Shadow Chaser

became a gurgling, and then I heard the soft thud of a falling body—our messenger was a very affable fellow.

“If I had my way, you would never leave this cell, Lafresa. I haven’t forgotten. So when you meet the Master you can thank him in person for sparing your life! You’re lucky, there’s a job for you to do.”

“What can I do for my lord?” The surviving woman’s voice didn’t even tremble. She wasn’t saddened in the least by the death of her friend.

“You are one of only a few who can be trusted with the Key. You will take it and bring it here.”

“The Key?”

“Have you become hard of hearing? The artifact is in the hands of one of the servants. You will bring it back, or is that too difficult for you?”

“No … it’s not difficult. But why me?”

“You ask the right question. Leta could have been in your place. And any feeble human, even without your abilities, could have brought this thing to the Master, but the problem is that … the Key has been attached. The elfess has already worked her shamanism and now the bonds will have to be broken. Apart from you there are only five others who are capable of that. And to anticipate your question, the reason you have been chosen instead of them is as follows: Player is too busy in Avendoom and the others are too far away. And they would require a lot of time to prepare before they could even begin.… Knowing your natural gift for Kronk-a- Mor, I make bold to presume that you won’t need any preparation. Or almost none…”

“When does the Master need the Key?”

“In two weeks at the most.”

“It will take me four months to get to Ranneng from here.”

“You will be there the day after tomorrow. Collect the artifact, break the bond, bring it to the Master, and then, perhaps, our lord will forget your annoying blunder. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“I shall need time. I have to wait for a propitious conjunction of the stars, otherwise the bonds will not break.”

“You have no time. Try not to make a mess of this.”

“Take off my chains.”

I heard a quiet clicking sound.

“Take the lantern and get out of here.”

“Gladly,” the woman responded.

“Remember, this time you’d better not make any mistakes, or it will be a long time before you see the House of Love again.”

“I shall remember your words, Messenger.”

I saw that the woman was short, with bare feet, but I couldn’t get a look at the features of her face. If this Lafresa was going to turn up out of the blue at the Nightingales’ mansion to collect the Key, somehow or other I had to get there in time to stop her. She walked off with the Messenger following her.

I waited for the sound of their footsteps to fade away.

“Harold, now you’ve stopped thinking altogether,” Valder remarked sulkily.

“Well, you’re a real chatterbox today,” I replied to the archmagician. “What’s the problem?”

“Did you hear what he said? It takes four months to get to Ranneng, but she’ll be there the day after tomorrow.” Then Valder disappeared again.

Ah, darkness! By the time I got to the city, the Key would probably already be gone! And I couldn’t warn Miralissa or Markauz, either. The only thing I could do—much as I loathed the idea—was follow those two and …

And what? Stop them? Or ask them to take me along?

Sagot, show me the way! I walked out of the cell and then, keeping one hand on the wall, set off toward the staircase, in the same direction the Messenger and the woman had gone earlier.

I tried to walk quickly and silently—as far as that was possible in the pitch-black darkness.

The pair I was following were fifteen yards ahead of me. I didn’t dare move any closer to the Master’s servants because I was afraid of being noticed, and I judged how far away they were by sound. As soon as their steps sounded quieter, I sped up and moved closer to the pair in front of me. If I overdid it and the sound started getting louder, I stopped and waited before carrying on.

We walked on like that until they came to the stairway. Then I had to wait for Lafresa and the Messenger to walk up before I could follow them.

It took me a long time to climb the stairs. In the first place, it was just as dark as ever, the steps were completely different sizes, and I had to feel my way along, so I could only move at a snail’s pace. In the second place, the stairway itself was very long: At first it went upward, then it started spiraling round and round, and it went on and on and on.

I felt as if I was going to offer up my soul to Sagot right there on that accursed stairway and, naturally, I lost sight of the pair I’d been following all this time.

When the steps finally ended, I peeped out cautiously into a corridor illuminated by widely spaced smoking torches. No one. No Messenger and no Lafresa. The massive stone-block walls were almost completely covered in soot, and the arched ceiling was far from clean, too. Here and there it still bore traces of genuine whitewash, but to my inexperienced eye they looked decades old. No doors in the walls, nothing but inscriptions in some language that I didn’t know—either ogric or the language of the Firstborn, I don’t have a clue about the writing of either race.

I hadn’t walked very far, perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty paces, when the corridor ended at another stairway, but this time there were only twenty steps at most. At the top of the steps the thick darkness started again. I put my foot on the first step, and my nose was immediately assailed by a faint, moldy odor of dust and decay.

“Oh, no,” I muttered to myself. I walked back a little way along the corridor and took a torch down off the wall.

The flame trembled and spat sparks in the draft that somehow managed to find its way into the underground maze. Then I walked up the steps into a small hall and swore out loud—I didn’t like what I saw one little bit.

There was a skeleton lying stretched out on a crudely built wooden table. I could tell straightaway that it wasn’t human. To judge from the fangs, it had probably been an orc or an elf. And it had a rusty hatchet stuck in the top of its skull.

I’m not afraid of dead men, especially the kind that lie still and keep their mouths shut. I’m not even really worried by the wretches that members of the Order call “the arisen” and the simple folk call “wanderers” or simply “the living dead.” They’re fairly clumsy creatures, harmless as long as you keep away from their hands and teeth. And try not to get under their feet in general.

The living dead do exist, that’s a fact. But I’d never heard of living skeletons before. How can bones move if they have no muscles, tendons, pads of cartilage, and all the rest to connect them?

Two answers immediately came to mind: Either some idiot was jerking the bones about on strings, or the shamanism of the ogres was responsible—and that, of course, was entirely possible.

Anyway, I had no time to figure out why the skeleton lying on the table was jerking its legs about rather friskily and apparently trying to get up. I was concerned with a different question: Would it be able to do what it wanted and would that be dangerous for me?

The skeleton jerked its legs and tried to stand up. But it was getting nowhere, because some kind soul had pinned its spine to the table with huge iron staples.

I have to admit that curiosity is a failing of mine. I walked a little bit closer. The creature immediately turned its head in my direction and hissed. I swear by Sagot that it hissed, even though it had no lungs or tongue or any of the other things that decent people are supposed to have in order to make sounds.

The black holes of the eye sockets, with a myriad of crimson sparks swirling in them, were trained on me. “Free me, mortal!”

I was dumbfounded for a moment. If skeletons had learned to speak, it was time for me to move into the cemetery—the end of the world had to be near.

“Not in this life,” I replied grimly, and backed as far away as possible.