Ghosts of Mehan'Gir, page 20
part #3 of The Four Trophies Series
Now that they had lost Karuin, he had been slowly assuming a number of her jobs – managing documents, keeping track of their funds on the road, arranging logistics and double-checking that everything went the way it should. These were not the things he considered himself good at, not at all how he saw himself, but they reinforced the feeling that he had a genuine role in the Company: that he added something to them.
He had a mage’s staff, of course, and that certainly added something – gave them something they were otherwise missing, even if he didn’t know how to use it yet. Kiergard Slorn had decided to leave the Emerald Crown in the strongroom on Calinnia, but Lanvik had brought the staff. He might find time or space to practice, or something might happen that prompted a memory of his magecraft.
Ethryk had purchased a narrow strip of leather in Men’Tahuu. During their long voyage, between bouts of sea-sickness, he cut it to size and fashioned it into a long strap to fit to the horn case that Tremano had bought earlier. When Lanvik tried wearing it over one shoulder and across his back, everyone agreed that people would no longer immediately assume it was a mage’s staff. So now Lanvik had more flexibility about taking it with him, especially away from the boat, and that was bound to be useful – once he’d remembered how to cast spells …
Two weeks out from Men’Tahuu, Slorn informed the others that they had consumed almost half the supplies. ‘If there’s any problem that delays us, then we’ll have to start rationing some things – the water, for a start.’
‘We’ll be there tomorrow, most likely,’ Vander assured him.
Sure enough, they sighted land late the following day: black soil and volcanic rock that reminded Lanvik of Tremark in the far north, though it was a very different climate here.
According to Captain Prianno’s chart, the Twilight Isles comprised five larger islands, as well as twenty or thirty rocky islets that were too small to be habitable. He had headed directly for the largest island, which was also the most easterly and therefore the closest, and the Company made the same choice. It was early evening, and they chose to drop anchor well offshore: they would keep a careful watch overnight, and only land in the morning. That wasn’t ideal, but none of them wanted to start exploring a strange and semi-legendary island in the dark, when they didn’t know what or who to expect.
After a tense night, during which they saw and heard no lights on the island or any other sign of life, they sailed round to a small bay on the southern shore that was marked on the chart. A stone pier extended out into the gentle waves, where they tied up the Twilight Ghost and headed inland.
‘Look,’ Magda pointed to the cliffs on their right. Low down, near the water’s edge, there was a Confederacy Arrow painted on the rock face. ‘Someone’s been here in the last few years, then.’ The symbol was a recent invention – certainly more recent than Captain Prianno’s visit.
‘The place seems deserted now, though,’ Ethryk said: ‘not even animals, which is unusual if no people have lived here for hundreds of years.’
‘Yes,’ Aruel agreed. ‘And there are no birds.’ None of them could hear any birds calling and that seemed eerie, by the shore.
Thawn and Garran had their swords drawn: they also sensed that something was wrong.
Steep cliffs flanked the bay, however the land rose more gradually at the back, where there was a clear path to follow inland. A small stream ran down the gully but there was very little vegetation growing near it: only a few struggling clumps of yellow-brown foliage.
‘What are we looking for?’ Bane asked. There didn’t seem any obvious sign of civilisation – no buildings or roads or stretches of wall. Only the path.
‘No idea,’ Kiergard Slorn admitted. ‘We’re just hoping this leads to the Ruby Hand, I suppose.’
After a few minutes walking, they came in sight of a dark stone rock wall ahead: it was curved in all directions, presumably circular, and the sides were regular like the Dams of Corvak – smooth and perfect: the hallmarks of ancient magic. Unlike the Dams, though, it seemed to have been cut from the existing rock rather than created: there were subtle variations, patterns and imperfections on its surface.
It rose a hundred feet above themand stretched perhaps six hundred feet from side to side. The path led right to its base, where a flight of steps ran at a regular angle up the side of the rockface: in places there were stretches of missing steps – collapsed, or washed away, or deliberately broken.
Kiergard stood at the bottom and shouted up, ‘Hello! Hello!’ He waited, but no-one answered. He peered up at the steps and then asked Bane: ‘What do you think?’
‘I wouldn’t risk them,’ the big man shook his head. He pointed to a number of places where metal spikes and hooks projected from cracks in the rock and added, ‘Someone before us decided to climb. Probably our Confederacy friends.’
The Company split in two and walked all the way round the rock wall, in case there was another way up. They found a second set of steps on the opposite side, also damaged and incomplete, but looking far more intact.
They fetched climbing equipment from the boat and, after a brief discussion, decided not to create an entirely new ascent. The individual stone steps that remained held firm when they tested them, so they used hard-driven wedges, pitons and shorter lengths of climbing rope to create secure footholds and rope handrails alongside them. They were finished in twenty or thirty minutes, after which everyone was able to simply walk up.
The top looked perfectly flat and perfectly circular – an artificial plateau – and was almost entirely covered by a huge, single building that extend almost to edge. The building appeared circular but when Lanvik looked closer, he could see that it actually had regular, angled sides.
‘It’s made of hexagons,’ he said. ‘Like a honeycomb.’
They walked round the outside, looking for ways in, and found a single wooden door half-way between the two sets of steps. There was a carving of a hand on the front, fingers spread and palm outwards.
‘The Ruby Hand,’ Kiergard Slorn said.
‘Unless they’re warning us to stop,’ Magda pointed out. ‘That could be what the hand means.’
‘I prefer my guess,’ he grinned at her, and pushed on the door with one hand. It swung open, easily, and they stepped inside. ‘Hello!’ he called ahead, but no-one answered.
They were standing inside a large hexagonal room, perhaps thirty feet from one side to the other: opposite them was a wide opening that led into a second, identical room. Someone had daubed red graffiti on the floor in both rooms.
‘The whole building might be rooms like this. Cells,’ Lanvik guessed. ‘I counted ten along each side so there must be hundreds of different rooms inside.’ He left a pause and realised that he was waiting for Karuin to speak, to tell them exactly how many rooms there would be inside. He tried to work it out in his head instead, but couldn’t.
The roof was transparent, so there was light to see by. Like the building itself, the ceilings were constructed from individual contiguous hexagons – Lanvik couldn’t tell what they were made from, but it wasn’t glass. They were dirty and presumably hadn’t been cleaned for centuries, so the rooms below were dim and murky in places.
‘Well, what we’re looking for would have been the most important thing here,’ Kiergard Slorn guessed, ‘so it’s probably at the very centre. And that should only be a few rooms that way.’ He pointed straight ahead.
Unfortunately, there was no opening at the far end of the second hall, but doors led off to the left and the right instead. They picked the left-hand option and found themselves in a narrow corridor with rooms on either side – it seemed that some cells were partitioned into smaller spaces. That corridor crossed the cell directly, leading into the next space, and there was a door leading slightly to the left from inside one of the rooms, but they found no exit that would take them towards the centre.
As they explored, it was obvious that the complex was indeed designed as a series of hexagonal spaces – some open and others subdivided into smaller rooms. Some were bare, others were decorated or busy with furniture; some appeared to be living quarters and meeting rooms, while others were simply storage spaces. The building also seemed to have been deliberately designed as a maze, to be as confusing as possible, and the fact that it was laid out in hexagons made it much easier to lose track of which way they were facing. The Company probably became lost almost immediately after entering, but it took them ten minutes to realise it.
‘I’m sure we’ve been this way before,’ Lisamel announced. ‘But we came in from over there,’ she pointed at a door on their right. Tremano didn’t say anything, but nodded.
Some Confederacy explorer had helpfully daubed numbers on the floors of each cell, presumably after encountering the same problem, so over the next few minutes it was easy to prove that yes, they were going round in circles.
‘We haven’t passed the entrance hall again,’ Lanvik said, ‘not since we came in. So not only can’t we find the centre, but we can’t find the way out either.’
‘That’s a cheerful thought,’ Magda said.
‘We could draw a map,’ he suggested.
‘Or we could cheat,’ Ethryk said. He pointed at the roof above them. ‘We could go over the top and reach the centre that way.’
The transparent ceiling panels were ten feet above the floor, but there were tables that provided a reasonably stable platform for Bane. After a few minutes’ effort, though, he couldn’t find any way to open them from below and he wasn’t able to break or smash them, even with a climbing pick.
‘We could get up and over the top from outside,’ Magda suggested.
‘Assuming we can find the way out,’ Bane said, as he stepped back down.
‘And even if we did, how would we break back in again?’ Lanvik asked. ‘We’d just be stuck on the roof.’
‘Fine,’ Kiergard Slorn told him. ‘Draw your bloody map, and then tell me how it’s going to help us.’
Menska was carrying the paper, pens and ink: she handed over a blank sheet, and Lanvik found a dusty table where he could sit. He drew a single hexagon in the middle, then six more around it, twelve more around them and so on until eventually he had a whole sheet filled with hexagons.
‘There are three hundred and one rooms,’ he told the others, a few minutes later, after counting them. ‘Thanks to our Confederacy friends, each room has a number painted on the floor.’ He had been going to write those numbers inside his map, but suddenly realised that they had no idea where they were.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I’ve done this wrong.’ He pointed to the walls around them. ‘Any one of these could be an outside wall. Or right next to the centre. So I don’t know where to start filling in the numbers.’
‘Great,’ Bane said. ‘Any other ideas?’
‘No, no,’ Lanvik assured him. ‘This’ll still work. It’ll actually be easier.’
He took a second blank sheet from Menska, drew one smaller hexagon in the middle and copied the number “74” from the floor into it. Then he asked the others to look through the three doors that led away, and tell him what the numbers of the adjacent rooms were. Then they chose a direction at random, and repeated that operation in the next room and the next and the next.
It didn’t take long before their route started overlapping with places they’d already been, which helped confirm that the map was accurate.
‘We could we do this faster by splitting up,’ Garran suggested.
‘No,’ Kiergard Slorn said. ‘We’ll stay together. There might still be dangers lurking in here.’
‘And there’s no guarantee that we could find each other again,’ Magda added.
So they stayed together as they gradually mapped one room after another, after another.
‘Through here,’ Tremano called at one point, when they were searching for doors. He had found a small simple bedroom, with a body on the bed. It was little more than a skeleton now, wearing a black robe and still half covered by blankets. There was a notebook on the small table beside the bed. Kiergard reached for it, but Menska stopped him.
‘We should come back for that,’ she warned. ‘Think how old it is. It might be fragile. It might just crumble away.’
‘Fine,’ Slorn nodded. ‘Later, then.’
‘I’ll make a note on the map,’ Lanvik said. The Confederacy had painted a number on the floor, but had left the dead man where he lay.
Lanvik’s map soon had well over a hundred cells on it, including a few where they had needed to leave their own number on a scrap of paper on the floor, since not every room had one painted on the floor. It was already obvious that they had spent most of their time so far in the bottom-right corner of the building. It was also becoming obvious where the centre of the complex lay but, on his map, it was just an empty space: they had visited only one of the seven rooms at the heart of the building.
He stopped the others and explained: ‘Look here on the map – these stretches must be the outside walls, so this area here has to be the centre.’ According to his map, they had walked all around that part of the building: it was surrounded by rooms that they had checked, but the block of hexagons at the very centre were blank, with no numbers written inside … except for one.
‘Can you take us back there, to that room?’ Slorn pointed.
‘Of course.’ Lanvik led them through a chain of nine cells, back to the room that the Confederacy had numbered one hundred and seven.
‘This is the closest we’ve been to the centre,’ he told the others. ‘It’s only one room further.’
They stood at the door and looked in – the room was filled with a jumble of wooden furniture. They could see all the walls, and there were no obvious exits that might lead to either the centre or any of the missing five rooms. The number “107” was painted on the floor, a few feet inside the room.
‘We’ve walked past here a few times,’ Ethryk recognised it. ‘It’s just a storeroom.’
‘You’re sure this is the place?’ Kiergard Slorn asked.
‘Fairly sure,’ Lanvik nodded.
‘Maybe the Ruby Hand isn’t here at all,’ Magda said. ‘We just assumed it would be. But maybe it’s in another building completely, or on another island. These cells might just be where the Keepers lived.’
‘There could be a secret chamber inside,’ Menska suggested. ‘Or a hidden door.’
‘Well, let’s move some of that stuff out the way first,’ Bane said. ‘Then we can have a proper look.’ He walked into the room. About three or four paces past the “107”, he vanished.
‘Bane!’ Magda shouted, alarmed.
Bane’s voice laughed, and then told the others: ‘Walk forward. It’s safe.’
So they followed him, and when they reached the place he had disappeared, the view in front of them suddenly changed. The drab and busy storeroom was replaced with a large chapel made from seven adjacent cells with no separating walls. Each of the back walls had been detailed as a broad arch with a stone bench set against the wall; the floor was neat flagstones, rather than the simple rock floor that they had seen a moment before.
It was like a chapel in a Temple.
Behind them, they had a clear view back to the room they had just left, but the space around them was nothing like they had seen from there. It was as if someone had hung a giant picture in front of them: a picture of an untidy, grubby and uninteresting storeroom. A picture that moved and changed in the light, that altered its perspective as they changed their positions, but which was only an illusion that they could pass through, if they chose to walk far enough.
It was a picture that hid what was really in the room, and convinced people not to bother even entering.
The walls around them were brightly painted with scenes taking place in the chapel itself. In every painting, there was a seated figure on a dais – a Statue. Worshippers surrounded the Statue: some seemed to be addressing it, others making offerings, others simply prostrating themselves before it. It sat in a featureless chair with its elbows on the arms and its hands resting in the air above its lap. Its left hand was coloured a pale red in all the images – hardly “Ruby”, but that was what they understood.
‘They’ve taken it,’ Kiergard Slorn said, bitterly.
He was right – the dais in the pictures was still there, right at the very centre, but otherwise the chapel was empty. The Statue was gone and, with it, the stone chair on which it had been seated and the Ruby Hand.
They were too late. Probably years too late.
These stories will be continued in The Four Trophies Book 4 – The Spoiled Land.
Planned Release Date, March 2019.
Thank you for reading Ghosts of Mehan’Gir.
If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends or consider posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend (and a book’s). LJC.
The Four Trophies, Book 4
The Spoiled Land
They have found the Twilight Isles but not the Second Trophy.
The journey back to safe waters will not be easy.
The Company of Kiergard Slorn must cross the Spoiled Land – a warped and poisoned jungle of strange creatures and unseen menace. They will encounter danger and deception, new friends and old, and unexpected people and places.
There may be nothing marked on the map, but the Spoiled Land is far from empty.
Glossary
Selected Names and Places mentioned in the text
Adastana of Kiritas (Dasha) – Pireon’s older sister, slightly older twin to Dachaeron
Agato – large island in the western Evallian Sea
Ajiila – one of the Dancers of Linatt who travelled from Elagion to Darkfall
An’Holt – formidable military base in the Confederacy
