Cursed Bones

chapter 45



They carried him to the fire and laid him down, but that only seemed to make things worse. He seized up in pain, gasping in short breaths, rolling on his side and curling into a ball. His men looked from one to the other and shook their heads in resignation. He’d been crushed by a giant snake. Most people didn’t survive such a thing.

Isabel walked over and picked up the club, Ayela forestalling any protest from Trajan’s men with a withering glare while standing over her wounded brother. Isabel walked away into the swamp, far enough for Hector’s last healing potion to work. Without it, Trajan would die. With it, he’d be on his feet in a couple of days. When she asked Ayela if they should use it, given Trajan’s feelings about magic, Ayela insisted they use it immediately.

When Isabel and the Goiri bone were far enough away, Ayela administered the potion, much to the consternation of Trajan’s men. They protested loudly but she ignored them as she tipped her brother’s head back. After swallowing the draught, he fell into a fitful sleep, becoming feverish in the night and waking frequently.

By morning, he was sleeping soundly and it looked like the worst of his injuries were mended. Isabel kept the club away from him while the potion did its work. She didn’t know if the Goiri bone would stop the potion from working at this point, but she didn’t want to take the risk.

By evening, he was up and mended well enough to walk. Isabel gave him back his club.

“Ayela tells me she demanded magic be used to heal me.”

“Yes,” Isabel said.

He nodded, frowning. “Thank you,” he muttered, turning away from her.

They set out the following morning on a maddening journey through a maze of high ground that didn’t often connect. Without Slyder, Isabel felt blind. She’d always taken him for granted, or at least the power he gave her … now she recognized just what a blessing he really was.

They reached the far side of the high ground several frustrating days later. Tensions were high. The mist was starting to bear down on them, pressing in from all sides like it meant them harm, creating anxiety, fear, even panic. They’d had to backtrack dozens of times and they’d gotten turned around several times, but they’d finally reached deep water. One last stretch and they would be free of the insistent desolation all around them.

It took a day to harvest the wood for the two rafts they would need and another day to build them. They set out at dawn the following morning, poling across the water with two men working together on each raft to move them at best speed. By dark, they’d traversed the majority of the band of water circling the outskirts of the gloaming swamp, but they chose to tie off to a tree and wait for dawn before proceeding.

By dark the following day, they were several leagues into the jungle and feeling much better for it. Spirits were high when they stopped to make camp. The chittering, burbling, singing life all around was a stark and welcome contrast to the lifeless desolation of the swamp. Isabel was buoyed by the abundance surrounding her, wishing she could share it with Alexander as she drifted off to sleep.

The journey to the hidden keep took several days along a path selected by Trajan to be both direct and little used. What it turned out to be was an overgrown game trail. On the second day, two dozen tree rats attacked by surprise, but they all targeted the last man in line, swarming over him, driving him to his knees and killing him in a matter of seconds.

Everyone watched with a mixture of fear and revulsion, stunned by the sudden speed and overwhelming violence of the attack, until a number of tree rats turned toward them and hissed in challenge, guarding their next meal.

They moved with more care from then on which slowed them down but also prevented them from blundering into the clearing in front of the cave mouth leading to the fortress entrance.

Trajan signaled—four Regency soldiers—everyone went to a knee. He pointed to three of his men and signaled for them to circle the clearing and attack from a different angle, then waited for them to reach their position before silently ordering his remaining two men to follow him into battle.

All six charged into the clearing without a word, closing the distance to the four soldiers before they could fully process what was happening. Overwhelming force, coupled with the element of total surprise produced predictable results. Trajan reached his intended target first, swinging his bone club up and under the side of the soldier’s jaw, lifting her up off the ground and twisting her head around with such force that her neck snapped, killing her before the blood spray from her shattered jaw could reach the ground. The remaining three died almost as quickly, two managing to get their swords half drawn before Trajan’s men reached them.

Trajan and his companions entered the fortress cautiously, but the place was dead and still. At the main entrance, Isabel saw the remains of a battle she’d fought in days past. Four corpses lay crumpled around the entrance, decomposing just enough to lend a sickly scent to the musty air, all dead by Isabel’s hand. Several more killed by others were scattered about, left to rot where they fell. In the center of the room was one of the witches, the greatest stench of decay coming from her corpse.

“So this one is definitely dead,” Isabel said. “If we assume the ghidora killed the one Hazel sent it after and Phane killed Clotus, that leaves ten.”

“We should make a thorough search of this place,” Trajan said. “If more of the witches fell here, I want to know of it.”

“You know this place better than anyone,” Isabel said. “I recommend we stick together in case we run into more soldiers.”

“Agreed,” Trajan said.

The place was surprisingly large and Trajan did indeed know it well. He led them through an exhaustive search of the entire fortress, which proved to be a heart-wrenching experience for both him and Ayela. Hundreds of Trajan’s soldiers were dead, killed in pitched battles that took place in the halls and barracks. Soldiers fought without full armor, sometimes even without boots because the attack had been so sudden, the enemy had breached the gates so quickly and poured into the fortress in such force that the defenders didn’t have time to mount anything but the most hasty of defenses.

From the carnage, it was clear that the Regency soldiers had been ordered to leave no one alive. The dead had suffered various types of wounds, but each and every one of the fallen had another wound, a narrow-bladed dagger puncture to the heart. Even their own dead had been stabbed in the heart and left to rot.

The corpses were piled highest near the outer door of the king’s chambers. Isabel had to watch her footing as she climbed over the four-foot pile of bodies. Within, they found more dead, including one of the Sin’Rath who had fallen just inside the king’s door and died from a cut to her throat.

The king’s chambers were large, cold, and dark. It took nearly an hour of searching to discover the three hidden doors leading out. They would have stopped long before finding the first one, were it not for Trajan’s insistence that they keep looking.

“I know my father well enough to know that he has at least two hidden passages,” he said. “Keep looking until you find them.”

The first passage they found led to a series of more passages that seemed to permeate the entire fortress, shadowing the main passages and allowing access or a view into many important rooms. As well as Ayela knew the secret passages in the fortress, she had to admit she’d never been in these passages.

The second hidden door led to a long tunnel leading into the dark, a cool breeze picking up the moment they opened the door.

The third passage was locked from the inside, an oddity that made Isabel wonder. Further inspection revealed a peephole looking into the room from the hidden passage beyond.

“We should see what’s behind there,” she said.

“Agreed,” Trajan said, motioning to two of his men. They picked up a table and used it as a battering ram to break the door open, thunderous echoes rolling away into the passages of the fortress with each strike. It took some effort, but they eventually succeeded, breaching the door and pulling it apart.

Beyond was a passage that led deeper into the mountain. After a few hundred feet, they came to a wide spot with a fifty-foot-deep pit barring their way. On the far side was a drawbridge operated by a winch with a hand crank.

“If you and Prince Trajan would stand back, I can cross and lower the bridge,” Hector said.

Trajan frowned but followed Isabel back the way they’d come far enough for Hector’s magic to work. By the time they returned, the bridge was in place. The corridor, roughly hewn from the mountain and having only rudimentary supports, continued for another hundred feet, opening into a small round cave with three hallways leading out. Two led back toward the part of the fortress occupied by the House of Karth, but the one directly across from them led farther into the mountain.

Another fifty feet and they entered a large irregular cavern lit by a vein of naturally luminescent crystals running through the ceiling. The place was a scene of squalor and filth. At least a dozen creatures had lived here, sharing this single living space, wallowing in each other’s excrement. The stench was nauseating. The flies, revolting.

“This is where the Sin’Rath slept,” Ayela said.

Trajan turned away from the room. Two of his men vomited.

“I’ve seen enough,” Isabel said, covering her mouth and nose.

“There may still be a witch here,” Trajan said. “We must search these chambers, no matter how distasteful it is.”

“Well then, let’s be quick about it,” Isabel said, drawing her sword and heading to one of the exits, with Hector falling in behind her.

They searched for over an hour, covering an extensive network of passages and rooms, some locked, some open, others without doors. From this network, the Sin’Rath could view and hear most of the important rooms in the fortress and had access to many of the more important areas via secret passages that connected with the other networks of passages but that locked from the inside.

Isabel was especially interested in one room they found. It opened onto a balcony encircling a pit below. On one wall of the pit was a stout door locked from the outside. A hole in the ceiling of the cave allowed a stream of daylight to fill the well of the pit while plunging the rest of the room into shadow. It looked very different from here, Isabel thought.

They found a few passages leading to the surface but they were all still locked and barred from within, so they decided to keep looking, reasoning that the Sin’Rath had escaped by some other route.

While the search revealed nothing new, it did serve to reinforce the absolute nature of the Sin’Rath’s treachery. For Trajan and Ayela, it felt like mockery. The Sin’Rath had been in control of everything … for their whole lives. They’d been watching, waiting … planning how they would use each member of the Karth line in their schemes.

Having completely searched the fortress, they left through the secret escape tunnel from Severine’s chamber, walking into the cool breeze toward the surface. It opened behind a boulder inside a cave with a natural underground river surfacing in a rushing torrent and cascading out of the cave mouth and down the hillside.

Isabel knelt down, Trajan right beside her, examining footprints in the soft riverbank soil.

“Many people came this way,” Trajan said.

“They’ll be easy enough to follow,” Isabel said. “The hard part will be spotting when the witches break away from the refugees.”

“Not with all of us looking,” Trajan said, motioning for one of his men to take point. They followed the trail from the cave and into the jungle for several hours before they came to a clearing littered with bodies, some were fallen soldiers from both the Regency and Karth, others were just people fleeing the Regency; some died by the blade, others were killed with magic.

The many paths leading from the clearing were all filled with carnage as if the refugees fleeing the fortress had scattered into the jungle the moment the Regency soldiers ambushed them. Trajan and his men began the painstaking process of following each path for a small distance and discovered that they all circled around to the same place, behind and to the left of the spot where they got ambushed. From there, the survivors of the ambush circled around and continued on into the jungle.

Their path took them over a small mountain pass and down to a major road that intersected two other major roads within a few leagues in each direction. Those who had escaped the fortress had camped by the road for the night and then gone in different directions, melting away into the jungle. Isabel looked at the trampled roadside where several dozen people had camped along it all at the same time and shook her head.

“Any idea how we can track the Sin’Rath from here?” she asked. “They could be anywhere by now.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Trajan said, then smiling suddenly and pointing before taking off at a dead run down the road. Some distance away, another man scrambled out of the jungle, running away from Trajan down the middle of the road. Trajan stopped and returned, smiling and schooling his breath.

“Now we have something to track,” he said.

“Who was that?”

“One of my father’s men, a watcher assigned to wait here and see if anyone showed up. He will run back to my father and report our arrival.”

“So the witches will know we’re still tracking them,” Isabel said. “We might not want to just follow that guy blindly back to them.”

Trajan hefted his club. “The witches have no power.”

“Maybe not,” Isabel said, “but they can always give bows to the hundred men they have working for them. A hundred arrows may not be magic, but they will kill you just the same, club or not.”

“I’ll send two men ahead to scout,” Trajan said.

“Fair enough,” Isabel said. “Let’s go … but carefully.” It was becoming painfully clear that Trajan was going to do what he was going to do, regardless of Isabel’s suggestions. She turned her thoughts to figuring out how she was going to get close to Phane, and exactly what she was going to do once she did.

The man’s tracks doubled back and looped around the other direction, meeting up with a set of almost forty older tracks marching two by two along a narrow jungle path away from the road. The scouts continued to range out ahead of them, searching out the path taken by the watcher, marking the trail and pressing forward.

After several hours of steady movement, the scouts were waiting alongside the path for them. They were in a rough part of the jungle. Cliffs, sudden steep hills and rocky outcroppings were the norm, with all manner of vegetation clinging to every surface possible. Travel was treacherous and slow.

“They left the trail up ahead,” Trajan whispered, as his scouts followed the trail farther. Everyone was quiet, waiting for word from the two men, but time passed and they didn’t return.

While they waited, Isabel started to worry that the Sin’Rath had captured them and were sending soldiers. Her idle worry seemed to take on a life of its own within her mind, expanding into fear and full-blown panic within the space of a few moments. She crouched with the rest of Trajan’s men, shivering in fear of some imagined threat. Ayela noticed something was wrong and touched her arm with an inquiring look.

Isabel nearly leapt out of her skin at the sudden contact, her panic breaking and fading away like water. She shook her head to Ayela and went back to her own thoughts. Never before had she experienced such sudden and irrational fear. It couldn’t be Azugorath, or the darkness, or anything else magical.

That left two possibilities: either she was becoming a coward … or it was the bone.