Came he from that place bearing wounds but gifts as well.
The Shepherd knows the cost of love and knows it well
So he calls his flock to follow him on his narrow, winding road.
For he has promised his flock a place, a sheltering abode.
So follow the Shepherd, seeking ever to heed his voice and know his Way,
Seek him while he may be found, to see his face one Great and Glorious day.”
As Siava finished, Vahrem and Iyshan hummed the final note and all looked down to where Heydr stared heavenward with the same touch of a smile softening his hard face. The merchant drew the dead man’s eyes closed and put an arm around Siava’s jerking shoulders as the young man began to weep. Tears rolled freely down the caravan master’s cheeks and into his blood-streaked beard.
“Someone’s coming,” Iyshan said thickly and one hand swiped across his face while the other pointed up the street.
A patrol of guards in the uniform of the Tin Quarter rounded the corner of Bite and Darning with lanterns in one hand and metal-wrapped clubs in the other. The caravan master gave Siava a comforting squeeze and rose shakily to his feet, suddenly very tired and hurting from a dozen bumps, bruises, and scratches he hadn’t noticed before. He attempted to straighten his beard but his fingers brushed his nose and he cringed.
He would have to meet them as he was.
“Too little, too late,” Siava muttered bitterly where he remained on his knees beside Heydr’s body. “The party’s already over.”
“I don’t think they’re here for this party.” Iyshan hawked and spat in disgust. “Look who’s leading them.”
Vahrem squinted past the glare of the lanterns and could barely make out the livery of the Gold Quarter royal guards and the sour-faced guard who’d summoned them.
“Do you see who’s not with him?” Iyshan grunted.
“Alborz.” He sighed and managed to say a quiet prayer for his old friend as he fought the urge to crumple and forgo any attempt to remain on his feet.
“Durra,” he said quickly without turning. “You two will be protected from what comes next. They can’t risk angering the clans by taking well-connected Wain Dwarves. I need you to get to Numi and find Alborz—if he can still be found.”
The guards were closing in at a jog and their formation swept wide to encircle the survivors.
“And if he can’t be?” Durra asked.
“Get the caravan out,” he instructed and opened his empty hands as the guards closed in. “Get clear of J—”
“Every man here is under arrest,” the frowning royal guard declared and motioned those under his command forward. “If you dwarves seek to impede us, you will be taken in as well.”
The Tin Quarter guards swept in and rough hands snatched their weapons away and bound each man with leather cords. Vahrem looked over his shoulder to where Asa and Durra stood to one side, their knuckles turning white as they grasped their Wain lances. He shook his head slightly as his hands were twisted behind his back and wrapped with cruelly tight cords.
“Did you have time to decide what we are being charged with on the way here?” Vahrem asked as he was hauled to join his group by the royal guard. “Or was that not worth the effort?”
For the first time, the man smiled, a cruel, ugly expression on his pinched, mean features. He drove a kick into his groin and the merchant’s legs buckled, but the men holding his arms prevented him from sinking to his knees.
Iyshan and Siava snarled and struggled but both earned blows across the face and stomach.
“The charges begin with illegal possession of weapons of war under the Hasriiman Dictates.” The guard sneered as he put a toe under Iyshan’s scimitar where it lay on the street. “And end with sedition against the Jehadim and plots to overthrow the prince.”
The merchant hung his head but knew better than to protest the absurd charges. His only hope was that Alborz was still alive.
“You runts had better claim whatever friends you have in this mess,” the royal guard snapped at Asa and Durra. “Come first light, this whole mess is going to the rot pits, and what goes in stays in.”
Neither dwarf spoke but their jewel-bright eyes shine with deadly intent under the moonlight. The royal guard spat again but turned away quicker than he needed to.
“Let’s get these rebels into the pit,” he called. “Move out!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Eat it,” the girl said after she’d swallowed a mouthful of cold arthropod flesh. “It won’t get any prettier.”
Ax-Wed stared at the ichor that dribbled from the corners of the girl’s dainty mouth and then at the many-legged chitinous creature in her hand. It had stopped flailing and clicking its pincers shortly after Zoria had smashed its mandibled head into a pulp against the cavern wall. The child had even been kind enough to demonstrate how to crack the invertebrate’s shell along seams in its glossy armor. Now, lobes of grayish flesh veined with traceries of blue and black lay before her and glistened in the dim blue light of a broken column that protruded from the floor.
This chamber seemed to have been an antechamber of the Gatehouse but during its disjunction from it had been thrown on the edge of an underground cavern where water from dripping stalactites pooled and created an alien ecosystem of sorts. Silvery blindfish no longer than a thumbnail darted about between algal blooms. Scuttling between the spongy pseudo-plants of the shallows were dozens or maybe hundreds of the elongated creatures that seemed to have been the girl’s only source of food these last months.
Watching the slow, jerky motions of the living creatures as they raked through the blooms for cowering blindfish did nothing to improve the Thulian’s appetite.
She had been a finicky eater as a child—one of the few weaknesses her mother tolerated—but since becoming a sell-sword, she’d learned to take food where she could find it.
But this…well, she was not even sure she would call this food.
“Hurry up, princess,” her companion teased as she slurped a dangling spool of flesh. “It doesn’t taste like much so pop it in and get it over with.”
The warrior woman dug her fingers into the gaps in the carapace and tried to not think about the slurping wet pops that came from within the carcass. A few twisting tugs later, she let the forearm-long husk fall to the floor and held the quivering meat at arm’s length.
“Oh, come o—”
“One more word,” Ax-Wed warned with a growl in the back of her throat. “Only one and I’ll shove this into your yapping mouth.”
“Promise?” Zoria asked in a sickly-sweet tone.
She swore profusely and in several languages but when she saw that the girl was about to make another snide comment, she snapped her teeth into the cold, quivering flesh.
Her companion hadn’t lied, at least. There was hardly any flavor to the mouthful that squelched between her chewing jaws. The flesh slid uncomfortably around her mouth, almost as though retreating from the teeth that burst the gelatinous lobes, but she pushed the thought aside and wolfed another bite. This was fuel for the madness that was about to come. She had nothing else so she would feed the furnace with this unclean flesh and hope her fury would burn it pure.
It took three more bites to eat the rest of the chewy flesh and when she finally came up for air, she heard the smack of a carapace upon stone.
Zoria had fished out two more of the creatures and was beating them on the floor.
“More?” Ax-Wed choked around a clinging chunk in her throat.
“Who knows how long it will take to reach this Gatehouse?” The girl shrugged as she laid the slain arthropods one beside the other. “We may need to eat again.”
It was so sound and mature that Ax-Wed was glad for the darkness which hid the flush in her cheeks. She should have thought of that but the prospect of eating more of that unwholesome flesh was getting the better of her.
Fuel for the fire, she told herself as she tried to not look at the way the creatu
res' clawed legs slowly curled into the corpses.
“It’s a good plan,” she said and swallowed roughly. “I’m not sure how the Blind Spiral caused this but you’re right that we might have to trudge along for a while.”
Zoria turned to the water that lapped at the edge of the stone tiles which seemed to have flowed into tidal spirals as though they were sand and not more adamant material. Her small feet slid to the edge of the frigid water and she stood waiting for the ripples of her entrance to subside.
“So I understand,” she said softly, her gaze fixed on the creatures teeming in the water. “You think someone messed up while closing this Gatehouse-thing and as a result, it threw the whole structure into the earth and left pieces of itself as it went.”
“More or less,” Ax-Wed replied as she took her dented helm from her belt and examined it. “I am counting on that, at least.”
The girl frowned as the water stilled and the creatures that had retreated from her intrusion began to move slowly toward the edge where several algae tufts drifted.
“And this is possible how?” she asked, her whispering voice unable to hide her obvious consternation. “How does a building simply plunge through dirt and rock? And how can we expect any of it to still be intact?”
The warrior woman moved to the place where the rough stone of the cavern walls breached the twisted stone tiles. A few stalactites dangled low overhead that might fit the bill.
“First, we know some could be intact because we’ve already seen evidence of that,” she explained as she drew her ax and with the raven beaked bill at the back of the head, began to take aim. “Second, a structure can do that when its whole purpose is to contain an entry to the Blind Spiral.”
Zoria’s hand plunged into the water and emerged with another two of the many-legged arthropods. The creatures clicked their mandibles and pincered toes as they squirmed in confused rage. The girl wasted no time and exited the water to beat the creatures on the floor and even against each other.
“Yes,” she said, breathless with a mixture of damp chill and sudden exertion. “Can you stop assuming I know what you are talking about with all this Thulian sorcery? Until an hour or so ago, you were a ghul under the bed.”
Ax-Wed swung out and the bill sparked against the stone. She had to dart away as a spear of rock plunged from the fractured stalactite and some of the shrapnel pattered against her armored back.
“What are you doing now?” Zoria asked as she laid her most recent catch alongside the other two she’d snagged.
The Thulian kicked aside some of the jagged chunks of rock before she bent to scoop up a spike of stone. She tapped it twice on the floor before she rose and looked at her companion.
“I’m improvising.” She shrugged, slung her ax on her belt, and retrieved her helm. “Do you want to learn about Gatehouses or not?”
“Will I understand anything you are talking about?” Zoria asked and folded her arms over her narrow chest.
“It’s unlikely,” Ax-Wed muttered and settled on the floor with her helm and the blunt stone spike. “But I don’t give up easily.”
The girl rolled her eyes but nodded for her to continue as she set about wrapping the “food” in scraps of cloth and binding those rags to a makeshift sling.
“Gatehouses are constructions of both esoteric engineering and alchemy,” Ax-Wed explained. “They are designed, placed, and constructed in a series of rituals that makes them conduits.”
“Conduits of what?” Zoria asked as she tied a binding in place. “Magic?”
“Not merely any magic. Thulian sorcery.” The warrior woman fitted the tip of the rock punch against the unwelcome dent inside her helm. “It is magic bound up in the Kingdom of Cacophony and its adjoining realms.”
She clenched her armored hand into a knot of leather and metal and pounded the stone hard. Once, twice, and finally thrice, she struck like a hammer until the helm clunked in protest as the metal flexed outward. She set her impromptu tool aside and held her helm up for examination.
“It’s good enough for who it's for,” she muttered as she traced a thumb over the crinkled deformities running across the dome.
“What is the Kingdom of Cacophony?” the girl asked after she’d recovered from a reflexive cringe at the ramshackle armor repair. “And what does it have to do with the Gatehouse?”
Ax-Wed paused in preparing to don her helm.
“It is the un-realm,” she said after a lengthy pause. “The place where old and powerful and utterly inhuman intelligences are in perpetual competition to subdue and consume. It is a hungry and godless plane of existence.”
Zoria could sense that her struggle to speak was not only discomfort with the subject but a struggle to intimate what she meant. It was as though words—or perhaps her grasp of the trade tongue—were insufficient to convey the reality of the fantastical place. If the conversation had taken place before her abduction, she might have disbelieved or dismissed it, but after what she’d seen with the Thulian and horrors in the dark, the girl could only stare in glum silence.
What she would have given to make the world as she had once dreamed it despite the mortal horrors she’d faced so early in her life.
“My people learned to barter with the entities in the Kingdom for power,” Ax-Wed said and held the helm in front of her, her copper eyes staring into the empty sockets. “That was how one island and one people subjugated most of the world all those centuries ago. I’ve read that even novice sorcerers with a few sacrifices at hand could use a Gatehouse to crush armies and break fortified cities but more than that, they could be used in even more powerful ways.”
Zoria could hardly imagine what could be more potent than being able to breach a great city like Jehadim. What greater expression of power could there be?
The warrior woman raised her grim gaze from her helm and seemed to read the question in her eyes.
“It was said that the Gatehouses could connect two points in our world through a bridge across the Kingdom,” she explained. “The Arcane Warlords of Thule could, within the Gatehouse, see any place, speak to any person, and even will bodies to pass along the bridge. If there was a properly made Gatehouse on the other side, it was said entire armies could pass with minimal…resources.”
At first, the girl thought that while this sounded wonderful and frightening, it hardly seemed quite as incredible as consuming an army with sorcery or battering a city. She almost said as much when her companion returned to staring at her helm, dark thoughts of her homeland and people swimming behind her eyes, but then she had a thought.
What could a man like Behnam have done with such power? To see, speak, and reach out and touch any of them in the house no matter where he was or what they were doing. She shuddered as understanding dawned on her in the yawning silence.
Why crush an army or break a city when you could cow any of them with the utter certainty of your threats? Who would dare raise armies knowing that with a word, you could be found or worse, what you hold dearest could be found? What soldier would march to war knowing that no matter how swiftly he moved, his family would be slaughtered before he saw the battlefield?
“How were they ever defeated, then?” the girl asked.
“Time and corruption,” Ax-Wed responded as she rearranged the mail aventail on her helm. “Negligence and Treachery.”
She looked up from her work, her eyes shining as cold and hard as copper pennies in the queer twilight of the cavern.
“Thule defeated itself,” she said, her voice flat and almost reproachful. “We damned ourselves for power, never realizing that the same lust would drag power from our grasp, one finger at a time.”
The warrior woman donned her helm, buckled it into place, and let the veil of iron links descend. Rising from the stone floor, she stretched with a soft grunt and turned to regard the girl with her unflinching gaze. Looming over her with only the barest glint of her eyes within the helm’s sockets, the Thulian seemed a deathless giant like
a revenant titan risen to do battle eternal upon some hellish plane.
“Are you ready to go?” she asked as Zoria stared at her, dumbstruck. The large but faltering woman she’d first encountered was gone and in her place was a force of nature bound to the peculiarities of the female form writ large.
“So will we try to find this Gatehouse?” the girl asked as she drew the sling of dead arthropods over her shoulder. “And use it to escape?”
Ax-Wed nodded.
“But that means going deeper.” She didn’t bother to make it a question.
It drew a simple nod in response.
“There will be more of the gnashers down there,” the girl warned and repressed a shiver. “I’ve heard them before—what sounded like tunnels full of them. And then there is the Voice and maybe other things too.”
The Thulian’s hand moved to the head of her ax in answer.
“We don’t even know if you can use the Gatehouse,” Zoria said and hated how she sounded but she felt as though she might burst if she didn’t say anything. “We could sneak and fight and run all the way down there to the bottom of the world and the Gatehouse might be useless rubble.”
Ax-Wed stared at her a second past what was comfortable to bear from those deep glinting sockets before she slid her hand to her belt and uncoupled her sheathed dagger. Turning toward the tunnel mouth, she pressed the weapon into the girl’s hands.
“You’ll need that,” she muttered with barely a pause as she marched toward the exit.
Zoria felt her hands tremble and her mouth go dry but the solid weight of the dagger in her hands was a comfort. Her fingers closed around the hilt and she felt a fiery strength rise in her that could beat back the heavy chill of fearful doubt.
She turned to follow her companion and shook her head.
“You don’t even know where you’re going,” she called, thankful to feel the crackle of defiance in her voice again.
“Then hurry and show me before I get too lost,” the Thulian called as she was swallowed by the darkness.
Circle In The Deep (The Outcast Royal Book 1) Page 20