Dark Legion (44 page)

“Urgh, that's close to where we started,” Neysa said.

“I know. This passage here is our last hope,” I said, running my finger along a line on the plan. “If it doesn't work…”

“We leave?” Marcus asked.

“We leave the hidden passages and do it the hard way. If you don't want to join me, feel free to leave.”

“I'll come,” Marcus said, almost before I finished my own sentence. “I promised your branded men that I would get their prince out alive.” Also, he was bound to me and my quest. He had no real say in it. If he had his free will, he would doubtless have left, or at least complained my ears off.

“Me too,” Neysa said.

I smiled at my friends. “Alright, let's go then, bodyguard. Save me from the spiders.”

Standing up was difficult. Every inch of my body was a source of pain. And damn it, I was so very tired.

 

After another wrong turn we found the passage we were looking for and were walking along it for a couple of minutes when Marcus came to a sudden stop. Deep in thought, I ploughed into the back of him.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“Noticed the lack of cobwebs along here?”

“No, but now that you mention it…”

“And look in front of me,” Marcus said.

I peered past him and saw the stirred-up dust leading down the passage. “Tracks?”

“Tracks,” Marcus said. “This passage is used, and fairly frequently by the look of it.”

We continued on more cautiously for several minutes until Marcus called a halt once more. He stood looking into the darkness. “Kill the light Neysa,” Marcus whispered. “I think I can feel the air move. If I'm right, it means there is another opening and I don't want your light shining out.” Neysa's light winked out, plunging us into darkness. It was cold without her light.

“And how will we find our way in this?” Neysa asked.

We stood for a long moment. The afterglow of Neysa's light still danced across my vision, but after a while, it mostly faded, except for one spot. One spot? No, that was no afterglow, it was the echo of light, a whisper really. I stood for a while longer to let my eyes learn their way, then took Neysa's hand in my own—it felt comfortable there—and led her forward. I felt a jerk as she grabbed Marcus's hand in turn. We continued on for a long time. Or perhaps not, but it certainly felt that way. Darkness had a strange way of messing with my perception of time. My night vision had always been good, but ever since joining the assassin's guild, I was sure it had only improved, but with the mere whispers of light in that passage, I could barely make my way, and stairs still presented some difficulty.

As the minutes stretched, I, too, felt a current of fresh air on my sweaty brow, and I was sure I could smell food cooking also. My stomach rumbled at the thought of food. Another bend and a set of stairs later, a sound echoed down the passage. Clang—clang—clang. Pause. Clang—clang—clang. The sound was faint at first, but got louder with each step.

 

We rounded a curve in the passage, and the light became brighter and the sound near deafening. The source of the light soon became apparent. Five small holes in the wall, peepholes, with beams of light shooting through them, making the swirling dust motes we stirred up look like smoke. I wasn't sure if the light was incredibly bright, or if it was just the contrast with the darkness. My stomach rumbled again. I could smell roasting meat, I was sure of it. Letting go of Neysa's hand, I walked to the closest opening, stuck an eye to the hole, and immediately jerked my head back from the blinding light. I blinked the tears from my eyes, then tried again, more slowly this time.

My eyes were first drawn to two men manning a large bellows. As they worked it, a flame soared in a furnace to my left. A large man wearing a metal mask removed a rod from a trough of water. He held it close to his face, looking down its length, then plunged it back into the fire. When he removed it, it was glowing orange, and he placed it on an anvil. Clang, clang, clang, he beat on it with his hammer. A blacksmith, then.

The metal rod, soon to be a sword, was plunged back into the trough with a hiss. The blacksmith stood and pulled on a lever which tipped a bucket of molten metal into a mold. He placed two silver bars into the empty bucket, poured another silvery liquid in after it from a glass decanter, and put the metal bucket back on the fire.

I looked over the rest of the large room. Swords and armor lay scattered across the many tables in various states of assembly, and a table near me was lined with swords. They looked the same as those used by the armored Dark Legion, but some had pommels, while others did not.

A movement on my very right caught my attention, but my line of sight was blocked by the wall, so I left my peephole and took up position behind another, the furthest to the right. Neysa stood away from the wall, looking angry, her mouth drawn in a tight line. “What?” I mouthed, but she did not respond.

I looked through, and saw two old hags waving fans into what appeared to be a shallow metal bath. With each wave of their fans, a fine gray dust flew into the air and kept there, swirling like a mist. They fanned it for several minutes, and when they were done, one of the hags picked up a glass decanter and held it beneath the bath. The other removed a plug or stopper, and a bright silvery liquid poured into the jar. The hag with the jar walked out of sight toward the blacksmith, and the other went off in the opposite direction. The first hag soon returned with an empty decanter and placed it on a shelf.

A grinding noise came from my right, mixed with a muffled cry. A hag came into view pushing an oversized wheelbarrow containing a young man, bound and gagged. She tipped it into the metal bath, and the man fell with a thump, face first. The hags left and soon returned with two small canisters, which they used to pour a liquid into the bath and over the man's body.

I gasped, but quickly covered my mouth. One hag pulled out a flint from a pouch in her apron and leapt back as she struck it. A huge flame shot up from the bath with the first strike, and I pulled my face from the wall, feeling the heat even at that distance. The man screamed. He may have been gagged, with his face pressed into the metal, but he screamed, and it was loud.

The hunger I felt with the smell of roasting meat evaporated, replaced with something less pleasant. I remembered then the discussion between the guard and Neysa, when they'd told her what was to happen to her. The young man had met just such a fate, all to extract the mercury from his body. I doubted it was necessary for him to be alive when they'd burned him.

I walked back to the first peephole and watched as the blacksmith opened up the mold. Four silver balls were tipped onto the table, still rough, but what would become pommels for the swords. Silver and mercury, with perhaps something else, but it was the magic-imbued mercury that gave the swords their power. I pulled back from the wall again to find Marcus and Neysa staring at me, filled with rage. I gestured for us to move on, and the man's screaming followed us down the passageway.

 

I walked blind for several minutes while my eyes found their way, and guided myself along with one hand on the wall. It was still dark, and I found my way more by the sound of clanging than the scant light. “Another blacksmith?” I asked.

“Sounds like battle,” Marcus said.

Around the corner, four more peepholes awaited us. We approached them and pulled away again in unison. None of the horrific scenes from the previous peepholes awaited us, but such reactions were only natural when the Dark Legion were involved. I stuck my eye back to the hole and saw what appeared to be a sparring session, with eight Inquisitors sparring in pairs. They wore armor, but not the impressive black stuff I had seen earlier. This armor was plainer, less well fitting. As much as I despised their order, their skill with the blade was impressive. It wasn't often that you could call men trying to hack at each other with sharp implements graceful, but these certainly were. The room appeared to be a training hall, with wooden dummies along one wall and archery targets along the other.

“Enough!” an Inquisitor yelled from the side. The others stopped their sparring and bowed to each other before sheathing their swords. “Take a break,” the man said, and walked away.

One of the Inquisitors was rotating his arms. “I don't think I will get used to this armor,” he said.

“You won't have to, brother,” his sparring partner said. “The new armor will be issued within the week.”

“I am not comfortable with how many of our tenets are being modified,” the Inquisitor said. “For too long I have lived with the knowledge that armor was only for those who believed they could be hit. And those new swords make me deeply uncomfortable.”

“With that I agree. The years we have spent eradicating the heretics that use magic… only to use it ourselves now. But who are we to call the Beloved's words into question?”

“Hah! More like Vesh's words. But you are right, brother.” The Inquisitor walked up to my wall and placed his hands to either side of my peephole. He stretched a leg out behind him. “My body is not used to the extra weight,” he said. He lifted his head, and just as he was about to come eye to eye with me, I ducked down. The Inquisitor probably could not see me, but if anyone knew of the passage, it would be the Dark Legion. I sat in the dust with my back against the wall, then tapped Neysa on the leg and gestured for us to keep moving.

 

A short while later the passage became completely dark, but it was not until I found a ninety degree turn by walking into a wall with my face that I asked Neysa to summon her light again. The walk was long, much of it consisting of steps, and I was thirsty, starving, and in a world of pain. We walked for so long that I began to question whether we were still in the palace. We had to be very high up. I looked at my plans from time to time, but I had no idea where we were, so I resorted to guessing. There were no other forking paths leading from the passage, so it did not seem to matter.

We walked and climbed until the path ended. Not until we reached our destination, not until we chose to stop, but until the passage ended in a soul-destroying dead end. I felt deflated, depressed, and above all else, furious. By all the names of the Gods, who would put a dead end after such a climb?

“Give me the plans,” Neysa snapped. She looked at them, biting her lip. She looked gorgeous. I loved seeing her in her element, but now was not the time for the thoughts that ran through my mind. She nodded, gave the plans back to me, then pushed me aside. The wave of heat from the ball of light following her made me flinch. She walked up to the wall barring our way at the end of the passage and held her hands to it. She pushed gently, and it swung open, hinged on one side. It appeared to require little effort on Neysa's part. I gestured for her to put out her light.

A dim light fell into the passage, and I made my way through the opening, taking slow and careful steps. I found myself in a small room. A small room that smelled like shit. On closer investigation, it looked to be a privy. It was shit.

Marcus and Neysa followed me in, Marcus scrunching his face and Neysa holding her nose. Neysa was about to speak, probably to say something obscene, but I held a finger to her lips. The door that led to the privy stood ajar, and I peered through the narrow opening.

A large, high-ceilinged room lay on the other side, sparsely furnished, with just a few paintings on the walls and cabinets here and there. Not what I would have expected from an emperor's room; it was too spartan. I looked over my shoulder, and my face nearly collided with Marcus's. He and Neysa were crowded in close and peered past me through the gap.

Marcus tilted his head to the room, so I slowly edged the door open. Fortunately, the hinges were well-oiled and the door swung open without a sound. I stepped through and saw that the rest of the room was as bare as my first impressions had led me to believe. Then, there was the bed, quite at odds with the rest of the room. It was massive, easily four times larger than the biggest I had seen, and sat on a raised platform.

“By the Gods,” Marcus whispered. “Bordellos need beds that size. Then we wouldn't need to rotate.” Neysa smacked him in the face, hard, and the sound echoed through the room.

I heard a gasp, and a chill trickled down my spine. Magic. I spun, and the others soon followed. Marcus drew his blade and advanced on the dark alcove around the corner from the privy. Neysa's ball of light flicked into existence, near blinding me.

“Calm down, calm down,” a voice said from the darkness. “I have been waiting.”

A figure slowly emerged, hands raised. He had long gray hair, a white robe, and tiny spectacles.

“Malakai!” Neysa said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Illusions

 

“Malakai!” Neysa said.

Malakai stood at the edge of shadow, looking half asleep. “Just so,” Malakai said. As Neysa approached him, her light shone into the alcove, revealing a desk containing a pot of ink, a burnt out candle, and several pages. The one at the top was half covered in writing. Had he fallen asleep?

“What are you doing here?” I asked.