Khaine took the first step through the doorway.
Swallowing fear and panic and a host of other flavors of terror which were all new to me, I followed.
X
Enough dust filled the place to choke a six-hundred-pound sea bass, and only through the heroic application of will did I manage not to sneeze loud enough to wake the drowned dead. Khaine swept his manna sword out in front of him, holding it like a torch, but the rich blue light only served to cast haunting shadows on every surface. The way the rays danced on the wall called the taste of seawater to my tongue, and I nearly vomited.
“Do you know your way around this place?” I whispered, and even the slight sound of my voice seemed to echo strangely in my ears.
“I’ve never been here myself,” Khaine murmured back.
“Great. Do you even know what we’re looking for?”
“A way down.”
I swallowed hard, suddenly glad for the darkness so that he couldn’t see the naked fear that transfigured my expression. “Down?”
“If the cache is still hidden, it will be in the safe room,” he said. “Always below-ground. All we have to do is find it.”
“You mean to tell me that we’re looking for some kind of catacombs on top of this disgusting knot of corruption?” I demanded, my voice breaking despite only whispering.
“Yes.”
Fantastic.
“I always wanted to die cold, in the dark, devoured by the teeth of the risen dead,” I muttered bitterly. “It’s every sorcerer’s dream.”
Khaine’s teeth flashed in the light of the manna blade. “Arbiters, too.”
I couldn’t help it; I grinned despite myself. A man with a manna blade who could match wits with me? Surely, the end of the world was drawing near.
That was the first moment of doubt in my petrifying fear of Arbiters. Havox Khaine was as different from D’Arden Tal as the ocean was from the sky. Perhaps they really were human, after all, and not just near-mindless automatons with bad attitudes.
In a hundred books of history, a thousand treatises on sorcery, one would only find perhaps ten mentions of the Arbiters. They were shrouded in mystery from everyone, keeping to themselves, aloof and apart from the rest of the world for almost a thousand years. They had once been part of the political landscape of the Old Kingdoms, back before anyone could remember, but that had changed, and they had destroyed their sanctuary and moved far to the east, out to the Free Cities. Their policy was one of strict non-intervention, a lesson I had learned quite painfully for myself not all that long ago.
Mentions of them after their exodus were even scarcer, as for a sorcerer to meet an Arbiter usually meant death for the one writing the book or the treatise. Historians’ accounts were vague and often inflammatory, painting the Arbiters as stone-faced zealots with only one thing on their minds: purging corruption wherever it took root, quite at odds with the legends of heroes and warriors against darkness that filled the legends of the lower classes. To be fair, many learned men of history were also sorcerers, and finding oneself constantly on the wrong end of the manna sword could be somewhat perturbing.
I had never seen Khaine in action, but he carried himself with grace befitting a man with more than a hundred and fifty years’ worth of experience, and as we ducked beneath cracked and fallen beams and clambered over moldering stone, his blade never once scraped a wall or a floor. He moved as though it were an extension of his arm, and I had a flash of gratitude that I wasn’t on the opposite end of that sword just then.
“Were any Arbiters ever sorcerers?” I finally asked him, keeping my voice to a bare whisper. “Or the converse, I suppose,” I added after a moment’s thought.
He stopped at the corner of two walls and something that might have once been a hallway, and glanced back over his shoulder at me, one eyebrow raised in curiosity.
I shrugged, embarrassed. “Just wondering.”
“The Grand Master would say no,” he answered after a moment. His unspoken thought lingered in the air.
“But you might say something different?”
He paused, and then looked away. “It’s my belief that once, we all were.”
A shiver that had nothing to do with the corruption prickling at my senses ran down my spine.
Khaine turned to the right to face what might have been the hallway, and grunted. I looked past him, and saw a stairway leading into the earth, partially blocked by fallen rubble.
“Oh, well,” I said, trying for levity but getting only bitterness instead. “Guess we’ll have to turn around and go home.”
The look he gave me might have been black amusement; it was difficult to tell in the dim blue light. “Not hardly.” He casually handed me his manna sword, hilt-first. I took it with ginger fingers; the light flickered as it passed between us, but remained strong in my hands.
I stared at it as I accepted its weight.
Not only was it half the weight of the steel version I’d commissioned, it had better balance, weighted just slightly toward the tip. It was a carving weapon, there was no doubt about it, designed for lightning-fast strikes with both of its razor-sharp edges. My forgery had had only a single cutting edge. Mendoz had once made me practice with his northerner’s greatsword for ten minutes—it was all I could do to lift it after that—and he had talked endlessly about the merits of various weapons. This one had never been on his list, strangely enough. A small, bitter smile full of regret and self-loathing came to my lips as I thought of the grizzled monster hunter again, dead not at my hands but just as surely by my misguided mistakes.
Khaine knelt and began lifting one of the rocks that must have been twice his weight, and it was only then that I realized that not only was I standing with a weapon at his back, but I stood with his weapon at his back.
What was this? Some sort of message of tacit trust? Why was he affording me such confidence? Questions whirled in my mind as I tried to process this strange new truth. I was holding the weapon, and he was defenseless, straining with effort as he worked to move the rubble out of our path. Could I kill him before he could defend himself and then vanish into the night, never to be heard from again?
While I stood there, stunned, Khaine grunted a few times as he worked and then stepped back, dusting off his hands on his trousers. Only when he extracted the manna sword from my hands did I startle out of my thoughts, and I jerked my hands guiltily away.
“If I’d sheathed it, the light would have gone out,” he said simply. His forehead glistened with beads of sweat that glittered like bubbles caught by sunlight.
Oh. Of course.
“You’ll have to go first,” Khaine said. “I’ll keep the light shining behind you. Just watch your step.”
I gazed into the yawning gulf of darkness before me. Only the very tips of the stone stairs could be seen, pale and narrow and thoroughly dangerous.
Swallowing the surge of fear that nearly bubbled out of my throat as maniacal laughter, I took the first step.
Then another.
XI
I lost count of the stairs somewhere around three hundred and forty. I did note, however, that the staircase went straight down. There were no landings, no subtle changes in direction, just a steep descent into the earth. The air got colder as we went, but a strange warmth now accompanied the ever-growing prickling sensation that signified the corruption, dancing on the backs of my arms and my neck. The smell of earth and stone and dust was cloyingly thick, causing my nose to fill with defensive mucus. My breathing became hard, labored rasps through my drying throat, but all I could think about was how awful going back up would be.
Surprisingly, given the condition of the ruined castle, the stairs remained in good condition. Some stray rocks had fallen here and there, but never once did I feel as though they might collapse beneath my feet.
Well, at least not until they did.
Just when I had finally gotten comfortable with the stairs, I placed my foot on the next one and felt it shift be
neath my boot. There must have been a flaw in the mortar or something, because the next thing I knew, I tilted wildly forward and my stomach leapt up into my mouth as the vast black abyss below me reached up to swallow me whole.
A surprised shriek ripped its way out of my throat as I slid. Just before my life started to flash before my eyes, though, a strong hand caught the back of my collar and dragged me down to my back on the stairs. Pain lanced through me as the edges of the stairs struck my neck, my spine and my legs hard enough to make lights dance in my peripheral vision. My head swam and I moaned in agony as the blunt wounds began to throb.
“Ow,” I managed to say after a minute.
“So much for the element of surprise,” Khaine said, though his tone was light, and not in the least accusing.
I winced. My unmanly shriek of terror was still reverberating off the walls somewhere down in the blackness below us, transformed by the stone into an eerie wail as it slowly died away. “Sorry about that,” I whispered.
Khaine shook his head and clucked his tongue dryly. “It’s so hard to find a good stonemason these days. Their work barely lasts a thousand years anymore.”
I huffed a laugh from my aching throat and slowly climbed back to my feet, rubbing my hand firmly against the back of my neck. I twisted my head from side to side, got a satisfying pop from it, and grunted.
“You kept me from falling,” I observed.
“The wounds would have healed, eventually,” he answered. “Still, I think it’s faster this way, don’t you?”
Well, he had a point there.
“I’m all right,” I said finally. “Just… a little slower, all right?”
He bared his teeth in a grimace. “Not too much slower.”
I resumed my count at one as we descended again, and as it turned out, I would have only plummeted about a hundred and fifty steps. Such a comforting thought.
At last we struck a landing, though it widened out into barely more than a corridor. As the light from Khaine’s sword flickered along the walls, I could see recessed rectangles on both sides where the blue radiance couldn’t fall.
Tombs.
My breathing quickened which, in the choking dust, wasn’t exactly pleasant. Ancient cobwebs spanned across the corridor ahead of us, the blue manna light casting them in shades of quicksilver. I had to swallow my heart when I saw that some of the strands were as thick as my little finger. The prickling feeling of corruption had grown into a constant burning sensation all along my back and neck, intermingling with the pain of my fall in a most unpleasant fashion.
Khaine took one look at the cobwebs and hissed, “Manna spinners.”
“The webs are old, though,” I said, noting how thick the dust lay on the silken threads. “Maybe they’ve already moved out?”
He shot me a glance.
“I didn’t think so either,” I sighed.
“There’s light ahead,” Khaine said.
I looked past the webs and squinted. The corridor seemed to go on forever in front of us, but at the very limits of my vision, I could almost make out the barest hint of light. It was little more than a pinpoint, really, and it might have been just a spot in my eyes if not for the fact that it didn’t waver when I looked back and forth in front of it.
“Could be,” I agreed.
Khaine stepped out in front of me, using the keen edge of his crystal sword to cut the dusty threads. “Stay close.”
My heart thudded in my throat as we cut our way through the giant webs. Each time the sword parted one of the threads, the loose ends sprang back in either direction and made a quiet but noticeable sound that reminded me of snapping kelp as they struck the floor and the ceiling. To either side of us, the recessed dark rectangles marking the tombs loomed larger than reality. The feeling of corruption remained impossibly strong, making me want to scream with the pain that radiated up and down my spine, and I almost imagined that I could hear the scraping and stirring of the skeletal bodies in their stone coffins within the walls. One of the first things that concentrated corruption could do was cause the dead to rise; I’d seen it with my own eyes, and it was one of the more hideous sights indelibly written on my memory.
The sounds in my imagination grew louder, and I found myself mere inches from Khaine’s left shoulder, practically breathing down his neck. I gulped down a mouthful of dust and allowed him a slight lead, but my hands had begun to shake uncontrollably from pain and fear, and biting down against the agonizing inferno was almost more than I could bear.
“Are we there yet?” I growled through clenched teeth.
Then they hit us.
XII
They came out of nowhere: spiders bigger around than a small pig, eyes glowing with crimson menace. Most of them had eight furry limbs, but some had been changed by the corruption and had nine or ten or more, and they came at us in a flurry of barbed appendages and fangs glistening with luminescent slaver.
Visceral terror overwhelmed my brain, and I let out a panicked shriek and threw myself to the stone floor of the passage. The barbs which would have been harmless on a tiny spider became deadly slashing weapons on the giant manna spinners, and I felt them rake at my clothing and slice into my skin. My panic turned to pain as they drew blood and flinched back, hissing as the bright blue fluid caused their extremities to smolder and spark with the purifying flames of the Arbiter.
Khaine’s manna sword swept through the air above me, slicing one of the manna spinners in twain at the center of its round, ten-legged body and causing it to explode in a burst of cobalt flames and a shower of ash. “Yes, technically you could bleed on them until they die, or you could help me,” he grunted, spinning in place as his sword slashed in the other direction.
It took everything I had to simply to avoid vomiting; my throat constricted so tightly that I could barely breathe. My mind was locked in panic. I could no more have called an incantation to mind than I could have recited the complete works of Brandauch the traveling minstrel—whose work was utter drivel, let me tell you.
I pushed myself to my hands and knees, and came face-to-face with one of the manna spinners. Time slowed to a crawl. I saw myself reflected in its innumerable bug-eyes, aflame with corruption and predatory satisfaction. Its huge mandibles clicked, and then it darted toward my face with preternatural speed.
“Kettek!” I screamed involuntarily.
There was no time to raise my hand, and I discovered a strange side effect of drawing manna on pure reflex alone. The bolt of light which normally would have coalesced at my fingertips instead centered on my teeth, and I made an indistinct cry of pain as if someone had punched me in the mouth as it flashed forward, slamming into the spinner’s body and hurling it away from me. The Arbiter’s power had touched the edges of what I’d called up, and the silvery bolt caught fire as it connected with its target. The spinner let out a shrieking hiss as it tumbled away, smoldering with blue flames.
The force of the impact on my face pushed me backward almost hard enough to hit my head on the floor behind me, but I wrenched my neck and managed to avoid the concussion. Shocked out of my fear paralysis, I rolled to my feet and brought my hand up, aiming at the closest spinner.
“Khrona drakar!”
My voice broke with the force of my exhalation, but that didn’t stop my mind from channeling the manna with my intent. Searing, white-hot flame burst forth from my outstretched fingers, consuming three spinners and clearing the hallway behind us of webs in mere seconds. They didn’t even have time to hiss, they simply roasted to ash in the inferno powered by my own fear. The sudden change from pitch black to sun-bright almost blinded me, and would have if my eyes had not snapped closed out of reflex. Even so, a green haze floated over my vision when the fire died away and I opened my eyes again.
Another spider came out of the darkness, slamming into my shoulders from behind. I let out a grunt as the force of the impact drove me back to my knees. More pain wracked my body as my kneecaps struck stone, feeling like they
had splintered. It let out a whistling scream as its legs battered against my head and neck, drawing blood and a ripping a similar screech from my own throat. I felt the mandibles sink into the base of my skull before I could move, and sudden, white-hot agony, qualitatively different from every other pain I’d experienced so far, flooded through me. My limbs went rigid almost instantly as the venom poured in.
A hot flash of fire exploded at the base of my neck, pushing me to the ground, but I couldn’t move. I hit the stone floor face-first, and my nose shattered under the impact. I felt the pain, but even though I tried to press my hands to it, my arms refused to move. Azure blood gushed out onto the black floor, its faint glow illuminating the cracks as it sought the path of least resistance, soon looking eerily similar to the spiderwebs above.
“Damn it,” Khaine’s voice came from above me. “You weren’t supposed to let it bite you.”
In my mind, I served the Arbiter with a devastatingly witty retort, but all that came out of my mouth was a pitiful exhalation of breath.
He knelt down, and I felt his fingers probe the scorching, pulsing wound on the back of my neck. “It doesn’t look bad,” he said after a moment. “It will paralyze your lungs in a few moments, but as you might have noticed, you don’t actually need to breathe. The manna will keep you alive while it battles the venom out of your system.”
I barely heard him. I was too busy screaming silently.
XIII
I don’t know how long I lay there in the darkness of that stone passage somewhere beneath the earth. It might have been an hour, or it might have been days. At some point, the torrent of unending agony receded, leaving only the sharp, prickling pain of corruption behind. My mind was a blur, unable to focus. Khaine had turned me onto my side so that I was staring into the darkness, and I could no longer tell whether my eyes were open or closed.
The Elements of Sorcery Page 23