Salute the Dark

‘So where has all this work led?’ he asked her. I should have been a Skryre, he reflected, for he knew he was now running Xaraea just as the Skryres had always run him: employing pointed questions, evasive answers, making her do the work.

‘A ritual.’ Her voice shook marginally, and he saw her fists clench. ‘I am not privy-’

‘But you have heard,’ he observed. She was hating him with a passion now, but he found he did not care so long as he could continue to pull her around like a marionette and get her to tell him what she knew.

‘They say…’ Her pause, then, was not reluctance to speak so much as reluctance to even think about it. ‘They say that it will be the greatest ritual since the Darakyon. They need… they command you there. They demand it.’

‘Do they?’ Achaeos had gone cold all over, and he knew that must show in his face. There was no gloating, though. Xaraea was frightened of what the Skryres were about, and he found that he was too. Slowly he swung his legs over the side of the bed. ‘I will come,’ he told her, ‘but it may take a while.’

She nodded briefly and was gone in an instant. No doubt she had a great deal else to do. The Skryres seemed to have made her their personal agent in this business, and he had no idea whether that was intended as a reward or not.

As great as the Darakyon, is it? he thought sourly, hearing in his mind the tortured, whispering voice of that haunted place. We all know how well that went. The great renegade ritual, five centuries before, intended to drag down the newly arisen Apt-kinden, to consign them to fear and barbarism and slavery once again, and it had failed. The great magicians who had shaped it had yet reached too far, and they, and the Mantis-kinden whose home had been their ritual ground, had been damned to a fate infinitely worse than death, eternal torture on the rack of thorns that was the blighted forest Darakyon, imprisonment in the Shadow Box, the twisted knot of spite that was all their ritual had achieved.

And that I held, and opened, and look what happened to me…

There were ritual chambers deep within the mountain but their walls, it seemed, were too confining for an enterprise on this scale. Instead Xaraea led the limping Achaeos upwards, first through slanted corridors and halls that he remembered from his youth, then by ascending long flights of steps that had always been forbidden to him before. From the murky, incense-fragrant halls they led to she took him step-by-step up steeply spiral paths cut into the rock, cramped and tortuous routes that he had never known existed. The chill told him where they were going. The very top of the mountain had signified a place of childhood terror. It was where the Skryres communed direct with the spirits and the elements, wholly open to the lashing responses of either. It was where they took you if you failed the Skryres.

Well, they’re taking me there now, he thought drily. There was light ahead, but it was a muted red. At first he thought it was fire-glow but as he came out into the open air he saw that it was sunset. The entire Lowlands seemed to be in flames, as if the bloated crimson sun was searing the world to cinders.

‘An omen, do you think?’ There were only two figures waiting for them there. One was robed like a Skryre, but the voice told otherwise. The second was the Wasp girl, Raeka, which meant that the first must be her master.

‘Tegrec,’ Achaeos rasped hoarsely, using his stick to lower himself to the ground. He felt as though even getting to the place of ritual might have killed him.

The Wasp magician cast his hood back. With it up, he had seemed forbidding and dangerous; now he looked only pale and worried. He cast a glance at Xaraea, but she was standing by the stair-mouth, locked up with her own demons. Haltingly, Tegrec knelt down beside Achaeos.

‘Second thoughts?’ the Moth asked him.

‘No,’ said Tegrec firmly. Raeka put a hand on his shoulder, and he reached back to grip it, a familiarity normally unforgivable under imperial law.

‘We will be striking your own people,’ Achaeos reminded him.