He said to her: 'You fancy helping us this time?'
She shook her head. 'I'm sorry, Randur. It's just not my way.'
Smiling to himself, he nodded his understanding. Soon he was standing by the door with the other two, ready for combat. Randur opened it and the white-skins immediately, simultaneously, turned to face him. Some of them had dark stains around their mouths where they had gorged themselves on raw horse flesh. Their heads tilted and twitched unnervingly.
'Now what?' Eir whispered. 'It's so hard to see them in this light.'
'The young lady has a point,' Munio said. 'You didn't think that through, did you? Rushing into combat, as always…'
'Shut up.' He's just as bad as Denlin was…
The figures came closer, then fanned out, weapons ready, forming a rough semicircle around the door of the hunting lodge. As they loomed nearer Randur could see them more clearly. They possessed absolutely no pigmentation, and their prominent veins were a clear network visible beneath the pallid surface. Their eyes possessed some disturbing quality that made them actually glow blue. They were humanoid, and frighteningly so in some ways – their movements and their mannerisms and their interactions. A figure in the centre with long colourless hair tried addressing them in a guttural and esoteric language. It sounded like the casting of a spell.
'That horse was ours!' Randur shouted, not quite sure what else to say. He pointed his hand to indicate the remains of the horse.
Tips of trees rattled in the wind. He held out his sword and aimed it at the spokesman. 'Leave us. Just go.'
The figure, now clearly a woman, took several phenomenally slow but light steps forward as if the terrain provided an awkward surface to move on. When she was only an armspan away from Randur, she spoke to him directly, although again he couldn't comprehend any of the arcane sounds uttered. Those blue eyes seemed as if powered by relics. Red trickles streaked her chin and neck like she was salivating the dead horse's blood. Her stare totally captivated him, whether because she was so utterly alien to him, or because there was some deep mental power keeping him transfixed, he couldn't tell.
Randur wrenched his gaze towards Eir, then back again. He did not know what to do next. There was a deep tension filling the air, as if millennia of time had been breached.
'Who are you?' he breathed.
The white woman raised her axe and suddenly Randur found himself on the defensive, whipping his blade through her extended wrist. A scream worse than that of any banshee ripped apart the evening air and stilled the weather. The others began to crowd in with their weapons.
As they surged on the three defenders, Randur waded into the melee. His opponents were not strong, almost flouncing away before him, but somehow these creatures always managed to block out his line of attack and push his sword away.
A pause in the combat, a sudden gasp.
Randur turned to see Rika emerging from the doorway with a crude torch in one hand, a vision that imposed itself upon his awareness like the appearance of some holy apparition.
At the sight of the flames, the figures scattered manically, though dragging with them the horse's corpse.
Randur looked round to Munio, and then to Rika, and… Where was Eir?
A muffled scream from the edge of the forest.
'Fuck, they've got her. Rika, make yourself useful and bring along that torch.'
*
Clustered together, they sprinted along a path parallel to the limestone cliff, with the forest to their right. The snow-covered terrain was utterly aphotic, their vision restricted to several paces in front under the light of the torch. There were faint tracks that the white beings had left behind them, punctuated frequently with drops of blood which Randur hoped originated from the hunks of horse flesh.
Eventually they caught up with a figure lying face-down in the snow. It wasn't Eir, Randur saw with a stab of relief. This was the spokeswoman whose hand he had severed. Lingering over her corpse, they realized she must have bled to death there in the darkness.
They moved on, the tracks accumulating, indicating that the intruders came along this path often. It sloped upwards, to the left, towards the cliff face.
And into the rock caves.
'The hell am I going in there,' Munio muttered.
'Fuck yourself then.' Randur continued forward with Rika, leaving his old tutor outside in the dark. He didn't care what was waiting for him – he would get Eir back, or else die trying.
A few moments later, a cry, 'Wait!'
Eventually Munio caught up, but was breathless because of the additional sprint. He panted, 'I can't have you lot all killing yourselves.'
Rika led the way to the entrance, while Randur gripped his blade in anticipation, switching his mind into that lethal zone, ready to be as savage as was needed. Torchlight picked out stalagmites and stalactites, so it seemed that everywhere they looked they were staring into the jaws of some rock beast. Would they ever find Eir in this maze? The surfaces had been weathered so intensely they looked wrinkled with age. In places the stone sagged. They passed mirror pools and zones drenched with bat excrement. The path itself was smooth from years of use, and Randur reckoned that the white-skinned race might not be merely hiding down here, but actually lived here – which would explain the lack of pigmentation in their skins.
Eventually the same path narrowed, before expanding into a larger cavern. Despite the absence of light they noted several exits on the opposite side.
'Down there, look.' Rika was pointing to a pool of water.
A pile of metallic objects was barely visible, a motionless form lying alongside. Randur's heart missed a few beats. They edged their way down cautiously, after detecting an ancient stairway smoothed out of the rock.
'Eir!' Randur called out, the echo of his voice strangely prolonged.
She lay flat on her back at the foot of the stairway, rubbing one hand over her face.
He sprinted to her side and skidded on to his knees. No blood, no wounds, nothing to denote she'd been suffering any pain. 'How do you feel?' he gasped.
'I'm fine. My head's a little sore, as is my neck, but I'm fine.' He helped her sit up and she buried her head in his shoulder. She was shaking and he did his best to comfort her.
Munio nodded at the sight, and stepped this way and that to check for any sign of the white folk. Randur, too, wondered where they'd gone, then he glanced upwards. 'Bohr…' he breathed, and Eir squirmed away from him to follow his gaze.
The torchlight reflected off an array of surfaces, gold, silver, copper, brass – hundreds of coins and ornaments, bangles and rings and necklaces. The hoard was vast, extending like a money-beach. Sloping downwards, it descended into a deep pool which bore evidence of rust, the centuries of decay evident.
Randur lifted Eir up in his arms, and they slowly skirted the rim of the treasure, sifting through it with their feet, totally in awe.
Munio crouched, with a groan, to examine some of the coins in more detail, asking for Rika to lower the torch. 'Some of these… they're positively ancient. Long before Emperors Gulion and Haldun. Look, this even has Goltang's image! Well I never… I've never seen such… such wealth,' he muttered.
'My necklace,' Eir whispered, exploring her skin with one hand. 'It's gone. They must have stolen it.'
'They might have even taken you just for your necklace,' Randur suggested. 'These people, it looks like they've been bringing all these trinkets down here for hundreds of years, and without anyone knowing about them.'
'Millennia!' Munio examined a piece under the light of Rika's torch. 'This here is from the Azimuth era.'
Randur noted how the old man was slyly filling his pockets with some of the trinkets, but thought better than to query it.
This seemed unreal, for an entire community to lead little more than a magpie existence, obsessed with anything that glittered. How long ago must they have fallen away from the surface world, evolving to become those ghosts who had butchered the horse?
