by Jon Kiln
Berengar found another wall and continued onward. He discovered that steady light was bringing up his vision in the passage ahead. Flickering light would mean torches, and the bandits hunting him, most likely. Steady light meant the sun, and possibly a way of escape. He followed along the passage with greater haste with his new vision.
He heard the voices behind him. They seemed to be retreating as if they had taken a wrong turn, but they were still behind, so he moved forward.
He saw flickering light build ahead.
Berengar took a side passage, but immediately slammed face first into the wall. He felt for the edges and found himself in a shallow indention. The light from the torches grew brighter. He heard footsteps, but no voices.
The captain pressed himself to the wall, barely hidden within the groove of the indention in the passage.
Berengar considered drawing his sword and surprising them to beat a retreat past them in their shock. He considered that this might be Nisero and his daughter, stalking quietly through the bowels of the castle, forced to hide also.
He waited.
The dark figures of the bandits passed by under torchlight. His questions were answered. There were too many to take on and his opportunity to surprise them and get past had itself passed. He fought to control his breathing and remain still.
One of the bandits stepped out of the pack and away from the light. He felt against the stone inside the indention. His hand slid toward Berengar’s face. The captain moved his hand onto the hilt of his sword. The bandit’s hand stopped on the wall just below Berengar’s nose. He held his breath. After a moment the bandit withdrew his hand and rejoined the group.
Berengar exhaled in a low, shaky breath. As he inhaled again, another bandit stepped in and felt the wall of the indention. He and a man passing behind him exchanged a series of sharp words in the foreign tongue.
The bandit turned to facing Berengar. He stopped and squinted. He started to withdraw, but then stopped again. He reached out slowly toward Berengar’s face.
The captain drew his blade and slashed upward, wild and hard at the bandit’s face. The blade caught the tip of the bandit’s thumb on his outstretched hand and lopped it off. Berengar connected with the bandit’s chest and chin on the slash. He felt bone grind against the edge of the sword as the bandit toppled away screaming.
Berengar did not wait to see if the blow had been fatal. He charged through the passage with his sword out and up and hoped that he would not take another awkward fall as he did.
The captain ran from the flickering light approaching behind him with the shouts and toward the steady light ahead. The light led him to a twist of stairs leading up. He took them three at a time and followed the curve upward.
Berengar skidded out of the broken door onto a main floor of the castle. He stared up at high windows. He looked around and saw open stairs leading up behind him. Above his head he saw hands hanging stiff over the side edge of the stairs, still holding a mace.
The captain looked out and saw clusters of bandits turn their heads and stare at him in a moment of surprise. He heard the bandits charging up the stairs from the dark passage behind him, and these bandits finally raised their weapons to him.
Berengar turned and ran through another broken door under the stairs. He followed them back down into the darkness at a full run with his sword drawn. He heard the bandits shove each other as they crowded in behind, blocking out what little light was coming from above.
The new passage smelled damp and rotten, but he kept running down the stairs.
Berengar considered stopping and striking out at the first person in the line. The attack would put a barrier in their path and a fear in their hearts that a bandit should rightly have for a member of the Elite Guard. He might be a lone member and retired, but they should fear for their lives. He and Nisero had dropped plenty of them. Either they were too stupid to be properly afraid, or they had embodied the insanity of their bloodthirsty leader and her dark, inhuman soul. Maybe they were more afraid of her than they were of him. He thought about Holst throwing himself at Nisero from Solag’s command. That filled him with an icy fear that had not been present before, even as he ran for his life into the darkness.
His feet hit the water and he could not tell if he was at the end of the steps or not. His knees buckled as he slipped, and Berengar lost contact with the walls. He plunged under and his eyes burned in the darkness within darkness. His momentum carried him out, and he felt the water slosh behind him in his wake.
He waved his arms and pushed himself up into the air again. Captain Berengar tasted the rotten filth in the water as he gagged and heaved a mouthful out. For a moment, he thought of the crane frozen in the salts among the dead trees, and he worried if this was his final moment. He coughed and spit again as his feet found the floor under the water. He realized it came just to his chest, below his neck. The water was putrid and stagnant, but it was not the salty death below. He expected he might well die of some other illness in the coming days if he was able to avoid a bandit’s blade, and the vengeance of an angry daughter of a long dead bandit king.
Light rose gradually over the black water below his face, as did the footsteps from the dry stairs behind him. The light flickered. He ran forward in long strides through the standing water and muck. His movements had the graceful, infuriating slowness of fleeing through a dream.
Something splashed behind him and there were shocked screams and arguments in multiple languages.
The ceiling was lower as Berengar entered the next passage, with less clearance between himself and the arch above. An arrow skipped across to his left and cracked on the stone wall where the water met the air. Berengar tried to run faster and failed.
More arrows struck the water behind him, close enough to splash him. He waited to feel one bite into his skin below the water, but none did. They had overcompensated their angle of draw. More arrows sounded in sharp cracks as they struck the stone above where the ceiling dropped.
Berengar had bounded into deeper darkness and felt the wall below the water as the passage curved. He heard his breathing more harshly in his ears as the light faded.
More splashes sounded and continued behind him. He heard the hiss of a torch being dropped in the water. One of the bandits cursed.
They were reluctant to follow him, but they were doing so now. As the cold, pungent water saturated into his clothes and wrinkled his skin, he felt the deeper cold of knowing their fear of the woman using her brother’s name was pushing them headlong. They would follow him into the underworld in the same way he was willing to do out of love for his daughter. Maybe it was hatred of the one called Solag that had also driven him to these depths, and the bandits fear of her had transferred to a driving hatred of Berengar. He was the reason that they were having to slog through the dark waters of death.
Berengar felt the floor disappear below his step. He parted his hands over and over in front of him to stay above the surface, in air he couldn’t see. He waded to the side and followed along the floor beside the wall. He expected it to vanish under him again at any moment, but he did not have the luxury of slowing his pace.
He found a metal grate along the wall and closed his fingers over the slimy grid of metal bars. Berengar saw a pin point of steady light above him. He gritted his teeth. Water sloshed up against his mouth and he spat out the taste of death again.
Berengar drove his foot into the bars under the water and stepped up. Water drained off his shoulders. He climbed and waved his hand above his head. The voices drifted to him over the water. He did not see the flickering light yet, and wondered if the bandits had managed to keep any torches lit. Berengar found nothing in the air above him. He climbed until the water was around his calves. He felt the entire structure of the grate shift with his weight. Metal on stone shrieked through the passage.
Berengar waved his hand blind above his head again. The pin prick of light flashed as his fingers crossed it. His hand met a stone fa
cing above and behind him. He stretched and clawed, but found no hold. He climbed up higher, leaving the water below him. Water dripped loudly off of the captain.
He found the stone top of the wall and passage where the shifting metal ended. He felt the wall over the grate for any handholds, but found none. He held on and reached behind him to the other side of the stone. The space leading up to the distant light might be some sort of chimney. He thought perhaps he could press both sides and climb up between the walls. He was heavy from the water in his clothes and spent from his desperate run. He might wear out and fall, bouncing between the stone walls on the way down.
Berengar felt a top edge and grabbed on. He let go of the metal with his other hand and gripped the lip of stone as well. He pulled and twisted until his feet came away from the bars and slammed his knees into the stone. He groaned and pulled himself up. Berengar shook with the effort.
He threw his arm up over the edge and pulled up higher. Berengar scraped his knees and bent over in the dark at the waist. He rolled over to his back on the ledge. He reached out to the side feeling for the wall, but found more flat floor. His wet hand slid through thick dust and formed a foul mud.
Berengar heard splashing underneath him. A flicker of light passed low through the chimney around him. He looked up the dusty passage, but the torches below did not extend into the corridor. He heard the metal rattle and then rattle again. Berengar prepared to run as the bandits climbed, but he waited.
The splashes continued onward. They had not ventured to climb. He supposed that they tested to see if it opened, and then were moving on without thinking of climbing. Their own torches would blunt the dim light above.
The sound retreated down the wet passage below. Berengar raised his head. The light seemed impossibly high. He was not sure how far beneath the castle he was, but he estimated the chimney went all the way to the top of the structure, which would explain the distant daylight. Even if he could climb all the way up, being perched on the top lip of a chimney above the castle would not serve his efforts very well.
He rolled up to his knees and faced the darkness down the new passage, one level up from the water. He saw nothing. The captain listened and did not hear any further activity from the water below him, nor from the darkness ahead. With his body damp, he waited to see if he felt the cooling touch of a breeze from any direction. There was none. That did not offer much promise of the way ahead. It made the pin prick of light above and behind him seem like it came down from another plane of existence.
Berengar placed his hand down to brace himself to stand, and it came down on a hard ball that rolled and rattled hollow. The captain felt a shot of pain in his wrist as his weight shifted at an angle. The captain felt around the smooth side of the object and then the large and small holes on the other side. As his fingers felt around it in the dark, his mind formed a picture and he realized it was a skull. Berengar frowned.
He moved his hand over along the wall to feel ahead. He found another object. It was smooth except from one tiny stress crack. Feeling the rough bulbs on both ends, Berengar decided it was a leg bone. He crawled forward and found another bone. It came to a sharp point. He thought it was a rib, but then decided it was likely a collar bone.
Berengar thought, I can build an entire man from what I’m finding here.
He found the wall and felt his way up the stone. As it curved, he rose with more caution. The ceiling was low enough that he could touch the top curve with his elbow still bent. He could stand up straight though.
He took a step and his foot rolled under him. Berengar held the walls on both sides and waded forward through bones instead of water. He felt the longer rib, arm, and leg bones part around his legs and crackle under his feet. Skulls rolled away off the piles as he disturbed them. Occasionally, his hand brushed against a pile of bone running up the wall like a snow bank. He blindly scattered them down into his path, making his fight forward more difficult.
Soon he realized that the wash of bones had reached above his knees. Berengar pulled his legs up free of the piles and crawled over the tops of them. His knees ached from pressing against the hard, uneven surfaces. Sharp points bit at the skin of his hands and through his clothes.
The ceiling started dragging his back as the piles rose higher, toward the top of the low passage.
His voice sounded dim and strained in his own ears in the darkness. “I can make my own army now.”
He prepared to turn back as the closing space forced him to his belly. He felt a faint breeze on his face like the skulls were breathing on him. He pressed forward and saw a sliver of light to his left near the ceiling.
Berengar raked his hands through and furrowed the bone aside. The stone door shuddered, but did not slide any further open. The captain saw dust particles dancing through shafts of light from the ceiling of the room beyond. He felt a steady breeze on his face through the light.
He continued to claw through the bones until he could slide his body into the gap. He changed his breathing to narrow his body, but he got stuck, expecting to be suffocated in his own trap—one day adding himself to the nameless pile of bones. He slipped through and came to rest in a larger chamber.
Berengar looked back as smaller bits of bone tumbled into the room through the opening behind him. “You weren’t that great of an army, even before your skin and muscle wasted away.”
The chamber in front of him had barred cages that ran from floor to ceiling across one long side, and receding away from the light above. Skeletons inside still held together by filthy rags hung from chains on the walls inside the cells. The light poured down from openings high above the cells inside the bars, and too far up for Berengar to see through the angle of his side of the chamber.
Along the floor, skulls and bones were formed into the shapes of chairs, and skeletons were rested at angles and posed on the morbid furniture. In the center of the room closer to the bars, the skulls and bones were stacked in pyramids. Arm bones jutted out of the skulls making the structure appear to be a tree from some version of the underworld. Another pile was all boney hands arranged to draw the eye in a spiral out from the center. The effect left Berengar’s eyes confused and made him dizzy.
He looked into the darkness along the bars away from the light, and the strange formations of the bones, wondering what lay in the darkness beyond these terrible visages. He looked back through the bone clogged gap and considered climbing back to the dark waters to make his escape that way.
He glanced at the skeletons chained inside the cells and thought he may have stumbled into a portion of the castle from which no one emerged alive.
He heard a scrape in the darkness and held his breath. His mind told him it was nothing, but his body hummed with an animalistic instinct to run, though there was nowhere to flee.
Flicking light grew, revealing the outlines of more boney sculptures deeper in the chamber. Berengar looked behind him and slipped behind a small throne of skulls. He knelt and stared through the ribs of the fleshless king slouching sideways, awaiting the audience of whoever or whatever approached.
Torches lit in their fasteners alternating from one side of the long passage to the other. Soon the figure reached the end where the captain hid. The torch being carried was locked into the empty holder on the stone column between the last two cells.
The figure turned and faced the stone door with bone spilling out from the narrow chamber beyond. Berengar wondered if this was the artist, and if he noticed the disturbance the captain created by entering.
He moved his head to get a better view between two lower ribs. The figure twisted toward Berengar’s hiding spot and he froze. He saw the twisted horns. The bear’s eyes glowed in the torch light, and the flickers moved across their black surface like the bear was living and ready to pounce on the captain in rage. The metal below the bear’s maw glowed as well.
She turned and Berengar saw the face of the girl that called herself Solag. She was not wearing the fake beard any
longer. Her angular face still showed a chiseled strength that Berengar normally associated with men.
Her dark blade swung out in front of her and Berengar lowered his hand to the hilt of his own sword, prepared to draw. She seemed to be alone, but he was reluctant to engage her in the dark chamber where he did not know what else might lurk.
He reminded himself that she had proven herself to be formidable in their last meeting. He was weary and injured as well. Patience might prove salvation in this moment, he thought. She could provide an opening for a secret attack. Bandits deserved little more. As he thought about what she and her people had done to his family and his village, restraining himself became more difficult. He still did not know what had become of Nisero and his daughter.
She lowered the sword and laid it flat upon the ground. Berengar’s eyes widened and his grip tightened.
She swept her arms out at her sides and parted the fur of her father’s cloak. Berengar saw between the bones of the slouching skeleton that she wore only two bands of black cloth under the cloak. One was tied around her chest in a dark bow in the front. The other was bound around her waist. He could not decide if it looked like an obscenely short dress or skirt. He had faced many armies of men that girded their loins by tying up the stretches of their tunics. This lower band of black cloth resembled that in its twists. He was not used to seeing a woman this way, and he could not tell what type of battle she was possibly preparing for in this state.
She knelt and slid bones around the floor near the bars. She added a few more pieces to the dead, bony tree. She then began a new twisted pattern of bone shards on the floor. It was almost mesmerizing in its curves. She seemed to be in a trance herself as she worked.
A shadow passed over the wall of the cell from above, and voices drifted along. She did not react to them.
Berengar considered lashing out and trying to strike by surprise, in that moment before she could snatch up her sword. He did not like the distance, nor the feel of his muscles from crouching for so long after running like he had.