Perhaps soon, in the hills above Caldeum, he would get his chance.
There was evil here.
Mikulov sensed it, hovering somewhere out of sight. The wind whispered it to him as the sun’s rays gave a momentary pulse of heat. The lizards scurried to safety, puffs of dust marking their passage.
With a breath of air, the gods instructed him to look up. Far above his head, carried by the hot winds rising from the desert, black birds were circling.
A sense of great danger overwhelmed him. The ground ahead offered him shelter. He slipped between two large slabs of rock and into a dark, shadowed crevice, away from prying eyes.
The air was even warmer in here, and the crevice ran deeper into the hill than he had thought. Mikulov advanced slowly as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. His sense of menace had not subsided once he had entered the narrow cave. In fact, it had gotten worse, and as he moved ahead, he felt his consciousness expand, a dreamlike haze falling over his heightened senses.
Before him he found a set of ancient, rough-hewn steps descending into the darkness, and he began to walk down, his hands out before him, feeling the moist air. Thick, rope-like cobwebs brushed his face. There was some light coming from below, enough for him to see, and the walls fell away from him as he continued, so that he had the sense of entering a vast, open cavern far below the surface. There were both great wonders and terrible dangers down here, an entire world underground, and he thought of giant spiders spinning webs across piles of rotting corpses, lurking in the shadows of dusty alcoves with a thousand glittering eyes and fangs bared and dripping, waiting for fresh blood.
The stairs seemed to continue forever. Mikulov lost track of how long he had been descending, and stopped wondering where the walls and ceiling of the cavern had gone. He had the feeling that far above him stretched a night sky littered with stars—not the sky of his own world, but that of another dimension or time. The gods would speak to him through this canopy of stars and show him the way to salvation. Somewhere below he would find the answers to all that he had been searching for, but he knew those answers could destroy Sanctuary.
He looked below and saw a wagon wheel of old, leaning buildings, the ground littered with fallen stones, silent and still, with dusty, broken streets running like spokes in all directions, and sensed that among the shadowy corners and forgotten rooms lay moldering corpses, their bony, empty sockets staring lifelessly ahead for time without end.
The lost city.
Mikulov slipped on silent feet through a crumbling stone arch. The city stretched before him, as if frozen for eternity as it had fallen, centuries before. A temple loomed to his left, its doorway open and pitch-black. Beyond it was a wide boulevard that had cracked in two, and the crevasse that yawned like a toothless mouth was glowing, as if the fires of Hell were beneath it.
Something moved in the shadows of the temple.
Mikulov glanced at the open doorway. For a moment, nothing happened, and then, moving with strange, jerking steps like a toddler just learning to walk, a creature emerged from the darkness.
It was human, or had been once. What little clothing remained hung like ribbons from the creature’s shoulders. Shards of gleaming white bone thrust through strings of leathery flesh. Its face was little more than a skull with wisps of hair and skin and grinning teeth, but it stared forward and then turned back and forth as if searching blindly for something.
It paused, its empty eye sockets focused on Mikulov.
As it stood outside the temple, another emerged from the dark, this one with more shriveled meat on its bones, then another and another. Mikulov turned to see other corpses gathering all around him, lurching forward with bony hands up and grasping. He turned back, but more had gathered behind him, cutting off the stairs to safety, and as he stood there in shock, he could hear the thunderous sound of thousands of skeletal feet marching through the streets, just out of sight.
Mikulov darted through the closest of the risen dead, feeling their cold bone-fingers kissing his shoulders before he slipped beyond them and ran ahead. As he approached the wide boulevard, he heard a shout and saw a group of people surrounded by horrible, ghoulish creatures that scampered upon all fours like dogs, their flesh pale and withered, their balding skulls gleaming. The people were cornered, their backs against the stone wall of a building. There were about six of them, one taller and thinner than the rest, his long, white hair wild around his face.
Deckard Cain.
Mikulov stood helplessly as the creatures closed in on the small circle. More of them approached on all sides, too many to count. Just beyond them stood a shadowy figure in a black robe, his features hooded. The Dark One.
The creatures fell upon the group. A thin, high scream cut through the noise of marching feet, the sound of a little girl in terror.
Mikulov ran forward as the ground began to shake, and stopped short as the crevasse before him suddenly widened. Something gigantic began to climb out of it, monstrous, armor-plated claws rising up and bracing it on both sides and a three-horned head emerging with yellow eyes burning like pools of fire. The creature rose up and towered before him, impossibly huge, more eyes opening like glowing orbs, shining like the fires of Hell itself, and its gaping maw opened, showing bone-teeth in a glistening jaw.
There was no use in fighting such a thing. He averted his eyes. The sound of deep, jarring laughter brought him to his knees as he waited for it to descend upon him.
The feeling of rough stone beneath him brought him back with a sudden jerk, and Mikulov found himself staring at a blank wall. For a long moment, he kneeled, motionless; the heat of the narrow cave he had entered was oppressive, making it difficult to breathe.
He gathered himself, got to his feet and glanced around. The cave was no more than ten feet long, and ended abruptly. There were no stairs, no cavern beneath him. Nothing he had seen was real.
Mikulov closed his eyes, seeking peace. As the images faded, he began to feel the gods once again: the whisper of sand across rock, the cry of a small animal in the distance, the heat on his skin. He allowed his pulse to return to normal.
The vision had been stronger than any that had come before it. He pondered its purpose. The gods had shown him this for a reason, but he did not know whether what he had seen would come to pass, or whether it had a different meaning that they required him to understand. Surely such a cursed place did not actually exist, and the creature that had loomed over him was so terrible it could not be flesh and blood. The thing’s laughter, the evil in its burning eyes remained with him even now, and he could not shake them.
Finally he opened his eyes. The narrow cave was still there, the walls still solid and eternal. Mikulov ducked back through the opening and into the scorching sun, looking up at the cloudless sky. Through the rippling heat, he could see that the birds had gone. His sense of immediate danger had passed. But a fresh feeling of urgency drove him forward.
His back itched where the tattoo that marked all Ivgorod monks extended from his neck halfway down his body. When he died, this tattoo would tell his life story through the eyes of the gods. He prayed it would reveal a victory against the plague that would soon descend upon Sanctuary, and that he would live long enough to see its completion.
But he would need help in the battle, from those who had fought such a plague before. If there were any Horadrim left, Deckard Cain would know how to find them. The little girl would play a central role as well; the prophecies had foretold it, but they spoke only of her strange power, and did not say how it would be wielded.
One thing was clear: he had little time left now. Ratham was nearly upon them, and the Dark One was preparing to strike.