What she had found, she did not know, but the room was as grand as any save the cavern of the Orb. Fifty men, stacked one atop the other, could not have touched its ceiling. A city could fit in here, she thought. No. Ten cities.
She drifted deep into the room, her robes trailing her like a wraith’s tattered flesh. She glimpsed thousands of unlit chandeliers hanging from the great darkness above, their chains like the web of some vast, world-eating arachnid. The floor was wounded with scores of shallow pits, all of them covered with iron grates and filled to their brims with ash. Scraps of shapeless metal lay strewn across the floor, some of them big enough to make swords from, others huge enough to carve buildings from. She went deeper still. She danced like a firefly to what she imagined was the center of the room, where an unthinkable variety of weapons hung from an uncountable number of racks. She glided between them, brushing the items with her fingertips. All these swords and spears. But our armies are already armed to the teeth. Who are these for? There must be millions…
A while longer of wandering, and her curiosity dwindled. Master will wonder where I am, she fretted. I can come back another time. And I will.
Skittering, she made her way toward a gaping oculus in the wall serving as one of the room’s thousand exits. This will have to do. I seem to have lost the other way in. As she neared it, she thought she heard voices whispering beyond it. They came from nowhere and everywhere, echoing inside her skull the same as in her dreams. The Orb? Or something else? The voices grew stronger when she floated out the door, and though she tried, she failed to grasp what they told her.
The passage outside the forge chamber was nocturnal, darker than a starless midnight. She was fortunate to need no light. She continued downward, tunnel after tunnel falling behind her, the whispers in her mind growing ever more powerful. At some point, she realized she was not entirely alone. The caverns higher in the citadel had been empty, but as she wandered lower, she began to see things moving in the shadows. Every time she passed a chamber, she peered inside, but instead of emptiness she glimpsed ghoulish forms ambling in the darkness. Their eyes were white, the color of moons, and their bodies insubstantial as mist. Not ghosts. Something else. She shivered each time one of them looked her way. Like the ghosts of ghosts. Images of dead things that were never human.
In time, the shadows fell behind her. The whispers bid her turn this way and that, and she came as if by accident to the stairs leading down into the Orb cavern. She knew the place at a glance. The floors were shinier here, and the twisted columns of obsidian rising to a ceiling much too high to see. She halted at the top of stairs, not at all tired from her trek. Only a thousand steps below, she glimpsed the Orb gazing up at her. It pulsed like a dying star in the void. It stared through her, desiring her, making her body tingle in places long forgotten. I found you, she exulted. Master will love me for it.
But when she set her foot on the top stair, her gaze fell to the space below the Orb, and her heart leapt into her throat.
Of the hundreds of captives she had seen entering the citadel not three hours ago, none now lived. Lips parted, eyes wide and black, she saw their drained and withered corpses scattered across the cavern floor, tangled in grim tribute to the Orb. They were far away, yet she was able to see their wounds. Some of them were split open from chin to pelvis, their broken ribs jutting up like knives. Others were horrifyingly mangled, their bodies twisted like fleshly ropes, every bone turned to powder. Still others were all but melted, their skins turned black and sprinkled in little piles of dust upon the floor. Her throat filled with bile. She felt a twinge in her gut, a sudden snap of pain. Some small part of her sensed the wrongness of what she had stumbled on. No Fury did this, she mouthed the words on lips gone pale with horror. The Orb did it. It…ate them. Look at their eyes. Empty sockets, all of them. Like their souls were sucked out. So this is what Master meant.
The living sacrificed.
To make way for the dead.
Still quivering, she looked to the bottom of the stairs. She saw Vom, her Master’s favorite, standing amidst some twenty Furyon knights. She wished he were not here. She remembered him from Morellellus, standing over Arjobec’s body. She knew him from her dreams as well, nightmares in which he bound her to his black table, minced her flesh with his sword, and violated her with his blade set against her throat. She hated Vom. He was swathed in stark grey robes, but beneath she saw his armor, jet and form-fitting, not tined like all the other Furyons’. And his sword. She frowned at the scabbard on his waist. Same as in my dreams. Something powerful in that thing. It has not killed dozens, but thousands.
She almost turned back then. This was supposed to be her time, when Revenen tutored her alone. I am the one, not Vom. She backed away. He should not be here.
But even as she began to retreat, she heard Revenen’s voice reach out and take hold of her mind. She glimpsed her Master at the bottom of the stairs, gliding like a ghost between the Furyons. He peered up at her with lifeless eyes, holding out his arms as if to welcome her into the sea of sacrifice.
“Come.” She heard his voice thunder inside her skull.
“Yes, Master.”
She pushed back the strands of ebon hair sticking to her cheek and slunk down the stairs. Everything felt quiet here, even the Orb, whose hunger she sensed had been temporarily sated. The instant her feet touched the cavern floor, the Furyon soldiers climbed up and out of the cavern, leaving her alone with Vom and Revenen. Tentative, she drifted like a snowflake to their sides.
“Welcome, my child.” Revenen spoke aloud.
“Thank you.” She smiled for him, but shot Vom a glance brimming with contempt.
“Did you see?” Revenen asked. He gestured with one skeletal hand toward the Orb, in whose shadow a new object lay. “These poor creatures died today. And in their deaths, we have completed our most powerful relic yet.”
She looked beyond him. There in the dark, she gazed upon the Furyons’ creation. The great horn, tall as three men and fashioned of blackened iron and beaten gold, lurked before the Orb. The massive instrument was flawless in a very Furyon way. Its coils were like a snake’s, if ever one so huge existed, and its mouthpiece made of hollowed bone. Revenen had hinted to her about those who made it. ‘Those who live even lower in the citadel,’ she remembered him saying. ‘Tyberians without names, who have no bodies anymore.’
The horn was almost a beautiful thing, but she knew it was not built for its grace. It was meant to be Graehelm’s destroyer, a weapon designed to slay all who might hear its evil wailing, the last dagger in the heart of a doomed nation. Though who exactly the Grae are, he never told me.
“May I go closer?” she asked.
“Yes.” Revenen’s half-face seemed to smile. “But do not touch it.”
She approached, sidling through the carnage of the dead. She felt only the barest remorse for the slaughtered slaves, though as she walked among their broken bodies she dared not look into any of their hollowed sockets. They died for a purpose, she convinced herself, but shivered when she did. Master knows what is right. If the Grae must be destroyed, a few hundred deaths seem a small price.
Violet candles blazed all around her, burning on the bloody floor, shining atop scattered obsidian boulders, and some even smoldering inside the skulls of the dead. She came to the horn, whose polished convolutions made a thousand mirrors in which she saw slivers of her face. For a reason she did not know, she did not want to see herself. She felt dirty, meek, and unworthy.
Alone before the horn, she shut her eyes. A weapon. A storm. A war. The sun forever setting. Many images spun inside her mind. She tried to imagine exactly what would happen when the Furyons blew the horn in the presence of their foes. Our ascent to the stars? The end of everything? Our return to glory?
“What do you think?” Revenen’s voice slid into her thoughts.
“Beautiful,” she whispered. “Perfect.”
She blinked, and Revenen appeared beside her. The way her M
aster shadow-walked made her shiver, and not always in a pleasurable way. She felt the cold sloughing from his skin envelop her, and the gentle swipe of his dead fingers across her shoulders made her knees go weak.
“You are what is perfect, child,” he said inside her mind. “Whoever your father was, his blood was as pure as mine own. You are Tyberian. In time, you might be Queen.”
“Of Furyon?”
“Furyon is nothing, only a few lines graven on a map. You could be Queen of everything, of the living and the dead and all things in-between.”
Trembling, she faced the Orb again. “Our power comes from it?”
“It, and others like it.”
“There are more Orbs?”
“More Objects. None of them the same.”
“When will the horn—”
“…go to Graehelm?” He snatched her thought away. “Soon. And others like it to Elrain, Romaldar, Thillria, and beyond.”
“Everywhere? What will we do when no one is left to feed the Orb?”
Revenen’s eyes were level with hers, but he seemed so much taller, a dark tower lording over the fertile field of her mind. “We shall do as we please,” he told her. “What else? There are other worlds, other places we might inhabit. In time, all of it will be ours. We shall be limitless.”
“Oh.” She felt foolish saying it.
He faced her, and the cold stars serving as his eyes consumed her. “Today’s lesson shall be different than the others,” he said aloud.
“But Vom—”
“…is already gone.”
She had not heard him leave. She glanced back to the stairs, and was happy to see no one remained. “He is quieter than me. I thought no one could be.”
“Like you, he is Tyberian. Five years your elder, and his training goes well. And yet his limitations are far greater than yours.”
He is like me? She wondered. Are we brother and sister? No, surely not. I hate him. I am here for me and only me.
“Yes.” Revenen stripped her thought out. “You are here for you. Today’s lesson is no cantrip or darkling spell, my child. Today we learn of history.”
“Tell me,” she begged. “Please…”
He wrapped his ghoulish fingers around her upper arm and directed her away from the horn. The sting of his coldness bit down to her bones, wounding her in a way she dared not express. She made no sound, but stilled her mind to endure the pain. He led her in a slow circle around the Orb, on all sides surrounded by the dead. The slaves murdered today seemed nothing compared to the larger sea of bones, which rose up in vast heaps around her, each pale pile like a mountain.
“The Orb was not made by man, nor by any mortal race,” Revenen explained once he had taken her to its far side.
I knew as much, she thought. “Who then?”
“Those who came before us. Those who sleep. They were the Ur, and they came long before us. They made the Orb and many others like it, though this is the most powerful.”
“Why did they do it?”
Revenen seemed to smile, his half-mouth dripping tatters of ethereal saliva. “Every empire must end, my princess. They who came before us made the Orb when their time was at an end. They were finished here, finished with the simple tasks of creating the stars, the earth, and the seas. They made the Objects so they might return, come the right time.”
“Return?”
“Yes,” he hissed. “Return through us. When enough of us have died, when enough have crossed into the Nether, the Ur shall return and grant the survivors what was theirs.”
A reward, she guessed. For aiding them. “It seems gracious of them, Master. But if they are destroyers, and if the Objects are made for the purpose of death, how can we know their intentions?”
Revenen seemed not to like the question. He glowered at her, and she shrank. “Soon enough you will understand,” he promised. “Come the end of man’s dominion, you and I will tread the night as god and goddess, and you will need no more answers from me.”
But she still had questions, so many questions. She might have asked them had not Vom reappeared at the top of the stairs. She heard his boots making grim music as they clapped against the obsidian, and she shivered involuntarily as he descended the stairs and halted twenty steps away. He looked like a shadow the way he moved between the mountains of bones. She wondered if she looked the same.
Vom’s gaze fell upon her, sharp as a sword against her neck, but his words were for Revenen. “We have guests, it seems,” he said in his damnably sinister voice.
“Yes,” answered Revenen. “They are early.”
“How shall we manage them?”
“Let them in.” Revenen folded his fleshless fingers together.
“Let them in?”
“Yes.” Her Master’s eyes smoldered white, which she took to mean he was pleased. “I invited them, after all.”
Damsel of Darkness
I will only stay a moment. Just long enough to see our guests across the threshold, Andelusia promised herself as she set her naked feet on the topmost stair.
Only a few hundred heartbeats ago, Revenen had commanded Vom to open the gates, and me to return to my room. She supposed it was dangerous to disobey, but reckoned her Master would not mind so long as she did not interfere. Willful, she slipped out into the grand vestibule beyond the Orb chamber. The way to her room laid not twenty steps away, where the shadows were thick as storm clouds. A glance in its direction, and her lips curled in a wicked smile.
One moment.
It cannot hurt.
I only want to watch.
The grand vestibule was like no other chamber in the citadel. At least two thousand steps long and many hundred wide, its floors and walls were polished to an unearthly shine, and its ceiling was like the open sky at night, vast and starless. Massive columns of ebony glass paralleled its walls, some hundred on each side, their twisted tops vanishing somewhere in the all-consuming darkness above. She used the columns to hide behind, darting from one to the next, trailing Vom as he made his way toward the citadel’s main gate. Lights were scarce here, only a few lavender lanterns hanging from the darkness via chains as thin as her wrists. The pools of violet light made her shiver whenever she slipped through, and yet it seemed they never touched her skin, for her body cast no shadows. If Vom heard or saw her, he gave no sign. She pretended she was invisible, and perhaps her imaginings were not so far from the truth.
When the great gates finally came into view, she crouched behind a column far from any lantern. If she breathed any longer, she could not feel it. Just watch and listen, she told herself. And be unseen.
The massive, misshapen gate possessed no guards. Vom stalked alone toward it, his fingers tight around his sword pommel. From somewhere in the darkness, she heard a noise. A shout? She wondered. Or was it thunder?
Whatever disturbed the silence came from the gate’s other side. When she heard it again, she deduced it was a knock, though it sounded more like a storm crashing than a noise a few knuckles could make. Vom stood in place, stiff as a dagger. She held her breath as a rending noise shook the world, a great, all-consuming groan, and her body went rigid as the gates began to churn open. The pallid light of the living world invaded the gloom. She heard the sound of the rain tearing at the earth, and caught flashes of lightning flaring. She heard a voice, speaking first in the Furyon tongue and then in the hollow tongue of Archithrope. It was Vom, challenging some number of persons she could not see.
“Who are you?” Vom hissed in Archithropian.
“Doom,” replied an unseen man.
“My Master tells me he invited you, but I think not. How did you come to be here?”
“It shouldn’t matter to you,” said the man. “Be gone, else they’ll need a spade to scrape your remains from the floor.”
“You boast.”
“Never in my life.”
Vom stepped backward. Five men entered: four Furyon knights and another, narrower man bundled in a tattered, rain-satur
ated robe. It was the little one whose shrouded visage she could not pry her gaze away from. His eyes, shining beneath his hood like Master’s, only…greener.
And look, Vom is afraid.
Vom spat a few more curses before retreating toward the Orb chamber. The five men took some twenty steps into the citadel, then halted all in unison. They drew their weapons, and for a half-breath she feared they had seen her. But no, she knew when they looked away. They were not looking so much as listening. I hear it too, she thought of the noises emerging above and behind her. What is that?
And then she saw the horrors.
A crack of cartilage, the dry scrape of raw bone against hard obsidian, and she glimpsed the citadel’s guardians. Revenen told me, she thought, but I did not believe him. The wretched things burst forth like locusts from tunnels she had not noticed, clicking and shuffling out of a hundred hiding places in the walls. Bones…she shrank against the column. Walking bones.
In ranks of ten and twenty the abominations emerged, black-boned cadavers sheathed in rotting armor. They were the carcasses of men, animated by the Orb. Several had four arms sewn into their shoulders, others six. In their grasps hung wicked swords, two-tined spears, and long daggers, every edge glistening black. Some hundred of them closed in around the five strangers, hissing as they came. When she realized they meant to kill the men and not her, she peeled herself from one column and skittered to another, where her vantage was better. The guardians’ grinning skulls massed, and her blood began to pound in her veins. The coming battle was exactly what she had hoped for. Fight for your lives, she laughed silently at the men. It will not matter. Master’s minions will have you.
The guardians fell upon the five. The armored men made a ring around the robed one, protecting him from the hacks and stabs of their skeletal foes with Dageni blades of their own. She tasted the tang of cold metal in the air. She heard swords crashing and sinew tearing, and witnessed black bones sailing through the air. Ten guardians, legs and arms severed, collapsed into jumbles of shattered bones, but twenty more filed in just as quickly. Their sockets burned with white lights like candles. Their black teeth smiled as though they were still alive. The morning’s entertainment. One of Master’s lessons, she believed. This will not last long. There are too many.
Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1) Page 74