by GJ Kelly
“The Wheel of Thought, or so Arramin called it,” Gawain whispered, gazing through the sparse growth of spindly saplings bursting up through the bleached flagstones at the edge of the great circular way.
They moved cautiously forward, to the very edge of the cracked and crumbling stones of the blue and white chequered way. Directly ahead of them, the gable end of the eastern refectory, scorched, tongues of soot poking upward from the vacant windows and what was once a door to the kitchens within.
And there, towering over the refectory, atop its great marble square and girded by its immense colonnades, the roundtower with its shattered dome, and atop the entablature of the colonnades, statues of Arristanas, holding aloft the Orb, and beckoning.
There they waited, breath caught in wonder, Allazar and Gawain witnessing again the spectacle of Calhaneth’s broken hope, and this time knowing the true horror of its shattering.
“Something is wrong,” Gawain finally whispered, the sound all the more alarming for the vista before them.
“It seems to me as it was when first we gazed upon it,” Allazar replied softly, his voice filled with immense sorrow. “Though then, fewer leaves than now blew across the chequered paving of that broad and dreadful way, where so many were struck down.”
“No, something is wrong. I cannot define it yet…”
They waited, in silence, and with a rising sense of dread while Gawain frowned, deep in thought, studying the spectacle before them.
Dry leaves scraped and rustled, skittering across the paving slabs on the gentle breath of chill breezes. They were everywhere, some spinning and swirling in tiny circles, lifting occasionally to spiral a few feet from the ground before falling back again.
“There!” Gawain whispered with great conviction, and pointed with his left hand, an arrow still strung in his right. “The fourth statue of Arristanas to the left of the blue column.”
Heads and eyes swivelled.
“Birdy, miThal,” Reesen announced calmly.
“Arr, pigeon by the looks, melord.”
“Aye, a pigeon. Where nothing alive has dared to venture for a thousand years,” Gawain insisted.
And, as if to emphasise his point, the pigeon launched itself gracefully from the statue, and two more, wings slapping and clapping as if applauding Gawain’s observation, blasted up from an unseen roost deep within the shattered dome of the roundtower.
Allazar blinked in astonishment, watching the birds as first they circled the dome, and then sped away to the north.
“No dark,” Reesen announced softly. “No light.”
Gawain turned to Allazar, but said nothing.
The wizard sighed, and shook his head. “I do not know what to make of it. Only that the object of our quest is to be found within that sad ruin.”
“Do we wait for darkness as planned, my lord?” Jerryn prompted softly. “Those pigeons seemed unharmed and were inside the dome for a goodly amount of time.”
“We’ll advance, and have done with it. Allazar, you’ll lead, but have the stick ready to shield yourself if needed. Be ready to run for the trees, all of you, should a loud humming commence from within that tower.”
Deep breaths were taken, and holding the Dymendin horizontally before him in both hands, Allazar stepped onto the cracked rim of the Wheel of Thought.
Nothing happened, of course, just as nothing had happened before. But this time, as he began to advance, there was no sense of rising pressure, no shimmering in the air above the broken dome, no deep humming to presage catastrophe.
Slowly, cautiously, but without hesitation, the remainder followed, Reesen taking a position to the left, head swivelling, using the Sight and turning full circle from time to time. It seemed to take an age to reach the shell of the eastern refectory, the interior blackened and gutted, nothing but twisted and melted pieces of metal within the scorched walls. There, they paused a moment, unsure which way to go, until Gawain nodded to the right, and Allazar set off again, around the north-eastern corner of the building.
They walked its length, trying to avoid looking in through the blind eyes of its vacant windows, or at the immense tongues of soot that spread upwards from their lintels. Ahead, perhaps fifty yards further on, the vast marble pedestal, giving the appearance of twelve layers of great rectangles of polished black stone each a little smaller than the next, laid atop one another.
Still there was no sign of imminent danger, and still they moved, staying closer together and behind Allazar once they were clear of the refectory.
“A little faster, if you please, Allazar,” Gawain whispered, the awe of the spectacle seeming to demand a respectful hush.
Allazar opened his stride, leaves occasionally crunching underfoot. Another small flock of pigeons, half a dozen of them, sped overhead, again towards the north, passing the roundtower without hesitation and without flinching from their course.
A gust of wind, the last breath of the storm they’d endured in the forest, swept an army of leaves around their legs, filling the air briefly with a rushing sound of waterfalls before it died. The sun emerged from behind the last of the clouds, pale and weak to the south, casting sharp shadows and making flecks of mica in the stone all around them sparkle like glittering gems.
Allazar froze, gazing up at the dome through the immense pillars of the colonnades before them, and held his breath…
Nothing. A sudden stillness settled over the city, but far from silent serenity, this was the sepulchral silence of a mausoleum.
The wizard let out his breath in a long, slow sigh, and set off again. Jerryn glanced to his left at Gawain, who caught the movement and returned the brief look of relief before the four followed Allazar’s lead.
At the first of the marble steps, Allazar paused again, seeing his own reflection in the polished stone, black as night, with thread-veins of white running deep below the high gloss sheen of its surface. No joints between the blocks were visible, and such was the effect of the sun and its reflection within the stones, that Allazar gingerly placed his foot upon the step as if it were liquid, rather than solid.
Up, then, twelve steps up to the broad expanse of black, broad as any Castletown courtyard ever was. Through the immense pillars towering high overhead, under the great span of the entablature atop them, footfalls muted, and the full imposing girth of the college and library of natural magycks struck them, its broken dome looming high above, almost lost from their view now.
An arched doorway, open to the elements, faced them, the eastern entrance to the roundtower gaping. Off to the right, Allazar’s head swivelling and the rest followed suit, a mottled green memory of the splendour that had been the tower’s shining copper dome; a great sheet of twisted metal, a thirty-foot length of cladding lying like a shrivelled petal where it had fallen a thousand years before those who passed it by were born.
Still they moved quietly across the jet black of the polished marble underfoot, and then, a yard from the threshold and peering into the blackness within the tower, Allazar stopped. The wizard glanced at them all, took a deep breath, and then let it out quickly, and then took another, and then stepped into the very heart of Calhaneth.
oOo
32. A Safe Wager
The darkness inside the tower had been an illusion caused by the brightness of the sun reflecting from its white-stone and mica-spangled exterior, and the relatively soft light within; a light which streamed in through the loophole light-wells Arramin had so accurately described on their first arrival in the city, in the summer.
While the wizard gazed about in awe and allowed his eyes to adjust to the relative gloom, the others moved in behind him, fanning out to each side.
“Dwarfspit,” Gawain gasped, and blinked rapidly.
High overhead, a vaulted stone ceiling capped the interior of the tower, a great cantilevered staircase spiralling up around the inside of the walls and through it to whatever lay above, presumably the Orb chamber. Nothing else remained of the interior, fire-blacken
ed stone walls testifying to the catastrophe which had destroyed the immense oaken beams which once supported four floors within the college, corbels now vacant. The fifth floor lay above that vaulted ceiling, and only by the spiralling stairs could it be reached.
But that was not the cause for Gawain’s exclamation. The cause lay in heaps near the foot of the staircase, by the southern doorway, and more by the western portal.
“Reesen?” Gawain whispered.
“No light, no dark, miThal.”
“Cautiously, then,” Gawain suggested needlessly, and they moved slowly across the bleached flagstones towards the shapes clustered near the foot of the stairway.
“Death, miThal,” Reesen announced quietly, his nose wrinkling. “Stinky odd.”
When they got closer to the remains, they saw the reason for the oddness of the odour Reesen had complained about. There were three bodies lying on the flagstones a small distance apart, and from the brown stains on the floor around them it appeared they’d been dead for at least three days. But the odd smell was emanating from a fourth, which was sitting against the wall a few feet from the gaping southern portal, through which the late afternoon sunshine spilled.
“What was it?” Jerryn asked, eyeing the remains.
“A man, I think. Those three look to be wearing the kind of hard-wearing clothes you might expect to find on a Gorian slave refugee. This one… has the shape of a man.”
“There is nothing there but a foul corruption, like mould heaped in the shape of a man reclining back against the wall,” Allazar said, horrified, and astonished. Then a sudden realisation gripped him. “The Orb!”
With that, the wizard rushed past the grotesque remains, and took the spiral stairs at an impressive run. Reesen made to follow, but Gawain held him back, watching as Allazar sped up and around the interior of the squat and broad roundtower, robes flying, staff glinting in the sunshine streaming in through the loopholes. In no time at all, or so it seemed, the wizard had made a full circumference of the tower’s tapered interior, and then vanished from view in the gloom of the entrance to the upper floor. After a few moments, he reappeared, took a few steps down, and then sat heavily.
“Gone,” his voice drifted down to them, echoing eerily. “The Orb is gone. Nothing remains but the plinth upon which it reposed.”
Slowly, they trudged up the stairway, staying close to the wall for safety, in stunned silence. Gawain, though, glanced frequently at the remains below. Four men had died there, and recently…
After passing through the ceiling and onto a narrow landing, Allazar leading the way, Gawain paused, and eyed the marks and chips in the stone of the wall. It was here, a thousand years ago, whitebeards had frantically attempted to gain access to the interior. Here that the steel-braced door had been blown apart and elfwizards destroyed when the treachery of the ToorsenViell had made itself manifest in fire and in death.
In the Orb chamber, leaf-blown and open to the elements, the plinth which Theo of Smeltmount had described in his account now stood vacant at the exact centre of the floor. Nothing else remained. The great domed roof, or rather what was left of it, seemed to have been fabricated from shaped metallic girders, the remains of which were twisted in testament to the explosion which had burst the dome asunder so long ago.
“We are too late,” Allazar sighed. “The Orb is in the hands of the enemy.”
Gawain shook his head. “Not yet. Come, we’ve sated our morbid curiosity and seen this place with our own eyes. Now it’s time to seek out those who came here before us, and not long ago if those three corpses below are any measure of time.”
“The Orb could already be on its way to Ostinath, or Callodon, or Juria, or to any town in the lands, Longsword.”
“Then, wizard, we shall track it. And take it, and destroy it. That empty plinth tells us one thing which is in our favour: the Orb is sealed safe now in its Morgmetal box, or the forest would’ve burned on the first sunrise of its journey away from here. Come, back below. I want another look at those corpses, and then our quest becomes a hunt.”
Those corpses were intriguing, to say the least. When the three dead men near the southern entrance were rolled over onto their backs, the gaping wounds in their chests spoke not of death in mortal combat. More, they were wearing chainmail beneath their humble, hard-wearing outer garments.
“These were men of Goria,” Gawain asserted. “I’ve seen such mail before, last year, and worn by the chain-pulling guardsmen with the Kraal in the woods alongside the Jarn Road.”
“What would slavers want with the Orb?” Jerryn asked, “Unless Goria plans to expand its reach beyond the Old Kingdom?”
“Why go to such lengths?” Gawain responded, “When simple force of arms and a thrust through the Jarn Gap while we were facing Morloch’s horde in the north would’ve seen Callodon fall within a matter of days? No, there is something much more sinister at work here. I don’t think these men were struck down by the Orb’s emanations, nor weapons of steel. I saw a wound like that, at Far-gor, inflicted by a traitor of the D’ith.”
“And the other ‘un, melord?” Ognorm nodded towards the grotesque form by the south door. “How came that one to die?”
“I don’t know. There are more questions here than answers. Perhaps there always were. Where are their weapons? Where are their packs and supplies? It’s as though they were stripped of such things before being abandoned where they fell.”
Gawain nodded at the other corpses near the western portal. “We’ll probably find the same there.”
They did, three more bodies identically dressed, though these appeared to have been struck down from behind rather than head on as their southernmost comrades had been.
“What now, Longsword?”
“Now, Allazar, we leave this place. We’ll find no spoor to track in here. We’ll start with the western quarter I think. If these were indeed Gorian guardsmen, then it’s from that direction they’ll have come, and it looks like it was in that direction these three were fleeing when blasted from behind by whatever it was that killed them.”
Out, then, out from the vacant ruin and dead heart of Calhaneth, out and across the marble paving towards the colonnades and the western quarter of the city. But they’d scarcely passed under the entablature and its beckoning statues of Arristanas when they spotted another corpse, this time laying face up on the steps, head downmost, and a steel crossbow bolt sticking out from its chest.
“This is no Gorian guardsman like those within,” Jerryn announced, “And it still has its sword, sheathed. We’ve seen this kind of blade before, my lord! Standing guard outside Ramoth towers!”
“Mercenaries of the west,” Gawain nodded. “And there are more of the same yonder on the flagstones.”
There were, six in all, five of them with the garb and weapons of the kind Gawain and Jerryn, and Allazar too, knew well enough. The sixth, though, was different from its comrades. That one was little more than a mass of black and green mould in the form of a man lying on the cold, bleached flagstones of the Wheel of Thought.
“What happened here, Longsword?”
“Judging from the way the bodies are strewn, I’d say they were shot from the cover of those ruined buildings yonder. Perhaps that one on the steps back there was the first to die, or was a straggler running from the tower to catch up, I don’t know. Come, let’s take a look over there.”
They jogged across the chequered circular way to the ruins of what was once a great college, blocks and columns sticking up from the soil like a row of broken teeth, rubble scorched and tumbled, the overgrowth weakly, yellowed and twisted, barely beyond the range of the Orb’s lightning when the device had resided in the dome.
Near the remains of a toppled wall, large areas of blackened humus lay exposed, as if they’d been dug over by an enthusiastic gardener’s fork.
“We’ve seen that before, too, at Far-gor, and in the hills east of Harks Hearth.”
“Aye,” Allazar agreed, “And on t
he road to Jarn. Those are the marks left by the black fireballs cast by a wizard of the darken creeds.”
On the other side of the rubble, signs where men had lain in wait, small areas cleared for shooting out across the way, and marks where toe-holds had been kicked to form crude supports while they’d waited.
“That’s strange,” Allazar remarked, and nodded towards what appeared to be a deep hole in the ground some twenty feet from where the attackers had lain in ambush. “It looks reasonably fresh.”
Gawain edged closer to the pit, and peered in. “It’s deep, but I can see stone in there. A sewer, or some kind of underground waterway, running under the college. I believe Arramin mentioned such works. But yes, the edges appear fresh-exposed. The collapse was recent, probably caused by the force that lay in wait tromping over it, as Martan might say.”
Gawain clambered back over the rubble and moved onto the rim of the Wheel of Thought again, folding his arms, arrow still strung in his right hand, pondering his next decision.
“How are you at scouting and tracking, Ognorm?”
“In truth? Couldn’t find me own arse with both ‘ands, melord.”
“Jerryn?”
“Rusty through years of court duties, and so not to be trusted should it be important.”
“Thank you both for your honesty. Reesen,” Gawain nodded towards the west, and gave a brief hand signal.
“Mithal.”
“Jerryn, Ognorm, go with him please. Stay alert. Meet back here in half an hour. Allazar with me, and stay close.”
Some thirty minutes later, they regrouped at the south-western rim of the Wheel of Thought, and Reesen gave his concise report.
“Much feets, go west, miThal.”
“Aye, my lord,” Jerryn agreed, “We saw signs of a large party, twenty or more. Beyond that, it’s difficult to say. The ground is churned up, and the leaf litter and humus doesn’t lend itself to accurate observation the way mud or more solid ground would do. Something else, too, another one of those mould-creatures, about ten minutes into the trees, lying at the foot of a statue.”