White Pagan, page 32
part #6 of Kestrel Harper Saga Series
It slid over them, angled to the edge of the ledge on which they stood, and piled against the mountainside at their back.
The stale stench of death blasted them as the passage was exposed, an old smell detectable behind their scarf coverings before mingling with the snowy gale and being swept away by the storm. Holding his breath against it, Kavan created a tongue of flame in one hand, intense enough in the darkness that Raebhá shielded her eyes and relied on his guiding grip to lead her inside. They each took a single step, hers more hesitant than his, to pass the threshold between the storm and security. An echoing cracking sound, the depression and release of a spring, revealed a pressure plate hidden beneath centuries of dust, the activation of which caused the stone door to slide back into place more quickly than it had opened. Kavan jerked Raebhá inside as the closing stone cut them off from the howling wind.
Startled, Raebhá slid from Kavan’s grasp and fell to her knees, yanking the scarf from her face to breathe more easily and voicing a question he would have no answer for.
“What is this place?”
Kavan, startled by the closing of the door, lost his handlight; he too pulled his scarf down as he willed warmth into his hands. Relieved she was safe, his gaze, his other senses, darted around in the total darkness but he detected no threat, only decades, or perhaps centuries, of emptiness below the power contained here. “You don’t know?”
If she knew, she would tell him. As remote as this place was, as stale, foul, and musty as the expulsion of air had been, he sensed that no one had been here in years. Perhaps it had been forgotten. There was no reason she should know, no reason except that, to Kavan, it held an air of significance that contradicted its abandoned aura.
Handlight reignited, he raised it above his head and began to turn, visually examining details long hidden from mortal eyes. The shape of the cavern appeared natural, but its concave walls were smoothed to a polished sheen, as if the room had been intended for ritualistic use. Across from the now-closed door, a tunnel pushed deeper into the earth, a passage that, when he stood at its entrance, was blocked by a heap of crumbled rock and broken timbers at the farthest edge of the light’s penetration. Despite its long disuse, power was still strong here, stronger than he believed it should be, particularly further down the passage, and he was curious to investigate.
“Can we get out?”
Raebhá shifted on her knees, watching the glow of his handlight as it tracked over the walls, her assessment of the room’s age and prior usage mirroring his. Unless this was an ancient holy place, nothing she had learned or studied could explain this place, but if it was a peculiarity of the northern people, there was no reason for her to know about it. The smell of death, the obvious knowledge that something unnatural to the dhóbhaen had happened here, turned her stomach. From where she knelt, she could not see into the passage but she did not need to see into it to read the curiosity that prevented him from answering her. “What is it?”
When he again did not reply, she got to her feet and came to his side to see the corridor and the blockage beyond the edge of his handlight. She saw the recesses of doorways but could not determine what held Kavan’s interest. “Kavan?”
Hearing the distress in her tone though not understanding it, he absently took her hand in his, using his touch to soothe her. “If there is a way in, there is a way out.” Even if he could not see it. Even if he had to force the door open, or destroy it, they would not be trapped in this place. “For now, we’re free from the storm…there are timbers there, wood for a fire.”
The wood, likely ceiling braces that might have collapsed with age or with the natural movement of the earth, was old enough that it might not burn well, but burning it was worth the attempt. “Only if we’re careful,” she whispered. “We do not want to bring the ceiling down.”
He scowled, unaware of why a fire should cause such a collapse. He could feel a slight push of air over his face, suggesting the structure was not tightly sealed, so he believed it would be safe enough to build a fire for periodic warmth and to heat the dried meat in their pack.
For any other need, their ability to regulate their body heat and their handlights would suffice.
Air coming from behind the collapse might suggest a way out but he was in no hurry to go back into the storm. He wanted to eat, to rest, to sleep. He wanted to know the secrets this place held.
Pointing to the doorways visible in the glow of the handlight, he murmured, “We should make sure we’re alone. Perhaps the nature of this place will be revealed.”
He did not sense any other life, not people, not animals, but the strong source of power might, he knew, mask something.
Or someone.
If there was a Gate here, he should know that too.
Raebhá tentatively nodded in agreement though with less compulsion to uncover the unknown. Darkness was as natural as light, as air and earth and every other part of the world and she was not afraid of it. Nor was she typically afraid of the unknown, often finding it exhilarating to uncover something new. Something in this place, however, the trapped feeling she could not shake, the smell of long-dead things, was disconcerting, and she stayed as close to Kavan as she could as he moved forward, watching his step this time in case there were other traps in store.
The corridor did not appear to be a mineshaft, although perhaps it had begun as one. There was a natural inherent power here that might have led those in the past to convert this place from a mine to a place with other uses. The walls were planed smooth as the entrance had been, meeting the floor at straight angles. Foot traffic had worn a path in the center of the passage, suggesting this place had once been extensively used, but it was not the roughly rounded channel into the earth Kavan had seen in mines.
Nor did mines contain doors to either side of a shaft, locked doors into rooms that required keys to open. There were no keys that Kavan could find, only his hand on the frozen latch beneath the keyhole. Prompted by the absence of his handlight when he shifted power to this new problem, Raebhá created one for them both to see what he was doing. It would also allow them, if the door opened, to see whatever waited in the silence beyond the windowless wooden barrier.
The metal grew hot beneath his hand as he forced power into the lock so that the rusted, frozen pins would turn beneath the strength of his determination. At last they snapped, the fatigued metal giving way so that the latch tongue depressed and the door groaned on squealing hinges. There was the renewed reek of death, stronger than it had been at the outer door. Handlight springing to life in his palm, supplementing Raebhá’s, Kavan glanced at her over his shoulder and then stepped into the frigid room.
His stomach lurched. He stared. Behind him, Raebhá’s voice was a stolen squeak of horror. Chained to the walls so that they could neither sit nor recline, the corpses of more than two dozen men and women, sickly ruddy and gray, hung emaciated, their sunken flesh having succumbed to cold, to thirst, to starvation in the darkness that had been their prison. The cold had hindered decay, had kept each preserved in whatever state fate had stolen their lives and had molded flesh to bone, leaving them a terrifying sight. Some bore wounds, traces of blades or beatings, open mouths without tongues, or discolored cuts across their throats through which their lives had seeped down their necks and the front of their clothing to form iced-over stains at their feet.
Raebhá’s feet refused to move. “This…cannot be; this is not possible.” Shaking her head from side to side, she struggled to make sense of what she saw. There were no stories in all of their histories, in the myths and legends of ages past, to explain this.
It was obviously possible, or else the most elaborate illusion or vision Kavan had ever seen. He started forward, determined to have answers, but Raebhá grabbed his hand and yanked him back.
Fraught to explain herself, so frightened she could not move, Raebhá hissed, “You don’t understand; this is not possible! The law forbids death as punishment! The only man to ever suffer execution was Dhágdhuán. Who are these people? How did they get here? Why…did this happen?”
Maybe they were taeré, condemned for some crime against the dhóbhaen, or other taeré had imprisoned them here, but that neither explained nor excused their execution.
Kavan understood the power such a revelation could exert on a person, the effect of shattered beliefs and disillusionment. Hearing that it was her people, his kin and blood, who had executed the voice of their Faith, the first among k’Ádhá’s children, was a shock itself and something he would seek clarification for later. This was the second time Raebhá had said it, but it was the first time the words sank past the porches of his ears. The Faith taught Dhágdhuán’s execution but never identified those responsible, as if his killers had been nameless, faceless others without significance. Or else his death was placed at the feet of the Teren, making Dhágdhuán the first of his race and Faith to die at Teren hands.
What if that story, like so many others, was wrong?
He gently pried his hand from hers with a soft kiss on her forehead. “I will learn the truth…give me the chance to…”
“No.” Again she shook her head in adamant defiance. Seeing the evidence was gruesome enough; knowing the truth was a frightening concept she did not want to face.
Kavan might be the seeker of truth. She admired him for it. In this instance, however, her curiosity was at odds with the certainty that she would rather not know what lies she had been told.
He cupped her chin and kissed her mouth, hoping to ease her anxieties as well as his own. Rather than still his heart, the kiss birthed a fire that warmed his flesh and forced him to back away before he could be further tempted. “They cannot hurt us…but the truth must be known. For their sake. It is the only way to honor them, to give their suffering voice. Whatever their crimes, they did not deserve to be abandoned to history and forgotten.”
Hands wrapped around his wrists, she pressed her forehead to his and willed herself to breathe slower, finding calm in his presence, his touch, the nearness of his scent, the strength of his power.
He spoke the truth. Never in their taught histories had the punishment of criminals been so harsh. Thieves repaid their debts with servitude or goods in equal portion to what was taken. Physical disputes were punished through public shaming and, if deemed necessary, a period of kylldrenai. On the very rare occasion where one was proven guilty of the intentional death of another, either more extensive kylldrenai was demanded by the márbhyndhánis or else the guilty was banished to the land of the taeré with strict instructions to never return to the land of the dhóbhaen.
Even the followers of Dhágdhuán and those who believed in the right to use their natural born power had been sent away on ships or through Gates instead of enduring the burning death Dhágdhuán had suffered. Death was a curse, an unnatural end to the dhóbhaen, an interruption to the flow of energy through nature, into their lives, and back into the world when the Ceasing arrived. The death of the dhóbhaen caused a restless energy and created all manner of negative things for the living. No dhóbhaen would knowingly bring another here to kill them or leave them to perish in the dark.
If someone had done so, as was obviously the case given the evidence of her eyes, if there was some terrible secret in the history of the dhóbhaen that the people were prevented from knowing, or if the taeré had been here, done this, without the dhóbhaen’s knowledge, then Kavan was right. Someone had to know; the truth had to be told.
The verse about the White Bard of Gálínphel shining light into the darkness might come to pass as the portents foretold…but not in the way Raebhá or anyone else expected. She held her breath, nodded with determination, and let go of his wrists. If the curse of death was contained in this place, she had already been exposed to it.
If she was to suffer the bhur, if Kavan was to suffer, they deserved to know why.
Kavan did not touch the dead, choosing instead to study their shriveled forms, seeking some remnant of identity. Although the faded scraps of clothing hanging from their desiccated frames suggested people of means, none wore items of value. They did not wear enough clothing to keep warm, but at least none had been stripped nude as part of their punishment. They were dressed similarly enough to indicate they had lived in a similar age, to hint that they had come from a similar region and background, but it was no longer possible, by looking at them, to determine their age or kinship or if they had been brought here together or at separate times.
Not possible unless Kavan touched them and he did not have the stomach to read each of the more than two dozen bodies hanging here. Curiosity compelled him back into the passage to open the door across the hall in the same manner as he had the first, revealing a second cell as he suspected. This one was smaller and contained a single individual, a man twisted sideways in his shackles as though he had strained against them, fighting to reach the others until his breath and heart gave out. The residue of power was strongest here, absorbed into the walls, into the floor, as if the captive had used what he had in a vain attempt to escape.
It was this man Kavan chose to touch, a man of enough import to imprison alone, a man whose long hair, now the color of his emaciated skin, hung in a queue over his shoulder, bound by a faded metallic thread. A man whose facial features were forever twisted in an agonized visage of despair.
Kavan gently pressed his fingertips to the man’s forehead, a touch meant to be much longer but which ended abruptly as he was thrown against the opposite wall by unseen hands. Raebhá ran to his side and knelt there, the crack as he impacted the wall frightening her.
The shackled corpse crumbled and fell in a shower of dust the color of dried mushrooms onto the floor. The power that held him upright was released by Kavan’s touch, expended to force away someone the captive had likely anticipated being his jailors. A final, desperate attempt at freedom or revenge that had ended in neither.
“Cliáth.” The name echoed in his head, into his bones, filling him with a dread and wonder that had no voice, only a long, low, “Gaed.”
She had said that name before.
Raebhá shook her head as if it would cleanse the name from her ears, as if it would erase the revelations that erupted with its utterance. The stories, the legends, the myths. The records of history the márbhyndhánis taught every generation of children, portraying Gaed Cliáth and his companions as heretics and traitors, claiming they had been banished on a ship of outcasts, expelled from the land, from history, as nothing but blemishes, minute dark stains on the glorious history of the dhóbhaen.
Not just Gaed, but his family. His sister, his mother, his sons, all sent away, never heard from again. Friends and compatriots. Fellow believers. Only his wife was spared, allowed to remain behind for reasons never revealed in any history Raebhá had been taught.
Had Gaed come back for his wife? Was he not placed on a ship but sent to languish here, to suffer and die in the dark? Perhaps he and those like him, Dhedec and Zythán and all of the others had been walled up in these rooms and any beyond the collapse in the hall, to endure agonizing deaths at the hands of those forbidden to kill?
If so, how had there come to be Cliáths, MacLyrs, Bhíncáris or Curnydhás from whom Kavan, Kóráhm, and others had sprung, in the lands of the west?
Why was this man here?
Who were the others?
With a groan, Raebhá sat with defeat and buried her face against Kavan’s shoulder. “What does this mean?” she whispered, her voice cracking and raw. He was battling his own demons, his own questions, but it did not prevent her from voicing hers.
“I…don’t know.”
What he did know was that, except for those whose throats had been slit, the others had died at this man’s hand, or rather, died at the mercy of his mind, an eruption of power thrust out with enough force to kill them instantly, a mercy killing intended to spare further agony. sídysá, that self-defense ability that Kavan carried without the need of training in its use, had stopped their hearts. The power of the act, amplified by the cavern’s natural energy, explained the residual power here, explained the agony the man had shouldered in that final act, the responsibility for so many lives that he could not save and had been forced to extinguish instead.
Had he died then, or had he lingered long after beneath the weight of what he had done? If he could do all of this, why had he not freed them rather than take their lives?
Why? How? Kavan did not think he could ever know.
There was nothing left of the man except dust and fragments of bone scattered beneath the manacles. Perhaps Kavan could learn something from the stone, from the bindings, or from the power that clung to the walls and floor around them. Perhaps he could learn more from the dead across the hall. But the heaviness in his head, in his chest, combined with Raebhá’s disjointed sobbing against his neck, left Kavan too weak-willed to pursue answers.
He wished Wortham was here to help ease his heart’s burden.
Without Wortham, Kavan instead wanted Kóráhm to come and take this burden of knowledge long enough to give him the peace of sleep. Perhaps sleep would be enough to allow him to forget.
Chapter 17
Too much excitement had jangled his nerves, twisted his stomach, and sapped him of the strength to rise from his bed. Time and again the nightmares came, and in his fever-induced delirium, he could not be sure where the line between dream and reality existed. He remembered things, flashes of sight and sound, blood on his hands, the smell and feel of it that never left him whether awake or asleep. Thinking that his wife could clear his head of the webs of tangled thought, that she would know the truth and reassure him of it, he called for her repeatedly.
Yet she did not come, or if she did, it was during periods of hallucination so that he could not recall her company.
When the moment of clarity returned, when he felt no fever in his body and no fog in his brain, he opened his eyes and struggled to sit. He was in his own room, his own bed, and from the weakness of the glow at the open window, he guessed it was midafternoon. The light silhouetted a figure there, and after a moment of panic that he was not alone, that someone had come to claim his life, he breathed a sigh of relief and recognition.
