14. Fourteen
fourteen
The maze that the fortress of Brightmere presented itself as slowly became more familiar – too slowly, in Erqis' opinion. Some days he was convinced the hallways changed when no one was looking. He hadn't slept well, every creak and thump jostling him awake, and by the bruised darkness under Qavor's eyes, he wasn't the only one on edge. His soldiers, likewise, were just as jumpy.
He wasn’t the only one still seeing the faces of the risen dead every time he closed his eyes. And every time he opened them, in the darkness of his bedroom, he expected Neira standing above him, his own dagger slashing for his throat – or his eyes.
Beside him, Qavor stretched. Breakfast had been hearty, the tea strong, served in the spacious room the two men shared. Not strong enough, though, to chase away the weariness, or to warm his soul for long in this wretched place that seemed determined to leech all warmth, all life, from everything around it. Now they made their way down a hallway that should have been familiar and yet didn’t particularly feel that way, their steps muffled on the thick carpet.
Erqis glanced at Neira’s door as they passed it. He hadn’t bothered posting a guard – she had nowhere to go, and there were enough soldiers around that she wouldn’t get far even if she tried.
He couldn’t get the image of her blood-flecked face out of his mind, that soft, oddly serene smile that had adorned her face when silence had fallen over the dungeons.
Beautiful .
“What do you think happened to the prince?”
"She didn't tell you?" Qavor asked.
"Nothing but vague suggestions." Erqis shrugged.
"The Dread King had to have had at least one outside ally – I'll bet you anything the boy is on his way there."
"Or she killed him,” Erqis continued. “That was one of her suggestions, but I don't think it's true. It's likely what the regiars suspected, though – a blatant grab for power by the eldest child, spurned for the proper heir. Tale as old as time."
"Why do you think she didn’t? Because she is a woman? Not trained as a warrior?"
Erqis chuckled. "If you'd seen her go at that weasel's throat with the dagger… no, I believe her perfectly capable. I just don't think that's what she did." Qavor hadn't seen the look on Neira’s face when she had spoken about her brother. The guilt, the worry. No, the child was alive, and she cared enough about the boy to hide him away somewhere beyond her own grasp, no matter how much it hurt her. History, however, would likely paint her as cold-hearted, power-hungry.
"Do you have plans for the boy?"
Erqis snorted. "Any plans I may have had fell apart the moment we set foot in that forsaken forest. This entire campaign isn't anything like I planned."
He picked a door he was fairly certain led to a room they hadn’t inspected yet and pushed it open wide, peering inside. Sheets of paper were strewn across a low table, some on the floor beside it – to the side stood a bed. A wardrobe, door ajar. There was a distinct chill in the room, the same aching clamminess that had followed them from the moment they entered the forest. The rest of Malvea was currently enjoying a beautiful summer, but Brightmere didn't seem to have noticed.
Cursed, all of it, he was certain. He wondered if the land would return to normal now that its king was dead, or if Brightmere had always been this way – maybe the rotten magic had sunk into the ground so thoroughly it would never return to what it once must have been.
"Anyway, the boy is six years old. If he wants to come at me for revenge in fifteen years, we can deal with it then. If Neira doesn't call him back here the moment we leave, that is."
"The princess doesn't seem like the kind of person who would be happy to sit and rule over an empty kingdom."
"Who would?" Erqis took a cautious step into the room, squinting. Next to the table, hidden from direct view behind the legs of a pulled-out chair, lay something… odd. "She can do whatever she wants. She's not a threat."
"You don't know that," Qavor insisted, following him into the room more slowly, taking in everything that Erqis' brashness might have missed. "You just said she isn't shy about wielding a blade."
"So we keep anything pointy out of her reach while we're here."
"Erqis, think about it. Nothing about this is normal. The entire realm, from what we've seen, is uninhabited. Aside from the bones. There is no farmland, no trade, yet the larders are bursting, and nothing we do seems to make a dent in the stores. The servants don't speak. The regiars don't even react to anything anymore." Any and all interrogations had been unsuccessful. The handful of prisoners that were left, most of them regiars, stood and breathed and blinked – and did nothing else. At first it had seemed like some kind of odd defiance; wilful, determined silence. Until it hadn’t seemed like that at all.
Every shift change, Erqis was given the same report: the prisoners were silent, unmoving – except for the rare occasions where, as one, they would stir, taking a breath and shifting in their cells… only to fall silent once more.
It was a stark contrast to how animated they had been when Erqis had taken the princess down there, as if her mere presence breathed life into them.
"You think she's the actual mastermind behind everything?" Erqis shook his head. He squatted down to drag his fingers through the residue he had seen, a sizeable heap of brown, vaguely oily dust and debris. "That would have been one hell of a ploy, Qav. Too elaborate, if you ask me. Especially if you're right and the food has some weird magical property to it. They could outlast a siege for years without issue, and every invader would starve outside their walls. Why humiliate herself like this?"
"What the fuck is that?" Qavor frowned down at the heap, lowering the paper he had picked from the table. "Why do you have to touch everyth- that's a finger. Put that down."
Erqis grinned at the withered half of a digit in his palm, thrusting it up at his brother. "What, you don't like fingers now?" He barked a laugh at Qavor's expression when the Farn stepped back with a wince. Poking it crumbled the finger into two pieces and he let them drop back onto the heap before rising. He wiped the residue off on the chair's cushion, darkening the light green velvet.
The wardrobe revealed a few sets of children's clothes, little boots and a ball of yarn. Under the bed, Qavor found two well-loved storybooks. The papers on the table were covered with the scrawled attempts of an unsure hand.
"Bleak for a crown prince's room."
"Like everything else here." Qavor looked uncomfortable even when they stepped back out into the hall.
It would have been funny – and certainly it was something Erqis would tease his friend with for years to come regardless – if the big Farn didn't have every right to be wary. It was only due to Qavor's insistence of being suspicious that Erqis was even able to act so carelessly, with little concern for his wellbeing.
"It's a miracle that the entire castle hasn't sunk into the moors yet." The grounds within the high, innermost walls alone were the size of a small town, the castle itself taking up three quarters of that space, and most of it was flooded by the odd, milky water they'd had to cross to get to the gates to begin with. Only the city itself – a village, really, a mere two or three dozen houses nestled between the city walls and the castle – seemed to stand on solid ground at all.
"Don't hex it, please." Qavor shuddered. When the remaining doors of this wing revealed only more dusty, semi-grand guest suites, he crossed his arms, frowning down the corridor. "Which one was the king's?"
Erqis snorted. "None of them were particularly impressive, were they? I couldn't tell you. Maybe he bedded down somewhere far from here, where his children wouldn't seek him out if they had nightmares."
"Sounds familiar."
"Honestly." Erqis peered down the broad staircase that would lead them to the main level. "Where do you think the regiars lived? Perhaps we’ll find something there."
"You're going to make me open every forsaken door in this ugly tomb, aren't you?"
"That's hardly fair, Qav." Erqis grinned over his shoulder, already making his way down. " You're the one who said no to splitting up to cover more ground."
Qavor's groan echoed behind him, soon followed by his footsteps.
The throne hall took up most of the ground level. The banquet hall they used for meals sat off to the side, the grand foyer to the front, and the larders and kitchens behind it. The whole place reminded Erqis of a stage, ready for a performance that hadn’t yet begun – or the forgotten constructs of a doll house. Not once did they see anyone who wasn't of his own company. No servants, no maids, no cooks. The kitchen was in use, several pots steaming on a long stove heated by a steady peat fire, but no one tended them when the two men went to look.
This place did have servants, unless Erqis and his entire contingent were experiencing a shared hallucination. They had seen the pale, sickly looking servants who brought their food and ran their baths. As a whole they were silent, with blank, faraway looks on their faces, likely terrified within an inch of their lives, and now somehow they had all disappeared.
The servant quarters sat behind the kitchens, and from there a second staircase took them back to the upper level and another two corridors full of empty rooms. Judging from the thick layer of dust on everything except the carpet, they hadn't been in use in ages – yet each one had a scrape along the floor of dust disturbed by a door opening, a pair or two of footsteps that led inside. The tracks always stopped in the middle of the room, and left again the same way. The beds were undisturbed, the windows crusted over with mould and cobwebs.
"I don't like this." Qavor stared at the tracks, his growing horror clear on his face. The least terrifying explanation was ‘odd behaviour,’ and somehow that didn’t give him much comfort. "I don't like this at all."
"These were the last rooms. Perhaps there are more underground?"
"An underground generally needs solid ground to work at all. I’m surprised the dungeons aren’t flooded."
Erqis rubbed the back of his neck, sighing. "We'll have to ask either Neira."
"Didn't you ask her already?"
"I did." Erqis closed the door behind them. For once, he did it quietly, as if even he was afraid of disturbing something. "She says she doesn't know, only that she knows it exists and that her father often disappeared for days at a time, and then returned suddenly as if he’d never left the castle."
Qavor grimaced. "The only thing underground is the dungeons."
With the longest, heaviest sigh of his life, Erqis turned to the stairs. "Then that's where we'll go."
The dungeons were just as unpleasant as the last few times he had been here, and while he would certainly expect nothing else from a dungeon, the one thing that made this one different from other dungeons he had visited in his time was the uncanny behaviour of its inmates.
The remaining regiars, a group of eight men of varying heights and advanced ages, stood in their large cell exactly as they had the last time Erqis had come down here without Neira. They stared with their odd, milky eyes as if they hadn't blinked in hours, jaws slack and shoulders loose. No tension, no misery, no pleading when the two men entered.
Nothing.
Unless Neira was here as well. Perhaps Qavor was on to something.
"A door in and out, and just a bunch of cells," Erqis said, propping his hands on his hips as he turned in a circle, slowly, on his heel. “Nothing else is down here.”
“How does anyone believe you’re the brains of this operation?” Qavor shook his head. He strode off towards the other side of the cavernous room. “We need to check inside the cells.”
Erqis rolled his eyes before starting on the opposite side. The two cells that held Arwess and Renger were exactly as he had left them, the barred doors opened and each with a dead body on the filthy ground. He gave them a perfunctory glance.
Arwess blinked back at him.
Erqis stopped short and spun around to squint into the relative darkness of the cell, even went as far as to produce a small, bright flame that filled his palm. The flickering light revealed the still corpse, its throat a dark, mangled mess from what Neira had done. By all accounts and logic: this man should be very dead.
And yet, Erqis knew what he had seen. Arwess had blinked. And there was a sense of anticipation, the strange feeling that Arwess was waiting, silently and patiently.
A cold shiver ran down Erqis' spine.
"Fuck," he muttered, quickly glancing about the cell again, but even with the light he now had, there was no ridge, no gap, no handle that would indicate another door. When he retreated from the cell it was backwards – he didn’t dare take his eyes off the body until he had to to lock the door.
"I found something!"
Qavor's echoing call saved him from having to check on Renger, but Erqis quickly closed that door as well. The faces of the dead, snapping at him inches from his own, lingered in his mind. He would not have them block their way out of here, if the dead men decided against all odds to rise again.
Qavor stood in the last cell on the far side of the room, his own hand wreathed in flame, and stared down into the darkness of a hidden stairwell.