Born Of Darkness (Book 7) (13 page)

Dull moonstones showed in the stonework. They had none of the sparkle they would have possessed when active.

“What do you think,” Jonas asked.

“It is indeed a moongate,” Kormak said. “And it is probably functional.”

“You’ve seen the like before?”

“Yes.” Kormak said, not liking the memories the sight of this thing brought back.

“You think it could be made to work?”

“By a sufficiently powerful sorcerer.”

“They say the Old Ones and their favoured servants used these to travel from place to place as quick as the light of the moon.”

“I know,” Kormak said.

“The elder signs around the Palace hold it inert.”

“They ought to.”

“They say thousands of these once linked every city and palace of the Eldrim. Now there are only a few score left. This would be priceless if it worked.”

“Most likely,” said Kormak. He wondered if the Sidereans really were considering trading this to Marketa and her masters. They could ask a great deal for it. He said so.

Jonas steepled his fingers then glanced around as if to make sure they were not overheard. He said, “The King-Emperor will never trade it.”

“Why? It is worth a fortune”

“She is our enemy.” Jonas said. “And the King-Emperor is already the richest man in the world.”

Jonas walked away from the moongate. He went over to stand before a massive suit of armour forged from orichalcum and spiderglass and some black metal alloy. It was made for someone both taller and thinner than he. The face was a demon mask. Black crystal filled the eye-holes in the visor. More moonstones had been set there. It radiated a cold power.

“What is it?” Jonas asked. “What disturbs you?”

“This armour,” Kormak said.

“It belonged to Darkoth Sharktooth, Prince of the Whispering Caves. He killed a dozen mighty knights and three Guardians of the Dawn before Pelageus overcame him. His axe hangs on the wall there.”

Kormak strode over to the huge weapon mounted on wall brackets. The blades were razor-edged and spread an arm-span apart. In the centre was set a rune-worked moonstone. Another was at the tip of the handle. It looked too heavy for a mortal man to lift. An Old One could wield it though.

“Your kingdom’s enemies were mighty,” Kormak said.

“They still are,” said Jonas.

***

Wearing the old man’s shape, Vorkhul limped through the dungeons. Blood-soaked rags covered imitations of festering sores. He kept his eyes human. His other senses were limited in this form. It was possible to make his hearing keener and keep his sense of smell stronger but not to the extent it had been in his more bestial shapes. His leg still hurt where that accursed weapon had bit into it. The wound followed him no matter what shape he wore. There was no escaping it.

Following some impulse from the old man’s consciousness, he wandered upwards, towards light, towards freedom. The price of the knowledge he absorbed was that something of his victim remained with him and enjoyed a short-lived spell of influence.

He did not mind. He felt that he had done this many times before and come to take pleasure in it. A dark undercurrent of memory warned him that doing so might have been the cause of his troubles. No matter how hard he tried to trace that thought to its source, he could not.

Wearing the human’s form allowed him easier access to the old man’s memories. They hovered on the surface of his mind like scum on a stagnant pond.

He savoured the recollection of standing by a small pool on a summer day and watching the tadpoles swim within it. They were tiny teardrops of life, twisting and lashing their way through the water. Some had vestigial limbs. All had tiny black dots for eyes. It was a memory of a day over fifty years ago, a lifetime for a human, an eyeblink for him.

Mortals! So frail and short-lived and so filled with superstition. They worshipped shadows their minds projected on the walls of the world. They were like tadpoles. They changed so quickly, from tiny children to brief maturity to final decrepitude. No wonder they were so afraid.

As he wrestled with the old man’s memories, he felt a mounting sense of loss and horror. Where were the images of his own people? Where were the Eldrim who should have ruled these pitiful short-lived things?

There were no recollections of their glorious magical palaces. Or their sky chariots. Or the sorceries that should have made them feared and adored. There was just the idea of distant lands where the remnants of the Old Ones lorded it over creatures they were little better than.

This was wrongness on a cosmic scale.

The Eldrim could not have fallen so completely. The world could not have changed so much during his imprisonment. The Old Ones were born to rule all lesser beings in the name of the Lady. They were the wisest, the most powerful. They were created to dominate. Nothing was allowed to challenge that. For millennia, nothing had. They had ruled supreme among the Elder Races. Invincible. Immortal.

Those who could not be defeated by force could be infiltrated, subverted, turned against each other and finally absorbed. Politics and religion were just as much weapons as sorcery and arcanotech and fleshsculpting. All were arts in which the Eldrim excelled.

The plundered memories showed him a world that had changed immensely from the one he had known. The Eldrim were a degenerate shadow of what they had once been. The other Elder Races, the mighty Quan, the Serpent Folk, the Kassandri, were remembered only as fearful legends. The Ghul, the Khazduri, the humans, scores of other subservient species, had all rebelled. Everything he had known had been swept away, leaving this barbarous shrunken world.

He dug through the old man’s memories and found only faint hints of war among the Eldrim. There were stories of the taint of Shadow. There were tales of humans who had overcome the Eldrim and driven them from their lands in the name of the Holy Sun.

The words triggered another flood of his own memories. The Shadow. Something about that made him salivate. Enormous holes in his recollections surrounded the concept, as if any knowledge of it had somehow been erased.

Who would do that? Why? How? He had no idea. He knew only that he felt a great sense of emptiness when he thought of the Shadow.

The Holy Sun. The great fiery enemy in the sky whose light burned the Eldrim, confused their senses, confounded their magics.

The Holy Sun, the arch-rival of the Lady of the Moon.

The Holy Sun. The deity worshipped by the accursed Auratheans.

He saw them now. Beings who rode from star to star in vehicles of sungold and solar flame, who existed as disembodied intelligences of light.

Suddenly a vivid image exploded into his mind, something he felt certain had happened to him. He remembered great golden ships dropping from the sky, metal giants emerging, living war-machines armed with weapons that burned like the sun.

The sick realisation struck him that he had vastly under-estimated the strength of his foes. They burned their way into his palace and captured him and . . .

Infuriatingly the image faded. He could excavate nothing more.

From the old man’s memories he picked out another image; of a huge Aurathean battleform standing in one of the buildings above him. It was one of the vessels in which they manifested. The metal giant occupying the Cathedral had done nothing in living memory. It was regarded as a mere empty suit of armour that had once been occupied by an angel.

That was wrong. The Auratheans had been a power, almost as great as the Eldrim, a threat to his people’s domination of the world.

He searched through his stolen memories and found not a single reference to Aurathean host forms. The humans knew nothing about what the Auratheans were, what they had once been. They worshipped only their empty vessels.

He needed time. He needed to sort through all the things he had learned and begin to piece together a picture of what had happened. He needed more knowledge too.

Another image flickered through his mind. And he felt a sudden shocking sense of recognition. This mortal had once worked in the palace, in a place where ancient artefacts were stored.

The human remembered relics of the Eldrim. There was armour that would allow him to endure the light of the sun. There were devices that would enable him to shape the aether with a thought. There was a huge mirror, a teardrop of liquid truesilver held within a stone arch, that could only be a moongate.

A moongate! A way out of this hideous place! He could go to where his people had once congregated, to Khazduroth or Winterpeak or the sub-oceanic domes of Talazar.

If it still functioned. It was worth investigating. If he could tap the gate’s power he could wreak such destruction that the mortals would relearn their fear of his people.

Vorkhul knew he would have to do this soon. The human who hunted him would return with others of his kind. He would not give up until one of them was dead.

He had his own reasons for going upwards now. He wanted to find the moongate. He wanted to be free of this place, to seek his own kind. He wanted to find out the truth of what had happened, not some half-remembered fable torn from the mind of a dying human. Most of all he wanted to get his hands on the weapons that would make him master of this pitiful degenerate world.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

RHIANA LOOKED UP when Kormak entered her chamber. She sat on the balcony, staring out to sea. “Where have you been?” Rhiana asked.

“Talking to people.”

“Did you learn anything?”

Kormak took the other chair on the balcony. His whole upper body still hurt and he felt tired. “Nothing that I did not already know.”

Rhiana came over. She draped an arm around his neck and then slid down into his lap. She shifted her weight and Kormak felt a stab of pain where the creature’s claws had bit into his flesh.

“Sorry,” she said when she heard him grunt. She leaned forward and looked out at the harbour.

“All of those ships,” she said. “All of them going so many different places and carrying so many different things. We could jump on one and get out of here. We could go to Port Blood. We could go all the way to Terra Nova. We could sail into the furthest north and see what the Shimmering Lights of the Aurora conceal.”

“I’ve seen the Shimmering Lights,” Kormak said. “And I’ve seen what lies beneath them. It is not pleasant.”

“Don’t you ever feel like just jumping on a ship and going somewhere, anywhere. Someplace you’ve never been. Someplace wonderful.”

“Sometimes.”

“I felt that ever since I was a little girl. Ever since I first saw a city. Ever since I saw the surface world.”

“I thought that the sea folk hated being above the waves.”

“Sometimes,” she said echoing his tone. “Me and my sister were always different. We always wanted to go places, do things. Beneath the waves can be beautiful but it can be cruel. And, to be honest, I think there is something in us that craves the light and the air. I think somewhere deep in the blood is the desire to see the surface. My people were changed by the Old Ones but originally we were land dwellers just like your people.”

“I hope you were not like the Aquileans. You’d spend all your time fighting each other.”

“I mean we were not like sharks or fish or Quan. It was never natural for us to be beneath the waves the way it was for those creatures. We had not been beneath the waters for a thousand thousand generations.”

“You’re definitely not like a shark.”

“It’s nice of you to say so,” she said. “Anyway we’ve drifted a long way from the subject of taking a ship. I wish we could just get on one right now and leave. I mean what has that creature from the sarcophagus got to do with us?”

“It has everything to do with me. I took an oath long ago to oppose such creatures and to protect people from them. I still hold to that oath.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to see you dead and I think that’s going to happen if you stay here.”

“I’ve fought Old Ones before and I’m still alive. They are not.”

“You’ve only got to fail once,” she said. “You’ve only got to make one mistake against a creature as dangerous as this one. That’s all it will take. Everybody’s luck runs out sometime. Everybody dies.”

“Yes,” he said. “Everybody dies. Everybody. There is no escape unless you’re an Old One. It’s not death that matters. It’s the way you die. I would rather go out with my sword in my hand than be devoured by some wasting disease in my bed.”

“I can see that. It’s one of the reasons that you do what you do, isn’t it? Even though you know that one day your luck is going to run out.”

He shrugged. “It hasn’t yet.”

“But it will.”

“Most likely.”

“I hope I’m not there to see it.”

“Most likely no one will be—except me and I’ll be beyond caring.”

“I’ve met men like you before, men in love with death and danger.”

He looked up at her. He felt tired, of this place, of this conversation, of having to justify himself. He took both her hands in his.

“This is my life,” he said. “And if it is my death, so be it. That’s just the way it is.”

She heard the finality in his voice, glanced towards the sky, bit her lower lip with her strong white teeth. The shadow of a smile passed over her face. “That’s just the way it is.”

A heavy hand rapped the door.

“Who the hell is it now?” Rhiana asked.

“Sir Kormak—the King-Emperor requires your presence in Council.”

“I had better go,” said Kormak.

“Yes,” she said. “You’d better.”

***

Vorkhul limped through the catacombs. He extended his senses as much as they could be and still allow him to maintain his disguise. He was nearing the vault where he had first emerged. His nostrils picked up faint traces of the hounds and the humans and their strange weapons. The scents were unpleasant, hinting at illness and dissolution.

He shuddered and wondered whether wearing this human form put his thoughts more in tune with those of mortals.

He came to the vault door, recognising it at once. Curiosity filled his mind. He felt the need to inspect the coffin that had entrapped him for so long. Perhaps he could learn something from it.