Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1)

by J. Edward Neill

  “Arjobec? Where are you? Answer me! Please!”

  Her gaze fell to the floor. She gasped as though a murderer’s hands had closed around her throat. Oh, no… no, no, no…she sobbed. No, Arjo, please… Upon the floor, barely visible in the sickly lantern light, poor Arjobec lay sprawled and slain. The whites of his eyes shined through slitted lids, his life’s blood darkening the floorboards. She saw the wound that had killed him, a clean puncture puckering outward on his chest.

  Arjo…she tried to weep, but there were few tears left to escape her eyes. Gagging, she slunk lower to the floor, and even as she did, she heard two voices issue from the darkest corner of the room. It was not the Furyon tongue she heard, but something else, a pair of hollow, spiritless sounds more like the speech of ghosts than men.

  “Andelusia.” One of the voices invaded her mind. “Grae girl, bright and blazing, cold and black. Come here.”

  The horror of the voice invading her mind locked her body in place. From the darkest corner of the room came a figure, clutching at the lantern. She looked up, and there she saw the shadow-man whose name was Revenen.

  Revenen, lost soul of Archithrope, looked like no mortal creature. He was cloaked in ragged blacks, his hands withered like a skeleton’s, his eye-sockets consuming the lantern light as surely as the ocean did the rain. He moved more in the manner of a spirit than a man, gliding soundlessly atop the floor. She saw little of his face, only that half was missing, and the remainder paler than a pile of dead fish. Her limbs went stiff at the mere sight of him, and her tongue dry in her throat.

  “What…are you?” she stammered.

  Revenen held the lantern high and let its pallid purple light fall upon her. A second shape moved beyond him. I know this one. She quaked when she saw the second figure’s face. My follower. The shadower. Say it is not so.

  The second man was Vom, the soldier she had seen in the tower of Orye, the hunter who had trailed her through the mountains, and the tall, spectral shadow who had stalked the dock on the eve she had boarded the Furyon frigate. By Revenen’s ghostly lantern light, Vom’s faced look grey as old parchment, while his hair, blacker than night, roved in lashes down his neck. He is mortal, she had the impression. Not like the other one. Why? Why here? What is happening?

  The two men stalked to the center of the room, where they halted and stared down at her. “You… you killed him,” she cursed them. “Why? What have you done?”

  She waited for them to slay her, but neither moved. Swallowing her horror, she skittered and knelt beside Arjobec, clutching his bloodied shirt with her half-frozen hands. “Leave him be,” she threatened them. “Do not desecrate him further. It is me you want. Why else would you have come? So just be done with it. Kill me. Do it now. Do it quickly.”

  Vom and the shadow-man did nothing. Their indifference turned her fear into rage, and she stood to confront them. Tearing her new dress away from her neck, she exposed the flesh above her breast to Vom. “Do it!” she shouted. “Kill me, same as him! Why hesitate? Just pry that sword out and finish it! What is the matter? Are you a coward?”

  Madness filled her. She shouted and wept, raged and spat. She swung her fists at Vom, but he pushed her to the floor. She dared not touch the shadow-man, but after cursing him a hundred times she feared him far less, ghost or not. Her flesh caught fire with her fury, and her tears streaked like hot rivers down her scarlet cheeks. “Why?” she screamed again and again. “Why destroy Graehelm? Who are you? What do want from me?”

  And then, when her voice failed her and she could rage no more, she retreated to the bottom stair and shrank against it. The shadow-man came to her and held his ghostly lantern above her. “Grae girl,” his voice entered her mind again, though his lips moved none. “I am Revenen. I come from Malog. I have answers for you. Follow and you will learn everything.”

  “No! Never!” she spat at him.

  Revenen kneeled before her. The cold sloughing from his wasted hands washed over her. Her terror returned tenfold, and her anger fled. Try though she did, she could not help but gaze into his lantern. Beautiful, so beautiful, she thought. Like water flowing at night. Like a lonely star in an empty sky.

  No, do not look at it. It is drinking you. Look away. But no…

  Too beautiful.

  Breath by breath, the lantern’s light unraveled her horror and undid her will to resist. The longer she stared, the more smitten she became. It felt like death, peaceful and painless, washing away all her worldly pain.

  “Will you join us?” Revenen’s voice invaded her.

  “No…I…I cannot. Go away. Leave me be.”

  “And yet you desire to follow me. You have nothing else to live for.”

  “Kill me. Else I will kill myself.”

  “You will not.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I see your heart. I know what you wish. Yield, and I will take you to Malog. You will see what you are made of, and you will understand why you are here.”

  She tried so hard to fight it, but the lantern’s light invaded her. She opened her mouth, meaning to curse her tormentors again, but the sounds that came out betrayed her. “Please,” she wept. “Take me away from here.”

  “You will not fight any longer?”

  “No. I yield. Please…just…please…”

  They took her.

  Vom snared her arm, and she staggered beside him. With her acquiescence, Revenen’s lantern blazed brighter and colder than a full moon on a cloudless eve, lighting the way for lack of any other light. They led her through three doors, across a shadowed street, and beneath an archway she did not remember. When Vom hauled her atop a horse whose haunches were rotted and whose teeth showed through its wasted flesh, she did not fight, but swayed in the saddle like a blade of breeze-blown grass. It was midmorning, but the sky looked twilit. She could not help herself. The darkness called to her.

  Her two captors shared a brief exchange. They spoke in Furyon, casting aside the other tongue they had used. She did not wonder what they said. Her curiosity was quenched, and her eyes as empty as urns whose ashes had long ago been spilled. Vom departed, tearing off on his horse, but Revenen remained. He climbed atop the cadaverous steed and sat in the saddle behind her. She felt limp as he drew her close with his frozen fingers. She felt the cold of him through his cloak, penetrating her. The light of his lantern still burned in her eyes, and the voices in her mind were stronger now than ever.

  He took her away from Morellellus, spiriting her into the nameless fields north of the city. The sea fell swiftly behind her. The dark city soon vanished. For many hours beyond, Revenen’s beast galloped tirelessly, its fractured hooves churning the loam twice as fast as any horse she had known. Listless, her heart defeated, she sat in the saddle for hour after miserable hour.

  Come dusk, Revenen took her off the road and into the Furyon wilderness, where men of good sense never roamed. He journeyed with her through the night, through rain and fog and cities half-drowned, and she never thought to sleep. The magnificence of the starlit countryside beyond Morellellus was lost to her, its beauty invisible beneath the shadows, its people hidden.

  When finally some small consciousness returned to her, she found herself riding beneath the next dawn, and she wondered where the time had gone. So peaceful. So swift, she came to believe. I have always been meant to take this journey. I must not resist.

  The next days went swiftly.

  Rests were few and far between. His claws always clutching her, his ghostly touch invasively intimate, Revenen sped her toward Malog. There were no fair sights on the way, not in her broken gaze. She saw cities with most of their lights snuffed and spiraling black towers lording over piteously poor shantytowns. She glimpsed grazing lands half-submerged, riverbanks flooded, and dead livestock floating in pools of ghoulishly grey water. She wondered if any of it was real, or whether I dream it.

  It was not until the fifth day Revenen let her truly rest. At noon of a day even gloomier tha
n the others, he took her into the lowest chamber of an old, long-forgotten tower. “Tressal,” his voice echoed in her skull. “Once a library in the keeping of Furyon’s first Emperor. Now abandoned.”

  “Tressal,” she repeated unthinkingly. “We will sleep here?”

  “Yes. You will.”

  In the hollow, lifeless chambers below Tressal, only the barest hint of grey sunlight dared enter. She sat in the shadows, crunching on old bread and sipping the cold, tasteless soup Revenen had ordered her to steal from an abandoned wagon. The wraith-man stood silent as she ate, a ghostly statue fixed in the corner of the room. She knew she should be horrified, but she lacked the feeling for it. Then the darkness came, and with it sleep. She drowsed on the bare stone floor, dreaming of the dark voices from the sky, the violet fire in Revenen’s lantern, and of horrors unmentionable. The visions were no longer dreadful. The taste of the shadows had turned to her liking, and the darkness become light.

  When she woke, she felt her sadness slipping away, her terrors replaced by the yearning to know what awaited her in Malog. I betray myself, she understood. But I am meant to. Forgive me…

  He took her away from Tressal. In silence, she assumed her position atop his deathly steed and watched Furyon fly past. The days and nights blended together. By her eighth eve away from Morellellus, the weather was as dismal as any she had ever experienced. The mornings were dark and torn ragged by rain, and the nights so profoundly black she could barely see her hands in front of her face. The thunder boomed ceaselessly in her ears. The clouds, black and billowing, conquered everything. The road was so rain-pummeled even the monstrous horse slowed to a slog, its hooves rending the muck to tatters. Even then, even with her clothes sagging from her skin and her hair slicked like red fire across her face, she was not afraid. The gloom seemed a friend anymore, and the sun a forgotten foe. She spoke none with her captor, for she was his thrall, and he needed only to gesture for her to follow.

  At last, on the ninth eve of riding, she crossed into the barren lands surrounding Malog.

  As she rode at midnight on a nameless path, Revenen snuffed his evil lantern and raised a skeletal finger toward the distance. She saw a wasteland drowned beneath a lake of rainwater. Slithering atop the lake she saw a road, a treacherous stone highway undulating like a serpent across the water and toward the dark horizon. I should be afraid, she thought. I should smash the lamp in his face and flee. I should leap from the horse and swim for my life. But she did nothing. It was not fear that bid her remain peaceful, but the need to know what was next.

  She rode and rode and rode. Her body never hurt, no matter the endless hours in the saddle. She did not know the place she came to. The road wound across the lake, and the stagnant grey water forbade any hope of escape. Whenever the lightning flashed, she saw a chain of cities in the distance, a ring circling all sides of the lake save the south. In her eyes, the cities looked like a grand mirage, a halo of grey towers and fortresses, a seamless, inescapable prison. The towers must be two hundred stories high, she believed. Look how they pierce the clouds. Look how beautiful.

  And then at last, she came to Malog.

  With the wraith-man’s arm wrapped like a gnarled tree root about her waist, she looked to the heavens and her gaze was lost, for what lay before her was like nothing she had ever imagined. Rising up like a colossal boil from the stark emptiness of the Furyon plain, the obsidian tower of Malog seemed not a tower at all, but rather a mountain, a fortress of stone challenging the boundaries of the sky for dominance of the world. From the look of it, entire cities could be housed within its bulbous, ebon walls. It seemed to be graven of a single piece of rock, for there were no joints apparent anywhere upon its shell. Thousands of tiny windows dotted it from top to bottom, peering like eyes over the wastes below. Malog, sky-injurer and shadow-caster, seemed at once impossible and unfathomable, a creation she knew no man could claim to have made. She was but an insect, and Malog her god.

  After allowing a long moment for her to take in the black citadel, Revenen ushered the horse to continue. The beast took her to the most massive of Malog’s gates, two obsidian doors wide enough for a hundred men abreast to enter. When she came within a fifty paces, Revenen reached for the reins and halted the horse again. “Malog,” he uttered the first true sound she had ever heard from him. “Home.”

  She gaped. Her mouth fell open. Her flesh trembled. The obsidian citadel, larger than all the fortresses of men combined, was as hideous as it was massive. The jagged towers jutting from its corpulent mass were anything but graceful, while its body looked as though it were hewn from the belly of the world’s most massive mountain, some place where the sun had never shined.

  “Who built it?” Her question was but a whisper.

  “They who came before us.” Revenen’s voice wormed its way back into her skull. “They who came from darkness.”

  “It must have taken centuries.”

  He took her closer. She felt her blood course like icy rivers through her veins, her body betraying her. Whatever stirred inside the fortress called to her, bending her to become its disciple. Unable to stand it a moment longer, she leapt from the saddle and ran toward the gates. She imagined Revenen was smiling behind her, and she was right. Revenen flicked his palm, and the gates opened, grinding on ancient, hidden gears.

  Into the darkness she wandered. No living thing greeted her, neither Furyon guard nor creature of the night. Revenen joined her and the gates groaned shut behind her, the darkness overwhelming. “How is this possible?” she asked. “Why am I here?”

  “You will see. Patience, child of Archithrope.”

  Revenen stoked his lantern back to life. His horse was gone, abandoned beyond the door. “This way.” He beckoned her, his ragged raiment dragging on the smooth obsidian floor. “We are almost to it.”

  Deep into the darkness she followed him without question. The first room beyond the gate felt large enough to house several cities. She saw no ceiling, only serpentine pillars of obsidian vaulting up into the darkness. She glimpsed doors now and then, vast portals beyond which only blackness existed. “What lived here?” she wondered aloud. “Were they giants? What were they like?”

  Revenen said nothing. He led her across Malog’s central hall, his footfalls silent before her. There were no lights here, no other living things, only the feeling of eyes studying her from every shadow. With every step, she felt her imagination swell inside her. She envisioned the glory of the thing at Malog’s bottom, the Object she felt calling for her. I know it is here, she thought. It hurts. But it feels so…good.

  Thousands of steps later, she trailed Revenen down a stair, and was struck by a gruesome odor, the smell of death.

  She came to the cavern of the Orb.

  “Welcome, child,” she heard his voice within her. “You are one of very few to enter this place. Kneel, and be worshipful.”

  In the largest cavern of Malog, Revenen flicked his spectral wrist and awakened thousands of violet candles. There she saw it, the Object of the Furyons. It lay at the edge of the candles’ light, and when her gaze fell upon it, the last vestiges of hope and goodness were driven from her heart. The Orb of Souls, the prime power of Archithrope, sat before her, a dark star in a chamber too vast for her to see the ends of. This is what called me, she knew. It is alive. I hear it calling my name.

  Standing at twenty times her height, the great globe of shining obsidian gazed down upon her from afar. It lay in its seat like the ocular seed of some grand, infernal beast, pulsing like a heart, taking hold of her senses. The black sphere was ensconced upon a ring of dark stone from which six spokes of Dageni steel curved cruelly upward. The spokes seemed to invite her, wanting her to impale herself upon their daggerlike ends. She wondered how many men had died upon them.

  I am yours, she told the Orb. Please…I always have been. Do with me as you will.

  She did not kneel before the nightmare relic as Revenen asked, but descended the stairs to better see that
which had claimed her. She felt death smoldering from the Orb’s cursed shell, but she did not quail. She saw the remnants of thousands of murdered men and women, a graveyard of bones surrounding the Orb on all sides, but she never shivered. She was wholly turned against herself, for instead of disgust she felt wonder, and instead of fear she felt awe.

  “This is what called me here.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many dead are there?”

  “More than we have bothered to count.”

  “Am I to become a jumble of bones like the rest?”

  “No. You are of the old blood. You possess the fire. Master it, and you might be queen. The Emperor will take your hallowed hand, and you shall become his bride.”

  Queen, she thought as she walked helplessly toward the Orb. She walked paths between mountains of bones and stood alone in the black sphere’s shadow, studying it, marveling at it as though it were a child born of her womb. The language of Archithrope scrolled across its surface. The twisted symbols of the world’s oldest tongue seemed at first a mystery to her, and yet when she looked closer, she found that some of them made sense. Power, one read. Immortality, writhed another. Sacrifice. Invincibility. Ambition. Annihilation.

  Carved as if by fire into her mind, the symbols whispered to her, telling of the unspeakable power she might wield if she were so inclined to learn. It all makes sense now. She wandered close enough to touch the thing. Their storm, their weapons, their utter coldness to the world, all of it comes from this.

  And then she came to it. She traced her fingers upon the Orb’s surface, and the final change washed over her. The crimson color of her hair drained away and became black as pitch. The soft, leafy-green of her eyes faded to grey steel. After a few heartbeats, the best parts of her began to die. Rellen, Garrett, and Saul were stripped from her heart and replaced with memories that were not hers, horrors that would undo the mind of a lesser creature. She was not Andelusia anymore. She was a child of Archithrope, a fledging of darkness, a slave to a power beyond her reckoning.