The Hammer and the Blade (21 page)

  He staggered back, reached for a weapon but had none. In fact, he realized to his shock that he was not in his own clothing. He wore a dress, a blue dress like Tesha's, but with a ragged, dirty hem and a torn bodice. For a reason he could not articulate, the attire made him feel vulnerable, and the vulnerability deepened the terror gnawing at his self-control.

  He hurried down the hall and the eyes swiveled in their plaster orbits to watch him go. New pairs of eyes formed in the walls as he went, cracking open in the plaster and paint. They were the eyes of men, he knew, judging, planning, plotting. He could not escape them.

  Thick wooden doors lined the hall between faded, moth-eaten tapestries. Sounds carried through the doors: a bestial, rhythmic grunting, the pained screams of women. He felt something sticky and warm under his slippers. He looked down and saw bright red blood seeping under the bottom of the doors, soaking the floor, drenching his feet in crimson.

  The grunting behind the doors grew more urgent, the screams more pained. He put his hands to his ears, unable to bear more, but he could not escape the terrible sounds. He fled, speeding down the hallway, past an endless processional of doors behind which horrors and bloody violations occurred unchecked.

  "Stop it!" he screamed, and banged a fist on one of the doors. "Stop!"

  But it didn't stop. The grunts grew faster, harder, the entire floor shook. A woman screamed desperately. He reached for the handle on the door but there was no handle. He put his shoulder into it, once, twice, but it would not budge.

  He whirled to glare accusingly back at the eyes in the wall – it was their fault, he somehow knew – but they were gone. Instead, the cracks in the plaster formed words, a sentence.

  The grunts and screams stopped. He blinked, breathing hard.

  Down the hall he heard wet respiration, deep and steady. He licked his lips and turned slowly on his heel to face the sound. The hallway ended at another door, larger than the others, and this one with a handle.

  The door was breathing, stretching and expanding as it respired, a great wooden lung that exhaled the smell of sweat, sex, and terror. He stared at it a long while, stuck to the ground by his bloody slippers and his fright.

  The handle on the door started to turn, a slow rotation that caused him nearly to faint.

  Panicked, terrified of the hulking form he knew must lurk on the other side of the wooden slab, he ran down the hall and grabbed the handle with both hands, preventing it from turning. Small, fearful sounds escaped his lips as he tried to hold it still.

  "Go away!" he shouted. "Leave me alone."

  He heard cracking and feared the wood of the door giving way. A titter of laughter sounded in his ears, wispy and otherworldly.

  He opened his eyes, his heart a hammer against the cage of his ribs.

  The wood of the fire crackled, not the door of his dream. He'd fallen asleep around the fire. Two of the guards lay on the ground near the fire, too, wrapped in their bedrolls. One of the pack horses stirred, whinnied, the sound like laughter.

  "Shit," he whispered, and sat up. His head was pounding, his eyes aching. He dabbed at his nose and it came away bloody. Inexplicably, his mouth tasted vaguely of pepper. He spit out the taste and glanced over at the tent that sheltered Rusilla and Merelda. The eunuch remained in his station, as immovable and expressionless as a mountain. A breeze carried down the cut, stirred the flames, Nix's hair.

  He absently poked the still-glowing embers with a stick. Sparks and smoke carried off into the air, and the breeze carried them toward the tents, the carriage. He watched them go, but they didn't go, not directly. Floating embers and swirling smoke gathered in a cloud around the window of Rakon's carriage, as if caught there in a tiny cyclone. For a fleeting moment, Nix thought he saw the outline of an enormous winged form just outside the carriage. Too, he thought he heard the faint titter of laughter in the wind, but the sound and the suggested form lasted only a moment before vanishing into nebulous shapelessness. Fatigue and the stress of traveling the Wastes were making him imagine things.

  He lay back before the fire, closed his eyes, and soon fell into dreamless sleep.

 

The sylph hovered invisibly outside Rakon's carriage, its voice a breeze in his ear, smoke from the fire outlining its winged form for a moment. Open tomes and several ancient, yellowed maps of the Wastes lay on the upholstered bench beside Rakon. He'd pored over them constantly in recent days, confirming and reconfirming his thinking, testing his conclusion.

  Each of the maps showed different parts of the Wastes, yet each part showed a road not unlike the road they traveled, which was actually not a road at all.

  "Lines, angles, shapes," said the sylph, its voice rustling the pages.

  Layering the maps one on top of each other, though clumsy, had brought revelation, had allowed Rakon to discern the truth of the Wastes, and, he thought, the location of Abrak-Thyss.

  "The lines of the roads are as I've described to you?" he said.

  The sylph could see the lines from high above, discern the angles, and note the shape.

  "They are as you've surmised," the sylph whispered, the breeze of its voice tickling his ear, stirring his hair.

  He replayed the spirit's words in his mind, tested them for ambiguities, saw none that troubled him.

  "And the prison of Abrak-Thyss?"

  "The winds here say nothing of Abrak-Thyss. His prison is in the earth, and the air knows him not. The winds speak only of a great mirror that covers the earth where a city once stood, not far from the end of the valley you travel even now. The winds whisper of the Vwynn devils whose delves hollow the earth below us. They say the Vwynn do not go to the place of the mirror."

  "A mirror," Rakon echoed thoughtfully. "Glass."

  Glass made sense. The mirror had to be it.

  The sylph stirred and its winds caused the maps to flutter, flipped pages in the open tome. "The Vwynn suspect you are here," the sylph said, and giggled. "They don't hear the wind, but they smell it, smell the sorcery on it. They're all around you, under you, prowling, stalking. The gusts sing of their hunger."

  "Silence," Rakon said, but the sylph continued.

  "But there is more, master. The breezes from Dur Follin hint that the Norristru pact with Hell is broken. Perhaps your enemies move against you even now. There are sorcerers and witches in Dur Follin gleeful at your fall, even now plotting your demise."

  "I said
silence
," Rakon hissed. "Begone from me, spirit."

  The sylph whirled around the carriage, incensed. "Perhaps next time you call for me, Rakon Norristru, the King of the Air will not heed and will not order me to come. Perhaps after that the wind will carry word of your death."

  Rakon growled, snatched at the air where he knew the spirit to be but his hand passed through its incorporeal form. He jabbed a finger at empty space.

  "And perhaps after I awaken Abrak-Thyss and renew the Pact, when House Thyss of Hell is bound once more to lend its strength to my house, then maybe I shall demand of the King of the Air that he give me you, to imprison in an airless jar with naught for company but your own voice. Forever. Do you think the King of the Air would gainsay me, then, sylph?"

  The sylph keened in terror, swirled gently around Rakon. "A zephyr offered in placation, master. I meant no offense, and of course wish you only good fortune on your quest to find and free Abrak-Thyss."

  "Leave me now, fickle creature."

  "But master, the thought of an airless jar–"

  "Think on it elsewhere. Leave me, I said, until I call again!"

  Keening, the sylph merged with the wind of the Wastes and was gone.

  For a long while, Rakon eyed his maps, the tomes that had led him to the Wastes, to the sole hope for his family. He looked out the window of the carriage, up through the cut and into the sky. Minnear floated against the black vault, nearly full. The thin, waning crescent of Kulven floated above it, a silver scythe. The Thin Veil was almost upon the world.

  Hell, too, blinked in the velvet of the night sky, a crimson dot of fire and stone. He glanced at it for only a moment. Hell was no longer his salvation. His salvation lay somewhere in the Wastes.

  He studied his maps a final time, folded and rolled them up, and tried not to think of the Vwynn.

 

 

 
 

Nix awoke before the dawn, as was his wont when he wasn't otherwise knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. The eunuch still stood his station, and Nix assumed he had not moved through the night.

  "Does the man piss in place?" Nix muttered through a dry mouth that tasted peppery. He sat up, prodded the embers to life, and put two logs on the fire to get it going.

  The camp stirred as dawn turned the sky gray. Men coughed, spit, pissed, pulled on mail and weapons, yoked horses.

  At Rakon's call, the eunuch carried Rusilla and Merelda back to the carriage in turn. Nix did not dare interfere, despite his impulse to do so.

  Egil soon emerged from his tent, yawning, the ruff of his hair sticking out in all directions. He offered a brief prayer to his dead god and came to Nix's side.

  "You feel all right?" the priest asked. "You look like shite."

  Nix made a helpless gesture. "Bad dreams."

  Egil turned and looked at the carriage. "The sisters, you think? Or this place?"

  "Maybe both," Nix said.

  Egil rubbed his palm over his head briskly, as if shaking the eye of Ebenor to wakefulness. "I slept poorly as well. But hopefully we'll not have too much of this. I make us only three days from Afirion."

  "Aye."

  Egil leaned in close and whispered, "I don't have the stomach to fight the worm today. I still ache from yesterday. I think we just surrender to the compulsion and get the damned horn. Then we get clear."

  Egil's choice of the word "surrender" caused Nix to recall his disquieting dream, the screams, the blood, the sense of hopelessness he'd felt, a hopelessness so profound that surrender seemed the only option.

  "I dislike surrender," Nix said.

  "Aye," Egil agreed with a nod. "But what else can we do?"

  To that, Nix said nothing, and he, Egil, and the guards ate on the move as they worked breaking camp, the guards tearing things down as efficiently as they had set them up. Within the hour, they were moving again, following the enspelled road through the cut. The clouds returned and dull, filtered light leaked down from a gray sky. They traveled for leagues through the cut, walled by the blood-colored cliffs, the skeletal trees atop the cliff walls rattling in the wind.

  Around midday the driver of the supply wagon spotted something ahead and pulled the horses to a halt.

  "What is it?" Baras asked, and Rakon's head emerged from the carriage and repeated the question.

  "Something on the side of the road," the driver said, pointing. He was the oldest of the men, his hair going to gray and his body paunchy. "There."

  Half the guards readied crossbows, and the others, including Baras and Jyme, drew blades. Nix and Egil came to the front of the wagon train, their own weapons drawn, and saw the thing to which the driver was pointing, a broken form lying just off the side of the road about thirty paces ahead.

  "Probably an animal," Baras said, and pointed at his men. "The five of you stay with the wagons. Jyme, you're with me." To Rakon, he said, "My lord, we'll just have a look."

  "Be quick," Rakon said.

  Egil and Nix fell in beside Baras and Jyme. Nix kept his eyes on the cliffs as they approached, sniffing for an ambush, but none was forthcoming.

  "What is that?" Jyme asked as they neared the form.

  A body lay on the side of the road, the limbs twisted as if from a fall. Scales the color of sand covered the creature's wiry form, or what remained of its form. Its thin limbs were all sinew and muscle. Each of its five long fingers ended in black claws. The hairless head was a thin oval, vaguely humanlike, and thrown back as if in pain. Fangs filled the overlarge, open mouth. Two vertical slits in the center of its face must have been its nostrils. Many small cuts and bite marks covered the flesh, scores of them. Scavengers had been at the remains. Tatters of dried, leathery skin flapped in the breeze, a drawn curtain revealing ribs and spine.

  "It's a demon," Jyme whispered.

  Nix could not disagree. He'd never seen anything like it.

  "Fell from the top, I'd wager," Egil said, looking up at the valley walls.

  Baras looked back at the caravan, at the creature. "Whatever it is, it's dead. We need to keep moving." He waved the wagon and carriage forward.

  Eyes lingered on the dead creature's form as they passed. The guards made the protective sign of Orella. Rakon stared at the remains with hooded eyes as his carriage rolled past.

  As they traveled, they passed seven more carcasses. All of them were dead many days, perhaps weeks, and appeared broken from a fall. Bites and scratches covered the scaled flesh, and all had been torn open.

  The men gave the bodies a wide berth. Twice after passing bodies Baras consulted with Rakon, but he never shared the subject of the conversations with Nix.

  The valley seemed neverending and they continued on for hours, walled in by the cliffs, walking an inexplicable thoroughfare littered with the corpses of demons.

  The men remained tense and alert, keeping weapons to hand. Nix watched the sky, the tree-fringed top of the cut, the walls, but nothing occurred, and by nightfall the men seemed to have shed much of their nervousness.