Chapter Thirty-seven
The black ice walls of Arctis Tor were sixty feet thick, and walking through the gateway felt more like walking through a railroad tunnel.
Except for all the bones.
Every breath, every step, every rasp of bones rubbing against one another, multiplied into a thousand echoes that almost seemed to grow louder rather than fading away. The bones piled higher as I went, forcing me to walk atop them as best I could. The footing was treacherous. The deep green and violet, and occasionally red or green, pulses of luminance in the black ice walls did nothing to light the way. They only made the shadows shift and flow subtly, degrading my depth perception. I started feeling a little carsick.
If one of the fetches appeared at the far end of the tunnel and charged me, things would get nasty, and fast, especially given how ineffective my magic had been against them and how the bones had slowed my pace. That was more than a little spooky, and it was hard to keep myself from thrashing ahead more quickly out of pure fear. I kept a steady pace, held it in, and refused to allow it to control me.
I had been shielding my thoughts from Lasciel for a couple of years now. Damned if I was going to give a bunch of murderous faerie monsters the chance to paw through my emotions.
I checked behind me. Charity had trouble managing the awkward task of crawling over the bones while armored and holding that big old war hammer, but she stuck to it with grim focus and determination. Behind her, Murphy seemed to have far less trouble. Thomas prowled along at the rear, graceful as a panther in a tree.
I emerged from the gate into the courtyard. The inside of the fortress was bleak, cold, and beautiful in its simple symmetry. Rooms and chambers had either never been built or had been built into the walls and their entries hidden. Stairs led up to the battlements atop the walls. The courtyard was flat, smooth, dark ice, and at its center the single spire reared up from the ground, a round turret that rose to a crenellated parapet that overlooked the walls and the ground beneath.
The courtyard also held a sense of quiet stillness to it, as though it was not a place meant for living, moving, changing beings. The howl of the wind outside and overhead did not reach the ground. It was as silent as a librarian’s tomb, and each footstep sounded clearly on the ice. Echoes bounced back and forth in the courtyard, somehow carrying a tone of disapproval and menace with them.
Bones spilled out in a wave from the gate, rapidly tapering off after a few yards. Beyond that were only scattered groupings of bones. Thomas drifted over to one such and poked at it with his drawn saber. The blade scraped on a skull too big to stuff into an oil drum, too heavy and thick to look entirely human.
“What the hell was this?” Thomas asked quietly.
“Troll, probably,” I said. “Big one. Maybe fourteen, fifteen feet tall.” I looked around. Haifa dozen other enormous skulls lay in the scattered collections of remains. Another six had fallen very close to each other, at the base of the spire. “Give me a second. I want to know what we’re looking at before we move ahead.”
Charity looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she took up position a few yards off, watching one way. Thomas and Murphy spread out, each keeping their eyes on a different direction.
Mixed in with the fallen trolls’ bones were broken pieces of dark ice that might have been the jigsaw-puzzle remains of armor and weapons. Each fragment bore the remnants of ornate engraving employing gold, silver, and tiny blue jewels. Faerie artistry, and expensive artistry at that. “Thirteen of them. The trolls were Mab’s,” I murmured. “I saw some of them outfitted like this a couple of years back.”
“How long have they been dead?” Murphy asked quietly.
I grunted and hunkered down. I stretched my left hand out over the bones and closed my eyes, focusing my attention on sharpening my senses, mundane and magical alike. Very faintly, I could scent the heavy, bestial stink of a troll. I’d only seen a couple of the big ones from up close, but you could smell the ugly bastards from half a mile away. There was a rotten odor, more like heavy mulch than old meat. And there was more sulfur and brimstone.
Below that, I could feel tremors in the air over the spot, the psychic residue of the troll’s violent death. There was a sense of excitement, rage, and then a dull, seldom-felt terror and a rush of sharp, frozen images of violent death, confusion, terror, and searing agony.
My hand flinched back from the phantom sensation of its own accord, and for just a moment the memories of my burning took on tangible form. I hissed through my teeth and held my hand against my stomach, willing the too-real ghost of pain away.
“Harry?” Murphy asked.
What the hell? The impression the death had left was so sharp, so severe, that I had actually gotten bits of the troll’s memories. That had never happened to me before. Of course, I had never tried to pick up vibes in the Nevernever, either. It made more sense that the substance of the spirit world would leave a clearer spiritual impression.
“Harry?” Murphy said again, more sharply.
“I’m all right,” I said through clenched teeth. The imprint had been more clear than anything I had ever felt in the real world. In Chicago, I would have thought it was only a few seconds old. Here…
“I can’t tell how old they are,” I said. “My gut says not very, but I can’t be sure.”
“It must have been weeks,” Thomas said. “It takes that long for bones to get this clean.”
“It’s all relative,” I said. “Time can pass at different rates in Faerie. These bones could have fallen a thousand years ago, by the local clock. Or twenty minutes ago.”
Thomas muttered something under his breath and shook his head.
“What killed them, Harry?” Murphy asked.
“Fire. They were burned to death,” I said quietly. “Down to the bone.”
“Could you do that?” Thomas asked.
I shook my head. “I couldn’t make it that hot. Not at the heart of Winter.” Not even with Hellfire. The remains of perhaps a thousand creatures lay scattered about. I’d cut loose once in the past and roasted a bunch of vampires-and maybe some of their victims with them-but even that inferno hadn’t been big enough to catch more than a tithe of the fallen defenders of Arctis Tor.
“Then who did it?” Charity asked quietly.
I didn’t have an answer for her. I rose and nudged a smaller skull with my staff. “The littler ones were goblins,” I said. “Foot soldiers.” I rolled a troll-sized thighbone aside with my staff. An enormous sword, also of that same black ice, lay shattered beneath it. “These trolls were her personal guard.” I gestured back at the gate. “Covering her retreat to the tower, maybe. Some of them got taken down along the way. The others made a stand at the tower’s base. Died there.”
I paced around, checking what the tracking spell had to say, and triangulated again. “Molly’s in the tower,” I murmured.
“How do we get in?” Murphy asked.
I stared at the blank wall of the spire. “Um,” I said.
Charity glanced over my shoulder and nodded at the spire. “Look behind those trolls. If they were covering a retreat, they should be near the entrance to the tower.”
“Maybe,” I said. I walked over to the tower and frowned at the black ice. I ran my right hand over its surface, feeling for cracks or evidence of a hidden doorway, my senses tuned to discover any magic that might hide a door. I had the sudden impression that the black ice and the slowly pulsing colors inside were somehow alive, aware of me. And they did not like me at all. I got a sense of alien hatred, cold and patient. Otherwise, I got nothing for my trouble but half-frozen fingers.