The tyranny of ghosts tlod-3

by Don Bassingthwaite

  “A good guess,” said Munta, “and that’s what outsiders were intended to assume. But the defense against Cyre was a ruse. The plans were for attack.” He put his finger back on Skullreave and moved it again, this time northwest around the end of the Seawall Mountains-and into Breland.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  13 Vult

  The stone arch that had once been the gate of Suud Anshaar still stood, even though large sections of the wall to either side of it had collapsed into a heap of rubble. “Daashor work,” said Tenquis.

  Ekhaas stepped up to the arch-somehow it felt more proper to enter this ancient site through the gate than through one of the gaps in the wall-and inspected what lay beyond. Anything made of wood had decayed long ago in the pervasive damp of the Khraal. Structures that had depended on wooden supports had fallen. What remained standing was a testament to the skill of Dhakaani craftsmen, masons, and, yes, daashor. Pillars and walls, flying buttresses and broken towers, vaults and more arches. More of Suud Anshaar lay sprawled across the ground than rose above it, but what did rise moved her. This had been a mighty fortress of Dhakaan. She could almost picture it in its glory The wail that rose above the ruins ended her reverie. The sound had been unnerving before. Up close it made her skin crawl and her ears go flat. None of them had put away their weapons. They brought them up as one and turned to put their backs together, each of them staring out into the gathering dusk. Ekhaas peered again through the arch, searching for any sign of movement beyond.

  There was nothing. The wail could have condensed like rain out of the heavy air itself.

  Marrow’s fur had risen in thick tufts along her spine. She swung her head back and forth, snuffling at the air, then gave a strange whine. “She doesn’t smell anything,” Chetiin translated.

  Ekhaas thought of the legends of Tasaam Draet. “If the wail is the ghosts of Draet’s victims, there’s probably nothing to smell.”

  “No,” Chetiin said with a frown. “She doesn’t smell anything. There’s nothing alive here. Nothing.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Tenquis, but Ekhaas could tell he didn’t believe his own words. The evidence was in front of them-rocks and rubble bare of even the hardiest grass.

  The stories said the Dhakaani travelers who had first discovered Suud Anshaar’s fate had found the fortress utterly empty of life. Her hand tightened on the hilt of her sword.

  “Where do we start?” asked Geth. “Do you think there are lower levels? The fragments of the shield could have been stored in a vault.”

  “Remember what the Stela of Rewards said,” Ekhaas reminded him. “Tasaam Draet was ‘given the care of the symbols of muut forfeited by those lords whose treachery he has ended’ as if that was some kind of reward. Legends also depict Draet as arrogant in his power. Someone like that would want to show off his reward. I think the fragments of the shield would have been displayed somewhere public.”

  She looked at the ruins again and pointed to a distant shell of nearly intact walls and soaring arches that lay among them like an egg in a cradle. “Dhakaani builders usually put throne rooms at the heart of a palace. The seat of a great lord would be in a similar hall. That’s the place to start.”

  “That sounds good,” said Geth. He stepped into the mouth of the gate.

  “What? Wait!” said Tooth. The bugbear had been quieter than Chetiin, but his eyes went wide with fear. “We’re going in tonight? Shouldn’t we wait until the sun rises?”

  “The moons give enough light. Do you want to sleep here?” Geth asked.

  Tooth’s big ears twitched down a bit. “You can stay outside the gates, Tooth,” Ekhaas told him. “You don’t have to come in. That was our agreement.”

  Somewhere in the distance, the shriek of a varag rose over the jungle. Tooth’s ears sagged a little more.

  “Maabet” he cursed-and lifted his grinders. “Fight a wolf, fight the pack. I’m coming.”

  The way through the ruins was slow. Suud Anshaar hadn’t just been a single fortress-it had been a complex and a large one at that. The rubble of buildings blocked their way, forcing them over or around heaps of stones that sometimes seemed dangerously unstable. Chetiin moved with ease, but the rest of them had to pick their way. The lack of plant life was something of a blessing, if an unnerving one. The shadows cast by the ruins in the moonlight were deceptive and their sightlines already uncomfortably short. Ekhaas was glad she didn’t have to worry about pushing through trees and bushes as well. She still found herself peering into every corner and behind every crumbling column, waiting for the attack she knew in her gut was coming.

  Maybe that was why she was the first to see the skeleton.

  She spotted it almost out of the corner of her eye, a silhouette framed within a stone window against the night sky. Visions of the undead, of dry bones to accompany bodiless, howling ghosts burst over her. She grabbed Geth and pointed-silently. The thing hadn’t moved. Maybe it hadn’t seen them.

  Ekhaas felt Geth stiffen under her hand, then he hissed to get the attention of the others. Tenquis almost jumped. Tooth and Marrow both froze motionless like the hunters they were. Chetiin, however, glanced once at the skeleton, then burst into motion. Like an independent shadow, he darted across the ground, paused beneath the wall in which the window frame was set, then swarmed up the stones and through the frame. Ekhaas saw the brief glint of moonlight on steel-then Chetiin paused, as still as the skeleton. After a moment, he lowered his knife, reached out, and touched the skeleton.

  It still didn’t move. Balanced on the window frame, the goblin turned and gestured for them all to join him.

  “What is this?” Geth growled, but he followed as Ekhaas moved out under the window. Up above, Chetiin was examining the skeleton closely. Keeping one leg on the windowsill, he stretched the other across and rested it on the skeleton’s bony hip, then reached up and heaved at the thing’s skull.

  It came off in his hands with an audible crack. The shock must have broken whatever balance kept the rest of the skeleton together, because it crumbled suddenly. Chetiin hopped back to the windowsill as the bones clattered down behind the wall like a small avalanche. Ekhaas’s ears flicked.

  “That sounded heavy for bones,” she said.

  “It did,” Geth agreed.

  “They’re not bones,” Chetiin called softly from above. “Geth, catch this. Be careful.” He held out the skull with both hands. Geth caught it with a grunt. Ekhaas heard it scrape against the metal of his gauntlet and stepped up for a closer look as Geth held it into a shaft of moonlight.

  It wasn’t bone at all, but dark, slightly glittering stone. And yet it was a perfect, if weathered, copy of a hobgoblin skull. The finer details had been erased by time and exposure, but all of the ridges, all of the crevices that Ekhaas would have expected to find in a real skull were there. Even the jaw was properly jointed, though it broke away as Geth attempted to move it. He cursed like a child caught damaging something precious, but Ekhaas took it from him and inspected the interior surface. More protected from the weather, it retained every line and pockmark.

  Tenquis stared over her shoulder. “If that’s daashor work, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Dhakaani sculpture was never this realistic,” said Ekhaas.

  “I don’t think it was a sculpture,” Chetiin said as he came spidering down the wall. “There were stone ligaments holding it together. I think it was a real skeleton that had been changed to stone.”

  “Khaavolaar,” breathed Ekhaas.

  “Could it have been done by a medusa?” asked Tooth. “Or a basilisk? No hunter has ever seen one in these parts, but this is old.”

  “Medusas and basilisks change living flesh to stone,” Tenquis said. “Their victims look like statues. I’ve seen them. Magic might change a skeleton to stone.” He looked back up to the window. “But why pose one like that?”

  A yip from Marrow brought them around. The worg crouched beside another collapsed wall, pawing at some
thing. Geth handed the skull to Ekhaas and went over. He bent down and brushed away dry dirt, then shifted a rock. His teeth flashed as he bared them. “There’s another one here. Crushed. I think the wall fell on it.” He picked something out of the ground and held it up. It was a battered and corroded metal greave. “This one was wearing armor.”

  Tenquis examined it. “Dhakaani design,” he said.

  Ekhaas shivered and set skull and jaw down on the ground. A frightening suspicion was growing in her. “Stay close, but look around,” she said. “See if you can see any more.”

  Geth looked up at her. “You think these were the people of Suud Anshaar? But the stories don’t mention this.”

  “I’m starting to understand that sometimes the stories aren’t completely right.”

  They found four more skeletons nearby, some more weathered than others, most preserved only by some coincidence of shelter. Two stood in a hidden niche, entwined in an eternal embrace, yet also curiously apart. Tenquis slid a hand among the frozen bones. “If they were posed like this,” he said, “why aren’t the two skeletons actually touching each other?”

  “I’m not sure they were skeletons when they died,” said Ekhaas. She held her arm in a position similar to that of one skeleton, then took Tenquis’s arm and pressed it to hers, matching the other skeleton. “Imagine the gap between our bones,” she said, her mouth dry, “separated by the thickness of flesh.”

  Tenquis jerked away from her. “Something turned their bones to stone?”

  Geth considered the skeletons, his face grim. “It happened fast, then. I don’t think they had any warning.”

  “Maybe they didn’t,” said Chetiin. The old goblin stood in a ruined doorway. “But you need to see this.”

  Beyond the doorway, two sturdy walls preserved a section of corridor no more than ten paces long, both ends open. Two stone skeletons stood in the corridor. Unlike the other skeletons they’d seen, these were posed in attitudes of panic. One was precariously balanced in a sprinting position-fleeing from something, Ekhaas guessed. The other was on its back on the floor, twisted around, and staring back with empty eye sockets. The person it had been must have fallen and looked around to see his-or her-doom bearing down.

  The skeletons were different in two other significant ways from the others they’d found. They were clad in the ragged remains of clothing-and they were human.

  “You said the last time someone came looking for Suud Anshaar was about thirty years ago?” Ekhaas asked Tooth. The hunter nodded, his eyes fixed on the black and glittering skeletons.

  “Those are Cyran clothes,” said Chetiin. “I think we’ve found the last people who came here.” He walked up to the skeletons, paused a short distance away, and pointed at a faint dark stain on the floor around them. “That’s what’s left when flesh rots and liquefies.”

  “Do you think-” Ekhaas hesitated, words catching in her mouth before she forced them out. “Do you think whatever did this killed them? Or did they-?”

  The words caught again, but this time Chetiin anticipated the question. “If I had to guess,” he said, “I think they might still have been alive after it happened.”

  Ekhaas’s stomach rose. She had to clench her teeth and fight it down. Tenquis shuddered and closed his golden eyes. Even Geth and Tooth looked a little bit green. Marrow whined and curled her tail low. Chetiin turned away from the skeletons — just as the wail broke over the ruins for a third time. Once again it was strangely sourceless, but in Ekhaas’s imagination it seemed closer than before.

  “Tiger’s blood,” murmured Geth. “Whatever that is, I don’t think it’s a ghost.”

  Tooth’s broad face had gone from green to pale. “It can’t be the same thing that killed Suud Anshaar, can it? Why wouldn’t your stories mention something like this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the empire suppressed what really happened before the story could circulate,” Ekhaas said.

  “I would,” said Chetiin. He’d drawn both of his daggers, the one from his left arm sheath with the nasty curved blade and the one from his right arm sheath with the blue-black crystal that winked like an eye from its ugly straight blade. He looked at Ekhaas and Geth. “What do we do?”

  Ekhaas exchanged a sharp glance with the shifter. His jaw tightened and he nodded. Ekhaas put her ears back. “We go on,” she said. “We keep looking for the shield fragments. We watch, and if whatever is making that noise shows itself, we try our best to kill it.”

  “If it can be killed!” said Tooth. There was an edge of madness to his voice. “What if it can’t? How-”

  Tenquis reached out and slapped him hard. “We’ll fight it,” he said harshly, “when we fight it.”

  Tooth stared at him. Tenquis slid his wand into a pocket and calmly readied his crossbow. “You’re harder than you look,” said Tooth.

  “I’m a tiefling,” said Tenquis, “and I want my revenge on Tariic. I’m as hard as I need to be.” He looked to Ekhaas. “How do we get to that hall?”

  “This way, I think,” she said. She led the way out of the other door in the ruined corridor, trying hard not to look at the remains of the last expedition to come this way.

  Since she had become aware of them, Ekhaas spotted more of the skeletons as she climbed through the ruins. A few were whole or almost whole, blending into the shadows. Some were just weathered heaps of bones, collapsed over time just like the fortress. Others were no more than broken bits of glittering black stone tumbled among fallen rock. Not all were hobgoblin. Ekhaas recognized goblins and bugbears, a pair of dogs, varags-how many of them had wandered onto the Wailing Hill before they learned their lesson? — even the fragile skeletons of birds, hollow bones broken as if they’d fallen out of the sky.

  If not even birds on the wing could escape the curse of Suud Anshaar, did they really have a chance?

  No, she reminded herself, they weren’t dumb animals, and they wouldn’t be taken by surprise. Whatever waited in the ruins, they’d fought and survived worse. They would find the shield fragments. They would escape the fortress. The fragments of the shattered shield would provide the key to destroying the Rod of Kings.

  Because if they didn’t, this journey would have been for nothing.

  She started to sing. Quietly, just loud enough that the others could hear her, and not a magical song, but a Dhakaani battle hymn invoking the strength of muut in combat and the glory of atcha in victory. It was an old song, as old as the long and wondrous middle years of Dhakaan, when the emperor’s power spanned a continent. The same song might have echoed in Suud Anshaar. Tasaam Draet might have listened to and been inspired by it.

  She felt some of her fear slip away. The others stood straighter and scanned the shadows with eyes that were brighter and more alert. They moved with greater confidence. Even Marrow seemed to beat her tail in time to the song. And when the wail inevitably came again, Ekhaas raised her voice just a little to challenge its power. For a moment, the wail seemed a little less terrifying-even if it did seem to have taken on a more directional quality.

  Chetiin pointed across the ruins. “Somewhere over there.”

  “I think I felt it through the ground,” said Tenquis.

  Ekhaas let the song die away, the better to hear any movement among the stones. Geth’s hand had stolen up to touch his collar of black stones. Faint wisps of vapor escaped between his fingers into the warm night air; he’d said in the past that the collar turned cold to warn of unnatural creatures.

  “Geth?” she asked softly.

  “Keep moving,” he said.

  They moved. The deeper they penetrated into the remains of the fortress, the better preserved the structure seemed to be. Walls, doorways, and pillars remained in place-with the result that their line of sight to the area around them was constantly changing and being cut off. Worse, the surviving corridors were often half-filled with debris. There was no running here. Moving too quickly sent loose stones sliding and might plunge a foot into a crevice. Marrow
had real difficulty scrambling up and down the slopes. Heading around one steep heap, Tooth had to catch and brace her with his shoulder. The worg snapped and growled at him. Ekhaas couldn’t tell if it was an expression of gratitude or a warning not to touch her.

  Still, they went as fast as they could, sticking close together. Ekhaas took the lead, though she was only guessing the way and hoping she didn’t lead them all into a dead end. With every mound of rubble they climbed or skirted, she half-expected to find her chosen path blocked.

  It never was. Ekhaas crawled under a pair of columns that had fallen against each other and stood to find herself facing a high, double-arched doorway with angular Goblin characters carved over it.

  TASAAM DRAET GOVERNS SUUD ANSHAAR BY THE WILL OF GIIS PUULTA, MARHU OF DHAKAAN. KNOW MUUT YOU WHO ENTER.

  She whirled and called back under the columns, “We’re here! This is the great hall.”

  Tenquis was just crawling through. Ekhaas helped him up, then stood out of the way as Marrow came squirming and wriggling through the gap. Chetiin followed, then Tooth. Geth came last, his face drawn hard and taut.

  The collar around his neck was white with frost. She drew air between her teeth. “Is it bad?” she asked.

  “Bad enough.” He took her arm and pulled her toward the arched doorway. “Get inside. If there’s going to be a fight, I want space around us.”

  Beyond the doorway, though, the great hall wasn’t in as good a shape as Ekhaas had hoped when she’d seen it in the distance. The long stone spans that had once supported the ceiling still stood, but in many places the vaults between them had crumbled. Moonlight fell onto more rubble. The walls were cracked and looked as if a hard push would bring them down. Other doors were either choked with fallen stones or opened directly onto the night.

  Aside from rubble and moonlight, the hall was completely empty.

  Tenquis turned to her. “What now? What are we looking for?”