Tanys Defiant

by Andrew Hunter

  “Are they dragons?” Tanys asked in amazement.

  “No,” Carathan replied with a smile, “they are called dinghasts. Beasts of burden among my people.”

  “And they don’t mind the cold?”

  “Their food is the fruit of the same black vine that the trolls use to make their wine,” he answered, “I trust you are familiar with its effects?”

  Tanys smiled. “Where are they taking us now?” she asked.

  “To a lost city,” he said, “a place so ancient that it exists only as a smudged name on a crumbling map belonging to an unpleasant old troll.”

  “But you think you can find it?” she asked.

  “Oh yes, I will find it.” He said.

  “What’s in this city that’s so important to you?” she asked.

  Carathan looked at her for a long moment, weighing his words before answering, “Treasure.”

  Tanys scoffed, “You don’t seem like a fortune hunter to me.”

  “It’s the kind of treasure that someone like me would be very interested in finding,” he said.

  “And what do you need me for?” she asked, raising an eyebrow curiously.

  “I needed a new bodyguard,” he explained, but his eyes told a different story in their perusal of her body.

  “When will we be there?” she asked, leaning on the railing close beside him, letting the coat fall open. The heat of her body flustered him somewhat, but he did not pull away.

  “Two days, I think.”

  “What will we do until then?” she asked innocently.

  Carathan actually blushed.

  Chapter 5

  Two days later, they stood on deck again, watching as the ice ship glided silently across the frozen surface of a river with high mountainous terrain to either side. Following the river northward, they came at last to a vast frozen sea, stretching away in all directions, flat and empty. Carathan explained that they were very close now, and they went below to make final preparations for the task ahead.

  Tanys knew what was expected of her. Donning her spider silk body suit, she strapped on the dagger belt as well as the articulated pauldron that Carathan had given her to cover her right arm. It was forged of the same flexible metal that Carathan’s men had worn and held in place with a harness of thin leather straps that wrapped around her chest. Thick, fur-trimmed boots and the white bear skin coat would protect her from the cold once they left the ship.

  She found Carathan in Misha’s room, kneeling beside her as she slept. He had still not released her from the enchanted sleep. He claimed that she still needed more rest, but Tanys suspected there was another reason he was reluctant to let the girl awaken. The sorcerer looked up, noticing Tanys watching him. He looked away, guiltily, and rose, clearing his throat. “I suppose we’d better be on our way then.”

  Strapping on his sword and donning his coat, Carathan lead Tanys down the hall and further down a short flight of stairs to a small hatchway in the side of the ship. Tanys noticed that the ship had stopped moving as the hatch swung down at his touch, forming a set of wooden steps reaching almost all the way to the icy surface of the frozen sea. Stepping out into the dim half-light of the polar noon, Tanys saw that the sea was not as flat and featureless as before.

  Dimly visible beyond the stinging mist that swirled in the frigid wind, a gleaming spire rose from the surface of the frozen sea. Impossibly, a white tower rose from the ice as though thrust up from below. Ancient, but undamaged, the tower sparkled, completely encased in ice and leaning slightly as though caught in mid fall by the freezing of the waters that drowned its base. As they walked towards it, the tower loomed larger than Tanys had initially believed it to be. She looked around, trying to catch a glimpse of other frozen monuments, but the tower alone broke the surface of the inland sea.

  “Is this it?” she shouted to be heard over the blasting winds.

  “The city lies below us,” Carathan shouted in answer, “flooded and frozen in a great cataclysm before the age of men.”

  Tanys wanted to ask more, but the winds grew fiercer as they approached the ancient tower. Searching for a while, they found an opening in the thick crust of ice that formed a shell around the tower. Squeezing through the narrow gap in the ice, they worked their way inward, at last reaching a broad corridor that ran like a spiraling ramp just within the outer wall of the tower. What little light reached through the yard-thick ice covering the oval windows revealed architecture of wondrous craftsmanship. Tanys could detect no seams in the stonework that formed the walls and vaulted ceilings. The floor seemed almost a rippling stream of stone that flowed uniformly from the corridor into the many chambers, large and small, that lay beyond ovular doorways. Everything was empty and ancient. A terrible sense of sadness filled Tanys’ heart as she followed Carathan down the shadowy corridor, drawing unconsciously nearer to him as they walked.

  “Who lived here?” she asked, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

  “An ancient race, beautiful and doomed,” Carathan answered, drawing his sword and murmuring a word of magic that caused a pale blue flame to flicker on the blade, lighting the path before them as the light of day faded with their descent beneath the surface of the ice.

  “What happened to them?”

  “Their city fell when the world was broken. Much was lost of the old world in the sunless years that followed, burned or buried forever… much of what was fair and wondrous in the world withered and scattered like ash.”

  “But here,” Tanys mused, “it was only frozen.”

  “Exactly,” Carathan replied, smiling, “it waits for us somewhere below.”

  “Below that?” Tanys asked as they halted, their descent blocked as the corridor sloped down beneath a solid layer of ice, preventing any further passage.

  Carathan only smiled again and reached into his pocket, withdrawing a small polished metal sphere the size of a walnut. He breathed on it once, whispering an enchantment, then tossed the marble onto the surface of the ice. A resonant metallic ringing sound echoed through the hall, and the metal sphere glowed red. Bright reflections shimmered on the walls as the ball sank into the melting ice. Tanys watched in amazement as the sphere sank further into the ice, melting a large water-filled passageway through it. At last the ruddy glow of the sphere disappeared beneath the dark waters, and Carathan moved again toward the watery pool.

  “Now what do we do?” Tanys asked with a touch of concern. The water still looked very cold.

  “Now we come to the interesting part,” Carathan said, “whatever happens, you must not allow anything to break my concentration or we will both die.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, somewhat alarmed.

  “It is a difficult spell, but very straightforward, just stay alert to any dangers when we’re down there. I’ll still be able to talk. I’ll just seem a little distracted because I have to concentrate on keeping the air bubble in place around us.”

  “The what?” she demanded loudly.

  Carathan responded only with an anxious smile before stepping forward, muttering another spell. As he walked down the corridor, the frigid waters that flooded it were swept back as if by a strong wind, pushed clear in a wide radius around the sorcerer’s feet. Noticing the water curve around the circumference of the unseen bubble Tanys swallowed hard and hastened to catch up with him before it poured around and refilled the hallway behind him.

  Tanys’ heart was pounding hard, and she drew close to the magician as they descended deeper into the flooded tower. The icy waters rose over their heads and closed above them, forming a shimmering globe all around. The chill of the frigid water frosted Tanys’ panicked breath in the air, but the floor was completely dry beneath her feet. She looked back and saw the last light of day dimmed to utter darkness as they rounded another spiral of the tower, leaving the ghostly blue flame of Carathan’s enchanted sword as their only source of illumination.

  As the terror of the unknown faded, Tanys looked again to Carath
an. He seemed to be studying a line of engravings in the stone walls of the corridor that at first Tanys took to be nothing more than decorative. The swirling loops and circular runes carved into the stone resembled no writing Tanys had ever seen, but Carathan was clearly reading them like a book. She finally worked up the nerve to ask him, “What does it say?”

  “Much of it doesn’t make any sense,” he replied absent-mindedly, “It is from another age… another world almost, one so different form our own that we could not hope understand it all. It would be like trying to explain the color of the sky to a worm.”

  “How are you going to find the treasure then?” she asked.

  “The tunnel goes down.” He said, ignoring her hard look.

  As they followed the downward spiraling tunnel, a growing sense of danger and unease began to prickle the hair on the back of Tanys’ neck. Twice she thought she caught a glimpse of something at the edge of the light. Perhaps it was a fish, flashing its tail as it fled from the strange intruders. The windows of the corridor looked out of the tower only into the black abyss of the sea beyond, but once she thought she saw something pale and frighteningly large pass by outside. She wanted to ask Carathan to move the air bubble toward the window so she could look out, but, whether it was from fear of breaking his concentration or fear of something else, she held her tongue.

  She steadied her nerves by forcing herself to become more alert and aware of her surroundings, noticing for the first time the change in the architecture of the tower. Though it had been some time since they had passed any doorways leading toward the core of the tower, she was certain that the spiral was widening in circumference. “Carathan,” she whispered, “the tower is getting larger the further down we go.”

  The sorcerer met her gaze, nodding his agreement, and Tanys noticed beads of sweat forming on his brow. The strain of holding the crushing weight of the icy waters at bay was beginning to show in his face. Nevertheless, they pressed on, and, as they rounded the curve of the spiral, the inside wall of the corridor opened up into a great pillared terrace overlooking a black void of empty water that filled the center of the tower.

  Tanys hesitated, not wishing to draw any nearer that vast emptiness, but Carathan continued, and she was forced to follow. He paused at last before a large windowless panel of the outer wall. The stone of the wall had been marred as though by many iron chisels, though the sweeping rakes of parallel gouges gave the impression that enormous claws had defaced the stone. Someone had obliterated whatever writings had once graced the wall and hewn new and crudely shaped runes into the ragged surface that remained.

  Carathan studied the rough runes for a long while, and Tanys’ unease continued to grow. Behind them, the abyss loomed, filled with unseen terrors that thronged and moved just beyond the edge of the light. She urged him to keep moving, but he seemed lost in his translation of the stone.

  “Amazing,” he said at last, “they found a way to survive.”

  “What?” Tanys asked, her voice trembling a little, “You mean the people that built this place? Where did they go?”

  “Nowhere,” he said softly, a touch of fear in his eyes as he turned to face the shadow of the tower core, “they are still here.”

  Something lunged forward out of the darkness with blinding speed. Long and snakelike, ghostly white, scaled and finned, with large luminous eyes, it burst into the air bubble, showering them with droplets of icy water as its jaws, brimming with needle-like teeth, closed around the blade of Carathan’s sword, ripping it free of his grasp. Tanys leapt forward to protect the magician, but the serpent’s body coiled and whipped as it slapped hard against the floor. The thick yellow-scaled tail smashed into her, hurling her back against the rough-hewn wall. The heavy fur of her coat protected her from serious injury, and she regained her feet in time to see the beast knock Carathan to the floor as it dove back into the onrushing waters of the collapsing bubble. The light was gone, and the black waters poured in, filling her boots and threatening to sweep her feet from beneath her. The cold water was like a thousand needles stabbing into the muscles of her calves, and Carathan screamed, almost fully immersed in it before he could regain control of the spell and drive back the water with the bubble of enchanted air.

  Tanys knelt beside him, taking him in her arms as he convulsed violently from the cold. Spells hissed through chattering teeth drove the last of the ice water from their clothes, but Carathan still felt as cold as death in her embrace. She pulled him tightly to herself, warming his body with her hands and his face with desperate kisses. She forced the memory of the monstrous serpent from her thoughts, thinking only of the man she now depended upon to deliver her from this nightmare of cold and darkness. At last the warmth returned to his lips, and he whispered his gratitude into a passionate kiss.

  “Was that one of them?” she asked finally as they knelt together in the absolute darkness of the sunken tower.

  “It may have been,” he answered with a great weariness in his voice, “They knew their city was doomed, and they knew the sea below would rise to claim them, so they gave themselves over to it. They were sorcerers who had once wielded the very fires of creation, and though they lost much of their power when the fabric of the world was rent apart… they could still survive by becoming something else.

  “The serpents of the nether sea were gathered here in this place, and, one by one, the greatest of the ancient magi cast themselves into the waiting jaws of these mindless beasts. Though their own bodies were devoured, their spirits came to possess the bodies of their devourers. In this manner they cheated the watery doom of their city and lived on, haunting the drowned city whose streets they once walked in the light of day.”

  “Can they be reasoned with?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered, “my heart tells me they cannot. They have writhed and hunted in the sightless depths for longer than men have ruled beneath the sun. The world they knew before might be no more than a myth to them now.”

  “What is it you came here to find,” she asked.

  “The very fires of creation they forgot how to use.”

  “Where do we find that?”

  “At the bottom,” he answered.

  Though Tanys offered one of her blades to Carathan to enchant with the light-giving blue flame, he insisted that the light would only attract more attention. Against her protests, he brought them to the very edge of the unseen precipice overlooking the void of the tower core. Tanys’ heart hammered with fear, but he insisted there was no other way to reach the bottom without revealing their presence further to the serpents in the dark. Swinging her legs over the side, she clutched his hand tightly. They would have to go at the same time. Carathan whispered another spell, and the two pushed off from the relative safety of the spiraling ramp, plunging into the blackness of the unknown depths.

  The sensation of falling was stomach churning, a weightless, sightless tumble into nothingness. They fell for what seemed an eternity, the only sound their rasping breath and the sibilant rippling of water past the walls of the bubble. Tanys wanted to scream, feeling that at any moment her sanity might fail, and she would be lost forever in this cold lightless hell. She pulled herself close to Carathan burying her face in his chest, and he held her tightly as they tumbled through the abyss.

  Gradually, she became aware of a glow so dim at first that she thought it only a trick of her light-starved eyes. Then, daring to look, she perceived a cold, distant radiance far below, growing ever stronger as they fell towards it. Presently, she could make out the floor of a vast chamber rising up to meet them, and she realized that their fall was not a plummeting freefall as she had first imagined, but a slow, controlled descent. The light seemed to emanate from a single point, atop a stone pedestal in the center of the chamber’s floor, a shimmering flame that seemed more warm and golden in color the closer they sank toward it.

  They came to rest on their feet twenty yards from the source of the golden glow. The floor glittered beneath th
eir feet, a kingdom’s fortune in gemstones, faceted and tiled into a mosaic of swirling rainbow patterns. Carathan paid them no heed, his eyes set only on the burning golden flame before them. Tanys drew her blades and followed closely at his side, ready for anything.

  Carathan held his breath as he closed the final steps to the burning flame. Tanys could not look directly at it, so bright the glow at this distance, but the sorcerer stared, unflinching, into its heart. He reached out his hand then and took the flame, somehow unburned by it, and drew it to his breast with a look of transcendent bliss on his face. In his hand, it seemed no more than a small glimmering jewel, no larger than an acorn, but the golden light still surrounded them. Carathan raised it then above his head, laughing in triumph, and the glow of the golden flame flared bright, illuminating the far walls and vaulted ceiling of the colossal chamber. It illuminated as well the hundreds of pale, coiling serpents that hung suspended in the waters all around, watching them with hungry eyes and gaping tooth-rimmed maws.

  Tanys’ blood ran cold at the sight, and her fingers tightened on the grips of her daggers. Carathan’s laughter failed, and the smile drained from his face as they looked at one another in alarm. Without a word, Carathan caught Tanys up in his arms and kicked hard off the floor with a spell that sent them both soaring upward in a seething column of bubbles. The serpents roiled and thrashed, caught off guard by the speed of their prey’s ascent. A cold membranous tail brushed across Tanys’ face as they burst through the wall of waiting monsters, but the ancient serpents’ teeth found no purchase as they snapped at the escaping mortals.

  Somehow Carathan found the opening to the corridor leading to the surface, and their ascent became a foot race up the spiraling ramp with the pallid serpents crowding tightly in the trailing shadows of the hallway, thrashing and tearing at one another in their eagerness for the taste of warm flesh. Tanys cast off her heavy coat and urged the sorcerer to greater haste in their desperate race for the safety of the surface world.