Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom (36 page)

“Where is that light coming from?” Rahm muttered.

“From Rael,” Iyasu said. “It’s her light. She’s made of the stuff, you know.”

“Well, I’m made of clay, if the stories are true,” the warrior said. “But you don’t see the stuff coming out of me.”

“Please.” Hadara snorted. “I’ve seen you squat in the brush more than once.”

Iyasu laughed, which earned him a glare from their djinn guide. The path became a stair and they descended, still hemmed in by the close stone walls, and even when the stair turned sharply to the left, and then left again, the passage grew no wider. But when they reached the bottom, the walls angled away and they stepped out into a large chamber dotted with pillars not unlike those in the ruins above, and in the center of this huge dusty chamber the seer saw the black scar in the floor, the jagged gap where the tiles had collapsed and vanished into the earth.

“What did that?” Rahm asked.

“The floor?” Jevad arched an eyebrow. “When Ramashad was plunged into the earth, the desert shook for leagues in every direction. It’s a wonder this entire pyramid didn’t collapse. Why? You’re not scared of a little hole, are you?”

“I’m scared I might lose my patience and kill you,” the warrior said mildly. “And then Hadara will be angry, not to mention this one.” He thumbed at Iyasu. He bared his teeth in a false smile. “But the hole doesn’t bother me.”

The djinn said nothing as he led them across the chamber and began his descent into the fissure in the floor.

“You said there was an underground passage,” Iyasu said. “You called it a road. Where is it?”

“Buried,” the djinn replied. “But we can still reach it through here. I’ve walked it many times. It’s quite safe. More or less. No trouble for a light-footed djinn or angel, but for a lead-footed man? Well, I can’t say.”

They descended the rocky slope of the collapsed floor, climbing and slipping and jumping as needed, and always guided by the warm amber light that seemed to infuse the air around the Angel of Death. Eventually, after climbing down, and over, and up but then back down again, they squeezed through a crack and skirted a bottomless chasm, and found themselves standing on a smooth, flat road with rough but clearly sculpted walls.

“The road,” the djinn said with a theatrical bow. “As promised.”

“Apparently,” Azrael said. “But if Ramashad fell into the earth, then this road can’t possibly take us to where the city is now.”

“It doesn’t. It will take us to where the city
was
, dear sister,” Jevad said. “And from there, it is quite easy to find where the city is now.”

As they followed the stone road, Iyasu peered at the walls, looking for clues about the people who created the passage centuries ago. The dry air, the lack of water, and the absence of wind should have preserved any marks from tools, or even traces of blood from an injured laborer. But he saw nothing. Even the dents and chips in the walls where he was certain a hammer and chisel had once removed some excess stone were vague and strange. Frowning, he began to drag his bare hand over the wall as he walked, hoping his fingers would find some new insight that his eye was failing to see.

“Wait,” he said abruptly. He turned to the wall and ran his hands over it in several directions, up and down, side to side. “Right here. The wall is rounded. It’s smooth.”

“So what?” Rahm sighed and frowned, clearly wishing to be on their way.

“So, these walls are all rough. Except here.” Iyasu crouched lower. “And here. Wait no, all along here, the bottom third of the passage, the walls are all smooth.”

“What could do that?” Hadara asked. “Water?”

“Absolutely water.” Iyasu nodded. “Just one problem with that. We’re in a desert. A very old, very dead desert. Jevad! Explain this. There must be a well, a spring, some sort of oasis. There was water here, wasn’t there? This tunnel wasn’t just a road, it was a reservoir.”

“It was, of a sort,” the djinn admitted. “It kept both cities alive.”

“So what happened?” Iyasu asked. “Where did the water go?”

Jevad paced back along the narrow path, bringing Azrael with him, and he knelt by Iyasu and touched the smooth wall. “I’ll give you a hint. You see, little magi, it wasn’t water we kept down here.”

“Then what was it?”

“Oil.” The djinn scraped his fingers across the wall and four bright trails of red fire burst into life. The flames quickly spread, pouring like a liquid inferno up and down the length of the passage way. Everyone fell back against the opposite wall, including Iyasu, whose sleeve had caught fire. The young seer shouted in sudden terror as he shook his arm and scrambled across the floor, even as his mind screamed at him to calm down and take off his shirt, his body refused to obey as it continued to flail and shriek, eyes fixed on the flames, skin prickling with the intense heat.

“Yasu!” Azrael tore the sleeve off and tossed it away, and then bent over him to carefully inspect his bare arm.

“No!” Rahm roared. “The djinn!”

Iyasu shuddered as hot and cold flashes raced up and down his arm, but as he blinked away the paralyzing fear of a moment ago, he realized that Jevad was no longer among them. “He’s gone,” the seer muttered. “I’m sorry.”

“Hush,” Hadara said as she leaned over him. “He doesn’t matter now. Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Rahm slammed his fist into the cold wall behind them. “That djinn killed countless good men. He deserves to die!”

“Then we will kill him later,” Hadara said loudly. “But we wouldn’t have even found him if not for these two, so their well-being is more important.”

The warrior frowned. “Yes. Yes, fine.” He turned away to pace a few steps away. The red flames dancing up and down the opposite wall were beginning to die down, but they still reached far down the passageway in both directions, lighting the way in shades of scarlet and copper.

“I’m fine, really, I’m fine.” Iyasu stood up, and for a moment he clutched Azrael’s hand as much to steady himself as to make himself feel safe in the dark tunnel, with the flames still licking the wall. “Come on. We know where to go now. We’ll be in Ramashad in no time.”

And without waiting for anyone to agree or argue, he led the way into the darkness with the only the light of the Angel of Death to guide him.

Chapter 29

The underground passage from Messenad was straight and level, and seemed to run forever through the dark, silent gloom deep beneath the desert floor. The smell of burnt oil lingered in the still air, stinging Iyasu’s nostrils. But he hurried on.

He wanted to run. He knew he was the smallest, the weakest, and the slowest of their number, and now was a moment that demanded speed if they were to have any hope of catching Jevad. But he continued to merely stride as quickly as he could, ignoring the stinging tingles in his singed right arm and his slashed eye as he went.

Maybe this tunnel will lead us straight to Ramashad.

Maybe it’s exactly what the djinn said it was.

Or maybe…

He shuffled to a halt.

“What’s wrong?” Azrael asked.

“End of the road.” Iyasu pointed where just ahead the smooth stone path broke off and only a jagged blackness remained.

“I’ll take a look,” she said, stepping around him.

“Be careful,” he whispered. “We don’t know how strong they really are, or how many there are.”

“I know.” And she stepped off the end of the road and dropped silently into the darkness, taking her light with her and plunging the rest of them into utter blindness.

Iyasu blinked in the dark and let his mind paint a clear image of the tunnel as he had seen it a moment ago. He could imagine exactly where the walls were, and exactly where the floor gave way. It wasn’t as good as seeing, but it was better than seeing nothing at all.

“Iyasu?” Rahm cleared his throat.

“Mm,” he answered as he squinted at the darkness.

“You’ve fought this djinn before, right?”

“Yes. In Maqari. Two years ago, more or less.”

“What happened exactly?”

“He killed me,” the seer said quietly. “Snapped my neck.”

“What?” Hadara inhaled sharply. “You died?”

“Nearly. But luckily, I had some good friends with me that day.”

“I’d say so,” the princess agreed.

A warm golden glow heralded Azrael’s return to them, and the angel stepped onto the path beside them with a quizzical look. “It’s a sea. A black sea of oil.”

The only way down was on angel wings, so one by one Azrael carried them from the path down through the cracked and broken chasm to the rough, sloping shores of the black sea. Iyasu prodded the oil and peered across its dark waves, but there was nothing to see but the rock walls holding the oil in the belly of the earth. The walls spread out to the north and south, fading into the distant darkness, and the roof soared above them so that only the tips of the stone spires reaching down toward the oil could be seen, like fangs hovering overhead, waiting to plunge down upon some unsuspecting prey.

“There’s no path,” Azrael said. “I looked. The walls lean over the oil. There’s no way to walk around it.”

“Then where did the djinn go?” Rahm asked.

“Over it.” Iyasu pointed west across the black waves. “He ran on the surface.”

“Well, lucky him.” The warrior leaned back against the rock wall. “What now?”

Iyasu continued to peer down at the oil, watching metallic rainbows twist and swirl across its surface by the light of the angel. He shook his head. “No idea.”

A small patter of bubbles rose to the surface about a stone’s throw away from the shore and popped, one by one. Iyasu raised an eyebrow.

“I could cross the sea and find the other side, find the city,” Azrael offered. “If you think you’ll be safe here, in the dark.”

“I don’t see why not,” Hadara said. “There’s nothing here.”

Another handful of iridescent bubbles gathered on the surface of the oil, only half as far as the first ones, and they made soft smacking sounds as they burst open. Iyasu frowned. “Rael?”

“What?”

“Have you ever seen a lake of oil before?”

“No. I have seen pits of tar before, but that’s not quite the same thing.”

“Did anything live in those pits?”

“No. Things only died in them.”

Iyasu nodded. “Right, well, then this is different then, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed at the lake as a third cluster of bubbles appear even closer than the last. “There’s something alive in there.”

Azrael leaned out over the oil, staring down at its shiny black surface, letting her golden aura set every little wavelet to shimmering. And then she stepped up into the air and floated on her half-seen wings away from the shore, out over the lake, slowly.

White jaws surged straight up from the oil, spread wide and filled with horrid, crooked fangs that lunged at the angel’s feet and snapped shut with an echoing thump, and the angel’s light went out, plunging the cavern into blackness once again, and in the darkness they heard something of monstrous size crash down into the lake, and felt a spray of cold oil on their skin and clothes.

“Rael!” Iyasu staggered back from the shore, confident of where it was but terrified of how large the beast might be and how far onto land it might be able to strike. “Rael!”

“Here. I’m here.” The voice came from above and was followed by the return of the amber light, now high up among the stalactites where the angel hovered on motionless black wings. “I’m all right.”

Iyasu shuddered and exhaled with relief. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“Hush! It may hear you.” Azrael drifted down toward the surface again, this time farther away from the rocky shore. After a moment of scanning the surface, she rose into the air again just as a huge white mass floated to the surface beneath her. The beast’s back was broad and scaled, cover from end to end in rows of small spines like knife blades piercing the air. A long tail tapered away from its back side, and a long snout tapered away from the two large milky eyes that stood atop its skull, and when it opened its jaws to hiss, it displayed long processions of dagger-like teeth that shone in the soft angel light.

“A crocodile.” Iyasu smiled and pointed. “It’s a crocodile. A very, very, very large albino crocodile.” He paused to stare at it, to take in the little marks and scales and discolorations, the shape of the eyes and nostrils, and the length of the fangs. “How did something like that end up down here? It shouldn’t be able to live in this muck. What on earth could it be eating down here?”

“That’s a worrisome question,” Hadara said. “Crocodiles eat large animals. And this crocodile is, as you said, very large itself.”

They watched as Azrael slowly glided across the sea of oil, taking her light with her from one side of the cavern to the other, and all the while the huge white beast swam beneath her, swishing its massive tail in long, lazy strokes.

“It’s hunting her.” Rahm snorted.

“Maybe, maybe not.” Iyasu ran his hand through his hair. “Maybe it’s attracted by the light. Even entranced by the light. I thought at first it was blind, but maybe it’s not, not entirely. It can sense light. It’s drawn to it, following some ancient instinct, longing for the sun. To bask in the sun like other crocodiles.” He grinned. “I think I we just found our way across.”

It took a bit of convincing before Azrael led the albino crocodile to the shore so the others could leap onto the beast’s scaly back, gripping each other for balance, and then kneeling for safety. And then the angel glided out across the sea of oil, and the crocodile followed her.

“This is insane,” Hadara whispered.

“I know.” Iyasu smiled. “Isn’t it?”

They passed beneath a vast forest of stone spires stabbing down at them from above, and from time to time a wall of ragged white stone would loom out of the darkness on one side or the other, often studded with the crumbling remains of a gigantic rib cage, a cyclopean skull, or some less identifiable bone of an even less familiar creature. Iyasu stared up at them all, mouth agape, speechless.

Time passed, but without a sun or stars to reckon by, Iyasu had only his own breathing and his own heart beat to mark the hours. The cavern stretched on and on, sometimes curving slightly to one side or the other, but mostly striking westward. But eventually, as his neck grew stiff and his stomach began to grumble, he spied a change in the dark, a faint scattering of light out beyond the soft glow of his beloved. He pointed to it and whispered, “There. Something in the distance.”