The High King's Tomb

Salvistar halted at the void, tossed his head, and leaped into it.

Karigan wanted to scream as they plummeted through the pitch black, but like her knowledge that she was to speak for Westrion, and that the spirits would invade the lands above if not called back to their graves, she knew the stallion would not let her fall. Indeed, she had the impression of great gossamer wings guiding their course and her seat was secure.

Eventually Salvistar landed lightly on a ledge deep within the void. The glow of their star steel armor cast a vaporous light on skulls and bones tucked into hundreds of depressions in the walls of the crevice. Engraved on the walls were Delver drawings and offerings of crude pottery, moldering furs, and weapons and tools of chert littered the ledge.

“Come,” she said. The voice was hers, and it was not. She spoke Westrion’s words.

One by one spirits massed around her, transparent presences, shadows. Thousands of them. She felt their hostility. Their voices shrieked in disobedience, spoke of their thirst to feed on the living. She knew this even though their utterances were unintelligible. She knew also that though many of the spirits were benign, many of the evil of their kind had been tossed to the very bottom of the void, a form of posthumous justice. Even deeper in the void was a damaged seal between the worlds, and demons scratched at it hoping to escape their hell. This was an even greater threat than that of the spirits.

“Sleep,” she commanded the spirits.

They screeched and swirled in rebellion, and one who had been their chieftain in life appeared before her, standing on air. Wild hair floated about his head and he was clad in animal skins.

“Go away, avatar,” he said. “You are not our god. We shall do as we wish.”

Karigan thrust her lance through the chieftain and he evaporated from existence. The other spirits stilled.

The great voice of Westrion welled up inside her and emerged as a forceful compulsion: “Sleep.”

The spirits scrambled for their niches like swarming insects and did not reemerge.

Salvistar launched himself from the ledge and spiraled down and down into sepulchral darkness, down to a place that had never known light. Karigan was not sure if it was even a physical place they traveled to or if they had transcended into some other existence.

Finally the stallion alighted and the glow of their armor revealed a dry, rocky landscape. The rocks were unweathered and of sharp and forbidding shapes. Embedded in the ground was a round shield of star steel. Like Karigan’s armor, symbols wriggled across its surface, but some did not move, were dead, and a portion of the seal was tarnished and had begun to buckle. She sensed the throng of demons on the other side pushing and scratching and beating the seal for release.

This was the greater threat. If the demons escaped, life on Earth would turn into a hell, a place of eternal strife and darkness, where the living must battle for their very existence or be enslaved and tormented unto eternity. Humans would become the live carrion for spirits and demons and the living world would be transformed into a realm of death.

She lowered the tip of the lance to the seal. Words of command poured from her lips, words she did not know, words that were not of any mortal speech. The seal brightened until she needed to cover her eyes.

Then all at once it faded to a silvery glow, the symbols restored, the tarnish banished, and the demons on the other side cast far away into the deeps where they belonged. With that, Salvistar surged upward, beating his great wings in the air. They climbed and climbed through the darkness until they emerged into the chamber of the Hillanders. Tremors no longer racked the tombs, though many ancient, dark spirits still flooded the avenues of the dead and the castle corridors above.

“Come,” Karigan-Westrion commanded and pointed the lance at the void.

The dark spirits flocked into the chamber, a great cloud of them that obscured the light. Unable to disobey Westrion, they spiraled back into the crevice, into the realm beneath the tombs. When the last one vanished, the ground rumbled and moved and the crack closed.

To the spirits and corpses of royalty, the death god said, “Return to your byres and sleep.”

The dead receded from the chamber into what remained of the corridors.

The dust hanging in the air cleared, as though sucked away and rubble rose from the floor and reattached itself to ceilings and walls. Statues and armor righted and reassembled; cracks and chips and dents fixed themselves until no sign of damage remained. All the pieces of King Smidhe’s statue flew back together with such speed that suddenly it was in one perfect piece again, the proud king astride his horse of marble.

Karigan blinked, and found herself not sitting on the stallion, but hiding behind the column, where she had started, the book in her arms. There was no sign of the armor or the stallion, and she began to think it had all been part of a dream. Just as before, she watched the man who attacked her kneel beside her trail of blood.

“None of it happened,” she whispered, and she put her hand to her feverish temple.

“It happened,” said someone beside her.

She turned to find a ghost gazing at her and she almost exclaimed, but he drew his finger to his lips to silence her. This was the Rider of ancient times who had visited her in her dream and in the white world. His winged horse brooch glistened on his chest and her own warmed in reaction.

“Aye,” he said, “I was the third to wear this brooch, the same one you now wear.”

Karigan shivered with the weight of history, as she had when Lil Ambrioth revealed she was the first to possess the brooch.