Melrose blinked until his vision improved; now there was still a large black spot in the centre of his vision but his peripheral vision was working and, by turning his head from side to side, he determined that he was in a stone-walled room of some kind. There was dirty straw on the floor and the miasma of stale urine started tickling his nostrils. There was a horse-like creature off to his left, and to his right was a short, belligerent-seeming woman who was holding a kitchen knife like a dagger and glaring at him. He assumed, for the moment, that the woman had addressed him, though he had encountered talking animals on several occasions. Mages, it seemed, liked their animals to be able to talk. Melrose thought that this was due to the lack of other company.
“I’m Melrose,” said Melrose, continuing to swing his head around, trying to get a better feel for the room. The stone walls seemed to be curved and the windows were more like arrow slits than windows.
“And what are you doing here, Mr. Rose?”
It was definitely the woman talking. Melrose noticed that there were stairs behind her leading down, and that there was a cot — a narrow wooden bed that looked intended for an infant — beneath a window. He blinked again, and the black spot in his vision receded a little more.
“I don’t know,” said Melrose. Honesty, he had found, was often the best policy as Mages tended to assume that everyone was lying. “I thought I was in a workshop, looking for… something I dropped earlier.” Sometimes honesty had to be tempered with caution though.
“You don’t know,” said the woman. Something like a smile forced its way onto her face and for a moment a forked tongue flickered between her lips. Melrose took a step backwards, bracing himself.
The woman flung herself forwards, the knife raised and arcing brightly downwards towards his chest. He made himself wait; the knife would never get through the leather cuirass unless the woman was inhumanly strong, so it had to be a feint. As the knife fell her other hand, which he realised had been behind her back, came up and out, clutching something and aiming for his eyes. His sword came up in a classic parry-prime position and he felt it jar in his hands as it bit against her wrist bones. A splash of purple blood hit his cuirass just before the knife bounced off it and clattered on the floor.
The woman hissed, drawing the corners of her mouth back — and back, and back until her face looked triangular and the sharp, piranha-like teeth lining her jaw were visible — and tried to retreat. Melrose stepped forwards again, pushing off from his back foot and driving the sword forwards and down and it struck the top of her head with his full weight behind it. Again it bit into bone, but now the sword gleamed with corpse-light and Melrose could hear the griping moans of the imprisoned spirits and it plunged downwards, tearing bone and flesh apart and sending a gout of purple blood upwards and outwards in a thick, noisome splatter.
The two halves of the woman landed on the floor each with a dull thump and the horse, if that was what it was, shied and backed away. Melrose wiped his eyes clear of gore and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell was revolting, coppery notes and sulphurous undertones mixed in a stench of rotting food and week-old corpses. The horse shied again, and Melrose retreated to the stairs which seemed too narrow for the horse to descend, to avoid being kicked while the horse settled down. From five steps down he surveyed the room and the mess he’d made of it while the horse tried to canter this way and that, clearly distressed.
The woman must have been lizardkin — the forked tongue and purple blood were pretty good indicators of that, and he’d fought and killed enough of them at the Battle of Archer’s Field to be confident. They were strange people, prone to frenzy and beserking in his experience, and he was quite relieved that this woman had attacked him before she’d worked herself up. The odd thing though, he thought, was that she almost seemed to have been expecting him.
The horse-thing cried, a half-whinny, half-sob that sounded wrong for a horse and slammed its front feet down on the floor. It jerked them back, tearing up clumps of straw, and then reared up again. Melrose decided to continue down the stairs and leave the horse-thing to its own devices.
He took the stairs slowly and cautiously though he thought it likely that the room below was empty as no-one had come up to see why the horse-thing was shrieking and sobbing. The room below turned out to be the same size as the one above, making him think that he might be in a tower of some kind, but full of dead bodies.
He was still breathing through his mouth but seeing the stacked bodies and the corpses hanging from butcher’s hooks along the far wall, he took a very cautious sniff — and was startled to find that the room smelled of nothing at all.
“An illusion?” he asked himself, and poked a stack of four stiff corpses with the tip of his sword. As the sword touched the grey flesh it stopped and light flared up around it, a pale blue nimbus that swirled as it surrounded the stack of corpses and then vanished.
“Or a preservation spell,” he murmured. He had no idea if such things actually existed, but something was stopping the sword from touching the corpses, and was probably stopping the inevitable stench of decay from making the rooms uninhabitable. He took a step forward and then hesitated. He had no idea what lizardkin ate, and maybe… maybe this was a larder of some kind?
It was hard to look through the corpses; partly because they all seemed to be humans, much like himself, and partly because the spell protecting them stopped him touching them or moving them, but after twenty minutes he came to the rather grim conclusion that every one of the bodies here was a soldier or warrior of some kind. Most, but not all, of them had burn marks across their eyes and all of them had stab wounds that looked like they’d been made by a small, sharp blade. A knife-blade, perhaps.
“How many people have you sent after this Device, Rufus?” he muttered, feeling that the Mage-smith had somehow succeeded in tricking him again.
Behind what was nearly a wall of stacked bodies he found another narrow staircase leading down, and that led to an equally narrow corridor that was only a couple of metres long and a door that opened out onto a plain of white sand. He stood in the doorway staring at it, wondering how the horse-thing had got into the tower — looking up above him he could see that it was indeed a tall, circular tower — and why it was there.
Then he looked around and remembered that the beggar had told him that they made their own gods in Dalshire.
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