A Lady in Crystal

by Toby Bennett

  “I cannot let that happen,” Ilsar said evenly.

  Akna frowned, he had no compassion of his own to speak of but he felt Ilsar’s compassion and concern resonating through the link between them.

  “I thought you were a professional,” Akna protested.

  “I am what I was made to be, just as you are but these children are not my targets and if they die we will both suffer for it.”

  “Shades and shards,” Akna cursed, “I knew that it wasn’t just this one. You know we cannot save them, bad enough that we have left evidence I was here.”

  “Do I seem to you to be afraid to spill blood? I take no pleasure from harming innocents but that is not my chief concern. Have you worked out what the Cardinal plans to do with these children?”

  “Not exactly but I can guess, he treated us badly enough; the children are not our concern, I won’t go back to his dungeon just to salve the conscience that you have somehow kept.”

  “You think I don’t want to run?” Ilsar all but spat, “had it not been for this child I might have found the strength to be rid of you and then I need not have worried about what might follow her death.”

  “You think I feel either surprise or gratitude?”

  “I know I cannot appeal to that in you but what about self interest?”

  “Explain.”

  Ilsar reached for the child and lifted the tabard that had been draped over her when she had entered the Cardinal’s palace. The cloth was light blue and decorated with fanciful designs in silver thread, Tara was too scared to be upset by the blood on it but normally, it would have broken her heart, it was probably the nicest piece of clothing that she owned and her captors had ruined it.

  “You see this mark? It binds them all to the ritual,” Ilsar said holding up one of the designs hidden in the swirls of silver thread. “Lothar doesn’t just plan to drain them, look out of the window, look down and really look this time.”

  Akna settled the heavy armour on his shoulders, shot his new partner a reproachful look and crossed the room to look out of the window. This time he did not focus on the walls but on the courtyard beneath and as soon as he did, it almost leapt out at him. The streamers and lanterns, candles and murals were not random, though they were not regular either, from his vantage point they came together to form a complex pattern of undeniable design.

  “A ritual?” Akna guessed.

  “Yes and all those children have already become part of it.”

  Distant laughter washed up from the courtyard.

  “Their joy will give the spell almost as much energy as their fear, already each one is feeding the daemon and when he has everything he can take, their blood will help him open a gate.”

  “To where?” The question was pointless, the tension radiating through his bond with Ilsar told him all he needed to know, she answered him anyway.

  “The daemon plans to open the world to his ancient kin.”

  “Varkuz? He really does exist?”

  “I did not lie to the Hierophant, as you no doubt assumed, Varkuz is a minor power, a nothing compared to what waits sleeping in the glittering deeps but his is indeed a daemon, perhaps the last daemon left on this side of the veil.”

  An image flashed in Akna’s mind of the Cardinal, as he had appeared beyond the veil all those years ago. “Lothar is his host.”

  “There have been many over the centuries but now Varkuz and his master Takiaza are reunited. With Takiaza diminished it is uncertain who is master now but it matters little, with Takiaza’s lore and the daemon's power, they will try to wake the daemons from their sleep.”

  “They will need more than just dreams, this time,” Akna whispered to himself, following the faint groves in the courtyard's flagstones, as they spiralled into a carved depression just in front of an altar decorated with rare blossoms. “The children will provide their blood.”

  “It doesn’t matter that you don’t care about the children, if they succeed here, we will not even be able to hide beyond the walls of Niskaar, they will have the power to find us all and take back what we plan to steal, If we are lucky, they will kill us, but even with new infernal servants, it might amuse Varkuz to break us and bring us back to serve.”

  Akna was silent for a moment. “We steal back the crystals first, there is nothing to protect unless we get them.”

  “Agreed.”

  “We cannot save this child though, she will raise the alarm if we let her go and we cannot take her with us.”

  “I’ll not tell,” Tara managed to gasp.

  “She shouldn’t get the chance,” Akna growled, “I’ll not risk everything on the word of a child.”

  Tara flinched, but not because of the danger she saw in the monster’s flat eyes, it was the sudden pain of a thin blade in her neck that shocked her into motion. Almost as soon as she felt the pain in her throat, a darkness began to gather at the corners of Tara’s vision. Not the dimness of the shadows behind the bookshelves but an emptiness an absence of anything that welled up over her vision and dragged her down to the cold stone floor, before she could summon up her frozen voice to scream.

  “The poison on the needle will keep her from waking for several hours, hopefully Varkuz will not feel that, as he might if we killed her or removed his mark.” Tara heard the woman say from some huge distance away.

  “Very well, if this is how you wish it. We shall not come back for her, she will have no chance to flee like the others.”

  “She might have thanked us for blade rather than a needle, if that bastard Lothar finds her.”

  Tara wasn’t sure if the monster just stopped speaking or she had drifted too far to hear only one sensation now reached her from the world she was so rapidly leaving and that was the lukewarm flow of blood from one of the bodies lying next to her, pooling about her head. It was a baptism from which she would awaken sooner than anyone expected.

  Ilsar slid aside a rack of scrolls and stepped into the narrow passageway behind them.

  “I can’t take us to the Cardinal’s private chambers but I can get us past most of the guards.”

  “Unless I miss my guess, it is not guards we will have to be worried about.”

  “Not conventional ones anyway, Lothar has positioned a chimera within the anti-chamber to his crystal room. There is no way to pass without confronting the monster.”

  “It must have some weakness, have you thought of anything?”

  “It was hard enough, even getting to see the creature.”

  “But you have seen it?” Akna asked as they trudged through the gloom of the secret passage.

  “Enough to know that we would have no chance fighting it.”

  “But you must think we have some chance or you would never have decided to join me.”

  “As I recall the decision was taken out of my hands, but yes I do think there might be a way.”

  “How?”

  “The beast is huge and placed in the centre of the ante-chamber, from there one of its three long necks can reach anywhere in the room.”

  “Except?”

  “For all its size and strength I think the creature is divided, great chains ensure that the left and the right head are never in contact with each other.”

  “So your hope is that if we remove these chains the creature might fight itself? Seems like an incredible risk.”

  “I am not sure that the chimera is even one dream, it is of such size and power that I suspect it has been created using three different monsters, summoned from the veil and forced into the same flesh. I have no idea how Lothar is able to merge dreams in such a manner but with Varkuz riding in his soul he has fewer limitations than other summoners. The creature is definitely full of rage and only fear of the daemon within Lothar prevents it striking, even at its own master.”

  “The chains tell me that there is some flaw with the summoning, why else would you make it hard for all heads to come to bear on a single place. Lothar is indeed reckless if he has created such a thing. An
d why could it not be controlled with a crystal?”

  “I doubt that there is any crystal powerful enough to completely contain the energies in that thing. The ante-chamber is many times the size of the rooms around it and the chimera almost completely fills it.”

  “So if we are wrong about the chains or we fail to break them, we’re dead.”

  “That’s about the sum of it.”

  Ilsar slid aside a spy hole panel and peered into the corridor beyond. Once she was sure that the corridor was empty, she worked the mechanism to open the door and stepped out of the secret passage.

  “We’ve backtracked.” Akna said drawing on his memories of the Cardinal’s palace.

  “True but you know that there is unlikely to simply be a direct route from the Cardinal’s apartments to a library that everyone uses.”

  Akna nodded. “How much further do we have to go?”

  “Not too far but I’m taking us by the most obscure route I know.”

  Akna rolled his eyes in impatience.

  “Yes I know that, we probably only have a limited time before the bodies in the library are found but I’d rather not try walking into danger just because we are in a hurry.”

  “As you say.”

  Despite his nod of agreement, Ilsar could feel Akna’s impatience, as potent as his lack of hesitation or care could make the assassin, Ilsar thought it also robbed him of the caution that she used on every mission she undertook. It was hard to tell whether she should trust the instinct for caution or Akna’s relentless determination, after all reckless as it was, it was only because they were doing things his way that they were even going to make a try for the stones. Caution might save them but with so little time before they would be discovered, it might also rob them of any chance of success.

  Akna pondered the bond between himself and the Cardinal’s pet assassin as they stalked through the darkness together. It did not seem strange to be so close to her, now that he understood she had probably been through the same tortures as he had. There was no way that Lothar or the daemon that inhabited his soul could have guessed that two of their victims might meet beyond the veil. It was something that should have been denied to them, as three years without dreams would attest, but their emptiness must have welded them this close. Indeed the longer they were in each other’s company, the more Akna imagined he could feel through the spiritual link between them. This was both a wonderful and hugely inconvenient thing. On the one hand Akna could finally admit to himself that he had deep feelings, even if they were only an echo of another damaged mind but on the other it meant that he felt the unfamiliar sensation of fear. Ilsar knew he was impatient but she probably did not realise just how significant the urgency he felt was. Yes, time was short but more than that, he was truly fearful of being discovered, not just the remembered fear that he felt when he thought back on the torture he had suffered at Lothar’s hands but a new fear at losing something, someone that mattered to him, right now.

  The very indifference that had allowed him to walk into the heart of his enemy, despite the horrendous odds against escaping alive, was being eroded by his bond with Ilsar. If she felt his recklessness, he felt her disciplined caution. His new instinct told him to run, that it was not too late to simply beg Ilsar to come away with him. They might search for them at first but there was a whole sunlit world beyond the ruined walls of Niskar, they would soon be forgotten.

  “What about the daemon?”

  It almost felt like Ilsar had asked him the question in response to his thoughts of escape, but a glance told him she was still walking ahead and had never spoken. There would be nowhere to run if Ilsar was right about the ritual in the courtyard, once true daemons were roused, even sleep would be unsafe for a fugitive from the Cardinal’s vengeance. Varkuz was surely behind Lothar’s inhuman capacity to channel so many dreams and bring so many summonings into reality, but Varkuz was a relic, a tiny remnant of the power that had once existed in the world of men, true daemons had dined on the blood of thousands and twisted the minds of those they left alive, to the sweetest madness they could devise to spice their souls. True daemons required no hosts but strode the world in flesh of their own making, not summoned but manifested of their own will. Akna shivered, fear was still a distant and unfamiliar emotion but he could tell that he was going to have to remember how to face it soon.

  Chapter 16

  “I have spent too long in silence, a statue counting time,

  Frozen by indifference, the lack of reason in the rhyme”

  The Chimera had a name, rather it had two names and three heads, the goat horned middle head was the most passive and was happy to be called either name but Drazkul, the crocodile head, and Grizkul the lion’s head were both proud and each refused to acknowledge their connection with the other, let alone share a name. Old goat spent most of his time in the middle of an argument that had raged for decades, since the daemon Varkuz first summoned them up to protect his greatest treasures. Strictly speaking, there might have been a time when they were three separate nightmares but the goat couldn’t see the point in holding onto the past, he had been forced to butt some sense into his raving brethren more than once and it was possible that they resented him for it but since he was actually the largest and wisest head, neither of the other two quite had the courage to challenge him. The thick chains on the walls helped, even if the goat was not there to intervene, their master had ensured that the two antagonists couldn’t quite reach each other, all they could do was spit their acid and fiery venom.

  The goat was immune to both fire and acid but he felt the burns on the other necks, it was one of the downsides of being in the middle, he suffered the pain of the whole while Drazkul and Grizkul had only their own petty scars and jealousies to tend to. The last half of the decade had been uneventful, the twisted mound of scale, fur and muscle that constituted the rest of the chimera’s body, probably could not have supported any kind of movement, even if the beast had not been chained up; so with little to do and nowhere to go, the three heads had sunk into a lethargic torpor that was only occasionally broken by visits from the master. Drazkul and his nemesis now slept most of the time but the old goat still kept a silted eye open, for much as Drazkul and Grizkul hated each other,the goat hated any being that was whole in itself. The goat had, on occasion, had the chance to taste human flesh and that was his whole narrow purpose in a narrow existence. The other two heads did not particularly share his hunger, they had little in their heads but the taste of venom and ash and the gnawing resentment of each other’s existence, but the goat shared his senses with both and he could let them share a little of his passion for sucking marrow from a thin leg bone or the crunchy thrill of splintering soft little fingers that all but melted in the mouth.

  The goat kept one eye open, so he noticed the latch on the great door into the chamber slowly turn. There was nothing new in that, of course, the master came and went as he pleased, but the goat did not smell the master, nor could he understand why the master would open the door so slowly, almost hypnotically. The goat dragged open his heavy lid, there was only darkness beyond the door, no torches, no guards. The goat knew disappointment rather than fear, if the master had not been there and a guard had been foolish enough to venture too close, then he would have at last had the meal he had been dreaming of for so long. Was it too much to hope that there was finally a thief? The goat cracked a second eye and allowed the other lid fall again, let whatever was out there think he was asleep, he would be crafty and if he were lucky, the fool, who had opened the door, would come close enough and he would have him, without even needing to awaken the two fools on either side of him.

  Sure enough after a few moments the shadows began to stir and not one but two human forms were discernible outside the door, just out of his reach. The goat suppressed the shiver of anticipation that went through him but he was too late to stop Grizkul feeling some of his excitement and letting out a sleepy growl. ‘Quiet you fool’ the old goat thoug
ht as hard as he could but that only awoke Drazkul, who insisted that he would not be left out of any discussion between heads, Drazkul was sure that the two mammalian heads were always plotting against her but now she had proof; Grizkul rounded on the crocodilian head, smoke pouring from his nostrils and his mane shaking with the repressed energy of the fires held within him. Drazkul licked her thin lips with the end of her whip-like tongue and a heavy drizzle of acidic slime seeped onto the floor, which was already pitted from years of such discharge, only the particular alloy that made up her heavy chain seemed unaffected by the hissing black drops that oozed from the lizard. Grizkul spat out a stream of smouldering magma at his hated enemy but, as usual, most of the sticky rock and flame fell before it could reach Drazkul; the super-heated stone simply pooled on the floor, glowing balefully and slowly cooling. The uneven surface of the stone floor, told the long story of how the two heads had been adding and dissolving stone in many such exchanges.

  The old goat snarled in exasperation, there would be no luring whoever was out there in now, he knew enough about humans to know that they were as cowardly as they were tasty. The goat opened both eyes, fully expecting to see some interloper running away down the darkened corridor, instead he saw a blur of motion and then pain shot through him and into his bickering companions. The crossbow bolt was small by comparison to the size of the old goat's eye but it made it impossible for the central head to keep both eyes open, he kept reflexively blinking and in between the strobing of his perception, two shadows materialised from the corridor and rushed into the room.

  One of the chimera’s greatest assets was usually its coordination, despite their rivalry Drazkul and Grizkul knew enough not to argue with the goat’s orders when it came to a fight, but with the goat relaying his pain, it was harder to focus on the two darting thieves, who for their part, seemed to move as if they were one being. Drazkul’s tongue lashed out, spraying hissing venom and at the same time molten stone erupted from the lion’s mouth. As if by some wordless agreement both the intruders crossed right under the flailing goat's head at the last moment, leaving the deadly effluents smouldering on the floor. The goat tried to bring his head down and blow a blast of his own sulphurous breath, that would send the humans reeling and rob their lungs of air but both runners raised the halberds they had stolen from the guards at the same time and he was forced to rear back, lest he skewer himself on the long broad blades. More flame and acid cut the air, pooling on the floor and one of the thieves gasped as the venom sprayed close to her arm and the flesh blistered.