Chapter 50

Simurgh had bought Katarina more than a couple of days, but once the storms returned, Katarina could do nothing but press onward, sleeping as she rode during the day, praying and singing to keep the storms at bay at night.

Katarina lost track of time completely. Everything was a dark and repetitive haze. Her sleep was thin and restless as she rode, and the nights were filled with the pounding surf of the Black Rain. She struggled to stay awake, stay aware, keep despair at bay. All she had to do was find the cause of the storm and destroy it. She repeated this to herself over and over as she rode. Every night she prayed that she wouldn't run out of food and water, and every day she found just a little more feed for her horse, and a little more water in her skin. This small miracle was lost on her, however. Her focus had become tight and pinpoint as she struggled against the bleak and dreary landscape.

When she passed through the twin cities, she was initially unable to realize she was actually in a city. The black rain had corroded everything. Rubble piled upon rubble filled the stone streets. She saw twisted bodies laying everywhere. They lay in every pose, some draped in piles. The week or so without the storm had apparently brought the capering monsters to an end.

At this sight a dim sort of gratitude filtered through her. She had no idea how she was expected to fight through entire cities of blighted monstrosities, but their premature end had saved her. That gratitude faded as she resumed her trek across the deteriorated and sickly landscape. Up until this point she'd had no idea how draining it was to have to keep her antimagic field up. It sapped her strength. It taxed her willpower. Her dreams were incomprehensible things as names and faces drifted and slid across her half-sleeping mind.

The twin cities slipped by without incident, and Katarina burrowed deeper into her mind as the rains poured on.

Katarina awoke suddenly. Some dim part of her mind had called her all the way out of her half-awareness. She glanced around at the spoiled landscape, low hills carpeted in stained, wispy grasses, trying to make sense of what had called her attention.

Patiently she went through her exercises in mental discipline, pulling herself out of her slumber. Her head came up and she glanced at the sky, at the thick omnipresent black clouds that covered the sky and reduced daylight to a pale, flickering shade of what it once was.

Sickly lightning flickered in the sky, revealing the cliffs she'd drawn alongside. The cliffs were blocky and ponderous and streaked with black, the same as all the other stone she'd seen.

She blinked. Hadn't she been told of cliffs before? She wondered, and thought back. She had. If these were the Cliffs of Schactise, then atop the cliffs was an old Pavlenko castle. She glanced up again, as the lightning illuminated a series of blocky shapes, further up. The sight of the castle atop the cliffs was welcome. She'd stop there and rest if she could. How to get up there, she wondered? She began to pay attention to the cliffs as she rode. Surely there was a way up, a way to the castle that was easily accessible.

After several hours of riding alongside the cliffs, she was suddenly blinded by the spontaneous glow of light. She flinched back and pulled her gun, remembering at the last second that this horse hadn't been trained as a Witch Hunter's mount. After a moment her eyes adjusted and she understood: the light had come from an innumerable amount of light-emitting crystals, something Katarina was familiar with.

Certain crystals collected light during the daytime and released it at night. There were some that released light when dipped in water, some that released light when squeezed, and others that released light when crushed. It seemed as though there was some mechanism for triggering these lights that she had somehow triggered. The lights themselves illuminated a vast cavern carved into the cliff, revealing a ponderously huge ramp spiralling up towards where the keep would be. Katarina guessed that four carriages could have ridden side-by-side up that ramp with room to spare. She let out a weary breath and led her horse inside with a simple heartfelt prayer of relief.

Inside the cavern, she found stables carved from the bedrock, and in the stables she was delighted to find a working water pump, despite the fact that the castle hadn't been used for centuries. After a great deal of reluctance and a great many prayers, she tasted the water and found it fresh and clean and good, though with a mineral taste.

She fed and watered her horse, ate a little food herself, and looked around the place for something to burn for a fire.

She found a number of ponderous stone braziers filled with brown stones that were scorched, and after several moments of investigation, she dug through her scant belongings for her firestick, and was delighted when the stones caught alight like wood. She was less than delighted, however, when without warning or cue that she could discern, all the other braziers flared to light throughout the cavern, basking everything within a warm cheery glow of firelight.

Katarina awoke from a long and dreamless sleep with her horse nudging her. She rolled out of her bedroll and stretched comfortably. Despite sleeping in a thin bedroll that had been laid on a mounded up pile of disintegrating old hay, she'd slept extremely well. She brushed and fed her horse, then broke camp and saddled up, and began the slow ride up the stone ramp.

The ramp was covered in a thick layer of fine stone dust that grit under the hooves of her horse. There were niches here and there just off the sides of the ramp that puzzled her until she realized how difficult it might be to control carts laden with heavy goods down a ramp.

At the top of the ramp was a thick and ponderous stone door with no visible latch, but after a long and careful examination, she could see a way to slip through the door mechanism if she were careful and were willing to climb.

She scaled the stone door adroitly, and squeezed through the gap between the door and the ceiling with some effort; the gap was narrower than she'd guessed. Once she was on the other side, she triggered the mechanism that opened the doors and retrieved her horse and continued her journey.

Katarina rode into a wide, but wholly empty room that looked similar to the average loading docks you could find in any seaport city.

The room was vast, with a ceiling twenty feet high, with ribbed vaults and ancient, rusty chandeliers that groaned and creaked as they shifted in their brackets. They were filled with light crystals that glowed dimly, flickered fitfully, or were simply dead.

Katarina looked around as she rode in, hand on her gun. Most of the vast room was covered in dust and flaky stone chips, though there were parts that had tracks running here and there.

"Signs of having been used recently." She murmured to herself.

This underhall looked to have been used in older times as a staging area, a place where perhaps cargoes and foodstuffs were loaded and unloaded. There were large berths where wagons might have rested while they were filled or emptied with whatever was to be brought in or out of the keep. Deeper in, a great many passageways branched out from this room.

"Well." Katarina announced self-importantly. "Here we are." There was a low, atonal humming coming from the right, so Katarina decided to investigate that, first. She turned her horse and berthed it and gave it an affectionate pat. "Wait here while I check it out." She confided in the horse. She checked the loads in her gun, loosened her sword in its scabbard, and began checking entryways for the sound.

Once she located the appropriate doorway, she checked the loads in her gun once more, and followed the passageway, carefully and quietly, to another room that was featureless except for a staircase at the far end of the room, and a large iron cage that sizzled with magical power.

"Would you look at that." Katarina observed to no one, and approached the cage. As she did so, a woman inside sat up. She was nude, with pale skin and grey eyes, and a great, thick tumble of white hair. Katarina jolted as the woman rose to her feet.

"You're human." The woman observed in a low voice that was filled with unmistakable wonder. Katarina blinked. The woman spoke an older dialect of Ardealan.

Katarina eyed the woman with no small wonder of her own. By Katarina's estimate, the woman was nine feet tall. "And you're not." Katarina replied, wracking her brain for the proper way to reply. The woman was well built and unmistakably gorgeous, without flaw, and Katarina observed that her hair hung past her ankles and pooled on the floor about her feet.

The woman ignored the challenge. She instead replied, "You're unchanged, not one of those prancing abominations, either." She observed, looking down at Katarina. She eyed the Witch Hunter ostentatiously. "No obvious sign of taint. Are you perhaps the wizard sent to end this miserable farce?" She challenged.

"What's a 'wizard'?" Katarina asked curiously. The woman gaped at her. "A warlock." the woman replied. Katarina gave her a baffled look. The woman grimaced. "One who trucks with magic?" She offered, and Katarina's face lit up. "Ah. Where I'm from, we call them Witches." She replied simply.

The woman settled her feet and eyed Katarina guardedly. "I'll ask again: Are you here to end me?" She demanded. "I am no easy meat." She warned.

Katarina shook her head. "I am no mage." She replied. "I've come a long way to end the Black Rain." She eyed the woman carefully. "Unless you've got some habit of locking yourself into a cage, I can't think that you're the cause." Katarina noticed long white feathers twined in the woman's hair. She dreaded to see the bird with feathers that size. They were nearly two feet long.

The woman shook her head. "My name is Ollara." She said by way of introduction. "I am no friend of the mutant freaks that have caused the blightstorms. He and his minions captured my mate, our child, and myself and brought us here." She explained simply. "I fear they have been sacrificed to feed that abomination's spells already." She finished bitterly.

Katarina exhaled. It was hard following the woman's speech. It was hard enough to speak the language she'd been born with, back in Begierde. This version was weird.

"You're not human." She repeated, and the woman shook her head. "I am not. I am what you humans call..." She trailed off. "A Moonracer."

Katarina shrugged indifferently. "I'm not from this land." She replied simply.

The woman gave a testy sigh. "My clan lives in the mountains and guards the secret passes. Do they not teach you of such things, human?" She asked, and Katarina shook her head again. The woman's eyes widened in anger.

"Enough with this farce of a conversation." Ollara spat. "Kill me or set me free that I might avenge my mate."

"My name is Katarina." She said by way of reply. "I am a Witch Hunter in service to the Golden Lady, the Lily of Spring." She finished. "I don't know if I should kill you. I'm not familiar with Moonracers or your clan. I don't know if I should free you." She paused. "Forgive me my suspicion."

"Ah, you serve Her, is it?" Ollara suddenly asked, her raptor's eyes lighting up. "Then there is room for us to bargain!" She exclaimed eagerly. "My clan also serves the Lily, human. There is some relic here of your kind. I know not what it is, but if you free me, I shall help you retrieve it."

Katarina's eyebrows rose at that. "What's that way?" She asked, pointing at the staircase.

The woman grimaced. "Are you not listening to me?" She demanded. "I am offering you a bargain!" She spat angrily.

"I'm listening." Katarina replied simply. "And I accept. But before I free you, I have some mages to kill. Does that staircase lead up to them?" She asked, and Ollara cocked her head to the side.

"You mean to face them alone?" She asked, and Katarina nodded.

"You need my help!" The moonracer replied, and Katarina shook her head. "I will defeat them." She said simply.

"Please." Ollara begged quietly. "You're my only hope of getting free and escaping this place." She whispered. "I can't trust that you will survive."

After a long, considering moment, Katarina shook her head. "I can't take that risk." She finally decided. "I swear though, I will free you when I get back."

Katarina headed for the staircase while the moonracer glared at her from her cage, tears in her eyes.

Katarina was as quiet as she could be as she ascended the stairs. She couldn't sense any malice in the creature, but Katarina didn't want to free her while there were mages about. She had no idea how to handle a giant. Even if that thing well and truly served the Golden Lady, Katarina did not want to be near it if it went on a rampage.

Katarina grimaced. She should have asked the giantess how many there were. Katarina didn't like the idea of going into a fight without auravision, but the long trek through the plains and dead cities had taught her not to use her blessed senses, period. There was entirely too much magic suffusing everything. If she used her senses here, she'd go mad from the overload.

The climb up the spiral staircase took a longer time than she'd expected, but when she'd heard muttering, she'd immediately dropped to a crouch and crawled up the stairs like a cat. The mumbling and nattering continued, but Katarina couldn't tell if there were more than one person ahead. She inched forward and peeked into the room near the top of the tower.

There were three of them in the room, which seemed to be dedicated to research. Books were stacked in haphazard piles, a large slate board with all sorts of magical formulae took up one wall. In the center of the room was a table with all sorts of metal apparatus; brass flasks and tubing and coils. A wooden crate sat under the table. Strangest of all was a person-sized ceramic doll that occupied one corner of the room.

The three that scurried about carried obvious mutations. One was covered in overlapping red scales, another had eyes that protruded from their sockets on short stalks, and the third had a second, smaller set of hands growing out from his wrists. They muttered to each other in a language Katarina couldn't identify, and it seemed they were disputing a formula of some kind on the blackboard. The one with the scales jotted a formula out on the board, then added something to it, then circled it for emphasis.

The one with the eyes on stalks dismissively wiped away the equation, wrote something else, and underlined his solution. The one with four hands raised them placatingly. Since their backs were turned, they didn't notice Katarina slipping into the room, crouched low, gun in her hand. There was a vague idea of a strategy forming in Katarina's mind as she tucked her gun away as she reached the table: If one of them walked away from the other two, she could cut that one's throat, then finish the other two with her gun, if necessary. She ducked under the central table and waited.

As she waited, schooling her breathing to silence, she peeked in the crate under the table and winced. A body was haphazardly stored in that crate, limbs hacked off and stacked atop the torso. It was pretty obvious to Katarina who that was, while certainly larger than your average child, it was no doubt Ollara's daughter. The limbs looked as though they'd been chewed on. From her vantage under the table, it looked as if the ceramic figure was behind a partition of glass. There was a disconnected sense of amazement; she'd never seen glass that clear and flawless before.

A figure shuffled past Katarina, robes dragging on the ground. Katarina slipped out behind the figure, swiftly clamped her hand over the mutant's mouth, and dragged a knife across its throat. The knife she carried was a blade she'd taken from a mage all the way back before she'd arrived in the logging village of Higgenfal; it had been magically treated to be as sharp as could be and to never lose its edge. She hauled back, swiftly and silently laying the body down. It was over and done in only a couple of seconds, and the mutant hadn't even gurgled. She eyed the body; it was the mutant with four hands. Katarina glanced up; strangely the other two hadn't noticed their compatriots death. They hadn't even turned around.

She ducked down again, using the table as cover. She eyed the knife, splattered with the mutant's blood. It had done its job masterfully. She carefully drew her sword so it wouldn't make any noise, and was startled when one of the others stepped around the table.

They let out a wordless shout, and Katarina sprang into action, her sword heaving forward in a thrust that punched through the mutant's ribcage as she brought the knife around in a panicked arc.

Her sword struck true, and shockingly, the knife slid through the mutant's neck with a whisper of effort and only the slightest tug of resistance. Katarina's eyes went wide as she swept the mutant's head from it's shoulders. The eyes that stared blandly from their stalks, the mutant's mouth sagging open in shock, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. His neck jetted a revolting spurt of blood and some greasy gelatinous substance as the body sagged, dragging down her sword arm with its weight.

She twisted, trying to spot the third, the one with scales covering its skin, and saw him making a dash for the ceramic doll in the corner. She jerked her sword free from the mutant, and threw the knife she was holding at the freak.

The blade wasn't balanced for throwing, however, so the knife never reached him. Still, he leapt forward with panicky urgency, and smashed his fist on the glass and screamed something in that language Katarina couldn't understand. He pounded on the glass, shrieking over and over in a frantic voice as Katarina rounded the table brandishing her dripping saber.

He balled up his fist and punched the glass; spiderwebbing it with cracks. He punched it again, and screamed as his hand went through. He yanked it back, spraying blood. Katarina lunged forward and her sword skated across the scales on his back. He whirled, back against the glass, his eyes bulging with the knowledge that he was wholly trapped.

"In the name of the Golden Lady, you are judged guilty of the crimes of mutancy, murder, cannibalism, and heresy." She admonished in a cold voice.

He gabbled at her incomprehensibly, hands out pleading in front of her. She'd seen that gesture on hundreds of mutants and witches alike, a plea for mercy, for clemency, a desperate bid for the right to live.

Katarina however, was pitiless for someone like him. She could feel him struggling against her antimagic field, trying to cast a spell that was doomed to fail from the onset. She thrust with the sword at his throat, and he frantically ducked to the side. She swung for his neck; he ducked and the blade clanged off the glass. She lunged forward and he dropped to his knees and scrabbled under the table, out the other side, and back down the stairs she'd came up. She vaulted the table in pursuit, and scrambled down the stairs after him. Her antimagic field only had a radius of ten feet, so she needed to keep him inside it to negate his magic.

He hit the floor in the room with the giantess, and Katarina pounced on him, leaping from the stairs. She hit him in a flying tackle and smashed his face into the floor. He tried to struggle to his feet but she bore him down with her weight. She punched the back of his skull with the basket of her saber, raised the sword up, and rammed it through his neck so the point punched through the other side, scraping off the stone floor. She twisted the sword and forced the blade out the side of his neck; he immediately went limp as his blood spurted in hot gushes across the floor.

"Witch Hunter." The giantess called, and Katarina looked up at the woman. "That was..." She trailed off.

Katarina pushed herself to her feet. "I'm not finished. There might be more." She replied exhaustedly. "Don't worry, I'll be back." She added as the caged giant opened her mouth to object.

When Katarina returned to the room, she eyed the shambles with a jaundiced eye. If there were anything she could salvage from the room, It'd have to be after she pressed on.

Despite her not using her blessed senses, she could still sense the presence of at least one more mage, likely up the stairs from the door on the other side of the room. As she started across the room, something in her mind clicked, and she froze, eyes scanning the room carefully.