The Shades of Winter a Novel of Averraine Read online

  We had no idea how the place was laid out. Not one of the corridors leading from the stairs was lit, so we could find no clues as to where the occupants spent their time, and it was debatable as to whether any of the wide hallways led anywhere in particular.

  Still, the two we’d killed had come from somewhere. The only logical thing, for me, seemed to be to follow back along the hall they’d emerged out of, and see where that somewhere was.

  Sigurd, on the other hand, reckoned that we had come only about halfway down, and argued that continuing on this way, since it was so central, was bound to take us to the inhabited parts of the place.

  “I’ll dice you for it,” I said, finally, because we weren’t getting anywhere at this point. “Kostra can decide.”

  She’s not my favourite goddess. The caprice of Chance has never thrilled me, but Sigurd adored her, the dice were like meat and drink for him. He was already squatting on the stairs and pulling out a couple of carved bits of bone before I’d finished talking.

  I called fours or higher and got them, a six and a five. Sigurd frowned. It was narrow odds to beat, and he didn’t.

  “Best of three?” he said, hopefully, but no one listened. They were forming up on the lower stair with Halvar on point.

  “Come on,” I said. “It doesn’t really matter to you so much if we meet them down this hallway or another, does it?”

  We stepped over the two bodies.

  “Shouldn’t we, you know, get them out of sight or something?”

  “No,” I said. “If someone finds them, well, let them wonder.”

  We started down the hallway. It was wide enough to walk four abreast if we liked, and then, only a little ways along, there was an open window looking into the central courtyard.

  It was just a little larger than an arrow slit, not really a window at all. We crowded around.

  The space below was empty. I mean, really empty. I had expected at least some cook halls or workshops, since even in the poor, starving villages from Camrhys to Imbria, a wall tends to enclose something, but this one didn’t seem to.

  The mist was still rising, and the side of the fortress that we’d come from was barely visible anymore.

  The courtyard, if that’s what it was, was utterly empty: just the naked earth, and nothing else. No buildings, no gardens. Not even weeds. It was barren and lifeless, and there wasn’t even a hint that anything had ever been there. A blank. A nothingness.

  After exchanging a few looks of incomprehension, we went on. Honestly, if it didn’t make sense to us, standing about discussing it wasn’t likely to get us any further.

  It was not much longer before we came to another set of stairs. Narrower, these ones, and steeper. And somewhere below, I thought I saw the faintest suggestion of light.

  It was a long and winding way down. At first, we were cautious still, stopping at each landing to listen, and to peer down into that dimly lit well below, straining for clues as to what we might meet. But the closer we got, the quieter it seemed. We had progressed, without quite noticing it, from tense whispers to low-voiced conversations, and our stops were shorter and less frequent. There really didn’t seem to be anyone here except us.

  The light grew, though. I thought it was more than one torch, and only a few flights below us now.

  At the bottom it was very odd, indeed. We’d come a long way down, and by my rough calculations, must by now be below the main floor level that led to the pier. Whoever had built this place had suddenly and without warning abandoned the smooth, carefully dressed masonry that had characterized everything we had seen before, and left this level as a roughly chopped out place, as though it wasn’t important at all. The columns supporting the ceiling beams were placed in a haphazard fashion, as if someone had only wanted to put in the ones that were absolutely necessary to keep the place standing. It made very little sense, but the ancients were inscrutable and beyond any mortal understanding, or so the legends said.

  We began to spread out a bit, looking around. It was a huge, cavernous space, but there were other occasional signs that we weren’t the only people to ever venture here. In addition to those few random torches stuck into their brackets near the stairs, there were odd-looking carved bits, very worn, and a couple of rude runes scratched into the walls, the sort of thing any bored youngster might chisel into his rowing bench, announcing his loyalty to his foster-kin or his contempt for his steersman.

  I began to worry in earnest.

  Where, in the names of all the gods, were the people who lived here? All those fabled Istaran wise, supposedly doing arcane deeds in the darkness? Apart from the two on the stairs, we hadn’t seen so much as a hair on their heads.

  And then there was a sort of a smell, almost musky. The air down here had been, when we’d first entered, a mixture of mustiness and smoke, but this was different. This had a sickening undertone to it, like rotting meat, but it was so faint that it was some time before I noticed it enough to mention it.

  “Aye,” said Oddhi. “Like a dead thing, but long ago.”

  The others were nodding.

  “It smells stronger over that way,” Raisa said..

  I moved the way she was pointing. She was right, it was getting stronger, the smell.

  By accident or design, the opening was placed so that the shadows hid it almost entirely: I was nearly over the threshold before I knew it. It was more like the mouth of a cave, but obviously hewn by human agency and big enough to walk into with headroom to spare, even for Ingvold. We peered down into more darkness.

  The signs here were not good; something terrible had happened in this place, and not all that long ago. That there had been a fire here, a huge one, extending a fair way down the length of it, was plain. The beams above were deeply charred, and the even rougher columns here, mere piles of rocks without any mortar, were black with soot and scarred by dark scorch marks.

  “Oh, piss on it,” Elke said, pushing past me. “They’ve got to be down here somewhere.”

  She had grabbed the nearest torch from its bracket and she strode boldly on in, and really, the rest of us had little choice but to follow.

  It wasn’t as long a tunnel as it had seemed from the threshold. Even as we rounded the first corner, we could see that the cave seemed to be suddenly wider, and the stench was getting much worse.

  The torch flared suddenly. We could see our surroundings clearly and in the opening space before us there was a wide pit, deep and dark, nearly beneath our very feet.

  And gazing down into it, we saw a horror rising out of the mists of time, a myth, a legend, a thing that could not be.

  Chapter 9

  Long ago, so long ago that even our earliest ancestors could not themselves have remembered it as anything more than a fireside tale, we had dwelt far to the north, in an open plain, an endless, fruitful land of meadows and wide, slow-moving rivers. We were riders, then, riders on a sea of sun-gold grass, following our herds as the seasons waxed and waned. An easy, pleasant life, they say, and one of plenty.

  Until the worms came.

  Not such worms as you know them. We named these ones the death-worms, for that is what they brought. Every inch they travelled, they sucked the life from the earth, a slimy, forever poisonous and unliveable devastation in their wake, as they grew larger and larger, fattening as they gorged on the game and the grasslands.

  You cannot kill them, not easily and not utterly, no, because they lay their eggs in secret profusion, so that each time our forefathers thought they had ended the plague, it might only be a few short seasons before their offspring rose again to torment the world.

  We might have only half-believed it all, we might have thrilled to the tale of it as children around a storyteller in our halls, but our terror now was something that was bred deep into our bones and coursed through our veins. We didn’t need anyone to define this for us. One look was all it took, one glimpse of that dead-white, pulsating, rippling flesh, and the glistening rondels of the eggs beyond
, and we had known what it was. We hadn’t needed to see that great mouth gaping wide, that blackened fang dripping its filthy ichor onto the stone below, but we did see them. And everything we were, everything we knew about the world, all of it changed in that instant.

  We turned and ran.

  • • •

  We were scattering even as we hit the opening back into that larger room, seized still by that irrational, overwhelming terror, not thinking of anything but the need to get away, away, away, as far away as we possibly could.

  At that moment, I could not have conceived that there could be anything worse in this place. I wasn’t coherent enough to frame a single thought about how that thing existed, let alone how it existed here. I was simply engulfed, as we all were, with the plain, unadulterated wrongness of it.

  It isn’t surprising, then, that I was so unprepared for him. The only wonder was that he didn’t slay me outright with that first swing of the enormous axe in his hands, but this was possibly because he chose to herald it with a roaring invocation to Skeid to lend him a strength he probably did not need.

  The ingrained lessons of a lifetime of battle-training kicked in without my participation. My body twisted, ducked and rolled away behind the nearest pillar, and my sword was out before I landed back on my feet.

  He seemed huge, in those first few moments, a towering fury out of nightmare, his dark warrior’s braid adorned with a string of bone beads that looked indefinably human. He was naked to the waist and his face was marred by a red, angry scar that sliced across the left side of his face, over the puckered socket where he once, presumably, had had an eye.

  Sanity reasserted itself. Most of the fighters I had faced before were bigger than me, and he was not, in fact, even as much of a giant as Ingvold. I dodged another swing of his axe, and instinctively moved to his left.

  He yelled out his plea to Skeid again and turned with me, raising the axe with a bit of a hunch at one shoulder. He was going to reverse it and swing the butt of it up towards my chin. I’d seen that move before, and I reacted as I’d been taught, letting him start the swing before hopping further back, so that the blow met only empty air.

  His rage was palpable and loud. He began to close once more, and this time he was adjusting with me, not letting me get as far into that place where his lack of vision gave me an advantage. On the other hand, a great axe is not effective unless the wielder controls the distance.

  I stepped in further, turning a little to the right, and the blow he’d started, which had predicted my backing off at least a half-stride, was now off its mark.

  He was good, though. He was more than merely well-trained to his weapon, he was attuned to it in a way few warriors are, and he began, right in mid-swing, to change up the distance again.

  I got lucky. The shaft fell, albeit with punishing force, across my shoulder blades, but even as I rolled out of his reach and sought the protection of another stone column, the memory of where I’d seen all this before was creeping into my mind.

  I don’t know if it’s true for others, but for me it’s always been possible, in the midst of battle, to actually think about several irrelevant things at once. Part of me was thinking that my aging back was going to be more than ordinarily sore come the next morning. Another part of me was scoffing at this, because it seemed obvious that “next morning” was not a likely future for me.

  And yet a third part of me was trying to work out this new, even more impossible thing in front of me, and remembering where I’d last seen that tricky move with a two-handed axe, and how I was going to stay alive through this without killing a man who seemed bent on my death.

  That was the real disadvantage, now. It was barely possible I could have beaten him, although I wouldn’t have put good odds on it, but to do so would have meant killing him, and that was the one thing I could not, would not, must not do.

  This made my imminent demise all the more likely. I was as close to despair as I’d ever been, and I’d been to that brink more than once before.

  He was getting a little craftier, now, and I could see that what he wanted was to herd me back towards the wall, where my ability to manoeuvre would be almost entirely gone. Oh, well, that was an easy fix. I scooted left and in the tiny moment that he used to turn to get me in plain sight again, I dashed for the open centre and then the safety of yet another one of the pillars.

  Another hoarse, incoherent roar of rage, and a crash as the axe hit the column, just as I realized how close he was and began to move again. I began to wonder if my mind was deceiving me. What I imagined simply could not be true.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of faded blue. Oddhi, slipping from behind another column, and circling to get behind my opponent. Another movement behind him as well told me that Raisa had managed to come up at my left-hand side, and that probably meant that they were all aware of my predicament and were rallying around me. I thought I’d never loved all of them so dearly as at that moment, and that cleared my mind a little.

  We were the Kyndred. We could do this. We had to. Our oaths demanded it.

  He hadn’t seen Oddhi yet, or perhaps he didn’t care. I was being penned again, against another wall. I didn’t know how much longer I could manage this little game, and I needed to warn them, all of them, that there was more in this now than simple vengeance.

  Luckily, he had gotten canny again, and was keeping back a little, trying to see which way I would run next.

  “Whatever you do,” I called out, “Don’t kill him. Just don’t.”

  I didn’t have much faith that it would sink in. I had lost track of where anyone else was and I had no way of knowing if any of them had even heard me, because the blood was pounding in my ears. My own voice seemed hollow, echoing, and far away, even to me. I was watching him, he was watching me, and I had no attention left to spare.

  I just had to have hope. It didn’t seem like that would be enough.

  And then Ingvold stepped out from seemingly nowhere, and hit the man hard, on the back of his neck, and he went down as quietly as a sack of oats goes into a store-room barrel.

  Chapter 10

  “We need to get out of Alvandir. We need to get out now.”

  “That’s not what we -"

  “Never mind. Believe me. We need to get out.”

  The memory of what lay behind us in the tunnel helped a bit. They didn’t want to stay either, not really. It was only stubbornness and a lack of alternatives that formed any resistance at all.

  Raisa went to the stairwell and stood listening.

  “All right,” she said. “I will give you this much, Tam. We’re sitting ducks down here. But what about him?”

  “He comes with.” I could hear the note of desperation in my voice. We needed to get moving, I thought. We needed to be gone.

  They weren’t buying it, and there wasn’t much time.

  “Trust me,” I said. “If you want to strike a blow at Istara, getting him out alive will hurt them more than the death of every wise one in this hell-hole. Whatever else we do, we need to get him away.”

  It’s a funny thing about trust. It’s as much a habit as anything else, and we’d had long years of it. They might not understand half of what I’d said, or believe what words did make sense to them, but the appeal to that lifelong practice convinced them that for now, the argument was finished. Lavran looked at me hard for a long moment, and then took off his belt, and knelt to pull the man’s limp arms together.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not having him wake up and start trying to kill you again,” he said.

  I felt the tension ease, but only a little. Halvar was nodding and unhooking his own belt. Once they had him decently trussed up, we went to join Raisa, who had gone back to listening at the foot of the stairs.

  It was still incredibly quiet. I couldn’t believe that the fight hadn’t woken every living thing in the place, but there was certainly no sign of it.

  “You have a pla
n for this?”

  I didn’t. Not an actual plan, but every nerve in my body was buzzing. I felt like a hunting dog straining at the leash, desperate for release, and it made me inventive.

  “Back the way we came. We get over that wall, and they might never know we were here.”

  Stupid. Beyond stupid. There was no way we’d be able to do it. That climb down? Even the thought of it made me feel dizzy and ill. But no one objected.

  The fear had taken everything out of us, I think. We were past terrified, past crazy, past everything known and familiar, and we had now moved into some other territory where if I’d suggested we would grow wings and fly home, they’d merely have nodded and gone on.

  The stairs were as dark as ever, but after a few moments, light reflecting up and down the shaft made it possible to see dimly into what lay ahead. We were almost to the third tiny landing before what that increase in light actually meant finally dawned, not on me, but on Sigurd, who stopped dead and hissed at all of us in a fury.

  We stopped. He pointed upwards, and we stood listening in fierce concentration till we understood.

  Someplace above, there was someone, several someones, or perhaps merely something. But whoever or whatever it was, it was alive, it was aware, and it was waiting.

  There was a narrow hall leading away. Absolutely black, just a blank spot between the stone walls. After what we’d found in that tunnel beneath us, the last place I wanted to go was into another unknown, but what lay above us was likely worse.

  I tried to think how far down below the main level we might be. I couldn’t. I tried to recollect the layout we knew of so far and estimate what direction this hallway would be leading us, and I couldn’t do that, either.

  But it hardly mattered.

  Lavran simply made a rude gesture in the direction that our certain ambush lay and started off, Ingvold and his unwieldy human burden right behind him, and the rest of us shrugged and fell into line.