by Scott Kaelen
“She died a long time before the blight,” Oriken remarked.
“Probably the first of her line,” Jalis said. “Or the first to rise to prominence, at any rate. Her position at the farthest reach of the crypt suggests she was the first to be buried here.”
“How did the builders know how many Chiddaris there’d be?” Oriken asked. “All the niches seem to have graves in them. That's pretty good guesswork.”
“I expect only the important individuals got a spot in the family vaults. The rest were likely buried aboveground. Plus, if we scrutinised the first few niches, I imagine we’d find they weren’t taken as such, but merely reserved.”
Dagra grunted. “It’s a shame old Cunaxa here wasn’t the last to be buried instead. Could've saved ourselves walking the length of this accursed hallway.”
“I guess if she had been nearest the entrance,” Oriken said, “then she wouldn't be the one looking after the family jewel, would she?”
Dagra cast him a cold glance before turning his attention back to their prize. He pointed to a group of carved symbols in the script surrounding the jewel. “Here’s some of those runes you get excited about, Jalis. Like the ones on my sword.” He held the wide blade of the gladius into the light, indicating the darkened inscriptions that ran down its length. “Attic something-or-other, right?”
“Antik rukhir.” Jalis’s Sardayan accent lent the old words a mystic edge, emphasising the k at the end of antik with a sharp click of the tongue, and rolling the r at the end of rukhir. She leaned closer to inspect the runes. “The language of the Umbral Era never ceases to amaze me. So many regional variations that seem to have evolved entirely separately from one another, and yet maintained recognisable common elements. We’re talking thousands of years ago, before the first longboats crossed the Burning Channel, and yet antik rukhir was as prevalent on Himaera as on the Sosarran mainland. And it pre-dates all of the old tribes.”
Oriken shrugged. “Who cares? I said it when you first saw the runes on Dagra’s sword. Sure, it’s an interesting weapon, but why get all excited about a dead language?”
“I don’t know which is the greater treasure,” Jalis sighed, with a wry smile. “The jewel, or your uncharacteristic insight.”
“All I’m saying is we’ve got the jewel and it’s worth a lot more than what Cela Chiddari is giving us. Even I can see that.”
“We all agree we’ve found a small fortune,” Dagra said, “but who’s got the coin to pay us what it's really worth? Certainly no one I know. Five hundred silvers ain’t to be scoffed at.”
Jalis nodded in agreement and glanced at Oriken. “Besides, we’re bound by the code. Even Orik wouldn’t disregard the guild’s rules.”
Oriken gave his hat a brief twist. “Course not. Perish the thought. But do those rules cover how to remove a valuable jewel that’s embedded in a solid chunk of granite? I’d prefer to deliver the thing in one piece, if possible.” Dagra shrugged and glanced at Jalis, who shook her head. “I mean,” Oriken went on, “it’s not as if we’ve got a hammer and a chisel, is it?”
Jalis muttered a curse. “In retrospect, something of an oversight.”
“So how do we get it out?”
“We use our blades.” Dagra pointed to the weapons at Jalis’s waist. “Yours would be best for the task, lass.”
Jalis laughed. “You’re making a joke, yes? I wouldn’t ruin my blades on that jewel, no matter what it’s worth.” She patted the long, black-bladed dagger at her hip, and the slender, silver dagger on her thigh. “Dusklight and Silverspire are more than just weapons or tools. They’re works of art, and irreplaceable.”
Dagra sighed and sheathed his gladius. “All right. Leave this to me.” He motioned for Oriken to turn around. Oriken did so, and Dagra untied the side-pouch of his backpack and rummaged inside, pulling out the short-bladed hunting knife.
“This ain’t no fancy blade with a name,” Dagra told Jalis, quirking an eyebrow. “Good old solid piece of steel Orik’s had since we were kids.”
“Actually, I did name it,” Oriken said, a glint in his eye. “Called it Akantu after the patron of lesser creatures.”
“No,” Dagra said. “You did not. And you shouldn’t mock the gods, least of all in this crypt.”
Oriken scoffed. “Patrons aren’t gods. They’re men and women, no different from… well, no different from me and Jalis.” He gave Dagra a wide grin.
“Fuck yourself,” Dagra suggested.
He placed the knife’s curved tip into the gap between granite and silver and began to lever it back and forth, working his way carefully around the jewel’s circumference.
“Don’t slip,” Oriken said.
“I doubt your knife could harm the jewel,” Jalis said. “That’s why I won’t tarnish my blades on it. It looks stronger than a diamond.”
Dagra’s heart raced as the hunting knife slipped over the silver band. Its sharp tip jittered across the jewel, emitting a high-pitched screech.
“Cherak’s stones, Dag!” Oriken said. “Are you trying to lose us our bounty?”
Dagra puffed his cheeks and blew out as his nerves began to calm. He thought he’d ruined their prize, but there wasn’t the faintest scratch on any of the jewel’s angular surfaces.
Jalis sighed. “Thanks for testing my supposition, Dagra,” she said flatly. “I think we can consider the point proven.”
There was a slight shake in Dagra’s hand as he inserted the knife’s tip back into the groove. He twisted the blade, and the grind of steel on stone whispered down the black hall.
“Do you think it’s magic?” he asked.
Oriken barked a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Maybe it’s got incantations woven into it. Remember that girl in where-was-it?” Dagra frowned as he brought up the hazy memory. “The one Maros rescued?”
“I’d hardly say he came to her rescue,” Oriken said. “She was chased by bees after disturbing a nest.”
“Dag’s got a point,” Jalis said. “That girl magicked an oak back into a sapling.”
“So we were told.”
Dagra bristled. “Well, they carted her off to the Arkh after that, so there must’ve been truth to it.” The jewel was beginning to loosen.
Oriken snorted. “If I saw it with my own eyes, I’d believe it. I don’t take everything I hear for true.”
“I know.” Dagra sighed.
“She was a feyborn, Orik,” Jalis said softly. Dagra could feel her warm breath on his neck as she watched him work. “Say what you like about some other things, but I can assure you that feyborn do exist.”
Oriken gave no reply and the conversation ceased. As Dagra worked, so did his imagination. In his mind he again saw the exposed burial hole full of webs. Somewhere behind the silken wall lay a twisted, withered relative of their client. And behind the slab he worked on now lay the bones of Cela’s most ancient ancestor, Cunaxa.
A skeleton by now, he assured himself. Just bones. Nothing to be afraid of. He levered the blade back and forth, and with a final twist the burial jewel slid from the stone…
Web-filled eye sockets stared at him. In mute horror, he stared back. The jewel’s housing now framed the sunken features of Lady Cunaxa Chiddari, covered in silken threads and peeking through the gap. The skin stretched over her skull like boiled leather, with clumps of hair fused to the mummified flesh. The brow and cheekbones were festooned with scabrous growths, and the terrible, lipless rictus grinned at him as if delighted to have company after the long centuries of solitude. Her blackened teeth shifted and parted. Horrified, Dagra watched as the webs tore and the jaw stretched wide, then the jawbone slipped behind the slab and struck the floor with a muted thunk.
“Gah!” Dagra sprang backwards, uttering the names of the Dyad in the hope that they would whisk him from the heathen hallway and back onto the heath. Bile rose in his throat as he tore his gaze from the wizened skull.
“It’s just a corpse, Dag,” Jalis said softly.
“It moved!”
“You disturbed its position, that’s all.”
Saliva swam in his mouth. He swallowed it. “Aye. Just a corpse. Of course. A corpse, of course!” He issued a brief but manic giggle. Catching the bemused looks of his friends, he cleared his throat and composed himself.
The jewel was in Oriken’s hands. He held it aloft and peered at it, undaunted by the grisly cadaver that watched them. Jalis took the lamp from the podium and held it by Oriken’s shoulder. The light glinted from the jewel’s multi-faceted surface. Its front was circular, the silver band clasped tightly around the circumference, seemingly forged into place. From side-on, the jewel was flatter but bulged in the centre around a shadowed core that broke into prisms in the lamplight. The dark spot put Dagra in mind of the black-yolked eggs of the dusk balukha, or a blot of ink trapped within a solid glass sculpture. He was beginning to amend his assessment of the jewel’s aesthetic value.
Oriken brushed his hand over the rear of the jewel. His face scrunched in distaste. “We’ll have to give it a scrub later. Got some of her face stuck to it.”
Dagra’s stomach lurched and his knees buckled. He clutched onto the podium beside him for support.
Jalis opened her backpack and passed Oriken a blanket. She held the pack open while he wrapped the jewel and stuffed it inside. She pulled the cord tight and knotted it, fastened the pack’s straps and slung it onto her shoulder.
“That better be your bedding and not mine,” Dagra told her. As he released the podium, his glance landed on the eyeless, noseless, and now jawless head of Cunaxa. As he glared blackly at the Chiddari matron, the head shifted again.
“Sweet mother of the prophets! Don’t tell me that didn’t happen!” The head was tilted askance, like an attentive child curious to know what the commotion was about.
“You can let go of my arm now, Dag,” Jalis said.
He mumbled an apology and staggered to the wall, leaned upon the stones and vomited. When he was finished, he wiped a sleeve over his beard and turned to see Jalis and Oriken regarding him sombrely, their faces awash in the glow of the lamp.
Dagra forced a laugh. “Don’t know where that came from.” He waved away Jalis’s proffered handkerchief. “No. I’m fine, really. Just a…” He could feel the corpse staring at him, but kept his attention firmly on Jalis. “We’ve got what we came for. Let’s get out of here. No sense lingering, right?”
Jalis nodded and turned to leave, but Oriken placed a hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t we treat ourselves to a few extras on the way out?” He gestured to the gems atop the pedestals, and into the recesses where gemstones winked from the shadows. As Jalis considered his words, he pressed the point. “We should at least take the ones on these pedestals for our client, since they obviously come as a package with the jewel. Right? If she doesn’t want them…” He shrugged.
Jalis didn’t look convinced.
“Walk and talk,” Dagra said. He took the lamp from Jalis and set off down the hallway, his friends falling in behind to follow their only source of light.
“The contract mentions nothing except for the jewel itself,” Jalis said. “If we take more, our actions might be deemed sacrilegious.”
Dagra spat a curse. “This whole place is irreverent.”
Oriken scoffed. “How can it be fine to steal the greatest treasure, but wrong to take the minor ones?”
“Hey,” Jalis said, “I don’t make the rules.”
Oriken sighed.“It’s not like Dag hasn’t pocketed a stone.”
“Oh, you child!” Dagra whirled around. “Seriously? It’s a worthless bauble! A pretty pebble from a ransacked grave!”
Jalis grunted under her breath. “Is that what you think, Dag, or is it what you hope?”
“Don’t start with that again. Not now. Let’s just head home, back to wealth and a warm bath.”
“You’ll get no argument from me there,” she said. “Orik, the graves in this crypt belong to our client’s ancestors. If we disturb any of them by removing their gems – most of which seem to be comparatively worthless anyway, as Dagra says – we’ll effectively be stealing from Cela herself, regardless of our intentions, however ostensible they might be.” She eyed Oriken keenly. “Dagra found his gem in the broken rubble; he can keep it, but we leave the rest.”
“You’re the boss,” Oriken said with a sigh. “But what about the city?”
Jalis sucked air through her teeth and glared at him side-long. “We’ll talk about that after we’ve left the graveyard. We’ve wasted more than half of the day already.”
Oriken looked at her a moment but said nothing more, and the conversation lapsed into silence as they retraced their steps through the long hallway.
Dagra couldn’t have cared less about the bloodstone he’d picked up. His thoughts were on the burial jewel, set to bring them a lucrative windfall indeed. But, more-so, his thoughts were on the matron of the crypt, her eyeless gaze intent on their departure from her resting place.
Soon, the desecrated burial hole came back into view. The scuff-marks, now covered by the footprints of Dagra and his companions, led from the broken slab to the stairwell…
To distract his wandering imagination, Dagra said, “Orik’s got a point, though. It’s questionable ethics that we can desecrate a grave if it’s part of our contract, but otherwise it’s frowned upon.” He barked a terse laugh and fished around in his pocket for the bloodstone. “You know what? I don’t even want this piece of trash. Thought it might look good on the gladius, but with the coin we’ll be earning I could buy one of Khariali’s glittering teats if I fancied.”
“Better Khariali’s teats than Cherak’s stones,” Oriken quipped.
With a flick of his wrist, Dagra skimmed the bloodstone into the shadows and listened to its clatter echo down the hallway.
“Dag.” At his side, Jalis’s eyes flashed a smile. “I didn’t say the other crypts in the graveyard aren’t viable targets, just the Chiddari crypt. This whole place has already been blighted by a goddess and abandoned for centuries. A few little mortals can’t consecrate it much more than has already been done.”
Dagra returned the smile with a weak one of his own. “True. But I’m not sure I’m interested. It’s not like we brought a mule with us; anything we found, we’d have to lug across the whole of Scapa Fell and part of Caerheath. Thanks, lass, but no. I just want to get out of this damned, dead and dusty place and breathe some fresh air, blighted or otherwise.”
Oriken mumbled under his breath as he trudged along behind them, though whether in assent or disagreement, Dagra couldn’t tell and didn’t much care. He forced his thoughts to the journey home, and to spending the rest of the year in and around Alder’s Folly with no long, arduous contracts, no dark and dismal underground places, and no more corpses.
Gods, he thought. Please, no more corpses.
CHAPTER TEN
INTERLOPERS
Dagra blew into the oil lamp’s flute to extinguish the flame, then passed it to Jalis. With a sigh of relief, he stepped from the Chiddari crypt into the cheerless vista of the graveyard. The red orb of Banael was diffused behind a full cloud-cover, its underbelly dipping closer to the horizon than Dagra was comfortable with. He cast a hooded glance at the statue of Cunaxa.
Well, lady, he thought. I could say you were once quite the beauty, except I’ve just watched your jaw fall off.
Wispy rivulets of mist were trickling through the cracks in the barren soil. Tendrils of the stuff licked and caressed the mildewed bases of headstones and crawled against the crumbled pathways. Even as he watched, the mist was spreading.
“How long were we in there?” Oriken asked, his eyes in soft shadow beneath his hat as he glanced at the low sun.
“Hours,” Jalis said.
“It didn’t feel that long.”
“Maybe not for you,” Dagra said.
Oriken turned his attention to the city, puffed his cheeks and let out a low whistle. “There mu
st be a heap of treasure over there. The castle alone has to hold a fortune. We could take shelter in one of the buildings for the night. The place has been derelict for centuries; I doubt any of the owners would mind.”
“Come on, Orik,” Jalis said. “Are you a man or a magpie? Don’t forget we’ve got a long trek back to the nearest bog-rotten pocket of civilisation, plus another couple of days travel till we’re back in Alder’s Folly. I don’t fancy lugging treasure across a hundred miles and more of countryside infested with marshes and monsters and very likely more that we didn’t encounter on the way here.”
“I'm not talking about filling our pockets and packs, just a handful of keepsakes. It wouldn’t hurt.”
For a moment, Dagra found himself considering the point. He’d meant what he’d said to Jalis about not being interested in looting for second-rate gems, but as he looked towards the sprawling city it was difficult not to imagine a greater wealth than mere chunks of pretty stones. Coins likely littered the place. And jewellery with precious diamonds and sapphires, emeralds and rubies. Or weapons, like his own ancient gladius; the wide-bladed short swords were rarely forged since the end of the Great Uprising, and Lachyla would be the best place to find another.
I’d like a second gladius, he thought, but not that badly. Still as harrowing as it’s been, it wasn’t quite as bad as I imagined. Maybe tomorrow, during full daylight…
He shook his head to purge the temptation, and frowned at the gathering mist. “We should get moving before this stuff becomes a problem.”
“But, listen—”
Jalis cast Oriken a cautionary look. “I said we’d discuss it later, and we will. For now, Dagra’s right. Back to the portcullis.” Catching Oriken’s glance at the distant Litchgate that separated the graveyard from the city, she thrust a finger northwards to the heathland. “That portcullis.”
They set off down the narrow path connecting the Chiddari crypt to the central Litchway. As they walked, Oriken maintained a monologue concerning the types of treasures they might discover in the castle. He was in mid-flow when Jalis halted abruptly and raised a hand to signal for a stop.