A Dark Sacrifice

by Madeline Howard

  Four days later they reached the foothills. No more than Winloki did Sindérian care for that country. Though better able to ward herself against voices in the night, she could not entirely shut them out—and if no ill dreams haunted her sleep, the ruined cities had enough tales to tell during daylight; the ghosts who haunted that region were so present, so voluble.

  They had believed in an endless cycle of reincarnation, viewed time as a maze of many twists and turns, so that they were always looking to the past or the future, with little thought for present joys or sorrows. Many had lived only to die, making elaborate plans for the life to follow, or dreaming strange dreams of a life before—which might lie ahead when they turned the next corner. So their minds had become like mazes, too, continually running in crooked paths. In their memories Sindérian saw shadows of an old, old power, neither of the Dark nor of the Light, but pitiless, greedy; slaves to that power they had enslaved others. In their history she saw omens of things to come: what had been in ages past, what might be in days ahead, if bindings broke and ancient evils were let loose in the world again.

  Meanwhile the year was withering around her. In the mornings, frost tingled in the air; in the evenings, she saw the moon as if through a thin haze of ice. So much time had passed, and she had hoped by now to be returning with the Princess to Thäerie.

  Then one night Faolein returned much later than usual, just as Aell was waking Sindérian for the predawn watch—and this time he had news that sent everyone’s spirits soaring. He had flown as far as the camp of the Furiádhin and he had seen the Princess.

  If the rest of you could grow wings and fly as I do, you might overtake them before sunset, he told Sindérian. As it was, given the nature of the terrain, she knew it might take two or three days.

  Yet the gap between them and the Pharaxions had narrowed. Relieved of all urgency since crossing over from Skyrra, Camhóinhann and his party must have been travelling at an easy pace, while she and her companions continued to press themselves.

  “They don’t know that we are here,” said Kivik as they ate a hasty, cold breakfast and sipped lukewarm tea.

  “It is certain they do not, or we would never have been able to travel so swiftly and so safely,” answered Sindérian. “But even if they did know, I doubt they would consider a party the size of ours a threat, or hurry themselves because we were following.”

  “Yet you continue to think that we can hinder them in some way?” said Prince Ruan, with a lift of his brows. “Four men and two wizards—one of whom has no voice or hands to work spells?”

  Sindérian turned away rather than meet that keen gaze of his. “The world is full of many unfathomable chances,” she said, “and even the Furiádhin can’t always predict where lightning might strike.” Yet a desperate plan was beginning to form in her mind, she was beginning to understand what she must do. And it was not a plan she was willing to share with him—or anyone.

  Though the smell of rain was often on the air, they had continued to travel dry, with the weather always ahead of them. The mountains were now so near, it looked as though it might be possible to reach out and touch them in the clear air. So when Faolein failed to return at all one night, Sindérian tried not to think of the updrafts and the downdrafts that would make flying in the high country up ahead so perilous.

  She was not prepared for the news he brought with him when he finally landed on her saddlebow late the next morning. They have disappeared.

  Her first joy at seeing him rapidly faded. What do you mean?

  I cannot find them. And I have spoken to every bird within miles. They are not the most reliable source of information, as you may know, for their minds cannot hold a thought for very long, but they all say the same thing: Camhóinhann and the rest disappeared yesterday morning. They went under the ground—gone to earth like foxes.

  She tried to make sense of that and could not. There might, of course, be caves in the mountains ahead, but she could think of no reason why the Furiádhin should go into one of them and stay for a day and a night. Perhaps, she said, the birds are confused. Or perhaps Camhóinhann has cast some spell of concealment.

  But from whom would the Furiádhin be hiding? She shook her head, for it defied explanation. It had been a long time since she had believed in benevolent powers, powers that took a kindly interest in the affairs of men. At best, the Fates were indifferent. But she had never imagined they could be so cruel as to allow her to come so close, only that those she followed might disappear, without reason, without sense. Even now she could not—or would not—believe it.

  I will not tell the others just yet, she decided. It may turn out that the birds are mistaken.

  Until now, Sindérian had been careful to move quietly through the world, using as little magic as possible, hoping in that way to avoid attracting Ouriána’s attention, to go undetected by those ahead. But with the disappearance of the Furiádhin and their prisoner she grew reckless, throwing her senses wide, soaking in all the influences of the countryside around her.

  The ghosts and their dark history she already knew. Otherwise, it was an ordinary record of suns and moons and passing days: the flight of a hawk, a dim memory of some traveller bolder than the rest who had braved the hill country until night terrors drove him back. She searched through it all, found the thread she was looking for, and followed it to the lower slopes of Penadamin, in the Fenéille Galadan. Her companions, not quite understanding what she was doing, allowed her to lead them on.

  All this brought her to an ascending track, where it did not take a scout or a tracker to see that a party of twenty or more had passed in the last few days, the prints were so clearly marked where mud had dried and captured them. And when they came to the cleft in the mountain and entered the rocky gorge, the stench of black magic, the smell of recent bloodshed, were unmistakable.

  But when the trail abruptly terminated at the base of a cliff with the carcass of a dead horse, four puzzled faces turned in her direction.

  “They can’t—they can’t have walked or ridden through solid stone,” said Kivik.

  “No,” she answered grimly. “I am afraid that the mountain opened up to receive them.”

  There was a long, dumbfounded silence, during which she fervently wished she had warned the others what to expect. Then Prince Ruan said, “You think there is a hidden entrance?”

  “I know there is an entrance. A pair of doors—I can’t see them but I can feel them—just there.” She indicated the place with a weary gesture.

  “And you can open them?” Skerry asked with a hopeful look.

  “That I don’t know,” she answered, swinging down from the saddle and skirting the body of the horse. In warmer weather, the smell would have been unbearable, yet it was not the carcass that made her stomach twist into knots or her scalp crawl. “But I mean to try.”

  There are magics here it would be unwise to meddle with, said Faolein’s warning voice in her mind. And look at the horse: there ought to be scavengers somewhere about, but nothing has touched it. That isn’t natural. We should be away from here.

  Sindérian was scarcely paying attention. A reckless mood was still on her, and in that mood good advice generally fell on deaf ears. Those spells are easiest that encourage things to do what is already in their nature. Faolein had said so himself. And it was the nature of doors to let people in, as much as keep them out.

  But hours later, sitting on the ground and glaring at the place where she knew the doors to be—having run through every likely spell she could remember or devise on the spot—she was finally forced to admit defeat. A series of runes and other signs were scratched in the earth before her, where she had been drawing them and rubbing them out for what felt like weeks. “The spell that seals these doors is far too ancient. No one studies that sort of magic on Leal—we haven’t for hundreds of years!”

  Blinking back angry tears, she tried to think what she ought to do next. But she was physically exhausted, her mind a tangle of
charms and spells—all of them quite useless—and the effort required to form even the simplest plan suddenly seemed far too great.

  “I suppose,” said Kivik, rising from his seat on a nearby boulder, “that it will take us weeks to go over the mountains in the ordinary way?”

  Without looking up, Sindérian nodded, one short, sharp motion of her head.

  “Then I think we had best begin. It is not so late, and surely we can ride for at least an hour before dark overtakes us.”

  There was a rustle of movement and a clink of mail rings as the other three men stood. Hooking a strand of dark hair behind one ear, Sindérian raised her eyes to look at them. One after the other, the faces of her companions were hardening into lines of determination.

  “After all,” said Skerry, “we have come this far with very little hope. I can think of no reason why we shouldn’t continue on in the same way a while longer.”

  Prince Ruan offered her his hand. Too tired to refuse him, she allowed him to pull her up into a standing position.

  His turquoise eyes were blazing. “As Lord Skerry says, from the very beginning we’ve had very little hope and no real plan. I don’t see that anything has changed, do you?”

  21

  The tunnel was so broad, four could ride abreast without crowding the horses. At intervals, other passageways intersected. Then Camhóinhann, who was leading the way, would raise his torch high and examine the walls. Each time he seemed to find markings no one else could see and chose his direction accordingly.

  The granite of the tunnels had been chiseled and smoothed until floors, walls, and ceilings were like dressed stone without any joins. Sometimes there were archways sealed by stone blocks, which Winloki took to be the tombs. But these were so very plain, without inscriptions or other carvings, that she had difficulty reconciling them with the diamond doors. Where she had expected mansions and palaces of the dead, she found only these dank and humble dwellings.

  Though most of the passages were level, occasionally they followed one that ascended or descended, and every time Camhóinhann took them deeper Winloki’s heart misgave her. Ever since the doors had closed behind her, she had remained silent, building a wall of resentment around her to keep the others out. But at last, the question that was pressing most heavily on her mind demanded an answer. “How long will we be here?”

  “When we came here before we spent an entire fortnight exploring these tunnels,” said Morquant. “But if memory serves me, it will be a journey of four or five days to the Doors of Corundum on the far side of the mountain.”

  Then Winloki wished she had not asked. The very idea of four or five days moving through this dead weight of air was simply intolerable. Sometimes she thought she caught a whiff of corruption coming from the vaults. Even the stillness was unnerving: a silence as vast as the mountain itself, it made nothing of their little disturbance clattering through on horseback.

  Sometimes the ceiling soared high overhead; sometimes the passage dipped so low, the torches left trails of smoke on the roof. Once they entered what must have been a natural cavern, where a river flowed through in a deep channel spanned by a narrow bridge.

  “Do not touch the water,” said Camhóinhann. “There are many things here that have strange properties; the water may be one of them.”

  At last they came into a series of passages where stonecutters had lavished their art in friezes of intricate pattern: pictures of gardens and flowering vines chiseled in high relief, so real she was half convinced she could breathe the heady scent of the flowers. Veins of silver and gold ore ran through the floor. These, then, were the mansions of the dead that Winloki had been expecting all along. Yet there was a subtle wrongness, as of something hidden: faces in the foliage she could not quite see, figures of men and women whose proportions hovered on the edges of deformity.

  An archway rich with carvings led into a chamber filled with stone tables laid out in exact rows. “Effigies,” said Efflam in a low voice, for on every table rested a marble image, lying with arms crossed and eyes closed, dreaming the centuries away in imperishable serenity.

  “No,” said Rivanon, “not effigies, not statues. These are the dead themselves. By some ancient process of alchemy unknown today they were able to transmute the matter of living things into stone.”

  And when Winloki leaned down to take a closer look, she saw that it was so. No statues had ever been so perfectly modeled, complete down to the tiny lines on an upturned palm, the eyelashes resting on an alabaster cheek, or the intricate embroidery on the edge of a sleeve. Yet all was of the same milky whiteness: hair, skin, gowns, sandals. Nausea clawed at her stomach.

  “Only royal burials were preserved in this way,” Morquant explained in a dry whisper. “This is the first room of the queens. In chambers to either side lie the lesser wives and concubines. The kings rest farther in.”

  From that hall they passed through many like it, where they saw hundreds more of the petrified bodies. In the women Winloki saw a cold perfection of feature she had never encountered in the flesh; the men, too, looked noble and splendid. Yet for all their beauty her revulsion grew. There was a subversion here of the natural order of things; and in the delicate veining of marble faces and marble limbs, she discovered a horror like leprosy. By comparison, the three priests seemed vivid with life: the bleached skin and colorless hair of the Furiádhin revealed a warmer tint, like ivory beside snow, or linen next to salt. Winloki was glad when they passed beyond the last burial chambers, even though it meant a return to the stifling passageways.

  After a wearisome journey of unknown duration, Camhóinhann ordered a halt to set up camp in one of the tunnels. And there everyone settled down, on bedrolls and folded cloaks, to sleep for what she could only assume was the night, all hours being the same under the mountain.

  The next interval began with a meal of dried meat and dried fruit, with water passed around in a leather bottle, before they all mounted up for another torchlit journey.

  To Winloki’s relief, it seemed they had seen the last of the stone figures. But in a corridor lined with the unmarked tombs, they began encountering vaults that had been disturbed, the blocks that had sealed them violently cast down—as if some tremendous force on the inside had hurled them outward. At the first, second, and third, Camhóinhann hesitated a moment before riding on. Not a word did he speak, but each time he pushed the pace a little harder, so that a grim sense of urgency began to infect everyone who followed after him.

  And all that day, if day it was, Winloki experienced a growing claustrophobia. Walled about with earth, above, below, on every side, she felt her craving for sunlight and pure air grow more and more insistent. It was then that she felt the true horror of deep places, became giddy when she thought of the vast number of underground passages spreading out still ahead of her, of the remaining hours and days of this dark journey.

  Most of all, the incalculable weight of the mountain, the tremendous mass of it, preyed on her mind. She felt crushed and suffocated, wondering how it was that the roof of the passage did not come crashing down under so much weight, so much pressure. And if, by any mischance, she were to be separated from the others, unable to find her way out…

  These dreadful thoughts so occupied her that she had no warning of anything amiss until she happened to hear Adfhail, the youngest acolyte, speaking with the guard Kerion. They were leading the horses down a descending corridor more precipitous than any they had encountered so far, and because they were a little ahead of her she caught only fragments of the conversation.

  “—a shuffling sound and a dull rattle. I did hear it. And there was something I could smell, colder and staler than the air, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand—”

  “Your imagination—it must have been. Nothing could live inside these tunnels. And do you think those things we saw could rise up and walk in their marble?”

  There was so long a pause, Winloki wondered if she had imagined the whole exchange. Then
Adfhail spoke again. “Look to the Furiádhin. Dyonas is uneasy, and that is unlike him. Mark my words: he and Camhóinhann have seen things here they never expected.”

  Winloki felt a noose of fear around her heart, drawing tighter and tighter. Was that the sound he spoke of now? But no, it was only the rattle of a harness, the clink of spurs on the cavern floor. She had been holding her breath, but now she relaxed and let it out.

  Then there came a sound impossible to ignore or dismiss: a deep groaning under the earth, followed by a sound like rock shattering, and a repetitive clatter in the passages behind them. As one man, the entire company came to a halt.

  “Look to the Princess,” said Camhóinhann sharply from somewhere up ahead. Swords came hissing out of their scabbards as the guards drew their weapons and moved into a tight, protective circle around Winloki.

  At another order from the High Priest, everyone began to move, this time at a much swifter pace than before. At first it seemed that they would easily outdistance whatever it was that followed them, particularly when they reached a place where the passage leveled out, enabling them to mount up and ride again. But they had been riding only a short time when they were assailed by a stench so foul it wrenched at the gut and turned the knees to water.

  All of the horses erupted into madness at once: squealing and bucking, bending nearly double in their efforts to savage their own riders, rising up on their hind legs and beating at the air.

  Winloki was one of those thrown. Stunned by the fall, for a moment she could only lie on the cold stone wondering what had happened, why her head throbbed so, what this commotion of stamping hooves and shrilling horses swirling all around her could be. By some miracle, she was neither trampled nor crushed before she collected enough of her wits to roll over, lever herself off the floor, and scramble to her feet.