The Pilgrims

Anfen shook his head. ‘You can tell me what you are, here and now.’

She smiled. ‘You have described it perfectly. I am a New Mage.’

He waited.

‘The castle is producing more of us, this very moment. I escaped. Unlike me, the others won’t be here to aid you. You are best to acquaint yourself with this new threat before you find your way to the Council of Free Cities, for it shall be dire. The more you know, the better you may deal with it, when the rest of the new mages are set loose.’

Anfen studied her face. She calmly met his gaze. It could not be denied: if she was as great as she seemed, she had the ability, if she wished, to kill him this very second with minimal effort. If that was her intent, why risk luring him to some other place to do it?

Luring him for capture? That was possible …

‘How long would we be gone?’ he said at last.

‘An hour.’

46

The groundman hole wasn’t far — groundmen had a knack for keeping them hidden in plain sight. As though reading Anfen’s mind, the light about Stranger illuminated the ground around it so he could examine the way for those odd spiked tracks. Watching him do it, she said, ‘I know what you fear.’

‘And what can you tell me of that fear, Stranger?’

‘For now only a little, as we will soon risk being overheard.’ They crawled down through the tunnel, its rock walls bare of lightstones. Stranger lit the way with the green gleam about her, otherwise the tunnel would be purely dark. ‘Tormentors they were named by survivors of the mining station wiped out by them. Apparently no written record of the creatures exists. They play with time, they come from beyond World’s End. Some are small — man-sized — some huge. A few small ones, an army patrol could perhaps handle, with some deaths. The large ones are … a different matter.’

‘And what do we do about them?’

‘You, I am unsure. I will tell you what the castle is doing about them. Us.’ She pointed to herself.

‘New mages?’

‘Yes. And if the new mages succeed in destroying all the Tormentors, what do you suppose their next task will be?’ She let that sink in. ‘We are an old project of theirs. So for how long have they known of Tormentors? But we must be silent, now. The tunnel walls are thin here, and castle guards are on the other side.’

It was clear they’d be gone longer than an hour, for at least half that time had passed before Stranger gestured to halt. She felt the rock wall with her hands, seeking a secret door, then found it. It appeared she stepped head first into stone that swallowed her up, for that section of wall was illusion, nothing but air. She kept an arm protruding through it to guide him in.

Soon, with greater frequency, voices could be heard to either side of their tunnel. Then the passages widened out and the walls’ lightstones were thick, large slabs. This was a thoroughfare commonly used, for military bric-a- brac lay here and there, and signs had been put on the walls with stern written orders and warnings. Small statues and portraits of Vous were everywhere the eye fell. Even as they watched, a man in leathers marched past and paused to wipe dust off the shoulders of a statue which showed the man’s Friend and Lord grim-faced on a drake, with a spear in hand, brass eyes staring at the horizon, seeing further than any mere man could …

Other tunnels led off away from this passageway to more secretive places, the entrance of each barred by iron lattice with heavy locks. After making certain no one was around to see them, Stranger ran out into the open and Anfen followed. Between two barred tunnels she found another secret wall, and again the rock seemed to swallow her.

Anfen knew they were heading for places not well known to the common soldiery, or to anyone else but a select few, despite the troops traversing past those very secret places day to day. He also knew he would not find his way back through these winding tunnels to the surface without Stranger’s help, which began to worry him. Every ten paces, he now gouged little marks with his sword’s tip in the rock wall. If Stranger noticed this, she didn’t comment.

Finally they came to a lightless tunnel angling downwards to a dead end. A secret door was doubtless let into the rounded back wall, or else she’d chosen this to be the place of his death. The air was warm and stuffy.

Stranger turned to whisper, ‘It is just ahead of us. It’s safe to talk in there, as long as no guards come. The mages may hear your voice, may even react to it, but they won’t recall it any more than a sleeping person would.’

He wiped sweat from his brow. ‘Mages?’

‘You will see. They won’t be able to harm us. They won’t even see us, though their eyes may be open.’

He nodded. ‘Let’s hurry. We’ve been longer than you promised.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’ She felt the dead end for its secret door. Not only was it well hidden, it was just big enough to crawl through, likely put there by groundmen when they alone owned these tunnels. Anfen struggled to fit, Stranger’s feet just before his face. It wasn’t lost on him that she’d exposed her back to him in these dark tunnels, especially after she’d already felt his blade’s edge. I trust you, it meant. Do you trust me?

The lightstones were tinged golden in the large cavern opening up before and beneath them. At first he thought she’d brought him to a prison, for down below, on the rounded walls, people were fixed in place with some kind of shackle. Men, women, all naked, their heads slumped forwards on their chests. None spoke or moved. A horrible smell filled the air: the way hair smells when it catches fire. Stifling heat rose from below, the air hard to breathe.

Stranger gazed down there, seeking guards, and held up her hand: don’t move, quiet. One of the castle grey-robes passed along the rounded wall, moving from one of the shackled bodies to the next. In one hand was a bucket, the other held a sponge with which he cleaned the prisoners. The grey-robe — under some sort of mind-control spell, by the way he moved — didn’t spend long on each before moving on. Soon his task was done, and he left the chamber through a secret door, the wall seeming to swallow him. Stranger whispered, ‘Now, go.’

A ledge ran down to the ground from below where they stood, though it was a perilous jump to land on it. Nimble as a cat, her leap made it look easy. Anfen glanced down — the drop wouldn’t kill him, but broken bones were likely, followed by certain capture. ‘As It wills,’ he muttered, and leaped not quite as nimbly, his boot slipping when he landed, and only Stranger’s grip stopping a painful slide down the slope on his butt. Their scuffing feet seemed very loud in the chamber’s oppressive silence.

The stink was worse as they went lower. The bodies were trapped not by chains or shackles; many parts of the wall were covered in what looked like large war mage horns curled around the prisoners’ arms, ankles, knees and feet, like long pinching claws. From some angles, the illusion was that a cruel inhuman hand held them in place. They were young people, late teenage perhaps, ranging up to mid-twenties. All had their eyes shut, faces blank. If they breathed, their breaths were too shallow to move their chests.

The horns that gripped them were dark in colour, black or deepest red. It was these that made the cavern’s air like that of an oven, though the bodies’ skin showed few burn marks. Those horns that hung spare, like unused shackles dangling in a cell, seemed not to be ‘switched on’ like the dark ones; they were the same dull hue as those on a war mage that hadn’t cast for a while. No heat emanated from them.

Stranger watched him examine it all. He looked to her, knowing now that she had been here, on the wall like these unfortunates, yet was somehow freed. Again, she seemed to read his face. ‘One of the guards liked to use my body, from time to time,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Mine and others. The bodies can be removed and set back a while later, and not awoken. That time, he took too long. I woke.’

Anfen nodded, not needing to ask what had become of the guard in question. The curling hot mage-horns seemed to be growing into the flesh of those bodies nearest, though the wounds were bloodless, as if the horns were now a part of them. ‘These people cannot be easily removed, it appears,’ he said. ‘I