Revelation didn t like competition.
They slipped past under the empty stone gaze of the statue. Harath gestured left shallow stone steps, leading up. They took them two at a time, knives drawn for anyone they might happen to meet at the top.
Nothing. Shadows and dust. Tall, wood-paneled doors twice the height of a man, riddled with dry rot, wedged ajar on the gritty, detritus-strewn floor.
This opens onto a gallery over the central hall, Harath told him when they got there. Gallery runs right around. Get a good view from up there.
Egar nodded. He gripped one of the doors at its edge, decided moving it would make too much noise, and inserted himself sideways in the existing gap.
Deep breath, said Harath judiciously.
It took rather more than that. The effort of holding his belly tight made Egar s eyes water, and he still scraped himself on the door edge, scraped the door open a farther grating inch, before he popped out the other side. He stood statue-still, teeth gritted, blade in hand, waiting to see if they d been heard.
Harath came sveltely through after him.
The gallery was, as promised, a grand affair, sweeping round the hall fifteen feet up, broad and balustraded. Bandlight seeped in through tall windows long ago boarded up. Egar crept up to the balustrade in a crouch and peered through. Below him, he saw an expanse of the same derelict, debris-speckled stone flooring as in the previous chamber. Some remnant altar up at one end, looked like it hadn t seen use in a century, couple of squat statues standing around elsewhere, a few long wooden benches and
He frowned. His gaze went back to one of the figures. He saw now there were five of them, four in a rough ring, the fifth more or less central
Like something he d once
Height of a small woman or a child. Crude stonework, the facial features barely picked out. Stubby arms outspread as if for balance. Like mannequins for arrow practice, but dark and unyielding and dumped to floor height.
The memory cascaded filtering soil of familiarity, and then the big rocks of recall, falling in his head.
Harsh gray light.
Some kind of beacon for the dwenda. Archeth, the morning following the skirmish, one boot on the tumbled figure lying facedown in the swamp. She was kicking at the thing with her heel, some monotonous residual anger working itself out. The wound across her temple was cleaned and livid in the thin morning light. The marsh dwellers made them, way back when. Forms a link, somehow. Something to do with the kind of stone they used.
He nudged Harath. Where d those come from?
Where d what c The Ishlinak saw where he was pointing. Oh. Beats me. They only had two last time I was in here. Pretty cheap shit by the look of it. Worse carving than the Voronak, and that s saying something.
It s glirsht, Egar said absently.
Naom stone. They ve got them set out like that s got to be compass points, right?
The younger man shrugged, sniffed. Could be. You want to see where they keep the slaves or not?
Yeah, yeah.
But he followed Harath along the gallery and through another decaying doorway with a lot of backward glances. And even after they left the hall, the squat black stone statues sat in his mind s eye like evil little dolls.
CHAPTER 19
After a while, the cormorants seem to tire of his company. They hop ungainly off the rock they ve all been sharing, disappear one by one into the depths below. The last one cocks its head back at him before it dives. Utters a parched croak that might be farewell, and is gone. Ringil raises the flask after them in salute.
Puts it to his lips and finds it empty.
No wonder they left.
For a while, he resists the obvious implication in that. The rock is oddly pliant and comfortable beneath him, there seems no reason to
Well, apart from that queasy, gray-white patch of radiance seeping through at the sky s eastern edge.
Something s on its way, Gil.
Best if you re not around for it to trip over when it arrives.
He makes the effort and gets to his feet. Swaying a little with the sudden height it gives him. He peers downward after the cormorants, gets nothing for his trouble but a vague gloom and the rising reek of fouled seawater. He shrugs. The fact that they were seabirds and he isn t doesn t seem to matter that much in the end. He takes the long step forward and plunges downward after them. Splashes into the
Not water exactly, it s too sparse and fleeting for that. But for scant moments he thinks he sees bubbles rising through it, his breath ascending in a milky trail toward a surface stirred silver by his entry above. There s a brief, chilly prickling, like the splash of cold water thrown in his face, and then something lunges sharkish at him out of the murk.
Fuck!
He catches fragments of a glimpse a circular mouth, dilated wide enough to swallow his head whole, the unbroken ring of a single taut lip rolled back and concentric rings of teeth erect in the throat beyond. It s the akyia, the thing that Seethlaw and Risgillen called the merroigai. Behind the nightmare head, the hint of a lithe, approximately human body bisecting into long, coiling limbs fronded with fins. A sleekly muscled arm, darting out, one clawed hand grasping for him, perhaps to save him from the fall but he shrinks from it like a child from the clutch of the Marsh Wraith, and the fall takes him on.
Deeper yet.
If there was ever a surface above him, it s long gone now. The darkness presses around like some giant constricting serpent out of legend. Breathing is an effort, forcing him to shallow intake through trembling lips. His eyes ache from peering into the black, but something will not allow them to close. The sense that something is coming has not left him he feels it plummeting down behind him, vast, shadowy, jaws agape. And he s pinned, less falling than hanging from some constructed torture table whose shape and extent he cannot yet see.
Pale and luminous, something else looms up out of the depths.
For a couple of shivery moments, he thinks it might be a jellyfish, one of the giant ones that wash up on the shores at Lanatray when the summers have been stormy. He remembers abruptly himself at eight years old, alone, as he increasingly was, walking dazedly on rain-damp sand among humped and shivery-translucent mounds that rose almost as high as he was tall. For a few eerie moments in that early-morning light, before a fast-growing hardheaded pragmatism set in, he believed wanted to believe these might be the quivering, fled souls of whales taken by the harpoon off the Hironish isles.
They were not.
And this, now he shakes himself back to the moment is not a jellyfish.
It s a stone.
It seems to settle with this recognition, bobbing about at his feet with dog-like attachment. It wants to be friends. A softly gleaming chunk of masonry the size of a big man s chest, inscribed across the top of one facing with letters in old Myrlic script. Ringil tilts his head a little and deciphers the lettering: and the Keys of a City greater than
Like something you d see on the walls of some ruined temple in the older, marsh end of town, some eerie once-isolated shrine now drowned in a sea of modern housing as Trelayne s burgeoning outer districts spread some of the stonework there is very old, it predates the Naomic ascendancy by centuries. the Keys of a City
The stone startles upward, as if hauled on a ship s cable by weary men. Knee height, a hesitant bob or two, and then rising again, a hound called off by its real master after some case of mistaken identity. Perhaps, he thinks with blurry imprecision, the words are not intended for him to read at all, and this conjunction of man and building block is just some mis-stroke of destiny or demonic intent, a sword skating off a shield it s supposed to cleave, an
