The autarch’s troops had made a road of sorts through the main cavern—carved flat and wide where it had been too narrow for the wheels of small supply wagons, scratched and covered with gravel where the limestone was too slippery, until it almost looked like one of the supply roads leading in and out of the massive camp outside. But this was no ordinary road; it led through a strange fairyland of stone pillars, most of them on the floor of the outer cavern, whose shadows stretched and gyrated on the cavern walls as the guards walked past with their torches. Then at the edge of the cavernous anteroom the road tilted down and began its back and forth progress into the depths, lit by the occasional torch wedged into a pile of rocks by the road. From time to time they passed another guard station or an empty supply wagon heading back to the surface, but otherwise the only people Qinnitan saw were the three accompanying her, eager Brother Gunis and the two bored guards, who spent much of their time talking quietly to each other.
Some hundred feet below the earth, the torchlight revealed a trickle of water dripping from the slabs that made up the walls, and Qinnitan realized they must now be underneath the bay itself. The water dripped through in several places from above, creating little ponds on the rock floor that overtopped and flowed away down the cracks into darkness.
As they passed out of that cavern into a larger one, Qinnitan could suddenly see a long distance downward as the track wound around the outside of a huge open cavern at least a hundred feet deep. The stone track had been replaced by huge wooden structures like bridges that seemed to be hung directly on the side of the cavern and which together made a single continuous road winding all the way to the bottom. The cavern was full of torches; dozens of soldiers, maybe hundreds, were moving in and out of various holes at the base of the wall, presumably a series of tunnels leading off in different directions like the spokes of a wagon’s wheel. From this height the soldiers looked like ants, and Qinnitan had the sudden, unpleasant sensation that she was being led deeper and deeper into something that was not actually a human thing at all.
“It is wonderful, what our autarch has done here,” Gunis said to the guards. “Have you men dug this all out in such a short time?”
The soldiers shared a look. “The caves run all through here and also underneath the bay and the island,” one of them said. “The miners didn’t have to do much, to tell the truth.”
“Still, it is wonderful.” Gunis clasped his hands together on his breast and offered an ostentatious prayer of thanks to Nushash.
Qinnitan hardly noticed him. As they walked down the inclined walkway, their footfalls now booming on wood instead of swishing through gravel, something had reached up from below, something invisible but incredibly strong, and fastened itself around her like a cold hand, making it suddenly hard to draw breath.
It knew she was here. She could feel it turning her over in its thoughts. It knew she was here… and it was very hungry.
I’ve seen this before, Daikonas Vo thought as he faced the cliff and the great uneven black door. It’s the Damnation Gate. It was something else his mother had spoken of—in fact, the night his father had killed her she had spat at him and said that evil spirits were going to drag him down to the Damnation Gate so that Xergal’s servants could flay off his skin. Vo’s father had not liked that, and in the course of expressing his displeasure he had broken Vo’s mother’s neck.
But this, he thought, this was not mere words: this was the thing itself. Yermun the Gatekeeper must be watching from inside, wearing his skin backward as he was said to do. Yermun, the brother of Xergal—“Immon” and “Kernios” to the northerners—was a bit of a hero to the White Hounds, who considered themselves to be lifelong prisoners in a foreign land just as Immon himself, powerful though he might be, was a prisoner in Kernios’ dread realm.
Brothers in Hell, the old White Hounds’ song ran, come running to the fight, and Heaven take the slowest!
With his clean new armor and his beard trimmed to something resembling Xixian military standard, Vo walked into the mouth of shadow. The pain in his gut was beginning again, that feeling like dirty claws scratching at the tenderest parts of him; it was all he could do to walk straight instead of stumbling like a daytime drunk. The guards at their post outside the huge hill entrance stopped him for a moment, perhaps troubled by something strange in his eyes, but Zeru had given him the code of the day and so they let him pass.
The pain became even stronger as Vo walked down into the great tunnel.
I am cursed. I have lost my wager. I took service with the autarch’s Hounds because it gave me license to do as I pleased, but I could not let well enough be. Because I wanted something more, I won a place in the autarch’s special service, and now that “something more” is killing me. I have lost a wager and the autarch, as he always does, has won. Someone else will get credit for my hard labor and I will die like a gutted animal.
He could not think about it. It did not make the pain in Daikonas Vo’s body worse but it made his very mind hurt, spread a red, glaring fog in his mind that confused him, and made him fear he might stumble off the path into some deep place.
Vo saw her at last from the top of the great cavern the Xixian soldiers called “Xergal’s Tent.” He knew it was the autarch’s whore even though she was far below him at the bottom of the chamber, knew her as if she were family, and although he could see scarcely anything from his vantage point except her black hair as she walked captive between two soldiers, he knew her shape and posture as a lover would. Her big, dark eyes would be half-shut, her thin face quietly mournful and her thoughts turned inward into one of those great, long silences that had impressed even Vo. He had never met a woman who could stay such a time in her own thoughts, except a whore he had bought once whose tongue had been cut out by a previous client.
He hurried down the creaking ramp that wound its way around the cavern wall. The girl and her captors were still standing in the middle of the moving crowd, facing a wall with several tunnel mouths of several sizes, when the thing in his middle grabbed at both his gut and his heart at the same time. Vo staggered, gasping, feeling as though some terrible fire had burst through the walls of his belly and would consume him entirely. For a moment the next torch down the path shrank to a spark and he could not get any air into his lungs, but then after a little blackness, Vo discovered that although he had fallen onto his hands and knees, he could breathe—and think—once more. He got up and began to stagger downward again, but could no longer see the girl and her guards below. They had chosen one of the tunnels.
By the time he reached the bottom, the pain had let up enough for him to talk.
“Which? Which way for the high officers’ compound?” he demanded of a Naked infantryman.
The man seemed to recognize the White Hound badge, if not Vo himself, so he replied respectfully. “The officers’ tents—go to that one, there.” He pointed to one side. “That’s your fastest way.”
Vo let him go and hurried toward the opening, staggering as he went. He knew there was little chance that he would recover the girl even if he caught up with her—how could he kill two guards without anyone knowing? The girl herself would give him away, just to see him tortured and executed. His work, his suffering, had all been for nothing. He had truly walked of his own will through the Damnation Gate.