Ghost in the Inferno (Ghost Exile #5) Read online

  So why couldn’t he torture the truth out of them?

  He had said so himself. He couldn’t gain the truth because he was going to settle for their deaths.

  Which meant he had some means of accomplishing their deaths concealed within the Hall of Torments.

  Caina cursed herself as a fool.

  It was a trap.

  Caina raked her ghostsilver dagger through the distorted air in front of her face. The weapon grew warm as it disrupted Kylon’s spell, and her voice lost its unnatural volume.

  “Go!” she shouted. “The Hall of Torments is a trap! Into the Hall of Forges, now! Run! Run!”

  They turned to sprint for the Hall of Forges.

  A deep, resonant click echoed through the Hall of Torments, and the floor started to tilt beneath Caina’s feet. A long, straight crack appeared in the floor a few inches to her right, and on the other side of the crack the floor began to tilt in the opposite direction.

  A double trapdoor.

  Of course. This had been Kharnaces’ throne room. Likely the ancient Great Necromancer had executed slaves by having the floor fall open beneath them, sending them plummeting to their deaths in the Halls of the Dead below.

  “Jump!” bellowed Nasser. He leaped for the archway as the trapdoors slid ponderously open and caught the edge, pulling himself over. Laertes followed suit, and Malcolm seized Nerina by the waist, slung her over his shoulder, and jumped. He wavered at the edge, and Laertes seized them and pulled them over.

  Caina and Annarah ran for the archway, the floor tilting even more ponderously. Morgant heaved himself over the edge and stood, while Kylon hesitated, looking back at Caina as the floor’s tilt grew sharper.

  “Damn it, Kyracian, go!” shouted Morgant. “Ciaran, your rope! Throw it to us quickly!”

  Caina reached for the coiled rope at her belt, and suddenly the trapdoors fell all the way open. Kylon leapt backward with a surge of sorcerous power, but Caina lost her balance and fell.

  She slammed into Annarah, and both of them tumbled into the yawning darkness below the massive trapdoors.

  Chapter 17: Undying

  “Hold on to me!” screamed Caina, wrapping her left arm around Annarah’s waist and hooking her left leg into hers.

  She didn’t know if the loremaster heard her through the rushing wind of their fall, and it didn’t matter. Caina had exactly one chance to do this right. If she missed, both she and Annarah would plunge to their deaths. At least it would be quick. Though they might rise as undead in the darkness of the Inferno.

  Best not to find out.

  Caina opened the collapsible grapnel at the end of the rope and flung it with all her strength. It tumbled overhead, the rope unwinding as they fell, and Caina saw a flash as the grapnel went over the right edge of the trapdoors.

  The rope went taut, and Caina came to a sudden halt, the jerk sending a spasm of pain through her waist as the rope pulled her belt against her stomach and hips. For an awful instant she was sure that the belt would snap, or that the rope would break. Yet both the rope and the belt held. Annarah’s arms and legs tightened around Caina, and she caught a brief glimpse of the loremaster’s eyes, wide and green and terrified. Distantly Caina realized that she was terrified too, but seemed a less urgent matter than climbing back up to the Hall of Torments before the rope broke.

  Or before the Immortals simply cut the rope.

  “Kylon!” shouted Caina. “Pull us up!” Another click echoed in the darkness, and the squeal of metallic gears came from somewhere. Caina looked around, trying to spot the source of the noise, and then she started to rise, Annarah still clinging to her.

  The stone doors were closing, pulling up the rope. Caina suspected the grapnel had lodged in the hinge between the stone door and the floor. The sheer weight of the doors would crush the grapnel, and then Caina and Annarah would fall to their deaths.

  There wasn’t enough time to get back to the Hall of Torments, and not even Kylon’s strength could pull them up before the doors closed.

  “Down,” said Caina. “We have to go down.”

  “What?” said Annarah.

  “Hold on,” said Caina, releasing one of the leather ties on the coil of rope at her belt.

  All at once the coil released and they fell. Again they came to a jerking halt, pain shooting up Caina’s stomach and hips as the belt dug into her. Annarah yelped and grabbed at Caina to keep from falling, which also hurt. She was a fit woman, but taller and heavier than Caina.

  Caina felt herself rising as the doors continued their ponderous swing.

  “Light,” croaked Caina. “Light, we need light.”

  Annarah thrust her left hand. At some point the pyrikon had reverted to its bracelet form, and her fingers shone with white light. In the pale glow Caina saw a stone floor about a dozen feet below them. Dark stains marked the stone, likely left over from various other victims Rolukhan had sent plummeting to their deaths.

  “We have to drop the rest of the way,” said Caina.

  “We’ll break our legs,” said Annarah.

  “Maybe,” said Caina. “Let your legs collapse underneath you and roll until your momentum stops. I’m going to drop you.” She risked a glance up. The rectangle of light was a lot higher up than she had thought. The rope was two hundred feet long, which gave her an idea of how far they had fallen. “I’m going to let you go on the count of three. One.” She shifted around, pointing Annarah’s feet towards the floor. “Two.” Annarah managed a sickly nod. She had faced down nagataaru without flinching, but evidently heights held a special terror for her. “Three.”

  She let go, and so did Annarah. The loremaster fell to the floor in a billow of white robes, and did a passingly good job of tucking her legs and rolling. Caina tugged at her belt, releasing the rope, and dropped the rest of the way to the floor just as the boom of the closing doors echoed overhead. She hit the floor, letting her legs collapse, and rolled across the hard floor, and came to a stop against a stone wall. Every inch of her body ached and throbbed from the impact, and for a moment she was too stunned to move or even to breathe.

  Then at last she took a ragged breath and managed to sit up.

  “Gods,” Caina croaked. Heights did not particularly bother her, but she had still just dropped nearly two hundred feet. Still, she didn’t seem to have broken any bones, and she was still alive.

  Kylon and the others still in the Hall of Forges might not stay that way for long.

  A wave of sheer terror went through Caina, driving her to stand. She did not need to imagine what Malik Rolukhan would do if Kylon fell into his hands. If Rolukhan learned that Kylon was in the Inferno, he would do everything in his power to kill him.

  Caina had to help them.

  Yet what could she do? She was one woman with a shadow-cloak, a ghostsilver dagger, and some throwing knives. She couldn’t carve her way through hundreds of Immortals to rescue Kylon and the others, and they could not defeat hundreds of Immortals on their own.

  What could they do but die?

  In the Inferno, death was likely the best possible outcome.

  No. She would not give up. She could not give up.

  “Annarah?” said Caina, peering into the gloom. The white light of Annarah’s pyrikon still shimmered in the darkness. “Annarah, can you hear me?”

  “I’m here,” said Annarah. Caina drew closer and saw that Annarah had shifted her pyrikon to a staff, leaning on it as she tried to stand.

  “Are you hurt?” said Caina.

  “No,” said Annarah. “Well. Yes. I think I turned my ankle. Though I shouldn’t complain. We ought to be dead.”

  Caina helped her to stand. “Can you generate more light?”

  “Easily,” said Annarah, raising her staff. The light at the end of pyrikon shone brighter, throwing back the gloom. They stood in a round chamber, a high cylinder that was a smaller version of the Hall of Flames. On either side of the chamber, Caina saw a stairwell descending deeper into the earth.


  None of the stairs went up. Her rope lay in a tangled pile a few yards away, the end snapped off by the closing trapdoors. They couldn’t get back up that way.

  “Damn it,” said Caina.

  “Thank you for my life,” said Annarah, hobbling a bit as she leaned upon her staff.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” said Caina. “All the corpses are gone.”

  “This Rolukhan must have sent slaves to carry them away…oh,” said Annarah. “The Halls of the Dead.”

  “Aye,” said Caina, feeling the cold aura of the necromantic spell around her. “We’re far enough down that we’re within the influence of whatever spell animates the undead.”

  “Oh,” said Annarah. “You are a sorcerer, then, Master Ciaran?”

  “What?” said Caina. “No. No, I’m just…sensitive.” She urged Annarah forward. “Let’s go.” She thought for a moment. “Those stairs must descend to the Halls of the Dead beneath the Hall of Forges. We can take the stairs and rejoin the others there.”

  If they were still alive and free.

  Annarah did not move.

  “What?” said Caina.

  The loremaster stared at Caina, her eyes full of sudden fear.

  “Who are you?” said Annarah.

  “Does it matter?” said Caina, and then she realized that the cowl of her shadow-cloak had fallen back during their misadventure with the rope. That meant the cloak no longer shielded her from arcane detection, and if Annarah had any arcane senses similar to Kylon’s…

  “Are you reading my thoughts?” said Caina.

  “No,” said Annarah. “A loremaster may not use the Words of Lore to enter the mind of another without permission. But we have an arcane sense, of sorts. Every mortal weaves a thread in the tapestry of destiny, and we can catch glimpses of those threads.” She swallowed. “I can see the shadows upon your thread.”

  “Ah,” said Caina, looking at the stairwells. “I can see how that would be troubling.”

  “Are you…are you the Herald of Ruin?” said Annarah.

  “What?” said Caina.

  “The Bringer of Dust, the Queen of Crows, the Moroaica, as the Szalds call her,” said Annarah. “The Herald of Ruin, as the loremasters named her. The Destroyer of Maat.”

  “I know the titles, yes. And no, I’m not her,” said Caina. “But she possessed me for about a year, though she could not control me.”

  “Then you are a woman?” said Annarah. “The Herald of Ruin only possessed women.”

  “Yes,” said Caina. “This is not important just now.”

  Yet her words did not seem to reach Annarah.

  “I’ve never seen a thread like yours,” whispered Annarah. “Not the Prince, not Callatas’s, not Morgant’s, not anyone’s. You have crossed so many threads, altered so many destinies. And I…and I see a shadow in your future…”

  “What kind of shadow?” said Caina. The wraithblood addicts said the same thing.

  “I don’t know,” said Annarah. She grasped Caina’s arm, her eyes full of wonder. “But the legends are true. You are the Balarigar, the demonslayer, the bane of sorcerers and tyrants.”

  “I very much doubt that,” said Caina.

  “You…you could even be the liberator,” said Annarah.

  “We can discuss the matter later,” said Caina, “if we manage to live through this.”

  She reached up and drew up the cowl of her shadow-cloak, cutting off whatever vision Annarah saw.

  “Yes,” said Annarah, blinking. “Yes, you are right. Forgive me. It has been a…trying day.”

  “A trying century and a half, I imagine,” said Caina, moving forward. Annarah managed to keep pace, though it was plain her right ankle pained her.

  “It does not seem that way,” said Annarah. “But a few hours have passed for me. The Words of Lore were right to warn of the peril of the netherworld. It is not a place for mortals.”

  “I agree completely,” said Caina as they reached the top of the stairs.

  “But your thread,” said Annarah. “Traveling to the netherworld leaves a mark upon mortal auras. You have been to the netherworld multiple times, to judge from what I saw.”

  “Yes,” said Caina. “That was the fourth time. I really hope it was the last.” She had said that after the first three times, too.

  “You have done all these things…and you are a Ghost nightfighter?” said Annarah, still stunned. “I have spoken with Ghost nightfighters before. I met with one to seek the help of the Ghosts after Iramis burned, but the Red Huntress killed him, and I fled instead to Rumarah, where I met Morgant. None of the Ghost nightfighters I met were like you.”

  “I’ve done some things and seen some places,” said Caina. “If we get out of here alive, I might tell you about some of them. We…”

  A creaking, tapping sound came from ahead, and green light flared in the darkness further down the stairs.

  “Here they come,” said Caina. “The undead. Your pyrikon warded us from them before, when we entered the Inferno. Can it do so again?”

  “Of course,” murmured Annarah, tapping the end of her staff against the stairs. Again Caina felt a surge of Annarah’s resonant arcane power, and the white light radiating from the pyrikon grew brighter. An instant later a score of undead rushed out of the darkness, wreathed in ghostly green images of themselves, and came to a sudden stop at the edge of the light.

  Caina let out a sigh of relief. She wasn’t sure if the new pyrikon upon her wrist could have done the same, and this was not the time to find out.

  “Keep walking,” she said. They moved forward, and the undead retreated from the light. “Don’t let that light go out, either.”

  Annarah shook her head, silver hair sliding against her shoulders. “The effort to maintain it is minimal. I only wish I could do more.”

  “More of what?” said Caina.

  “To aid them,” said Annarah. “The Undying. Some of them have been imprisoned here for thousands of years, ever since Kharnaces the Great Heretic was defeated. Thousands upon thousands more Undying have risen in the centuries since. I imagine this Malik Rolukhan, the current Lieutenant of this evil place, has thrown hundreds if not thousands of victims to be raised by the spell upon the Halls of the Dead.” She shook her head. “If there was a way to free them from the enslavement of the bloodcrystal, I would do it.”

  “The enslavement?” said Caina.

  Something started to rattle in her thoughts, her mind putting pieces together.

  Free the slaves, Samnirdamnus had said.

  Do what you always have done, Sulaman had told her.

  “Wait,” said Caina. “Bloodcrystal. What do you mean, a bloodcrystal?”

  “A bloodcrystal is a tool of Maatish necromancy, made from the blood of a murdered victim,” said Annarah. “A necromancer can use it as a reservoir of stolen life force, and they can be created to serve other purposes as well…”

  “I know,” said Caina. “But a bloodcrystal powers the spell binding the Undying?”

  “I believe so,” said Annarah. “Most likely one of the greater Maatish bloodcrystals, probably a Subjugant Bloodcrystal.”

  “I’ve never heard of that kind,” said Caina. “I’ve encountered an Ascendant Bloodcrystal, but not a…”

  “You encountered an Ascendant Bloodcrystal and you’re still alive?” said Annarah, stunned yet again.

  “Not important right now,” said Caina. “Tell me about a Subjugant Bloodcrystal.”

  “It was one of the greater forms of Maatish bloodcrystal,” said Annarah. “The Great Necromancers wrought them to aid the Kingdom of the Rising Sun’s wars of conquest. Any living mortal slain within the reach of the crystal’s aura rises as an Undying under the command of the crystal’s bearer.”

  “I see how that would be useful in a battle,” said Caina, though the thought revolted her.

  “Likely Kharnaces left a Subjugant Bloodcrystal here to defend the fortress,” said Annarah. “I’m sure the College of Alchemis
ts would have loved to have claimed it, but the undead kill anyone who approach the crystal.”

  “Why didn’t the loremasters of Iramis destroy it?” said Caina. “Your powers can ward away the undead.”

  “We should have,” said Annarah, “but other concerns held our attention, and then the Padishahs claimed the Inferno as part of their realm, and the Prince had no wish to provoke war with Istarinmul.”

  Caina nodded, her mind racing. Kylon and the others could not hold out against Rolukhan and the Immortals for very long. Even if she and Annarah rejoined them, they would be overwhelmed.

  Unless they had help.

  Caina looked at the undead filling the stairs and took a deep breath.

  “This,” she said to herself, “is probably a very bad idea.”

  “What do you mean?” said Annarah.

  Caina drew back her shadow-cloak’s cowl and stepped to the very edge of the light.

  “Balarigar!” said Annarah with alarm.

  The undead flinched away from Caina.

  “Who am I?” said Caina, staring at the undead, watching the ghostly images writhe over their bones. “Look at me!” Her voice echoed through the stairwell. “Look at me and tell me who I am!”

  For a moment the dead remained motionless.

  “The Bloodmaiden,” croaked one, the ghostly image of a Maatish soldier in kilt and cuirass playing over his bones.

  “The Bringer of Dust,” rasped another.

  “The Queen of Crows.”

  “The Destroyer.”

  “And what did the Destroyer do?” said Caina.

  “She destroyed the Kingdom of the Rising Sun,” said one of the ancient Maatish soldiers.

  “She threw down the Undying pharaohs from their thrones and ground them into the sand of the desert,” said another.

  How Jadriga would have laughed.

  She had tried so hard to recruit Caina as a disciple, and Caina had refused her every time. Now Caina was about to pretend to be her. Perhaps she had earned that right. Both Andromache and the Sage Talekhris had mistaken Caina for the Moroaica, and that had nearly gotten her killed several times.