The Longsword Chronicles: Book 01 - King of Ashes

by GJ Kelly

  "From the west. I'm sure. I'm fifty years a miner."

  "Where in the west?"

  "The rip itself, or very near its edge I should say. Maybe five mile, maybe ten, difficult to tell with the winds."

  "Then after we've slept, we'll follow the rip to the source of the sounds."

  "Can't Serre."

  "Why not?"

  "Buttress and rockfall, maybe five 'undred o' my paces that way. No chance digging through, no way o' climbing over."

  "In truth?"

  "In truth. When I were your age, I were of a mind to walk the rip, see if I could find oresign exposed by nature."

  Gawain sighed, and sank to the ground. "We have to discover the source of those sounds. It may be that the Ramoths have somehow bridged the chasm. It may be the route through the Teeth to Morloch himself."

  "Then, Serre, rest well. For when we've slept, we've to retrace our steps back to that first rest chamber, and take that tunnel as was worked by 'umans after all."

  Gawain groaned, disgusted. "I though you said it petered out after ten miles?"

  "So it does." Martan grunted, settling down and unpacking his blankets. "But there's other shafts lead off it, and more from them that leads to the rip. The route we took was the quickest to get here, from where we started."

  Gawain spread his blankets, and took the remains of his first cake of frak from his pack. There was perhaps an eighth of it left. They must have been weeks in the tunnels already.

  "Sorry yer disappointed, Serre." Martan said sincerely, "But as I said, this is the Teeth. 'Ard rock, and pain."

  "Aye." Gawain sighed, settling down on his blankets, his back protesting. "Hard rock, and pain."

  oOo

  21. The Nest

  Were it not for Gawain's stone heart and the constant reminder of Raheen strapped across his shoulder, he could very easily have given up, and returned to Threlland, and the slaying of Ramoth emissaries.

  But hard rock and pain were not the sole prerogatives of the Teeth. Hard rock and pain resided in Gawain's chest, and they fortified him as he and the old miner retraced their route back to the chamber where they'd first rested so long ago. After sleep, they set off down the 'fresh worked' tunnel, and again the world was reduced to the claustrophobic confines illuminated by their glowstone lamps.

  Martan protested not once, and Gawain's respect for dwarves knew no bounds. He could not imagine a lifetime spent thus, let alone with the added agonies of hammering passages through this unrelenting stone and finding no reward for the effort. On the contrary, Martan seemed positively to thrive and revel in the confined spaces and the damp atmosphere.

  From time to time, the old dwarf would pause, and let out a little chuckle, and shake his head. When prompted, he would tell an amusing tale about this miner or that, and what had happened while cutting this particular section or that tunnel yonder. It kept their spirits up, and bound them closer together.

  Gawain was, he knew, completely lost. Should anything befall his companion, then death by starvation awaited the young man. He'd never find his way out again, not in a lifetime of trying. No wonder Martan had politely declined the notion of assisting Allazar in drawing a map, and Gawain felt slightly foolish on recalling the suggestion.

  During one of their rest periods in a small chamber, Gawain had remarked how sprightly and sure-footed Martan was, for all his years. He couldn't believe the old man had been denied the mines in Threlland through age. This drew an astonished look from the elderly miner.

  "When the time comes you can't cut ten times yer length in a day, what good are you to anyone?"

  Gawain shook his head sadly, and with awe. He doubted he himself could cut half his own length in a day, in this unyielding rock. Threlland hills were softer, Martan had explained gently, hoping that Gawain wouldn't feel too dreadfully inadequate that humans were so inept underground.

  Gawain had long given up attempting to measure time, and instead measured their progress by rest-chambers and the rate at which his frak was diminishing. Martan had said not to worry, he would tell Gawain when it was time to return to Threlland, if they found no sign of the Ramoths.

  But they did. Tooling sounds began to echo faintly, and then they grew louder. Still the tunnels were dwarfcut, but here and there, in the rest-chambers, they found an increasing number of signs that humans had attempted to heighten the walls for easier access. The tooling sounds grew louder still, and Martan grew nervous, closing the shutter on his glowstone lamp so that barely a glimmer lit the way ahead. Gawain shut his down completely, following Martan by sound alone until his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  Finally, though, the high-pitched ringing echoes of iron striking rock become muffled by an undercurrent of sound, like a low-pitched moaning. Mingled with that were alarming gusts of air that seemed to blow from nowhere, and occasional crackling sounds which neither of them could identify.

  Then Martan stopped dead in his tracks, and shut down his lamp completely. The action was so completely unexpected that Gawain's hand instinctively reached for the hilt of his longsword over his right shoulder, but even though this stretch of tunnel had been heightened, it would have been impossible to draw the blade in such close confines.

  Martan stood rooted to the spot, and then Gawain understood. Even with the lamps shut down, he began to make out Martan's silhouette in front of him. There was light, ahead of them, and a strong breeze suggesting a vast open space beyond...

  The old miner eased himself against the wall, and Gawain took the hint, though with the sounds echoing down the tunnel from all directions, they could have spoken without fear of detection, or so it seemed to Gawain at least.

  He moved cautiously forward, the darkened lamp in his left hand and his knife in his right. The breeze grew stronger, the light seemed brighter as they approached the opening, but Gawain thought it must just be his eyes adjusting to the faint glow from without. Finally, the tunnel opened out onto a familiar ledge, and the sounds that had echoed down the tunnel grew louder and more distinct.

  The low-pitched moaning seemed to be resolving into a repetitive chant, and as Gawain stepped onto the ledge and scanned the immediate area, he recognised a single word, split into two syllables, repeated over and over again. Ra-Moth. Ra-Moth...

  Gawain gasped as he turned his eyes to towards the sound. Perhaps five hundred paces to his left, lights, moving, from the edge of the rip, and beyond, barely visible on the far side of the mighty chasm, tiny pinpricks of light, moving. Moving, to the edge of the rip, and down into its depths.

  "Poke me in the eye and say I'm dreaming." a familiar voice whispered from behind Gawain's left shoulder. "Look what the mad bastards are doing!"

  Martan's eyes were clearly better than Gawain's in such poor light, but a shudder ran the length of the young man's spine nevertheless. He eased forward, and since Martan didn't object, he was confident that they were invisible in the darkness as far as the Ramoths were concerned, them so far away and them bathed in light as they were.

  The ledge here was narrower than the site of Gawain's first encounter with the rip in the earth, and he lowered himself to the ground, his head over the edge, gazing in awe and horror. Martan gasped too, and held his breath.

  The procession of moving lights on the far side moved slowly but surely to the chasm's edge, spaced at intervals of perhaps thirty paces. Each light moved slowly to precipice, and then began to descend...rough-hewn steps had been cut into the sheer wall of the precipice, and it was these the lights were following. Down, and down, to the blackness so far below that the tiny pinpricks of light faded and were invisible before the floor of the rip had been reached.

  And on Gawain and Martan's side, the lights emerged from the inky blackness, moving upward, slowly and deliberately.

  The tooling sounds they'd heard were coming from the chasm walls. On both sides of great divide, lights were fixed at intervals, and workers were hammering new steps out of the rock face, a second stairway to the pi
t.

  "Madness." Martan gasped, as one of the tiny lights dropped suddenly, and rapidly, and disappeared.

  "Morloch madness." Gawain agreed, watching as another tiny light plummeted to destruction far below.

  "Something's happening," Martan hissed, "They've stopped!"

  They had, at least on the ledges either side of the rip. The lights on the downward wall, on the far side of the chasm, continued on, but the lights on the upward side came to an abrupt halt. There was a sudden crackling discharge, and a massive shaft of black aquamire light blasted across the chasm, and was gone. Immediately, the procession of lights resumed.

  While they watched, Gawain counted. Perhaps one in five of the lights that went down the far side of the chasm emerged on this side. Not once, when the lights plummeted to destruction, did he nor Martan hear a scream.

  "Do you know," Martan whispered, his voice tremulous, "how long it must have taken to carve those steps? How many lives? How many lives?"

  Gawain shook his head, stunned. The sheer scale of the effort, the sheer waste of life, for what? So that shaven-headed vacuous idiots could babble about an ancient god to uncaring traders at markets across the southlands? Madness.

  "That is where I must go." Gawain said, nodding towards the few survivors that carried their tiny lamps into a well-lit cavern. "You do not have to come."

  "Yes I do, if you're to find yer way out again."

  "I can come back to you."

  "You'd be lost in the blink of an eye, Serre, and well you know it. I've come this far, and not yet bloodied a nose. I'll not hug me knees in the dark while you get yerself gloriously killed by that lot."

  Gawain smiled. "Very well. But stay behind me, Martan, for your own sake."

  "I'll try."

  Gawain stood back from the edge, sheathed his knife, stowed the lamp in his pack, and drew his short sword. When he glanced at the old miner, he saw a glimpse of the dwarven youth who'd first ventured across the farak gorin so many years ago. Martan stood proud, a rockhammer in each powerful hand, and a sparkle in his eyes that spoke volumes from beneath bushy gray eyebrows.

  Gawain moved off, silently, Martan several paces behind him. The chanting grew louder as they approached the cavern, and just beyond the pool of light spilling from it, Gawain paused. A bell sounded, far off, and he froze, noticing that one of the shaven-headed lamp-carriers approaching from the edge of the precipice stepped quickly to one side. After a few moments, a crackling blast of aquamire light blasted from the cavern, and shot across the rip to the far side, and was gone in the blink of an eye. The lamp-carrying Ramoth continued, and as it drew near, Gawain could see it was a woman. In one hand she held a small glowstone lamp, perhaps a quarter of the size of Gawain's and Martan's, and in the other, she held a small black phial. Her eyes, as she passed within ten paces, were empty, vacuous, completely unaware.

  "What is that stuff she had?" Martan whispered.

  "Aquamire, from its appearance."

  "What's aquamire?"

  "Whitebeard evil. Poison. Power. Whitebeard evil."

  "Ah. That's cleared that up for me then." Martan muttered.

  "Hurry, we must follow."

  Gawain strode forward, before another tiny light could emerge from the edge of the chasm. The chamber was lit by glowstone lamps hanging from sconces in the smooth stone walls. It ran dead straight, far off into the distance, and if Martan's assertions about direction were correct, it ran due south.

  Tiny alcoves had been cut into the sides of the walls at intervals, and Gawain had no idea what purpose they served. Up ahead, the bald Ramoth woman strode onward, completely unaware that she was being followed. Beyond her, Gawain could not see. But the incessant chanting grew louder with every pace, and the distant light at the end of the tunnel seemed to be growing brighter too.

  "Serre!” Martan whispered urgently, and Gawain glanced behind him. Entering the far end of the tunnel, now some sixty paces behind them, another shavehead Ramoth.

  "No matter. They seem unaware of us. Keep going."

  Twenty more paces and Gawain discovered what the carved alcoves were intended for. A bell sounded, low and booming...up ahead, the Ramoth woman side-stepped into an alcove, and Gawain had the briefest glimpse of something large and round and dark in the far distance, before a powerful hand grasped his cloak and dragged him back into an alcove. Moments later, the sizzling blast of aquamire light ripped through the tunnel...and was gone, leaving both Gawain and Martan feeling slightly singed and curiously dazzled.

  "Not a nice place, this nest o' yours, if you'll pardon me saying so."

  "No. Not a nice place at all. Come, friend Martan, I believe our quest is almost at an end."

  They hurried down the tunnel, almost catching up with the Ramoth woman, and over her shoulder Gawain saw the great black circle again, and shuddered.

  The tunnel emerged into a vast cavern, and they hurriedly sidestepped along the smooth walls away from the tunnel's mouth. Before them, a considerable distance away, a group of robed Ramoths, perhaps fifty of them, sat on the glazed rock floor, chanting the name of their obscene god over and over again. "Ra-Moth" echoed around the cavern's walls, which were studded with glowstones and sconces. On a raised stone platform at the far end of the cavern stood a massive black eye, and beyond it, another tunnel, shorter, at the end of which daylight shone weakly.

  "Oh by my teeth! What're they doing?" Martan hissed.

  The line of Ramoth lamp-bearers walked around the group chanting on the floor, mounted the great stone platform, and up a short flight of wooded stairs. At the top, they uncorked their phials, and poured the treacly liquid into an opening at the top of the great eye. Then they descended the stairs, and still carrying their tiny lamps, walked into the tunnel, and carried on, towards the outworld.

  "I do not know." Gawain muttered, sheathing his short sword, and drawing his longsword. But that must stop, whatever it is."

  Again, a bell sounded, and again, from the great black lens at the far end of the cavern, a mighty blast of black aquamire light crackled and lanced down the tunnel behind them. This time it did not simply disappear, but diminished to a steady pulsing stream. A black shimmering shape began to form in the air before the chanting Ramoths, whose worship grew frenetic and high-pitched.

  "Morloch comes?” Martan gasped.

  "No, I don't think so."

  The shape crystallised into a dreadful figure, robed and almost human, but fully twenty feet tall, hovering in mid air above the worshippers. It was slender, but the massive bulbous head was grotesque, a snake's head, with two aquamire black eyes.

  "Ra-Moth!" the chanters screamed, in a frenzy.

  "You have been chosen." the creature announced, its voice familiar to Gawain, and from the puzzled expression on Martan's face, to him too. "And you have been chosen."

  Two of the Ramoths stood, delirious with joy.

  "Take up the amulets before you."

  Gawain watched as the two shaveheaded Ramoths, one man and one woman, rushed forward to the great black lens, and picked up the familiar eye-amulets of Ramoth Emissaries.

  "Wear them always. Do my bidding. Spread my word. Make way for my coming. Go."

  The two Ramoths, thus newly-appointed emissaries, each hung the eye-amulets around their necks, bowed low, and hurried to the tunnel leading out from the Teeth.

  "Pray. Make way. Soon you too will be chosen." Ramoth said, and the shimmering image faded, and was gone, and the black pulsing light too disappeared.

  "You'll pardon me for saying so, Serre, but that voice sounded something familiar."

  "Aye. Morloch."

  "Aye. Odd, that. And the man, the one who was chosen?"

  "Aye?"

  "Recognised 'im, too. A Jurian, son of an iron-monger my brother trades with."

  Gawain studied the cavern, and was making up his mind to rush forward, to destroy the black lens, when another familiar figure emerged from the tunnel to their left. A black rider, his mask g
rotesque, and turning slowly in Gawain's direction.

  Gawain raised his longsword, bracing to strike as the hideous painted eyes turned his way, when there was a sudden blur of movement from behind him.

  Martan shot forward, rockhammers crashing into the creature's head. The force of the hammer-blows ripped the mask clean off, exposing the hideous visage beneath. The head was human in shape, but nothing else. Hairless, colourless, save for the pulsing black veins that throbbed with aquamire, and the glistening black eyes that sparkled lifelessly. The creature was every inch as tall as Gawain, and stood gazing down at Martan, frozen with horror. Then the dwarf smashed his hammer into the thing's face, square between the awful eyes.

  It blinked, and its hand reached down, fingers spread, to clutch Martan's tunic. Gawain swung his blade, and cleaved the vile head from its armoured shoulders.

  Instantly, the deafening death-screech rent the air, and the jet-black death-blast shot upward to the cavern roof. Pieces of rock fell, hitting the ground just as the empty armour shell toppled backwards.

  Martan leapt aside, and collided with a Ramoth lamp-bearer as he emerged from the tunnel, then he turned to cast a worried look at Gawain.

  "Two more o' them things a-coming!"

  But a more serious problem was approaching. The chanting followers were on their feet, and advancing towards them both. These were not vacuous slaves, yet. These were followers who had made way, and were emissary-candidates. Gawain and Martan had invaded their most sacred temple, committed unspeakable sacrilege. Martan followed Gawain's gaze.

  "Ah, Dwarfspit!" he cried, and then rushed into the advancing throng, hammers flailing.

  Gawain strode to the tunnel entrance and shot a quick glance at the advancing black riders. For a split second he considered his arrows, but it was too late. The first of the maddened Ramoths was already charging down on him, and he turned and cut the man down, and then another. Soon the melee was furious, and desperate. Gawain was forced to back away, and something slammed into his back. He glanced over his shoulder, and saw one of the black riders re-cocking its crossbow...