The Empire's Ruin, page 85
“I said,” he replied, “that it was unlikely.”
Gwenna drew her second blade. “Not comforting.”
Kiel arched an eyebrow. “Were you looking for comfort?”
She ignored him, closed her eyes, listened hard.
“I don’t hear anything. No footsteps, no heartbeats. Are there other ways in than this passage?”
“The conduits for flushing the staircases. And above, far above … yes.”
“Could something have climbed in?”
“Something capable of climbing several hundred paces of smoothed limestone.”
“Gabhya,” Gwenna spat.
“Possibly. There are limits to inductive logic. Some things must be seen.”
“Meaning you want us to go up there to check if it’s a man-slaughtering monster or a batch of dead bodies.”
“Can you think of another way?”
“I was hoping for something more from one of the Csestriim than Let’s look at it and see if it tries to kill us.”
“I’ve always found hope to be an intriguing emotion.”
Gwenna growled a curse, then, blades held before her, advanced up the spiral stairs once more.
By the time they reached the next landing they might as well have stepped into a charnel house. The thick stench flooded her throat, choking her, gagging her. She’d spent plenty of time around the dead—in training and later—but the dead were usually outside, on battlefields mostly, or ships. In the closed space of the Blind, the smell had nowhere to go.
A stone doorway opened off the staircase. She glanced through it, then over at Kiel.
“Still no heartbeat,” she whispered. “No breathing.”
He nodded.
She gestured with her blades. “Doesn’t mean I want to go first.”
“You are faster than me,” the historian pointed out.
She lowered the tip of a sword to his chest. “So don’t test me.”
Kiel studied the length of steel for a moment, then nodded, readied his spear, and stepped through.
Gwenna counted to five—long enough for the man to spring any traps or trigger any ambushes—then followed.
The first thing that struck her was the size of the chamber. It had to be a hundred paces across at the very least, easily large enough to contain a small village and still race horses around the perimeter. The ceiling swept into a graceful dome overhead, so high she might have tested a working trebuchet in the massive space. Into that dome, the Csestriim had embedded a graceful pattern of their strange, unbreakable glass through which a blue-gray glacial light filtered down, quiet and cold. That light reflected off the floor, which was utterly empty—save for a chest-high table or altar off in the center—the stone polished to a perfect, lacquer-black sheen.…
No, she realized. Not stone. Water.
Enough water to sail a boat on, had there been any wind. Enough to fill a small lake.
She paused, then spat onto the surface. Ripples rose silently, widened out and away.
“There,” Kiel said.
She turned to find the historian pointing with his spear.
Around the perimeter of the chamber ran a stone walkway, just two paces wide and a hairsbreadth above the level of the water itself. Sprawled across that walkway, barely a stone’s throw distant, lay two carcasses. Gwenna studied them, heart thudding dully in her chest.
The first was obviously a product of Menkiddoc’s sickness, some kind of massive, clear-shelled insectile monstrosity with faceted eyes, serrated wings, far too many teeth. Blackened ichor had leaked from a slash across its back, staining the stone. The sword that made the cut lay nearby, just a few feet from the hand of the woman who had wielded it.
She wasn’t dressed like a soldier. Instead of armor, she wore slim, simple trousers and a close-fitting shirt. The garb of a sailor, maybe, though Gwenna smelled nothing of the sea on her. Her hair was short, tucked back behind her ears, revealing the smooth, dark skin of her face. Her eyes were empty, fixed on the light-spangled ceiling arching above them. The wound that felled her wasn’t immediately obvious.
Gwenna followed as Kiel crossed to the body.
He knelt, rolled the woman from her side onto her back, then paused, his hand on her shoulder.
Gwenna caught the hint of a scent wafting off the man, something at once soft and astringent. She stared. Just when she’d finally understood why the historian never smelled of emotion he went and scrambled her understanding. The scent was faint—the echo of a whisper—but unmistakable all the same: regret.
“You knew her.”
Kiel nodded. “A long time ago.”
“Which for you means what? Hundreds of years?”
“Thousands. Many thousands.” He fell silent for a while, then: “She was the mother of my only child.”
Gwenna blinked. “She was your wife?”
“The Csestriim did not share human notions of matrimony or pair bonding. We always found them inexplicable.”
“Well you must have spent some time with her, anyway.”
“She was the mother of my child,” he said again, as though there were no more to explain.
“Where’s your kid?”
It seemed ludicrous to use the word kid for a being that had been alive for millennia.
“Long dead. Killed in the wars with the humans.”
He said the words without a hint of sorrow or anger. Indeed, aside from that single whiff of regret, he seemed to feel nothing but a mild surprise at finding the body. He didn’t close her eyes or touch her face or do any of the things a human might have done, but he didn’t move either, just knelt there studying her.
“What was she doing here?”
“The same thing we are, I suspect.”
“And just what the fuck is it,” Gwenna asked, “that we’re doing?”
“Searching for weapons.”
“For one weapon in particular,” she said, understanding backhanding her across the face. It was from this place that the Csestriim had destroyed Menkiddoc. “You want to find the source of the sickness. The thing that created it.”
“There were other weapons here as well,” the historian replied without looking up. “Many others.” He had begun at last to search the woman’s clothing, running the fabric carefully between his fingers. “Do you see these niches ringing the chamber?”
Gwenna turned. She’d been so focused on the bodies when she first entered that she hadn’t noticed the slim alcoves carved from the wall. They stood at even intervals a few paces apart, each one taller than her and as deep as her forearm. Most held empty pedestals; a few contained weapons, a few, strange items of unknown purpose or provenance.
“This was the armory,” Kiel said. “All manner of weapons were kept here. Some of them leach-forged. Some very dangerous.”
“An armory?” The armories back on the Islands had been low, functional buildings packed tight with racks and racks of weapons. “Looks more like a temple.”
“There is what you might call a holiness to the dealing of death and the preservation of life.”
“Holy or not, most of it’s gone.”
“Evidently.”
“So someone came in here, stole a whole batch of deadly shit, and disappeared.”
“Indeed.”
Gwenna turned back toward the body of the dead Csestriim, the fine hairs at the nape of her neck prickling.
“Her?”
“Perhaps.”
“How did she get in? The doors below were closed.”
“She did not come from below.”
“Spare me the riddles.”
Kiel straightened finally, his hands empty. Whatever he’d been looking for in her clothing, he hadn’t found it.
“You have heard of the kenta?” he asked.
Gwenna nodded slowly. “Some kind of Csestriim leach gates. Came across one years back in northeastern Vash.”
Kiel nodded. “There is one here.” He pointed toward the stairs. “Above.”
Instead of moving toward the doorway, however, he turned to the center of the chamber, gazed out across the glass-still water to the small stone table at the center. Not a table, Gwenna realized as she followed his eyes. More like a crypt, or a bier. Before she could frame the question, Kiel started out once more, following the stone walkway around the perimeter. Roughly a quarter of the way around the arc he turned toward the center once more, then strode off across the water, walking on its surface as confidently as a man moving over stone.
Two steps behind him, Gwenna pulled up short, stared down into the ink-black water. Her own reflection stared back. She was leaner than she remembered, lips thin, cheeks almost gaunt. No more than she’d expect after a hard march on meager rations, but that thinness wasn’t the only change. Her eyes gleamed in the faint, otherworldly light of the cavern. Swollen pupils nearly eclipsed her irises. Her teeth, when she drew back her lips, looked like the teeth of some feral, predatory creature. She couldn’t tell if they were actually longer, sharper, or if her mind was playing some kind of vicious trick.
With an effort of will, she hauled herself away from her reflection. Kiel was halfway to the center of the room, striding across what she saw now wasn’t water at all, but a stone path polished perfectly black, set dead level with the water’s surface. She could make it out only at the edge, where the light reflected differently.
“Come,” Kiel said, not bothering to look back.
And like a woman walking across the night sky, she followed.
The island at the center was a hand higher than the path. The altar occupied most of the space. It reminded her vaguely of the tables in the laboratory below, but where those were clean and exact, polished as fine tools, the stone of the altar was rough, heavy, solid, the sort of thing that, in a human space, would have been consecrated to some kind of ceremony. Also, unlike the tables below, it was not empty.
Bones sprawled across the pitted surface—femur, pelvis, a scattering of ribs, vertebrae lined up like a child’s blocks. A skull. All the flesh had long since rotted away along with the ligaments and tendons, but with no animals to disturb the site, with no wind or water to work at it, the skeleton lay almost perfectly intact, as though someone had reassembled it only that very morning. The arms were bent at the elbows, the small bones of the hands scattered through the rib cage, as though the person had died with their hands folded across their stomach. A peaceful death, if there was such a thing.
“Another Nevariim?” she asked.
He shook his head. “She was one of my kind.”
“What’s she doing”—Gwenna gestured to the stone bier—“here.”
“It was her task to deploy the seed.”
“The seed?”
“The weapon that destroyed Menkiddoc. Many millennia have passed since the event.”
“The event?”
Kiel met her glare. “The attack. The victory.”
“How about the slaughter.”
He nodded. “Most victories involve an element of slaughter.”
She frowned. “Seems tough to deploy a weapon from inside a mountain.”
“This was a weapon like none you have encountered.” Kiel regarded the tableau for a moment, then shifted the ribs aside, sifted through the fingerbones, the carpals and metacarpals. “And it is gone.”
“Gone?” Gwenna glanced down at her newly acquired ring, the matzcel. “Was it…”
Kiel shook his head. “The seed was an even more intimate instrument. It was not worn by the wielder. It was consumed.”
Gwenna looked back at the stone surface. “So where did it go?”
He followed her gaze, as though he could scry the future in the bones’ scattered angles. “A great deal may rest on the answer to that question.”
“But you don’t know the answer, do you?”
“No,” he replied, still not looking up. “I do not.”
“You exterminated a race—”
“I was not stationed here—”
She talked right over him. “You poisoned a continent. And then you lost the fucking poison.”
Finally he turned to meet her eyes. “Lost is the wrong word. A ring slipped from a finger and tumbled into a river is lost. A ship crushed by a storm and dragged to the sea’s bottom is lost. A glass shattered on stones, an ancient tome consumed by fire, some boundary oak felled by lightning and devoured by rot—these are lost. What should terrify you about the seed, what should terrify the entire world, is not that it is lost, but that now, after so many years lying silent and still, locked away at the heart of a mountain behind doors of stone and song, it has been found.”
* * *
As they climbed, the air went from chill to cold, cold to frigid. The faint scrape of wind over stone began to break the tomb-silence of the lower levels.
“Feels like someone left a window open,” Gwenna muttered.
Kiel shook his head. “A door, more likely.”
They rounded the final curve of the staircase to find just that—another heavy stone door hanging open on gleaming hinges. A few flakes of snow spun in from beyond. A faint breeze caught Gwenna’s hair, tossing it back from her face.
The historian glanced over at her. “What do you smell?”
She inhaled, tested the air for any hints of flesh or rot, shook her head. “Stone. Ice. Snow. The only poisoned thing up here is me.”
Beyond the door, the wind howled and screamed. After the still, silent reek of the dead pervading the spaces below, it was almost a relief to feel the knife-sharp gusts slicing through her blacks, the cold air filling her lungs. Despite her assurances to Kiel, she turned in a quick circle, blades half raised, scanning the space for anything monstrous—for anything at all.
The fortress watchtower wasn’t really a tower, of course. Instead, the Csestriim had cored out the very summit of the mountain, hollowing the stone peak, carving massive windows into the rock. The strange non-glass from the chambers below filled two or three, but most stood empty, gaping wide onto the blizzard scribbled across the sky beyond.
“I guess the glass breaks after all.”
“Not the glass,” Kiel said, nodding to the crumbling sills. “The weather finally wore down the stone holding it.”
That was how long the historian had been alive—long enough for wind and snow to erode a fucking mountain.
She crossed to one of those windows, let the snow burn her cheeks, gazed out into the crazed white beyond. “So this is how the gabhya got in. And when it did, it found the door already open for it.”
“So things would appear.”
She turned to him. “Seems like a dumb mistake for a Csestriim, not closing the door behind her.”
“We left the door open below,” Kiel pointed out. “As you have seen, the song locks are not quick to open. Axta would have had—”
“Axta?”
“The woman we found slaughtered below. The mother of my child. She couldn’t know if the Blind was compromised. She would have left herself an escape.”
“Escape,” Gwenna said, turning back to the inside of the chamber, “through that.”
Like the ring Gwenna wore on her finger, the kenta looked … wrong. Warped. Turned in on itself in some way she couldn’t quite articulate. She could trace its lines with her eyes, follow the arc of the gate from base to base, but the effort left her feeling disoriented and vaguely nauseous.
“Where does it go?”
“To any number of places,” Kiel replied, crossing to the kenta, kneeling just a few paces away from it. “For one who knows the way.”
“So, your girlfriend came through. She opened the door. The gabhya followed her down and killed her.”
“That much seems clear.”
“Doesn’t explain where all the weapons went.”
“She could have been removing them if she thought the Blind was no longer secure. Or she could have arrived here only to discover the armory already emptied.”
“So who else knows the way?” She gestured to the kenta. “Who can go through that thing?”
“The Shin monks.”
“Thought they were all dead.”
“Most of them. And those remaining likely know nothing of the kenta.”
“So, not them then. Who else?”
“The Ishien. The emperors of Annur.”
“The emperors…”
He nodded. “It was for this purpose that Kaden and his father trained with the Shin in the first place—in order to be able to use these gates.”
“And they never came here?” Her head ached just thinking about it, but according to the historian, Annur was just a handful of steps away. “Why didn’t some Malkeenian clean out your hoard centuries ago?”
Kiel gestured toward the door leading down into the fortress. “They would not have been able to pass the door. They would not even have seen it. They did come here, but they believed it a single chamber set into the mountain’s peak. Some kind of watchtower, nothing more.”
“What about Adare?”
“She did not train with the Shin. She could no more pass through the kenta than you can.”
Gwenna frowned, made herself look at the gate.
“What would happen if I tried to go through?”
“You would cease to be.”
“I’d die?”
“Something considerably more thorough than that.”
She tried to imagine something more thorough than death. No blood or corpse, nothing to bury or burn, a perfect scrubbing out, as though she’d never even been born. The thought fascinated and horrified her in equal measures. She didn’t want to die anymore—she’d understood that after fighting the kettral—but there was something so clean, so unsullied, about just … ceasing to be. A shiver ran through her, whether from the storm’s cold or her own emotion, she couldn’t say.
“So we’re back to your girlfriend. She was the only one who could pass both the kenta and the song lock.”
The historian nodded. “She is the most likely source of the breach.”
“Maybe she got all the weapons somewhere safe and just came back for one last sentimental look at the place.”
“Or another party followed her here, found her and the gabhya dead, took the weapons and the seed.”
