Sword of the Gods - Bruce R. Cordell [101]
“Rat-snuggler!” she hissed.
Her first instinct was to rush the cavity and see where Kalkan had gone.
No, she told herself. You’ve already pressed your luck too much.
So she waited a full song, then another, studying the circular hole. It didn’t fade back to becoming a mere wall, as she’d half feared and half hoped.
Time to get Demascus, she thought. Instead, she stole into the room to give it a quick once-over.
A table squatted on the opposite wall, heavy with glass jars, piles of scribbled parchment, inks, quills, and colored stones. Behind the table, the wall was plastered with drawings. She edged closer, and realized they were, every one, of Demascus.
There were probably a hundred. Demascus wearing armor, climbing stairs, fighting with a greatsword, wielding two matched long swords, Demascus leaping a massive crevice, standing at attention in a line of mighty soldiers, bending his knee to someone in a throne who glowed with divine power, Demascus with his Veil strangling a giant, whirling through shadow, and … more. All drawn with the same strong lines and attention to detail. All focused with monomaniacal contemplation on one person.
Riltana put a hand to her mouth. She’d seen something like this once before, when she’d broken into the home of a barrister rumored to have a breathtaking collection of rubies. Instead she’d found a secret room covered in likenesses of different women. All women who’d previously gone missing, never to be seen again.
Riltana had fled the home and anonymously tipped off the peacemakers the next day. The man had turned out to be some kind of vampire or ghoul—she’d never really found out which—living like a normal person by day, complete with a law practice, friends who all would swear up and down he was one of the most thoughtful people they knew. But each tenday he meticulously planned how to kidnap, kill, and eat a fresh victim. All so perfectly that no one in Airspur ever became suspicious that a monster lived in their midst, preying on them.
The drawings before Riltana were exactly like that, though they seemed to span several different … incarnations, if that was the right word. As if Kalkan was a serial killer, but always chose the same victim, over and over, through each new life. How extraordinarily dreadful if true, she thought.
The carrion smell was thicker at that end of the room than when she’d first noticed it at the entrance. Kalkan was gone. So where was it coming from?
She approached the wall, but veered toward a closet door in the corner. It was being used as just one more surface to display drawings of Demascus. She opened it.
The nauseating odor swelled tenfold. The chamber beyond was a blood-soaked slaughterhouse of hanging meat, stripped of fur and skin. Most of it was swollen with rot and maggots, and a malodorous discharge pooled beneath each carcass, thick with flies. Bloody knives plunged into a wooden carving block showed that bits and pieces of the flesh had been carved off and … eaten?
Oh gods, she thought. She gagged on rising bile.
The carcass closest to the door—it almost looked like a dangling arm, not a hoof as she’d first thought …
Riltana lost her composure to a fit of explosive retching.
The hanging carcasses were not animals; they were people.
CHARTER TWENTY-THREE
AIRSPUR
THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)
UP THERE,” THE THIEF TOLD DEMASCUS, HER VOICE STILL flat.
She ascended one side of a set of matching stairs that converged on a landing. Afternoon light blazed down the steps from a stained-glass window depicting an apple tree laden with red orbs.
Demascus followed the windsoul up.
She’d found him and Chant searching the alley where the secret passage had let out. His relief had dissolved his dour mood. He was so happy he could have kissed her. She explained she’d trailed Kalkan back to his lair, but her manner had been oddly subdued. She explained that Kalkan had escaped