Samrale smiled, nodded at the knight with the strong hand, and sat back down. “I understand you completely. Now, allow me a moment.”
—Chapter Twenty-Five—
THIRTY AND ONE
Umaryn, Chelsea and Malwynn rested in shifts as the clouds cleared and the moons rose. Each in turn watched the wrapped and tied body of their friend James, watching with focused intent in the meager firelight for any signs of movement in his flesh. Any shift would be the sure sign that his soul had fouled and his body had betrayed his spirit.
But shift after lonely shift the movement never came. His arms remained taught to his side under the white fabric they wrapped him in, and his head never moved. His jaw never clenched in that too familiar angry way and his legs never twitched. Not even a toe wiggled. Perhaps James was pure after all, a saint despite his time in the service of Alisanne.
Perhaps as well he was proof positive that redemption was possible in the world. This thought was not lost on the twins.
Malwynn had taken the first shift of rest and it was he who sat awake with nested, nervous fingers when Aleksi Oathman approached the consecrated foundation. The milk-skinned vampire walked somberly alone down the center of the overgrown railway with his hands stuck in the pockets of his tattered trousers. He had no shoes, and his blood soaked shirt had turned brown and crusty. He looked like a tired vagrant wandering lost in the woods. Aleksi didn’t even look up to make eye contact with Malwynn until he nearly tripped on a fallen beam that had been somehow thrown in the way during the numerous confrontations since their arrival in New Falun.
He caught himself before falling, and Malwynn watched as the old vampire smiled, and laughed at the moment. He looked to Mal and shrugged. “It’s been a long day, and I haven’t had a long day in about twenty years.”
“I do imagine you’ve had a few long nights,” Mal said, innocuously hiding some of his dwindling supply of Obrinnor’s moss in his hands in the event the vampire intended ill against him and his family.
The look on Aleksi’s face told Mal of a lifetime of sadness and regret. The necromancer let the moss fall back into its pouch. Aleksi was no harm. “Too many long nights to count.”
“Rarely are we aware of the costs of the life we buy with our actions, eh?” Mal said with a soft chuckle, trying to let the girls sleep.
“Wisdom. You have such wisdom, Mal. I saw it when you shared your mind with me. What costs you must have paid to earn that gift, Malwynn. You and your sister both,” Aleksi said as he stopped walking. Mal noted that his feet were several feet from the edge of James’ blessed territory.
“Regret has been more than a bit of my thoughts of late. But, I don’t know if I would’ve done anything differently. And I think I regret that realization as well.”
Aleksi smiled, understanding what the younger man said fully. “To bring you to the door you claim to have the key to is to violate my oath. I will die. All of my kind will die. That is part of the oath and magic that makes us what we are.”
Mal walked closer to the vampire so he could speak in a quieter volume. “How do we do this then?”
“I have an idea that I believe will work, but it will require effort and some sacrifice on your part. I do not think you will be disagreeable to it. At least, I hope not.”
“Let me hear it,” Mal said.
“Unlike the others who have come to the ruins of New Falun looking for treasure, you actually have some idea of what lies below where we stand. Of all the people we have sent to the fires you most of all are who we need to keep away. After you leave here—if you leave here at all after you find what you seek—others will return. Most will know nothing unless you tell them what you saw, and that means we must turn the others away as we always have, though I wish to do it less violently than before. We can uphold our oath and allow others to live, but to do our job, we must bolster our numbers.”
“And you need me to do that,” Mal finished for him.
“Inside the door you seek to open, there is a tome with the proper rites to create more of our kind. It came from the Empire. A pact struck between Alisanne and a necromancer from the north so that she could protect what lies below. He came here, and before her and a group of apostles that served Alisanne he accepted our promise to protect this place, and turned us into what we are. He left on a private train after. So strange to see such an unwelcome presence so far south. The only way I can lead you to what you seek is if you swear to help us replenish our numbers so that we may continue to protect the people of Elmoryn from the secrets beneath us.”
“Is what’s hidden down there really that important?” Mal asked him, feeling like it was all just too much to swallow. Too fanatical. Too blind.
Aleksi stepped closer, and Mal watched as his toes at the tip of his bare feet began to slowly smolder from the spell laid upon the ground. They turned black in the moonlight. “If the world were to discover what is below, Elmoryn could rip itself apart. I believe that.”
“Tell me you’re saying that because you fear for the people of Elmoryn, and not because you are protecting the best interests of your church.”
Aleksi stepped back as the pain in his toes overcame his need to be close to make his point. “I believe that the church has done a good thing trying to keep this secret. And I do fully believe when you see what you came to see, you’ll understand why I said what I said. But to do this, I must know you will help us maintain our oath after you intend to leave.”
“I won’t kill anyone to make more of your kind. Nor will I allow you to kill anyone not willing,” Mal said brusquely, a little too loud.
“I understand, and when you read the rite you’ll discover those who wish to become as us must wish it. You cannot force someone to take on the mantle of guardian here. It is a choice we must offer them.”
“Fine then. When we are done with whatever comes I’ll assist you so long as Chelsea and Umaryn are given safe passage, and you promise to protect what’s below us without killing so many people recklessly. I’ll wake the girls, and we’ll go now. I want this over with.”
“Don’t bother, Mal,” Umaryn said from her spot on the grass. “We’ve been listening. We’ll be ready in a minute.”
Mal looked back at Aleksi, and the two men exchanged a smile. Some truths transcend being dead.
The twins and Chelsea both believed the walk to the other door would be a terrible journey through pitch black primordial forest rife with the stench of the dead, and wandering unknown evils.
The only part they were correct about was the pervasive darkness. Under the thick Duulani forest canopy the light shed by both moons failed to reach them, but the path they walked upon was known well to Aleksi. He and his vampires had been walking the dark route at night every night scouring for trespassers and animals to drain the blood of, and he knew it intimately. He knew every step, every stone, every stream and every root underfoot. He spoke softly to the wary trio that followed them, informing them of every possible misstep, every low hanging branch in the blackness, and explaining the slow return of ominous animal noises to the travelers. Outside of the New Falun gorge, the animals remained. The aura the vampiric presence cast failed to reach beyond the walls of mountain stone.
Their path led them through the forest outside of the New Falun gorge, through the trees that clung to the side of the main rail artery that led north to the Duulani hub city of Eden Valley well more than a day’s ride away. When they reached a precarious looking wooden bridge that spanned the valley they had heard about, Aleksi angled them away from the tracks and down the steep embankment until they disappeared into thick undergrowth towered over by larger and older trees. Trees that had stood the test of weather and time for centuries, and would likely still be standing long after they all were dead and made ash.
“The door is opened by a small black object,” Aleksi said after the terrain leveled out. “We call it a key, though it doesn’t look like one.”
“I have it,” Mal said as he op
ened his pocket and produced the small black object that defied description.
“Good. We know only of two keys. Before you arrived we believed that only a single key existed. Clearly we were wrong. The door is just ahead. I must warn you; when the door opens you will be a bit surprised by it, and you will be... shocked when you see what is behind it. The construction we will enter is massive. It spans all the way back under the ground to the mine, and is older than you can imagine. Every step we took to get here was along its length. It predates The Great Plague by many years, we believe. Please think about that. It speaks to the volume and importance of what we’re about to see.”
“What’s inside this place?” Chelsea asked, more than a bit of trepidation in her voice.
Aleksi stopped and turned, stopping the whole group. “We don’t discuss the contents of the vault outside of the vault.”
“Interesting superstition you have there...” Umaryn said. “And why do you call it the vault, anyway?” She had hung her helm on her belt, and her black hair gleamed like molten shadow in the tiny bits of streaming moonlight that fought through the leaves.
“Because it appears to be a place intended for storage. A secure place. It is not due to a superstition we do this,” he said as he started walking again. “It’s a practical precaution. I cannot explain more until we are inside, and the door is shut behind us.”
“Wait,” Umaryn said, stopping again. “We’re going to shut the door behind us? How do we know it’ll open again?”
“There’s no choice in the matter. There are two doors to enter, and the inner door will only open when the outer door closes. Even if it didn’t work that way, we would not allow the door to remain open. Nothing may enter without our express permission. I believe it to be safe. The doors,” Aleksi said, trying to comfort the red armored woman.
“I don’t like this,” she said as she started walking again.
“There is a lot not to like for one of your kind,” Aleksi said.
“What’s that supposed to mean? One of my kind?” Umaryn asked him, her hand dropping to her hammer.
He looked over her shoulder at her, then at the key in Mal’s hand. “You are an artificer, yes? Have you examined the key-thing?”
Her lip curled in disgust. “Yes I am. And the key… it’s… unnatural.”
“Very much against the way we do things on Elmoryn now, yes?” Aleksi asked, his voice pregnant with a hint at some secret knowledge.
“Yes,” she said, catching on a bit.
“There are many, many things inside the vault that are far stranger than our set of keys, Umaryn. But as I said, we will discuss it when we enter. Speaking of which...”
The embankment they walked beside had turned into a sheer cliff that climbed beyond the roof of the treetops and into the Elmoryn nighttime sky. The smooth stone was dark and damp with little trickles of the rain that had fallen earlier seeping their way down, dashing over and under the vines, roots, and moss that impeded their race to the rich soil at its base. A place in the stone where light disappeared stood before them, and despite the lack of illumination from above and the vegetation overgrowing it, the shape of the dark place couldn’t be mistaken for anything but a recessed doorway.
Aleksi walked into the dark space and disappeared into its depths. Chelsea followed, but Mal and Umaryn stood still, staring at the darkness.
Chelsea stopped and turned. “We didn’t come all this way for you two to stop at the doorstep.” In the dark under the trees a single ray of moonlight split the distance between the twins in two. It gave Chelsea just enough light to see both brother and sister had taken each other’s hand like they were children again, and both had wet eyes. She could see a single bright streak of light on Mal’s cheek illuminating a tear running down his face. “Mal? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“Our parents were here. Right here, in this spot,” he said with a shaking voice. He looked down to the dark earth and wet stones at his feet. The innocent ground held such power in his memory, in his mind.
“Yeah,” Umaryn said. “What’s just there... It cost us everything. And to be where they were...”
She returned to them, leaving the dark passage into the stone and Aleksi. “I... I didn’t think about it. Do you want to wait a little longer? Take some time to digest what we’re about to do?”
Mal wiped his tear away and shook his head. He reminded Chelsea of a too-tired toddler fighting sleep. “No. I need to do this. We need to do this. We’ve already paid too steep a price to wait any longer.”
“Do it, brother. Use the key,” Umaryn said, looking down at his free hand and the black piece of strangeness that he held in it.
The three took their last journey together into the dark passage as one.
After starting a small flame on the end of a stick wrapped with torn fabric, they could see the top of the passage narrowed to a peak, not unlike a corridor in a fine cathedral.
“This stone work... It’s impeccable. Perfect. The mortar is finer than anything I’ve ever seen, and the stones are all entirely uniform,” Umaryn said with admiration as she took a second lit stick from Malwynn. “The craftsmanship is unreal. Such skill abounded before The Fall.” She ran a loving hand along the surface of the smooth passage and a strange look came over her face.
“What is it?” Chelsea asked.
“It’s... odd. The stones have no proper soul. They’re unnatural. Not made or sculpted by man. The mortar has some life, and the stones still radiate a faint soul. I think it means the blocks were made somehow without life, but the passage was made by hand, with man-mixed mortar. I don’t quite understand it.”
“You’ll experience quite a bit of that inside,” Aleksi said from a few paces ahead.
They turned to him, and saw that the passage didn’t go deep into the stone of the cliff. Just behind where the pale man stood was a mirror-like metallic surface that ended the tunnel into the cliff face. The giant metal object defied the eye and had no explanation. It’s perfectly smooth surface looked like still water and polished steel mixed into one.
“What is that?” Malwynn asked Aleksi, his eyes pinned wide open.
“This is the door,” Aleksi said as he rapped his knuckles on the metal object before stepping to the side of the passage. The metal did not ring, but instead absorbed his touch. The door must have been made of something strong indeed. “And this is where you press the key,” he motioned with one hand to another mirror-smooth surface beside the metallic rectangle at the end of the corridor. The obsidian-black square was no larger than a man’s hand, and didn’t seem to have a slot for the key to be inserted into.
“How does it work?” Mal asked, holding the key up. “I know it doesn’t use The Way. I’ve examined the key too many times in the dark of night for it to be magical.”
“I wish I knew,” Aleksi said, sounding a bit defeated. “All we know is that we hold our key close, and the door opens.”
Chelsea, Malwynn and Umaryn looked at each other as if they were about to be marched up the stairs of a hangman’s platform. None wanted to speak or act, but eventually, Mal stepped forward. He held the key extended towards the smooth black rectangle set in the stone and kept his eyes on Aleksi. The vampire nodded reassuringly and pressed his body back against the stone to allow Mal’s hand to pass.
The tiny black thing that he knew to be the key got to within an inch of the strange obsidian-like surface, when the black changed color. A square ring of green light appeared just inside the edge of the blackness. It flashed three times before illuminated words appeared inside the green square. The words were written strangely in the most common language used across Elmoryn: Lish.
SITE 0031
ACCESS GRANTED.
Beside the black space that flashed the bright green words, the enormous perfectly flat metallic door made a hissing sound like a hundred pound stone being dragged through wet beach sand. Mal stepped back, suddenly fearful of what was happening, but the vampire at his side st
ood passively. He’d seen this very sight innumerable times before, and he closed his eyes in reverence.
The door moved to the side, recessing itself into the wall instead of swinging in or out. A blackness even darker than that in the passage loomed as the smooth metal reflecting their torchlight slipped away. The massive thickness of the door could then be seen. It was as deep as a man’s chest and solid metal throughout. A fire could rage against it for years before the metal would melt, and an army of Gvorn would grow old and die before they could pull it down. This door was meant to turn away things far greater than man.
The door hissed to the left until it reached the side of the wall, where its movement stopped. As soon as it ceased its gentle, grinding slide, a flash of white light hit their eyes, and blinded them.
“Don’t worry, it’s just a light. Give your eyes a second or two to adjust. You can put your torches out. You won’t need them inside,” Aleksi said.
The vampire was right. As they blinked and looked about inside the now scaldingly lit tunnel, their eyes adjusted, and soon they could see. Just beyond the outer door they could see a strangely clean chamber with an identical inner door beyond. Recessed in the ceiling were four equally spaced white discs that shed a pure white light that resembled the heart of a lightning bolt. The light had no warmth like a candle or a flame, and it hurt the eyes and made the brain ache.
“What is the source of that terrible light?” Umaryn asked as she shielded her eyes from it with a hand above her brow.
“Something pre-Fall. The entire vault is lit by them or similar devices. They radiate no magic, and we’ve no idea how they function, but they function,” Aleksi said as he stepped beyond the door into the chamber. “Come please. The inner door won’t open until we are all inside with the key.”
Together again they all took the first step into the place that cost their parents, their uncle, and the entire population of their town their lives.
The Echoes of Sin (The Kinless Trilogy Book 3) Page 33