Circle In The Deep (The Outcast Royal Book 1)

by Aaron D. Schneider

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “I’ll pull his guts up through his eye sockets.”

  Alborz grunted noncommittally as he made the last-minute adjustments to his office. While a fine leader and officer, he was not the most fastidious and as a result, he’d had to tidy things a touch. It might not matter but in his mind, a messy office was counterproductive when it came to intimidating a subordinate.

  “I’ll put a hex on him that will make him beg for death,” Mehk Numi continued as she paced while her staff jingled softly with every step. “Caravans will carry stories by campfire from Verenvar to Narlish of what I’ll do to him.”

  The Argbed stepped back to assess his office for a moment and nodded in approval.

  “Will he beg for death before or after you extract his innards from his skull?” he asked as he moved to settle into his chair.

  “This is no joke!” The dwarfess snarled belligerently as she rounded on the man. “Who knows what those faithless whoresons are doing to them?”

  For all her thunder, Alborz could see it was fear and not fury that drove the elderly dwarf.

  “Well, turnabout is fair play,” he said with a grim imitation of a smile. “I have it on good authority from one of those whoresons that our men—at least those who survived the attack—remain unharmed and have even been fed, however meagerly.”

  That was far from enough to satisfy Numi, who threw a hand up with a dwarfish curse and resumed pacing. The Argbed decided that was just as well. He needed her to look angry.

  There was a knock at the door and a voice spoke from the other side.

  “Naiman Khani is here to see you, Argbed.”

  “Don’t forget your part,” Alborz said softly before he raised his voice to be heard in the hall beyond. “Enter.”

  Royal Guard Naiman Khani walked through the door, his face as pinched and sour-looking as ever. As the Argbed watched the man enter, at first scowling and then bug-eyed when he noticed the wizened dwarfess glaring at him, he felt a sudden sense of regret. He was not fool enough to believe that all the men under his command were good men—in fact, his faith in the teachings of the Shepherd made that a certainty—but he’d known that Guard Khani was rotten for some time. It was never much and only the little things—the looks, the half-caught remarks in the barracks, and other tiny details had always told the Argbed that the man was, even by men’s lowly standards, a scoundrel.

  And you did nothing about it, he berated himself as the guard stood uneasily before him. There was always something else more pressing or some other duty more important than plucking the poisoned weed.

  The silence stretched but he continued to stare until Guard Khani practically squirmed before him while Numi seethed, one hand clutching his desk with whitening knuckles.

  Should I have thrown him out? Alborz wondered as he steepled his hands in front of him. Or would there have been a chance if I’d taken him under my wing and given him some attention?

  Khani glanced surreptitiously toward the window that overlooked the Citadel courtyard four stories below. It seemed more and more apparent that he wondered if a dive to the stones below would be preferable to standing before his commander’s piercing gaze.

  Either way, he was my responsibility and now, he is the reason a brother of the Flock is dead and my friend is in a dungeon.

  He drew in a slow, leaden breath and realized too late that he might have been better served sorting his mind rather than his office.

  “You were in the Tin Quarter last night when you were supposed to be on duty at the Citadel,” the Argbed said, his tone cold and uncompromising. “You falsely delivered a message to Vahrem Kal’Stru’s camp that I was waiting for him at the Tin Quarter barracks.”

  Guard Khani’s mouth opened to object, but his tongue betrayed him as he continued to stare mutely at his superior.

  “You delivered that message to ensure that the caravan master would be in the streets when hired thugs came to kill him,” he continued. “When Vahrem and his men fought these attackers you—under the instruction of Hazarbed Guuhal—led a troop of Tin Quarter guards to arrest Vahrem and those with him.”

  “No,” Naiman managed to rasp from his dry throat. “No, it—”

  “Liar!” Numi shrieked and advanced on the man with her staff clanging like chimes in a whirlwind. “I saw your wretched face when you came and delivered that murderous message.”

  The guard recoiled and his jaw flapped as he tried to find the words to save himself, but all that emerged was, “No. No. No!”

  “There is no question of your part in this,” Alborz said and his voice cut through the babble like a flint knife. “The only question that remains is who gets to deal with you.”

  Naiman’s features blanched until his skin seemed waxen over the bunched muscles in his jaw and face that all worked fruitlessly to compose some kind of argument.

  “For betraying me and your brothers in arms, I could have you beaten to death in that courtyard,” the Argbed said with a nod to the window. “You will be stripped, bound, and it will be the duty of every man you serve with to take turns striking you until you are a boneless heap before you are pitched into the charnel heaps.”

  “No,” the guard mouthed and it seemed the power of speech had failed him utterly.

  “Or I can hand you over to the Wain Clans.” Alborz nodded at Numi. “I understand two of their clan were wounded in the attack and Vahrem’s caravan was friends with their clan.”

  “Not only friends but clan-sworn,” the dwarfess declared and glared daggers at the recoiling man. “A death of one of Master Kal’Stru’s is a death of our own, and you will wish for something as sweet as being beaten to death by the time we are through with you.”

  The way her eyes gleamed with a terrible light, Naiman was not the only one in the room convinced of the elder dwarf’s threat.

  “Beware the vengeance of dwarves,” the Argbed quoted, although until this point, he thought the proverb had been an exaggeration. “So what will it be, Guard Khani? Do you choose to die among us or the dwarves? I know which I would choose but you must go your own way as you already seem to have done.”

  Naiman stood trembling and looked from his commanding officer to the glowering dwarfess and back again.

  “No,” he managed to squeak, but even that effort seemed too much for him as he fell to his knees.

  “If you will not choose, I will have to judge who holds the stronger claim,” Alborz said, unable to keep the disgust from his voice as he looked at the man quivering before him. “I gave you the chance to choose your end like a man but it seems even that dignity is too much for you.”

  “No!” Naiman sobbed as tears began to roll down his face. “You don’t understand.”

  “Don’t understand what?” Numi all but snarled as she lurched forward and delivered a resounding backhanded slap across the man’s face. “I understand that you are a traitor who lets good men be murdered in the street and drags innocent men into cells. What do we not understand?”

  The guard tried to cover his finger-welted face but her hand struck twice more to split his lip and bruise his cheek before he could finally shield himself. In answer to that, the elder dwarf took the staff and began to rain blows on him with a ferocity that belied her age.

  Alborz rose, uncertain as to what would happen first. Either Naiman would finally lash out or Numi would beat the man to death. His intervention wasn’t required, however, as Guard Khani raised his voice in a despairing cry that froze everyone in place.

  “It wasn’t the Hazarbed,” the man howled as he drew both arms up to guard his battered head.

  A sudden, stomach-clenching silence gripped the room for a moment and Numi and Alborz shared a discomfited glance.

  “You were seen leaving the inner court this morning,” the Argbed said and struggled to keep his tone even. “Who else could you be reporting to other than Hazarbed Guuhal?”

  He could guess the answer but he didn’t want to believ
e it. If his assumption was true, it meant things became even more complicated and even more dangerous.

  Naiman shook his head behind his hands and sobs wracked his frame.

  Alborz stepped out from behind his desk like a rising thunderstorm. With one hand, he knocked the cowering man’s arms away and with the other, he seized the front of his uniform.

  “Who?” he roared with a blistering fury that made the man flinch.

  “The p-p-prince,” Guard Khani stammered, unable to meet his Argbed’s eye. “P-prince Tark-khind.”

  His left hand released the uniform and seized the man’s throat.

  “You lie,” he accused in a voice so cold it could have frosted the air. “Do you think implicating the prince will save you?”

  The look in his subordinate’s eyes suggested that this had not even occurred to the terrified man.

  “I-I’ve reported to the Hazarbed for months,” Guard Khani confessed in a constricted rasp. “B-but yesterday, when I slipped away to make my report, I was told by Guuhal to go to the prince’s solarium.”

  Alborz’s grip slackened when strength began to leave his arm. He wished he could rally himself to choke the life out of the odious man but somewhere deep within, he knew it would do him no good. The truth would be the truth, Naiman or not.

  “Prince Tarkhind gave me instructions on what I was to do even if Vahrem didn’t come with me,” the man continued. “When it was…over, I-I returned this morning to give my report that it was done. I don’t think the prince expected me. He was meeting with Guuhal and they seemed like they’d been arguing. I gave my report and came back.”

  Alborz released him, sank back against his desk, and knocked the neatly stacked piles of parchment askew. One hand rose to massage his knotting temples while the other grasped the desk lest it too go out from under him like the rest of the world seemed to have done.

  “What do we do now?” Numi asked quietly, her fury spent and ashen.

  The Argbed stared into the courtyard and wondered what he would look like stripped and tied to a post. This was not what he’d planned for and not the battle he’d expected but Shepherd help him, he knew only one way—forward.

  “You prepare the caravan to leave,” he replied calmly as he continued to visualize his execution. “And I make peace with what comes next.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The deeper they went, the worse the stench became.

  Even in the webwork of hidden tunnels that stretched through the sorcery-burrowed earth, the stink of the degenerates—or gnashers, as Zoria called them—was ever-present. Ax-Wed had assumed that eventually, they would become accustomed to the stench, but it was as if by some perverse scheme, the creatures had ensured that the intensity and nature of their vileness were complex and layered enough that there was always something more to turn the stomach.

  A torch or candle might have burned away some of the stink but they’d known the light might not last as long as they needed and also that the scent would betray them to a snuffling degenerate. Instead, the Thulian had chosen to shave some of the alchemically glowing stone from a pillar and lace it onto strips of cloth that hung about their necks. The light was poor but sufficient and easily hidden under their clothing in a pinch.

  “The smell…” Zoria wheezed as she slid a strip of cloth over her mouth and nose. “That might do me in before the gnashers.”

  The warrior woman nodded and held a hand up for silence.

  They were approaching a junction point where they would have to emerge from the hidden tunnels and would be exposed until they found the next panel that opened the path downward. Thus far, the degenerates seemed ignorant of the tunnels, which she found strange, but even Zoria, as clever as she was, had admitted that finding them was a happy accident.

  Regardless, if they would have their expedition thwarted, a juncture seemed the most likely time and place.

  Ax-Wed raised a finger and pressed it to her metallic veil in pantomime shushing before she moved with remarkable lightness to the panel.

  She forced herself to take soft, shallow breaths, leaned close to it, and stifled a scowl of irritation when Zoria pressed in closer to listen as well. For several minutes, they hovered there but heard nothing but their heartbeats in their ears and the soft susurration of their breath.

  “Is it clear?” the girl mouthed with a shrug, the borrowed dagger half-drawn from her sling.

  The Thulian nodded but turned to prevent the girl from being the first one through the secret portal. It made sense that the one wearing armor and who was best capable of dispatching an ambusher went first, although if the creatures that dwelled there had set up an ambush, resistance would only delay the inevitable.

  With her hand resting at the base of the Thulian sylver head of her weapon, Ax-Wed eased the panel a few inches to one side. The rush of foul air made her eyes water and gorge rise in her throat, but bloody-mindedness mixed with fear of what the smell portended helped her to not succumb.

  From the seemingly absolute darkness beyond, she guessed that no torches were burning in the chamber, which might have seemed a comfort had she not faced a swallowing wall of blackness. The depthless expanse threatened to teem with a silent, crouching army of monsters, but she choked the dire imaginings as she tightened her hold on her ax.

  She waited for a few moments and when no pallid claw or malformed face rushed out of the dark, she let the panel slide gradually aside so the wan azure light began to play across the chamber. Under the tentative revealing glow, she could see the floor was different from what they’d encountered in other chambers. The rooms previous to this were dusty and perhaps streaked with the grime of unclean things passing through them, but the surface of this room was littered with refuse, all so moldering and mangled as to not be worth trying to identify.

  We are getting close, she thought, the realization a heady mixture of excitement and terror. Whether we die trying to escape or die hopeless could be moments away.

  The chest-tightening thoughts of trying to work the Gatehouse might have dominated her but as the panel slid completely to the side, her danger-sharpened eyes noticed something twitching amidst the detritus on the floor.

  Ax-Wed immediately cupped a hand over the light at her breast and surrendered the room to darkness and in that strained stillness, she could faintly distinguish the sound of soft breathing. Something was alive in the room and she’d caught a glimpse of it moving. Had that been some kind of talon or claw she’d seen twitching at the end of an angular limb?

  The Thulian chafed impatiently and her hot blood hammered through her veins as she waited in the dark, but she knew one misstep at this point could seal their fate. Rather than act in haste, she waited in the dark until she was almost certain the breathing she heard was the even drone of a sleeping creature.

  Slowly, one finger at a time, she let the light seep out and little by little, it revealed the room again. Her searching gaze located the jaggedly-clawed foot—for that was indeed what it was, although it seemed poorly shaped for anything like what a human might call walking. The long, slack-fleshed leg it was attached to trembled and the claw shuddered as before, but that was all.

  With her ax at the ready, she slid into the chamber and the faint glow advanced before her. It was soon joined by Zoria’s light as she followed with the dagger in hand.

  The creature on the floor now bathed in shades of soft blue light was revealed to have a body akin to lumpy and deflated pouches of scabrous flesh gathered around a malformed and spindly frame. It took Ax-Wed a quarter of a minute—a hellish eternity of staring given the subject—to realize what she was looking at.

  By the Watching Eye, she swore voicelessly. It is a female!

  As she stood in morbid fascination, Zoria began to slide forward with dagger poised. She caught the girl’s arm and gave the slightest shake of her head, careful to not let her mailed aventail clink.

  Her companion responded with a scowl but relented when her grasp tightened
fractionally.

  She pointed to the walls and then at the panel they had entered through.

  Zoria, still wearing her irritation across her brow, crept around the slumbering she-gnasher, mindful of the piles of filth and noxious leavings that littered the floor. She progressed carefully to the far wall under the warrior woman’s watchful gaze and began to search for the next panel.

  As the girl did so, Ax-Wed looked at the ruinous creature again, unable to avoid noting what the stretched and puddled flesh suggested. In that grim twilight, she believed she not only glimpsed a single creature but an entire bloodline of abominations wrought from catastrophe. If her theories of the Gatehouse had been correct—a vast complex stretched and driven through the earth that ran like water—couldn’t the attendants have survived? And sustained by incestuous propagation, cannibalistic feeding, and liberal supplementations of sorcery and blasphemous rites, had they become something adjacent to the men they once were, twisted and regressed cousins to those offered to them? Was this troglodytic thing that lay naked in its squalid filth a distant relation to vaunted and dreaded Thule and even to her house?

  The thought clung to the back of her throat like a hunk of putrid meat and threatened to make her gag.

  She wanted to deny it and cast it off as some perverse fantasy but as she stared at this debased matron, could she deny that it made the most sense? And if she’d reached such conclusions, could that be what those in power of Jehadim above had learned? Was that ancient lineage why offerings were being made—blandishments to secure old knowledge or forestall ancient wrath? And where did the Voice in the dark enter into all of this?

  Her foreboding thoughts were interrupted when Zoria stepped into view, the degenerate female sprawled between them.

  “Nothing,” she mouthed exaggeratedly as she pointed behind her. “Nothing.”

  Ax-Wed squinted into the dark and saw the girl’s eyes wide with the fear that threatened to overcome her. If there were no more tunnels, they would have to brave the corridors—and the army of horrors that might be between them and whatever doom waited in the dark.