Perilous Shadows: Book 6 Circles of Light (29 page)

Chapter
Sixteen

Essa walked to the
steps and waited for everyone else to join her. Her sharp purple
teeth gleamed as she grinned down at them. Farn landed and
reclined, facing the building.

‘I sense no life
within,’ he told them, his eyes whirring pearl and
sapphire.

Essa climbed the steps
and put her hands flat against the doors. Despite Farn’s comment,
swords hissed from scabbards and guards closed up behind the
Sergeant. She pushed steadily and the doors swung inwards without a
sound. Tika and Rhaki were the only ones without a weapon in their
hands when they moved through the guards to arrive on either side
of Essa.

‘I doubt you’ll need
weapons,’ Tika said quietly.

The doors had opened
into a hall, large enough to hold a couple of hundred people, but
at present it contained only bones. Shea slid around Tika to stare
inside.

‘Why are they all in
here? They must have been killed all over the town. Did someone
drag them all here? Why?’

Without waiting for an
answer, Shea moved slowly into the hall. The sun was almost
directly opposite the doors and its light illuminated the piles of
bones heaped as high as Sergeant Essa. Sket frowned as he followed
Shea. Tika knew what concerned him and what the rest of her party
had also noticed. These were not full skeletons haphazardly thrown
one on the other. There was no clothing, no rags even, around the
bones, and cloth would not have rotted in the few months since
these people died.

Given Volk’s
description of the harshness of the winter only just past, it
seemed just as unlikely that corpses could have been reduced to
bare bone in the time. There was no dust beneath the bones, and the
more Tika and her friends looked, the more weird the scene became.
Bones had been sorted: lower leg bones there, feet stacked neatly
several paces away. Ribs formed a bizarre pile of cages next to a
stack of shoulder blades. In silence, they moved cautiously further
into the hall. They spun in unison when Shea gasped, following the
direction of her gaze.

Along the front wall
behind the door, skulls were piled, empty sockets staring back at
these intruders. Tika swallowed, trying to ignore the nausea
beginning to churn in her stomach. Not all of the skulls were of
adults: many, many tiny skulls filled in gaps among the larger
ones. Tika walked to the other side of the doors. Long leg bones,
stacked like firewood, and next to them, uncountable hands
stretched in, fingertips all angled towards the centre of the
hall.

‘Who could do this?’
Rhaki whispered beside her.

Tika shook her head,
unable to reply. A shadow loomed across the floor but it was only
Farn, at the doorway, his eyes flashing darker blue as he took in
the scene. Then he backed away from the doors and settled to wait
for the company to emerge.

‘Do we check the whole
house?’ Sergeant Essa spoke neutrally.

Tika realised it was
exactly the right tone to steady the shocked and sickened company.
She sucked in a deep breath.

‘We check. And we stay
together.’

There were several
small rooms on the ground floor, all simply furnished, apparently
waiting rooms or offices. Volk told them that all towns of a
certain size had one of these small Menedula buildings. The priests
were consulted by citizens for all matters pertaining to business,
taxes, and indeed, nearly every aspect of their daily lives. Volk
explained some of these things as the company climbed the stairs to
the next floor.

They found a small
library, ransacked, books and papers ripped and strewn around the
floor. There were more of the smaller rooms, most containing only
beds and work tables. Again, these rooms seemed to have been torn
apart, the bedcovers shredded to ribbons.

‘I wonder if whoever
did this, was looking for something, or was just intent on
destruction?’ Tika pondered.

They found neither
bodies nor bones. Standing at the foot of another flight of stairs,
Essa grinned.

‘Last lot of stairs
Sket.’

He growled and, beside
Tika, followed the Sergeant upwards. They discovered a large room,
uncannily similar, although on a smaller scale, to Cho Petak’s
apartment. The bookcases against the wall were untouched, papers
still stacked neatly on a long table set at an angle across the
further corner. Facing the table was a half circle of five chairs:
high, wing backed, wooden armchairs. Three of the chairs had their
backs towards the door and it was one of these that drew Tika’s
attention.

The back of her neck
prickled and there was a definite warmth from the pendant under her
shirt. Essa and Sket were on either side, Sket’s sword drawn and
Essa holding the long knife she preferred. Tika vaguely heard a low
snarl from Essa, then she was moving into the room. She gave the
chairs as wide a berth as she could, until she stood behind the
table, never taking her eyes from the middle chair.

She saw feet dangling
from the too high seat and knew she’d found Mena. For the first
time in this land, Tika drew her own sword and moved in front of
the chair. The white blonde hair was a shocking contrast to the
face beneath it. The whole skull had lengthened, the eyes, violet
surrounded by silver had lost their roundness, were oval now and
tilted higher on the outer corners. The nose was unaltered and
while the jaw also seemed unchanged, the tips of two tusks pushed
up over the upper lip.

Mena’s hands rested in
her lap, lightly clasped, claws replacing nails. Her skin had
thickened, looking leathery and grey, with faint lines patterning
it as if it was cracking. Tika’s companions were all staring at the
altered child who stared blankly back. Tika leaned closer and the
violet eyes flickered and the lips parted.

‘I cannot adjust.’ The
voice was a rasping whisper. ‘These bodies are too frail. This air
is too foul.’

Light fled from the
eyes and Mena’s head slipped slightly, to rest on the wing of the
chair, her hands relaxing to lie palms up on her thighs.

There was complete
silence in the room, then people moved away from the strangely
pathetic corpse. But Rhaki approached and knelt beside the chair.
He touched the child’s face gently and then inspected her clawed
hands. Tika was distracted from her appalled contemplation of Mena
by a soft curse. She looked across the room and saw Onion bent over
a half hidden window seat.

A small boy lay curled
there, his back to the room. Onion turned the boy carefully and
they all saw the gaping incision across his throat, the wide hole
in his chest. Volk swore loud and long, and faces turned towards
him.

‘His name is Tyen. He
brought the girl out of the Menedula. They walked all the way to
the Oblaka during the worst of the madness. He did not deserve this
end.’

Rhaki joined them. ‘The
girl didn’t kill him,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t explain why I feel
this but I do, very strongly. Something killed this boy. And it was
that which killed the girl.’

Seeing the puzzled
expressions that greeted this statement, Rhaki tried
again.

‘There was something
left in the girl, some basic emotion or instinct, when her mind and
body had been taken over. I believe she saw the boy’s murder and
that caused a huge surge of – feeling. You know what I
mean.’

He saw the guards
nodding.

‘Before a fight,’
Kazmat muttered. ‘You feel both scared and that you could beat
anything.’

‘Exactly. I think the
girl felt some similar surge. The boy was about her own age, they
had undertaken a journey fraught with danger together. I would
guess they felt protective of each other.’

Volk nodded. ‘Until
just before you arrived at the Oblaka, Tyen was always at her side,
or watching her. If she was shut away with Finn Rah, Tyen sat
outside the door.’

‘As I thought. It is
possible that the girl experienced this visceral feeling of anger,
outrage, horror, when she saw what was done to the boy. Those
strong feelings could well have been utterly beyond the experience
or understanding of whatever was using her, disrupting its
possession and causing it to flee.’

‘And leaving her
finally dying,’ Tika murmured.

Rhaki rested a hand on
Tika’s shoulder. ‘Mena died well, in the end.’

Fedran coughed
politely. ‘What should we do with these two?’ he asked.

Tika looked at Volk.
His small dark eyes studied the boy, then he went back to look at
the girl in the chair.

‘I would lay them
together,’ he said at last.

Tika nodded, accepting
Volk’s choice without question. She watched him lift the boy
carefully, tousled dark hair falling over Volk’s brown shirt
sleeve. She was not surprised to see Rhaki lift Mena, equally
carefully, and carry her after Volk. She saw Onion watching her,
anger in his eyes.

‘Would it take much to
knock this down?’ she asked.

The anger faded. ‘No,
Lady Tika, not much at all.’

‘Do it.’

She headed for the door
then glanced back. ‘Wait until we’re all well out of the way, won’t
you Onion? And do be careful.’

She received a grin
which made her shudder and hurried on after the others.

‘They seem all right
most of the time,’ Sket muttered as they trotted down the stairs.
‘But then they go and look crazy.’

‘I’ve noticed,’ Tika
replied.

Essa glanced back.
‘These three can handle it,’ she assured them. ‘Some can’t. Rose,
he was their leader for years, but they’d been covering for him for
quite a while I’d guess. He blew himself up at Ghost Falls, where
Dog got her leg smashed. She was trying to stop him.’

They hurried through
the bone filled hall and out into the sunshine. They found Farn had
stopped Volk and Rhaki to peer closely at the two small bodies they
carried. When the two men walked on down the steps, Farn followed,
pacing close behind them. Volk took them around the black building
and they saw that, particularly on its rear, north facing wall, the
paint was flaked and peeling, revealing the same pale stone
underneath as the other buildings of the town.

There was little
greenery to be seen anywhere. A few low spindly bushes and patches
of grass struggled to find nourishment from the thin rocky soil.
Volk paused and looked about him. He moved on, picking his way over
the rough ground to where the ridge began to rise above them again.
Tika also paused, scanning the higher ground. She saw Farn land
again on the ridge top, watching them below. A few withered brown
ferns and lines of shrivelled creepers spread like nets across the
upper level but Tika saw where Volk was heading.

A great bulge of rock
pushed out over a small flat shelf and that was where Volk was
aiming for. Volk, Rhaki and Essa had no difficulty climbing up to
the overhang, but the others had to watch their footing. Especially
so when several loud explosions nearly deafened them and the ground
quivered slightly beneath their feet. A large cloud of dust and
debris hung above Merriton and Sket laughed.

‘Shouldn’t think
there’s much left now.’

He held out a hand to
help Tika the last paces up to the ledge. Looking down at the two
small bodies now laid side by side, his laughter
vanished.

‘They’d have enjoyed
that, I’ll wager.’

Tika squeezed his
calloused fingers. Volk was gathering rocks from around the ledge,
placing them along Mena’s right side and Tyen’s left. Everyone
joined in the task, slowly covering the young boy and the changed
girl. Before a stone hid Mena’s face, Tika studied her for several
moments. There was a peacefulness about the face, in spite of the
tusks and the tilted eyes. Gently, Tika placed the stone and went
to fetch more.

Volk wasn’t satisfied
until the cairn was solid and nearly as high as Tika’s shoulder.
Only then did he nod, brushing the dirt and dust from his hands.
They retraced their steps down the slope until Tika felt a touch on
her shoulder. She paused and stared up at Volk.

‘Do you think that
gentleman has them now?’ he asked gruffly.

She sighed. ‘I couldn’t
say Volk. Perhaps we should have said some words over the two. I
don’t know.’

Volk grunted and turned
back. ‘I’ll catch up to you in a while.’

It was dusk when
Shivan, in his Dragon form, glided down to land on the roof terrace
of the Karmazen Palace. He shimmered into his human shape and went
quietly to the archway. He peered in to the great chamber and saw
no one there, although several lamps were lit. A half empty goblet
of the blood drink stood beside an open book on a table next to one
of the couches.

Shivan extended his
senses, as Tika and Rhaki had shown him, and probed through the
adjacent rooms. The First Daughter still lay in her great canopied
bed and a healer was present as always. He felt the slightly
different mind signatures of two cats. Then he probed towards the
outer rooms, as far as the upper landing, and found many Dark
guards patrolling the whole area. He sensed an odd blurred smudge
and realised it must be Corman even as the Palace Master came into
the chamber. Shivan made a mental note to tell Tika what the mind
signature of one who was in the half death felt like, when Corman
spun towards the arch.