Ocean Of Fear (Book 6) (7 page)

“Bastards,” Zamara wiped the slimy green from his shirt and inspected his soldiers. Almost half of them were dead. Sometimes a man survived a poisoned dart, perhaps because of some natural immunity to the toxin or because of a diluted dosage. Mostly though, they died.

“They won’t stand and fight. They attack and then they dive into their pools or canals and swim away. It is not honourable.”

Frater Jonas’s laughter was bitter. “But it is clever. They reduce their casualties and they increase ours. They slow our movement and they cost us precious time.”

“You think they are in league with the Kraken?” Zamara asked.

Jonas shook his head. “I think they are protecting what is theirs. If I were a gambling man I would bet they were trying to prevent us going closer to the citadel. They only attack us on paths that turn towards it. Maybe they are sending a message.”

“They could have just written us a letter,” said Zamara. He laughed at his own joke. None of the others did. They were too tired or too afraid. It was nerve-wracking, waiting for a poison dart from an ambush, moving through a city filled with inhuman monsters.

Kormak counted the dead amphibians. There were less than half a dozen of them, most killed by crossbow bolts. The rest had hopped back into the water as the humans closed.

“They did not attack us at the dock,” Kormak said. “They did attack the Kraken’s ship.”

“Maybe they followed him away,” said Zamara.

“Or maybe they attacked his ship because they had reason to,” said the priest.

“The Quan,” said Kormak.

“The terrible thing here is we might be on the same side as these green-skinned bastards,” said Zamara. “But we have no way of communicating that to them. How do you parlay with a bunch of giant six-limbed newts?”

“Just be grateful there are not more of them, or we would not be going anywhere except the funeral pyre,” said Jonas.

Kormak studied the amphibian’s corpse. In death its eyes were still open. Its tongue hung out. Its chest no longer pulsed and its limbs had stopped twitching. After the priest’s words a twinge of sympathy entered his mind. The amphibians might be the savage, Shadow-tainted remnants of a once proud people but this was their home.

“Let’s go,” Zamara said. “The Holy Sun is not going to keep looking down on us forever.”

The central ziggurat loomed ever larger, a six-sided mountain of damp greenish stone rising over the relative flatness of the city. Huge carved faces with bulging eyes and distended jaws spat fountains of water down its algae-covered sides. The steps of the pyramid jutted twice the height of a man, but ramps went up the side of the structure. Their curved sides were smooth. Going up them felt like crawling up a grain chute in a warehouse.

Kormak led the way. Behind him the men pulled themselves up the side of the ziggurat. He risked a glance back at the city.
 

The canals formed moats around blocks of buildings and flowed into large pools dominated by central hexagonal islands. The structures seemed the tips of gigantic towers emerging from an infinitely deep pool of semi-stagnant water.
 

The water shimmered black and vast. Sinister ripples moved across it, as if an enormous beast displaced it as it rose to the surface. He half-expected to see a massive head emerge.

After the sun’s light died, a faint phosphorescent glow appeared on the surface of the water, giving the whole city a ghostly appearance.

He clambered on, knowing they did not have time now to return to the ship. They were going to have to make camp on top of the great six-sided pyramid. He wondered if they would survive the night.

PHOSPHORESCENT INSECTS SWARMED over the canals. Greenish balls of light drifted over the pools of murky water. Tendrils of mist rose like steam from a boiling pot, strange vapours produced by hidden things in the depths. The shadows of the buildings loomed out of the gloom. In the shimmer of moonlight and the stagnant waters’ glow, Triturek had an eerie, inhuman beauty.

Kormak clambered over the lip of the chute and out onto the summit. He stood on a vast flat area of interlocked stone blocks. In the centre, the dark maw of a great pit loomed. The ashy remains of cooking fires spread across the flagstones.
 

The soldiers muttered and groaned as they emerged behind him. One of them helped Frater Jonas up. The priest breathed like a beached whale. Sweat soaked his robes.

Kormak walked over to the remains of another campfire. A broken grog bottle lay near it.

Zamara glanced at Jonas with something like contempt. He strode over to Kormak, looked down at the blackened stonework, knelt, stirred the ashes with a finger.

“The Kraken has been here,” he said.
 

“He can’t be too far ahead of us,” Kormak said.

Zamara looked around and made an ironic sweep with his hand. “Unless he used the chutes to slide down the far side of this accursed pyramid.”

“I suspect he went inside,” Kormak said. He walked over to the gaping pit in the ziggurat’s roof. Around its edges ran another ramp, smooth and flat and bounded by stonework carved with the faces of toad-headed demons. The ramp vanished down into the distance, turning at right angles at a new level below.

“The Triturids obviously did not believe in stairs,” the captain said. He glanced over his shoulder. The soldiers had lined up on the edge of the ziggurat. One took a piss off its edge. Others watched the lights in the city below and whispered to each other. They seemed grateful to have reached a place where they could not be so easily ambushed. Frater Jonas sat down near the remains of the fire, letting his breathing subside.

“We’re going to have to go in, aren’t we?” He spoke softly so that the others could not hear.

“The Kraken came up here for a reason,” Kormak said, “and I doubt it was simply to enjoy the fine views of the city. Whatever he is looking for is somewhere below us.”

“We’ll let the men get their breath back and then head down,” Zamara said.

He paused for a while and then said, “Strange, strange place. I wonder what it was.”

Frater Jonas picked himself and limped over. “I am guessing a temple.”

Zamara walked over to the edge of the ziggurat. He tilted his head to one side, contemplating what he saw. “You could fit the port of Trefal into a small corner of this city. What happened to it? Why was it abandoned?”

Jonas shrugged. “No one knows. I am curious about what is below.”

“We all know what curiosity did to the cat,” said the captain. He turned to the marines. “Break out the lanterns and torches, you sea-dogs. We’re going below to find this bloody pirate and make him give an accounting for his crimes. And then we’ll give a different sort of accounting to the Chancellor when we collect the bounty on the Kraken’s head.”

Tired as they were the men did not object. Kormak suspected they found the idea of facing pirates less intimidating than spending the night in the open atop the giant ziggurat.

The torches flickered. The air stank of damp. Mould blotched the walls and ran like snot from the huge nostrils of the carved amphibian heads. The Elder Sign hanging against Kormak’s chest was warming up. He glanced over the banister than ran down the side of the ramp. A long way below him lights glittered. The sound of distant dripping water rippled through the building.

More statues stood on hexagonal plinths. They resembled the Triturids, with enormous eyes and nostrils and long spindly limbs. Some of them carried multi-faceted gems, some of them brandished long spears tipped with serrated blades. Others carried blowpipes. All of them had great crested head-dresses attached to their brows. Long tongues protruded from some of their mouths.

The statues put the marines on edge. They made Elder Signs over their breasts and offered up prayers to the Sun. They believed they were looking at demons, and they might not have been far wrong.

The party emerged onto a landing.

Torchlight revealed flecks of colour on the wall, tiny glittering parts of a great mosaic, made from gems and glass. Terves pried a stone loose with his dagger. “Glass,” he said in a tone somewhere between disgust and wonder.

Kormak inspected the mosaic. It depicted a towering six-limbed amphibian locked in conflict with a tentacled giant. Around their feet squid-faced humanoids battled a horde of Triturids in a number of settings; atop hexagonal ziggurats, in the churning waters of the sea, under the eaves of a great forest.
 

One mosaic depicted the tentacles of a gigantic monster erupting from the waves and smashing the walls of a city.
 

The images were all distorted, much broader and rounder than they should have been, as if produced by a being with sight that worked differently than a human’s. Colours were subtly wrong although that might have been just the light.

“Gods at war,” said Zamara, nodding at the mural.

“It must have been something like that,” said Frater Jonas. “The Old Ones devastated kingdoms with their conflicts. They unleashed powers that twisted the world, that slew immortals, that laid waste to continents.”

The monotonous drip, drip, drip continued. The air grew colder as it got moister. It was chilly in the depths of the pyramid in a way it had not been outside.

“What was this place?” Zamara asked. “The population of a small kingdom could live in here.”

“Perhaps it has no function we would understand,” Kormak said. “The Elder demons did not think like we do.”

“This was the biggest structure in the city, it seems fair to assume it was a palace or a god’s house,” said Jonas. He was speaking just to disagree, to find an outlet for his nervousness. Kormak had seen men bicker this way before.

Something rippled and flowed a long way below, reflecting their lights and lights from elsewhere. A smell of rot filled the air. There was an oily taste on his tongue he had come to associate with the presence of blight.

Memories of the great pyramid of Forghast flooded back, a structure constructed to channel magical energy according to the principles of geomancy. Perhaps this place followed the same principles. The captain and the priest still debated.

“We need to get moving again,” Kormak said. “If we are going to find the Kraken before he gets what he came here for.”

They reached the bottom of the ramp. It disappeared into blackish, stagnant water that reflected the light of their torches like oil would.

Zamara ordered one of the soldiers he should go forward. Reluctantly the man walked down to the water’s edge and began to wade forward. The liquid rose to his calves then his thighs then his waist as he walked but it did not seem to get any deeper. The man turned and returned to the company and stood, water dripping from his sodden britches.

“Cold,” he said. “And scummy.”

“We’re going to have to go through it,” said Kormak.

“But which way,” the captain said.

Kormak glanced around. In the far distance, along a great tunnel-like corridor, lights could be seen. “That way looks as good as any other,” he said.

The water sloshed by up to Kormak’s waist. It dragged at his limbs, slowing his movements. It chilled his legs. The uneasy feeling that things were lurking below the oily surface niggled at his mind.

The currents tugged at his legs like tentacular monsters. He picked his way forward, fearing that there might be a great gaping hole in front of him.
 

A scream rang out and a man vanished. His torch hit the water’s surface and extinguished with a hiss. Kormak moved towards him but a second later the soldier emerged from the water, liquid pouring from his hair and face. “Tripped,” he said. He glared around as if fearing that in the time he had been under water, the rest of them might have disappeared.

A sloshing sound told Kormak that someone was at his shoulder. From the shape of the shadowy image reflected on the water, he knew it was Zamara.

“This is an accursed place—tunnels full of water, giant sinkholes, inhuman statues. The sooner we are out of here, the better I will like it.”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” Kormak said.

“This would be a bad place to get caught by a sorcerer or his pet. We move too slowly and if we lose the lights, we’re done.”

Kormak glanced back. Some of the men held ships storm lanterns, some carried torches. It seemed like they had enough light sources but he knew how quickly things could go wrong in a place like this.

“They need light too,” Kormak said.

“Do they?” Jonas asked.

“The pirates do,” the captain said. “But does the sorcerer or his pet demon.”

“You’re a ray of blessed sunshine, captain.”

Zamara laughed. “I am tired. I am wet. I am cold. And I don’t mind admitting I am a trifle worried.”

He meant he was scared almost witless but he could not say so in front of the men. Command must always look confident.

Ledges appeared on either side of the path, turning the passageway into another canal. Kormak pulled himself out of the water onto hexagonal flagstones. All around men passed their torches to others and clambered out of the murk. They set their lanterns on the edge of the ledge as they pulled themselves up. Even this brief respite from the chilly water cheered the men. Kormak guessed it was only a matter of time before cold wet clothing brought the misery back.

The waters of the tunnel rippled, as if displaced by something below the surface. A man in the channel screamed. Blood billowed out around him. The victim splashed and shrieked then disappeared below the water. When he emerged something clung to his arm. It was about the size of a man’s head, teardrop shaped, with six tiny limbs and a long tail. It bore as much resemblance to the Triturids as a tadpole to a toad. It came to Kormak the things were the spawn of the city’s amphibian inhabitants.

More men shrieked and stumbled in the water. Kormak reached down and grabbed one by the arm. The man howled and writhed and made it difficult for the Guardian to keep his grip. The spawn had sunk its teeth into his flesh and would not let go. Its jaws had closed like a mantrap and looked just as powerful.