Chapter 3 - Infiltrating the Dark Keep

The hilltop offered a view that made my balls try to crawl back inside me. Blackrock Hold lay down there, a heap of broken towers and half-fallen walls. The cold slapped me in the face and cut straight through my cloak. This place was older than dirt and twice as dead. I shivered and pulled my cloak tighter, but that cold came off the place itself.

The valley below was a mess of weeds and dead trees, the ground cracked between them. Mist hung over the valley floor, thick enough to chew, and hid the bottom half of the fortress. I wanted to turn Bertha around and ride straight back to Ashbourne. But I had a job to do, and damned if I was going to let a pile of old rocks scare me off.

I led Bertha into a copse of gnarled trees that were somehow still alive in all this. I tied her reins to a low, rotting branch.

“Hey, girl, I’ll be back. Promise.” I patted her flank. She was warm, the only warm thing for a mile. She nickered low, and I could swear she didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame her. I wasn’t entirely sure myself.

I turned towards the ruin. The sun was almost down, and the ruin’s walls had gone black, full of holes I couldn’t see into. I took a deep breath and got a mouthful of rot. I’d been in worse places. Well, maybe not worse, but just as bad.

I focused on the shadows around me and slipped into the Shadow Dance. My skin went cool, and the edges of my vision blurred. I moved like someone who actually knew what he was doing for once, over the open ground towards the fortress. A year of Ashara drilling me in that skimpy leather had paid off. I’d learned the footwork, and I’d learned every inch of her ass. The walls came up fast, crumbling gray blocks with half of them missing. Overgrown ivy crawled across the stone and choked the gaps between the blocks, and my gut knotted tighter with every step.

As I neared what might once have been the main gate, now a large hole in the wall, I checked the ground before I trusted it, and there they were, tripwires: almost invisible threads that caught the last of the light, stretched taut across the uneven ground, hidden among the fallen stones and weeds.

“Clever bastard,” I muttered. I carefully skirted the wires, picking my way through the debris one slow step at a time.

I stepped across the threshold into the dark. The air got colder the farther in I went, and it stank of decay with something coppery and sweet underneath. I was pretty sure it was blood, so I breathed through my mouth.

I went slowly, eyes adjusting to the dark. The walls were damp, slick with moisture and moss. Something was growing in the corners, feeding on the rot. I decided I didn’t want to know what.

I ducked under a collapsed archway and found cages, rusted and swaying in the drafts that whistled through the broken walls. They hung from chains bolted to the pillars, and the last gray light leaking in showed me what was inside: bodies, or what was left of them.

They might have been villagers once. Now they were dried-out, twisted things, some still wearing rags. Others had swollen up with rot, and I had to swallow hard to keep my supper down. Their mouths hung wide open, and I’d swear their empty eye sockets followed me as I moved.

Malkor had gone all in on the haunted ruins aesthetic. His budget must have been tight. It was mostly set dressing, and the actual fortress was half rubble. I almost admired the commitment.

I turned away from the cages. Dim torchlight flickered ahead, throwing shadows that jumped and twitched along the walls. With it came the sound of guttural chanting, low and steady, carried on the same drafts. Nobody chants in a ruin at sundown for any good reason.

I pressed myself flat to a stretch of wall, the stone cold on my back. I held my breath, listening. The chanting echoed off the empty stone until it came from all around me. Somewhere up ahead, feet shuffled on loose stones and robes rustled. None of them were in a hurry, so nobody had heard me yet.

Stop Malkor. Save the girls. Grab the grimoire if I could. I had to keep moving.

As I stood there, I thought about how much easier this would be with Felix at my back. He was even better in the shadows than I was. Plus I’d have had his ass to look at. But he wasn’t here, so it was just me and my daggers.

I pushed the thought aside and went on down the corridor. It was a mess of fallen masonry and rotting timbers, and every board was a chance to snap something loud under my boot.

As I turned a corner, a flagstone sank under my boot, and steel came swinging out of the dark straight at me. I threw myself sideways and landed hard on the stone floor. A pendulum blade on a rusted chain hissed past right over my head, and the chain shook dust and grit down on me from the ceiling.

I scrambled to my feet with my heart hammering and searched the corridor for more traps. That one was on me. I’d been so busy watching the floor for wires that I never looked up.

Further down, the old grand staircase had collapsed into a heap choked with weeds. That was where I found two guards, lit by a torch in a bracket on the wall: hulking figures with lumps of extra flesh bulging out of them. Their skin was a mess of gray and sickly yellow, none of it matching, with seams of scar tissue running between sections where someone had stitched different bodies into one. Black veins pulsed beneath the surface. Their eyes were milky white, unseeing, but their noses twitched, heads jerking side to side, sniffing. They were blind and hunting by smell, and I hoped to the gods I didn’t stink of Bertha as bad as I suspected.

I kept to the shadows, skirting the edge of their patrol. The pair of them shuffled past, close enough that I could smell the wet meat on them. They moved in jerky, uneven steps, too many joints bending in directions joints shouldn’t bend.

The third one I didn’t see.

Something with too many fingers closed around my throat from behind. They wrapped all the way around my neck, each one thick as a sausage, and squeezed. My feet left the ground.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t scream. The thing swung me around and pinned me against the wall by my throat, my boots kicking uselessly at its torso. Up close, it was worse. Its face was two faces, stitched together down the middle, one half grinning, the other screaming. Yellow fluid oozed from the seams where the flesh didn’t quite meet. It stank of open wounds and vinegar.

My vision went spotty, and the edges went black. My hands clawed at the fingers, but they stayed locked tight, and I was scared out of my fucking mind.

It hit me that I had daggers. My right hand let go of its fingers, found the hilt at my belt and pulled the dagger. I couldn’t swing. No room, no leverage, no air. So I did what Ashara taught me when everything goes to shit: find the weak spot and stick something sharp in it.

I drove the blade into its eye.

It was the good eye, the only one on that face that wasn’t milky, and it was looking right at me.

Yellow ichor sprayed across my face. It was hot and thick, and it tasted of copper and bile. Oh, that was foul. That was genuinely the worst thing I’d ever had in my mouth, and I’d eaten Maple’s mystery stew. The thing screamed, a gurgling shriek that came from two throats at once, and the grip loosened for half a second. I sucked in air, shoved the dagger in deeper, twisted. More gunk gushed down my arm, soaking my sleeve.

It squeezed again, harder than before, and my ears started ringing.

I yanked the blade free and stabbed again, at the throat this time. The steel punched through gristle with a wet pop. Its blood spurted onto the wall and all over me. The thing staggered. The fingers spasmed open. I dropped, hit the ground on my knees, and when it bent over me, I drove the blade up under its jaw before it could recover. Stay dead, you ugly bastard.

It went down hard. The floor shook. Its yellow blood pooled under it and crept over the cracked stone in little streams.

I stayed on my knees, gasping, my hands shaking so hard the dagger almost slipped from my grip. My lungs burned. Every breath scraped my throat raw.

Breathe. Assess. Move. That was Ashara’s voice in my head, in the same tone she used when she cracked me across the knuckles during training. Up, Samuel. You can bleed later, when nobody’s watching.

I wiped the worst of the slime from my eyes with my sleeve, which only smeared it around. I checked the corridor. The other two guards hadn’t heard, or if they had, they were too stupid to come running. Lucky me.

I stood up on shaky legs. My throat throbbed where those fingers had been. I’d have bruises for a week. I looked down at the dead thing at my feet, at the goo still oozing from three stab wounds, at the ruined patchwork face.

“You’re disgusting,” I told it. My voice came out as a raw croak. “And you got your shit all over my good cloak.”

I wiped my dagger on the thing’s rags and kept moving deeper. The torchlight ahead grew brighter, the chanting louder.

I had yellow crap drying on my face and a dead mutant behind me, and this was the glamorous life of a rogue.

But I was still breathing, and I was still in the shadows. Stop Malkor, save the girls, grab the grimoire. Everything else could wait.

Ashara would beat me bloody for getting grabbed like that. She’d also remind me I was still alive, which meant I’d done something right. Small comfort when you’ve got monster blood in your teeth.