The Setharii magi were interrogated and released one by one, granted guest right and leave to enter the hold. I was the last, and it was difficult to keep the anger and disgust from my face as I met the gaze of the infested druí. I pondered killing him as I answered questions on who I was, why I was here and stated that I had no intentions of harming Kil Noth or any of its inhabitants. Some druí had ways to detect lies, but there is truth and then there is the whole truth, and I was a tyrant – if I didn’t want to know something for a short time then I didn’t and walled it away in the back of my mind. If I didn’t know, I couldn’t lie. Nope, I had absolutely no intention at all of sticking my grandmother’s severed head on a spike after I’d forced her to heal my hand.
He studied my eyes and face for a long moment, then nodded to the guards. There was no offer of guest right. The druí and warriors exited, barring the door after them to keep me prisoner. They let me stew there for hours while all the others were free to enjoy the hospitality and entertainments of Kil Noth’s great hall. It was just like the vindictive creature that was my grandmother.
Eventually I dozed off, unknown hours passing until Angharad arrived to wake me. At least she now wore an ice-blue dress, thin and teasing though it was. I kept my Gift open and ready to kill, but she was a blank slate that offered no hint of what she was thinking or feeling.
“Well?” she demanded.
I shrugged. “Do not play the idiot with me, boy,” she hissed. “Do ye honestly believe I would not know ye searched their minds? Doubly so if I told ye not to. What did you find?”
“The bearded one you had doing the interrogations,” I said. “Are we done here?”
She winced. “As I suspected. Murdoc was useful as a human, but will prove more useful still as a receptacle for disinformation before his end. Do ye ken what is wrong with him?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I know everything. Do you?” “Everything is it?” She chuckled. “Ye have grown so arrogant, my boy. So ignorant. I am Angharad Walker and I have seen sights that would blast and burn your little mind. I know the true nature o’ the Scarrabus.” Her amethyst eyes swivelled to look at my gloved right hand. “I also know that ye have come to be healed.”
My hand clenched into a fist. “I am here because you held every innocent in Kaladon hostage to your mad whims.”
“And to have your hand healed,” she reiterated.
I ground my teeth. “And to have it healed. How did you know?” She blinked, lids slowly slicking across crystal. “The Queen o’ Winter told me so. She could feel the change in ye as soon as ye entered her domain and pressed your blackening hand to frozen flesh and walls o’ ice.”
Damned spirits, and this was the biggest, meanest, oldest spirit in all the Clanholds, the one all clans sacrificed and prayed to, and gave power to. This was the god-spirit that she had always intended me to be a priest of, the one she tried to force upon me years ago. The scars marring my face burned, remembering that damned ritual and her burning rage when it had failed.
“I am no gullible, fawning druí,” I said. “The only spirits I give a crap about are the ones I can toss down my throat. The rest can all go fuck themselves.”
Her fingers twitched into claws and her eyes flared with light. Then she stiffened and looked at the wall opposite me. Something was happening; I could feel a whisper, a magical vibration in the realm of the mind. It was gone before I could locate the source.
My grandmother’s anger drained. “A new morning has dawned and the Eldest wishes to see ye. If ye want your hand healed ye must come with me.”
“I thought you were the eldest of the druí?” My eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Or do you mean a spirit?”
“I swear on the Queen o’ Winter’s name, the Eldest is neither druí nor spirit. Come.” She led me from the interrogation room, down a hallway, and through a circular stone doorway guarded by two mailed warriors who stepped aside to admit her. After we entered, the massive stone disc rolled back into position behind us, sealing us off from the rest of Kil Noth.
I stamped down my welling panic. Enclosed spaces and I did not get on well, especially underground. I leaned heavily on my hatred of her as I grabbed a lantern from the wall and followed her slight form down a tightly spiralling staircase. Down and down and down for an age. She did not seem to need any light, her bare feet following a familiar foot-worn path down those ancient stone steps.
My back and pits were slick with cold sweat the time the stairs opened up into a long vaulted hall, more from claustrophobic fear and stress than physical exertion. I took deep calming breaths, glad to be in a more open space, and studied the bones laying on granite slabs in long rows down the sides of the hall, great heroes arrayed in all their finery. This was Kil Noth’s Hall of Ancestors, the second most sacred room in any Clansfolk hold, a place where no outsider had ever been allowed to venture. Until me, six years ago, and then only because it was on the way to the chamber where they held their most sacred of rites. On the walls behind each tomb hung weapons and prizes they had taken in battle, or great works of artistry and exquisite musical instruments. I had been too dazed from shock to examine them on my last visit.
Behind a dusty skeleton clutching a bejewelled crown and spear sat another skull on an iron spike, a heavily warded and ridiculously expensive Arcanum robe hung on a wicker frame around it. A sigil was emblazed on the front of the robes, one that I recognised from Setharii history books. Huh. I guess we now knew what happened to Elder Rannikus and his army that had attempted to invade the Clansholds. Ending up as a prize on a wall was not how I intended to go.
This great hall was not what Angharad was interested in. She led me through at a swift pace to stop before two heavily warded doorways. She placed her hand on a gold plate on the wall to the left and the stone door slid noiselessly back to reveal a strange, angular room beyond. The floor was square but the ceiling rose from the sides up into a higher point in the centre, almost like we had entered the heart of a pyramid. The walls were slick and black.
Unstoppable terror flooded through me. It was identical to the room in the Boneyards of Setharis that I had been buried alive in as an initiate, the room I thought I would die in with only a magically reanimated corpse for company. The place I went a little mad in.
My grandmother noticed my reaction, and foresaw exactly what I was about to do. Her Gift opened and her eyes flared bright with power.
My magic roared towards her mind, frantic to tear it to shreds and escape this cursed place before I was trapped all over again. Help! I screamed. Somebody blocked me from ripping into Angharad, sheltering her mind from the torrent ripping at it. It was not human. This was a trap. I was a fool to think the Scarrabus would not try to infest me again.
<Peace> <Calm> A deluge of almost-human emotion rolled over us. Angharad visibly relaxed and let go of her magic, overwhelmed and accepting.
Not me. I drew deep, and deeper still on the sea of magic as I resisted the inhuman power trying to influence me. My right hand burned with the desire to wrap around Angharad’s throat and rip it out. I would die before giving in to the Scarrabus.
Apologies, Edrin Edge Walker. I am not Scarrabus.
What the f–?
The back wall rippled and something stepped through what moments ago had been solid stone. It was huge, larger even than the great silver apes of the Thousand Kingdoms to the south that it somewhat resembled, looming head and shoulders taller than me and twice as broad. It was covered in shaggy grey fur decorated with carved bone and gemstone beads. Its large sloping forehead boasted a third eye that glimmered with human intelligence.