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.