Chapter Seventeen

NETHER & BACK

Quintessi was true to her word. She wasn’t, however, the slightest bit bloody punctual.

We all have vices amongst our virtues, and you could say one of my failings was my impatience. People have told me I’d rather slaughter a queue than wait in one. That is… somewhat accurate.

The hours ground on me like I was grain in a mill. Sleep harassed me. I yawned so hard tears squeezed from my eyes. Every scream and clang of steel made me rock back and forth as I watched both sides of the corridor equally. It was agonising, waiting for a nightmare or a saviour without knowing which would get to me first.

‘About damn time!’ I yelled when I saw the quivering shine of a lamp. A masked figure stood behind its glow. The stink of the brazier they wafted made my empty stomach queasy. It caused me a moment of worry when I realised it might not be Quintessi at all.

‘Keep your voice down! Ashlander moron,’ hissed a thankfully familiar accent. ‘I’m not the only prosecutor down here.

‘What took you so long? I swear it’s almost dawn.’

Quintessi removed her mask and showed me a glower. ‘Crabluck and Gurt as usual. They had me reorganising a whole room of files. Only just managed to get rid of them. And I’m not about to ruin my life getting caught freeing you. Already sick to the stomach with the thought of it, but as the scripture says, lesser of two evils,’ she said, throwing down a sack at the bars. The handle of my cleaver poked into the light.

I clapped my hands. Tasparil danced impatiently on my shoulder. ‘Alright. Less talking. More freeing.’

‘You’ve got some cheek trying to order me about. I’m still in charge here, filth,’ she said, wafting the brazier past my bars as if I was plagued.

Even though my nose and eyes burned, I faked my smile and grabbed the bars. My words were spoken through my teeth. ‘I sincerely apologise, Prosecutor Highclaw. But perhaps, considering the enormity of the situation and that I very, very much want to be free of this shit-smeared and godsforsaken place as soon as possible, we should move a little faster?’

‘I knew I should have chosen that mute we brought in a month back,’ Quintessi muttered as she saw to the lock. The rattle of her keys made me flinch as if they were the chains of nightmares. The lock had barely clicked before I barged the door open.

‘Don’t get ahead of yourself. Still plenty of Catacrone to escape,’ Quintessi warned me.

‘And how exactly are we going to do that?’

Quintessi put her boot on the sack before I could reach for my blade and belongings. Her white sword came free of its scabbard and waggled in my face. ‘You have options. You can go up in disguise and walk out in the hope nobody above questions your stink. Or you go down five levels to a tunnel almost all the prosecutors have forgotten. One lined with white tile that comes out on the low streets, so long as you don’t get lost or eaten. You can either take the disguise or the brazier and the lamp. I can only guide you so far.’

I shook my head emphatically. ‘Down? No, no, no. There won’t be any down.’

‘Then up it is. Now listen close. There is a fountain in the Halfstreets. All carved from red stone. When both moons shine full at midnight tomorrow, I’ll be there. We will talk more.’

‘What’s to stop me running off never to be seen again?’ I asked with a smirk.

The blade tilted my chin up to the skylight. ‘Your word. We had a deal.’

‘You’re taking a big gamble, Quintessi. I’m a sinner after all, aren’t I?’ I asked her. The blade tried to menace me but it only made me chuckle. ‘A scurrilous criminal. Maybe a murderer as well as a smuggler and liar. Maybe the worst you’ve ever had in your cells. What’s to say my word is worth shit? You must either be the most optimistic soul in the Realms or the most desperate.’

‘Maybe I’m both. But that doesn’t meant we can’t both gain from this.’ Quintessi blinked her shining blue eyes independently. ‘You can’t win if you don’t gamble.’

‘Wise.’

‘Surprised an Esfer can be wise?’ she muttered to me.

‘Not at all. Just sounded like something I’d say.’

‘Hmph. My father likes to repeat it constantly. Now hurry up. Robe’s in the sack.’

‘Robe?’

‘Yes, robe. You’re not fit to wear prosecutor’s garb.’

The sword stayed trained on me as I opened up the sack and found white cloth bundled inside. There was no armour, just a cleric’s robe and mask emblazoned with the Venerance’s six circles.

‘Ugh,’ I said as I shuffled it on over my soiled clothes. ‘Why is it so itchy?’

‘You get used to it.’

The rest of the sack contained nothing but my book of tales and my cleaver. ‘Where are my shells?’

‘Gone. Prosecutor’s pockets, probably. You’re lucky you’ve still got your blade.’

I had earned those shells. Fought for them. Possibly killed for them. I seized the handle of my cleaver.

‘Leave it in the sack,’ growled Quintessi, poking me with her sword tip. Her spare hand hovered around her neck in some peculiar fighting pose. ‘The drake better hide in there too.’

Tasparil didn’t like that one bit, but he did as he was told while hissing enthusiastically at us both. I looped the sack over my shoulder and put on my mask. The slits in its wood gave me a very narrow view of the world. I wondered if that was the whole root of the problem with the Venerance.

‘This way,’ whispered Quintessi as she led me up the slope of the corridor. ‘Don’t speak. Walk like you belong. Clerics come here often with orders from the temple. Or to give us sermons. Some of the more zealous or moronic ones come to preach the Watcher’s words to the prisoners.’

It didn’t take us long to find another prosecutor wandering the darkness. He said nothing to Quintessi bar a moody grunt and chose an adjoining corridor to patrol.

‘They really don’t like you, do they?’

‘Shut up,’ Quintessi told me. ‘I’ve got thicker skin than you think.’

It didn’t seem that way to me, but I kept my mouth closed for once.

After two spiralling levels of cells, we approached an open doorway that looked very much like an exit to me. It was a simple archway in the stone and two steel-bound wood slabs, old and battered, but it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, let me tell you.

Two prosecutors stood in a very relaxed state of guard on either side of the door. To tell the truth, they lounged like a pair of lizards. One was lying on a low lump of stone, nibbling at a bag of something balanced on his chest. Another leaned against the wall, scratching something into the stone with her knife.

Before they noticed us, Quintessi pushed me into an alcove in the wall and handed me the brazier.

‘I go ahead. Give me twenty paces before you follow. I won’t have them thinking we are together,’ she instructed. ‘Understand?’

‘Fine with me.’

I counted thirty to be sure. With my head high and wafting the brazier in circles as I’d seen the clerics do, I followed.

The prosecutors were greeting Quintessi with low moans and tuts. The horizontal one flicked a nutshell at the passing Esfer. ‘Look who’s out strolling like a lady of the spires,’ he said.

‘Crabluck’s looking for you,’ hissed the woman with the knife.

Quintessi gave them nothing in reply as she walked through the open gates. The heckling followed her like her own shadow.

‘Where you off to, Quintessi? Crabluck’s office is the other way.’

‘Back to her father’s tower, I’ll wager. Or that bastard brat of hers,’ chuckled the man.

Quintessi halted momentarily before she forced herself onwards.

The prosecutors were so pleased with themselves, they barely noticed my approach. When they finally heard the scuffing of my feet, they ceased their smiling and stared balefully. The kind of staring where the head moves but the body doesn’t.

‘Little short for a cleric, aren’t you?’ the woman asked of me.

The man I recognised as the one who had paid me several visits, standing outside my cell and taking far too much pleasure in seeing me locked up. He clutched at the parchment bag in his lap.

‘You want some nuts, cleric?’ he asked with a smirk.

The other prosecutor waggled her knife. ‘Come on, Karal, stow that shit.’

I paused, keeping my brazier swinging. I could see Quintessi beckoning to me furtively, but I took a breath through the skeletal teeth of the mask instead, and sighed as I rearranged the sack at my side. It had all been going so well, hadn’t it, my dear reader? Down, it would have to be.

Karal swivelled upright. ‘Clerics are just the scrapings who fail to be prosecutors. What’s she going to do about it?’

Prosecutor Crabluck, I silently recited. Prosecutor Gurt. Ganner. Swordsaint Orzona. Reverent Lectra. The last on my list stood right beside me.

‘And let’s not forget the pervert,’ I whispered as I took off the mask.

‘What did you call m—’

The prosecutor had been standing for no more than a heartbeat before I opened the sack. As Tasparil burst free to attack the woman, I pulled the cleaver free and swung it like a child swiping a head from a flower. The momentum took the blade right between the deviant Karal’s legs, into an entirely different bag of nuts and further beyond.

I hadn’t expected to feel such reverberation in my blade. I could feel bones cracking against the steel. Nor had I expected the spatter of blood across my face and robe. One fleck stung my eye.

The woman had batted Tasparil aside and bounded at me with a deafening screech of, ‘Escapee!’

My sword was still stuck in the howling, blubbering prosecutor. With a lunge, I kicked his comrade square in the chest and sent her tumbling against her own graffiti. It bought me enough time to wrench the blade free with a sound that tested my stomach. Karal, my first kill, slumped to the floor, blood and innards pouring from his midsection as his eyes rolled up.

I didn’t dare wait to watch. Turning my back on that most beautiful of doorways, feet slipping in the blood, I ran back into the wailing dark of Catacrone. Yes: it was possibly the stupidest decision I’d made yet, but there was another of my vices for you: I never wait to think of the consequences. Alas. At least it kept me on my toes. Made my days a little more interesting.

One level down, with only the brazier for light, I found a prosecutor barring my path. He was so startled at the sight of a cleric covered in blood that he didn’t notice Tasparil winging through the shadows.

‘Halt there!’

‘A prisoner’s escaped!’ I yelled. ‘Gone mad, he has! You better help them!’

‘Bleeding Watcher!’ the prosecutor cursed as he sprinted away. ‘Not again.’

Two levels down and I reached my cell, still with the door open as if I’d been snatched by a nightmare. Cries were rising above the cacophony of Catacrone. A bell began to clang.

Five more levels were all I needed to survive. ‘Five levels,’ I said aloud to the drake as he landed on my shoulder. ‘Five levels of nightmares and who knows what else. That’s fine. Everything’s fine.

I grit my teeth, held up my smoking brazier and pressed on into the darkness.

Two levels passed much the same as those before. The light of the burning blightpowder and herbs was meagre, and the skylights growing fewer, but I could see enough to move quickly and not stumble like an idiot.

The inmates in those deeper cells were pale and ragged. Some whistled and whispered nonsense from the corners my light couldn’t reach. Others called for mercy, for salvation, for death.

‘Cleric!’ screeched a skeleton of a man that groped from his bars, nearly sending my heart crashing out of my ribs. ‘Save me, cleric!’

Detritus started to build up in the corners of the corridor. Carved stone turned to rough brick. I saw broken skulls litter the floors of cells. The noises of pursuit were dying away, and I had the distinct feeling few prosecutors came further than this. There were still cells down there that were occupied. They contained the broken and forgotten. Those inmates that weren’t catatonic, or drowned in carpets of their own hair and beards, were the ones that filled the prison with screaming. They threw themselves against the bars and hurled spit and rat bones and garbled words at me.

Not all the screams were those of madness. The nightmares showed themselves by the time I’d counted three levels. Two loitered over a body in a bloody cell, and they screeched at me as I scuttled past. One gave a lumbering chase, much to my immediate regret, but it came to a convulsing halt at the stink of the brazier.

‘That’s right,’ I told it with a confident cackle. ‘Stay right there. I don’t want to see your rotten arsehole of a face in any more detail than I have to.’

Unfortunately for me, that wish would not be granted.

By the fourth level, the screams were fading to an ever-present rumbling. I’d thought it was the noise of the city before, on the nights I couldn’t sleep, but this sounded like boulders wrestling. It grew louder with every quickening step. The darkness had become thick and cloying. Brief flashes of misplaced lightning lit the spiralling corridor. Silhouettes of disfigured bodies showed themselves, briefer than a blink. There were dozens of them.

Chains shifted behind me in the darkness. A snuffling came from up ahead. I saw nothing but the smoke I wafted. Tasparil’s claws dug deeper into my shoulder. My hands were slick with sweat around the brazier and my blade. My breaths came short and loud. I swung the coals in great arcs, lighting alternate parts of the corridor in my search for a tunnel lined with white tiles. Nothing resembled Quintessi’s description. I saw cells reduced to mounds of rubble. I saw piles of bones. I saw old devices of torture, but no tunnel. Frustrated, I spun around to check a glimpse of something pale, and the brazier lit up the face of a nightmare standing within arm’s reach. It grinned through the smoke, staring at me with the eyes of a dead prisoner in its skull.

‘Watcher!’ I squealed, dodging away so fast my feet skidded in the muck and I ended up sprawled on the floor. I felt the impact of the brazier against the dusty stone, and even before I looked I knew what had happened. The chamber had opened in the fall. Half the smouldering coals and reeking leaves had spilled onto the grimy floor. My light had died to almost nothing.

‘No, no, no,’ I mumbled as I franticly tried to rescue the burning mess. It took scorching every one of my fingers, but I managed to save most of the brazier’s contents. I blew fiercely, coaxing it into a glow, and in the blossoming light, I saw a dozen nightmares gathered about me, reaching slowly with their key-like claws. Of all the memories my mind likes to bring me in the early hours of sleepless nights, that sight is one that comes often. And it always makes me shiver, even despite all the nightmares I’ve seen since.

A screech burst from me. ‘Get back, you bastards!’ I bellowed as I spun the brazier around my head as if it were a mace. The wave of smoke drove them back again with snarls of annoyance. My cleaver chased the glowing coals, catching claws and hides and clashing with chain. To a blood-chilling howling, I found a gap and ran for it.

Five levels, by my count, and I came to a place where a breeze blew, and I felt as if the walls had fallen away. My corridor felt more like a ledge, and I came to a shuddering stop. The rumbling was all that could be heard, and the more it filled my ears, the less it sounded like boulders but huge chains dragging against stone. The kind that kept cruisers weighed down against storm-winds. The nightmares joined the din with their own shuffling and bellowing. I stared through a veil of precious smoke for untold time before a flash of light showed me the true terrors they kept in Catacrone’s depths.

I only caught a glimpse, but I could see they were as mighty as trees. A broad dome like that of a mushroom’s cap towered above a sinuous body. Thick and swollen legs spread about the darkness and moved constantly. Like the nightmares gathered about them, they, too, were bound and tortured by chain. The sparks came from the clashing of steel links that were as thick as I was tall. I could feel the sonorous roars of the giant creatures in my chest, and they definitely did not sound like the happy and contended kind of roaring.

‘No,’ I whispered. It was all astoundingly horrific, and I had absolutely no wish to see any more of it. A very human scream from somewhere in the dark was like a whiplash that sent me scurrying. I started babbling out of dread. ‘White tile tunnel. White tile tunnel. That’s all I need. I swear to the Watcher, Quintessi, if you’ve got this wrong—AHA!’

Caught in the brazier’s glow was a tunnel so covered in muck you could hardly see the lines of white running through the masonry, as if the builders had run out of brick at some point and made do with tile. Quintessi hadn’t lied. I’d found my way out. It was just a shame I had chosen to shout about it so obnoxiously loudly.

A landslide of chains almost split my ears. I ducked instinctively as a rush of wind made the brazier glow. Something colossal and full of rage slammed the wall above me. Masonry rained down as I hauled myself into the tunnel. As I felt a roar shaking the stones beneath my feet, I was consumed by the enormous urge to run. I didn’t argue with it. Tasparil was already racing ahead, seemingly in terror. As I came to the first bend in the tunnel, I saw why.

I was barely around the corner when an enormous tentacle of mottled grey smashed into the bricks behind me. Chips of tile and broken bricks pummelled me as I ran from its squirming reach. Red claws protruded from the tentacle’s end, snapping together like a maw. Fortunately, they grabbed at nothing but dust and rubble while I made good my escape around the next corner. And the next, and the next, until I was supremely confident no tentacle in the Holy Realms was long enough to seize me and haul me back to the hellhole beneath Catacrone. For all I knew, I might have actually delved briefly into the netherworld. I couldn’t imagine it could be any worse than what I had just witnessed.

Tasparil scented the way out, and I was more than happy to follow him through any tight squeeze or swamp of questionable filth that had accumulated beneath the earth. And let me tell you, there were all kinds. I left the brazier crashing and smoking behind me when I saw my first sign of light through a wall of wooden boards. A dawn, by the rose glow of it. One I should have seen three fucking months ago. I could hear voices behind the boards, and whether it was a house or a shop or a street that lay behind them, I wasted no time in hacking my way through.

‘By Watcher’s sweaty arse! Who in the bloody nether is that?’ came a cry as I fell from a pipe and smashed a crate beneath my back. I was upright in a moment, cleaver swinging back and forth at the two shadows before me. The morning light blinded me.

‘Who are you?’ I barked.

A human woman with long braids of hair barring her face jabbed her blades at me. She was covered in sharp steel. Dirks to daggers from head to toe. There must have been a dozen of them strapped around her thighs, waist, and wrists. ‘I bloody asked you first!’ she snapped.

‘What is that?’ I said, pointing my cleaver at the thing behind her. I thought it was an old man at first, hunched and crooked-handed. The clearer my eyes became, the more inhuman it became. It didn’t even look half-human. A bug-eyed face came to a snout that bristled with yellow fangs. Pink arms and legs as scrawny as a salamander’s poked from a mass of white fur. Two pointed ears twitched in time to a long, furry tail, stained with mud.

The woman snarled. ‘What?’

‘That!’ I pointed again. I’d never seen a creature like it. Tasparil flapped his wings in angst.

‘Who? Him?’

‘Yes, him.’

The thing chattered incomprehensibly.

The woman nodded. ‘She is rude! Who in the nether are you? I better get an answer soon or so ’elp me, I’ll start throwin’ metal!’

‘Dwellin!’ I yelled. ‘Now you.’

‘Malyka Horu’s Daughter. Or the Iron Zephyr to my paying’ customers, of whom I have fuck all.’

‘And that thing?’

The creature flexed its claws as it squawked.

‘That thing ’as a name and ’is name is Scramp.’

‘Scramp,’ I repeated. I stared behind me at the tunnel, swearing I heard a distant roar.

‘What were you doing in there, Dwellin? What’s a cleric doing covered in blood in crawling out of a dirty tunnel?’

‘Escaping. You? Where is this?’

Malyka thumbed her jaw while she watched me. Intricate tattooed swirls of black ink ran from ear to chin. ‘You’re in a back alley of the Halfstreets, and we were lookin’ for this exact tunnel when you came burstin’ out of it. I ’eard a rumour from a friend, see? A rumour there’s a lost room of confiscated riches in an old Catacrone tunnel.’

I laughed at that. ‘Trust me, either your friend is an idiot or they’re trying to get you killed. There’re no riches in there. Only nightmares.’

The woman crept closer as she tried to peek deeper into the tunnel. My cleaver rose up to meet her.

‘Shit,’ Malyka said, straightening up and spinning the blades around her hands. ‘You’re bloody right. Do Larasta must want me dead.’

Scramp nodded with a chittering that sounded like haunted laughter.

‘Once, actually,’ Malyka responded to the thing as if its noises were somehow a language. ‘I only fucked his wife the once. Sure, it might have lasted two days but that still only counts as one.’

‘While that’s all very interesting,’ I piped up with a stamp of my foot, ‘are we going to do something about this situation, or are we going to stand here all day?’

‘You found a way out of Catacrone?’ asked Malyka. ‘That’s supposed to be impossible.’

I nodded, feeling a pride coming to wash out the fear. ‘That I did.’

‘You the smugglin’ sort, or the thievin’ sort, or…?’ Her eyes slipped to the blood smearing my cleaver.

‘I’m not the murdering sort, if that’s what you’re asking. Unless you’re a prosecutor who deserved it,’ I muttered. The sight of the dying man refused to leave my mind.

Malyka shoved her blades back in their sheaths and smacked her lips. ‘Want a drink? she asked, tilting a hand to her lips.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know about you and your sorry situation, but I could certainly use a cold ale or a swig of rum. Maybe both.’

The question took me aback. Suspicion pinned me. I’d become accustomed to dealing with characters such as Big Toad, or Voldo, or Gurt and Crabluck, and here were another two potential disappointments. Another two potential problems to add to my list. But as Quintessi said, you can’t win if you don’t gamble. At some point, allies had to rear their heads amongst the antagonists, surely? And besides, after what I had just faced, I was parched enough to ignore the risk. My dust-filled throat was drier than an ash-field. My mouth was soured with the taste of fear and sweat. Even a sip of water would be worth another fight, another enemy.

‘Well?’ she asked again.

I took a chance and gave Malyka a nod. She flashed me some teeth in return. As did Scramp, though his smile didn’t look as friendly with the amount of fangs he owned.

‘Should probably ditch the bloody cleric’s rags and give your face a wipe, though,’ Malyka recommended. ‘That’s the kind of thing that gets a fucker noticed in Bashkar.’

She was right. Sheathing my cleaver, I pulled the itchy robe over my head and threw it into the forgotten tunnel. I paused to stare and listen hard. Deep in the pitch-black gloom where the brazier still smoked, despite the growing noise of the waking streets around me, I heard the faintest snuffling of a distant nightmare.

‘Problem?’ Malyka called to me.

‘Not anymore,’ I muttered. The broken boards splintered beneath my feet as I finally walked free in the city of my darkest dreams.