by Greg James
Another cry.
This time, Milanda was not silent; she roared back her defiance.
Her voice shattered, racing away from her, a vortex of fragments, chased down by the fearsome echoes that were made in reply. She pounded her body against its saw-toothed confines. She went grinding through the tunnels, desperate, a human worm. She could hear her pursuer; it was making plenty of noise, splashing and surging—predator letting prey know that it would soon be upon her.
Milanda’s heel snagged on something.
She tried to kick it away. It held on. Her heart went still. She kicked again. The sole of her foot hit a soft-hard mass, pulp that was taut over bone, suppurating. She could feel blunt teeth gnawing hard on the thin leather that protected her sole. She saw the shimmer of nocturnal eyes in the underground night.
She saw the face of the boy who died for her.
The one who tried to kiss her.
The boy without a name.
She cried out as he leered at her through a ragged mane of hair with yellow rapist’s eyes.
Her throat and nostrils were drawing in and driving out breaths tinged with the ripe flavour of tunnel-water. Milanda tried to push on and to push away the creature at her heels. The teeth of the burrow bit into her as surely as did the teeth of her hunter, some even stabbing deep enough to draw forth blood. She swore at the pain and the sensation of the water touching her wounds. Colours washed in and wove across her vision. Fear sent a welcome exhilaration through her body, opening the veins, widening the arteries; she could taste it on her tongue.
Milanda kicked hard against the hunter’s maw, breaking bone and tearing its loose flesh.
Move, move, move!
Pushing on, driving herself harder than before, her bleeding, her breathing and her gasping were all Milanda was aware of. She did not notice when the ground gave way, opening out before her.
She fell into empty space.
*
Milanda did not know how long she was unconscious, but when she came to, her head hurt like it had been beaten with a hammer.
There was a light ahead, weak and plaintive. There was an odour that she could not identify in the air. She picked her way through debris.
Her feet scuffing through the dirt was the only sound.
All was cold and dead down here. There was only silence, dust and death. Hunched forms could be seen curled in the dirt and in the hollows of caverns that must once have served as homes. Had this been some old settlement from older times?
She reached out and touched the stone the caverns were cut from and then snatched her hand back just as quickly.
It was not stone. It was rotten with rust, as metal would be after ages under the ground. As her eyes adjusted in the gloom, she saw in the caverns shapes of things she did not know. A chest with a window of broken glass as one of its faces. Black, tangled bundles hung inside it, which were not the work of spiders. There was another such chest close by, from which a coil of black tangles ran to a long chest of splintered metal. She peered inside it and saw glistening squares and rectangles decorated with slanting scratches and horizontal patterns.
Iron cities, she thought, as in the stories.
Getting to her feet, Milanda looked at the dead in the cavern and at how they were preserved. She brushed her fingers against the shoulder of one. It crumbled. She snatched her fingers away from the small mouth of darkness she had made in the fossilised corpse. A sound came from inside it.
Milanda frowned and reached tentatively for the dagger at her waist, thanking Khale for giving it to her. She took a step back, and another.
The corpse she had disturbed shuddered violently, showering the ground with flaking pieces that trailed lengths of web.
It was a cocoon.
Milanda then recognised the sound from inside, and she ran.
She cast a look back over her shoulder and saw the cocoon-corpse collapse into a pile of grey dregs. A river of insects came rushing out of it.
Milanda ran through light and dark, dodging shapes that loomed out, grey and unfamiliar. Some were tall and looked as if they could scrape at the sky were they above ground. She glimpsed twisted webs of rusted iron and the webs of the city’s black-shelled kings strung between them. The noise of the insects echoed all around and, as the shadows drifted and moved, she thought that they were coming at her from every direction. Though her legs ached and her lungs cried out for rest, she would not stop her flight from them.
The ground she ran upon was unusually flat, and she saw it was made of some crushed form she didn’t know. There were no bricks here, and little in the way of wood. As she ran on, she wondered what happened could have happened and how this city’s people fell to such a fate.
She came to a metal door, slightly ajar. Breathing in, she squeezed through and pushed it shut.
That should keep them out.
Turning away from the door, Milanda saw that she had entered a curious chamber.
There was an old man—thin, sickly and fragile—kneeling before an altar. The altar was filthy and streaked with the leavings of vermin. The old man nodded his head back and forth in a ritualistic rhythm. As she watched, Milanda heard the man wail, chant and sob in an unintelligible dialect. From the dark, beyond the altar, she heard a response.
At first, she thought it was a whispering, and then she thought it was a chittering. At last, she recognised it as the sound of the insects, only this sound was much louder, more aggressive and far more intense than before.
As it reached its peak, she saw the old man throw himself back on his haunches as if struck, his mouth hung open and his eyes rolled back into his skull. From his chapped lips, through brown teeth, came an incandescent mote of light —burning bright before burning dim. The mote wavered and wove through the air, illuminating the chamber in a way that made Milanda blink and wince. Her eyes ached to close, but she stubbornly continued to watch the unfolding spectacle.
As the mote left the man altogether, the body fell forwards onto the altar, its brow connecting with a brutal crack before going limp and dead.
She knew he was dead—dead because something had just left him. The mote seemed to gain a sense of steadiness and direction as the timbre of the insects’ noise changed. The mote was being drawn beyond the altar, slowly, surely, dissipating into the darkness. But as its light went out, she caught a glimpse of something; the outline of a hole in the far wall.
The last of the light passed through it.
The chamber was plunged into darkness.
She was alone, with only a dead man for company.
It was then that she heard the clattering and chittering. The sound assaulted her ears; fierce, hungry, and churning. It made her think of a whetstone grating away skin and flesh from bone. After long minutes of looking and waiting, her eyes finally adjusted and she could see into the darkened room.
The altar was bare.
The old man was gone, even though Milanda was squatting in the one entrance to the chamber.
How could that be?
She went over to the altar, running her hands across the crusted surface. Then she examined the walls and floor, tapping and stamping her way around the space until she was satisfied there were no secret doorways or trapdoors.
Where could he have gone?
She looked to the hole in the wall. It was too small a space for an adult human to pass through, even one as decrepit and wasted as the old man had been.
There was no way through; it was impossible.
Swallowing hard, she knelt before the altar, feeling a tremor pass through her flesh as she realised she was adopting the same position as the old man. She reached her fingers into the hole, feeling soft, mucal deposits smear across her skin. She groped around its edges until she found strange, regular depressions. This was not a hole that had been made by men. The depressions felt like something had gnawed its way through. With a deep breath, she leaned forwards until she was able to see inside the hole, and make out what was
stirring there, wet and glimmering below.
Milanda shouted at what she saw. She threw herself back from the hole, flailing, crashing to the ground. She watched it come for her, surging, seething, and roaring, out of the hole in the wall. It washed over her. It consumed her utterly.
She remembered nothing more.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Milanda clambered through the upper levels of the iron city. She did not remember what had come before, only a humid darkness and the bitter taste of smoke.
Another dream? Was this place cursed as the henge?
She drank water that trickled from between the clammy rocks as she made her way. The mountains were above, and she clambered gamely through their roots.
She rested on precarious shelves of rock and had dreams where the faces of the dead closed around her, weeping, begging, and pleading for life as they slowly twisted and took on the forms of the skinless beasts, slavering and hungry for her flesh. She drew her knees up tight against her chest until the sound of their voices passed.
She did not know how long she climbed for, but her arms and legs ached fiercely, so it must have been hours. Time passed dully without the whitening dawn in the morning or the fall of twilight in the evening. Instead, there were only the same grey and white-veined teeth thrusting out of underground shades, barely changing around her.
Things only changed when she saw a glow coming from somewhere and felt the slightest breeze on her face. She climbed harder. She climbed faster.
She came out into the open and fell on her knees, drinking in the free air.
Looking back, Milanda saw she was at the far end of the dark gash known as Traitors’ Gap. The wastelands of the Heart of the World lay ahead of her.
Across the desolation, a shining brown mist came dancing before the wind.
Milanda stood her ground; no longer wishing to run, or to be protected by others.
I will stand alone, she thought, though it may be the end of me.
In the short time since she had left Colm, she had lived through too much to do otherwise. The brown mist flowed towards her as the waters of a river and then parted, dissipating into dust and wind.
Milanda was no longer alone.
Three fragile-looking figures in loose robes stood before her. Each wore a skull-cap and seemed to have been shorn of hair, much like servants of the Church. But Milanda could see that these figures were not of the faith, or of the Small Kingdoms. Their fingers were adorned with rings that bore heavy, precious stones and their necks hung low under the weight of grotesque yet ornate necklaces of gold, silver and bronze.
“Greetings Milanda, daughter of Alosse and heir to Colm. You are welcome to our lands.”
Milanda returned the courtesy with a dry, tentative mouth. “I thank you, my Lords.”
“Ah, we are not Lords, your Grace. We are mere messengers sent on behalf of the Autarch.”
Milanda licked her lips, “And what message do you bring?”
“That he wishes you to return with us, and trouble yourself no more with crossing these tiresome leagues on foot.”
“Then, you are mages?”
“We are.”
“And if I wish to continue crossing these tiresome leagues on foot alone?”
The messengers smiled as one. “You will come with us.”
They were identical in all aspects, and they spoke as one; like the skinless beasts but of a different creed, Milanda thought.
She tried to speak but found she could not. She tried to move but found she could not. Her breath quickened as she felt her heartbeat beginning to slow in her chest.
The lean figures of the messengers swam before her eyes and she tried desperately to focus on them but could not. Then her heart’s beat returned to normal, though it still went faster, hammering hard in her chest as she took in the three figures once more—each a mirror of the other, but all dead, long-dead. Their crumbling lips set in crooked, broken smiles.
I could kill you with a thought.
And Milanda knew she was hearing the voice of the Autarch inside her skull.
You will come to me.
She obeyed.
*
Khale and Leste crossed into Traitors’ Gap with the dawn, after spending the remainder of the night searching for Milanda. The rocks towered over and above them, leaving only a narrow sliver of daylight to fall through and light their way. The ride took them a day, and it was uneventful, although occasional scatterings of debris and scree fell from above.
They spoke little along the way; lost in their own thoughts.
Leste squinted up into the shadowed clefts that textured the walls of the pass. She saw no-one there but she could not rid herself of a feeling that they were being observed, and that they had crossed some kind of boundary now—one that had existed unspoken for hundreds of years between the peoples of the Small Kingdoms and the denizens of the wasteland beyond. Sweat made her palms slick on the reins of her steed and a fist curled tight around her stomach. If she had not been with Khale, she might have turned at this point and ridden away.
“Do you feel fear, Leste of Colm?” Khale asked.
“I feel ... something,” she said, unwilling to show him fear.
“That is well. I feel it, too, like dirty fingernails picking at my scars. The Autarch has his eyes on us. There is naught to be done about it.”
They came upon a burrow towards evening where a mark was cut into the stone around it. It made Leste think of the henge and its etched standing stones.
“What is that? Juu ... lar ... what does it mean?” she asked.
“They have her,” Khale said, ignoring her question.
She decided not to press him on it.
“We must go after them.”
Khale looked at her. “You swore an oath to bring her back alive, didn’t you? You swore it to Alosse’s corpse.”
“How did you know that?”
“Because that’s what heroes do. You want to be one, more than anything. More than honour. More than nobility. More than love. I will tell you this,” Khale said, looking into her eyes, “Alosse wanted to be a hero and he was one, and he died hating everything that being a hero brought him.”
Leste said nothing.
“I don’t ask you to think your King’s murderer an honest man, or even a good one. I ask only that you remember I said this to you, here and now.”
“I will remember.”
“Good.”
“And now?”
“Now, let’s storm the gates of Neprokhodymh.” Khale shouted the cursed city’s name so that it echoed back through the pass.
“Do you think we will die?”
“Perhaps.”
“I thought you could not die, Khale.”
“There’s always a first time.”
“How can that be?”
The Wanderer turned and gave her a curious smile, “Because I live in hope.”
They set off across the lifeless plains towards the sorcerers’ city.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Colours came first, then shapes and light as Milanda awoke. Sensations came next. She was bound upon a low dais of polished limestone. She was in what appeared to be a vast library that smelled of mildew and incredible age. Its ceiling was high, vaulted, and held in place by pillars of ebon and incarnadine, as broad and thick as ancient trees. She noticed there were tall mirrors of shadowglass set into the pillars.
She had read of shadowglass in her books, and of the uses it was put to. A shudder passed through her body. Across the ceiling’s panels, she could see a fresco of flowing figures; their faces were twisting masks of obsidian, their limbs ending in tendrils, teeth and claws. All of them were as one, and all were caught in the chaos of a seemingly endless maelstrom, silently tearing one another apart.
“The Darkness wherein the Gods and their Black Madness writhe ...” she whispered, reciting the words as they were taught to her by the Sisters of the Church of Four.
A figure that
had once been a man walked through the leaning corridors of the library’s teeming shelves towards her. He ran his fingers along the decrepit, leathery spines of ancient books, stroking them with a gentle lover’s touch. He stank of the same rot that pervaded the chamber and the city standing beyond it, for this was the Autarch of Neprokhodymh. He might have been a great man once, but no more.
The Autarch made his way to a chair of ornately carved wood that creaked as he let his weight fall upon it. His weight was not great as his bones were hollow flutes and his skin was dry papyrus stretched over worm-grey flesh. The faces carved into the wood of the chair were those of the dead, but none were as terrible as the face he bore; it was barely more than a skull with strings of withered hair and beard clinging to it. The skin had dried out to such a degree that it glimmered like a coating of powdered amber crystal.
“How I envy them so,” the Autarch whispered, stroking at the faces that adorned his chair. “The peace of the grave, the quiet of decay and the absolute rest of oblivion. If only I had known that eternity could be such a long and tedious thing.”
He met Milanda’s eyes, and she flinched away.
“I have lived for hundreds and thousands of years, daughter of Colm. I do not remember how long exactly. Within these walls, the passage of time becomes meaningless.”
The Autarch sighed, and Milanda saw breath pass over the space where a tongue quivered like a slug and through teeth that were stalactites of ossified bone.
“I had not foreseen this as my fate when I was a young adept. I spoke the words from my Master’s tome, the one I stole, and now I can’t even remember the title of it, nor a single damned line. I cursed myself, and I’ve forgotten the words that I did it with. I felt like a God when I struck down my Master with the merest glance. Do you think I can remember the spell I did it with either? No. The hieroglyphs and elder signs are all gone from my mind. These eyes that once commanded such a terrible stare are all gristle and cataracts. You can see that, can’t you?