House of Chains
The ghost’s laughter was like a boulder rolled over gravel. ‘ They are behind you now, Karsa Orlong. You approach the land known as the Jhag Odhan .’
It had seemed no more than a half-day’s worth of travel in this dream world.
Signs of the army’s passage grew less distinct, the ground underfoot frozen rock hard and now consisting mostly of rounded stones. Ahead, a plain studded with huge flat slabs of black rock.
Moments later, Karsa was moving among them.
There were bodies beneath the stones. Pinned down.
‘ Will you free these, Karsa Orlong? ’
‘No, Delum Thord, I shall not. I shall pass through this place, disturbing nothing.’
‘ Yet these are not Forkrul Assail. Many are dead, for they had not the power their kind once possessed. While others remain alive, and will not die for a long time. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Karsa Orlong, do you no longer believe in mercy? ’
He travelled on, and soon left the terrible plain behind.
Before him now stretched a field of ice, crack-riven, with pools of water reflecting the silver sky. Bones were scattered on it, from hundreds, perhaps thousands of figures. Bones of a type he had seen before. Some still sheathed in withered skin and muscle. Shards of stone weapons lay among them, along with fragments of fur, antlered helms and torn, rotting hides.
The fallen warriors formed a vast semicircle around a low, square-walled tower. Its battered stones were limned in runnelled ice, its doorway gaping, the interior dark.
Karsa picked his way across the field, his moccasins crunching through the ice and snow.
The tower’s doorway was tall enough to permit the Teblor to stride through without ducking. A single room lay within. Broken furniture and the pieces of more fallen warriors cluttered the stone floor. A spiral staircase that seemed made entirely of iron rose from the centre.
From what he could determine from the wreckage, the furniture was of a scale to suit a Teblor, rather than a lowlander.
Karsa made his way up the ice-sheathed staircase.
Karsa stepped off the landing and looked down.
‘Thelomen Toblakai, welcome to my humble abode.’
Karsa scowled. ‘I crossed blades with one much like you. He was named Icarium. Like you, yet less so.’
‘Because he is a half-blood, of course. Whilst I am not. Jaghut, not Jhag.’
She lay spread-eagled within a ring of fist-sized stones. A larger stone rested on her chest, from which heat rose in waves. The air in the chamber was a swirling mix of steam and suspended frost.
‘You are trapped within sorcery. The army was seeking you, yet they did not kill you.’
‘ Could not would be more accurate. Not immediately, in any case. But eventually, this Tellann Ritual will destroy this core of Omtose Phellack, which will in turn lead to the death of the Jhag Odhan-even now, the north forest creeps onto the plains, whilst from the south the desert claims ever more of the odhan that was my home.’
She bared her tusks in something like a smile. ‘Among the Jaghut, they are now one and the same, Thelomen Toblakai.’
Karsa looked around, studying the wreckage. He saw no weapons; nor was the woman wearing armour. ‘When this core of Omtose Phellack dies, so will you, yes? Yet you spoke only of the Jhag Odhan. As if your own death was of less importance than that of this land.’
‘It is less important. On the Jhag Odhan, the past lives still. Not just in my fallen kin, the Jhag-the few that managed to escape the Logros T’lan Imass. There are ancient beasts that walk the treeless lands beside the sheets of ice. Beasts that have died out everywhere else, mostly on the spears of the T’lan Imass. But there were no Imass in the Jhag Odhan. As you said, a refuge.’
‘Beasts. Including Jhag horses?’
He watched her strange eyes narrow. The pupils were vertical, surrounded in pearlescent grey. ‘The horses we once bred to ride. Yes, they have gone feral in the odhan. Though few remain, for the Trell come from the west to hunt them. Every year. They drive them off cliffs. As they do to many of the other beasts.’
‘Why did you not seek to stop them?’
‘Because, dear warrior, I was hiding .’