Highland Dragon Master

by Isabel Cooper

  “If it’s trying to scare us, there’s something it doesn’t want us to see.” She bent her head to the paper, squinted, and slowly began reading aloud. “The Year of Our Lord 1308, if God grant my memory serves. Roul ran into the forest, and Amis after him. We found them not, and I fear the worst.

  “It corrupts. I think we have contained the worst for now, but without the Order’s greater protections, we may be able to save no more than our souls, if those. Would that this cursed place would meet the fate of Atlantis, and—What’s that?” She looked up and to the side.

  “What?” Erik asked. From what he could tell, the rest of the room looked as it always had.

  “There was a sort of red flicker. I thought.” Frowning, Toinette shifted her weight to get a better view.

  As she moved, Erik did see more, but not the red flash Toinette had mentioned. Instead, he noticed the floor below the altar, and how the edges were wavering just around the lectern. A crack shivered silently into being. Another followed.

  He threw himself backward with a shout of alarm. Toinette spun around at the noise. She had a knife in one hand, but that wouldn’t save her. The floor was crumbling rapidly by then, pieces falling away into a lightless void. Her face went white with fear, and she scrambled backward—too slowly.

  The last of the floor around the altar disintegrated beneath Toinette’s feet just as Erik wrapped his arms around her. Briefly they both teetered on the edge, balance shifting between solid ground and nothing. Then Erik pulled with all his strength, and Toinette shifted her weight, and they fell, but backward, landing hard on stone whose solidity proved itself along every inch of Erik’s spine.

  He didn’t care.

  “Damned well didn’t want us reading that book, then,” Toinette said, getting to her feet and straightening her clothing. “I don’t guess it can do that to the rest of the room, or it would have. But I’d as soon not linger.”

  Erik rose as well. The place where the altar had stood was now a neat-edged hole, bottomless to all appearances. He looked away swiftly. “Back, then, and try the other door. What did you see?”

  “A shape made of red light,” said Toinette. “I didn’t get a very good look at it. It vanished almost as soon as I saw it.”

  “Perhaps a sign of the room changing,” Erik said, as they made their way up the aisle, past the polluted font. “I’d not have expected red, though. Nor the light from that direction.”

  Toinette nodded. “Nor I. We’d best look if we see it again, though. Whatever it was, it may well have saved us.”

  Thirty-Five

  “Porca Madonna!”

  Toinette breathed the blasphemy into the great vaulted hall that lay behind the left-hand door. It was far larger than the church, easily the size of a similar hall in any great castle. She wasn’t at all certain how it, the church, and the hallway fit together inside the temple building, but she’d stopped trying to make her ideas of size and place work. That wasn’t what had drawn the curse from her throat.

  As in any hall, this one had long tables running down the center, with a dais at the head. Figures sat on the benches, and a fire danced in the hearth—but the flames were sickly green, and the figures were all of men long dead. Skeletal hands clasped stone cups. Wispy gray raiment flowed over shriveled shoulders. Their faces, however, were not like any man’s, living or dead: smooth black ovals obscured all their features.

  Nobody sat on the dais. On its benches, a pile of gray hands filled each place where a person might have been.

  “It doesn’t smell like the dead,” Erik said. He spoke quietly, as if addressing a scholarly point or a detail of tactics. Toinette saw the pallor around his lips and knew his tone for armor. She also realized that he was right, though she’d been trying to avoid noticing any smells. “Only cold and slimy, like the rest of this place.”

  “Small mercies, yes?”

  “Aye.”

  They both drew their swords before proceeding. The room was large enough, and though they’d not yet had anything physical attack them, Toinette watched the dead for any sign of movement as she and Erik walked slowly past their ranks.

  None of them were missing hands.

  The piles on the dais held all sorts. As Toinette passed it, she saw rings, gold and gems shining oddly in the uncanny light, and broken fingernails with dirt crusted underneath. A man’s hairy knuckles lay next to the smooth white hand of a lady or a youth. She briefly glimpsed a much smaller hand and was glad it was buried too deep for her to see it clearly.

  She saw no blood on any of them, nor smelled it in the room. Even old, that smell tended to linger. “What is this place?” she whispered.

  Expecting no answer, she started at Erik’s voice. “I’m no’ certain it is a place, truly. Not with a history of its own. Even a dead place would have more life to it. This feels like a picture brought to life, or a child’s castle of snow.”

  “Some child,” said Toinette, looking back over her shoulder at the row upon row of blanks where faces should have been, and the wisps of hair falling around them.

  “Aye. But look you, did you see a door to the kitchen where we came in? Or tapers on the wall? Or a rood screen in the church?” He gestured downward. “No rushes underfoot either. What’s making this only imitates the surface of things, or only wants enough to twist.”

  “Then those”—she looked back again, taking in hands and men both—“never were people?”

  “I couldna’ say for certain. I’d not go up and grab one to find out. But I doubt there’ve ever been so many bodies on the island.”

  “I’m not sure if these are good tidings or bad.”

  “No more am I.”

  There was a door behind the dais. Unlike the others they’d passed through, it looked like rough, heavy wood, as would have been fitting for any castle. The handle was still black and spiked, though, and the door opened too easily. The wood it appeared to be should have been heavier.

  Toinette took a last glance behind her to be sure none of the dead were pursuing, then stepped through.

  * * *

  They emerged onto a ship.

  Erik groaned and shut his eyes. “Are we—”

  “At sea,” Toinette said, sounding as disoriented as he felt. “And it’s raining.”

  Both were making themselves obvious. Erik closed his mouth against the rain, for what good that would do: he doubted it was water, and having it hit his skin could be bad enough. The swaying beneath him was considerably more pronounced than it had been on the Hawk, save for the storm.

  They were alone again. At any rate, when Erik opened his eyes, he could see no other figures. The darkness around them could have hidden a great deal.

  Toinette was standing with her hands on her hips, sword lowered at her side as she looked up at the white sail rippling in the wind. “Imitation, yes? Nothing real?”

  “So I’m thinking,” said Erik, although the rain felt cold and wet enough. “Or not made to use.”

  “What can—” Toinette stopped and shook her wet head. “Sorry. If you knew, you’d have said.” She gave the ship a careful look, then said, “This is an old vessel. Small castles fore”—she indicated the wooden plank beneath them, then pointed across the ship—“and aft. And no sealed deck. Meaning no door that makes sense.”

  Indeed, looking downward Erik saw only flat wood, with no trace of a door. “Then what shall we do?”

  “Go where it’s least sensible,” Toinette said and pointed upward.

  Near the top of the mast, almost completely hidden by the rain and the flapping sail, eerie light made a faint square outline.

  Erik winced. “I could try to fly in this,” he said, thinking of his injured wing, but Toinette shook her head.

  “And fall into that water? If it is water? No. We climb.”

  * * *

  As she’d t
old Marcus, Toinette had never learned to climb masts, any more than she’d learned to climb trees or anything else taller than a garden wall. She’d the advantage of having seen a number of men climbing in the rigging, though, and hearing a fair bit about it. Grip the shrouds, put your feet on the ratlines, and hope your arms don’t give out was the sum of the advice, and she went quickly to work, conscious both of their precarious position and of Erik watching her.

  The desire to show off, or to not look a damned fool, hadn’t passed either after bedding the man or admitting her past. Even in the middle of an evil temple, probably due to die soon, she felt his eyes on her as she gripped the vertically running shrouds, got her feet up on the first of the ratlines running between them, and began to climb.

  Most sailors learned to climb in port or just out of it, ideally on a calm day. Toinette had rain blowing horizontally into her face, the ship pitching back and forth beneath her, and the ropes slippery beneath the soles of her boots. Wet hemp had taken most of the skin off her palms by the time she made it midway up, and she’d almost exhausted her supply of profanity.

  She kept glancing behind her as she climbed, making sure Erik was still there and whole. For a man who hadn’t spent much time at sea, he kept up well—and kept his spirits. Every so often he’d meet her eyes through the rain-swept darkness and nod reassurance: Don’t worry about me.

  Once, when Toinette looked back at her handholds, she saw a faint red light shimmering around them. It lasted through two blinks that time, but not long enough for her to get breath and call out a warning—and then nothing happened. The ship’s swaying grew no more violent, nor did the rain get any worse.

  No point wasting breath, then, when the storm and the exertion made conversation impossible. She didn’t speak of the glow until they reached the top of the mast, where the light glimmered like a trapdoor in the sky.

  Then they caught their breaths and hesitated, pure instinct not to tamper with the obviously nonsensical briefly overcoming the knowledge that there was nowhere else to go.

  “I wonder,” Erik panted, “that there’s any way at all to climb. Or a door.”

  “I saw red around the ropes,” Toinette said then. She glanced down and didn’t see it again. “Any ideas? As to why, I mean?”

  “Aye. But not here. We’re only putting off the moment.”

  Toinette had to admit that. Having admitted it, she had to pry her own fingers off the rope and stick one arm through the phantom trapdoor, which didn’t burn it off but rather let her put her palm on a flat stone surface. It was only slightly reassuring, but that was as reassuring as the temple would get.

  She closed her eyes when she hauled herself through the portal, fearing the passage and the light more than she did emerging blind on the other side.

  * * *

  “What ideas?”

  Briefly Erik was at a loss to know what Toinette spoke of, having been recently preoccupied with sitting down, catching his breath, and wringing a wet substance that he hoped would be harmless out of his hair and tunic. The portal had cast them into another featureless hallway, which he welcomed.

  “Oh,” he replied, when his thoughts had caught up to the conversation. “I can think of four possibilities. It may be that this place, uncanny as it is, must follow certain rules. Rooms must connect to other rooms as much as they do in a real building, and a room must have most of the qualities of what it imitates. And so on. Or the…being…behind it hasn’t the wit to change very much.”

  “Are those two notions, or one in two parts?”

  “Only the one, if you’re keeping a list.”

  “Just trying to follow your speech.” Toinette got slowly to her feet. “Argh. And we should start walking again, before my muscles all lock up. Go on.”

  While Erik couldn’t argue her logic, his legs disliked greatly that she’d made the argument. “Second,” he added on a groan, “though we don’t know what’s at work here, if we assume that either this place has its own will or it responds to another’s, we may be influencing it with our own minds. Third, there may be another party, one besides our foe and us.”

  “Or it may all be a trap,” Toinette said. Their wet boots squished as they walked. “Could be meat tastes better for the struggle.”

  “That was the fourth possibility, aye.”

  Toinette looked at the blank walls around them. “We don’t know that this place thinks,” she said slowly, “or that its creator is yet around to do the thinking. But we keep talking as though that’s the case.”

  “That we do,” said Erik. “It has that quality.”

  “Or we do.” Toinette shrugged, and grimaced as her soaked gown shifted on her back. “Every sailor speaks of his ship as a woman. I’ve never come across one that was more than wood and canvas, mortal-built. We make people out of things.”

  Soldiers in France named cannons, Erik had heard, and his father praised his manor, during storms, as a man speaking of a faithful dog. He nodded. “You think this—”

  “I don’t know,” said Toinette. “But it might just be a place men used, and the remnants of that use. Ungodly use, and ungodly men, likely, and made accordingly.” She glanced back at the glowing portal they’d come through. “More than likely. Doesn’t mean we’re walking through more than a ruin. So that’s your fifth path.”

  “That it is,” said Erik. “And I’m glad you thought of it. I’d best be careful of assumptions here.”

  “Best we be careful of everything here,” Toinette said dryly.

  Thirty-Six

  Less time passed than in the previous hallway, or so Toinette thought. She hadn’t yet gotten into the habit of counting footsteps or breaths. After enough time she felt she might pick it up, as little purpose as it would serve. They were there for as long as it took, the labyrinth was as large as it was, and trying to learn too much about the place might well lead to madness or, at best, headaches. Counting would be a way to occupy her mind, as prisoners were said to make marks on the walls of their dungeons. She wasn’t that desperate yet.

  So she wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking when a second hall crossed theirs, and she didn’t much care. She breathed out through her teeth and stood with Erik, staring down the options: three more paths instead of two this time, and no doors.

  “Thread or breadcrumbs?” she asked, remembering tales she’d heard abroad.

  “Cloth.” Whether Erik knew the stories or not, he followed the trail of her speech well. He held up one arm. “Cut at the elbow, if you will. I’d rather not take the time to get undressed. And don’t have the hand off with it.”

  “I’ll try to resist the temptation,” said Toinette. “I’m only glad you volunteered. I’ve little enough left to sacrifice.”

  “I noticed.” He cast a glance down her figure—lingering at her breasts and then her half-bare legs—that warmed her despite their grim surroundings.

  She flashed a smile back. “Don’t distract me while I’ve got a knife.”

  Cutting off the sleeve without piercing skin was indeed a small challenge, but the cloth did fall without any bloodstains added to the general grime of their travel. Toinette picked it up and began cutting it into strips: small, but with luck still visible on the floor in front of a passage.

  “Rightmost?” she asked. “It’s not likely to be worse than the others.”

  “Aye,” Erik began, then stopped short and stared. “Look there.”

  He pointed with his bare arm. The skin above his wrist was paler than the rest by several shades. As he gestured to a blurry spot of red above the center door, he looked momentarily like a saint in a window, indicating a mystery revealed.

  In very broad strokes, Toinette supposed there was a similarity. She had no intention of telling Erik as much.

  The shape lasted longer. It became a square before it started to fade at the corners, then blinked o
ut of sight, leaving Toinette and Erik frowning at a patch of empty wall above a passage.

  “Might be a trap,” she said again.

  “Or it might not,” said Erik. “It’s not us making it happen, I know that much, for how would we have an idea of what path to take? And if this place must obey certain rules, or was constructed for a particular use, why such indication?”

  “Unless it’s a warning not to go that way. Or points to the only safe path.” Toinette thought of the red glow on the mast and frowned as she spoke. Surely a mere sign, of any sort, would have been on the door or at the base of the mast, not the handholds. It wasn’t material. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other. We might as well.”

  They kept to the middle, though the path didn’t remain straight for very long. It twisted around corners, rose and fell over hills, and, as it led Erik and Toinette onward, began to change again. Glimmers began to appear in the walls, like those in the rocks Toinette had seen elsewhere. The stone took on variegated shades.

  Erik nearly stumbled over the first roughness in the floor. He caught himself on one wall, pulled his hand back quickly—neither of them wanted to leave their skin long in contact with any part of the temple—and blinked down at the uneven surface. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “Likely we both will,” said Toinette, but she felt it less inescapably true than she had in the rooms before.

  “It’s not so foul-smelling here either,” Erik remarked after sniffing the air. “Not pleasant, but not as bad as it was.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Toinette said, but she realized she could: the cold stench didn’t invade her nose any longer. She’d gotten so accustomed to it that being able to smell her own sweat instead was startlingly pleasant. “If it is a trap, they know how to lure us.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “At your service, my lord,” she said with a mocking bow.

  * * *

  The smell kept dwindling as they went on, and the light gradually became dimmer as well. In the forest, that had been another sign of dread to come; this time, Erik welcomed it. Were they underground, which seemed likely, darkness was natural. In a similar spirit he rejoiced as the walls became rougher, though his toes were less philosophical about matters after the third time he stumbled.