The space around them constricted – more heard than seen in the darkness. Aedan caught his breath, but then guessed that the cage had entered a channel in the rock. They were nearing the exit. The angle of the cage, however, was wrong, and the edges caught on protrusions, scraping and juddering with a harsh metallic din. It was a good thing no limbs still dangled – they would have been torn off in a blink, and a scream.
The clattering did not relent until a dim light grew above them and they screeched to a halt in a large storage or loading room partly filled with stone blocks and mining equipment. Daylight, at last, poured in through windows and warehouse-sized doors.
The cage did not quite reach the level; it was still partly sunk in the channel which meant the door could only open partway. They squeezed out one at a time and climbed up onto the landing platform. Fergal and Merter remained until last.
As Fergal was stepping up, the cage shuddered and jumped several feet, launching him up in the air. Tyne and Aedan reached out and caught him as he dropped onto the edge of the platform. For a moment the three of them stood tottering. Liru darted in, gripped Fergal’s cloak and pulled. It was enough to shift the balance and they staggered away from the drop.
“Hurry Merter!” Fergal shouted. “I think it’s found the ballast chains.”
Merter was still inside the cage. He tried the door, but it was now completely obstructed by rock.
He was trapped.
The group stared in horror as the cage lurched again. This time another chain snapped and the tilt increased. Merter grabbed hold of the bars and scaled them with wild haste. Clinging to the roof struts, he traversed until he found a bar that was partly detached at one end. He put all his weight on it and wrenched. It moved, but it would not give. He reversed his feet, lifting them and placing them against the roof to push his body downwards as he pulled on the loose bar again. His face bloomed red, veins swelled, and his whole frame shuddered with the effort, but still the bar would not yield.
Chains snapped taut again and the jolt threw Merter to the steel floor. A link burst and another chain fell slack, dipping its corner into the waiting emptiness. The cage was now beneath the level of the landing. Merter was on his feet again and up the bars, straining with frantic desperation.
“Oh,” said Liru, looking away. “I can’t watch this.”
Aedan glanced to the side and noticed that Tyne was not there. His eye caught movement from behind and he saw her now, sprinting back from a tool rack with a sledgehammer. She rushed past them, leapt, and landed with graceful precision on a small square plate in the centre of the cage roof. Then she spun, raised the sledgehammer, and struck at the bar Merter had attempted to loosen.
The first blow glanced to the side. She gritted her teeth and swung again. This time the bar broke free and spun down onto the floor. Merter surged up through the gap and leapt onto the outer frame. He turned back, helped Tyne across and hoisted her up to waiting arms.
Then the last chain broke.
Tyne’s scream was even louder than the clatter of steel as the cage, followed by the chains, dropped down the shaft, crashing from side to side as it descended. Merter, who had been standing on the cage roof, was thrown against the rock walls where he clawed in vain and fell back onto the bars.
For an instant the structure wedged in the darkness right at the very roof of the cave beneath them. Aedan felt a surge of hope, but it was snatched away. There was a creak of metal, a shrill scrape, and an eerie quiet as the iron enclosure fell away into the void.
The dread silence held them for a moment. It ended with a crash that boomed up from hollow depths.
“Could he have caught onto the rock when the cage jammed?” Aedan asked, his voice trembling.
“Merter! Merter!” Tyne screamed.
They all listened. There was no reply. Again and again they called until their throats ached, but the only sounds that reached them were the soft collapses of burning timber.
Aedan saw that Liru was crying, then he realised his own cheeks were wet.
When it was certain that Merter was lost, Fergal drew them away from the edge and helped Tyne support Osric. They hurried to the large doors and stepped out onto a broad street. Fergal glanced around, getting his bearings, then he called Aedan and pointed.
“This road bends but it will eventually take you past the palace courtyard. From there you’ll recognise the way back.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Aedan asked.
“You need to get word to Thormar, and you need to get Liru to safety.”
“But –”
“I’ll hear no argument. We will be slow, perhaps too slow. Your lingering will do us no good. In fact, the larger the group, the slimmer the hope of remaining unseen. Now go!”
Aedan set off with Liru at a run, the two injured soldiers following. They kept to the shadowed walls as much as possible, glancing around every corner before crossing roads.
Coming to a wide open space, they stopped. Something remained of a few stalls and stands, but otherwise the place was cluttered with debris. It was the old market. Aedan decided not to attempt a dash across the middle and, instead, took a course through the long shadows of the high western walls. As they completed their circuit, they looked back to see the soldiers entering the market square and running straight across, stamping and kicking their way through the disorder with enough noise to travel several blocks down the silent streets.
“Idiots!” Liru said.
They turned and ran on. Twice they had to cross the road to negotiate once-imposing statues, marks of the city’s former magnificence now stretched out on their broken faces, and often they danced between skeletons.
Eventually the leaning gate to the royal courtyard came into view. They passed through it and ran across the open space. Aedan knew the crown would be gone, but he looked anyway.
They rushed through the main doors, down the sleeping banquet hall, along the series of passages still marked by Fergal’s pebbles, and reached the stairwell.
“No lamp,” Aedan said. “It’s going to be night down there.”
He looked behind him. The two soldiers had closed the distance. They were sprinting and the panic in their eyes was fresh.
“Move!” the first shouted.
With a hand on each wall, Aedan led the way down the narrow stairs. Liru’s light steps and shallow breathing followed close behind. The soldiers were moving fast, too fast. It wasn’t long before one of them fell, thudding and wincing until he came to a stop just behind Liru where he swore freely and struggled to regain his feet. He was lucky. Such mistakes could be fatal.
“I never saw the snake you woke,” said Liru between rapid breaths. “Was it small enough to follow us here?”
“The head was as big as a saddle. I think it could get down this stairwell, but I’m sure it could eat a horse.”
They burst from the darkness into the staging chamber. A torch flickered with a dark red flame and black smoke, and as he looked around, Aedan knew they should not have come here.
“Slipped the net did you?”
It was Rork, the heavy soldier with the loose jaw and slippery, leering eyes. He flung a crossbow down, drew a very bloody sword and strode towards them.
From behind, a noise of pounding feet grew and the two soldiers burst into the room, knocking Aedan and Liru to the side and tumbling into Rork. The first clutched a bleeding head, and the second, a clotted stump of a forearm.
“Monster!” the first of them gasped. “Quick – we need weapons.”
“Monster?” Rork said, raising his eyebrows, smiling slightly.
“Some kind of serpent-dragon thing. Oh yes, you just go ahead and laugh. It’s real and it’s as big as a whale! It swallowed Marvyn and Drake like they were rats.”
“Marvyn and Drake were rats. And you’re a gutless, spleenless, brainless liar. What really happened?” Rork shouted, spit leaping from his flabby lopsided mouth as he shoved the man in front of him.
> While the soldiers bawled and cursed, Aedan looked around the room. Senbert and Holt were on the floor, gagged and bound. Aedan felt his knees weaken as he recognised Commander Thormar lying in a dark pool. There was a crossbow bolt protruding from between his shoulder blades, and it looked as if someone had been hacking at his head and torso.
Aedan turned his eyes to Rork. Only the lowest of wretches could shoot that big-hearted man in the back and then.… He tried to steady himself, to keep his anger back and his eyes from misting. Images of a lazy river and a quiet porch that would now remain empty kept tugging, goading him. Thormar had not deserved this.
These soldiers would be chased down and hanged if word ever reached Castath. Their lives would depend on making sure it never did. Thormar, Aedan realised, was only the first. As soon as the soldiers ended their argument, he and Liru would be silenced for good.
Aedan noticed Holt looking at him. When their stares locked, Holt motioned with his eyes and head down the passage. The message was clear.
Run!
Heading back to the others was not an option – the entrance to the stairwell they had just left was blocked with jostling soldiers, and the ascending ramp was an unknown. The long corridor out was the only escape. With small steps, Aedan edged away from the light, taking Liru’s arm and keeping her beside him. He had learned that sudden lateral movement would be more likely to draw attention, so he backed directly away with slow steps. The black slime still clung to them, so as they neared the end of the chamber they almost dissolved into the shadows. They could now move to the side. Aedan drew Liru quietly towards the tunnel.
Five paces.
He felt the ground with his foot before each step. They could not afford to stumble.
Three paces.
The soldiers fell silent. His grip tightened on Liru’s arm and he prepared to run. But the lull was brief. The voices grew again, louder than before. Aedan and Liru slipped into the darkness of the long passage.
“Shoes off,” Aedan whispered.
The stone was cold, but smooth and dry. A red glow from behind was just enough to show them where the walls were. They set off at a run, swift and silent.
After a hundred paces the darkness was complete. They slowed down but kept jogging, arms held out on each side. Whispered reflections from their own pattering feet helped them sense their way between the walls.
Aedan thought they might be nearing the end when there was a terrific din of shouting. It was followed by the ominous clatter of hooves as a rider appeared behind them at the far end of the tunnel, flaming torch in hand. The light was only a spark in the distance, not enough to show Aedan the incline ahead. He and Liru both pitched forward as they reached it. They scrambled to their feet and hurried up into the chamber where the wolves had pressed them.
It was dark in here. Aedan took Liru’s hand for fear of losing her. He worked his way along the dark walls until he found the narrow entrance to the stairway he had seen on their arrival.
The thrumming hooves drew nearer, shaking the dark space with echoes.
Climbing these turret-stairs – far steeper than anything they had seen in the fortress – without a light would be precarious at best, but there was no choice. Aedan went first. The stairs were narrow, even at the outer edges. Each was at least twice as high as it was wide. A fall here would be much like a fall down a ravine. Bare feet helped somewhat, but the surfaces were dusty and even bare feet could slip. They climbed at a pace that was balanced between urgency and caution.
The hooves fell silent.
They climbed on. Though his hands were encumbered by the boots he was holding, Aedan found it necessary to use both hands and feet. He whispered for Liru to do likewise. The darkness made it all too easy for them to topple over backwards. He was sure there would be exits in the rock at stages, maybe narrow passages that would enable them to loop around a pursuer, but he found none, only the interminable stairs. He was puffing hard now.
But then a doorway appeared in the outer wall. A faint radiance betrayed the narrow exit while the stairs continued on upwards. Aedan made the decision quickly. He slipped through the opening into a dimly illuminated space.
It was a long and narrow room filled with racks from floor to ceiling. Some held arrows and crossbows that were mostly disintegrated, and the rest held rocks grouped in sizes – hundreds of them. Trolleys stood beside the racks, many already loaded.
Aedan hurried to the far end of the room. It opened onto a wide corridor running left and right. Cut in the outer wall were arrow slits and, between them, slightly larger openings. The featured surface on the outside of the statue had completely hidden these. Behind the openings stood compact catapults of a design Aedan had never seen. They were eaten through with rust and cloaked with moss and ivy, but what remained of the intricate arrangements of hinges, rails and wound steel looked enormously powerful.
These towering statues did far more than provide lookouts and archery posts; they were guard towers in disguise. Aedan had no doubt that the range of the catapults overlapped that from fortress walls; it meant that a siege force would have been caught in a death zone, fired on from both sides.
The rocks gave Aedan an idea. “Let’s try and roll one of these down the stairs,” he said.
They rushed back to the entrance, grabbed the closest trolley and pushed it, but the ancient wheels were rusted solid. Aedan grabbed one of the mid-sized boulders, wrenched with all his might and staggered with it in his arms to the opening. As he rolled it out onto the stairs, a large hand gripped the corner of the doorway.
The first impact of the boulder was followed by a roar of pain and anger, but Aedan didn’t wait to find out what the damage was. He whirled around and yelled at Liru. “Run! Go right. Go right!”
Before he reached the end of the room he caught up to her, grabbed her arm and led her to the left. He hoped Rork hadn’t seen. They rushed along the gently bending corridor, weaving between trolleys and catapults, stumbling occasionally over boulders hidden in the dusty half-light. After fifty paces they reached a turret stairwell leading up, while the passage continued to encircle the giant statue. Aedan worried that they might encounter Rork circling in the opposite direction, so they took the stairs. It led them up to another level much like the first.
They stopped and listened.
Aedan was unsure now. Could Rork have found another stairwell? Could he be on the same level, ahead of them?
The silence was broken only by the low hooting of wind through arrow slits. Then there was another sound. They both heard it – a soft metallic scrape, like the tip of a sword brushing stone, the sound a man could make if climbing a turret-stair with his sword held out in front of him. Rork had not fallen for the trick. He was right behind them.
They ran. The angle of the outer rock here was slightly different, allowing shafts of sunlight to slice across the passage. It made the obstacles even more difficult to spot. They both tripped several times. When they reached the ammunition room, identical to the one below, they stopped and looked back. This time, there was no uncertainty. Big steps pounded towards them and a tall figure flashed from the darkness whenever it cut through a shaft of light.
Aedan hurried past the racks to the doorway that opened onto the original stairwell. Up or down? There was no time to ponder. He chose up and climbed a little more than a turn before stopping.
“Quiet,” he whispered.
They heard the scrape of Rork’s jacket as he entered the stairway. Then he fell silent, obviously listening for his prey.
After the sudden exertion, Aedan found his head was less than steady, like water slopping around in a recently moved tub. It made his orientation on the steep, dark stairs uncertain, and for a dizzy moment he felt as if he were falling backwards.
His fingers were cold from the stone under his hands when the sound of boots reached him. Rork was moving down. When the impacts of his large boots had faded to near-silence, Aedan started climbing again. He remembere
d the height of the statue and wondered how much of the giant was left when he thumped his head against something above him. There was a flash of light, then darkness and pain.
“Ahh!”
“What is it?” Liru asked.
Aedan reached up and pushed. The trapdoor broke off its rusted hinges and fell away with a clang. He winced at the sound. The light revealed a movable stone block beside him. He guessed that it could be slid across to seal off the opening above, but he could not see how to shift it.
He climbed the last few stairs up through the trapdoor. As he stepped into the open air and looked out, he immediately crouched. Liru crawled out and Aedan replaced the trapdoor, hoping their pursuer would be uncertain about the direction of the sound and abandon the chase in the darkness. As Liru stood, her knees bent too, and she instinctively put a hand to the ground.
They were standing on a small circular platform, perhaps twenty feet across, obviously on top of the giant’s head. A low, ivy-clad parapet surrounded them. They could now see that the statues on either side had similar platforms on top, each overlooking the green plain that rolled out a long, long way below, rich velvet in the afternoon sun. But it was not only the height that was causing them to stoop, it was the wind.
A thick bank of cloud was barrelling in from the mountain, and the gusts that swept majestic grassy waves down the hills and across the plain were almost pushing them off their feet.
Then something extraordinary began to happen, and Aedan felt a wild excitement.
“Look. Look!” he said, pointing. “It’s the storm you missed last time. It’s happening again!”
Liru turned and gasped.
Bright afternoon hues began to peel away above the curiously shaped bank of clouds, revealing the azure of night, and from this deep blue darkness, stars emerged until they covered half the sky. The western sun still cast its glow over the land, painting it with copper fire. The wind picked up and the clouds continued to alter shape in the strangest ways, as if they were being moulded rather than blown, and then they began to move as one, as an army charging in formation, though no army ever moved with this speed. They rushed forward until they were directly above, then they stopped.
Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) Page 63