Alium, page 33
Ogwold suddenly leapt up in disgust, crying out. “These are Novare! They eat Novare!”
Byron only laughed, though weakly, following Ogwold’s gaze of horror to the unmistakable and relatively whole foot of a man lying upon the stone. “Should we have some? I’m starving.”
For some reason Ogwold found this hilarious, and he broke into booming, crazy laughter. Something about the depravity of it all, the violence and the oppressive darkness and the foreign but uncanny wrath that boiled in him all this time broke and showered out of him in deep hearty guffaws. And Byron laughed too, a cold and distant, but a true laugh such that Ogwold felt somehow in this darkest and most vile place he had truly connected with the man. They laughed and laughed, surrounded by corpses freshly bleeding and recently gummed.
*
Ogwold had forgotten all about the sphere, even though it lit the room; but now it came down to float between them, and pulsed softly as if to draw their attention and remind the ogre in particular that there was more work to be done.
“I think it can lead us out of here,” he said suddenly. “The wizard who gave it to me said it is drawn to Zenidow. And that is the highest place of all, if we are down deep. Besides that, I think it is more complex than that. Sometimes it speaks to me in a way, puts pictures in my mind.” He shut his eyes. Again Byron did not seem perplexed by the notion of magic or of purely psychic communication. Ogwold sent the image of an opening in the darkness, sunlight pouring through. Outside he flung up grass and trees swaying in a mild wind, birds chattering. For a time nothing came in return, but the glow against his eyelids began to fade, and the boots of Byron to step away.
“This way,” said the mercenary.
They ran through many tunnels again for some time, following the streaming path of the sphere. The tunnel began to wind upward, and even the air seemed easier to breathe, but truly it was astounding how deep they were in the mountain, for the hours slipped by one after the other, and still they felt nowhere near the surface world. Up and up went the steep grade, which hadn’t the slightest turn and seemed like a great ramp to extend nearly straight up into the mountain. Higher still went this passageway, and the amount of smaller holes unto the hidden matrix of tiny tunnels dwindled, and now there was only the craggy and difficult way up, more and more troubled with formations of rock. Though this way was large enough to accommodate even Ogwold, it was increasingly sheer and not at all meant for the trespass of feet. Frequently they needed to climb directly up the spill of rocks.
“This must be a passage for the flying ones,” said Ogwold. “It’s like a chimney. But as long as we can climb it, it must lead to the air.” Looking down at Byron he was reminded of the huge sword the man carried on his back, which he was now hauling upward. His face seemed calm, but then Ogwold had become accustomed to Byron’s ability to mask his feelings, and he could see in certain turns of the sphere’s light that some of the boulders behind them were stained with the man’s leaking blood.
“Then why is it still so stuffy?” Byron scoffed.
The sphere buzzed on upwards, and the light it cast at least showed more holds for their hands and feet. After about an hour of climbing the incline became nearly completely vertical and the ascension of its bare surface far more technical, but only for a short while, after which it began dramatically to lessen, and then more so, and they were once again able to scramble over steep lumpy boulders. They came up over the top of this last rockslide into a large, wet cave, nothing like the big vaulted spaces where the aborjay-like Krug creatures roosted, for it was full of softly glowing mosses and pungent hanging gunk. But there was also, here, a draft, and it smelled oddly fresh in the stink of the strange ooze that slopped all over the floor.
They passed under three great archways that seemed almost carved from the rock, and then into a most peculiar room. It was the first place, other than for the stone tables where the creatures had fed, that bore any semblance of architecture or really any sense for edges and corners that they had seen, and again Ogwold was reminded of the sentience of these monsters so many of which he had slain. The floor was a mosaic of tablets etched with strange and somehow hideous runes, many of which in their deep crevices filled up with the luminescent, rotten moss. Great ribbed columns rose in four rows from floor to ceiling. They were not decorated at all, but still showed fine workmanship, if not artistry. These rows they followed further through the room, where the sphere now ventured and cast its light.
At last they beheld the chief tenant of the place, and it was unlike any before it. The heinous thing coiled lethargically upon a great, flat stone, looking like an engorged worm. Its skin was pale and translucent, so that its black organs pulsed visibly against that membrane, and it was covered everywhere with the same evil looking cilia of its kin. Though it did have two small, feeble arms, which grasped and twitched in a most unsettling manner, it did not have legs, and the swollen length of its sluggish body seemed its only means of locomotion. Its single head was enormous and bulbous, trussed in thick veins, and its mouth was like the others, large and cavernous, toothless. Behind it hung in ranks of leathery pods from the cave roof many of the winged creatures, which seemed burlier and meaner than any they’d met before.
“It’s the King,” said Byron wryly.
“Why aren’t they attacking?” Ogwold wondered aloud.
Then the King spoke. Or so it seemed. The long filamentous hairs all over its body began to undulate each in their own unique patterns, and in turn the hairs of the guards too waved and whipped. A conversation seemed quite afoot. Silently the sphere flew to the throne, and rested upon the great lolling head of the slug. It pulsed once, and the cave filled with light. Then Ogwold and Byron saw Videre. She was chained by each paw to the far wall, her fur boltered in blood. It was impossible to tell whether she was alive or dead.
Byron’s green eye flashed in the dark. He charged forward and swung his sword, unsheathing and slicing down and across in one motion. Three of the winged Krug who had at once flung themselves forward were destroyed by the strike; but the King was untouched. Then they were all upon him before he could ready another blow. These creatures were more powerful than those below throughout the caverns. Swarming him, slamming against the broad side of the sword, which he held still before him as in a great shield, they forced him to the ground, piling and scrambling, attempting to overpower him. But now Ogwold had readied his own weapon.
He couldn’t say later why he used it in this new way, but he pointed this time with the greener arm towards the King, and he said: “What you’ve done to us is one thing. But what you’ve done, whatever you’ve done to Videre; it’s unforgivable.” Suddenly the arm shot forward at a stupendous and fine length and passed like an emerald thread through the head of the King Krug, narrow and sharp, silently thrusting from the back of his chair, and several feet beyond, covered in filthy black bile, crumbling bits of stone falling to the wet floor. A small black bulb twitched for a moment, impaled upon the green spear, then went horribly still. The king shuddered and died. The guards atop Byron leapt up, shrieked, and began flapping their soundless wings and moaning bitterly, their evil hair writhing more profoundly than ever. In a great mass they took up their leader’s body and flew with it down the great chimney.
Ogwold ran to the great cat, and broke her shackles with the mere strength of his hands. Though she could not stand, she was able to open one eye and mew, if faintly. He rubbed her rough snout and sat beside her, panting. “I heard you protected me, Videre,” he murmured into one huge, triangular ear. “You should have escaped.”
She groaned in reply, rolling her eyes over as if to say, “Only if you had too.”
For a long while they sat in the dank while the ogre fixed his green hand over her heart and reached out with his mind to her spirit. Her wounds were not so easy to undo as had been the mercenary’s, and many anxious hours passed—Byron seated in the near dark, Ogwold murmuring softly, the plant surging and flexing as it worked its fine veins into the gashes beneath her stiff fur—before at last the great cat was able to open her big black eyes.
Slowly she rose, shook her head gingerly, and licked Ogwold head to toe while he smiled and held her. Then the three of them searched for a way out at the back of the chamber. They shuffled to a great and ancient stone door that looked to have been shut for thousands of years. With all his strength, and the plant arm growing and buckling, Ogwold was able to slide the thing open wide enough to slip through, and at last they came suddenly out into the alpine air, sucking up clear breaths. As soon as the light struck their faces, they all sat flat on the ground with relief.
Just as suddenly, Ogwold surged with joy, drinking the pure and life-giving sunlight as if he had been starved of it for all his life. With each gulp of those divine rays a great weariness began to leave him, and he realized then how deeply exhausted and ragged his spirit had become in the darkness. Only when the first wave of this deliverance had passed did he realize these feelings had come from the plant in his arm. Much of its reserves had been expended in the caverns and tunnels, and perhaps it had even approached its end in healing Videre. Ogwold held the arm fondly as it drank the sun, and shared in its glorious revival.
*
They were on a high shelf, higher up than they’d ever been on the journey, and the air, though clean, was scarce. No vegetation grew here, and there was no path in any direction. The stretching forests far below were like homogeneous swaths of dark green. The gigantic mountains all around seemed all the more close.
“Now I see why this is the safest place for their ruler,” Ogwold wheezed.
“And not deeper?” Byron winced, now fully nursing his wounds.
“Imagine what lives deeper if these things were so close to the surface.”
“That is an interesting thought.” Byron leaned against the cliff face and sighed. “There must be some way down,” he mused. Ogwold walked to the edge of the shelf and looked out into the open. The way was sheer and rocky, but not impossible to navigate. It was certainly dangerous though, and one slip might send them forever falling. In some places the rock was not completely vertical, at least. Still, he was no fan of heights.
“Do you have rope in that bag?”
“I doubt the cat can hold onto a rope.”
“Then we’ll have to find a way to walk down. Or go back through the caves.”
“There’s no going down that way without wings.”
“True.”
“Can you ask that marble of yours?”
“Oh! Why yes I should.”
Ogwold sat and breathed in the mountain air, listening for the humming of the sphere. In the heat of the moment he had ceased to hear it, but now it came warmly back to him, though the sphere did not itself appear. So he followed the droning over to the side of the shelf. And sure enough, there were steps there. Real, stone steps, though ancient as anything in the mountains. They were barely still visible, but they were certainly there.
Byron joined him and said, “Maybe there were delvers here once.”
“Or those creatures were once more civilized.”
“They couldn’t have descended from Novare. These steps are easily thousands of years old. I do not think my kind have even inhabited this range for more than five hundred. Let alone have they surmounted such peaks.”
“Maybe they have some other ancestor. Or, they haven’t even changed at all; though it seems like these steps and that door haven’t been used in a very long time.” They marvelled at the strange steps, for they were quite small, much smaller than the mutants would use easily, and for Ogwold very treacherous. His angled foot took up six or seven such broken plates with each plod. Videre had the easiest time of their descent, injured though she was.
The sun had already been low when they’d come up out of the crypt in the mountain, and now night fell, blisteringly cold and dark as void, but the sphere bloomed even as the black grew, and lit up their path once more, holding low to the stair so they did not misplace their feet. They travelled all through those late hours quickly as they could, for fear of more Krug accosting them, but not the slightest sign of life occurred to the senses even of Videre.
When the white shards of day broke in the great cracked vault of the grey sky they were exhausted, but now the stairs had led them to places where strange, low and rough vegetation grew, and the steps themselves became harder to find, as they were choked in thick weeds and barbed shrubs. Soon their trek was more of a general downward plunge, forgetting those ancient walks which seemed to have completely eroded away, or were at last vanished upon some legendary passage back into the deeps of the mountain. They shoved, slicing at times through the thick grey brush, eventually coming into a sheer rocky place, where they scrambled for some time, in many places having to slow and move very carefully. Gradually the decline became more manageable, and they could see rising up around them the beginnings of a scraggly wood. Through the dead and sparse trees they stalked hungrily and blasted from lack of sleep. They were starving and still no animals seemed to frequent the area.
By noon the trees steadily became more green and stately, and the cracked dry rock grew grasses in new tufts, though of a different nature than the high brambles from before. Far down in the distance below they beheld the first smokes of civilization. Many old structures were visible, charred and fallen in among the trees which grew in that area more thickly, but there were others that seemed freshly built, and the busy specks of men went about some business among them. From so high up they could see that the extent of the settlement was sprawling and enormous compared with the mining encampments they had passed earlier in the range. It was composed not only of sleeping huts and cabins, but of great halls and longhouses—some wrought of stone and several stories tall—whose purposes they could not guess, if not to say that here in the remote abysses of the Mardes was a thriving city.
At the seeming centre of the unfolding spectacle of buildings was a stone palace with red-roofed conical spires rising high above all else, but apart from the planned magnificence of this great work of architecture the rest of the area seemed almost improvised in its infrastructure, for around the palace thronged maddening jumbles of tentacled cobbled roads and rising, falling, vastly different buildings seeming to have no natural order in their relations. Unlike high-walled and road-latticed Occultash, which had been commissioned and raised in singular aim for the attainment of great riches for many centuries, this city appeared rather as though a small village had become quickly more populated, and others much like it had sprung up all around, only in time and perhaps through much interclan bickering to be patched together with strange winding and sharply angular roads, sometimes wholly interrupted by patches of dense forest.
Thrusting upwards on either side of the descending company, like the sudden, great knees of the enormous mountain which had spat them out, were two smaller peaks whose sloping feet continued further and embraced the city. Around these great dark shins, upon ledges, dotting the switchbacks, clustering at their final meeting with the flat crust of Altum, were not only the bustling camps and shanties of numberless delvers, but also huge buildings of industry, and everywhere could be seen the black mouths of mines. Beyond the city and the division of the cradling mountain slopes so crawling with delvers, the signs of civilization dwindled into a thick and misty forest, extending many leagues off into a grey horizon just faintly shadowed with the distant hulks of new, black peaks. It was a greater expanse of trees than ever Ogwold had seen, and even Byron was impressed with its vastness here so high in the mountains.
As evening again began to fall, the company lost its grand view of the land below, and descended through a low slope now populated with wooden cabins and small lots of mangy livestock. Soon they came out from the trees, walked the cobbled streets where they were a strange sight, covered in blood both black and red, ragged and bent over with exhaustion, Byron with his gigantic sword, Ogwold with his hulking stature and rough grey skin and eyes, and Videre with her general otherworldliness. But there were few Novare about in the dusky light, and even those who tramped near to them did not take much notice it seemed. Perhaps most were away in the mines, many of which were visible from town, great yawning shafts as they were, up along the ensconcing slopes.
They stopped before an old well. Bolted to its aged, partly shingled roof was a sign, which read ‘Fonslad.’
“I’ve heard of this place from traders,” said Ogwold. “It is one of the largest cities beyond Occultash. They say all of the King’s lucidium comes from these mines.”
Byron squinted back at a collapsed farmhouse which they’d passed. “That can’t be reason enough to stick around here. The cavelings must rule the night.”
Ogwold did not quite seem to hear this, kneading his blocky chin with one hand. “If we are here, then… Come to think of it, we are on the other side of that enormous mountain we’d only just reached!” He turned and leaned back, taking in the towering mass of rock and scarp behind them, stretching off into the clouds. “I’d have thought the rounding of that body would take a month alone. Now I know! This mountain is called Haud, father of Fonslad.”
Byron produced the old, yellow map from his bag and studied it scrupulously. “If that is Haud… We’ve travelled over thirty leagues.” He stuck his chin up at the peak from which they’d descended. “We’ve your sphere to thank for this progress.” For the moment’s glory of which he spoke, the mercenary’s face was grim and impassive, as it had been for most of their journey. The heat of danger and battle had passed from him, as now they walked again on paths already trod by Novare.
Videre stole off on her own into the denser growths perhaps to hunt and rest alone. Ever since they had sighted the vast forest beyond Fonslad she had quickened her pace and eyed the horizon hungrily. The less wild Ogwold and Byron came to a spacious inn entitled, in silver lettering upon an old swinging sign board, The Silver Shovel.
