The Skybound Sea

Page 47

“Move, idiot!” Kataria snarled, shoving him toward the door.

Denaos’s boots were just disappearing beneath the stone slab, Asper already gone in. Kataria tossed her bow under and slithered on her belly after them.

“Come on, come on!” she barked at Lenk.

“Mahalar! We’re moving!” he cried as he threw himself to the ground.

The elder Shen nodded, turned to hobble after them as Lenk tumbled the gap. He could see that the stone was just a cover to a wooden door, a series of groaning gears and chains slowly raising it.

“It’s just going to keep opening!” Asper shouted in the darkness beyond the stone. “Find a switch or something!”

“What makes you think there’s a switch?” Denaos asked.

“I don’t know, just find something!”

Lenk watched the desperation in Mahalar’s eyes, watched the dust fly from his mouth like spittle. He watched the Shen drag his body across the stones. He watched a brief smile flit across his face at the thought of his plan coming to fruition.

He watched the obsidian spearhead burst out the Shen’s chest.

Xhai appeared from behind, hoisting the weapon by a pale, ivory-colored shaft. She looked at the impaled Shen contemptuously, irritated that she hadn’t used it on something a little more impressive. Contempt turned to a wicked delight in an instant, though, as the spear’s head glowed an ominous blue.

The Shen’s flesh blackened as he writhed helplessly upon the shaft. The moisture and warmth left him, sucked into the spear by a great inhale. Even the dust left him as the spear swallowed it all.

He watched Xhai shake the weapon and dislodge a blackened, frozen husk from the shaft.

He watched Mahalar fall to the ground.

He watched Mahalar’s lightless, dark eyes stare back at him.

“Here! Here’s something!” Denaos called. “Quick, help me pull it!”

A clicking sound. The stone groaned as more black-clad warriors came up on the stairs, carrying something thick and heavy between them. The door slid shut as Xhai shouldered the spear and walked back to her mount.

And Lenk was left staring at the darkness.

THIRTY

FIRE

“So . . . what now?”

Lenk could hear Denaos clearly in the darkness. Just like he heard him the last six times. There was surprisingly little to do in a pitch-black room full of warm, stale air and the reek of decaying moisture.

They had spread out, searching blindly for another switch, for anything that might lead them out. The crude metal lever that had shut the door had been found nearly by accident and had promptly snapped in half shortly after. They couldn’t go back even if they wanted to.

“Uyeh!” a distant voice cried through stone.

“Toh!” five others sounded in reply.

The stone door shook as something smashed against it.

They most certainly didn’t want to go back and see what that was. Nor did they want it to come through. Not that such a thing seemed all that feasible. The door did nothing more than tremble. It was a comforting fact, Lenk thought, right up until he remembered it meant the sole route of escape was quite closed off.

Then it was back to groping.

He found nothing but cold stone. Still, cold stone was preferable to any number of options. One of which bumped rather harshly against him.

“Sorry,” Kataria muttered.

“It’s fine,” Lenk replied.

“Oh, it’s you.” She bumped again. This time with fists.

“Gods damn it, will you stop that?” he hissed.

“I should do worse,” she said. “Gariath would want me to do worse.” She struck him again. “How could you leave them like that?”

“Because we can’t run anymore,” he said.

He could feel her glare. “We ran in here.”

“In that case, because I wanted to die in one piece,” he snapped back. “Look, I know we should have gone back. I know we shouldn’t have even come up here. I wanted to sail away on a ship made out of skin but you—”

“Weak. Traitor. Betrayed us.”

“Never wanted them here. Killed them. Too dark.”

He shook his head. Whispers. Memories of whispers, no less. Easily ignored. He believed maybe one-quarter of that.

“We don’t have a lot of options left,” he said. “The tome can’t fall into the netherlings’ hands.”

“Not like there’s a lot of choice,” Asper replied from the other side of the room. “They’ll break through, eventually.”

“Not if the demons kill them first,” Denaos chimed in. “If you pray hard enough, maybe the Gods will take pity on us. The demons will kill the longfaces and be left without a way in and we’ll have the privilege of starving to— oh, good GODS.”

His curse came with the shuffle of stone as the rogue fell backward.

“Something . . . something . . .” he stammered. “I just touched . . . something!”

“Something?” Kataria asked. “Is it big and black?”

“No.”

“I don’t see it, then.”

A soft light bloomed in the darkness. It grew, painting a slender, writhing body, vacant, glassy eyes, faint dots of green light that grew brighter with each breath. The fish twisted, slithered in midair, upward.

Toward a dozen more lights that blossomed in sympathy. Fishes swirled about the ceiling of a large, circular chamber carved into the mountain, illuminating the darkness in a soft nausea of blue and green. Carved upon the walls were images of tall, powerful women with hands extended in benevolence and faces scarred out by fire and sword. “Death to heathens,” “Glory to Gods,” “Kill all Demons” and other more colorful phrases were smeared across the walls in dark, soot-stained graffiti.

“In many different languages,” Kataria noted.

“Huh?”

“That one’s in shictish,” she said, pointing to a line of writing upon the wall. “That one in something else.”

“The mortal armies,” Lenk muttered. “All peoples bound together to fight Ulbecetonth.”

“Well, so long as every culture got the chance to write something dirty,” Denaos said, walking past them. “But unless one of them has a curse you haven’t heard yet, I suggest you come look at this instead.”

“Uyeh!”

“Toh!”

Another tremor shook the stone door. It was all the persuasion anyone needed to follow Denaos to the other side of the cavern. A great archway rose up, flanked by two statues posing as pillars. Both depicted strong, young men with long, flowing hair and fins on the sides of their heads, tridents held in webbed hands.

Their stone skin was worn, however, by the intricate web of chains that wrapped around and between them to meet at a focal point at the center of the archway.

Another statue, shorter though far more imposing, stood there: a hooded man with a tremendous stone eye for a face, left palm outstretched in a warding motion, like the others Lenk had seen on Teji and Jaga. The chains bound it to the pillars and, hanging from every third link, a scrap of paper with barely legible script was woven to the metal.

“Do they say anything?” he asked, peering at the slips of paper.

“‘Turn back, ye who wanders,’” Denaos read off a slip, “‘the way ahead is shut to all but the dead. Enter, ye who seeks their joining.’”

“Really?”

“No, not really. I just thought that sounded ominous enough to make you stop thinking about it for a while.” He tried to pull a pair of chains apart to make a gap large enough to pass through. “Give me a hand with these.”

“Right.” The young man stepped up and took the links. “Kat, watch our back. Asper—”

He certainly hadn’t meant to finish that sentence with a scream that was usually reserved for people with hot pokers in the eyes. But the moment he had tried to pry the chains apart, he felt something inside him tear. His shoulder became damp, sticky. He could smell something pungent.

“The hell’s wrong with you?” Denaos asked, cocking a brow.

“Uh . . .”

Any chance he might have had of coming up with something more clever than that ended as Asper pulled the collar of this tunic away, exposing the glistening infection in his shoulder.

“I told you,” she snarled. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”

“Tell him what?” Kataria asked, wide-eyed. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I’m fine,” Lenk said.

“I can’t tell if you’re trying to be stoic, clever, or stupid,” Asper said, pointing at his shoulder. “But this sort of precludes two of those.” She studied the wound, wincing. “It looks bad.”

“How bad?” Kataria asked.