Shadow Blizzard (20 page)

The magical light picked an immense column out of the darkness—it was so big that it would have taken forty men holding hands to put their arms round it (assuming they joined hands first, of course). Mmm, yes … many of the trees in Zagraba could have envied the thickness and height of this stone monster. And there were hundreds of these columns in the hall. I walked past the stone giants, feeling like a pitiful little bug. The morose gray monsters soared upward out of the light, hanging silently over the uninvited guest and threatening to drop the distant vault of the ceiling on his head.

A vague sense of alarm stayed with me all the way through this place, with its constantly howling wind—
hmmmmm
—dismal grayness, and faint smell of decomposition.… At one point, when cold shivers suddenly started running down my back for the hundredth time, I decided, for some reason that I didn’t understand, that I ought to look round as quickly as possible. I don’t know if it was my impulse or Valder’s. A single fleeting glance was enough to make me hide the light under my jacket and order it to go out.

Far, far away, at the very beginning of the columned hall, there was a faint sprinkling of orange dots. There could be no doubt that they were torches. I could see several dozen of the bright blinking points. They would disappear behind a column and then reappear again, advancing slowly but surely in my direction.

I would have wagered my soul that the torch-bearers couldn’t be Balistan Pargaid’s men. There couldn’t be many left from the group that had come down into the Palaces of Bone with Lafresa.… But this group numbered fifty or sixty. So it was someone else parading through the hall.

Hoping that I’d managed to hide the light in time and the strangers hadn’t noticed it, I darted behind a column close to the wall and as far as possible from the center of the hall. Were the strangers actually looking for me or was this their regular daily stroll around the local sights? Just to be on the safe side I got the crossbow ready, pulled my hood up over my head, and pressed myself back against the wall.

Hmmmmmmm
.

The wind of the ancient halls sang a lullaby to the slumbering gloom of eternity. The sound of the wind was a faint dreary note in my ears and the only thing I could hear above it was the desperate pounding of my heart. For a long time there was no other sound but my heartbeat and the lullaby of the wind. And then the Halls of the Slumbering Darkness shuddered and the night awoke.

The steps came closer and closer.… First an orange glow appeared on the distant columns, and then I could hear the strangers’ heavy snuffling as they breathed. On the one hand that was good—if they snuffled, it meant they were alive. But on the other hand …

I didn’t finish what I was thinking, because at last I saw
them,
and I immediately wanted to be ten leagues away. It’s not every day you get to see the images on walls come to life. Somehow I hadn’t been expecting to see living examples of the creatures that the makers of the Palaces of Bone had depicted with such obsessive accuracy in their statues, paintings, and mosaics.

Half birds, half bears that even the Order didn’t know about (I was sure of that!). The creatures walked past me—tall, about the same height as an ogre, massively built, almost square, with thick arms and legs and bare clawed feet. Large, elongated heads rather like a bear’s, with little ears, round birdlike eyes, and small curved beaks that gleamed like steel in the light of the torches.

These strange, in fact absurd creatures were dressed in loose violet robes. The shapeless tunics almost completely covered their bodies, leaving only the hands, feet, and heads exposed to view, all covered with reddish fur. Or perhaps it wasn’t fur, but feathers. From that distance it was hard for me to tell.

No jewelry and no weapons. I could sense that the creatures were strong, confident, and … old. Not even old, but ancient—their age could rival eternity itself.

“They are the world,” Valder suddenly whispered. “They came to Siala at the moment of its birth. The firstborn were not the ogres and certainly not the orcs.… These beings lived at the very beginning of the Dark Era. A race that was once mighty, and alien even to the ogres, now condemned to live here. Quite different from us. Absolutely alien … Look, Harold, there they are—the firstborn of this world.”

I didn’t know how the archmagician knew about the half bird, half bears, but I literally gaped wide-eyed at the beasts.

They were walking past, only fifteen yards away from me. Walking in single file, snuffling loudly, and waddling from one foot to the other. Every third one was carrying what at first I had taken for torches. In fact they were knobbly black wooden staffs, polished until they shone, and set on the top of every one was a skull. Skulls of elves, orcs, men, and even ogres—they gave out an orange light very similar to the light of an ordinary flame.

One figure followed another until it seemed the procession would never end. The sound of snuffling, footsteps, claws scraping on the stone slabs of the floor. They drifted past me, these ships of ancient, bygone glory that had sunk to the bottom of the centuries, and their huge shadows slid ominously across the bodies of the columns. Finally the last of them, the eighty-sixth wayfarer, walked past me, and darkness fell.

Where had these creatures come from, what obscure depths of the Palaces of Bone had they lived in for all the millennia of Siala’s existence, what did they want, what did they aspire to? I didn’t know if they were dangerous, but, Sagot be praised, they had missed me. Darkness only knew how the firstborn (the genuine firstborn!) would react to an uninvited guest. Perhaps they’d greet him with open arms and lead him along a safe route straight to Grok’s grave and the Rainbow Horn, or perhaps they’d simply turn my skull into a new lamp without thinking twice about it. Something told me the second alternative was far more likely than the first.

But even so, I couldn’t just stay where I was. The column of creatures was moving in the direction I had to go in, and so I set out very quietly, scarcely even breathing, after the Ancient Ones.

I kept my distance so that—Sagot forbid—I wouldn’t be heard or, even worse, get caught in the circle of light from the skull-lamps. I crossed the entire gigantic hall, running from column to column. The string of lights ahead of me trembled and divided into three parts that flowed off into the labyrinthine corridors, and the hall went dark.

In all this time I didn’t hear a single word from the creatures. Where had the bird-bears gone, what goals were they pursuing, what did they want? Naturally, I didn’t go chasing after them to ask stupid questions. Wherever the creatures had gone, they weren’t going my way. In the literal or the figurative sense. My path led into a barely noticeable narrow corridor that began between the last two columns of the hall, but the three bands of Ancient Ones had taken other roads.

I felt a strong temptation to take out the maps and see where these creatures could be heading, but I ruthlessly suppressed this impulse of treacherous curiosity. The less you know, the better you sleep. I had no doubt that the bird-bears who had just walked through the columned hall had come to it from the depths of the levels without names, where no one had dared to go for the last seven thousand years.

“What do they want, Valder?” I blurted out.

Surprisingly enough, this time the archmagician condescended to answer me.

“They’re waiting, Harold.”

“Waiting? What for?”

He said nothing for a long time. A very long time. I thought I was never going to get an answer.

“A chance. A chance to come back to our world. They are a mistake of the gods, or perhaps of the one they call the Dancer in the Shadows. They were created as … as an experiment, as the first creatures, and they almost destroyed Siala, and were punished for it.… They are waiting for someone to smash the fetters that hold them in the bowels of the earth. Waiting and dreaming of
their
world being as it used to be. With no orcs, ogres, elves, and, of course, no men. They are waiting for the Holders of the Chain, those we are used to calling the Gray Ones, to bungle things, and the thread of equilibrium to snap, as it almost did on a fierce winter night many years ago.”

The dead archmagician’s words struck me like a physical blow.

I realized what he was hinting at.

“The Rainbow Horn?”

“Most likely. They were the ones who awoke the evil that was sleeping here. Their own evil. They can sense that the time is near.…”

“But how do you know all this?”

No reply. Valder disappeared, leaving me to my questions and doubts.

*   *   *

A meager supper, sleep that brought almost no relief, and back to the journey. The corridor led me into a cave where at last I could stop wasting lights and banging my nose against the wall.

It was every bit as large as the hall with the columns. Reddish orange walls, a ceiling with light beaming down from it and lighting up the whole place magnificently. And I could have sworn it wasn’t magical light, but absolutely genuine sunlight.

For the first two minutes my eyes, which had grown completely unused to anything like this, simply couldn’t see a thing. I squinted and tried to blink away the involuntary tears. But it cost me a lot of pain before I finally got used to it and could look at the world normally.

The light streaming from the ceiling more than sixty yards above my head was like the light of the evening sun shining through the leaves of a dense forest. It was something warm, gentle, not too bright, and, of course (after the gloom of the catacombs), unbelievably beautiful. This was probably the first time in a week of strolling through the Palaces of Bone that I felt grateful to the architects and magicians who had created such a miracle in one of the deep caverns.

The cave was so large that someone had even built a little fortress in it.

Yes, yes! An absolutely genuine fortress!

Walls about twelve yards high, gates torn off their posts and shattered. Four ethereally elegant towers with spires as sharp as spears. (Correction—three with spires; the fourth seemed to have been flattened by a magical fist: all that was left of it was a stump.)

Another tower set right at the very center, with the same architecture as the other four, but incomparably larger. If someone suddenly got the urge to move in there and set up defenses, even professional soldiers would have a hard time trying to storm the fortifications (in my ignorant view as a thief).

The reason I hadn’t noticed the citadel straightaway was that its walls were almost the same color as the walls of the cave. I had to walk a long way before I reached this bastion that was sited so mysteriously, tramping along the reddish path that wound its way between the tall outcrops of stone sprouting up all over the floor like fingers. The path was littered with fine fragments of stone and every now and then one of them crunched under the soles of my boots.

When I got closer, I realized there was no way to go round the fortress. Its walls ran into the walls of the cave, and without the lost cobweb-rope, there was no way I could storm a barrier that was twelve yards high.

The only way to get to the other side was to walk through that yawning gap and hope there were gates on the other side of the fortifications, too.

I wasn’t exactly happy with the idea of going inside. There were far too many bones outside the entrance.

They were fearfully old … many of the dead had arrows stuck between their ribs. The archers defending the place had reaped a rich harvest. There were plenty of weapons, but they were so old and rusty that the touch of a boot was enough to make them crumble into dust.

Shields, helmets, bows with their strings rotted away, armor with barely visible engravings of a Black Rose, a Black Flame, a Black Stone, a White Leaf, or White Water. Elves from the dark and light houses, who had fought shoulder to shoulder, attacking the fortress.

And I knew the only enemy the elfin houses could reunite against. It had to be their eternal and most important enemy, their closest relatives—the orcs. There was a battering ram lying beside the smashed gates.

I stood there weighing up my chances, then sighed and took out the crossbow. I removed one of the ordinary bolts and replaced it with an ice bolt. There was nothing else for it; I had to go back or go on into the fortress.

Surprisingly enough, nothing grabbed me, either in the gateway or the narrow corridor with loopholes for firing arrows at uninvited guests. Now there were old bones crunching under my feet instead of small stones. The elves had been given a warm reception in here, too. The corridor smelled of mold and damp from the old wooden ceilings and of bitter almonds. A strange aroma for a place like this, to say the least.

I walked out into the courtyard and the red column of the central tower was directly opposite me. The entire space was littered with bones, like the area in front of the gates.

A serious battle. The skeletons of orcs and elves were sometimes intertwined in the most incredible poses. The rusty crescents of s’kashes and yataghans were scattered around under my feet. In many places the ground, the walls, and the bones were covered with soot, or even fused and melted. In the western part of the yard there were heaps of red blocks and fragments of stone from the ruined tower. Magic had been used, as well as arrows and swords.

Many elves had laid down their lives, very many, but I had no doubt about who had been victorious. The bodies of eight orcs were embedded in the wall of the central tower at a height of about ten yards above the ground. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the orcs had suffered for a very, very long time, even after the elfin shamans and magicians had finished the execution. It was surprising that time didn’t seem to have touched the dead orcs; for some reason it had spared them. I had the impression that they could have died only a minute earlier.

Their flesh hadn’t melted away like the wax of a candle or rotten meat, and it hadn’t dried up like a salty plum from over the sea. After traveling round the Border Kingdom, mixing with Algert Dalli’s men, and fighting that battle at Crossroads, I knew a little bit about the badges of the most famous clans of orcs. The defenders of the fortress had badges that were white and black, almost completely faded. I’d never come across clan insignia like that before. If I ever got out of Hrad Spein, I’d have to ask Egrassa what clan of orcs wore black and white.