‘No, what?’ Ceri asked. With luck Lily’s insight might make sense of why she was nervous too.
‘No one seems to be following.’
‘That should be encouraging,’ Ceri replied, though she knew what Lily meant.
‘We’ve been moving fast, but they should be able to move faster. I was kind of expecting to see someone in the rear view by now.’
‘Maybe they didn’t respond to the scouts being taken out as quickly as you’d think.’
‘He probably knew when you killed the first one.’
Ceri sighed. ‘So where are they?’
‘No idea. We should have sex.’
Ceri’s head snapped around and she blinked at Lily. ‘Feeding off me is doing absolutely nothing to reduce your appetite, is it?’
‘No, look, it’s obvious. If we’re banging away like a barn door in a gale, they’re bound to turn up and attack us.’
Ceri opened her mouth to protest, then she closed it to consider. Finally she said, ‘No, you can’t make it rain by washing your car. If we push on we can probably make the castle before dark.’
Lily pouted, but started packing up their things. ‘You know, we could give it a try, just in case.’
‘No, Lil.’
‘Just an hour, maybe two, to see if they’re following?’
No, Lil.’
‘You never let me have any fun.’
~~~
The last hour or so of the walk was steep. The pass sloped sharply upward making it hard to keep up a good pace. Ceri and Lily found themselves getting slower and slower until Lily looked up and spotted the top of the watchtower over the ridge ahead of them.
‘Look! We’re almost there.’
Ceri looked up and saw the black stone turret. It was more or less a couple of open windows cut into the side of a spike. From what she could see there were no joints in the stone. It was a spire of rock rising up from whatever lay beyond the rise. The sight spurred them on and, ten minutes later they were walking over the rise. There they stopped.
The Castle of Bones was huge, for this world anyway. It had to be over twenty-five storeys, with the lookout spire rising a hundred feet above the top floor. A vaguely triangular shape, it jutted out of the cliff face it was settled against with no signs of joins, joints, or imperfections. It was as if it really had been grown out of the mountain. The only windows were in the uppermost floors, just below the tower, but there was a door. Vast and somehow constructed of the same black rock as the castle, you could have walked a dragon through it and it seemed to be the only way in.
The area in front of the castle was a large open area, the centre of which was a lake. They were going to have to walk around the edge to get to the doors.
‘It looks like something out of Lord of the Rings,’ Ceri said.
‘As long as you’re not thinking of the Mines of Moria.’
‘I didn’t know you’d ever read Tolkien.’
‘I had a boyfriend who thought it was amazing, but I’d rather not discover there’s a tentacle monster in the lake.’ She grimaced. ‘This world does some really crazy tentacle monsters.’
‘Only one way to find out.’ Ceri started off around the lake. ‘You know, this kind of looks like a volcanic crater. Maybe an impact crater.’
‘Impact? What the Hell could fall down and cause a hole like this?’
Ceri shrugged. ‘No idea. Something big. Or something smaller and really fast.’ Her lips pursed as she considered. Lily was busy watching the black water. ‘If this world is floating through a dust cloud of some sort, maybe something bigger fell out of the sky. It would make a helluva hole. There’s a theory that the craters on the moon are caused by meteorite impacts, but without going there it’s conjecture. There was one theory someone proposed that huge impacts have caused large-scale extinctions on Earth.’
‘Are you just talking to make noise?’
‘Uh… It is really quiet in this bowl.’
‘Well, I’m not seeing any ripples in the water. Not a thing. It’s flat as a pancake.’
Ceri scanned the water and then looked up at the sharp edges of the crater. ‘No wind. And no lake monster.’ They walked another few yards before she added, ‘Of course, the one in Lord of the Rings didn’t show up until Boromir threw a stone into the water.’
‘Boromir’s the stupid human one, right? We should be okay, we’re not going to throw a stone in.’
‘We’d have trouble. Haven’t you noticed? There isn’t even a loose pebble on the ground.’
‘That’s not exactly natural.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything natural about this place, love. Not one thing.’
They walked on in silence. On Earth the bowl they were in would have been sinking into harsh darkness by now. The sun was low in the sky and there was no direct light. Here the sunlight was more diffuse; the long evening still illuminated the floor of the bowl. It was getting cooler, though, and dimmer, and they both felt they should at least try to get inside before night fell properly.
The doors looked bigger close up than they did from across the lake. ‘We’ll never shift those,’ Lily commented. ‘Plus, I can’t see a lever or a switch, or a doorbell.’ In fact the rock of both the doors and the castle was smooth, featureless, devoid of any mechanism which seemed likely to open the huge gates.
Ceri looked up at them and said, ‘Friend?’ Lily looked at her as though she could not believe she had just done that. ‘What? Maybe Gorefguhdget was a Tolkien fanatic.’
‘Maybe a little after his time?’
‘Huh, yeah, maybe.’ She walked up to one of the doors and slapped it with her palm. ‘Come on, open for widder’s sake.’
With a sound which was almost a sigh, the huge gates swung open.
‘Fuck me sideways with a pile driver!’ Lily commented. Ceri thought it was very apt.
‘I guess we should go in.’
‘Well, that was the point of coming here.’
As they entered the hall beyond the door, runes in the ceiling came to life, lighting the room. It was vast, a huge, vaulted ceiling rising up five storeys and big enough to accommodate a small army. There were corridors leading off it; three huge openings in the walls toward the rear. They did not notice the doors closing again until they were in the middle of the chamber, but it did not really make a difference, they had no intention of leaving that way.
‘We want up,’ Ceri said.
‘Yeah… do it sequentially? Left side first?’ Ceri shrugged and set off toward the left hand corridor. ‘I wonder why it’s called the Castle of Bones?’ Lily asked. It sounded like she was speaking to have some sound in the silent, black stone structure.
‘Khedra is derived from the Ctholnaraeic word for “spine,”’ Ceri replied without thinking. ‘The castle was grown out of the Spine Mountains so it got called the…’ She stopped, speaking and moving, and looked around at Lily. ‘How do I know that?’
‘More memories surfacing?’
‘I’ve never had them come up when I’m awake… but I guess that’s it.’ She looked up at the roof of the corridor, her eyes sliding down the walls. ‘These corridors look kind of like the ones in the dream, but you said the High Ones were fifteen feet high? These are scaled for something much bigger.’
‘Just being grandiose?’ Lily suggested as they started walking again. It seemed like they were following a shallow curve as they went on.
‘Maybe. I don’t know. It seems like they were built for something huge.’
The corridor came to an end in another chamber too vast to be within the castle building. It appeared as though the room had been cut into the mountain and it went on for a long way. Aside from the buttresses which held up the roof every hundred yards or so, the room was entirely empty; a huge, featureless, empty space.
Lily pointed across at the other side. ‘Want to bet that’s where the right hand corridor comes out?’
‘I guess we want the central one then. What is this place? If
it’s barracks, where are the beds?’
‘Rotted?’
‘Does anything in this place look disturbed, or rotted?’
Lily shrugged and turned around to go back the way they had come. ‘No. Maybe Molech cleared everything out when he was here.’
‘I’d have thought he’d have used the space.’ Shaking her head, Ceri followed after Lily.
The middle corridor lead into another huge room. Not as big as the entrance hall or the “barracks” at the back, it was very high. Two staircases spiralled up the walls; technically one staircase and one ramp. The stairs were clearly designed for something with long legs so they took the ramp. Even then it was pretty steep. And the room had one other interesting feature.
‘You notice there’s no ceiling?’ Lily said about halfway up.
‘I had, yeah. It seems to go up all the way. I’m guessing that flying up is an option.’
‘Could we?’
Ceri giggled; the question had had such an eager ring to it. ‘Probably, but I’d like to check out all the floors, just in case. What’s the matter, my gorgeous pet? Feet getting tired?’
‘Yours aren’t?’
The next floor up seemed to really be barracks. The rooms were scaled for something around fifteen feet in height, with a twenty foot ceiling curving down to fifteen feet of wall, and this floor had doors like the one Ceri had seen in her dream. The rooms off the balcony contained bed frames, ranks of them going back deep into the mountain. Each had a thick mattress and blankets on it as though the place was just waiting for its garrison to return. They were all single beds, but they were easily big enough to fit two humans in.
‘I’m guessing at barracks for these “High Ones,”’ Ceri commented.
‘But those things have been dead for tens of thousands of years, and the bedding is fresh.’
‘Enchantment. There’s some sort of enchantment keeping this place clean and fresh. Or they’ve got a horde of Twills.’
‘That’s a fascinating thought.’
Floor three seemed to be the kitchens and store rooms, though they were empty of supplies. There were still pots and pans, big ones, and various cooking implements hung on racks around the kitchen. Everything was clean, pristine to a standard Twill would have accepted, and neatly lined up ready for use. There was an enormous fireplace at each end of the room with spits which looked as though they could roast an elephant.
Above that were two floors of rooms which seemed to be for officers or guests. Better decorated, and also arranged for people of different sizes. There were more of the big beds and furniture, but also rooms designed for more human-sized people.
‘At least we can have a bed for the night if we want,’ Lily commented.
‘Huh, if the place is as well kept as this, we can probably sleep in the royal chamber.’
That seemed to put a spring in Lily’s step, and the floors were not as far apart as the bottom one. It was when they got to the floor above that they found the library. The entire floor was one large room with two wings filled with racks of books and scrolls. The central section was a reading room with variously sized chairs and large tables, and a mural painted on the long wall at the back. They walked through the stacks, pulling out scrolls and looking at them.
‘These mostly look like Ctholnaraeic,’ Lily commented. ‘No idea what they say.’
‘A couple are Devotik,’ Ceri said, handing Lily one of them. ‘You read it better than I do.’
Lily rolled the scroll open a foot or so, read the first couple of lines, and then closed it quickly. She looked paler than usual. ‘Necromancy,’ she said. ‘A spell which promises to rot the victim’s body away while they’re still alive.’
‘Glorious. I doubt we’re going to find anything really useful here. Not without something to let me translate it anyway.’ She wandered back into the reading room and looked up at the mural. It was some sort of abstract design; demonic modern art maybe. As she looked, the details in the pattern stood out. Her brow creased into a frown. ‘Lil, this symbol here, it’s draconic.’
Lily wandered over and stood beside Ceri, frowning at the set of lines and dots where she was pointing. ‘I see… wiggles and dots.’ Her eyes roamed over the pattern of multi-coloured swirls. ‘I don’t see anything I’d call writing…’
Ceri’s eyes looked up and around, the patterns twisting in her mind as she looked at them more closely. ‘It’s… it’s a story. Gorefguhadget’s story.’
‘In draconic script? I didn’t think you knew that much draconic.’
Ceri swallowed. ‘I don’t, but I can read this. Listen… “From another world where magic was more plentiful than water, Gorefguhadget came, bringing with him his wife Lenadenora. His powers were great and his first act was to forge his crown in the fires beneath Mount Khed. And the power of the crown was great, for it gave power over all demons and all the magic of the world.”’
‘That sounds like he wasn’t a demon.’
‘Uh-huh. It goes on about how he made the castle grow out of the rock and brought many of his people from this other world. They ruled over the demons for millennia, setting up the system of Lords to control each region. No one could fight him because he controlled every demon in the land through the crown… Uh, and then someone managed to create a suit of armour and a sword which stopped the crown from affecting the wielder… That’s kind of weird… “And the smith who created the sword was a woman, and she decreed that only a woman could wield it.” I know this place is equal opportunity, but I’d have thought they’d… Why do you look like you’ve just seen a ghost?’
Lily swallowed. ‘Ceri, Molech gave me armour and a sword to fight you and the dragons.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘They protected against sorcery and dragon fire, and they could only be used by a woman.’
‘Oh… That seems like a helluva coincidence.’
‘We’re saying that Gorefguhadget, legendary ruler of all demons, was a dragon. The High Ones were dragons.’
‘It makes a kind of sense. They were probably trying to do the same here that they did on Earth. Get themselves a new home. When they failed here, they moved on because the demons were too good at fighting them.’
‘Explains your dream too.’
‘Huh?’
‘I’m guessing it came down through Brenin. He was Gorefguhadget’s second child, or a descendent of that child. It makes a kind of sense that the same line would be employed in these takeovers.’
‘I guess you are the only demon I have in me then.’
‘No. There was that Devos in Shilfaris.’
Ceri turned from the wall and started for the door. ‘He doesn’t count. Not a regular thing.’
‘He so does. Next you’ll be entertaining Chelvig.’
‘Don’t be silly, I’m sure you can manifest two tails.’
The next floor seemed to be a magic work room. The connection with dragons just got stronger as Ceri recognised draconic symbols mixed with Ctholnaraeic around the containment circle and more draconic symbology on various instruments. There was no sign of the portal room, however. Faran had said it was behind the throne room, but Ceri had kind of hoped when she saw all the magic paraphernalia. So they carried on up to the next floor. It looked alarmingly familiar to Ceri and she started off down a corridor in a hurry.
There was the door and the room beyond it, but there was no cushion and certainly no egg. In fact there was no sign of anything in the room, just featureless walls lit by a single rune in the ceiling overhead. ‘This was the nursery,’ she said. ‘Their children were hatched here.’
‘What’s on the other side? This room certainly doesn’t take up the whole floor.’
Ceri turned and looked back at the door. ‘Private quarters for him and his queen, playrooms for the children. Their rooms stretch back into the mountain a ways. Reception room at the front and then private chambers going back.’
‘We should get some sleep,’ Lily said. ‘I’m gues
sing the throne room is above us, and the portal room behind that. You’ll need your wits about you if you’re going to make it work, and neither of us got much sleep last night.’ She grinned. ‘If Gorefguhadget really was one of your ancient ancestors, I don’t think he’ll mind if we borrow his bed.’
They found the sleeping chamber behind the reception room and a large lounge. The bed was on a podium with quite a high step up, and it was huge. The corner posts were black basalt, carefully carved like giant, twisted candlesticks and there were curtains drawn across all four sides. The mattress was thick and quite firm, and Lily lay back on it with a sigh as soon as she had undressed.
Ceri crawled on beside her and lay down. ‘This feels kind of weird.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s like… sleeping in my parents’ bed or something.’
‘Turn on your side,’ Lily replied and, when Ceri had done as she asked, she spooned up against her back, encircling her waist with an arm. ‘We don’t have to do anything other than sleep. I can keep my appetite in check for one night.’
Ceri smiled and closed her eyes. ‘Tomorrow we go home.’
‘I can’t wait.’
‘Love you, Lil.’
Lily softly kissed the back of Ceri’s neck. ‘I love you too, Ceri.’
Day 41
‘Mother, where are we going?’ Ceri heard the voice coming from her own mouth, or so it seemed, but it did not sound like her. Around her the corridors of the castle moved past at a swift walking pace. A sonorous, resounding ringing sound could be heard bouncing through the halls around them.
‘Home, shekushka, we have to go home.’ Lenadenora’s voice sounded worried. She was trying to make it sound like everything was normal, but it was not and she was worried, scared.
‘But this is home.’
‘Not anymore.’ They rushed into a large, vaguely semi-circular chamber with a big, stone chair at the far side of it; the throne room. It certainly looked like the throne room of somewhere called the Castle of Bones. The throne itself was large and Gothic, set up on a couple of steps. They ignored it, rushing past to a doorway at the back of the room. Another corridor and they were moving faster now, Lenadenora’s urgency was infectious and Ceri found herself almost running to keep up.
Thaumatology 10 - The Other Side of Hell Page 18