Heritage: Book One of the Gairden Chronicles (25 page)

Shrugging, he stepped through.

The trail unwound in front of him like a ball of string. He followed it around bends, up inclines, and down rough steps. After about another hour he stepped into another waypoint. Threads of darkness unraveled, spooling out to establish links between tunnels that lined the walls from top to bottom like honeycombs. A thick net divided into small squares covered the wall like webbing. Footholds, Aidan presumed, for travelers to use to climb up to their tunnel of choice.

Aidan felt his stomach drop as he followed his vein of darkness up, up, up to a tunnel that lay just below the layer of shadows that hid the ceiling—or dozens more tunnels, for all Aidan knew—from view. Carefully looping his arm through the lantern’s handle, he began to climb. The netting was made of coarse rope arranged in wide loops, perfect for finding footholds but a burden on soft hands. Several minutes later he crawled through his opening, sweaty and panting, his fingers red and throbbing. Climbing to his feet, he peered around the side of the chamber to study the sets of vertical bars crossed with diagonal lines etched near the symbol. Then he groaned.

There were thirty-nine marks, one down from the forty count. He caught his breath and trudged on, following a gentle slope and walking in what felt like a circle. His thoughts wandered as the minutes wore on. After what felt like hours he entered a third waypoint even more cavernous than the last. He knuckled his back, sighing as he bones popped, and studied his trail. Again it went up the wall, even higher than before.

Aidan ground his teeth.
There’s got to be a faster way.
He set the lantern down and looked around the room, thinking. Daniel had said anyone could walk through the tunnels the old-fashioned way: walking, blisters, lots of sweat. Only those who practiced dark magic could ride the tunnels, as he’d said. How exactly did one do that? Daniel had said that the Touched could use dark magic, but he hadn’t said
how
the Touched bit into that forbidden fruit.

That was another thing. Even if Aidan
could
use dark magic, did he
want
to? Should he? All accounts described practitioners of dark magic as corrupt and twisted, like Dimitri Thalamahn. How did that happen? Did years spent dabbling in Midnight rot one’s soul like a piece of fruit? Or did the first dalliance invite evil to settle in?

Faint whispers tickled his ears.
What did you say?
he asked the sword.

—I didn’t say anything.

Aidan strained his ears and froze. Whispers, lots of them, coming from all around. He couldn’t make out the words, but their low and guttural tone made him reach for his sword and move to the center of the room. Shadows danced along the wall. His heart took off at a gallop. Not just whispers, but
whispers
, the shadow creatures that had haunted him awake and asleep. He drew from the lantern and hurled fire at a cluster of darkness against the far wall. The flames clung to the rock, but the whispers were unfazed. There was no shriek of agony, no loss of mass.

Because there were no whispers. These shadows were just shadows.

Then what’s making that noise?

An idea came to him. He set the lantern down, held Heritage tight, and blinked. Sight settled over him, painting the walls white but leaving the trails the deepest shade of midnight. He stood listening, but the words remained indecipherable. There was no magical Hearing to go along with Sight, it seemed. He blinked, returning the waypoint to its normal palette of blues and blacks, and stared up at the key that marked the next tunnel he needed to take, wondering what to do next. Just as he was about to slip his foot into the netting and start up, one voice cut through the whispers and spoke a clear, unmistakable phrase.

—Touch and spirit me away, Lord of Midnight.

The voice was low and hoarse, and the words were not common, nor Darinian, nor any other tongue that passed through most lips. It was the Language of Light, the ancient language the Touched used to pray to the Lady of Dawn to complete a kindling. But these words formed a prayer. To the Lord of Midnight, not the Lady of Dawn.

A shiver ran through Aidan. Praying to Kahltan using the Lady’s beautiful language was like filtering spring water through dirt, blood, and ash. Could he do it? He didn’t even know what the prayer meant. Touch? Touch what?

—The key, perhaps?
Heritage suggested.

Aidan frowned.
Are you encouraging me to try this? To use dark magic?
The suggestion baffled him, and left him wary. Heritage was an instrument forged using the Lady’s light. To receive such a notion from so divine an object was as startling as the Lady of Dawn and Lord of Midnight sitting down to dinner.

Heritage didn’t respond. Hesitantly, Aidan climbed up the netting, panting by the time he pulled himself through the tunnel entrance and flopped onto his back. Weariness ebbed away, but his mounting nervousness did not. Time was growing short. He didn’t know how he knew—the sword hadn’t said as much—but he knew all the same. He could feel it, like a low rumble beneath the feet before the earth shook. Daniel had said it best back at the Hornet’s Nest. They were moving too slow. Walking and running, even his shifts, just weren’t fast enough.

The trail of darkness fed through the key mark just inside the tunnel and continued on. Aidan raised his hand to the key, stopped just short of touching it, then let his fingers settle. The grooves of the “X” and squiggly line felt rough, like they had been carved with a knife. He took a deep breath, kindled from the lantern at his feet, spoke the prayer in the Language—
Touch and spirit me away, Lord of Midnight
—and squeezed his eyes shut, bracing himself as if anticipating a hand made from shadows and nightmares to burst from the wall and drag him into the rock.

Nothing happened.

He opened his eyes to squint and looked around. The light remained in him, coursing through his veins, heating his blood. Through his veins. His eyes widened as he studied the trails of darkness flowing through the wall. Like blood through veins. Light wouldn’t work. He wasn’t praying to the Lady. He was praying to Kahltan. To darkness. The whispers fluttered around him then, intoning the prayer over and over.

Aidan released the light, letting it drain out of him. Then he reached out to draw from the black veins. As his fingertips sank into the goo, he sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. It was thick, jelly-like, and cold as ice. Colder. He pulled in darkness until his fingers went numb, then yanked them away. Inky goop rushed over the impressions his fingertips had made and flowed onward. Aidan imagined some huge, dark heart buried deep within the tunnels, pumping blood through the passageways and beating in slow, low measures. Wiping his hand on his pants, he extended a trembling hand to the key and prayed in the Language.

The cold rushed out of him and the floor, the walls, the world fell away. Then it reappeared. But it was different. He no longer stood at the mouth of a tunnel dozens of feet from the ground. He stood at the mouth of a tunnel
on
the ground, staring out at another waypoint.

Staring around in amazement, he groped at his feet for the lantern but couldn’t find it. It was gone; he had not been touching it when he had... what had he done? It wasn’t kindling. Kindling involved warmth and light and a slight warming of the skin. What Aidan had done was cold and dark, and stank of ash in a cold hearth. Darkening.

He stepped out into the waypoint and immediately forgot about the lantern. He did not think it would do him any good here, anyway. This waypoint was similar to the first. Smaller, fewer tunnels leading off every which way. He picked out his thread easily and followed it to another opening. Only the key was displayed on the wall. No marks. He had traveled miles, probably leagues, in a heartbeat. He thought back to how Daniel had described it:
like riding a wave
. Close, but not quite right. It was like shifting with his eyes closed—not nearly as fatiguing as his desperate leap from Sharem back to Sunfall, but somewhat draining, still.

In fact, other than a slight chill and a bit of tiredness, he felt fine. He patted his hair, his face, body, legs. No darkness growing on him like fungus, no urge to raise bodies from their graves and send them on a hunt across Crotaria. He had used dark magic and lived to tell the tale.

Not that he would. Dark magic was forbidden. He let out a laugh, shaky at first, then a full-bellied roar that had him bent over gasping for breath. The living dead pursued him, shadows came to life and tried to eat him, his parents had been replaced by abominations and wanted him arrested for treason. What was one more crime, one more slight, atop his mounting pile of worries?

Aidan got hold of himself and faced the tunnel. One challenge down. Now for the next. Sallner. A kingdom eight hundred years in exile, its people corrupted by their tyrannical rulers, disciples of Kahltan and wielders of the darkest magic—only now, Aidan found himself more curious than revolted. What had Dimitri and Luria Thalamahn done to corrupt themselves and their people, exactly? Such questions were not asked, at least not by those who feared being branded a heretic. It was enough to know that the Sallnerians had embraced darkness and used it do terrible things.

It
had
been enough. Not anymore. Now he wanted to know.

He stepped into the tunnel.

—Something is coming
, Heritage said, its voice tense.

Footsteps, dozens marching in time along the path before him, like a waterfall heard from far off. The footsteps were growing louder. Aidan ducked into one of the side tunnels and crouched in the shadows to watch. A man in flowing green robes appeared and crossed the chamber. Behind him marched a column of men in a variety of dress—Wardsmen vests, trousers, and mail; Darinian furs; the loose, flowing, colorful garments of Leastonians.

Suspicious, Aidan touched Heritage and summoned Sight. Bile rose up his throat. They were vagrants, every last one, and they surrounded the man near the mouth of the tunnel Aidan had just left. But he was not a man, either. Empty sockets stared around. Fleshy strips ran between his lips like cell bars.

The vagrants milled around him. Half of the group strode on, disappearing into the tunnel. The rest waited. Aidan heard the man who was not a man mutter a phrase—a prayer in the Language of Light—and the rest of the mob disappeared.

Cautiously, Aidan rose and crept back into the waypoint.

They came from Sallner,
he thought.

—And just left for Torel
, Heritage finished.

Not just for Torel. For his friends waiting for him back at the Fisherman’s Pond. He fought the urge to race across the chamber and let the darkness spirit him back to Daniel. To Christine.

—There is little time left, Aidan. You must press on.

Chapter 23

The Prophet

T
HE TUNNEL STANK OF
death and rot. Aidan gagged and pinched his nose, keeping one hand on his sword hilt in case more vagrants appeared in front of him. Up ahead he saw light filtering through a curtain of vines. He hurried forward, eager to leave the tunnels behind. His first glance at the southern kingdom was almost enough to make him turn right back around.

Sallner was as dead as the vagrants who had chased him across Crotaria. The vines hanging over the cave entrance, which dropped him behind the charred remains of what was probably a shop, were brown and brittle. Aidan brushed them aside and they crumbled and fluttered to the ground in flakes. He took a step forward and tripped, barely catching his balance. The ground at his feet had once been unbroken, smooth, paved stone. Now it was torn by gashes. Some, like the one that had caught him, were as thin as a knife’s blade. Others were chasms that stretched far in either direction. Aidan edged carefully around one pit, sending pebbles skittering and clicking down the side.

When the last stone dropped away, a silence Aidan had not noticed before settled back over the land. There was no movement, no breeze, no sound. Sallner sat frozen in time.

—Keep walking south,
Heritage said.

Aidan barely heard her. Great wonders rose up all around him. There were towers that rose up to the sky; telescopes, instruments crafted by Torelian inventors some five hundred years ago, hung limply from broken windows. Rutted stone steps led up to buildings built from gleaming marble—or at least, the marble had gleamed once. Now it was dull and dirty, smeared with grime.

All the buildings had been gutted. Glass crunched under his boots as he turned in a circle, unable to fix on one spot for too long before another snagged his attention. Spiral staircases, huge chambers, burnt books, colored powders as fine as sand, and a square slab of dirty glass twice the size of a door. It clung to the side of the building like a mirror, tilted back to stare up at the Lady.

Rather, where the Lady
would have
shined her light on its surface if not for the green haze that hung over the sky like a thick forest canopy, covering everything in a twilight haze.

Where am I?

—Illuden, Sallner’s greatest city. Many discoveries were made here.

Aidan felt a deep melancholy settle over him. Walking through the remains of these huge structures, spotting marvels every time he swiveled his head, was like walking through the skeletons of some long-dead beast. Walkways that trailed off into nothingness and jagged hunks of wall were its bones, and the discoveries left behind were meat that no one had shaved off to consume.

He passed more buildings, many even larger than the first, all bearing scorch marks like bruises. Empty windows stared like eye sockets. He did not cross through them. He did not want to look. He thought of the mirror hanging from its side, the way it was slanted to catch the Lady’s light. It wasn’t glass, he knew. He couldn’t be sure, but its material reminded him of the lamp hanging from his neck. He thought back to the telescopes drooping out of windows. Torelians had created them five hundred years ago. Sallner had been exiled for eight hundred.