I held the unlocked manacles close to my chest and kept my head bowed, being led as I was to the slaughter. For all I knew, I would be sacrificed at the end of the tunnel. I had received no news since Mara Suryan had promised me she would try to contact my companions on the Lady of Osona and prepare a daring escape. I feared she had not been successful. Or, perhaps, she had decided that my death was an acceptable loss for the sake of the lives of her young charges. I would not fault her for that.
Ajan led me through the bowels of Salmacha. Behind me walked two other guards, mailed and armed as he was, to prevent my escape. They were unnecessary—the way back led only to my cell. The only way to go was forward.
Silence fell upon the corridor. The digging had stopped. Beneath my feet, the earth tensed and trembled; not quite a quake, but the warning of one. Whatever slept under the island was close to waking. If it did, all hope was lost.
The tunnel constricted, the ceiling almost scraping the top of my head, and then it opened up into a massive underground chamber. Its walls were jagged and uneven, and massive hewn logs supported the ceiling. Rubble and dust in heaps on the floor suggested even these supports would not be enough.
At the center of the room lay a shallow indentation, blackened and stained with old blood. Around it, carved into the stone and painted with more blood, lay the sigils of this foul ritual.
I chanced a glance upward. To my right stood Mara, her face set in grim resolve, flanked by two more women in chainmail with their hair covered in silk. Behind them stood a pair of young girls, their delicate faces identical and painted red from the edge of their rich dark hair to the ends of their small noses. Two lines of white paint curved down their necks from their ears, meeting at their collarbones. Their garments were sapphire silk, with a golden sun embroidered on one shoulder and a moon on the other, the rest being a field of stars. Heavy golden jewelry weighed down their wrists and ankles. Decorated with strings of pearls, their hair fell almost to the backs of their knees.
King Sondassan’s twin granddaughters were dressed for ceremony. I was not to be the only sacrifice this night. Mara would not have been here otherwise.
Dust fell from the ceiling like soft rain. This cavern would collapse, one way or another. Ajan’s knuckles on my lead were white, and he trembled visibly. “Gods,” he muttered, but I knew not to whom he prayed.
Neither he nor the other guards struck me for raising my head, so I looked around the room. Two more lightless tunnels led out, one on the right-hand wall and the other opposite the way I had entered. Perhaps they made their way up to the palace, or perhaps they only delved deeper into the earth. I would find out if I survived the night.
High Priest Ucasta loomed on the other side of the dry, bloody pool, his scarlet vestment dark and his face skeletal in the dim, smoky light. On his either side stood his lesser priests, dressed in the same red, their collars polished wood instead of jewels. I counted eight of them, and ten more guards, standing in ranks behind.
A desiccated corpse knelt beside the pool. It held a laquered walking stick, its hands reaching out to grip it with the fragile stiffness of death. Its arms were mottled skin stretched out over bones, emerging from a voluminous robe as white as untouched Northern snow. A golden crown encircled its hairless, bent head.
The corpse took a deep, shuddering breath and looked up. He was no corpse—he was King Sondassan, and he clung to life by the barest thread, staving off the coming of death with blood and dark magic. His sunken eyes fixed me with a gaze of pure, unholy hunger. If ever they had possessed the power to recognize his family, that was long gone. He saw only the life-force that would let him live another hour, another day.
“I fear even my blood cannot help you, Your Grace,” I said, foolishly emboldened by his apparent weakness.
The king seemed not to hear me, but Ucasta’s sinister smile split his weathered face as he bowed, half-mocking, in my direction. “Your blood, Champion, will finally summon the ancient god of this magnificent isle, so that a new god may take its place. If it reassures you, we will lay a stone in the new temple in your honor.”
Sondassan raised a bony hand from his walking stick, pointing at me with a finger like a knotted twig. Though his eyes were clouded, he could see me.
“You’re already dead, Your Grace,” I said. “Don’t condemn your people to die with you.”
His mouth opened, showing gray gums and a tongue like a grave-worm. A gasp, thick and rattling, came from his throat. Alas, it was not his last breath. He still lived, and he still thought he could become a god.
Ucasta lifted his arms, beaming with wicked pride. “Bring forth the sacrifices!”
“Very well,” I said, and the cavern echoed and amplified my voice. “You shall see why they call me Champion.”
I threw off my chains, and they fell in a cascade to my feet. Shifting my stance, I turned to the guard at my left. My fist found his windpipe where it emerged above the collar of his mail. It cracked under the force of my blow. He gasped and sputtered, blood turning his spittle pink. I took his sword from its sheath as he fell.
Ajan drew his own sword, his eyes wide with fear. I admired him, in that moment, fighting against his fellows with no allies but myself and Mara.
“Take the princesses to safety!” Mara ordered. Ajan and the two other women obeyed, ushering the girls to the tunnel behind me in a rush of silk and the clatter of jewelry. Whatever was to happen, they should not see it, and the farther they could get away from the bloodthirsty thing that once was their grandfather, the better. I heard one of them ask a question in a language I did not recognize, high-pitched and afraid.
The other guard drew his own sword and swung at me, a high, wild arc that missed my head and brushed against my shoulder. I felt nothing. Battle-rage was already upon me, singing its keening song in my ears. I pushed past the soldier’s sword-arm and drove my blade into his abdomen.
“Seize them!” Ucasta cried, and the guards behind him filed out to obey. The earth under our feet gave one slight lurch, like a dream of falling that wakes the dreamer in an instant. Though the men exchanged frightened glances, they pressed forward, unsheathing their swords in a hiss that filled the echoing chamber.
Mara took three long strides and met them on the stretch of uneven ground before the dry pool. She took the first blade on her mailed arm and answered with a crushing blow of her mace, sending the first soldier sprawling. He did not get up again.
I ran up to her undefended side, turning the sword over in my hand. With all the force of my strength and stature, I struck the leftmost soldier across the face, crushing his nose beneath my iron pommel.
He cried out and stumbled backward. Blood ran from his nose and tears ran from his eyes, and he brought a hand up to wipe them away.
Another guard stepped into his place. He was nearly as young as Ajan, his face a twisted mask of fear and anger. He struck with a wild overhand swing, and our blades met with a deafening clash of metal.
Then, silence fell upon the chamber. The echoes ceased and my ears strained. It was as though I had gone suddenly deaf, and I feared the high priest had cast some foul magic upon me. The cavern convulsed as though a great hand had seized it and shaken it forward and back. A roar of crumbling stone and rushing water accompanied it. My frenzy spared me the memory of the great worm erupting from beneath Phyreios. I did not care if the sea overtook the island and myself along with it, but the quake stilled with the room, at least, intact. The city above may not have been so fortunate. Though the earth calmed, the sound continued, and it resolved into words—words I could not understand, in an inhuman voice that shook dust from the ceilings and rattled my very bones, but words nonetheless. High Priest Ucasta was chanting. The ritual had begun.
Sondassan’s whitened eyes closed, and he raised his head, his robes stirred by the labored motion of his dying breaths, one after another. The torches darkened as if covered in mist, and an indigo glow illuminated the carved sigils around the pool. Ucasta’s obsidian crown glittered in the eldritch light. Around him, the lesser priests murmured in an undulating harmony.
A high-pitched tone assaulted my ears, and I found it difficult to breathe, as though a weight was on my chest. The air felt as thick as water. When the Ascended had brought forth the worm, there had been blood and light, but this was something I had not seen before.
The soldiers surrounding me did not have that disadvantage. Noticing my distraction, they seized my arms and dragged me to the ground. I had one guard on either side, and a third tried to hold my legs, but I kicked him away. The clattering of chains made its way through the unholy din, and I struggled, my muscles straining and fallen rock digging into my back. Another soldier knocked the sword I had taken out of my hand.
Pressed against the floor of the cavern, I could feel the island groan as if in agony. I thought I could hear water flowing beneath me, the ocean flooding the tunnels though the island’s foundation, but it might have been only the chant, as it grew louder and deeper and the room grew darker.
A shout went up on the other side of the cavern, behind the pool and the priests. The guard holding the chains dropped them near my head, the sound of metal ringing against stone not unlike the digging I had been unable to escape for three days. He drew his sword, stepped over my arm and the man holding it, and ran toward the other tunnel.
“What’s all this?” cried Captain Hamilcar of the Lady of Osona.
True to her word, Mara had contacted the ship, and now my companions had arrived to attempt a daring rescue. Hamilcar, being the man he was, had seemingly chosen the most dramatic moment to arrive, but I would say nothing in protest.
Iron clashed against steel at the far end of the cavern. Mara’s boots left my field of vision as she pushed her way past the soldiers.
I pulled my legs beneath me and twisted my chest, finally throwing off one of my captors. I grasped the other’s sword, still sheathed at his hip, and drew it out. His eyes went wide.
I turned my body and swung the sword. The blade bit into the soldier’s neck, cutting through flesh and colliding with bone.
He collapsed. I freed my other arm and scrambled to my feet, in time to see Mara knock Ucasta’s head back with a wicked underhand swipe of her mace.
The chant went quiet, though it did not cease entirely—the lesser priests, their eyes closed in prayer, maintained their part in the harmony. Ucasta’s crown shattered into a rain of glittering black shards. He staggered back, stepping over the ledge of the dry pool and falling into the carved indentation.
Blood ran from his nose and mouth, and it dripped in thick rivulets onto the stone.
The eerie bluish light grew brighter. King Sondassan took one strong, deep breath, and he looked at me with clear, bright eyes.
Back to Chapter XVI: Betwixt Iron and Stone
Forward to Chapter XVIII: In the Hall of the Dead King
If you’ve read Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea, you know that Eske has reason to be worried about blood on an altar. If you haven’t, you can get your copy here. In any case, thanks for reading! I’m happy you’re here.
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