The Golden Key (Book 3) (16 page)

8

Giorge followed the others as they moved along the sequence
of sarcophagi. Each one they opened led to another brief, startling discovery
of a dead ancestor who had been miraculously found alive, another curtailed
reunion. As they went, he felt a growing desire for privacy with his mother. He
wanted to talk with her—
really
talk with her—but there wasn’t time. He
still hadn’t processed the fact that she was alive, even though he had been
certain of it ever since she had removed the black hood. Her long black curls had
cascaded over her shoulders when she shook her head, and then she ran her
gloved hands through those wavy strands like she had done so many times when he
was a child. But the loving brown eyes he remembered were hidden behind the angry
glare she had given him when he had freed his great uncle. For a long moment it
had looked as if she were about to throw her poniards at him—or at his great
uncle, he couldn’t tell which—but she hadn’t; she had just turned away and
stomped to the next sarcophagus.

He had followed her, slipping a bit as he walked too
quickly, and then realized she hadn’t been stomping in anger. The slime abruptly
turned into a thick layer of grit, and a few steps after that it was but a thin
layer of dry dust. He followed her example and stomped the mud from his boots.
Whatever was feeding the slime, wherever the moisture was coming from, it
didn’t reach this far.

Two ancestors later, they rounded the corner and moved along
the wall toward the brightly lit corner some forty feet away. Sarcophagi lined
the wall, each about a foot and a half wide and two feet away from the ones
next to it. By the time they reached the third sarcophagus, they knew where the
light was coming from: a florescent orange fungus.

“I don’t like this,” his mother said. “I have heard tales of
such fungi, and it is wise to stay away from it.”

It was the familiar voice, but it didn’t hold the gentle
lilting Giorge so fondly remembered. He didn’t look at her when he nodded; he
had heard similar tales, himself—probably from her. They were a standard
warning for grave robbers. “Perhaps if we cover our noses?” he offered. There
were feeble rattles coming from within the next sarcophagus.
Is he suffocating?
“Your mask, perhaps?”

She nodded and pulled her mask back over her face. “It
targets the eyes as well as the nose,” she said. “If it finds a way in, there
is no hope—save a healer familiar with it, and that must be done quickly.” She
stepped cautiously forward, trying to avoid the fungal growth creeping along
the wall with its tendrils gently draped over the top of the sarcophagus. It
was already eating into the wood, but he didn’t think it had penetrated too far
yet. It was mostly new growth.

There was a puff of orange when the lid popped free, and she
hurriedly thrust the lid aside and reached into the sarcophagus.

“Don’t breathe it in!” Giorge called as he jumped back a few
paces.

His mother pulled the man out of the sarcophagus and pushed
him hurriedly away from it. She followed a step behind, and when they were near
Giorge, she lifted her mask and took a deep breath. “We need a better plan,”
she said, pointing at the orange cloud spreading out from the sarcophagus
behind her. “If those spores get into you, you’re dead. The fungus creeps into
your skull and devours your brain. It is a slow, agonizing way to die.”

Giorge nodded. He had been told the same thing, perhaps even
by the same person who had told his mother. But the next sarcophagus was far
from silent; whoever was in it was thudding up against the inside of the lid,
trying to break out of it. A thin layer of the luminescent fungus covered the
upper half of the sarcophagus, and there would be no way to avoid its spores
when they opened it up.
If
they opened it at all.

The man she had freed stood unsteadily beside her, as if he
had forgotten how to stand. His head was bowed, as if he was completely unaware
of his surroundings.

“You’re free now,” Giorge told him as gently as he could. “I
know it’s disorienting, but we don’t have time right now to explain what we think
happened. Others are still trapped.”

When the man lifted his head and turned to Giorge, his eyes
were closed. He was young, like all of them, but his face was scarred, as if he
had seen many battles and some of them had been unkind to him. A jagged scar
ran along his brow, and the beard did little to cover up where he had been
badly burned. His nose was ragged, as if it had been broken and set a dozen
times. When he opened his mouth, there were few teeth and no words, only a low,
rumbling groan. Then his eyes opened, and a fierce orange glow burst free.

Giorge staggered back a step and stopped.
Momma!
She
was right beside the man, within easy reach, ready to give him support if he
needed it….

The man tried to speak again, and this time the groan slowly
eased into an elongated word, “Kkkkiiillllllllll.” Then his mouth snapped shut,
abruptly cutting off the word. He lifted his arms and reached out for Giorge.

“No!” Giorge cried as his mother stepped closer to the man.
“He’s infected!”

The reunions behind him fell to an abrupt silence as
Giorge’s shout echoed from the walls of the large chamber.

His mother hesitated only a moment before ducking behind the
man and hurrying away from the wall painted with fungus. She only took a few
steps before turning back, but it was far enough.

The man took a slow, ponderous step toward Giorge and
stopped. He opened his mouth again, and this time, the words were clipped and
clearly enunciated. “Kill me,” he said. “Please.”

Giorge stepped warily back and drew his sword. As he did so,
his mother gasped and pulled her mask down over her face again. Then she
circled stealthily until she was behind the man. She rushed forward with her
poniards and thrust both of them into the man’s back.

“Harold!” one of the men behind Giorge yelled—but whatever
else he might have said was lost.

The man seemed not to notice his wounds as he stepped
forward with his arms extended, a sickly orange, algae-like growth dangling
from his outstretched hands.

Giorge stepped back until he was almost lost in shadow, his
sword held out in front of him. How could he kill the man without getting
infected? The spores…

Archibald towered over him, his long sword in hand and a
grim look on his face. “I do not like this,” he said, his voice uncompromising.
“It is not right to kill ones’ forebears, even if it is a merciful act.”

Giorge’s mother continued stabbing the man from behind, but
it seemed to have little effect on him. When he did take notice of it, he slowly
twisted around, swinging his arms and spewing out a putrid orange cloud from
his mouth.

“By Onus’s Forked Tongue!” Archibald cried, springing
forward and swinging his sword.

His mother easily ducked beneath the man’s arm, but when she
saw the sputum, her eyes grew wide—then slammed shut. She dropped to the floor
and rolled quickly away.

A moment later, Archibald’s sword cleanly severed the man’s
head, sending it flying backward. But no blood spouted from the wound. The body
didn’t fall. It continued turning until its arms thudded against Archibald’s
breastplate. The contact didn’t stop its momentum as it slowly rotated to the
ground. It still wasn’t dead—But was it alive? It lost much of its direction,
and the arms flailed the air. Archibald easily avoided them by taking a long
step backward. When he was next to Giorge, Giorge gasped and stepped rapidly away
from him: his breastplate had a patch of orange film on it,
and it was
moving
.

Before he could do more than notice it, a loud crash
shattered the near-silence of the tomb. The lid of one of the sarcophagi in the
far corner, where the light was brightest, had fallen to the floor. Something
stepped out that had a bright, pumpkin-colored aura enveloping it. It was
brighter than the fungus on the wall, almost as bright as one of Angus’s
Lamplight spells.

As he was adjusting to the alarming situation, another lid
fell.

“Battle formation!” Archibald shouted, taking up a position
in front of the others.

Giorge reacted as he always did when Hobart made that
command: he sheathed his short sword, moved toward the rear, and took out his
throwing knives. Within moments, he was joined by a dozen others, including his
mother, leaving Archibald to stand as an army of one against the growing army
of luminescent dead-but-nots.

When his mother joined him, he whispered, “He’s got spores
all over him. They’re
moving
.”

She nodded. She had already taken off her mask and thrown it
aside. “We need a way out,” she said.

“Or fire,” someone beside them suggested. “We can burn them
if we can make a fire.”

“The sarcophagi are made of wood,” another said. “Who has
flint and steel?”

Several voices replied in the affirmative.

“Any axes?” one asked as they moved toward the nearest sarcophagus.
“It will be easier to dismantle the sarcophagi with an axe.”

After a few seconds of silence, a few of them began sawing at
them with their knives and swords. Then one said, “Make some shavings for
kindling. I’ll get the fire going.”

Giorge stared at Archibald’s back. He wasn’t planning to
engage in the conflict if he could help it; he was more concerned about what
the fungus was doing to Archibald. It had been radiating outward on his
breastplate like an expanding pool of water seeking the easiest way to escape
the confines of its puddle. What would he do if Archibald became infected?
Fire?
he suddenly thought.
They need kindling.
“That way,” he said, gesturing
down the wall toward the crumpled heaps beyond his own sarcophagus. “There’s
kindling aplenty down there.” He heard footfalls running, and he quickly added,
“Mind the slime!”

“Look!” one of them called. “Over there!”

Giorge turned long enough to see where the woman was
pointing, and when he looked in that direction, he gulped. The headless body of
the man who had asked to be killed was on its feet again. This time, its
movements weren’t aimless: it was heading straight for them. The others,
glowing steadily as they emerged from the corner, were also trundling toward
them.

“They’re slow,” his mother said. “We can easily avoid them
if we need to—at least for a short while. We will tire eventually.” She put her
hand lightly on his elbow and asked, “How came you here?”

Giorge frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I—” he paused. He
had died, hadn’t he? “Whatever brought me here did so without my knowledge,” he
hedged. “When I woke, I was in my own sarcophagus.”

She digested this, and nodded. “As did I,” she said. “Did
you find a way out?”

Giorge shook his head. “I was only free for a short time
before you—” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence, so he stopped and
shrugged. “I haven’t had time to explore.”

“We best hurry to do so, then,” his mother suggested. “If we
can’t find a way out of here, we’ll die. There isn’t enough wood to burn all of
them.” She paused as she urged him past their ancestors hacking away at the
sarcophagi’s lids, slowly prying off narrow strips of wood and adding them to a
growing pile. She stooped down to pick up one, taking care to avoid splinters,
and then led him along the wall. They stepped carefully over the slime until
they reached his sarcophagus. Some of the others were gathering handfuls of the
rotted sarcophagi beyond his, and as one of them passed, she held out her hand
to stop him. It was his great uncle, and her voice caught in her throat.

“Magdel,” he said. “I had hoped—”

“We are not finished,” she interrupted, her voice icy,
venomous. “I will tend to you later.” She took a slow, deep breath, letting her
stare speak for her. When she released his arm, she took a handful of the
rotted wood shards from him and turned to Giorge. “We need a torch,” she said.
“Do you have flint and steel?”

Giorge nodded and reached for a pouch at his side. He held
it out to her.

“Good,” his mother said, thrusting his great uncle from her.
“We can’t build a fire on this floor; it’s too wet. We’ll have to build it
here.” She urged him up to his sarcophagus and dropped the wood fragments on
its dry base. She took the flint and steel, and patiently coaxed a tiny fire to
life. She held the end of the strip of wood over it until it was burning well and
then handed the makeshift torch to Giorge. She paused to stomp out the little
fire and said, “They will need all the wood they can scavenge.”

“Which way?” Giorge asked, looking around the room.

“Do you see any doors?” she asked in a sarcastic tone. “I
don’t. We go where there is no light.”

Giorge nodded, but they only took a few steps before his
mother stopped and bent down. She took off her glove and dipped her finger in
the mud. “This isn’t just moist,” she said. “It’s wet. The water has to be
coming from somewhere over there.” She pointed to the shadows along the wall
opposite the fungus. “Either that, or it’s seeping up through the floor in the
far corner.”

“Yes,” Giorge said. “We would see the water if it was water
trickling down that wall,” he added, pointing at the fungus-covered wall. “The
floor was dry over there.”

His mother stood up, took the torch from him, and walked
carefully into the growing shadows. There was no way to tell how deep those
shadows were, but one thing was certain: If there was an exit, it was either
very well hidden or it was somewhere in the dark along that wall. He followed
after her, amazed by how graceful and sure-footed she was as she walked through
the mud. He vowed to ask her how she did it—
if they lived long enough
.

9

The best way to understand a horse
, Barnham had
written,
is to become one. Here’s how to do it
…. Embril would have to
remember to annotate it to let other wizards know they couldn’t use magic while
in horse form. If she had known that, she wouldn’t have done it. Barnham also hadn’t
included a description of how different the world looked to a horse.

Her vision was disorienting at first, but she quickly
adjusted to it. Except for the blind spot directly in front of her, she could
see what was ahead of her well enough, but that was only a small part of her
visual field. To the right and left were two flat side views that had no depth
whatsoever. They were like the illustrations in Barnham’s book: two
dimensional. She couldn’t tell how near or far something was to her, and she
bumped into a lot of things because of it. Combined with the depth of the
frontal view, it created an odd wrap-around effect that made her feel like she
was moving inside an elongated bubble that stretched behind her to infinity. It
wasn’t a complete bubble, though; she couldn’t see
anything
behind her
unless she turned her eye that way.

Her hearing was acute, and every little unfamiliar sound
made her jump. Little chirps and squawks, long groans, thunderous
thumping—Barnham never said anything about those sounds, and they were
unnerving. What was making all those noises? Would they try to eat her? She twitched
and jumped at all of them at first, even after Darby had come up beside her and
hissed, “Calm down. You’re making the other horses nervous.” That only made her
jump again. It was as if he had come from the dark abyss trying to swallow her
up from behind. At least she could cope better with the blind spot in front of
her. In the end, Darby had led her to the back of the line and they lagged
behind the rest of the group. He even put blinders over his horse’s eyes to
keep it from seeing her. It didn’t help much. She nickered and whinnied at the
slightest suggestion of movement, whether it was a bush swaying in the wind or
a rock settling back into place. It was like they were leaping out at her from the
flat, mostly gray landscape. There were splotches of color, mainly the blue sky
and patches of green, but she had to identify most things by their shape. It
took a lot of time to adjust to it.

Embril
wasn’t scared, though;
her
body
was scared. It was amazing how her muscles reacted so swiftly to the noises and
movements, long before she was even consciously aware of them. Her skin was
hypersensitive, and when a slight breeze struck her, every hair on her body
felt like a tiny pinprick tugging at her. It didn’t hurt; it was like when she
ruffled the edge of the pages of a book with her fingertips. Even the pack
frame on her back didn’t bother her; the powerful horse’s muscles made her
heavy chest of books feel like they were little more than an inkwell and quill.
But when the books shifted position, she noticed it every time, even when it
was but a fraction of an inch.

She was fast, too, but they wouldn’t let her run as fast as
she could. They went quickly, but not
fast
, and she thought she could
maintain the pace for hours without difficulty. But she missed the other horses
and wanted to run faster, to catch up with them. It was a strange desire; she
had always preferred to be alone with her books, but there was something about
being a horse that made her want to be around the other horses, even the ones
that didn’t like her very much.

She
hated
the mud they plastered to her mane and
tail. It had dried quickly, and it jangled as it tugged mercilessly on the
roots of her hair and pounded against her neck and backside. Bits of it flaked
off and dribbled down her flanks or shoulders, and she kept thinking they were
flies trying to eat her. It was
most
disconcerting.

By the end of the first day, she had catalogued a lengthy
list of things she would have to add to Barnham’s book. She wanted to make sure
no other wizards were ill-prepared for the effects of the spell, and when she
got back to the library she planned to write about her experience as a horse in
considerable detail. She
liked
details, and Barnham’s had a lot of them
about the behavior of horses, about how to train them, about how to ride
them—seemingly everything
except
what it was like to
be
a horse.
When they stopped at the end of the day, she even thought about putting a quill
between her lips and jotting down some notes, but decided it would be
pointless. She couldn’t see in front of her nose well enough to guide the
quill, and she didn’t have fine-tuned control of the muscles for the delicate
movements that writing required. She would only end up wasting parchment—or
eating it. She had strange cravings…. Instead, she made a mental note for each
new thing she experienced and was still rehearsing her list when Darby handed
her lead rope to Tobar.

Tobar led her to the place where they kept the other horses hobbled.
When she realized what he was doing, she stopped in her tracks and stomped her
foot. Her ears lowered, her nostrils flared, and she snorted at him.

He stopped, turned, and asked, “Aren’t you hungry?”

It had been a long, enjoyable, unsettling run, and she had
been overwhelmed by it. Now she realized she was quite hungry, and since she
would be stuck in horse form for three days, she would have to eat what the
other horses ate.
One more thing to note,
she thought as she let him
lead her to the grain bag next to the other horses. She twisted her head to
look inside the bag with one eye and saw the flat little
gray-tinged-with-yellow seeds. She knew it was the grain grown in Tyr, but she
was reluctant to eat it. Why couldn’t they give her bread, instead? Then,
treating the experience as an experiment, she stuck her nose into the bag and
took a quick sniff. Her tongue snaked out to lap up a few of the tasty little
seeds, and it wasn’t until her third nibble that she realized what she was
doing. Then she paid a lot of attention to how the grain tasted, how it felt on
her tongue, how it crunched between her thick teeth, how it felt as she
swallowed. By the time she finished, she had composed a full page of
description to add to Barnham’s.

After she finished, Tobar tied her up with the other horses,
and she resented it. She
was not
a horse, even though she looked and
acted a lot like one. She told Tobar exactly that, and he shrugged helplessly
as he answered, “Lieutenant Jarhad’s orders.” For him, that was the end of it,
and he hobbled her like he did the other horses. She forced herself to stand
still as she fumed, but it was not the end of it for her. After Tobar left, she
bent down and spent several long minutes loosening the hobble straps with her
teeth. When they slid to the ground, she stomped over to Lieutenant Jarhad’s
tent. The soldier on guard tried to stop her, but she butted him roughly aside
and thrust her head in through the flap. “I
am not
a horse,” she said in
lieu of introducing herself. It sounded a lot like a huffy snort flung out of
her nostrils. “I
will not
be hobbled or tied up.”

Lieutenant Jarhad glared at her for a long time before he
put his sword back in its sheath. “As long as you remain in that form,” he said
through clenched teeth, “you will be treated accordingly. Now go back to the
other horses where you belong.” When she didn’t move, he yelled, “Darby!” and
turned away.

She shook her head, stomped her feet, and repeated, “I
am
not
a horse.” Then she backed out of the tent and walked proudly away,
ignoring the soldiers staring at her. She wandered around the camp for several
minutes, occasionally snorting and shaking her head, and then found herself
standing near the other horses. She didn’t really know why, but it felt natural
to her.

When Darby joined her, he scolded her. “You need to stop
antagonizing the Lieutenant. The only reason he is tolerating your presence is
because Commander Garret ordered him to bring you with us.”

She turned her left eye toward him and braced herself with
her legs wide apart. “Then tell him to quit treating me like a First Order
Apprentice,” she said, her tone imperious despite having the rattling undertone
of a whinny.

Darby laughed, “If he were doing that, you would have been
flogged by now.”

She stared at him. “If he
dared
—”

“He won’t,” Darby said, shaking his head and sighing. “But
he’s used to having his orders obeyed without question. He knows the value of
wizards, but he’s never been around one that hasn’t also been trained as a
soldier. You are as much a thorn in his side as he is in yours.”

She shook her head and snorted. “What have I done to him?”
she demanded. “Haven’t we covered more ground today than we would have if he
had spent time helping me to ride better?” Her tail swished across her
backside, sending shivers of sensation along every hair rustled by the dried
clumps of mud rubbing against them. Then she stomped her front feet and shook
her head. “No,” she said. “
He
is the one who is being unreasonable.”
Without waiting for a response, she stomped back to the horses. A few of them
nickered—friendly, uncertain sounds that made her feel a little better. She stayed
close to them for a long time and eventually calmed down enough to think about
how she was acting. She set aside her indignation—she knew the source of
that!—and focused on the effects of that indignation on her body. Barnham had a
lot of information about the movements she was making and what they signified, and
she tested his interpretations against the movements related to
her
emotional states. They were quite accurate, and she decided she would also have
to comment on that in her annotations.

When she finally settled down enough to sleep, the horses
near her wouldn’t let her. They kept bumping into her and nipped at her flank
or withers. She finally settled into a position near the outskirts of the small
herd and slept fitfully, waking up frequently as new sounds filled the night.
They were
scary
sounds that made her jumpy.