CHAPTER THIRTY
Druadaen peered down into the pit. Others had sheltered here; several broken weapons, pieces of armor, and smashed overland kit lay at the foot of the rough slope. They ranged from rotting and rusted antiques to recent additions.
Unfortunately, this was no better than the first ruin he’d reached on his day-end push for the hills. That one had bones mixed in with the debris, some of which hadn’t been there long enough to be sun bleached. So he’d pressed on in the hope that the second ruin would offer a little more shelter and also appear a little less like a killing ground.
Half of his hopes had been realized; this one offered a great deal more shelter. A tall, saw-toothed remainder of the walls shielded the pit from the west and the north, and where they abutted, supported the remains of two upper stories, creating an overhang. Altogether, it promised a dry night, regardless of the direction or kind of weather. The one drawback was that his horse couldn’t fit beneath the overhang.
On the other hand, although this pit contained no bones, it was both larger and richly littered with the mauled remains of equipment. And of course, there might very well be bones hidden beneath the uneven layer of debris that covered the near half of the pit’s bottom: shattered masonry, earthenware slivers, rotting timbers, and a pervasive slurry of rain-clotted mud, dust, and ash. A worrisome place to hide, and a worse place to be trapped by anything that might wander past: fighting an uphill foe, even as a defender, was bad enough. Doing so on a slope with treacherous footing was unthinkable.
He glanced east, hoping he had missed some distant silhouette that might signify yet another chance of shelter. But the plain was as level and empty as a tabletop until it ran up against the fog-shrouded hills that were his final destination. And even if he had been able to reach them by pressing on into the early darkness, and even if he was lucky enough to find shelter, there would be no safety there. None at all.
Even rested and in broad daylight, approaching those uplands to find and capture an abomination was as dangerous as anything Druadaen had ever undertaken. With horse in tow, he would have to move stealthily from one screening terrain feature to the next. Then, leaving his mount at a fair distance, he’d have to ascend to a vantage point from which to spot a suitable target, which he would then have to track, capture, and drug. After that, he would have to drag or carry the abomination to (or at least near) the horse, secure his captive, and then ride hard to outpace any pursuit.
So, Druadaen concluded sadly, if he chose to arrive in those monster-infested hills tired and blind in the middle of the night, it would only prove that Lorgan had been right; suicide was his actual objective, after all. Sighing, he peered back down into the pit; well, if I’m going to risk sleeping in it, I’d best study it. Closely.
Judging from the heavy walls and reinforced arches that framed the depression on all sides except for the slope down, it had been a basement or sunken courtyard. As in the rest of the sprawling complex, its walls had been fashioned from a substance he’d observed before: an unbreakable mortar or concrete that was as smooth as slate but had the appearance of a frozen fluid. Although he’d seen sections of brickwork and heavy blocks elsewhere, there were none here.
The debris in the pit sloped down from Druadaen’s vantage point toward the back of the pit. It thinned out and allowed the actual flooring to show through about halfway to the back wall, which was lined by the largest of the arched openings. Set atop—or in?—the exposed floor were the only metal fixtures he’d seen in this ruin: several pairs of crisscrossing strips that appeared to be cast from brass. They emerged from three of the partially obstructed openings in the rear wall and played across the floor in a pattern that resembled snakes crawling across each other. Tracing one of the three twinned curves of brightness back into the dark openings, Druadaen was abruptly reminded of the rails used to move ore-carts in mines. These, however, were far thinner and, despite the elements and the ages, remained objects of graceful, golden beauty, made even more so by contrast to the slope of wreckage and filth leading down to them.
After he’d measured and studied the pit three times over, Druadaen realized that he was not so much continuing to survey it as he was putting off his inevitable descent. He dismounted, tied off the reins on the stub of a tilting marble column, and began to pick his way down the rough embankment. His first concern was to find a safe path for the horse, and a level spot where it might stand next to the west wall, close to the overhang at the rear. His second, although no less important, job was to search for signs of recent habitation.
The embankment was wetter than it appeared. A small foothold gave way and Druadaen’s cautious descent instantly became a fast slide down the black ooze. Covered in the muck, he flung off the gobs coating the hand with which he’d broken his fall and reflected that his misstep had at least one redeeming feature; no one was there to see it.
It took a while to discover a solid path to the point at which the west wall abutted the north, and once there, he began his inspection for signs of recent disturbance or other activity. After examining every inch of the flooring and locating the best spot for his mount, he finally accepted that he’d found everything he could—and that it was all maddeningly inconclusive. Most every piece of junk could have lain there for a few moonphases or as many years. Maybe centuries. However, while he hadn’t the time or light to explore all the irregular gaps and holes and half-collapsed openings in the pit’s three framing walls, he established that there was no spoor—either scat or kills—near any of them. Only a faint yet pervasive smell that reminded him of pitch, rust, and some of Elweyr’s stranger chemicals.
While studying the threshold of one of the doorways into which the brass rails ran, he made his only unusual discovery: a very small leather pouch. Inside was a pendant of several fused metals and set with an intaglio sigil that resembled no alphabet he had ever seen. Druadaen secured it in his tightly laced purse and leaned closer to examine the rails: the last part of his painstaking survey of the pit.
Even seen from a foot away, the shape of the metal strips was as perfect as their unmarred surfaces. Almost equally miraculous, none of them were buried beneath the debris or muck that adorned the rest of the floor. Druadaen could only suppose that when fortune-seekers sheltered in the pit, they saw the rich golden glints and cleared away the detritus with the intent of removing the metal. If so, none of them had any success. Despite their brass-gold appearance, the narrow rails were at least as hard as Druadaen’s steel dagger, and whatever held them in the narrow grooves that accommodated their gracefully intersecting arcs and loops was apparently as invulnerable as they themselves were.
Druadaen had just decided that he had finished his inspection of the pit when he heard a distant, strangely hoarse horn: probably made of wood. Which, according to Lorgan, was typical of abominations; they either lacked the facility or the patience to fashion anything from bone or other materials. Consequently, their horns were typically small, rot-hollowed lengths of tree trunks.
Druadaen tried to gauge the distance and direction of the sound as he considered his options: fight, flight, or hide. Fighting was madness; abominations might lair alone but tended to travel in groups. And any that were large enough to carry a horn fashioned from a log would be extremely dangerous opponents. Flight wasn’t promising, either; according to Lorgan and the viziers of Sarma, once an abomination figuratively or literally smelled blood, they would track it relentlessly. And although a horse was faster, they were almost sure to outlast it in a chase.
So the only option was to hide. But that meant getting his mount down into the pit quickly, which was just deep enough to conceal it. Keeping it still and quiet were another issue entirely.
Druadaen scrambled up a rougher part of the slope so as not to erode the narrow path he’d blazed for the horse. He made sure there was no urgency in his actions as he took its reins and led it to the lip of the pit. But whereas Druadaen had merely had some misgivings about his footing, the horse’s eyes rolled white in alarm as he started to coax it down the embankment. It shied back twice before he managed to get it to descend in one swift rush. The weight of the animal caused it to sink until the muck was well above its fetlocks. Happily, that put the tops of its ears lower than ground level. Less happily, it also meant that any hope of a speedy escape was now as hopelessly mired as the creature itself.
Using the last bit of dried fruit he’d kept in reserve for moments like this, Druadaen hooded the skittish horse with his cloak, thereby muting the intermittent windings of the horn. Even so, had it not been well trained, Druadaen would not have been able to keep it steady with one hand, sword at the ready in the other, listening for any sounds that might indicate the abominations were coming closer or moving off.
The sun—now a cloud-smothered gray blob—had almost completed its descent to the horizon before Druadaen heard the horn again: more distant and probably slightly further north. Still, if he was close enough to hear their horn, they were too likely to spot him if he left the pit.
He leaned back against the wall, determined to make the best of the night ahead.
After the horn had quieted again, a whisper of thin rain came misting down. Druadaen retreated to the overhang, patting the horse apologetically as he did. Once under that shelf and arranging his gear, he noticed things he’d missed during his faster inspection of it: partially consumed clods of peat and other signs of a comparatively recent fire. There were also a few seared tatters of cloth that, judging from the stains, had been used to wrap wounds. And, in a narrow drainage trench between the floor and the wall, he found broken or discarded bits from the kits of travelers. Most of it had lacing and hides typical of Last Lander artisans, primarily Sarmese and Kaandean. However, as he dug down, he found knives from Absolutia, shreds of Ruildine woolens, and smaller, often unrecognizable bits that could have been, and probably were, from almost every nation of Lorn Hystzos. However, if any of the owners had died here, their bodies or bones had been completely consumed, carried off, or were drowned under the calf-deep slurry just beyond the limit of the brass rails.
As soon as the rain let up, Druadaen exited the low overhang at a crouch; dinner had been cold and dull ever since he’d left the Fur-Drake’s Oath, but he’d be gods damned if tonight’s meal was going to be wet, too. He made his way back to the horse, careful of the slick stone and the increasingly sloppy slurry beyond. He patted it apologetically again. This was the second night he’d had to leave the horse saddled and with some of his bags still upon it; hard on the horse and now, likely to soak his kit. But if a threat drew near, he might be lucky and have enough time to flee—but there’d be no chance of doing so at all if the horse had to be retacked.
The gelding was calm enough as Druadaen began to work at the saddle bag that held his rations, only to discover that the rain had soaked the rawhide ties. Water-swollen, he kept at them with fumbling fingers even as the rain started to return. Eager to finish, he was hurrying when one of the taut loops finally started loosening. He gave it a hasty tug.
The horse flinched, not hard or far, but in doing so, bumped outward from the wall—and straight into Druadaen, who was pulling backward on the tie at that moment. Between the push from the horse’s flank, the sudden release of the tie, and the slurry that was running off the hill, he slipped, falling backward as the contents of the saddlebag went flying.
Reaching rearward to break his fall, the backs of Druadaen’s arms bumped into the stiff rims of his cuirass’s armholes; he pushed harder, trying to get his hands back before he hit the ground.
He landed with a grunt, almost four feet away from the horse. Worrying that it might have been spooked, he took the precaution of scrambling back a few more feet, where he found his footing improved; he was on the open floor of the pit, amidst the rails.
Seeing the contents of his ration bag lying in the path of the spreading ooze, he pushed to his feet to rescue it, touching one of the rails as he did so.
A noise like grinding metal gears came out of the nearest opening on the north wall.
Food forgotten, Druadaen darted back toward the west wall—before he realized that it was only six feet beyond the closest loop of one of the brass tracks. And if what he heard was connected to those shining rails—
The grinding became a rising screech that rushed out of the opening like the bow wave for the figure that followed. Except, Druadaen realized it was not an actual figure; it was a parody of one:
A head shaped like a sphere, but bisected by a discus. A wasp waist that divided the bipedal form into distinct segments, like the parts of an ant. Legs that ended in wheels that squealed as the metal mannequin flashed, quick as a panther, along the rails. Three similarly segmented arms waved weapons: a long, curving sword; a broad dagger with a narrow point; and a long spear. A fourth appendage mimicked the motions of the others in futility: there was nothing beyond its elbow joint. All of it was made from the same brilliant brass as the rails along which it streaked—
—straight toward Druadaen.