Lord of Slaughter

14

When Elifr sensed water he thought it might be safe to light the torch. He got out the tinder and flint and set to work.

His eyes adjusted to the light. He had come to a narrow shelf of rock at the side of a cave of black water — the ceiling supported by elegant pillars. He had no idea what this place was — that the Greeks used it to supply water to the palaces. Nor did he know the connection to the tunnels of the Numera had come about as the result of a rockfall, and since it was said the water spirits had been seeking a way to the surface, the hole that had opened had not been closed. His dream-sharpened senses told him this way led down.

The route to this cave was not easily found or reached — just a split in the ceiling of the cavern. But Elifr, his wolf senses sharpened by hunger, sensed the deep water that lay beyond. Elifr had earned many meals in the mountains by taking birds’ eggs from perilous ledges and he climbed the rough wall to squeeze his way through.

Could the prisoners get out this way? Which of them could get free of his manacles? Even if they did, the dark itself was as effective as any irons.

Elifr peered out into the flooded cavern. He gave a start — there were faces staring up at him from the torchlit water. He calmed himself. They were not real. At the base of two of the pillars were the carved heads of snake-haired women, gazing blankly up. He tried to see further out, the swimming torchlight making a ghost of his reflection.

Words came to him, just the echo of a memory. I am a wolf. He’d spoken those words before, unimaginable years ago. Another word. Mother.

He remembered his family, the hearth, the little house on the hill with its turf roof and low walls, lying next to his brothers and sisters in the night, breathing in the smell of their hair, listening to the push and pull of their breath. The spirits had called him and he had given up that life without regret but here it seemed precious again. No hearth, no home. Just this black water.

A dry terror seized his throat, a terror not of death but of the ordeal that would precede it.

No point delaying. He put a foot into the water. It was cold but he would get used to that. He had endured worse and knew he could survive a long time in there. The waters of this land were cold but nothing compared to the ones of his northern home.

He propped the torch against a rock, swallowed as if gulping down his fear and offered a prayer to his spirits.

‘You that roar in the mountain winds

You that sparkle in the waters

Spirits of sunlight and moonlight

Find your servant in this darkness.’

The prayer gave scant reassurance. The realm he was moving in was not governed by the spirits of rock and stream. This was the realm of the dark god Odin, the magical, the mad.

He threw off the loincloth the Greeks had put on him, wishing he still had the pelt that had been torn from him in the emperor’s tent. He would have been more a wolf in that, an animal that did not feel the creeping dread in that place.

He walked forward into the pool, fighting down an urge to gasp as the water came up to his thighs. The torch stretched its shadows over his head as he went. The pillars seemed a city themselves, stretching out to the limit of the light.

Each pillar had at its top a carving of a mythological beast, things of bursting eyes and ravening mouths. Reflected in the torchlight, they loomed below him like monsters from a dream.

Elifr moved forward on instinct, not sure what to do. The pillars went on and on. Tear shapes were carved into some of them, ruder than the carvings at the tops. A strong sense of their meaning came to him. People had died here, lots of them, constructing this place. The tears were the only record of the slaves who had worked to build it.

The ceiling dipped to meet the pool and he could go no further. Carved eyes, hundreds of them, watched him from the rock there. The water was colder. He walked the width of the wall. Yes, colder streams flowed in at two places. He felt beneath the water. There were inlets in the wall. Big enough to swim through? What to do?

Again, one of those voices from the dark of his mind: Magic is a puzzle, not a recipe.

He trembled with the cold. He did not have long. He needed to act.

Elifr could see nothing beyond twenty paces back in to the cave, the limit of his torchlight. This place hated the light. And light was no use down there where he needed to go. Then what? Only faith. Only belief in the purpose.

He put out his hands. Childish stories came into his head, of the trolls and monsters who were said to lurk in dark pools such as these. His mother had sung a rhyme to her children in the bleak winter nights.

Born before, of spirits obscure,

Where the mountain stream plunges into the dark

The mere stands, there you will the marvel foul behold

The heath stepper, fen dweller, war creature

His talons ungentle, his teeth the heroes’ bane.

At the time he’d been frightened, then later thought it a tale to warn children away from dark waters. Now it seemed to stir something inside him, a fear in his bones that sparked imaginings of bloody claws reaching out to grab him from the unseen depths of the pool. The fear comforted him. It was familiar. In his rituals on the mountainside the greatest terror had always led to the greatest insights, to an awakening of the senses and the mind of a wolf. Is there anything beyond this wall? He had to know what would be asked of him. A little sacrifice, a little bravery to prepare the way for the great sacrifice to come. This first sacrifice didn’t seem small, though.

He had to do it, had to risk it. This was the place that had been revealed to him. The torch guttered and went out. Now the dark was absolute and his mind made up. He cast away the useless brand, gulped in three quick breaths of air and kicked down to the smaller of the two inlets, pushing himself into the blind black waters.

The cold gripped him, his breath left him and he returned gasping to the surface. He tried again and again, but with the same result. He knew this was the way — he had learned that in his visions — but he could not go on, not with his human powers. To continue he would need to summon a wolf inside him, as he had summoned one when he freed himself from the guards. But for that he would need an enemy, a threat to trigger his fury. He would need to draw the guards after him. The wolfman sniffed the air, gaining his bearings in the darkness. Then he started back, up towards the Numera.