The Longsword Chronicles: Book 05 - Light and Shadow

by GJ Kelly

  Once the northern chain had been slipped, and Allazar crouched on the deck with pole in hand, Gawain eased his own pole over the side, and took a deep breath before nodding to the wizard and stepping up onto the walkway.

  Reesen moved in front of Gawain, two large and flaming torches held aloft so that the heat from them warmed his face and arms. Berek was to the rear. On the opposite side of the barge, Jerryn and Prester provided the fiery shield for Allazar, and with a gentle shove of the poles, the barge began slipping through the water.

  Nerves were stretched taut as bowstrings as the two men on the walkway slowly made their way towards Loryan at the stern, bracketed by flaming torches every step of the way. Water lapped at the hull, mist swirled, and the tiller gave a slight squeal as Loryan straightened it.

  At the stern, Gawain lifted the pole out of the water, turned, still stooping low, and with a glance across the vessel towards Allazar, crept as quickly as he could back to the bow.

  Gawain turned again, dipped the end of the pole into the water and waited for Allazar, when the barge careened off a mooring-pole, the low booming sound of the impact almost deafening for the silence around them. Hearts stopped, stomachs lurched, breath exploded, and the sound of the mooring-pole scraping down the side of the vessel came to an abrupt halt when Allazar pushed away a little.

  Frantic hand-signals were made, and crouching low, Loryan scurried the length of the barge to take the steering-lever at the prow, the better to negotiate any further obstacles in the water.

  They set off again, nerves suddenly screaming once more as metal creaked under pressure from Ognorm’s pry bar, and then with a piercing crack like a maroon in miniature, the mooring spike Ognorm had used to secure the casket’s tether to the deckhouse bulkhead burst apart, scattering clinking pieces of metal all over the cabin deck-plates.

  “Elve’s Blood and vakin Dwarfspit,” Gawain sighed, heart pounding, and then continued poling the barge onward across the pond.

  On their fourth journey from prow to stern, Loryan hissed a warning, and they ceased poling, and leapt nimbly down onto the deck. Allazar took his staff from Jerryn, and used it to fend away the dockside as best he could, but still the hull scraped along the blue-stone wall before coming to a halt.

  After that, there was frenetic but quiet activity. Packs were slung in place, cloaks donned over them and weapons checked and readied. And then they waited in the silence while Gawain surveyed the scene. The embers of the fire they’d kept burning through the night were ashes now, and nothing remained of Ognorm’s clothing which had been drying on the deck around it, save for his wet boots. The rest had been packed or doused with brandy and used to make the torches, the flaming brands now little more than smouldering sticks, and useless.

  Visibility had improved, they could see the tree line well enough thirty yards away across the dockside, but within the trees themselves the mist clung fast, unmoved by the faint breeze drifting from the north as Allazar had promised at dawn.

  “Our course is due east and true,” Gawain whispered. “If that shadow-creature yet lives, I will not have us pressed back into the city. We’ll keep the lamps lit, shutters wide, and move as quickly as we can. Stay close, Ognorm and the Orb in the centre. Eat and drink now, we won’t be stopping for food. Water we’ll replenish when we come across it. Should anything happen, you must keep going. The Orb must be destroyed. Get it to the camp on the plains, thence to Porthmorl and into the sea. Nothing else matters. Not who we are, not where we’re from. Nothing. Is that clear?”

  A chorus of ‘ayes’, and then a single “Nai, miThal.”

  Allazar translated, and Reesen gave a curt and sombre nod, though his expression when he regarded Gawain was a curious one, before he turned away to survey the woodlands to the east. A slight shake of the head told Gawain that the way ahead was clear, at least insofar as the Sight could see.

  A third concussion from the west jerked their heads around instinctively, and this time it sounded a lot closer than it had when they were moored in the middle of the pond. Reesen blinked, canted his head, and then turned his worried gaze to Gawain.

  “Many,” he said simply. “One miles.”

  Gawain nodded, his expression stern as he eyed them all. “To the east then, and the Orb’s destruction.”

  oOo

  43. Lamps Closed, Eyes Wide

  The mist within the woodland north of the city of Calhaneth clung low to the ground, and for the men hurrying through the shadowy trees as quickly and as quietly as they could, was made all the more eerie for its lack of height. To them, it seemed as though they were wading through an ocean of vapour, waist-high in places, and though the ground immediately beneath their feet was just visible, they had to trust that nothing unseen barred their passage or lay in wait to trip them. It slowed them down, all instincts screaming against headlong flight across unseen terrain.

  They’d paused briefly at the tree line when it became obvious that the excess length of chain still attached to the casket was a rattling harbinger announcing their presence to all within earshot. And so they’d stopped, and stuffed a damp and grubby shirt into Ognorm’s pack to muffle the sounds before continuing, picking their way carefully through shrub, weed and bramble until they were well within the gloomier depths of the forest where only fungi flourished unseen in the leaf litter.

  No-one spoke. No-one dared. The men formed a tight circle around Ognorm, though Reesen insisted on moving three or four paces ahead of them in the van where, unbeknownst to the three Gorians, he could cast his Sight. Not that he would see the shadow-creature, if it chose to attack. The threat of its presence made flesh tingle, eyes widen, and all senses sharp as new pins.

  The next pause came unexpectedly and abruptly some four hundred yards, or thereabouts, from the mooring pool left behind them. Reesen stopped dead, the others almost running into him before coming to a halt. There was a stream crossing their path, and so they took the opportunity to fill water skins and canteens, and then set off again.

  It was the silence which plagued them as much as the fog, every footfall seeming to their ears a deafening clarion alerting the enemy to their presence and to their course. Nor was it comfortable running, holding up a miner’s lamp like a torch, the lights dull in the gloom and the mist, sun still low in the east and not yet high enough to pierce the leafless canopy. Damp clothing chafed, cloaks were heavy, boots likewise, and less than an hour after scurrying from the barge, breathing became noticeably louder.

  All except for Ognorm, who loped along with lamp held high in his left hand, and his mace held low in his right, eyes wide, but clearly untroubled by the weight of the Morgmetal casket and the Orb in his pack.

  Two hours after leaving the barge the world brightened, a nebulous white halo illuminating the treetops slightly to the south of their easterly track. With the relative new brightness came a degree of relief; surely it was too bright now for the shadow-creature to venture from its hidden lair.

  Reesen slowed to a halt, and cocked his head this way and that. Gawain eased forward to stand beside him.

  “Odd,” the elf whispered. “House. Big.”

  “Slow,” Gawain whispered in reply, and they eased forward, breathing hard but treading softly.

  They kept up that cautious, creeping pace for a full five minutes, and Gawain was about to step out again when a shape loomed in the fog, tall and angular, and indeed, distinctly odd. As they drew nearer, weapons and lamps held firmly, another shape began to resolve itself, semi-circular, which added to the bizarre appearance of their discovery so far from the outskirts of the city.

  Still they crept forward, until the remains of the immense ‘house’ were clear to behold in the slowly expanding area of visibility around them. It was brighter here, and Gawain poked the tip of the longsword into the soft black humus and leaf litter until it met with firm, stony resistance. The area surrounding the building had once been paved, and the foundations deep, for no trees had burst up through the sto
nes.

  “It must have been some kind of pump house or other mechanism for the city,” Allazar whispered. “That is a water-wheel of a kind.”

  A deep and dark channel ran under the wheel, the lower half of the immense turbine invisible below ground.

  Suckerweed clung to the white-stone walls, and the gently sloping stone roof was still intact. A glance through the vacant windows revealed all manner of complicated machinery, cogs and chains and pulleys, filling the cavernous interior.

  “Either water flowed in that subterranean channel to drive the wheel, or the machinery drove the wheel to move whatever liquid once flowed below.”

  “We’ll rest here for a few moments,” Gawain announced softly, “Within the protection of the walls,” and moved around the corner of the building, and into it, climbing a flight of steps before passing through the weed-covered and ancient arched portal.

  The roof was vaulted and suckerweed from without clung to it in places wherever light could reach, and the floor was covered in forest detritus, though there was surprisingly little of it. Machines sat idle upon elevated stone beds, and metal walkways surrounded them. The men filtered in behind him, breathing hard, and sat gratefully on machine-laden platforms, drinking thirstily from water skins and canteens.

  “Fog’s slowly lifting,” Jerryn managed, between swigs of water.

  “Aye,” Prester agreed, sniffing and wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Bit of a breeze from the north, too.”

  “Big chains,” Ognorm remarked, eyeing the maze of wheels and pulleys around them. “Would’ve taken some poor bugger a lot of work with an ‘ammer to make that lot.”

  Shafts ran overhead, bearings seated in stone columns, cogged wheels transferring power through the chains to or from the main wheel and to other shafts and other machines.

  “In the days when Calhaneth thrived,” Allazar sighed, screwing his water skin’s stopper tight, “This building would have hummed with ceaseless motion, all the chains and wheels turning. Though to what end, only perhaps Master Arramin might guess.”

  “Would that our motion could be ceaseless too,” Gawain sighed, “The better to make the plains.”

  “Agreed,” Berek fiddled with the miner’s lamp hanging from his belt, twisting it open and shut in the gloom of the machine room. “Such things as this hold no appeal for me.”

  At the far end of the building, the ground suddenly exploded upwards with a deafening concussion, a pair of steel trap doors blown wide open, flinging forest debris in all directions. In an instant, the shadow-creature was hurtling towards Ognorm, but in the same instant, it slammed into the elven steel chains and shafts, twisting, writhing, trying to alter its shape to pass between the metallic obstacles which began to vibrate and shudder with the force of its efforts.

  “Out!” Gawain screamed, “Out!” and the men began moving towards the doorway.

  “Tireandanam!” Allazar shouted, presenting his staff as the shadow began oozing through the links of a massive chain, tendrils of black reaching towards them.

  A streamer of white lightning blasted from the staff, and in an instant, the shadow creature was gone, though Gawain thought he caught a glimpse of it disappearing back into the pit exposed by the trap doors. Allazar’s lightning, though, leapt and danced and crackled along chain and shaft, jumping gaps and sparking, streamers striking stonework and blowing splinters of white-stone from wall and ceiling. Men dived to the floor, covering their heads, and when the crackling and sparking finally ceased, Gawain took his arms from over his head, pushed himself to his knees, and beheld the scene of chaos.

  Ognorm was laying face down, three men on top of him, Reesen, Berek, and Jerryn. Loryan and Prester were on the steps leading to the doorway, rubbing their eyes and holding lamps aloft, and Allazar was standing in the middle of all of it, staff pointing towards the distant pit.

  “Put a candle down there!” Gawain cried, and then to the others, “Outside! Outside!”

  In the mist outside the building, men took stock of each other and their surroundings. Jerryn was bleeding from a cut to the head, struck by a splinter of stone loosed by Allazar’s fire. The wizard himself stood at the top of the steps in the doorway, his back to them, and then he launched an Aaron’s Candle into the pit, turning hastily immediately he did so.

  Brilliant light burst from the windows and doorway, silhouetting the wizard. Shafts of light also burst up from around the immense wheel, and seemed to lance up from the ground where cracks in the subterranean channel lay hidden beneath the forest floor.

  “Dwarfspit!” Gawain hissed in disgust, “Vakin threken thrukken Dwarfspit! Allazar, tend to Jerryn, quickly. Ognorm, are you hurt?”

  “Narr melord. You?”

  Gawain shook his head. “Anyone else injured?”

  No-one spoke, all eyes wide and scanning their misty surrounds. The fog was thinning, slowly, from the top down, visibility extended to sixty or seventy yards now and the treetops, and sky beyond them, clear.

  “Lamps closed,” Gawain whispered, and metal squeaked as the lamps were extinguished.

  Compared to the dark grey gloom at dawn, the forest was now positively dazzling.

  “It must have tracked us below ground, Raheen, and found a way in to the underground channel.”

  “Aye,” Gawain agreed, “And the poor light and shadows in the building gave it a last chance to strike at us between now and nightfall. Stupid. Dwarfspit vakin stupid to have gone in there!”

  “You could not know, Longsword,” Allazar soothed, “With so much stone underfoot, and stone and steel around us.”

  “Your wizard is right, Raheen. It could just as easily have risked an attack upon us outside the walls.”

  “Are you done with Jerryn’s wound, Allazar?”

  “I am.”

  “Jerryn, fit for travel?”

  “Aye, my lord. The wound is nothing, and well bound.”

  “On then, with greater haste now the fog is moving. The further from the city we can go before dark, perhaps the weaker that shadow-creature will become. With luck the enemy behind us will stumble upon it before they stumble upon us.”

  “There’ve been no further maroons,” Berek announced, shifting his pack and making certain all was secure. “They’ll have likely found the pond by now.”

  “And picked up our trail,” Gawain agreed. “Come, let’s put more distance between us.”

  On they ran, their pace made all the more urgent for the heart-pounding ferocity and suddenness of the shadow-creature’s attack, and the knowledge that in all likelihood a dark wizard with a mercenary force at his command was hard on their heels.

  An hour later they came to another of Calhaneth’s relics, another vaulted building housing machinery and a great wheel, but here, some fifty yards to the south of it, a section of the underground channel had collapsed, exposing a brickwork tunnel that appeared to run slightly southwest.

  Pausing to drink while walking and this time giving the building a wide berth, Allazar frowned, and in the welcome daylight, edged as close as he dared to the tunnel, to peer into the gloom.

  “Like the spokes of a wheel, the tunnels seem to run towards the centre of the city, carrying something to that dread place, or from it, in its golden years.”

  “Arramin spoke of sewers, perhaps these are they.”

  “Yes,” Allazar agreed as they moved on, still walking briskly, “Yes, perhaps they are. He’ll be most disappointed not to have seen them himself.”

  “Assuming we live to tell him the tale,” Gawain muttered.

  “There is no telling how many pipes and tunnels were laid beneath the city to carry water in and waste out,” Allazar exclaimed. “It is not a commentary on the wonders of Thal-Marrahan I am making, Longsword, but an observation that the shadow-creature has been free to roam far from the centre of the city in daylight, and still is. If indeed these channels radiate from the hub as spokes on a wheel, its range clearly extends well beyond the ci
ty’s outskirts and in all directions. It may still be tracking us below ground even now.”

  “All the more reason to avoid going near dark holes in the ground then.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you need more rest, Ognorm?”

  “Narr, melord. Lifted and shifted a lot more’n this, and a lot farther too. I’ll sing out if’n it starts to grind me down, melord.”

  Gawain nodded, noting the fleeting looks of frank admiration the Gorians shared at Ognorm’s strength and endurance, big men though the praetorians were themselves.

  “Men,” Reesen suddenly whispered, and pointed through the trees into the fog, north of west. “Five mens one mile.”

  “Five?”

  “Isst, miThal.”

  “Scouts, probably. Berek?”

  “Aye, they’ll send pathfinders ahead to mark a safe way, circling to cut our trail and track it. Main force will follow at a lesser pace to be fit for fighting, but quickly for all that. They’ll know the trail marked by the pathfinders is safe for fast movement, fog or no fog. How does your man see them, Raheen?”

  “He’s an elf,” Gawain said simply, trusting that Gorian ignorance of elfkind would forestall any further questions concerning Reesen’s ability. “Let’s move, and let’s pick up our own pace now that visibility has improved.”

  They’d barely begun moving when the concussion of a maroon from the northwest cracked through the trees behind them, sounding ominously close in spite of the distance.

  “Ignore it, Raheen,” Berek announced. “Now they have our trail it’s meant to drive you hard, tire you out and drain your strength for fighting.”

  “Simanian mercenary scum,” Prester spat, “They don’t know what fighting is.”

  “Assuming that’s what’s chasing us,” Jerryn muttered ominously.