‘Now what?’ she asked him in the profound quiet. At first Jatal could not answer, such was the clash of emotions and thoughts the question elicited: elation that perhaps she truly did rely upon his judgement, versus anger and resentment that perhaps she thought him so weak as to be in need of such bolstering. ‘We should leave a quarter of the lancers with the horses,’ he managed coolly. ‘The rest should secure this court.’
Andanii nodded to the captain of her guard, who went to relay the orders. The quiet of the surroundings made Jatal suppress his breath as he listened. He caught distant yells over the brush and jangle of the troops’ armour as they spread out. Perhaps the Warleader and his men had reached the compound before them. Oddly enough, though no plants or flowers were in evidence, a cloyingly sweet perfume choked the air making him faintly nauseous.
‘M’lady,’ a lancer called from one of the neighbouring buildings. Andanii crossed in response and Jatal followed. They passed through the crowd of troops to an airy stone hall, perhaps a meditation
space
, or classroom. Within, a field of corpses lay sprawled across the flagged stone floor. All dead Thaumaturg magi. Or, since most were quite young, a class of their acolytes, students or postulants. The nearest was a girl. Her dark hair was cropped close to her skull, almost like fur, and her flesh was snowy pale where her legs and arms showed beyond her plain robes. The seeming reason her flesh was so unnaturally ashen was that her blood was now all pooled across the stones. The same was true of all the others.
A grisly assemblage of some thirty freshly dead.
‘Those fool mercenaries!’ Andanii snarled, and she pressed the back of a hand to her mouth. ‘They will bring the yakshaka down upon us!’
Jatal was not so certain of this; the mercenaries seemed to be across the compound. And the students lay toppled forward from cross-legged positions – a pose of meditation. Their features were still serene, though smeared in drying gore. The Warleader’s men were mercenaries, true, but they did not strike him as so coldblooded. Besides, if one of the mercenaries had come across such a pretty girl as this, Jatal had no doubt he would have done more than merely strike her down.
He turned to his second, Gorot. ‘Take charge of the main body – secure that courtyard.’
The old campaigner saluted and jogged off.
‘M’lady,’ Andanii’s guard captain called. He’d been examining the bodies and he peered up now, wonderment and a touch of unease in his gaze. ‘I see no wounds among them.’
A set of prints crossed the pooled gore. A calm unhurried set of bare splay-toed feet that walked on across the next court leaving behind a trail of drying blood. The killer? None of the mercenaries went barefoot. A fellow Thaumaturg? Yet the acolytes’ slippers lay in a jumbled heap next to the entrance – these people did not go barefoot.
Someone did. The detail nagged at Jatal. It was familiar but he could not quite place it. The prints somehow mesmerized him; he could not help but follow them. They climbed on to a raised colonnaded walk of a series of stone arches, where Andanii joined him. ‘We have to stop these fools from spilling any more blood.’
Jatal peered up from the path of blood. ‘We should not move on until we’ve secured this area.’
The princess slammed her sword home. ‘We have to link up with the Warleader and his troops in any case. And where in the name of the holy sun is everyone?’
‘The cowards have fled,’ Andanii’s captain put in, coming abreast of them.
Jatal studied the man.
Did he really think it would be this easy?
He raised a hand for patience. ‘We mustn’t wander willy-nilly like a lost wind searching. We’ll send out small scouting parties to locate them.’
Andanii’s clenched brows rose and for an instant Jatal thought he saw something like admiration touch her eyes. She gave a fierce nod. ‘Very good, Prince of the Hafinaj. Sound strategy.’ She waved to her captain, who bowed and jogged off.
‘This Warleader had better have an excellent excuse,’ she growled, hands on her armoured hips.
‘He will no doubt claim to have lost us in that maze.’
‘Yes. He shows a strong head,’ she said, grinning. ‘We’ll have to keep him on a shorter rope.’
Jatal answered the grin. Yes, the language of horse-breaking for their hired Warleader. The man seemed to have forgotten that he worked for them.
The sudden crash of metal and a man’s scream of agony made Jatal flinch. Andanii spun, sword drawn instantly. Their guards converged on a tall stone altar-like plinth where one figure towered over all – one of the Thaumaturgs’ armoured bodyguards, the yakshaka.
Even as the princess moved to close two guards blocked her way. From his raised position on the steps Jatal could see that this yakshaka had been in a fight: it wielded its great yataghan one-handed. Its other arm hung useless, its bright inset stones now smeared in dark wetness. Yet in just a few blows two of their men-at-arms had already fallen.
Yells of alarm now sounded to their rear. Jatal turned a slow circle: on every side the fearsome yakshaka had stepped ponderously from the cover of walls and open portals. They had been encircled. ‘Make for the exit!’ he bellowed. He urged one of Andanii’s guards to shuffle her onward.
And where was Gorot now when he needed him most? Organizing the main body!
‘This way, my nobles,’ the guard captain called, waving aside. Their party made for an open-sided building and onward to another alleyway. Andanii’s guards hurried them along between a series of cell-like stone buildings.
Here the noise and shouts of fighting echoed and re-echoed in a dull directionless roar. Jatal suspected that this captain had no idea where he was taking them – just that he was fleeing a potential
slaughter
. They stumbled into a tiny flagged yard enclosed on three sides.
‘Now which way?’ Andanii demanded.
The man did not respond. Instead, he directed one of the twelve guards to the way they had come. ‘Watch the entrance.’
‘You have no idea, have you?’
He turned to regard her. A small smile raised the edge of his mouth. ‘We will, ah, circle round, my princess.’
‘Captain!’ a guard called from a wall. This enclosure appeared to be a dormitory, open to the central shared space, complete with a fire-pit and a few pots. Jatal thought it perhaps servant’s quarters. Andanii and he crossed to the guard. Under the narrow stone roof lay scattered straw, covered here and there by thin blankets. The guard waved to a tiny opening where a stone staircase led down into darkness. The moist air emerging carried a repellent stink of rot.
‘Perhaps this is where everyone has gone,’ Jatal mused.
‘The serpents’ den,’ the captain snarled. A shouted alarm snapped everyone’s attention to their rear, where yakshaka now closed with their ponderous loud steps. Iron clashed as the guards blocked and slipped the first massive swings. ‘Nothing for it,’ the captain said, and waved down four men. Two of these were Jatal’s, and he gave his own assent to their questioning glances.
The captain invited Andanii onward. ‘My princess …’
Andanii shot him a glare as if determined not to betray any hint of disgust or dread. She drew her slim sabre and started down – even she had to turn sideways to manage the pit-like opening. The captain turned next to Jatal. ‘My lord?’
‘After you.’
‘I must organize the retreat.’
‘Then do so.’
The captain inclined his helmeted head just a touch, and Jatal was reminded that this man had spent his entire career skirmishing and raiding against him and his allies. ‘Wait here then, if you would … my lord.’
From the pit’s opening Jatal watched while the captain jogged to the line of defence. Four of their guards had fallen to the lumbering monstrosities and now the captain waved the rest into a retreating rearguard action, yielding ground towards the stairs.
Jatal waited until they had nearly reached him then hurried down into the dark and near solid stomach-gagging stink. Beneath, it was not so murky as it had seemed from above. Slim corridors lined with dressed stone led off in three directions. It seemed that slits
and
chutes cunningly hidden among the stonework allowed shafts of light from the Fallen One’s Chariot to play down among them. Andanii waited here with her two guards. Of the other two, Jatal’s, he saw no sign.
‘What now?’ she asked him again, her voice low and quite choked by the stench.
This time Jatal did not wonder about the motive behind her asking. He heard the clenched panic behind the words and felt it himself. With each choice, they’d been driven, or been foolish enough, to advance ever further into the Thaumaturgs’ embrace. Inwardly he was already of the conviction that none of them would escape here alive.
Andanii’s captain and the rest of the guards came crashing down the near-vertical stone stairs. Armour scraped the walls and bared swords rang and clashed. Heavy steps sounded above, but that was all. Jatal was certain there was no way such behemoths could manage what seemed a mere servants’ entrance.
‘We should move,’ Jatal answered Andanii at last. ‘They’ll know another way down.’
‘Yes,’ the captain added. He had seized a torch from a wall sconce, and now motioned aside with it. ‘This way looks to head back.’
Jatal did not dispute that, but he was sceptical that they would so easily negotiate this maze. He caught Andanii’s attention. ‘Where are the other two guards?’
She pointed. ‘They went to scout.’
‘We can’t leave them.’
The captain urged them on. ‘Come, Princess.’
Andanii had sheathed her sabre. ‘They will follow,’ she hissed, and set off to follow her guards.
For a moment Jatal stood motionless, alone, listening. What had been that fellow’s name? Oroth? Something like that. ‘Oroth!’ he called. ‘Myin-el? Can you hear me? We’re moving! Come back!’ He listened again but heard nothing distinct, only the breath of the damp air moving through the tunnels, and once again something like distant muted screams and yells.
Do not become separated from them!
his dread howled. Cursing himself and Andanii, he set off to follow.
He found them soon enough, all jammed up together in a tunnel. He pushed his way to the fore. ‘What is it? Why aren’t you moving?’
Andanii and her captain did not answer; they did not have to. At their feet lay the corpse of a yakshaka guardian. Jatal’s first thought was that they had bested it, though he’d heard nothing of any
struggle
. Then, in the flickering golden light of the captain’s torch, he made out what held their attention: some sort of black fluid, thick and oozing, dripped from every joint of the armoured giant: at hips, elbows, shoulders and neck. The stench of putrefaction was overpowering. It physically drove Jatal to retreat a step. ‘
Gods!
’ He gagged, a hand at his mouth.
‘Not the work of our friends the mercenaries,’ the captain observed from behind a fold of cloth pressed to his face.
‘Then who?’
‘We’ll see,’ Andanii answered, and she strung her great bow, as tall as she. ‘I will go first. Captain, hold the light behind me.’
Jatal disagreed with this order of march but the captain bowed, murmuring, ‘Yes, Princess.’ It seemed that the members of her entourage were used, or trained, to defer to her. Stepping over the obscene corpse of the Thaumaturg guardian, Jatal followed the captain.
The tunnel complex wound on. All openings were corbelled arches, an ancient architecture Jatal recognized from the written narratives of travellers through the region, even those of thousands of years ago. He glimpsed in passing what looked like dormitories, study halls, and small meditation or prayer cells.
He thought he’d gained something of an insight into these Thaumaturgs from this hidden maze of structures – presumably their true habitation. It was as if the surface was of no interest to them, or was used merely as sleight of hand to deceive and mislead. Their true vocation and interests lay beneath, hidden or shielded. And from what he’d seen so far, these practices struck him as detestable and obscene.
They passed more sprawled corpses, these of older men and women, all Thaumaturgs, or their servants. None of the bodies bore any obvious wounds. All lay disfigured, bloated, or, in some cases, with their flesh traumatized and torn as if having burst from within. The stink of sickness and rotting flesh was unrelenting but by now Jatal was able to endure it without his gorge constantly licking at the back of his throat.
They entered a larger chamber, its flagged floor crowded with bodies. At first he thought it some sort of infirmary or training centre for physicians. Corpses in various stages of dissection lay on stone plinths, while the weak torchlight hinted at mummified bodies along the walls. The ones hung on the walls appeared to be aids in instruction: each displayed a differing system within the human body. On one, the musculature lay exposed and preserved in all its ropes and cable-like twinings over the bones. On another, the
circulatory
system of veins and arteries lay highlighted and tinted like so many streams, channels and rivulets upon a map.
In an instant it struck Jatal that what he observed was not a ward for the healing and reknitting of the flesh, but rather its opposite: a theatre for the systematic disassembling and deconstruction of the human body. The insight left him dizzy with revulsion. For an instant his only thought was to flee. He felt as if his very breath carried into his body some sort of contagion or contamination that could poison it.