The Empire's Ruin, page 80
“It’s inside me,” she said quietly.
He nodded.
“But there’s a … a cure, right? Up at the fortress? Some Csestriim potion that can fix it?”
“It is not a potion, and it is not a cure. If the artifact is there, however, it can hold the sickness at bay.”
She dragged herself abruptly to her feet. “Then let’s get moving.”
With the sudden motion a wave of dizziness washed over her, followed by nausea, then a stab of hunger. For a moment, the scents of the others eclipsed all thought—the dried sweat on their skin, the reek of unwashed flesh, the blood crusted over their wounds.…
“The hunger is not you,” Kiel said quietly.
Gwenna blinked, turned her attention back to the historian, nodded.
“You must hold it at bay until we reach the pass, the fortress.”
“Jonon didn’t.”
“Jonon didn’t try. He chose the sickness. He embraced it.”
“So…” She trailed off. “What am I supposed to do?” Her voice sounded like ash.
“You already know the answer to that question.”
“Fight,” she said wearily. “Keep fighting.”
Kiel nodded.
“Is that ever not going to be the answer?”
“Perhaps someday.”
“But not today.”
“No,” the historian replied. “Not today.”
* * *
“Come on,” Gwenna said, hoisting Rat up onto her shoulders. “Stop arguing and ride on my shoulders.”
“Can walk,” Rat protested, but that was just the last dregs of the girl’s stubbornness talking. She’d been stumbling most of the afternoon, tripping over stones, muttering what must have been curses in her own language.
“You can walk later,” Gwenna said, shifting the weight, starting up the slope once more.
It should have felt terrible. The ravine had only grown steeper. Massive boulders choked the defile—some the size of dogs, horses, hay carts—forcing Gwenna and the others to scramble rather than hike. Rat weighed as much as a bushel of grain, and Gwenna had her own pack to deal with as well. They were almost out of food, but the kettral eggs were heavier than they looked, each one like a smooth granite stone. The added burden should have turned every step into agony, but she had grown stronger since the bite of the gabhya. Her body hungered to hurl itself against the world. She was still aware, in a vague way, that her lower back ached, that her thighs and calves throbbed with every step, that the thin, frigid mountain air left her gasping like a fish plucked from the river, but she found herself enjoying that pain, seeking it out, devouring it.
Better to devour that than something else. Better attacking her own exhaustion than the people around her.
The burning in her calf had subsided, dispersing through her body until she felt it everywhere, an almost-itch just beneath the skin. It reminded her of a terrible rash she’d had as a child. For almost a week she’d scratched herself raw, bloody, despite the admonitions of her brothers, had soaked her sheets in blood, and sweat, and pus. This was like that, except there was nothing to scratch. Her skin looked normal—tan after so many days in the sun, freckled. Nothing to indicate the infection coursing beneath.
Fight it, Kiel said, but she had no idea how to fight it, and so she just kept doing what she knew how to do: moving forward, moving up, carrying Rat on her back, laboring on, pouring herself into the work, as though by climbing she might drag herself out of the sickness, the madness, the past.
Kiel’s voice broke into her thoughts.
“It was here.”
She stopped, scrubbed the sweat from her brow with one hand, steadied herself against the side of the canyon, looked up.
She’d been so intent on her footing that she hadn’t realized that they’d climbed nearly to the saddle. The ground had begun to level off. Another few hundred paces and they’d be up and over the mountain pass, over the spine of the continent.
There was no fortress.
Despair stabbed through her. She’d never really expected to find some Csestriim ruin. Too much time had passed. Too many millennia. And yet, the historian had seemed so confident. He’d been right so many times before that she’d dared to hope.…
She slipped Rat roughly from her shoulders, rounded on Kiel.
“Where is it?” she hissed.
She was vaguely aware of the others eyeing her warily. She’d spoken to none of them about the bite, about the infection consuming her, but they’d been there for the fight, they could see the blood bathing her ankle.
“Where is the cure?” she demanded once more.
Pattick’s face was a mask of confusion. Cho Lu had dropped back, the way one might in front of a rabid dog. Everything about their postures screamed concern. Despite the breeze, the mountain air stank with their newly kindled fear.
“Gwenna Sharpe?” Rat asked.
“You are sick,” Dhar said, his weathered face grave. “The bite of the gabhya.”
She strangled the impulse to lash out at him, to cut him down before he could warn the others.
“Yes.”
Pattick staggered back half a step, as though he’d been struck.
“There may be a remedy inside the fortress,” Kiel interjected quietly.
Gwenna turned in a slow circle, her arms outstretched. To either side of the canyon the stone walls climbed up and up in sweeps of white-gray limestone smoothed by the weather and water, soaring to peaks hundreds of paces above their heads. A formidable spot for a fortress. A dozen good soldiers would have been able to hold a wall built across the narrow gorge. If anyone had thought to build a wall. Which they had not.
“No fortress,” Bhuma Dhar said, frowning through his mustache.
“Could be the wrong pass,” Cho Lu suggested. He had his hand on his sword.
The posture made Gwenna itch. For a moment she closed her eyes, listened to the blood throbbing in the soldier’s veins. When she opened them, she stared for a while at the artery just beneath the dirty curve of his neck. Did he actually think he could fight her? She half choked on a laugh.
“You need to go,” she whispered. “All of you.”
“Go where?” Pattick asked. He pointed back the way they had come. “There’s a storm rolling up on us.”
She’d been so focused on herself that she hadn’t noticed the clouds piling up the canyon below.
“I don’t give a limp fuck where,” she snarled. “But you need to get away from me.”
“No,” Rat declared, taking her by the hand.
Gwenna ripped free of the girl’s grip. “Don’t touch me.” A shudder ran through her, awful and delicious. With an effort of will she harnessed her rage, forced herself to speak slowly, enunciating the words. “Do not touch me.”
Cho Lu put a protective arm around Rat’s shoulders, but the girl shook him off. Tears stood in her eyes.
“Gwenna. Sharpe.”
“Here,” Kiel said.
Gwenna spun to find him standing at the canyon wall, his palm pressed to the stone. After a moment, he shifted his hand a few inches, nodded, then closed his eyes and began to sing.
It sounded like a song, at least, until Gwenna realized it was just a single note, low and wide, held far longer than she would have thought possible, rasping over the rock, echoing back off the canyon walls. Then, just when she thought he must be about to run out of breath, he laid another note atop the first. She stared. She’d never heard anyone sing two notes at the same time, but Kiel was already adding a third, high and strange, well above the other two. The chord stretched on and on, grating against the sky and stone, longer than any breath Gwenna had ever held.
And then, with the satisfying click of something falling neatly into place, a section of stone swung open on silent hinges.
Pattick recoiled, sketched the circle of the Annurian sun with one hand while he fumbled for his blade with the other. “You’re a leach.”
Kiel shook his head. “No.”
“That’s some kind of kenning,” the legionary insisted. “I saw it.”
“Not magic,” the historian replied. “Technology.” He gestured.
The door was thick as Gwenna’s arm was long, hung from hinges that seemed too slight to support its weight. They gleamed like just-polished silver. A complex mechanism—all gears and rods—was built into the door’s back.
“It is a harmonic lock,” Kiel said.
Cho Lu stared into the darkened doorway. “Which means what?”
“It responds to a very specific set of frequencies. Notes.”
Bhuma Dhar studied him. “How do you know these things?”
Kiel smiled. “It is a historian’s business to know.”
Hope lurched to its feet in Gwenna’s heart, a sick animal stumbling dumbly forward.
She ran a hand over the inside of the doorway. She’d studied a lot of masonry in her life—a big part of blowing things up involved understanding how they’d been made in the first place. She’d gone over towers and turrets, curtain walls and keeps, bridges and buttresses everywhere from Freeport to the Waist, but she’d never encountered work like this. The cut stone was smooth as glass, beveled to fit flush with the frame. As rock went, limestone was soft. After ten thousand years there should have been some erosion where water seeped into the crack, staining where it ate away at the minerals. The door and its frame, however, might have been cut by a jeweler only the day before.
She gazed up at the cliff towering above them.
“The mountain is the fortress.”
Kiel nodded.
“Why?” Dhar asked.
“It was once a place of learning, then, later, a bulwark against great danger.”
“Yeah,” Gwenna said. “Well. I guess that didn’t work out.”
“Why do you guess that?”
A vision of the Csestriim swept through her, bodies shattered across the rock of the pass, broken open, ropes of intestine gleaming in the sunlight.…
“Because everyone who built it is dead.”
* * *
Cho Lu peered into the darkness of the narrow passageway. “How do we know there’s nothing in there?”
“As Commander Sharpe observed, the inhabitants of this place died long, long ago,” Kiel replied.
“Yeah, but I mean, new inhabitants. More stuff with too many faces and not enough eyes.”
The historian gestured to the lock. “Unless the gabhya have learned to sing, it should be safe enough.”
“Safe enough.” Bhuma Dhar frowned. “This is a phrase I have come to distrust.”
As they moved down the corridor, Gwenna imagined the weight of the mountain pressing down from above, squeezing, crushing. Her breath felt heavy in her lungs. She could hear the others half panting, still winded from the long climb up the mountain.
This is a place where people die.
The thought didn’t feel like her own, but no one had spoken.
After maybe a dozen paces, the passage opened into a large, circular room, domed, maybe a dozen paces across. She had expected darkness inside, an absolute tomb-blackness. Instead, she found the air suffused with a cool, weak, watery light. Motes of dust floated silent and weightless in the chill space. It felt almost as though she’d stepped underwater. It took her a few moments to locate the source of the light: glowing stones, each one a pace across, set into the ceiling of the antechamber in which they stood.
“This has to be a kenning,” Pattick murmured, following her gaze.
“Just daylight,” Kiel replied, “filtered and focused from high above through lenses and shafts of something like glass.”
“Something like glass,” Dhar repeated quietly.
Gwenna squinted, tried to imagine the artificial veins built into the heart of the mountain, the engineering that would require. The science. The patience.
“How the fuck did we ever defeat them?” she muttered.
“The Csestriim?” Pattick asked.
Kiel stared up into the blue-gray light. “That,” he replied after a long pause, “is one of the great questions of history.”
The soldier followed the historian’s gaze. “This is from those wars?” Awe hushed his voice. “From the wars between the humans and the Csestriim?”
“It is older. Far older.”
“If it wasn’t built to fight humans, then what?”
“Initially it was not built for fighting at all.”
Pattick shook his head. “Then why the hidden door? Why carve it into a mountain?”
“You have been hunting?” Kiel asked.
“We used to go for ducks. Take them on the wing with short bows.”
“Did you hunt from a blind?”
Pattick nodded. “My sister and brother built one at the edge of the marsh. Not much of a thing, just some reeds tacked up over the timber, enough to hide us from…” He trailed off, eyes going wide.
“This place was called Oztoc in the Csestriim tongue. It means the Blind.”
“This is no structure of reeds and timber,” Dhar observed. “What were they hunting?”
“Gabhya?” Pattick whispered.
Kiel shook his head. “Something a good deal deadlier than gabhya. The Csestriim who built the Blind had come here to hunt Nevariim.”
Rat half flinched at the word. When Gwenna glanced down, she found the girl’s small face twisted into a snarl.
Cho Lu forced a laugh. “Not the same skull-collectors from Rat’s hometown.”
“I would not have thought so,” the historian replied. He shook his head. “And yet…”
The words hung there, light as the dust motes. For a few heartbeats no one spoke. Then Gwenna unshouldered her pack.
“The rest of you stay here,” she said, moving toward a door in the far wall. The discovery of the Blind had distracted her for a few moments from the fire blazing in her blood, but now that they were inside she could feel it once more, the heat raising blisters in her brain. “The historian and I will go on.”
“Here?” Pattick asked, turning in a slow circle. There was no wood for a fire, and no chimney to vent it, but the room was warmish—not frigid, at least—as though the stone itself radiated a faint, unflagging heat. “Should we close the door?”
Outside, the storm was shredding itself through the mountain pass. With the greatest gusts, a few flakes drifted the length of the corridor, landed on the floor, melted.
“No,” Gwenna replied, too loudly, too quickly. “That door is your only way out.”
She imagined them trapped, scrabbling at the slab of stone while she took them apart piece by piece.
Cho Lu pointed at Kiel. “He knows the tune. He can sing us out whenever we want.”
“He can,” Bhuma Dhar agreed quietly, his dark eyes on Gwenna, “if he is still alive.”
“The door stays open,” Gwenna said again.
Pattick looked past her, toward the other side of the chamber, where a second passage bored deeper into the mountain.
“What about that doorway?” he asked warily.
“If anything you don’t recognize comes through either door—”
“We kill it,” Cho Lu replied.
She nodded. “I don’t care if it looks like a kitten. I don’t care if it’s the world’s meekest mouse. I don’t care if it’s…” She shook her head. “If it comes through that door and it looks wrong, you slaughter the living shit out of it.”
The words echoed strangely off the bare stone of the chamber. Pattick shot her a worried glance. Gwenna realized she’d started reaching up for her own blades, as though the time for slaughter had already arrived. Slowly, deliberately, she lowered her hands.
The Manjari captain didn’t take his eyes from Gwenna. “And if you do not find your cure?”
“Follow your davi,” Gwenna ground out grimly.
Pattick shook his head. “Davi? What does that mean, follow the davi?”
“We will guard both doors,” Dhar said, ignoring the legionary, leaning slightly on the word both.
“And Rat.”
Rat shook her head furiously. “I go with you.”
“No.”
The girl’s face hardened.
“Gwenna Sharpe—”
“We’re going to keep her safe,” Pattick cut in. At first, Gwenna thought he was talking about Rat. After a moment, however, she realized he had spoken to the girl. “We have to stay here,” Pattick said, “in order to keep Gwenna safe.”
Rat turned to him, suspicion scribbled across her face.
“Here?”
The legionary nodded. “We have to watch her back. Make sure nothing goes in after her. Make sure nothing sneaks up on her.”
The girl bit her lip, turned from Gwenna to the open door, then back.
“We will not be very long,” Kiel said. “We should return before dusk.”
“Return,” Rat said.
Gwenna smoothed her hair. “It will be all right.”
Rat swatted the hand away. “Nothing is all right.” She pointed a skinny, filthy finger directly at Gwenna’s chest. “Return.”
“You have a job to do,” Gwenna said. “You watch the doors. Can you do that?”
Rat straightened, put a hand on her knife, nodded gravely. “Something comes through, kill it to shit.”
“Kill it to shit,” Gwenna agreed.
* * *
Csestriim or not, the layout of the fortress was simple. A short passage led from the antechamber to a spiral staircase, which wound up and up through the stone, a hundred paces, then two with no landings or doorways. It felt like trudging up out of the bottom of a very deep well, only there was no light at the top, no air, no freedom, no apparent end of any kind.
As they climbed, Gwenna wrestled with the poison inside her.
It was like the sickness back in the jungle—the same eagerness, the same hunger, the same feeling that the world wasn’t quite real—but worse. Where the other had seeped into her gradually over the course of days, drifting in with every breath, soaking her skin with each touch, this coursed through her like fire, devouring her bones, her blood, the fevered workings of her brain.
