Daughter of Ancients

Chapter 24

My confidence wavered as we abandoned the cliffs and gullies of the ridge and walked out under the demonic face in the sky. The foul smokes had us gagging, and the agonized screams of the captives and the hissing contempt of the Zhid curdled my blood. But, as I had guessed, neither demon nor captive nor Zhid took any note of us whatsoever.

We walked right through the chaotic war camp. Two Zhid wrestled in the dust to our left, cursing and spitting, slashing at each other with bloody knives. An entire troop marched past on the hammered roadway, their empty-eyed commander with red hair and thin lips riding a coal-black charger, and ten warriors dodged between the dusty tents answering a shouted summons. But not one of the Zhid challenged us.

The faster we walked, the more space there seemed to be between us and the vision, and when we were forced to slow down because Nim was paralyzed with terror, the specters brushed closer. I wrapped my arms about the woman and forced her to move, telling us both over and over that none of it had as much substance as the chill wind that swirled sand into my face.

Paulo slogged along beside me, his face grim, scarcely looking right nor left. But halfway-across the plain he took my arm and spoke quietly in my ear as we walked. "Did you ever see stars in Zhev'Na?"

"No. Never." The odd question made me look up, of course. The demon apparition hung in the sky overhead, his eye of flame still pointed at the ridge behind us. But everywhere else the sky had taken on a deep purple cast, and the stars that hung suspended there were green. "Especially not green stars."

"I've seen green stars. In the Bounded, the young master's kingdom, we have a dark purple sky and green stars. He's here. This is his work."

"Then he's turned . . . become one of them again." My feet slowed. A ghostly Zhid rider barreled down the path toward us and, by reflex, I dragged Nim out of the way, forcing myself to move forward again.

"No, he cares for the Bounded. If he'd turned—and I told you already, he wouldn't ever—the Bounded wouldn't mean anything to him any more. He knows I'll come after him, and other than his parents, I'm the only one would know about the green stars. But if he's using his magic to tell me he's here, then why would he make all this other wretched business?"

The dark blight of the ruin grew larger in front of us, like a jagged hole in the night. I could see only one answer. "To frighten people away. To warn you away."

He nodded and walked on. "We'd best watch our step then."

In the moment we climbed over the cracked and crumbled slabs of black granite that had been the walls of Zhev'Na, the smoke demon and all the rest of the vision vanished. Behind us the plains lay barren and quiet. In front of us was . . . night. If darkness could be said to have bulk, then it was a thick, palpable darkness that hung over the ruin of Zhev'Na and gathered in the shadows cast by the bulbous moon.

We picked our way past the fallen walls, through burned beams and shattered paving stones, all that remained of the armories and barracks that had nestled beside the walls like evil chicks to a monstrous hen. A line of broken columns indicated the remains of a covered walkway, five years of wind-tossed thornbushes piled up in it.

"Where do we start?" Paulo stopped and surveyed the place. The piles of broken stone seemed to stretch forever.

I squeezed the quivering bundle of rags in my arms. "Nim, show us where you found the kaminar."

Her terror-dulled eyes roamed the ruin, peering out from under her mop of tangled hair.

"We'll protect you. You said it was a vault. . . buried deep . . ." Perhaps the Lady would consider it proper revenge to put the young Lord in her own tomb. "Please. We're afraid our friend is a prisoner here. You are so brave to help us. So kind."

Nim jerked her head and pulled me in an unexpected direction, not toward the Lords' house where one would find the deep chamber where the Great Oculus had spun out its evils, but instead through the Drudges' courtyard of workrooms and kitchens, and past the long, low barracks to the slave pens.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Just there." Her dusty whisper was almost indistinguishable from the wind. She pointed to a tangle of bent metal rods and broken stone. Wind and sand had scoured the filth from the warped black cages where those slaves used in fighting practice had been kept. In the ruins just beyond the cages, Nim showed us a huge crack in the stone floor. Great sections of paving had buckled as if the earth had heaved up the foulness that had been done there and pushed up against the fallen roof, leaving a gaping hole in the floor and a broken stair descending into blackness.

I cast a light, and Paulo and I knelt to peer over the edge. Nim squatted beside us and pointed to a rectangular opening at the bottom of the stair. Beside it lay the broken pieces of a stone door and tarnished brass hasps and hinges. I pressed the back of my left hand to my mouth and backed away, dizzy and sweating. The Lords had buried her here under this building. So deep . . .

Suddenly wary, I raised my handlight higher. Over my left shoulder stood a huge stone hearth and a broken brick chimney, blackened with centuries of use. Two broad shards of granite lay beside it, part of a single slab cracked down its middle and broken apart. Echoes of agony rang in my memory: my brothers struggling not to scream as the hot metal was dripped on the back of their necks to seal the slave collar, failing when the pain became too much to bear, and sobbing in despair as half their lives were torn from them. I had been so young I had not even tried to contain my wailing.

"It was here," I whispered, pulling my hand down to shrink the span of the light. I didn't want to see any more.

"What was here?" said Paulo.

Arms crossed on my breast, I wrapped my hands about my neck to remind myself of freedom. "They sealed us here. My brothers and me. In this very room."

"Oh, demonfire, I'm sorry, Jen."

Yet the echoes of past screams bared another part of the truth. "Think of it, Paulo. D'Sanya was held captive just below this place, where prisoners were sealed into the collars. If she couldn't sleep, D'Sanya would have heard their cries. For a thousand years. You were here. You know what that sound was like."

Paulo looked gray. "She's mad. However she's been able to hide it, she couldn't be nothing else but mad."

Truth unraveled its knots as I explored its windings. "She made the slave collars. That's why she can't look me or my father in the eye. That's why she begged Nim and her friends not to kill her—because she thought they were slaves, and she knew what she'd done to them. She's a Metalwright, and she made the collars, and then she had to listen to them being used every day of her life." Poor, poor D'Sanya.

"The lesser evil. That's what she told him. They'd kill five slaves whenever she would disobey. She told him she always chose the lesser evil."

The young Lord. Paulo's friend. The handsome young man with the lifetime of guilt in his eyes. The one we'd come to find.

"He's not here," I said, standing up. "She's put him somewhere else. This is the place of her guilt, not his."

Paulo glanced up at me. "We've got to go down and look, though. Before we go. In case there's something we can't see from here."

Conscience, ethics, kindness said I should go along to check for traps and spells and to protect Paulo. But remembered pain was palpable in the air. The stair was almost straight down, a sheer drop of almost two stories. "I can't go down there. I can't. I'm sorry."

"Just wait here, then." He looked at me carefully and laid a kind, very ordinary hand on my arm. "I won't be gone but a bit. Will you be all right?"

I nodded and forced my light as bright as I could, shaping it to illuminate the yawning pit as he descended the broken stairs. Then, cowardly, I looked away before I got dizzy and fell in after him.

Nim looked back and forth between me and the hole in the floor, chewing her fingers with stained teeth. "Can't stay here. Not here. Demons will come for us here. Worships will come."

I pulled her close, hoping I would have more success comforting her than I was having with myself. "No demons live here, Nim. Only shadows of demons."

"But some shadows are more substantial than others." The grating voice boomed from behind us.

I whipped my head around as Nim whimpered and collapsed into my arms. A massively built Zhid wearing bloodstained leather armor stood smiling at us with pale, soulless eyes. In one hand he carried a leather whip, studded with metal barbs, and in the other a long, curved dagger that glinted sharply in the soft light from my hand.

Truth? When the whip sliced the air a finger's breadth from my left cheek and cracked into the broken stones at my feet, raising a spurt of dust, I came to the sickening conclusion that this illusion might be real.

"It is most unseemly for such a one as you to exist uncollared," snarled the Zhid. "At least you kneel, as should Dar'Nethi vermin before their betters. Yet clearly you do not remember all your manners."

The whip cracked to the other side of me, ripping the shoulder of my tunic and leaving a stinging warning underneath it. The next one would be on my hands. I knew what he wanted, and I was not about to do it.

I jumped to my feet and dodged the ripping slice of the whip, trying not to trip over the cringing Nim as I shifted to my right. I needed to move away from the pit—force the warrior to turn his back to the steps where Paulo would appear at any moment.

"The days of my servitude are over," I yelled, hoping Paulo would hear. "I kneel to no one, and I spread my arms for no one, especially not a pitiful Zhid who acts as if one mindless brute can stand against a free Dar'Nethi."

"Then we shall have to see about that free part," he said, smiling.

"I am not nine years old this time. I don't even think you're real."

Farther . . . only a little farther. Make him turn away from the stair . Another step to the right. A thick, charred beam and a heap of crumbled stones blocked my way, forcing me to move within reach of the Zhid's hairy arms, unless— I quenched my handlight.

"Vermin's teeth!" growled the warrior as I pelted him with shards of stones that clattered harmlessly on his leather armor. In the dark he had no idea they were harmless, and I smiled as I heard him crash into the debris from the caved-in roof while scrabbling to get away. An unstable flickering of red light gave away his position, and then I bolted, grabbing Nim and yankjng her back past the pit and the stair, where I hoped Paulo was biding his time in the dark.

We hurried through a maze of rubble, and then dodged into the shadow of a half-broken wall. "We're going to go separate ways to deceive him," I said to the quivering Nim. "You must run back to Rab. As soon as you can, no later than first light, the two of you must have the horses at the place where we crossed the walls of the ruin."

The warrior cursed and bellowed for someone else to join him. I had only moments.

"But the demons, mistress . . ."

"The only dangerous demons are these inside the walls, and I'll take care of them. You saw my magic light, remember?"

Nim nodded, her face a portrait of indecision.

"Well, I have much more power than that. Just be careful and quiet until you are well away from the fortress. You have been so brave to bring us here. Here—" I pulled a gold coin from my pocket and closed her palm around it. "This is my talisman. It will protect you as you cross the plains. I kept you safe before, did I not?"

"Yes, mistress, you did, but—"

"Then you shall be safe going back. We're going to make sure that you and your friends are safe always. No burning metal to hurt or blind you. No demons to frighten you. But at first light . . ."

"We will be at the wall as you say."

"Thank you, Nim. Bless you. Together we'll bind these demons forever. Now be off with you. Hurry."

Without looking back, I sped in the opposite direction, angling away from the flicker of red light cast by the angry Zhid. Nim had shown us far more than I expected. If the young Lord was to be found, I knew where he had to be. But first, Paulo . . .

"She's heading back for the pens!" The shout was far too close. Another red light flared in exactly the direction I was running. I shifted my course, hurrying across the broad practice yards, risking the exposed route in the need for speed. Paulo would have to fend for himself.

By the time I reached the dark, upright, bony fingers of the broken colonnade, ten more red flares had sprung up behind me and to the sides. My luck took its usual course and a squat, barrel-shaped Zhid warrior with a bald head stepped from behind a toppled statue of a gryphon. The warrior's long sword gleamed wickedly in the scarlet light cast from his hand. Chuckling in satisfaction, he edged around the giant paw of the gryphon, waving the tip of his sword in a tight, controlled circle.

I could not retreat. I had some thought of circling, then taking off and outrunning the broad-beamed Zhid, but my hopes were not encouraged by his bellowing laugh when I began the move. My neck prickled. Worse and worse. Armor clanked from my left in the direction of the barracks, along with the unmistakable whisper of swords leaving their sheaths.

Before I could think what else to do, a thin black shadow leaped off the gryphon's crumbled wing and onto the warrior's back, yelling, "Go!" As I ran, the two fell to the pavement, grunting and grappling.

To my right, just beyond a tumbled wall, a tower of fire belched high into the night, blistering my exposed skin as I picked my way through the fallen columns, into the Drudges' courtyard.

This time keep to the shadows, fool , I thought I sped down an alleyway between the servants' latrines and a collapsed guardroom. I'd had to shovel out those latrines and haul food, water, and lamp oil to that guardroom. Slaves learned all the back alleys. If you stayed out of sight, you were less likely to be detained by random cruelties—like the two Zhid holding a knife to my eyes, threatening to cut them out if I blinked too soon, and then laying bets as to how long I could hold them open. The passage was almost blocked by a fallen slab, but I crawled under and emerged in the courtyard of the Lords.

An unnatural cold crept out of the rubble into my shuddering bones. What forces had Gerick and his father unleashed to shatter the slender towers that had soared so high? The gigantic carvings that had flanked the tall black doors had toppled, and one of the beast heads, double my height, stared at me with dead black eyes from the center of the court. The great fire bowls that had once sat atop the parapets were now cold and broken, the giant shards protruding from a mountain of broken granite.

For a moment the shouts and snarls of the chase seemed distant, muted by a sighing wind that crept about the ruins and curled about my feet, grasping with dead fingers at my trousers. The wind whispered in my ears of evil upon evil, lingering remembrances of pain and fear, of souls lost and wandering, cruelly, everlastingly separated from the Way of light and hope and joy.

It was all I could do to go forward. My blood pounded. A warning blazed in my head like a beacon: Begone from this place !

He was here. I knew it with a certainty I could attach to nothing else. I half expected to feel his strength moving my legs again. I could have used it; my knees would not stop shaking.

Yet the fortress where I had lived in constant fear was a shattered shell, while I stood here alive and uncollared. The Lords who had terrorized me and tormented those I loved were dead. Whoever these warriors were, whatever this cold terror might be, they were only an echo.

I ran for the gaping maw where the entry doors had stood. From beyond the dark mouth came murmurings, weeping, curses and hoarse, mocking shouts.

The roof of the temple hall was open to the night, the wind howling through cracks wider than a man. Yet no rubble, sand, or thornbush cluttered the polished black floor, so like a lake of black ice. Nothing remained of the giant statues of the Lords—the fearsome monoliths carved in black stone that had been alive with the Lords' presence behind their masks of gold and gem-studded eyes. Far across the cavernous space was the way I had to go, the downward passage into the bowels of the palace. My pattering footsteps mocked my false courage as I sped across the shining floor, while in my head the warning blazed louder, desperate: Begone from this place! You have no business here !

As I hurried downward into the oppressive darkness, I cast my light again. It flickered feebly. I'd not be able to maintain it for long. I sped down flight after flight of broad steps, not daring to look anywhere except into the pool of light at my feet. When I at last faced the smooth black door that led into the innermost heart of Zhev'Na, I stopped to listen. The warning hammered in my head with the certainty of mortal danger. Go back! Do not come here !

But I couldn't change my mind because of some cowardly palpitations about cold stone and memory. Paulo had put himself in jeopardy to get me this far. I pushed open the door.

The walls and columns of the vast chamber showed gouges and great charred and jagged rents as if damaged in a cataclysm of fire. In its center lay the sculpture of a man resting on a bed of stone, very like those you see atop a coffin lid or carved in relief upon the face of a standing tomb. But before I could examine the sculpture or the damaged walls, a bolt of lightning flashed from the palm-sized ring of brass that hung spinning in the air above the sculpted man, drowning my handlight in such brilliance it forced my eyes closed. And when I opened them again, I was in a different place altogether. . . .