Until finally, Holg's light washed into a large chamber with two drum-shaped constructions of silvery slats and wire in the center. Bolta sat in the corner rocking back and forth, his eyes squeezed shut and his hands covering his ears.
"Bolta," Kagur said.
He didn't answer. Maybe he couldn't hear her. Although that would be strange, considering that he'd heard and answered in his wordless fashion when she and the others had called from a distance.
She strode across the room, and Holg and the warriors hurried after her. She took hold of Bolta's wrists to pull his hands away from his head.
He thrashed, and other cave dwellers restrained him. "Easy!" said Vom. "It's us!"
Bolta's struggles subsided into shuddering. He gaped at Vom, and his mouth worked, but nothing came out.
Kagur was suddenly certain Bolt hadn't made the whimpering cries they'd heard. Something else had. Something that wanted to draw the rest of them to the same spot as their addled, helpless comrade, maybe so it could creep up behind them while they were all paying attention to him.
She turned, and at that instant, at least a dozen voices started howling and babbling all at once.
The hideous raving battered at a mind already beleaguered by the effects of twisted space. And the sight of the creature responsible was nearly as hard to bear.
A shapeless, limbless mass of flesh, it heaved and oozed through a second doorway, simultaneously stretching sideways so as to block the opening through which the raiders had entered. Its dozens of eyes glared, while the deafening yammer issued from countless slavering, jagged-toothed mouths. The floor softened, and Kagur's feet sank into it like the mere presence of the creature was corrupting its surroundings.
Something—the shrieking and braying, Kagur judged—was unquestionably corroding the ability of her companions to defend against the threat. The others were reeling. Some covered their ears like Bolta. Some wept. Some screamed, adding to the din.
Kagur might be in the same helpless state if she hadn't earlier weathered a comparable psychic assault when she faced the seugathi. But she had, and since she was still capable of battle, it fell to her to kill this horror as well. She reached for the hilt of her sword.
Some of the creature's bulging eyes shifted, tracking the motion. One of the larger mouths stopped raving long enough to spit.
Kagur leaped aside. The gob of spittle splashed against the wall, then sizzled and smoked as it trickled downward.
The vigorous evasive action thrust Kagur's lead foot halfway into the softening floor. She heaved it out before it could stick fast, finished drawing her blade, and rushed the creature.
She had to dodge another wad of acidic spew before she closed the distance. Then she landed a first cut on writhing flesh.
The resulting gash was deep, but she wished she knew where to aim. Unfortunately, though, she had no way of telling where within the formless body the vital organs lay—or if the creature even had any.
A portion of the beast simultaneously reared higher and curled outward to encircle her. Mouths opened wide to bite.
She tried to step back from the threat, and the sticky floor held her in place. She strained and broke free, but the sudden release made her stagger off balance. The creature made a flowing lunge to seize her before she recovered.
But Holg scrambled between the two of them. He drove the butt of his staff into one of the creature's eyes.
Kagur recovered her footing, and then she and the old man attacked the beast together. She slashed it repeatedly, and he either put out more of its eyes or thrust his staff in one or another of the howling, gnashing mouths as opportunity allowed.
Over time, the latter attacks, and the fact that the shapeless thing needed some of its mouths to spit and bite, somewhat diminished the volume of its wailing. Maybe that helped the warriors of the crags recover from their incapacity, for one by one, they too joined the fight. Vom jabbed with his spear. Nesteruk and Passamax chopped with hatchets.
Flailing with a deceptive lack of grace, the creature flipped two extrusions of its substance around Passamax and gathered him in like a drunkard forcing an embrace on someone reluctant to receive it. Crooked teeth sank into the orc's green skin, and he gave a cry midway between a roar and a scream.
Sure that in another moment Passamax would be maimed if not dead, Kagur sprang on top of the shapeless creature, where its rippling, humping flesh made her stagger and nearly drop one of her feet into a gnashing mouth. Recovering her balance, if only for an instant, she raised her sword high and thrust it down into the shapeless thing's mass all the way to the cross guard.
The creature convulsed and tossed her tumbling down its heaving flank. It didn't take advantage of her momentary helplessness to bite her, though, and when she rolled to her feet, she saw it had stopped moving.
She scrambled up to see how Passamax was. "Get me loose," he gritted, still wrapped in the creature's flesh.
She and a couple of the others extracted him. His bites were ragged and bloody, but when Holg tried to examine one, he yanked his arm free with a snarl.
"You're all right?" the old man asked.
"Of course! I'm a Skulltaker!" Passamax paused. "But it was close. The thing was sucking my blood."
Vom looked down at the creature's carcass. "It wasn't just getting lost that kept the old xulgaths from making it out alive. But now the real threat is dead."
Passamax sneered. "Unless there are twenty more of them crawling around."
If we meet more, Kagur thought, we'll kill them, too. But she hoped it wouldn't come to that.
"Get Bolta up," she said. "We're leaving."
"Wait," said Holg.
She turned. The old man was looking in the opening through which the shapeless thing had come. He held his staff out to the side so the wall blocked its glow from illuminating what lay beyond. That way, his clouded eyes could see more clearly.
Kagur sighed. "We don't have time to poke around."
"Do we have a moment to rearm ourselves?" Holg replied. "We've long since thrown all our javelins, and dropped or broken other weapons along the way."
"What?" She strode past him into the next room, and he brought the light in after her. Cave dwellers followed him.
Three tall, barrel-shaped latticeworks stood in the center of the floor, and for the first time, Kagur discerned a purpose for the frames. These had prongs hooking up from the bars to hang things on.
Some of the hanging objects combined curves and angles into shapes so strange she had no idea of a particular item's function or which part of it, if any, a user was supposed to grip. But others were recognizably javelins cast all in one piece from point to butt from a metal that gleamed like either brass or bronze depending on how the light caught it. A few of the weapons hung by themselves, but dozens more reposed in quivers made of the same yellowish substance.
The cave dwellers came forward to inspect them more closely but hesitated to touch them. Kagur remembered that any metal weapon was a wonder to them, and these partook of the ziggurat's eeriness and unimaginable age.
Passamax broke the general feeling of awe by snorting, picking one up, and holding it out for everyone to see. "It's got an angle in the shaft," he sneered, and Kagur realized he was right. All the javelins did. "It won't fly true."
"In here," said Vom, "nothing does."
"You know what I mean." The orc turned, cocked the weapon back, and chucked it at the wall.
As the javelin left his hand, it became a length of glare. The lightning bolt blasted the wall with a dazzling flash and a boom that made the raiders recoil and peppered them with bits of flying stone.
For a moment, in the aftermath, no one moved. Then an orc led a general scramble for the doorway.
"Stop!" Kagur bellowed. Somewhat to her surprise, everyone heeded her. "We're taking the javelins. We can use them."
Vom peered at her uncertainly. "Are you sure we can carry them?"
"I am," said Holg. He lifted one
of the javelins from the two prongs that supported it, then twirled it in his fingers and tossed it from hand to hand. Even Skulltakers tensed, but the yellow metal stayed metal.
"See?" the shaman asked. "You have to throw them properly to trigger the transformation."
After a moment, Passamax's mouth stretched into a grin. He grabbed a quiver from its prong, and others followed his lead.
As she and Holg looked on, Kagur whispered, "Were you sure it was safe to play with the javelin like that?"
"Fairly sure, and our friends needed more convincing. I take it you're over your wariness of enchanted weapons."
Apparently she had, for it had never even occurred to her that it might be prudent to leave the javelins behind. Maybe the Darklands, where sorcery was no stranger than most everything else she encountered, made her former mistrust of it pointless.
On the way back, she and her companions followed the blazes scrupulously, even at the points where common sense indicated a shortcut was available. And in due course, their caution brought them to the stairs.
They descended the next flight without incident. Halfway down the one after that, the section of steps below them suddenly elongated and twisted into a spiral that made it look like no one could traverse it without walking upside down like an insect.
"It's all right," Kagur said, proceeding onward without hesitation. "The stairs will be normal once we're on them." She was glad when it turned out to be so.
Finally, the raiders reached the tier on which they'd begun. The stairs continued, but into water. Holg's light reflected on its black surface just a few steps farther down.
Kagur had kept count of the levels. But with the distortion scratching at her thoughts, she was glad to have her reckoning confirmed.
Holg invited the darkness, and as usual, no one could see any trace of a green glow. So they all had to search for it as they'd looked for Bolta, prowling through a honeycomb of painted chambers and marking the walls along the way, meanwhile listening for howling, raving voices.
To Kagur's relief, she couldn't hear any more of the formless creatures. Maybe, in the times before the xulgaths had given up trying to explore the core of the ziggurat, the place had been full of the things, but most had died in the long years since.
Suddenly, blackness shrouded everything. As Kagur jumped, she realized Holg had covered the head of his staff. "We're close," the old man whispered.
Even now, she couldn't see any green phosphorescence. "How can you tell?"
"I feel space straightening out. We're nearing the edge of the damage."
"Then we sneak and feel our way from here."
She skulked forward and caught the tiny padding sounds of the others following. Sliding her fingertips along the wall, she found a doorway and peeked through.
Off to the left, points of green light, dim but steady, with no shifting or paradoxical aspect to them, strung away into the gloom. As Kagur looked at them, she felt what Holg had: an easing of the malaise that bent space engendered.
But she also saw figures waiting at the edge of the phosphorescence. She was pondering how to deal with them when a groping hand fumbled at her waist.
"Sorry!" breathed Rho.
"We're stopped," whispered Vom from somewhere close at hand. "Why?"
"We found the way out," Kagur said, "and the xulgaths blocking it. I want one lightning bolt—only one—and then we charge. Passamax, you do the throwing."
"Out of my way," said the orc. Kagur felt people shifting in the dark to clear a path for him.
With farther to travel, the streak of lightning writhed like a snake and crackled in the instant before it struck. The blast tossed bodies into the air.
"Now!" Kagur said. She lunged through the doorway, and her comrades pounded after her.
The lightning had killed some xulgaths and thrown the rest into confusion. Still, the survivors glimpsed their foes rushing out of the darkness and scrambled to defend themselves. A javelin flew at Kagur, and she dodged. That saved her, but someone behind her gave a strangled grunt as the weapon struck him.
She avoided a second such missile, then sprang in among the creatures hurling them, where the reek of lightning-burned flesh hung in the air. A xulgath screeched and rushed her with gaping jaws and outstretched talons. She sidestepped and cut its head as it plunged by. It staggered, and Nesteruk, screaming, finished it with a knife thrust to the chest.
That left the orc boy's flank exposed to another xulgath, but Kagur and Rho lunged at the same time and cut the reptile down together. She sensed danger at her own back and spun, her blade slashing a xulgath across the snout. She cut again and tore its midsection open.
She looked around. As far as she could tell, only two xulgaths were left, both running away. She started to drop her sword and ready her bow, but before she could, Passamax and another Skulltaker hurled ordinary flint-tipped javelins the reptilian guards hadn't had a chance to use.
The weapons caught the fleeing xulgaths in the backs. One fell instantly. The other managed two more stumbling steps, and then it too collapsed.
Kagur looked around at her companions. A couple had fresh wounds, but they were all still on their feet. "Onward!" she said.
As they raced down the passage, more xulgaths lunged from a doorway to attack them, but to no avail. Escape was at hand, and despite all the raiders had endured, the knowledge energized them. They stabbed and hacked through their foes in a matter of moments.
A murky rectangle appeared in the gloom ahead. It was the way out into the open air, and Kagur felt fierce satisfaction at the sight of it. Then the doorway blazed white as the Vault's sudden morning flooded it with sunlight.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Slaves
Someone snarled. Kagur's comrades understood as well as she how daylight diminished their chances. But they'd come too far to do anything but press on.
They burst out onto the shelf above the water. Hissing voices clamored overhead as xulgaths on the upper tiers caught sight of them. Pivoting, squinting and blinking, Kagur looked for their canoes.
They were nowhere in sight, nor were any xulgath boats of comparable size. Evidently, more than one opening led into the ziggurat at lake level, and the raiders had emerged on a different side from the one on which they'd landed.
But one of the larger xulgath boats sat some distance down the shelf with several of the reptiles moving around on deck. Either the craft was just about to depart or it was just putting in.
Kagur had no idea how to manage such a vessel, and was sure her companions didn't, either. But she sprinted toward it anyway, and the other raiders pounded after her.
For a few blessed moments, the xulgaths aboard the boat seemed oblivious to the fugitives' approach. Then something—most likely the cries from the upper tiers—roused them to action. One cast a javelin, but the hasty throw fell short. Two more pushed the boat away from the pyramid with poles.
Like most natives of the tundra, Kagur had never learned to swim, but she didn't let that balk her. She ran even faster, leaped off the tier and over the water, and thumped down in the prow of the boat.
At once, a xulgath spearman lunged at her. But she'd landed well, with her balance intact, and she parried the thrust and slashed the reptile's neck. It fell with blood pumping from the wound.
She pivoted and looked down the length of the vessel, at more xulgaths preparing to hurl javelins—and at the human and orc rowers bound to their oars with coarse lengths of rope or vine.
She shouted to the latter: "You can be free! Just get the boat closer to the ledge!"
The captives gawked at her. Then a grizzled orc covered in lash marks both old and new roared, "Do it!" Other slaves dipped their oars into the water.
Hissing and screeching, xulgaths swung cracking whips. A couple even jabbed with spears or chopped with hatchets. Still, the rebellious thralls swung the vessel back toward the ziggurat, near enough for Kagur's companions to jump aboard.
The xul
gaths were dead a few breaths later.
"Now go!" shouted Kagur, still to the slaves. "Get us to shore!"
"Which shore?" asked one of the human slaves.
"The closest one without a xulgath city sitting on it," panted Vom.
Kagur looked back at the ziggurat and all around the lake and decided they actually had a good chance of reaching safety. No xulgath boats were giving chase. Only one was even in view, and it was just a speck on the shining blue water, too distant to intercept her vessel even if the reptiles onboard somehow realized it had fallen into the hands of their enemies.
That meant she had no one left to fight, no more decisions to make, and no more mysteries to try to comprehend. In fact, since she wasn't rowing, she had nothing to do, and with that realization, she suddenly felt how sore and weary she was.
She flopped down in the bow of the boat with her back against the gunwale. There, spent though she was, she set about wiping the blood from her father's sword.
Grubby green feet planted themselves in front of her, and she looked up. Swaying slightly with the motion of the boat, a quiver of javelins swinging on his back, Nesteruk stood before her.
"You're the leader," he said in a tone of sullen contrition. "It was for you to say whether we fought or run."
Kagur sighed. "Sit."
He did.
"Your mother was a brave warrior," she said. "So was my father. We will avenge them, and it will be a better vengeance than what we could have had in the pyramid. The blue giant and a pile of xulgaths will be lying dead while we're still alive to eat, drink, laugh, and hunt. Do you see?"
Before Nesteruk could answer, Dalk came thumping down the walkway that ran the length of the boat between the rowers' benches. "Look!" he said, pointing back at the ziggurat.
Kagur scrambled to her feet. A point of brightness danced atop the pyramid in the way that only metal could catch the sun.
Eovath was up there brandishing his greataxe. Using it to work magic like Holg employed his staff.
Kagur turned to the rowers. "Faster!" And although they'd already been pulling the heavy oars vigorously, they picked up the pace a little more. But it still wasn't fast enough.
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