The Black Shriving (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 2)
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Authors: Phil Tucker
The Black Shriving
Book 2 of the
CHRONICLES OF THE BLACK GATE
By Phil Tucker
© 2016 Phil Tucker
Cover art by Andreas Zafeiratos
All characters and events in this book, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
CHAPTER ONE
Audsley stepped through the Lunar Portal and stumbled with a gasp into darkness. On his shoulder, Aedelbert hissed in alarm, rearing up and flaring his wings as Audsley tripped and fell, cracking down onto both knees and sending old bones skittering away from him across a smooth black floor. Heart pounding, he fought the urge to scream. The room into which he'd emerged was vast, with ebon pillars broader than the biggest trees rising up to disappear into the gloom high overhead. A faint mist hovered a few feet over the ground, obscuring much, though from where he knelt Audsley could make out the hunched forms of what looked like countless bodies spreading away from him into the distance.
"Where are we?" he breathed, and then yelped as Tiron strode through the Portal right behind him, sword in fist. Scurrying aside, he placed his back to the pillar in which their Portal was embedded, and then started and turned to gaze up the pillar's length. It was composed of Portals, its surface covered in dead archways that spiraled around the column like some ghastly impersonation of a water twister. Audsley's mind spun. There had to be at least fifty, perhaps a hundred Lunar Portals embedded in this sole pillar. He turned, wide-eyed, heart pounding, to the vastness of the room. Ten, maybe fifteen other cyclopean pillars stood around him. A thousand Gates?
"Audsley?" Tiron's voice was a harsh grate. "Where are we?"
The three guards stepped in after Tiron, shuffling their feet as they came through, eyes wide, swords gripped in both hands. They clustered by the Portal, which flickered once and then went dead moments after the final man had stepped through.
We're trapped here
, thought Audsley, climbing to his feet.
That Portal won't open for a month.
"I don't know, exactly," he said, ignoring Tiron's wild glare. "I don't - I've never heard of anything like this. Look. Countless Portals." He moved to study the one they'd stepped through. "And completely unlike any design I've seen. These runes up top..." He peered up at the Portal's apex, where three sigils were deeply inscribed into the black stone. "What language is this?"
"Don't bunch up," Tiron said to the three guards. "Give yourselves room to swing."
The guards reluctantly stepped out to form a loose triangle around Audsley and Tiron, casting nervous glances around the gloom.
"Bodies, ser," said Meffrid. He was a handsome, square-shouldered young man with a thick shock of sandy blond hair. Audsley recalled him as being one of the more pious guards at Kyferin Castle, first to arrive to service and the last to leave. Meffrid knelt and poked at the shape that lay at his feet, barely visible through the ground mist. "Old. Little more than bones."
"Yes," said Audsley. "That makes sense. The upper torso I found in Mythgræfen Hold's basement was near desiccated." He toed the stiff cloth and bones that he'd kicked apart upon stepping through. "This must be the rest of him. And those... his companions."
"Or enemies," said Tiron. He was frowning at the mist, hand pressed to his side. He'd been wounded, remembered Audsley. How badly? "Though I can't get a sense of the fight from here. Hold on." Tiron limped forward, pausing to stare at the hunched shapes, casting around as he sought to read the battlefield as if it were a book. And perhaps to him it was.
"I've never seen nothing like it," whispered Temyl, lowering his blade and gaping at the sheer size of the chamber. Wiry and unkempt, with greasy brown hair slicked back into a short pony tail, he made Audsley think of a plaintive weasel. "It doesn't end. You could fit all of Kyferin Castle in here, you could."
"Unlikely," said Audsley, trying to sound scornful and not quite pulling it off. "The darkness and mist is playing with your mind. Let us remain cool and collected!"
How would Ser Wyland handle this moment? Audsley didn't know. The silence weighed upon his shoulders like a great leaden blanket. The air tasted damp and had a mineral tang.
Aedelbert pressed close to the side of his head, haunches bunched, claws sunk deep into the fabric of his shoulder pad.
Tiron sank into a crouch, staring at a large corpse. "Kragh," he said. "And not the only one. There's a good number of them here."
"Kragh?" Bogusch, the third guard, stood a little straighter. "They've always fought on the side of the Ascendant, haven't they? That's good, right?"
"Who knows," said Tiron, limping back. "Whomever they fought made this room their last stand."
"What do you reckon, ser?" Meffrid rubbed at his jaw. "Couple of hundred bodies here?"
Tiron nodded. "Could be. Audsley, we should move. We'll not learn much huddling at the base of this pillar."
"Yes, quite," said Audsley, stepping away. Where had he seen runes similar to those inscribed over the Portal? He tore a small strip of fabric from his sleeve and rose to his toes to wedge it into the sharp recess of a rune. "There. Now we should be able to find it again. Let's proceed." Tiron was gazing expectantly at him. "Oh! A direction! Any should suffice." He cast around. "There seem to be fewer pillars to our left. That might indicate a wall?"
Tiron nodded. "Meffrid, Bogusch, at the back. Temyl, up front with me. Audsley, stay in the center. Let's go."
The group formed up and moved away from their pillar. The mist swallowed the sounds of their footsteps and swirled around their knees, its pallor made ghoulish by the bodies that were barely visible through it. Everything was black: the floors, the pillars, all made of a smooth black stone that gleamed as if slick. Obsidian, perhaps?
Nobody spoke. Tiron moved forward slowly, sword moving from side to side as if he expected to be rushed by enemies at a moment's notice. It was almost too easy to imagine: the pregnant silence suddenly split by a harrowing scream, the blur of moving shapes, claws probably stretched out to seize at their throats -
Audsley grimaced and fought the urge to spin around and look behind them. "It's all right, Aedelbert," he whispered, reaching up to caress his firecat's head. "Just a little mist and several hundred corpses in a huge and terrifying room. Nothing to be worried about."
"Will you look at that," said Tiron, stopping and rising from his combat stance.
Audsley followed his gaze to a nearby pillar and saw that a huge furrow had been torn through its side, destroying a dozen Gates in the process and revealing that each pillar was solid to the core.
"What could have torn through rock like that?" Tiron mused.
"Nothing natural," said Temyl, forming the sign of the Ascendant's triangle awkwardly with both hands while still holding his blade. "Nothing natural."
Audsley blinked and wrinkled his nose as he stared up at the fearsome gouge. "The rock looks almost melted at the edges." Seized by curiosity, he hurried to the base of the pillar and knelt to grope blindly across the floor. "Here." His hands closed over a large hunk of smooth rock, fingers detecting ripples across its surface. He tried to pull it free and quickly gave up. "It's adhering to the floor." Audsley sat back on his heels and gazed up again at the furrow. "Melted and then cooled, I'd hazard. Whatever carved that gash in the pillar must have done so with a heat strong enough to melt volcanic rock."
"That's not good, is it?" Temyl formed the triangle again.
"It happened hundreds of years ago," snapped Tiron. "It's neither good nor bad. It's history."
"Perhaps," said Audsley, rising to his feet. He cast around. "Are the bodies here all from one side?"
"No," said Meffrid. "Two sides seem to be present. One lot's wearing black, the other white."
"No, there are dead dressed in white on both sides," said Tiron. "But those in black seemed to have been solely on the defense."
"Interesting," said Audsley. He rose to his feet and dusted off his knees. "Let's proceed. I need more information."
The group set off again, moving slowly, warily, though they heard not a sound they hadn't generated. After five more minutes of creeping along, they fetched up against a wall of the same black rock, rising up as smoothly as a castle's curtain wall into the darkness that hid the ceiling. Without a word they turned and followed the wall, and over the course of the next half hour performed a complete circuit of the giant room, which proved to be hexagonal in shape. Nobody spoke, yet Audsley could hear the low-level panic growing in Temyl, whose breath came in ever shorter hitches.
"All right," said Tiron at last. He sheathed his sword and rubbed his face wearily. "We've walked around this place for long enough. Let's camp here for now as we regroup and assess. Meffrid, you're on watch. Keep that sword handy. The rest of you, at ease."
Audsley placed his back against the smooth wall and slid down slowly to sit. Aedelbert leaped down from his shoulder and into his lap, where he curled up into a ball, shaking out his feathered wings in irritated huffs and pushing his head into Audsley's hand, who obliged with gentle scritches.