Shadow of a Dark Queen (56 page)

Without saying anything, Erik reached out and quickly placed his hand on de Loungville's arm, gave a quick squeeze, and released it, the only gesture he could make without saying something.

The sergeant looked at him, giving him only a brief nod of acknowledgment, before Erik moved down the tunnel. Greylock reached the junction of the tunnels, peered both ways, then motioned for the
men to follow to the left. Erik reached the junction and as he started to turn the corner, he fought down the urge to look back to where de Loungville waited.

If only the Captain were here, he said to himself silently. Where could Calis be?

* * *

Calis held close to the wall as he stared in wide-eyed amazement. He and his father had spoken many times of what it would be like to confront their unusual heritage, a legacy of ancient magic, warped by the skill of Macros the Black, and used to bring to his human father the powers incarnate of the legendary Valheru.

Tomas had wooed and won the hand of Aglaranna, the Queen of the Elves, and had fathered Calis, impossible fruit of a union unique in history. Calis was young by the reckoning of the elven people, little more than a half century old. By human consideration, he was a man of middle years, and by any measure, he had more than a dozen lifetimes' experience in watching the pain and madness of the creatures that lived on this world.

But nothing had prepared him to deal with the consequences of what he had chosen to investigate.

Elves possessed the ability to navigate by the dimmest light of the night, a single moon, or distant stars, but even dwarves were incapable of seeing in the utter blackness of underground tunnels. Yet they had other senses, and Calis, unlike his elven cousins, had traveled with dwarves enough in his youth to have learned some of their tricks: the sound of air moving, faint echoes upon the passage walls, counting turns and remembering distances. It was said that once upon a path, no dwarf could ever fail to retrace his steps. Calis possessed the same knack.

After leaving the company, he had moved back down to the vast gallery, the circular central hail of this city within a mountain. For that was what he was certain it had been, once in ancient days, a city beneath the mountains, as Roo had supposed. But the youth from Ravensburg had no idea what sort of city.

From what he had studied with Tathar and the other Spellweavers of Elvandar, Calis had suspected from the first that this was a city of elven construction rather than dwarven. But the elves who had built this place were as unlike Calis's people as they were unlike any other mortal race. Those elves had existed as slaves to the Valheru, and only by command of their ancient masters could such a place have come to be built by elven hands.

Once he had reached the gallery, Calis was convinced the sound he had heard had been nothing more than a distant rockfall. There were no signs of pursuit; still, he moved downward to make sure, passing the strange split in the tunnels that had called to him so strangely.

He had moved deep within the well of darkness, and when at last he could hear only his own breath and the pounding of his heart in his ear, he turned back. But as he approached that odd junction where he had hesitated the first time he had passed, at the head of the company, he again paused, sensing something ancient and compelling deep within the tunnel that moved downward.

It was a foolish risk, yet it was impossible for Calis to resist. He knew he should ensure the others got free, but he had faith in the cunning of de Loungville and the skills of Nakor.

And now he knew what had called him. There was something ancient at the heart of this hall. And he looked upon it with fear and astonishment.

He had taken the tunnel moving downward, following it through another gallery, smaller than the grand gallery they had climbed, yet large enough to have served as a small town. High above, a faint light shone down, so far away that the noon sun was but a pinpoint, yet that entrance, at the summit of some high mountain, told him his instinct was correct.

This ancient place had once been home to a Valheru, much as the great cavern below the Mac Mordain Cadal, the ancient dwarven mines in the Grey Tower Mountains, had been home to Ashen-Shugar, the Ruler of the Eagles' Reaches, the Valheru whose ancient spirit had come to possess his father and change his nature so profoundly.

Crossing a narrow stone bridge, he had come to a set of wooden doors large enough to admit a great dragon, and Calis knew that once they did, for the Dragon Lords kept their mighty mounts close at hand. In the door was a smaller portal one used by servants in ages past.

He had moved a heavy iron handle, and to his surprise it opened a latch easily and without noise. The door had swung open on hinges recently well oiled, and Calis blinked his eyes as the sudden light threatened to blind him.

At the end of the long cavernous hall, a ledge overlooked a vast cavern ablaze with torchlight; and in the center of the cavern a village of mud huts, crude and without craft in their fashioning, was constructed around a series of cracks. Steam rose, heralding an underground source of heat, and at the
center of the largest vent a heat shimmer danced in the air. As he had approached, Calis had been bewildered by the sudden rise in temperature. Where he had been feeling damp chill when he left the others, he was now sweating as much as he had been in the desert. The thermal vents showed that this Valheru hall was fashioned inside what had once been a volcano.

The air was pungent with the smell of decay and the stench of sulfur on the air. Calis felt his eyes burn at the sting of it as he looked down on the scene below.

Throughout the hall roamed serpent men, and at the center rear of the hall, on a high dais, a great throne rose against the wall. Upon that throne, where once sat a Dragon Lord, now sat one of their tribe, a creature of scales and claws, but its eyes were fixed upon space, for it was ages dead. The Pantathians nearest the motionless figure appeared to be priests, wearing vestments of green and black, and to the mummy of some ancient reptile king they paid homage.

Calis was no Spellweaver, but he felt the bite of magic in the air, and around the base of the throne he saw artifacts from eons past.

It was the presence of these items that caused him to suffer. He ached to march into the hall, brushing aside those creatures, and to mount those steps to the top of the dais, casting down this lesser creature, to take possession of the items of might that lay at its feet.

For Calis was certain these items were indeed relics of the Valheru. Never had his blood sung so, save once when his father had allowed him to hold the shield of white and gold he wore into battle.

Calis fought back such foolhardy urges and tried to make sense of the scene before him. It would be too easy to count this simply a Pantathian village, for there were too many strange things to account for; he wished Nakor was here—the little man's ability to see things clearly would have been invaluable.

As it was, Calis attempted to memorize every detail before him, drinking in the conflicting images and trying to record them in his mind without passing judgment on their significance, so as not to neglect an important detail through an error in judgment.

After a half hour, several human prisoners were brought into the hall. Most had the vacant-eyed look of those in shock or under some sort of spell or the effect of drugs, but one woman struggled against her chains. The priests ranged themselves in a line across the lowest step on the dais, and the centermost spread his hands, holding in one an emerald-topped staff.

He spoke in a hissing language unlike anything Calis had heard in his travels, and motioned to guards to take the prisoners and move them to another place. Calis wished for his bow, that he might kill this priest; then he wondered where such a violent rage came from.

Then the priest motioned for the first prisoner to be brought before the throne, and two guards moved to carry out the command. A series of ritual passes of the staff was punctuated by guttural croaks and deep hisses, and the emerald at the top of the staff began to glow brightly.

Death magic surged in the room as one of the guards held the first prisoner's head back, while another quickly struck with a long knife, cutting the
head completely from the body. Calis held himself motionless, despite strong anger surging up within. The guard threw the head into a corner, and Calis followed its flight, watching as it landed with a wet thud among a pile of heads, some rotting, others now skulls, that sat behind the throne.

The two serpents holding the man's body lifted it, carried it to a recessed chamber, and tossed it down out of sight. The screeches of hunger that answered caused Calis to swallow hard.

The woman who seemed unfazed by the drugs started screaming, and Calis felt his nerves grow taut. He clutched his sword hilt and ached to charge this den of monsters. One by one the drugged prisoners were slaughtered, their heads tossed to the pile after dark magics seized their life energy, and the bodies were fed to the Pantathian young.

The woman screamed continuously as she crouched on the floor, her terror outracing her fatigue. At last she remained alone before the priests. The priest with the emerald-topped staff motioned for the guards to take the woman next and they lifted her up, ripping her tunic free, so she stood naked in front of the priest, who ignored the warm sticky puddle he stepped in as he walked through the pooling blood of the victims.

Calis saw the priest motion the guards to hold the woman fast, and he saw them force her to lie back, holding her down while the priest began to make more motions with the staff and prod her with the butt end while singing in his alien tongue.

Calis felt his throat tighten. He had encountered the Pantathians' evil sorcery before. They were able to use humans to create Pantathians who looked like
humans. Calis had seen the results before and knew it was a powerful, black art being practiced below.

Calis was no student of magic, but he had some knowledge of it, and this next act was too vile for him to begin to understand. As the priest removed a long dagger from his robe and advanced upon the now shrieking woman, Calis looked away.

He judged himself too close to this place of dark magic for too long and moved backwards, slowly, into the gloom. A few paces up the passage, he turned, and hurried up the long tunnel. He quickly slipped through the door, closing it behind him, and paused a moment to let his senses start to adjust to the gloom.

As he paused, he considered what he had just seen. It was impossible to imagine what the Pantathians gained from the priest's slow torture of a human woman. He had no doubt that eventually the priest would kill the woman, and her head would join the others on the pile as her body went to nourish the young.

He wished for a moment that Nakor had been along, for the strange little man who claimed not to believe in magic seemed to know more about it than just about anyone Calis had met. He might make some sense of how this ritual torture and slaughter tied into what he feared might be occurring with the Emerald Queen and the Valheru artifacts of power.

Calis hurried through the darkness.

Without conscious thought, he started counting steps and measuring distances with his hearing, and he hoped that he'd find his company where he had left it.

De Loungville almost leaped when Calis touched his arm. He spun around to hear a familiar voice ask, “Where is everyone else?”

“Captain!” de Loungville said. “I was about to say a brief prayer to Ruthia and a small testimonial to Lims-Kragma on your behalf, then get the hell out of here.

“Now I can sit down and die of a burst heart!”

“Sorry I startled you, but I couldn't tell who it was here in the dark, and it smelled like you but I wanted to be sure.”

“Smelled like me . . . ?”

“It's been a while since you've had a bath, Bobby.”

“You're no bunch of roses either, Calis.”

“Have you a torch?”

To answer, De Loungville struck steel to flint and set a hot spark into the treated cotton wadding wrapped on a stick. The flame started modestly but spread quickly, and by the time de Loungville held it up, they were bathed in a pool of light.

“Call me mother, but you look a fright,” said de Loungville. “What did you find down there?”

“I'll tell you when we've put some distance between us and it. Which way?”

“We found a passage used by some serpent men, so I put Greylock in charge and sent the men in the other direction, to the left.”

“Good: that should mean they're on the surface by now. If we hurry, we can overtake them before they get too far down the hillside. We're a lot higher up than when we came in the tunnel, Bobby.”

“And a lot farther from where we want to be than we were when we started,” responded de Loungville.

“We'd better hurry. We have a long way to go.” Softly Calis added, “And I fear not that much time to get there.”

E
rik ducked
.

A shower of darts flew through the air and bounced off his shield as he tried to keep low to the ground. Since leaving the cavern and moving down through the hills to the grasslands, Nakor and Sho N had both claimed they were being observed.

When they had finally reached an area of broken rocks, islands of limestone, shale, and granite that broke up pools of tall grass, a sudden attack of the Gilani had greeted them. Six men died in the first assault, which was barely driven back by the heroic efforts of those in the forefront.

Greylock had quickly organized the defense, and the struggle had gone on for nearly a half day. Two more men had died as they retreated up the hillside, looking for this defensive position. Praji and Vaja had moved to the front, and were in council with Greylock as Erik approached.

“I've got everyone situated as best I could, Owen. We're taking a beating.”

“I know,” came the calm reply. He looked at Praji and said, “Any idea why they hit us?”