The Tyranny of Ghosts: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 3 (27 page)

“Those are Cyran clothes,” said Chetiin. “I think we’ve found the last people who came here.” He walked up to the skeletons, paused a short distance away, and pointed at a faint dark stain on the floor around them. “That’s what’s left when flesh rots and liquefies.”

“Do you think—” Ekhaas hesitated, words catching in her mouth before she forced them out. “Do you think whatever did this killed them? Or did they—?”

The words caught again, but this time Chetiin anticipated the question. “If I had to guess,” he said, “I think they might still have been alive after it happened.”

Ekhaas’s stomach rose. She had to clench her teeth and fight it down. Tenquis shuddered and closed his golden eyes. Even Geth and Tooth looked a little bit green. Marrow whined and curled her tail low. Chetiin turned away from the skeletons—

—just as the wail broke over the ruins for a third time. Once again it was strangely sourceless, but in Ekhaas’s imagination it seemed closer than before.

“Tiger’s blood,” murmured Geth. “Whatever that is, I don’t think it’s a ghost.”

Tooth’s broad face had gone from green to pale. “It can’t be the same thing that killed Suud Anshaar, can it? Why wouldn’t your stories mention something like this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the empire suppressed what really happened before the story could circulate,” Ekhaas said.

“I would,” said Chetiin. He’d drawn both of his daggers, the one from his left arm sheath with the nasty curved blade and the one from his right arm sheath with the blue-black crystal that winked like an eye from its ugly straight blade. He looked at Ekhaas and Geth. “What do we do?”

Ekhaas exchanged a sharp glance with the shifter. His jaw tightened and he nodded. Ekhaas put her ears back. “We go on,” she said. “We keep looking for the shield fragments. We watch, and if whatever is making that noise shows itself, we try our best to kill it.”

“If it can be killed!” said Tooth. There was an edge of madness to his voice. “What if it can’t? How—”

Tenquis reached out and slapped him hard. “We’ll fight it,” he said harshly, “when we fight it.”

Tooth stared at him. Tenquis slid his wand into a pocket and calmly readied his crossbow. “You’re harder than you look,” said Tooth.

“I’m a tiefling,” said Tenquis, “and I want my revenge on Tariic. I’m as hard as I need to be.” He looked to Ekhaas. “How do we get to that hall?”

“This way, I think,” she said. She led the way out of the other door in the ruined corridor, trying hard not to look at the remains of the last expedition to come this way.

Since she had become aware of them, Ekhaas spotted more of the skeletons as she climbed through the ruins. A few were whole or almost whole, blending into the shadows. Some were just weathered heaps of bones, collapsed over time just like the fortress. Others were no more than broken bits of glittering black stone tumbled among fallen rock. Not all were hobgoblin. Ekhaas recognized goblins and bugbears, a pair of dogs, varags—how many of them had wandered onto the Wailing Hill before they learned their lesson?—even the fragile skeletons of birds, hollow bones broken as if they’d fallen out of the sky.

If not even birds on the wing could escape the curse of Suud Anshaar, did they really have a chance?

No, she reminded herself, they weren’t dumb animals, and they wouldn’t be taken by surprise. Whatever waited in the ruins, they’d fought and survived worse. They
would
find the shield fragments. They
would
escape the fortress. The fragments of the shattered shield
would
provide the key to destroying the Rod of Kings.

Because if they didn’t, this journey would have been for nothing.

She started to sing. Quietly, just loud enough that the others could hear her, and not a magical song, but a Dhakaani battle hymn invoking the strength of
muut
in combat and the glory of
atcha
in victory. It was an old song, as old as the long and wondrous middle years of Dhakaan, when the emperor’s power spanned a continent. The same song might have echoed in Suud Anshaar. Tasaam Draet might have listened to and been inspired by it.

She felt some of her fear slip away. The others stood straighter and scanned the shadows with eyes that were brighter and more alert. They moved with greater confidence. Even Marrow seemed to beat her tail in time to the song. And when the wail inevitably
came again, Ekhaas raised her voice just a little to challenge its power. For a moment, the wail seemed a little less terrifying—even if it did seem to have taken on a more directional quality.

Chetiin pointed across the ruins. “Somewhere over there.”

“I think I felt it through the ground,” said Tenquis.

Ekhaas let the song die away, the better to hear any movement among the stones. Geth’s hand had stolen up to touch his collar of black stones. Faint wisps of vapor escaped between his fingers into the warm night air; he’d said in the past that the collar turned cold to warn of unnatural creatures.

“Geth?” she asked softly.

“Keep moving,” he said.

They moved. The deeper they penetrated into the remains of the fortress, the better preserved the structure seemed to be. Walls, doorways, and pillars remained in place—with the result that their line of sight to the area around them was constantly changing and being cut off. Worse, the surviving corridors were often half-filled with debris. There was no running here. Moving too quickly sent loose stones sliding and might plunge a foot into a crevice. Marrow had real difficulty scrambling up and down the slopes. Heading around one steep heap, Tooth had to catch and brace her with his shoulder. The worg snapped and growled at him. Ekhaas couldn’t tell if it was an expression of gratitude or a warning not to touch her.

Still, they went as fast as they could, sticking close together. Ekhaas took the lead, though she was only guessing the way and hoping she didn’t lead them all into a dead end. With every mound of rubble they climbed or skirted, she half-expected to find her chosen path blocked.

It never was. Ekhaas crawled under a pair of columns that had fallen against each other and stood to find herself facing a high, double-arched doorway with angular Goblin characters carved over it.

T
ASAAM
D
RAET GOVERNS
S
UUD
A
NSHAAR BY THE WILL OF
G
IIS
P
UULTA
, M
ARHU OF
D
HAKAAN
. K
NOW
MUUT
YOU WHO ENTER
.

She whirled and called back under the columns, “We’re here! This is the great hall.”

Tenquis was just crawling through. Ekhaas helped him up, then stood out of the way as Marrow came squirming and wriggling through the gap. Chetiin followed, then Tooth. Geth came last, his face drawn hard and taut.

The collar around his neck was white with frost. She drew air between her teeth. “Is it bad?” she asked.

“Bad enough.” He took her arm and pulled her toward the arched doorway. “Get inside. If there’s going to be a fight, I want space around us.”

Beyond the doorway, though, the great hall wasn’t in as good a shape as Ekhaas had hoped when she’d seen it in the distance. The long stone spans that had once supported the ceiling still stood, but in many places the vaults between them had crumbled. Moonlight fell onto more rubble. The walls were cracked and looked as if a hard push would bring them down. Other doors were either choked with fallen stones or opened directly onto the night.

Aside from rubble and moonlight, the hall was completely empty.

Tenquis turned to her. “What now? What are we looking for?”

Ekhaas stared around the devastated hall. “I don’t know. A shrine? Something ostentatious.”

“Under the rubble?”

“Maybe,” said Chetiin, “the shield fragments aren’t here at all. Maybe they are in a vault somewhere.”

“They’re here,” Geth said.

There was a strange wonder in his voice. Ekhaas started to turn to look at him but the shifter was already pushing past her. Feet crunching on gravel, he paced down the length of the hall, slowly sweeping Wrath before him.

“Maabet,”
rasped Tooth. “He’s lost it.”

“No,” said Ekhaas. “He hasn’t. Stay with him!” She jogged
after Geth, catching up to him. “You feel the fragments through the sword, don’t you?” she asked. “Just like you felt the Rod of Kings. The connection
is
there!”

Geth shook his head. “It’s different. When
duur’kala
songs woke the connection between Wrath and the rod, all I had to do was hold out Wrath, and I knew where the rod was. This is more like a lodestone being drawn to steel.”

“The shield has been shattered. It’s bound to feel different—”

The wail rose again. This time there was no doubt that its source was close and coming closer—from the very direction they’d just come.

Tooth whirled at the sound. “It’s tracking us!”

“Stay calm and keep watch,” said Ekhaas. “Geth …”

“Here.” He stopped, sword pointing at a thin scattering of rubble across the floor. “They’re here!”

“You’re sure?” Ekhaas asked. They’d almost reached the end of the hall. A low dais rose no more than a double handspan above the floor. It seemed a strange place to display relics given by the emperor as a reward. A fearful thought struck her. “They’re not underground from here, are they? Not in some buried vault?”

“No. They’re close.” He dropped to his knees, set Wrath down, and started tossing fallen stones aside.

The first stones he moved revealed part of a Goblin inscription carved into the floor. It was only a single word, but it made Ekhaas’s heart jump.

Shattered.

“Tenquis, help us!” She bent down beside Geth and swept more rubble away. The tiefling crouched on Geth’s other side. It took only moments to clear the rest of the inscription.

L
OOK ON SHATTERED
M
UUT
AND BE HUMBLED
.

The top of the inscription lay toward the dais. Anyone kneeling before the lord of Suud Anshaar would have had no choice but to read the words. “The fallen nobles,” said Ekhaas. “He was reminding the fallen nobles of what they’d lost.” She
scrambled past the words to rake at the remaining rubble. Her breath came fast. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears.

Purple byeshk flashed under moonlight. Ekhaas got down on her knees, stretched out her arm, and used it to sweep away the last fragments of stone.

Her heart fell. She sat back, her ears folding flat.

Set into the stone were three toothed metal disks. Three
shaari’mal
forged from byeshk. She looked up at Geth and Tenquis. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What are these?”

Geth picked up Wrath and brought it close to the embedded disks. “These are what I was feeling,” he said. “These were forged from the same byeshk as the sword and the rod.”

“But they’re
shaari’mal
. They’re not pieces of a shield. Unless”—she glanced at Tenquis—“could they have been reforged?”

The tiefling shook his head. “You don’t just reforge an artifact, even one that was broken.”

Ekhaas reached out and touched one of the disks. Strange runes had been carved into the smooth surface. They weren’t Goblin or any other language she knew, but she had seen them, or runes very much like them, before—etched into the Sword of Heroes and the Rod of Kings.

The Stela of Rewards in Volaar Draal had shown an engraving of three
shaari’mal
. Were these what the emperor had given Tasaam Draet? Were they meant to be a symbol of Dhakaan? She couldn’t deny that they seemed to be related to the rod and the sword, but what
were
they? She rubbed her head with dusty fingers—and froze as the wail came yet again, so close she felt it through the floor. So close it made the weakened walls of the hall groan.

“Geth! Ekhaas!” said Chetiin sharply. Ekhaas twisted around. Chetiin, Tooth, and Marrow faced the end of the hall where they’d entered. Beyond the arched doorway, the crossed pillars they’d all crawled under were trembling as if something strained against the other side.

Ekhaas made a decision. “We’re taking these with us,” she said. “Geth, look for the best way out.”

He nodded and jumped to his feet, snatching up Wrath and darting to the nearest open doorway in the walls. Ekhaas pulled a knife from her belt and tried to force the tip in between one of the
shaari’mal
and the stone that held it.

Tenquis brushed her hand aside. “Let me,” he said. “A
daashor
set this here.” Grabbing a pinch of dust from the ground, he narrowed his eyes, whispered a word, and let the dust sift over the stone around the disk.

Where the dust fell, stone crumbled like dry sand. The indentation it left was small, but it was enough. Tenquis hooked thick fingernails under the byeshk disk and lifted it free. He held it out to Ekhaas, but she shook her head.

“Do the other ones, then put them in one of your pockets. Keep them safe.” She stood—

—just as the pillars fell in a crash of stone. Dust billowed up in a thick cloud, and the reverberations of the crash brought more dust sifting down from the ceiling of the hall. There was a second crash from behind her, accompanied by a curse from Geth. Ekhaas turned briefly to see the shifter leaping away from a doorway that had become just another heap of rubble—but a new noise brought her attention back to the drifting dust cloud. A slow grinding noise like millstones turning. She heard Tenquis whispering frantically over the remaining
shaari’mal
, then that was drowned out by another wail.

A shape emerged from the dust cloud. Or rather, seemed to absorb the cloud as it advanced. Marrow whined and eased back a few steps.

The creature … the
thing
… towered twice as tall as a bugbear. It had the obscenely thick body of a massive serpent, bigger around than Ekhaas could have encircled with her arms. Instead of rising to a serpent’s head, though, that body became a woman’s leanly muscular torso and arms. The thing’s face was narrow, with a fine jaw, knife-edge cheekbones—and a smooth
expanse where eyes should have been. Above that blank brow, thick tendrils longer than arms, with sharp pointed tips took the place of hair, writhing with an independent motion.