in the face.’

  To reaffirm her point the woman flicked open her long coat to reveal holstered mage-guns strapped to each thigh and a pair at her belly. Lynx guessed there were one or two on her lower back, too, looking at the line of her coat. Mage-cartridges could explode if they were within a hand-span of one being fired so all mage-guns were one-shot weapons.

  ‘Deern,’ called Toil from the front. ‘If you want to lead the way, you’re welcome to it. Until then, shut up and remember rule one.’

  She stood on the wide path they’d found running along the centre of the great upper chamber. In the dark she could only see that it ran in both directions and an identifying marker stood above the stone doorway they’d entered through.

  Crouching, she steadied herself and again put her head and lamp beneath the line of illusion. It was disconcerting to watch, her face and arm just disappearing from view, but this time there came an exclamation of success and she soon popped back up again.

  ‘Found it,’ Toil declared as Lastani edged forward, her excitement immediately obvious despite the darkness.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Toil ignored her and moved a bit further along the path before prodding down with her staff. It sank a little way into the illusion then stopped with a crisp clack. Toil probed around the edge for a while, testing out the size of hidden stone, then pulled a pot from her pocket and dabbed her finger in. Lynx had seen the stuff before, back in Shadows Deep. Toil had used it to make her finger glow in the Duegar lamp’s light – mimicking the luminescent fingers of the Wisps as she spoke to them in their sign language.

  Now Toil used the concoction to mark the limits of the stone, thin smears two yards apart that glowed bluish-white in her lamp’s black light. With the safe ground marked, Toil stepped down on to the hidden step and probed again each side, quickly finding another lower down. She made swift progress now she knew what she was looking for and before long ducked down so that only the pack on her back was visible as she surveyed the path ahead.

  Aben gestured for Sitain to go after Toil. The young woman stared as though he’d suggested she jump off a cliff, but she said nothing and eventually followed, Lynx close on her heel. The steps were long and shallow, each a couple of yards square, but as Lynx went and the white light of the oil lamps was left behind, he felt a familiar lurch of fear in his belly.

  Toil’s black lamp illuminated little to his eyes. He knew Sitain would be perfectly happy, being a night-mage, but to Lynx the darkness seemed to swallow him up – all the worse for knowing there was a great yawning drop just a few feet away.

  ‘What can you see?’ hissed Toil, barely visible two steps further down.

  ‘Sod all,’ Lynx growled. ‘Mebbe this wasn’t such a good idea.’

  ‘I think she meant me,’ Sitain said.

  ‘Yeah, I know, but talking’s good.’

  Lynx fought the urge to flee and instead pressed his shoulders against the stone wall behind him. There was some sort of handhold there, a long groove in the bare rock face, and he grabbed it gladly, but still the fear trembled in his belly.

  ‘Keep talking if you need to,’ Toil said, ‘just so long as Sitain does too.’

  Lynx couldn’t tell if that was kindness or pragmatism, but chose not to ask, knowing how fractious he was in the dark. Any chance to pick a fight and he’d grab it down here, but there was also a voice at the back of his head reminding him that they didn’t have time for that. He took a long deep breath instead and focused on what Sitain was saying.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t see a whole lot. The steps lead a long way down. The path we were on is the top of a bloody big bridge-type of thing, supported by some sort of web of stone. They all extend further than I can see. In the dark there’s just a faint suggestion of lines further away but nothing I can make out.

  ‘On the other side of the upper chamber there’s a … a column maybe? The far wall’s curved anyway, it’s huge but looks like it’s not just the far side of a great hall. Gods in pieces! If that’s a column then …’

  ‘Then we’re in far bigger chamber than we thought,’ Toil finished.

  ‘Deep too,’ Lynx added for no real reason other than to torture himself. ‘Really bloody deep.’

  ‘Don’t worry; it’ll be far smaller than the great rift in Shadows Deep.’

  ‘Given what you bloody stirred up from the bottom of that rift,’ Lynx said slowly, ‘that’s not as comforting as you might think.’

  ‘I doubt there’s anything alive down here,’ Toil replied. ‘With the canal and Parthain, if this wasn’t sealed off from the outside, it’d be full of water by now.’

  ‘Or we just can’t see the water – or when we open up whatever this leads to, we release the pressure and a million tons of blackness rises up to drown us!’

  ‘Lynx, take a breath,’ Toil advised. ‘The Duegar made things to last and this place is dry – you can taste it on the air. Now come on.’

  Before she could turn to continue down the steps a sound rang out across the entire upper chamber. Distant and echoing, it seemed to roll forward like thunder and for a moment of pure mind-numbing panic, Lynx thought he’d been right after all. In his mind’s eye he pictured a tidal wave of water sweeping over the path, dragging all of them in its wake down into the great depths far beneath.

  ‘Oh gods,’ Lynx moaned, sinking down to the floor, back pressed against the stone behind and arms tight around his body.

  His heart started to hammer away in his chest, blood roaring in his ears like the crash of waves on rock. Bursts of light started to flutter before his eyes as the sound built and was
hed past them, becoming the resonant echoes of an impossibly large bell’s toll. He felt it in his bones, shuddering through his marrow as the bitter taste of bile filled his throat. His head became a jagged mess of thorns snagging his thoughts and making every breath exquisitely painful.

  ‘Sitain, check on the others,’ he heard distantly as rough hands took hold of him and the sound began to fade.

  Lynx closed his eyes and tried to breathe properly. A familiar cord of panic was pulled tight around his chest and he could only manage shallow pants, but the effort itself gave him a focus.

  ‘Lynx,’ Toil said as smooth fingers slipped over his cheeks. ‘Can you hear me?’

  He made a garbled sound, still with his eyes closed.

  ‘Lynx, we’re safe,’ Toil continued gently.

  Lynx didn’t answer her. The words made it as far as his ears, but ‘safe’ meant nothing to him right now. There was only the stink of sweat and stone dust, mud and blood. The clink of chains, the groan of wood and the clash of tools on rock. He pressed himself harder against the smoothed stone wall behind him, finding comfort in the fact it was nothing like a chipped-out tunnel.

  Toil kept quiet for a while, cradling his face but saying nothing more as he fought the panic inside him. Her presence was a help all the same, as much of an anchor as the rock behind him. After a short time he heard a cough from somewhere nearby and light footsteps. He opened his eyes and squinted through the dark as someone crouched and whispered close to Lynx’s face.

  ‘Ah, Toil?’ Kas said, glancing at Lynx before returning to business. ‘Bit of a problem back here. The shitting door’s just closed up behind us, we’re shut in! What in the name of all that’s shattered do we do now?’

  ‘Oh hells, shut? Well, get those bloody mages working – get it open again!’

  ‘They already tried, it ain’t shifting.’

  ‘We’re shut in?’ Lynx wheezed, dark humour and increasing fear clashing inside him. ‘Oh screaming black hells.’

  ‘Lynx, you just breathe, focus on that. This is no different to Shadows Deep, not really.’

  ‘Not different? We’re fucking locked in!’