Chapter 11: Whispers

Omen Brought led the few faithful tarrasquin, and knowing that the valley was full of cutthroats and thieves they shrouded themselves as their fellows had when they attacked. Cloaked by a combination of esoteric gadgetry and their own saurian gifts of low movement and changing skin, they prowled along the edges until the highwaymen made their move. Casualties were unavoidable, but they fought bravely, losing one of their own, and our losses were fewer than they would have been. Still, Longway's death was a blow. I gladly would have taken his place. But somehow I was spared, though a knife had pierced my heart. My chest burned, and each breath came with a cost, but I was alive and in a day's time fit for travel. The Ossarians were alarmed and gave me a cautious berth, and Kendra fussed over me constantly. The Vandals seemed more somber and attentive toward me, Dolores in particular. As for me, my prime concern was that my brand may have been marred. It was not. My healing skin had regrown the wraithkin mark in cleaner detail than its own surface, even over scar tissue.

We were huddled in the great hall of an old castle that had fallen from the cliffside and landed somewhat intact. The floor had once been a ceiling, and we'd made bedding and blankets out of old tapestries, of which most had rotted away. Omen Brought made the rounds regularly, asking if there was anything needed that he could send his followers to acquire. I had questions burning holes in my brain. I felt sweat misting my brow from the agitation that had taken me, for now that we were safe and stationary, our doughtiest guards returned to our sides, I was free to wonder, and I had to know what had befallen my home. I eagerly awaited Omen Brought's approach, rehearsing in my thoughts how I would pose my questions. But each time he came near to me he was distracted and turned away. After a while I grew impatient and went directly to him.

"Thank you for your bravery," I said with a bow. I did my best to draw pity from him, wearing my sadness boldly in my blue, monochromatic eyes.

Omen Brought stared down at me thoroughly unmoved.

I was persistent. "You distinguished yourselves by your integrity."

Silence, and a slow retreat.

My shoulders sank, and my head drooped in honest grief. "I want to know what happened to my home."

The tarrasquin warrior grunted a brief reply, his voice rushed and muffled as if feared to leave his mouth and was eager to be safe again behind closed jaws.

"Your sires grew strange. Drew many eyes. Some were greedy. Some were worried. Worried, kept watch, saved who they could."

"What could any thieves have thought to steal from the Dolomites?".

Omen Brought was done with me, and as I turned sullenly away I thought of the great stores.of renewable food the Dolomites produced, and the relics they drew power from for the transmuting of flesh.

Dolores found me in a quiet corner where my dejectedness beckoned shadows to enter through my pores and nest in my internal fibres. I did not want to be seen, but I could not hide from Dolores. In the dark she may as well have been a man; as tall and wiry hard as she was. But her hand on mine was softer than a dying breath, and she looked at me the way a mother did a stillborn child.

"Did the tarrasquin tell you anything?".

"That you and Oscar came to protect us. Thank you.". I looked up at her. "Do you know what our attackers wanted? Did they want our food? Did they wish to enthrall the djinn? Were they afraid of the patients in the storage vaults breaking free?".

I heard Dolores exhale before she replied. "You may have touched on all the reasons your fathers drew unfriendly eyes."

Then came my tears in full, far less than a common boy's but greater than I had done. "Why slay the excrutiants?".

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Her arm drew me close. "Because they are cruel, heartless filth. But it may have been a kindness to those poor creatures, regardless of their murderers' intent."

The truth in her words splattered against my wall. "Omen Brought would not say who attacked us."

"They were his former company.".

The plainness in Dolores's voice was oddly comforting. Her unplaited tone gave me the space to process that the traitors were moved by simple greed, an intrinsic component to a desperate world. My anger then was not directed in so base and materialistic as those who inflicted harm, but on the conditions of the world that drove them to such extremes. I made many assumptions then, especially regarding the faithless tarrasquin, and stowed away my rage for a time when it would serve me. For the rest of the night, I sat within earshot, far from the sight of eyes, hearing what I could of the tarrasquin talk. Setting one of the Ossarians to work questioning them helped. Asking her what had become of her husband, I learned he had been one of those culled when their's was an emergent need. I may have commented that the tarrasquin were clearly more alert to the behaviour of the masters than we, and may have kept back knowledge that could have saved many of us. She pressed them for information while I lurked, and throughout the night I learned a few things; namely that while greed was brewing in a few of their hearts, mostly they acted out of fear. The Ossarian woman seemed content to believe they were afraid of only the Dolomites. I remembered the name Jadus, and wondered if there were not more players in this foul game. This is the harshest rub of living under a darkened sky; one can never see more than a few cubits ahead.

We moved with much more speed the next day. Fewer bodies to protect meant the tarrasquin were free to roam in wide arcs, and we felt secure knowing they were prowling on our behalf. Also, those too weak to travel quickly had not survived, a sad boon but one we took for what shadow of hope it gave us. They were dead, we were not, and so there was meaning, and victory. Welcome to Tarthas.

The worst of it was the noise. With eleven Vandals and nine Ossarians, we had fewer torches and so much less light. Longway was sorely missed, as he had carried a great deal of gear, in particular tools and parts for multiple shelters. When we slept, I volunteered to sleep under the black sky so that others could be underneath tents. I took every watch I could manage the strength to take, in part to sate my own curiosity at what lay about us, and in part because I'd become afraid of sleep. I feared the hypnosis of the black distance and the white ripple it threw at me, and I feared the feeling of a knife in my chest and waking alone. Kendra listened to me and slept inside a tent with a Vandal woman who Dolores and Kobb frequently consulted with. She had a motherly look, and was capable yet not a fighter or prone to play the role. She seemed more focused on Kendra than Dolores, and a hardier companion than any of the Ossarians save Noak and his wife, Millet.

As we pressed on we heard sounds that could have been anything. At times we heard feet, at times we heard roars, at times we heard cries or screams, and sometimes, when our hearts were darkest, we heard the squelching sounds of beasts feeding. The noises echoed off building and cliff, and the wind would howl high and shrill when we needed peace the most. Near the end of the canyon we saw a stair lit by pale torches. It zigzagged in short bursts for a third of the canyon's rise, then went long and straight until it rose again in a gradual curve, then ended steep and serpentine. There were two arches on either side of the stairway landing, which was reached by a wide ramp guarded by a row of winged grotesques with torchlight eyes.

The Ossarians and some of the Vandals walked more quickly when they saw the landing, but I held back. Something worried me. Perhaps it was the two arches flanking the landing. They were huge, their openings completely dark, and behind them were walls and ceilings that ran into the walls of the canyon on either side. I wanted very much to be out of that place, as we were running low on food and water, as well as resolve. The noises were getting louder, and we hadn't seen the tarrasquin for the better part of the day.

I was elected Azazel, and shakily approached the landing while the rest waited on guard a dozen yards back. I had never felt such terror before, not even when Oscar died defending me from creatures I could never name. Then I saw the monster. I knew not what it was, but I could see its size and what appendages it would attack me with. These dark arches were so densely devoid of light it seemed the space within them was solid somehow. I held my torch tightly with both hands, but I did not ignite it, for I feared being seen, and hoped for the dark to be an equalizer between me and whatever hid inside the arches.

As I drew close I could make out some detail in their design. The light from the group glinted off the walls, and glittered across the sandy floor. The arches were of that design that could either be very new or old beyond reckoning. The smooth walled stonework of the time before the Fall was an art we had lost. If one deep enough beneath the sediment of history, one found structures made by the means we have today, only they were grand beyond what we today can conceive. These arches were of that ancient build. Each stone was hard as iron but incorruptible, and weathered by ages of pain. Past each arch was an array of buttresses that ran upwards to nearly the top of the canyon, capped at their zenith by turrets. I could not make out the specific designs, but the roofs of the arches were lined with grotesques. One of them had luminous eyes.

When there is malice, there is an omnipresent and fetal sort of courage. What I felt then was a cold emptiness, and the constant, nagging anxiety that brings, compounded with being exposed to all the horrors of Tarthas for the first time in my life. As I crept under the left hand arch, feeling my way through the dark by stretching out my foot with each step, I felt my heart pounding so hard I feared it might wake whatever slumbered in there. I wished more than ever to not be seen, and to be a creature of raw ether, devoid of the vulnerabilities of flesh.

Somehow the chamber inside the arch was softly lit. I could only make out the barest shapes of things, and still frequently tripped or stumbled, but major obstacles were on the edge of sight. There seemed to be a faint green light reflecting off of anything I looked at, but I could not determine its source, and my eyes did not adjust to it as they did a naturally dim room. For a brief time my confusion over this ghost light distracted me from my anxiety, and I found myself completely taken by a large mound of grey stone that seemed to have fallen from a great height. There were no engravings, and as I ran my hand along it it felt surprisingly supple, though still very firm. The surface was cracked and pitted, with sudden, jagged rises that ran like scars in every direction. A piece of rock ran like a pillar tilted downward, then bent as it neared the floor.

I climbed over it and put my hand on the mass behind. A metal chain was coiled between the two pieces, attached to an iron plate somewhere in the tumble of heavy stones. I yanked at the chain, but the links were so large and heavy I could barely move it. I poked my head between the joints of the cross fallen stones, but the chain seemed to be coming from somewhere that was somehow above ground, in spite of the pile of stone having fallen. I sat against the pillar and leaned my head back. I was aware of the group waiting outside, but wanted to discover more of this pile of rock's nature before ushering them in. Did it hide some trap, or otherwise harmful device? Did it mask a crevice one could fall in? It was the only feature in the chamber, other than some large basins near the back corner, and a hole in the other corner that was walled off by a ring of alumidine that rose to a grown man's chest. A putrid smell came from there, so I warned everyone to stay clear of it. I had exhausted my list of contrived reasons to delay waving the group inside, and had come face to face with the fact that I was afraid of leaving the enclosure of that space between the mass of stone and the fallen pillar.

I felt slightly more at ease when we had made a camp of sorts. There was light in the room, though as little as we could get away with. There were broken digits and scraped elbows that needed to be tended to, along with bruised and aching hearts. The Ossarians, especially the three children that had survived, were especially weepy. Kendra sniffed a little, but was mostly herself. The Vandals were busy scouring every space I had ignored, and a few of them ventured out and into the other arch. They said they found nothing but an enormous skeleton. Though they insisted the bones had long since been picked clean, we unanimously decided to remain where we were, despite the rank smell that occasionally wafted from the far corner. When all were settled and I no longer needed to be vigilant, I allowed myself to sleep until I was woken for my watch. I felt deeply indebted to the Vandals, and wanted to be a part of every effort to show my gratitude. And so a man named Yamcha shook me awake, and I positioned myself between a pair of broken keystones in between the two arches. Obscured by the darkness, the stones, and my dark grey robe, I stood guard for the remainder of the night.

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