Bloodforged (34 page)

‘Vile vegetable!’ snarled Stefan, sinking down to the steps and massaging his wounds once they were safely out of their reach.

Ulrika collapsed beside him, doing the same. Her hands and wrists were covered in lacerations and angry red punctures. ‘I believe we are fortunate we do not live,’ she said.

‘Why is that?’ asked Stefan, pulling a broken stamen from his leg.

‘They didn’t seem to care for our taste.’

‘I hope they die from it,’ said Stefan.

Ulrika smiled wryly. ‘I wonder if it was necessary that we come here. The violin seems well guarded. Could any living men make it through these obstacles?’

‘They are cultists,’ said Stefan. ‘They will have magic.’

Ulrika’s smile faded. He was right. The cult might have no difficulty at all. She sighed. ‘On we go, then.’

They stood and continued up the stairs, but after only two more full turns, they came to an obstruction that seemed entirely impassable. As Ulrika had noted when they had been observing the spire from a distance, part of it seemed to have melted. They had reached that part now. The walls of the stairwell and the tower had folded like they were made of hot wax, the storeys sinking down and flattening one on top of the other, and sealing off the way up in a closed throat of bulging, buckled walls.

Ulrika stepped up to the weird drooping ceiling and touched it. It was hard granite. Whatever force had melted it was gone now and the stone had reverted to its natural state.

Stefan sighed. ‘This may be the end,’ he said. ‘Not even a warlock will get through that.’

‘No,’ said Ulrika. ‘But a vampire might get around it.’

He looked at her curiously, and she beckoned him to follow, then returned to the landing they had just passed. The rooms of this storey seemed to have been the personal apartments of the mages who had lived there, for there were beds and tables and writing desks in them. There were also human silhouettes burned into the walls and floors, like shadows cast by a bright sun.

Ulrika crossed to a tall, shattered window, poked her head out and looked up. Unlike the smooth walls at the base, the stone here was pitted and crumbling, with plenty of handholds, while above, where the tower had melted, it was wrinkled and bulging and even more worn, like the skin of a snake, half-shredded.

‘It is practically a ladder,’ she said, then climbed out and began her ascent as Stefan stepped out and followed behind her.

But as they reached the level of the melted walls, the climb got more difficult. The stone hummed with trapped energy and made her fingers tingle and twitch, while weird winds with human screams battered her and tried to pull her off the tower. Then, out of nowhere, a man fell towards her, flailing and shrieking. She flinched, and had to scrabble with her claws to regain her grip, but he fell through her, as insubstantial as the air. More men fell as she continued on, and flashes of noise and blinding light began to explode all around her, only to vanish again instantly.

In the flashes she could see horrible winged creatures circling the tower, belching fire and black bile, while robed warlocks hovered on floating purple discs and blasted it with arcane bolts. Sorcerous defenders fought back with blasts of their own, burning the warlocks out of the sky with fire, and crusting the wings of the abominations with ice so they fell, though there were always more to replace them.

It seemed to Ulrika she was climbing through a storm of trapped time, where the events of the spire’s destruction played out for ever. Fire and black energy billowed around her, burning her flesh without seeming to damage it, while the wall beneath her hands was alternately straight and true, then molten and shifting, then warped and cold and unmoving. More than once she grabbed at holds and nearly fell when her hand discovered they weren’t really there. After that, she closed her eyes and climbed only by feel. Still she was buffeted by noises and winds and memories not her own, but eventually these grew less frequent and the currents and sounds abated.

She opened her eyes again and saw she had climbed above the melted section to an area where the stone was black and cracked, and the char came off on her hands and clothes. There was a window above her and to the left, and she crabbed carefully up and over to it, and at last pulled herself in, her arms trembling with fatigue, then turned and helped Stefan in as well. When they were both safe, they stood, brushing soot from their clothes and hands, and looked around.

The room was a high-ceilinged, wedge-shaped quarter of the tower, with a small door to the stairwell in the far wall, and large, arched and columned doors on either side, leading to other quarter sections. It looked as if it had once been some sort of treasure room, for there were chests and coffers and strange objects all around, all destroyed. The chests were blackened piles of tinder, and the things they had contained nothing but unrecognisable lumps. Suits of armour were heaps of shining slag, the jewels that had encrusted them cracked and clouded. A collapsed shelf spilled charred book covers whose pages had all burned away. Rivulets of silver and gold ran across the flagstone floor from cracked coffers. An obelisk from ancient Nehekhara lay black and shattered in one corner.

Ulrika squatted and picked up a cracked jewel. ‘If the fires destroyed this, how has the violin survived?’

Stefan shook his head and started for the door in the right-hand wall. Ulrika stood and followed. The next room was the same as the first, a black ruin filled with charred treasures. They crossed it to the next. The third room was also a field of wreckage, except for a massive stone vault built into the interior wall.

‘That is how,’ said Stefan.

They crossed to it, picking their way through the mess. It rose to the ceiling, and though its walls were as black with soot as the rest of the room, they were whole, as was its metal-banded door and all its hinges and locks and fittings. From within it, the violin called to them, a pitiful, pleading melody.

Ulrika stared, amazed. ‘The battle warped stone and made it burn like wood, and yet this survived?’

Stefan stepped forwards and wiped the soot from the lock plate, revealing a band of squat, angular runes running around it.

‘Dwarf work,’ he said. ‘My master had such a vault to protect his treasures. It was no guard, however, against Kiraly’s treachery,’ he added bitterly.

Ulrika pulled on the door’s sturdy handle. It didn’t budge. She kicked at the door. It was as solid as it appeared, and felt as if it were feet thick. She walked around it and looked at the sides. They were whole and solid.

She shook her head. ‘If all the power of Chaos couldn’t open it, I doubt we will find a way.’

Stefan turned towards the door. ‘We have only checked three sides yet,’ he said. ‘We may have better luck with the top, bottom or back.’

But they didn’t. When they went out to the circular gallery that surrounded the stairwell, and against which the back of the vault butted, it was whole, and trips to the storeys above and below the vault revealed the same for the top and bottom. In a place where nothing had remained untouched by magic, the dwarf walls alone had survived intact.

Ulrika sighed as they returned to the vault room and stood in front of its heavy door. ‘I was right earlier. We needn’t have come. No one will breach this vault. Not even a warlock. The cultists’ plan, whatever it is, will fail.’

‘You are likely correct,’ said Stefan, his brow knitted. ‘Still, it would be best to be sure.’

‘But how can we be?’ asked Ulrika. ‘The only way to be certain is to take the violin ourselves and destroy it.’

‘That would be the most certain way, yes,’ said Stefan. ‘But seeing the cultists thwarted by the vault would be a great reassurance too.’

Ulrika raised an eyebrow. ‘Wait here and watch them fail, you mean?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Very good,’ said Ulrika. ‘And afterwards they will be trapped here with us. We can question them in peace.’

Stefan smirked. ‘
Now
you sound like a vampire.’

They found the perfect place to wait and watch atop the columns that flanked one of the doors to the other rooms. These were crested with blackened, broken statues of double-headed Kislevite eagles, each taller than a man, and crouched behind them, Ulrika and Stefan were well hidden, yet still had a good view of the vault.

For an hour nothing happened, and Ulrika began to worry the sun would rise before the cultists came, and they would have to spend the day hidden within the spire, but then a sudden skirling of the violin brought her head up. Stefan looked up too.

Ulrika strained her hearing and her senses. There were faint voices from outside the tower and far below, and on the furthest edge of her perception, human pulses.

After a moment, a rich voice rose above the others. ‘You will experience some strange sensations as we rise, brothers. Close your eyes and ignore them. They are echoes of the past, nothing more.’

There were murmurs of assent, and then all fell silent.

Ulrika exchanged a glance with Stefan. She recognised the voice. ‘The warlock from Gaznayev’s,’ she whispered. ‘The one who tried to burn us.’

‘Excellent,’ said Stefan. ‘I have wanted to meet him again.’

They edged forwards, looking down towards the windows. She could sense three heart-fires coming closer, rising up the outside of the spire. A moment later came stifled shouts and grunts.

‘Steady!’ hissed the warlock’s voice. ‘Ignore them!’

Ulrika’s jaw clenched, hoping the men would lose themselves in the violent illusions of the mind-storm and fall to their deaths, but, disappointingly, she heard no further screams.

Then faint shadows touched the sill of one of the windows. Ulrika and Stefan crouched lower, trying to see better. Ulrika frowned. The men seemed to have scaled the wall very quickly. Even she and Stefan had taken longer.

The shadows loomed closer, and, as Ulrika and Stefan stared, three men in the veiled hoods and cloaks of the cult floated through the window hand in hand, surrounded by a nimbus of violet energy, and settled gently to the floor. The warlock in the middle was perfectly calm, as if flying was as natural as walking to him, but the other two men breathed sighs of relief to be on solid ground again.

‘On your guard,’ said the warlock, pointing to where Ulrika and Stefan’s footprints showed bright against the soot-blackened floor. ‘The interlopers are here. Search the place.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE HANDMAIDEN OF THE QUEEN

The two guards looked around uneasily.

‘Can you not use your sight, brother?’ asked one.

‘Here?’ The warlock laughed. ‘I can barely see reality for all the illusion that swirls around this place. My sight is useless. Go. And use the blades we made for you. If they are the ones who attacked before, you will need them.’

Ulrika and Stefan exchanged a glance at that, then watched as the men drew long swords and began to look through the burnt clutter that filled the room. The blades of the weapons gleamed with the sheen of silver. They looked as if they had been dipped in the stuff. The cultists had come prepared to face them.

While his men searched – one walking right under Ulrika and Stefan into the next room – the warlock stepped to the vault and began murmuring and moving his hands in complicated patterns. Despite what he had said about his sight being useless, Ulrika was sure he was trying to determine what was in the vault and what warded it. She wondered what powerful magic he would use to open it. It would have to be a great spell indeed.

After a while the two men returned.

‘We did not see them, brother,’ said one.

‘We checked the floor above and the floor below,’ said the other. ‘They have been there, but they are not there now.’

The warlock nodded. ‘Very well. Perhaps they gave up. Even for such as they, the vault would be impregnable. Be vigilant regardless, but first, you will do what you are here to do. Have you the hag’s hand, Brother Song?’

The man nodded and took a bundle from a pouch at his waist. He unwrapped it. It was a withered hand.

The warlock stepped back. ‘Do not let it touch the floor or walls or anything else here – myself included,’ he said. ‘Only the hand of one who draws their magic from the coloured winds may open the lock, and it must be untainted by any hint of Chaos.’