Chapter Ten #3
Ahead, the imps found the passage blocked, and Kai saw it wasn’t a pile of debris; it was cut blocks, carefully stacked to close off a large doorway. He studied it for signs of intentions, but there was nothing. He brushed his hands over the rough brick, just to make sure, then nodded to Tenes.
She slipped forward and put her hand on the center block. Her mouth hardened at whatever the earth spirits told her. She stepped back and signed, It’s a sealed chamber. Something alive inside, I don’t know what.
Kai told the others, “Be ready.”
Highsun said, “Do you need the—” But the blocks crumbled under Tenes’ touch.
The brick material had no resistance to her, no spirits claiming it for her to cajole or negotiate with.
As the debris crumbled away, white light, unnatural light, shone through the gaps.
Tahren pulled Tenes behind her and stepped forward beside Kai.
Past the door was a sizable room that had once been richly appointed.
A bed cubby against the side wall was covered with heavy patterned fabric and gray-white fur blankets, but they looked worn and stained.
Shelves lined the other walls, full of dust-covered jeweled boxes and metal trinkets and piles of disintegrating paper with wooden bindings that might have been books or scroll cases.
Copper dishes and broken ceramic lay scattered on the stone tile floor, and the stale air smelled of rotted food and piss.
The light came from an elaborately figured metal bowl in the center with a glowing glass orb; Kai could see the wavering characters of the intention that powered it.
Nearby was one of the heavy stone throne chairs that Hierarchs had seemed to prefer, and huddled in it was a gray, wizened figure.
It said, in Old Imperial, in the pure accent Kai hadn’t heard in decades, “So you are finally here.”
“We would have come sooner if I knew we were expected.” Kai banished the imps and stepped into the room. “Where’s your expositor?”
“Barbarians, dross, coarse, heathen,” the Hierarch said, and laughed, a dry cackle that ended in a cough. “I don’t need an expositor, this close to the holy cistern.”
Kai thought to Ziede, Could that be true?
If there was an expositor here, I think we might know about it by now, she thought back. She said aloud, “How long have you been here?”
“I was born in the north.” The Hierarch peered at her. “I was the last.”
Kai strolled the periphery of the room, past a small open bathing room that smelled as if the water source had dried up days ago.
There was a far door that was also blocked, but it looked recent.
Very recent. The broken stone and tile might have come from the collapse of the tor’s outer entrance, and was piled haphazardly.
There were two trap intentions on the half-buried sill, and Kai unraveled them without effort.
He kept one eye on the Hierarch, alert for an attempt at an attack, but the Hierarch had slumped back in the chair as if exhausted.
Kai said, “You should have stayed in the north. You wouldn’t have had to wait for death for so long. ”
“Perhaps I should have.” The Hierarch glared at the passageway. “Come in where I can see you.”
A watchful Tahren stepped inside, and Ziede leaned in the doorway and eyed the room with contempt. She said, “Did they wall you up in here because they all disliked you, or were you supposed to do something?”
“Ah, I was waiting. I was the last, the one you didn’t kill. I was destined to destroy you all.” They laughed again, with another choking cough. “Yet here we are.”
Tahren’s expression was opaque, but Kai could read the disgust under it. “You were young, then, for such a destiny.”
“The others didn’t live,” the Hierarch told her. “They put them on the altar block one by one and one by one the holy cistern took their death instead. They were not perfect in its sight. Me, it took as its hand and body and the throat of its Voice.”
Ziede tilted her head. “How nice for you.”
The Hierarch laughed again. “I know who you are, Witch. I was shown sketches. And the forsworn Blessed with you. You haven’t changed.” They twisted in the throne to squint at Kai. “A demon. But you’re different. Are you the Witch King? The Arike King’s creature?”
It made a terrible kind of sense, making a Hierarch who was also an expositor.
The Hierarchs had created the expositors to serve them, then abandoned or lost control of them as the war raged on and they were pushed out of the north.
Kai used Witchspeak to ask Tenes to come over to him and said, “I am. Are you the only one here?”
“The only one,” the Hierarch said. “Everyone else died. When they died, I made them into servants but some didn’t like it.”
Ziede’s expression sharpened. “You made your own dead into constructs.”
Tenes slipped around the room to Kai’s side as the Hierarch peered at her and said, “They serve. That’s all they’re meant for.
There was no dross to use. Until lately.
The dross came here and I would have bled their pain into the Well and then made their bodies into servants as is right.
We are the height of creation, we are destined to rule, it is our burden to shepherd all other races as our cattle. ”
Ramad stepped into the room, his gaze moving over the rotted books.
His expression was set and grim, his jaw tight.
He seemed to have trouble looking directly at the Hierarch.
Long ago, Kai had grown used to facing the monsters who had tried to eat the world, but it had to be hard for someone who had never seen one before.
Ramad said, “Not all of your people died. Those who lived to the northwest of here moved away, and left you behind.”
Tahren added, “Maybe they were tired of tending to you for all those years.”
Kai thought of the empty earthwork settlement.
Sura had said there were signs the inhabitants had packed and departed.
He snorted. “And the Well. Hidden under all this rock, useless.” In Witchspeak he told Tenes, Can you tell what’s on the other side of this door?
If this place followed the pattern of the Summer Halls, it would be another court, probably attached to a hall for attendants to assemble to worship the Hierarch.
They could use it to get through into the Well chamber and make sure the rest of the constructs were dead.
It would take time to bring this place down, and having to watch for stray constructs would make it all the more tiresome.
“Not useless,” the Hierarch said, but there was no heat in it. “I used the Voice to drive you away.”
“You collapsed the entrance and killed all but a few of your servants,” Ziede pointed out.
“The ones I didn’t set on fire,” Kai added.
“Forsworn, dross,” the Hierarch said, again as if by rote. Tenes signed, More rooms, possibly a larger space beyond them.
Tahren moved back beside Ziede, as if she couldn’t stand to touch anything in this ruin. “Why did they wall you in?”
“I told them to.” The Hierarch slumped wearily, as if the brief conversation was almost too much. “You found us. Years of waiting, hiding, you found us and it’s over. Are you here to kill me?” When Tahren and Ziede didn’t answer, the Hierarch turned to regard Kai.
Kai met their rheumy gaze. “Yes, we are.”
The Hierarch’s voice dropped to a bare whisper. “Good. Do it, then.”
Ramad turned with a faint frown. “Could we ask them where in the north they were born—”
Stone cracked so loud it took Kai’s hearing. He felt more than heard the rumble that shivered through the tor. Visceral fear shot through him; he had been nearly crushed here once already. It froze him for half a heartbeat.
Fortunately Tenes didn’t freeze. She grabbed Kai’s arm and slammed a hand against the debris blocking the doorway. It exploded outward into a dark room beyond. Kai jolted back into motion and shouted, “Here!”
Tahren grabbed Ziede and charged toward him. She scooped Ramad up along the way and flung him into Kai’s arms. She reached them just as Tenes planted her hands on the doorway’s stone jambs.
Rock and dirt rained down on both sides of the opening.
Ramad’s arms wrapped around Kai’s neck and Kai clung to him as the tor slammed down.
A huge slab shifted and fell on the center of the room, crushing the Hierarch and extinguishing the light intention, plunging them into total darkness.
Icicle claws scrabbled over Kai’s skin as Ziede directed her wind-devil to snatch the remaining air out of the room and form it into a hard shell around them.
It deflected the debris and smothering dirt, but the heavy rock pressed in on it.
Kai’s back was against Tenes’ side. Tahren gripped his shoulder, Ziede pinned between them.
After an eon, the rumbling stopped. They were crushed in on all sides by the collapsed weight. Only Tenes’ control over the solid stone frame of the door and Ziede’s air bubble kept them alive.
Kai called an imp. It arrived with a burst of soft light and a tiny squeak of dismay at its surroundings. Ramad gasped in disbelief. “We’re alive.”
“Yes,” Ziede said breathlessly. She squeezed Kai’s arm. “Don’t anyone jostle Tenes.”
Kai bit his cheek against the useless urge to ask Tenes questions she couldn’t answer without the use of her hands. She would either save them or not, there was nothing the rest of them could do now.
“Highsun,” Tahren said, her voice loud in Kai’s ear. “He isn’t here.”
Ramad’s beard scratched Kai’s cheek as he moved his head a little. “He was still in the corridor. He must have been killed—”
“Was he?” Kai’s voice came out a little strangled and Ramad relaxed his grip a bit. “In the corridor?”
Ziede said slowly, “He didn’t come in the room. A scholar—”