Circle In The Deep (The Outcast Royal Book 1)

by Aaron D. Schneider

  “Where did they all come from?” Durra muttered as he blinked like a dawn-struck owl.

  “From every gutter and every back alley,” pronounced a deep, soulful voice. “Out from under every bridge and forsaken doorway.”

  The company from the stockyard jumped and almost drew their weapons as a single figure approached them with a small lantern. The bearer of the small beacon of light was short and dressed in dark, drooping robes whose wide neck pooled around a bald, tattooed head.

  “Peace, my children,” the man reassured them and raised the light to show his wizened, ink-engraved face. “It is only your good father wishing you welcome and bidding you come as friends.”

  “I know no father but the Shepherd,” Iyshan retorted and settled his scimitar into its sheath. “I need no father but the Shepherd.”

  The man, clearly a priest of Myrnatt, extended his lantern, which was the gleaming crystal pendant of his office and shined with alchemical light.

  “What was that, my child?” he asked and bemusement put a quaver in his potent baritone. “I could not hear you. Do you wish to take your rest amongst this poor congregation? It shall be close quarters but all children of Myrnatt are welcome.”

  “Thank you, gentle priest,” Vahrem said and stepped forward to draw the priest’s attention. “We do indeed come as friends but we don’t come to rest. We’ve been summoned to the guard barracks and simply wish to reach our destination quickly. Is there perhaps a path through this…eh, congregation?”

  The Myrnattian’s deep frown mingled the shadows on his deeply creased face with the dark ink on his skin to create a bewildering and almost ghoulish mask.

  “The plaza is thick with those poor children seeking rest,” he declared with a doleful shake of his head. “I would not have you disturb them as our shrine has promised to watch over them. Even if I should allow it, you would be hard-pressed to pass through without upsetting them. You would be better served to travel up Bite Street and turn south when you reach Darning.”

  Asa swore softly and Vahrem sympathized with the short-legged fellow, although he’d expected as much.

  “Thank you, kind priest,” he said with a nod that wasn’t quite a bow. “We’ll trouble you no more this night and wish you safety until the dawn.”

  The company turned to go when the priest advanced another step.

  “A blessing from your father before you go, my children,” he called after them and the crystal pendant swung in his upraised hand. “For Myrnatt’s blessing and guidance tonight.”

  Iyshan and the other two men from the caravan shuffled back as though the old man had offered them a viper. The two dwarves shared a look and Durra shrugged, which triggered a stifled giggle from Asa.

  “Sadly, our errand calls,” Vahrem said and turned away again. “Farwell.”

  “No child is so busy that he has no time for a father’s blessing,” the priest pressed, his voice softly chiding. “It will take but a moment.”

  The merchant gritted his teeth and sighed as he shook his head.

  “We mean no insult but the men among us are of the Flock and the dwarves follow His Speaker,” he explained as quickly as he could without seeming rude. “Such things as you offer are forbidden to us and wasted on the dwarves. We hope you understand.”

  For second things seemed to rest upon the edge of a knife. Technically, the followers of the Shepherd were recognized both under the laws Jehadim and the Imperial Dictates of the Hasriiman Dynasty, but none of those of the Flock were under any illusions. One perceived indiscretion against the established sects—especially the favored Myrnattians—could be all it took to raise the accusations and vigilantism of the mob from a shallow and unquiet grave.

  Vahrem thought about commanding the company to simply run as he watched the old priest’s face in the moonlight, but a vision of the masses behind the priest in pursuit with blood hymns upon their lips made him wait. He’d hate to rob any assassins of their fee by being run down by an angry mob. Maybe once the mob flayed him alive—as was the tradition for “shearing the sheeple”—the assassins could recoup their losses by putting him out of his misery.

  The priest’s face assumed the ghastly contemplative facade again but when he spoke, it was in a slow, rueful tone.

  “Very well, my children. Go,” he said and swept one hand before him three times as was the custom for dismissing unwelcome spirits. “I shall pray Myrnatt shows you his bounties and leads you from this path you’ve chosen.”

  “You don’t choose the Shepherd.” Iyshan snorted with an outthrust chin. “He chooses you.”

  “Thank you for the consideration,” Vahrem said with another slight nod and a warning look at his manservant. “We’re headed to the barracks now.”

  The priest walked away and shook his head slowly.

  Iyshan sniffed and set off at his master’s side, his face etched with disapproval.

  “I don’t like this.”

  The caravan master paused long enough to fix him with a burning scowl before he moved forward without comment. The man wilted a little but marched along in silence. The other members of the company seemed to be of similar mind and they settled into a silent and determined trudge up Bite Street.

  They might have continued like that to the barracks had the attack not come two blocks from the intersection of Bite and Darning.

  Four men emerged from an alley brandishing meat hooks, cleavers, and mallets, the gory implements of the meat workers’ trade. They wore greasy aprons and, to hide their faces, stitched leather masks in which crude holes for mouth and eyes had been cut. Oddly, their flesh appeared to have been smeared with some concealing, congealing pigment so the color of their skin seemed to be unnatural and indistinct hues.

  They appeared both grisly and hungry as they prowled forward with weapons that gleamed in the moonlight.

  “Vahrem Kal’Stru,” the leader said and leveled a flensing knife so long it was practically a sword. “You owe the meat market.”

  Iyshan’s scimitar, a fine blade of Carnyxian steel, slid free and flashed a moonlit warning.

  “My master has never done business with you butchers,” the manservant declared and stepped to the merchant’s side. “Leave now while you can still do so.”

  The rest of the company drew their arms, none as fine as Iyshan’s blade but all of them weapons of war, be it horseman’s ax or Wain lance. Only Vahrem, his eyes fierce but his countenance unmoved, kept his blade and whip at his belt.

  “I have no quarrel with you,” he declared and stood his ground with his hands on his hips. “But if your guild has a claim against me, have them bring it before the magistrate or even the prince. I will pay you then. There is no need for this.”

  The butchers pantomimed laughter as they gnashed their teeth in a series of dull clacks. In response, a chorus of whoops and jeers rose behind the company. They turned and saw another four men, similarly armed and dressed, exit the alley behind them.

  “Form a circle!” Vahrem ordered and armed himself with both his long-bladed knife and his whip in an instant.

  Hemmed in on all sides, the company formed a rough circle. Their gazes darted from one group of the encroaching foe to the other but their hands were kept steady by their leader’s steady, booming voice.

  “Stay together and watch the man to your left,” he instructed and rolled the woven length of the whip out in front of him. “Feet set, eyes up, and into the Shepherd’s rest we go.”

  The whip cracked once, a peal of thunder in the city street.

  “Get ʼem!” yelled one of the butchers and like a pack of wolves, they began their advance.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Despite the hot sweat caused by her shuffling trek and the covering which clung to her, she stood before the shadowy chamber and shivered so badly her limbs trembled and her teeth chattered.

  “We are a blight,” Ax-Wed moaned as her gaze swept over the shadowy bas reliefs carved into the walls. “A cancer.”

>   Zoria stood a few steps away from the quaking giant, her cherubic features crinkled into a fearful frown.

  “You did this?” the girl asked, unsure if she should move a little closer to the doorway into the chamber. “Or you know them, at least?”

  Despite her apparent horror, the Thulian staggered into the room. She gathered her ragged shawl in one hand and extended the other to trace her fingers across a polished column. Where they touched, ripples of thin, azure light gleamed within the stone and the illumination seemed to defy the otherwise opaque appearance. The growing rings of light spread up and down the pillar but didn’t stop when they reached the floor and instead, continued to dance across it.

  Here and there, the ripples found veins within the stone and after they had spiraled around these twisted cords, more light came.

  “What are you doing?” Zoria demanded as she retreated to the doorway and squinted against the sudden illumination.

  Ax-Wed did not speak but with her head bowed, she rested her hand on the stone until the ripples had spread through the whole room. The awakened brilliance made it seem as though they stood in the world above under the light of a pale morning.

  The ceiling remained a dark, stony sky but all else was revealed in that false daylight. Both stood silent in dreadful awe.

  Upon the walls, the bas reliefs depicted scenes of horrible historic accounts. At the direction of some vast enthroned figure worked in black basalt, warriors wrought in white marble set off across oceans to lands of terrified, shrunken people, now depicted in gray granite. There was no depiction of battles waged between the marble warriors and the granite pygmies, only the images of the bodies of men, women, and children being hewn and fed to carrion crows of gleaming basalt. Upon piles of broken granite bones, the marble warriors raised an edifice of marble—possibly a tower or perhaps a temple. This cyclopean structure dominated the far wall, its gates spread wide to expose a yawning disk of black stone as large as a man.

  This stygian circle loomed large in the eyes of both women, as terrible as a lightless sun yet for vastly different reasons. For Zoria, it was the crowning horror of a vast and inscrutable honorific to a heathen history but for Ax-Wed, it was far worse.

  “Atlacothix,” the Thulian muttered as she shuffled toward the black disk set in the wall. “Now it all makes sense.”

  The air stirred and like an echo from a deep well, a whisper of the presence that moved among the degenerates drifted around them.

  She stood before the night-dark circle with one hand outstretched.

  “Don’t touch it!” Zoria cried and took a step into the chamber but refused to release her hold on the doorway. The poor girl didn’t know exactly why she’d cried out, but the longer she spent in the presence of what seemed terrifyingly like a black eye, the more she feared it was staring back.

  Ax-Wed paused and looked stiffly over her shoulder.

  “It’s only a stone, girl,” she said before she rested her hand against the smooth, dark surface. “Evil with memory but harmless.”

  When the Thulian was not devoured by the night-black edifice and was able to draw her hand away, Zoria finally found the will to draw a breath. She shuffled another few steps into the room and squinted against a brightness she had not seen for months.

  At the base of the pillar where she’d found the bowl, she noticed a small pile of what she’d assumed were discarded dishes and eating utensils. She hadn’t been wrong about the bowls—many were akin to the one she’d used to fetch water and others that were more elaborately decorated—but what she’d taken for cutlery she now realized were items she was certain no sane person would ever want to put near their mouth. Knives with their edges set with obsidian barbs and forks whose tines ended in cruel, jagged hooks were merely the ones she could recognize in an assortment of tools both bizarre and menacing.

  “What is this place?” she asked and her voice sounded loud and breathless, even in her ears.

  Ax-Wed turned toward her, silhouetted against the utter dark of the black disk.

  “This is a Chamber of Dedication,” the Thulian said and her shoulders sagged as she spoke. “Or at least what is left of it.”

  The girl shook her head and retreated a step.

  “That doesn’t explain anything,” she pointed out and trembling anger crept into her voice. “You need to tell me the whole of it.”

  The warrior woman looked over her shoulder and drew in a sharp breath as she did so. Despite that, her companion noticed that she was already moving more easily. Her body had lost some of its stiffness and replaced it with a fluid strength. Given the strange look in her copper eyes, the girl would not have said such a development was not comforting.

  “What do you know of Thule?” Ax-Wed asked.

  Zoria shrugged and shook her head and looked even younger with the gesture.

  “Some haunted place in the Caged Sea,” she replied. “Most of it sank when the demons that lived there angered one or more of the gods. It’s as made-up or long gone as the sky-castles of Zahnd and Nanujin’s Caves of Wonder—the kind of stories I’d tell the little ones at night when Benham wasn’t around.”

  The Thulian smirked, an expression completely bereft of humor.

  “If only.” She grunted and pointed to the wall where the marble warriors stood before the giant worked in black stone.

  “That tells of how the One-Eyed King sent out the warriors of Thule,” she explained and her finger traced the panels of graven stone. “They ranged the world over, gathered slaves and sacrifices, and built Gatehouses which were the foothold of the Empire.”

  The hair on the back of Zoria’s neck prickled. She knew the words used meant far more than the simple assembly of syllables implied, but she had no desire to be stripped of her ignorance.

  “When the Empire fell, those strongholds that were still intact were supposed to shatter their Gatehouses and return to Thule,” Ax-Wed continued and nodded toward the black disk. “But it seems something went wrong. Atlacothix,” she muttered and paused when the stirred whispers rose again at the word. “Very wrong.”

  The girl’s gaze swept left and right but there was nothing but the evil room and its masterful commemorations of atrocity.

  “Please stop saying that,” she snapped as she wrapped her arms around herself. “And why do you keep saying it anyway?”

  The warrior woman shook her head and a sad smile spread across her face.

  “I keep hoping I’m wrong,” she said as she moved toward the door. “I need to get ready.”

  Zoria gave her a wide berth as she moved out of the room and her horror-hardened gaze scrutinized the woman.

  She was bowed as though bearing something heavy on her powerful shoulders. Despite this, she already seemed to move as she had before she’d collapsed from her injury. Whether this was a function of sorcery or the superhuman nature of her people remained unclear but the rate of recovery from such an injury was uncanny.

  Was there no end to the wonders and terrors this woman could introduce to her already strange world?

  As Ax-Wed stepped through the doorway, the chamber began to darken and the light passed through all the stages of the world above with dizzying speed. Morning brightened to noon and burned to an afternoon that smoldered into dusk before sinking into the night. Only as darkness descended could Zoria see the glimmering veins within the stone like bolts of lightning frozen there.

  They faded in the next moment and the room looked as it had before—a darkened chamber with a collection of items piled at the base of a central pillar.

  Unfortunately, it seemed that nothing in the world could make her unsee the black eye staring at her from across the room. Even as she crept to the doorway, she felt its awareness of her. Never in her wretched life had she ever felt so small and so naked.

  Say it.

  She clawed at the stone doorframe until her fingers remembered they were flesh and the skin broke and her nails splintered.

  Say it


  It willed her to speak its name.

  “No,” she whispered, her gaze fixed upon the sentinel eye.

  Say it.

  “No!” she shouted savagely as she tore herself away from the portal and raced after Ax-Wed.

  Her mind told her that all she heard was the sound of her footsteps but deeper within, she knew she heard laughter behind her.

  It was a long while before either of them spoke and in that time, Ax-Wed began to make her preparations.

  She tore a strip from her blood-stiffened undershirt and bound the fleshy bulb tethered to her former wound. With grim resolution, she tightened the binding until her eyes watered and her breath came in low rasps, but the pain subsided when numbing atrophy set in.

  This done, she examined her arms and armor. The latter was in good condition aside from the puncture from Masheed’s treachery and some superficial damage sustained during the battle with the degenerates. Her ax and dagger were in good order although some of her blood crusted where blade and guard met, but she would worry about picking that out later.

  Carefully, she checked the edge of her ax and as always, drew a bead of blood as she ran her thumb along the edge of Thulian sylver.

  “So what are we getting ready for?” Zoria said at last, not yet ready to raise her head from where it had sunk onto her knees.

  Ax-Wed sucked her thumb for a second before she turned to raise an eyebrow at the girl.

  “We?”

  The girl’s head rose and her gaze met the warrior woman’s fiercely.

  “What are we getting ready for?”

  She smirked but gave no answer as she inspected the gore-crusted remains of her shirt. Her brow furrowed in dubious examination as she shook her head slowly.

  “I suppose you could go bare-breasted into battle,” Zoria suggested and her eyes brightened with a mischievous light. “In fact, I think I heard one of the girls read a story about wild Thulian sisters riding naked into battle.”