The Tyranny of Ghosts: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 3

by Don Bassingthwaite

  Since she had become aware of them, Ekhaas spotted more of the skeletons as she climbed through the ruins. A few were whole or almost whole, blending into the shadows. Some were just weathered heaps of bones, collapsed over time just like the fortress. Others were no more than broken bits of glittering black stone tumbled among fallen rock. Not all were hobgoblin. Ekhaas recognized goblins and bugbears, a pair of dogs, varags—how many of them had wandered onto the Wailing Hill before they learned their lesson?—even the fragile skeletons of birds, hollow bones broken as if they’d fallen out of the sky.

  If not even birds on the wing could escape the curse of Suud Anshaar, did they really have a chance?

  No, she reminded herself, they weren’t dumb animals, and they wouldn’t be taken by surprise. Whatever waited in the ruins, they’d fought and survived worse. They would find the shield fragments. They would escape the fortress. The fragments of the shattered shield would provide the key to destroying the Rod of Kings.

  Because if they didn’t, this journey would have been for nothing.

  She started to sing. Quietly, just loud enough that the others could hear her, and not a magical song, but a Dhakaani battle hymn invoking the strength of muut in combat and the glory of atcha in victory. It was an old song, as old as the long and wondrous middle years of Dhakaan, when the emperor’s power spanned a continent. The same song might have echoed in Suud Anshaar. Tasaam Draet might have listened to and been inspired by it.

  She felt some of her fear slip away. The others stood straighter and scanned the shadows with eyes that were brighter and more alert. They moved with greater confidence. Even Marrow seemed to beat her tail in time to the song. And when the wail inevitably came again, Ekhaas raised her voice just a little to challenge its power. For a moment, the wail seemed a little less terrifying—even if it did seem to have taken on a more directional quality.

  Chetiin pointed across the ruins. “Somewhere over there.”

  “I think I felt it through the ground,” said Tenquis.

  Ekhaas let the song die away, the better to hear any movement among the stones. Geth’s hand had stolen up to touch his collar of black stones. Faint wisps of vapor escaped between his fingers into the warm night air; he’d said in the past that the collar turned cold to warn of unnatural creatures.

  “Geth?” she asked softly.

  “Keep moving,” he said.

  They moved. The deeper they penetrated into the remains of the fortress, the better preserved the structure seemed to be. Walls, doorways, and pillars remained in place—with the result that their line of sight to the area around them was constantly changing and being cut off. Worse, the surviving corridors were often half-filled with debris. There was no running here. Moving too quickly sent loose stones sliding and might plunge a foot into a crevice. Marrow had real difficulty scrambling up and down the slopes. Heading around one steep heap, Tooth had to catch and brace her with his shoulder. The worg snapped and growled at him. Ekhaas couldn’t tell if it was an expression of gratitude or a warning not to touch her.

  Still, they went as fast as they could, sticking close together. Ekhaas took the lead, though she was only guessing the way and hoping she didn’t lead them all into a dead end. With every mound of rubble they climbed or skirted, she half-expected to find her chosen path blocked.

  It never was. Ekhaas crawled under a pair of columns that had fallen against each other and stood to find herself facing a high, double-arched doorway with angular Goblin characters carved over it.

  TASAAM DRAET GOVERNS SUUD ANSHAAR BY THE WILL OF GIIS PUULTA, MARHU OF DHAKAAN. KNOW MUUT YOU WHO ENTER.

  She whirled and called back under the columns, “We’re here! This is the great hall.”

  Tenquis was just crawling through. Ekhaas helped him up, then stood out of the way as Marrow came squirming and wriggling through the gap. Chetiin followed, then Tooth. Geth came last, his face drawn hard and taut.

  The collar around his neck was white with frost. She drew air between her teeth. “Is it bad?” she asked.

  “Bad enough.” He took her arm and pulled her toward the arched doorway. “Get inside. If there’s going to be a fight, I want space around us.”

  Beyond the doorway, though, the great hall wasn’t in as good a shape as Ekhaas had hoped when she’d seen it in the distance. The long stone spans that had once supported the ceiling still stood, but in many places the vaults between them had crumbled. Moonlight fell onto more rubble. The walls were cracked and looked as if a hard push would bring them down. Other doors were either choked with fallen stones or opened directly onto the night.

  Aside from rubble and moonlight, the hall was completely empty.

  Tenquis turned to her. “What now? What are we looking for?”

  Ekhaas stared around the devastated hall. “I don’t know. A shrine? Something ostentatious.”

  “Under the rubble?”

  “Maybe,” said Chetiin, “the shield fragments aren’t here at all. Maybe they are in a vault somewhere.”

  “They’re here,” Geth said.

  There was a strange wonder in his voice. Ekhaas started to turn to look at him but the shifter was already pushing past her. Feet crunching on gravel, he paced down the length of the hall, slowly sweeping Wrath before him.

  “Maabet,” rasped Tooth. “He’s lost it.”

  “No,” said Ekhaas. “He hasn’t. Stay with him!” She jogged after Geth, catching up to him. “You feel the fragments through the sword, don’t you?” she asked. “Just like you felt the Rod of Kings. The connection is there!”

  Geth shook his head. “It’s different. When duur’kala songs woke the connection between Wrath and the rod, all I had to do was hold out Wrath, and I knew where the rod was. This is more like a lodestone being drawn to steel.”

  “The shield has been shattered. It’s bound to feel different—”

  The wail rose again. This time there was no doubt that its source was close and coming closer—from the very direction they’d just come.

  Tooth whirled at the sound. “It’s tracking us!”

  “Stay calm and keep watch,” said Ekhaas. “Geth …”

  “Here.” He stopped, sword pointing at a thin scattering of rubble across the floor. “They’re here!”

  “You’re sure?” Ekhaas asked. They’d almost reached the end of the hall. A low dais rose no more than a double handspan above the floor. It seemed a strange place to display relics given by the emperor as a reward. A fearful thought struck her. “They’re not underground from here, are they? Not in some buried vault?”

  “No. They’re close.” He dropped to his knees, set Wrath down, and started tossing fallen stones aside.

  The first stones he moved revealed part of a Goblin inscription carved into the floor. It was only a single word, but it made Ekhaas’s heart jump.

  Shattered.

  “Tenquis, help us!” She bent down beside Geth and swept more rubble away. The tiefling crouched on Geth’s other side. It took only moments to clear the rest of the inscription.

  LOOK ON SHATTERED MUUT AND BE HUMBLED.

  The top of the inscription lay toward the dais. Anyone kneeling before the lord of Suud Anshaar would have had no choice but to read the words. “The fallen nobles,” said Ekhaas. “He was reminding the fallen nobles of what they’d lost.” She scrambled past the words to rake at the remaining rubble. Her breath came fast. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears.

  Purple byeshk flashed under moonlight. Ekhaas got down on her knees, stretched out her arm, and used it to sweep away the last fragments of stone.

  Her heart fell. She sat back, her ears folding flat.

  Set into the stone were three toothed metal disks. Three shaari’mal forged from byeshk. She looked up at Geth and Tenquis. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What are these?”

  Geth picked up Wrath and brought it close to the embedded disks. “These are what I was feeling,” he said. “These were forged from the same byeshk as the swor
d and the rod.”

  “But they’re shaari’mal. They’re not pieces of a shield. Unless”—she glanced at Tenquis—“could they have been reforged?”

  The tiefling shook his head. “You don’t just reforge an artifact, even one that was broken.”

  Ekhaas reached out and touched one of the disks. Strange runes had been carved into the smooth surface. They weren’t Goblin or any other language she knew, but she had seen them, or runes very much like them, before—etched into the Sword of Heroes and the Rod of Kings.

  The Stela of Rewards in Volaar Draal had shown an engraving of three shaari’mal. Were these what the emperor had given Tasaam Draet? Were they meant to be a symbol of Dhakaan? She couldn’t deny that they seemed to be related to the rod and the sword, but what were they? She rubbed her head with dusty fingers—and froze as the wail came yet again, so close she felt it through the floor. So close it made the weakened walls of the hall groan.

  “Geth! Ekhaas!” said Chetiin sharply. Ekhaas twisted around. Chetiin, Tooth, and Marrow faced the end of the hall where they’d entered. Beyond the arched doorway, the crossed pillars they’d all crawled under were trembling as if something strained against the other side.

  Ekhaas made a decision. “We’re taking these with us,” she said. “Geth, look for the best way out.”

  He nodded and jumped to his feet, snatching up Wrath and darting to the nearest open doorway in the walls. Ekhaas pulled a knife from her belt and tried to force the tip in between one of the shaari’mal and the stone that held it.

  Tenquis brushed her hand aside. “Let me,” he said. “A daashor set this here.” Grabbing a pinch of dust from the ground, he narrowed his eyes, whispered a word, and let the dust sift over the stone around the disk.

  Where the dust fell, stone crumbled like dry sand. The indentation it left was small, but it was enough. Tenquis hooked thick fingernails under the byeshk disk and lifted it free. He held it out to Ekhaas, but she shook her head.

  “Do the other ones, then put them in one of your pockets. Keep them safe.” She stood—

  —just as the pillars fell in a crash of stone. Dust billowed up in a thick cloud, and the reverberations of the crash brought more dust sifting down from the ceiling of the hall. There was a second crash from behind her, accompanied by a curse from Geth. Ekhaas turned briefly to see the shifter leaping away from a doorway that had become just another heap of rubble—but a new noise brought her attention back to the drifting dust cloud. A slow grinding noise like millstones turning. She heard Tenquis whispering frantically over the remaining shaari’mal, then that was drowned out by another wail.

  A shape emerged from the dust cloud. Or rather, seemed to absorb the cloud as it advanced. Marrow whined and eased back a few steps.

  The creature … the thing … towered twice as tall as a bugbear. It had the obscenely thick body of a massive serpent, bigger around than Ekhaas could have encircled with her arms. Instead of rising to a serpent’s head, though, that body became a woman’s leanly muscular torso and arms. The thing’s face was narrow, with a fine jaw, knife-edge cheekbones—and a smooth expanse where eyes should have been. Above that blank brow, thick tendrils longer than arms, with sharp pointed tips took the place of hair, writhing with an independent motion.

  But for all that it moved like something alive, Ekhaas knew that it wasn’t. Its face was a statue, stiff and unemotional. Its skin was as black and glittering as the transformed bones of the skeletons that littered Suud Anshaar. The millstone noise that ground against Ekhaas’s ears was, she realized, the sound of its great body slithering forward, accompanied by the fine grating of its twining tendril hair. The thing was stone given mobility, a construct like a golem or a warforged, but more finely crafted and surely far older than any Ekhaas had heard told of in any tale. As it slithered into a patch of moonlight, she saw the scars of millennia on its surface—

  Something about the flash of moonlight on that stone made her vision blur, and when she blinked, the weathered scars were gone and the stone was smooth and flawless. She blinked again, and the scars were back. The black stone crumbled into dust with every movement, only to drift across a new patch of stone and resurface it. Just looking at the creature made Ekhaas’s head spin and ache. It was as if time and space had only the loosest grip on the ancient thing. For all that it made her nauseated, though, the strange play of dust to stone and back again was captivating, the cycle of ages collapsed into moments …

  “Look away from it! Everyone look away from it!”

  Geth’s hand was suddenly on Ekhaas’s shoulder, shaking her. She wrenched her gaze away from the construct and staggered as reality crashed back around her. Geth caught her, held her up as she regained her balance, then turned her loose. Around them, she saw the others were also twitching and stumbling as if waking from sleep. Only Geth seemed fully alert.

  The collar of stones around the shifter’s neck was so cold it steamed in the humid air. The gift of the Gatekeepers had saved them all.

  As if realizing that its prey had broken free of its influence, the construct opened its stony mouth and let loose another terrible wail. It came slithering into the hall amidst a pattering rain of dust and masonry.

  “Rat!” roared Geth over the wail. “How do we fight that?”

  A bit of stone fell past Ekhaas’s eyes and bounced off her arm.

  She twisted her head and looked back to Tenquis. The tiefling was on his feet, drawing his hand out of a bulging pocket. Ekhaas couldn’t hear him, but his lips formed a word, and she saw the lines of embroidery on his long vest shift. The bulge of his pocket vanished. In the ground at his feet were three empty holes in the shape of shaari’mal.

  Ekhaas grabbed Geth and shouted in his ear. “Get everyone out of the hall!” She shoved him in the direction of one of the last unblocked doorways but didn’t wait to see if he obeyed. The construct was advancing with the unrelenting patience of centuries. Ekhaas raised her eyes to the leaping spans and trembling vaults over its head, filled her lungs, and threw all of her will into the magic of the song.

  Dissonant cacophony exploded among the age-weakened stone, as loud as the construct’s wails but more focused. Mortar that had endured for millennia burst. Stone cracked with a report like a lighting strike and started to slide.

  Nature’s laws took over. With a roar that punched all the way into Ekhaas’s belly, the ceiling of Suud Anshaar’s great hall came crashing down. The construct scarcely seemed to notice. It was still slithering toward her when the first blocks slammed into it.

  Walls followed ceiling, but Ekhaas was already turning and sprinting in the direction she’d pushed Geth. Chips and chunks of stone flew around her. She ducked her head and ran. The doorway was close—and through it she could see Tenquis, the fingers of one hand tight around his artificer’s wand, the fingers of the other splayed and trembling as if they supported an invisible weight. Ekhaas threw herself through the arch. She caught a glimpse of pained release on Tenquis’s face, then he dropped his hand.

  The doorway crumbled just as her feet cleared it. The ground hit her hard, and for a brief instant, it was all she could do to catch her breath. Hands took her arms. Geth and Tooth hauled her to her feet. Ekhaas turned to look back at the heap of rubble she’d made. Dust swirled above it in the moonlight.

  Then was sucked back down among the toppled stones. Rocks shifted and clattered as the thing underneath the heap moved. A muffled wail filtered into the night.

  “Khaavolaar!” cursed Ekhaas. “We need to—”

  The wail went silent. The movement beneath the heap stopped. Instinctively, Ekhaas froze for just an instant. They all did.

  In that instant, a long, glittering black tentacle stabbed out of the rubble. It lashed through the air like a whip in the moonlight, so close Ekhaas could feel the knife-edge wind of its passing.

  Tooth was the one who took the blow, however. His arm snapped up as if he could block the tentacle’s attack, but it just wrapped aroun
d his forearm and pulled. The hunter screamed.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  13 Vult

  When the shrieks and howls of hunting varags had broken over the Khraal the previous afternoon, Midian had looked to Makka and asked, “Is there anything in this bloody jungle besides Geth and the others that would bring out that many varags?”

  Makka had grinned at him. “Us.”

  Whatever the shifter and his group had done to provoke the varags’ hunt—and Midian had a feeling it wouldn’t have taken much—it had left the way clear for the pair of them to follow without fear. Every varag in the area seemed to have been drawn into the chase. They’d found the Dhakaani road, and even the need to track their quarry had been eliminated. When Makka had offered prayers of thanks to the Fury, Midian had been almost tempted to join in.

  Then dusk had come and with it a terrible wail like nothing Midian had ever heard before. Moments later, Makka had frozen for an instant, ears cocked, then leaped for the nearest tree and climbed it like a squirrel. Midian hadn’t stopped to ask why, but simply followed the bugbear’s lead.

  He’d barely reached a hidden branch before a flood of frightened varags came pouring along the road and through the undergrowth.

  When they’d passed, he and Makka had descended and continued on their way. More wails had drifted through the darkening jungle. The barren hill and its crown of ruins at the end of the road had been a surprise, but not much of one. They’d known their elusive prey was heading somewhere.

  “Do we follow them in?” Makka asked, eyeing the ruins under the moonlight.

  Yet another wail rolled out. “I don’t think so,” Midian had said. “They’ll come out again—or they won’t.” He found a comfortable perch in a tree with a good view of the ruins and settled in to wait, with Makka crouched below.

  After that, it was just a matter of patience.

  Geth acted without thinking, roaring and swinging Wrath in a flashing arc. The byeshk blade jerked in his hand as it hit the black tentacle that held Tooth, but smashed through it with a crack like splitting stone.