‘Didn’t you hear?’
‘Hear what?’
They didn’t hear. They weren’t meant to. But we were. Why? Had the Soldier been mistaken in his assumptions? Sent by Hood, not to see the dead priests and priestesses of D’rek… but to speak with us.
The Tyrant shall return. This, to a son of Darujhistan. ‘Gods,’ he whispered again, ‘I’ve got to get home.’
Greyfrog’s voice shouted in his skull, ‘Friend Cutter! Surprise and alarm!’
‘What now?’ he asked, turning to see the demon bounding into view.
‘The Soldier of Death. Wondrous. He left his spear!’
Cutter stared, with sinking heart, at the weapon clutched between the demon’s teeth. ‘Good thing you don’t need your mouth to talk.’
‘Solemn agreement, friend Cutter! Query. Do you like these silks?’
The portal into the sky keep required a short climb. Mappo and Icarium stood on the threshold, staring into a cavernous chamber. The floor was almost level. A faint light seemed to emanate from the walls of stone. ‘We can camp here,’ the Trell said.
‘Yes,’ Icarium agreed. ‘But first, shall we explore?’
‘Of course.’
The chamber housed three additional mechanisms, identical to the one submerged in the lake, each positioned on trestles like ships in dry-dock. The hatches yawned open, revealing the padded seats within. Icarium walked to the nearest one and began examining its interior.
Mappo untied the pouch at his belt and began removing the larger one within. A short time later he laid out the bedrolls, food and wine. Then he drew out from his pack an iron-banded mace, not his favourite one, but another, expendable since it possessed no sorcerous virtues.
Icarium returned to his side. ‘They are lifeless,’ he said. ‘Whatever energy was originally imbued within the machinery has ebbed away, and I see no means of restoring it.’
‘That is not too surprising, is it? I suspect this keep has been here a long time.’
‘True enough, Mappo. But imagine, were we able to enliven one of these mechanisms! We could travel at great speed and in comfort! One for you and one for me, ah, this is tragic. But look, there is a passageway. Let us delve into the greater mystery this keep offers.’
Carrying only his mace, Mappo followed Icarium into the broad corridor.
Storage rooms lined the passage, whatever they had once held now nothing more than heaps of undisturbed dust.
Sixty paces in, they reached an intersection. An arched barrier was before them, shimmering like a vertical pool of quicksilver. Corridors went to the right and left, both appearing to curve inward in the distance.
Icarium drew out a coin from the pouch at his belt, and Mappo was amused to see that it was of a vintage five centuries old.
‘You are the world’s greatest miser, Icarium.’
The Jhag smiled, then shrugged. ‘I seem to recall that no-one ever accepts payment from us, no matter how egregious the expense of the service provided. Is that an accurate memory, Mappo?’
‘It is.’
‘Well, then, how can you accuse me of being niggardly?’ He tossed the coin at the silver barrier. It vanished. Ripples rolled outward, went beyond the stone frame, then returned.
‘This is a passive manifestation,’ Icarium said. ‘Tell me, did you hear the coin strike anything beyond?’
‘No, nor did it make a sound upon entering the… uh, the door.’
‘I am tempted to pass through.’
‘That might prove unhealthy.’
Icarium hesitated, then drew a skinning-knife and inserted the blade into the barrier. Gentler ripples. He pulled it out. The blade looked intact. None of the substance had adhered to it. Icarium ran a fingertip along the iron. ‘No change in temperature,’ he observed.
‘Shall I try a finger I won’t miss much?’ Mappo asked, holding up his left hand.
‘And which one would that be, friend?’
‘I don’t know. I expect I’d miss any of them.’
‘The tip?’
‘Sound caution.’ Making a fist, barring the last, smallest finger, Mappo stepped close, then dipped the finger up to the first knuckle into the shimmering door. ‘No pain, at least. It is, I think, very thin.’ He drew his hand back and examined the digit. ‘Hale.’
‘With the condition of your fingers, Mappo, how can you tell?’
‘Ah, I see a change. No dirt left, not even crusted under the nail.’
‘To pass through is to be cleansed. Do you think?’
Mappo reached in with his whole hand. ‘I feel air beyond. Cooler, damper.’ He withdrew his hand and peered at it. ‘Clean. Too clean. I am alarmed.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it makes me realize how filthy I’ve become, that’s why.’
‘I wonder, will it do the same with our clothes?’
‘That would be nice, although it may possess some sort of threshold. Too filthy, and it simply annihilates the offending material. We might emerge on the other side naked.’
‘Now I am alarmed, friend.’
‘Yes. Well, what shall we do, Icarium?’
‘Do we have any choice?’ With that, the Jhag strode through the barrier.
Mappo sighed, then followed.
Only to be clutched at the shoulder and pulled back from a second step – which, he saw, would have been into empty air.
The cavern before them was vast. A bridge had once connected the ledge they stood on to an enormous, towering fortress floating in space, a hundred or more paces opposite them. Sections of that stone span remained, seemingly unsupported, but others had broken away and now floated, motionless, in the air.
Far below, dizzyingly far, the cavern was swallowed in darkness. Above them, a faintly glittering dome of black rough-hewn stone, like a night sky. Tiered buildings rose along the inner walls, rows of dark windows but no balconies. Dust and rubble clouded the air, none of it moving. Mappo said nothing, he was too stunned by the vista before them.
Icarium touched his shoulder, then pointed to something small hovering directly before them. The coin, but not motionless as it had first seemed. It was drifting away, slowly. The Jhag reached out and retrieved it, returning it to the pouch at his waist. ‘A worthy return on my investment,’ he murmured. ‘Since there is momentum, we should be able to travel. Launch ourselves from this ledge. Over to the fortress.’
‘Sound plan,’ Mappo said, ‘but for all the obstacles in between.’
‘Ah, good point.’
‘There may be an intact bridge, on the opposite side. We could take one of the side passages behind us. If such a bridge exists, likely it will be marked with a silver barrier as this one was.’
‘Have you never wished you could fly, Mappo?’
‘As a child, perhaps, I am sure I did.’
‘Only as a child?’
‘It is where dreams of flight belong, Icarium. Shall we explore one of the corridors behind us?’
‘Very well, although I admit I hope we fail in finding a bridge.’
Countless rooms, passages and alcoves along the wide, arched corridor, the floors thick with dust, odd, faded symbols etched above doorways, possibly a numerical system of some sort. The air was stagnant, faintly acrid. No furnishings remained in the adjoining chambers. Nor, Mappo realized, any corpses such as the one Icarium had discovered in the mechanism resting on the lake-bed. An orderly evacuation? If so, where had the Short-Tails gone?
Eventually, they came upon another silver door. Cautiously passing through it, they found themselves standing on the threshold of a narrow bridge. Intact, leading across to the floating fortress, which hovered much closer on this, the opposite side from whence they had first seen it. The back wall of the island keep was much rougher, the windows vertical slashes positioned seemingly haphazardly on the misshapen projections, crooked insets and twisted towers.
‘Extraordinary,’ Icarium said in a low voice. ‘What, I wonder, does this hidden face of madness
reveal of the makers? These K’Chain Che’Malle?’
‘A certain tension, perhaps?’
‘Tension?’
‘Between,’ Mappo said, ‘order and chaos. An inner dichotomy, conflicting impulses…’
‘The contradictions evident in all intelligent life,’ Icarium said, nodding. He stepped onto the span, then, arms wheeling, began drifting away.
Mappo reached out and just managed to grasp the Jhag’s flailing foot. He pulled Icarium back down onto the threshold. ‘Well,’ he said, grunting, ‘that was interesting. You weighed nothing, when I had you in my grip. As light as a mote of dust.’
Slowly, tentatively, the Jhag clambered upright once more. ‘That was most alarming. It seems we may have to fly after all.’
‘Then why build bridges?’
‘I have no idea. Unless,’ he added, ‘whatever mechanism invokes this weightlessness is breaking down, losing its precision.’
‘So the bridges should have been exempted? Possibly. In any case, see the railings, projecting not up but out to either side? Modest, but sufficient for handholds, were one to crawl.’
‘Yes. Shall we?’
The sensation, Mappo decided as he reached the midway point, Icarium edging along ahead of him, was not a pleasant one. Nausea, vertigo, a strange urge to pull one’s grip loose due to the momentum provided by one’s own muscles. All sense of up and down had vanished, and at times Mappo was convinced they were climbing a ladder, rather than snaking more or less horizontally across the span of the bridge.
A narrow but tall entranceway gaped ahead, where the bridge made contact with the fortress. Fragments of the door it had once held floated motionless before it. Whatever had shattered it had come from within.
Icarium reached the threshold and climbed to his feet. Moments later Mappo joined him. They peered into the darkness.
‘I smell… vast… death.’
Mappo nodded. He drew out his mace, looked down at the spiked ball of iron, then slipped the handle back through the leather loop at his belt.
Icarium in the lead, they entered the fortress.
The corridor was as narrow as the doorway itself, the walls uneven, black basalt, wet with condensation, the floor precarious with random knobs and projections, and depressions slick with ice that cracked and shifted underfoot. It ran more or less straight for forty paces. By the time they reached the opening at the end their eyes had adjusted to the gloom.
Another enormous chamber, as if the heart of the keep had been carved out. A massive cruciform of bound, black wood filled the cavern, and on it was impaled a dragon. Long dead, once frozen but now rotting. An iron spike as thick around as Mappo’s torso had been driven into the dragon’s throat, just above the breast bones. Aquamarine blood had seeped down from the wound and still dripped heavy and turgid onto the stone floor in slow, steady, fist-sized drops.
‘I know this dragon,’ Icarium whispered.
How? No, ask not.
‘I know this dragon,’ Icarium said again. ‘Sorrit. Its aspect was… Serc. The warren of the sky.’ He lifted both hands to his face. ‘Dead. Sorrit has been slain…’
‘A most delicious throne. No, not delicious. Most bitter, foul, ill-tasting, what was I thinking?’
‘You don’t think, Curdle. You never think. I can’t remember any throne. What throne? There must be some mistake. Not-Apsalar heard wrong, that much is obvious. Completely wrong, an absolute error. Besides, someone’s sitting in it.’
‘Deliciously.’
‘I told you, there was no throne—’
The conversation had been going on for half the night, as they travelled the strange paths of Shadow, winding across a ghostly landscape that constantly shifted between two worlds, although both were equally ravaged and desolate. Apsalar wondered at the sheer extent of this fragment of the Shadow Realm. If her recollection of Cotillion’s memories was accurate, the realm wandered untethered to the world Apsalar called her own, and neither the Rope nor Shadowthrone possessed any control over its seemingly random peregrinations. Even stranger, it was clear that roads of a sort stretched out from the fragment, twisting and wending vast distances, like roots, or tentacles, and sometimes their motions proved independent of the larger fragment.
As with the one they now traversed. More or less following the eastern road leading out from Ehrlitan, skirting the thin ribbon of cedars on their left, beyond which was the sea. And as the traders’ track began to curve northward to meet the coastline, the Shadow Road joined with it, narrowing until it was barely the width of the track itself.
Ignoring the ceaseless nattering from the two ghosts flitting behind her, Apsalar pushed on, fighting the lack of sleep and eager to cover as much ground as possible before the sun’s rise. Her control of the Shadow Road was growing more tenuous – it vanished with every slip of her concentration. Finally, she halted.
The warren crumbled around them. The sky to the east was lightening. They stood on the traders’ track at the base of a winding climb to the coastal ridge, rhizan darting through the air around them.
‘The sun returns! Not again! Telorast, we need to hide! Somewhere!’
‘No we don’t, you idiot. We just get harder to see, that’s all, unless you’re not mindful. Of course, Curdle, you are incapable of being mindful, so I look forward to your wailing dissolution. Peace, at last. For a while, at least—’
‘You are evil, Telorast! I’ve always known it, even before you went and used that knife on—’
‘Be quiet! I never used that knife on anyone.’
‘And you’re a liar!’
‘Say that again and I’ll stick you!’
‘You can’t! I’m dissolving!’
Apsalar ran a hand across her brow. It came away glistening with sweat. ‘That thread of Shadow felt… wrong,’ she said.
‘Oh yes,’ Telorast replied, slipping round to crouch before her in a miasma of swirling grey. ‘It’s sickly. All the outer reaches are. Poisoned, rotting with chaos. We blame Shadowthrone.’
‘Shadowthrone? Why?’
‘Why not? We hate him.’
‘And that is sufficient reason?’
‘The sufficientest reason of all.’
Apsalar studied the climbing track. ‘I think we’re close.’
‘Good. Excellent. I’m frightened. Let’s stop here. Let’s go back, now.’
Stepping through the ghost, Apsalar began the ascent.
‘That was a vicious thing to do,’ Telorast hissed behind her. ‘If I possessed you I wouldn’t do that to me. Not even to Curdle, I wouldn’t. Well, maybe, if I was mad. You’re not mad at me, are you? Please don’t be mad at me. I’ll do anything you ask, until you’re dead. Then I’ll dance on your stinking, bloated corpse, because that’s what you would want me to do, isn’t it? I would if I was you and you were dead and I lingered long enough to dance on you, which I would do.’
Reaching the crest, Apsalar saw that the track continued along the ridge another two hundred paces before twisting back down onto the lee side. Cool morning wind plucked the sweat from her face, sighing in from the vast, dark cape that was the sea on her left. She looked down to see a narrow strand of beach fifteen or so man-heights below, cluttered with driftwood. Along the track to her right, near the far end, a stand of stunted trees rose from a niche in the cliff-side, and in their midst stood a stone tower. White plaster covered its surface for most of its height, barring the uppermost third, where the rough-cut stones were still exposed.
She walked towards it as the first spears of sunlight shot over the horizon.
Heaps of slate filled the modest enclosure surrounding the tower. No-one was visible, and Apsalar could hear nothing from within as she strode across to halt in front of the door.
Telorast’s faint whisper came to her: ‘This isn’t good. A stranger lives here. Must be a stranger, since we’ve never met. And if not a stranger then somebody I know, which would be even worse—’
‘Be quiet,’ Apsalar sai
d, reaching up to pound on the door – then stopped, and stepping back, stared up at the enormous reptilian skull set in the wall above the doorway. ‘Hood’s breath!’ She hesitated, Telorast voicing minute squeals and gasps behind her, then thumped on the weathered wood with a gloved fist.
The sounds of something falling over, then of boots crunching on grit and gravel. A bolt was tugged aside, and the door swung open in a cloud of dust.
The man standing within filled the doorway. Napan, massive muscles, blunt face, small eyes. His scalp shaved and white with dust, through which a few streaks of sweat ran down to glisten in his thick, wiry eyebrows.
Apsalar smiled. ‘Hello, Urko.’
The man grunted, then said, ‘Urko drowned. They all drowned.’
‘It’s that lack of imagination that gave you away,’ she replied.
‘Who are you?’
‘Apsalar—’
‘No you’re not. Apsalar was an Imass—’
‘Not the Mistress of Thieves. It is simply the name I chose—’
‘Damned arrogant of you, too.’
‘Perhaps. In any case, I bring greetings from Dancer.’
The door slammed in her face.
Coughing in the dust gusting over her, Apsalar stepped back and wiped grit from her eyes.
‘Hee hee,’ said Telorast behind her. ‘Can we go now?’
She pounded on the door again.
After a long moment, it opened once more. He was scowling. ‘I once tried to drown him, you know.’
‘No, yes, I recall. You were drunk.’
‘You couldn’t have recalled anything – you weren’t there. Besides, I wasn’t drunk.’
‘Oh. Then… why?’
‘Because he irritated me, that’s why. Just like you’re doing right now.’
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘What for?’
She suddenly had no answer to give him.
His eyes narrowed. ‘He really thought I was drunk? What an idiot.’
‘Well, I suppose the alternative was too depressing.’
‘I never knew he was such a sensitive soul. Are you his daughter? Something… in the way you stand…’
‘May I come in?’
He moved away from the door. Apsalar entered, then halted once more, her eyes on the enormous headless skeleton commanding the interior, reaching all the way up to the tower’s ceiling. Bipedal, long-tailed, the bones a burnished brown colour. ‘What is this?’
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