Ahead, stairs descended into an interior sunken court surrounded by smaller, separate buildings. Statues bordered the court on all sides. These were the first depictions of the human form Jatal had seen from the Thaumaturgs: they were uniform, a figure bent in reflection, hands clasped, yet mouth open as if about to speak. The Warleader led the way down the stairs and across the court. Here were the bodies of several shaduwam. They lay contorted, hands at throats, their faces sculptures of agony. They had actually gouged bloody wounds at their necks with their own dirty broken nails. The
sight
made Jatal unbearably uneasy. Was this some sort of Thaumaturg curse?
As the leading element of the column reached the top of the opposite stairs, stones shifted behind in a loud grinding and Jatal spun. A mist gusted from the mouths of the surrounding statues in one long loud exhalation. The troopers caught in the sunken court, some thirty of them, clutched at their throats. Weapons clattered to the stones. Andanii lurched down the stairs as if she would rescue the nearest, but Jatal thrust an arm across her chest, stopping her. ‘They are dead already,’ he told her.
Across the court the rest of the column halted, glaring left and right, their eyes wide. ‘Go round!’ Jatal called. The leading ranks acknowledged this, saluting. They led the way to the sides, searching for a way through. Somehow, Jatal did not think this would be easy; they had entered a labyrinth of traps or dead ends. All prepared by the Thaumaturgs for unwary invaders long ago.
‘What now?’ Andanii asked the Warleader.
The man’s perpetual expression of impatient disapproval twisted even further as he peered ahead. He motioned aside. ‘This way, I believe.’ He strode on without waiting.
Jatal moved to follow but Andanii stilled him with a hand on his arm. ‘We need to talk,’ she whispered, low.
Her voice, so husky and close, raised an answering thrill in his blood. Yet he clamped down on the sensation and kept his expression indifferent.
A final confession, my princess?
‘Regarding what?’ he asked, and applauded himself for the casual steadiness of his voice.
Her brows wrinkled prettily as she eyed him sidelong.
How beautiful you appear, my princess – even here surrounded by death
.
‘I’ve had no time. He has been watching me. I have suspicions …’ she shook her head and dabbed her sleeve to her sweaty lips, ‘but you will think me mad …’
I, too, have my suspicions, my princess of death
. Their remaining troops waited for orders a respectful distance away. Jatal noted that every one of them was a member of her picked Vehajarwi bodyguard.
Ahh, my princess … So this is how it is to be?
Up the hall, the iron-grey figure of the Warleader paused. He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘You are coming?’ Andanii flinched, her mouth clamping shut. She motioned her bodyguard to fall in line.
How meekly she follows this man! His merest gesture is her command!
Andanii … I do not understand you at all
.
He searched her face as if he could read some hint of the workings of her mind there; she answered with a discouraging curt jerk of her head as if to demand silence.
So be it, my princess. Silence it shall be
.
Their route brought them up a hall lined by narrow cells. Most held the slumped figure of a Thaumaturg, in robes that were once white but now bore the broad stains of spilled blood. They appeared to have been felled while in meditation. When the Warleader reached the end of the hall a metallic note rang out, clear and throbbing. It sounded like a struck bell. Its reverberations hung in the air as if suspended. The tone strengthened with each pulse. It stabbed at Jatal’s ears. The Warleader paused. He cocked his head as if puzzled.
Andanii said something but Jatal heard nothing of it over the throbbing of the bell. A hand took hold of Jatal’s arm. He glanced round and was horrified to see a female Thaumaturg in her bloodstained robes. Whether she was dead or yet alive it was impossible to tell. One-handed, he ran the woman through. Despite the sword thrust through her stomach she held on. Her face betrayed nothing; just an inhuman curiosity, as if everything was a surprise to her.
From every cell up and down the hall the fallen bodies now emerged and closed upon them. The Warleader contemptuously batted one down. It slowly climbed to its feet again. The bodyguard strove to cut them down, but the narrow confines of the hall limited their swordplay. Most switched to their heavy fighting dirks and thrust at faces and chests.
It became obvious that even the worst slashing or head wound did nothing to slow the creatures. Jatal saw one of Andanii’s bodyguards push a dirk blade through one eye and into the brain behind yet the creature continued to grip the man’s arm. It carried the hilted weapon in its eye as no more than some sort of grisly decoration.
Yet he sheathed his own sword and also frantically drew a fighting knife. Next to him, one of the things had hold of both arms of a bodyguard. It drew the man close while at the same time throwing open its mouth to an unnatural degree. Out poured a vomited torrent of ghastly steaming fluids straight on to the guard’s face and neck to run down his front over and beneath his armour. The man howled and writhed in the creature’s grip.
Jatal stared, gagging and sickened, yet also mesmerized by the appalling sight. The man’s flesh smoked where the greenish-black muck had sprayed. It dripped and ran as if melting, falling away. White bone appeared beneath the mess at jaw and collarbone. The
man
threw back his head in a shriek of utter insane agony. His neck burst in a spray of blood as the flesh of the throat was eaten through, collapsing. The head fell backwards at an impossible angle, half decapitated. The corpse would have fallen but for the support of the creature’s grip. It bent forward now, mouth open, and took a great bite from the tangle of wet ligaments and sinew at the angle of shoulder and ruined neck.
All this Jatal witnessed in a frantic instant while fending off the swipes and searching hands of the creatures surrounding him. Now he turned to the one that had hold of his arm. It was all he could do to resist screaming his own mindless panic at the thought of what awaited him. His gorge rose in unspeakable terror and anticipation. An idea came to him and he threw down his knife to take hold of the grip of his sword once more and yank it free. Up and down the hall the men of the bodyguard were falling beneath the grasping hands of the Thaumaturg-warped creatures. Ahead, the Warleader appeared to be hacking his way free. Andanii, he saw, was close behind.
Desperate with disgust and terror, he swung at the creature’s wrist. It parted from the arm – though the hand yet maintained its grip on his bicep. Jatal pressed forward. Every hand that reached for him he swung at, leaving blunt waving stumps behind.
Ahead, the Warleader had hacked his way clear to reach a set of stairs leading down. He spared one brief glance backwards; his dead ashen-hued eyes seemed to grant his followers nothing – not even a common humanity. He turned his back and continued on, abandoning them. Close behind, dodging and ducking, leaving scraps of her robes in clenched waving hands, Andanii also made the stairs. She too paused to glance back, all the while bending and stringing her longbow. Her gaze briefly brushed Jatal’s only to flick down to where the Warleader had disappeared. She followed the man at a run.
In that brief contact, Jatal thought he read a desperate agony mixed with a ferocious ruthless resolve.
So it was done. The coward! Relying on others to do what she couldn’t face herself. She would discard him to follow the foreigner!
Her actions so shocked Jatal that he fell backwards into the arms of one of the creatures. It moved to wrap its limbs around him but he managed to bring his blade up inside the hug and hack through the wrists to duck free.
I will have her head!
His rage saw him through: kicking the creatures down, decapitating in wild swings, not caring who was near, stepping and slipping
on
the fallen. His onslaught opened up a route that five of Andanii’s bodyguards followed to reach the stairs. Here he paused, his chest heaving in his ecstasy of near blind rage and terror, until he saw that the surviving fiends were still following.
He pointed his sword and gasped, his voice almost completely gone, ‘This way …’
They entered a maze of subterranean tunnels, just as at Isana Pura, yet even more terrifying and grotesque. They passed what were perhaps a series of operating chambers. On stone slabs lay the current victims of experimentation: a female cleanly flensed of all skin; the twined ropy muscles and gleaming bone of her frame perfectly revealed as if she were an anatomical sculpture. Here, one of the bodyguards came close, a lantern held high, and they all jerked as her bared lidless eyes shifted towards the light. Her throat moved, her naked jaws working. But as she had no cheeks, her words came out as gurglings and hissings.
Snarling his horror and disgust, the guard swung his blade to decapitate her. Yet he failed. His sword jammed in her neck – perhaps her ligaments and bones had been hardened for preservation – in any case, he yanked but could not free the blade. She rose then, swiftly, and her fingers, all sinew, bone and long, curved, yellowed nails, found his face to gouge and dig in.
He howled, abandoning the sword to grasp her hands. Everyone hacked at the thing. They finally managed to dismember it but not before the guard had fallen, his face and throat a bloody torn ruin. Jatal picked up the lantern where it had rolled aside, luckily not extinguishing. ‘Do not touch anything!’ he snarled, and limped onward.
They passed a chamber where rank after rank of small short figures, children in Thaumaturg robes, sat as if in meditation. They faced away towards the far wall. Jatal stepped into the room, raising the lantern high. ‘Flee, all of you,’ he called. ‘The shaduwam are here.’
Heads turned. Some forty pale faces regarded him silently. Jatal’s vision darkened in abhorrence; the eyes and mouth of each child had been sewn shut.
Behind him, the guards cursed softly and gagged. Jatal pushed them back as he retreated from the room. He lowered the lantern and the heads calmly turned away as the children – children! Was that what they were? – returned to their meditation. Jatal stood in the hall, unsteady on his feet. His heart hammered and his throat
was
as dry as kiln-heated sand yet it burned with suppressed acid bile.
A madhouse! Inhuman!
All Jatal wanted now was escape. He urged the men onward. Was this why the Thaumaturgs offered no resistance? They no longer thought like humans, no longer shared common human values and fears? Were no longer even human? Perhaps they considered them no more a threat than an ant or a lizard? Who could know? None of this seemed remotely sane.
Unfortunately, the path led downward. They descended narrow slick stone stairs. At the bottom they found a heavy iron gate that had been smashed aside. Beyond lay a large chamber with halls leading off into utter darkness. Jatal raised the lantern; the stairs descended into dark water that covered the floor. It stank like a sewer and gnawed, half-skeletal corpses floated about, both Thaumaturg and shaduwam. He had no idea of the water’s depth, or what it might contain. The lantern’s weak light just brushed a distant figure somehow raised above the surface of the pool – a figure that wore the remains of tattered white robes over gleaming armour.
The guards surged forward. They descended the stairs into the water up to their waists. Jatal followed, holding the lantern high. They pushed their way through the water. The sloshing and splashing echoed about the chamber and halls to return loud and distorted.
It was Andanii; she had pulled herself on to, or been laid upon, a stone slab similar to the other operating platforms they’d seen everywhere. She bled from numerous wounds – what looked like vicious bites that had gouged rounded chunks from her flesh.
‘Princess!’ the men called, outraged, choked with tears. Their voices seemed to rouse her; she stirred, her limbs shifting. Jatal pressed forward.
She has earned this! Why then am I terrified for her?
‘Andanii,’ he whispered, his face almost pressed to hers. Blood smeared her mouth and chin.
She shook her head, mumbled something.
‘What? What is it?’
Say it
, something in him urged her.
Say it was all a mistake!
‘… no … trap …’ she gurgled in a mouthful of blood.
Jatal set down the lantern to scoop her up in his arms. ‘Ware! Trap!’
The remaining four of Andanii’s bodyguard spread out, surrounding them. One picked up the lantern to hold it high. ‘There!’ he
called
, pointing his sword. Hunched shapes came lurching their way up the halls. They appeared naked, hairless, with long ropy arms ending in great taloned hands.
The group retreated to the stairs. Water surged, rising and splashing as a number of the creatures straightened from the murky waves to block their path. Closer now, Jatal could see that they were of basic human stock.
No real monsters here – the true monsters are the Thaumaturgs
.
Yet things had been done to them. Thaumaturg experimentation. Their heads were narrower than any skull ought to be, the flat eyes devoid of emotion or intelligence; Jatal read in their opalescent depths hunger only – no recognition of a common humanity. Their mouths hung open to make room for teeth that stood out as sharpened and serrated weapons. Jatal did not think that they could close their mouths even should they try. They raised their clawed hands and made blood-chilling noises all the more horrific for sounding almost like words.