He changed his mind and climbed to the tower’s top. Ropes of rainwater leaked down upon him, and his boots clapped loudly against the stairs. No guards. No traps. Nothing. He reached the door and stopped dead before it. As though afraid of what it might conceal, he grazed it with his fingertips. It was wrought of the coldest iron, with no sounds echoing beyond. Gingerly, he began to unthread the chains someone had used to prevent the door from being opened. His heart pounded beneath his ribs. He loosed the last strand of chain and looked at his hands, red with blood and orange with rust. His dagger at the ready, he pulled at the door. The hinges cracked the quiet with an awful groan.
The light beyond the door was dim, but still brighter than elsewhere in the house. He saw a round room, stone-walled and barren. Three windows, barred with black iron, allowed enough daylight inside to carve away most of the gloom. A single step beyond the door, and he knew something was amiss. The floor was stained with old blood, and the scent of death nearly gagged him. His gaze fell upon the far wall, where two figures sulked in the shadows. One was crumpled upon the floor, motionless and grey, while the other sat with his arms hanging over his knees.
“Father?” He hoped against hope.
The seated figure, his face concealed by the shadows, lifted his head. “I’m no one’s father, not yet anyway. More’s the pity.”
He dared two steps inward, keeping his dagger close. “Who are you then? I have questions. Your freedom for your answers.”
“You would let me go?”
“Perhaps. First answer me this; have you seen or heard from Councilor Emun Gryphon or King Jacob Nurė? These men are important. I need to find them, and quickly.”
The prisoner peeled himself from the floor and limped toward him like a wounded dog. He raised the Furyon needle to deliver a quick death, but when he saw the prisoner’s face, he lowered it. “Yorian?” he said in utter disbelief.
“Crows take my soul,” Yorian replied. “Is it you, Rellen?”
To see Yorian was a shock he had never expected. The lad of some twenty years had been a soldier in Marlos’s service, and was among those wounded during Nentham’s attack in the northern bogs. Yorian had been newly knighted when Rellen had last seen him, fresh and full of fire, but imprisonment had not served him well. Gone were his armor, sword, and Gryphon tabard, all replaced by filthy, bloodstained rags. Bruised, thin, and unshaven, the young knight wavered where he stood.
He dropped his dagger and steadied Yorian before he collapsed. “How are you here?”
Yorian looked paler than death, his arms as skinny as the bars on the windows, but still he mustered a smile. “Rellen, so good to see you. What took you so long?”
“I came as soon as I could.” He lowered the lad to the floor and knelt beside him. “There’ve been many troubles since we last talked. How long have you been here? Are you hurt? What’ve they done to you?”
Yorian managed a second smile. “Only a few weeks. Thracic’s spearmen failed to kill me, so why should a tower? The other one got it worse, you can see. Look at him, dead as yesterday’s dinner. But he wasn’t one of us, and more’s the better for that. All I need to live is food, blessed food. For the last two nights, they gave me nothing.”
“You’ll have food. But first explain; how are you here of all places? What of your brothers?”
Yorian’s face was ashen, his eyes filled with suffering. “It all started after you sent us home. We did just like you and Marlos told us to. But Nentham, he had men everywhere. We never saw the lot that swept down on us. Everyone but me and Magun escaped, and Magun…well…they weren’t so kind to him. What’s worse is that Nentham has an army of his own. They keep moving me from place to place, but I hear things. House Thure means to start a war, m’lord, and soon.”
He swallowed hard. “I know. I heard. What of Mormist? Have they leaked anything about the war?”
Yorian nodded. “Aye. I heard plenty about that. Nentham’s been spreading lies, Rellen. He tells everyone you and yours are dead. He tells some folks Verod has fallen, but I heard otherwise when they threw me in the city dungeons. Some of the guards have kin in the Dales. They say the rains have stopped, but that the dark men have yet to attack.”
Verod still stands? He felt a slight swell of hope. “The castle…” he said. “The Furies will lay siege, and Nentham’s army will be waiting for our men when they flee.”
Yorian grimaced. “M’lord Rellen, if the war’s still on, why are you here? Shouldn’t you be at battle? I thank you for saving me, but—”
“Things have become complex,” he interrupted. “Triaxe and Barrok are lost, Nentham has betrayed us, and the Furies seem to be sorcerers. More importantly, Father and Jacob have gone missing. I hoped to find them here. I’m a fool, I know. You needn’t remind me.”
Yorian smiled yet again, this time broader than ever. “M’lord, you’re no fool. The guards…three days ago…they talked too much. The stars shine upon House Gryphon. Lord Emun and the King are here.”
He felt his heart leap into his throat. “Here? Where? Say it, Yorian! Where are they?”
“Down.”
“Down?”
“In Thure’s dungeon,” Yorian shuddered. “This house is only half pretty. Below the stairs, where the sun never shines, there’re cells full of bones and machines meant for truth-gleaning. They kept me down there for a few days, but moved me out because of the latest prisoners. They want no one else alive to hear what happens.”
Heart beating madly, he leapt to his feet. He wished for Lorsmir’s sword, for Garrett, for a whole host of Gryphon men, but two daggers and Yorian were all that lay before him. “Yorian, can you walk?” He stuck out his hand.
“I think so.” The young knight rose on wobbly legs.
“Here.” He offered his waterskin. “Drink. And take this, too.” He gave Yorian his ordinary dagger, keeping the Furyon stiletto for himself.
After Yorian drained the skin dry, he patted the young knight on the shoulder and gazed down at him. “You know what we have to do,” he said.
No matter his many wounds, Yorian arose. He was every bit a knight of Gryphon, and Rellen liked him all the greater for it. “Aye,” said the lad, his gaze full of vengeance. “Let’s be done with it. Let’s find your father and leave this place for the crows.”
The Bottom
Rellen’s hands were wet again, though not with rain. Streams of scarlet dripped from his borrowed Furyon needle, and the bottoms of his sleeves felt sticky and warm. “Not the same as during battle,” he told Yorian as he rose from the corpse of a Mooreye sentry. “Before today, I never killed a man who didn’t look me in the eyes. And now I’ve taken five.”
“You did what you needed to.” Yorian stood in the shadows, gaunt as a ghost. “If you had not, it’d be our blood on the floor.”
He wiped the black blade clean and claimed the fallen guard’s sword for his own. Blood from the armored goliath at Nentham’s front door mingled with that of the guard who had surprised him on the dungeon stair. The smell of it on his sleeves and boots turned his stomach. “Father will have to forgive me,” he said. “I doubt I’ll ever sleep right again.”
In Nentham Thure’s dungeon, little lived.
The only sounds were water dripping and rats skittering in places unseen. A fine place for suffering, he reckoned. Just like I imagined. After slaying the axe-wielding goliath at the mansion’s front door, he and Yorian had come to the haunted hallway beneath the grand stair, and then to the door beyond, and then to the darkness.
The dungeon ran deep below the earth, he knew. He stood at its entrance, spying three rotten-walled passages. The dark arteries curled into the blackness, each one seeming to go on forever, each one reeking of death. The spiked iron door lay open at his back, and the cooling corpse of the sentry looked like a jumble of bones at his feet. He hated to be here, and yet something inside him told this was the place, and no other,
“Sounds like no one else is home,” said Yorian.
“The guard was down here for a reason.” He plucked a torch from its sconce. “These tunnels run deep. Could be an army down here.”
He chose the center passage. Yorian followed. Even with his torch held high, he took but a few steps before the darkness consumed everything around him, devouring the ceiling and walls, sheathing the floor in shadows. He trod carefully forth, hopping over rubbish, pooled water, and piles of old bones. He glimpsed darkened doorways, dead-ends, and empty cells with chains hanging from their tops. Why here, beneath his own house? He used his torch to burn away strand after strand of cobwebs. How does the man sleep at night?
Far though he walked to the ends of the center passage, he found no signs of Jacob or his father. If any prisoners had ever been kept in the center passage, they were long gone. Some six-hundred steps down, the empty corridor came to a sudden end, packed earth and stacks of skulls marking where further passage was impossible.
“Try another way?” Yorian shivered.
His torch spat a gout of embers on the floor. “We’ve no choice.”
He and Yorian backtracked to the dungeon entrance. It was a grim return, for the first thing he saw upon returning was the Mooreye man’s corpse. The fool had never expected the dungeon door to open, and had not even drawn his sword before Rellen’s dagger had found his throat.
“Right or left?” asked Yorian.
A swish of his torch, a grimace in both directions, and he motioned toward the passage on the left. “This way. The air feels warmer down here.”
But the air was not truly warmer. He chose the left passage because it meant he did not have to step over the Mooreye man’s body again. In morbid silence, he slunk through the shadows. The deeper he went, the more cells with rusted bars and cages full of bones he saw, and the colder his blood felt. The smells in the left passage were fetid. The stink of wet earth and moldering foodstuff crawled up his nose like worms burrowing.
And then, after some hundred steps more, he saw a light flickering in the distance. Like a candle whipped by the breeze, the fragile red glow wavered far down the passage.
“See that?” asked Yorian.
“I do.”
“What now?”
“We keep going.”
“What if there are guards?”
“We kill them.”
He plunged his torch into a shallow puddle. The flame hissed as it died, and the corridor collapsed into darkness. The light’s still there. He stared at the distant flame. Father, can it be you?
Concentrating on the red pinprick, he crept ahead. He felt like a rat scuttling through the underworld, a worm curling in the loam of many graves. He passed empty cells and cages hanging from chains, all devoid of life, several stuffed with the remnants of their former occupants.
Halfway to the light, he saw the corridor ahead did not simply end, but turned sharply to the left. There, flickering like a red eye in an ebon void, a guttering torch sat in a hollow in the wall. He slunk toward the light. Some hundred breaths later, he came to the end of the passage and the beginning of another. The red light braised his skin an eerie hue, and he peered around the corner, listening for whatever might be beyond. Father? He hoped. Jacob?
His heartbeat clattered in his ears like a banging pot, but over its drumming he still heard the movement in the dark. The slow, methodic tap of footsteps upon stone drifted to his ears. Not far beyond the edge of the failing torch’s light, he glimpsed a great room, and in the room, many lanterns blazing.
Yorian caught up to him and crouched in his shadow. “What do you see?”
“A chamber,” he whispered, “and an iron gate. The gate’s open. I see lanterns hanging from chains. There are many cells. They look empty, but it’s hard to tell from here.”
“Anything alive?”
“A guard, neck to shin inside a suit of Fury steel. This must be Nentham’s main prison. The guard must be the warden.”
His fingers fell to the sword he had wrested from the guard at the dungeon’s entrance. Pitiful, he thought of the dull, rusty blade. Dank and Garrett were wrong. I should’ve brought Lorsmir’s blade. With a last look at the short, hundred-notched sword, he glanced back at Yorian.
“What are you thinking?” Yorian peered up at him
“Stay here.” He shouldered the stolen blade. “If I die, run. Try to get back to Gryphon and tell them everything you know.”
“Rellen, I—”
Before the lad could say anything else, he curled around the corner and marched straight toward the iron gate. He heard Yorian hiss at him to return, but shut the knightling’s voice out. Nentham’s prison chamber lay just beyond the gate. Within, he saw some thirty cells lining the outer walls, though few of their contents were visible. The lanterns in the dusty, slate-floored chamber were many. Their lights felt dim in his eyes, their gold and yellow glows turned to hazy crimson by the blood pounding in his head. In the center of it all, he saw the warrior in black pacing. Nentham’s warden was as tall as Garrett, as hulking as Bruced, and locked almost entirely in armor darker than midnight.
He passed through the gate like wind drifting. He moved in silence, like a snake gliding atop still water. I could try to surprise him. He glared at the warden’s back. But the indignity of his previous slayings gnawed at his heart.
He froze, and though he knew himself a fool, he tapped his blade thrice against the chamber’s cold stone wall. “You there,” he called to the warden. “Turn around.”
As soon as he spoke his challenge, he knew the black-armored warrior was not of Graehelm. The dark-haired Furyon whirled about and withdrew a long, thick-bladed monster amongst killing tools from the sheath upon his back. The Furyon’s armor was hundred-tined, but the beast wore no helmet, only a gaze colder than winter. Will you look at that? Rellen sized the huge man up.
I’ve just killed myself.
He and the Furyon locked stares. The knight crooked his neck and gazed at him like supper about to be served. “Is the lord of Gryphon here?” he asked. “What of the King? Nentham put you here to keep them from escaping, no? Must be hard to be a Fury, and yet serve the lowest of Grae lords.”
If the Furyon understood, he showed no sign. The beast hoisted his sword and stalked straight for him. Rellen met him in the middle of the room. The Furyon slashed once at him, missing badly, and then Rellen counterattacked, letting fly a flurry of withering hacks like never in his life. He strove against his enemy like the wind beating at a door. He crashed against him like bright water against a dark shore. Twenty breaths in, he drove the Furyon into retreat, his sword finding its mark many times, the blade screaming against the dark armor like a shower of meteors striking a mountainside. It was a brief advantage, he knew. The sparks erupting when Grae steel met Dageni plate were impressive, but did no real injury.
Dazed, the Furyon stepped outside the battle dance. The beast said many Furyon words. Something about me dying, Rellen guessed. And somewhat else about being surprised I want to fight. The Furyon stalked him, menacing with quick jabs of his sword, gauging death’s distance with every thrust. Rellen dared no more careless attacks. He wandered just outside the black blade’s range, sparring more than fighting.
The ballet continued at length. He and the Furyon studied one another like books, moving about the room like flames snapping in a hearth and searching for kindling to consume. He feinted and teased, but the Furyon slogged forward. The black knight’s eyes were like coals, unblinking and lifeless, and his skin so tight against his bones he looked more like a smiling skeleton than a man. Rellen could not help but wonder of the Furyon realm, and whether all of its people were just as lifeless. “What are you?” he mocked. “If I split your head open, will you still smile?”
The knight hesitated.
Rellen attacked.
The knight’s sword was slower than his, but far from sluggish. It met his second charge, sweeping like a hammer down toward his head, whistling like cold wind through the stale dungeon air. He raised his sword to st
ave off the stroke, and when he did, his small, dull blade shattered and spilled to the floor in fragments.
He felt a fool for pressing the attack. He staggered backward, his hands numb, his forearms ringing with pain. The Furyon came at him again, chasing him from corner to corner, swishing his sword like a reaper’s scythe. The beast has to tire, he thought as he ducked and retreated from some hundred slashes. I can win this.
He counted on the Furyon to slow, to gasp for breath, or to lose himself to rage. But when his silent foe showed no signs of weakness, he was left with no other choice but to hurl objects in the room as weapons. He weaved to and fro in the great prison chamber, flinging chairs, dishes, burning lamps, and even bones, but each object shattered against the Furyon’s armor, useless as rain against the sea. “Should’ve killed you when your back was turned.” He hurled a goblet that clanged against the knight’s breastplate. “I could have, you know. You live only because I’m a fool.”
His last weapon was the Furyon dagger, but it was too short and narrow to be any use against a Dageni greatsword. As he retreated from a flurry of strokes that sundered a table, smashed two lanterns, and left deep gouges in the stone floor, his foot struck a crack. He tumbled. The room swam through his gaze in a blur of broken light and screaming swords. In the blink of an eye, the Furyon was on him. The beast smacked him across the forehead with the pommel of his sword, and then hurled him to the ground as though he were made of straw. His senses were fouled, his brain banging like a bell inside his skull.
Blood running down his forehead in ropes, he crumpled, and his executioner came for him.
Stupid, so stupid, he cursed even in his haze. Could’ve died easier at Verod. And maybe I should have.
As he lay on the floor, he felt no pain, only the sinking of his senses like a cold stone in his gut. Despair wracked him, hollowing out his heart, and the knight’s shadow cast him into such darkness he could see almost nothing. The knight hoisted his sword high into the air, coiling for a final stroke. He tried to roll out of the way, but his muscles disobeyed.
Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1) Page 59