Reign of Ash (16 page)

“Then again, farmers used their magic to keep crops from rotting after a rain, or to heal a sick cow,” he said. “Healers depended on their magic. Maybe we’d find or remember a way to do those things without magic, but it would take a while. And in the meantime, there would be a price to pay.”

“We’re already paying a price,” Kestel said. “You’ve heard Niklas tell about strange beasts that came from the storms, and we’ve seen the madness for ourselves.”

“Without magic of our own, there’s no way to limit the storms,” Blaine agreed. “They’re dangerous, and they seem to be getting stronger.” He sighed. “And without magic, mortals can’t hold their own against men like Pentreath Reese.”

“Then we’d better hope that we can track down Quintrel,” Kestel replied. She rose from her seat and stretched. “I’d best go back to my room and pack for our outing. Just let me know when you and Piran and Verran want to get going in the morning, and I’ll be ready.”

“Something’s wrong.” Piran reined in his horse and stood in his stirrups, scanning the horizon.

“See anything?” Blaine asked, turning in his saddle to look.

Several candlemarks had passed since they left Glenreith. It was mid-morning, and they had left the main road behind them more than a candlemark ago, journeying forward on a narrow road that seemed more farm trail than byway. Their roads had led them steadily uphill, into the foothills of the Belhovan Mountains, though the sharp, rocky peaks were still many leagues away.

“The air feels… thick,” Kestel remarked, looking around worriedly. “Let’s get going. I don’t like this place.”

“Doesn’t look as if anyone else has been through here in a while, at least not since the snow fell,” Verran observed, looking ahead of them at the road with its unbroken covering. “The only things we’ve seen all day are some wild dogs and goats.” He looked out across the open field.

“Kestel’s right, let’s get out of here,” Blaine muttered. But before he could shift in his saddle, a dark line on the horizon caught his eye.

“Look there,” he said, pointing. Already the dark line had grown closer, and it undulated as it moved.

“If that’s a magic storm, we’ve got nowhere to hide,” Piran replied. “We’ll have to outride it. Move!”

They spurred their horses forward, slowed by the heavy snow. The darkness on the horizon appeared to be moving on an intersect course with the road. The goats in the field raised their heads, and one of them bleated an alarm that was taken up by the rest of the herd. Terrified, the goats ran in the opposite direction of the storm, nearly getting themselves trampled as they ran across the road dodging the horses and sliding on the slippery snow.

Blaine eyed the growing darkness, which still seemed to head directly for the road. “The goats have the right idea!” he shouted. “Leave the road. If we ride at an angle, we might outrun the storm.”

Blaine urged his horse on, galloping across the fields. It was reckless to ride at full speed across unknown ground – his horse could easily step into a hole and break a leg. But the ground held solid, frozen by the bitter cold, and Blaine took comfort in the fact that with the Great Fire, the fields were unlikely to have been turned this season. Still, he held on to his reins tightly and gripped his horse with his legs to keep his seat.

On the horizon, Blaine could see the rooftops of a village. He hoped it was Riker’s Ferry, the small hamlet that should be a null zone if his theory was correct. “Ride for the village!” Blaine shouted. “If I’m right, if it really is a null place, the storm won’t follow us.”

They easily outrode the goats, thundering across the open fields. Blaine could feel the nearness of the magic storm as his head began to throb.

“It’s gaining on us,” Verran called, fear in his voice.

Blaine spared a glance over his shoulder. The storm moved like a billowing curtain, sweeping across the land, close enough that its power pulled the snow up into it. As the storm grew closer, they could see the air sparkle and glow as the wild
visithara
magic pulsed. A growing hum filled the air, rising in pitch as the magic storm grew closer, and Blaine knew from the storms he had survived that the hum would grow to an earsplitting screech. Blaine fought to retain control as his horse began to panic.

Kestel and Verran had leaned over far enough that they were gripping their horses’ manes. Both of them rode as if they were just trying to hang on, almost completely at the mercy of their horses. Piran’s expression was grim.

“Look out!” Piran yelled. “There’s another one!”

Blaine looked up. A shining ribbon of light hung in midair, dangerous and terrible in its beauty. Where the storm to their right had already touched down and carried with it snow and debris, the new storm had yet to descend. Worse, it was heading straight for them and moving fast.

“Veer!” Blaine shouted, angling his horse toward the open space between the two approaching storms. The pounding in his head was amplified by the thud of his horse’s hooves, and his vision blurred with the pain.

Behind him, Blaine heard frantic squeals from the herd of goats, which were running, wide-eyed in terror, stumbling and staggering across the snowy ground. The first storm was closing in on the goats, and as the wild magic reached the slowest animal in the herd, the goat was lifted off its feet to hang suspended in air for an instant, its hooves still pawing frantically for traction. There was a wet
pop
and the goat exploded, sending a gruesome spray of blood, flesh, and entrails over the rest of the herd, which scattered. The storm moved forward relentlessly, and one by one, the hapless goats were pulled into the maelstrom, screaming their fear. Blood seemed to feed the wild magic, and the color of the storm shifted, growing red with the gore of the slaughtered goats. Even the smell of the storm changed. It had first smelled like the tang in the air after a nearby lightning strike – now it was the metallic scent of blood.

Blaine shot a worried glance toward Verran and Kestel. Kestel had grown pale, and Blaine could see that she grasped the mane with balled fists. Verran looked as if he was fighting for consciousness, hanging on for his life. Piran, out in front, was sitting tall, shoulders back, defying the storm. Blaine came up behind Verran and Kestel, unwilling to allow them to take up the rear, and smacked the rumps of their horses to urge them forward, even as the storms thundered closer.

The ground behind Blaine began to shimmer, and he shivered as he recalled stories that amid such storms men had fallen into mere mud puddles, never to be seen again. He dug his heels into his horse’s ribs, but the frightened beast needed no urging to run for its life.

The air around them glowed, full of luminous, tiny particles. Blaine’s lungs strained for breath, and the gasps he took felt thin, depleted. His vision tinged with red as he struggled for breath. His chest burned, lungs ached, and his heart thumped. Blaine felt as if he could sense the movement of the blood through his veins, as if the blood itself were on fire, and as if everything – blood, breath, and will – was gradually being pulled into the dark, roaring maw behind them.

The village was in sight and growing closer with every hoofbeat. Whether the villagers knew of the storm or were just going about their business, no one was in sight, with the doors shut and the windows shuttered. A low stone wall separated the village from the fields beyond.

The two storms closed in on each other. The hum had become a shriek, loud enough that Blaine could feel it reverberating in his bones, piercing enough that it forced a groan. With one final, desperate burst of speed, Blaine’s horse shot forward just as the two storms collided.

Sure they were all about to die, Blaine sent his horse leaping over the stone wall, and it felt to him as if they were pushed by a wave of sound and light.

Blaine reeled, barely clinging to consciousness. His vision was clouding, and his head hurt as if it might explode. Dimly he realized that it had grown easier to breathe. Their horses came to a halt, and both Kestel and Verran tumbled from their saddles. Blaine kept enough presence of mind to control his descent, but his knees gave out when he reached the ground and he fell to the snow. As if from far away, Blaine could hear Piran shouting his name, but then the darkness closed in and he heard nothing more.

“I
hate crypts.” Connor trudged behind Lynge and Penhallow while Geddy and Lowrey brought up the rear of the small procession. Geddy and Connor carried packs on their backs filled with supplies. Geddy, who was holding a lantern, fell a step behind and let Lowrey walk beside Connor.

“You’re missing the point, lad,” Lowrey said in a voice tinged with wonder. “I’m sure that, before the magic died, these crypts were fairly quivering with power. Preservation spells. Memory spells to assure that descendents didn’t forget an ancestor’s legacy. Even binding spells, I’d wager, on a corpse or two someone wanted to make damn sure stayed buried.” He sounded as if he had just been invited on a treasure hunt, and for once, academic enthusiasm triumphed over his usual curmudgeonly outlook.

“It’s still full of dead people,” Connor argued, unwilling to be distracted and perversely committed to sulking. “Not even living dead people, like when we were in Penhallow’s hiding place. That was a nice crypt, more like a parlor. This is just a tomb.”

“Would it cheer you up to know that for several hundred years, the only ones permitted to step foot in these crypts were the priests and priestesses of the gods, the seneschal, and the direct descendants of the crown?” Lynge said, but his placating tone barely hid a chuckle.

Connor knew he was being unreasonable, but he wasn’t ready to give in. He had nearly been killed in Penhallow’s underground hiding place when Reese and his
talishte
had attacked and the roof had caved in. Twice he had run for his life from monsters in the dark through narrow, twisting tunnels belowground. The harrowing escape from Voss’s fortress via the underground river was still fresh in his mind. “Not really,” he grumbled.

Despite himself, Connor was impressed by the grandeur of the royal necropolis. In the bedrock beneath Quillarth Castle, artisans had gone to considerable work to sculpt an entire city for the dead. Façades of the oldest buildings in Castle Reach had been meticulously duplicated, as had Quillarth Castle itself. The detailed stone models looked to be scale models of the originals.

“It’s said that inside the models, everything is just as it was in their full-size counterparts,” Lynge continued, taking Connor’s mood in stride.

Connor could not help but be intrigued as he looked around. Dozens of buildings were represented, and at the far edge, he could hear running water and he glimpsed a quayside much like the Castle Reach harbor.

“I don’t understand,” he protested. “If the kings believed that the dead are taken to the Sea of Souls, why bother?”

Penhallow chuckled. “The crown forces a king to sacrifice his conscience many times over,” he replied. “Even the best king may fear such sacrifices doom him to wander the Unseen Realms. This city of the dead, and others like it, provided a bit of insurance, just in case the king did not merit the gods’ favor in the afterlife.”

The chamber with the scale model of Quillarth Castle and Castle Reach opened into another equally large chamber. The room was easily as large as the castle’s huge dining hall, but instead of a table that could seat one hundred guests, row upon row of catafalques stretched from one end of the room to the other.

“Behold: the final resting place of the kings of Donderath,” Penhallow said in a quiet voice.

Carved, life-sized figures lay atop granite biers with heavy, engraved pediments. In the row closest to the doorway was a catafalque that did not appear to be shrouded by the cobwebs and dust of the centuries. Connor caught his breath as he recognized the figure atop the bier. King Merrill lay as if asleep, his hands on his chest intertwined above a carved sword, his eyes closed in rest.

“Merrill commissioned his bier several years ago,” Lynge said sadly. “We implored him to have the sculptor carve an image of him as an old man, but Merrill insisted it look as he did at the time.” He sighed. “Who knows? Perhaps the king or his seer had a premonition. Geddy and I prepared the king for burial and brought him down here the day after the Great Fire.”

“No funeral?” Connor asked, trying to hide his shock.

Lynge shook his head, and from the expression on his face, Connor guessed that the seneschal was reliving the memory. “Our world had burned. Parts of the castle and much of the city were still afire. Most people had fled the castle. Those who didn’t were far too busy digging out the survivors and finding corpses amid the rubble to bother with a funeral or having the king lie in state. At least the king had a proper burial. We did our best by those who perished, but many were buried in a common grave.”

Connor caught back a gasp thinking of Lord Garnoc. Lynge seemed to guess his thoughts. “Your master was one of the few we were able to bury with honor. His family had served Donderath’s kings for generations, and for that, Lord Garnoc could be buried in one of the sections of the crypt reserved for favored nobility,” Lynge said.

“When Meroven’s mages struck the great houses, it meant there was little chance anyone would reclaim the bodies of the dead lords who were at court. The survivors had other priorities and no means to bring home the bodies, even if they wanted to,” Lynge added sadly. He drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders, lifting his head. “It’s time to move on.”

Three new tunnels opened off the catafalque chamber, requiring them to thread their way among the biers. Connor glanced at the figures as he passed them, awed by the presence of the kings and queens of long ago. Many of the faces he recognized from statues, paintings, or tapestries that had graced the castle’s walls. So many of these men and women had loomed larger than life, commemorated long after their deaths for their valor in battle, their wise rule, or their cunning defeat of adversaries. Just as many were remembered more for their dark deeds and oppression.

He glanced toward Penhallow, whose expression was pensive.
How many of these kings has Penhallow served in his long lifetime?
Connor wondered.
How many of the men in these chambers did Penhallow know, either as a mortal or as
talishte
? Does immortality remove the sting of loss?
Given the look on Penhallow’s face, Connor doubted it.

“What’s down those other tunnels?” Connor asked.

Lynge answered without turning. “One of the corridors holds the bodies of the royal consorts and their families. The second corridor has crypts for the nobility. Warriors of great valor are buried in vaults down the third corridor.”

Lynge led them on, holding his lantern aloft to light the way down the center corridor. More tunnels opened off of their corridor, and Connor hoped with all his might that Lynge would be able to remember the way out.

Out of the corner of his eye, Connor caught a glimpse of movement. Quillarth Castle’s age meant that many ghosts haunted its corridors. Connor had encountered several of the spirits that frequented the castle. Disembodied voices, sudden cold spots, doors or cabinets that opened or closed on their own, even moving shadows were not unusual. Once, Connor had glimpsed someone standing behind him in a mirror, only to find the room empty when he turned.

“It’s just the ghosts, lad,” Lowrey said. “Nothing to fear.”

Connor looked at him askance. “I’m not so sure of that.”

“When a building’s this old, it’s not surprising a number of souls don’t want to leave when it’s their time,” Lowrey replied. “And a place like this, a king’s castle, with all the important doings that have gone on here: the war councils, the executions, the betrayals and love affairs,” he said with a shrug. “Well, you can see why some spirits might not be in a hurry to go elsewhere.”

Another movement caught Connor’s attention. It was as if he glimpsed the edge of someone’s long robe, or the last bit of a passing shadow. He shivered. “Have you ever had one try to get inside your skin?”

Lowrey frowned. “What’s that? How do you mean?”

Connor drew a long breath before speaking. He had never told anyone about his experience, not even his former master, Lord Garnoc.
Will the others think me mad?
He wondered.
No madder, perhaps, than the tales I’ve told thus far, of ribbons of light descending from the sky to burn the world, or of vampires at war over whether to restore magic. I can hardly see where one more tale can hurt.

“I was coming back late one night from doing an errand for Lord Garnoc,” Connor began, casting caution aside. “I was alone in one of the lower corridors. I saw a man farther down the corridor, holding up a hand and signaling for me to stop.” Connor paused and stole a glance at Lowrey, to see if the mage-scholar was laughing at him. To his surprise, Lowrey was listening intently.

“Go on,” Lowrey urged.

Connor cleared his throat, surprised to have his story taken seriously. “I called out to the man. He started to move toward me, and all of a sudden, I felt him overtake me, as if he were trying to get beneath my skin.” He shuddered. “Memories that weren’t my own flooded over me. I felt as if, for a moment, I had become someone different.” He paused. “I was terrified, and – odd as it sounds – I flung the ghost away from me, and I ran.”

Connor took a deep breath. Even now, the memory was unsettling. “He just… vanished. There was nowhere for him to have gone that I couldn’t have seen him. But I swear, he looked as solid as you or me when he was coming toward me.”

Lowrey peered over his spectacles at Connor. “You’re a medium.”

Connor’s eyes widened. “A what?”

“There’s something about you that attracts ghosts and allows them to take you over.”

“You mean, possess me?” Connor asked, horrified.

Lowrey nodded. “Aye, in a manner of speaking. It’s not common, for all that the tavern charlatans seem to be able to talk to anyone’s dead husband or brother or son for the price of an ale.” He paused. “Interesting.”

“Interesting?” Connor yelped. “Damn terrifying if you ask me. Do you mean to tell me that ghost might not have let go of me?”

Lowrey shrugged. “No. You may not know how you did it, but you obviously had some natural protection that let you break free. Interesting thing about mediums: Unlike necromancers, you didn’t lose your abilities when the magic died.”

“What’s the difference? I don’t have magic,” Connor asked, interested despite himself.

“Mediums aren’t thought to have true magic, not in the way a necromancer does,” Penhallow mused. “I’ve heard it said that a medium’s ability to interact with the dead is similar to the power of our
kruvgaldur
– something intrinsic to our being, not external magic. Mediums usually don’t initiate the contact with a ghost.”

Penhallow eyed Connor as if seeing him for the first time. “Necromancers can actually raise the dead, bind spirits to their will. Lowrey here can probably explain it better, but I suspect they’re two very different abilities.”

Lowrey sighed. “Unfortunately, mediums often bear the risk without the power. It’s rare for a necromancer to be possessed against his will, but mediums are always at risk. You’ll have to be on your guard, m’boy. There are more ghosts than usual since the Great Fire.”

Connor drew a deep breath. “I thought I was just nervous, but I keep seeing things down here just out of the corner of my eye.”

Lowrey’s expression became serious. “You’re nervous, all right,” he replied. “But that’s not why you’re seeing things. Kings and queens, as well as powerful warriors and ambitious members of the court, are buried here. Most had secrets they took to the grave with them – and beyond. Secrets, lies, treachery, and forbidden love produce strong emotions. They don’t fade with death. I have no doubt you’ve glimpsed some spirits. Stay sharp.”

The corridor widened and opened into a large circular room. Like spokes from a wheel, five corridors led away from the central chamber. In the center of the chamber floor was a large mosaic made of inlaid stone, gems, and bits of gold and silver. It glittered even by the lantern’s glow, and Connor imagined that the mosaic would have been breathtaking if the torches on the walls had been lit.

The mosaic was a depiction of Esthrane and her eldest child, the minor god Veo the Trickster. Esthrane stood with arms upraised and stretched far apart, her feet planted wide and solid on the ground. Veo sat at Esthrane’s feet, represented as a toddler with a preternaturally wise and knowing expression. A nimbus glowed around Esthrane’s hands and feet, and a light encircled Veo’s head, suggesting the constellation that bore the goddess’s name. It was no accident, Connor was sure, that each of the corridors aligned with one of the points in the mosaic.

The chamber’s walls also had floor-to-ceiling mosaics between the corridor openings. Each mosaic showed a scene from stories about the goddess. As with the floor mosaic, the panels were crafted from precious and semiprecious stones and joined with seams of gold and silver. One scene showed the handfasting between Esthrane and Charrot, with a cord of lightning bolts encircling their joined hands to form a permanent union. In the background, Torven watched the marriage with a jealous expression. A second panel showed Torven enticing Charrot from Esthrane’s bower with gifts of gems and gold, as an angry Esthrane looked on.