‘Heh,’ the squirrel cat chuckled each time he heard the dull thud of my skull banging into something painfully solid.
He did that every single time. After a while we’d settled into a pattern; Ishak would make a turn, followed by Reichis saying, ‘This way, quick!’
Thud. I’d hit my head.
‘Heh.’
‘Okay, now this way.’
Thud.
‘Heh.’
Nephenia had charmed candles in her coat that would’ve lit our way, but both Reichis and Ishak insisted that the smoke would interfere with their sense of smell. I’m not sure I believed them. Nonetheless, sometime just shy of when I began contemplating the potential culinary merits of roasted squirrel cat and sautéed hyena, we came upon a heavy iron door.
‘It’s locked,’ Reichis said.
‘You can tell that just by smell?’ I asked.
‘No, but who has a secret door into their most sacred temple without putting a lock on it?’
‘Good point.’
In fact, he was right. Usually if a lock is big and heavy but relatively simple I can pick it. The smaller, more intricate ones, Reichis handles – the little monster is a genius at picking locks. The problem comes in when you have a big lock with parts that are too stiff for the squirrel cat to turn, but the mechanism is too complicated for me to pick. That’s the sort of lock you put on a secret door into your temple.
‘We could just hide out here until another vizier comes along,’ Reichis suggested. ‘As soon as he unlocks the door, we jump him, rip his throat out. I can pop out his eyeballs while you cut off his ears. Maybe you could get the tongue too. It’s always so squishy I have trouble tearing them out.’
‘Or we could just use my warden’s coin,’ I said, pulling it from its slot in the hem of my shirt.
He looked up at me quizzically, his whiskers twitching. ‘How’s that going to get us any eyeballs?’
‘It’s not,’ I replied, flipping the coin over and over, adjusting the angle, height and motion until I felt it binding to the lock inside the door. ‘We’re trying to sneak into a sacred temple to prevent a god from starting a war here, remember?’
‘Oh, right.’ His muzzle went down, making him look a little crestfallen. Somehow that made me feel guilty.
‘Maybe the god has eyeballs?’ I suggested.
His fuzzy little head tilted as he looked up, his feline upper lip curling into an extremely nasty smile. ‘Oh yeah …’
Ancestors, I swore silently. A loud click signalled my warden’s coin had bested the lock. The iron door swung open, beckoning us into the holiest site in all of Berabesq, where my business partner was now looking forward to the prospect of eating a god’s corpse. When did my life get this messed up?
Despite my rather disreputable history and the general paucity of my purse – and not just because of Reichis pilfering it at regular intervals – I’ve visited a number of architectural marvels during my wayward travels. Cazaran, the capital of Gitabria, for instance, boasts eight spectacular bridges connecting the two halves of the city across a massive gorge. The Imperial Palace of Darome is no slouch when it comes to ostentatiousness either. The Ebony Abbey, with its unnaturally beautiful towers erected from the mystical material of pure shadowblack, had been just as impressive before my father and his posse of war mages had destroyed it. But for raw, awe-inspiring resplendence? None of them held a candle to the holy spire of the Great Temple of Makhan.
‘God,’ Reichis murmured as we slinked through one of the glittering passages.
‘Which one?’ I asked. ‘Every time you bring up squirrel cat gods it seems there are more of them.’
He looked up at me as if we’d suddenly lost the ability to understand each other. ‘What? No, idjit, I said “gold”.’ He gave a shake of his fur, causing his coat to change colour to match the lustrous walls all around us.
‘Do you two always talk this much when you’re supposed to be infiltrating the most protected temple on the continent?’ Nephenia hissed.
‘She’s got a point,’ Reichis said. ‘Best if you shut up, Kellen.’
I took the card that the Path of Mountain Storms had given me and tried once again to orient myself on the little circular map representing this floor of the spire. I had no clue whether I could trust any of it any more, but so far it had turned out to be exactly as accurate as you’d expect, given the diagrams were based on the faint head movements of drunken blind servants who weren’t even aware they might be revealing the temple’s design, which is to say, not much at all. On the other hand, while places on the map were often mismatched left to right or front to back, most of the actual rooms and passageways described on the card did, at least, exist.
‘There should be a prayer room on each floor,’ I said quietly. ‘We should probably stay away from those.’
‘Agreed,’ Nephenia said. ‘Also, you might want to remind the squirrel cat about the purpose of our mission here.’
I glanced around, but Reichis had disappeared again. I crept down the corridor and turned a corner to find him scratching his claws against one of the gold-painted walls in an attempt to extract as much of the valuable ore as he could.
‘What in all the hells are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Shh,’ he snarled back at me. ‘Can’t you see I’m workin’ here?’
There are times when my furry business partner’s avarice has to be handled delicately. ‘But if we load up on gold, how will we carry the gems?’
‘Gems?’
‘Haven’t you heard the stories? The treasure room in the spire is rumoured to contain the largest collection of precious stones on the continent.’ I began counting off on my fingers. ‘Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires …’
‘Sapphires?’
‘Buckets of them.’
He stopped scratching at the walls, though his claws glinted with gold flecks as he sauntered back to me. ‘Those buckets will be a big help when you’re carrying my gems back to the saloon.’
Glancing once again at the map, I tried to reason out which hallway would most likely lead to the staircase to the floor above. We made painfully slow progress those next few minutes. The gleaming, polished floors felt almost like sheets of gold beneath our boots, our every tiptoed step echoing down the halls and threatening to summon the temple guards who patrolled the spire. Blessedly, there weren’t as many of them as I would’ve expected.
‘Why is this place so poorly protected?’ Nephenia asked quietly. I recognised from the soft way she spoke the same techniques Ferius had tried to teach me for making yourself heard by those next to you without your voice carrying any further.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, cringing at how my own whispers seemed to reverberate all around us.
‘This place is giving me the creeps,’ Reichis chittered.
Ishak concurred with a quiet yip.
I gestured for both of them to keep silent, though I couldn’t dispute their assessment; the further we travelled along the opulent corridors, the more bizarre the contrasts we discovered. Opposite a hospital room laden with shelves stacked with medicines and instruments of healing we found a second door, inside which awaited a veritable torture chamber filled with devices I could only assume were designed for the extraction of confessions from captured blasphemers. A library boasting more books than I’d seen in the entire Imperial Palace of Darome on one side of the corridor faced an anteroom equipped for the ritual destruction of unholy texts. The endless contradictions of Berabesq’s six religious sects appeared to coexist in discordant harmony within a single temple.
At last we found the first set of stairs and began the laborious process of ascending through the levels of the spire one by one. Just as the card in my hand described, no single staircase united all the floors, which meant we had to cover almost every part of the spire as we made our way to the top.
The only consistent architectural features of the spire were the prayer rooms located at the end of the corridor
that led off to the right at the top of each flight of stairs. Ceilings painted with the constellations of the night sky looked down upon parquet floors where carved wooden kneeling discs awaited those wishing to pray in comfort. It was while sneaking past the third of these vast chambers that we learned why the temple seemed so empty.
‘What are the temple guards doing in there?’ Nephenia asked in a whisper.
We soon realised that it was the same on every floor: a prayer room filled with dozens of black-and-silver garbed sentries who should’ve been performing regular rounds of the spire but were instead on their knees, heads bowed as a vizier standing on a raised platform led them in worshipful chants to one of the six faces of the Berabesq god. The entrance to each of the chambers was protected by sturdy iron bars, which would have made sense if you wanted to prevent unauthorised entry, but these gates were locked from the outside.
I motioned for the others to stay back as I crept around the corner from one of the prayer rooms and climbed a latticed wall to the gap above the ceiling where uncovered wooden beams spanned the chamber to allow air to circulate throughout the spire. From there I got a closer look at the men and women below.
The temple guards, viziers and other holy functionaries were indeed deep in prayer, but something still didn’t look quite right. The guards seemed jittery – visibly uncomfortable at just sitting there. Their heads would turn towards the door as if the empty corridors beyond troubled them. When one started to rise, the vizier leading the prayer shouted at him. The guard knelt back down on the prayer disc and resumed his chanting.
Why would the viziers be keeping the temple guards inside the prayer rooms? I wondered, not expecting to find an answer, of course, which was why I nearly fell off the beam when one appeared.
Strange, isn’t it? A young boy’s voice appeared in my mind. He sounded different than before, his words strained, thin, as if scraped from the throat of someone holding back tremendous pain. It’s almost as if they’re waiting for you to kill me.
48
The Torment
The screams weren’t the worst of it. Even as those heart-rending wails drew Nephenia, Ishak, Reichis and me inexorably along the circular passageways of the spire’s summit, our steps taking us in a spiral towards whatever awaited us at its centre, the four of us shivered, not from cold, but from the strange buzzing permeating the air all around us. The closer we got, the more the walls seemed to buckle and warp, as though the stones behind the golden surfaces were shuddering in revulsion. Something terrible was happening here. Something unnatural. The black markings around my left eye felt as if they were starting to bubble.
We were nearing the centre when Ishak, who had been pacing ahead of us, abruptly turned and bared his teeth, growling at Nephenia.
‘He wants us to turn back,’ she said.
‘Damned straight,’ Reichis grunted, the colour of his fur shifting from black to grey to blood-red and back again. ‘I want out of here.’
‘Get a hold of yourself, partner,’ I said. I’ve learned the hard way that comforting him when he’s scared results in nasty bite marks.
Nephenia shook her head, fingers pressing into her temples. The tattooed bands on her forearms weren’t shimmering the way they normally did. Instead, the sigils glistened as if the metallic inks were slowly turning liquid. ‘I’m getting sick, Kellen.’
I wasn’t feeling great myself, but I was nowhere near as bad as she was, which was odd. Usually I’m the first to get nauseous.
You and I have something in common, the voice in my head said, even as the boy’s screams echoed down the passage towards us. Something that makes this less … unfamiliar to your senses.
What? I asked silently. I figured a god who can put thoughts in your head can probably hear them too.
Come and see.
I forced myself onward. The others gritted their teeth and followed. Before long we reached the end of the winding passage and found ourselves hiding just outside an open doorway as we peered inside to a massive circular room maybe fifty feet across. Cheerfully coloured draperies depicting desert flora and fauna hung from floor to ceiling. Toys of all shapes and sizes were strewn about, some simple stuffed animals of the kind given to babies in their cribs, others complex wind-up mechanical contraptions suited to much older children. There were games too; illustrated boards with carved wooden pieces in the shapes of soldiers and siege engines. In one corner of the room sat a small student’s desk, its surface buried beneath sheaves of rough paper covered in ink marks and scratched-out words.
Shattering the image of a rich child’s bedroom was the waist-high block of stone at the centre, where six viziers in ornate brocade robes stood over the bound body of a boy whose dark skin had turned ashen from pain. Blind Asabli servants held out leather-bound books that the viziers turned back to again and again before inscribing sigils onto the boy’s limbs with pens that ended in sharpened bronze tips. Each stroke left behind an angry red welt on the boy’s flesh, the ridges between filled in with lines of ink so pure and unrelenting in its darkness that I couldn’t stop myself from whispering its name out loud.
‘Shadowblack.’
The breath froze in my lungs even as my mind began sorting through tricks and tactics, tracing the lines of attack and ruses I would need to stop the viziers. Nephenia pulled me out of the way before one of them might have glanced over at the doorway and seen me.
‘Kellen, wait,’ she whispered. She needn’t have worried; the combination of the boy’s screaming and the viziers’ chanting would’ve drowned out an invading army. ‘You can’t fight them.’
I couldn’t quite make sense of her words. The image of the boy, strapped down on that table … It was like watching myself three years ago, when my mother and father had dripped molten inks on the skin of my forearms, forever imprinting upon them the counter-bands that would deny me access to the magic that defined my people.
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked quietly. ‘We faced worse odds when we fought the monks at the Ebony Abbey.’
‘You see those gold designs down the arms of their robes?’
I nodded. They were incredibly intricate, almost like spiralling lines of script in a language I couldn’t recognise. The time and effort to embroider such garments would be enormous.
‘You won’t find anything like that on the habits of regular viziers,’ Nephenia went on. ‘Nor even on the warrior vestments of the Faithful. Those men in there are the Arcanists.’
‘The what now?’ Reichis asked, his ears flattened against his skull.
I’ve never made much of a study of the Berabesq theocracy, other than looking for ways to avoid it. Nephenia could tell from my expression that I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘The Arcanists,’ she repeated, wincing from whatever phantom pains this place was inflicting on her mind before she explained. ‘You remember a couple of years ago when we fought that squad of Faithful in the desert? The ones who could use their own blood to create mystical shields? Those abilities are imprinted on them by the Arcanists.’
‘So they’re charmcasters like you, only they can embed spells into human beings?’
‘I suppose so, but I’m nowhere near as powerful. I doubt even a lord magus could hold their own against an Arcanist.’
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years devising plans for defeating the innumerable people out there who want to kill me. I had no tactics for taking on six of anything as powerful as a lord magus, mostly because such a feat was impossible.
Heed your friend’s warning, the voice in my head said. Should you meddle in their affairs, the Arcanists will destroy you and your companions in ways that will leave your spirits howling in agony long after your bodies have grown cold.
Like they’re doing to you? I asked.
It is not the same. The pain is significant, yes, but such sacrifices are necessary.
Necessary for what?
Another scream erupted from the boy’s throat.
&nbs
p; This, Kellen of the Jan’Tep, is how a god is made.
49
The Ritual
We crouched in the shadows like cowards and waited as they tortured the boy for another hour. Nephenia didn’t dare use one of her charms to conceal our presence, for fear the Arcanists would sense the use of Jan’Tep magic. Theirs was a different kind of mysticism than that of my people, with abilities inscribed onto their skin just as they carved miracles into the flesh of the boy they were turning into a god.
Almost like the malediction, I thought, my fists clenched so tight my fingernails were digging into the flesh of my palms.
‘There’s something strange about this,’ Nephenia said in a hushed whisper. ‘There have been rumours about the secret techniques of the Arcanists since the birth of the Berabesq theocracy, but not one of the tales speaks of them working with the shadowblack.’
The chanting died out abruptly. The screams took a while longer. Several heavy thumps of leather-bound books closing was followed by soft, almost gentle words spoken by the Arcanists to the boy as they unbuckled the restraints holding him to the table. When they finally began trudging out of the room, I feared they might spot us in the shadows, but the stooping of their shoulders and the shuffling of their feet spoke of a bone-deep exhaustion that hid us from them as utterly as any obscurement spell. Soon the six Arcanists and their blind attendants had passed us by without notice.
Experience had taught me to wait in case one of them came back, but a pinched, reedy voice called out from the chamber, ‘Have no fear. It will be many hours before they return.’
I rose from my hiding place. Before entering the room, I carefully and methodically unwound the ancient scourge rope coiled around my right arm, then removed the roughly carved dice Emelda had given me from their decaying felt bag in my pocket. Nephenia already had two of her charms ready: her box of caged storms and a pair of tiny mechanical spiders. Reichis and Ishak had their teeth and claws on display, along with their attitudes.
Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker Page 27