A storm came, sudden and rough, ripping up the landscape like a wild thing. They lit a fire in the old hearth using sulphur and lime, and Eir, without much idea of what she was doing, began to cook three hares Munio had caught earlier. That was despite Randur’s nervous suggestion that he should continue to look after culinary matters. Rika sat down cross-legged in a corner, soon in deep contemplation. While the old swordmaster scrutinized a map, Randur boarded up the broken windows as best he could, with some fragments of wood. It felt good to be doing this – making some progress, settling in. Jokes shuttled back and forth rapidly between himself and Munio, as they slowly rebuilt their relationship.
They lit lanterns. Inside there were remnants of ornaments, paintings, furniture, riding and hunting implements, but closer examination showed they had all been purposely damaged, leaving Randur wondering at the cause of this destruction.
‘What d’you suppose happened here then?’ Randur lifted a tin plate to examine the decay in the half-light. ‘There are even teeth marks in the metalwork.’
‘Someone must have been pretty hungry,’ Eir suggested. ‘Will our horses be all right, left outside in this weather?’
‘They’ll be fine,’ Randur said. ‘They’ve some shelter out back, and I’ve fed them amply. How’s our progress so far, Munio?’
‘Good,’ the old man said, his face unreadable. ‘Right on schedule.’
‘You sure it’s the most direct path?’
Munio turned and glared at him. ‘We must not stray from this route if we ever want to get there, let alone stay alive. Or do you still not trust this old mind?’
‘I trust you.’
‘Good. Now, do we have any wine left?’
‘You drank the last of it last night.’
Munio grunted, and began studying the map again. He had been very diligent in making sure their progress went according to his schedule, but where this sudden burst of efficiency had come from, Randur hadn’t a clue. Perhaps it was because all the wine had gone, and this was Munio’s natural state – sober and angry and driven.
Eir brought over the cooked meat, her gold necklace glittering in the candlelight as she leant across the table. The food was burnt on the outside and undercooked inside. ‘Just another minute back on the fire and we’re ready,’ he said to encourage her – and also so he wouldn’t spend the rest of the night vomiting out into the storm.
Rika finished off her meditation, and engaged with Munio in ascertaining their route. She followed a thick line with her finger and asked, ‘Is this a road used by the military? I would rather we kept away from anywhere the army might be.’
Munio shook his head, staring down at the charts. ‘We have no choice except to cross it, but there are no soldiers in this section of the island. The road was mainly used for transporting ore.’
With a cautious pride, Eir brought the food from the fire again. ‘I think the wind has died a bit, Rand. Would you like to check to see if the storm’s eased and look at the horses?’
Randur sighed. Would you like to . . . ? was, it seemed, a common question in these close relationships – something he was so far unused to – and the actual answer was of course, No, I would not like to. I have just spent the last half-hour blocking out any thoughts of the bastard storm. I would rather stay warm and dry, thank you very much.
‘Yes, dear,’ he offered meekly, then shuffled through to the next room and over to the front door.
He kicked away two thick logs helping to secure it and unhooked the door. In the dim lighting of the glade stood several figures, glancing about. His heart flipped. He closed the door carefully, so it wouldn’t make a noise. Taking a peep through a gap in the wood, he could discern several people with . . . pure white skin? What on earth were they – albinos?
Another look: men and women, naked, very slender. They were clearly visible against the backdrop of the dark forest, but when they moved against drifts of snow, they were utterly camouflaged. Their movements seemed jerky. Behind them, the trees stirred loudly in the breeze.
He beckoned Munio immediately and gestured for the swordmaster to take a look. Crouching to see clearly, Munio gave a start of surprise when he saw them.
‘Ghosts?’ he gasped.
More came, ten in all now, and they began pointing and gesturing in hand signs like tribesmen out on a hunt, ready to kill – that was no reassuring omen.
‘Ghosts, my arse,’ Randur grunted. ‘Ghosts don’t communicate like that.’
‘And when, dear boy, have you ever seen a ghost do anything?’
‘Good point,’ he conceded.
There was a gentle sound over to one side, out of sight, then one of the horses was led forward into the open by two of the white-skinned newcomers. They gathered around the horse – primitive weapons in hand, crude spears and bows, axes crafted from stone – and suddenly the animal shuddered violently, staggered, and collapsed, blood spurting from the artery in its neck. With savagery, the alien people set out about severing the animal’s head from its body, their own skins reddening slickly.
Light was fast deserting the sky.
‘Shit, what should we do?’ Randur hissed, panicking. Defending their shack against those unknown beings seemed a daunting prospect, to say the least, but he was prepared to go out and fight. Without horses for transportation they would soon die out here in the wilds.
Munio eyed him harshly until he ventured a response. ‘We’re heavily outnumbered. And the four of us could just about fit on three horses . . .’
‘So your solution, O great swordfighter, is to sit here and do nothing while they eat all our transport. And then maybe us for dessert.’
‘You want to get us killed, Kapp—’
‘Stop calling me that! I’m Randur now. And I’m not going to just sit around and do nothing.’
Randur stomped into the other room to inform the sisters of what was happening. Eir hurriedly tied up her bootlaces, then picked up her blade. Rika’s face maintained the same calm demeanour as always.
He said to her: ‘You fancy helping us this time?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Randur. It’s just not my way.’
Smiling to himself, he nodded his understanding. Soon he was standing by the door with the other two, ready for combat. Randur opened it and the white-skins immediately, simultaneously, turned to face him. Some of them had dark stains around their mouths where they had gorged themselves on raw horse flesh. Their heads tilted and twitched unnervingly.
‘Now what?’ Eir whispered. ‘It’s so hard to see them in this light.’
‘The young lady has a point,’ Munio said. ‘You didn’t think that through, did you? Rushing into combat, as always . . .’
‘Shut up.’ He’s just as bad as Denlin was . . .
The figures came closer, then fanned out, weapons ready, forming a rough semicircle around the door of the hunting lodge. As they loomed nearer Randur could see them more clearly. They possessed absolutely no pigmentation, and their prominent veins were a clear network visible beneath the pallid surface. Their eyes possessed some disturbing quality that made them actually glow blue. They were humanoid, and frighteningly so in some ways – their movements and their mannerisms and their interactions. A figure in the centre with long colourless hair tried addressing them in a guttural and esoteric language. It sounded like the casting of a spell.
‘That horse was ours!’ Randur shouted, not quite sure what else to say. He pointed his hand to indicate the remains of the horse.
Tips of trees rattled in the wind. He held out his sword and aimed it at the spokesman. ‘Leave us. Just go.’
The figure, now clearly a woman, took several phenomenally slow but light steps forward as if the terrain provided an awkward surface to move on. When she was only an armspan away from Randur, she spoke to him directly, although again he couldn’t comprehend any of the arcane sounds uttered. Those blue eyes seemed as if powered by relics. Red trickles streaked her chin and neck like she was salivating the dead
horse’s blood. Her stare totally captivated him, whether because she was so utterly alien to him, or because there was some deep mental power keeping him transfixed, he couldn’t tell.
Randur wrenched his gaze towards Eir, then back again. He did not know what to do next. There was a deep tension filling the air, as if millennia of time had been breached.
‘Who are you?’ he breathed.
The white woman raised her axe and suddenly Randur found himself on the defensive, whipping his blade through her extended wrist. A scream worse than that of any banshee ripped apart the evening air and stilled the weather. The others began to crowd in with their weapons.
As they surged on the three defenders, Randur waded into the melee. His opponents were not strong, almost flouncing away before him, but somehow these creatures always managed to block out his line of attack and push his sword away.
A pause in the combat, a sudden gasp.
Randur turned to see Rika emerging from the doorway with a crude torch in one hand, a vision that imposed itself upon his awareness like the appearance of some holy apparition.
At the sight of the flames, the figures scattered manically, though dragging with them the horse’s corpse.
Randur looked round to Munio, and then to Rika, and . . . Where was Eir?
A muffled scream from the edge of the forest.
‘Fuck, they’ve got her. Rika, make yourself useful and bring along that torch.’
*
Clustered together, they sprinted along a path parallel to the limestone cliff, with the forest to their right. The snow-covered terrain was utterly aphotic, their vision restricted to several paces in front under the light of the torch. There were faint tracks that the white beings had left behind them, punctuated frequently with drops of blood which Randur hoped originated from the hunks of horse flesh.
Eventually they caught up with a figure lying face-down in the snow. It wasn’t Eir, Randur saw with a stab of relief. This was the spokeswoman whose hand he had severed. Lingering over her corpse, they realized she must have bled to death there in the darkness.
They moved on, the tracks accumulating, indicating that the intruders came along this path often. It sloped upwards, to the left, towards the cliff face.
And into the rock caves.
‘The hell am I going in there,’ Munio muttered.
‘Fuck yourself then.’ Randur continued forward with Rika, leaving his old tutor outside in the dark. He didn’t care what was waiting for him – he would get Eir back, or else die trying.
A few moments later, a cry, ‘Wait!’
Eventually Munio caught up, but was breathless because of the additional sprint. He panted, ‘I can’t have you lot all killing yourselves.’
Rika led the way to the entrance, while Randur gripped his blade in anticipation, switching his mind into that lethal zone, ready to be as savage as was needed. Torchlight picked out stalagmites and stalactites, so it seemed that everywhere they looked they were staring into the jaws of some rock beast. Would they ever find Eir in this maze? The surfaces had been weathered so intensely they looked wrinkled with age. In places the stone sagged. They passed mirror pools and zones drenched with bat excrement. The path itself was smooth from years of use, and Randur reckoned that the white-skinned race might not be merely hiding down here, but actually lived here – which would explain the lack of pigmentation in their skins.
Eventually the same path narrowed, before expanding into a larger cavern. Despite the absence of light they noted several exits on the opposite side.
‘Down there, look.’ Rika was pointing to a pool of water.
A pile of metallic objects was barely visible, a motionless form lying alongside. Randur’s heart missed a few beats. They edged their way down cautiously, after detecting an ancient stairway smoothed out of the rock.
‘Eir!’ Randur called out, the echo of his voice strangely prolonged.
She lay flat on her back at the foot of the stairway, rubbing one hand over her face.
He sprinted to her side and skidded on to his knees. No blood, no wounds, nothing to denote she’d been suffering any pain. ‘How do you feel?’ he gasped.
‘I’m fine. My head’s a little sore, as is my neck, but I’m fine.’ He helped her sit up and she buried her head in his shoulder. She was shaking and he did his best to comfort her.
Munio nodded at the sight, and stepped this way and that to check for any sign of the white folk. Randur, too, wondered where they’d gone, then he glanced upwards. ‘Bohr . . .’ he breathed, and Eir squirmed away from him to follow his gaze.
The torchlight reflected off an array of surfaces, gold, silver, copper, brass – hundreds of coins and ornaments, bangles and rings and necklaces. The hoard was vast, extending like a money-beach. Sloping downwards, it descended into a deep pool which bore evidence of rust, the centuries of decay evident.
Randur lifted Eir up in his arms, and they slowly skirted the rim of the treasure, sifting through it with their feet, totally in awe.
Munio crouched, with a groan, to examine some of the coins in more detail, asking for Rika to lower the torch. ‘Some of these . . . they’re positively ancient. Long before Emperors Gulion and Haldun. Look, this even has Goltang’s image! Well I never . . . I’ve never seen such . . . such wealth,’ he muttered.
‘My necklace,’ Eir whispered, exploring her skin with one hand. ‘It’s gone. They must have stolen it.’
‘They might have even taken you just for your necklace,’ Randur suggested. ‘These people, it looks like they’ve been bringing all these trinkets down here for hundreds of years, and without anyone knowing about them.’
‘Millennia!’ Munio examined a piece under the light of Rika’s torch. ‘This here is from the Azimuth era.’
Randur noted how the old man was slyly filling his pockets with some of the trinkets, but thought better than to query it.
This seemed unreal, for an entire community to lead little more than a magpie existence, obsessed with anything that glittered. How long ago must they have fallen away from the surface world, evolving to become those ghosts who had butchered the horse?
‘Look at these markings on the walls.’ Rika brought the light nearer to an area of pale stone that had been noticeably smoothed away. Rock-script bled across it. ‘These are deliberate markings, symbols or equations. I’ve never studied the subject in any detail, but I believe this could be the Máthema language.’
The jagged lines were painted in startlingly bright pigments, yellow and red, the workings of a culture tens of thousands of years old. The notion was absurd, because the writing seemed so fresh.
‘Vectors,’ Rika whispered. ‘Geometric patterns, algebra. Integration ... And yet the graffiti scribbled around it all seem like ...’
‘The scrawls of madmen,’ Randur mumbled, studying the ragged scripts. Vaguely, one set of symbols spelled out:
To Randur it resembled ‘HELP US’ and he was hardly surprised they had gone mad because of all the mathematics ...
‘So is this what eventually happened to that great civilization, then?’ Eir suggested. ‘I always thought it was crop failure that wiped them out. Surely they couldn’t just simply vanish underground while chasing treasure.’
There was a noise nearby, an inhalation of breath, and Randur peered towards the dark exits beyond. Sets of orbs began faintly glowing blue, two, four, then an almost exponential rate of appearance.
‘They won’t come at us - not with that torch.’ Randur glanced to Rika, as if to ask How long will it last?
‘I’ve plenty of sulphur and lime, and matches if it runs out,’ she said. ‘We’re quite safe.’
They returned their gaze to the hoard and the script, independently investigating their discoveries. For some time they patrolled the area to investigate.
There was a weird and distant howl, like a fractured incantation. The group glanced at each other and readied themselves for a fight, but nothing followed. A tension persisted in
the air, though, as if someone had triggered a relic. Sounds began to act abnormally, voices hanging disturbingly in the gloom. Reverberations of their footsteps became suddenly muted.
Then there was the clink-clink-clink of metal.
Coins skimmed back and forth across the floor, rolling over each other, rupturing the surface of the water. Of their own accord, the countless metallic discs began to aggregate and spool, to form a figure.
They massed, stacked and banked up, forming a torso and arms and legs, which then pushed themselves up from the mirror-pool. Resting on top of a vague metal head was a semi-shattered rust-crown.
A coin golem?
The four scrambled back up the stairway as the metal entity strode out of the pool, its legs and feet buckling rustily as it gained control of its own movements. Randur hovered at the rear, now feeling utterly useless, because it would take much more than a couple of sword strokes to bring this bastard down. Stretching upwards, the thing’s head nearly scraped the roof of the cavern, sending individual discs slipping away from it like drops of water.
It began to lumber after them, vast and awkward, and making a hell of a racket.
They ran.
‘Stick together and aim for narrow passageways!’ Randur shouted. ‘I doubt it can fit through many of them.’
‘Nor do I,’ Munio called back.
Light from the torch dipped as they entered pockets of stale air, retracing their route. The occasional enforced darkness made for an unlikely escape. The path narrowed, opened up again. Randur desperately wanted to pause to check on the state of the golem following them. He could still hear the rattle of metal against stone as its body clipped the outcrops of rock, spilling metal-flesh each time. It was in pursuit, but what he wanted to see was how much of it was left.
The air became fresher and colder as the outside world beckoned them again.
A burst of the glade, the stars above, the glow of snow – and they bundled out, breathlessly slipping and sliding down the slope. Behind them, the coin golem was nowhere to be seen.
Randur felt his heart slapping inside him, and he crouched on his hands and knees until he regained his composure.
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