Bloodfire Quest (The Dark Legacy of Shannara, #2)(62)

He found this arrogant and dangerous, but he kept his thoughts to himself. It would be a mistake to underestimate Edinja Orle. She was determined and ruthless in spite of all her smiles and sweet words, and if you were an obstacle in her path you were likely to find yourself crushed.

“Tell me something of this help you would give me,” he said finally. “How would you give me an edge if there were to be another encounter with Aphenglow Elessedil?”

She walked back to her lounger, picked up a heavy robe, and threw it over her shoulders. “I will do better than tell you. I will show you. Wait here with Cinla until I return. Drink as much of the wine as you like. Dream sweet, wicked dreams of me.”

She crossed to the back of the room and touched something in the wall; a jagged section of stone swung open with a grinding sound. She passed through, and the section of wall closed behind her, leaving Stoon alone with a watchful Cinla.



She was gone for almost two hours. During that time, he finished off the decanter of wine, wandered her bedchamber and perused her possessions, stood looking out the window at the city, sat looking at Cinla—who never moved—and took long moments to consider if perhaps he had gotten in over his head. Edinja Orle’s seduction of him had been welcome enough, the lure of her promises and her ability to deliver on those promises a far better risk than the one he’d been taking by remaining with Drust Chazhul. But she was a viper and fully capable of turning on him without warning, and he did not think himself the least bit safe from her venom.

By the same token she was irresistible, and the attendant risk in staying with her was intoxicating. He was balanced on a wire, and whichever way he tumbled he would likely be killed. The only reasonable choice was to stay on the wire.

When she returned, she materialized in a rustle of clothing and a shimmer of silver hair. She brought him awake from where he dozed in his chair. Then she led him to the hidden door in the wall and from there to a stairway that descended through the tower and deep underground. Together they passed down countless steps, and the air grew stale and the stone damp. She said nothing as they went, her eyes on the way forward, her hand clutching his. He followed dutifully, thinking as he did so that this is how it would be until the end, that he would always allow her to lead him, even to what one day would prove to be his death.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, a passageway burrowed ahead through a scattering of smokeless torches and shadows. They traversed it in silence, and he began to hear whispers of voices and the rustling of movements from ahead, muffled and unrecognizable. He could not identify their source or their purpose, but they sent chills down his spine and unpleasant images through his head. They grew louder the farther in he went, and the effect on him grew more pronounced.

At the end of the passage was a huge iron door. Edinja touched it lightly twice, so quickly he could not remember afterward which bolts in which sections she had fingered, then the door swung open in a creaking of iron against iron.

Stoon had seen many strange and terrifying things in his life, and there wasn’t much that could give him pause. But he was not prepared for what waited behind that heavy door.

“Cat’s blood!” he hissed softly.

Men shambled about a cavernous chamber of stone blocks, iron racks dripping with chains and shackles and, in the dim recesses of the far back wall, cages. But these were not men in the accepted sense of the word; these were something else entirely. Resembling men, they stood mostly upright and were possessed of two legs and two arms, but they were otherwise misshapen in unnatural ways, their faces so severely blunted and warped that their features had virtually disappeared. They muttered and huffed like cattle as they trudged about the chamber, but they did not converse. They seemed to know what they were supposed to do, but they paid no attention to one another or to anything that was going on about them.

“What are they?” Stoon asked.

Edinja was smiling. “They are my creatures. Assembled and shaped in ways that I alone determined. Answerable only to me. They do what I wish without argument. They carry out my orders without question.” She looked at him. “Is that not the sort of servants everyone wishes they could have?”

He nodded, thinking as he did so that no one wanted creatures like these prowling around their homes. No one but Edinja. These were aberrations—humans mutated into monsters, men made into beasts. Where had they come from? They might have been men once, even if they were clearly something much less now. What had she done to them? They looked to have had their brains reconstructed, their ability to think and react scrubbed down and selectively erased.

“Come,” she said, taking his hand and pulling him forward. “Meet your new companions for your voyage.”

She took him to the cages at the back of the room, passing them by until she came to the final three. In each was a prisoner of reasonably normal appearance—big, heavily muscled men who had seen hard work and lived hard lives. Ragged and dirty, they screamed curses at Edinja as she stood safely out of reach. They grasped the bars and shook them violently, throwing themselves against the cage doors so hard Stoon wondered that the chains securing them did not give way.

“Not very well behaved, are they?” she said to him, stepping away so that a handful of her creatures could lumber forward and begin their work. They opened the cage doors and hauled out the prisoners one by one, dragging them like wild animals across the chamber floor to be securely shackled and chained to heavy wooden tables set side by side. Stoon could not help but notice the stains in the wooden planks; many of them had been made by blood.