The High King's Tomb by Kristen Britain
THE SILVER SPHERE
Thursgad awoke to silence. Dead silence.
He sat up recalling where he was and shuddered. The last thing he remembered was a crazed spirit charging him and his cohorts with sword raised. He peered around the corner of King Smidhe’s sarcophagus to see what was what and recoiled with a gasp. Gare lay there in a pool of blood, unmoving. Had the vengeful apparition killed him?
Thursgad scrubbed his face. Gare was dead and Rol was nowhere to be seen; had abandoned him in this miserable place. Or maybe because the dead were displeased by the desecration of their tombs, Rol hadn’t left willingly but was spirited away to some cursed shadow world to be tormented for an eternity.
Thursgad pushed himself to his feet, gazing warily at his surroundings, but nothing so much as moved. He did not know what he’d do if he saw another ghost. He made the sign of the crescent moon hoping to placate angry spirits and calm himself.
A throbbing against his hip reminded him he carried Grandmother’s mysterious sphere. He’d obeyed her instructions so far, not handling it or telling anyone about it, but now it seemed to want out of its purse. Was it time to release the sphere? Grandmother told him to smash it when he was ready to leave the tombs. He was certainly more than ready, having no wish to disturb the dead further and share in Gare’s fate, or Rol’s—whatever that was.
Thursgad tentatively loosened the drawstrings of the purse, removed the sphere and rested it on his palm. It was heavier than it looked, and it almost felt like it sucked on his flesh like a leech. He shuddered again.
He could not see his reflection in its silvery surface, but there was underlying movement, like shadows or black smoke. Grandmother had not explained what the spell did, but he knew it couldn’t be anything good. Maybe he shouldn’t release it at all, but if he didn’t, one way or another Grandmother would find him and punish him, and he’d seen what she could do to those who displeased her. She scared him more than any ghost.
He’d obey her wishes, but not until he was nearly out of the tombs. He rolled the sphere around his palm, searching its gleaming surface for any indication his was the proper course. Aye, he’d find his way out of the tombs, release the spell as he left, and flee the castle, the city, and the country. He’d escape to Rhovanny to become a prosperous wine farmer. That’s just what he’d do.
Fingers closed around his ankle.
Thursgad screamed. He should have made sure Gare was really dead, but he had not, and with his nerves already on edge, he lost hold of the sphere. It flew through the air in a graceful arc. He fumbled after it, but it was slippery as if oiled, and escaped his grasp. He watched in horror as it plummeted to the floor.
When the sphere hit stone, it did not bounce or roll, but cracked like an egg. No yolk oozed from it, but it expelled a wisp of smoke.
“Help me,” Gare whispered.
Thursgad kicked his ankle free of the man’s grasp and backed out of reach. He watched the smoke spiral up from the sphere, wondering why nothing else happened. He expected the ceiling to cave in, a maelstrom to sweep through the catacombs, doom to descend, but all was still. Too still, now that he thought of it. Aye, much too still…He tensed, ready to bolt.
Until he heard scratching from beneath the lid of King Smidhe’s sarcophagus.
Thursgad promptly fainted once again.
Karigan hid a short distance down one of the passages that led off the main chamber where the statue of King Smidhe sat astride his marble horse. She stood in the shadow of a column trying to catch her breath, and held her wounded arm to her, fingers clamped over slashed flesh. The book was tucked beneath her elbow.
From this vantage point, she could see the man searching for some sign of her in the main chamber to indicate which way she’d run. He knelt to the floor and touched something. Karigan glanced at her wound and discovered blood oozing between her fingers and dripping to the floor. He would track the droplets until he found her. She’d have to run again, and she wasn’t sure she had it in her. She could just give him the book, and that would be the end of it. She could rest.
But the real end would be how Second Empire put the information in the book to use. The end of Sacoridia.
She would have to try and hide it before the man caught up with her. And he would catch up. She knew it.
Before she took a single step, however, a strange sensation crept over her, a palpable shadow, though the passage she stood in was neither darker nor lighter. The tombs were, by their very nature, a still place, but they were too still.
The man stood erect, glancing over his shoulder and up into the dome. He appeared to sense it, too, whatever it was.
The air grew colder and a force pulled on Karigan, made her stumble from her place of hiding. Moans rose and echoed through the corridors of the tombs, like the opening of an ancient door that has lain shut for centuries and is forced open. The moans keened in layers, some far off, some close to Karigan’s ears. She wanted to burrow into a corner and hide, but she was being called. Raised.
Bones rustled beneath shrouds. The dead scrabbled at the insides of sarcophagi trying to escape. The linen-wrapped dead arose from funerary slabs. Spirits streamed by her, kings and queens, whole royal families with crowns upon their heads, some mere shadows with gaping holes where their eyes should be. Their passage was a chill wind.
A skeletal hand with a bejeweled ring on its finger skittered by her feet like a spider.
“Bad dream,” Karigan whispered, suddenly recalling her nightmare in the House of Sun and Moon.
She tried to hold onto the column she’d been hiding behind, but the calling forced her on, her trailing hand leaving a smear of blood on stone. The calling pushed her forward, compelled her to join the dead in their march toward the main chamber.
She was faded out, a ghost herself. She tried to drop the fading, but could not. Some greater power had taken command of her ability.
Karigan, along with the dead, spilled into the chamber. They were a ghostly sea that surged and receded in waves. The man spun around and around, aware of the spirits by the look of terror in his wide eyes, but there was no way to know how much he actually saw. The ambulatory corpses, royal mantles dragging on the floor behind them, were very visible.
Awakened, the spirits moaned. Why are we awakened from our sleep?
The man screamed when a corpse bumped into him. The scream attracted the spirits and they swarmed him. He thrashed and then crumpled to the floor, whimpering and throwing his arms over his head.
Why? the dead implored. Why are we awakened?
Karigan wanted to know why, too. Had the intruders triggered something?
Great pressure built in the air and the lamps of the tombs dampened to a weak orange glow, leaving the dome in darkness and the lower levels of the chamber in a sickly light. The spirits gusted around her in an even more agitated state.
Whyyy? they wailed.
A vibration crept up through Karigan’s feet, up her legs. As the throbbing increased, statues, armor, and vases shook and rattled. The tremors continued to intensify and all around objects crashed to the floor.
A queen’s pallid spirit came face to face with Karigan and screamed, her mouth opening into a cavernous void, before she drifted away in shreds.
The statue of King Smidhe on his horse quaked. His outstretched arm cracked at the elbow and smashed to the floor, chipping the horse’s mane on its way down.
The tremors increased even further and Karigan feared the whole of the castle would collapse upon her. If the tombs were shaking this much, it must be far worse above ground.
A powerful vibration almost knocked Karigan off her feet. The head of King Smidhe’s horse broke off and shattered into millions of pieces. The floor cracked open and she scrambled backward to avoid falling into it. The crack expanded, opening to impenetrable depths.
A wall of dank, even colder air rose from the abyss and the dead cried out around her. One of the shambling corpses fell into it, crown, scepter, and
The new spirits flew around her. They passed through other spirits leaving swirls of otherworldly dust behind them. Before Karigan could leap out of the way, one passed through her like a sword of cold steel sheathed in her ribs. She staggered. Another came at her and reflexively she batted it away with the book. Perhaps because it was a book of magic it deflected the spirit.
Ghostly voices wormed through her mind. She sensed great age in them, but could not discern the words. These spirits were far older than the oldest of those interred in the tombs. From the time of the Delvers? Maybe even older. Their graves must lie below the Halls of Kings and Queens.
The statue of King Smidhe, horse and all, finally weakened by millions of cracks, collapsed into shattered limbs and rubble. Masonry from above began to shower down. Karigan fought her way through spirits toward the shelter of one of the corridors, but found it in equal tumult.
She breathed hard, wishing away the destruction and the dead, wishing for balance and normalcy, wishing she were nestled in her own bed. No doubt that bed was being jostled hard right now. She could not imagine the chaos up in the castle.
Was this it for her? Would she die crushed in the tombs? Would she be buried beneath the rubble with those already dead?
Her breathing constricted as panic set in. She had survived many things and averted disaster a time or two, but this was way beyond her ability to fix—there was nothing she could do against such a force. She would never see her father or her aunts again, or Condor, or her friends. She closed her eyes against the devastation and chaos, wondering what death would really be like.
As if in answer, she felt the presence of the death god’s steed beside her. She opened her eyes to find the stallion standing there in the corridor with her, his mane and forelock flowing in a supernatural breeze.
“Can you make this stop?” she asked. Or, had he come to claim her?
He turned his head just enough to fix her with one obsidian eye. That eye was a turmoil of stars, a race through the infinite. Karigan shook her head and looked away, fearing she’d get swept away in that gaze.
The destruction around her seemed far off, as though the closeness of the stallion buffered her from it. More of the dome’s ceiling panels crashed down, raising a powdery dust. The spirits whirled and rose and vanished into it.
“Well?” Karigan demanded of the stallion. “What are you going to do?”
He snorted at her as if marking her impertinence, then knelt down before her.
“Oh, no,” Karigan said, backing away. “This is your thing to fix. Your master is the god of death, and this is—this is dead business.”
His gaze caught her again and this time she could not escape. She was drawn into a vision of his making. In it she was swept out of the tombs, out of the castle, and upward among the stars as if suspended on wings. Below her she saw the castle and Sacor City. It was still dark and street lamps glittered below as tiny pinpoints of light. Despite the darkness, she could see everything: how the buildings shook and houses crumpled, how the city walls gave way. The towers of the castle wobbled. People fell from walls, were crushed beneath rubble. Others ran screaming through the streets. Fires consumed the noble quarter and other neighborhoods.
It was as if the hill the castle and city sat upon was coming to life and trying to shake the constructions of humanity off its back.
A castle turret toppled, then another, and a portion of the roof fell in. Karigan screamed along with those in the vision.
The hill then heaved and collapsed in on itself taking the castle and about a third of the city down with it, leaving a vast smoking crater. It wasn’t just dust rising, she realized, or smoke from burning buildings, but dark spirits spiraling out of the crater like a malignant cloud.
Karigan fell from the sky.
AVATAR
When the vision released Karigan, she was still screaming, thought she was still falling. The stallion exuded a blanket of peace from where he knelt beside her, and once she realized she stood on solid rock, her screams died.
“That’s what will happen,” Karigan said to the stallion, shaking all over. Despite the mayhem around her, the hill and castle had not collapsed. Yet. Her friends, her colleagues, they still lived; there was a chance to change the outcome. She licked her lips. “You showed me what will happen if I don’t mount.”
The stallion whickered. It came to her as a clear affirmative.
She did not want to submit herself to the will of the gods, to become their tool, but if Sacor City fell, the lord-governors would fight for power over the king’s corpse and Second Empire would take the opportunity to seize control. Nothing would stand in the way of Mornhavon the Black’s return. From that perspective her decision was simple. She would not, could not, allow Sacor City to fall.
She mounted the stallion.
And found herself clad in the splendor of star steel. She bore a great lance and a shield that displayed the device of the crescent moon, which shone with an ethereal pearlescent glow. Upon her head was a winged helm, and she knew its appearance without having to look at it in the same way she knew the armor she wore was forged by the smith god Belasser, the fire of the stars his furnace. The armor gleamed as though the light of those stars still resided in it, and it weighed nothing. Its surface crawled with winged symbols that changed shape so constantly she could not see their true form.
The stallion was likewise armored, and she sat upon a warhorse’s saddle, but he wore no bridle, just a chanfron of star steel to protect his face. The book she’d fought so hard to capture rested now in its own saddlebag of fine mesh mail.
With the armor came knowledge, the knowledge that not only would the castle and city fall if she did not act, but that the void in the middle of the chamber provided a doorway for spirits to leave the realm of death, malignant spirits that would torment and feed on the living.
This was why Salvistar became involved, and this was why she was chosen to act on behalf of his master: this rupture in the layers of the world violated the will of the gods and the laws of nature, and the heavens knew, literally, that she had interacted with the dead often enough.
Salvistar clip-clopped into the central chamber. Riding him was like riding the air. The destruction and shaking of the tombs paused as if all time stopped. The ghosts were clearer to Karigan’s vision than before, all the men, women, and children who had ruled over Sacoridia in life. They bowed to her and her steed, and backed out of the way.
The other spirits, those who had come from below, were not as clear. They remained smudges of darkness, but she had a sense of their more primitive natures, their desires were more basic. They hungered, lusted to penetrate the living world. Fear was their tool, souls would satiate them.
Salvistar halted at the void, tossed his head, and leaped into it.
Karigan wanted to scream as they plummeted through the pitch black, but like her knowledge that she was to speak for Westrion, and that the spirits would invade the lands above if not called back to their graves, she knew the stallion would not let her fall. Indeed, she had the impression of great gossamer wings guiding their course and her seat was secure.
Eventually Salvistar landed lightly on a ledge deep within the void. The glow of their star steel armor cast a vaporous light on skulls and bones tucked into hundreds of depressions in the walls of the crevice. Engraved on the walls were Delver drawings and offerings of crude pottery, moldering furs, and weapons and tools of chert littered the ledge.
“Come,” she said. The voice was hers, and it was not. She spoke Westrion’s words.
One by one spirits massed around her, transparent presences, shadows. Thousands of them. She felt their hostility. Their voices shrieked in disobedience, spoke of their thirst to feed on the living. She knew th
“Sleep,” she commanded the spirits.
They screeched and swirled in rebellion, and one who had been their chieftain in life appeared before her, standing on air. Wild hair floated about his head and he was clad in animal skins.
“Go away, avatar,” he said. “You are not our god. We shall do as we wish.”
Karigan thrust her lance through the chieftain and he evaporated from existence. The other spirits stilled.
The great voice of Westrion welled up inside her and emerged as a forceful compulsion: “Sleep.”
The spirits scrambled for their niches like swarming insects and did not reemerge.
Salvistar launched himself from the ledge and spiraled down and down into sepulchral darkness, down to a place that had never known light. Karigan was not sure if it was even a physical place they traveled to or if they had transcended into some other existence.
Finally the stallion alighted and the glow of their armor revealed a dry, rocky landscape. The rocks were unweathered and of sharp and forbidding shapes. Embedded in the ground was a round shield of star steel. Like Karigan’s armor, symbols wriggled across its surface, but some did not move, were dead, and a portion of the seal was tarnished and had begun to buckle. She sensed the throng of demons on the other side pushing and scratching and beating the seal for release.
This was the greater threat. If the demons escaped, life on Earth would turn into a hell, a place of eternal strife and darkness, where the living must battle for their very existence or be enslaved and tormented unto eternity. Humans would become the live carrion for spirits and demons and the living world would be transformed into a realm of death.