by Layton Green
They caught glimpses of the city as they descended for a thousand feet to the floor: a stippled skyline of ornate stone buildings, a trio of aquamarine lakes with canals branching outward like spokes on a wheel, plazas made of inlaid gemstones and adorned with statues and fountains. Smokestacks and crenellated guard towers rose at various intervals throughout the city, and hundreds of winch and chain funiculars ringed the perimeter, depositing delvers at the entrance to tunnels or dwellings that honeycombed the cave walls. The dwellings ranged from barracks to living flats to elaborate stone mansions near the base of the wall.
Seeing the full might of the underground city sparked Will’s imagination, but also incinerated his hopes. Even if they escaped the mines, which he imagined was some version of hell, how could they possibly get through this fortress of a city unnoticed, and then navigate the Darklands by themselves?
“Lucka, we’ll never get out of here,” Dalen muttered, echoing Will’s sentiment.
Yasmina was slumped across Marek’s shoulders. Caleb looked so despondent that Will worried if they weren’t chained together, he might step off the staircase and let himself fall.
When they reached the bottom, the odors of smoke and limestone were replaced by the smell of spicy charred meat from street vendors and the salty tang of sweating workers. Pedestrians and stone-wheeled steam carriages on grooved tracks moved about the city in orderly fashion.
Instead of entering the city proper, the delver guards took the prisoners on a perimeter road made of blue marble. No one gave them a second glance. An hour later, on the opposite side of the cavern, they reached an enormous funicular set on four rails. A guard tower loomed over the machine.
The delvers herded the prisoners onto the funicular. It rumbled to life, and they descended for so long Will guessed they were now deeper than when they had begun the ascent to Fellengard. With the prisoners pressed against the side railing to absorb the view, the funicular finally came to a stop in a ruined city in another bowl-shaped cavern, vast but smaller than the one above. Instead of the wide boulevards of Fellengard, high granite walls and sinuous alleys dissected neighborhoods of rough-hewn stone, and the buildings were two and three stories high instead of six and seven. It looked as if some great battle had once taken place, because the walls and buildings were crumbling and pockmarked by jagged holes. Now and then Will saw a giant heap of coagulated stone, as if melted by a powerful fire.
The funicular came to rest next to a guard station. A sign carved into the wall read Olde Fellengard, and above it was another phrase written in unfamiliar script. The delver language, Will assumed.
The station exited onto a large courtyard lit by mineral lamps. Guards, prisoners, and workers crisscrossed the open space. Will spotted two more vertical trams on the periphery, and while their group waited at the station for the delver guards to fill out scrollwork, another group of chained humans ascended into Olde Fellengard on a funicular, from somewhere below the city.
Not just somewhere, Will thought, taking in the filthy appearance and glazed eyes of the new arrivals.
The mines.
A short time later, Will’s posse of prisoners was shepherded into the courtyard, unchained at the waists, and grouped into fours. Will, Caleb, Dalen, and Marek were placed together. Yasmina was carried off by a delver.
“Where’re you taking her?” Caleb shouted.
“To the infirmary,” the delver said with a smirk.
Will didn’t like the ominous implications of his tone, but there was nothing they could do. He could only pray Yasmina would receive some type of medical care.
Another delver led the four of them down a curving street to a circular courtyard with a gaping hole in the middle. The courtyard was lined with delver dwellings converted into cells, and a guard shoved Will and his companions into a barred enclosure the size of a small garage. It contained four straw mats and a bucket. The only illumination came from a mineral lamp hanging near the center of the courtyard, emitting an olive-green light so dim Will could barely see inside the cell.
The delver locked them inside without a word. After he left, Will placed his hands on the bars and tried to shake them.
Solid as the mountain itself.
“Well,” Caleb said, “this is fun.”
Marek eyed Will warily from the corner. Will went over and offered his hand. “Thanks for helping with Yasmina.”
Marek ignored his gesture. After testing the solidity of the wall at various points, the large man slumped with his back against the wall. Dalen did the same.
Will searched deep for words of encouragement to offer his companions, but found he had nothing to say.
The delver took Yasmina five streets away, to a low rectangular building stuffed with narrow cots. Though conscious, her mind was imprisoned in a dreamlike state. The outside world felt very far away, on the other side of a one-way mirror. She barely registered the smell of urine and death in the room, the dozens of prostrate forms lying on cots, the lack of any equipment resembling medical care, or the groping hands of the delver guard.
Will had no idea if it was day or night. The constant, disorienting glow of the mineral lamps added to the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare phosphorescent twilight.
Not a feeling of being trapped, he corrected. A reality.
At some point, a delver guard led two women in chains and tattered clothing into the courtyard. Heads bowed, the women shuffled around the courtyard passing out food and jugs of water to the cell blocks, then emptied the prisoners’ waste buckets in the hole next to the mineral lamp.
Dinner consisted of bread, mushrooms, and a nutty gruel. At least there was plenty of it; Will assumed they wanted the prisoners to have energy to work the mines. Despite the foulness of the meal, Will shoveled it down, and made sure Caleb and Dalen did the same. Marek didn’t need any urging.
After dinner, Will lay on his side on his smelly mat, trying not to think about how far underground they were, or the bedbugs he felt crawling through the straw, or the rats he heard scuttling through the courtyard, or the cold black tunnel his future had become.
The next morning all the prisoners in the courtyard were chained in a line and marched through Old Fellengard, to a section of the city reduced to rubble. Along the way, they passed three more funicular stations and dozens of plazas lined with cellblocks. How many prisoners were down there, Will wondered? How many mines?
Down they went on a new funicular, squeezing through a narrow shaft for what seemed like miles. At last they creaked to a halt, entering a cavern far different from the grimy coal mine Will had expected.
A grotto of ethereal beauty stretched before them, filled with giant crystal shards as thick as Will and three times as tall, jutting out of the floor and ceiling and walls at crazy angles. They picked their way a few hundred yards through the jumble of quartz behemoths, then passed into an even more stunning cavern.
Formed out of some translucent mineral, the floor was a mantle of blue glass, the ceiling carved by nature into whorls that curved downward to merge with the maze of pillars and grottoes forming the interior of the cavern. He thought it looked like something created by CGI for a fantasy video game. Except, that was, for the harsh reality of the pick axes hanging near the entrance, the delver guards grasping three-pronged scourges, and the group of prisoners hacking away at one of the blue pillars.
“Shift’s over!” roared one of the delvers. After filling the mine carts behind them with broken pieces of blue mineral, the prisoners stumbled to the wall and replaced their picks. Will noticed women and a few different races sprinkled among the captives.
No instructions were given, though some of the prisoners in Will’s group looked experienced. Scrambling at the crack of a delver whip, Will and Caleb grabbed pick axes and started hacking at the same pillar as the previous miners.
Will ended up between Caleb and a tall man with broad shoulders and a gaunt frame, his long blond hair tied in a ponytail. Will could tell he had on
ce been imposing. Unlike most of the prisoners, he held his head high and didn’t act as if he would never see daylight again.
Well into the day’s labor, when Caleb and Dalen could barely lift their picks and Will’s arms ached from wrist to shoulder, he risked addressing his neighbor. The guards kept to the rear of the room and didn’t seem to mind conversation, unless it interfered with the work.
“What’s your name?” Will asked.
Startled Will had spoken, the man regarded him with a grim expression. “Tamás. Of the Mirgath Clan. And you, my friend?”
“Will Blackwood.” He saw no harm in revealing his name. As if it would matter down here. He jerked his head to the left. “That’s my brother, Caleb.”
The man stared at him. “Blackwood? You’re Romani?”
“Apparently.” It was the first time Will had heard the term Romani used, and he wondered why Mala had always referred to herself as a gypsy.
“From where do you come?”
“The far North,” Will said, playing along. “We were taken on our way to New Victoria.”
Tamás nodded, and Will breathed a sigh of relief. He had been practicing the local accent so he could blend, and Tamás hadn’t seemed to notice. It was easier in this world, he suspected, because of the lack of transport and global connections. Who knew how a villager from “the far north” would talk?
“Why New Victoria?” Tamás asked.
“We have another brother. We’re trying to find him.”
“I wish you success,” he said, though even Tamás’s confident voice bore a trace of despair. “And how is it in the North for our people? Genocide as well?”
Will paused a beat, earning a crack of a whip.
Tamás caught the confusion in his eye. “You haven’t heard? I feared as much. The wizards run a fine propaganda campaign. Death squads and Inquisitors patrol the Ninth, under the pretext of searching for followers of Devla, but exterminating any of our people they encounter. And not just us—all freeholders who refuse to take the Oaths. I’m certain they’re preparing the Ninth for settlement.” He frowned at the pick in his hands. “With help from us.”
“I don’t follow,” Will said.
Sweat dripped from Tamás’s brow as his shoulders heaved with effort. “This blue mineral is tilectium. The wizards adapt it for use in their personal flying carriages. Gathering tilectium in this quantity . . . they’ve something nefarious in mind, rest assured.”
“But why bother with secrecy or a propaganda campaign?” Will asked. “Who’s going to stand up to them?”
“Tis true,” Tamás said, “that the Revolution was never much of a threat. But we’ve no choice. The Devla uprising has angered the Congregation, in the manner that a bee sting angers a cloud giant, and Lord Alistair is unlike his predecessors. He makes the steam carts run on time, as the delvers say, but there is no tolerance within his bones. The only check to his power is the perception of the people. Though the wizards don’t need the common born to win a war, where would the Congregation be without its tax base, its laborers, its servants? Most common born have no love for our people, but outright genocide might not sit well.”
“So he does it on the sly,” Will murmured, remembering the bodies of the villagers stacked like firewood they had seen on the journey. “Like Hitler at first.”
“Who?”
“No one,” Will muttered.
Tamás’s eyes lit with a feverish glow. “It’s not just about settlement. It’s the return of an idea he fears, Will Blackwood. Impotent the Devla uprising may be, but were it to spread outside the Romani, then who knows what might result?”
“Then the wizards would just kill everyone,” Will said, “and bring in some common born from somewhere else to do their bidding.”
Caleb chuckled. “Ever the sword of logic, brother mine,” he said, wheezing his words out.
“Just calling it like I see it,” Will said.
“You’re not wrong,” Tamás said, dropping his gaze and striking the tilectium with a defeated swing of the pick. “Opposing the wizards is foolish. The likely outcome is that Alistair will have his way, our people will perish in the Fens, and he will swallow the Ninth and turn his ambitions across the borders. A man such as he will never be satisfied.”
“Maybe they’ll surprise you,” Will said.
“Who?”
“The leaders of the Revolution. Maybe they have something in mind you don’t know about.”
“The sentiment is a kind one,” Tamás said, lowering his voice, “but I believe I would know of such a plan. Until my arrival in these accursed mines a year ago, I was the leader of the Revolution.”
Will forced himself not to show surprise. The guards were watching. “Then why are you still alive?” he whispered. “They don’t know who you are?”
Tamás shook his head. “True to form, they see only wizards as a threat.”
Long hours later, after Will’s muscles had turned to slush and blisters had formed on his hands, a new crop of prisoners arrived by funicular, and the delvers ordered Will’s group to stop. He lowered his pick, watching Caleb’s slumped form with worried eyes.
“I was brought here with my brother as well,” Tamás said, leaning on his pick and flicking his eyes at Caleb. He dropped his voice so only Will could hear, the sadness of his next words radiating outwards. “He died last month.”
Will balled his fists and let out a slow breath. “We have a friend they took to the infirmary when we arrived. What do you know about that?”
“The infirmary?” Tamás’s smile was grim. “No such place exists. There is merely a room where the delvers wait to see if the sick are going to live or die.”
-25-
Traveling on the currents of the night, the thing known as a Spirit Liege briefly pondered its existence, shadowy images of the man it used to be flickering in the synapses of its mind like an unremembered dream. As did memories of the terrible experiments that had broken that man.
It no longer knew what it was. It only knew that it had emerged in its present incarnation in a castle in the sky less than a day ago, and that it was called a Spirit Liege. That, and it knew the nature of its mission.
Find the sword born of spirit.
Kill whoever wields it.
Bring the weapon to Lord Alistair.
It would have to be careful, though. Both the wielder and the weapon handled with the utmost of care. For the sword born of spirit, the Spirit Liege had been told, was one of the few things on Urfe that could destroy it.
The Spirit Liege alighted outside Zedock’s swamp citadel in the middle of the night. Drifted through the heavy curtain of air that it could no longer feel.
It could feel currents of energy, psionic signatures, astral winds, magical vibrations.
But not warmth or morning dew, pain or pleasure, the stinging slap of an icy day.
It flowed into the bottom level of the obelisk. The ghost knight guarding the fortress descended the spiral staircase, regarded the intruder with the silence of the damned, and then clanked away.
The Spirit Liege floated back and forth over the bottom level. Near the base of the stairs, it found the residual psionic signatures of the two men who had died there—one a necromancer, one a much less potent wielder of magic. Scattered throughout the room, it could also sense the faint and non-magical energies of three more humans. Even more indistinct, so old as to be useless but infusing the obelisk like a rag soaked in blood, it sensed the charred aura of death. Death and suffering.
And finally, entangled within the energy lines of one of the humans, was the magical residue which the Spirit Liege sought: the sword born of spirit.
Unlike the energy traces left by the humans, or even the two wizard born, the scent of the sword saturated the essence of the Spirit Liege as would the scent of fresh meat to a canine.
As it absorbed and catalogued the residual energy of the sword, the Spirit Liege had the thought that whatever its masters had created it to b
e, it and the sword were kindred things.
It followed the trail of magical currents through the swamp. Often the path would disappear, because that was the nature of residual magical energy, but the Spirit Liege would search in a wide perimeter until it resumed once again.
The trail led to a boat by the fen where the three humans had lingered, on into the marsh forest, and then to the remains of a campsite, where the humans were joined by the energies of dozens of beings. The Spirit Liege did not know this new scent. It just knew that it was not magical and it was not human.
The three humans comingled with others, confusing the Liege. It could no longer distinguish the individual human energies. But the scent of the sword was as strong as ever. Over the course of the next week, it followed the magic out of the swamplands and onto the plains, into the hills of trollkind, and all the way to a collection of fantastical rock outcroppings at the base of a mountain range.
And then, perhaps blocked by the towering mass of granite stretching to the horizon, the heady fragrance of powerful eldritch magic—the sword born of spirit—disappeared.
The eyes of the Spirit Liege glowed white in the darkness.
-26-
For his History and Governance class, Val returned to a small auditorium in the main building. Rows of cushioned chairs faced a central dais, and students from multiple coteries filled the room. Val was relieved beyond measure to be a face in the crowd.
Slipping into the back row, he squeezed between an older woman smothered in diamond jewelry and a muscular blond man draped in furs and wearing a golden helm. The professor was a pale sorceress with dark hair piled in a bun, wearing a gray robe with the traditional stole. She first gave an eloquent spiel about how wizards were the chosen ones, the cream of humanity’s crop. How they were different from the common born and had a duty to uphold the Congregation’s standards and ideals.