Thief of Destiny: The Collected Saga of the Panther Page 17

  One by one, the three slipped away from the world of light and life. Manwe's feet touched the cold ground when he landed last, a chill that ran a shiver up his spine as he considered the last time he had been here, searching out his dead lover and fence, Toba, who had been cast down into gloom for a robbery gone wrong.

  Cleon drew his copper wand. Tapping it in the palm of his bare hand, he summoned a small speck of light, an immortal spark that shone close to light his handsome features. He craned his head back to take in the central vault where they landed. "My, my, Panther," said the sorcerer, gaping at its immensity, "you could get lost down here."

  Folami crouched down as she searched for the nearest walls. She had already drawn a pair of darts into her hand. "I imagine many have."

  Manwe started eastward, aware enough still of which direction he faced. "Let's go this way. There was a series of ledges that made getting to the lower channels easier."

  Folami and Cleon fell in behind him.

  As promised he led them to a series of wide-set ledges, rock layered upon rock, and used these natural steps to pick their way farther east. For a time, they contended only with the noises they made—an errant pat of the sandal here, a displacement of crumbling stone there, and their breathing. When they met the bottom of the cavern floor, he turned them to the south, to where the tunnels opened.

  "These are the channels you mentioned," Manwe told them. He let Cleon turn his magical light on the openings in the cave’s wall, five voluminous doorways into the hell he had longed to forget. He spotted the fourth passage from the left—Toba's body remained somewhere in that hollow hell where the cannibals lived.

  Folami broke ahead of them. "Which one, Panther?"

  "Farthest one on the right," he said. "The air in that one smells different."

  Cleon clucked at him. "Manwe..."

  "I'm guessing," he admitted, "the rules don't work the same down here when it comes to the channels. I wandered into that one blind." He pointed to the fourth passage from the left.

  Folami sighed at the answer.

  "It is felicity, then, that I remember a story from my childhood of an easterly wind." Cleon flicked his wand out at the channels as he walked forward. "Do you know the tales of the easterly wind, Panther? What of you, Songbird?"

  Manwe glanced to Folami and shared her confused expression.

  "Oh, well, time for a story," Cleon said with a bit of self-satisfied glee. "Once upon a time there was a great sorceress in Barintha named Dadera, a sailor by trade. One night she and her crew were trapped in a storm far to the north, not far from the continent of Talav, mind you..."

  Manwe interrupted. "Is there a reason for this story?"

  Cleon cleared his throat in annoyance. "When trapped in this storm, she and her crew at their wit's end, a single word came to Dadera, a word that summoned something very peculiar that showed her the way eastward, toward Talav's nearest coast."

  "And that was?" asked Folami.

  The sorcerer's grin widened at the question. "Glaros."

  The end of Cleon's wand spat gouts of blue sparks and from them formed a seagull coated in black feathers with a red beak. The manifestation flapped a few times to pick up speed and altitude, glowing as it ascended to the great ceiling of the cavern. Stone that had not seen light since time immemorial revealed veins of mineral and raw gem, a rainbow of majestic purples, blues, and crimsons. The gull flew in a great wheel before returning on a course toward the entrance to the channels. Swooping low into a gentle glide, the bird entered the second opening from the right.

  "And our path is set," said Cleon, pleased with himself. Returning his wand to his belt, he marched with a spring in his step.

  "I bet you this isn't the last time he's going to do that," Folami muttered as she followed.

  Manwe cracked a grim smile, glad for some humor. The opening of the passage to the east loomed like the mouth of some buried god, the threshold between the place where the last light died and the sun never touched, a passage that only the chosen—or the mad—would take. Resolved, the three entered nothingness.

  Left to a perfect pitch of black, only the red haze of Cleon's magical sprite led them along the passage, its wings fluttering for short bursts as it swooped around corners and forks.

  "How could anyone ever walk this?" asked Folami, her voice lonesome and bare.

  "Those in search for power do powerful things," Cleon answered. “I’ve heard of things my kind have done for secrets. This seems like a fair approach to them.”

  The stone beneath Manwe’s feet, smooth and unbroken, tracked onward without blemish. The only thing he knew was that it was cold, and the longer he marched, the more it bit past the thin leather soles of his sandals, until the nerves numbed.

  Time ceased. Cleon's light, bobbing in place above the red sorcerer's shoulder, ruled alone in the straits of the underworld. Manwe followed that flash of red for hours, he thought, pawing walls and corners every time it made a sudden deviation from the everlasting dark that seemed to go on forever.

  Until Cleon stopped.

  Manwe felt Folami's hand on his back. "What's wrong?" she whispered, the words echoing.

  The sorcerer shushed them.

  In the perfect stillness of the pitched realm, Manwe heard the patter of feet. He drew his knife, holding it down at his side in preparation to stab. He heard Cleon's breath ahead of him, a few inches to the left. The sorcerer moved, his robes swishing. Folami stopped.

  Everyone stood still.

  The footsteps not belonging to them, a smattering of more than three or four pairs, closed in with each passing second until Manwe struggled to keep his blade at its neutral position. He remembered the kind of things that lived down in these depths.

  What if they attacked first? What if he missed his thrust and stabbed Cleon? What if his lover died before he ever knew what happened?

  Blind, bound, and burdened by the shadow, Manwe stepped forward as light blossomed from the tip of Cleon's wand. The flash slowly rose toward the ceiling in a soft ring of white, lighting the sharp stalactites in columns of green emerald.

  Standing before Cleon formed a shape, clear enough that Manwe knew him to be a man. The stranger's black eyes follow the ascending ring of illumination. Naked, pale, his flat face opened as he raised his stone ax in challenge, his fat lips parted to reveal teeth filed into wedges.

  Manwe thrust at underworlder the moment Cleon’s spell ended.

  Hot blood coated Manwe's hands as he drove his knife into the chest of the underworlder again and again. His victim died with a great struggle, scratching at him until he stilled, wet arms splayed wide.

  The noise of Cleon's baleful magic conquered everything, booming with the flashes the sorcerer cast with every word he spoke. Somewhere in the strobing explosions, Manwe watched two of the Songbird's throwing daggers tumble past his face, burying themselves in the throat of a charging enemy. Life moved in still shots of revelation, blackness, terror, blackness, death, blackness. Manwe danced around the figures as they appeared before him, their razor mouths gaping. Throats opened in drizzling lines.

  Wine ran in the galaxy of Cleon's starry summons.

  Manwe wrenched back the head of an underworlder and plunged his knife into the man's jugular. The body flopped to the hard stone, kicking in the pain as life spurted from his neck.

  Manwe turned, teeth bared at the dark world, ready for whatever monster came next. A hush came when a final body smacked the floor, a stale breath from the battle's heat that exhaled before a brooding silence asserted itself.

  Cleon mumbled, and a slow, burning ball of azure light formed. Casting the underground vault blue, the light shimmered in the wall’s mineral veins in hues of salmon and purple. The powdered forms of the dead underworlders blended well with the gray beneath their feet, their stone and wooden weapons broken.

  Cleon had remained on his spot in the center of the vault, untouched and not a hair out of place. Folami crouched by the wall, the fr
ont of her leather armor glistening blood. Her fighting knife trembled in her hand. Manwe surprised himself by how far he had gotten from them. Three bodies lay face down in their pools, stabbed and sliced to death by his quick work.

  The sorcerer's light cast the gore a purple-red to match the augmented hue of his robe. "What are these things, Panther?" he asked with honest curiosity. He stood over one of the bodies, glowing eyes fixed on the wedge-like teeth in the dead man’s mouth. "Is this what men become if they stay down here too long?"

  "I've fought with these… things before," Manwe replied. "They are a cruel sort, bred for feasting on the flesh of their own."

  "Maybe not," Cleon contended. "Vodunis can be 'men or women, not-men and not-women,' as they would say. What if these are the descendants who came down here and were forgotten, unable to become the holy things they had set out to be?"

  "Then the worm-god Lacroi has charmed mortals into a horrid fate," Manwe said, disturbed by his lover's musing at what he knew to be beasts—the same beasts who had taken Toba first and would not hesitate to take Cleon either. Beneath the weir-light, he spied ahead, letting the dim channels be revealed. For some reason, he thought he saw a flicker of something farther along, and not the gleam or shine of transcendental rock, but a light, an impossible star in a void.

  "Look on," said Folami. "Do you see it, Manwe?"

  Cleon turned in the direction they gazed, a beacon of red in a blue world. "Perhaps our journey is closer to completion than realized. Hurry!"

  Without a moment's rest, they continued, leaving behind the dead to do whatever the dead do in a lightless world. The farther they traveled toward this beckoning glow, the more shape and size returned. The tunnels, now easy to see and simple to navigate by sight alone, smoothed as if someone had taken the time to give them their luster. Before they could wonder at these feats of masonry, they were halted, staked to the ground when the saw what lay onward.

  The darkness had faded to the splendor of an illuminated city.

  A pair of staggered towers, like the fangs of a ridge-lion, grew from the unseen ceiling of a vault beyond a size Manwe had ever reckoned in a place often narrow and tight. Windows had been cut in the side of the rippling stone, and in a few places, torches sputtered in halls and on flights of stairs that riddled the descending structures like an upside-down anthill. A strange green light emanated from the obsidian metropolis built beneath these massive stalactites, a collection of shanties piled atop shanties holding up old stone structures, a necropolis that had built up instead of out. The viridian glamour seemed to streak the granite and swirl the metamorphic dark when Manwe realized something quite clear about their discovery.

  This was a city of ghosts—and it was abandoned.

  The three travelers found a road cut within the stone, a lighted highway that led to the first tower. Their path ended at a broken wooden door, its faces cracked by a great inward blow. Flecks of a weird scale smeared the damaged edges.

  Cleon held his shimmering wand forth to shine on the portal. "Interesting."

  Manwe picked at one of the scales, its thin sheet brittle between his fingers. "This is dry. Whatever passed through here did so long ago."

  "Perhaps none of Tolivius’ vodunis know about it," Folami conjectured. She entered the tower first, sneaking beneath the fallen furniture heaped past the entrance. “Coming?”

  It was not long before they came upon the first bodies. As they combed through the subterranean tower, they discovered rooms filled with corpses, finely dressed men and women with pleasant faces that were painted white, red, and yellow. Their bodies torn open, entrails hanging from crude hooks hammered into the walls. The old smell of their rot pervaded the keep. Not an insect or animal had disturbed them.

  On one of the many flights down to the base of the stalactite towers, Folami stopped in the threshold between the next stairwell and a room that must have served as some meditation cell. The soft light of a brazier set in the wall flickered, its flame a bright lime color.

  She looked down the lighted steps and slung off the pack she carried to rummage through it. "The stairwell is clear."

  Manwe took the corner of the room facing both the doorway to the stairs and the hall they had entered from, resigned to sleep upright so he could watch from his easy vantage when it was his turn to guard them. "What happened here, Cleon?" he asked his lover. "The city vodunis told us to go east to find their kind as if someone would be here to meet us. All we've found is death."

  "I bet Folami’s first guess was the right one: news below the earth moves slower than it does above." Cleon drew in the air with a bare finger, leaving starry strands pinned to nothing. "Those men we ran into in the channel might have been scavengers, picking the last loot of this place."

  "Then coming here was a waste," said Folami.

  "Bear hope, little bird." Cleon rolled out his blanket for the night. "Tomorrow is a fresh day and hopefully there will be fresh signs to follow. For now, I'll be glad for a bit of light that I don’t have to make," he said, his voice long and forlorn.

  Exhaustion claimed the three of them as they settled the hard ground, surrendering to the dangerous notion of sleep.

  On the first watch, Manwe could not count the hours since they descended into the underworld. Had it been a day? Or days? What if they had died in the battle, and now they were spirits, wondering the places beneath until the Mother called for them to live again and make up for their sins?

  What if it had been weeks since they last saw the sun?

  Letting the ache in his feet eat at his consciousness, he fought with his eyes to stay open. Rainbow-smeared walls wriggled as they cleaved from each other, threes upon sixes upon nines before it crashed into stark focus. Manwe's mind played tricks, sneaky little things that he tried to ignore:

  The cold hard lips of dying Toba, his last bit of affection for the man he had failed to save.

  A centaur charged a canyon.

  Somewhere, in the distance, lords and ladies bred before a strand of glittering diamonds.

  When the rainbow smears settled, Manwe stood beneath his old jackalberry tree, its boughs thickened by summer’s warmth. Grass tufted the hard soil, emerald pillows that only appeared for a short but wonderful time during the rainy season when sunshine and lightning bolts mixed in startling displays.

  Toba's fingers laced with his, but it wasn't Toba who held Manwe's hand.

  It was Cleon. Seated on the branch they shared, the sorcerer gave Manwe the kindest smile any Gypian had ever deigned to give him, the kind shared between people who simply saw each other for themselves.

  At the back of his mind came a familiar drumming, bone-on-bone knocking to a quick beat. Wedge-toothed devils chewed on pink intestines.

  The sorcerer's handsome face slackened as the sun arched over the savannah, and as the orange disk headed for the earth, Cleon's face withered and decayed, a dead skin mark that clung to the bones, mottled and black. A moan of torment echoed from the emaciated body. Time carried on, eroding at things material until… Souls passed on, to live and arise, never left below the dirt.

  Cleon's soul could not break the dirt.

  Manwe woke with a start, bolting upright from the ground. On his feet, he searched the dimly-lit chamber where the three of them slept, his knife at the ready. No nightmares attacked.

  "Panther," Cleon whispered.

  Manwe turned in the sorcerer’s direction, his knife raised for harm.

  Cleon stared back at him, his golden eyes swirling in black sand deserts, tornadoes of shifting embers. The rich fabric of his red robes glowed faintly, like a bright fruit struck by night’s little light.

  The sorcerer did not flinch. "It's only a nightmare, Panther.”

  Manwe sniffled, embarrassed. His knife fell from its place, hidden from sight like the fell thing it was. He palmed some tears from his eyes. "Isn't everything down here?"

  Cleon's eyes shifted a second time toward the lime brazier. “Aye, but little things
can make it suitable."

  "Suitable?" Manwe scoffed at the idea and the brazier. "How can this be suitable? This is not a place for living folk."

  "That is why the great vodunis come down here," Cleon said. "Perhaps in this place between all places they find a different sort of sorcery, something more innate to our kind."

  Assured that they were alone, Manwe relaxed his vigil. He returned to the corner he had fallen asleep in. He glanced to where Folami slumbered, her head buried beneath the pair of small blankets she had brought with her. Curious to if she listened or not, another wave of tired invaded Manwe. He slouched into his place. "Then what does that say about the sorceries we see up above?"

  "It says that we are further than we think yet feebler than we can imagine," Cleon replied, his expression thoughtful. "It makes sense that to learn to raise the dead one would go to a place where the dead supposedly go. We are at a nexus between life and death, where one walks those threshold places, where the rules that govern the world above may not hold in the world below. The dead might be the least we deal with."

  Manwe regarded his lover in that moment, curious about what horrors waited beyond the next set of stairs.

  Manwe reached the bottom landing to a new hall, this one longer than the last a floor above. He signaled for Folami to follow, who, in turn, let Cleon know to bring up the rear. The three had risen an hour before, ate a cold breakfast of nuts and sun-dried fruit, and set to combing the halls of the tower, this time heartened by the lack of corpses that had choked the upper levels. Allowed a fresh breath of clean air, the trio meandered through the rooms, taking their time to examine the few things they could spot with Cleon's weir-light.

  "They must have lived simply down here," Manwe whispered while he observed a broken oil lamp he had picked up along their route. "They all had their little lights."

  "And if the power of a voduni is as it says it is," Cleon followed, "then whatever power snuffed them all out must have been ferocious."