Word of Traitors_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [12]
“Get closer,” Pater told her. “I think you’ll find it’s more original than you think.”
Ashi knew victory arches—House Deneith was based in the ancient Karrnathi city of Karrlakton, where monuments were nearly as common as hovels—and as they approached the arch in the wall, she could see what Pater meant. Karrnathi arches were typically decorated simply with fluted columns and a band of relief sculpture around the top, crowned perhaps with a memorial statue. This arch was different. Reliefs crawled across the red stone walls: hobgoblins and bugbears and goblins in battle and on the hunt. It was difficult to distinguish what they were fighting or hunting, but the scenes of struggle were clear. Nor could the arch properly be called a “victory arch,” because at least as many of the goblins depicted in the fantastic carvings were dead or dying as were triumphant. The higher up the walls the reliefs went, the more dead dar there seemed to be, until just beneath the crown of the arch, where rows of curved spikes jutted out like sinister horns, the carved bodies were piled in heaps. Ashi stole a glance at Sindra. The Lyrandar viceroy looked vaguely unsettled.
The carvings continued in the shadows of the arch as well, though here the dead stood in a parade of figures pierced with swords and crushed with hammers, bristling with arrows and ravaged by monsters, burned, tortured, decapitated, and dismembered. Ashi stared at a bugbear who appeared to be marching onward as if in ignorance of the massive ballista bolt that pierced his belly, and felt recognition. “Baargaar Seven Axes,” she said. “These are the heroes of dar history.”
“Aye,” said Pater. “And now they have one more.” He pointed up.
About halfway through the vault of the arch, the parade of figures gave way to smooth stone and on the edge of the empty space was a figure freshly carved—a hobgoblin wearing a spiked crown, one eye socket empty, a sword in his right hand and a rune-carved rod in his left.
“Haruuc,” said Ashi. She couldn’t help noticing that the stonecarver had taken some liberties. Under Haruuc’s feet lay the broken body of a goblin dressed in the clothes of the shaarat’khesh and holding two daggers, one wickedly curved, the other straight and plain. Chetiin. Ashi wondered if the others were having the same difficulty as she was in reconciling the quiet, wise goblin who had traveled with them to recover the rod with the treacherous assassin who had cut down Haruuc. That Chetiin was a killer—yes, even an assassin—there was no doubt, but which of them wasn’t? Ashi had been a hunter and briefly the huntmaster of the Bonetree, the most feared and savage clan in the Shadow Marches. Chetiin was an elder in an ancient clan of assassins and skilled in ways Ashi could only hope to imitate. When he moved, he was a whisper. When he fought, he was the blade of a dagger. When he spoke, his strained voice carried the lessons of a lifetime. He carried their loyalty and the loyalty of Haruuc and the loyalty of the Silent Clans. Yet he had turned against and slain in cold blood the greatest leader the dar had known in generations, someone who had trusted him and called him a friend. If Chetiin were standing in front of her right now, Ashi didn’t know if she would talk to him or try to put her sword through him.
Beyond the arch, the only sounds were the movement of bodies and the crash of the cataract. The road formed the only level surface across rocky and irregular ground and even it ended within a dozen paces of the arch. The funeral procession walked through tall grass, dry with the end of autumn, heading toward a ridge of weathered rock—the same ridge that formed the cataract in the river. Haruuc’s tomb waited within the shelter of a fold of the ridge, a low structure with a peaked roof that sank back into the rock and a larger underground chamber. It had been built of the local gray stone and seemed stark in its simplicity. The door gaped open, ready to receive its occupant. Ashi felt her flesh crawl. The