Edging up to one, a guard peered in only to immediately flinch away, gagging, the back of a gloved hand to his mouth. Jatal glanced to Andanii: she was covering the chamber with her bow while her captain guarded her, so he steeled himself to take a look.
The stone-flagged floor was slick and sticky beneath his boots with some sort of tacky dark ooze that had slopped over the sides of many of the sarcophagi. The fetid reek was exactly that of corpses left to decompose after battle.
A hand pressed to his face, Jatal bent to glance in the nearest and though intellectually he had already deduced what awaited there, he could not suppress the atavistic human wrenching of his gut. He stood for a time, frozen. He’d been driven beyond horror, beyond any connection to the pathetic thing that lay within.
‘What is it?’ Andanii called.
Gods, yes, what was it? The stew of a human body amid hardened crusted fluids, flesh fallen away from bones and floating amid the stone plates of armour peeled away … or perhaps unable to adhere? The process interrupted … contaminated … corrupted. The clutching clawed hands of bare tendon and bone. The skull fleshless where the bath had eaten all soft tissue but for a cap of scalp and hair. This poor creature had been alive!
Then beyond Jatal’s comprehension the skull turned towards him and a skeletal hand rose, beseeching.
The next thing Jatal knew he was clenched in the arms of the captain, Andanii facing him, demanding something.
‘Speak, damn you! What was it? What happened?’
Jatal blinked at her. He felt his heart hammering as if he’d fought the duel of his life. A cold sweat chilled him from his brows to his feet. Andanii appeared to see the awareness in his eyes for she nodded over his shoulder and the captain released him. His sword, he noted, lay now amid the muck of the floor.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
The princess shifted uneasily, rubbing an arm, her bow still in her hand. ‘That’s what we want to know.’
‘What did you see?’
She frowned, eyeing him as if uncertain of his sanity. And she would not be so wrong. Merciless gods! It lived! What a terrifying curse.
‘What did you see?’ he asked again, calmer, straightening his hauberk and shirts.
She shrugged. ‘You screamed and stabbed the corpse. And you kept stabbing …’
‘That is — was — no corpse.’
Andanii waved that aside as absurd. ‘Impossible. I saw it. It wasn’t even a body any more — just a tub of …’ She trailed off, unable to find the words.
‘Pus? Haemorrhaging? Diseased secretions?’
She winced, nodding. Now he noted how pale she was, how dark her lips in contrast. Yes. You did see it, didn’t you?
‘We must move on …’ the captain murmured.
Jatal collected his sword and searched about for something to wipe away the foul green and black emissions that smeared it. He found a bit of rag amid the wreckage on the floor. ‘No, Captain. No more need to stumble blindly about all these tunnels, dormitories and classrooms. Not when we are not alone.’
He faced the dark, sheathed his sword. ‘So if you are listening — come out! I know you are there and I know who you are. You’ve followed us all the way, haven’t you? Come to wage war upon your old enemy …’
He felt the heat of Andanii near his side. ‘Jatal,’ she began, gently, as if soothing a skittish horse. ‘Listen to yourself. You must calm down.’ He turned to find her face close, her dark eyes searching his, yet veiled, evaluative.
‘You think me mad?’
She bit at her lip. ‘Please, Jatal. Listen to yourself. There is no one out there.’
Jatal felt his every muscle quivering. His shirting clung to him soaked in his cold sweat. Was he unhinged? Certainly such sights would drive anyone beyond reason. Into delusion. Yet it all made such clear sense! He rubbed his gritty burning eyes. Perhaps he was wrong — he always suspected he was wrong. In everything. Every choice. Wrong. Such a poor leader he was …
‘The darkness is never empty,’ a man called from the writhing shadows beyond the lamplight.
Jatal heard the stamp of feet and shush of drawn blades as the captain and remaining guards readied themselves. Andanii’s bow creaked once more from just behind his ear. Yet he rested his hands on his weapon belt, thumbs tucked in, and cocked his head, waiting, while a figure came gliding silently from the murk.
He was not the one who had come uninvited to accost them during their meeting. But he could have been his brother, or father. Hair a matted nest of filth upon his head. His limbs and torso smeared in dirt, or perhaps the corrupt muck from the sarcophagi, now cracked and flaking. Eyes glared white all around from behind a near-mask of soot or dirt caked on by some fluid, perhaps blood.
One of the shaduwam of Agon.
Jatal sensed Andanii flinching away from the priest’s advance. Soft curses of recognition and dread sounded from the guards.
‘With these acts you have plunged us into irrevocable war, damn you all,’ Jatal ground out.
The man’s gaze seemed to be fixed upon Andanii. He appeared unperturbed. ‘We have been at war for centuries,’ he answered indifferently.
‘With your brothers, the Thaumaturgs.’
The bright orbs of the man’s eyes shifted to Jatal and his teeth gleamed bright as he smiled. For a moment Jatal thought the man was about to bite him. ‘Best not to reveal all one knows, or suspects, my prince. But you are correct. There is no antipathy so ferocious as between those closest in their philosophies or tenets, yes? The narrower the disagreement of dogma, the wider the ocean of blood spilled. So it has always been.’ He shrugged his lean bare shoulders. ‘It would be different if we were far more alien to one another in our beliefs. Then there would be only mutual contempt, or disinterest.’
Andanii stepped up to Jatal’s side. She now carried her bow hugged to her chest. ‘You are all lunatics. The Thaumaturgs will fall upon us with all their might.’
The man smiled even more broadly. ‘Then we must strike first — expunge them.’
Jatal wanted to strike that smug knowing smirk from the man’s face, but he was right. And such no doubt had been their intent. To instigate war. And they had succeeded. All talk was vain now. He pressed the back of a gloved hand to his slick hot forehead, and sighed his utter, sickened exhaustion. ‘Take us to the Warleader.’
The shaduwam bowed mockingly. ‘At once, O my prince.’
*
‘When I arrived I found just the same slaughter you describe,’ the Warleader explained. They stood in one of the squat towers that studded the Thaumaturgs’ compound. His armoured back to Jatal, the Warleader overlooked the boxy sprawl of the city where, in the golden early morning light, plumes of black smoke rose here and there — the inevitable byproduct of any sacking. Jatal and Andanii remained close to the slit of a stairway that their priest guide had shown them, as if unwilling to approach the man.
The Warleader glanced over his shoulder. ‘We were separated almost immediately from your column.’ He offered a slight shrug. ‘My troops are not such great riders as yours.’
‘So you knew nothing of their plans?’ Andanii demanded. ‘These Agons did not contact you?’
The foreigner glanced back once more, his gaze flat and dead — lizard eyes, Jatal decided. The man had an unnervingly alien gaze. Like that of the grey opalescent eeriness of the great river crocodiles that were occasionally found on the borders of their lands.
‘No,’ the man answered in his ashes-dry voice. Turning, he faced them. He rested his hands on his worn belt where his thick yellowed nails grated against the metal rings of his mail coat. His mouth behind his grizzled iron wire beard turned down. For a moment Jatal felt as if he faced some hoary stern elder god out of legend. ‘Now we must consider the future,’ he said. ‘You can be certain that through their arts the Thaumaturgs are aware of this massacre. They will not let it go unanswered …’