Roar, page 4
Only those with the blackest of souls were sent down to the lamaia after death. At least by the gods. People who had committed such terrible crimes that it was considered there was no other suitable punishment. Any other death was thought to be too merciful by them. But the King had no mercy at all. And he had the knowledge and power to build a device that could do what the gods could do. Naturally he used it. But it wasn't the evil he sent. It was those he hated. Those who opposed him. Thorm did not want to join them.
The stories of those executions were terrible. He had heard how the Orb, sitting in the middle of the Great Courtyard in the Palace of the Sun, would be made to spin. In time it would disappear and be replaced by a dark void. Then the sound of the lamaia could be heard coming from within it. Strange, blood chilling sounds that spoke of eternal torment. The smell of blood would drift through and only those with the strongest of stomachs would retain their last meal. And finally the Enforcer would throw the person in. The screams as they were sacrificed to lamaia were said to be unbearable. And the sound did not did not stop until the portal was finally closed. But even then, it was said, the victims continued screaming. They never stopped. It was only that they couldn't be heard.
It really was a fate worse than death. Thorm did not want to suffer it under any circumstances. But if he went after the King and somehow made it through into the Palace of the Sun, it was a fate he would likely experience.
And he would fail. Because the Eternal King truly was unkillable. That was the one thing every story agreed upon. He could be – he had been – struck down by his enemies in every possible way. He always got straight back up, unharmed.
Besides, Thorn thought to himself sourly, there was no point in killing the Eternal King. Even if he did so it wouldn’t free him from his current form. The King could not help him even by dying. The hag might be able to help him but would not. Even if she was sane enough to understand what he wanted, why would she help the man who had put her in that wheeled chair? And there was no one else. Every other wizard was either in the King’s service and locked away in the Palace of the Sun or dead. He was the only one with magic outside the King’s service that he had ever known of.
All he could do was make the best of his new life while he searched for a cure. And in truth that was exactly what he had done these last three years. Before he had even fully recovered from his injuries he had dealt with the light and the air. And once he had recovered sufficiently he had dug himself a way out through the rubble so that he could steal some rugs and pillows to make his basement more comfortable. He had stolen food too.
After that he had set to work trying to rid himself of this curse. Day after day, year after year. And he had failed.
Just as he was failing now.
Annoyed with his lack of progress in reading the book, Thorm let out a disgusted sigh. Though of course it sounded more like a small roar as it echoed around his basement. It was large enough that it could carry an echo. Large enough that he could cast a spell safely in it. And the mass of rubble on top of it was heavy enough that he could roar with all his strength and no one would hear. Then he got up and thought about taking a walk.
He shouldn't. He needed to keep studying. These books were his only hope of regaining his proper form. But despite his need even he couldn't keep studying forever. Besides, this particular tome wasn't providing him with a lot of useful information. Some did, but not this one.
The book logged the chronicles of the ancient wizard Arator, as recorded by his scribe and translated by the sages. Arator had been one of the greats of the ancient past. From the time before the Eternal King had arrived. He had wandered the world performing many great feats of magic. He had killed monsters, defeated armies and cured plagues. It was why Thorm had known he wanted the book from the instant he had laid eyes on it. But it seemed that the scribe had been more concerned with what Arator had done, and not so much with the mechanics of it. So he had related a hundred stories of the ancient wizard's great feats of magic, but never once mentioned the words he'd used or the gestures he'd made. It was annoying. As was the fact that Arator had he still been alive and not dust for the last thousand and a half years, could have fixed him. Any ancient wizard could have.
According to the stories the ancients had had immense power. They had created the very language of magic, having absorbed the knowledge of the Hyperboreans – the immortals who lived beyond the north wind – and fused it with their own. There was nothing they could not do.
Nothing that was save live forever. Eventually their time on this world had come to an end. The greatness of the past faded and the world changed. Magic had gradually been lost and the ancient world turned to ruins. Chaos had ensued. It had been a dark time. Until the Eternal King had appeared out of nowhere and created the Volden Plains.
These days what magic there was came in many forms – but all of them were merely a pale reflection of the wonder it had once been. Some was innate, contained within the very essence of a person or a creature, and released almost without thought. Some of it was released through passion and wild emotion as the hags did. Some had to be cast by a wizard, requiring an act of will. And some was even harvested from mystical creatures.
Thorm’s magic, just as that of Arator himself, had to be cast using words and gestures for all save the simplest of spells. Words and gestures that the ancient wizards themselves had created. Why they'd done that he didn't know. But there had been a reason. The ancient wizards had understood magic in a way he didn't. That no one did. And they had made sure that their chroniclers copied down everything they did in detail so that others could learn. He could learn. But he couldn't speak and he couldn't gesture. So instead he needed to fix them in his thoughts so that even when he couldn't get the words out or make the gestures, his mind knew them. It was a hundred times harder to hold all the details of the gestures and every nuance of the words in his head as he cast instead of simply doing everything without thinking as he once had. It had taken him years even to relearn the spells he had once cast instinctively. And now that he finally had and he was ready to learn new spells, the books weren't providing what he needed.
This one wasn't anyway. Arator's scribe obviously hadn't been a wizard. The words and the gestures presumably had meant nothing to him – why else would he not have recorded them? So there was little to learn from his work. The book had proved to be another waste of Thorm's time. It was time to do something else.
It was early evening. Darkness would be falling soon. Once it did he would be able to roam the city. His new form meant it was dangerous to be seen in daylight. But in the darkness a cat – even a big cat – could be unseen. Especially if said cat had a chameleon spell plus a few other spells to create a few distractions. The night coupled with his magic gave him the ability to steal what he needed to survive. The night that meant more books on magic and something to eat.
The decision made, Thorm padded across the basement to the exit leading down into the sewers. On the way though he caught sight of himself in the full-length mirror and stopped in surprise. He did that sometimes when he saw his reflection, shocked by what he saw even after all this time. Not so much because he was a lion, but because he wasn't a normal lion. His fur was tawny gold, but his mane was white, and he didn't know why. Lions didn't have white manes. Nor emerald green eyes, or claws of diamond that could slice through stone. Whatever he was he was no normal lion.
He'd wondered about that for three long years. Ever since his form had been changed into that of a beast. He'd searched through a hundred books on magical creatures, looking for any reference to a lion like him. In fact, one entire wall of his basement was now filled with books on magical creatures. But he'd yet to find an answer as to what he was. Still, he thought there must be one. Those differences had to be important even if he didn’t yet know why.
But then there were so many other questions that needed answers. Like why he still had his mind. And how he could still use his magic – though it wasn't as easy as it had been now that he had no voice and no hands. And why the hag had transformed him into this. Surely if she was trying to kill him she should have transformed him into something easy to kill like a worm? Then again, she hadn’t needed to transform him into something else to kill him. He'd been completely helpless before her.
Then again she was mad. And she wasn't human either. Not when she had snakes for hair. Or actually snakes growing among her hair. She was part aspen as far as he could tell. Though that didn't explain her madness. The aspen were as sane as most people from what he had heard. As intelligent too. And from what he had read, reasonably friendly. But they had snakes instead of hair and she had both. Surely that could only mean that her blood was mixed.
But had she been something else entirely? There were stories told that the drugs the King forced on his wizards did more than just make them obedient and deprive them of their sanity. It was rumoured that they twisted their flesh as well as their minds. It was said that every so often one of them would escape. Those who had seen them claimed they did not look human. Thorm didn't know whether there was any truth in those stories. But when he thought back on what he'd seen in the hag, he had to wonder.
Of course, he realised, he wasn't going to find any answers to any of his questions standing there staring at himself in a mirror. So he carried on to the far end of the basement and padded down the tunnel leading down into the sewers.
Building the tunnel had been his one of his first tasks after he'd woken up to find himself trapped in the basement. After light and air escape had been his priority. It had to be because as large as his basement was, it still only had a limited amount of food and water. But cutting his way through so much solid rock had been an immense task. It had been hour after hour after hour of intense concentration, and headaches that would not end.
The end result had been a mixed success. He'd worked out how to maintain a spell of cutting light with just a thought, though it kept cutting out and having to be recast. And though he'd managed to cut through at least twenty yards of rock leading down to the sewers within a couple of days, it had been a full two weeks before he had built the tunnel wide enough to use. And even after that he'd had to fix it, turning the last half of the tunnel around so that it opened out onto the brick walkway that ran alongside the actual river instead of directly above the river itself. But he had done it.
Still, the tunnel had been small, uneven and treacherously slippery if any water got on to it. And unfortunately, water did seem to settle on it at times, condensing when the temperature was just right. It meant that every so often when he tried to walk down it to the sewers, he ended up sliding instead. A couple of times he’d actually slid all the way down, gathering enough speed to fly onto the walkway, bounce off it before falling into the dark, stinking river. Swimming in raw sewage was a truly unpleasant experience.
This time however, he managed to pad down the tunnel without any difficulty, and soon found himself in the sewers, standing safely on the walkway beside the river of filth. And by luck, since when he'd first cut the tunnel he'd had no true thought as to where the sewers were, he was in a darkened section of it. No one would see him.
That was important. He didn't want people to start telling tales about a lion wandering through the sewers. And he absolutely didn't want anyone finding his tunnel and following him back to his basement. For that reason, he stopped at the entrance to the sewers, and stood silently for a while, listening, just to make sure.
Oddly the sewers weren't as empty as he would have once thought. There were workmen who got sent down every so often, mostly he gathered, to prevent blockages. The rivers had to flow or else the gas and smell built up and became a hazard. If it grew really bad there could be an explosion. Even if it didn't, the smell up top would cause complaints. And far be it for the Eternal King to have people complaining that his Eternal City stank! After all this was his shining home. It was where he had first built his Palace of the Sun before he had set about conquering the rest of the towns and cities of the grasslands and formed the Volden Plains a thousand years before.
So throughout the sewers, there would often be small groups of workers, using rake like implements on twenty-foot-long poles to scour the bottom of the rivers and make sure everything kept flowing smoothly. Fortunately, to date he had never had a problem avoiding them. They were noisy and it was easy enough to simply hide in the shadows until they passed.
Workmen though weren't the only people he had to worry about. A great many houses and businesses had basements like his with access paths down to the sewers. Proper ones, not crude tunnels like his. And some of them had guards stationed there to protect whatever valuables they hid in their basements from those who might strike from below. After a time he had worked out where the various guards were stationed and learned to avoid them. Still, there had been a few worrying moments, and even shots fired at him in the past.
And of course, there were thieves. Thieves and smugglers. In fact, there were a lot of shady individuals who used the sewers as ways to and from the places they wanted to rob, as well as a secret way in and out of the city without attracting the attention of the guards. He would never have guessed there were so many blaggards, cut throats, brigands and other scoundrels in the entire world. Such people were expert at remaining hidden. It made for some unexpected and sometimes dangerous encounters in the darkness. It was why he was always so careful to pause and listen for sounds of movement before he moved on. The one blessing of his new form however was that it granted him acute hearing.
Eventually satisfied that he was alone, he padded off quietly toward the markets. Though he obviously wasn’t going there to buy anything, there were plenty of sewer grates that led up to the markets and stalls above. They were a great place to listen in on conversations and find out what was happening in the city while remaining unseen. It was fortunate that no one above ground ever thought that what they said in private could be heard by a lion standing right beneath their feet.
Knowledge as the sages said, was power. Perhaps. For him though it represented opportunity. By listening to what was said above Thorm learned where he needed to go to find what he needed. And mostly what he needed was knowledge. He needed to find more books on magic. Better ones.
And that was one of the ironies of the Eternal King's rule. Magic was banned unless it was owned by him. But books about magic weren't.
Thorm wasn't sure why that was. Sometimes he thought it was simply that if you weren't a wizard, if you didn't have that spark of magic within you, then the books were useless. You couldn't become a wizard simply by reading about it. At other times he thought it might all be part of an elaborate trap. That the King’s spies watched who bought books about magic to catch those wizards who had slipped through their net. Maybe that was why the Enforcer had brought the witch hunter and the hag with him. He'd been seen. Whatever the reason, it only mattered that there were plenty of such books about.
Just then though his focus was on something else; not getting his paws wet. The sewers didn't actually smell as bad as he would have once imagined. The water flowing through them travelled at a steady clip and so most of the filth was quickly washed away. Still, the thought of swimming in it was enough to make him ill.
Fortunately, the Eternal City had been well designed, and that included its sewers. The city sat on a shallow plateau beneath the shadow of the Windlass mountains. It was from there that the river Atar originated, flowing down to the Plains before splitting into a dozen channels and then entering the city where it raced through the series of tunnels that underpinned it. Each tunnel was just that; a tunnel cut into the bedrock beneath the city that stood at least twenty feet wide. Thorm had no idea who had carved the tunnels, or how. And since the walls were almost perfectly round and slightly worn with age, he sometimes wondered if they really had been created by some sort of giant stone eating worm as the legends claimed. Abutting the walls of the tunnels was a walkway made of hardwood and steel that allowed him to walk along a path a full three or four feet above the flowing water. It meant his paws should stay dry.
Of course wood aged. Even the heaviest of hard woods rotted over time, and the maintenance wasn't good. So there were places where the six foot wide path was almost rotted away. Where posts a full foot thick, had become unsteady. Where the hand rails no longer existed. And where the heavy decking boards of ancient oak had become soft underfoot. After a thousand years or more he supposed that was only to be expected. But still it meant he had to be careful in places in case something finally gave way beneath him.
Light filtered through the grates in the roof of the tunnels every twenty yards or so. And every so often there were passages in the walls that led up to the city streets. Places where he could walk up the stairs, and then sit in the shadows of the little entrance ways and stare out at the people in the streets as they went about their business. The grates were much like his shop window save that they had bars across them to stop people from freely heading down into the sewers. One of those entrances, a place he visited far too often, came out on the opposite side of the street from his old store. From there he could sit and stare at the pile of rubble that had once been his store and his neighbours' stores and witness the ruin of his life.
