Dragons of War (20 page)

Slowly he got back to his feet. His head was ringing from the impact. It was dark, but not pitch-dark. There was a dim light coming from somewhere to his left. After a while his eyes adjusted and he saw more tables, and along a wall a series of tubs and sinks.

He was in a large kitchen, unused for an age. He moved toward the light, found a huge door half off its hinges, the wood rotting away at the bottom. Beyond the kitchen was a maze of cellars and storerooms, pantries, and more kitchens, each one with a dumbwaiter to the rooms above.

All were empty.

At length he came out upon a landing. This was the source of the light that came from somewhere above. He slipped quickly down the stairs, farther into the darkness below.

The air in the shaft was cool and smelled of stone. How deep it went into the world was unknown to Relkin. But if it took him farther away from the dwarves and elves, that was all he asked.

The call came two and a half months after his arrival in the Tetralobe. An interval that Thrembode the Magician had filled by earnest study in the library, broken by bouts of the inquisition.

It seemed almost miraculous to him now, but he had survived the inquisition virtually unscathed. They had hardly even tortured him. Just a slight roasting of his left hand and some needlework under the fingernails of the right. He was healing quite quickly, and in the library he had been able to examine a number of rare and important works, including the Negek Deem, one of the high-level praktika of the great magic.

For the last few weeks he had lived in a luxurious private cell, eight feet by eight, equipped with a pallet of straw and a blanket. Such blankets were marks of privilege. He had tickets for two meals a day from the Nexus Hall kitchens, though the meals were monotonous. Each consisted of boiled rice, boiled cabbage, and a sauce derived from unidentifiable meat and beans. There was just enough to keep a man going. One would never grow fat while dining on the Masters' board in the Tetralobe.

And so the days had passed in active inquiry. All the while, however, a low, rising fear had grown in his heart. Around him, in the library, in the cavernous feeding hall, there were hundreds of other grey-faced men, like himself, waiting to be seen. Gaunt men of indeterminate age and hopeless eyes. None spoke to any other, especially not in public. At the refectory, they ate their cabbage and gruel in silence, and then returned to their cells. It was possible to wait for years in this way.

Thrembode did not want to waste his life like this. Though the material in the library was useful and he had learned a couple of new spells, still he would rather be on his way, back to the warmer, lusher lands of the East or West. He had need of a woman, but dared not frequent one of the brothels in the square; not when he was under scrutiny.

To keep him occupied there had been the business with General Lukash. He needed to meet with Lukash, to study Lukash, to come to understand the general. The problem had been that General Lukash would never honor any appointments. Lukash had shown him nothing but enormous disrespect, and Thrembode was infuriated already by the thick-necked, bullet-headed general. Lukash was a Teetol half-breed risen from the ranks in Axoxo. The Doom there had seen good qualities in Lukash, and he had risen far. Then he had been sent to Padmasa and had performed well in command of an army in Kassim. Lukash was also said to have been involved in the great secret program that was going on beneath the Tetralobe. This made him every bit as important as he evidently believed himself to be.

Even in the rumor mad world of the Tetralobe, there was no actual knowledge of what exactly the secret was, only that it was huge, and was taking place in a special complex, dug out below the Tetralobe itself over a period of two and a half years. No one, at pain of their lives, had been allowed into the section since. Only imps and a handful of Mesomasters had ever gone in. The imps had all been of the new breed, the ones with overlarge heads.

Lukash was involved somehow in this business, that was all Thrembode could discover. Even Administrator Gru-Dzek could find out little. Lukash had nothing but contempt for everyone, or so it seemed to the disgruntled administrator. Thrembode was relieved to discover that Administrator Gru-Dzek was getting the same treatment he was.

Still, there was the worry that his part in the upcoming war would be a disaster unless he could somehow establish a better relationship with Lukash. He had to at least meet with the man once or twice. How much did Lukash know about the Argonath? Had he ever been there? Did he speak Verio? There were many questions for which he had no answers. And so the magician had been forced to keep trying, leaving message after message with the general's office despite the humiliation of never receiving a reply.

As the days had lengthened into weeks and finally to months, Thrembode had felt a strange, quiet despair enter in and settle across his heart.

He was a fellow of the bright world of the cities. All the great cities of the world, that was where he was at home, from Ourdh to Lenkeiseen, from Kassim to Kadein, places with light and color and life. He was not meant for life here in the grim Tetralobe.

Worst of all, he could not indulge his passion for women, not here in Padmasa where it was regarded as a weakness and nothing more. He practiced absolute continence, aware of the unseen but constant scrutiny.
They
watched him now.

Yet there were times when it was a torture, and he felt a terrible sexual heat come over him. He had to struggle with himself to keep it from overwhelming his mind and sending him running to the brothels in the Square.

And so he remained, after nine weeks of this, rotting away in a tiny cell, always cold, always hungry, always watched, and always waiting, he began to wonder how long he could stand it.

And then, quite suddenly, there came the break. One grey cold morning like any other, he returned to his cell from the refectory and found two of the strange, megacephalic imps waiting for him. Their tunics and breeches were of a glistening black material that looked almost like skin. Their heads were enormous, bigger than a man's, but the faces were tiny, squeezed together in a look that was perfectly ratlike with pointed noses jutting out above projecting teeth in overcrowded jaws. They were hard to look at for very long.

"Where have you been?" said one of them in a thin, reedy voice.

"I have been at the refectory, eating."

"You had permission?"

"Yes."

"From whom did you obtain this permission to be absent from your cell?"

Thrembode's brow furrowed. He was not about to be interrogated by a pair of imps!

"Who are you?" he said.

They stared at him a moment, their eyes blinking.

"We have been sent to summon you. You are wanted for questioning."

There was a small red insignia on the right breast of their flack tunics. He saw the mark of the Five, a pentad of red circles.

"To the Deeps?"

"You talk too much," said the first imp.

"Indeed, perhaps I do. I have waited a long while for this privilege."

In truth, Thrembode would have preferred not to enter the Deeps ever again.

"Come," they said as they turned and walked away together. Thrembode hesitated. They looked back.

"Come, you are wanted, now!"

There was no escape. Despite his naked dislike of the creatures, he followed.

They kept up a brisk pace and passed quickly through several large halls, filled with lines of petitioners, waiting to see administrators. At last they pushed through a pair of huge wooden doors into an anteroom guarded by a dozen large men who wore black armor and carried shield, sword, and spear.

Above the next pair of doors was a gallery cut from the rock where sat the monitors, a row of strangely mutated imps with overlarge eyes and ears.

Thrembode felt those strange eyes upon him and knew those ears were straining for the slightest whisper he might make. He composed himself with the utmost decorum and strode on behind the megacephalic imps.

Beyond the doors lay a vast open space clouded in darkness. Somewhere far below tolled a giant bell. In the center of the floor gaped the great Shaft that lead to the Deeps. The Shaft was three hundred feet across and smooth-sided. It went down into dim red-lit darkness.

An immense system of spars and wheels overhung the Shaft on one side. Here were lifts and chains that descended deep into the depths. Equipment was piled to one side, and a great gang of slave eunuchs was strapped to the cables. A boxy carriage was waiting.

More guards in black armor stood by, including a lurking troll in the darkness by the wall of equipment. Thrembode shuddered at the sight. He'd always had a loathing of the things, man-eaters all. He wondered what they fed it. Unfortunate worn-out slaves most likely.

Once he and the megacephals were in the elevator coach, the door closed, a whiplash cracked, and the cage began to descend into the darkness of the Shaft.

The descent continued for several minutes and at length broke out into another even more enormous dark space.

Points of red light glimmered far away in the immensity. Thrembode shivered and observed his breath frosting in the air. The temperature had dropped many degrees. There came a bright flash of light from below, and the great bell tolled once more.

This was the Prime Abyss.

He glanced out the window of the coach. The megacephals glared at him, but he ignored them. The distant lights were as much as a mile away, he estimated. The Prime Abyss was an ancient volcanic magma chamber, drained long ago and frozen ever since.

The coach came to rest beside a rickety wooden platform supported on stilt legs more than a hundred feet high. It was a temporary structure. There was no railing, nothing but this narrow wooden platform that jutted out into the empty dark. On the platform waited a group of megacephalic imps. One of them pointed.

As Thrembode turned in the indicated direction, he saw that the darkness here was anything but empty.

Floating in the dark about a hundred paces away, slightly above the level of the rickety platform, was a great black sphere. Flashes of light blasted the space around it every second or so. The bell tolled loud enough to make one's ears ring.

He gazed upon the Five, the very Doom Masters themselves, at work upon another of their creations.

A thirty-foot-wide sphere of black marble hung there, a steel collar around its middle connected to a dozen heavy chains that rose to the top of the Shaft. Floating around this mass were five forms, humanlike but hidden in shadow. Every so often a flash of red light would come from one of them, and a beam would lance down into the black stone and illuminate a small section of it for a moment. At the same time there would be a fierce hiss, then the ringing sound as if a bell had been struck with a hammer.

Thrembode gazed in awe. This was the pinnacle of his world. These were the Masters. They worked the stone with their mighty magic and knotted it full of a dark mentality, a being of pure intellect and no physical form, trapped inside the rock, a slave to their will.

The shadows moved, the rock rang the tune of creation. All their energy was directed at the huge block of stone, but still there was enough radiating outward into the space to make Thrembode shiver. The strength of these energies was enormous. Such power they had! Nothing on this world could match them, certainly not the gaggle of hags at work in the eastern cities. Soon they would be strong enough to control the entire world.

He waited on the end of the ramp proudly inflated, his hands clasped behind his back. He stood close to the edge. After a while he realized he was listening to a kind of seething rustling going on below him, a constant sound.

He turned to one of the megacephals and inquired as to its cause.

"Cockroaches, four feet deep. They eat everything that falls to them."

After that Thrembode stood back from the edge and tried to tune out the hideous sound of a billion insects down below.

Then with a thin wail, a body went past, tossed from the heights, a worn-out slave.

After the impact, the seething grew intense.

Suddenly the field strength around the nascent Doom shrank and faded. Thrembode looked up at once.

The Great Ones approached him, floating on pure psychic power. Now he could actually see them, glittering things, covered in horn. Their eyes were now scarlet slits set in bulging crystalline orbs. Whorls of horn had grown up and out from their cheekbones and the temporal lobe. Thrembode felt his sense of awe overcome the terror.

"This is the second time you have stood before us, Magician Thrembode," said one of them, he could not tell which.

"Yes, Masters, I am privileged."

"You have been very busy in the East, Magician. In Kadein, in Tummuz Orgmeen, in Marneri, and most recently in Ourdh, a series of catastrophes."

Thrembode bit back any response.

"In Kadein we lost an excellent network of agents, I believe."

Thrembode kept absolutely silent. The seething went on undisturbed beneath him.

"And we lost a Doom in Tummuz Orgmeen. A fine Doom, one of our best."

"Except that we understand that a certain magician expressed criticism of the fine Doom that we had wrought."

"This magician said that the Doom was 'flawed,' did he not?"

Thrembode felt his mouth go dry.

"Something's caught his tongue."

Thrembode struggled for a moment to speak and at last regained control of his tongue.

"I am most sorry to have given offense. I did not mean to suggest that there was anything wrong with your work. I was frustrated by my inability to make the Doom understand our peril. It did not understand how troublesome the hags can be."

"Nonsense." This was said very fiercely.

Thrembode gulped, took a deep breath.

"I meant no criticism. I beg your pardons for my stupid remarks. I am an unworthy critic."

There was a long silence.

"This is true, and we have many complaints against you. However, we have put aside the charges. We have a mission for you."