Crown of Steel (Chaos Awakens) (30 page)

"Shut up!" Crow snapped, not looking back.

"Tell them, Kassa. Tell them what waits for them beyond the gray." The old man ignored Crow.

"What does that mean?" Crow responded. "Kassa, what is he talking about?"

"I don't know." Kassa replied. "It's just trying to get to us."

"It's working." Haley answered, and she sounded almost as agitated as Crow.

The path ahead of them split into three different directions. "Take the right most path and keep going." Xandrith instructed. "It doesn't particularly matter, but the less we hesitate the better. Any time we come to a branch we'll go right." The group walked down the right most path, though the corridor seemed to be slightly more narrow than the one they'd previously been in.

"I wouldn't have gone down the right path." A young female's voice spoke from their backs. Xan resisted the urge to look behind him, but Crow's head snapped immediately.

"Emmie?" His voice cracked and his forward pace stopped. Xan grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around.

"It's not real, Crow. Keep walking." Xan told him, but there was a haunted look in the boy's eyes.

"Crow? Is that what they're calling you? That's funny." The girl’s voice came from behind them again. Xan looked across at Crow. His face was ashen. "I suppose you are kind of like a crow, though. You just circle above it all while terrible things happen below. Remember when those men raped me and cut off my head, Crow? You saw it all from your little hiding place under the floor. Did you like to hear me scream? It was really painful. Daddy was right about you all those years. You're worthless."

"Emmie, I was just a little kid. I couldn't do anything. I wanted to save you but ..." Crow started to turn again but Xandrith grabbed him by the shoulder.

"She's not real. Keep your eyes ahead and just ignore what she is saying." Xan kept his voice level and as calm as he could, but for the first time ever he felt sorry for Crow. Whoever Emmie was, it was obvious Crow felt a lot of guilt about not being in a position to protect her. The pain on the young man's face was clear for anyone to see.

"You could save me now." She spoke quietly. "Just take my hand and help me leave this terrible place. You could fly me free from here, Crow. Please, save me!"

"Steady, Crow. It's not real." Xandrith said again.

"I know." He answered quietly. He looked defeated, broken on a level that made Xandrith feel for him, perhaps for the first time. The loud-mouthed youth had been beaten into submission by the ghosts of his past. Xandrith could understand that.

Emmie spoke again. "You don't know anything. Being dead is cold and terrible. Every minute of my existence is filled with the memory of how my life ended and you just sat watching me die. Now you just keep on walking with your back turned to me like I don't even matter. How many years did I take care of you? I cleaned your wounds after father beat you, tought you to read when he refused to let you go to school."

Crow didn't reply and so the Emmie figure went on. "Do you remember all the nights I gave you part of my dinner since you were in trouble and weren't being fed? I even spoke up on your behalf. Do you remember the beating I got for that? This is how you repay me?" To his credit, Crow didn't reply to this taunting, but Xan could see the weight of the words resting heavily upon his shoulders. As suddenly as they'd begun, the footstep at their back ceased. Instead of filling Xandrith with relief the new silence only worked to set the assassin further on edge.

"There’s something ahead." Haley called out.

"Ignore it, keep walking." Xan answered from behind her.

"I think it's a body, and it's right in the middle of the path." She added a moment later.

"It's definitely a body." Kassa added. "Looks like a woman."

"It's just another attempt to get us to stop. Walk around it and keep moving." Xan instructed, though a shiver was passing down his spine. This was obviously another trap being set by the gray halls, but who was this one aimed to attack? "Don't look at her if you can avoid it. I'm sure one of us will know who she is." Xandrith added after a moment's thought. He should have heeded his own advice. The others listened and everyone made a point of not looking down at the decaying woman in the middle of the path, though missing her scent was impossible. Xandrith looked. He wasn't really curious, but he had believed himself beyond such easy emotional influence. Of course his foolish superiority was sundered the moment his eyes met the sunken sockets of the corpse.

It felt as though it had been a lifetime since he'd last seen Leahn. So much had changed for him in the time that had gone by. He hardly felt like the same person at all anymore, but in reality it hadn't even been a full year. The months of decay had not been kind to her. Leahn had been a warm eyed, slightly over-weight, and sweet woman when Xan had last seen the deceased mage. Leahn had set Xandrith on this quest to begin with. Xan had come to end her life and she'd known it, but still she'd treated him as a friend and set him on the start of the tasks that had led him to where he was. She'd had faith that he could be more than just an assassin, and her faith had ended with a knife through her heart. Those dead eyes stared up at him, seeming to follow him as he walked past her rotting corpse.

Xan knew there was no way she could actually be there in the halls of gray, but at the same time her dead, penetrating gaze felt like a completely natural accusation. Those eyes said, "I let you kill me, and I only wanted one thing from you. Look how you've failed me. Are you even human anymore? You're a monster. You were a monster when you killed me and you'll always be a monster." Xan forced himself to look away, but it was already too late. Those dead eyes were haunting his mind now. Leahn's voice filled his head, reminding him of his failures and the waste he'd made of his life. She'd given him a second chance, and he'd blown it.

"It's not real." He muttered beneath his breath, just loud enough to hear himself, but the words felt flat and lifeless. He didn't believe them. These gray halls knew him. They knew about his failings, and they were reminding him of the mess he'd made of things. Her head turned and a terrible smile spread across her dead face.

"Give up, Xandrith. You've already lost." The words were hollow, a hoarse echo of the voice Leahn had possessed in life. "You've brought us exactly what we need to destroy you."

"You're not real, damn it!" Xandrith yelled and his voice echoed from the halls around him. The words slammed into him with even more volume than he'd given them to begin with. As the words struck him, clarity also assailed the assassin. He looked up sharply and found himself standing alone in the hallway and facing the wrong direction. He spun back around expecting to see his three companions just a few feet away, but they were gone and he found himself facing an impenetrable gray wall with halls branching both left and right, but nothing going forward.

Laughter trickled down the gray halls, a masculine chuckle bouncing from surface to surface and filling the horrible silence of the other worldly plane in a disturbingly unnatural way.

"We've searched for you for so long, Xandrith. We never thought you'd come to us yourself." A voice spoke from behind him, but Xan didn't look back. He started walking down the path to his right at a fast pace. He'd broken his own rules. He'd stopped and looked back, and now he was lost in the gray. That had been stupid. The deception was so obvious that Xan felt painfully stupid for falling for it. It had appealed directly to his humanity, and he'd been only too eager to fall into that trap.

"You can try and run from us, but it's already too late. There are no missteps within our realm." The voice spoke again, but the tone and timbre had changed. It had possessed a masculine voice the first time, but this time the words rang with the clear and chiming tones of a powerful female speaker. "This place is ours. It is us. Tesserect believed he'd discovered a shortcut to pass through space, but what he'd really found was origin. We connect all points, we are all points. The delicate strand of power that lets you pass through here is easily broken and you've fallen from the route, little assassin. There is no point in trying to escape now."

Xandrith kept moving. "If there is no point in trying to escape why do you keep trying to convince me to give in? If it were hopeless, you could just leave me to die."

"Die?" The female voice had become the male voice again. "You won't die in here. Death is for your world. Here, we will devour your being. You will see. The hounds are coming."

As if to emphasize the last words, a snarling sound echoed down the hall from behind Xandrith. "I've dealt with dogs before. I'm not impressed." Xan replied.

"We shall see." The voice replied, and then it was gone. Xan wasn't entirely certain how he knew it was finished talking to him. It was as though a pressure that had been pushing against his back was suddenly lifted. Talking back to whatever it was would accomplish nothing. That didn't stop him from putting in some choice last words.

"When I'm done with your dogs, where would you like me to shove the broken pieces?" He yelled, knowing there wouldn't be an answer. There was something satisfying about getting the last word in even if he was just talking to himself. An eerie howl filled the air, closer than the snarling had been before. "Damn dogs." He muttered to himself before increasing his forward pace.

The path in front of him split and he went right without slowing down. He had no idea where he was going or if it even mattered that he was choosing directions completely at random, but he wasn't going to just stop and let the dogs get him. A particularly loud snarl from behind him coerced his steady forward pace into an all out run. He didn't bother to look back to see what was at his heels, if anything.

Running down the gray corridors was disorienting. It was difficult to maintain a fixed perspective on exactly where the floor met the walls and where the walls parted into new lengths of hallway. Xandrith ran recklessly forward, careening down the blank pathways heedless of his direction of travel. Each time he rounded a corner it seemed he would lose his balance and careen into the nearest wall, but the assassin found himself rolling through the turns, his body leaning and bending through the passageways with ease as though diving down the gray ways was completely natural to him. His feet felt light, and the pounding of his heart was a steady and forward driving beacon. He was filled with fear, but at the same time he felt alive. The long days of torture seemed a blurry vision into some unknown past and he felt like a remade man. He began to laugh.

The sound was horrifying as it rolled up from inside of him, bouncing out of his chest to the beat of his footfalls. Even to Xan's own ears the laughter was a crazy sound. This was madness. This was insanity. It was wonderful and intoxicating, and it drove him forward even faster than the quickly approaching snarls creeping up behind him. Something lost was found again.

The center of his spine tingled and Xandrith dove to the side in a roll. Something large and terrible sailed through the place where his body would have been if he hadn't dodged. It landed in front of him on four powerful legs. One of the gray walls stopped the assassin mid roll and he used the surface to straighten himself up and launch himself into a standing position as the dog began to stalk towards him again. It was a large canine creature with fur the color of smoke and eyes like shards of coal glaring out from beneath its heavy brow. The top of its head was level with Xan's shoulder and its mouth hung agape, impossibly wide. The beast would have no trouble putting all of Xan's head directly between its large white teeth and it looked like it had the jaw muscle to crack him open like a ripe melon. It had long, saber-like teeth, some of which were easily as long as a stiletto dagger. Its body was devoid of fat and was instead a mass of knotted and angry muscle, lean and powerful. It could have been called a wolf, but only if one was envisioning a wolf built out of the nightmares of lunatics. As the assassin came eye to eye with the creature he began to wonder if his earlier bragging about returning the creature in pieces might have been ill thought out. Fortunately he didn't have long to ponder the error of his ways. 

The dog creature closed the gap between them with a sudden forward spring and Xandrith had nowhere to go. He grabbed for the creature's prominent collar bone as it sprung at him. The beast was powerful, far stronger than Xan had feared. He barely managed to keep it from locking its jaws around his throat as it snapped and tore its way forward, trying to get its long teeth into Xan's flesh. The assassin reacted on instinct alone. He drove his knee up into the dogs soft underbelly as hard as he could, hoping that the blow would be enough to at least knock the creature back and give him a moment to recover. It flinched, but it didn't go away. Xan tried again, but this time the dog leapt back to avoid the blow. This was just the break Xandrith needed. He hadn't hurt the thing, but at least he was free from it for a moment.

Xan reached to his hips for his knives, and his hands came away empty. He wasn't carrying knives. He reached for his other weapon, the magic he'd come to rely upon, but it wasn't there. He couldn't draw any energy from the dog creature and the glyphs of magic spun away from him, gibberish that he couldn't hope to make sense of. What was happening? Of course he realized almost immediately. His magic didn't work in this place. He'd known that before he entered.

Xandrith didn't even see the second creature that launched itself at him from his unprotected side. The force of the impact knocked him from his feet and before he even understood what had gone wrong powerful jaws had clamped on to his shoulder. The saber-like teeth of the dog ripped through his flesh like it was wet parchment.

We won't die here. Not like this.
An inner voice spoke to Xan, one that he hadn't heard in quite a while. He felt a surge of strength flash through his body and he clenched his right fist. His left hand would barely respond to him. As his fist closed, he felt his hand clenching down on the rounded surface of a knife. The hilt was a familiar shape that seemed as though it had been built specifically for his palm. He recognized it immediately. What he was feeling was impossible, but he couldn't deny the reality of the sensation in his palm. He struck out blindly, pain driving him to desperation. The knife that couldn't be struck flesh and suddenly the weight of the demon was lifted from his body as it howled and backed away. Xan's eyes passed over the impossible blade.