“How long?” said Corvus.
“A few moments,” I said. “Please shut up so I can concentrate.”
Corvus snorted, but turned to watch the dead forest. I held out the concrete chip and the handful of dust, focusing my will and power upon them. The silvery glow around my hand grew brighter, and a curtain of mist rippled into existence, the air growing colder and colder against my bare arms.
Wait. It wasn’t supposed to do that.
“Katerina!” snapped Corvus, his voice cracking like a whip. “Hurry!”
I frowned, looked over my shoulder, and was so shocked by what I saw that I almost lost my grip on the spell.
A…thing was floating towards us.
The wraithwolves had looked like twisted wolves. The anthrophages had looked vaguely human. This thing, this monster, whatever it was, had no analogues in the real world.
A huge sphere of glistening gray flesh floated overhead, black veins pulsing and throbbing in the slime-coated hide. From the underside of the sphere hung dozens of black tentacles, their sides covered in razor-edged barbs. A cluster of misshapen grayish-green flesh nodules adorned the bottom of the pulsing sphere, and dozens of fanged mouths dotted the nodules, opening and closing to reveal jagged fangs. Each mouth looked large enough to bite me in half.
I had seen a lot of terrifying things working for Morvilind, but this was in the top ten.
The thing was floating right towards me.
That put it in the top five. Maybe even the top three.
I whirled to face the rippling sheet of mist, throwing every last scrap of will and magic I could muster into it. The mist writhed, and then began to glow with pale gray light, shining brighter and brighter. Through the light and the mist I glimpsed a large room of black stone, and I was pretty sure it was McCade’s vault on Earth.
“Corvus!” I shouted. “Go!”
I turned and saw him running at me. The huge creature floated after him, moving at least as fast as a car. I spun, took three running steps, and jumped over the edge of the vast chasm.
The rift way swallowed me.
Chapter 9: Books and Scrolls
I hit a floor of black stone, rolled, and landed on my back with a groan. I sat up just as Corvus stumbled through the rift way, and beyond him I saw the huge spherical creature lowering itself toward the ground. It couldn’t fit through the gate, but those tentacles could.
At once I released the spell, and the rift way snapped shut, the view of the Shadowlands and the ghastly horror vanishing.
I flopped upon the floor, breathing hard, and Corvus knelt next to me.
“Are you injured?” he said.
“No,” I said, sitting up with a grunt. “Just tired. Ugh. What the hell was that thing?”
“I have no idea,” said Corvus. “I have never encountered one before. I do not know if such creatures are native to the Shadowlands, or if it came from some distant world. The Shadowlands are supposedly infinite.”
“Ugly thing,” I said. I pushed off the floor, stood, and managed not to fall onto my face. “Just as well it didn’t follow us. It wouldn’t do to end McCade’s gala with some alien monster rampaging through the guests.”
“It would make for a memorable Conquest Day,” said Corvus, his tone grim as he looked around.
“Hah,” I said, and I looked around myself.
For a moment I was too baffled to speak.
I wasn’t in a vault. I wasn’t in a utility room or a mechanical room.
The room…it looked like I had landed in a temple of some kind.
For one thing, it was big, about the size of a mid-sized church, with a vaulted ceiling about thirty feet over my head. The walls and floor were built of gleaming black marble, and a dais rose at the far end of the rectangular room. There was even an altar and a gleaming golden symbol hanging on the wall above it.
“Looks like a church,” I said.
“It’s not,” said Corvus, and his voice was harder than I had heard it yet. His dark sword returned to his right hand, and his eyes moved back and forth as if he expected attack from any direction. “Look closer.”
I did…and I felt my frown deepen.
James and Lucy Marney’s church had stained-glass windows depicting Jesus and the apostles preaching to crowds or tending sheep or doing various other religious things. This room, this temple, had lines of symbols marching up the walls of black marble, strange symbols of wedge-shaped lines that I recognized as cuneiform after a moment, cuneiform similar to that upon the tablet Morvilind wanted. There was an empty space on the dais before the altar, and I saw a double circle ringed with Elven hieroglyphs. Morvilind had not taught me any summoning spells, but I recognized a summoning circle when I saw one. The Marneys’ church taught that the communion wine was the blood of Christ, but I was entirely certain the wine did not leave crusted bloodstains upon the altar, nor fill the air with a metallic, rotting reek as it dried.
And the golden symbol above the altar was not a cross.
It looked like a peculiarly stylized sunburst. No, that wasn’t quite right. The nine rays coming off the central orb of the symbol were too wavy for that. Instead, the rays look liked…tentacles, tentacles that surrounded a fanged mouth.
“Definitely,” I said, “not a church. Damn it. We’re not on Earth, are we? I screwed up the rift way. We…”
“No,” said Corvus. “Look.” He pointed. A vault door stood in the wall behind me, identical to the one I had seen in McCade’s mechanical room. It was the same door.
I summoned power and cast the spell to sense magic, and at once the sensations flooded over my mind. I felt the buzzing, snarling auras I had detected earlier, but much closer. They were here with me, now, in this very room. I also noticed a dark overtone in many of the auras, a nauseating and greasy sensation that made my skin crawl.
Dark magic.
That meant Morvilind had sent me to steal an object of dark magic.
“Oh, hell,” I muttered.
“You recognize the symbol, then?” said Corvus.
“No,” I said. “What is it?”
Corvus hesitated. “It is not something you should know.”
“For God’s sake,” I said. “Today I’ve almost been killed by wraithwolves, anthrophages, and whatever that floating greasy tentacle thing was. What is worse than that?”
“This is,” said Corvus. “It is the symbol of the Dark Ones.”
“Dark Ones? That sounds downright ominous,” I said. I didn’t recognize the title. “What are they really called?”
“No one knows,” said Corvus. “Save perhaps for their cultists. They are creatures that dwell in the realm beyond the Shadowlands, in the place called the Void.”
“That’s the source of dark magic,” I said. “The High Queen forbids all traffic with or summoning from the Void.”
“She does,” said Corvus. “It was one of her disagreements with the Archons when they drove her from the Elven homeworld. There are cults among both Elves and humans that worship the Dark Ones and attempt to summon them up. The Dark Ones are incredibly dangerous, and attempting to summon one or even worshipping one is an automatic death sentence from the Inquisition.”
“Then McCade is one of these cultists,” I said.
“Perhaps even the high priest of his cult,” said Corvus. “He built all this, or his father did, and he likely has followers.”
“Does that earn him an automatic death sentence…ah, decree of execution from the Shadow Hunters?” I said.
Corvus’s hard eyes turned towards me. “The Shadow Hunters are the enemies of the cultists of the Dark One.”
“Right,” I said. Well, the Inquisition might hate the cultists, but since I was pretty sure the bloodstains on that altar were human, the cultists did not seem like good guys. That said, I didn’t care. I hadn’t come here to hunt down crazy cultists who worshipped monsters from beyond the Void. I had come here to steal an enspelled tablet. “Let’s see if we can find that book of your
s. I suppose your decrees of execution are picky about the particulars.”
“At this point,” said Corvus, scowling at the golden sigil of the Dark Ones upon the wall, “it is a formality. This temple could not have been constructed without the knowledge of Paul McCade, and he must die. But the Silent Hunters adhere to our decrees.”
“Stay away from that summoning circle,” I said as we climbed the steps to the dais. “There’s some kind of spell on it. I don’t know what it will do, but I really don’t want to find out.”
“Nor do I,” said Corvus, and we kept well away from the circle and its ring of Elven hieroglyphs. Standing too close to the circle made me dizzy, like I was standing atop a skyscraper and staring at the street far below. For a moment I had a vision of losing my balance, of falling into the circle, a fanged maw rising up to meet me…
“Katerina?” said Corvus.
I recognized the presence of a mental influence upon my thoughts. Whatever spell within in the circle was trying to call me to it.
“Definitely,” I said, walking away, “stay well away from that circle.”
I reached the altar. It was a massive slab of black marble, adorned on the sides with cuneiform symbols. I wondered how much McCade had spent upon black marble to adorn his weird little temple. Clearly the man had too much money. Bloodstains marked the front of the black marble, dull and dark, and the air smelled vaguely of rotting meat. A number of objects rested atop the altar – a golden chalice, a curved dagger, and an open book resting upon a pedestal.
“That your book?” I said. There was an alcove in the wall behind the altar. One side held a row of metal boxes for circuit breakers, likely for the electric lights shining in the temple’s ceiling. The opposite side held a utility shelf containing a miscellaneous assortment of objects. There was a small leather pouch, and my eyes widened as I saw the gleam of gems. Perhaps McCade used those gems in his rituals to contact the Dark Ones.
I tucked the pouch into my duffel bag. It’s not as if Morvilind pays me an allowance or a salary or anything.
“It is,” said Corvus from the altar.
“What is it?” I said. “Some book about the Dark Ones, I suppose? Their secret gospel or whatever?” I cast the spell to sense the presence of magic. All the items upon the altar radiated dark magic, but there was a powerful magical object in the alcove.
“It is called the Void Codex,” said Corvus. I glanced back and saw him lift the book from its pedestal. “It was written in Germany sometime in the fifteenth century by a heretic priest who had founded a cult devoted to the Dark Ones. The wars of the Reformation wiped out his cult, but copies of his book survived and have circulated ever since. They did little harm until the High Queen’s advent and the Conquest…”
“Because magic became far more common then,” I said, sifting through the detritus on the shelves. It mostly seemed to be bloodstained cloths and old knives. I wondered how many people McCade had killed down here. I wondered what he had done with the bodies.
Suddenly I was glad I had not eaten McCade Foods canned meats in quite some time.
“Precisely,” said Corvus. “The book became far more dangerous, and the High Queen banned it and ordered the destruction of any copies.”
“Hard to do that on the Internet,” I said, squatting down to examine the last shelf.
A scroll rested on the bottom shelf. I opened it up, and a surge of excitement went through me. Elven hieroglyphs covered the scroll, and I realized it was a spell. I didn’t recognize the spell, but I did spot the hieroglyph for “mind” near the top of the scroll. If I lived through this, I could learn a new spell, another spell that I might use to free myself and Russell from Morvilind’s grasp.
I stuffed it into my duffel bag, and realized that Corvus was still talking. Best not to mention this little discovery to him.
“The Inquisition has tried,” said Corvus, closing the book and picking it up. “Anyone caught hosting, downloading, or reading the file is executed at once. They don’t even bother with a Punishment Day video. They’ve also flooded with Internet with false copies, and track anyone who tries to download it.”
“That’s actually halfway clever,” I said, pushing away some bloodstained rags, grateful that I was wearing gloves. “I think…”
I froze.
The tablet Morvilind wanted sat on the bottom shelf.
The damned thing looked so…tiny. I don’t know what I expected. Morvilind had told me it weighed nine pounds, and stone is fairly dense, so it couldn’t have been too big. Nevertheless I had been planning to steal it for weeks, and it loomed so large in my thoughts that it should have been at least as tall as the menhirs along the Warded Ways. Instead the tablet was about the size of both of my hands and two inches thick. It looked like a fancy bathroom tile, albeit one covered with cuneiform. Morvilind had said it was an Assyrian tablet, so I suppose the language was Assyrian. I vaguely remembered from the Marneys’ church that the Assyrians had been bloodthirsty warriors and brutal conquerors in ancient days. Perhaps the Dark Ones had helped them with such conquests.
The tablet absolutely radiated dark magic. The stone was cool and dry, yet somehow gave off the sensation of rancid greasiness, even through my gloves. I felt an urge to fling it away from me, the same urge I would have felt if a spider had crawled up my bare arm. Yet for Russell’s sake I had to deliver the damned thing to Morvilind.
I pulled off my makeshift backpack and opened it, drawing out a little roll of bubble wrap and another of duct tape. With a few quick motions I secured the tablet within the bubble wrap and tucked it into my pack. I didn’t know if the dark magic upon the tablet made it more resistant to cracks than regular stone, but the thing was thousands of years old and I wasn’t going to take chances. I pulled the straps over my shoulders and stood up. The extra weight of the tablet was uncomfortable, but not unbearable.
“What are you doing?” said Corvus.
I blinked. He had the Void Codex tucked under his left arm, its unadorned cover made of green leather. In his right hand he held his Shadowmorph blade, blacker than the marble beneath my shoes.
“The same thing you are,” I said. “What I came here to do.”
His eyes were hard and cold. “You came here to steal an artifact of dark magic? A relic of the Dark Ones themselves?”
I shrugged. “I came here to steal what I was hired to steal. I don’t give a damn what my employer does with it.”
“That thing is dangerous,” said Corvus.
“You so sure of that?” I said. “Can you read Assyrian?”
“No.”
I shrugged again, the straps digging into my shoulders. If I got out of here and Morvilind wanted me to steal another piece of rock, I would make sure to bring padded straps. “Then how do you know it’s dangerous? For all you know, it’s some old Assyrian king’s recipe for sugar cookies.”
“Because,” said Corvus, “I can sense the dark power around the thing as well as you can.”
“Not my problem,” I said. “I don’t intend to use it.”
“Then you will merely sell it for money,” said Corvus.
“Something like that,” I said. I couldn’t tell him the truth. Morvilind had been very clear about what would happen if I told anyone the details of our little “arrangement”.
“Then you are a fool,” said Corvus. “It is dangerous…”
“Don’t lecture me,” I snapped. “I don’t want to hear any speeches about morality from an assassin who kills for money.”
“We,” said Corvus, his voice just shy of a growl, “are not assassins. The Shadow Hunters are…”
“Executioners, yes, yes, I know,” I said. “But you don’t do it for free, do you? I bet you get a little remuneration? Maybe a little honorarium? And the parasite inside you feeds off the life force of your victims, lets you do all kind of neat tricks. So don’t claim to be an executioner or some sort of knight on a mission. You’re a hired killer, plain and simple.”
; “The magic in that tablet is dangerous,” said Corvus, his eyes hard and flat, “and it will destroy you if you attempt to use it.”
“That’s good news, then,” I said. “If my employer uses it and makes his head explode, I’ll be rid of him.” I waved a hand at him. “You found your book, your Void Codex or whatever. Don’t you have someone to assassinate?”
“I will not let you take that tablet to work evil elsewhere,” said Corvus. “Or…yes, I see now. Has this been a game all along? Perhaps you belong to a rival cult, and you’ve come to steal McCade’s artifact for your own high priest.”
I burst out laughing. “Don’t be an idiot. I didn’t know these Dark Ones existed until about five minutes ago. Listen to me, Corvus. I don’t care about the Dark Ones, I don’t care about the Rebels, I don’t care about the High Queen, I don’t care about anything. All I care about is selling this tablet.” For with that tablet, I could buy another piece of Russell’s life from Morvilind’s grasping, miserly hands.
“Then you are a mercenary fool,” said Corvus. “I am not sure which is worse. At least the cultists of the Dark Ones have their faith, however mad and twisted. You, however, are heedless of the harm you could cause, and care nothing for anything except your money…”
“I have my own purpose,” I said. “One a blood-drenched old murderer like you would never understand. Now. Go about your business and get out of my way.”
“I will not let you leave with that tablet,” said Corvus.
“Oh?” I said. “Are you going to stop me?”
“If I must,” said Corvus.
I met his gaze without blinking. “Sure you can do that?”
He didn’t say anything, the Shadowmorph sword motionless in his right hand.
He could stop me. In a fight, there was no way I could take him. I didn’t have any spells that could harm him. Cloaking would be useless, since he already knew I was here. I didn’t have any way of deflecting his lightning spells, and the thought of fighting him physically was ludicrous. The man had picked me up and sprinted over the Warded Way without breaking a sweat. Short of shooting him in the back of the head with a gun, there was absolutely no way I could overcome him.
Cloak Games: Thief Trap Page 13