The Labyrinth of the Dead (14 page)

"No!" Portia followed with a few sweeps
of her wings. "Damn it!"

"Portia, my lady!" Lahash
bellowed after her. "Where do you lead?"

"Excuse me?"

"We seek revenge upon this creature
that has taken our queen from us. Where do you lead us in retribution?"

Portia paused. "Lead you?"

"Yes." Lahash
lowered his eyes. "We will follow you. Tell us what we must do to stop this
creature and we shall obey." He touched his breastplate with his closed fist.

Although she doubted his sincerity, she
accepted his oath. "To the sanctuary."

Lahash nodded. "We will meet you there." He took up the
twisted horn that hung from his belt and blew a shrill, cutting note that
mobilized the reapers and herders.

"Captain Lahash,
once you and yours have dispatched the usurper, will you then turn your blades
on me?"

The question
caught him off guard, she could tell. He offered her a grim smile and a shrug.
"No one can truly see the future, Lady Portia."

"Got it." She wheeled away from them,
striving to catch Kanika.

Fissures cracked the landscape from one
side of the island to the other. Salus was slowly collapsing in on itself. The
tremors had not let up and were worsening by the minute.

Kanika was nowhere in sight.
Frustrated, Portia waited near the wrought iron gate for the rest of the demon
army to arrive.

Lahash arrived, his troops bearing one of the broken
doors of the palace to lay across the stream. Two herders reached with their
sinewy hands and chattered to one another, and then to Lahash.

"What are they saying?" Portia asked
him.

"The wards are still down," he
translated. They whistled and clicked. "More than down, broken." Lahash paused, thoughtful. "The girl, Kanika. She
accompanied you at the behest of the queen. She was here. In the sanctuary."
The sense of wonder in his voice alerted Portia at once.

"Kanika? Yes, she came with me." Portia
remembered the girl’s reticence, how she had all but dragged her into the
sacred area. She had felt the ward when she had stepped through, but somehow
Kanika had injured the protective spell. "She broke the ward. She allowed you
and your men to follow us."

"We are banned from this place. But
when you invited Kanika inside, it opened a path for the rest of us."

Portia looked around, the weight of
guilt beginning to press hard on her chest. At the sanctuary’s boundary, the
grass was already dying back into black curls as the vile gloom of Salus
encroached into the sacred space.

"I did this," she whispered, "and now
Nigel has full access to every inch of this place." Beyond the splinters that
had once been an elegant bridge, a bright light shone through the obscuring
mists that protected the heart of the sanctuary. "The tower. It is the key to
this. All the soul-lights shot straight for it, and it is where Imogen is being
kept. What was Belial’s intent with the tower? How is it tied to the rift
engine?"

Lahash squinted into the fog beyond the hedgemaze. "Tower?"

"See, there?" Portia pointed. "How did
this place play into her plans, Lahash?"

A membrane slid across his reptilian
eyes, then retracted. He nodded. "I see it now, but I am not certain about her
intentions. I only knew she meant to open a gateway between this place and the
living world. She has allies there in your world, powerful necromancers. The
Aldias, they are called. They had struck a bargain, but I do not know what it
entailed."

Portia sighed and pinched the bridge of
her nose. "Of course. So help me, if I live through this, I am going to purge
every last one of those traitors from this earth." She turned to Lahash. "Lay the bridge. Bring a flame-thrower, if you have
one. We won’t have time to fuss with that hedgemaze
they have."

The commander barked out the orders.
Reapers and herders swarmed to comply, arranging the heavy bronze door over the
remains of the bridge and the bodies of their compatriots.

When satisfied with their work, Lahash made a nod to her. "Lead on, Lady Portia."

"Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d
rather walk beside you. That way, I won’t leave my back exposed to your knife."

—9—

THE SMOLDERING remains of the fine hedge maze broke
Portia’s heart. The sweet grey smoke soon mingled with the acrid black plumes
that roiled into the sky out of the gashes in the ground around the sanctuary.
The fissures had broken apart the soft turf, sending clumps of dying sod into
the steaming metal entrails of the island. Glass tubes ran through the ground
beneath them with flashes of light blinking through them, coming faster and
closer together. They all converged at the base of the tower.

"Souls, or the remnants thereof." Lahash indicated the small spheres of light. "Amazing how
they still shine."

"After having been consumed, portioned
off, pressed into gold, and burned like coal. It is rather something," Portia
agreed bitterly. They gazed down into the gash and Portia felt the coin that
hung from the axe press against her hand. She opened her palm and took the coin
into it, closing her fingers around the small comfort it offered. There was
something of Imogen there; she could feel it. It both gave her peace and
sickened her at once.

The tower’s light burned steadily
brighter as it absorbed each soul sphere jetting into it.

"What becomes of them here, then? If
they are not bricks or lampposts or chairs or what have you."

"Fuel. The inferior souls, the
fractured, the mad, the children, they were always burned for fuel to keep the
island floating. I can only imagine they provide the catalyst for the machine."

A quake rocked them nearly off their
feet, but the land directly below remained solid and sturdy. They retreated
from the edge of the rifts nonetheless and advanced on the shining tower
itself. As they crossed one of four ornate bridges into the inner garden, the
sky cleared into a pristine blue and the air smelled sweetly of summer breezes,
ocean mists, and just the faintest hint of lilies.

The tower remained pristine and looked
just as Portia remembered from her brief visit there. Whatever magic protected
this most sacred area, it still functioned and seemed to thrive on the influx
of soul fragments being pumped into it. Although the chug of the engines could
no longer be heard, the strange and chiming hum was stronger here.

The herders hesitantly moved ahead,
issuing commands amongst themselves and their hounds by a series of clicks,
huffs, and whistles. In the sparkling light, Portia could see the subtle
differences in their faceplates and telescopic eyes—many were brass, others
copper, and some were pewter. The flesh around each protuberance was puckered
with scars, some far newer than others. As one of them returned to make report,
Portia could see herself reflected in the convex lens before it blinked and the
herder turned its face away. It brought its hands up, and Portia saw the bare
muscle pulsing, almost writhing around the finger bones. It pointed to the
tower reaching high into the filmy clouds.

Portia nodded and bid it follow her,
but the creature recoiled.

"You must. If this is going to succeed,
I’ll need you all."

It shook its head.

"Do you want to save your queen or
don’t you?"

Lahash cuffed the herder. "Do as she says!"

A muffled cry sang through the grating
of its faceplate; it could have been words. Losing his patience, Lahash ripped the brass plate from the creature’s mouth,
disgorging a slurry of thick saliva and blood. The herder’s jaws had been cut
away, leaving the interior of the mouth gaping and lipless. A lolling tongue
flapped in that toothless maw like a dying fish.

"
Annn-errrrr
,"
the herder moaned.

"Danger? You’re warning us of
danger
?
Where have you been this entire time?" Lahash’s black
dagger had sliced the pitiful thing’s throat and was returned to its sheath
before Portia could even react.

"Damn it, Lahash!
What do you think you’re doing?" Portia threw him aside, knocking him hard to
the grass.

The herder sank to the verdant ground
with a sigh that sounded almost relieved. The monocle telescope clicked into
focus and Portia saw her face in it once again. "
Nnnnn-iiiiii-eeee-lllllll
,"
it said with what little air remained to it.

"Nigel?" Portia prompted, kneeling
beside the creature.

The nod was minute. "
Nn-ii-ee-ll annn-errrr
." It jerked and
the telescope lost focus, its life ending with only a few quiet clicks.

"You idiot!" Portia rose and rounded on
the commander. He still sat in the grass, rubbing his shoulder where she had
hit him. "It could have told us something useful!"

"Then ask the rest," Lahash snarled. "Damn lot of them click at each other like
cockroaches. What one knows they all know."

Portia took him by the throat and
lifted him from the ground with little effort. "You are not helping. Either you
start helping, or I am going to make sure that you don’t interfere with my
plans again. Is that clear?"

He said nothing, but averted his eyes.
Portia dropped him and turned to the remaining herders. They retreated from her
anger, faces cast away, telescopes whirring furiously into a closed position
before clamping shut.

"Ridiculous! Will not one of you give
me any more information?" She threw up her hands as they shied from her. "Then
I suppose we’ll just have to do this the hard way. Now get over there and
investigate, damn it." The herders hesitated, but she took one by its shoulders
and, turning it toward the tower, gave it a definitive push. "Go!"

The herders slowly shuffled their way
toward the tower, hands outstretched and telescopes clicking. The reapers did
not follow them; instead, they looked nervously between Portia and Lahash.

"After you, my lady." The commander
bowed, a mocking grin curving his thin lips.

Portia bristled. "I hope my axe blade
is the last thing you ever see."

Lahash shrugged. "Suit yourself."

* * * *

The sanctuary tower looked as if it had been carved
out of a single opal. The walls were translucent and shimmering with a thousand
colors. Even Lahash had to pause to marvel at it. The
receiving antechamber on the ground floor was empty, but a circular staircase
climbed the wall to their right. Portia started up the stairs, leaving the
others a few yards behind as they negotiated the small space with their armor
and weapons. She could not be bothered to care.

Portia’s breastbone throbbed
incessantly now, a sensation nearly unbearable, and she scratched at it
furiously.

Every few turns, the narrow stairs
opened onto a spacious floor. Most contained couches and clusters of thick,
tasseled cushions on the floor. Others held beds draped with gauzy curtains,
but most had simple furnishings and smelled of incense. The whole place had a
monastic feel about it. In every room she came to, Portia scanned for signs of
Imogen, even just a stray red hair littering the pristine floor. But she saw
nothing and had no time to search. She climbed on, her soul beginning to feel
weary as at every turn there were always more stairs, but her legs never
flagged in their strength. The tower was unendingly high. Portia all but
stumbled into the last room, a sprawling chamber with an arched, clear crystal
ceiling bounded on all sides by an ivory balcony.

There were maybe a dozen women there,
dressed in long white gowns and draped in lace veils that hung to their hems.
They knelt before the young woman who had perched herself on a low couch.
Kanika wore her power in a shimmering mantle that hung all about her, streaming
down her back and pooling around her like a physical thing. Portia had to
remind herself that Nigel controlled the girl now, wholly and entirely.

Behind the couch, a woman stood with
head bowed and hands bound before her in chains that ran up under her veil and
encircled her neck. Portia recognized her amber flesh. Celestine, the abbess.
Beside the couch huddled another woman, smaller in stature and paler of flesh,
one of the many veiled maidens of the sanctuary. Her head drooped, defeated,
and Kanika petted her idly.

The other veiled women shied from the
intrusion, and Portia immediately looked for Imogen among them.

"You are so focused, my sweet sister,
so devoted," Kanika murmured in a voice that sounded like her own but was
riddled with Nigel’s inflections.

"I am not here for you. I am only here
for her."

"And I am here because of you both.
There is still time, my dearest sister, still a chance to help me in this
endeavor. We three could rule this world and that of the living. Think of that.
No more hiding in shadows, no more taking orders from the clandestine Primacy.
We would be the governors of our own fates." Kanika sat up with a cat’s smile,
twiddling a pair of chains. One was connected to Celestine, but the other
snaked away from the couch and along the floor. The coin shivered toward it and
the heat in Portia’s chest answered.

Portia tried to follow it with her
eyes, but it was obscured among the veils of the frightened spirits before her.
Imogen could not be among these cringing ingénues. She could never bend her
head in supplication to Nigel, no matter whose face he wore.

The tower shivered, and the corona of
light above them increased in intensity.

"Nigel—"

"Oh, call me Kanika. You say that name
with such love. Such love that it made me begin to question your dedication to
your lover. Does she know how precious I have become to you, Portia darling?"

"Kanika was just a girl who needed
Gyony protection. Is she lost to us now? That poor sweet child?"

"Not so sweet as you might imagine.
There was a reason her soul was easy to snatch, to melt and remold, to carry my
spirit within it instead. Kanika was no innocent, I assure you."