by Tim Jones
"Is that woman here?" asked Kendik.
"Yes, and two others with her. Dinazhe is determined to keep them with him."
"And is there another with him, a —"
"Don't say it, don't even think it!" said the woman. "It is here. It will hear you. It will lead him to you."
"Well," said Anarya, "that's good, because we mean to kill both it and him."
"This pretty girl is his creation, just like the others," the man told Kendik.
"Perhaps you are right," said Anarya. "Perhaps my memories are false. Perhaps I was his creature once, but I am my own woman now. And I will kill my creator if I can. Do you seek to stand in my path?" She took a step towards them, dagger raised. They cowered back.
"I think we can aid each other," said Kendik. "I heard you say that you would have to cut out some stones to go further. Will those same stones give us safe passage to Dinazhe?"
"If he is concentrating on other things, they might."
"But there are traps between here and the exit," added the woman. "Tell us how you got past them."
So Kendik explained. As the explanation did not outline a use-able escape route, the old couple decided to take shelter in this overgrown farm cave and await the outcome. "If you are victorious, then a way out may be open to us," said the woman. "If you are not, we will meet our doom here. Do you have a knife?"
Anarya's knife was sharp. Dinazhe had inserted the stones in the flesh of his servants' upper arms. It was necessary to dig into the scar tissue there to remove them. The woman cried out, and the man fainted. There was a lot of blood, and though they tried to staunch the flow, some dripped onto the floor. Eager insects burst from the skirts of the vegetation to lap up the nutrients.
Kendik held the bloody stones gingerly in his hands.
"Just like Atlan's. Where does Dinazhe get these things?"
"From his creature," the old woman said. "It excretes them. They contain magic."
After making sure that the servants were as comfortable as possible, Anarya and Kendik bade them farewell. Placing the stones, which they had wiped as clean as they could, in their pockets, they started along the path that led out of the overgrown farm and deeper into the kaer.
"I have accepted my destiny," said Anarya.
"What?"
"If I am Dinazhe's creature, then I expect that his death will also mean mine. But Sezhina should not share that fate. She is my sister, and I will free her if it is the last thing I do. One of us at least will have the pleasure of smiling down on our tormentor's broken corpse."
She looked at him with a face etched in stone. There was nothing more to say. At the far end of the farm cave, a flight of steps had been cut into the rock. They climbed them, looked back for a moment to check that the old couple had stayed put, and stepped into the next tunnel. The dim light vanished. They were in darkness, and there was darkness ahead.
Chapter 28
"How big is this kaer?" whispered Kendik. He had lost track of how many airy caves and narrow tunnels they had walked and clambered through since they left the farm cave.
"Big," replied Anarya. "Several thousand Name-givers took refuge in this kaer, and it took a lot of time to connect existing caves and excavate new ones. We are still in the upper levels. There are many farm caves, though we have seen only one. We will reach the plaza soon."
"And what are we likely to find there?"
"Death."
"I have seen enough bones already," said Kendik.
The cave they were in opened at its far end into the largest cavern they had yet entered. A soft, buttery light welled from light quartzes embedded in the walls. Many other caves and tunnels opened into this place. Kendik did not need Anarya to tell him that they had reached the plaza.
And it was full of bones. They lay everywhere, some still recognizable as skeletons, some broken and tumbled beyond recognition.
"Those who did not come to see the Gates being opened would have gathered here to wait for news," said Anarya.
The drifts of bones grew thicker as they approached the center of the room. To Kendik, they were like the ruins of some ancient alphabet, spelling messages of pain and fear.
And there, in the center of the room, was the cause and the symbol of many troubles. Disregarded by the Gnashers, the ball of True earth still hung there above the dish of True water. Kendik walked towards the plinth on which the bowl rested, avoiding the bones when he could, crunching them when he could not. The gap between earth and water still stood at the width of two fingers.
"What would happen if I tried to grab the ball?" asked Kendik.
"Don't!" said Anarya. She moved to slap his hand away. The sudden movement dislodged her blue stone from the pocket of her vest. It fell with a clatter and rolled out of sight.
The effect was immediate. Around them, the air grew colder. A mist gathered on the floor, and transformed itself into bodies. The forms of people long dead took shape where they had fallen. Anarya was flawless, but these revenants bled from terrible wounds or tried to walk on broken legs as they shambled towards Anarya.
"I know her!" said Anarya. "This is Krina!"
Kendik was grimly focused on one task: to find the fallen stone. He could not see it on the plinth that held the bowl of True water, nor on the floor at their feet. For one wild moment, he thought it had fallen in the bowl itself, and contemplated disturbing the sacred object to find it.
"Don't," said Anarya to someone Kendik could not see, "don't make me ."
The reanimated dead of Kaer Volost paid Kendik no attention, but they were solid enough. One crunched a bone as it advanced towards Anarya, and he saw the blue stone, undamaged, a tread ahead of it. He reached down and clutched the stone just as a heavy foot descended towards it. From behind him, he heard the swish of a sword, then a wet thump.
He straightened, turned, and saw Anarya being pressed backwards against the plinth by a mass of clutching bodies. Her sword swept down again, and another body fell to the floor. The one calm corner still left in Kendik's brain noted that there was no blood. The rest of him willed his arm to stretch out to Anarya and place the blue stone in the clutching fingers of her left hand.
As soon as she grasped it, the bodies faded to nothingness. Whatever power had called them up was placated, and the room lay lifeless again.
Anarya was shaking. "I had to kill—I had to kill—"
"It doesn't matter," said Kendik. "She was long dead, and now she is at rest again."
An expression of fury drew down the corners of Anarya's mouth. "This is a foul place!" she said. "I will not rest until I have cleansed the evil from it."
"I can see now why Dinazhe isn't too worried about anybody penetrating the kaer," said Kendik. "He has guards aplenty."
"I hope that he has not become aware of our presence," said Anarya, her narrowed eyes turned on Kendik. "Only the priests are entitled to touch the elemental clock!"
Kendik had nothing to say but "Sorry." He had no idea what perversity had placed the thought of grabbing the ball into his head.
There were so many exits from the plaza that it took a couple of false starts before Anarya found the right path. "How do you know this is the right way?" asked Kendik.
"Because I sense him," she replied. "I sense his evil."
Kendik couldn't sense anything other than the rumble in his stomach. He persuaded Anarya to turn aside from the hunt so they could force down a few more mouthfuls of what had once been recognizable as their food. Only now, when he was no longer moving, did he, too, sense that something evil lay below them, something implacable and alien.
"I do not think you sense Dinazhe," he said to Anarya. "I think you sense the Horror."
"Perhaps they are one and the same," replied Anarya.
There were fewer skeletons now. They passed through one more farm cave. It was vast and silent. The plants on its walls and in its racks were barely clinging to life, and no insects chittered to disturb the silence.
"We are rea
ching the limits of the kaer as I knew it in my childhood," said Anarya. "Below are the dark lands where, according to Sezhina, strange cults roamed."
"That sounds like the right place for Dinazhe."
With the threat of evil before them, and the memory of evil behind, they entered a long, winding tunnel that sloped gradually downwards. They had been walking down it for almost five minutes when they heard a noise to their right: a long, low moan. A narrow passageway led in that direction. They squeezed into it, Anarya in the lead. She stopped abruptly. "What is it?" hissed Kendik.
Silently, she stepped forward and to the left so Kendik could see what she had seen.
They had entered a roughly circular cave, which must once have been hollowed out, or at least enlarged, by the labor of Name-givers. In the days of the kaer, it had probably been the residence of a family. Now, in the steady glow of their light quartzes, they could see that it held three people. Two of them were chained to the wall, almost within touching distance of each other, and the third was off to Kendik's left, on the other side of the room. Two hung loosely in their shackles. The third saw them, recognized them, and raised a manacled finger to his lips. It was Atlan.
The other two prisoners had been so changed by their captivity that it took Kendik a moment to recognize them. It was not until he moved to the prisoner on the left that he realized she was Sezhina. Anarya lifted Sezhina's head, and they both stared in horror at her appearance. Her face was bruised and bloodied, the little hair she had left clung to her scalp in loose clumps, and her eyes were vacant. The woman they had known was gone, or lost deep inside herself.
Sezhina's left shoulder was bare but for a clumsily applied bandage around which blood and lymph leaked. Her clothes were blood-streaked and filthy.
I left her here, thought Kendik. While I was thinking of my own skin, she was suffering through this torment. He looked at Anarya, contrition written large on his face. She stared back at him and said nothing.
They crossed to the other two prisoners. Kendik went to Atlan first. "How are you?" he whispered.
The ghost of a smile. "Better. It has not tapped me yet. Free us now. Kill that one." Atlan jerked his head to the right and indicated the remaining prisoner.
It was the assassin, and he was in no better state than Sezhina. Kendik was cautious about getting within arm's reach of the man, lest the assassin merely be faking his injuries and his exhaustion— but the man from Iopos showed no sign of animation even when his enemy was, at last, within his reach.
"I can't bring myself to kill a man in this state," said Kendik.
"Then free us and get out," said Atlan.
But that was much easier said than done, for the shackles were made of well-forged iron, as were the chains. Kendik could have chopped at them with his sword, but that would have blunted his sword and left the shackles unaffected. Anarya tried and failed to separate the links with her dagger.
Kendik looked at Sezhina's hands. They were covered in dried blood, and the skin was almost gone from two of the fingers on her left hand. It was plain that she had tried to free herself—but that had been when she weighed more. She was skin and bone now. Somewhere in his soggy bag of food was some butter ...
At first he thought it wasn't going to work. He smeared her hands with butter and tried to tug them through the shackles. They would not budge. Anarya was using the same method on Atlan. Although the big man was able to help, they weren't making much progress.
From somewhere behind him, Kendik felt a renewed gust of dread and disorientation. Redoubling his efforts, he rotated Sezhi-na's left wrist to an angle that would have made anyone conscious cry out in pain—and it worked. He freed her left hand, then her right. She slumped to the floor.
Then it came. Through the narrow entranceway slithered a wet, glutinous mass of tentacles, some as thin as a pencil, others thicker than Kendik's arm. On its own, each tentacle was no more terrible than that of some sea creature cast up to an untimely death on the shore; but together, they emanated such a miasma of hatred and despair that Kendik found he could barely look at them, even as they sought him out. He heard Anarya gasp. She turned from Atlan to face the creature, dagger held low in front of her.
The thing kept on oozing through the doorway, more and more tentacles rippling into view. If Anarya can face it, Kendik told himself, so can I. He grasped at the medallion on his chest for comfort, then drew his sword, stepped forward, and hewed at the nearest tentacle. It split in two with a faint sucking noise. The severed part evaporated. The rest of the tentacle whipped round, spewing some noxious liquid. A few drops of the liquid spattered on his lower leg, burning through the thin fabric and pinpricking his leg with pain. Yet, for a moment, as he struck, the thing's hold on his mind had been loosened. He advanced and struck again, jumping back to avoid the thing's deadly blood.
A cry from his left. Anarya was hacking left-handed with her dagger at tentacles that had seized her right arm. Kendik cut the tentacles with a few frantic blows, then returned to the attack. The thing was wavering. He yelled at it, words of defiance he could not himself understand.
Then the ground shook. The rock pillars of the doorway crumbled. The thing—the Horror—dragged its full bulk into the room, and Kendik almost swooned. Such hatred, such depths of negation, he had never known. It had no eyes that he could see, but it possessed a central core—a mouth surrounded by black, bulbous protrusions of flesh—that sensed his presence, that turned towards him, that opened its mighty jaws and advanced. Kendik raised his sword high and chopped downwards, but the writhing mass of long, thin tentacles around the mouth fastened on his skin faster than he could chop them off. A blow numbed his arm, and his sword clattered out of his grasp onto the rock behind him. Anarya darted forward to sever a few tentacles, but she soon became entangled as well. The thing's mouth opened wide.
Then a woman leapt between Kendik and Anarya, raised Kend-ik's sword high, and cut directly at the thing's central core of flesh. It roared—the first sound Kendik had heard it make—and reared backwards. Moving, despite her injuries, with the speed and agility that marked her as the adept she was, Sezhina cut again and again at the monster, while staying just out of reach of its mouth. Twice, she was hit by jets of its blood, but her skin was so gashed and bloodied that it made little visible difference.
Focusing on this new enemy, the thing loosened its grip on Kendik and Anarya, and they scrambled out of its reach. The pit that had opened in Kendik's mind was closing now. He stood up and prepared to rejoin the fray.
A heavy object crashed into his head and knocked him to the floor. Kendik looked up to see the assassin from Iopos, one hand slipped free from its shackle, swing the shackle's iron chain up for a crushing blow to his head. Then the assassin cried out and dropped his chain, which thudded harmlessly to the ground near Kendik's feet. Atlan had cast the loop of chain between his own still-shackled hands over the assassin's head and around his neck even as the assassin readied the killing blow. Atlan crossed his hands behind the assassin's neck and squeezed. The assassin's face turned red, then purple, then blue. With a final, choked gurgle, the life of the Holder of Trust, the agent of Denairastas, ran out, and the assassin slumped forward in death.
"He killed my brother," said Atlan. "He kept telling me. Every day, while he had strength. Now Mors is avenged."
Kendik turned his attention back to the fight with the Horror just in time to see Anarya, newly returned to the fray, dart in and strike at the thing with her dagger, then leap back to avoid a tentacle. Sezhina was chopping away at it methodically, though Kendik could see that her shoulders were beginning to droop. With a two-handed blow, she plunged the sword almost up to the hilt in its heaving flesh. A jet of ichor spurted out and struck her in the face. Screaming, she fell backwards. Kendik jumped to his feet, grabbed the hilt of the sword, and pressed it further into the Horror. He could feel the thing's confusion and fear. Abruptly, it pulled away from the confrontation and wrenched its body backwards, blun
dering out of the room and back into the depths of the kaer with Kendik's sword still stuck in its flesh. More of the doorway fell in as it withdrew, then Kendik felt his mind clear. It had gone.
He looked around. The assassin lay dead on the floor. Atlan stood in his chains, crying. Anarya was cut, bruised, and singed, just like Kendik.
And Sezhina lay on the rock floor, breathing shallowly. It was impossible to tell how much of the punishment she had taken had been inflicted by the Horror in the latest encounter, and how much during the weeks of slow torment that had preceded it. She lay on the floor and looked at them. One eye was bloodied and almost closed, but the other was clear.
Anarya sat down and cradled Sezhina's head in hers. "Sister," she said.
"Sister. Here is what you must do. Undo that bandage on my shoulder."
"But —"
"There is no time! Undo the bandage!"
Anarya did as she was bidden. The wound was deep, extending almost to the bone. New tissue grew around a protuberance that issued upwards, looking ominously like a stubby tentacle itself.
"Now cut your hand with that dagger and place it over the wound."
"But what is that —"
"Dinazhe used it to draw off my life force for his own. He did the same to that dog from Iopos. He used the power of the Horror to keep us enslaved. He said Atlan was too damaged, and he would keep him for later. Now I want you to have all that I have left. Quickly!" Pain drew a dark hand across Sezhina's face. "There is very little time."
Kendik almost intervened, almost said no—but this was Se-zhina's last request, and he would not thwart it. So he knelt and sat beside Anarya as she made a shallow cut on her hand, then pressed the wound against the growth on Sezhina's shoulder. With a sigh, Sezhina closed her eyes. Anarya remained bent over Sezhina, her eyes wide and staring. All of a sudden, she fell forward, sobbing. Sezhina's eyes slowly opened. She blinked once. A sigh escaped from her throat, and she died.