City Of Ruin (33 page)

A pause in the combat, a sudden gasp.

Randur turned to see Rika emerging from the doorway with a crude torch in one hand, a vision that imposed itself upon his awareness like the appearance of some holy apparition.

At the sight of the flames, the figures scattered manically, though dragging with them the horse’s corpse.

Randur looked round to Munio, and then to Rika, and . . . Where was Eir?

A muffled scream from the edge of the forest.

‘Fuck, they’ve got her. Rika, make yourself useful and bring along that torch.’

*

Clustered together, they sprinted along a path parallel to the limestone cliff, with the forest to their right. The snow-covered terrain was utterly aphotic, their vision restricted to several paces in front under the light of the torch. There were faint tracks that the white beings had left behind them, punctuated frequently with drops of blood which Randur hoped originated from the hunks of horse flesh.

Eventually they caught up with a figure lying face-down in the snow. It wasn’t Eir, Randur saw with a stab of relief. This was the spokeswoman whose hand he had severed. Lingering over her corpse, they realized she must have bled to death there in the darkness.

They moved on, the tracks accumulating, indicating that the intruders came along this path often. It sloped upwards, to the left, towards the cliff face.

And into the rock caves.

‘The hell am I going in there,’ Munio muttered.

‘Fuck yourself then.’ Randur continued forward with Rika, leaving his old tutor outside in the dark. He didn’t care what was waiting for him – he would get Eir back, or else die trying.

A few moments later, a cry, ‘Wait!’

Eventually Munio caught up, but was breathless because of the additional sprint. He panted, ‘I can’t have you lot all killing yourselves.’

Rika led the way to the entrance, while Randur gripped his blade in anticipation, switching his mind into that lethal zone, ready to be as savage as was needed. Torchlight picked out stalagmites and stalactites, so it seemed that everywhere they looked they were staring into the jaws of some rock beast. Would they ever find Eir in this maze? The surfaces had been weathered so intensely they looked wrinkled with age. In places the stone sagged. They passed mirror pools and zones drenched with bat excrement. The path itself was smooth from years of use, and Randur reckoned that the white-skinned race might not be merely hiding down here, but actually lived here – which would explain the lack of pigmentation in their skins.

Eventually the same path narrowed, before expanding into a larger cavern. Despite the absence of light they noted several exits on the opposite side.

‘Down there, look.’ Rika was pointing to a pool of water.

A pile of metallic objects was barely visible, a motionless form lying alongside. Randur’s heart missed a few beats. They edged their way down cautiously, after detecting an ancient stairway smoothed out of the rock.

‘Eir!’ Randur called out, the echo of his voice strangely prolonged.

She lay flat on her back at the foot of the stairway, rubbing one hand over her face.

He sprinted to her side and skidded on to his knees. No blood, no wounds, nothing to denote she’d been suffering any pain. ‘How do you feel?’ he gasped.

‘I’m fine. My head’s a little sore, as is my neck, but I’m fine.’ He helped her sit up and she buried her head in his shoulder. She was shaking and he did his best to comfort her.

Munio nodded at the sight, and stepped this way and that to check for any sign of the white folk. Randur, too, wondered where they’d gone, then he glanced upwards. ‘Bohr . . .’ he breathed, and Eir squirmed away from him to follow his gaze.

The torchlight reflected off an array of surfaces, gold, silver, copper, brass – hundreds of coins and ornaments, bangles and rings and necklaces. The hoard was vast, extending like a money-beach. Sloping downwards, it descended into a deep pool which bore evidence of rust, the centuries of decay evident.

Randur lifted Eir up in his arms, and they slowly skirted the rim of the treasure, sifting through it with their feet, totally in awe.

Munio crouched, with a groan, to examine some of the coins in more detail, asking for Rika to lower the torch. ‘Some of these . . . they’re positively ancient. Long before Emperors Gulion and Haldun. Look, this even has Goltang’s image! Well I never . . . I’ve never seen such . . . such wealth,’ he muttered.

‘My necklace,’ Eir whispered, exploring her skin with one hand. ‘It’s gone. They must have stolen it.’

‘They might have even taken you just for your necklace,’ Randur suggested. ‘These people, it looks like they’ve been bringing all these trinkets down here for hundreds of years, and without anyone knowing about them.’

‘Millennia!’ Munio examined a piece under the light of Rika’s torch. ‘This here is from the Azimuth era.’

Randur noted how the old man was slyly filling his pockets with some of the trinkets, but thought better than to query it.

This seemed unreal, for an entire community to lead little more than a magpie existence, obsessed with anything that glittered. How long ago must they have fallen away from the surface world, evolving to become those ghosts who had butchered the horse?

‘Look at these markings on the walls.’ Rika brought the light nearer to an area of pale stone that had been noticeably smoothed away. Rock-script bled across it. ‘These are deliberate markings, symbols or equations. I’ve never studied the subject in any detail, but I believe this could be the Máthema language.’

The jagged lines were painted in startlingly bright pigments, yellow and red, the workings of a culture tens of thousands of years old. The notion was absurd, because the writing seemed so fresh.

‘Vectors,’ Rika whispered. ‘Geometric patterns, algebra. Integration ... And yet the graffiti scribbled around it all seem like ...’

‘The scrawls of madmen,’ Randur mumbled, studying the ragged scripts. Vaguely, one set of symbols spelled out:

To Randur it resembled ‘HELP US’ and he was hardly surprised they had gone mad because of all the mathematics ...

‘So is this what eventually happened to that great civilization, then?’ Eir suggested. ‘I always thought it was crop failure that wiped them out. Surely they couldn’t just simply vanish underground while chasing treasure.’

There was a noise nearby, an inhalation of breath, and Randur peered towards the dark exits beyond. Sets of orbs began faintly glowing blue, two, four, then an almost exponential rate of appearance.

‘They won’t come at us - not with that torch.’ Randur glanced to Rika, as if to ask
How long will it last?

‘I’ve plenty of sulphur and lime, and matches if it runs out,’ she said. ‘We’re quite safe.’

They returned their gaze to the hoard and the script, independently investigating their discoveries. For some time they patrolled the area to investigate.

There was a weird and distant howl, like a fractured incantation. The group glanced at each other and readied themselves for a fight, but nothing followed. A tension persisted in the air, though, as if someone had triggered a relic. Sounds began to act abnormally, voices hanging disturbingly in the gloom. Reverberations of their footsteps became suddenly muted.

Then there was the
clink-clink-clink
of metal.

Coins skimmed back and forth across the floor, rolling over each other, rupturing the surface of the water. Of their own accord, the countless metallic discs began to aggregate and spool, to form a figure.

They massed, stacked and banked up, forming a torso and arms and legs, which then pushed themselves up from the mirror-pool. Resting on top of a vague metal head was a semi-shattered rust-crown.

A coin golem?

The four scrambled back up the stairway as the metal entity strode out of the pool, its legs and feet buckling rustily as it gained control of its own movements. Randur hovered at the rear, now feeling utterly useless, because it would take much more than a couple of sword strokes to bring this bastard down. Stretching upwards, the thing’s head nearly scraped the roof of the cavern, sending individual discs slipping away from it like drops of water.

It began to lumber after them, vast and awkward, and making a hell of a racket.

They ran.

‘Stick together and aim for narrow passageways!’ Randur shouted. ‘I doubt it can fit through many of them.’

‘Nor do I,’ Munio called back.

Light from the torch dipped as they entered pockets of stale air, retracing their route. The occasional enforced darkness made for an unlikely escape. The path narrowed, opened up again. Randur desperately wanted to pause to check on the state of the golem following them. He could still hear the rattle of metal against stone as its body clipped the outcrops of rock, spilling metal-flesh each time. It was in pursuit, but what he wanted to see was how much of it was left.

The air became fresher and colder as the outside world beckoned them again.

A burst of the glade, the stars above, the glow of snow – and they bundled out, breathlessly slipping and sliding down the slope. Behind them, the coin golem was nowhere to be seen.

Randur felt his heart slapping inside him, and he crouched on his hands and knees until he regained his composure.

‘Next time,’ Munio growled, ‘don’t let’s go getting any stupid ideas about following things into dark places, right?’

‘We had to rescue Eir,’ Randur reminded him. ‘Anyway, I wanted to know who they were.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Eir panted, ‘I’ll be glad not to come across any money again in a hurry.’

As the two of them embraced, Randur peered over her shoulder, into the darkness.

She whispered into his ear, ‘Thank you for coming to get me.’

‘You’re our main cook now,’ he replied. ‘Can’t have you dying on us.’

It was called ballooning, and it was how spiders would colonize new territory.

By the open window of Voland’s upstairs study, it shuddered and jutted into its new state, organs and segments unfolding in the small, candlelit room. It watched its shadow, double, triple in size against the wall.

The thing bloomed.

Under its abdomen, four glands drooled out the tougher silk it needed. It could secrete silk from its mouth also, a freak biological error that had somehow occurred, but the toughest material came from underneath. The texture began to solidify, then it quickly spun it, flattened it, elongated it, then globulated it. The spider crawled next to the window, draped those masses of silk outside, manipulated it in the air, till soon the wind caught it, began to fill it and, as this gossamer balloon became five times its size, it was hauled out into the skies above Villiren.

In this form it could not feel the bite of ice-tainted air, and so drifted along with a sense of freedom and comfort. Despite the clear skies, the twin moons were concealed by the bulk of the planet, leaving the creature with the advantage of the night. Tugging at silk strands it tilted the balloon this way and that, sensed changes in the currents above and below and took advantage as and when it pleased. Even around midnight, the city was unsurprisingly alive, so it had to choose its routes carefully so that the taller buildings obscured its passage overhead – not an easy job in Villiren, especially towards the southern section of the city. From up here, the movement of all those people registered visually as minute vibrations, minuscule alterations within hundreds of microclimates.

The spider floated above the border between Scarhouse and Althing, the Citadel almost behind. Knowing that the most proficient military gathered there, it did not want to risk being seen by a skilled archer, brought down in a nest of fine swordsmen. Over the Shanties, behind the old harbour of Port Nostalgia housing retired dockworkers and miners. The side along the coast would be particularly quiet, away from the main hubbub, and with a couple of its legs it began to pull at the threads so as to diminish the volume of the balloon.

Descending onto a small, flat roof, the gossamer collapsed to one side like a deflated corpse. It would need to re-inflate it for the return journey, but for now it untangled itself then scuttled over to the edge of the roof, peering at the movement of people down on the street.