Shadow Blizzard

7 The Dance Of The Sunlight

I don’t know how much time went by, but I woke up suddenly, as if someone had jabbed their elbow into my side.

The maps called the place I had reached the Eighty-Sixth Northeastern Hall of Stairways. It was a hall of onyx, and the black stone greedily devoured the light of the magic lamp, so that visibility was lousy. I couldn’t risk increasing the brightness; at this stage I had to be careful with every new light and make it last for as long as possible, so that I’d be able to reach the way out.

I tried not to think about the fix I was in. Up on the outside, in the old life, I used to think that going down into Hrad Spein would make me part of the greatest and most dangerous adventure of the century. Only now I realized it was something far more serious than that. I couldn’t find the words to describe the way I felt about the present situation.

Alone. Completely alone. In almost pitch darkness, going deeper and deeper, with my remaining supplies vanishing at catastrophic speed, without the Key, without any hope of getting back out through the Doors.

What was I hoping for? Probably nothing more or less than a miracle. A Great Big Divine Miracle. Of course, the gods were just desperate to save a certain Harold; they were queuing up for the chance.

My mood could hardly have been worse.

Dozens of black staircases running upward or winding downward like corkscrews. No difference between the staircases at all, as if the architects had followed some strict system that I didn’t understand.

I walked past them for a long, long time, sometimes touching the cold stone with my fingers and listening to the silence. The onyx devoured every sound. At least, that’s what I thought until I heard the scream. Although I didn’t really hear it so much as feel it. The scream didn’t last long, it broke off a second after I heard it, and it was very far away.

I stopped and listened. Silence. After walking right through the Hall of Stairways and tramping through a few small vestibules, I reached the entrance to a hall where there was light, and quickly put out my little magical lamp.

The entrance was every bit as tall and wide as the Doors, and once again there were two statues waiting to greet me, just like at the Hall of the Slumbering Echo. An orc on the right, an elf on the left. The orc’s double-handed sword was broken, and the Firstborn was using a stiletto to poke out his own right eye with an impassive look on his face. There was already a gaping socket where his left eye should have been. I shuddered—the huge statue, five times the height of a man, seemed alive. The sculptor had certainly been granted talent from the gods.

The elf’s sword was still in one piece, but the weapon was lying on the floor, with its handle toward me. I chuckled—it wasn’t every day you could see an elf voluntarily discarding his weapon. But the elf had decided to keep his eyes and not stick any sharp objects into them. He had simply covered them with his hands.

How could I possibly understand what the builders had tried to say with these statues! There was writing on the floor. I was about to walk on past, but the letters impressed into the stone slabs flared up with a gray pearly light, forcing me to take notice of them.

At first they were orcish squiggles, then they trembled, diffused, and gathered back together as the squares, circles, and triangles used for writing by the gnomes and dwarves. A few moments later in some incredible way the gnomish scrawl rearranged itself into human letters that froze, glinting like pearls.

Here lie the sixty-nine rulers of the House of the White Leaf, sleeping their eternal sleep. If you are a gnome, a dwarf, a man, or the child of another race and you can read these lines, we adjure you not to disturb those who guard the peace of the dead and to seek another path.

But if you are a contemptible orc or are stubborn and refuse to listen to the voice of reason, or simply ignorant and cannot read—enter and accept the fate predetermined for you by the gods, and do not complain that you were not warned.

The letters gleamed for a few seconds, then re-formed into orcish squiggles and faded. This was probably the first moment in Hrad Spein that I thought about just giving up and trying to find another way to the sixth level.

I’m one of those people who usually listen to the inner voice of reason. And after all, the elves wouldn’t go and warn a traveler about danger for no particular reason, especially if you bore in mind that there hadn’t been any warning notices before any of the other traps I’d met. It would be better to err on the side of caution and not go blundering into a nest of vipers.

To reach the main route leading to the descent to the sixth level I only had to go through a few more halls, walking straight ahead without turning off (if the maps were telling the truth, of course).

A detour would cost me an extra day and a half of wandering through stairways, corridors, and halls, and I simply didn’t have a day and a half to spare. I was far enough behind schedule already, and the time estimates I’d given Milord Alistan weren’t worth a demon’s belch anymore.

My stay in the Palaces of Bone really was having a very bad effect on my brain. I’d started rating the value of time above my own life. Anyway, the result was a kind of momentary blackout inside my head, and I only came round when I’d already taken twenty paces across the hall that I’d been categorically advised not to enter.

That’s the way the most stupid mistakes in the universe are made. I didn’t do it, I didn’t want to, it just happened.

The fear was churning inside me like the geysers on Dragon Island. And it was about to spill over at any moment.

“Calm down, don’t panic!” an inner voice whispered to me. “Nothing terrible has happened, you can still go back. Try to keep calm. Look around!”

At long last Valder had given me a piece of useful advice! I took several deep breaths, trying to control my breathing and the thundering drums of my heart. It was true, I had already taken twenty paces across the forbidden hall and I was still alive and well, despite the ominous warnings at the entrance. Had the elves just been trying to give me a fright? I should just take a look around and decide whether to go back or go forward.

The hall wasn’t large (for Hrad Spein). Only the size of a jousting field. The walls were made of huge blocks of stone, each the size of a smallish carriage. The architecture was rather basic, especially bearing in mind that there were sixty-nine rulers of one of the light elves’ houses lying here.

This hall couldn’t compare with the beauty I’d seen on the earlier levels. It was strange. Were elfin kings really buried here, or was that just another fairy tale for the gullible? There was no way to check now—the niches between the stone blocks had been walled over ages ago, and there was no way to tell just from the bones if someone was a member of a royal house or some plain, boorish peasant.

The arrangement of the columns was totally chaotic. Three here, one there, and eight over that way. They were eight-sided, tall, and very slim—you couldn’t really hide behind one of them. But the strangest thing was the patches of light slowly wandering chaotically around the floor. As if there were rays of sunlight falling from the ceiling; but, naturally, there weren’t any rays and there wasn’t any sun, either.

This was a rather strange sight, and somehow ominous, too. The hall was in semidarkness, lit only by the pale light radiating from the walls, but every column threw a dense, inky shadow, and creeping around entirely at random were about forty patches of sunlight, each one a good yard and a half across. There weren’t any bright patches to be seen where I was standing, but up ahead …

You could call it an assembly, or a swarm. I turned toward the way out. Eight patches of sunlight had appeared out of nowhere and were blocking my way: If I wanted to leave the hall now, I would have to walk straight through them.

I didn’t have the slightest desire to tread on something when I didn’t even know what it was, and the only thing left for me to do now was jump through them—fortunately for me there were small black areas of floor between the patches that had lined up in front of me. As if they could read my thoughts, the patches started moving and fused together into a single large blob.

“Bastards!” I exclaimed.

There was something about these patches of sunlight and the way they wandered about that bothered me. I even shot a crossbow bolt at one, but it just clanged against the floor and nothing happened.

“I won’t walk on you, and that’s it. Slit my throat, but I won’t do it,” I muttered, and turned away from the door.

I’d have to get across the hall. There had to be some pathway through!

I stopped right at the edge of the patches and stood there. There had to be some system to this aimless wandering, some principle behind this movement, but I just couldn’t grasp it.

They crept around with all the speed of a paralyzed mammoth. Whatever they were, they were in no hurry and they moved at their own leisure.

Some patches decided it would be a good idea to go right, others decided to go left, some followed a diagonal from corner to corner, some went round in circles or spirals, and some followed jagged lines that only they could understand. Sometimes they crawled onto each other and for a moment fused into one big patch, then they separated again and went their own ways. But there were always fairly large gaps left between them, so if I was agile enough, I could simply run around these sluggish creepers. Here at the edge of the hall there weren’t very many of them, but the closer to the center, the more of them there were. And there was an especially large number beside some kind of heap lying about eighty yards ahead of me.

I strained my eyes hard, but I couldn’t make out what it was lying on the floor. And then I saw something I hadn’t noticed before—the places where the patches absolutely refused to crawl.

The shadows from the columns! They lay across the floor in long dark lines, and not a single bright patch dared to cross them.

The shadows were little islands in the pattern of movement that covered the floor. So I had a good chance of getting through the hall if I followed them and avoided the patches of light.

I stepped in just as soon as the next patch of light had crept past me. A long leap! Then another, and another! A halt. Two patches started moving toward me and I jumped back, almost stepping on a third one. Jump left! Jump right! Straight ahead! In three leaps I covered the distance between me and the first shadow and, once I was safe, I sighed in relief and caught my breath. Basically, it wasn’t all that complicated, the main thing was to keep your wits about you and make sure you didn’t step on a patch of light by accident.

The eight yards of space between me and the next shadow were empty. Forward! I ran like a hare, hoping to confuse my pursuers and avoid a long chase. Sometimes I had to stop to let a patch go by, jump over two patches at once, or run in the opposite direction. My arm began to throb with pain; I couldn’t understand why.

Either the patches realized I was skipping around between them like a drunken Doralissian, or they simply decided to have a bit of fun, but they started creeping a lot faster and more randomly, so I reached the fifth island of shadow puffing and panting. And apart from that, three times I almost blundered and only avoided stepping on a patch of “sunlight” by some miracle.

The pain in my left arm had started systematically gnawing into my bones. I had to lean back against a column, sit down on the floor, and rummage in my little bag to find the appropriate magical elixir. During the game of leapfrog across the hall everything in the section of the bag where I kept the vials had got jumbled up.

I swore and started sorting out the confusion. I had to stuff several unimportant vials in the pockets of my jacket—they could lie there until I found a free slot for them. It took me about two minutes to put everything back in order, and all that time the patches kept on stepping up the pace.

The patches seemed to have gone wild, and in one place my way was blocked by an unbroken stream of them. The pain in my arm was becoming unbearable now and I had to grit my teeth. My improvised route had come to an end. From here to the middle of the hall it was only ten yards at the most, but the next haven of shadow was thirty yards away. And the space between me and it was filled with creeping patches, so many of them that I could see virtually no black areas between them. This was a real challenge! How could I get across a space like that without touching a patch of “sunlight”?

Then I finally paid some attention to the heap lying about fifteen paces away from me. What I hadn’t been able to make out from a distance, turned out close up to be nothing other than a pile of human bodies. Balistan Pargaid’s men.

Of course, Lafresa and Paleface didn’t happen to be among the dead. There were seven corpses lying on the floor in poses that no normal person could possibly have imagined. “Grotesque” and “unnatural” are probably the most respectful words to describe what I saw. It looked as if the dead men had all been born without any bones in their bodies. One’s neck was twisted so that the back of his head looked forward and his face looked backward. And as well as that, his elbows and knees were bent in completely the wrong directions, not at all the way that Mother Nature intended, so that he looked like a strange parody of a spider. Another dead man had simply been tied in a knot and a third had his legs woven together in a way that looked very frightening. Lots of bloody streaks across the floor indicated that death had overtaken the unfortunate fellows at different points in the hall, and then the bodies had been dragged into a single heap.

This was bad. Very bad. As usual, Harold had got involved with something very, very nasty. The main thing now was to find out what this nasty thing was before it snipped my head off. Any information at all about the enemy would be a step toward victory.

And then it hit me …

“Why, you thickhead, brother Harold!” I swore, smacking myself on the forehead in annoyance.

That was the secret of it! May the darkness crush me—those words at the entrance: “Do not disturb those who guard the peace of the dead,” meant exactly what they said. And the statues weren’t watching, they were pretending to be eyeless or blind. Blind guards, eternally watching over the peace of the elfin lords! The rhyme riddle had a line about it, but I’d managed to forget it at just the wrong moment. And it was no accident that my arm was hurting, either—I was wearing the red copper bracelet that Egrassa had given me! It was protecting me against the guards of this hall, even if the protection was painful.

All these thoughts went rushing through my head like a storm wind. But now I didn’t know what to do—feel afraid of what might happen or feel happy that I was still alive.

I glanced sideways at the bodies of the unfortunate men (which did nothing to raise my spirits or inspire me with optimism). Eventually I plucked up my courage, consigned the world and its mother to the Nameless One, and went dashing through the middle of the hall without even a glance at the dead bodies. I flew off to the side to avoid a patch creeping up silently from behind me, and performed a mind-boggling somersault as I tried to avoid three patches that were advancing on me at once. The shadow stretching across the floor was only five paces away now, and I was just figuring out how to move on from there, when … When I finally I failed to spot one patch of “sunlight” and stepped on it with the very edge of the sole of my boot.

To say that I was on a safe island in a single heartbeat is to say nothing at all. What heartbeat, may a h’san’kor take me. It was five, ten, a hundred times faster than that!

The crossbow jumped into my hands of its own accord, the pain from the copper bracelet started smarting really badly, but I never even thought of taking off the dark elves’ amulet. It was my only defense now, the only thing that could save me from the guards watching over the remains of the dead lying in this hall. The patches of light all over the floor stopped moving, and then little golden sparks started appearing above the patch that I’d stepped into so clumsily. First one, then a dozen, then a hundred …

The sparks appeared, hanging in the air, flashed for an instant with a blinding golden light, and then started to pulse in time with the beating of my heart! There were more and more of them, until I could already make out a vague silhouette. An instant later and there standing in front of me was a creature of gleaming gold, made up of millions of tiny little sparks.

A Kaiyu.

One of the elves’ greatest myths, one of the orcs’ greatest horrors.

Two thousand years earlier, when the elves went for the orcs’ throats in the Palaces of Bone and the blood of the feuding relatives flowed like a river in the burial chambers, something happened that should never have happened.

The orcs took their revenge by despoiling the graves of the elves, and they chose the graves of only the very noblest houses of the Black Forest, scattering the remains of the dead across the halls and leaving their bones to be mocked by the darkness. The Firstborn attacked the thing that was most important to any elf—the honor of his house and the memory of his ancestors. The elves tried to fight back by leaving guards beside the graves, they set traps and whispered spells.… But there’s an effective response to every attack, every guard gets tired sometimes, any trap can be disarmed, and any spell can be overcome with another spell.

The despoliation of the burial sites continued, and then one of the elfin houses decided to summon these Kaiyu from another world to defend the graves against violation by the Firstborn. What happened after that can be read in the legends that the orcs and the elves tell on especially dark nights. But none of the Firstborn ever dared to ravage the elfin tombs again.

And there, standing just five yards away from me, was one of these incorruptible, blind guards who couldn’t be killed. The Kaiyu seemed to be made of thousands of glittering sparks. It was impossible to look at the creature for long—the bright golden gleam made my eyes start to water, and the figure of the soulless guard blurred and trembled like a mirage at noon on a hot summer day. I could only make out the silhouette.

The creature was a head taller than me. Two arms, two legs, a head. No tails or horns or teeth. How could this creature have teeth? It didn’t even have a mouth! And where the eyes ought to have been there were two empty, gaping holes. The creature was completely blind.

Well now, blind or not, it seemed to have a very definite and accurate idea of where I was. At least, it came toward me, and without hurrying, as if it was quite confident that I couldn’t get away from it.

I panicked and shot a bolt at it. It flew through the creature’s body without causing any damage and clattered against the far wall in the darkness. The beast was suddenly only one pace away from me and it raised its hand. I roared in fright, realizing that this was the end, but the Kaiyu’s hand simply swept through the air beside my ear and the guard moved past me and stopped, giving me a good view of its back.

I don’t know which of us was more surprised. The Kaiyu stood there for a brief moment, obviously trying to figure out why I was still alive, and then it had another try. With the same result. As if some force had erected a barrier between us. The guard could see me (strange as that may sound), but he couldn’t harm me. Thanks to Egrassa and his bracelet.

Meanwhile the Kaiyu stepped on the nearest patch of light and the sparks making up his body showered down onto the floor in a golden rain. All the patches in the hall started moving again. What was I to make of that? Did it mean they had decided to let me go?

The bracelet was scorching my arm more and more painfully, and the moment was rapidly approaching when the pain would become so unbearable, I would have to take it off (if I wasn’t going to lose consciousness). I had to risk it and try to reach the way out before it was too late.

Taking no more notice of the patches of light, I set out toward the exit. As soon as my foot touched the first patch, another Kaiyu appeared. This time the golden sparks assembled into the body of the guard a lot faster. But the beast didn’t even try to attack me. I stepped on another patch, and then another.…

Not every patch threw up a Kaiyu; if that had happened, the entire hall would have been crowded with them. Five guards appeared, formed up into a semicircle, and followed me. A fantastically beautiful and at the same time terrifying sight.

The five golden creatures “looked” in my direction, then crumbled into a shower of sparks that were drawn into a patch of “sunlight,” disappeared for a fraction of a second, and then reappeared, but now outside the patch that I had just stepped on. And we walked across the hall like that.

Once I left the hall the Kaiyu stopped following me. The patches on the floor started moving about and waiting for their next visitor, who would arrive in darkness only knew how many hundreds of years. The pain in my arm gradually eased as the amulet protecting me relaxed and became a perfectly ordinary copper bracelet again.

I had passed through the Kaiyu Hall and lived. That was worth celebrating, which was exactly what I did straightaway. Of course, instead of wine I had to make do with ordinary water from a subterranean river, and instead of quail I had to chew on half a dry biscuit.

Forty paces farther on, the first side tunnel appeared, and I started counting the intersections to make sure I wouldn’t miss the turn I needed. At the eighteenth intersection I stopped and turned to the right, leaving the central vestibule.

Up ahead of me the vestibule led to a stairway down to the sixth level, and I was absolutely certain that was the way Lafresa and the rest of Balistan Pargaid’s men had gone. I was going to be more cunning and turn off the main highway. There were many routes leading to the sixth level, and the one mentioned in the verse riddle was a lot shorter than the route chosen by the Master’s woman servant.

I would reduce the distance by three quarters and go straight to the very heart of the sector I needed on the sixth level, while dearest Lafresa would have to tramp across the sixth level from its very beginning and lose almost two whole days. That would leave me well ahead of my rivals. And what if I managed to prepare for the encounter and take back the Key? Almost all (or perhaps all) of Lafresa’s companions had been killed in the Palaces of Bone, and my chances of victory had improved enormously. The important thing was to keep enough lights and food for the journey back.

I spotted the statues of the giants “whose gaze burns all to ash” immediately. They were standing facing each other, clutching stone hammers in their gnarled, knotty hands.

The giants had an air of antiquity and hidden menace. Whose chisel could have carved these huge colossi out of stone? How had they been brought down to this depth and what for? Instead of faces the statues had the smooth surfaces of closed helmets with tall crests and narrow eye-slits. Both of them were looking down at the ground in front of their feet. Between them there was something that looked like a pool or a basin, but from where I was I couldn’t see any water.

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

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

Perhaps that “basin” was the way down to the Sector of Heroes on the sixth level? That was exactly where I needed to go, but that phrase about the apparent ease with which the giants’ gaze reduced anyone who came too close to ashes made me feel a bit cautious.

Once I was in the hall, I didn’t try to hurry; I leaned back against the wall and started looking for the answer. There had to be an answer, no fool would ever build an entrance especially so that no one could ever use it. So, if I was going to get to the basin, the giants had to close their eyes for a while.

But how could I make them do that? They were statues, after all. Some kind of mechanism? I couldn’t see anything of the kind. I must admit I thought long and hard over this puzzle. But no clever ideas came to mind. The statues looked monolithic and immovable.

Deciding to test their fiery gaze, I put my hand into my bag and took out the very smallest of the emeralds. It was the only thing I wouldn’t be sorry to part with. I put the stone on the smooth floor and gave it a smart kick. It slid along the surface, flashing in farewell to me like a little green star, moved into range of the giants’ gaze, and disappeared in a blinding flash.

“Oho!”

I had to go back to work on the essential problem of how to get down to the sixth level. I rummaged through all the papers I’d taken from the Forbidden Territory, paying especially close attention to the parts I’d thought were unnecessary. A heap of incomprehensible drawings, showing the architecture of several halls, a meaningless sequence of symbols, and some other obscure rubbish … Mmm, yes. Damn all in the papers. It was a rotten idea. But the answer had to be somewhere close! I could feel it in my gut.

I approached the giants cautiously, almost turning myself cross-eyed. With one eye I tried to watch the statues’ heads and draw the line limiting the effect of their fiery gaze across the floor. With the other I tried to spot some kind of clue to the answer. Eventually I had to stop or risk being roasted and then incinerated.

The giants were close now, and from where I was standing I could see quite clearly that the statues were not so very perfect and the craftsman’s chisel had worked the stone rather crudely. And I also noticed something else, something that made it worthwhile almost going cross-eyed. The giants were both standing on rather tall round plinths. Well, what was so special about that—a plinth’s a plinth, isn’t it? But I would have offered up an eyetooth if those plinths didn’t rotate (together with the giants, of course), if you just knew how to make them to do it. The seasoned eye of an experienced man will always spot a concealed mechanism. All I had to do now was find out how the mechanism was activated and the job was as good as done.

The hall with the giants was subjected to another intense inspection. I was looking for something like a lever or a protruding block of stone, but there didn’t seem to be anything of the kind there. Then my gaze fell on the floor, slid over the smooth claret-colored slabs, and stopped on the signs of an alphabet that I didn’t know.

I’d seen squiggles like that somewhere before. Why, of course! In the “unnecessary” part of the papers! In among the drawings and incomprehensible sketches there was a piece of paper with a sequence of symbols like those. I took the bundle wrapped in drokr out of my bag again, opened it, and started rummaging through the manuscripts.

There it was! My memory hadn’t deceived me. There on the paper were the same symbols as on the floor. Some kind soul had noted down the key, but forgotten to mention when and where it should be used.

I leaned down, found the symbol that was shown first on the sheet of paper, and pressed the appropriate little slab. It moved an inch. Everything turned out to be outrageously simple (if you happened to have the answer on a piece of paper, that is). All I had to do was to press fourteen of the seventy or so symbols shown here in the right order. As soon as the last of the blocks slid in, the hall was filled with a quiet humming sound, as if counterweights and pulleys had started moving somewhere under the floor, and the giants started slowly turning their backs to me and their fiery gaze toward the far wall.

I gave a whoop of triumph, as if I’d found the entire treasure of the Stalkon dynasty under my bed.

The way was clear, the menacing giants were no longer looking at the basin, and I set out in the appropriate direction.

The humming started again, the plinths trembled and started slowly turning in the opposite direction. I broke into a run, trying to cover the distance to the basin before the giants’ gaze became a deadly threat again, and jumped into the black hole without thinking.

“Aaaaaaaaagh!” I howled in fright, realizing that my feet wouldn’t be touching the floor again in the immediate future.

The hole turned out to be very deep. I fell the first twenty yards like a stone, and I’d already said good-bye to life, but just then the air thickened, I started falling more slowly, and the descent became smooth and gentle.

I had enough wits and courage to stop yelling and light up one of my magical lamps. I was falling slowly down a narrow shaft. Its walls drifted past me and disappeared upward. If I’d wanted to, I could easily have reached out and touched them with my hand. It was only through some caprice of the gods that I hadn’t smashed my head against the wall when I first started falling. About two hundred yards farther down I slowed down even further and found myself in one of the halls on the sixth level, in the very heart of the Sector of Heroes.