Shadow Blizzard

Palaces, but unfortunately they didn’t have the power for it. Everything seemed to be quiet, but I stayed alert and kept stopping to listen. Thank Sagot, there was nothing terrible or mysterious. The eighth level was cold, though, and the constant drafts blowing out of the side corridors cut straight through me.

I didn’t have any maps, but, remembering what the Messenger said, I kept walking straight on without turning off. Of course, it was stupid to trust a servant of the Master, but so far everything he said had been true, and I thought that improvising was probably not the best way out of the difficult situation I was in.

After I’d walked for half an hour, the torches on the walls were spaced wider apart and I had to take my mushroom lamp out again. Then came a series of halls with rows of massive, squat columns along the walls, vaulted ceilings, and buttresses. The architectural style was quite crude and careless, very hasty, although I was certain that the halls had been created by orcs and elves. This was the slapdash way all the Young Races had done things when they were desperate to get out of here. But, strictly speaking, that was a perfectly sane desire for any rational being—although I only started to understand what the reason was forty minutes after I left the last torch behind me.

The light of my mushroom lamp picked a rather interesting picture out of the darkness of the immense hall. Something that not even a madman from the Hospital of the Ten Martyrs could have drawn—he could never even have imagined that such a thing could exist.

I admit quite honestly that cold shivers ran down my spine, my throat went dry, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. It’s not every day I have the “good luck” to see a scene from the play that the priests used to frighten us so often (I mean the story of the arrival of the darkness in Siala and similar fairy tales). Anyway, right there in front of me was a wall nine yards high. Nothing so very special about that, except that in this case, instead of bricks, the builders had used human skulls.

Thousands of thousands of them staring out at me with the dark holes of their eye sockets, thousands of thousands of them grinning at me sardonically with their bare teeth, thousands of thousands of them gleaming blinding white.

Thousands of thousands? More than that! How many skulls had it taken to make a wall like this? It was an appalling and yet fascinating scene. A scene of unreal and macabre beauty. Who had created this and how? What for? And where had they got such a massive number of human skulls? And was my own head likely to end up as one more brick in this terrible wall?

The wall completely blocked off my path. I walked along it, but ran up against the wall of the hall. I set off in the opposite direction and discovered a way through in the form of an archway with its vault made of ribs. I slipped through the archway and …

Yes indeed, and … Now I was certain that the Palaces of Bone had got their name thanks to this place. There before me lay a depository, a collection, a veritable treasurehouse of bones and remains that had once been people.

Nobody could ever have dreamed this, even in their most terrible nightmare. The walls of the hall were faced with skulls, the ceiling was covered with crossed ribs and shoulder blades, the huge chandeliers were made of yards and yards of spinal columns, rib cages, and skulls with magical lamps burning inside them and lighting up the Halls of Bone.

As I walked past these remains, I glanced at the bones and shuddered. It wasn’t very pleasant walking through a gigantic open warehouse of human death. The breath of dread and horror was palpable. It was as if the souls of everyone who had not been properly buried in all the centuries gone by were staring out at me through those dark eye sockets.

In these vast deposits of bones there wasn’t a single complete skeleton. Whoever put together this huge, macabre museum had taken the time to pull the skeletons apart and sort out the bones. There were heaps of different kinds of bones clustering, crowding, towering up along the wall. The vertebrae were in one place, the ribs in another, there were pelvises, lower jaws, large and small shinbones, upper arm bones, ulnas and radiuses, finger bones and toe bones, there were even piles of teeth.

Winding through the hills of bones (some of them were over six yards high) was a perfectly decent path. I walked along, trying to keep my wits about me and especially not to look at the skulls. The stares of thousands of thousands of eye sockets drilled straight through me. I felt a childish terror seething inside me. Walking through mountains of human remains silently contemplating eternity and all living things—this is truly cosmic horror.

And then the pyramids started. As was only to be expected, the skulls of the unfortunate dead had been used in their construction, too. Every one of these structures rose up to a height of more than ten yards. The skulls were laid with geometrical precision and fitted perfectly against each other. I think several thousand dead men’s heads must have been used in each pyramid. And in every pyramid there was a dark triangular opening or niche. I didn’t know why in the name of darkness they were put there, but I certainly was never going to climb into them.

I heard the ringing sounds in the distance soon after I passed the eighth pyramid.

Clink, clink. Clink, clink.

The sound was coming closer, and I started looking for a place to hide. I ought to have known—you should never say never. Sagot had obviously heard me and decided to have a joke, because the only place where I could hide now was in a niche in a pyramid. There was no time to think about it, the unknown Chimer would be with me any moment now, and then darkness only knew what might happen. I only had a knife—and not too much confidence in my ability to fight whatever it might be.

The niche proved to be quite roomy, and I fitted into it without any difficulty. I had to put the mushroom away in my bag, or the light would have given me away. The world around me was plunged into darkness.

Clink, clink—the steps were getting closer. Suddenly the walls of the pyramid directly opposite me emerged from the darkness. The unknown Chimer was carrying a torch. And then I saw the lad himself. Every step it took produced a ringing sound. The Chimer turned out to be a member of the numerous tribe of the restless dead. At least, its face was mummified, as dry and wrinkled as a raisin, it had no nose at all, its cheeks were ripped open, and the teeth were visible through the holes. The eyes were as black as agate and dead. Like Bass’s eyes.

The creature was wearing a court jester’s cap, with little miniature skulls on it instead of bells. In its left hand the creature was holding a torch, and in its right—a stick with an iron ball on a chain. The Chimer’s appearance was terrifying and impossibly absurd at the same time.

I sat in my refuge, as quiet as a mouse. The Chimer walked through the territory entrusted to its care and disappeared into the darkness. I waited until its steps faded away and climbed out of the pyramid. I had to get through the Halls of Bone as quickly as possible, or I could be in for trouble. A knife isn’t the most effective weapon against a ball and chain.

When I heard the ringing sound again, I dived into the next pyramid without thinking twice, and once again the dead man didn’t notice me. I had to hide another four times from the creatures patrolling the Halls of Bones.

The bones piled up in heaps along the walls somehow didn’t bother or frighten me anymore. Right then, Shadow Harold had only one thing on his mind—making sure he didn’t run into any Chimers.

The pyramids of bone parted and I found myself in … Well, probably you could call it a square. An entirely open space without a trace of bones. The mushroom lamp wasn’t giving much light, so I just had to walk forward, hoping there was no one anywhere nearby. Standing right in the center of the square was a statue.

I beheld the figure of Death. She seemed to be carved out of a single piece of bone with a texture and blinding pearly whiteness that were reminiscent of a mammoth’s tusk.

Death was sitting on a massive throne built of human bones with her bare feet resting on a huge skull that was an integral part of this monumental sculpture.

Death was wearing a plain sleeveless dress, more appropriate for a simple peasant woman on her way to the local harvest fair than the Queen of Lives and Fates. She was wearing a skull half-mask, so all that could be seen of her face were the plump lips (pressed tightly together) and her perfectly formed chin. Her luxuriant white hair tumbled down onto her naked shoulders.

The sculptor’s skill was beyond all doubt. The hair seemed real, the figure was almost alive. In the shrines, Sagra’s servant Death is always shown with a weapon (a scythe, or a sickle on a long staff), but there was nothing like that here. The woman had a bouquet in her hands. Her long elegant fingers held the flowers carefully—white narcissi, the symbol of death and oblivion. But what struck me most of all were her eyes, or rather, the lack of them (everyone knows that Death is blind, but she never errs in her choice).