Gallow (58 page)

The other part of the ambush belonged to Achista – Oribas wasn’t there to see it happen but he knew how it would go: the Lhosir would follow the trail until it stopped at a huge fallen tree that barred their path. Then Marroc would rise from the shadows beyond and throw their spears. Archers on either side would pepper the Lhosir with arrows, and after that it would fall to a confusion of fighting. In the thick forest the Lhosir wouldn’t be able to make a shield wall and muster a charge. There would be three or four Marroc for every Lhosir. Achista would repeat the victory of Jodderslet.

That was how it would be, and so when he heard the first shouts go up, the Lhosir roars and battle cries and the Marroc screams, Oribas dropped out of sight into the snow beside the trail. The sounds of the fighting rose to a peak and then petered away into the shouts of wounded Marroc calling for aid and a few furious roars of the last battle-mad Lhosir as they scythed down as many Marroc as they could before they fell. And then finally what he was waiting for: the sound of men running, the last Lhosir following their own trail back, racing out of the trees.
Legs. Shoot them in the legs.
That’s what he’d told the bowmen. They’d be soldiers in mail coats, with helms, carrying shields, armour too thick for an arrow to puncture, but they had nothing to protect them below the knees.

They came, two of them, running fast, still with their axes and their shields even in their rout. Oribas willed the Marroc arrows to fly true but the Lhosir were moving fast and were hard to hit. A flurry of shafts zipped across the trail. One of the Lhosir staggered but kept his feet as an arrow hit him in the side and stuck out of his furs. Oribas gripped a rope lying beside him in the snow. He watched the fleeing Lhosir and then jumped up and pulled with all his might and snapped it taut across the trail. It took the legs of the first Lhosir and he sprawled in a flurry of snow. The rope jerked out of Oribas’s hands. He staggered forward. The second Lhosir lurched sideways, half tripped over the first and stumbled on. Without thinking Oribas hurled himself, crashing into the last Lhosir’s side and knocking him down. They flailed at each other in the snow for a few seconds but the Lhosir had twice the strength and twice the weight of Oribas and threw him off with ease. For a moment Oribas lay floundering on his back like an upturned beetle. The Lhosir pulled himself up. His face was a rictus of fury. He lifted his sword and there was simply nothing Oribas could do about it, no words or clever plans that would make the slightest difference; but before the Lhosir could strike a Marroc arrow hit him in the back, knocking him off balance, and then another Marroc flew out of the trees and bore the Lhosir down, hacking at his face with a knife, and then another and another, and by the time Oribas found his feet, the Lhosir was dead, a crimson pond of blood dripping out of his savaged throat. Oribas stared. Most of the dead he’d seen before had been half ripped to pieces, stinking and rotting and savaged by vultures under the desert sun, so it wasn’t the torn flesh and the blood that held him. It was that he’d never seen a man dead at his feet who’d been trying to kill him only a moment ago.

He was still looking at the Lhosir when Achista and the other Marroc came jogging up the trail. Some were dressed in freshly scavenged mail, others carrying new swords and shields. They stripped the man at Oribas’s feet with the speed of jackals. Achista pressed a sword into his hand. She was dressed in mail now, a hauberk that was too long for her and far too wide and made her look ridiculous, but it also made him want to take her and hold her long and tight because she was going into battle now and the death he’d seen made him realise that it was all horribly real. Before the day was out, it wouldn’t only be Lhosir who were dead.

T
he Marroc pushed quickly through the forest and onto the slopes beneath Witches’ Reach. Achista didn’t lead them towards the saddle between the two mountains; instead she took them across the craggy snowbound slopes, picking a way between them until she reached a crack in the mountainside, a slit of a cave only a few feet wide but as tall as a house. A trickle of water ran out the bottom. Oribas bent to sniff at it and recoiled. Achista laughed. ‘Where do you think the cess from the tower ends up?’

Inside the cave, far enough to be out of sight, a handful of wooden brands wrapped in cloth lay beside coils of rope and two small kegs of fish oil. The Marroc broke the seals on one of the kegs and dipped their torches. One of them got a tiny fire going and lit the first, then they lit one from another until every other Marroc had a burning brand. Through the orange flicker of the flames Oribas saw a path worn in the floor of the cave.

‘This cave leads up into the tower?’ he asked with a wry smile. ‘Surely the Lhosir will have barred any such tunnel?’

‘You Aulians built this tower.’ Her eyes gleamed in the firelight.

‘We do like to dig.’ That old fascination with reaching down into the earth, to the shades that dwelt there. The last emperor might have dug the furthest, but Aulians had been delving into the soil and rock since before the empire was anything more than a town with grand aspirations.

‘When the Aulians left they barred the tunnel with two seals. One was opened a long time ago. No one ever found a way to open the other. The forkbeards think they’re safe.’

‘But you’ve found a way?’ Her eyes bored into him and he understood. He shook his head. ‘I’m not a wizard, Achista.’

‘Addic said you’d know how to open the seals.’

Oribas laughed. ‘Even if I did, how long ago were these tunnels closed? How many hundreds of years? Metal rusts, Achista. Stone crumbles. I will try but I very much hope you have another way.’

The passage rose into the heart of the mountain, the crack in the stone petering out into a tunnel, roughly hewn and so narrow that even Oribas was forced to hunch his head into his shoulders. The Marroc shuffled along in the feeble near-dark of their torches, creeping like spiders in the night through puddles and rivulets of foul-smelling water. The walls glistened with damp slime and the stink got worse the deeper they went. After an hour of climbing into the mountain’s heart, the Marroc stopped. The passage opened into a round shaft twenty paces across that rose towards the mountain’s peak and delved to its root. Below where they stood, the shaft was filled with scummy water. A narrow ledge circled it.

‘This part is slippery.’

Achista sent one Marroc around the walkway to the far side. Metal rungs bolted into the stone rose into the darkness of the shaft. Oribas stared at them in horror. ‘And how old are those?’

‘Addic and I climbed them months ago. We marked the loose ones.’

They brought more torches. Oribas looked up. The shaft disappeared into darkness. ‘How far does it go?’

‘As far as the tallest tree in the forest.’

Oribas shrugged. Some of the trees in the Varyxhun valley were as tall as fifty men. He followed her around the walkway and started to climb behind her. He wasn’t sure why he was suddenly at the front of the Marroc, but it seemed natural to be at Achista’s side. ‘Where’s your brother?’ he asked. ‘Shouldn’t he be leading this?’

They were twenty feet above the water now. ‘I found this, Oribas, not Addic. If anyone should be here to lead ahead of me then it’s Rannic, but he’s with Modris now, casting his shield over us.’ She tapped the rung just above her feet. ‘This one’s loose. Make sure you tell whoever comes behind you.’

They climbed only another few feet when there was a howl from below. Oribas turned his head in time to see a Marroc splash into the water, fallen from the treacherous stone walkway. The Marroc cried out once more and then sank like a stone. A second man fell after him as he crouched to try and reach his friend. He scrabbled at the wall of the shaft and managed to grab another Marroc around the ankle, but his hands kept slipping and there was no way anyone standing on the walkway could bend down to help him without pitching themselves into the water as well. He fell back and then lunged again. His fingers clawed at the stone.

One man already drowned, just like that, out of nothing. The pointlessness of it made Oribas angry. ‘You have ropes!’ he shouted at them. ‘Use them! Pull him out!’

It took three Marroc to haul the second man out. It was as though the foetid water in the shaft clung to him, trying to drag him down.

They climbed on. Oribas didn’t know how far. He counted the rungs for a while when his arms started to tire and got up to somewhere close to a hundred before he lost count because it now took all the will he could muster just to keep going. He’d climbed ladders and stairs aplenty in his time but none like this; and when they finally reached the top, his arms and his shoulders felt like lead. Achista held her torch out over the edge and waved it so that those below could see the end was in sight, then, when there were a half-dozen of them safely up, she pulled Oribas to his feet and led him on. They were in another passage now, wider and made with more care, typical Aulian work lined with bricks and tiles, though the floor was still rough bare rock. Oribas looked for inscriptions or engravings or murals but everything was crusted in filth. When he stopped to scrape some off, Achista pulled him on again. She dragged him to a wall with a circular stone door in the centre. To the right of the door four bronze wheels dark with verdigris stuck out of the stone, each engraved with symbols that had almost disappeared over time. Oribas took her torch and inspected them. There were six signs on each wheel, animals, the totems for each of the six Ascendants who’d once stood guard over the empire. A chill ran over his skin right to his feet and back again and wouldn’t leave him alone. He’d been to places like this before. He brushed a little of the dirt aside, nodded to himself and then walked away. ‘And now we turn back,’ he said to Achista as he passed her.

‘You can’t open it?’ Her look was tragic.

‘I probably can but I certainly shouldn’t. I’ll tell the others. No need for the ones still climbing to come up all this way for nothing.’

Achista darted in front of him, stopping him with a hand pressed to his chest. ‘Please.’ He opened his mouth, but before he could even begin to tell her why he shouldn’t, why none of them should even go near a place like this, why the Lhosir in the tower were taking their lives to the edge of the abyss simply by being here, she put her other hand on his cheek and stared at him with such wide, hopeful eyes that she killed his words dead. He stood agape. ‘Please,’ she said again. ‘It’s the only way in. We have to! We have to try. If we don’t try, what are we?’

Gallow would have said the same. And if Gallow had been here and told him to open it then he would have done so even while he was explaining exactly why no man alive should ever enter a place that had been closed with a seal of the Ascendants. ‘This isn’t a seal to keep us out, Achista. It’s a seal to keep something in.’

‘Whatever was inside has been dead and gone for hundreds of years now.’

‘Yes,’ said Oribas, turning back to the door. ‘It has. And it should stay that way.’

She took his hand and held it tight. ‘After the Aulians left, they say the Reach became the home of a Marroc prince. They say that beneath it he found an Aulian treasure vault. For twenty years he tried to open it until at last he solved its puzzle. They say he found the answer written on a nearby rock. The day after, he left with all his men and headed north and was never seen again. After that, no one lived in Witches’ Reach until the forkbeards came.’

Oribas shook his head. ‘I have another story for you. A long story for another time, of the Rakshasa that killed my home, my town, my people, my family and many others besides. I prayed and the gods sent Gallow Truesword and together we destroyed the creature.’ He turned to face her and looked her hard in the eye. ‘But before Gallow, I tracked the Rakshasa back to the place from which it came. I found a seal like this that had been opened. Thousands of lives, Achista.’ He went back to the wheels beside the door and gave one an experimental tug, half hoping that it wouldn’t move, that the mechanism inside had corroded solid. And the wheel didn’t turn, but even as he shrugged his shoulders ready to walk away again, Achista had an unlit torch pushed through the wheel to make a lever and was pulling on it with all her weight, and with a jerk it shifted. The sound of grinding stone and metal echoed through the passage. She looked pleased with herself and started to push at the round stone door. Oribas pulled her away. ‘The seals are held closed by a riddle, Achista.’ He brushed dirt from the stonework on the other side of the door. ‘There are four mechanisms inside the stone. Each wheel must be set to the sign of the correct Ascendant to move the bars that prevent the door from opening. When all four are set correctly, the stone can slide aside. They are not easily made and so are not made lightly. Something on the other side of this seal was not meant to be found. And to be sealed here, in a place so remote from the heart of the empire . . .’ He shook himself. ‘If I open this for you, Achista, you must promise me: no one will touch anything on the other side unless I say it is safe.’

Achista set to work on the other wheels, loosening each until she could turn all four. Oribas finished clearing the dirt from the inscription beside the door. The words carved into the stone were old and worn but still deep enough to read: ‘
Here buried under the mountain lies the iron witch, drowned in the river and laid out in salt where the wind and the sun shall be guardians amid this place of snow and ice
.’

Achista squinted at the wheels. The other Marroc were crowding close now, drawn in by their curiosity. ‘But these are just animals.’

‘The six Ascendants are the Earth, the Sun, the Fire, the Sky, the River and the Night. Each has its totem.’ Oribas frowned. ‘Buried under the mountain. A statement of fact, but the mountain is also the Earth.’ He skipped to the other side of the door and turned the top wheel to the sign of the bear, the totem animal of the Earth. Without a torch for a lever it took the two of them to make the wheel move, Achista’s hands pressed onto his. ‘The iron witch?’ He shrugged. ‘Laid out in salt? Not sure. Drowned in the river is obvious, and the wind and the sun are simple enough too. Guardians in this place of snow and ice. Cold could be the earth again but it’s always four different Ascendants. Winter is the season of Night, so maybe that.’