Chương 27

Lorn pushed the door open. The room beyond was wide and low, carved from the same stone as the rest of the tunnels but warmer here, lit by braziers and a cook fire that burned in a pit near the far wall. Bedrolls lined the edges of the room in neat rows. A long table of rough planks sat in the center, and around it sat a dozen men and women in matched grey and black uniforms, their skin the color of ash. Some of them held cards. Others ate from bowls of rice and salt pork.

One man had his feet up on the bench and a cup of something dark in his hand. They all looked up when the door opened, and their eyes went to Lodin, and the easy murmur of conversation died. They were disciples of the Shattered Summit Sect. The same he and Sarin Jeida had just fought, up above. The same who had butchered all those innocent people, thrown their bodies in pits, sacrificed their souls for some profane ritual. His jaw tightened.

Heat bloomed behind his sternum and spread outward into his arms, into his fists. The memory of that empty village came back to him, the silence of it, the mass grave, and here these people sat with full bellies and cards in their hands. Lorn walked into the room as if he belonged there. The Shattered Summit disciples watched him pass and a few of them nodded at him, casual, familiar.

"Everyone," Lorn said, "this is my brother." No one seemed surprised. They stared. Lodin stared back, fists clenched at his sides. Lodin's gaze shifted to Lorn, and Lorn returned it with a raised eyebrow.

"You're with these people." The words left his mouth before he could measure them. The Shattered Summit disciples at the table remained still. Lorn's raised eyebrow didn't drop.

"I am," Lorn said. Something shifted in Lodin's chest. A weight he had carried across an ocean, through every fight, down every corridor of this tomb. He had pictured his brother in chains. Behind bars. Held against his will in some dark place, pale and starved and desperate for rescue. To be honored above all others. He had heard those words and imagined the worst. He had not imagined this.

"Do you know what these people have done?" Every face at the table hardened. The man with his feet on the bench set his cup down. The woman nearest the door put her cards flat on the table and her hands went to her lap. Lorn held his gaze. A quick calculation ran behind his eyes.

"Walk with me," Lorn said.

"I think we've gone far enough."

"Not quite far enough," said Lorn. Then he nodded his head in the direction of the door, and though his expression remained calm, there was a pleading quality in his eyes.

"Come." Lodin glanced around. He could destroy these demons now or later, it didn't matter much. But Lorn wanted to show him something else. Whatever it was, it couldn't justify… This. But it might be important anyway. Or maybe a part of him simply wanted to be convinced this wasn't real. Lorn led him through a door at the back of the barracks and into a corridor carved from the same pale stone. The sounds of the common room fell away behind them.

Their footsteps echoed off bare walls, and the ghost-flame dragon cast blue light across the featureless rock ahead. The corridor opened into a second, then a third. Each one plain, and the same size as the last. The air grew cooler and the smell of cooking smoke faded, replaced by the mineral scent of deep stone and old water.

"When I started to reach out," Lorn said, "I found a lot of people. Scholars, monks, healers. Minds I could touch across distances Master Yan said should have been impossible." He paused at a junction and chose the left passage without hesitation.

"But one voice came from further than any of them. Further than I thought anything could reach." Lodin said nothing. He walked and he listened.

"It came from below." Lorn's voice had gone quiet, and the dragon at his shoulder dimmed as if it listened too.

"And it belonged to a soul in tremendous pain, trapped in a place no soul should have to endure. He called out the same way I did, and I was the one who heard him." The passage ended at a broad stone arch. Beyond it, darkness yawned, vast and hollow. Lorn stepped through. The ghost-flame dragon flared, and its blue light rolled outward across the cavern floor like a tide. The chamber dwarfed everything Lodin had seen in the tunnels behind them. Its ceiling vanished into shadow. And the floor was a labyrinth.

Stone pillars rose in staggered rows, scarred with blast marks and gouges. Channels cut the flagstones into a grid, and Lodin could see the dark gleam of liquid in some of them, oil or pitch or something worse. Wooden frames stood at intervals, fitted with counterweights and spring mechanisms. Rope bridges spanned gaps where the floor dropped away into pits, and the ropes showed the frayed wear of heavy use. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

Lorn walked into it the way a man walks through his own home, and Lodin followed.

"I helped him," Lorn said.

"I gave his soul a place to rest. He showed me what had been done to him, and who had done it. And in exchange for my help, he lent me his power, and his knowledge." The cavern floor rose in a gentle slope toward the far wall. As they drew closer, the ghost-flame light reached further ahead and pulled a shape from the dark. A door. It filled the cavern wall from floor to ceiling, forty feet tall at least, carved from a single slab of pale stone that looked white in the blue light.

At the center sat the First Emperor Odoshinko in his aspect as the Sovereign. Regal robes pooled around his legs and spilled over the edges of a broad throne. His eyes looked straight ahead, and his face was stern. Around him stood the weapons of his arsenal: a jian at his right hand, a pair of dao crossed beneath his left, a war hammer propped against the base of the throne, a spear stood upright behind his shoulder, and a long bow and quiver of arrows carved into the stone at his feet.

A seam ran down the center of the slab. Lodin traced it with his eyes, from the peak of the arch to the stone floor. The line split the Emperor's throne and passed between his feet, precise enough to slide a hair through and nothing thicker.

"It's a copy," Lorn said. Lodin looked at him.

"The original sits beneath Tianlong Castle. Three hundred feet underground, at the end of a maze of corridors filled with traps and formations that would kill anything with qi in its body." Lorn's gaze rested on the carved face of the Emperor, and a strange expression crossed his features. Respect, or something close to it.

"Behind it is a vault. And inside that vault is a box, on a chain. The box Mayari Lakan used to trap the other half of Wandering Flame." The cavern was silent. The ghost-flame dragon coiled close around Lorn's shoulders and its light held steady, blue and cold. Lodin looked at the door again. Then he looked at the training ground behind them. The pillars, the channels, the rope bridges, the pits. The dozen soldiers in the barracks who had nodded at his brother like a captain.

"You built all of this," Lodin said. Lorn met his eyes.

"To get through that door."

"Through the real one," Lorn said.

"Yes. The Shattered Summit Sect was put to the task, after they were turned. I came later." The silence held between them.

"I saw that pit," Lodin said.

"At that village. The one your people emptied. You did that to all the other villages around here, didn't you. Called it a plague." Lorn's jaw tightened.

"Families, Lorn. Little kids. Taken out of their homes, rounded up and butchered and thrown in a pit to burn." Lorn stared at him. The ghost-flame dragon dimmed at his shoulders, and for a moment the cavern held its breath. A shadow settled behind Lorn's eyes.

"You're right." His voice was flat, toneless.

"It wasn't fair, what we did to them. They didn't deserve that. They were normal people." Lorn took a step toward him.

"But do you know who else was the victim of undeserved misfortune," His voice had changed. The flatness was gone, replaced by a low burn that flared with each word.

"Before there were any humans here at all. One being, whose soul was mangled and cast into hell. Who has suffered unspeakable torments for centuries." The ghost-flame dragon flared. Its blue light blazed across the cavern walls and threw the carved face of the Sovereign into sharp relief. Lorn's eyes burned the same color as the flames that wreathed his shoulders, and for an instant Lodin could not tell where his brother ended and the dragon began. A cold feeling settled in the pit of Lodin's stomach.

He looked at the training ground behind them. The pillars. The channels. The rope bridges. The replica of a vault door that stretched forty feet above his head. He thought about those Shattered Summit disciples in their barracks. All of his preparations were complete. Or so it seemed.

"You have all of this," Lodin said.

"So what are you waiting for." Lorn held his gaze for a long moment. He raised his hand and it was engulfed in a nimbus of blue flame. Then the seam down the center of the Sovereign began to burn as well. Pale blue fire traced the line from floor to arch. The ground rumbled beneath Lodin's feet. Stone groaned against stone, deep and ancient, a sound that resonated in his ribs.

The stone Emperor split down the center and the two halves of the great door ground apart, slow and terrible, until the gap between them was wide enough for a man to walk through. Darkness waited beyond.

"Have a look," Lorn said. Lodin looked into his brother's eyes, but they were flat, expressionless.

"Go on," said Lorn.

"I'll be with you." Lodin stepped through the gap. The darkness on the other side swallowed the ghost-flame light at the threshold. He let his spirit sense unfurl, cast it outward in a wide arc. Stone walls on three sides. A ceiling above, close. A floor of smooth rock. The room was the size of a courtyard, squared off, featureless. Empty.

"I don't see anything," he called back. Blue fire erupted in the dark. Three figures blazed to life around him, each one a perfect copy of his brother rendered in blue ghost-flame. They closed on him before he could turn, at a speed Lodin could match but only barely, and the first one drove a knee into his ribs that folded him sideways. The second caught him with a palm strike to the chest that blew him back three steps. The third appeared at his flank and whipped a kick across his jaw.

Lodin stumbled, caught himself, brought his guard up. A clone came at him low and he sprawled back to avoid the takedown, but spikes of blue flame materialized in the air above him and lanced down. One punched through his shoulder. Another grazed his thigh and left a line of searing cold. Lodin ducked a roundhouse kick from the first clone and ate a heel to the back of his skull from the second. Stars burst across his vision. He threw an elbow behind him and it passed through flame.

A clone drove a front kick into his chest and he slid backward across the stone. Two more appeared at his sides. He zigzagged between them the way he'd once slipped tacklers in the training yard, burst through a gap, and three more blazed to life in his path. Six fists of ghost-flame hammered him back toward the center of the room. Lodin's spirit sense screamed warnings from every direction.

Spikes of flame materialized faster now, a storm of blue needles that drove him into the path of the clones and the clones drove him back into the path of the needles. Then every clone detonated at once. The blasts hit Lodin from all sides. The force slammed him off his feet and hurled him deep into the darkness at the back of the chamber. He struck the far wall, bounced off, hit the floor and skidded across the stone. He lay on his back, ears ringing. The ceiling above him began to glow with blue fire.

Ghost flame crawled across the walls on both sides. The stone groaned and cracked and the ceiling buckled. Slabs of rock split from the walls and crashed down around him, each one heavier than the last, a cascade of dark stone that shook the floor and filled the air with dust. The last thing Lodin saw through the gap in the falling rock was his brother's face, lit blue, expression unreadable. But his eyes were sad.

"It was good to see you again," said Lorn. And then Lodin was buried in rock and darkness. - - - - The great door ground shut. The Emperor sealed himself whole again, and the seam down his centerline went dark. Lorn lowered his hand. The ghost-flame dragon coiled tight around his shoulders. He stood before the door for a moment, still and quiet, and then he turned and walked back through the cavern, past the pillars and the pits and the rope bridges, toward the barracks where his soldiers waited.

The last step of their preparation was complete. Now they could proceed with the rest.