Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights

by Patrick Weekes

  Audric shrugged. It was such common knowledge he didn’t see her point. Of course outside Nevarra, most nations burned their dead instead of entombing them. Even Audric, with no love of corpses, found the thought disturbing.

  “Less well known is that if a more vigorous spirit claims a corpse, it may become emmeshed in that man or woman’s unfinished business. Whatever Lord Karn’s goal, it must be something that would disturb the Necropolis. Or it could lie within a part forbidden even to the dead.”

  Audric shuddered. Something on a causeway past the gates was coming toward them.

  “And the spirit driving him is a strong one indeed,” Myrna added.

  “I’ll be no good down there, madam!” Audric blurted.

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t do well. With the dead. Madam.”

  “Why not?”

  Audric shrugged helplessly. “They make me uncomfortable. Since … ever since I was young. I get nervous round corpses, madam.”

  “Fascinating.” Myrna looked oddly intrigued. “Then I must apologize for my choice of transportation.”

  A carriage rattled up. Audric gripped his spear. The horses were bare skeletons with coronas of sickly, surging green fire. The pair stamped as they drew up. Audric stepped back as a horse swung its bony head around, as if mimicking a living curiosity.

  “Madam?” Audric’s voice was strangled.

  Myrna’s face was half shadowed by the bulk of the carriage, rimmed by that spectral light. Her appraising look threw Audric back to being called to the Chantry mother’s office in trouble, the squirming sensation of being measured in a way all his reading hadn’t prepared him for.

  “This must be your choice.” Myrna lit into the carriage, skirts brushing the lacquer-black frame. “Only answer one question.” The inside of the carriage was dark and curtained. Myrna’s voice issued from plush shadows. “Would a guardsman who’s recited the history of every stone in every promenade we’ve passed not regret passing up the chance to see the architecture of the Grand Necropolis?”

  * * *

  “I didn’t know I was talking out loud,” Audric muttered, clinging to a handhold as the carriage pelted down a track circling the Necropolis’s open-air mausoleums.

  “You mumble.” Myrna seemed more relaxed, now that they were on their way. “I am impressed by the specificity of your knowledge.”

  “Er … the Chantry taught me letters.” Ivy-smothered archways whipped by, then the horses plunged down a thoroughfare lined with human-size urns. “I kept some books.”

  “Architectural art seems to be your passion.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “And you have excellent recall. Given your apparent zeal, I’m surprised you didn’t join the Chantry’s scholars.”

  Audric thought of those old rooms of books with a pang, followed by a darker current: coughing in poorly lit rooms by the river. A yearlong fever, haunting his parents and cousins. “A guard makes enough to feed their family, madam.”

  Myrna seemed content to leave things there, and took something out of a velvet purse. A rib bone. “Emmrich’s prepared your trophy for us. His cathexis is very reliable.”

  Audric felt the ground tilt downslope. “Madam?”

  “His magic.” She tapped the rib bone. “This will now guide us to where Lord Karn’s fled. Emmrich would join us, but he’s been called to other matters.”

  The carriage swung down a tunnel. Audric felt his ears pop, a sensation he recognized from swimming in lakes as a child. That can’t be right. We’ve only started traveling down.

  “What, pardon me, madam … what’s more urgent than a body loose in the Grand Necropolis?”

  Her cheek quirked. “Our chief issue will be sorting him out from the others.”

  They finally careened to a halt. Somehow, in that sunless tunnel, was a row of pale willows. Their drooping branches formed a silent bower leading to a cage over a square, dark pit.

  “Have you ever been to the Necropolis?” Myrna asked as she stepped out, unlatching the cage’s gate.

  Audric thought about his parents. “Twice.”

  “We will be going deeper than the public gardens.” The necromancer snapped a finger. The cage clattered as if were being shaken by something deep below. “Touch nothing, make little sound, and do not wander.”

  “Yes, madam.” Audric touched the bandage on his neck again, and tried very hard not to look at the stamping skeletal horses. “Madam. When you … when we see Lord Karn…”

  “Yes?”

  Audric rubbed his neck, feeling more than a little resentment at the thought of the man. It was as if all the terror from the funeral was slowly transmuting into outrage. “He’s, um, he’s a mean biter in death, madam. How do we rope his sorry lordship back with us?”

  A platform rose up, slamming into place inside the cage with what sounded to Audric like a very final thud.

  “We will ask him, guardsman. Politely.”

  * * *

  The cage had been descending for a minute, its chains shuddering and groaning. Audric strained to see the levels they passed through the gloom. Here was the lower parts of the open-air gardens, but they’d gone down below them already. Surely.

  “The Necropolis’s geography is a tangle.”

  Audric startled. Myrna was beside him, closer than he’d realized. She put a steadying hand on his shoulder. Audric was further surprised to feel the warmth of it through Myrna’s glove, even a heartbeat after she removed the hand. “It subtends in unexpected ways.”

  “I don’t, er … I can’t take your meaning, madam.”

  “The lower halls and chambers of the Great Necropolis are not always in the same place at the same time.”

  The lift went past another level. Audric stepped back as he saw skeletons in armor trudging sightlessly between rows of crypts. Their rotting clothing had the Watchers’ stamp on it. Some sort of undead guard?

  “Powerful magic, madam.”

  “Oh, yes.” Myrna took out the rib bone, turning it over and over in her hands. Audric was fairly certain she was looking at something he couldn’t see. “The deeper we travel, the more pronounced the effect becomes.” Myrna snorted, a sound Audric hadn’t expected from her. “There’s a reason even the canniest of thieves have never pilfered past the—”

  The lift jolted, stopped. A voice screeched up the shaft.

  “Interlopers! Moldering busybodies! Wretched, gall-filled vermin!”

  Myrna sighed. “Lord Karn, I presume.”

  “You’d chain me back up in that box before my honor is restored!”

  “Your body and spirit are at odds,” Myrna said pleasantly, as if they were speaking in a market. “I’ve come to correct this.”

  “Bah!”

  Audric looked around, attempting to pinpoint where Karn’s voice was coming from. He was perturbed to realize it was echoing from inside his own head.

  “Lord Karn seems more, um … how’s he talking, madam?” Audric whispered.

  “He’s had time to reconstitute himself,” Myrna replied. “I suspect a spirit of Pride moves his lips.”

  “No!” The force of it rocked the lift. “I am myself! I am Penrick Karn, death of dragons, favored of the kings of Nevarra!” The spirit’s voice reached a fever peak. “Join the dead you hold so dear, and leave me to my work!”

  Something rattled the top of the cage, and made a sharp, chiming snap. Then the lift fell.

  “Guardsman!” Myrna grabbed Audric again. There was a sickening whip-whip-whip as entrances flashed past the lift’s doors too fast to see. Audric looked at her in terror, but through the screaming plummet Myrna’s eyes were fastened on those squares of light. Corpse-glow flickered.

  “Hold fast!”

  Audric’s neck prickled, and there was a wrench—

  Audric hit stone. The Mourn Watcher slid to a stop beside him. This was a vaulted corridor. Fine marble finished by sand-polish, his mind chattered, and there’s a bronze trim on those s
conces of green fire. A few lengths away was the lift shaft. Broken chains whipped past, followed by nothing, then a distant crashing boom. Dust billowed out, coating them both.

  Myrna coughed into a handkerchief. Audric pulled himself up, saw he was braced on a tomb, and almost fell again letting go. As the dust settled Myrna wiped her face, tucked away the handkerchief, and turned to Audric.

  “Guardsman? I fear we face a slight delay.”

  * * *

  That sleight of hand she’d used in the lift, Myrna explained, could only whisk people about a step or two. She had no spell that would magic them aboveground. They would have to return the long way. After, and she emphasized this, they dealt with Lord Karn.

  “Where is he now?” Audric asked. “Was he … was that him inside the lift?”

  “Karn cast forth a shadow. Pride has the power to make itself known where it is unwanted, and I am sure it is a spirit of Pride that has possession of Lord Karn’s remains.”

  “Seems so, madam.”

  Audric looked around, still dazed. The delayed fright warred with a fascination with the stateliness of his surroundings. The place was beyond antique. He peered up at a cornice carved with skulls that merrily stared back down. The grainy stone looked as if it was at least from the Tower Age. Did the Grand Necropolis go back that far?

  Audric considered it, then another thought intruded. “Lord Karn, madam. He’s tried to kill me twice!”

  “Unfortunate,” Myrna agreed.

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “Yes,” she replied, then added, “Approximately.”

  A wind suddenly whipped through the corridor, rattling dried flowers tied in sheaths to the crypts.

  “Madam?”

  “I hear it. Stay by me. Be still.”

  The sconces’ fires dimmed. Audric backed into Myrna, who’d gone still herself. Voices leaked through the air, which seemed to darken in a fashion unrelated to the light. The sounds grew louder, witless gibbering that sounded like words but slipped away just before being understood. It came from all around, as if they were in a crowd, and underneath the mutters Audric heard something more, a predatory droning crawling nearer …

  Eventually, it faded. A frown pinched Myrna’s face, and her voice was soft. “We are lower in the Necropolis than is wise. Cleave to me, for both our sakes.” Then she held out her hand.

  “I can’t, I wouldn’t presume…” Audric babbled, horribly ashamed for some reason.

  “The presumption is mine.” Myrna looked down the passage. “If you’re in contact with me, you may see things … more clearly. Until we reach the upper levels.”

  Audric took her hand. He was wearing his gauntlets, but warmth spread up his arm. What sorts of magics the Mourn Watchers had at their disposal he didn’t know, but the air seemed to steady. The corridor lead into a tall room with pillars repeating in long lines like an arcade. To Audric’s astonishment, streams of black water gurgled through the chamber, via channels cut into the rock.

  “It’s like the Gardens of Yith in Starkhaven!” he blurted.

  Myrna stepped over a stream. “A visiting architect must have been inspired.”

  Audric watched the streams ripple. They braided together at the end of the room, feeding into a carved gap in the wall, then sounded as if they’d turned into a waterfall. “A duke had the gardens built over the resting place of his lover’s ashes three hundred years ago.”

  “You are one for trivia. Emmrich would be delighted.”

  “Madam?” Audric ventured. “What’s Lord Karn’s ‘mission’? What … well … what does he want?”

  “Karn’s temerarious flight has something to do with ‘honor,’ supposedly,” Myrna said as they picked their way across the narrow channels. “Nobility’s intrigues never held any interest for me.”

  Something itched at the back of Audric’s mind at that, but the thought was shattered by a loud splash behind them.

  “Madam—”

  “Hold.”

  Something flopped out of one of the streams, inching forward. Pale blooms stretched and grasped the air. Fingers, Audric realized. Connected fans of scrabbling arm bones. But the streams were too shallow to accommodate that bulk of arms and hooked fingers …

  “Madam!”

  “Behind me.” Audric obeyed. Myrna added, “Do not drop my hand.”

  The thing kept oscillating out of the water, undulating up more and more fused bones, nightmare fronds of something that was never alive. Water poured off a tangle of ribs that crested up before them like a cobra’s hood, crowned by a misshapen thing vaguely resembling a skull. It split open sideways, its gullet spiked all the way down its neck—

  Myrna slapped it, whip-fast, with an echoing crack. Her hand coruscated with emerald fire.

  “We are permitted passage,” she enunciated clearly. “Leave.”

  The thing’s neck curled in confused anger, away from the Mourn Watcher’s flames. It hissed like shifting sand. The spell burning in Myrna’s hand coiled into ropes. A lash or a whip. Strangling cords.

  “I will not ask again.”

  The thing fluked back down into the murky waters. Audric realized he had been squeezing the Watcher’s other hand far too tight, and relaxed his grip.

  “Thank you.” Myrna turned, and only then did she shake her free hand with a wince. “What bones. Like iron.”

  “Madam?” Audric whispered. “What’s … how did … what was that thing?”

  “Uncataloged,” Myrna said briskly. “Emmrich will be thrilled to hear of it. Let us depart, quickly.”

  * * *

  Audric’s next few hours were a series of wonders and horrors, a grand delirium like those nightmares of his childhood. He stood with awe in the arena-sized tomb of a warrior-queen, carved with a riot of battles and feasts that cavorted on the stone. He shivered at the majesty of the Flowering Gates closing off a silent, enormous silver grave. He crossed a bridge made of giants’ bones, over a pit of skeletons of a sort he did not recognize. He hid from a wheezing thing that doused all the light around it, but left behind lingering gray shadows when it was gone.

  Just once, Audric had let go of Myrna’s hand, when a specter rushed him. Everything had suddenly been much darker and disorienting. The Mourn Watcher had dispelled the spirit while Audric clung to the sides of a grave. He’d felt as if the room were heaving. When she’d grabbed his elbow again, things snapped into focus.

  Not that Myrna’s presence made the architecture less baffling. Corridors sprouted where there should have been no room between the walls. Stairs leading down took them to landings higher than the ones they’d started on. At one point, they’d make their way through a maze of mirrors with sliding panels that led to smaller and smaller boxlike rooms until they had to crawl. All the time, he’d gripped the Watcher’s glove, and all the time, his mind worried about Lord Karn.

  “Has he … has Karn found what he wanted yet, madam?”

  “He may be occupied,” Myrna said, as they traveled a gently sloping path past tableaux of the dead. The carefully preserved corpses had been posed as they’d been in life, reenacting their daily rituals. Some even moved, albeit slowly. “It’s no easier for the dead to pass through some of these places than the living.”

  “Lord Karn must want this manner of honor settled pretty … very badly.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Myrna replied. “Have no fear. We draw closer to the upper levels.”

  Audric felt it. A lightening in the air. The twists and turns of the passages were just as numerous, but the chambers were quieter. They even passed a few docile undead shuffling past harmlessly. After the exotic terrors below, Audric only felt mild aversion instead of his previous squirming fear.

  Myrna stopped abruptly.

  “That statue,” she said. “How would you describe it?”

  “Lapis lazuli carved in the amour-tourmente Orlesian style, holding a scepter.”

  “Does it seem familiar?”

  “Um, I’ve seen w
oodcuts of the style. In books.”

  “Does it seem as if we’ve passed it before?”

  “Oh.”

  “Four times now.” Myrna looked about as if the room would spit up answers. “Something has foiled our direction.”

  A voice spoke. Audric had last heard it in the cage of the lift. “Vanity, Watcher, to think you could stop the pride of his house!”

  The Watcher sniffed. Her hand went to the velvet purse and the rib bone. “These games diminish us all, your lordship.”

  “You will have nothing of me!” Karn’s voice seemed deeper, more resonant, Audric noticed. Was that how demonic spirits sounded, once they settled into a body? “I can feel you tugging with that little piece of rib, and dragging that wretched thing behind you!”

  Audric cleared his throat. “I don’t … we wish you no ill, Lord Karn.” He was, in fact, imagining throttling what was left of the man’s throat. Audric felt a sympathetic pain from the wound on his neck.

  “The Mourn Watch would cage me, let me molder on a shelf!”

  Myrna’s lips became a thin frown as she looked around, as if searching for the disembodied voice beyond the walls. “Lord Karn—”

  Something smashed through the ceiling. Audric was nearly crushed as a golem of lashed-together bones hit the floor with a crack. It thudded toward them, effortlessly shoving aside the broken stone.

  Audric heard Lord Karn’s voice sneer, “I go to make my challenge, Watcher,” just before the golem’s long bone-glaive whistled down.

  Audric and Myrna dived in different directions. The golem swept the glaive back at head height. Audric was saved by ducking behind a fallen chunk of stone. He scrambled farther as the golem advanced. Myrna started to dash to where he was. “Guardsman! As in the lift! Come to—”

  The golem slammed the glaive into the ceiling. Myrna barely tumbled clear of a slab of stone the size of a horse. The pouch containing the rib bone slipped from her hand, and the golem’s blade scythed down. There was a crunch. Myrna winced but kept moving even as the glaive spun.

  There was a ring of metal on metal as it hit Audric’s spear.