"The reinforcements told me about the bodies on the level below," Eovath called. "They recognized the she-orc with the missing breast. They're looking forward to amusing themselves with the carcass."
Nesteruk looked like he was gathering himself to run back up the stairs. Rho gripped his shoulder.
"What's your point?" Kagur called.
"The point, sister, is that the xulgaths know it's Skulltaker warriors you brought here to profane their sacred place. Them and Dragonflies, the Skulltakers' neighbors. So they know where to retaliate."
Some of Kagur's companions winced. Others traded somber glances.
"They'll focus all their strength on exterminating those two particular tribes," Eovath continued, "unless I talk them out of it."
"Which you will," Kagur said, "if I accept your challenge."
"Yes."
"Then I accept on one condition. You come fight me down here. I never betrayed my own kin. You can trust my promise that my companions won't attack you."
"And in addition," Holg called, "you'll find out what it's like in the center of the pyramid. Aren't you curious?"
Once again, Eovath didn't answer right away.
After a moment, the warriors of the crags filled the silence. "Coward!" shouted Vom. "The giant's pissing down his leg!" Others laughed, or spat so noisily their foes might hear the wet hawking sound even at a distance.
"Think what you like," Eovath answered, "but I can't break the xulgaths' laws and keep their friendship. Goodbye, Kagur. I love you, and I hope you find your way to Gorum's hall."
Kagur looked to Holg, then indicated Bolta, who was still fascinated by his own weapon. "What's wrong with him?" she asked.
"One of the xulgath shamans cursed him and stole his wits."
"Can you mend him?"
"Probably, but not right away. I barely have any power left."
She gestured toward the wounded Skulltakers. "Can you at least help them?"
"I'll try."
While the old man inspected their injuries and prayed over them, everyone else rested. Or at least Kagur tried. But she felt like something was twisting tighter and tighter inside her.
When Holg returned to her side, he squinted at her face and then whispered, "Other than the obvious, what's wrong? Surely you don't believe you should have gone back up the stairs, or that anyone blames you for staying put. We all know the xulgaths would have swarmed on you in an instant."
She scowled. "It's not that. It's what I did before. Nesteruk was right. We did still have a chance to kill Eovath, and I threw it away."
"A very slim chance, I think."
"Still ...for an instant, I felt it would be wrong for Nesteruk in particular to die as he was about to. And that makes no sense. He was fighting to avenge his mother. Of all of our warriors, he had the best reason to stand and slaughter xulgaths until he dropped. So what was I thinking? Is the madness in this place addling me?"
"I don't believe so." The old man paused in the manner of someone framing his next words carefully.
"Do not start prattling about ‘patterns.'"
Holg's lips twitched into the fleeting hint of a smile. "I can't answer a question if you deny me the use—"
"Then don't answer. It was a stupid question anyway. It doesn't matter why I did what I did. It's done. Tell me why we can't see clearly. Is there magic here that interferes with our sight?"
"Not exactly, or at least I don't believe the answer is that simple. Otherwise, I could close my eyes, rely on my other senses, and the distortion wouldn't bother me. I think space itself is kinked or broken here."
"What does that mean?"
He frowned, thinking, and then asked, "Where is Gorum?"
"Elysium."
"And where is Elysium?"
She had no idea what he was getting at. "I don't know. Up in the sky? The real sky?"
"Have you ever seen it there?"
"You know I haven't."
"So it can't be up there in the same simple way as a cloud or a star. Still, we know Gorum and his realm have to be somewhere. The homes of all the gods and devils must be somewhere, yet you could walk the world for a thousand ages and never catch a glimpse of any of them."
"Are you sure you're answering my question?"
"I'm trying. According to certain philosophers, the answer to the puzzle is that space itself is more complicated than we imagine. It has extra directions to it we don't ordinarily experience, and our inability to look in the right direction is what keeps us from beholding the Lord in Iron's fortress."
"But we're experiencing the ‘extra directions' now."
"Some of those same sages believed that under certain conditions, one level of being could overlap another, or that a patch of space could simply contort in the throes of its own special kind of sickness. Then folk in the area might perceive the effects in a muddled sort of way."
Most of Holg's words sounded like nonsense, holy-man speak, but she thought she grasped the essence. "All right. What makes it so dangerous no xulgath ever survived it?"
Holg scratched his chin. "It's possible our outsides don't entirely enclose our insides in such a place. Perhaps, if we step wrong, the blood will simply spill out of our veins or the hearts will fall out of our chests through one of the extra directions."
"If that's the problem, can we do anything about it?"
"I don't know."
"Then assume it's not. What else could it be?"
"If space twists back on itself and perception is undependable, it might be the reptiles simply wandered around lost until they died of thirst."
"Maybe. But if paths lead in, the same paths lead out. Bright steel, we're sitting at the bottom of one right now! It's just not one we can use. Do you have enough magic left to guide us to another?"
"No. Sorry."
"Can you make cold fire like you put on my shield?"
"No. But I can make something comparable. A light we can shine or cover as needed."
"Do that, then."
She rose from the place where she'd been squatting. The warriors of the highlands looked at her, and she struggled to think of what her father might have said to them in her place.
"We did what no men or orcs have done before us," she began. "We came to the xulgaths' stronghold and butchered them by the dozen. That's why they're frantic for revenge. Why they plan to march on your tribes and slaughter every last one of your kin.
"But we," she continued, "are going to prevent that. We're going to find a way out of this pile and warn everyone the xulgaths are coming. So on your feet! We need to move!"
The warriors clambered up and hefted their weapons. Their faces looked grim, but not panicky. Under the circumstances, it was as much as she had any right to expect.
She pressed her fingers to her lips and then led everyone back to the staircase. Dalk shook his head to signal that he hadn't seen or heard any signs that a foray from above was in the works. Then he served as rear guard when she led her companions down the next flight of steps.
By the time they groped their way to the bottom, the darkness was all but absolute. By rights, Kagur thought, that should have made it easy to spot green phosphorescence marking a way out. But, turning, she couldn't see any such glow.
She glanced back at Holg. "Pray your prayer," she said.
"Brace yourselves," the old man said. He murmured, and a pale shining flowered on the head of his staff to reveal more of the distortion's writhing, flowing indeterminacy.
An orc grunted, a human hissed as if at a sudden pain, and Kagur wouldn't have been surprised to learn that his head had actually started throbbing. Hers hadn't, quite, but it felt like it could at any moment. Despite the need to survey her surroundings, she was glad the light was relatively dim.
Beyond tall doorways lay interconnecting chambers with murals on the walls. Most of the faded paintings depicted things with barrel-shaped central masses, an abundance of snaking limbs, and several fan-shaped projections—wings?—stick
ing out of them, shapes so bizarre Kagur's mind balked at even recognizing them as representations of living creatures. In some pictures, they were on the ground, in some, swimming beneath green waters, and in still others, flying against starry skies.
Some of the rooms contained objects positioned toward the center. Although the shifting and flickering made their precise forms uncertain, the articles appeared at least vaguely drum-shaped more often than not, while many were simply metal frames with empty space at the centers. They were apparently furniture of some sort, but Kagur couldn't guess the function of any particular item.
"What can you tell me?" she asked.
Holg shook his head. "I picked up a fair amount of lore in my travels, but nothing that even hints at the creatures in the paintings."
"Well, they must be long gone, or the xulgaths couldn't have taken over this place. So we'll hope we don't need to know about them. My guess is, these stairs run all the way down to the bottom level."
The shaman frowned. "Shouldn't we try to escape the distortion by the shortest path possible? To avoid the hazards, whatever they are?"
"The reptiles expect that. They know how unpleasant it is in here. So when they station warriors to catch us just in case we do make it out, they'll put their best on the upper tiers. And when we break out on the bottom one, we'll already be at water level."
"All right. That makes a certain amount of sense."
"To me, too," said Vom.
Kagur jumped. The burly, bearded Dragonfly had apparently moved closer to hear what she and Holg were saying. That was fine, but it unsettled her that she hadn't registered his change of position until he spoke. What else might sneak up on her while her eyes were undependable?
Hoping Vom hadn't noticed her display of nerves, she crept down the next flight of stairs with her companions trailing along behind her. As she made her way along, it seemed to her that the inconstancy, while no less pervasive, was becoming somewhat less disturbing on a visceral level. Her queasiness had abated, and her head no longer felt like it might start pounding at any moment.
She suspected her mind was learning to shield itself from strangeness and impossibility by not looking at anything too long or too carefully. A doorway was a doorway, and that was enough. She didn't need to determine whether it was rectangular or skewed to the side.
When she reached the next level, she peered about and found more chambers, more murals depicting the barrel-things, and another assortment of their inexplicable furnishings. She asked Holg to quell his light, just in case that would enable her to spot green phosphorescence; if so, she'd at least reevaluate her plan. He wrapped his fingers around the head of his staff, and blackness swallowed everything.
There was still no green light. She told the old man he could let the white one shine.
When it did, she gasped, and others did as well. Rho yelped.
Before Holg had plunged them all into darkness, it had been obvious despite the distortion that one flight of stairs, the one they'd just negotiated, ran upward, and the next one descended. That was no longer the case. Though still extending in opposite directions, they lay at right angles to their former attitudes, except Kagur sensed that wasn't really true. They weren't horizontal. They stretched off in some extra direction people were never supposed to see. Horizontal was merely the way her eyes were struggling to make sense of what was before them.
"Something did this!" snarled an orc named Passamax, whose tusks jutted almost up to his eyes and who wore fangs, talons, and finger bones in the long greasy ponytail dangling down his back. "To trap us!"
"No," Kagur said. "We've seen how everything changes. This was just an especially big change."
"Kagur's right," Nesteruk said. Either he'd gotten past being angry with her or his own judgment impelled him to agree with her anyway. "We aren't trapped. Both ways are still there, the same as before."
"That's true," said Vom, scratching in his beard, his tone thoughtful rather than contentious, "but which one do we take?"
Kagur realized with a jolt of dismay that she didn't know. Even with the staircases rotated to lie on their sides, their positions relative to one another should provide a solution, but with impermanence and paradox baffling her, she couldn't work out what it was.
She looked to Holg. Even he appeared flummoxed.
But Dalk was rear guard. That meant that even though everyone had already stepped off the last flight of stairs, he was likely still closer to it than to the next one. Kagur looked around and located him, though it took a moment. Distortion had gnarled his face and upper body, making them lopsided and nearly unrecognizable.
Wondering if she looked equally hideous, Kagur pointed to the flight of stairs that, judging by Dalk's position, was the correct one. "This way."
Setting her feet on steps that appeared to stand on end instead of lying flat was a bewildering, awkward business. She worried that if she made the wrong move, she could pitch herself down the empty center of the stairwell, but she couldn't even tell what such a misstep would entail.
She finally sat on the floor, closed her eyes, and scooted her way along. After a moment, she felt an indescribable twisting that reminded her of Holg's notion that in this place, a person's insides might fall out even if his skin was intact. Fortunately, though, that didn't happen. Her rump simply slipped off one surface and bumped down on another.
The flight of stairs felt and looked more normal once she and her companions managed to shift themselves onto it. They descended successfully and then peered around. The pale glow of Holg's staff revealed more chambers, murals, and skeletal metal frameworks, and that was all. Nothing was moving or manifestly posed a threat.
Holg briefly covered the end of his staff. Kagur still couldn't see any green glow.
"All right," she said as the old man restored the light, "on to the next tier." She turned toward the stairs and then spun back around.
"What's wrong?" asked Holg.
She took another look at her companions. Unfortunately, she really had belatedly noticed what she'd thought she had. "Bolta's missing. Who was watching over him?"
The Dragonflies looked back at her in dismay, and though she felt anger flare inside her, she also realized she deserved to feel its sting every bit as much as they did. Yes, one of them should have tended to his demented kinsman, but as leader, she should have made certain somebody did so. Disordered space was gnawing at everyone's mind.
"Don't answer," she continued. "What matters is finding him. Dalk, you've been walking behind everybody else. When was the last time you saw him?"
"Well ...not on this last descent. On the one before it."
"That means he wandered away one tier up, when we were all trying to figure out which stairs were which. We'll go back up and get him."
Passamax glowered. "The rest of us need to get out of here, not waste time searching for a simpleton."
"The Dragonflies would search," said Vom, "if a Skulltaker had gotten lost. Are our warriors are braver than yours?"
A muscle in Passamax's arm jumped with the urge to answer the suggestion with the hatchet in his fist, but he controlled himself. "If we're going to do it," he growled, "let's go."
By the time they climbed back up, the stairs had reverted to approximately the proper attitude relative to their terminus. Unfortunately, Bolta was nowhere in sight. Kagur and her companions called his name, and the shouts echoed away in a halting, unnatural fashion that gave her a chill.
Bolta didn't answer.
Kagur picked a doorway at random. "Keep together." She slipped Eovath's knife from its sheath. "I'll mark the walls to make sure we can find our way back."
Holg stepped up to her side and murmured, "Bolta could have wandered up the next set of stairs, too. He could have gone all the way back up to Zevgavizeb's holy of holies. He could even have stumbled through a hole in the weave of things and fallen out of the world entirely."
Kagur scowled. "We're still going to look."
"I know. I'd decide the same if I were leader. I just wanted you to be aware."
Venturing away from the stairs reminded Kagur of searching the tombs of the serpentfolk. She had the same feeling of confusion and frustration, but this time, it wasn't only because an inimical force was scraping at her mind. The arrangement of the painted rooms with their occasional peculiar accoutrements was simply beyond human comprehension, as she realized anew when she entered a chamber and spotted one of the marks she'd been scratching along the way.
She was sure that mere moments before, she'd moved away from this room in a straight line. Thus, it was impossible for her to have returned, and yet she had. Maybe a person could get so lost in this place she never found a way out.
She reassured herself that even if the trail she was blazing doubled back on itself, it must ultimately lead to the stairway. Still, even assuming she was right, how long should she continue searching?
Her every instinct told her not to abandon a comrade. But if the raiders were still inside the ziggurat when morning came, escape would likely be impossible.
Five more rooms, she decided. After that, if they still hadn't found any trace of Bolta, they'd turn back.
Counting them off by making a fist and then uncurling the fingers one at a time, she'd just prowled into the fourth one when a soft cry like a whimper sounded from somewhere up ahead.
Chapter Thirty
The Ancient Armory
Straining, Kagur listened. She didn't hear anything more.
"Bolta!" she shouted. Her companions did the same.
After the strange, staggered echoes died away, the afflicted tribesman's cry—if that was what it was—came again. It still didn't have any words to it.
Vom shook his head. Due to the distortion, his shaggy mane flopped around him in a way that was somehow disturbing, although Kagur couldn't define why. "Why isn't he talking?"
"He wasn't talking before," Passamax replied. "We found him, let's go get him."
"We are," Kagur said.
As they stalked onward, she kept marking the walls despite the urge to hurry now prodding her on. The cry came at intervals, and sounded closer each time.
Called to Darkness Page 24