Skull Gate (19 page)

They turned down another unlighted corridor. Conditions appeared no better. The manor seemed as ruinous inside as out. A long web draped from the ceiling; Frost's candle illuminated its plump occupant. Onokratos saw it, too. Bending quickly, he snatched off a thin felt slipper and smashed the spider against the wall. With a wild hand he destroyed its home, leaving not a strand. Then, staring hatefully at the pulped remains of the arachnid, he mouthed a torrent of blasphemous curses.

Frost watched it all in stunned silence and shuddered.

They came to a stairway. She had not considered where in the two-level manor she might be, upper floor or main. She lifted her light higher, followed her unpredictable guide. His candle cast an amber glow against the darkness, but she could not see the stair's bottom. She took the first step, grabbing the banister to feel her way, then snatching back her hand. The rail was covered with a pale, chalky powder, ancient dust. She brushed her palm on her tunic and swallowed.

Down they went, with no end in sight. It had not occurred to Frost that the manor might have levels hidden below the earth, but certainly that was the case. The way wound down and down. The air grew chill, moldy. Onokratos led, head bowed. She saw only his back and the hand with which he clutched his candle. Could it still be a man hunched so in that heavy robe? She felt for her sword's hilt and remembered it was not there.

“Old man?"

Only an echo answered, no other sound. They descended lower, deeper into the earth, the stairs winding tight, ever around and around.
It's like a tower
, she thought to herself,
built in the wrong direction, down instead of up
.

A low growl rose out of the ebon depths, freezing the blood in her veins. She stopped. It came again, a snarling that sent shivers racing up her spine. She peered over the edge of the stairs into an abyss, a blackness that her small candle failed to penetrate. She looked back the way she had come, darkness that way, too. Onokratos did not stop; the gap between his light and hers widened. She hurried to close it up.

The growling continued with intermittent pauses. Then came a shriek so loud, so soul-shriveling, she nearly dropped her candle. Hot wax splattered on her hand, it trembled so. For one terrifying moment she feared someone had unleashed Demonfang. But the sound degenerated once more into a series of low, animal snarls. A fine sweat broke out on her forehead and palms. She wiped her hands.

“I thought you were leading me to Aki,” she said. The passage flung back her words. She waited for the echo to subside. “You said you were taking me to Aki,” she repeated. But Onokratos kept his silence, and only the sounds of whatever lived below answered her.

An odor of filth and stale urine wafted in the air. It grew stronger with each step until she wrinkled her nose against it. Then the stairs ended. They walked a short distance down a narrow passage and stopped. The light from Onokratos's candle fell on a lonely door.

From behind that door issued the growls and a bestial scratching. The terrible stench had become a foul, pungent taste in her throat. She studied the old man's face, wary of a trap. She had seen such doors as this, with their shuttered portals, in prisons and dungeons. A hot anger began to blossom in her heart.

“Is this where you're keeping a child?” she accused icily. “In a fetid cell?"

He returned her stare impassively, reached up, seized a small wooden peg on the peephole's shutter, and slid it open. He beckoned for her to look inside.

She cried out and staggered back. “Oh, gods!” she moaned, and sagged against a wall for support. “You beast, you devil!” She shut her eyes, but the vision remained to sting her eyes. With an effort of will she forced herself to look a second time through the portal.

It was Aki, barely recognizable, but certainly the child. Her once lustrous hair was a black mass, tangled and wild. She was naked, her flesh smeared with her own excrement. Her eyes, once so full of mirth, gleamed ferinely in the light of Frost's upraised candle. Her small lingers were cut and bleeding from scraping at the walls and floor. In one hand she clutched the half-chewed carcass of a rat. She peered at her guardian from a corner of the cell, then, lips curling back over teeth, she howled. When the echo faded, she pressed the rat's flesh to her mouth and bit deeply. Blood dribbled on her chin.

Frost whirled away, seized Onokratos by his robe, slammed him against the cell door. “Devil!” she screamed. The back of her hand crashed into his head, sending him in a heap to the floor. “What have you done?” She bore down on him, fist ready to strike.

The old man rolled over and pointed one ringed finger. “Stop,” he whispered.

She loomed over him, wanting with all her heart and soul to smash him, to pound him into the stone, to sink her fingers in his soft throat, to rip out his black heart and squeeze it in her hands until it beat no more. But she had seen his power, knew what he could do. It would not help Aki to get blasted to ashes now. She had to wait, bide her time, then find a way to help the child.

Onokratos got his feet shakily under him. “She's no better or worse off than my daughter,” he said. “Only I can't let this one run free in my house. They would fight like the animals they've become."

Frost struggled to quell her temper. “Why not lock them both up?"

He sneered, a startling change from his usual passivity. “Kalynda is my child, my flesh and blood,” he said. “Should I lock her up in her own home, or this one”—he jerked a thumb at the cell door—“who is nothing to me, nothing but a pawn?"

She almost hit him again. Such callousness toward any child filled her with loathing. Later, she would make this man pay dearly for his cruelty. Now, she bit her lip and kept her tongue under tight check.

Abruptly, he turned and led the long way back up the stairs. The stench was left behind; the animal noises faded. Her heart cried out not to leave the young queen, but reason told her there was little she could do without careful consideration. She had already encountered Kalynda; Aki seemed every bit as savage, as feral.

“Isn't there some danger that your daughter will attack us if she's free to roam the manor?"

The old man shook his head. “I am protected,” he answered. “But because you and your friends are my guests, I've confined her activities to the western wing of the manor. She won't hurt you."

Rather, I was concerned with hurting her, Frost thought. Aki is my charge. Your daughter means no more to me
.

Finally, they arrived back at the room where she had awakened. Onokratos extinguished the stubs of their candles. The other candles still burned, but the rich light did nothing to drive the chill from her bones. That would take much time, she figured, as long as her mind retained an image of Aki gnawing that rat.

She strode to the bare bed frame but was too agitated to sit or lie down. She paced back and forth, arms folded, head lowered as she thought. Onokratos watched, sitting on the edge of his table. She could feel his eyes upon her. On his lap he cradled the book he had been reading earlier.

“What happened?” she demanded when it was clear he would offer no explanation.

“Kalynda was playing and fell—"

Frost waved a hand impatiently. “I mean, what happened to Aki? Your daughter's problems are not mine."

He set the book aside, regarded her evenly. “One story requires the telling of the other."

She glowered, then drew a deep breath, forced herself to sit on the old bed frame. When she was as comfortable as she thought herself likely to become, she nodded and waited for him to continue.

“We are not Korkyrans, Kalynda and I."

Frost sighed. The old man was determined to weave a tale when she only wanted facts. She knew by his accent he was not of Tras Sur'tian's people.

“Keled-Zaram is our home, far to the east."

“I know the land,” she informed him, hoping it would speed him up.

“When Kalynda's mother died I could no longer bear to live there. Every tree, every hill reminded me of her. The birds and smallest squirrels reminded me of her. I saw her face in every cloud. So, I sold my small business, took my daughter, and began to wander. Kalynda had seemed like a miracle to me, born in the lateness of my years and of her mother's. We had been childless through our long years and long since resigned ourselves to barrenness until her birth. She was our gift from the gods.” His eyes misted over and took on a faraway look. “And, even with her mother gone, that gift was no less precious. I knew we couldn't wander forever, an old man and a little girl. Kalynda needed a home and stability. In time, my grief lessened and the needs of my child became paramount. When we found this old abandoned manor, it seemed like yet another godsend. I thought that with only a little honest sweat we might once again breathe life into its fallow fields and make a new life for ourselves here. But, we had been here less than the full cycle of one moon when Kalynda—” Onokratos choked suddenly, unable to get his words out. His whole body sagged. He swallowed hard. Two tears rolled thickly down his face. “She was playing in the fields. There was an old well we knew nothing of, and she fell in."

Frost leaned forward, finding herself interested in the tale despite her impatience. “Was it some injury to her head that made her mad?"

“A moment,” he begged, holding up a hand to end her questions. “This is very hard for a father."

She regarded him with considerable frustration. She had come to confront an evil man, another Thogrin Sin'tell, when she'd begun her quest for Aki's captor. She thought she had found him in the heartless creature that had dispassionately caused her charge's fearful condition.

And yet this man's pain was obvious, his concern for his daughter genuine. Men did strange things, she knew, for love of family. Did her own family history not illustrate that fact? Suddenly, she wanted very much to hear all of Onokratos's story.

“It was not such a deep well,” he began slowly, “and there was no water. The fall did not hurt her, but...” He shook all over and clutched himself as if to calm his quivering flesh. “There were spiders, so many fat, blood-sucking, chaos-spawned spiders!"

A cold hand gripped her heart, and she remembered the old man's unsettling, violent reaction to the unlucky web dweller her light had chanced to fall upon in the corridor. She had no love for the horrid things, either. As a small child they had terrified her; as an adult she had learned to live with that fear. Still, the fear remained, lurking in some shadowed corner of her mind.

Onokratos's face streamed with tears, and he wiped a sleeve over his eyes. “They stung her, not once, but many times, until she was swollen and paralyzed with their poison.” He paused again and sobbed like a lost child; great shudders racked his aged frame. “She screamed, but the well was far from the manor, and my joints are old. By the time I got to her there was little I could do."

Frost caught her breath. “Are you saying the poison drove her mad?"

His head snapped up. His face contorted with rage and contempt. “Ignorant Esgarian whore! I'm trying to tell you she died! She died!"

Frost leaped up, crossed the room in three strides, and seized the front of his robe. A finger's breadth separated their noses as she shouted at him. “She lives, you shriveled old vulture! I've seen her myself. Look where I bear her scratches!” She stabbed a finger at the wound on her cheek. It was scabbed, still sore. “What game are you playing with me that requires such lies?"

He knocked her arms away and rose, stumbling back. “She died, I tell you! But I prayed to Gath, chaos master and lord of spiders, to give her back to me. I prayed to that monster for the soul of my beloved, my dearest Kalynda!"

She froze even as she reached for him. “The spider god?” She would not believe that anyone, no matter how desperate, would dare to invoke that forbidden deity. What utter, terrible foolishness! Gath was chaos itself, and all the universe was no more than a fly in his subtle web. Not even the other gods, though their strength equaled his, held converse with him.

“For Kalynda, yes!” His fist smashed down on the wooden table as he worked his way around it, putting it between them. It was the first indication he'd given that he held any fear of her at all. “I dared even that to gain her back!” Then his anger deserted him; his gaze sought hers. “But that treacherous god betrayed me,” he confessed, his voice suddenly bleak with despair.

Her rage had not subsided. It boiled within her. “You fool! What did you expect? That such a power would deal fairly with you?"

He turned his back to her, unable to meet her accusing gaze. “I bargained with him in good faith! I wanted only to see my Kalynda play and laugh and sing again, to see her happy! I needed to hold her in my arms as she slept at night, to hear her sweet voice, to have her bring me flowers still kissed with morning dew as she used to.” His tears rushed forth again, dripped to the table, splashed on the book.

“Gath answered your prayer, didn't he?” Calming herself, she urged him to continue with his story. “But not as you expected."

He shook his head. “Not immediately,” he answered. “First, there was a price to be paid."

She nodded, barely whispered. “When you deal with gods there is always a price."

He told her of a dream that came to him the night Kalynda died. The chaos lord, night's master, the thousand-named, appeared and spoke to him. Dark and awesome in his terrible beauty, his voice was the voice of the earth and air, a rumble and a murmur both at once. The ransom of Kalynda's life would only be a small price: one pure and uncorrupted soul to take his daughter's place, not in the land of the dead, but in the abyss of chaos that was Gath's realm. If such a soul was offered, Kalynda might again walk the earth again at her father's side. So promised the spider god in his most seductively silken manner. Then the dream melted into the more common nightmares of mortal sleep.