Shadow Blizzard (15 page)

But I still had my crossbow. I took aim and pressed the trigger. The bolt struck a spark from the ceiling beside the block and bounced off, falling down into the pit. All right, so we’d have to try a different approach. I lay down on my back so that the projecting section of the ceiling was right above my head and held my weapon with both hands.

Clang!

The block sank back smoothly and silently into the stone, until it was invisible. Something in the wall started humming quietly, and then the slabs of stone slid out of their recesses and started moving very slowly toward each other. I didn’t wait for them to come together and form an uninterrupted surface—it was far too likely that the trap would be rearmed.

I jumped onto the moving slab on the left and hurried across, being careful not to tumble into the pit. I managed to step onto the normal surface before the slabs came together with a dull
crump
.

After another two halls, there was another corridor with long slits in the walls, only this time they were at the level of my hips. Another nice little surprise, may the darkness take it!

I walked over to a broken sarcophagus. I had no idea who it was that had tried to shatter the lid of the grave, but now the remains could easily be reached. A yellow skull grinned out at me. I picked it up and tossed it onto the floor of the corridor.

Semicircular blades sprang out of the far ends of the slits and flew through the air with a whine until they reached the entrance, then stopped. So that was it. I could easily have been sliced into two Harolds. While the blades were withdrawing into the wall and the trap was being rearmed for the next unwary traveler, I slipped past and hurried on.

So far all the traps had been fairly crude devices, but that only meant that they had been made by human hands. I expected the elves and orcs to be far more inventive in their methods for dispatching undesirable visitors to the sacred Palaces into the light.

Quite a lot of time had gone by, and I felt very tired. This time I chose the site for my nest in the hands of a large, repulsive gargoyle. It cost me quite an effort to scramble up into the stone hands that were folded together to form a cup, but once I was up there, I felt as cozy as if I were nestling in Sagot’s pocket. I ate half a biscuit, took my boots off, laid my head on my bag, and my hand on my loaded crossbow, and slept like a baby.

*   *   *

I don’t know how long I slept—time passes imperceptibly in the catacombs, with no sun and no stars. I had to rely on hunger and fatigue to guide me, and since my fatigue had disappeared without a trace, it seemed quite possible that I’d been asleep for a long time. In any case, there was an urgent rumbling in my stomach, and I had to wolf down another half portion of my magical rations to keep it quiet.

My body was numb from lying on stone for so long, and it was an effort to stand up, stretch, and pull on my boots. It was time to be moving on, there were no more than ten halls left before I reached the Doors.

“Walk, walk, walk, and we still don’t get anywhere! Do you realize we’re lost in all these damned corridors!”

I instinctively ducked down at the unexpected sound of a voice, but no one would have seen me, even standing fully upright. The gargoyle’s cupped hands made a magnificent hiding place.

“And it’s all your fault!” said a second voice.

“My fault?”

“Who was it suddenly needed to take a leak? It’s your fault everyone went on ahead and we couldn’t find them! What a fool I was to stay with you!”

“Don’t panic. Milord Balistan Pargaid doesn’t abandon his men.”

“Sure, he’s been searching real hard for us for the last eight hours,” the second man snorted.

The voices started moving away, and I decided I could jump up, grab the edge of the cup, and pull myself up to take a look. Two soldiers dressed in chain mail and carrying swords were slowly tramping in the direction that I’d just come from.

The poor souls were lost. And serve them right. After another two halls they’d reach the trap that would reduce them to bloody pulp. And I certainly wasn’t going to try to stop them.

So Balistan Pargaid and Lafresa had reached the second level. That was bad news. I just hoped they’d lost plenty of men on the way.

I waited until the two men disappeared into the distant corridor, then jumped down and went on. The route from here was as straight as Parade Street, and I could go as far as the next intersection without worrying about a thing. The two lost sheep who had just tramped past would have activated any traps, and since they were still alive, I could assume that there were no traps on the path ahead. I ran through the next six halls (just in case the lost men might suddenly decide to come back).

In the seventh hall, where the walls were riddled with the black openings of corridors leading in every possible direction, I paused and rummaged through my papers, then stepped into the fourth corridor on the right. It was a little strange, to say the least—seven paces and then a sharp turn to the left, another seven paces and another turn to the left, then to the right, and so on for quite a long way, a kind of crooked-snake toy put together by a drunken child.

I gave thanks to Sagot when I found myself facing a stairway. There were two stone sculptures waiting for me there—those familiar beasts, half bird and half bear. I wondered whose sick mind could have come up with the idea of such ugly monsters. It certainly couldn’t have been a man’s. When the stairway ended I found myself in a hall. A huge hall. And pitch dark, I couldn’t see a thing. I was just about to reach into the bag for my lights when the floor started glowing and a brightly lit path appeared, running out into the distance from under my feet.

More magic, but at least this time it didn’t threaten instant death. The path ran on and on, showing me the way, until it stopped at the far wall, and at that point a bright rectangle blazed up at that. It was so far away that I didn’t realize what it was at first, but when I did … When I did, I gave thanks to Sagot.

It was the Doors.

5

THROUGH THE SLUMBERING GLOOM

My footsteps echoed off the white marble slabs of the floor and multiplied as they bounced about under the ceiling, fluttering like bats startled by the light of the torches.

I felt a desperate urge to walk off the path into the surrounding gloom, where I would be less conspicuous but, darkness take me, the lighted path had been created especially for anyone coming this way to walk along, and Sagot only knew what was in store for me if I left it.

About twenty marble slabs right in front of the Doors were lit up in a rough semicircle, forming a kind of platform about twenty yards across. From that point two corridors ran off to the right and left of the Doors. There were little light blue lamps on the high ceilings of the corridors, flooding the entrances with a pale bluish light and filling the corridors with a bluish haze. I didn’t know where the corridors led to—there was no mention of them in the papers from the old Tower of the Order.

But the Nameless One take the mysterious corridors! I certainly wasn’t going to waste any time exploring them. Just at that moment there was nothing in the world apart from those Doors towering up seventeen yards above my head.

I took my glove off one hand and gingerly pressed my palm against the surface of the Doors. They felt warm, as if there was a gentle flame burning somewhere inside them, and at the same time icy cold, as if they’d been carved out of a single block of dark ice. And they were very smooth. I didn’t even try to guess what material they were made from, but it looked very much like black glass. I would have wagered the income from my next hundred Commissions that an entire regiment of giants or an army of magicians of every possible hue could never even have made this barrier tremble.

The elves had created something magnificent, and only someone who possessed the Key could pass this way. (I imagined how furious the orcs must have been when they discovered that the easiest and quickest route to the tombs of their ancestors had been closed off by the elves.)

I stood at one edge of these magnificent Doors, set one hand on their surface, and walked the ten yards from one edge to the other. Nothing at all. An absolutely smooth surface, entirely unbroken, if you didn’t count the elaborate images worked into it by the dark and light elves’ master sculptors, images that told the story of their people’s battles with the Firstborn.

The pictures were incredibly beautiful and the attention to fine detail was astonishing. Here was an elf armed with a s’kash setting his foot on the body of his prostrate enemy. The figures seemed to be alive and I could see every hair, every ring of chain mail, every wrinkle in the corners of the middle-aged elf’s eyes.

And here was a gigantic oak tree. I could see every single leaf, every crevice in the thick bark. Orcs hung from the tree head-down, their eyes filled with absolute terror. Elves stood below them. Many elves. From what I knew of the race of the Secondborn, I’d say the lads were preparing the appalling Green Leaf torture for the orcs.

Of course, all this was very impressive, but the Doors didn’t have what was most important to me—a keyhole that the Key I had brought could fit into. I almost went blind staring at that surface as I walked from one corner to the other, but I didn’t find even the tiniest opening. As if it wasn’t enough that the surrounding gloom and the blue haze of the two corridors were beginning to set my nerves on edge, there was something not quite right about the Doors, too. But I just couldn’t understand exactly what it was that had been bothering me since the moment I walked up to them.

Calm down, Harold, calm down. I had the Key, and it was created to open the Doors. So it must open them, and all I had to do to find the keyhole was exercise my imagination.

I tried coming at the question from every possible angle, but I got nowhere. Maybe it was some kind of elfin joke—to make Doors that didn’t open? But then, why in the name of darkness had they gone to all the trouble of bringing in the dwarves to make the Key? Not just for the fun of it, surely?

But eventually I found the answer. It was concealed in the figures on the Doors, or rather, in one of them. In the lower left corner there was a figure of a tall elf. He was holding his right hand out, palm upward, and it was hollow. The color of the glass made the hollow almost invisible, in fact it was barely even a hollow, just a slight irregularity that was lost among the dozens of figures embossed into the Doors. But the size of the hollow was exactly right for the Key to be set into it.

I pulled the chain with the Key on it out from under my shirt and set the slim, elegant, icy-crystal artifact in the elf’s hand. The crystal flashed with a purple light and for a moment the elf’s entire figure lit up. The transparent Key turned exactly the same color as the Doors and fused into a single whole with them.

And then a glowing purple line ran from the bottom to the top of the huge Doors, right at their very center, and they started slowly opening toward me without a sound. I had to step back so that they wouldn’t catch me. I felt something snap gently in my chest, and I realized that the bonds with which Miralissa had tied the Key to me had broken. Which was hardly surprising: I’d opened the Doors and the bonds were no longer needed. The artifact had done its job.

“The bonds are strong,” the Key purred. “Run!”

Run? But the Doors had only just opened!

“Run away! The smell of the enemy!” the Key whispered in farewell, and fell silent.

The smell of the enemy? What did that mean?

I sniffed the air and caught a faint scent of strawberries. Lafresa!

“Kill him!” a man’s voice barked in the darkness.

Maybe sometimes I’m not all that bright, maybe I’m as dense as a cork, maybe I don’t know how to use a sword, but there’s one thing that can’t be denied—in a really tight spot I think with the speed of lightning and run even faster.

When Count Balistan Pargaid roared his command, I was already far away from the Doors and flying along the corridor on the left as fast as I could go. In the distance someone yelled that I had to be caught, others shouted for me to stop immediately or it would be worse for me. Naturally, I had no intention of stopping. Fortunately, the group that had been waiting for me to open the Doors hadn’t brought any crossbows along, otherwise I would have been dispatched into the light already. There was only one thing they could do now—try to catch up and put a few holes in me. I had one slight advantage over the Master’s jackals—I started running a lot sooner than they did, and running in chain mail with swords is a lot harder than running without them.

I hurtled along the endless corridor flooded with blue light, praying to Sagot for an intersection so that I could confuse the chase. But it was just my luck, there wasn’t a single branch off the corridor—its walls just moved farther apart, its ceiling rose even higher, and every second blue lamp went out.

That made the place even gloomier—the murk was so thick, it felt like I was running through a phantom world, wallowing in a syrupy bluish haze. The blue light made everything that was happening seem unreal.

Whoo-osh … Whoo-oosh … Whoo-oosh …

The lights on the ceiling were blurred spots rushing past above my head. The floor was laid with slabs of white marble with gold veins, just like in the Hall of the Doors, but fortunately it didn’t glow. On the other hand, I could hear the tramping feet and menacing roars of my pursuers very clearly. The idiots still hadn’t realized that yelling your head off in places like Hrad Spein can be bad for your health. I had a good lead, so I could afford to look round to see what my chances of surviving today’s race looked like.

The thick blue haze filled the corridor, so I could only see about a hundred paces. But I’d opened up a much bigger lead than that, so there was nothing in my field of vision yet. There was no time to think things over—Balistan Pargaid’s dogs would be there at any moment, and then only a miracle would save me.