The Alchemy Press Book of Ancient Wonders Page 4

  “Show me,” she told him sharply, reminding the Beetle-kinden of his station. Gracer bobbed, grinning, and headed for the doorway, snagging a lamp as he went and beckoning for them to follow.

  Once inside, Hastella had gone still, so Elantris squirmed past, careful to avoid jostling her, and became so involved in proper decorum that he only saw the thing when he straightened up.

  He let out a brief, strangled yelp and sat down hard, heart hammering as fast as beating wings. Gracer whooped, typical coarse Beetle, and even Hastella had a slight smile at his expense. Red-faced, Elantris picked himself up and backed away from the skeleton Gracer’s people had assembled beyond the doorway.

  They must have set this display up to impress the woman paying their wages. They had gone to some lengths to wire and strap the thing together, and had sunk bolts into that antique ceiling to suspend the thing. It was an impossible monster.

  It was bones, just bones like the men outside, but no man this. It had been posed on its hind limbs, rearing up like a mantis, its forelegs – arms? – raised as if to strike down with their crescent claws. Its spine had been reconstructed into a sinuous curve, and Hastella’s sketch had not done that head justice. Elantris looked up at it, that broad, heavy skull with jaws agape, baring its long, savage fangs.

  The whole beast looked to be about the size of a man but ferocity dwelled in every bone of it, as though without the wire and the cord it would have lunged forwards to tear the throat out of any mere human.

  “Is it a human of some unknown kinden, perhaps?” Hastella suggested, for there was little in the world that carried its bones on the inside, after all. There were humans, and there were a handful of species domesticated by them: goats, sheep. Nothing like this beast dwelled in the world any more, and for that Elantris was profoundly grateful.

  “Probably not, Domina,” Gracer told her. “The relative proportions of the limbs suggest that it went on all fours, and the skull… My anatomist tells me that it has a lot of attachment points for muscle – not a bite you’d want to get in the way of – but a far smaller brain-space than ours… It’s something new, Domina.”

  “But this reconstruction, it’s speculative,” she offered.

  “Ah, well, no.” Gracer had that smug look universal to academics with the answers “The skeleton was found not quite in this, ah, dramatic pose, but still complete – tucked just around the doorframe. There wasn’t much interpretation required. If you would wish to take it back, Domina, as a gift from us in appreciation for your support, it would make quite the conversation piece, perhaps?”

  He was being too familiar again, but Hastella seemed content to let him get away with it. “Show me more,” she directed.

  The next chamber was a great, long hall, and for a moment Elantris had to stop, swaying, his eyes bustling with shadow movement that had not been cast by Gracer’s lamp: hurried flight, the thrust of spears, a tide of furious darkness, the silhouettes of monsters. His ears rang with distant howls and screeches, hideous and alien.

  He realized the hand on his shoulder was his mistress’s, and bowed hurriedly. “Forgive me.”

  She was studying him, though, and he understood unhappily: So, she brought me here for my eyes, then. He had medicines for when the seeing dreams became too insistent, but if dreams were why Hastella wanted him here then he would have to forego the cure and suffer.

  The floor was littered with stone, irregular forms that eventually resolved themselves into the broken fragments of statues. Once he had understood that, Elantris felt he progressed through a stone abattoir. Everywhere he looked there were broken arms, legs, sundered torsos.

  “No heads,” he said, before he could stop himself. The other two looked back at him.

  “Very good,” Gracer said. “Yes, this isn’t just wear and tear, and our dead lads out there weren’t just taking a nap. There’s holes in some of the skulls and shields, broken bones. They died defending this place, I reckon, and whoever got in here, they weren’t gentle with the fixtures. We guess this walk we’re on was lined with these statues, and they all got knocked over, and someone took care to hack off every head and cart them off.”

  “But why?”

  “Symbolic, probably.” Gracer shrugged. “My best guess.”

  At the end of the hall was another low, rubble-choked entryway, and a handful of Gracer’s people were working at it, shifting the stones and setting in wooden props. “Ceiling came down here,” the Beetle explained. “And that was just time, I think. We’re almost through, though. Seeing as you’re here, I was going to get my crew to go all night, and maybe in the morning we’ll all get to see what’s in there.

  No! The thought struck Elantris without warning. I don’t want to know. But he said nothing. Of course he said nothing.

  “A perfect idea, Master Gracer,” Hastella said warmly. “So good to find a man of your profession who understands proper showmanship. Perhaps, after my tent has been pitched, you might join me for a little wine, and we can discuss what else I may be able to provide for you and your team.”

  HASTELLA’S TENT WAS a grand affair, overshadowing the little billets of the scholars. Elantris got a separate chamber to himself, metaphorically if not literally sleeping at the feet of his mistress. He had thought she would want him to wait on her while she and Gracer talked, but she had sent him off around dusk, and he understood why. It was not that she cared about privacy, but that she wanted him to dream.

  The temperature had fallen as soon as the sun crossed the horizon, and yet the day’s heat still seemed to linger feverishly in Elantris, leaving him alternately shivering and sweating, fighting with his hammock, staving off the night as long as he could while the murmur of Hastella and Gracer’s voices washed over him like waves.

  He was standing before that crude opening again, in his dreaming. In the dark of the desert he could not see the restored heads of the statues flanking it, but he felt their stone gaze upon him.

  He did not want to go in, and for a moment he felt that he did not have to, that he could still walk away and let the past keep its secrets. Then there was a rushing from all sides, and shadows were streaming past him, of men, of beasts, and he was carried helplessly with them.

  He was racing down that hall, seeing the great flood of bladed darkness course on either side of him. He wanted to fight it, to resist it, but he could not: he was a part of it, it a part of him. He was responsible for what it did.

  Ahead, the monster reared, bones at first but then clad in a ripple of fur and flesh. He saw those claws strike, the savage jaws bite down, flinging fragments of the dark on all sides. Then it was not a monster but a man in a monster’s skin, face loud with loathing and hatred. There were many men, many monsters, creatures of the absurd, of the horrific: long-necked things with cleaving beaks; snarl-muzzled grey nightmares that coursed in seething packs; branch-horned, plunging things that used their antlers like lances. And the darkness was torn and savaged and brutalized by the monstrous host, but gathered itself and came again, pulling Elantris like a tide, forcing him into the jaws of the fiends to be torn and clawed and run through, over and over.

  He awoke, crying and flailing and finally falling from his hammock completely – a real, physical pain to drag him from the morass of his nightmares. Looking up, he saw Hastella standing over him. How long had she been watching?

  It was dawn already, the first threat of the desert sun just clawing at the eastern horizon outside the tent. “Tell me,” Hastella said, and he did, all he could remember, a jumbled, near-incoherent rant of a story, and yet she listened all through.

  Gracer had been optimistic, and his ragged band was still trying to safely clear to the next chamber through most of that day, leaving Elantris nothing to do save kick his heels and steal bowls of wine when he thought Hastella was not looking. He wanted rid of this haunted place. Every instinct told him to cling to his ignorance.

  At the last, close to dusk, Gracer came, with much apologetic scraping,
to say that they were ready, now, to break through. The delay had plainly dented his confidence as, even as they passed down the hall of broken statues, he was insisting that they might find nothing of great import. Now the moment had come, he was abruptly nervous that he might run out of material.

  His entire team were standing there, shovels and picks and props in hand. Elantris squinted through that dark straight-walled aperture, seeing that there was a space beyond it but nothing more.

  Like looking into a grave.

  As thoughts went, he could have wished for something more uplifting.

  “Olisse, you go first with the lantern,” Gracer told a Fly-kinden woman. She nodded curtly and hunched down, shining the lamp through. She was just a little thing, like all her kind, barely reaching Elantris’s waist. If the ceiling ahead was unsafe her reflexes, and the Art of her wings, would give her a fair chance to get clear.

  She slipped under the lintel, barely having to duck, and the darkness within flurried back from her. Elantris shuddered, remembering his dream.

  There was a long moment of silence, in which they could see the light within waxing and waning as Olisse moved about. Then: “Chief, you’d better get in here,” came the Fly’s hushed voice.

  “We’re all coming in,” Gracer decided.

  “Chief—” Elantris heard the Fly say, but Gracer was already hunkering down to duck through the doorway, and Hastella was right on his heels.

  “Founder’s Mark!” Gracer swore, his voice almost reverent. The other scholars were staring at Elantris, plainly expecting him to be next after his mistress. With no other choice, he scrabbled into the next chamber.

  It was carpeted with bones. The chamber was wide and deep – deeper than the lantern would reveal, and everywhere was a chaos of ancient skeletons, heaped and strewn and utterly intermingled. Some were plainly human, whilst others – larger, heavier, stranger - must be the remains of more monsters, so that Elantris wondered if this had been some den of theirs, and these multitudes their victims back in the dawn of time.

  We are well rid of such horrors.

  Olisse was hovering overhead with the lantern, unwilling to touch down. Hastella was impassive, but Gracer regarded the ossuary with wide eyes.

  “I never saw anything like this,” he murmured.

  By now Elantris had seen that, like the statues, one thing was missing. There were no skulls in all that chaos of jumbled bone, neither human nor other.

  “How far back does this go?” Gracer was asking, and Olisse glided forwards, thrusting the lamp out, then letting out a startled curse. She had found an end to the slew of bones, and it was marked by a pile of skulls that reached close to the ceiling. The lamplight touched on the sockets of men and of fiends, the bared teeth of both united in decapitation and death.

  What came here and did such a thing? Elantris wondered. The contrast between the orderly burial of the guardians without and the mound of trophies within was jarring, and as much as he tried to convince himself that this could just be the respect that some ancient culture accorded its honoured dead, he could not make himself believe it.

  “Well, obviously it’s going to take a lot of study, to sort this out,” muttered Gracer, the master of understatement. “It could have been … a number of things.”

  A massacre, say it, Elantris challenged the man silently. A massacre of men. A massacre of monsters.

  The Fly came down gingerly beside that great monument of skulls that towered over her. Some of the inhuman relics there had fanged jaws great enough to seize her entire body.

  Elantris thought he saw it in the lantern-light then, even as Hastella was turning to go. Beyond that mound of grisly prizes, against the back of the cave wall: more skeletons, human skeletons, still intact and huddled together, and all of them as small as a Fly-kinden. Or a child.

  Then his mistress was heading back for the surface, and he was hurrying after her, out into the gathering dusk.

  She would not talk to him all evening, nor to Gracer; just sat in her tent and, perhaps, tried to come to terms with what she had seen. The scholars were uncertain what this meant. Gracer dragged Elantris off to their fire and plied him with questions he could not answer, angling for some insight into Hastella’s mind. Elantris drank their wine and bore their inquisition because it kept him from sleep.

  Even after the scholars had turned in, cramming themselves into their threadbare little tents, he loitered on, in the steadily deepening cold, staring at the canvas that hid that fatal doorway, mute witness to an atrocity ten thousand years old.

  At the last, it was either drop on the chill sands or haul himself to his curtained-off corner of tent. When he had finally opted for the latter he found Hastella still awake, staring at him as he entered. He could never read her eyes, even at the best of times. These were not the best of times.

  In his dream the darkness was receding like a tide, leaving only bones in its wake. The monsters were all dead now, and so were the men who had stood by them. In his dream he watched each of their skeletons hauled up, clothed briefly in flesh in the moment that the blade came down, in the moment that the scissoring mandibles cut, then the head was free and the body was left where it fell. He was in amongst the darkness. The weight in his hands was the great head of a monster torn from its body by savage pincers, its mighty jaws gaping impotently, teeth helpless in the face of history. He placed it with the others, on that gathering pile, and did his best not to look beyond.

  In his dream he retreated down that hall and smashed the statues one by one, taking from those carven human shoulders the heads of monsters, the gods of a vanished people.

  In his dream, he moved the stones to wall in that doorway in the cliff, blocking up his ears to the shrill cries of those they had left alive within. In his dream it was necessary. He had cast his lot, given his allegiance, and that made them his enemies in a war that only utter extermination could bring to a close.

  In his dream he buried his comrades and their beasts, those who had fallen in bringing this final conclusion to an ancient rivalry. He heaped earth on the shattered wing cases of beetles, the broken legs of spiders, the serrated mouthparts, the snapped antennae of those who had brought survival and victory to his ancestors.

  He started from his vision to hear Hastella re-entering the tent, wondering blearily what she could have been doing. Had she been into the dig site again? Had she stood, staring mesmerised at that great trove of the fallen and the dismembered? Had she pieced together some story in her head to account for it all, and would that story resemble his dream?

  She was a hard woman, honed like a knife by the politics of the Spiderlands, where to be weak was to fall, where emotion was leashed and used, and ran free only behind closed doors. Had she been shedding tears over that host of the unknowable dead? Had she been drinking in the tragedy of ages?

  He thought not. A humble secretary he, but he knew her too well.

  In the first grey of pre-dawn she had orders for Gracer. “I want all your team working double time in the new chamber,” she told him. “I want a catalogue of everything you’ve found. This is the greatest historical discovery of our age, Master Gracer. You have two days to conduct an overview and provide me with a report I can take back with me.”

  Was it academic prestige or financial reward that glittered in the eyes of Fordyce Gracer? In any event he had his complement on the move before the sun cleared the horizon, filing into that darkness with their tools and their sketchboards and their lanterns, eagerly tossing theories back and forth.

  Hastella watched them go with a proprietary air, standing under the canvas of the tent that shadowed the doorway. “Elantris,” she said, when the last of them had gone in, “pack my possessions. We leave shortly.”

  He glanced at her, then at the gaping socket of the opening. “Mistress?”

  Her expression did not invite further inquiry.

  As he stepped out into the sun he saw that the camp had visitors.

  A c
ouple of the scholars had stayed at the fire, preparing food. They were dead – and soundlessly – before Elantris came out, and the newcomers were already heading his way. They were Scorpion-kinden, almost a score of them: huge, pale men and women in piecemeal armour, bearing spears and long-hafted axes, and with curving claws arching over their forefingers and thumbs. With them were a handful of their beasts, scuttling purposefully beside them, slung low to the ground beneath overarching stingers and raised claws, each held in tight control by a leash of Art.

  The brigands from Dust Port! Elantris thought, stumbling back into the tent. “Mistress!” he got out.

  “I gave you an instruction,” she snapped at him. “Go to it.”

  The light went almost entirely as a bulky figure shouldered in behind him, a Scorpion-kinden man fully seven feet tall. His eyes sought out Hastella.

  “Go about your work,” she said quietly. For a moment Elantris thought she meant him, but the Scorpion was loping past them both, heading for that shadowed entrance, and his men and his animals were on his heels.

  “I don’t understand,” Elantris heard himself say.

  “I think you do,” Hastella said softly. “I think you have seen something of the past here, what was done of necessity by those who came before us. We are the Kinden, Elantris. We are the inheritors of the world, and that is the order of things. There is no sense confusing the academics with what might have been, or confounding them with what price we might have paid to ensure our survival. Such knowledge is not to be showered on the common herd.”

  “You knew…” Elantris whispered.