The Masks of Sentinel Chapter Five (part 3 of 3)

  
          "Mirrors," Xaltoran said. "It was done with mirrors."
          All of the screens were now functioning correctly.
          Watching the fleet burn, Falk was saddened at the unclean deaths of so many warriors.
          Xaltoran went on: "The reverse of each black shield was patterned with silvered lenses. When turned, they gathered, concentrated and magnified the daylight - to such an extent, my ocular devices were blinded."
          Falk said, "It must have looked like wizardry ... like the release of some caged elemental."
          "A brilliant stratagem."
          "Literally," said Falk wryly. "I wonder what Starkad would've done if the day had been overcast."
          "Something different, though equally effective - of that you may be sure."
          "I'm sure of one thing: a sea-eagle in flight is more deadly than a hundred on the waves. Are you able to clip its wings?"
          "I did not anticipate an aerial attack. None of my emplaced weapons can be trained to the sky."
          "A serious oversight."
          "Agreed."
          "Why not project your giant self at the flying ship?"
          "A whimsical notion. Have you forgotten so soon it's merely an image?"
          "The Skarnyr might not realize that until it's too late."
          "They aren't given to panic. Besides, Frostmane would grasp the deception immediately."
          "You seem to be unusually well informed regarding the Skarnyr and their king."
          The descent of the black-cored crystal globes appeared on three of the screens.
          Falk muttered, "Starkad, at least, shares my taste for the whimsical."
          "I fear not."
          "Explain."
          "Those spheres contain doomspore. In arctic regions, doomspore thrives where nought else grows. Eternal ice and darkness inhibit its germination. In warmer climes, although it cannot survive long in daylight, its growth is explosive."
          Falk shrugged. "I still don't see the danger."
          "Look."

          In the catacombs, the grey-robed man marked the position of the trap that had claimed his companions by laying his rat-headed staff along the almost invisible seam in the floor, then moved on into the burial passage.
          Shapes wrapped in weblike cerements occupied niches cut out of the living rock. Motes of dead tissue - the cells of an eye that once loved beauty, perhaps, or the atoms of flesh that once bloomed like roses - sparked into momentary, jesting life in the torch-flames. These constant reminders of mortality filled the lone seeker with a heavy, formless melancholy.
          Advancing between the ranks of the imperial dead, he began to imagine that he was moving forward in time. The burial methods of respective dynasties, subdividing the past as clearly as strata in rock, grew increasingly sophisticated. Winding-sheets gave way to preserving varnishes; artless casings evolved into ornate sarcophagi.
          He paused to admire the finer examples, captivated as much by their artistry as by the costly materials of which they were made. Many monarchs must have looked far more imposing in death than in life. And it amused him to think of all that wealth, which generations had risked their lives for, either in wresting it from the earth, or fighting for its possession, ultimately finding its way back to a deep place hidden from the sun.
          There was something ironic, too, about the wall-paintings. The deeper he went into the labyrinth, the more exquisite they became. Brightly coloured, jewelled, gilded - these murals seemed more vivid than the world of reality and light, yet were doomed to almost unbroken and perfect darkness.
          The searcher realized that he was nearing his goal when he began to recognize many of the scenes his torch carved out of the shadows, lords of legend giving way to monarchs firmly rooted in history.
          At last, he came to the end of the long passage. With Erastor itself slowly dying, he wondered whether it would be extended much farther. He stood in a place of crystal tombs, their occupants preserved as perfectly as insects in amber.
          Torchlight snaked over white, masklike faces.
          He soon found what he had been looking for, opposite the resting place of the late ruler, Jethuran.
          Sealed in a plain vertical block lay the mortal remains of a man presumed living and presumed king.
          The searcher indulged in a vulpine grin, then took a leather wine flask from beneath his grey robe.
          "A double toast," he announced to the legions of the dead. "Xaltoran, the pretender ... Kaihima, the rightful queen!"
          He drank long and deep, washing the dust of countless monarchs from his throat.

          Falk saw the first of the globes hit the walls and explode into clinquant shards. Exposed to the air, the buds, hissing snakelike, tumesced at blinding speed, formed clusters of pulsating gourds. These in turn exploded, showering out clouds of dark spores, each individual grain swelling, bursting, shooting tendrils already studded with black nodules. The process was repeated a hundred times, a thousand, too fast for any eye, mortal or mechanical, to grasp ... globe after globe ... generations multiplying.
          An image from one of Tarush's anecdotes forced its way into Falk's mind. It concerned a mass spawning of kraken the captain had witnessed in the Southern Ocean: "Imagine a heaving, writhing sargasso, bleached by the starsea's light - and composed entirely of frantically mating squid!"
          Whiplike roots sought blindly, furiously for food.
          Foam-silver tentacles slithered over rushing, screaming men, probed through the eyeholes of helmets, prized between armour-joints, clamped leechlike onto flesh.
          There was no defence and no escape.
          From his lone vantage, an ashen-faced Nissuraj watched his troops succumb to the doomspore. What he failed to observe was a minute black seed settling on his right hand.
          Viewing from an infinitely safer place, Falk whispered, "What kind of world have I been reborn into?"
          Where the spoors touched skin, they unfailingly took root, filaments piercing the walls of veins and spreading, faster than the flow of blood, to each extremity. Buds resembling pustulous boils then broke free. In the next (and generally final) heartbeat, pale tubers sprouted from face and body, shredded cloth, punched through armour.
          The castle's masonry offered nutrition in the form of lichen and mineral salts. Ravenous, the plant flowed like white smoke up the saffron walls. Unless checked, it would boil over the outer towers and advance towards the heart of Erastor.
          No further globes fell.
          None were needed.
          Erastor's ramparts thronged with pulsing white mounds that had once been warriors.
          From a high window, a seething carcass fell: Lord Nissuraj Terl Taq'Eftyr, erstwhile King's General.
          As if in mourning, the eagle in the sky began to weep, heavy black tears trickling from its golden eyes and onto the pullulating mass below.
          Soon, the tears were falling thick as winter hail. And wherever the dark droplets touched the rampant, leprous growth, chromatic fire spurted.
          The blaze rapidly took hold.
          Chamelionic flames ran over the great cloak of interwoven tubers, feeding on the doomspore as voraciously as the doomspore fed on flesh and stone - and threatening to overtake it.
          Nine thunderous blue flashes marked the destruction of the light-lances; the possessor of the tenth, having been pursued deep into the castle by a spectacular fireball, was at this point almost literally licking his wounds.
          Only when the roaring iridescence challenged the highest crenelation did the rain of black tears cease.
          Stricken by cleansing fire, the crest of the doomspore's advance twisted and threshed like a giant white worm in mortal agony; beyond it, spore-clouds flared to extinction.
          With every tendril, bud and seed consumed, the eldritch blaze dissolved as rapidly as it had been kindled. In its wake, the walls resembled cliffs of volcanic sulphur: deeply pitted, streaked with brown and black, patched with furnace-glaze. There was no sign of life. Along the ramparts, charred ivory shapes and scraps of metal lay scattered like jetsam after a great storm.
          Forsaking the destruction, Frostmane's eagle passed over the great keep and between the minarets, hovered like a true bird of prey, then descended into the most notable of Erastor's open spaces - the garden under the Tower of Masks.

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