‘Fletcher,’ the noble said, gripping Fletcher’s wrist. ‘If you reach the caves before us, save my mother first. Please.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Fletcher replied, though he avoided Rufus’s eyes. His heart went out to Lady Cavendish, but in Fletcher’s mind the goblin eggs were the real threat. Every one destroyed was one fewer goblin sent against Hominum.
‘Thank you,’ Rufus whispered. ‘I would be forever in your debt.’
Then he was gone, jogging after the others.
Just as he began to move, Fletcher was slammed against the wall. Caliban had barged him aside, stooping so that his horns didn’t scrape the ceiling.
‘Looks like Rook isn’t missing you.’ Othello winked, following.
The next passageway was as long as the last corridor had been, but it ended far less abruptly. After a few minutes of walking, the passage opened up, revealing an antechamber as large as the summoning room at Vocans.
Stranger still, the place was full of sacks, some of which had burst, scattering freshly picked yellow flower petals haphazardly throughout the room. The petals lay upon a thick layer of dust which coated the floor of the room, disturbed only around the edges, where whoever had brought the sacks had walked by.
‘What is this place?’ Othello asked. The dwarf sent wyrdlights skimming around the room, darting into the corners until the entire chamber was lit. They revealed hieroglyphs and etched scenes on the walls, all of which were painted in fading dyes.
‘Can you read these?’ Fletcher asked Jeffrey, who was already busy copying them into his notebook.
‘No,’ he murmured, his fingers tracing along the symbols. ‘I don’t think even the orcs could. This is ancient stuff here. A culture pre-dating theirs by millennia.’
‘You’re saying orcs didn’t build this place?’ Verity said, not looking up from her tablet.
‘I have no idea,’ Jeffrey said, his pencil scribbling back and forth across the pages. ‘There are pictures of orcs on the walls, so I would think they did. But these hieroglyphs are in an entirely different language. Whichever civilisation built this place, they died out a long time ago. That would explain the difference in size and architecture of the ziggurats that surround the pyramid. No wonder it’s so important to the orcs, I bet they think this place was built by their ancestor-gods.’
Fletcher examined the hieroglyphs closest to him. The symbols depicted the jungle’s animals and plants, a sort of alphabet based on the natural world. They bore no resemblance to the orc runes that he had seen on Ignatius’s summoning scroll, which were formed from jagged lines and dots.
It was impossible to decipher their meaning, so he turned his attention to the sacks of petals by his feet. After Jeffrey’s warnings of the jungle plants he avoided touching them, but a deep sniff revealed them to smell similar to tobacco, with an alcoholic tinge. What the petals of a plant like that were doing within the pyramid was a mystery.
‘Guys, I think you need to take a look at this,’ Verity said, looking up from her scrying stone with wide eyes. ‘They’ve reached the pyramid.’
So they had. The tablet showed the skull-shaped palanquin being lowered, the rhinos kneeling before the great stairs. Fletcher also noticed drums had begun to beat again – even this deep into the pyramid the dull thump could be heard, as if the ancient building had a pulse of its own.
That was when Fletcher saw him. The albino orc, leaping out of the skull to land on the steps, his body a perfect symmetry of power and athleticism. His appearance triggered roars and the stamping of feet from the crowd, until their fervour shook the very ground.
It was true that the albino orc was taller than the other orcs, standing at what must have been eight feet. He wore little more than a plain skirt, his white skin greased to gleam like polished ivory. In contrast to the plethora of stylings from the orcs around him, a simple mane of ashen hair fell over his shoulders, as long and thick as Sylva’s. He was less bulky than those around him, with rangy musculature suited more for speed than strength.
He raised his arms, welcoming the adoration of the spectators. Nodding and smiling through his savage tusks, he walked like a dancer up the steps, his pace fluid and controlled. Two shamans flanked him, their Nanaues vaulting back and forth along the stair with excitement.
Before they had reached the top, the crowd’s roar turned into a chant, a single word repeated over and over, muffled by the walls of the pyramid. The drummers punctuated the mantra with the beat, redoubling their efforts to keep in time with the masses.
‘What are they saying, Verity?’ Fletcher asked, trying to make out the word.
‘Khan,’ Verity said, her eyes closed with concentration. ‘It sounds like Khan.’
‘That’s his name,’ Mason said, shuddering. ‘That’s what they call him.’
The three orcs had reached the top of the steps by then, and as Fletcher watched, Khan withdrew a jagged, obsidian knife from a scabbard at his waist.
The crowd went mad, howling and screaming in a fanatical fervour. Only the score of blue orcs who had lost the pitz contest remained silent, kneeling at the base of the steps. Then, one by one, they were shoved up the stairway, making the long walk to the top.
‘This is too weird,’ Cress murmured. ‘There’s nothing up there. What are they doing?’
‘You’ll see,’ Mason said grimly, shuffling away from them. ‘But I’d rather not watch if it’s all the same to you.’
The first blue orc reached the flat top of the pyramid. Even though Ebony was far above him, Fletcher could see that the orc’s hands were shaking. He shuffled forward until Khan jerked him on to the altar. The blue orc lay there, spread-eagled, while the albino orc raised the knife. Fletcher looked away just in time.
Verity retched and handed the tablet to Sylva, running to heave in the corner. The rest looked on in horror. Only Jeffrey had been spared the scene, too fascinated with the etchings on the wall to pay attention to the tablet.
‘Sacrifices for the old gods, the forgotten gods,’ Mason murmured. ‘Orcs are scared of ’em, reckon they’re inside this ’ere temple. So they give ’em the most blood – more than they give to any of the others.’
The blue orc’s corpse was hurled down the steps, to tumble past the remaining victims and into the crowds below. The onlookers cried out once again, scrambling for the body then raising it above their heads and passing it backwards in a macabre celebration.
Another sacrifice lay down on the altar, his chest heaving with fear. The knife rose and fell once more. Khan held the still-twitching carcass by the ankle, crimson spurting from the gaping chest wound and on to the altar.
The group in the pyramid stood there for a while, watching the blood drip with grim fascination. Until Jeffrey spoke up.
‘Guys. You’re not going to believe this.’
40
They stared at the wall Jeffrey was pointing at, unable to believe their eyes. Malik snuffed out the nearest wyrdlights and replaced them with a ball of fire, so that the faded colours were not tinged with blue light.
An orc in white was drawn there, the spitting image of Khan. There were orc warriors behind him, painted in the red and yellow of the bodyguard outside. But what was astonishing were the humans on the other side of the painting. They were drawn roughly, but their features and bodies were unmistakeable. One figure led them, mirroring the position of the albino orc.
‘Every thousand years,’ Fletcher murmured. ‘I bet that’s what the hieroglyphs say. A marked messiah, sent to defeat mankind. That’s what an old soldier once told me, anyway.’
‘More like a natural mutation that occurs in every species …’ Malik said under his breath. ‘It may be that albino orcs are larger and have a higher summoning level than others, making them natural leaders. The rest is superstition, nothing more.’
‘Be that as it may, that’s not the strange part,’ Sylva said, looking at them as if they were all blind. ‘It’s the humans. They shouldn’t be drawn here.’
‘Why not?’ Cress asked.
‘Because humans arrived here two thousand years ago, when your ancestors crossed the Akhad Desert,’ Sylva explained. ‘This pyramid was built long before humans even set foot in these lands. Elven texts as old as five thousand years have mentioned this place.’
‘There’s something else,’ Jeffrey said, wiping away a layer of dust with his sleeve.
The outline of a demon appeared between the orcs and humans, the paint that had coated it long peeled away. ‘A Salamander,’ Fletcher breathed. Ignatius chirruped with excitement and pawed at the wall below.
Set above this image were two separate scenes. One, where the orcs stood victorious over the bloody corpses of the humans, and another, where humanity were the victors.
Fletcher thought back to his first infusion dream. He knew from this dream that Ignatius’s summoning scroll had been originally intended for an albino orc, over a thousand years ago. Perhaps the orcs who had drawn the images here had been trying to recreate this prophecy. What was obvious to him now was that, according to both the carvings and his infusion dream, the orcs believed that a Salamander was the key to their victory … or doom.
‘We need to copy this all down,’ Fletcher said, pointing at the wall. ‘Maybe we can translate it later.’
‘Already done,’ Jeffrey said, showing Fletcher his sketch book.
‘Guys,’ Sylva interrupted, holding up the tablet. ‘We need to move, now. The sacrifices are over and Khan is walking towards the back entrance. He has a bunch of his shamans with him, plus a group of orcish youths. They must be adepts.’
‘Damn it,’ Malik growled. ‘There’s nowhere to hide in here – we’ll have to move on. Follow me.’
He snuffed out his fireball and jogged to the other end of the antechamber, where the passage continued. Fletcher and the others had no choice but to go after him.
‘Looks like we’ve waited long enough,’ Othello whispered, trying and failing to hide a smile. ‘Isadora’s team missed their window.’
They jogged until the passageway split once again. There was no time to decide who went where; in the rush Fletcher ended up taking the right passage with Othello, Sylva and Lysander. This time, the floor angled up sharply. They seemed to be heading to the central point of the pyramid.
‘Hey,’ Fletcher gasped, their feet thundering along the passageway. ‘We left Cress and Jeffrey.’
‘We’ll catch up with them later,’ Sylva replied, leading the way with a glowing fingertip. ‘The orcs will be here any min—’
Sylva cut her words short as the passageway ended abruptly, opening up into a massive room. It was vaulted with great beams of rusted metal, while a network of pipes flowed from the ceiling and out into the walls.
A pit fell into darkness around the platform, so deep and cavernous that they could not see the bottom. A wide plinth sat in the middle, with a pentacle deeply engraved in it. There was a hole in the very centre, though how deep it went Fletcher could not tell.
The only way to reach it was four stone bridges, crisscrossing from the four entrances to the room.
‘Where the hell are we going to hide?’ Othello asked, his eyes scanning the room. ‘There’s nothing here!’
‘Look – stairs,’ Sylva said, pointing to the plinth. It was supported by a wide pillar of equal width beneath it. The column had a rough stairway carved to go around it, the stone a fresh white, as if it had been cut recently.
Fletcher tossed out a wyrdlight, sending it spiralling into the depths below. It was deep, almost half as deep as the pyramid was tall. But at the very bottom, Fletcher could make out a tunnel leading into the earth.
Strangest of all, a clutch of several hundred eggs could be seen, piled in a trench around the base of the pillar. They were bottle green and perfectly spherical, with the size and appearance of unripe oranges.
‘Those must be gremlin eggs,’ Fletcher said, recognising them from the Warren. ‘Goblins’ eggs would have to be much bigger, because Mason said goblins hatch from their eggs as fully formed adults.’
‘I don’t want to know what those are doing there,’ Othello said. ‘But I guess we’ll find out in a minute – that tunnel’s our hiding spot. It might even go to the caves.’
‘Who knows where it leads,’ Fletcher said, peering into the depths. ‘I bet that’s where Khan and his shamans are headed, down those steps. If it’s a dead end it’ll be us three trapped down there against … how many orcs?’
‘Ten,’ Sylva said, counting the shamans and adepts on Verity’s tablet. ‘Their demons have been infused though. We’d better hurry – they’re walking in through the back entrance right now.’
Fletcher wracked his brains. They could take one of the other three passages leading into the room, but there were no guarantees that the shamans wouldn’t come that way. They couldn’t go down … an idea formed in his mind.
‘Lysander, can you fly us up to those beams?’ Fletcher said to the Griffin, looking at the vaulted ceiling. ‘They’re broad enough to hide us.’
Lysander squawked in agreement, then gave Fletcher a wink, confirming that Captain Lovett was in control. He grinned back, her support steadying his resolve.
‘Are you sure?’ Othello said, staring up at the beams. ‘They look rustier than a fisherman’s bucket.’
‘It’s that or take our chances in the caves,’ Fletcher said, putting Ignatius on his shoulder and then mounting Lysander. Othello and Sylva squeezed on behind, and Fletcher felt Sylva’s hands slip round his waist. He, in turn, gripped Lysander around the neck. Without a saddle, Fletcher’s seat was made up of the ever-shifting back muscles of the powerful beast, and the Griffin’s feathers were slippery beneath his breeches.
Fletcher opened his mouth to give the order, but before he had a chance, Lysander launched them from the bridge with one powerful thrust of his wings. For a heart-stopping moment they dropped like a stone, then the bottom fell out of his stomach as they swooped upwards in an arc that hurled them into the rafters above.
Lysander skittered his talons along one of the broad beams in a screech of rusted metal until they came to a standstill. For a moment Fletcher took some deep breaths to calm himself, his face buried in Lysander’s glossy neck feathers. Then he felt the others dismount and he followed their example, careful to plant himself in the very centre of the rafter.
From this view, he could make out the eggs at the base of the pit quite clearly, as well as the platform below. The largest pipe was just beside his head, and the sloshing of liquid could be heard from within. He shuddered and extinguished his wyrdlights, casting the room into pitch darkness. He was just in time, for he could already see the glow of light coming from the entrance they had used.
Then, clutching a crackling torch in his hands, Khan ducked into the room. Up close, his size was even more stark in contrast to the shamans that followed him. His brow-ridge was less defined, and his tusks were somewhat smaller than most orcs’. But that was not what made him stand out the most to Fletcher. It was the demon perched on his shoulder, peering around the room with amber eyes.
Khan had a Salamander with him.
41
The Salamander was black as pitch and twice as large as Ignatius. It even had stubs of wings on its back, where Ignatius’s shoulder bones were. But despite these anomalies, it was indisputably a Salamander, from the spiked tip of its tail to the toothless beak on the end of its snout.
Ignatius seemed to think so too, for he chirred quietly as he watched the demon preen itself on Khan’s shoulder. Fletcher quelled him with a thought and watched as the shaman retinue marched behind, following the albino orc over the bridge. One carried a sack of yellow petals from the antechamber.
None had their demons with them, nor did they have summoning leathers but, even from the rafters above, Fletcher could see that all of them had pentacles and other symbols tattooed on their hands, just as he did. Even the new adepts had them, though several held their hands ginger
ly, as if they had only recently been marked.
Up close, Fletcher could see that these adepts were smaller than the others, with underdeveloped tusks jutting from their lower lips. They wore little more than grass skirts, but their bodies had been dusted with white powder, perhaps to emulate the albino’s skin.
A shout from Khan made Fletcher jump. He gave orders in guttural barks, pointing at the five corners of the pentacle. The shamans that had accompanied him took their places there, while the adepts kneeled behind, watching intently.
More orcish speech followed, and in unison the shamans began to etch complex symbols that intersected in the air above the star. It was mesmerising to watch. For some reason, Fletcher had always imagined orc shamans to be the most rudimentary of summoners, barely capable of controlling anything more than a low-level imp.
He had to remind himself that orcs had been summoning long before humans, and though he daren’t suggest it to Sylva, possibly before the elves had too.
Khan bellowed another order when the etching stopped. A strange ring of double helix hung in the air above the pentacle, and the shamans’ hands glowed blue as they pumped mana into the symbol. Soon, the ring became a disk of spinning blue light, moving faster than Fletcher could follow.
The orc shamans began to wail and chant, raising their voices against the roar of the spell. As their voices reached a crescendo, Khan knelt on the floor and pressed a small knob on the platform. It sank into the stone and a rumble echoed throughout the pyramid. The clank and screech of machinery echoed from the ceiling just above Fletcher’s head. For a moment Khan stared up at the noise and Fletcher ducked behind the beam, his heart fluttering in his chest like a caged bird.
It was only when he heard the slosh of liquid in the pipe beside him that curiosity compelled him to peek again. What he saw was sickening.
Blood gushed from the pipe and into the hole at the centre of the pentacle, pulsing like a severed artery. As the fluid passed through the spell it frothed and sizzled, the consistency becoming viscous, the colour verging on black. Far below, the liquid clotted and congealed over the gremlin eggs, oozing out of holes at the base of the pillar and into the trench. Then, the eggs began to throb, palpitating in the water as they grew in size, spilling out of the trench and filling the pit right to the edges.
The Inquisition Page 27