The Warded Man (Demon Cycle, #1)(104)
His thoughts flashed back to the pile of books from the old world that crumbled to dust when he tried to pick them up. The rusted blade that gashed his hand and infected it so badly he felt his arm was on fire. The wine cellar that caved in and trapped him for three days until he dug himself out without a bottle to show for it. Ruin hunting never paid off, and one day, he knew, it would be the death of him.
Go back, he urged himself. Have a bite. Check your wards. Get some rest.
“The night take you,” Arlen cursed himself, and headed down the stairs.
But for all his self-loathing, Arlen’s heart pounded with excitement. He felt free and alive beyond anything the Free Cities could offer. This was why he became a Messenger.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, and dragged a sleeve across his sweating brow, taking a brief pull from his waterskin. Hot as it was, it was hard to imagine that after sunset the desert above would drop to near-freezing temperatures.
He moved along a gritty corridor of fitted stones, his torchlight dancing along the walls like shadow demons. Are there shadow demons? he wondered. That would be just my luck. He sighed. There was so much he still didn’t know.
He had learned much in the last three years, soaking up knowledge of other cultures and their struggles with the corelings like a sponge. In the Angierian forest, he had spent weeks studying wood demons. In Lakton, he learned of boats beyond the small, two-man canoes used in Tibbet’s Brook, and paid for his curiosity about water demons with a puckered scar on his arm. He had been lucky, able to plant his feet and haul on the tentacle, dragging the coreling from the water. Unable to abide the air, the nightmarish creature had let go and slipped beneath the surface once more. He spent months there, learning water wards.
Fort Rizon was much like home, less a city than a cluster of farming communities, each helping one another to ease the inevitable losses to corelings who bypassed the wardposts.
But Fort Krasia, the Desert Spear, was Arlen’s favorite. Krasia of the stinging wind, where the days burned and the cold nights brought forth sand demons from the dunes.
Krasia, where they still fought.
The men of Fort Krasia had not allowed themselves to succumb to despair. They waged a nightly battle against the corelings, locking away their wives and children and taking up spear and net. Their weapons, like those Arlen carried, could do little to pierce the tough skin of a coreling, but they stung the demons, and were enough to harass them into warded traps until the desert sun rose to reduce them to ashes. Their determination was an inspiration.
But for all he had learned, Arlen only hungered for more. Every city had taught him something unknown in the others. Somewhere out there had to be the answers he sought.
Thus, this latest ruin. Half buried in sand, almost forgotten save for a crumbling Krasian map Arlen had discovered, the city of Anoch Sun had stood untouched for hundreds of years. Much of the surface was collapsed or worn down by wind and sand, but the lower levels, cut deep into the ground, were intact.
Arlen turned a corner, and his breath caught. Up ahead, in the dim flickering light, he saw pitted symbols cut into the stone pillars to either side of the corridor. Wards.
Holding the torch close, Arlen inspected them. They were old. Ancient. The very air about them was stale with the weight of centuries. He took paper and charcoal from his satchel to make rubbings, then, swallowing hard, continued on, lightly stirring the dust of ages.
He came to a stone door at the end of the hall. It was painted with faded and chipped wards, few of which Arlen recognized. He pulled out his notebook and copied those intact enough to be made out, then moved to inspect the door.
It was more a slab than a door, and Arlen soon realized that nothing held it in place save its own weight. Taking up his spear to use as a lever, he wedged the metal tip into the seam between the slab and the wall, and heaved. The point of the spear snapped off.
“Night!” Arlen cursed. This far from Miln, metal was rare and expensive. Refusing to be balked, he took a hammer and chisel from his pack and hacked at the wall itself. The sandstone cut easily, and soon he had carved a nook wide enough to work the shaft of his spear into the room beyond. The spear was thick and sturdy, and this time when Arlen threw his weight against the lever, he felt the great slab shift slightly. Still, the wood would break before it moved.
Using the chisel, Arlen pried up the floor stones at the door’s base, digging a deep groove for it to tip into. If he could shift the stone that far, its own inertia would keep it in motion.
Moving back to the spear, he heaved once more. The stone resisted, but Arlen persevered, grinding his teeth with the effort. Finally, with a thunderous impact, the slab toppled to the ground, leaving a narrow gap in the wall, choked with dust.
Arlen moved into what appeared to be a burial chamber. The air reeked of age, but already fresher air was flooding the chamber from the corridor. Holding up his torch, he saw that the walls were brightly painted with tiny, stylized figures, depicting countless battles of humans against demons.
Battles that the humans seemed to be winning.
In the center of the room stood an obsidian coffin, cut roughly in the shape of a man holding a spear. Arlen approached the coffin, noting the wards along its length. He reached out to touch them, and realized his hands were shaking.
He knew there was little time remaining before sunset, but Arlen could not have turned away now if all the demons in the Core rose up against him. Breathing deeply, he moved to the head of the sarcophagus and pushed hard, forcing the lid down so that it would tilt to the floor without breaking. Arlen knew he should have copied the wards before trying this, but taking the time to copy them would have meant coming back in the morning, and he simply could not wait.