Murad appeared undecided for a moment; clearly, he had had his heart set on a fighting escape. He was still wound up too tightly; they all were. A spark would set them off and they would die here with the questions un-answered, and that was intolerable.
“All right, we’ll let the imp go,” Murad conceded at last.
Bardolin let out a sigh. He was utterly tired. He felt sometimes that this land had fastened on him like a succubus and would feed off him until there was nothing left but a withered husk that would blow away to ash in the wind. Soothsaying was not one of his Disciplines, and yet the presentiment had been upon him ever since they had made landfall that there was something deadly to the ship’s company and to the world they had left behind, and it resided here, on this continent. If they escaped they would take it back to the old world with them like a disease which clung to their clothing and nestled in their blood. Like the rats which scurried in the darkness of the ship’s hold.
He bent to the bewildered imp, stroking it.
“Time to go, my little friend.” Can you see the way out, up there in the wall? Up you go. Yes! That’s it. Where the last of the daylight is coming through.
The imp was peering through the narrow aperture in the wall. The entire company watched it in silence.
“I may leave you for some time,” Bardolin told them. “But don’t be alarmed. I am travelling with the imp. I will return. In the meantime, stand fast.”
Murad said something in reply, but he was already gone. The world had become a vaster place in the wink of an eye, and the very quality of Bardolin’s sight had changed. The imp’s eyes operated in a different spectrum of colours: to it the world was a multivaried blend of greens and golds, some so bright they hurt to look at. Stone walls were not merely a blank façade, but their warmth and thickness produced different shadows, glowing outlines.
The imp looked back once, down at the silent room full of men, and then it was through the high, narrow window. It was hungry and would have liked to share in the meats that had been laid out for the company, but its master’s will was working in it. It did as it was told.
Indeed, in some ways Bardolin became the imp. He felt its appetites and fears, he experienced the sensation of the rough tufa blocks under his hands and feet, he heard the noises of the city and the jungle with an enhanced clarity that was almost unbearable until he became used to it.
The rain had ended, and the city was a dripping, steam-shrouded place, fogged as a dawn riverbank. The light was dimmer than it should be; the crater sides would cut out much of the light in the later afternoon.
What to make of this hidden city? The volcanic stone of the buildings was dark and cold, but the lambent, upright figures of people were about—not many of them now—and a single crescent slice of sunshine glowed like molten silver way up on the side of the crater: the last of the departing sun. Soon night would settle. Best to wait a few minutes.
Something else, though. A . . . smell which seemed tantalizingly familiar.
The imp clambered down the side of the high wall like a fly, head-first. It reached the ground and scampered into a cooler place of deeper shadow, an alleyway it might have been called in Abrusio. There it crouched and breathed in the air of the dying day.
The daylight sank as though someone had slowly covered a great lamp somewhere beyond the horizon of the world. It was actually possible to see the growing of the night as a palpable thing. In minutes the city had sunk into darkness.
But not darkness to the imp. Its eyes began to glow in the murk of the alley and its vision grew sharper.
Still, that smell somewhere, hauntingly reminiscent of something from the past.
To our duty, my diminutive friend, Bardolin’s mind gently prodded as the imp crouched puzzled and fascinated in the humid shadow.
It obeyed the urging of a mind that was moment by moment becoming one with it. Obediently it scuttled around the side of the house which imprisoned the company, looking for the front door, another window, any means of entry or egress.
There were things moving in the streets of the city. To the imp they were sudden dazzling brightnesses darting in and out of sight. It was the heat of their bodies that made them so luminous. The imp whimpered, wanted to hide. Bardolin had to sink more of his will into it in order to keep it under his command.
There—the door they had entered the place by. It was closed, but there was no sign of Kersik, Gosa or the beast-headed guards. The imp sidled over to it, listened and heard Murad’s voice within. It chuckled to itself with an amusement that was part Bardolin’s, and set one glowing eye to the crack at the door’s foot. No lights, no warmth of a waiting body.
Push at the door, Bardolin told it, but before it could do as it was told it felt a growing heat behind it, the hot breath of some living thing. It spun around in alarm.
A man might have seen a tall, bulking shadow looming over him, with two yellow lights burning and blinking like eyes. But the imp saw a brightness like the sun, the effulgence of a huge, beating heart in the bony network of the chest. It saw the heat rising off the thing in shimmering waves of light. And as the mouth opened, it seemed to breathe fire, a smoking calefaction that scorched the imp’s clammy skin.
“Well met, Brother Mage,” a voice said, distorted, bestial but nonetheless recognizable. “You are ingenious, but predictable. I suppose you had no choice: that festering pustulence of a nobleman would have left you no other options.”
The thing was a massively built ape, a mandrill, but it spoke with the voice of Gosa.
“Come. We have kept you waiting long enough. Time to meet the master.”
A huge paw swept down and scooped up the imp even as it leapt for freedom. The were-ape that was Gosa laughed, a sound like the whooping beat of a monkey’s cry but with a rationality behind it that was horrible to hear. The imp was crushed to the thing’s shaggy breast, choking at the vile heat, the stench of the shifter which it had smelled but not quite recognized. It had been confused by memories of Griella, the girl who had been a werewolf and who had died before they had set foot on this continent. It had not recognized the peril close by.
The were-ape limbered off at speed, its free hand bounding it forward whilst the short back legs pushed out, a rocking movement which seemed to gather momentum. Bardolin saw that his familiar was being taken towards the stepped pyramid at the heart of the city.
They passed other creatures in the streets: shifters of all kinds, nightmarish beasts that reeked of Dweomer, warped animals and men. Undi at night was a masque of travesties, a theatre of the grotesque and the unholy. Bardolin was reminded of the paintings in the little houses of worship in the Hebros, where the folk were still pagan at heart. Pictures of hell depicting the Devil as master of a monstrous circus, a carnival of the misshapen and the daemonic. The streets of Undi were full of capering fiends.
He should withdraw now, leave the imp to its fate and slip back into his own body, rejoin the others and warn them of what was waiting for them outside the walls of the house in which they were imprisoned. But somehow he could not, not yet. Two things kept him looking out of the imp’s eyes and feeling its terror: one, he felt nothing but stark fear at the thought of abandoning his familiar, and with it a goodly portion of his own spirit and strength; the other was nothing more or less than sheer curiosity, which even in the midst of his fear kept him drinking in the sights of the nocturnal city through the imp’s eyes. He was being taken to someone who perhaps knew all the answers, and as Murad hungered after power so Bardolin thirsted for information. He would remain in the imp’s consciousness a little longer. He would see what was at the heart of this place. He would know.