“I thought you were in here a couple months ago,” Vi said.
“Looks like the wytches have been busy.”
They entered a vast subterranean chamber. The ramp that had once descended thirty feet now plunged more than a hundred. The nobles’ cells and the cells from the first and second levels of the Maw were gone. The ramp was wide enough for four horses abreast and it spiraled around a great central pit. At the bottom, they could see a gold altar with man tied to it and meisters around him.
“Shit,” Vi breathed. “We have to go down there.”
Kylar followed her eyes. She wasn’t looking at the man on the gold table. She was looking at the south end of the pit, where a small tunnel led toward the castle.
The place felt wrong. It wasn’t the altar or the darkness. The smell of the Hole was thick here now. Sulphuric smoke crawled along the floor. It reminded Kylar of his fight with Durzo.
Beneath the smoke, there were other smells. Old blood and the cloying stench of decaying flesh. Beneath the darkness and the queer chanting of the wytches and the reedy cries of pain from deep in the tunnel—mercifully toward the Hole, not the way he and Vi would go—there was something else.
It was a heaviness. Oppression. Kylar had made the night his home for too many years to be afraid of the dark—he thought. But here, in the very air he breathed, was something deeper, darker, more ancient and more vile than he could imagine. Just smelling the reek made him remember killing. He recalled the shameful glee he felt as the noose slipped around Rat’s ankle. He remembered when he’d poisoned a saddlemaker’s stew and the man hadn’t been hungry and had let his son have it. He remembered the exact shade of purple the boy’s face had turned as his throat had swollen shut and he’d suffocated. He remembered a hundred deeds he was ashamed of, a hundred other things he should have done and hadn’t. He stood paralyzed, breathing the foul air.
“Come on,” Vi said. Her eyes looked haunted, enormous, but she was moving. “Breathe through your mouth. Don’t think, just do.”
Kylar blinked stupidly and came back to himself and followed Vi. The presence was Khali. Just like Logan had warned.
They made their way down into the pit. Kylar walked near the edge, looking down. As he got nearer, he could see that the meisters weren’t sacrificing the man, at least not in any conventional sense. Their victim was a Lodricari with tattoos covering his entire body. His skin hung thin and loose on his big, withered frame. He was bound with thick chains face down on the gold table and he was stripped to the waist.
Six meisters were seated at the points of the gold Lodricari star inlaid in the floor, cross-legged, their eyes closed, chanting. Two more stood on either side of the altar. One was holding a hammer and the other …
Kylar couldn’t believe it until he moved to the very last spiral and the level of the floor. The first meister was holding a carpenter’s hammer and gold nails while the second was holding a horse’s spine in his hands, positioning it above the tattooed man’s tailbone.
The meister set the spine in place and the other meister, gritting his teeth, set the six-inch-long golden nail above it. He slammed the hammer down. The tattooed man screamed and bucked. In two more heavy whacks, the nail sank all the way in. Then both meisters backed up and Kylar saw their victim well for the first time.
There was something wrong with his skin. At first, because of all the tattoos, Kylar couldn’t tell what it was, but between the tattoos he could see that the man was flushed. His veins pressed against the surface of his skin as if he were lifting a great weight. That would have been understandable, given what he was enduring, but the veins weren’t in the right places. Thick veins and arteries, blue and red, pushed up against his skin everywhere. And the skin itself seemed oddly dimpled, as if he had pockmarks over his entire body.
The meisters stepped back and called out an order. A prisoner was brought out of the north tunnel, where Kylar could see a holding cell with a dozen men in it. The man was shackled hand and foot and a rope was tied around his neck. A young, pretty meister took the rope and unstrung it, taking care not to let any part of her body enter the circle of magic. She stood on the far side of the circle from the prisoner, who was bleating with fear. Cold sweat poured from the man’s face and urine coursed down his leg. His eyes were locked to the man on the altar.
The young meister began pulling on the rope around the man’s neck, drawing him toward the circle. He took one hobbled step before he started fighting, and then it was too late. He lost his balance and came shambling forward to keep himself from falling. When he saw that his path would bring him straight to the tattooed man, he threw himself to the side.
With his hands shackled behind him, the victim had no way to catch himself. His face cracked against the fireglass floor.
The meisters who weren’t seated or chanting cursed. The woman repositioned herself, flinging the rope over the altar. A meister joined her and they began pulling the semiconscious man toward the altar again.
Why don’t they just use magic? But then Kylar looked through the ka’kari and thought he knew why.
This entire chamber was full of magic. It billowed from the meisters the way sulphuric smoke billowed up from the Hole. It seeped along the ground. The very air was thick with it—everywhere but around the altar. There, the air was dead. The meisters were creating something that would resist magic—even theirs. But as Kylar looked closely, he saw that the man wasn’t untouched by their magic. All the meisters who were chanting were weaving something together in the air above the altar, and they were sinking it into him at two points. In the back of the man’s neck, on either side of his spine, sat two diamonds, each the size of a man’s thumb, nailed in. In the visible spectrum they were invisible, covered with blood and grime and the man’s hair. In the magical spectrum, they blazed. Only through them could the meisters touch the man’s body.
The meisters finally pulled the prisoner up, gagging and choking. Kylar felt Vi tug on his tunic, an urgent let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-here, but he ignored her. The prisoner lurched forward and fell on top of the altar, across the tattooed man.
Though he landed at an angle and should have rolled off, he stuck. The meisters dropped the rope and stepped back fast, almost fleeing. The pitch of the chanting rose. The prisoner screamed, but Kylar couldn’t see why. The tattooed man’s muscles were bunched, his skin flushing even redder—and then blood washed over his back.
The prisoner was yanked off his feet and sucked onto the tattooed man’s back. Then the prisoner’s tunic was ripped away and Kylar saw the tattooed skin writhing. Each of those thousands of pockmarks was opening as a fanged little mouth. Everywhere, tattooed skin was chewing into the prisoner.
As the prisoner was consumed straight into that tattooed back, the man on the altar screamed in agony equal to his victim’s. Through the ka’kari, Kylar saw whole ribs ripped from the prisoner and pulled through the undulating back and attached to the new spine. Skin swelled and grew over the spine as well. The meister chanted and Kylar saw that they were directing the growth. Whatever this tattooed beast was, they weren’t making it. It had already been made. They were just growing it into a shape fit for war.
In another ten seconds, the prisoner was gone. Sort of. Parts of him had been incorporated into the new creature. The monstrosity on the altar had gained perhaps half of the prisoner’s mass. The prisoner’s spine had reinforced its spine. Ribs had given the torso more length. Skin had been stretched over the new growth, though now it too was pockmarked with those little mouths. The prisoner’s bones had been ground down and transported to the creature’s skull, which had doubled in thickness.