It
was raining in Larksborough, as it seemed it always was, and Ellis was walking
along the high street towards the castle, not caring that his hair was getting
wet, or that he was walking down the middle of the road and thus stopping
traffic, or even that people were staring at him from the shelter of shop
doorways and the awnings of cafes. His
vision was fixed on the ruined monument ahead, which was as it should be
because that was where he was going and he was going there for a very important
reason. He had a date.
As he drew nearer to the ancient edifice, past the edge
of the high street and into Castle Square, where the ice cream stands sat
isolated and alone, shedding rain drops like tears, his anticipation began to
grow. This was a date he had been
looking forward to for a long time. He
had planned and prepared. He had made
himself look as good as possible. He
had brought flowers. Look, there they
were in his hand. And chocolates, too –
how could he have forgotten the chocolates which he carried in his other
hand? Glancing down he reassured
himself that they were there.
When he looked up again he was past the Tourist
Information booth and was walking through the great archway that lead into the
castle courtyard, the jagged cube of the main keep rising before him. Blocks which had tumbled down centuries ago
- blocks buried deep in the earth – were finding their way back to the walls they
had fallen from, lifted by invisible hands and placed with the care of a master
mason. The keep was growing before his
eyes, and of course this was all completely natural, because he had expected
nothing less. The castle rebuilt itself
around him and he stood in the courtyard and waited for his date to arrive.
She was running late, which was no surprise. Wasn’t she always late? Didn’t she always keep him waiting? He smiled at the thought, because he enjoyed
the anticipation, the thrill of the uncertainty. Would she, or wouldn’t she?
He could never tell – he was never entirely sure – and yet, though she
was never punctual, she always came in time.
There was a roar behind him and he turned, smiling, ready
to greet her and her army of Stoneskins.
“Sarah…” he began, seeing her standing there, surrounded
by Grinders and Spiketails and Shamans and other, unknown monsters of chipped
rock and hardened muscle, but it wasn’t Sarah, was it? Sarah wasn’t who he had been waiting for and
he knew that. He cleared his throat,
embarrassed, and tried again.
“Rosetta,” he said, smiling through his blushes as he
stared back at the woman who had given him life, that thought making him
correct himself once more, this time without shame, “Mother.”
“It’s
good to see you again, Ellis,” she replied with a smile, “We have a lot of
catching up to do.”
Ellis
came to with a sudden jolt, revulsion flooding through his gut, almost making
him gag, then he felt his arms and wrists and ankles catch painfully on
something and he fell back against a cold slab of rock.
“Ow!”
he yelped as his head hit the slab, the back of his skull pressing against the
bruise from his first fall. His vision
blurred for a moment, then cleared again and he lifted his head once more,
wincing, as he tried to get a view of his condition and his surroundings.
He
was tied to a polished block of granite which sparkled in the light of a series
of elaborate candelabra spaced irregularly around chamber of carved rock. The walls - from what he could see of them
in the inconstant glow of the candles – were graven with intricate pictures and
glyphs, but apart from a few larger figures, he could not make any of them out.
His
bonds appeared to be made of leather and were tied tightly around his limbs and
attached to thick metal loops embedded in the rock. He tried to see if he could wriggle out of them, but after a few
minutes of desperate struggling he gave up and slumped back on the slab,
exhausted.
Where
am I? he wondered, closely followed by, and what was I dreaming?
The
dream had been disturbing, but he had had plenty of odd dreams since he
came to Shadow and none of them had given him any reason to believe they held
any more meaning than dreams on Earth did.
Even so, he couldn’t imagine why he would dream of Doctor Barkham two weeks
after he had abandoned her to her fate in the Silverspire, nor why he would
dream that she was, in some dream-logic way he couldn’t quite piece together,
his mother. It made less sense than
even his most ludicrous dreams before.
He
sighed, trying not to think about it, and was startling when a voice broke the
silence over to his right.
“So
you are alive,” the voice said.
It sounded neither male, nor female, and though it had a crystalline
purity when Ellis first heard it, it seemed to echo in his mind for a split
second afterwards and in that infinitesimal moment it had fractured and
fragmented, sounding like a pair of speakers in harmony, or a choir. He shook his head, then glanced over to
where the voice came from. For an
instant, as his head turned, he caught a glimpse of something which was all
lines and angles, impressions and emotions rather than shapes, before the
figure resolved itself in the centre of his vision.
A pale,
attractive and androgynous youth with golden hair and white robes stood before
him. “I thought Once-Scorned had killed
you for sure. He was definitely less
careful with you than with the others.”
Ellis
tried to sit up a little, but his bonds seemed to have tightened since he last
made an attempt and he was now stuck fast to the slab.
“I
wouldn’t wriggle too much. Those bonds
were made to hold down sacrifices to Lakhma and we were unable to undo the
enchantment on them. The more you move
the tighter they will get.”
A
flood of panic surged through Ellis veins and he desperately fought the urge to
thrash himself loose. He turned away
from the youth – who in the periphery of his vision once more became something
abstract and incomplete – and held his body still. The youth must have seen his struggle for when Ellis turned back
to look at him, resolving him into the image of a human once more, he was
smiling, almost proud. “Very good,” he
said, “you have some control.”
“Where
am I?”
The
youth took a step closer and then spread his arms, gesturing around the candlelit
chamber. “This is one of the sacrifice
chambers from the days when my kind worshipped the Dread God, Lakhma, deep
beneath the Stonerib Shoals. They have
not seen use for some several centuries, but they serve well to hold
prisoners.”
“And
why am I a prisoner?”
“You
were skulking about on the deck of the Ya’ma’Khul and we could not risk
you drawing the attention of that Lich.”
“Lich?”
“Yes. The undead pirate you were stalking – all
rags and bones, with a soul of purple lightning and a voice like oiled
sandpaper whispering sweet, sweet compulsion.
Very theatrical.” The youth took
another step closer. Ellis found the
smile on his face extremely unsettling.
“Is
that what it was?” Ellis asked.
“Oh. Was that a spoiler?” There was a hint of mirth in his tone now,
but Ellis couldn’t tell if it was genuinely light-hearted or sarcastic. “Yes, it was a Lich. Very rare in these parts, or so I hear, but
then any visitors at all to the Shoals are rare. That’s why we came here.”
“And
who are you, exactly?”
“Oh
no,” the youth said, stepping so close now that he could lean down over Ellis
and beam his fey smile right into Ellis’ face, “I think you’ll find that I’m
the one asking the questions now, starting with: who are you and what are you
doing chasing a Lich through the Shoals?”
Ellis
gulped.
“Now,
now,” the youth said, his voice ever so soft, “you can tell me, sure you can:
you have to! You have absolutely no
choice if you want to leave this place and see your friends again.”
“My
friends? Greta and Luke? Are they here? What have you done to them!”
“Nothing,
yet. Some of my brothers are
interrogating them as we speak.”
“Why? What have we done to deserve this?”
The
youth’s expression soured and his voice hardened as he replied, “You brought a
Lich to our doorstep – a Lich!
Don’t you understand how serious that is?” He pulled his face away for a moment, staring at the carvings on
the walls and continued in a softer tone, “We came here to hide away from the
world. We’d given up meddling in the
politics and affairs of this blasted city.
We are not the power we once were.”
He leaned in closer once more.
“A Lich, quaint thought we might have thought them once, could kill
us all now – so tell me, what are you, and it, doing here?”
“We
didn’t know anything about your hiding place, honest, and we didn’t bring the
Lich here on purpose,” Ellis began, words spilling from his mouth in a pathetic
torrent. “Our fleet was using the
Shoals to hide from it, but they must have known we were going to hide here
because they landed in an inlet to the north and then attacked our camp. Myself and a couple of the others had been
scouting at the time and so we were chasing them all inland in the hopes of finding
the rest of my friends.” He took a
breath. “Do you know where they
are? Have you captured them as well?”
The
youth stepped away, stroking his chin with one hand in an overly artificial
gesture of thoughtfulness. “Yes, I
think we may have captured some of them.
They were on the deck before you – an old man and a girl.”
“That’s
them – were there others?”
“Just
the woman, the boy and you.”
“Can
I see them?”
“Is
the interrogation over already?” the youth asked.
“I
don’t have anything else to say, but if you let me speak to my friends we might
be able to help get rid of the Lich! If
anyone can stop that thing, it’ll be the Former Baron and Siren.”
“I’ll have to consider it. Let me speak to my brothers and see if your
stories match up first, then, maybe, you can see them.”
The
youth turned on the spot and then began to weave his way through the candelabra
towards a shadow-shrouded tunnel.
“Wait!”,
Ellis called, “you still haven’t told me who you are!”
The
youth sighed and made a small, half-turn towards the slab. “We have gone by
many names in this world, the Exalted Ones, the Chosen, Light Bringers…
countless others, but these days we go by the name your people gave us when our
Empire collapsed. Now we are just the
Fallen.” His smile faltered slightly
and he added, “And you may call me Broken-Hope.”
With
that the youth vanished into the tunnel and Ellis was alone with his confusion
and discomfort, fearing for his friends and, most of all, hoping Siren was
safe.
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