Icarium reached the threshold and climbed to his feet. Moments later Mappo joined him. They peered into the darkness.
'I smell… vast… death.'
Mappo nodded. He drew out his mace, looked down at the spiked ball of iron, then slipped the handle back through the leather loop at his belt.
Icarium in the lead, they entered the fortress.
The corridor was as narrow as the doorway itself, the walls uneven, black basalt, wet with condensation, the floor precarious with random knobs and projections, and depressions slick with ice that cracked and shifted underfoot. It ran more or less straight for forty paces. By the time they reached the opening at the end their eyes had adjusted to the gloom.
Another enormous chamber, as if the heart of the keep had been carved out. A massive cruciform of bound, black wood filled the cavern, and on it was impaled a dragon. Long dead, once frozen but now rotting. An iron spike as thick around as Mappo's torso had been driven into the dragon's throat, just above the breast bones. Aquamarine blood had seeped down from the wound and still dripped heavy and turgid onto the stone floor in slow, steady, fist-sized drops.
'I know this dragon,' Icarium whispered.
How? No, ask not.
'I know this dragon,' Icarium said again. 'Sorrit. Its aspect was…
Serc. The warren of the sky.' He lifted both hands to his face. 'Dead.
Sorrit has been slain…'
'A most delicious throne. No, not delicious. Most bitter, foul, illtasting, what was I thinking?'
'You don't think, Curdle. You never think. I can't remember any throne. What throne? There must be some mistake. Not-Apsalar heard wrong, that much is obvious. Completely wrong, an absolute error.
Besides, someone's sitting in it.'
'Deliciously.'
'I told you, there was no throne-'
The conversation had been going on for half the night, as they travelled the strange paths of Shadow, winding across a ghostly landscape that constantly shifted between two worlds, although both were equally ravaged and desolate. Apsalar wondered at the sheer extent of this fragment of the Shadow Realm. If her recollection of Cotillion's memories was accurate, the realm wandered untethered to the world Apsalar called her own, and neither the Rope nor Shadowthrone possessed any control over its seemingly random peregrinations. Even stranger, it was clear that roads of a sort stretched out from the fragment, twisting and wending vast distances, like roots, or tentacles, and sometimes their motions proved independent of the larger fragment.
As with the one they now traversed. More or less following the eastern road leading out from Ehrlitan, skirting the thin ribbon of cedars on their left, beyond which was the sea. And as the traders' track began to curve northward to meet the coastline, the Shadow Road joined with it, narrowing until it was barely the width of the track itself.
Ignoring the ceaseless nattering from the two ghosts flitting behind her, Apsalar pushed on, fighting the lack of sleep and eager to cover as much ground as possible before the sun's rise. Her control of the Shadow Road was growing more tenuous – it vanished with every slip of her concentration. Finally, she halted.
The warren crumbled around them. The sky to the east was lightening.
They stood on the traders' track at the base of a winding climb to the coastal ridge, rhizan darting through the air around them.
'The sun returns! Not again! Telorast, we need to hide! Somewhere!'
'No we don't, you idiot. We just get harder to see, that's all, unless you're not mindful. Of course, Curdle, you are incapable of being mindful, so I look forward to your wailing dissolution. Peace, at last. For a while, at least-'
'You are evil, Telorast! I've always known it, even before you went and used that knife on-'
'Be quiet! I never used that knife on anyone.'
'And you're a liar!'
'Say that again and I'll stick you!'
'You can't! I'm dissolving!'
Apsalar ran a hand across her brow. It came away glistening with sweat. 'That thread of Shadow felt… wrong,' she said.
'Oh yes,' Telorast replied, slipping round to crouch before her in a miasma of swirling grey. 'It's sickly. All the outer reaches are.
Poisoned, rotting with chaos. We blame Shadowthrone.'
'Shadowthrone? Why?'
'Why not? We hate him.'
'And that is sufficient reason?'
'The sufficientest reason of all.'
Apsalar studied the climbing track. 'I think we're close.'
'Good. Excellent. I'm frightened. Let's stop here. Let's go back, now.'