Herald of Ruin, page 21
part #2 of The Sanford Files Series
“‘In league’ might be putting a little too much pepper on it,” Ruby said. “But for the time being we’re on his side, yes. It’s the only side available at the moment, anyway. We’re all friends here, and I’ll let you loose. But, ah, I don’t have the key. Altman? Do you have a crowbar handy?”
“I have the key,” he said wearily, walking up with the dog at his heels. “I took all Sanford’s keys from his desk. I don’t know what most of them open, but I was the one who locked the warden up in the first place, so I recognize that one.” He fitted a key into the large lock and turned it over with a thunk, then pulled the door open.
The warden emerged, all dignity, and gazed around the dingy hallway. Her hound pressed against her legs like a child seeking comfort, but she didn’t take any notice. “I see Sanford has made some changes.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them with a grunt. “Did you kill him?”
“We didn’t do anything to him at all,” Altman said. “He just… well…”
“He drank blood from a magic cup and disappeared,” Ruby said. When the warden stared at her, she just shrugged. “Well, he did.”
“Sanford set up safeguards.” The warden closed her eyes again, gazing at some inner landscape. “If he should ever fall, he wanted to prevent his enemies from gaining access to his treasures… and weapons. I didn’t realize the extent of the enchantments, but he seems to have hidden everything away down here. It’s like a maze, and parts of it are opaque even to me.” She opened her eyes. “Sanford must be dead.” Her voice was as flat as cracking stones. “This wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”
Ruby suffered a sick twist in her stomach. Could the old man really be dead? “Gloria is upstairs, Tillinghast is taking over, but I guess you know that, and she says Sanford is still alive, but that we shouldn’t expect him back anytime soon. Or ever. I think they sent him… away.”
The warden cocked her head. “If he left the earthly realm… if he is in another world… yes, that would trigger his defenses as surely as his death.” She barked a laugh. “That’s why he didn’t just arrange for this whole building to drop into the Abyss, or for the basements to fill with boiling mud, or even lock things away behind barriers no one could penetrate.”
“Because if he ever made it back from some other world, he’d want access to his things,” Ruby said.
Altman nodded. “That sounds like Sanford. He wouldn’t even consider death a certainty, I bet. People come back from that, too, sometimes, though not always changed for the better. So we can access the basements again. That’s good. I think Tillinghast would have been annoyed if we lost everything.”
The warden stared at Altman with those stonecutter eyes. “Do you think this Tillinghast will care for the Lodge, and see to it that the Order prospers, once he takes control?”
“I don’t know about that,” Altman said before Ruby could so much as scoff. “I think he has plans that Sanford would have fouled up, so he fouled Sanford up first. But he doesn’t really want the Order, warden. In fact, Tillinghast promised me, when he left town, that he’d leave the whole thing in my hands.” He drew himself up and looked Van Shaw in the eye, trying to look commanding, though Ruby could tell it took him some effort. Like a boy dressing up in his father’s clothes, she thought.
The warden only clucked her tongue. “You help to overthrow the old king, and plot to take his place?”
Altman didn’t shrink before her steel gaze, though, which made Ruby respect him a little more, or else doubt his intelligence. “You speak as though that isn’t always how these things are done,” Altman said. “When the power shifts, you do your best to figure out which side it’s going to settle on, and if you’ve got any sense, you stand on that side. You jumped ship from Sanford, too, as I recall.”
“I never had any real loyalty to Sanford. I have loyalty to the Silver Twilight Lodge. Sanford wasn’t a good steward, even if he was our founder. I have my doubts about whether you’ll be a good one, either.”
“The truth is, I have my doubts, too.” Altman sounded almost humble. Could that possibly be genuine? “Which is why I’d like you to run the Order with me, warden. We’ll make all the important decisions together. And I can say whatever oaths on that awful stone in that horrible circle you like, to prove my sincerity. You know more about this organization than anyone else, and I’d be a fool not to want you by my side.”
The warden looked astonished, which, on her face, was only shown by a slight widening of the eyes. Then she nodded. “Aye. Seems a sensible way to handle things.”
“You two make things so complicated,” Ruby said. “I just want a great big pile of money and some magic jewelry.”
Gloria Dyer appeared around the corner. Why hadn’t Ruby heard the clicking of her heels? “Before you go counting your money,” Dyer said, “or handing out crowns and titles, first you must earn them. Our work isn’t done. Not until Mr Tillinghast has full control of this place and its relics and libraries and everything.” She smiled at them, but Ruby thought her expression strained. “Glad to see you’re free, Miss Van Shaw. We’ll get you a new necklace, but for the time being, we’d prefer you to focus your consciousness and attention here.”
“How did you get in here?” the warden demanded.
“She just walked in, because you weren’t up there to stop her,” Ruby said.
The warden shook her head. “No, I mean here, through Sanford’s maze?”
“I came down to see what was taking so long and followed the sounds of your voices.”
The warden said, “Hmm. When Standish and Altman traversed the secret path to open the passageway here, it must have stayed unlocked. I suppose Sanford’s plan was to return and take a leisurely stroll in the pattern he set and open the basements up again behind him. We’ll have to do the same. But… well…” A cloud passed over her face.
“What?” Dyer said. “Can’t you do it? I thought you were the Lodge?”
“I can lead us down,” Van Shaw said. “I can sense the passages, because no place in the Lodge may be barred to me – my oaths see to that. But it’s not just confusion and dead ends we have to worry about. Sanford may have made… other arrangements.”
“Traps?” Gloria said.
“Among other things.” The warden sniffed. “But we’ll cope with them as and when needed. What would you like to see first, Miss Dyer?”
•••
Altman insisted on going upstairs to get a shotgun, though the women seemed to be of the opinion he was silly to think a firearm would be any help down below. Ruby accompanied him, though, and ducked into Sanford’s office, returning with his sword cane. “I saw this scare some ghouls off, once, so I know it’s good for something,” she explained.
“Do you even know how to use a sword?” he asked.
“I know which end of it to hold, if that’s what you’re asking.” She took up a perfect fencer’s opening pose, right there in the hallway, bowed formally to Altman, and then moved rapidly through a series of slashing and stabbing forms with the sheathed stick, her feet moving as quickly as a dancer’s, her arms a blur.
Altman drew back in alarm, and Ruby laughed, sheathing the sword and then leaning on the walking stick. “I had to ingratiate myself with some society girls for a job once, and they were all mad for fencing, so I signed up for some classes. I took to the sport like a duck to water, though I suppose real fighting is a lot different from scoring points in a mask and padded jacket.”
“You’re a damn sight better with a sword than I am,” Altman said. “I never even learned any fancy knife-fighting, though plenty of the boys in my unit liked showing off their moves. I never bothered.” He drew his kukri, showing her the curved blade. “The most successful knife fights are the ones where your opponent is dead before they notice you’re even armed. The only time I let someone see my knife coming is when I’m aiming to scare them, not kill them. Or at least not kill them right away.”
“You don’t benefit much from the element of surprise with a sword, as a rule,” Ruby said. “Though hiding it in a stick is a good start.” She leaned the cane across her shoulder at a jaunty angle. “Shall we see what the warden and Gloria are up to? I doubt they’re swapping recipes for Sunday roast.”
Those two did a make an odd couple, Altman thought – the bubbly Gloria and the dour warden – but they had a lot in common, didn’t they? Both had experience serving as reliably competent lieutenants for powerful men. Would Gloria ever turn on her master? And if she did, would she be as successful as the warden had been? Was the current situation really success, or just a pause in the hostilities?
Altman followed Ruby down to the basements, his gun held at port arms, his mind a million miles away. So Sanford was stranded in another world? What did that even mean? The magus had occasionally mentioned strange places Altman had never heard of – Yuggoth, the Plateau of Leng, the Cold Wastes – but Altman figured they were just remote regions of jungle or desert or tundra. After his time overseas, Altman was well acquainted with the variety of monsters that seethed and slithered on and under the earth, but if there were other worlds… Altman clearly had a lot to learn if he wanted to run this Lodge. He would find everything he needed to know in the hidden libraries, he supposed, if they could regain access. He’d never been much of a reader, but if he wanted to change his life, that was probably the least of the new interests he’d need to develop.
They found Gloria and the warden, still trailed by a hound, walking down a narrow passageway not far from the holding cell. There was a solid wall at the end of the hall, but the wall was receding as the warden walked steadily toward it. It looked like some trick of distance or perspective, but no; the wall was really moving, sliding along backward as if on hidden rails.
“I’ve had hallucinations like this,” Ruby whispered to him as they brought up the rear together. “Only, I haven’t had any absinthe tonight.”
The wall abruptly fell over backward, leaving a dark opening in its place, but there was no crash of impact. The wall was simply gone. “Look, a stone staircase descending into infinite darkness!” Gloria said. “How spooky!”
Altman joined them at the top of the steps – he could only see the first half a dozen stairs before darkness swallowed them – and peered around at the vast darkness beyond. Was this some huge cavern under French Hill? Or was it just… nothing? “I’ve never seen this part of the basements before.”
“We’re standing in the real basement,” the warden said. “The one that’s actually under the house, that someone dug out with shovels a long time ago. The rest of the basements, the deeper levels… those weren’t built at all. They were made. And that darkness is the place they were made in.” She gestured at the endless dark. “Sanford – or not Sanford himself, but his adepts – stole empty spaces from all over the world. They took from abandoned mines, lightless caves a thousand feet down, and flooded basements in abandoned towns. They bundled all that space together using strange geometries, and moved it all here, or rather, made it so you could reach that concatenation of space from here. Sanford has been expanding the habitable portions of the basements steadily for decades, growing the halls and chambers like mushrooms in a cave, and he hasn’t begun to fill this space yet. There are a lot of forgotten places in the world.” She took a hesitant step onto the stairs descending into the dark, as if testing for firmness. “It seems he’s moved most of the basements farther away, pushed them into the dark. We’re lucky he left a stairway to connect us to the rest. Once we reach the deep basements, I can stitch things back together, connect a door in the real basement to a door in the magical ones, and things will return to… I suppose you could call it normal.”
“How far down do we have to go?” Altman said. “Through the dark?”
The warden chuckled. “Wrong question, lad. You should be asking what’s lurking down there in the dark.”
“Do you think that horrible shoggoth is down there?” Ruby pulled the handle of the sword cane out enough to show an inch of steel.
“The shoggoth?” the warden said. “I remember you had a run-in with the ma– with Sanford’s pet. You nearly pissed your knickers, didn’t you? Ha. That thing was just a baby, and half tame besides. That’s how Sanford was able to use it as a guardian. There are things locked up in Sanford’s menagerie that would eat the shoggoth and consider it an hors d’oeuvre. If I was Sanford, and I wanted to make sure no one mucked around with my things while I was away, I’d open up the grim menagerie and let those creatures roam.”
“Really?” Gloria sounded more interested than terrified, which Altman thought displayed a tragic lack of understanding. “But surely the monsters would eat him, too, when he came back?”
“Oh, the things Sanford locked up are all afraid of him,” the warden said. “They’ve learned.”
“We’ll just have to teach them to be afraid of us, too, then,” Gloria said cheerfully, and strolled down the stairs, as if they weren’t a narrow thread of matter connecting the earthly to the unknown.
Chapter Nineteen
The Cold Wastes
“My first week in the Dreamlands was especially dreadful,” Sanford said to the ash-haired sage on the top of the mountain. The magus – now the wanderer – scratched at his beard, which had gotten quite long, and was no longer neatly trimmed, though on occasion he hacked at it with a knife. “On the very day I arrived, I was pursued by the ghosts of the Beings of Ib. Have you heard of them? Frightful creatures.”
“They brought doom to Sarnath.” The sage didn’t have ash-colored hair, but hair made of ash, sifting gray flakes down onto the shoulders of his red robe. “Though some say they did not rise up on their own, but were dispatched by–”
“They were certainly dispatched after me,” Sanford interrupted. He’d met a few of these sages already, though most were more humanoid, and knew they could go on for hours if you let them start lecturing. “An enemy of mine made some kind of arrangement with the ghosts, and sent them to kill me, or at least keep me by the lake.” He nibbled some kind of seed cake and sipped a cup of vile herbaceous tea. Sanford still didn’t need sustenance. His ring was supping on the life force of the sage and any living things in the snow outside even now, but there was no reason to be impolite. This man, or man-shaped entity, was going to help him get home. Finally.
“And yet you escaped,” the sage said. His eyes were just smoking holes in his stony face, but there was no doubt he could see perfectly well. That seeming contradiction would have unsettled even Sanford, once, before he’d spent all these months in the Dreamlands.
Sanford leaned back on a pile of cushions and looked up at the ceiling of the temple. They conversed beneath a dome of stone, with a circular window at the very top, revealing a white sky of blowing snow. It was quite warm and cozy in here, though, despite the lack of a fireplace or stove. The sage needed neither, as he produced ample heat – he was his own furnace, in a way.
“Oh, yes,” Sanford said. “I thought, being ghosts, they might have a limited range. Many apparitions are linked with a particular place and can’t stray far from their locus of origin. I set myself on a path that led straight away from the lake and ran. The knife-wielding spirits nearly caught up with me, once or twice. I have a spot on the back of my neck where one of them even laid a finger on me, and do you know, that patch of skin is completely numb? No sensation there at all when I press on it. I shudder to think what would have happened if they’d grabbed me… elsewhere.”
“You escaped the denizens of Ib. You have traveled far from that place, to reach this one. Have you gained understanding in your travels?”
“Oh, I’d say so.”
The sage leaned forward, eyes faintly smoking. The smell of fire and stone reminded Sanford of the night Huntress Fashions burned down. Gods, how long ago had that been? Months, at least. Time was hard to mark in the Dreamlands. “Tell me what you have found.”
Sanford had had ample opportunity to reflect on his mistakes, to learn from them, and resolve to do things differently when he made it home. “I have learned that I should take better care of my allies. I have learned that personal loyalty is valuable, and preferable to instilling obedience through fear and intimidation. I have learned that I might, perhaps, in the future, relate to those in my employ with an open hand rather than a raised fist.”
The sage frowned. “I am less interested in your personal growth than I am in the sights you saw and the entities you encountered.”
Sanford chuckled. “Yes, quite.”
The sage looked at him expectantly, even hungrily, and Sanford drew breath to tell the rest of his tale. He found this whole interaction tedious, but that tedium was the price he had to pay for help: the sage collected wisdom, or rather, the sage collected information, and then sifted it for wisdom, the way a panner sifts the contents of a riverbed for gold. Thinking of gold…
“I saw a golden gleam in the distance, and once the Ib were behind me, I set off across the blasted heath toward its source. I followed a spiraling path up a mountain, past these little caves with things living inside them, a bit like ghouls, but paler and with longer limbs. I had to fight them off. Fortunately, I had with me a dagger, made from the fang of an unusually large Hound of Tindalos.” He flexed his right hand. The ring with a tooth on it was long gone, transformed into the knife, and subsequently lost. He’d acquired other blades, but none so wondrous. “That sent the buggers scattering for their holes, but didn’t give me much hope for finding civilization at the summit. Functioning city-states tend to clear the monsters off their access roads. When I reached the heights, I found an abandoned temple of shining gold. It would have been lovely to loot, back in my world, but it was useless to me here, and infested with more of those monsters. I did find a sort of gondola, though, made of gold, which carried me across a sea of mist to the far shore.”
“Yes, and then?” The sage’s smoking eyes were showing hints of flame now. Did the fellow somehow burn knowledge, to fuel himself? Sanford didn’t know, and, upon reflection, didn’t much care. As long as he got what he wanted out of this arrangement, Sanford was not opposed to a fair deal. Sometimes that was the best you could do, after all.
