Act of Will

SCENE XLIII One of Them

For a second the greyness of the mist was complete. Then it began to thin and I instantly knew that I was not where I had been. There was no rain. There was a glow, as of torchlight, and I could see great stone walls and arches. I was inside some vaulted chamber that had no windows and smelled strongly of horses. It was hot and stuffy. And there were raiders everywhere.

There must have been fifty of them. They were walking in pairs, some carrying boxes and weapons, some dragging corpses. They were all in full armor and looked like they were getting ready for something important. The mist was still clearing about me. Before it blew away altogether, I did the only thing I could think to do and jammed the raider’s helmet on my head. Instantly the world got a little darker, narrower, and more claustrophobic as I peered at it from inside the helm.

I was standing in one of a series of arched alcoves around the wall of a huge circular room. To one side was a stack of scyaxes, to the other a pile of folded crimson cloaks. I grabbed one of each, threw the cloak over my shoulders, and hoped it would do. It was stuffy and dry in there and I could feel the sweat breaking out all over me. On the other side of the room, I could see a handful of raiders stepping out of similar alcoves and guessed they were the ones who had traveled with me from the stone circle in the Iruni Wood. Two of them started dragging one of the corpses from the circle. The other corpse, minus his helm, was probably still there. I had taken his place.

The other raiders walked away. Only two were to do the job of funeral detail and they hadn’t come for me yet. I watched, thinking fast. If I played dead well enough, I might yet get out alive.

I slumped down and kept very still, watching through my helm as the soldiers shouldered the corpse onto a table beside a pair of small metal doors. They removed his helm, cloak, and body armor, working quickly and methodically, as if they had done this many times before. When he was left wearing nothing but the light bloodstained clothes he wore under his armor, one of them took a long steel hook and used it to open the metal doors. As soon as the doors were opened I could see what they were doing. My heart sank.

It was a furnace. The chamber was hot and stuffy because they cremated their dead down here. They just used the same magic that allowed them to transport themselves into a fight to spirit any dead away to where they could be privately and absolutely disposed of.

And if I played dead much longer, they’d be sticking me in there to burn me with the others.

I got to my feet, checking that the funeral detail wasn’t coming for me yet, then moved quickly, looking for a way out, walking with what I hoped looked like a sense of purpose. It would only be a matter of time before they realized they were missing a dead body.

There were two stone staircases going up the sides of the chamber. I made for the left one, knowing that whatever was upstairs had to be better than this. I was halfway up when another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Looking down, I could see that the floor of the great chamber was a single vast stone, pale and lustrous like quartz. It was the same as the rock in the stone circle by the farmhouse, the same as the crystals in the raiders’ helms. Whatever this place was, it had been built on an outcrop of that same rock. I stood there, staring at it.

“Get down there,” said a commanding voice at my elbow. It was a raider: an officer, judging by the lateral crest on his helm. “You’re blocking the stairs. We’re ready to move.”

I mumbled and stepped aside to let him pass, but he wasn’t to be sidestepped.

“I said get down there,” he growled. I wondered if I could come up with something that would get me up and out, but then I saw something that changed my mind.

Coming through the heavy oak door at the top of the stairs was the raider with the staff and the great horned helm. He moved slowly, and if the raiders always moved like cogs in a great machine, he was something different, something earthy and terrible, something animal but saturated with dark purpose. Immediately I knew that he was the one who worked whatever magic moved the raiders from place to place. Even at this distance I could feel his strangeness and the power that seemed to come off him like an odor. I wasn’t about to go up to meet him.

The officer who was ordering me to go down sensed his presence and fell silent as if unnerved. Hugging the cloak about me, I hurried down. He followed at my heels, and right behind us came the magic worker in his horned helm, breathing power and malice.

“Get your horse and weapons,” said the officer, and then turned away quickly, as if he was as anxious as I was to get away from the figure behind him.

Suddenly the raiders seemed to be everywhere, hemming me in, moving as a unit. With no other options, I moved with them, down a passage to a great curved corridor that circled the chamber we had just come from. In fact, it wasn’t a corridor so much as a long narrow room where the smell I had picked up before became almost overwhelming. It was a stable.

The raiders all seemed to know where they were going, and the moment I hesitated I was jostled until I got into the line. We kept moving as we filed past dozens of gigantic horses, all barded with leather and ring mail and cloaked in scarlet. Each raider opened the door to one of the stalls, seized the bridle of his mount, and waited. I had no choice but to do the same. Maybe we would lead our horses outside and I could slip away as soon as I had figured out where I was.

Then a sound went through me like thin steel, a high, wailing cry from the circular chamber, a keening that contained words I couldn’t catch. There was a great roar, as of thunder, a flash of white light that bounced off the walls and made the horses start and whinny. As I tried to calm mine down, I saw the mist begin to gather around both of us and knew only that whatever nightmare I had stepped into was about to get worse.