Shadow Blizzard (19 page)

About a hundred paces farther on I thought I could hear vague, indistinguishable words starting to take shape through the hissing, but no matter how hard I strained my ears, I couldn’t make out what they meant.

I found the dead man about twenty paces later. All that was left of him was a heap of bones. Ah, but wait, men don’t have fangs growing out of their lower jaws. Like the skeleton that had almost chopped me into stewing steak, this was either an elf or an orc, but I could thank my lucky stars that this skeleton wasn’t going to attack me.

By this point the hissing had changed to a totally incomprehensible muttering, as if the speaker had stuffed his mouth full of hot porridge. Twenty yards farther on there was another corpse waiting for me, and in the next five minutes I counted twenty-six skeletons. But there was no way of telling what they had died of or how they had gotten there.

The muttering was hammering away insistently at the door of my mind now, as if some bastard had stuffed an entire hive of angry bees who could talk into my head. I could only pick out occasional words from the ragged droning—“blood,” “die,” “brain,” and the like.

Well, let’s just say the words I heard weren’t exactly the kind that would cheer my heart. I could feel the muttering in my head, and the corpses that kept turning up with increasing regularity set my nerves on edge, so I started singing a simple little tune to crowd out the voices, but it didn’t really do much good.

The next corpse was a great surprise. This was no heap of old bones, but a perfectly fresh body. I would have wagered my soul that only a few hours earlier this lad was still alive and well, and not planning to die.

I’d seen him at Mole Castle with Balistan Pargaid—from which I could draw the conclusion that Lafresa and her companions had already walked through the gallery and gained a few hours on me. What a cunning bitch!

But at least things were a bit clearer with this corpse. Even a thick-witted Doralissian could tell what the lad had died of. He’d stuck a yard of iron into his own chest a few times—in other words, he’d committed suicide. His hand was still clutching the handle of the dagger sticking out of his chest.

The muttering was pulsing in my head like a dull ache now. I frowned and ground my teeth, but I couldn’t understand just what foul plague could have affected me like this.

Five steps farther on the whisper suddenly broke into a howling chorus of triumph in my head, making me drop to my knees and squeeze my head in my hands. I was swamped by a wave of universal revulsion and horror.

I didn’t just hear words. There was everything here—visions of unbelievable horror, the smell of decomposing corpses, the taste of death-worms on my tongue, the sensation of rummaging through a corpse’s belly. The voices were insistent, calling me to them, chanting a song that set me howling in horror and excruciating pain. My senses were completely confused, but absolutely everything was clamoring for and craving my death, urging me to take out my knife and thrust it into my throat.

The song rumbled on, massaging my mind insistently with its soft, slippery fingers. Every word, every chord of the voices brought new horrors that crept into my ears, blinded my eyes, smothered my tongue.…

That was when I realized that I’d found my way into the Halls of the Slumbering Whisper, but there was nothing I could do about it now. The voices were stronger than me, and I was slowly, inexorably going out of my mind. I wanted to take a few steps and throw myself off the edge of the balcony, or beat my brains out against the wall, or turn my knife on myself.

I had to do something, anything, to stop THIS! Against the will of my faintly glimmering mind, my hand reached out to the handle of my knife. As Sagot is my witness, I tried to fight it, but the struggle was like trying to smash a massive boulder with a twig. The voices INSISTED that I had to die, and it was impossible not to submit.

Just as he did in Hargan’s Wasteland, Valder spoke in a barely audible whisper:

“I’ll help!”

The voices howled in unison with the irresistible torrent of the song and retreated to the very boundaries of hearing. My hand obeyed my will once again.

“Quick, Harold, I can only give you a minute! At this moment that’s as much as I can do!” said the dead archmagician.

I jumped to my feet and dashed back toward the place where the voices still had no power over me. My hands were shaking, but I managed to fish the cotton earplugs out of my bag and stick them into my ears. The muttering came closer again, so that I could almost make out the words. It took me another ten precious seconds to take out the vial with the liquid that neutralized any hostile magic for a couple of minutes. I tore the seal open with my teeth and poured the contents into my mouth. The bitter taste flooded over my tongue and my stomach protested and shuddered, almost turning me inside out. I had to make an effort to hold the foul muck down.

“That’s it, I can’t do any more!” Valder declared, and the dam he had created burst and collapsed.

The voices came back, but now they were just voices, mouthing abominations without any visions to support them. The bitter liquid was working—but for how long? Casting aside all doubt and hesitation, I rushed forward, hoping to get through the gallery before the defensive magic weakened enough for the whispering voices to take control again.

“Kill yourself! Go to the darkness! Die! Die! Die! Blood! Kill!” the voices whispered in powerless fury. “Stop! Wait! Die, it’s so easy!”

I ignored the whispers, gritted my teeth, and kept dashing on as fast as I could, constantly leaping over the bones that lay in my way.

I came across another two of Balistan Pargaid’s men, but where were the others? Had Lafresa managed to fight off the whispers?

The voices sensed a moment of weakness and moved in, whispering and threatening every possible kind of nightmare and all the pain in the world. It was really hard for me not to stop, and to keep on running. The bitter taste on my tongue was gradually fading, and the whispering was coming back.

I covered the last five yards of the gallery in three huge bounds, without any magical protection. The voices howled in triumph, thrusting their talons into my brain, but I was already covering the final yard and it was too late for the whispering to bind my reason with the nets of insanity.

I flew out of the gallery and the hall, and suddenly everything went quiet. Kli-Kli’s medallion scalded my skin with a cold flame and, before I could even understand what had happened to me, I went crashing headlong into Count Balistan Pargaid.

I had to lie there for a little while, gasping for breath and waiting for the sparks in front of my eyes to fade away. The collision had completely winded me and knocked me to the ground. Damn Balistan Pargaid, for getting under my feet at just the wrong moment.

His Grace and one of his soldiers were standing there, transformed into frozen statues. They looked as if they had been carved out of cloudy ice and then sprinkled generously with hoarfrost.

I walked up to them and carefully touched a hand. The cold fingers scalded my palm. It really was ice. Some kind-hearted soul had turned the servants of the Master into statues of ice just for the fun of it. A ludicrous, but entirely appropriate end for one of the most powerful lords of Valiostr and servants of the Master.

Following the encounter with Balistan, it took me a few moments to spot the spiral stairway leading down through the floor toward the fifth level. Well, then, that was one more landmark passed.

6

THE MASTERS OF GLOOM

Counting steps in Hrad Spein had become a habit. It helped distract me from my gloomy thoughts. Only this time the counting wasn’t really helping much. At 573 all the black thoughts came down on me so hard that I lost count and gave up.

Lafresa was still ahead of me in the race for the Rainbow Horn, and she still had the Key—I’d never get out of the Palaces without that. She found her way unerringly through the labyrinth of dead halls, moving on as if she was strolling along Parade Street, taking no notice of the menaces lurking on every side, and paying for her safe passage with the late Balistan Pargaid’s men.

By my calculation there were no more than twelve of them left. Probably not even that many. Who knew which path the blue-eyed witch had led her little detachment along and how many bodies I hadn’t noticed? In fact it was quite likely that now the Master’s woman-servant was continuing on her way alone.

The first of the main dangers—the Halls of the Slumbering Whisper foretold in the verse riddle—was behind me now, but the fun was only just beginning. How did it go on in the scroll …

Through the halls of the Slumbering Echo and Darkness

Past the blind, unseeing Kaiyu guards,

’Neath the gaze of Giants who burn all to ash,

To the graves of the Great Ones who died in battle …

Encouraging lines, weren’t they?

*   *   *

I woke from a nightmare, although I couldn’t remember what horrors I’d been dreaming of. All that was left of the dream was a stabbing pain in my chest and an immense weariness, as if I hadn’t slept at all.

The rest I had allowed myself on the final turn of the staircase hadn’t brought the relief I’d been hoping for, and I set off in a depressed mood.

The fatigue of the last week weighed on my shoulders like a heavy burden, pressing me down. I was only just starting to realize that the journey through Hrad Spein wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. The constant tension, the constant anticipation of danger, were having an even worse effect on my health than all the distance I’d tramped from the entrance of the Palaces to the entrance to the fifth level.

I got up with a groan (unfortunately, stone steps are not the most comfortable place to sleep) and stretched my numb arms and legs. Hundreds of tiny needles started wandering over my body, pricking me first in one place, then another. But strangely enough, this minor discomfort pepped me up better than anything else could have done, and I reached the fifth level in a perfectly cheerful state of mind.

The fifth level. The very first hall—and once again an unexpected change in the decor. Where was the gold, where was the subtle elegance, where was the charm of the statues and the delightful visual beauty of the walls? All of that had been left behind on the third and fourth levels of the underground Palaces. Here there were only monotonous stone walls with mediocre paintings, and the floor was made of flagstones about two square yards in size, carelessly aligned with each other.

I noticed that all the slabs on the floor had different colors and markings, and not all of them would have met with aesthetic approval from a decent artist. Most likely someone had laid the slabs out in a huge mosaic, but because it was so immense, there was no way I could see what it showed. Every hall had its own mosaic, its own set of colors on the floor, but by the meager light of my little magical lamp it was impossible for me to make out the overall picture.

I didn’t know why these halls were called the Halls of the Slumbering Darkness; as far as I could tell, this honorary title could easily have been awarded to any of the unlit spaces from the third level on.

I tramped through the underground labyrinth for half a day, only occasionally checking the maps and starting a new light—the number of those was dwindling rapidly. I tried not to think about the time when I would have to grope my way along by touch.

It was a lot cooler down here than on the upper levels. Essentially I was wandering through huge natural caves with graves in the roughly worked walls, mosaic floors, and stalactites and stalagmites that had grown together to form fantastical fairy-tale columns.

The fifth level seemed to go on forever, and the cave-halls seemed boundless. The farther I walked, the more I felt enveloped in the dead cobweb of decline from the former majesty of the Palaces of Bone.

The columns were covered in lumps and bulges and in some places water dripped from the ceiling and the first signs of future columns had appeared on the mosaic floor. I couldn’t see the walls, they were a very long way off, and I tramped on and on, taking my bearings from the path laid out in red slabs.

Sometimes it branched into two, three, four, or even eight new paths, and I had to leaf through the papers for a long time, straining my eyes and my brain as I tried to compare the orcish squiggles on the maps and on the flagstones of the floor.

The constant darkness was enough to drive anyone crazy! I would have sold my soul for a helping of well-roasted meat, a pint of beer, and a ray of sunshine. The gods be praised, at least I wasn’t short of water. There was more than enough of that here. Once I even crossed a little hump-backed bridge over a small lake of black water as smooth as a mirror.

The underground caves came to an end and the gloomy halls of the Palaces of Bone began again. It got warmer, water stopped dripping down the walls, and the smell of damp disappeared, giving way to a faint smell of decomposition.

I didn’t like that smell at all. Why was there still a stink, if the age of the burial sites on this level was measured in centuries and everything that could rot ought to have rotted away, leaving mostly bones? That aroma of old death made me feel vaguely anxious, but a smell is just a smell, and so far nothing worse had happened.

There was a light breeze blowing in the Halls of the Slumbering Darkness. It sang somewhere up under the ceiling, making a constant eerie
hmmmmmm
. When I first heard the sound, I thought it was the terrible whispering coming back, but after what seemed like an age drenched in cold sweat, with my knees trembling, I realized that it was only the wind.

I walked on until I came up against a wall. It was slightly concave for some reason, and I was surprised by this, so I allowed myself the luxury of ordering the light to burn at full brightness.