Shadow Blizzard (29 page)

I moved on, looking through the doors and not forgetting to search for the red triangle at the same time. Dozens of faceless halls on all levels. But after the Doors, I didn’t see a single place that was even vaguely familiar. In the time I spent walking round those doors, so many pictures of Hrad Spein appeared that my head was filled with a total muddle. The only thing I remembered was a skeleton striding from corner to corner in some vestibule and crimson sparks in some large hall. Imagine the smooth black velvet curtain of night, with crimson sparks scattering across it in the distance, looking very much like the fiery snowflakes of the world of Chaos. I had no doubt that this door led to one of the deepest levels of the Palaces of Bone.

Another door. I put my hand on it and gasped out loud in surprise. It was a night scene. The light of the slim moon was barely enough to light up the clearing surrounded by majestic golden-leafs. There was a small fire glowing close to the entrance to Hrad Spein. Its timid flickering awoke a strange yearning in my heart. There were soldiers sleeping beside the fire. There was just a still figure of the sentry standing on the boundary line between the firelight and the night. The sentry stirred and I recognized Eel.

This was my chance! I could escape from Hrad Spein this very moment! All I had to do was open the door and step through it, and I would be free! No more cursed stone walls, coffins, catacombs, fear, weariness, endless nightmares, and lack of sleep, no more hunger, no more running.

I could send the quest for the Rainbow Horn to all the demons of darkness, send the Commission even farther, and forget these last few days, as if they were nothing but a terrible dream. My hand reached out for the door handle against my will, and the door opened very easily.

A breath of the fresh autumn night and campfire smoke blew into my face. I breathed the aroma in like a gift from the gods. One step, and the nightmare would be over. Just one step, that was all. I opened the door a little wider and the hinges creaked gently. The sound was enough to alert Eel and make him start walking toward me. I didn’t know if he’d seen anything or was simply following the sound, but I wanted very much to shout out and attract his attention.

“Look to the right, Harold,” Valder whispered to me.

His voice broke the spell, and I looked. In the lower corner of the door to my right, there was a triangle. A red one.

Cursing all the gods and the Master, and fickle fate into the bargain. I slammed shut the door to freedom, lifted my hand off the handle, and took a step back. I was trembling convulsively, and no wonder! I’d almost ruined everything. Almost burned my bridges. Curses! What on earth had come over me?

“Thank you, Valder.”

“I just thought you might not like to walk through all eight levels again,” he said with a gloomy chuckle.

“You thought right,” I replied, still unable to gather my wits. “Thanks again.”

“Don’t thank me too much, I have my own interest in this business.”

“And what’s that?”

“My non-death started with the Rainbow Horn, when … well, you know what I mean.”

I certainly did. That was the very first dream vision I’d had.

“I console myself with the hope that—” He paused, as if afraid of extinguishing this timidly flickering flame of hope. “—that when I’m somewhere near the Horn again, I shall be able to leave this world and find peace.”

“Let’s hope you’re right, Valder, and the artifact does help you.”

“I hope so,” he sighed.

“Did you hear my conversation with the Messenger?”

“Yes.”

“Is he telling the truth?”

A long pause, and then …

“Yes, the Rainbow Horn is the force that can disrupt the balance.”

“What about the Master? Is what the Messenger says about him and those other beings, and about me, true?”

“I don’t know.”

“But if the Horn is capable of disrupting the balance, perhaps we shouldn’t…”

“The balance can be disrupted whether you take the Horn or not. It doesn’t depend on the Horn any longer.”

“But what should I do?”

“Fulfill the Commission and pray to Sagot,” Valder said, and stopped talking.

Fulfill the Commission and don’t think about a thing.… Hah! I walked up to the door with the red triangle on it, took a deep breath, opened it wide, and walked into the eighth level of the Palaces of Bone.

11

THE RAINBOW HORN

I found myself in a small room that smelled of age, dust, and candles. Whatever else might be lacking, there were certainly plenty of candles—the entire room was crammed with candlesticks.

A hefty metal table piled high with books and scrolls, heavy drapes of dark claret velvet on the walls, a faded Sultanate carpet on the floor—it almost came unraveled under my feet. In the far corner, beside the way out, a small cupboard with shelves packed with jars and flasks. A picture in a heavy, ornate, gilded frame on one of the walls. It was impossible now to tell what the unknown artist had originally painted—all the colors had faded. Two bronze-bound chests standing beside the table.

I looked back, but the door I had come through to enter the room was gone. There was no way I could get back to the Level Between Levels now.

I walked over to the table and lifted the lid of the nearest chest out of curiosity. No, there wasn’t any treasure inside. The trunk was filled right up to the top with fine quality wheat. A very strange choice. Who on earth could have got the idea of bringing something so useless down from the first level? The second trunk was filled halfway up with wheat berries.

I slammed the lid down in annoyance and turned my attention to the table, with its books and yellowed scrolls, covered with an immensely thick layer of dust. I had no intention of touching them, but for some reason Valder decided to say something.

“Wait. Go back to them.”

I walked back to the table and picked up the first book that came to hand.

“I can’t read these squiggles,” I said, looking at the book without the slightest interest.

“I can. It’s old orcish. A magical book. It’s priceless.”

Well, maybe it was priceless, but I wasn’t going to lug it back up to the surface. The book was as heavy as Kli-Kli after a binge on cherries.

“Pick up that one, with the yellow cover.”

I raked aside the scrolls, raising a thick cloud of dust, and fished out the book that Valder wanted. It was a bit larger than my palm and about two fingers thick. There was gnomish writing on the cover.

“The Little Book of Gnomish Spells
.
”

Was that a note of awe I heard in Valder’s voice? Well, I supposed that wasn’t so very surprising. All the gnomes’ books were hidden away in the Zam-da-Mort and neither the gnomes nor the dwarves could get at them. The dwarves wouldn’t let their closest relatives within a cannon-shot of their mountains, but they couldn’t figure out how to open the magical depository without them.

That was why what I was holding in my hands was immensely valuable to both the races. I twirled the book this way and that, then carefully put it back in its place. I certainly wasn’t going to take it with me, or even tell Hallas and Deler about my find. There was no point. The little book in the yellow cover could easily ignite a conflagration that would end in a new Battle of the Field of Sorna. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one who unleashed another round of slaughter between the dwarves and the gnomes.

“Is there anything else that interests you, Valder?”

No reply.

I shrugged and walked toward the door. It was time to grab the Rainbow Horn and get out of this inhospitable place … fast.

*   *   *

Now that was talking big! “Grab the Rainbow Horn”! I had to get to the lousy tin whistle first! And getting to it turned out not to be so simple.

When I stepped out of the library room, I stepped into a wide corridor or hall. It was shrouded in shadows and semidarkness, just like the sixth level. Wax torches spluttered in an attempt to illuminate the underground Palaces, but unfortunately they didn’t have the power for it. Everything seemed to be quiet, but I stayed alert and kept stopping to listen. Thank Sagot, there was nothing terrible or mysterious. The eighth level was cold, though, and the constant drafts blowing out of the side corridors cut straight through me.

I didn’t have any maps, but, remembering what the Messenger said, I kept walking straight on without turning off. Of course, it was stupid to trust a servant of the Master, but so far everything he said had been true, and I thought that improvising was probably not the best way out of the difficult situation I was in.

After I’d walked for half an hour, the torches on the walls were spaced wider apart and I had to take my mushroom lamp out again. Then came a series of halls with rows of massive, squat columns along the walls, vaulted ceilings, and buttresses. The architectural style was quite crude and careless, very hasty, although I was certain that the halls had been created by orcs and elves. This was the slapdash way all the Young Races had done things when they were desperate to get out of here. But, strictly speaking, that was a perfectly sane desire for any rational being—although I only started to understand what the reason was forty minutes after I left the last torch behind me.

The light of my mushroom lamp picked a rather interesting picture out of the darkness of the immense hall. Something that not even a madman from the Hospital of the Ten Martyrs could have drawn—he could never even have imagined that such a thing could exist.

I admit quite honestly that cold shivers ran down my spine, my throat went dry, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. It’s not every day I have the “good luck” to see a scene from the play that the priests used to frighten us so often (I mean the story of the arrival of the darkness in Siala and similar fairy tales). Anyway, right there in front of me was a wall nine yards high. Nothing so very special about that, except that in this case, instead of bricks, the builders had used human skulls.

Thousands of thousands of them staring out at me with the dark holes of their eye sockets, thousands of thousands of them grinning at me sardonically with their bare teeth, thousands of thousands of them gleaming blinding white.

Thousands of thousands? More than that! How many skulls had it taken to make a wall like this? It was an appalling and yet fascinating scene. A scene of unreal and macabre beauty. Who had created this and how? What for? And where had they got such a massive number of human skulls? And was my own head likely to end up as one more brick in this terrible wall?

The wall completely blocked off my path. I walked along it, but ran up against the wall of the hall. I set off in the opposite direction and discovered a way through in the form of an archway with its vault made of ribs. I slipped through the archway and …

Yes indeed, and … Now I was certain that the Palaces of Bone had got their name thanks to this place. There before me lay a depository, a collection, a veritable treasurehouse of bones and remains that had once been people.

Nobody could ever have dreamed this, even in their most terrible nightmare. The walls of the hall were faced with skulls, the ceiling was covered with crossed ribs and shoulder blades, the huge chandeliers were made of yards and yards of spinal columns, rib cages, and skulls with magical lamps burning inside them and lighting up the Halls of Bone.

As I walked past these remains, I glanced at the bones and shuddered. It wasn’t very pleasant walking through a gigantic open warehouse of human death. The breath of dread and horror was palpable. It was as if the souls of everyone who had not been properly buried in all the centuries gone by were staring out at me through those dark eye sockets.

In these vast deposits of bones there wasn’t a single complete skeleton. Whoever put together this huge, macabre museum had taken the time to pull the skeletons apart and sort out the bones. There were heaps of different kinds of bones clustering, crowding, towering up along the wall. The vertebrae were in one place, the ribs in another, there were pelvises, lower jaws, large and small shinbones, upper arm bones, ulnas and radiuses, finger bones and toe bones, there were even piles of teeth.

Winding through the hills of bones (some of them were over six yards high) was a perfectly decent path. I walked along, trying to keep my wits about me and especially not to look at the skulls. The stares of thousands of thousands of eye sockets drilled straight through me. I felt a childish terror seething inside me. Walking through mountains of human remains silently contemplating eternity and all living things—this is truly cosmic horror.

And then the pyramids started. As was only to be expected, the skulls of the unfortunate dead had been used in their construction, too. Every one of these structures rose up to a height of more than ten yards. The skulls were laid with geometrical precision and fitted perfectly against each other. I think several thousand dead men’s heads must have been used in each pyramid. And in every pyramid there was a dark triangular opening or niche. I didn’t know why in the name of darkness they were put there, but I certainly was never going to climb into them.

I heard the ringing sounds in the distance soon after I passed the eighth pyramid.

Clink, clink. Clink, clink.

The sound was coming closer, and I started looking for a place to hide. I ought to have known—you should never say never. Sagot had obviously heard me and decided to have a joke, because the only place where I
could
hide now was in a niche in a pyramid. There was no time to think about it, the unknown Chimer would be with me any moment now, and then darkness only knew what might happen. I only had a knife—and not too much confidence in my ability to fight whatever it might be.

The niche proved to be quite roomy, and I fitted into it without any difficulty. I had to put the mushroom away in my bag, or the light would have given me away. The world around me was plunged into darkness.