Deadhouse Gates

'We've found a cellar for a tomb.'

'I ain't ready to die yet.'

'Lucky you.'

She watched him totter to his feet. He looked around. 'This room was flooded once. With water that flowed.'

'From where to where?'

He shrugged and approached the stairs in a slow, laboured shuffle.

He looks a century old. As old as I feel. Together, we can't make up even one Heboric. I'm learning to appreciate irony, at least.

After some minutes Kulp finally reached the door. He laid a hand against it. 'Bronze sheeting — I can feel the hammer strokes that flattened it.' He rapped a knuckle on the dark metal. The sound that came was a rustling, sifting whisper. 'Wood's rotted behind it.'

The latch broke in his hand. The mage muttered a curse, then set his weight against the door and pushed.

The bronze cracked, crumpled inward. A moment later the door fell back, taking Kulp with it in a cloud of dust.

'Barriers are never as solid as one thinks,' Heboric said as the echoes of that crash faded. He stood holding his stubbed arms out before him. 'I understand this now. To a blind man his entire body is a ghost. Felt but not seen. Thus, I raise invisible arms, move invisible legs, my invisible chest rising and falling to unseen air. So now I stretch fingers, then make fists. I am everywhere solid — and always have been — if not for the deceit perpetrated by my own eyes.'

Felisin looked away from the ex-priest. 'Maybe if I go deaf you'll disappear.'

Heboric laughed.

At the landing, Kulp was making moaning sounds, his breath oddly harsh and laboured. She pushed herself upright, stumbling as pain closed iron bands around her ankles. Gritting her teeth, she hobbled to the stairs.

The eleven steps left her reeling with exhaustion. She fell to her knees beside the mage and waited a long minute before her breathing steadied. 'You all right?'

Kulp lifted his head. 'Broke my damned nose, I think.'

'From that new accent I'd say you were right. I take it you'll live, then.'

'Loudly.' He rose to his hands and knees, thick blood hang' ing in dusty threads from his face. 'See what's ahead? Ain't had a chance to look, yet.'

'It's dark. The air smells.'

'Like what?'

She shrugged. 'Not sure. Lime? As in limestone, that is.'

'Not bitter fruit? I'm surprised.'

Shuffling steps on the stairs indicated Heboric's approach.

A glow rose ahead, raising vague highlights that slowly etched a scene. Felisin stared.

'Your breath's quickened, lass,' Kulp said, still unwilling or unable to lift his head. 'Tell me what you're seeing.'

Heboric's voice echoed from halfway up the stairs: 'Remnants of a ritual gone awry is what she's seeing. Frozen memories of ancient pathos.'

'Sculptures,' Felisin said. 'Sprawled all over the floor — it's a big room. Very big — the light doesn't reach the far end-'

'Wait, you said sculptures? What kind?'

'People. Carved as if lying around — at first I thought they were real-'

'And why don't you think that any more?'

'Well…' Felisin crawled forward. The nearest one was a dozen paces away, a nude woman of advanced years, lying on her side as if dead or sleeping. The stone she had been fashioned from was dull white, limned and mottled with mould. Every wrinkle of her withered body had been artfully rendered, no detail left out. She looked down on the peaceful, aged face. Lady Gaesen — this woman could be her sister. She reached out.

'Don't touch anything, mind,' Kulp said. 'I'm still seeing stars, but I've got raised hackles that says there's sorcery in that chamber.'

Felisin withdrew her hand, sat back. 'They're just statues-'

'On pedestals?'

'Well, no, just on the floor.'

The light suddenly brightened, filling the chamber. Felisin looked back to see Kulp on his feet, leaning against the crumbled door frame. The mage was blinking myopically as he took in the scene. 'Sculptures, lass?' he growled. 'Not a chance. A warren's ripped through here.'

'Some gates should never be opened,' Heboric said, blithely stepping past the mage. He walked unerringly to Felisin's side, where he stopped, cocking his head and smiling. 'Her daughter chose the Path of the Soletaken, a fraught journey, that. She was hardly unique, the twisted route was a popular alternative to Ascension. More … earthly, they claimed. And older, and that which was old was in high favour in the last days of the First Empire.' The ex-priest paused, sudden sorrow crumpling his features. 'It was understandable that Elders of the day sought to ease their children's chosen path. Sought to create a new version of the old, risk-laden one — for that had crumbled, weakened, was cancerous. Too many of the Empire's young were being lost — and never mind the wars to the west-'

Kulp had laid a hand on Heboric's shoulder. It was as if the touch closed a valve. The ex-priest raised a ghost-hand to his face, then sighed. 'Too easy to become lost…'

'We need water,' the mage said. 'Does her memory hold such knowledge?'

'This was a city of springs, fountains, baths and canals.'

'Probably filled with sand one and all,' Felisin said.

'Maybe not,' Kulp said, glancing around with bloodshot eyes. The break in his nose was a bad one, the swelling cracking the too dry skin on either side. 'This one's been emptied out recently — feel how the air still stirs.'

Felisin eyed the woman at her feet. 'She was once real, then. Flesh.'

'Aye, they all were.'

'Alchemies that slowed ageing,' Heboric said. 'Six, seven centuries for each citizen. The ritual killed them, yet the alchemies remained potent-'

'Then water deluged the city,' Kulp said. 'Mineral-rich.'

'Turning not just bone to stone, but flesh as well.' Heboric shrugged. 'The flood was born of distant events — the immortal custodians had already come and gone.'

'What immortal custodians, old man?'

'There may yet be a spring,' the ex-priest said. 'Not far.'

'Lead on, blind man,' Felisin said.

'I've got more questions,' Kulp said.

Heboric smiled. 'Later. Our immediate journey shall explain much.'

The chamber's mineralized occupants were all elderly, and numbered in the hundreds. Their deaths appeared to be, one and all, peaceful ones, which had a vaguely disquieting effect on Felisin. Not all ends are tortured. Hood's indifferent to the means. So the priests claim, anyway. Yet his greatest harvests come from war, disease and famine. Those countless ages of deliverance must surely have marked the High King of Death. Disorder crowds his Gates and there's a flavour to that. Quiet genocide must ring very different bells.

She felt Hood was with her now, in these hours and those since their return to this world. She found herself musing on him as if he was her lover, driven deep inside her with a claim that felt permanent and oddly reassuring.

And now, I fear only Heboric and Kulp. It's said gods fear mortals more than they do each other. Is that the source of my terror? Have I captured an echo of Hood within me? The god of death must surely dream rivers of blood. Perhaps I have been his all this time.

Thus I am blessed.