Chained By Fear: 2 (24 page)

“I doesn’t care,” Ugga said. “I wants more of the beer.”

Torg leaned down and whispered in Elu’s ear. “I have a gift for you.”

He slid Sōbhana’s dagger into Elu’s boot. “Keep it safe. It’s quite valuable.”

Despite his drunkenness, the Svakaran smiled. “As you say,
great one
.”

When midnight arrived, the tavern was bursting with drunken fools, including Ugga, Bard, Elu and Rathburt. Torg imagined the four of them standing by the log fire, their arms draped around each other at various heights, singing like loons. In a short while they would most likely head for the brothels within the seventh wall.

By this time, Torg was gone. He sat alone in his room at the inn, attempting to meditate. But he was unable to clear his mind, continually replaying his conversation with the merchant. Whatever the barrels contained, it couldn’t be good. But why would the witches want or need to poison an entire city, especially one as prosperous and militarily neutral as Senasana? Torg had missed something, but he couldn’t determine what.

The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he needed to find out what was in the barrels. And the only way to do that was to open them himself. He cursed the starlight, which provided too much illumination on such a clear night. But he was a Death-Knower, Asēkha and Tugar wrapped into one. His abilities would suffice.

As would be expected of an Asēkha, Torg had earlier chosen a belted black tunic and breeches from the batch of new clothes. His hooded cloak also was black, but it was too cumbersome for his intended mission, despite the chill in the night air. He went to a pewter basin in the latrine that was filled with clean water. Then he dumped the water down a small drain and stuffed the now-empty basin with towels. With a burst of flame from his fingertips, he reduced them to ash. It happened so quickly, there was very little smoke. Torg ground the ash in his hands and rubbed it on his face.

With the Silver Sword strapped to his back in its new scabbard, Torg exited the room through the window. His stealth was such that the warder in the turret saw no unusual movements.

The gaps between the stone blocks provided adequate grips. Torg wound his way around the back of the building and dropped into a narrow alley between the inn and the seventh wall. He knelt there and examined his surroundings. A hundred paces to his left, a door opened and someone emptied a bucket of garbage onto the pavement. Torg saw a dozen fist-sized shapes converge on it, tearing into the discarded food.

Torg crept along the base of the seventh wall, examining its texture with his fingertips. It was made of the same slippery stone as the ninth wall but otherwise was far less grand, smaller even than the eighth. Torg crouched on his haunches and leapt upward, landing like a cat on the top of the wall. From his vantage point, he could see the brothels, which swarmed with late-night business. Behind dark windows, men, women and even monsters engaged in every conceivable form of sexual activity. Few paid any attention to what was going on in the streets. With little effort, Torg passed by unseen.

The sixth wall also was small and undefended. Torg leapt over it and dropped onto a walkway of tiny white pebbles. The crunch of his soft landing was the first discernible sound he had made since climbing out the window of the inn.

Torg crept around the side of a white building that was raised off the ground on squat pillars. He knelt down and peered into a crawl space, studying a sunken area containing several wood furnaces stoked by male attendants. Heat rose up through hollowed spaces in the walls. Torg stood and then slid the toe of his boot into a crevice in one of the pillars, clambering up to a small window. He looked inside a well-lighted chamber that contained a pool of heated water. A dozen naked women lounged around the steamy pool, while several more were submerged past their shoulders. The ones he could see were tall, muscular and small-breasted, with short-cropped hair.

Torg recognized them as Sāykans, the famed female soldiers of Kamupadana. The Warlish witches had been masters of the Whore City for ten thousand years, but a never-ending line of Sāykans had served as its guardians for millennia beyond count. With the rise of Avici removing any serious threat of attack, the Sāykans now were used primarily as a police force. But they remained capable of holding the walls against great armies. In the corner of the bath, Torg could see their weapons arranged in open cabinets. Several female attendants stood nearby.

The Sāykans’ taut bodies were extremely pleasant to observe. They reminded Torg of Sōbhana, and he lingered by the window longer than was wise. The Sāykans were not as skilled as Tugars, but they were well-trained and clever. Then, one of the soldiers noticed something.

“We are watched!” she said.

Instantly they were on alert, racing toward their weapons and shouting orders to the attendants to sound an alarm. Torg cursed himself for his lapse of concentration and fled down a narrow space between the concrete buildings. He needed to get as far from the commotion as possible before attempting to scale the fifth wall, which he knew was the most heavily guarded of all.

The alley opened into a manicured courtyard. Several Sāykans, wearing studded leather tunics and leggings, stood near a bubbling fountain. As of yet they seemed unaware of any disturbance. A building adjacent to the bathhouse had a low balcony facing the courtyard. Torg pulled himself onto the balcony and crept along the flat stone on his stomach like a centipede.

A scourge of shouting followed, and a dozen half-dressed soldiers poured out of the bathhouse, calling to their sisters by the fountain. In response, several raced into the alley to investigate.

Torg waited until they returned. He was close enough to hear their report. They had found nothing. He waited until they dispersed.

Again Torg cursed himself for his stupidity before dropping off the balcony and slipping along the borders of the courtyard. He passed a second bathhouse, slithered through a narrow alley and raced along a lonely street for half a mile without encountering anyone. When he passed between another pair of buildings, he saw the fifth wall. It wasn’t as enormous as the ninth, but it was easily the second largest of all, almost fifty cubits tall and surmounted by walks with machicolated parapets. A deep moat, swarming with small but deadly eels capable of stripping the flesh off a person in moments, surrounded its base. One massive drawbridge spanned the moat, but it was not visible from where Torg stood. In the starlight, he could see dozens of soldiers patrolling the walks. Even late at night and with little threat of direct attack, they remained on alert.

Torg wondered if the mysterious barrels in the ziggurat had anything to do with heightened security.

Crouching in the dirt, he gauged his situation. The fifth wall was more than four hundred paces from where he stood. Beyond the moat was an empty expanse of hard-pressed clay, with scattered patches of gnarled grass. The archers on top of the wall had plenty of visibility. Torg wondered if it might be impossible—even for him—to advance much farther without being seen.

However, the water was dark enough to provide concealment. Torg wasn’t in the mood to wander around naked the rest of the night, so he stripped off his clothes to protect them from the eels, wound them around the leather scabbard and stepped into the moat, holding the scabbard above his head so that his black outfit would not be chewed to shreds.

Instantly, the eels attacked his exposed skin. While most other beings would have been bloodily devoured, Torg was unharmed. It felt like goldfish were nibbling and tickling him, especially on his penis.

Torg walked into the chilly water up to his chin and then swam one-handed until he was able to stand again. The eels continued to gnaw at him, unsuccessfully. He veered to his right and waded in the direction where he believed the drawbridge to be, which was his best—and perhaps only—chance of continuing his mission. He couldn’t conceive of any way he could scale this wall without being discovered.

The crescent moon had long since set in the west, but at least half the night still remained. Torg would need every bit of darkness. He hoped to be back at the inn by dawn. Otherwise, he might have to hide in some hidden cranny, while his four companions fretted over his unexplained disappearance.

Torg shuffled through the water for what seemed like a very long time before the drawbridge came into view. Blessedly, the great wood bridge was lowered. But it also was heavily guarded. He could see more than twenty Sāykans in plain view, which meant twice that many were hidden.

There was a dry area beneath the bridge on the far bank. Torg lay there on his side and dressed, while the eels flopped and snapped in the shallow water just beyond.

The soldiers on the bridge talked among themselves, sensing no need for discretion. Torches lit the twin towers that framed the gateway. To enter undetected, Torg needed a diversion.

The iron bands that secured the wooden planks of the drawbridge provided handholds. Torg slithered beneath the bridge over the deepest area of the moat—and waited. Boots thumped above him. He heard laughter, one soldier teasing another. As quick as a snake, Torg reached around the edge of the bridge, grasped an ankle and yanked one of the women over the side.

The soldier screamed as she fell. The dark water broiled. The others raced to the edge of the bridge but were too late to save her. Meanwhile, Torg slipped through the gateway, a silent black shape.

For a moment, Torg’s mind was elsewhere. Sister Tathagata wagged her skinny finger at him, scolding him for his cruelty. He argued back that anyone who sided with Invictus was his enemy.
But did the soldier have family? Friends? How much suffering would her death cause?
It would take many lifetimes to cleanse Torg’s karma of this violent act. Torg tried to ignore his guilt, but he could not ignore that killing left him feeling dirty. He found himself envying Rathburt.

The gap between the fifth and fourth walls was the narrowest of all, containing rows of wooden barracks that had been built and rebuilt thousands of times while the nine walls had magically resisted disintegration, requiring little repair.

The majority of the Sāykans must have been asleep, but hundreds still wandered the pathways between the barracks. The cramped conditions worked to Torg’s advantage. He slipped from shadow to shadow, approaching the fourth wall in just a few quick steps. This wall was only ten cubits tall and unguarded. Torg vaulted over it.

Within the fourth wall stood the quarters of all nonmilitary personnel who resided permanently in the city—grooms, maids, cooks, kitchen helpers, servitors, heralds, minstrels, stewards and other laborers. Of these, most were women, while men, the inferior species, occupied only the lowliest positions. Any male living permanently within the fourth wall was either a eunuch—and not by personal choice—or a man used as a breeder.

Torg moved through this area easily. Almost everyone was asleep, and he saw few soldiers on the streets. The third wall was the same height as the fourth and contained many gates left untended to allow residents to enter the temple complex.

Strangely, the top of the third wall was lined with thousands of multicolored candles. Torg had never seen or heard of this before. Tendrils of wax coated the stone. Torg slipped inside an open door. The temples were dark. He noticed a lone woman in white robes standing on a ladder, replacing old candles with new.

Torg stood still and watched her for twenty long breaths. She appeared to be the only person in the immediate area. He came up from behind, kicked the ladder out from under her and caught her as she fell, suppressing her yelp with the palm of his hand. When she struggled, he compressed a pressure point behind her right ear. The girl went limp.

Torg carried her into a nearby thicket and held the Silver Sword against her throat. Her face was pale with fear, but when he removed his hand from her mouth, she did not scream or struggle.

“If you do as I say, I won’t harm you,” Torg whispered. “But if you cry out or try to run, I’ll kill you. Do you doubt it?”

She nodded, almost coolly.

“Good. Answer my questions quietly, and I give you my word you’ll live to see the morning.”

She nodded again, this time more vigorously.

“Why the candles?”

In a steady voice, she whispered, “There’s a special ceremony
 . . .
inside the ziggurat. The candles are to entrap the spirits. They cannot pass beyond the holy light. At least, that’s what the witches tell us.”

“What kind of spirits?”

“The witches do not say. But whenever the witches perform their magic, the spirits are aroused.” And then she whispered, even more quietly: “And I’ve overheard the royal priestesses speak of
undines
.”

This stunned Torg.
Undines
were creatures that normally dwelled in the demon realm. When summoned into the world of the living, they entered flesh and multiplied until the host body swarmed with them. The result was a grotesque ruination of the mind and body that created a cannibalistic fiend capable of infecting others with their bites.