Cloak Games: Thief Trap (16 page)

“There isn’t enough time,” said Corvus. 

I opened my mouth to answer, but he moved before I could speak. His arms coiled around me like steel bands, and for an awful moment I was sure that his self-control had snapped, that he was going to call his dark blade, drive it through my chest, and feast upon my life force. Instead he slung me over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and did it so fast that I could not react.

Then he sprinted forward. 

He could move fast, even when bearing my weight. Far faster than a normal man should have been able to go. The Shadowmorph must have been lending him strength. He sprinted forward, jumped, and landed maybe a third of the way across the Warding Way. He sprinted forward another few yards and jumped again. We shot through the air, and he landed on the dirt on the far side of the road, my chin bouncing off his side. Corvus stopped, turned, and put me back on my feet.

He wasn’t even breathing very hard. 

“Don’t do that again,” I said, wobbling a bit. God, but he was strong. He would have been strong even without the Shadowmorph’s influence. I cast the spell to detect the presence of magic, and felt a faint stirring from the nearby monoliths. “It’s activated, but…”

“But not very much,” said Corvus. “The Inquisition, for all its power, does not have infinite resources. A dozen different major concerns continually occupy their attention, and wizards with the divinatory skill to see into the Shadowlands are not that common. Someone will investigate what we just did, I am sure…as soon as they can get around to it.” 

“Fine,” I spat out. His logic made sense, I had to admit, but I still did not like it. “Then let’s get the hell out of here before someone does come to investigate.”

“Can you run?” he said. “Or should I carry you.”

“Oh, shut up.”

We jogged into the trees, following the pale light in my hand. The ground became rockier, more uneven, the trees more twisted. Here and there I saw piles of yellowing skulls stacked up like miniature pyramids. I didn’t know if they were real skulls or some distorted reflection of the real world, and I didn’t want to find out. The concrete chip in my hand glowed brighter, the mental tugging growing more insistent. 

The trees thinned, and suddenly I found myself standing on the edge of a precipice, a vast canyon that had to be at least a half-mile deep and two miles wide. A turbulent river surged through the heart of the canyon, and it was so far down that I spotted clouds floating below me. We didn’t have canyons like this on Earth. Maybe there were canyons like this on Mars, or this was some sort of abstract representation of a historical event. 

“Here,” I said. “It’s here. This location corresponds to the vault in McCade’s mansion. I can open the rift way from here.”

“It’s not over the edge, I hope?” said Corvus, glancing at the rocky ground far below. 

I shook my head. “Right at the edge.” I took deep breaths, clearing my aching, buzzing mind to summon the power I needed to push open the rift way back to Earth. As before, the magic came more easily, but the effort to control it was no less, and I was already tired. 

“How long?” said Corvus. 

“A few moments,” I said. “Please shut up so I can concentrate.”

Corvus snorted, but turned to watch the dead forest. I held out the concrete chip and the handful of dust, focusing my will and power upon them. The silvery glow around my hand grew brighter, and a curtain of mist rippled into existence, the air growing colder and colder against my bare arms. 

Wait. It wasn’t supposed to do that. 

“Katerina!” snapped Corvus, his voice cracking like a whip. “Hurry!” 

I frowned, looked over my shoulder, and was so shocked by what I saw that I almost lost my grip on the spell.

A…thing was floating towards us. 

The wraithwolves had looked like twisted wolves. The anthrophages had looked vaguely human. This thing, this monster, whatever it was, had no analogues in the real world. 

A huge sphere of glistening gray flesh floated overhead, black veins pulsing and throbbing in the slime-coated hide. From the underside of the sphere hung dozens of black tentacles, their sides covered in razor-edged barbs. A cluster of misshapen grayish-green flesh nodules adorned the bottom of the pulsing sphere, and dozens of fanged mouths dotted the nodules, opening and closing to reveal jagged fangs. Each mouth looked large enough to bite me in half. 

I had seen a lot of terrifying things working for Morvilind, but this was in the top ten.

The thing was floating right towards me.

That put it in the top five. Maybe even the top three.

I whirled to face the rippling sheet of mist, throwing every last scrap of will and magic I could muster into it. The mist writhed, and then began to glow with pale gray light, shining brighter and brighter. Through the light and the mist I glimpsed a large room of black stone, and I was pretty sure it was McCade’s vault on Earth. 

“Corvus!” I shouted. “Go!”

I turned and saw him running at me. The huge creature floated after him, moving at least as fast as a car. I spun, took three running steps, and jumped over the edge of the vast chasm.

The rift way swallowed me. 

Chapter 9: Books and Scrolls

I hit a floor of black stone, rolled, and landed on my back with a groan. I sat up just as Corvus stumbled through the rift way, and beyond him I saw the huge spherical creature lowering itself toward the ground. It couldn’t fit through the gate, but those tentacles could.

At once I released the spell, and the rift way snapped shut, the view of the Shadowlands and the ghastly horror vanishing.

I flopped upon the floor, breathing hard, and Corvus knelt next to me.

“Are you injured?” he said. 

“No,” I said, sitting up with a grunt. “Just tired. Ugh. What the hell was that thing?”

“I have no idea,” said Corvus. “I have never encountered one before. I do not know if such creatures are native to the Shadowlands, or if it came from some distant world. The Shadowlands are supposedly infinite.” 

“Ugly thing,” I said. I pushed off the floor, stood, and managed not to fall onto my face. “Just as well it didn’t follow us. It wouldn’t do to end McCade’s gala with some alien monster rampaging through the guests.” 

“It would make for a memorable Conquest Day,” said Corvus, his tone grim as he looked around. 

“Hah,” I said, and I looked around myself.

For a moment I was too baffled to speak. 

I wasn’t in a vault. I wasn’t in a utility room or a mechanical room.

The room…it looked like I had landed in a temple of some kind. 

For one thing, it was big, about the size of a mid-sized church, with a vaulted ceiling about thirty feet over my head. The walls and floor were built of gleaming black marble, and a dais rose at the far end of the rectangular room. There was even an altar and a gleaming golden symbol hanging on the wall above it. 

“Looks like a church,” I said. 

“It’s not,” said Corvus, and his voice was harder than I had heard it yet. His dark sword returned to his right hand, and his eyes moved back and forth as if he expected attack from any direction. “Look closer.”

I did…and I felt my frown deepen. 

James and Lucy Marney’s church had stained-glass windows depicting Jesus and the apostles preaching to crowds or tending sheep or doing various other religious things. This room, this temple, had lines of symbols marching up the walls of black marble, strange symbols of wedge-shaped lines that I recognized as cuneiform after a moment, cuneiform similar to that upon the tablet Morvilind wanted. There was an empty space on the dais before the altar, and I saw a double circle ringed with Elven hieroglyphs. Morvilind had not taught me any summoning spells, but I recognized a summoning circle when I saw one. The Marneys’ church taught that the communion wine was the blood of Christ, but I was entirely certain the wine did not leave crusted bloodstains upon the altar, nor fill the air with a metallic, rotting reek as it dried. 

And the golden symbol above the altar was not a cross. 

It looked like a peculiarly stylized sunburst. No, that wasn’t quite right. The nine rays coming off the central orb of the symbol were too wavy for that. Instead, the rays look liked…tentacles, tentacles that surrounded a fanged mouth. 

“Definitely,” I said, “not a church. Damn it. We’re not on Earth, are we? I screwed up the rift way. We…”

“No,” said Corvus. “Look.” He pointed. A vault door stood in the wall behind me, identical to the one I had seen in McCade’s mechanical room. It was the same door.

I summoned power and cast the spell to sense magic, and at once the sensations flooded over my mind. I felt the buzzing, snarling auras I had detected earlier, but much closer. They were here with me, now, in this very room. I also noticed a dark overtone in many of the auras, a nauseating and greasy sensation that made my skin crawl. 

Dark magic. 

That meant Morvilind had sent me to steal an object of dark magic.

“Oh, hell,” I muttered. 

“You recognize the symbol, then?” said Corvus. 

“No,” I said. “What is it?” 

Corvus hesitated. “It is not something you should know.”

“For God’s sake,” I said. “Today I’ve almost been killed by wraithwolves, anthrophages, and whatever that floating greasy tentacle thing was. What is worse than that?”

“This is,” said Corvus. “It is the symbol of the Dark Ones.”

“Dark Ones? That sounds downright ominous,” I said. I didn’t recognize the title. “What are they really called?”

“No one knows,” said Corvus. “Save perhaps for their cultists. They are creatures that dwell in the realm beyond the Shadowlands, in the place called the Void.”

“That’s the source of dark magic,” I said. “The High Queen forbids all traffic with or summoning from the Void.” 

“She does,” said Corvus. “It was one of her disagreements with the Archons when they drove her from the Elven homeworld. There are cults among both Elves and humans that worship the Dark Ones and attempt to summon them up. The Dark Ones are incredibly dangerous, and attempting to summon one or even worshipping one is an automatic death sentence from the Inquisition.” 

“Then McCade is one of these cultists,” I said. 

“Perhaps even the high priest of his cult,” said Corvus. “He built all this, or his father did, and he likely has followers.”

“Does that earn him an automatic death sentence…ah, decree of execution from the Shadow Hunters?” I said. 

Corvus’s hard eyes turned towards me. “The Shadow Hunters are the enemies of the cultists of the Dark One.” 

“Right,” I said. Well, the Inquisition might hate the cultists, but since I was pretty sure the bloodstains on that altar were human, the cultists did not seem like good guys. That said, I didn’t care. I hadn’t come here to hunt down crazy cultists who worshipped monsters from beyond the Void. I had come here to steal an enspelled tablet. “Let’s see if we can find that book of yours. I suppose your decrees of execution are picky about the particulars.” 

“At this point,” said Corvus, scowling at the golden sigil of the Dark Ones upon the wall, “it is a formality. This temple could not have been constructed without the knowledge of Paul McCade, and he must die. But the Silent Hunters adhere to our decrees.” 

“Stay away from that summoning circle,” I said as we climbed the steps to the dais. “There’s some kind of spell on it. I don’t know what it will do, but I really don’t want to find out.” 

“Nor do I,” said Corvus, and we kept well away from the circle and its ring of Elven hieroglyphs. Standing too close to the circle made me dizzy, like I was standing atop a skyscraper and staring at the street far below. For a moment I had a vision of losing my balance, of falling into the circle, a fanged maw rising up to meet me…

“Katerina?” said Corvus.

I recognized the presence of a mental influence upon my thoughts. Whatever spell within in the circle was trying to call me to it. 

“Definitely,” I said, walking away, “stay well away from that circle.” 

I reached the altar. It was a massive slab of black marble, adorned on the sides with cuneiform symbols. I wondered how much McCade had spent upon black marble to adorn his weird little temple. Clearly the man had too much money. Bloodstains marked the front of the black marble, dull and dark, and the air smelled vaguely of rotting meat. A number of objects rested atop the altar – a golden chalice, a curved dagger, and an open book resting upon a pedestal. 

“That your book?” I said. There was an alcove in the wall behind the altar. One side held a row of metal boxes for circuit breakers, likely for the electric lights shining in the temple’s ceiling. The opposite side held a utility shelf containing a miscellaneous assortment of objects. There was a small leather pouch, and my eyes widened as I saw the gleam of gems. Perhaps McCade used those gems in his rituals to contact the Dark Ones. 

I tucked the pouch into my duffel bag. It’s not as if Morvilind pays me an allowance or a salary or anything. 

“It is,” said Corvus from the altar. 

“What is it?” I said. “Some book about the Dark Ones, I suppose? Their secret gospel or whatever?” I cast the spell to sense the presence of magic. All the items upon the altar radiated dark magic, but there was a powerful magical object in the alcove. 

“It is called the Void Codex,” said Corvus. I glanced back and saw him lift the book from its pedestal. “It was written in Germany sometime in the fifteenth century by a heretic priest who had founded a cult devoted to the Dark Ones. The wars of the Reformation wiped out his cult, but copies of his book survived and have circulated ever since. They did little harm until the High Queen’s advent and the Conquest…”

“Because magic became far more common then,” I said, sifting through the detritus on the shelves. It mostly seemed to be bloodstained cloths and old knives. I wondered how many people McCade had killed down here. I wondered what he had done with the bodies.

Suddenly I was glad I had not eaten McCade Foods canned meats in quite some time. 

“Precisely,” said Corvus. “The book became far more dangerous, and the High Queen banned it and ordered the destruction of any copies.”